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.
Rich people have enormous carbon footprints. But the fundamental problem with their climate impact isn’t what they consume — it’s that they own the means of production, and it’s extremely profitable for them to pollute.
Scott Morrison has responded to scandals over misogyny and sexual assault with token gestures and hollow words that won’t get near the root of the problem. In order to challenge sexism, we have to empower working-class women through economic justice and redistributive policies.
Extremist Israelis marched in Jerusalem last week chanting “Death to Arabs.” It’s part of a deeply worrying trend of rising far-right Zionism in a country that was already saturated in it.
Mexican-American workers have a long tradition of radical organizing, stretching back to the days of the Industrial Workers of the World and the mid-century Communist Party. And in 1968, with a longtime Communist Chicano family at the center, Mexican-American students in LA launched the largest student walkout in US history.
HBO’s Mare of Easttown is constructed around a familiar, virtually surefire plot: a shocking crime in a small town leads to an investigation that ultimately reveals every major local scandal in an astoundingly errant community. And it works.
Fifty years ago today, on May Day 1971, thousands of antiwar protesters descended on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War. The ensuing three days of disruptive actions directly confronted the Nixon administration — and resulted in the largest civil disobedience–related detentions in US history.
To win over German workers and replace their socialist loyalties with fascism, the Third Reich made a Nazi version of May Day a national holiday. But the real International Workers’ Day is the one that lives on today.
Throughout his career, two misleading stereotypes distorted our view of Raúl Castro. He was neither a pale shadow of his brother, nor a one-dimensional pro-Soviet ideologue, but a major historical figure who played a key role in shaping the Cuban system and then reforming it.
Over the past few months, pharma giants like Pfizer and Moderna have become household names and fodder for affectionate memes. But their prominence reflects how the market has cannibalized science and public health during a global crisis. Big pharma still is not your friend.
Israel has effectively made the establishment of a separate Palestinian state impossible. It’s clear what’s needed now: a single, democratic state with full rights for all people.
On immigration, the Biden administration — far from offering an alternative to Trumpist policies that so many commentators characterized as fascistic — has largely followed in Trump’s footsteps. But Biden has encountered only a tiny fraction of the criticism Trump attracted for pursuing many of the same anti-immigrant policies.
Every winter, thousands of North American tourists flock to sunny destinations in Mexico to be served by workers on poverty wages. The Mexican government has promoted tourism as a route out of poverty, but the profits from the industry are flowing away from local communities.
Justin Trudeau’s government claims that the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) can solve Canada’s infrastructure problems. In reality, the CIB is a vehicle for private interests to get their hands on public assets and revenue streams. It should be excluded from coronavirus recovery plans.
Louis Menand’s new history of Cold War art and thought The Free World wants to rehabilitate liberal anti-communism. To do so, it downplays both the political repression of the US left and imperial America’s genocide against its Third World political opponents.
It’s hard to come up with a better encapsulation of capitalism’s dreary imprint on culture than the latest innovation in the field of advertising: the retroactive insertion of product placement ads into classic movies.
At Rutgers University, unions have banded together to advance work-sharing as an alternative to the administration’s demands for massive job cuts. The approach has been an engine of solidarity between different groups of workers that has helped cut through the zero-sum logic of austerity.
The US public poured billions of dollars into developing a COVID-19 vaccine, yet drug companies are reaping the profits and jealously guarding the intellectual property from poor countries. Let the drug companies cry: we should release the vaccines immediately.
The horrific COVID crisis in India isn’t just the result of rich countries’ criminal hoarding of vaccines and intellectual property — it’s the fault of Narendra Modi’s far-right government, which has prioritized private profits over public health.
In his first 100 days as president, Joe Biden has proven unusually willing to associate his administration with the labor movement’s agenda. Unions have a greater opening to win an expansive pro-worker agenda than they have in decades. But we haven’t seen real change yet.
Hulu’s docuseries Sasquatch uses Bigfoot as a hook to zero in on an unsolved 1993 triple homicide in the weed empire of Northern California. The series has some compelling material to work with — which it proceeds to squander.