Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
Don’t let the Democrats tell you Joe Biden’s hands are tied on the debt ceiling. If he really wanted to, he could use any number of maneuvers to refuse Republicans’ anti-worker, anti-poor demands and still avoid default.
There is mounting evidence that corporate profiteering is playing a key role in the latest wave of inflation, with profit margins soaring while real wages continue to fall. To fight inflation, we have to tackle corporate greed.
Although China now has an urban majority, the key to its development since 1949 lies in the vast countryside. Maoist land reform redistributed land on a huge scale, but the country’s rulers are still reluctant to discuss the darker side of its history.
California’s legislature is voting on a climate bill that would require companies — including fast-food giants like In-N-Out — to disclose the largely hidden indirect emissions involved in production and consumption. Big business is fighting it tooth and nail.
The European Commission has proposed a slight loosening of debt limits — but Germany’s neoliberal finance minister Christian Lindner is blocking the change. His zombie economics will impoverish citizens and hasten the rise of the far right.
America’s blood plasma industry is the largest in the world and preys on the economically desperate.
Mexican president AMLO and the Drug Enforcement Administration have been involved in a heated war of words following revelations of covert operations on Mexican soil. At the same time, an extensive web of corruption within the agency is being laid bare.
A law proposed by New York socialist legislators would prohibit charitable organizations in New York from funding Israel’s illegal settlements — and pick a fight with the powerful pro-Israel organizations that regularly try to destroy progressive candidates.
Hollywood is often portrayed as a haven of elitist liberalism. To the extent that’s true, it’s partly because the Hollywood blacklist made it so difficult to produce working-class movies like the 1954 classic Salt of the Earth.
South Carolina’s 2022 Democratic candidate for governor, Joe Cunningham, has just become the national director of the group No Labels, the third-party astroturf campaign that could help tank Joe Biden’s reelection.
Minnesota just passed a paid parental leave program. But the plan has no minimum benefit and entirely excludes all new parents who did not earn $3,500 in the 12 months leading up to birth.
As the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces clash with the Sudanese Armed Forces, both sides are causing widespread destruction. The Sudanese people, meanwhile, are organizing to survive and keep the struggle for democracy going.
Amid raging wildfires and evacuations, Alberta is grappling with political inertia. Fighting for a livable future in the climate-denying, oil-producing province will require a bold politics of anti-austerity and just transition policies.
Thanks to activist efforts, corporate and government policies have begun to make insulin more affordable for diabetics. These changes were won by exposing Big Pharma’s role in the US’s unjust for-profit health care system.
Just because not all jobs can be done at home does not mean that no jobs should be done at home. Working from home won’t end exploitation, but it’s nonetheless an important front on which labor can strive to secure improved working arrangements.
Greece votes in a general election today, with the right-wing New Democracy resisting the challenge from Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza. The campaign has been subdued, reflecting voters’ limited faith in Syriza’s ability to undo the austerity it helped to impose.
Homeless people in the United States are far more likely to be victims of gruesome violence than to be perpetrators. Yet the widespread demonization of the homeless would lead you to believe the exact opposite.
As Canada’s conservative heartland goes to the polls, the incumbent United Conservative Party is planning to sell much of Alberta’s social housing to landlords. Under the plan, landlords will prosper, and tenants will suffer.
Over the past few decades, scientists have been making fewer and fewer innovative breakthroughs. The blame lies with academia’s increasingly competitive, metrics-driven model, which discourages creativity and risk-taking.
Amid the debt ceiling debate, House Republicans are pushing for cuts to the Veterans Administration, and corporate Democrats are continuing to support privatizing the agency’s socialized medicine. Both are an attack on working-class veterans.