There's a lot of talk these days about labor shortages and workers unwilling to work because unemployment benefits are too high. Ignore the hand-wringing: it's a very good thing if workers have the freedom to say no to low-paying, dehumanizing jobs.
Coming almost exactly ten years since Spain’s Indignados protests, Pablo Iglesias’s retirement as Podemos leader marks the end of a political era. In its early years, Podemos appealed to Spaniards outside traditional left-wing circles — yet it failed to build a party working people could consider their own.
We’re often told that creating a single secular democratic state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians would violate Israel’s “right to exist.” But no nation-state has an inviolable right to exist — especially not an ethnostate based on exclusion and ethnic cleansing.
This day in 2011, the Indignados protesters occupied Madrid’s Puerta del Sol to denounce Spain’s dominant parties and their austerity agenda. Ten years later, the Spanish left no longer has that insurgent dynamism — but it’s had an enduring success in breaking a previously monolithic neoliberal consensus.
Everywhere in the media and in the halls of power, we hear that Israel has a right to self-defense. But when it comes to the question of whether Palestinians suffering under brutal occupation have the right to defend themselves, those same voices are conspicuously silent.
In May 2009, Sri Lankan forces massacred 150,000 Eelam Tamils trapped in the island’s north. The slaughter was part of an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing. But the Australian government has whitewashed those atrocities and helped equip Sri Lanka’s state security forces.
For a century, reformers have tried to change Washington's regressive tax system. Last week, a landmark capital gains tax became law. The story of how they got there shows how the Left can win against Democrats defending the status quo.
Since the start of his political career, Joe Biden has rigidly adhered to a deeply unprincipled commitment to back Israel no matter what for the sake of his own political advancement. The Left now has a chance to make that approach a major political liability for the president.
The French interior minister has issued a blanket ban on protests in solidarity with Palestine. For months, Emmanuel Macron’s government has joined the far right in denouncing “Islamo-leftism” — a war on anti-racist movements that is now undermining basic civil liberties.
To supply bosses with exploitable low-wage workers during a deadly pandemic, Republicans are reviving a grotesque lie: the myth of the “welfare queen.”
Jay Carney went from being Barack Obama’s press secretary to being Amazon’s top flack. But PR is only part of his job — his larger mission is to help Amazon ruthlessly exploit its workforce so it can expand endlessly.
Scott Morrison, Australia's conservative premier, is selling his 2021 budget as a job-creation package. But in reality, it's a miserly budget — except when it comes to handouts for business and the wealthy.