The national press has fawned over Mayor London Breed’s coronavirus response. But after being unanimously instructed by San Francisco’s city council to move the homeless into the city’s empty hotel rooms, she has inexcusably dragged her feet — putting the homeless and all San Franciscans at serious risk.
The Last Dance, ESPN’s highly touted series on Michael Jordan, is not a documentary. It’s a ten-hour exercise in mythmaking that gives Jordan one more chance to sell the corporate product that always mattered to him most: himself.
In films like Annihilation and Ex Machina, director Alex Garland knows how to make the end of the world look majestic. But his new show, Devs, gives a grace and dignity to the apocalypse that you won’t find in our own world.
The 2008 bailout was a giant giveaway to corporate America. 2020 is more of the same.
Rioting is a rational response to grinding poverty and oppression. And though it’s not always the case, research shows that it can be effective in winning social change.
Donald Trump’s dangerous and unhinged response to the George Floyd protests shows why he must be defeated in November. But Joe Biden’s policy proposals and disturbing record on criminal justice suggests the era of resistance will have to continue with Biden in the White House.
US police have used rubber bullets against civilian protesters on a massive scale the past week. These projectiles actually originated in Northern Ireland — and their history is anything but "nonlethal." There can be no justification for police use of rubber bullets.
Activists and advocates in New York City have long called for the city to make sharp cuts to the NYPD, the nation's largest police force. The uprising against police brutality, in New York and around the country, has suddenly put serious momentum behind those demands.
At times of widespread misery, a single incident of blatant injustice can cause enormous, unexpected outrage — outrage that then fuels far wider protests and more radical demands. This is exactly what we’ve seen across the United States since George Floyd’s murder.
The police were first created to suppress labor militancy and the Left, before becoming a tool to bludgeon the most marginalized in society, particularly poor black people. We must dismantle this brutal instrument of social control.
Donald Trump wants to use the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops on the streets of American cities. It’s an act of desperation that will probably backfire — but an alarming sign of the lengths he may be willing to go to save his disintegrating presidency.
Critics of the demand to “defund the police” cite current polling snapshots as supposed proof of protesters’ electoral malpractice. They’re politically shortsighted — and confused about the key role of mass protest movements in dragging such demands from the margins to the mainstream.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, calls to cut police budgets have spread like wildfire. In an interview with Jacobin, two Chicago city council members explain why they’re calling to defund the police and why the city’s mayor Lori Lightfoot can’t credibly call herself a “progressive.”
Defunding the police means cutting bloated local police budgets and diverting the resources to social programs. Politically, it’s right up Bernie’s alley. He should embrace it.
Credit for the unprecedented wave of mass protests should go to anti-police brutality activists, movement journalists, and politicized young people. But let’s not forget the boys in blue themselves: cops' vicious treatment of protesters proved to millions around the world that the protesters were right.
It's a dark time in the US and across the world, but the last two weeks actually give us some cause for hope. Cities are pledging to shift money from cops to public services, violent officers are being disciplined and fired, and a wave of left victories came in last week’s primaries.
Cops in New York have responded to pressure for reform with a targeted slowdown, while they continue to dish out violence on the streets. We need to be as determined in forcing change upon the police as they are in resisting it.
This summer, military recruiters continue focusing their efforts on twenty-three American cities with large numbers of black and Latino young people. As coronavirus drives thousands into unemployment, the Pentagon is developing bizarre neighborhood profiles and trolling social media to boost their enlistment numbers.
By aggressively pushing for higher budgets and salaries, police officers have insulated themselves from accountability while draining resources from essential public programs. It’s long past time to defund them.
Liberals are right to condemn Donald Trump for his disastrous mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and his undisguised contempt for democracy. But Trump is no aberration: his rise was only possible because of a Republican and Democratic political consensus that has ravaged American politics and society for a generation.