
Justin Trudeau Wants to Bring Back Austerity
Justin Trudeau claims that he wants to build a better, fairer post-pandemic Canada. If we look past the platitudes, we can see that the Liberals just want to return to business as usual.

Justin Trudeau claims that he wants to build a better, fairer post-pandemic Canada. If we look past the platitudes, we can see that the Liberals just want to return to business as usual.

After yesterday’s ruling declaring former Brazilian president Lula da Silva eligible to run in next year’s election, Brazil’s ruling class is panicking. But for Brazilian workers struggling with economic hardship and the COVID-19 pandemic, Lula’s return means there is finally some hope for change.
To end police violence, we must end policing as we know it.

Despite the pious wishes of many leading Democrats, the “good old” Republican Party is never coming back. Over the past four decades, GOP leaders set out to transform the party into the perfect vessel for Trumpian extremism — and they succeeded beyond their wildest nightmares.

Despite America’s two-party duopoly, third parties have played a crucial role in shaping US politics for good and ill — from bringing us pro-worker reforms and the welfare state to laying the groundwork for Donald Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism.

The Trump administration is determined to finally crush Cuba, through concerted actions to cut off its fuel supply. Resisting Donald Trump’s imperialism, the Nuestra América solidarity convoy is mobilizing to provide direct aid to the Cuban people.

Austin, Texas, has been an important front in the battle for housing justice, where efforts to decriminalize homelessness have previously been successful. The city’s voters will soon need to defend those gains from a right wing trying to claw them back.
Al-Qaeda and ISIS are products of US and Saudi imperialism.

Average Americans want to cut the military budget, but a constant stream of defense contractor cash to Congress makes such cuts unlikely. Perhaps the best way to argue against the continued expansion of the gargantuan budget for war: insist that we need that money for measures like $2,000 survival checks.

Consumer advocates want “earned-wage access” apps to be regulated as payday loans, in order to prevent them from taking advantage of consumers in dire straits. Fintech companies have backed right-wing-funded efforts to counter such legislation.

The union organizing campaign currently underway at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama could prove to be the most important labor fight in the South since the failure of Operation Dixie, the movement’s last large-scale push to organize the South in the late 1940s. The story of that historic effort holds lessons for the struggle today.

New Deal job programs didn't just absorb unemployment but allowed thousands of artists and writers to work on ambitious creative projects. Works Progress Administration funding allowed a golden age in US culture — but drew vicious anti-communist attacks, offering a foretaste of McCarthyism.
In November, the Right continued to lose wealthy suburbs but made inroads in working-class counties.

French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.

Movies depicting the spread of disease have become a well-established genre and helped frame our understanding of the real-life COVID-19 pandemic. The spirit of these films increasingly reflects the despair and atomization of neoliberal capitalism.

From his new memoir, it’s clear that Barack Obama believes process is politics. But no amount of “process” will solve the problems that plague us — for that, we need the political will he could never muster as president.

An effort is underway to restore President Woodrow Wilson’s reputation and laud him as a great reformer. But his best reforms were won by a mass movement, often pushing against Wilson himself. It’s that movement that should be revived, not Wilson’s legacy.

BlackRock is being depicted as an environmental hero for its recent commitment to fight climate change — at the same time the Wall Street firm undermines climate action and helps companies hide dark money political spending.

Now that hedge funds are losing billions to Redditors buying stocks like GameStop, Wall Street wants heavy-handed intervention into the market, and brokerages have clamped down on the upstarts. It’s a reminder that there’s no such thing as “people’s capitalism” or “shareholder democracy” — the capitalist economy is structured to do what’s best for the business elite.

Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese could be facing a leadership contest. Albanese’s record has been unimpressive, but changing leaders won’t be enough to turn the party’s fortunes around. Real party democracy and a break with neoliberal dogma are the only remedies for Labor’s malaise.