Tanner Howard is a freelance journalist and In These Times editorial intern. They’re also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
National support for Black Lives Matter has soared — while President Donald Trump’s approval rating has plunged ten points in a single month. The movement for racial justice is more popular than Trump’s presidency.
Critics of the demand to “defund the police” cite current polling snapshots as supposed proof of protesters’ electoral malpractice. They’re politically shortsighted — and confused about the key role of mass protest movements in dragging such demands from the margins to the mainstream.
Minneapolis bus drivers provided a model of solidarity during the George Floyd protests by refusing to transport police officers. We spoke with the president of the bus driver union’s black caucus about the inspiring action and the need for a labor movement that fights for more than just bread-and-butter economic gains for its members.
The mass protests against police violence have had an impact on even the most culturally conservative element of American sports culture: NASCAR.
Recently revealed emails show that a wide range of public entities were used to police a California graduate workers strike. It’s part of a long tradition of government agencies spying on labor organizers and radicals — but now with cross-agency coordination and ever-expanding budgets.
Defunding the police means cutting bloated local police budgets and diverting the resources to social programs. Politically, it’s right up Bernie’s alley. He should embrace it.
Nearly one in five workers in the United States is currently unemployed. The immediate catalyst for these gargantuan figures is the pandemic, but workers’ rights to “just cause” dismissals had long been eroded by a neoliberal war on labor.
Cops in New York have responded to pressure for reform with a targeted slowdown, while they continue to dish out violence on the streets. We need to be as determined in forcing change upon the police as they are in resisting it.
A new book uncovers the reality of America’s victory in the Cold War — detailing how massacres of leftists in twenty-two countries helped to overcome resistance to capitalism across the world, writes Grace Blakeley.
With thousands of Canadians protesting police violence, Justin Trudeau has offered no plans to combat brutality in Canadian policing — but he did take a knee at an Ottawa protest for the cameras. It’s a tried-and-true Trudeau formula: refuse to take meaningful progressive action, but pose for the press as if he did.
Establishment pundits love to cite Martin Luther King as a way to delegitimize militant protests and shame unruly protesters. But King wasn’t a proponent of passive, compliant protest — to him, nonviolent action was about forging a powerful collective force that could coerce ruling elites into conceding to demands for justice.
It’s a dark time in the US and across the world, but the last two weeks actually give us some cause for hope. Cities are pledging to shift money from cops to public services, violent officers are being disciplined and fired, and a wave of left victories came in last week’s primaries.
Credit for the unprecedented wave of mass protests should go to anti-police brutality activists, movement journalists, and politicized young people. But let’s not forget the boys in blue themselves: cops’ vicious treatment of protesters proved to millions around the world that the protesters were right.
Just two days after the murder of George Floyd, a young welder and rapper named Modesto Reyes was killed by police in the New Orleans suburb of Jefferson Parish after a traffic stop. Why aren’t the deaths of Reyes and the other young black men recently killed by police in the New Orleans area national news?
Longshore workers on the East and West Coast are stopping work today to demand an end to racist police murders. We spoke with one of the protest organizers about the action — and why labor must take the lead in the fight against police violence.
Republicans are simply outraged at calls to defund the police. But for years, they’ve had no problem defunding the agencies tasked with enforcing laws against the world’s most hardened, powerful criminals: corporations.
Ilhan Omar, once a refugee, has become a major force in US politics. In her new memoir, she charts her journey from Somalia to the US Congress and explains why, despite hating her politics, she can’t help but admire Margaret Thatcher. Incredibly for a memoir like this, the book is actually good.
Critics declaring Bernie Sanders’s campaigns a total failure have discounted a basic socialist proposition: our metric for his success should not just be his winning or losing, but the extent to which the working-class movement has advanced.
The brutality we have repeatedly seen meted out by American police all over the country isn’t a bug of our political-economic system — it’s a feature.
Australia’s mean and punitive benefits system is a key tool for disciplining workers while amassing profits for private firms. The labor movement needs to join with the unemployed to overhaul it entirely.