The House just passed a stimulus bill that breaks the 25-year bipartisan consensus that the very poor shouldn’t be eligible for cash benefits. It’s a watershed moment — and we should build on it by turning the US welfare state into a poverty-fighting machine.
The Biden administration intended to release far-reaching safety rules designed to protect workers from COVID — until big business came calling and demanded the rules be drastically scaled back.
Despite the coronavirus outbreak, the University of Illinois has jacked up health care premiums for graduate workers and refuses to grant additional sick days to those who test positive for COVID-19. This is what workers have to deal with in the corporatized university.
Faced with another global recession, many governments are responding with even stronger state interventions than they did in the 2008 financial crisis. But stimulus packages to prop up businesses must also pose the question of public control — not just bailing out corporations, but repurposing their operations to confront the disasters ahead of us.
Labour MP Navendu Mishra spoke to Jacobin about the UK government’s feeble response to coronavirus — and why workers with precarious income and housing need help now
The Spanish flu of 1918 infected a quarter of the world population and was decisive to the rise of public health-care systems. Today’s COVID-19 crisis is again showing that collective problems demand collective solutions — and a state that provides for all our essential needs.
The media is fawning over Andrew Cuomo’s performance on the national stage in response to the coronavirus pandemic. They’re ignoring the devastating austerity budget that he just rammed down the state of New York’s throat.
European leaders won’t consider debt cancellation or abandon the dogma of neoliberal austerity. Coronavirus shows that well-funded public services are essential for our survival — austerity is a matter of life and death. We need an alternative.
Across France, workers are insisting that they be allowed to make masks and ventilators rather than continue with business as usual. Their initiatives show that when workers, not stock prices, decide what’s being made, production can serve the needs of society as a whole.
Newly revealed emails show that Pennsylvania officials have had to overcome a lack of leadership from Trump’s Centers for Disease Control to carry out basic digital contact tracing.
New research shows stay-at-home orders and eviction bans are key to stopping the spread of COVID-19. But Gov. Gavin Newsom is ignoring that research and reopening California with a weak eviction moratorium.
Two bandmates saw their sons both overdose on fentanyl in the space of a few years. The synthetic opioid crisis is more out of control than many realize, and the coronavirus pandemic has only made it worse.
When the pandemic officially ends, millions of Americans will lose federal health coverage. For-profit health industry contractors are poised to massively cash in on their misery and precarity.
New drugs are developed with vast amounts of taxpayer money. But instead of universal access to these publicly funded scientific achievements, we get prohibitively expensive medicine and sky-high profits for pharmaceutical companies.
The coronavirus has the global economy teetering on the edge. It's a perfect time to pour massive amounts of money into green public investment, both to shore up the economy and to put us on a path toward a low-carbon future.
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed a simple fact: it’s low-wage workers like cleaners, cashiers, and care workers who make our society run — not bankers, landlords, or CEOs.
For decades, America’s hospitals have been underfunded and understaffed in the name of efficiency. An examination of conditions at one public hospital in Oakland show us how unprepared this austerity-starved health care system is for what’s to come.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo has issued an executive order requiring all nonessential workers to stay home. But construction workers are still being forced to build luxury condos — more evidence that for capital, high-priced real estate is more important than workers’ lives.
In chaotic times, New York governor Andrew Cuomo wants to convince you he is the calm, competent leader you need. It’s been effective — so effective you might miss that even in a pandemic, Cuomo is fighting to protect the rich and impose austerity, including devastating Medicaid cuts, on everyone else.
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.