Jonathan Sas has worked in senior policy and political roles in government, think tanks, and the labor movement. He is an honorary witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. His writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, National Post, the Tyee, and Maisonneuve.
Workers say that in retaliation against their unionization, Starbucks is shutting down a heavily trafficked store in Ithaca, New York. It’s part of a scorched-earth strategy that appears to be aimed at wearing workers down and forcing out pro-union employees.
Netflix’s Persuasion tries and fails to bring Fleabag’s irreverence to Jane Austen.
The House has approved an $850 billion military budget, twice as much as Biden’s stimulus checks cost. Yet somehow, we aren’t getting panicked screeds from corporate pundits about how a massive injection of federal spending is going to turbocharge inflation.
In Canada, the results of pandemic income support seem to confirm the claims of universal basic income advocates. But to make UBI work, we need to ensure it’s coupled with a massive expansion of welfare state policies.
Legendary socialist writer Mike Davis used to put a prompt to his students: If you had a B-52 with unlimited tonnage, what ugly, antisocial buildings would you bomb? We put the question to urbanist thinkers who have been inspired by Davis’s writing.
US police departments spend tens of millions of dollars every year to manipulate the news, flooding the discourse with “copaganda.” These aggressive tactics give the public a distorted view of what public safety means, what threatens it, and how to solve it.
Since the Amazon Labor Union’s victory in New York, interest in organizing has surged nationwide. In North Carolina, worker-organizers are building solidarity by helping coworkers struggling with starvation wages and an increasingly punitive management.
Joe Biden just returned from his Middle East trip, where he went hat in hand to some of the world’s most brutal, US-backed despots in a desperate bid to boost oil production. All he got was a fist bump from Saudi tyrant Mohammed Bin Salman.
Tonight is Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. You probably won’t hear it on the broadcast, but there’s labor unrest brewing involving minor-league players, concession workers, and Bernie Sanders — and the target is baseball’s oligarchic business model.
Enthusiasts for Israeli militarism often claim that Gaza needs “freeing from Hamas.” Such a claim is steeped in the logic of collective guilt, refusing Palestinians the right to both armed struggle and the ballot box.
The outgoing Conservative leader claims to be the victim of a nefarious deep state conspiracy. Britain does have a deep state, but Johnson is the very last person who would show up on its hit list.
In 1945, the French revolutionary poet André Breton took a trip to Haiti. Breton was fascinated by Haiti’s culture and tradition of revolt — and his own talks helped trigger a popular uprising against the country’s dictator, Élie Lescot.
Critics of Marx have accused him of imposing a European model of historical development on the rest of the world. But the real Marx rejected Eurocentric thinking and developed a sophisticated view of world history in all its diversity and complexity.
US and EU officials recently suggested targeting livestock and agriculture in Asia and Africa to reduce methane emissions. Far more emissions, however, come from oil and gas production in the US — but reducing them requires taking on fossil fuel companies.
A startling poll shows how rapidly the Democrats are trading away their traditional multiracial, working-class base for white, highly educated voters. And the shift is causing a change to the party’s political priorities as a result.
The antiwar movement was right to challenge the lies used to justify the US-UK invasion of Iraq. We should be equally willing to denounce Vladimir Putin’s fake pretexts for war against Ukraine.
The French left made gains in spring’s elections — but it did much better in big cities than in deindustrialized areas. Debates in France Insoumise have highlighted the need to win back the older working class without giving up on political radicalism.
Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, billionaire real-estate developer Rick Caruso is campaigning for LA mayor as an antiestablishment maverick. In reality, like Trump, he’s just another wealthy conservative out to protect himself and other rich people.
Paul Robeson, the socialist actor, musician, and civil rights campaigner, dedicated his life to battling against right-wing red-baiting that has echoes in reactionary crusades against progressive education and “critical race theory” today.
In the 1990s, the New Democrats trusted corporations to do the right thing. The results were disastrous.