Last month’s revelations of the Spanish monarchy’s illicit financial dealings embarrassed official claims that “we’re all in this together.” Faced with COVID-19, citizens are forced to build their own collective response — replacing the empty rhetoric of “national unity” with the real practice of social solidarity.
The US’s federalist system undermines even the most basic attempts to carry out effective national action. In pandemics, that’s a recipe for death and disaster.
Thousands of drivers have rented vehicles through Lyft’s Express Drive program, working long hours for the company to pay off weekly rental bills. Now there aren’t enough rides on the road, and drivers can’t pay. We talked to Lyft drivers in three cities about how they’re managing the possibility of losing their cars in the middle of a pandemic.
We cannot let capitalists absolve themselves of blame for the COVID-19 crisis. Their choices have turned an emergency into a disaster.
Coronavirus has exposed capitalism as unable to meet our most basic needs, but that has never been enough for the Left. We need to develop democratic organizations and build our social power, even in the middle of a pandemic, to win.
For three decades, economic woes and the crumbling of old party ties have fueled the rise of Italy’s populist right. Faced with the coronavirus, Giorgia Meloni is becoming an increasingly prominent voice — leader of a Fratelli d’Italia party directly linked to the fascist past.
One in six New York City police officers is out sick. Those who are still working have refused to perform emergency duties, like assisting overstressed mortuary workers, while continuing to make unnecessary arrests. It’s time to send New York cops home.
Coronavirus is ravaging the globe right now. It’s a perfect time for the Israeli state to figure out how to expand its already vast surveillance powers.
As tech firms team up with governments to fight the coronavirus pandemic, we’re being asked to accept a trade-off between our digital privacy and our health. It’s a false choice: we can achieve the public health benefits of data without accepting abusive and illicit surveillance.
Donald Trump richly deserves to be condemned for his response to COVID-19. But the catastrophic failures of public policy didn’t start with Trump: this bipartisan disaster has been decades in the making.
Even as governments halt nonessential travel, thousands of workers are being flown from Eastern Europe to pick farm produce in Britain. Housed several workers to a caravan and often paid below minimum wage, their experience shows how “flexible” seasonal hiring allows bosses to flout the most basic workers’ rights.
The people of Kashmir have been left badly exposed to COVID-19 by a state that spends lavishly on tools of repression while neglecting public health services. The Indian government is using the lockdown to extend its regime of surveillance and control.
Latin America has always been vulnerable to shocks from the global economy. But there’s no precedent for the COVID-19-induced slump that’s about to engulf the continent.
The coronavirus has scattered the pieces on the geopolitical chessboard, revealing the fragility of just-in-time global production. Getting back to normal is the last thing we need.
Millions of people stuck at home means more orders for Amazon. But squeezed Amazon employees in France and Italy didn’t want to be “essential workers” — and they launched a wave of strikes to demand a shutdown.
Faced with the mounting economic crisis, European leaders have promised aid to the hardest-hit member states. But there’s always strings attached. For France Insoumise MEP Manuel Bompard, the proposals for loans and grants ignore the real scale of the crisis — because they all put debt repayment above the needs of average Europeans.
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.
Abe Shinzo’s government was slow to respond to COVID-19, lagging behind neighbors like South Korea. The public health crisis has been worsened by the recklessness of Abe’s foreign policy, which relies upon an erratic US sponsor whose bases are a vector for spreading the disease.
We have so many miseries in American society because rich people are hoarding all of our resources. We shouldn’t applaud them when they toss us a few dollars as philanthropy.
A coronavirus-era partnership between the United Electrical Workers and Democratic Socialists of America has given birth to what may be the most innovative labor organizing campaign since the '30s: the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.