Opal Lee is a writer.
States and municipalities are increasingly relying on court fees as revenue streams, creating at least $27.6 billion in debt for Americans. To handle that debt’s collection, those states and municipalities, and even the IRS, are increasingly turning to private firms, which can add up to 40 percent surcharges onto the fees.
Sweden’s Social Democrat-led government is in crisis after its defeat in Monday’s no-confidence vote. It lost its left-wing support after it moved to abandon rent controls — showing how the neoliberalized wing of social democracy is undermining its own past achievements.
New York City mayoral election was bizarre. And it’s not over: Eric Adams’s unique blend of supposedly anti-racist law-and-order politics, pro-landlord policy, and appeals to outer borough resentment of liberal Manhattan elites won the first round.
The Battle of Blair Mountain is one of the most stunning episodes in the United States’ violent history of class warfare. In 1921, twenty thousand armed miners in West Virginia marched on the coal bosses and were met with bombs and submachine guns.
Five years after the Brexit referendum, Boris Johnson is flying high in British politics. He could have been stopped, but the pro-Brexit right and the anti-Brexit center were united in opposing Jeremy Corbyn and a Labour left–led government.
The billionaire class isn’t just a group of people who happen to be superrich. It’s a dynastic oligarchy with a single overriding objective: controlling the government to protect its inherited wealth.
After an IRS leak about billionaires’ massive tax avoidance schemes, corporate media says there’s nothing to see here because the avoidance is surely legal. But there’s no reason we should assume that these billionaires are playing by the rules.
One man put a stop to Hitler’s march across Europe: not Stalin, Churchill, or Roosevelt, but a German Communist called Richard Sorge. Sorge was a real-life spy whose exploits surpassed any fictional creation, and one of the twentieth century’s great heroes.
The Soviet experience of Nazi invasion inspired many powerful works of cinema. In contrast with Hollywood’s approach to World War II, Soviet filmmakers avoided triumphalist images of warfare, depicting the conflict as a brutal necessity that should never be repeated.
Performed in a city under siege, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony symbolized popular resistance to the Nazi invasion. A complex work with several layers of political meaning, the symphony was a high point of twentieth-century classical music.
The Nazis reserved two fates for the Soviet Union’s people: slavery or extermination. The outside world still hasn’t fully registered the scale of the horrific crimes unleashed by the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union on this day in 1941.
Sebahat Tuncel is an MP for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) who has spent almost five years in Turkish jail on fabricated terrorism charges. She writes from prison on how President Erdoğan is using the courts to suppress dissent — and why Kurdish and democratic forces will never give in to his regime.
Polling places open tomorrow in New York City as the race to succeed mayor Bill de Blasio effectively comes to an end. The campaign has been endlessly frustrating for the city’s left — but its chances in other upcoming races look quite good.
The conditions in child migrant detention facilities aren’t just cruelly overcrowded and holding kids for far longer than is legal or moral — they’re also a perfect storm for a major outbreak in infectious diseases, including COVID-19.
Amazon calls its annual Prime Day a “holiday” — but it’s pure misery for the hundreds of thousands of workers tasked with fulfilling orders.
We often hear about discontented French voters turning to Marine Le Pen’s far right, but not about the tens of millions who’ve given up on voting at all. They were the key in yesterday’s regional elections — and they’re the ones the Left has to win.
Marco Rubio has been hailed as an embodiment of some Republicans’ newfound economic populism. But his new student debt relief plan shows how much of a farce that all is: it pauses student loan payments for one year… for survivors of terrorist attacks.
To have proper social housing we must reject private-sector control — even from nonprofits. It’s simple: public housing must be publicly owned.
Twenty years ago, Barbara Lee cast the lone vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force — the blank check for endless war Congress gave George W. Bush after 9/11. She’s been vindicated by history. Those who pushed the “War on Terror” have not.
For weeks, pro-Palestine protesters physically prevented the unloading of Israeli-operated cargo that had entered the Port of Seattle. It finally took a violent crackdown by Seattle police to get the ship unloaded.