By LISA LUINENBURG In a stunning victory for women, Ireland officially removed its nearly total ban on abortions in late September. The change was a result of a referendum on May 25 of this year, in which 66.4% of voters (to 33.6% against) overwhelmingly voted for a repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution,…
By MARISELA TREVIN After a day of nationwide protests on Monday [Sept. 24], Argentine workers participated in mass work stoppages on Tuesday. Many of the country’s streets and avenues were practically deserted as public transportation workers and private-sector employees stayed home. It was perhaps the most forceful of the four national strikes that have been…
By BARRY SHEPPARD Two big hurricanes hit southeastern United States in September-October. The first was named Florence, which devastated North and South Carolina with torrential rains, up to 40 inches in some locations over a few days, causing massive flooding as rivers overflowed for weeks. The second was Michael, which hit Florida with very high…
Michael Moore plugs ‘Farenheight 9/11’ (Paul Morigi / Getty Images) By LISA LUINENBURG Michael Moore’s new documentary film, “Farenheight 11/9” debuted in theaters across the country on Sept. 21. The title of the film is a reference to the date on which Trump was declared the winner of the U.S. presidential election in 2016. And…
By RUWAN MUNASINGHE — HARTFORD, Conn. — On Dec. 14, 2017, Hartford lost one of its greatest legends when 20-year-old Zoe Dowdell—also known as Gangstalicious—was shot and killed by New Britain police. Caleb Tisdol and Noah Young (also known as “Skinny), the others in the car, were convicted on various charges and are currently incarcerated.…
By ANN MONTAGUE Outrage continues to spread throughout the United States over President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh, currently on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has been roundly criticized for his reactionary rulings against labor and protections for the environment, and scorned for his opinions…
By JOHN LESLIE Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast on Sept. 14 with major flooding, leaving hundreds stranded, more than 500,000 without power, and at least 45 dead. Many residents of the region had not anticipated the extent of the flooding from the slow-moving storm, and hundreds required emergency evacuation. Florence had risen to the…
By ROBBIE MAHOOD Oct. 1 is election day in Quebec, the first under a new law that requires a new mandate every FOUR years. As the population wearies of cutbacks in health care, education, and social services, the Liberal Party government of Philippe Couillard is facing defeat. But this will not be at the hands of…
By JEFF MACKLER Part II. (Part I appeared in August 2018.) In today’s epoch of worldwide imperialist intervention and war, real revolutions are hard to make, even harder to maintain, and sometimes difficult to define in their evolution or degeneration. Today’s antiwar movement debate on the still-unfolding dynamics operating in Nicaragua is a case in…
By JOHN LESLIE Trump’s reactionary immigration policies have created a climate of fear in immigrant communities. Deportations, workplace raids, and hate crimes are on the rise as ICE, police, and far-right vigilantes target immigrant workers and their families. Naturalized citizens are now the object of administration reviews of their citizenship status, based on the expansion…
By ERNIE GOTTA The Connecticut Secretary of State’s office is threatening to rule Iraq War veteran Fred Linck, the Socialist Action candidate for U.S. Senate, off the ballot. Dozens of petitions are still in the hands of town clerks (likely containing hundreds of uncounted signatures), and a cursory examination of a sample of counted signatures…
By KJELL OSTBERG The outcome of the Swedish parliamentary election on 9 September confirms a general European trend: rising right-wing populism and a weakening Social Democracy. The traditional picture of Sweden as the home of a progressive social democratic welfare state has been fading away for several decades now. The outcome of the Swedish parliamentary…
By BRUCE LESNICK Humanity faces a multi-faceted crisis. Endless wars of imperial aggression, both overt and covert—from Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan to Yemen, Palestine, and Central and South America. These conflagrations compel those at the bottom of the economic pyramid to fight and die to protect the wealth and privileges of those at the…
By DON HARMON “Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice” is one of the rallying cries for the march and protest to be held in San Francisco and many other cities on Saturday, Sept. 8. (Sept. 6 in New York City.) In San Francisco, the march will begin at 10 a.m. at the Embarcadero Plaza and continue…
By JEFF MACKLER Analyzing President Donald Trump’s excoriating traditional U.S. trading partners at the Group of Seven’s (G7) May meeting in Quebec, Marxist economist Michael Roberts commented: “What all these Trumpist antics revealed is that the period of the Great Moderation and globalization, from the 1980s to 2007, when all major capitalist states worked together…
By FRED LINCK Below are remarks by Socialist Action Senatorial candidate Fred Linck to an Aug. 25 Connecticut rally in solidarity with the national prison strike. Organizers reported in the first days that incarcerated people in 17 states had joined the strike—risking severe punishment for their effort. Some were engaged in refusals to work, in…
By STEVE XAVIER John McCain, the right-wing U.S. Senator, and war criminal, from Arizona, has died after a struggle with brain cancer. More recently, McCain has been a thorn in the side of Donald Trump’s presidency on certain aspects of policy. Predictably, liberals and social democrats have joined with conservatives and centrists to heap praise…
By MICHAEL SCHREIBER — PHILADELPHIA — Oral arguments on behalf of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal will take place here on Aug. 30 before Judge Leon Tucker of the city and county Court of Common Pleas. Defense activists plan to fill the courtroom and to demonstrate outside to demand a new trial for Mumia and his…
By BARRY WEISLEDER I strongly recommend the latest book by Ian Angus, “A Redder Shade of Green.” This anthology, published by Monthly Review Press (New York, 2017, 198 pages), contains well-written articles, very accessible to non-experts, that first appeared between 2009 and 2017. They summarize the latest scientific findings on the state of the environment and provide…
By MARTY GOODMAN Haitian immigrants face a double-barreled wall of racism, from Donald Trump as well as from the historic racism of the ruling class of the Dominican Republic, which shares its border with Haiti. After decades of racist bipartisan immigration policy toward Haitians, in November 2017 Donald Trump revoked the Temporary Protective Status (TPS)…
By ANDY BARNS The immigration crisis in the United States has two essential forces at play. One is the struggle of immigrant workers to find a better life, away from the horrors created by U.S. imperialism in their home countries. The other deals with the forces of capitalist class rule within the United States, who…
By JOHN LESLIE Facing poor working conditions and mistreatment that made workers feel “like slaves,” workers at Jasic Technologies are attempting to form a union in Shenzhen, China. On May 10, a delegation of workers delivered a petition to the company and the officially recognized Workers Union. After first expressing support for the workers’ effort…
By RUWAN MUNASINGHE “The structuring of the LSSP leadership … showed itself best during the August 1953 Hartal (general strike). The LSSP leadership appeared as a really revolutionary team at the head of insurgent masses, fighting in the streets simultaneously for immediate material gains for the impoverished masses and for the socialist overthrow of the…
HARTFORD, Conn. — On Aug. 8, volunteers for the campaign to elect Fred Linck turned in more than 10,900 signatures to the Secretary of State to secure a ballot line for U.S. Senate in the November elections (7500 are required to qualify). Fred Linck is an antiwar Iraq veteran, a climate justice activist with 350…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Since April, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans have taken to the streets in protest of the policies of the government led by FSLN President Daniel Ortega. The protests at one point escalated to road blocks and occupations and have been fiercely resisted by the government. Undoubtedly, Nicaraguan society is in crisis. Here,…
By JEFF MACKLER The unfolding events in Nicaragua over the past three months pose two critical questions for socialists and antiwar activists. Where do we stand on the critical issue of U.S. imperialist intervention and where do we stand with regard to the dynamics of the still-unfolding confrontations? That U.S. imperialism is intervening in Nicaragua…
