By STAN OREGANO For the past three years, the center of Democratic Party opposition to the Trump presidency has been on the basis of loud and repeated claims that Trump is a bought-and-paid-for agent of the Kremlin. Dreams of recouping the party’s fortunes by explaining away the debacle of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat stirred…
By LISA LUINENBURG On Feb. 15, President Trump declared a National State of Emergency in order to appropriate billions of dollars to build his much-touted wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Even though Congress had granted him $1.375 billion for the border wall in the latest federal budget bill, this wasn’t enough for Trump. He wanted…
By BARRY WEISLEDER What does the arrest in Vancouver [on Dec. 1, 2018] of Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive with China’s tech giant Huawei, have to do with the “rule of law?” Precious little. What does it have to do with enforcing Washington’s illegal trade embargo of Iran? A bit more. Meng is accused of…
Below, we present a statement by the Young Workers Committee of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Socialist Action believes that this statement is an excellent contribution to a discussion in the labor movement of what to do next in the fight against Trump’s government shutdown. One real strength of this statement is that it does not…
By MICHAEL SCHREIBER “This is the most important midterm election in the modern history of this country,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, and many politicians and pundits agreed. President Trump spoke similarly during his week-long campaign tour, aimed mainly at shoring up Republican candidates in so-called Red States. “Everything we have achieved is at stake,” Trump…
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 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 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 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 JOHN LESLIE — UPDATED, July 9 — Abolish ICE! Stop the raids! Reunite families! No Wall! Those are some of the central demands shouted by thousands who have taken to the streets to protest Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies. Occupy ICE encampments of protesters have been set up outside ICE headquarters and other government…
A joint statement by Socialist Action (U.S.) and Socialist Action/Ligue pour l’action socialiste in the Canadian state. The recent imposition of a 25% tariff on steel imports to the United States and a 10% tariff on aluminum from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union follow the earlier imposition of these tariffs on the rest of the…
By BARRY SHEPPARD The most effective way to counter Donald Trump’s reactionary policies is through mass action. The Democratic Party hopes to steer movements and individuals opposed to Trump into support of its candidates. While this trap of “lesser evil” politics has proved to be a failure over and over again for the past eight…
By JEFF MACKLER “Our opponent,” said Kayla Moore, wife of the now defeated Republican Party U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, “who is an ultra-liberal, who was an Obama delegate, who is for full-term abortions, who is for more gun restrictions, who is for transgender bathrooms, who is for transgender [people] in the military—is against everything…
By NICOLAS BRANNON Massive tax cuts for the wealthy are moving forward in Congress, with the Senate passing its own version on Dec. 1. All that is left now is for the House and Senate to combine their two very similar bills and smooth out the minor differences. Once that is done, the plan will…
By CLIFF CONNER — Cliff Conner is currently writing a book entitled “The Tragedy of American Science.” How loathsome is the Trump administration? Let me count the ways. On second thought, let me not—it would take too long. But one important threat it poses to the United States and the world is to the integrity…
By NICOLAS BRANNON In the last month, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have begun preparing a tax cut bill that would be a huge benefit to rich people and corporations. The details are still being negotiated among the representatives of the bourgeoisie, but the basic goals are clear. The bill would cut income…
By JEFF MACKLER When U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a National Security Council meeting last week, from which President Trump had departed, that his boss was a “fucking moron,” it’s likely that Tillerson, who has refused to deny his characterization, was not referring literally to any diminished mental capacity of the president. After…
Soon after hurricane Irma devastated islands in the Caribbean and parts of Florida, Socialist Action reporter Ernie Gotta interviewed Omar Pérez Figueroa about the effects of the storm on Puerto Rico. Gotta followed up with Perez after hurricane Maria decimated the island. Pérez, a native of Puerto Rico, is a member of the Juventud Hostosiana, the youth…
By ERNIE GOTTA President Trump had this to say about professional athletes taking a knee during the National Anthem: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” What was the response? The…
By MARTY GOODMAN Below is the text of a speech that the author delivered at a Sept. 13 forum in New York City sponsored by Socialist Action. What is fascism? Let’s consult an expert, Adolf Hitler. Hitler cut to the chase at a 1933 meeting of German industrialists when he told them: “Private enterprise cannot…
By BARRY SHEPPARD Trump made this unprecedented threat not in a tweet or off the cuff remark but in a written speech before the United Nations General Assembly. No other country in the U.N. has ever openly stated its intention to destroy another country. Coupled with his earlier threat to rain down “fire and fury”…
By MICHAEL SCHREIBER In the week following the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which ended with the murder of Heather Heyer, anti-racist and anti-fascist protests erupted in hundreds of cities and towns across the United States. About 3000 marched in Philadelphia on Aug. 16, and 1000 rallied in Portland, Ore., two days…
By WAYNE DELUCA Only days after threatening “fire and fury” against North Korea, President Donald Trump said, “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.” Trump was improvising, with no back-up from the Pentagon, and seems to be inventing his militaristic bombast as he goes. But we cannot dismiss the…
By JEFF MACKLER “Trump Ends Covert Aid to Syrian Rebels Trying to Topple Assad,” read a July 19 New York Times headline. Citing The Washington Post as its source, the article noted that the official termination of the “secret” U.S. program “was never publicly announced, just as the beginnings of the program four years ago…
By MARK SILVERMAN Senate Republicans failed in yet another effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” having abandoned efforts to repeal and replace the ACA with a so-called “skinny” repeal-only effort. Despite engaging in the bullying tactics for which he is noted, President Donald J. Trump failed to galvanize Republicans as…
