New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has been praised around the world for her response to coronavirus. But while Ardern's response has been much more coherent and competent than, say, Donald Trump's, its economic protections for the country's workers are nowhere near enough.
For a year, centrist pundits scolded the Left for daring to criticize Boris Johnson’s response to COVID-19. This week’s hearing with former aide Dominic Cummings revealed we were right all along.
Locked down, smartphones are giving many of us some comfort and connection now. But the hardware and software that make our phones so indispensable are also tracking us twenty-four hours a day. This crisis will only open the door to more privacy intrusions in the name of public health.
Because self-isolation hurts corporate profits, billionaires are calling to end the too-limited public health measures taken so far by the US government. Unless we take action, Trump might heed their advice — and enormous numbers of people could die as a result.
The massive concentration of wealth and power at the apex of American society is not just obscene from the abstract standpoint of justice. It is a threat to our common health.
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.
Narendra Modi’s government has failed to take preemptive action against a pandemic that may overwhelm its underfunded health services. Arundhati Roy and other leading intellectuals have signed an appeal for the release of India’s political prisoners, who are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 in the country’s overcrowded jails.
Tens of thousands of journalists are losing their jobs, newspaper chains are going under, and vulture capitalists are picking over the remains. We need a news bailout — but one that overhauls the existing corporate model and pushes the media to put the public before profits.
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.
My vision of democratic socialism wouldn’t be Utopia. But here’s the case it would be better than the status quo during both normal times and these times of crisis.
To boost book sales, celebrity journalist Bob Woodward concealed a tape of Donald Trump that contained information about the pandemic that may have prevented thousands of deaths. This isn't hyperbole. This is peak 2020 insanity.
It’s now widely understood that black Americans have been disproportionately hit by the coronavirus. But though mainstream commentators are willing to recognize this basic disparity, and the role of racism, they perpetually obscure the question of class.
For decades, oligarchs like Real Madrid chairman Florentino Pérez have made Spain's old-age care sector a favored cash cow. Today, the coronavirus deaths caused by their penny-pinching are a grim monument to the failures of privatization.
If you're curious about who both Republicans and Democrats are prioritizing in providing coronavirus relief, look no further than the new legislation proposed by House Democrats that would give away enormous amounts of money to corporate lobbyists and dark money groups under the guise of aiding average workers.
As we face down what the World Health Organization calls “a new normal” of high-impact epidemics, researchers and public health officials find themselves at war with for-profit pharmaceutical companies.
Coronavirus is colliding with American mass incarceration, making clear that warehousing human beings en masse is an often deadly decision. We should use this crisis to push for decarceration.
COVID-19 is ravaging the country’s meatpacking plants, turning packinghouse workers into sacrificial lambs. But none of this was inevitable — it’s the result of companies’ decades-long assault on meatpacking unions, which destroyed workers’ ability to have a say over their working conditions.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot was elected last year as a progressive reformer who rejected politics as usual in Chicago. Yet her response to coronavirus in the city has prioritized the city’s corporate interests, not the vast majority of Chicagoans.
The coronavirus shock has shaken the world’s stock markets, imposing the need for massive state bailouts. But the measures to deal with the crisis risk spurring an authoritarian controlled capitalism — one that protects corporate interests while offloading the costs onto the rest of us.
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.