USA/Canada

Dan Katz looks at the impact of the economic crisis on black people in the USA and the political response of the Obama administration. The terrible legacy of slavery, and the Jim Crow segregation which followed, still weighs heavily on black America. In June 2010 the Equal Justice Initiative issued a report on racial discrimination in US jury selection. 135 years after the 1875 Civil Rights Act was supposed to eliminate such practices the EJI found: “Prosecutors have struck African Americans from jury service because they appeared to have ‘low intelligence,’ wore eyeglasses, walked in a...

As the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans in late August 2005, Abdulrahman Zeitoun remained tucked in the relative safety of his daughters’ second floor bedroom. Around him were gathered the books, photographs, mementos and other less valuable but expensive-to-replace items from around the house. Abdulrahman’s wife, Kathy, and children had already left the city with thousands of others. Despite repeated requests to leave, the “man of the house” remained. This decision was not just some macho reflex: Zeitoun sensed that he could be useful in the aftermath of the storm. He felt...

The Mineral Management Service (MMS) is a US government agency that combines two tasks — collecting revenue from oil and gas for the US government; and regulating health and safety. The MMS is the second-largest source of income to the US government after taxation, bringing in around $13 billion a year. A branch secretary for the RMT's offshore energy section OILC told Solidarity that in the US, “the operators and regulators have far too cosy a relationship. That was going on here ten years ago. But the employers and the regulators — the Health and Safety Executive — are now separated. That...

On the 20 April the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, killing 11 workers and rupturing a high-pressure extraction pipe in two places. The full extent of the disaster is not yet fully clear. As Solidarity goes to print oil continues to be pumped into the ocean. British Petroleum (BP) and US government agencies are placing the figure at 5,000 barrels a day. But many independent estimates put the figure higher, up to 100,000 barrels a day. Despite several high profile attempts by engineering teams, no one knows how or when this flow will be...

Barry Finger, a member of the editorial board of the US socialist magazine New Politics , looks at the political life of Phyllis Jacobson, who co-founded and for a long period edited the magazine. Phyllis Jacobson, who died after a protracted illness on 2 March, just shy of her 88th birthday, was the dynamic force behind a remarkable political and intellectual partnership of shared passion that left an indelible imprint on three generations of twentieth century American radicalism. Phyllis, much like her future husband Julie, came to revolutionary socialism in her early teens, through the...

Greg Albo is a member of the Socialist Project group in Canada, a professor of political economy at York University in Toronto, and a co-editor of the Socialist Register. He spoke to Solidarity about the "Canadian model" of cuts seen in Lib-Dem and Tory circles as a model of how to deal with government financial problems. The Liberal government of Jean Chrétien elected in Canada in 1993 made big cuts. That they were costless is a myth now being put around in discussions among the OECD and G20 governments. The social cost was huge. A big chunk of federal spending in Canada is intertwined with...

May Day in the US was marked by defiant nationwide protests against the recently enacted Arizona law, which made it a crime to be present in the state without legal immigration status and authorized police to question people about their status based on “reasonable” suspicion. Tens of thousands gathered in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco and Washington, DC in outrage at a law, now providing a blueprint for similar racist proposals in Utah, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and elsewhere, targeting Hispanics and making suspects out of people based on the color of their...

Phyllis Jacobson, who died after a protracted illness on March 2nd, just shy of her 88th birthday, was the dynamic force behind a remarkable political and intellectual partnership of shared passion that left an indelible imprint on three generations of twentieth-century American radicalism. Phyllis, much like her future husband Julie, came to revolutionary socialism in her early teens. They met through the Trotskyist faction within the Socialist Party, later the Young People’s Socialist League, 4th International of the late 1930s after the split with the SP. There they, like so many of their...

The United States spends almost twice per capita for health insurance coverage than most other advanced capitalist nations and still leaves almost 50 million Americans uninsured. About 45,000 people die each year due to lack of insurance or the inability to access the insurance they have due to inadequate coverage. At the rate in which health care costs have been climbing, 20% of consumer spending would be captured by health care costs by 2017. But thirty cents of every dollar spent on private health insurance is eaten by paperwork and bureaucratic overhead costs. Three thousand lobbyists...