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.
Mainstream outlets are claiming the mounting coronavirus crisis in New Orleans is the result of cultural practices like Mardi Gras. That’s nonsense — it’s a consequence of deep class divides and decimated public health infrastructure.
We pay tribute to Michael Sorkin, the architect and writer who died last week after contracting COVID-19. Sorkin spent his life both interpreting and changing cities in the interest of economic justice.
In an interview with Jacobin, Medicare for All advocate and former Michigan governor hopeful Abdul El-Sayed explains why the COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable — and why the cruelties of the US’s for-profit health and economic system are making everything worse.
The World Bank’s “pandemic bonds” demonstrate how global capital has an uncanny ability to profit from social ills. So far, investors have earned about $96 million in interest on the pandemic bonds, but developing countries have yet to receive desperately needed money.
Portugal’s center-left government has announced that all migrants with open residency applications will be given regularized status, allowing them full access to health care and social services. Its example shows that our collective response to the coronavirus outbreak has to include everyone — regardless of where they were born.
A decade of Tory austerity, now compounded by the COVID-19 crisis, is pushing Britain’s National Health Service to a breaking point.
Australian workers are finally being addressed in the government’s rescue packages, but the measures go nowhere near far enough. National Secretary of the United Workers’ Union Tim Kennedy argues that the crisis offers an opportunity for genuine pushback and transformation.
We must not choose between staving off economic catastrophe or a public health disaster. We can do both — if we immediately expand Medicare to cover everyone while safely and simultaneously rebuilding our healthcare infrastructure.”
We didn’t know we were entering a new era until it arrived. We can never go back.
Martin Luther King Jr died supporting striking black sanitation workers in the South. Less than a decade later, a black Atlanta mayor and King’s own father were attacking that same group of workers and breaking their strike. Black urban governance is meaningless without a commitment to strengthening the public sector and rejecting the logic of austerity.
Manolis Glezos was just 19 when he sparked Greece’s anti-Nazi resistance by tearing down the swastika from the Acropolis. This was the beginning of a life dedicated to the cause of the oppressed — in which, as he put it, “No struggle for what you believe in is ever futile.”
Last month’s revelations of the Spanish monarchy’s illicit financial dealings embarrassed official claims that “we’re all in this together.” Faced with COVID-19, citizens are forced to build their own collective response — replacing the empty rhetoric of “national unity” with the real practice of social solidarity.
The coronavirus crisis will lead to health insurance premium increases by up to 40 percent next year. We can’t afford that. Instead of seeing premiums skyrocket or bailing out private health companies, we need to seize this moment to abolish private insurance and create a single, national insurance plan.
As health systems around the world are thrown into crisis, tech firms are winning lucrative government contracts to roll out spurious apps and digital services. We need technological innovation to combat this pandemic, but it must be administered publicly to prevent the further commodification of our health care.
Israel’s blockade of Gaza has turned the strip of land into the “world’s largest open-air prison.” And now the overcrowded enclave has its first confirmed cases of COVID-19.
The ranks of the uninsured are growing, and people are already dying from a lack of coverage. Yet Joe Biden says coronavirus has nothing to do with Medicare for All. He’s wrong: its time has come.
The United Kingdom emerged from the horrors of World War II and established a national health system. We can do the same thing with the coronavirus crisis and Medicare for All.
Mainstream media coverage of Mexico’s leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his response to the coronavirus crisis has been terrible. While world health authorities have commended Mexico’s approach, the media — blindly parroting AMLO’s right-wing opposition — have panned it.
Brazil’s fragile health care system and densely populated cities threaten to turn the COVID-19 outbreak into a full-scale social collapse. President Jair Bolsonaro’s dismissal of the pandemic as a “little flu” is feeding dissent even among his allies — threatening to hasten the far-right leader’s downfall.
From why the free market can’t cope with coronavirus to the rise of Modi and Bolsonaro to how shock therapy destroyed Russia in the 1990s and what the UK Labour Party does after Corbyn, we have a bunch of videos coming out this week.