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
We must not choose between staving off economic catastrophe or a public health disaster. We can do both — if we immediately expand Medicare to cover everyone while safely and simultaneously rebuilding our healthcare infrastructure.”
We didn’t know we were entering a new era until it arrived. We can never go back.
Martin Luther King Jr died supporting striking black sanitation workers in the South. Less than a decade later, a black Atlanta mayor and King’s own father were attacking that same group of workers and breaking their strike. Black urban governance is meaningless without a commitment to strengthening the public sector and rejecting the logic of austerity.
Manolis Glezos was just 19 when he sparked Greece’s anti-Nazi resistance by tearing down the swastika from the Acropolis. This was the beginning of a life dedicated to the cause of the oppressed — in which, as he put it, “No struggle for what you believe in is ever futile.”
Last month’s revelations of the Spanish monarchy’s illicit financial dealings embarrassed official claims that “we’re all in this together.” Faced with COVID-19, citizens are forced to build their own collective response — replacing the empty rhetoric of “national unity” with the real practice of social solidarity.
The coronavirus crisis will lead to health insurance premium increases by up to 40 percent next year. We can’t afford that. Instead of seeing premiums skyrocket or bailing out private health companies, we need to seize this moment to abolish private insurance and create a single, national insurance plan.
As health systems around the world are thrown into crisis, tech firms are winning lucrative government contracts to roll out spurious apps and digital services. We need technological innovation to combat this pandemic, but it must be administered publicly to prevent the further commodification of our health care.
Israel’s blockade of Gaza has turned the strip of land into the “world’s largest open-air prison.” And now the overcrowded enclave has its first confirmed cases of COVID-19.
The ranks of the uninsured are growing, and people are already dying from a lack of coverage. Yet Joe Biden says coronavirus has nothing to do with Medicare for All. He’s wrong: its time has come.
The United Kingdom emerged from the horrors of World War II and established a national health system. We can do the same thing with the coronavirus crisis and Medicare for All.
Mainstream media coverage of Mexico’s leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his response to the coronavirus crisis has been terrible. While world health authorities have commended Mexico’s approach, the media — blindly parroting AMLO’s right-wing opposition — have panned it.
Brazil’s fragile health care system and densely populated cities threaten to turn the COVID-19 outbreak into a full-scale social collapse. President Jair Bolsonaro’s dismissal of the pandemic as a “little flu” is feeding dissent even among his allies — threatening to hasten the far-right leader’s downfall.
From why the free market can’t cope with coronavirus to the rise of Modi and Bolsonaro to how shock therapy destroyed Russia in the 1990s and what the UK Labour Party does after Corbyn, we have a bunch of videos coming out this week.
Two years after forcing Al Franken’s resignation from the Senate over sexual misconduct allegations, prominent Democrats now have to decide whether to stand on principle or keep silent about the latest assault accusations against Joe Biden. We asked them — and so far, most are choosing to keep silent.
Against CDC guidelines and health experts’ urgings, the DNC and Joe Biden’s campaign urged Americans to vote earlier this month — undoubtedly spreading coronavirus further. But don’t expect any accountability for it, from mainstream media or anyone else.
Our global crisis of democracy is real, but its solution isn’t rebuilding political norms. It’s rebuilding working-class power.
Joe Biden’s astonishing propensity to make things up is a major liability for him. But Democratic voters have been largely kept in the dark about those lies by liberal media outlets.
The Democratic establishment’s response to the latest allegations of sexual harassment against Joe Biden show the cynicism of a party elite that switches its feminism on and off whenever it’s expedient.
New York’s jails have become a focus of COVID-19, with 103 inmates and 80 staff testing positive already. One Rikers Island detainee told Jacobin about the outbreak in the prison — and the inhumanity of trapping people in a hotbed of infection.
Spain’s requisitioning of private hospitals is a fine example of government mobilization to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. Yet the country’s overwhelmed wards also show how neoliberal policies have chipped away at public health care — starving hospitals of resources while siphoning them off to paid-for alternatives.