William G. Martin teaches at SUNY-Binghamton and is co-author of After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment (2016) and a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier; he covers local justice matters at www.justtalk.blog
After Gladys Berejiklian’s resignation last week, New South Wales has a new premier. The rise of Dominic Perrottet — with links to Opus Dei, a raft of reactionary opinions, and close ties to big business — is bad news for Australia’s most populous state.
Capitalism is all-encompassing — we can’t simply opt out and cultivate our personal purity. Like so many others, the protagonist of Tao Lin’s latest novel wants to leave society, but the point is to change it.
More than 1,400 workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants across the US are on strike. Fed up with 12- to 16-hour days, seven days a week, with mandatory overtime, they were pushed over the edge by the company’s drive to downgrade wages and benefits for new workers.
There’s good reason to speculate that the Pandora Papers, the massive leak exposing the tax-dodging practices of the global superrich — which includes plenty of Russians and Chinese, but almost no Americans — is a CIA plant. Nevertheless, it’s a newsworthy story that deserves the attention it’s gotten.
Last Sunday, Berliners voted to nationalize the big landlords and win housing justice. We managed to get over a million people to vote to expropriate 240,000 apartments owned by mega-corporations.
The jumble of characters and subplots in the Sopranos prequel makes for a less-than-focused production that can’t stack up to the original series. But then, what can?
French philosopher Jacques Derrida is best known as one of the champions of postmodernism. But in the early 1990s, at the height of capitalist triumphalism, Derrida took up the cudgels in defense of Karl Marx — and inadvertently spawned a whole musical genre.
At last weekend’s Teamsters for a Democratic Union convention, nearly 400 rank-and-file Teamsters convened to discuss taking power in their union and organizing Amazon.
The Pandora Papers — 12 million files on the global 1 percent and the legal tricks they use to get out of paying taxes — are one of the biggest journalistic bombshells in years. They expose a system with one set of standards for the rich and another for everyone else.
Legislation to hold the Purdue Pharma Sackler family accountable is stalled as the Chamber of Commerce begins lobbying on the bill. Congress can’t let the criminals that fueled the opioid crisis get away with murder.
Loretta Preska, the judge who did Chevron’s bidding in the case against activist Steven Donziger, has a history of conflicts of interest and pro-corporate rulings. And she’s not alone — corporate influence and conflicts of interest are rampant in the courts.
Like Parasite before it, Netflix’s survival thriller Squid Game dramatizes the horrors of modern inequality and exploitation in South Korea — and shreds the capitalist myth that hard work guarantees prosperity.
NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes in Jacobin arguing that athletes like Kyrie Irving aren’t making a “personal choice” by refusing the COVID vaccine — they’re jeopardizing the public health of all through their platforms.
In Spain, a center-left coalition government faces opposition not just from right-wingers and business leaders but from parts of the judiciary and police. For Pablo Iglesias, it’s time the Left pushed back against right-wing dominance in the state machine.
Australia’s unemployment benefit is one of the lowest in the OECD. This isn’t just a by-product of austerity politics — it’s designed to force the unemployed into low-paid, casual work, undermining wages and conditions across the board.
Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers immortalized Algeria’s fight against French colonial rule. But Saadi Yacef, who died last month at age 93, stood out among the movie’s stars, for he had also been a key leader of the armed struggle in real life.
In 1980, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau introduced the National Energy Program. Though flawed, the policy showed how state intervention in the energy sector could overcome the boom-and-bust of the business cycle.
Conservative ideologues have dismissed the French Revolution as an unnecessary bloodbath. But a fresh look at the Revolution shows us its vital relevance to contemporary political issues, from demands for economic equality to the struggle against racism.
It’s easy to laugh at people eating “horse paste.” But the widespread willingness to take off-label treatments and drugs formulated for animals stems from problems in our privatized health care system, from domestic pharma prices to global vaccine inequality.
We asked our film critic — who has somehow never seen The Sopranos — to watch HBO’s new prequel film The Many Saints of Newark to see if it could work on its own merits.