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.
We’re working longer hours than in decades. But we don’t have to. We deserve a more democratic economy in which we have the free time to develop our talents, hang out with friends and family, and do whatever else we please.
Even though Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm, raked in billions in profits last year, new documents show their tax rate actually went below zero. This may help explain why CEO Stephen Schwarzman has spent nearly $25 million to help Trump and GOP senators win: to ensure the tax breaks enriching Blackstone stay in place.
Last night’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a ninety-minute stream of consciousness that pitted a mediocre-at-best challenger to a raving, dangerous reactionary. Were we expecting anything different?
Austria’s capital city is famous for its model public housing and social services, the legacy of municipal socialism in the 1920s. But it’s been decades since the Social Democrats have done anything to build on this record. Now a new leftist party is working to turn Vienna red again.
In last night’s debate, Donald Trump failed to condemn white supremacists — even telling the Proud Boys to “stand by” — then refused to promise he would encourage his supporters to refrain from political violence in November. His rhetoric is growing more and more dangerous.
Earlier this month, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina voted to unionize. Taking place in one of the most anti-union states in the country, and challenging a bitterly anti-labor employer, the campaign is a monumental victory for labor.
In both his campaigns, Trump has run ads aimed at killing black voters’ enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee and lowering their turnout. The strategy is craven, but the ads exploit real disillusionment. Without a sharp break from their history of failing black constituents, Democrats will remain vulnerable to such opportunistic gambits in the future.
A century ago this month, the new Soviet government summoned anti-colonial revolutionaries from across Asia to a gathering in Baku. The Baku Congress proved to be a watershed in the fight against European colonial domination and the rise of the Global South.
The conservative front group backing Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination already spent $27 million to remake the Supreme Court. We have no idea where the money came from.
The seeds for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pioneering sex-discrimination Supreme Court briefs were planted in the early years of her legal career of the 1960s, from an unlikely source: Sweden, under the prime ministership of social democrat Olof Palme.
The catastrophic descent of interwar Europe into fascist rule may not be repeatable in today’s world. But a different form of reactionary politics could still take shape and prove to be just as harmful.
It’s tempting to turn the new reporting on Donald Trump’s tax shenanigans, paying only $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017, into a story about Trump as a singular villain. He’s despicable, but he could only get away with it because we live under a system that allows the wealthy to rip off $266 billion from the country every single year.
Twenty years ago today, the second Palestinian intifada began in response to a provocation from Israel’s Ariel Sharon after the collapse of US-sponsored peace talks. The brutal Israeli response inaugurated a war on Palestinian society that continues to this day.
The International Working Men’s Association was launched in London on this day in 1864. As the “First International,” it cemented class solidarity across countries as a shared ideal and inspired large numbers to organize against capitalist exploitation.
Donald Trump says he expects the Supreme Court to decide the 2020 election, as it did in Bush v. Gore. If Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, the court will have three justices who worked directly on the case that undemocratically determined the 2000 election.
With the election campaign in its final stretch, Joe Biden has taken nearly a third of September off from campaigning. It’s an enormous strategic blunder that anyone hoping for Donald Trump’s defeat should be very worried about.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez displayed uncommon courage in withdrawing from an event celebrating Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli leader who instructed soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian demonstrators. It’s another sign that the tide is turning against defenders of Israel’s human rights abuses.
Fifty years after his death, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser still casts a long shadow over Arab politics. A symbol of defiance in the age of decolonization, Nasser transformed his country but never gave its people control of the system that ruled them.
Two generations of Egyptian Marxists debated how they should respond to Nasser and the system he founded. Some were defeated, some were co-opted — and their failure still haunts the Egyptian left today, fifty years after Nasser’s death.
A deep commitment to democracy is at the heart of the socialist project. Anticommunists have historically claimed they oppose states like the Soviet Union out of a concern for democracy. But those anticommunists’ real project has nothing to do with democracy — and everything to do with smashing the Left.