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
Jacob Lawrence was one of twentieth-century America’s most celebrated black artists. In Struggle, his series of paintings on the American Revolution, he opened up new territory in American history by venturing beyond the narrow set of topics like Harlem, jazz clubs, and cotton plantations which had become synonymous with black art in mid-century America.
For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists against Bernie Sanders’s left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos’s newspaper’s recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos.
With an election due this autumn, Norway’s once-dominant Labour Party has been out of government for almost a decade. If the Norwegian left can’t recapture the spirit that underpinned its greatest achievements, an impressive legacy of social reform will be under threat.
The coup in Myanmar has exposed the faulty foundation of the country’s democratic transition. We spoke with an organizer in Myanmar’s burgeoning labor movement — which will be central to the fight against authoritarianism in the coming days and months.
In response to the Capitol riot, new legislation proposed by New York Assembly members Ron Kim and socialist Zohran Mamdani would divest public money from firms whose executives bankroll shadowy far-right groups.
A collective wail of anguish went up after news broke that Dolly Parton’s working-class anthem “9 to 5” has been repurposed for a Squarespace ad lauding “working, working, working.” Our grief is justified. But the song’s deformation into a hollow jingle says more about capitalism than Dolly.
Jeff Bezos joined Black Lives Matters’ calls for racial justice last year. But Amazon workers in the majority-black town of Bessemer, Alabama are trying to unionize — and Amazon has fought them tooth and nail.
The US Chamber of Commerce is pushing Democrats to slash COVID-19 relief checks for millions of people. And corporate Democrats appear to be listening.
Jeff Bezos is stepping aside as Amazon’s CEO having made a fortune of almost $200 billion. It’s an attempt at reputation rehabilitation — but he can’t escape the legacy of exploitation he leaves behind.
The Italian president has appointed former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi to form a “nonpolitical” government. In fact, this is the latest in a string of technocratic administrations designed to impose unpopular austerity measures — a deeply ideological program that Italians have never voted for.
A British government ad campaign targets lockdown rule-breakers, blamed for undermining measures to tackle the pandemic. But the real problem is the government’s failure to set effective rules to start with — scapegoating individual behavior even as it has allowed the virus to let rip in crowded schools and workplaces.
The Robinhood trading app is an attempt to commercialize a powerful but thoroughly fictional myth: that finance can be democratized while ownership and control remain in the hands of powerful capitalists.
As part of its anti-union agenda, Alberta’s right-wing government has wrested control of workers’ retirement funds from a joint board that gave them a guaranteed say. Workers in the province are preparing to mount a legal challenge to the power grab.
Gig economy companies and organized labor are at war over the future of work and the definition of “employee.” The companies’ strategy has split the labor movement by enticing some unions into a partnership-based company unionism instead of independent workers’ organizing.
There’s wide support for the kind of social-democratic policies Canada’s New Democratic Party should be offering, but the party is afraid to put forward a bold left-wing program that can inspire supporters. The NDP’s history shows how it’s possible for a left party to succeed against the tide.
Drug companies have received over $10 billion from the US government for COVID-19 vaccine production. Yet those companies weren’t required to offer their vaccines at fair prices or share intellectual property rights — and they want to keep it that way.
Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit shows a Cold War world far from the usual Hollywood tropes of freedom-loving Americans confronting evil Russian totalitarians. The villains in this piece aren’t our heroine’s Soviet chess rivals, but the middle-class tyrants of US suburbia.
From GameStop to COVID-19 relief, the past year has given us an abundance of reasons to ignore the advice of neoliberal economists like Larry Summers. There are tentative signs that the Biden administration might do just that.
Despite Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s own admission that reopening other parts of the city like restaurants would be unsafe given COVID-19 infection rates, she is insisting Chicago teachers and students return to in-person learning. The Chicago Teachers Union has voted to defy the mayor, refusing to return to schools under current conditions.
Community organizer Carroll Fife is preparing to enter city hall in Oakland. She joins part of a wave of left-wing insurgents unseating neoliberal officials across the country, and she’ll be working to build municipal power from the bottom up.