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.
Nurses at Mission Health hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, are about to vote on a union. We talked to five of them about why they’re organizing, how health care–worker unions can improve patient care and safety, and what a victory would mean for establishing a beachhead for unions in the South.
It’s not just the right thing to do — canceling student debt would be insanely popular and not very difficult. If Joe Biden’s supporters are serious about him winning, they should pressure him hard to do it.
Among all the people living in Sicily, migrants are the single population best tested for coronavirus. Yet now the regional president is scapegoating them as the source of contagion — insisting that Africans must be expelled in order to “stop Sicilians becoming racist.”
Marek Edelman was a leader of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi genocide. After 1945, Edelman stayed on in Poland as a champion of democratic socialism who played a courageous role in the country’s dissident movement.
To protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Bucks sat out Game 5 of the NBA playoffs — and forced the entire league to shut down. The Bucks players are workers who shut down their workplace with a strike. You can go on strike, too.
America’s animal shelter system is a disaster. We need a well-funded, fully public system that no longer treats animals as expendable commodities — and empowers the workers who staff public shelters.
Facing a tough primary challenge from Alex Morse, embattled congressman Richard Neal is trying to block voters from seeing an ad about him being Congress’s #1 recipient of corporate PAC money.
Joe Kennedy’s campaign for Senate against Ed Markey is utterly pointless, a vacuous bid to leverage his youth and his family crest into another position of power.
Three socialists ran in this month’s Tennessee primaries. With endorsements from the Memphis chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, all three of them won.
The 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan demanded major cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare during Barack Obama’s first term. Joe Kennedy praised the plan as “the right blueprint forward.”
Legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie is best known for his anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” which can come off as an innocuous ode to America if you aren’t listening closely. But the singer-songwriter was a lifelong socialist.
On the one-hundredth anniversary of American women’s right to vote, let’s remember the working-class socialist suffragists who struggled for the franchise. And let’s devote the next hundred years to realizing their vision.
Polish economists like Oskar Lange and Michał Kalecki produced highly creative models of how a socialist system could work, balancing equality and efficiency. But Poland’s Communist government neglected their ideas, sowing the seeds of its eventual demise.
Many colleges and universities around the country have insisted on reopening in-person classes and putting the burden of preventing coronavirus on individual college students. The administrators behind these decisions seem to care little for the obvious devastation this is wreaking among students.
The outrageous shooting of an unarmed black man in Kenosha shows the difference between elected officials’ kind words and actual progress. The movement against police violence will be fighting for a long time.
The lunacy on display at last night’s Republican National Convention is what keeps frightened liberal voters satisfied with the meager crumbs of progress offered by the Democrats — and the meagerness of those crumbs is what keeps working-class whites inside an increasingly lunatic GOP.
Barack Obama swept into office with a progressive mandate, but his legislating was tepid, often conservative. One key reason: his administration had no plans — or even interest in — overcoming the massive capital strikes they were up against.
Yesterday, Trump’s USPS chairman, Robert Duncan, confirmed he had served on two Republican super PACs — at the same time new documents showed that the GOP takeover of the United States Postal Service coincided with a significant slowdown in mail delivery just months before the November election.
Last week’s coup in Mali came after weeks of protest against an unpopular, autocratic ruler, but the intentions of the junta leaders remain unclear. The country now badly needs to address deep-rooted problems of the Malian state that have been neglected for much too long.
The Polish Communists were savagely persecuted by Stalin in the 1930s, before he raised their party to power after 1945. Despite attempts at reform, their regime could never transcend its origins as a Soviet satellite state.