The late poet laureate Philip Levine gave us a unique and loving set of portraits of the American working class. Six years after his death on Valentine’s Day, let’s mourn his absence and celebrate his work.
When Karen Lewis and her Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators took power in the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010, the landscape for labor in her city and country was bleak. She rose to the moment — and helped transform what was politically possible for a teachers’ union and the labor movement as a whole to accomplish.
The media made the Lincoln Project and New York governor Andrew Cuomo into heroes of 2020. Now they’re both engulfed in scandal, and it’s time to hold them accountable.
Anti-colonial revolutionary Thomas Sankara fought to transform Burkina Faso into a truly independent, self-governing nation before his assassination in 1987. But as a recent film shows, Sankara’s legacy continues to inspire struggles against oppression despite ruling elites’ efforts to erase him from public memory.
The late AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney was an admirable figure who had a vision for reinvigorated US labor unions. But he only tried to reform a union movement that needed a more fundamental refoundation.
France was once the heartland of revolution. Today, its left is battered, and its far right is rising. To understand why, we have to look at François Mitterrand’s socialist government’s turn from radical reform to neoliberal austerity in the 1980s.
After the bloody suppression of the Polytechnic students’ uprising in 1973, universities became a symbol of Greek democracy — and for decades, police were banned from even entering campuses. But on Thursday, parliament voted to create a special police force to patrol universities, as the right-wing government mounts a troubling crackdown on supposedly “dangerous” student groups.
Five years ago, Bernie Sanders proclaimed on national television, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.” If this was the one moment of note that emerged from both Sanders campaigns, all the time and money and effort still would have been worth it.
One of the top national security think tanks backing the Biden administration, the Center for a New American Security, has been taking money from every major defense contractor while pumping out a steady stream of research supporting those companies’ interests. It’s yet another sign that Biden’s promised “return to normal” has, unfortunately, arrived.
The Senate filibuster isn’t just an impediment to even mildly progressive legislation — it’s one of the most antidemocratic aspects of a deeply antidemocratic institution. It should be abolished immediately.
The energy that Karen Lewis brought to the labor movement through her Chicago Teachers Union presidency still vibrates through unions across the country. If you look closely at the fire in educators standing with students and community members in recent years, you can see Lewis's unwavering determination in the flames.
For a moment, it seemed like the centrist think tank Third Way was abandoning its commitment to austerity. No longer: Third Way is now boosting a campaign to deny $1,400 COVID-19 survival checks to tens of millions of Americans and undermining the push to raise the minimum wage to $15.