Defend the Hong Kong Democracy Movement!

GIVEN HIS OTHER films, the left and climate action forces anticipated Michael Moore’s latest work, Planet of the Humans, to be a vivid exposition of the great threat of climate change and an equally vivid and inspiring demonstration of what can and must be done.

We expected a film that would demonstrate that humanity already possesses the knowledge and technologies — of renewable energy, of regenerative agriculture, of alternative transport, of all the Green New Deal’s goals including democratizing...

When the National Weather Service issued a flood warning for central Michigan, residents weren’t worried because they had been through a similar warning two years before. But this time two of the four dams on the Tittabawassee River burst, causing 10,000 residents to flee from their homes in the middle of the governor’s “stay at home” order necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

And perhaps they didn’t think that the floodwater would rush as far as the Dow Chemical plant, where it would...

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905) is a well-known novel that tells a seldom-remembered story. Decades of its usage in U.S. history classes might be to blame.

Set in Chicago’s tight-knit Lithuanian community at the start of the twentieth century, The Jungle’s central character, Jurgis Rudkus, is the archetypal immigrant worker, driving himself to the limits of endurance to support a family. But the novel’s few pages describing ghastly conditions in the city’s meat-processing...

A nationwide uprising against murderous racialized police brutality has broken out in the streets of U.S. cities — even amidst the considerable risks of mass protests during the coronavirus pandemic, let alone threats from rampant militarized police violence. An enormously positive development is the fact that it is both Black-led and multiracial in its actions and demands, relative to historic urban rebellions from the 1960s onward. The central demands to “Defund the Police” and “De-militarize...

The scope and magnitude of what have become worldwide protests and an emerging mass upsurge against racism and police brutality following the murder of Black worker George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the US, are unprecedented. These mobilizations are marked by the massive multiracial participation of young people in a cross-generational movement. They have also been in many cases the first mobilizations in countries emerging from lockdown and have succeeded in imposing their presence...

The coronavirus pandemic has acutely exposed a fundamental contradiction of capitalism: as the Ricardo Levins Morales poster states “capitalism is not healthy for children or other living things”. The false tradeoff between the economy and life now holds many working people and children hostage: go back to work and back to school, or the economy tanks. But in an age where the politics of austerity have cut off material resources to public K-12 schools, while simultaneously maintaining...