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.
Popular critiques of financial deregulation often blame the City of London’s excessive political influence. But financialization wasn’t imposed on capitalism by elite plotting — it was a political response to its inherent crisis tendencies.
Xiomara Castro won Honduras’s presidency pledging to tax wealth, expand the welfare state, and end the country’s “failed neoliberal model.” Her win was also a defeat for the US, which backed a coup that overthrew her husband Manuel Zelaya 12 years ago.
For months, medical experts warned that leaving large areas of the world unvaccinated would make new variants inevitable. But for Big Pharma, profits come before public health.
The reconciliation bill’s clean energy rebate program sneaks in a provision that could tie homeowners’ appliances to natural gas for a long time — benefiting fossil fuel companies at the expense of the climate.
If we followed the advice of “slow food” advocates like Alice Water, we’d end up with literally billions hungry and more workers hyperexploited. There’s nothing progressive about the “slow food revolution.”
Big business loves the Supreme Court just how it is: on the side of big business. That’s why corporate lobbyists want to stop any possible Supreme Court reforms the Biden administration might consider.
No lyricist and composer treated their audience more like adults — capable of wrestling with the ambiguities and tragedies of life, without needing big, dumb heroes or happy endings — than Stephen Sondheim.
Austin City Council member Greg Casar has passed dozens of pieces of progressive legislation in the last 7 years, from paid sick leave law to renters’ protections. Now he says he wants to take federal action on working-class issues by running for Congress.
The United Auto Workers is one of America’s most important unions. It has long been hobbled by an autocratic internal culture and widespread corruption. The members’ vote in favor of a direct voting system to elect leadership could change that.
For centuries, detractors of Niccolò Machiavelli have presented him as the founding father of political cynicism. But the Italian thinker was really a republican idealist whose support for popular rule can inspire struggles against the oligarchies of today.
Prescription drugs, hospital visits, housing, higher education, and more have all become frighteningly more expensive, far outpacing Americans’ wages. But those kinds of price increases are ignored by the politicians who are now stridently decrying inflation.
Chris Cuomo abused his platform at CNN to help his politically besieged brother. It was flagrantly unethical, but in keeping with the culture of complete unaccountability for unethical abuse that American media elites have long enjoyed.
In 1981, Warren Beatty directed Reds, a retelling of John Reed’s classic firsthand account of the Russian Revolution. The film still stands up today as one of the greatest and most faithful depictions of revolutionary politics.
An investigation carried out by Ricochet in collaboration with Jacobin finds Canadian TV panels are dominated by lobbyists. These corporate pundits are treated as impartial talking heads, but they’re actually part of an effort to defend Canadian capitalists.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon has long sought to rally blue-collar voters he labels “fed up, not fascists.” Yet his movement has faced an uphill battle countering disaffection with politics — and the growing media dominance of far-right talking points.
Based on the true story of Venus and Serena Williams’s coach and father, King Richard shows us the toll racism took on a generation of black men — but also the fight it inspired in them.
Three decades after Augusto Pinochet’s fall, Chile stands at the precipice of electing a socialist president and reordering its political system. But the achievement of genuine democracy in the birthplace of neoliberalism is far from guaranteed.
The Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System, like pension funds everywhere, engages in socially harmful speculation and investment. Pension funds should be paid for by contributions and taxes, not financialization.
New York governor Kathy Hochul is pushing to end remote work — not to help workers, but to do the commercial real estate industry a favor.
Barbados’s decision to become a republic happily brings to an end its centuries-long formal subjection to the British Empire. But as the country has already discovered in its dealings with the IMF and World Bank, not all forms of colonialism are so easily rebuffed.