Opal Lee is a writer.
In Los Angeles, Betsy DeVos is using the chaos of COVID-19 to push a voucher scheme that would force public schools to compete for students to stay open. After conquering LA, DeVos and friends aim to take the plan nationwide.
The Obama presidency gave rise to a uniquely powerful iconography that projected a sense of hope and radical possibility. But behind the president’s messianic imagery was a country unraveling at the seams — and a president who stood for nothing.
In 1972, the Soviet Union beat the US in men’s Olympic basketball. The controversial victory has overshadowed the story of Cuba’s bronze medal at the very same games, and the remarkable socialist sports infrastructure that made the island nation’s win possible.
Cristóbal Andrade is a car mechanic and socialist elected to Chile’s Constitutional Convention. Jacobin asked him why he attends sessions dressed as a dinosaur.
A major socialist-led grassroots campaign is underway to pass Jamaal Bowman’s Green New Deal for Public Schools — a strategically savvy measure that combines forthright climate action with large-scale investment in working-class schools.
The Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert is spearheading amendments that could gut Democrats’ climate bill — while also benefiting her husband’s fossil fuel business.
Longtime union organizer Joel Brooks is running for city council in Jersey City on a platform of permanently affordable housing, a municipal Green New Deal, and a public safety agenda that stabilizes rather than upends people’s lives.
This weekend marks the 48th anniversary of the US-backed coup against Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende. That coup’s history is important, but we can’t forget that Allende’s government also achieved incredible things while in power.
Central to the justification for the “war on terror” by right-wing and liberal administrations was the simple idea that the United States has the right to impose its will on the rest of the world. The results, unsurprisingly, were disastrous.
Despite copious evidence of Saudi complicity in the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration and its successors have spent twenty years shielding the country’s elite from accountability while making war on an ever-growing list of other Middle East countries.
HBO has a new documentary about Barack Obama. It’s so devoid of politics that a viewer just learning about Obama would have no idea he escalated the war in Afghanistan and presided over eight years of rising economic inequality.
The 9/11 era helped create a modern version of the Dark Ages. Today, we must finally move beyond it and forge a new sort of politics based on truth and collective emancipation.
Two decades after 9/11, the US prison at Guantánamo Bay still holds detainees who have been charged with no crime. The crimes of Gitmo must end and the base must be returned to the Cuban republic.
For the past two decades, the psychology of 9/11 has shaped the nation’s political landscape and thrown the world into turmoil. That era must be definitively ended.
Respectable pundits and politicians scoffed at the antiwar demonstrators who tried to stop the invasion of Iraq. But the slogan they raised, “No blood for oil,” captured the truth about Bush’s war drive.
Two decades ago, the mainstream media responded to the September 11 attacks by stacking their news coverage and pundit commentary with the country’s most belligerently pro-war voices. We are still paying for their appalling misjudgment.
The United States invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 because its leaders wanted revenge. The US occupation brought misery and destruction for the Afghan people, and its failure was guaranteed from the start.
When Chile’s generals overthrew Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, Britain’s Tories welcomed the coup as good news for investors. But British trade unions worked to block trade with the newly empowered Chilean fascists.
The Bush administration was already planning to invade Iraq before 9/11, but the attacks supplied the necessary pretext. The catastrophic war that followed turned Iraq into an ungovernable wasteland.
Political theorist Nancy Fraser tells Jacobin that we face several crises at once: in the economy, in social reproduction, in the environment, and in politics. Without dramatic intervention, we may end up with “cannibal capitalism.”