Opal Lee is a writer.
Our work lives are so fissured, our ability to survive requiring such constant and Herculean efforts, that even fantastical narratives portraying the hunt for a steady job as swirling, maddening, operatically dramatic, degrading, bizarre, and never-ending feel just as real as life itself.
If Joe Biden managed to pull off a victory despite his lackluster campaign, it’s in part because the electorate felt the urgent need for a president who would focus on the coronavirus crisis instead of railing against a series of cultural bogeymen. No wonder: most people care more about their material conditions than the partisan culture wars.
The Lincoln Project said it would win over Republican voters from Donald Trump. Instead, Trump consolidated his base as the group burned $67 million that could’ve been spent better on real political organizing.
Democrats based much of their 2020 campaign on support for the Affordable Care Act. But the law has become less popular as the pandemic has exposed its flaws while continuing to enrich insurance companies.
Whatever the final outcome of the election, we know one thing for sure: the pollsters screwed up royally. And the heyday of celebrity pollsters seems to be coming to an end.
For Golden Age Hollywood, Kaua’i became synonymous with paradise. But Anthony Banua-Simon’s new documentary Cane Fire traces the reality of life on the island, from domination by sugar companies to its transformation into a low-wage service economy.
The fire at Greece’s notorious Moria refugee camp left over 12,000 people without shelter, but the new camp built to replace it holds only 3,000. The deliberate overcrowding flies in the face of anti-COVID measures, but it also has a clear political message: asylum seekers’ lives are more dispensable than European citizens’.
British journalist Robert Fisk, who died last week, produced decades of outstanding work, from Ireland to the Middle East. His greatest impact on public opinion came after 9/11, when he mounted a brave challenge to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Joe Biden and the Democrats have steadfastly refused to articulate a compelling alternative political vision to Donald Trump’s reactionary right-wing politics. Trump looks likely to have lost, but without creating an alternative to defeat it, Trumpism could return with a vengeance four years from now.
After a $200 million propaganda blitz, California voters passed the Uber- and Lyft-backed Proposition 22 on Tuesday, permanently excluding online “platform” workers from labor protections. Unsurprisingly, the companies are now talking about extending such legislation nationally.
There’s still much we don’t know, but we can take some key lessons from the elections last night: Democrats’ weak economic message helped Trump, the Lincoln Project embarrassed itself, a ton of grassroots money was set on fire, Americans don’t love Obamacare, and the Democratic courts’ strategy failed.
Nothing is certain yet, but we may be gearing up for what amounts to a Biden-McConnell coalition government. The Left will be up against a split government composed of two parties bent on pushing austerity and war.
Victory for socialist candidate Luis Arce in last month’s Bolivian election seemed to turn the page on the overthrow of Evo Morales last fall. But the murder of miners’ leader Orlando Gutiérrez just after the election shows that the coup plotters are still a violent threat — and will do all they can to silence working-class Bolivians.
There’s something deeply ironic about Donald Trump’s bizarre, pre-election “YMCA” video: You can no longer stay at the Village People’s YMCA in Manhattan, because the gentrification carried out by real estate barons like Trump drove out housing for poor people.
Whatever the final outcome of the vote, there has rarely been a more vital moment to champion democracy and majority rule. That means abolishing the Electoral College.
Brazil is governed by a president with well-documented links to Rio’s mafias. In order to understand Jair Bolsonaro’s rise, it is key to understand the link between his brutal law-and-order politics and the increasing stranglehold of organized crime over Rio.
Last week, Poland banned abortion after its government stacked the courts with right-wing ideologues. But they didn’t count on women fighting back — and now they face a historic wave of protest.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party are trying to stop ballots from being counted by flooding the courts with lawsuits and sowing doubts about mail-in ballots. We can’t let them steal this election.
Tonight’s election returns might seem dispiriting, but that’s exactly what the Right wants — for us to preemptively concede. Our demand should be simple: just count the damn votes.
For weeks, voters have been forced to wait in interminable lines just to cast their ballot. That’s an indictment of American democracy — and it points to deeper flaws in a political system that represents the oligarchic minority over the working-class majority.