How Bernie Won a Landslide of Latino Voters
In this year’s primaries, Bernie Sanders won landslide levels of support from Latinos. Here’s how he did it.
19633 Articles by: Opal Lee
Opal Lee is a writer.
The Israel-Palestine Conflict Isn’t a “Clash of Cultures.” It’s About Colonialism.
Palestine has been battered for over a century, yet the narrative of a “tragic clash” of two peoples with claims to the same territory still prevails. That framing is wrong — Palestine’s miseries are the product of settler-colonial conquest.
Our Revolution Failed to Live Up to Its Potential. But the Bernie Movement Needs a Mass Organization Now.
A few weeks ago, we had a democratic-socialist presidential campaign with several million donors and over a thousand-person staff. Today, we have no mass organization to carry on the struggle. We can change that — but only with Bernie’s help.
Coronavirus Shows Us Why Occupational Health and Safety Is Life or Death for Workers
The power of organized labor won the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 49 years ago today. That victory has saved thousands of lives in workplaces across the country — but we need to think even bigger than regulatory reforms now.
We Need Unionized Jobs, Not Crumbs of Charity
Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has donated $100 million to food banks during the current crisis, but he won’t even pay his own workers sick pay. Instead of charity, we need rights we can rely on — and as Unite leader Len McCluskey argues, the best way to win them is to organize with our coworkers.
J. B. Pritzker Should Lift Illinois’s Rent Control Ban to Provide Relief for Renters
Illinois cannot act to provide relief for its renters struggling under the coronavirus pandemic because of a 1997 rent control ban pushed by the Right. But this could change if its governor, J. B. Pritzker, used his emergency powers to lift that ban and aid the millions of Illinoisans who can’t pay the rent.
Mike Davis: Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell
People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But Mike Davis argues that a rapid reopening of the economy would only result in unspeakable tragedy for millions.
Tech Giants Are Using This Crisis to Colonize the Welfare System
In recent years, firms like Google and Facebook have used the Global South as a test bed for new and unregulated forms of data collection. Faced with coronavirus, the same mechanisms are being rolled out across the world — with for-profit data collection becoming increasingly central to states’ management of their welfare systems.
Billionaires Are the Pandemic’s Villains, Not Its Heroes
As tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in the coronavirus crisis, the richest Americans saw their wealth rise by hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s not a coincidence.
We Can’t Settle for Human Rights
The idea of human rights was once intimately tied to egalitarianism and socialist politics. By the 1990s, it was used to justify neoliberalism.
When France’s Railworkers Got Ideas Above Their Station
Railworkers have been decisive in the resistance to Emmanuel Macron’s dismantling of the French welfare state. These workers’ strength owes to their ability to bring traffic to a standstill — but also to a culture of solidarity built across decades of militant workplace activism.
Unions Are Saving Our Lives Every Day
The coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that as long as they’re making profits, capitalists don’t care if we live or die. But unions, at their best, fight for everyone.
Australian Universities Were Sick Before the Pandemic
The COVID-19 crisis has hit Australian universities hard, with a largely casualized workforce already at risk of job losses. As rank-and-file union members prepare to fight back, they’re forced to confront a neoliberal rot that set in decades ago.
We Need Massive Aid to the States — Not a Round of Bankruptcies
Mitch McConnell’s suggestion that states should go bankrupt instead of asking for federal assistance was the bloviating of an austerity-minded reactionary. What we need instead is a universal welfare state that refuses to let workers in any state suffer the vagaries of the market.
The US Political System Is to Blame for This Pandemic
Donald Trump richly deserves to be condemned for his response to COVID-19. But the catastrophic failures of public policy didn’t start with Trump: this bipartisan disaster has been decades in the making.
We Must Offer a Message of Solidarity and Hope
People are losing everything — their jobs, their homes, their health care, their savings. Democratic socialists must articulate the pain and uncertainty ordinary people are experiencing during this crisis or the Right will fill the void.
We’re Still Picking up the Pieces of the Last Crisis
After the bank bailouts in 2008, the next stage in the government’s response was to cut spending on public services and lump even greater responsibilities onto private households. The end result was a huge rise in informal and unpaid labor carried out by women — and faced with the current shutdown, the losers from the last crisis are being punished even further.
To Fight the Pandemic, We Must Challenge the Whole System
The dysfunctions of modern capitalism have left us perilously exposed to a public health catastrophe. We must build on the solidarity engendered by this crisis to fight for a different world.
John Prine’s Human Touch
Legendary singer-songwriter John Prine loved people and hated cruelty. It is a simple but beautiful motivation for music, and the world is poorer for his no longer being in it.
Amazon Workers Desperately Need an Insurgent Union Campaign
Amazon is one of the most important companies in the American and global economies. If enough out-of-work socialists and other fed-up workers got jobs at the company and organized, they could build real working-class power in the 21st century economy.