Coronavirus isn’t only exposing Donald Trump’s incompetence. The crisis is laying bare the consequences of the neoliberal economic agenda corporate Democrats have been pushing for decades.
In the Red Summer of 1919, racist violence hit America as the Spanish flu ravaged the country. With mass protests against police murders sweeping the pandemic-plagued United States, it appears we might be now living in a Red Spring.
Commentators like to point to Wuhan’s “wet markets” as the source of the pandemic, but COVID-19 is the result of a much larger, global phenomenon of environmental degradation. Combatting both means putting the politics of food production and land use at the very heart of our socialist project.
African countries have shown impressive ingenuity in dealing with the coronavirus. But the legacies of colonialism and Western-imposed austerity have left them ill-equipped to attack the deadly virus.
China’s united response to COVID-19 is often painted as a reflection of authoritarian “Asian values.” But the collective mobilization relied on real public support — a temporary social truce that today threatens to fracture.
Professional Democrats used to paint Donald Trump’s border wall as the symbol of everything that was grotesque about him. But now that Joe Biden has come out in favor of it, they’ve offered barely a whisper of protest.
In November, Evo Morales was forced out of office in a right-wing coup. He was trying to avoid a campaign of terror from the Right — but under Bolivia’s new ultraconservative president, Jeanine Áñez, that terror, now carried out by paramilitaries, is still escalating.
We live in an Orwellian era, in which working-class people pilfering convenience store goods is called “looting.” Rich people stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, on the other hand, is just well-functioning “public policy.”
Benjamin Netayahu’s newly convened government, the largest in Israeli history, is also facing the country’s greatest economic crisis in decades. As signs of public disaffection start to grow, it may try to avoid challenges to its power by provoking a violent confrontation with Palestinians.
Lawmakers across the country are using identical legislative language to shield hospital and nursing home corporations from prosecution for COVID–19-related illness and deaths — after those companies pumped huge amounts of cash into state elections.
There’s a pandemic raging and Bernie Sanders is off the ballot, but other candidates inspired by his campaign are still running — like Rick Krajewski and Nikil Saval, two candidates for the Pennsylvania state legislature with roots in working-class fights, who are backed by Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Social media platforms have become a central element of modern political life — too important to allow them to be run according to the whims of either an unbalanced president like Donald Trump or a few tech billionaires like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.