Opal Lee is a writer.
Almost 60 years ago, Joan Didion wrote that “the city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” Since then, insurance companies and developers have prioritized short-term profits over housing resilience and affordability for Californians.
Tomorrow Donald Trump will take the oath of office again. By spurning economic populism and embracing Bush-era Republicans, Democrats helped pave the way for his second inauguration.
On Wednesday, Jared Kushner doubled his stake in a financial firm that stands to gain from turbocharging illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory — just before the announcement of a cease-fire deal that Kushner may have helped advise on.
It is absurd to suggest that insurance companies have been blindsided by increasing climate risks. On the contrary, they’ve been fully aware, highly prepared, and hard at work protecting profits at the expense of policyholders.
The TikTok ban is about US tech hegemony, not national security or protecting Americans’ data, which homegrown social media companies make a business of collecting and selling.
Mark Zuckerberg’s embrace of the Republican Party has come as a surprise to those who identified him and Meta with the progressive wing of the Democrats. In reality, he has long championed right-wing causes from school privatization to government deregulation.
On Thursday, France’s Parti Socialiste refused to back a motion of no confidence in François Bayrou’s government. It sold out its left-wing allies for feeble concessions, renewing the party’s dismal record of tailing neoliberal centrists.
From price gouging to risky developing to insurance dysfunction, the dynamics of private housing markets are making the Los Angeles fire disaster considerably worse. We don’t need to prioritize real estate profits over people’s housing needs.
There is no ambiguity about President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record: it was bloody, and it was disastrous.
South Korea’s right-wing president, Yoon Suk-yeol, has finally been arrested after his attempt to stage a coup. But Yoon’s supporters are still mobilizing aggressively, hoping that Donald Trump will take their side over false claims of electoral fraud.
The Trump presidency is not a pathology of mass politics. It’s a problem of our billionaire political economy.
Director David Lynch, who died this week at 78, brought an avant-garde sensibility into the American mainstream when we needed it most. There will never be another like him.
After nearly half a century as a key figurehead in the Democratic Party’s rightward turn on domestic politics, Joe Biden had a chance to undo some of that damage as president. Time after time, he blew it.
TV networks turned the Los Angeles fires into a sensationalist spectacle, repeating words like “inferno” on a loop while almost completely avoiding any mention of climate change. Their coverage treated the disaster as entertainment rather than a warning.
Mexico’s staunchly left-populist former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, just spent six years in power. But his road to the National Palace was anything but a straight line.
A CGI simian twist isn’t enough to turn Better Man into anything more than a by-the-numbers Robbie Williams biopic.
Joe Biden’s own Energy Department is warning that data centers’ energy consumption, water use, and emissions are already skyrocketing amid droughts and climate disasters. Biden just signed an executive order to accelerate an AI build-out anyway.
The Los Angeles fires threw schools into chaos, revealing their unpreparedness for the escalating challenges of the climate crisis. Schools need comprehensive disaster preparedness systems — not last-minute plans that put students and staff at risk.
While opposing guest-worker programs like H-1B, socialists must clearly reject the Right’s blanket opposition to immigration.
After 15 months of bloodshed, news has emerged of a cease-fire deal in Gaza. The US always had the power to restrain Israel but refused to use it.