The World Bank’s “pandemic bonds” demonstrate how global capital has an uncanny ability to profit from social ills. So far, investors have earned about $96 million in interest on the pandemic bonds, but developing countries have yet to receive desperately needed money.
It’s been a week since I was laid off, and my husband is out of work, too. Today, I need a rent suspension. Tomorrow, I need a homes guarantee.
An important new book, Sabotage: The Hidden Nature of Finance, skewers the destructive role of finance in our economic system. But its authors shy away from the radical implications of their analysis and end up peddling technocratic illusions about the necessary cure.
In an interview with Jacobin, Medicare for All advocate and former Michigan governor hopeful Abdul El-Sayed explains why the COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable — and why the cruelties of the US's for-profit health and economic system are making everything worse.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre died forty years ago today. Sartre’s philosophy and political values can still inspire struggles for freedom today.
What made Bernie Sanders different from any major presidential candidate in our lifetimes was that he didn’t pitch himself as the most qualified pilot — he demanded that we pilot the plane ourselves.
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a dangerous escalation in tensions between China and the United States. But our allegiance shouldn’t be with either country’s ruling class — it should be with both countries' workers.
When it hit the Bay of Bengal in May, Cyclone Amphan caused apocalyptic scenes, flooding whole districts and flattening villages. Amid a pandemic and in a region already riven by food insecurity, storms like these are catastrophic.
The oil industry, long characterized by boom and bust cycles, has crashed, with prices hitting below zero. The White House will reach for a corporate bailout, but now’s the opportunity to move away from oil extraction and build a rational system of clean energy.
Millions of people can’t pay rent because of the coronavirus-induced recession. In the absence of government action to help them, many are going on a rent strike. We talked to two Brooklyn rent strikers about why they organized their building to withhold rent and how other renters can do the same.
In response to the nationwide protests, Donald Trump seems ready to take the United States to a place many have been fearing since his election. Escaping from it means recognizing that he didn’t get us there alone.
Bromides about a V-shaped economic recovery after the pandemic just distract us from the size of the task that we face. We were already headed for crisis before COVID-19 — only a far-reaching reorientation of the economy can stave off social collapse.
For centuries, politics on the rock of Gibraltar has been dominated by the imperialist rivalry between Britain and Spain. But faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, communities built solidarity across the disputed border — insisting that the demands of public healthcare stood above the battle for flags and territory.
For decades, Europe’s big economies outsourced the problem of pollution by literally shipping their trash to China. When Beijing banned the toxic trade in 2018, it could have served as a wake-up call — but instead, the big polluters have rerouted their garbage to low-wage, low-regulation countries inside the European Union.
The Democratic donor class does not want progressives anywhere near the levers of power — even in races where they could clearly win. That's why they're backing centrist millionaire Democrat John Hickenlooper over a proponent of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal for a Colorado Senate seat.
Hailing from a working-class Pennsylvania background, Robert Eshelman-Håkansson led the life of a bohemian intellectual before rising to become chief aide to the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He leaves behind friends and admirers throughout the US and in half a dozen countries around the world.
Entire sectors of the economy are now invested in a state of permanent war and surveillance. Here’s what it would mean to defund the US military and put that money to meeting human need instead.
States across Europe and East Asia are closing nuclear reactors and replacing much of their electricity-generating capacity with offshore wind energy. Socialists should embrace the growth of this industry — and use green reindustrialization to fight for well-paid, stable jobs.
Justin Trudeau is facing a conflict of interest scandal, in which the Canadian prime minister stands accused of steering public money towards a favored charity. But the details of the case lay bare the singularly hypocritical style of Canadian neoliberalism: a surface patina of progressivism covering up the cynical machinations of the corporate elite.
The answer to misinformation on social media is not to empower private corporations as censors, but instead to reduce their power altogether.