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
There’s still much we don’t know, but we can take some key lessons from the elections last night: Democrats’ weak economic message helped Trump, the Lincoln Project embarrassed itself, a ton of grassroots money was set on fire, Americans don’t love Obamacare, and the Democratic courts’ strategy failed.
Nothing is certain yet, but we may be gearing up for what amounts to a Biden-McConnell coalition government. The Left will be up against a split government composed of two parties bent on pushing austerity and war.
Victory for socialist candidate Luis Arce in last month’s Bolivian election seemed to turn the page on the overthrow of Evo Morales last fall. But the murder of miners’ leader Orlando Gutiérrez just after the election shows that the coup plotters are still a violent threat — and will do all they can to silence working-class Bolivians.
There’s something deeply ironic about Donald Trump’s bizarre, pre-election “YMCA” video: You can no longer stay at the Village People’s YMCA in Manhattan, because the gentrification carried out by real estate barons like Trump drove out housing for poor people.
Whatever the final outcome of the vote, there has rarely been a more vital moment to champion democracy and majority rule. That means abolishing the Electoral College.
Brazil is governed by a president with well-documented links to Rio’s mafias. In order to understand Jair Bolsonaro’s rise, it is key to understand the link between his brutal law-and-order politics and the increasing stranglehold of organized crime over Rio.
Last week, Poland banned abortion after its government stacked the courts with right-wing ideologues. But they didn’t count on women fighting back — and now they face a historic wave of protest.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party are trying to stop ballots from being counted by flooding the courts with lawsuits and sowing doubts about mail-in ballots. We can’t let them steal this election.
Tonight’s election returns might seem dispiriting, but that’s exactly what the Right wants — for us to preemptively concede. Our demand should be simple: just count the damn votes.
For weeks, voters have been forced to wait in interminable lines just to cast their ballot. That’s an indictment of American democracy — and it points to deeper flaws in a political system that represents the oligarchic minority over the working-class majority.
Whatever happens in the election, the Left will be either blamed or shamed. Don’t be surprised — be ready for the fight of our lives.
In an oligarchic system, there are few better predictors of how a president will govern than where they got their money. Here’s who’s funded both the Biden and Trump campaigns.
The far-right violence that Donald Trump has stoked has deep roots in US history. Kicking him from office won’t change that — but it would deal a blow to right-wing vigilantism.
In New York this campaign season, something extraordinary happened: a dedicated effort by AOC and the state’s newly elected DSA-aligned socialist legislators to transform their campaigns into non-electoral socialist organizing vehicles within their districts.
More than 31 million adults who live in the United States are legally prohibited from voting in today’s election. That’s an obscene human rights violation.
Republicans and the broader conservative movement have been trashing democracy and pushing voter suppression for decades — because they know that their oligarchic project is unpopular and they can’t win fair and square.
For too long, progressives have accepted without question the legitimacy of the courts. That needs to change now.
In recent days, Poland has seen its biggest protests in decades, with strikes and demonstrations against the harshened abortion ban. As MP Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk tells Jacobin, the movement is a lightning rod for frustrations at the country’s hard-right government — and can finally put women’s hardships at the center of the political agenda.
Amazon’s Borat sequel tries to replay the zany laughs of the original but picks easy, woke moralizing over funny social satire.
In the Canadian province of Alberta, the United Conservative Party has enlisted accountancy firms to promote its agenda of economic liberalization, cloaking its partisan policies in the bloodless language of efficient management and accounting practices.