Opal Lee is a writer.
Canada’s Starbucks organizing wave is moving eastward from British Columbia, with a store in Alberta going union earlier this month. Poetically, the Starbucks union win is on anti-labor Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s home turf.
Henry Cuellar, the conservative, antiabortion Democratic congressman — who Nancy Pelosi called a “fighter for hardworking families” — has shocked the labor movement with a radical bill seeking to eviscerate workers’ rights.
The British rail union leader Mick Lynch has recently gone viral for his media appearances defending his union’s strike. In an interview, Lynch discusses that strike, the media firestorm he’s helped spark, and how workers can defeat Britain’s superrich.
Writer-director Jordan Peele’s mysterious third film, Nope, draws on genre tropes from both alien invasion films and Westerns, but it ends up with something altogether original: a Hollywood spectacle about spectacle.
The internet feels like an antisocial, dystopian wasteland. Capitalism made it this way. But if we can pry the web out of the hands of the profit motive, we can build a better internet.
Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin have reached a deal for an energy, health care, and tax policy bill after Manchin has delayed and watered it down. But the exact details of the bill, as well as its passage, are still far from guaranteed.
In early February, Bernie Sanders advocated US involvement in peace talks to head off an “enormously destructive war” in Ukraine. We should have listened.
Biden’s climate bill is better than nothing — but just barely. “It’s a renewable energy revolution on top of a fossil fuel build-out,” says one climate advocate: in other words, a historic clean energy investment chained to a fossil fuel giveaway.
In 1945, Italian fascists saw US forces as occupiers, not liberators. Yet in postwar decades, neofascists sought to insert themselves into the Western anti-communist alliance: an “Atlanticism” that continues to inspire the far right today.
Over 50 years ago, German philosopher Günther Anders warned that space travel was in danger of being used for power and profit. Against the “provincialism” of space capitalism, he wanted the view of outer space to meaningfully expand our horizons on Earth.
After retiring from Congress, many lawmakers go on to lucrative gigs as corporate lobbyists or lawyers. They’re required by law to notify a congressional ethics committee when they begin negotiating for a new job — but next to none of them do.
Municipal bonds once allowed cities to quickly fundraise for important infrastructure and public housing projects. We should organize against today’s system of bondholder supremacy, which enables investors to extract tax-free profits from communities.
The Democratic Party is trying to deny the Green Party access to the ballot in North Carolina. I’m not a Green Party supporter, but I’m a plaintiff in a lawsuit fighting back, because Democrats are trying to stamp out democracy in my state.
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s massive wealth and resulting political influence are symptoms of a profoundly unequal society. But don’t buy into his “evil genius” self-branding. His ideology isn’t a dark enigma — it’s just run-of-the-mill rich guy stuff.
As they do their best to keep the Left weak, Democrats have spent more than $40 million in 2022 to support far-right Republican candidates.
The British government has intensified the discriminatory policies that led to the Windrush scandal of illegal deportations. Its latest scheme to forcibly transfer refugees to Rwanda may prove unworkable, but such theatrical cruelty is an end in itself.
The January 6 Capitol riot may have been a laughable failure, but it highlighted the frailty of American democracy. Unfortunately, the Democrats running the ongoing hearings investigating the riot seem to have no idea what to do about it.
Since Donald Trump’s presidency, both Democrats and Republicans have begun to openly criticize globalization. Although these concerns have often been combined with xenophobic nationalism, the Left should not cede the debate on trade policy to the Right.
The wealthy young Salvadoran Ana Margarita Gasteazoro decided to give up her privileges for struggle against a far-right dictatorship — leading to her jailing and torture. That dictatorship is gone today, but El Salvador’s undemocratic crackdowns are not.
Labor activist Ginger Goodwin spent his life fighting for the rights of working people in British Columbia, and on this day in 1918, he was killed for it. His story is a reminder of the need for uncompromising socialist politics.