Music gives tangible shape to the best and basest in all of us. Yet under capitalism, it’s just another commodity. That artists and critics continue making and writing about music despite the industry’s vampiric drive for profit shows our stubborn unwillingness to give up a key piece of our humanity.
The exploitation and abuse of Britney Spears, justified by her legal conservatorship, is an extreme example of practices that are common in the entertainment factory.
Long-distance bus travel is far less carbon-intensive than plane travel, not to mention an incredible way to see the country. But the trips often aren’t pleasant. One easy way to change that: publicly subsidize overnight lodging for bus travelers.
Mexican-American workers have a long tradition of radical organizing, stretching back to the days of the Industrial Workers of the World and the mid-century Communist Party. And in 1968, with a longtime Communist Chicano family at the center, Mexican-American students in LA launched the largest student walkout in US history.
Despite America's self-image as a land of immigrants, over its history, the United States has deported more people than any other nation in the world. Yet migrant workers have found ways to sabotage the deportation machine to win their dignity and rights.
After supporting screenwriters and actors through their monthslong strikes, film and TV crew workers with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) are launching a reform caucus. The members say they want to democratize their union.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador has wagered that he needs the support of the military in order to execute his progressive agenda. But the Mexican army is a conservative organization looking after its own interests, and it is no substitute for the mass base that AMLO must mobilize if he is to achieve true transformation.
California’s post-Reagan drift into the welcome arms of the corporate-friendly Democratic Party has meant a politics that looks like an elite lifestyle brand. It’s a state where social liberalism reigns, but so does staggering poverty and inequality. The Democratic Party has failed California and unless things change, it will continue to fail our nation.
Politicians want to improve our worsening mental health with big psychiatric initiatives. The problem with this model, says historian of neuroscience Danielle Carr, is that it ignores the social and structural forces causing widespread mental suffering.
Business interests are eager to reopen schools so they can get the economy running again and turn a profit. But teachers across the country are insisting that schools should only be reopened when it can be done safely — and they might just go on strike to fight back against the billionaires.
Over 20 years ago, as Prime Minister Tony Blair led the UK to join the US invasion of Iraq, pop star George Michael took a principled, public stand against the war. His example put antiwar politics in the limelight.
He introduced Bernie to Joe Rogan. His show Secular Talk dominates YouTube. He even helped get AOC elected. So why doesn’t the media know who Kyle Kulinski is?
Companies like Shake Shack, Ruth’s Hospitality Group, the Los Angeles Lakers, and J. Alexander’s Holdings drew from the Paycheck Protection Program established to aid small businesses in paying their employees. While average workers have suffered under the pandemic, these huge corporations have helped themselves to enormous amounts of cash.
In the early 20th century heyday of US socialism, J. Stitt Wilson was elected mayor of Berkeley, California. He was a Christian socialist who held up Jesus the Carpenter and the Bible as radical injunctions to create a society of cooperation and democracy.
The Hollywood screenwriters' strike has deep historical roots: stretching back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, writers and many others in the industry have insisted that filmmaking is a form of labor — and fought for their rights as workers.
Mexico’s former secretary of national defense was arrested last month for alleged drug trafficking and money laundering. His trial will be important, but justice for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the war on drugs means not only prosecuting involved Mexican officials, but also American officials who were complicit all along.
How Breitbart News rose on the darkest of money to hijack the conservative media -- and how liberals helped them do it.
During the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike, comedy writer Adam Conover has been a constant presence on picket lines and on social media, explaining what’s at stake for strikers and how the union plans to win. We spoke to him about the strike.
Once again, Joe Biden has pledged to cure cancer. At the same time, his campaign is being bankrolled by the very industries that profit from keeping treatment prohibitively expensive.
Beef tells the story of a chance road-rage encounter that blossoms into a modern feud. Director Lee Sung Jin says it’s about “how hard it is to be alive,” but the show’s cross-class fantasy logic points at the powder keg of growing alienation in our society.