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.
Jon Stewart rightly scorned cable news’ empty bickering during a 2004 CNN Crossfire appearance that went viral again this week. But calls for post-partisan decency still miss the point: we need a positive agenda to improve people’s lives, not empty calls to be the adults in the room.
Elon Musk is right to dream of humanity’s future as a multi-planet species. However, the multigenerational, millennia-long project of space colonization will be a public-sector endeavor, or it will not happen.
Keir Starmer has tried to blame yesterday’s election disaster on Jeremy Corbyn. But it’s Starmer whose leadership has hollowed out the party, refused to offer a compelling vision for change, and left many with little reason to vote Labour.
This day in 1945, Nazi Germany finally surrendered. Faced with revisionist attempts to claim the war was a struggle between “twin totalitarianisms,” we should remember the working-class partisans who resisted the fascist violence — and the better world they fought to build.
For decades, Australian governments have kept refugees locked up in detention centers on offshore islands and the mainland. But refugees and their supporters have shifted public opinion by exposing cruel conditions and challenging the racist government policy.
Three-quarters of the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada. Canadian mining firms are mired in corruption and human rights abuses around the world, yet Justin Trudeau has reneged on pledges to regulate them and end the abuses.
The by-election defeat for Labour in Hartlepool is a damning indictment of Keir Starmer, who has failed to deliver the “electability” his supporters promised. But his leadership is bound to double down on Labour’s right turn instead of drawing the correct lessons.
True, the parameters of American liberalism have clearly shifted. But Joe Biden’s actions in his first 100 days have revealed an administration whose most fundamental objective is to restore the Republic to its pre-Trump state — not to undertake its reconstruction along totally different grounds.
Joe Biden and many of his appointees have links to drug companies trying to delay and weaken the COVID vaccine patent waiver he’s now promising to negotiate.
When we allow private organizations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to police scientific discourse, we abdicate our commitment to free scientific inquiry.
A bill advanced by Boris Johnson’s government would give British police massive powers to criminalize protest and evade public scrutiny. But the “Kill the Bill” movement has mobilized impressive opposition against it — providing a first sign of the Left rebuilding after Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat.
Labor strategist Jane McAlevey offers her take on why Amazon workers were defeated in their recent Bessemer, Alabama union drive.
A key challenge for the Left in the coming years will be to reject attempts to stoke tensions with China — tensions the Biden administration has made worse in its early months.
Historian Andrew Bacevich has made his name picking apart the bipartisan forever wars from an idiosyncratic, conservative position. We spoke with him about Joe Biden’s foreign policy, whether American primacy is coming to an end, and the folly of a new Cold War with China.
The center has no convincing way to account for unemployment and low wages. Workers are compelled to choose between the solutions provided by the Right and the Left — and unionization can make all the difference in how they choose.
From a lack of investment in public health care to mishandling vaccine production, Narendra Modi’s right-wing government has failed the Indian people during the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands are dead as a result.
Even before the pandemic, Bulgaria’s public health system had been wrecked by privatization. Now suffering among the world’s highest COVID mortality rates, Bulgaria provides a case study in how “market reforms” hobble public infrastructure and suck skilled workers from the European Union’s poorest countries to its richest.
Labour’s dismal polling for today’s Hartlepool by-election show its awkward, flag-waving nationalism isn’t convincing anyone. Too bad Keir Starmer won’t stop playing on the Right’s terrain and start offering working-class voters real economic populism.
Restaurant and bar owners whining about the difficulty of finding workers to toil for low wages and no benefits never seem to consider the possibility of raising those wages and benefits to try to attract such workers. But they’re also ignoring something more basic: the coronavirus pandemic wiped out an enormous swath of the restaurant workforce.
Joe Biden has the power to eliminate federal student debt, make colleges and trade schools tuition-free, and end high-stakes testing. We just passed his 100-day mark. He hasn’t done any of it.