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
Ousted from the Georgian presidency in 2013, Mikheil Saakashvili bizarrely moved his anti-Putin crusade abroad, as he became governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region. His recent return to Georgian politics is the latest in a series of quixotic antics — but also expresses the essential shallowness of liberal democracy in the post-Soviet space.
Yesterday, Amy Coney Barrett told lawmakers she doesn’t have “firm views” on climate change. For decades, her father was a lawyer at Shell Oil, which now has a major climate case in front of the Supreme Court.
America’s political institutions are designed to keep democracy at bay. But evidence is mounting that Americans have had enough and want reform.
One in four rural households have been unable to get the medical care they need during the coronavirus pandemic. Rural Americans have been struggling to obtain and afford care like never before, and Donald Trump could end up paying the price in November.
In 2018, the “Red for Ed” teachers’ strike wave exploded, first in West Virginia, then in Oklahoma, Arizona, and beyond. It shook the foundations of public education and teacher unionism in America — and may play a key role in fighting COVID-19–induced education austerity in the near future.
Since its establishment, the Electoral College has stood out as one of America’s most unpopular political institutions. But the long history of failed reform attempts hasn’t made this outmoded institution any less undemocratic — it’s time we finally abolished the Electoral College.
To court pack, or not to court pack? That is the question Democrats are doing everything they can to avoid answering — even though Republicans have been successfully packing the courts for years.
Amazon and Jeff Bezos have made a killing from the pandemic while underpaid warehouse employees have to work in unsafe, unsanitary conditions. On Prime Day, the most lucrative date on the company calendar, workers are organizing to challenge “Amazon capitalism.”
As the possibility of Donald Trump trying to undemocratically snatch the 2020 presidential election seems increasingly likely, we should look to a previous successful attempt by Republicans to seize the presidency while the Democratic Party all but stood by helplessly: the 2000 election’s Florida recount.
The New York City Democratic Socialists of America has built an electoral powerhouse with no paid staff and just a few years of political experience. Here’s how they pulled it off.
The South African house track “Jerusalema” has rocketed around the world, becoming a viral sensation. But it’s no common pop song — it speaks to a growing desire across Africa to remake and reimagine the world.
Austrian socialist Rudolf Hilferding, author of the magisterial Finance Capitalism, used the tools of Marxism to develop a rigorous understanding of the changing capitalist economy while making the case for a socialism that put freedom and democracy at the center of the project.
Donald Trump is deeply corrupt. That corruption is a product of the larger kleptocratic system, created by a judiciary that would favor the rich even more with Amy Barrett on the Supreme Court.
Since the 1990s, Mexico’s banks have been privatized, bailed out, and sold off, resulting in a massive upward transfer of wealth. The AMLO administration is introducing a public option for basic banking, but it must go further to rein in the untrammeled power of the banks.
Two decades after the peace process expired between the Camp David and Taba summits, many look back with nostalgia at the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. But historian Ilan Pappe argues that the failure of Oslo to deliver Palestinian sovereignty was baked into the process from the start.
Hundreds of thousands of maritime workers remain stranded at sea because many countries refuse to classify them as “essential workers” and because shipowners are prioritizing profits over worker safety. Seafarers have suffered enough — it’s time to bring them home.
In the stiflingly reactionary cultural atmosphere of postwar America, most filmmakers didn’t talk much about class. But there was one significant exception: film noir was the most class-conscious genre of motion picture America has ever produced.
States across Europe and East Asia are closing nuclear reactors and replacing much of their electricity-generating capacity with offshore wind energy. Socialists should embrace the growth of this industry — and use green reindustrialization to fight for well-paid, stable jobs.
Entire sectors of the economy are now invested in a state of permanent war and surveillance. Here’s what it would mean to defund the US military and put that money to meeting human need instead.
This morning, Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed to a cease-fire after almost two weeks of fighting over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. But like after the last truce in 1994, there can be no enduring peace without a political solution — one that overcomes the violent legacy of the Soviet collapse in the Caucasus.