Fifteen years ago this week, thousands of activists marched on the Financial District in New York City. They formed the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, launching a movement focused on economic inequality that spread across the nation and globe under the slogan, “We are the 99%.” Protesters would go on to sleep in Zuccotti Park for nearly two months before police raided the encampment. “Occupy Wall Street changed the public’s common sense about class and class struggle and inequality in this country,” says Yotam Marom, who helped organize the Occupy protests in New York City. “It’s hard to see how you get a Bernie Sanders 2016 run without the public shifting its relationship to that story.” Marom says Occupy […]

“If we don’t connect those dots between the struggles, we’re never going to get anywhere,” says Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. “That’s what music is for. … We have to make music with people from different backgrounds because then we have that conversation.” Giddens has had a wide-spanning career, including her time with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an old-time Black string band, and her work as a musical consultant on Ryan Coogler’s landmark film Sinners. She won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 2023 for her opera Omar about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa who was sold into slavery in the 1800s. Her new album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, comes out on Friday.

As world leaders prepare to head to New York for the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week, Democracy Now! speaks with Amitabh Behar, executive director of Oxfam International. “We live in a very different world from 1945,” when the U.N. was formed, says Behar. “You cannot continue with the veto power.” And with António Guterres soon stepping down, Behar stresses that the United Nations’ next secretary-general must be a woman — “a fundamental shift we need to make.” He also argues that while the world is “torn apart” by inequality, “there are real possibilities of change.” Behar cites the G20’s International Panel on Inequality and “movements across the world” aimed at “changing regimes,” […]

U.N. Fact-Finding Mission Finds Evidence U.S. Committed War Crimes in Iran, Iran Strikes More Ships in Strait of Hormuz as Trump Dismisses Soaring Gas Prices, Yemen’s Humanitarian Crisis Grows as Houthis Battle Saudi-Backed Forces, “Drop the Genocide 20”: Progressives Target Biden Admin Officials Who Aided Israel’s Assault on Gaza, Russia Bombs Civilian Sites as Ukraine Continues Drone Attacks on Russian Oil Facilities, Congress Approves New Sanctions on Russia and Iran, White House Withdraws Nomination of Lance Schroyer to Lead ICE, ICE Is Heavily Redacting Documents Needed to Prove Immigration Status, ICE Stops Tracking Data on Miscarriages of Women and Girls in Its Custody, ICE Agent Accused of Shooting a Man and Lying About It […]

We speak with moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of the new book Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. Neiman argues that evil — far from being an outdated religious concept — is a vital way to understand how injustice works in the world. The Trump administration’s abusive policies have been aided by a general reluctance to call them out as evil, part of how people are “brainwashed … by the idea that morality is for losers, suckers, fools,” she says. “People worry that it’s polarizing, that it’s demonizing, and by that worry, we leave the strongest weapons we have in the language in the hands of people who are least responsible in using them,” says Neiman.