Opal Lee is a writer.
The Saudi regime is responsible for one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises through its war in Yemen. The Biden administration has now frozen arms sales to the Saudis, but Justin Trudeau’s government seems happy to step into the breach as their gunrunner of choice.
In recent years, Marine Le Pen has sought to detoxify her party’s brand and distance herself from her father Jean-Marie’s crankish outbursts. But his latest volume of memoir is a reminder that her so-called populist right is rooted in fascism and a National Front that united Vichyites and antisemites with radicalized conservatives.
A team of leading Finnish researchers had a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine ready last May, which could have allowed countries all over the world to inoculate their populations without paying top dollar. Yet rather than help the initiative, Finland’s government sided with Big Pharma — showing how a patent-based funding model puts profit over public health.
Jack Lang enjoys a reputation as Australia’s most radical Labor leader. Lang didn’t start off on the party’s left, but he refused to impose austerity measures as New South Wales premier during the Great Depression, leading to a bitter confrontation and Lang’s dismissal from office.
Leo Panitch saw no other option than to act as if socialism and a world free of exploitation could be won in the here and now, his longtime collaborator Sam Gindin writes. Despite knowing that socialism was unlikely to emerge in his lifetime, Panitch devoted himself fully to a project that could liberate generations of people to come.
The Social Democrats’ 2019 election win fed hopes that Denmark would move away from extreme measures that strip migrants of their valuables and criminalize minority neighborhoods. Yet since then, the Social Democratic government has continued this offensive — with recent calls for a “zero asylum” agenda that will push refugees into endless purgatory.
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.
The spread of COVID-19 anywhere on the planet threatens us all, yet Big Pharma’s monopoly on the vaccine supply ensures that people in most of the world aren’t getting inoculated. In this appeal, left-wing figures like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Rafael Correa, and former Brazilian president Lula call on governments to lift the patents and ensure vaccines are distributed as cheaply and quickly as possible.
For journalist Matt Taibbi, Herbert Marcuse is a pseudo-intellectual at fault for much of what ails the contemporary left. But the real Marcuse was a serious thinker who remained committed to socialism and working-class struggle. In our moment of political defeat, his works like One-Dimensional Man are well worth revisiting.
Yesterday, we were treated to a telling contrast: Joe Biden bombed Syria without congressional authorization, and then refused to lift a finger when the Senate parliamentarian slapped down a minimum wage increase. It’s a pathetic reflection of Biden’s twisted priorities.
The standoff between Facebook and the Australian government has ended with Facebook agreeing to pay off news companies. But the deal won’t help journalists whose wages and conditions have been under constant attack, unless they start organizing to defend their rights.
Pushing through a $15 minimum wage wouldn’t just be an economic gift to workers — it would be a political gift from the Democrats to themselves. Inaction, on the other hand, would hand a historic favor to the far right. Biden is committing a huge blunder by wavering.
Few industries in the United States expose workers to COVID-19 at higher rates than the meatpacking and food processing sector. We spoke with a worker at a Tyson poultry plant in Arkansas about his fear of getting sick, what Tyson thinks of its workers, and how long it’s been since he received any hazard pay.
As the legal marijuana industry continues to expand across the United States, unions are expanding with it. We spoke to a weed worker in Chicago who’s in the middle of a union drive at Windy City Cannabis about how low pay, dangerous working conditions under COVID-19, and a lack of “democratic control” on the job led him and his coworkers to organize.
The new film Nomadland is a heartfelt look at the lives of itinerant Americans cast aside by the Great Recession. But it ignores how employers like Amazon are raking in profits off this new class of worker.
During the Korean War, the United States inflicted unimaginable horrors on the Korean people. Yet today Americans know almost nothing about their government’s role in war crimes and atrocities.
Germany’s employment model is under attack, as mass closures and cost-cutting businesses make once-stable engineering jobs ever more precarious. Some trade unionists have turned to worker buyouts as a means of saving jobs — a move that hands workers more control of their situation, but also brings dangers of its own.
A confidential memo now circulating spells out exactly how Vice President Kamala Harris to help push through a $15 minimum wage. There are no excuses for inaction.
After more than two decades, New York’s storied tabloid, the Daily News, finally has a staff union again. But with the paper’s sale to Alden Global Capital, a rapacious hedge fund notorious for crushing newsrooms, the union is going to have its work cut out for it just keeping the paper alive.
Historian Walter Scheidel claims to have found the surprising secret of Europe’s rise to world domination: the collapse of the Roman Empire. Scheidel’s work is an impressive, globe-trotting feat of scholarship, but his argument ultimately fails to convince.