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
On October 6, Lidia Thorpe was sworn in as the first Aboriginal woman to represent Victoria in Australia’s parliament. This month, Thorpe spoke to Jacobin about a centuries-long struggle for justice.
Comcast received $1 billion in government subsidies. But it’s still imposing new data fees on customers reliant on the internet due to COVID. Thanks to a massive lobbying effort and ties to Joe Biden, the telecom giant might very well get away with it.
America’s biggest corporations have made record profits during the COVID-19 pandemic — while denying or clawing back their workers’ hazard pay.
Housing organizer and socialist Guilherme Boulos recently shocked Brazil by forcing a runoff for mayor in the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, São Paolo. In an interview, he lays out his vision for the position, how to embed the Brazilian left in the country’s working class, and how to “place the periphery in the center.”
We don’t have a labor party in the US, but as of earlier this month, we do have a Labor Caucus in Congress. We talked to Wisconsin representative Mark Pocan about the caucus’s plans.
The writer Yukio Mishima, who took his own life fifty years ago today, remains one of modern Japan’s most important cultural figures. Mishima’s eccentric and contradictory political stances have also gained him a devoted following on the international far right.
Whatever his failings, the late New York mayor David Dinkins’s historic stature and contributions to the common good gave him a unique place in the democratic socialist movement.
On Tuesday, France’s National Assembly passed a bill effectively banning citizens from posting videos of police officers. Emmanuel Macron is trampling on historic press freedoms in order to prove himself as a “law-and-order” president — an authoritarian turn which makes a mockery of his claimed defense of liberal values.
An astounding 68 percent of Americans say they want lawmakers to reject corporate executives and lobbyists if they are nominated for Joe Biden’s cabinet posts, according to a new survey.
New York’s first and only black mayor, and one time Democratic Socialists of America member, David Dinkins came to power at a time when anyone left of center was forced into a defensive posture.
The US’s monstrous for-profit health system saddles millions of workers with debt for the crime of seeking medical treatment. We desperately need to cancel all medical debt, even as we continue to fight for Medicare for All.
If you were hoping for a change of heart from Joe Biden after a decades-long career as a hawk, we’ve got bad news: his incoming team helped shape some of the most militaristic policies of the Obama administration.
For Seattle’s ruling class, having even one socialist, Kshama Sawant, on city council is far too many. Which is why, Sawant writes in Jacobin, since she first won office in 2013, the attacks from Democrats, the Right, and corporate juggernauts like Amazon haven’t stopped attacking her.
A trillion dollars could maintain wages at pre-crisis levels for all workers in America, enabling people to stay home and stop the spread of the virus, for four months. Instead, it’s gone into the personal piggy banks of a handful of billionaire owners and investors.
Everyone knows the desperate need to stop fossil fuel extraction immediately to avoid climate catastrophe. But that hasn’t stopped a Trump-appointed financial regulator from trying to force banks to continue financing fossil fuel projects.
To avoid runaway climate change, we need to transform our societies’ economic priorities. But the Green New Deal can’t succeed unless it enjoys working people’s active support — and starts out from their existing moral assumptions.
In 1952, West Germany paid reparations to Israel — not as compensation to Holocaust survivors, but in the form of supplies to the Israeli state. Coming at the same time as denazification reached its end, the move had little to do with moral atonement, and everything to do with whitewashing West Germany’s international image.
Under the short-lived Medevac Legislation, 192 refugees were transported from offshore detention to Australia for medical treatment. Today, most of them are still imprisoned in hotels around the country, where they have to endure a total, indefinite lockdown.
The nightmare scenario of the winner of the Electoral College losing the popular vote didn’t happen this time around. But the Electoral College is still a fundamentally anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic institution. We should absolutely scrap it.
As inspiring as the Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s were, they failed to democratize the Middle East. The primary cause had little to do with the region’s cultural or religious characteristics and everything to do with the profound weakening of the Middle East’s working-class power under neoliberalism.