Opal Lee is a writer.
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.”
In British Columbia, the social democratic NDP has disappointingly dragged its feet on legislating paid sick days. With a plan in the works for next year, the New Democratic Party needs to ignore the business lobby and side with workers.
At the University of Pittsburgh, roughly 3,500 educators are voting on a union. If they win, it will be the largest new union in the United States this year.
Israel’s leaders exploited the US reaction to 9/11 to demonize Palestinian resistance to the occupation. They have used the discourse of “counterterrorism” to entrench a system of apartheid, while exporting repressive methods and weapons around the world.
Biden and European Union officials continue to help Big Pharma prevent the distribution of intellectual property rights to fight COVID.
Landlords scored a major victory with the end of eviction bans. The path forward for organized tenants and socialists has to make prying power out of landlords’ hands a top priority.
Instead, the quest to avenge just shy of 3,000 civilian deaths in New York and Washington has now resulted in the deaths of at least 400,000 civilians.
In 2001, conservative prime minister John Howard demonized 433 refugees who had been rescued at sea. It inaugurated an era of racist, abusive policies toward asylum seekers in Australia — and a movement that fights in solidarity with refugees.
A Canadian wine enthusiast’s quest to uncover whether wines produced in Israeli settlements were being misleadingly labeled “Made in Israel” has set off a long legal battle. In the process, he has exposed Canada’s complicity in Israel’s occupation.