TRUTH OUT

  Abortion rights shouldn’t be at the mercy of the judiciary. We need federal legislation codifying  Roe v. Wade  — and Democrats need to buck up and eliminate the filibuster to pass it.   The Supreme Court’s December 1 hearing on Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban confirmed what everyone had already guessed: anti-abortion justices will throw abortion rights on the scrap heap when they hand down their decision next summer. The three judges who support abortion rights were reduced to appealing to the court’s reputation. “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked early in the hearing. Chief Justice John Roberts, perhaps the only anti-abortion justice concerned with preserving the court’s legitimacy, querulously noted that only the fifteen-week ban, not banning abortion as a whole, was before the court. The five other hard-right ap...

  Nothing was as inspiring to me about Bernie Sanders’s 2020 run as the slogan he used to jump-start the campaign last fall. “Are you willing to fight for that person you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” he asked in  his Queens rally speech  in October. He was reviving the gist of an old slogan of the labor movement that badly needs remembering in the time of Trump and the coronavirus: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Bernie made it clear that the “us” in “Not me, Us” is  all  of us. Wider layers of the Left responded, gravitating to his campaign and identifying with it even more than in 2016. The Sanders 2020 campaign became a point of connection for people and organizations representing the whole range of struggles and causes that emerged in the Trump era and before it. I’m one of those people — the spirit of solidarity that the campaign, whatever its weaknesses, came to represent is the main reason I went  from ske...

  The russian invasion  of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, launched by the Kremlin after months of rising tensions, quickly generated a flood of casualties and several million refugees, as well as bringing the senseless destruction of cities and towns. A negotiated peace may yet bring it to an end. But amid the continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities by Russian artillery and the ramping up of Western military aid to Ukraine, the possibility remains that the war will continue. With that, the odds of a wider conflagration involving several nuclear-armed states would shorten alarmingly. While it is not yet clear how the war will unfold, the world stands at the threshold of a troubled new period. What follows is an attempt to sketch out the historical matrix from which the present conflict developed, and to identify the possible scenarios that lie ahead. 1 The Kremlin bears the responsibility for unleashing this war, and regardless of the outcome will carry a heavy moral burden for...