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
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, is enforcing one of the strictest social distancing orders in the world, subjecting thousands to arrest and expanding an already ravenous and bloated prison system. With millions facing destitution and abuse, coronavirus is laying bare the instability that has always been at the core of neoliberalism in countries like El Salvador.
After 2008, Lebanon’s oligarchic elites engineered a financialized boom that fueled inequality and lined the pockets of bankers. Now its economy has imploded, leaving the country’s working class to foot the bill.
House Democrats’ latest stimulus bill, the HEROES Act, is designed to lay out the party’s basic principles for coronavirus recovery. Unfortunately, those principles include Democrats being very happy to shore up corporations’ and billionaires’ profits and political control of Washington.
Mrs. America, the new miniseries about Phyllis Schlafly, doesn’t want us to come away with a harsh view of its subject. But we should: Schlafly’s right-wing views were consistently monstrous, doing untold damage to the country.
Arundhati Roy has a tendency to rile India’s media and political elites like no one else on the subcontinent. Perhaps that’s because no writer today, in India or anywhere in the world, writes with the kind of beautiful, piercing prose in defense of the wretched of the earth that Roy does.
The tycoons of Big Tech are following in the footsteps of their Gilded Age predecessors, using a facade of social concern to cover over their depredations. We need to depose the new Robber Barons.
In the twentieth century, the United States engaged in brutal, even sadistic interventions all over the world, from Indonesia to Brazil, to stop the Left’s advance. We’re still living in those interventions’ shadow.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot was elected last year as a progressive reformer who rejected politics as usual in Chicago. Yet her response to coronavirus in the city has prioritized the city’s corporate interests, not the vast majority of Chicagoans.
Making cities more resilient against coronavirus pandemics will require taking on the landlords, real estate developers, and elected officials who prop them up. We need safe, affordable housing.
The state of Wisconsin plowed ahead with an in-person election last month despite the many clear dangers. A new study suggests exactly what many feared: a direct link between voting in person and spreading COVID–19.
The mass slaughter of leftists in Indonesia was more than just another Washington-backed atrocity. It was the prototype for smashing the hopes and dreams of the Left in the developing world — for good.
Hurricanes, pandemics, and droughts are acts of God. Private markets in housing, health care, and food — and the resulting deaths — are not.
Here’s a guide to the words you should probably know, even if you don’t want to think about them.
The links between business, finance, and the state do not represent a perversion of liberal democracy — they are an unavoidable feature of capitalist political economy.
Class struggle will shape how this crisis plays out, and the world that’s created in its wake.
The Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population in just a few years. But the peasants and laborers who survived wielded newfound power over their masters.
On the literary destruction of Los Angeles and the nervous breakdown of American exceptionalism.
Why we all hate celebrities right now.
David Cronenberg’s first three films track the progress of epidemics “from the perspective of the disease.” What they reveal is a North American society already on the brink of disaster.
In films like Annihilation and Ex Machina, director Alex Garland knows how to make the end of the world look majestic. But his new show, Devs, gives a grace and dignity to the apocalypse that you won’t find in our own world.