USA/Canada

US socialists Ann Coleman, Alan Maass and Nicole Colson report on the US Supreme Court's historic ruling on same-sex marriage. This article was taken from the International Socialist Organization publication website socialistworker.org (no connection to British SWP). The authors welcome the ruling, seeing it as a culmination of many struggles for equality. Some socialists and LGBT activists in US, as in the UK, question the institution of marriage. We invite debate on this question. The US Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling on same-sex marriage (26 June) was a sweeping victory in the decades-long...

Thirty-six year old African-American man Kevin Allen was shot dead by police in Lyndhurst, New Jersey on Friday 29 May. Kevin was shot in a public library after apparently resisting arrest for violating his probation and pulling out a knife. Police have released a report claiming that officers had “no choice” but to shoot Kevin after “pepper spray and officers' batons had failed to subdue him”. But nobody is likely to lie still and calm after being pepper sprayed! The idea that the police, with all the force at their disposal, could not “subdue” a man in a small library room, housed in the...

Members of the American International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) have just agreed a five-year deal with the employers federation, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). The deal covers 20,000 dockworkers at twenty-nine US west coast ports. The nine-month-long war of attrition by the PMA which preceded the deal was the latest stage in an employers’ offensive against US dockers stretching back to the early 1960s. Before then, working conditions on the docks had been dictated by the ILWU’s victory in the 1934 US West Coast dockers strike. The 1934 strike saw the ILWU effectively win...

A discussion piece on the campaign by Bernie Sanders, to get the Democratic Party nomination for President. Sanders calls himself a social-democrat and supports reforms on a range of issues including the introduction of universal health care. Barry Finger is a member of the editorial board of US socialist journal New Politics . As proponents of independent political action, we believe that the Democratic Party is a deathtrap for progressives and that history has demonstrated time and again that progressive movements immersed in the DP are stripped of their potential political power...

“This city has looked like it had a riot since I was born,” Baltimore resident Vashti Presco said. “It wasn’t rebuilt after 1968, even though other cities had worse riots. That drugstore is probably never going to get rebuilt.” Protests in Baltimore since the killing by police of Freddie Gray have been labelled as riots in the media. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has condemned those involved as “criminals” and “thugs”. President Obama condemned the protesters’ violence. All are ignoring the many peaceful protests and erasing the brutal violence inflicted on the black community in Baltimore by...

The US National Guard was called into Baltimore on Monday 27 April to put down riots which followed the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died last week of injuries sustained during a violent arrest by police. Freddie suffered a broken neck which left his spine “80% severed” and his voicebox crushed. He lapsed into a coma and died a week later. Freddie was chased and arrested for “catching an officer’s eye” and running away. Mobile phone footage of Freddie's arrest shows him being dragged into a police van while yelling in pain, one of his legs appearing limp. Police chiefs have...

­Michael Slager, the cop who killed unarmed black man, Walter Scott, on 5 April in North Charleston, South Carolina, has been charged with murder. The murder charge was brought only after an eye witness handed over to police mobile phone footage of the event showing Walter being shot eight times in the back as he ran away from Slager. The witness also said there was a struggle in which Slager used his taser on Walter before Walter got away and ran. Police spokespeople has originally reported that Walter had taken Slager’s taser and used it against him. The video shows Slager picking up the...

Uetricht begins his account of the transformation of the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) and their 2012 strike by counterposing two incidents representing the opposite faces of teacher trade unionism. One is represented by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sitting on a panel to discuss Chicago’s Infrastructure Trust — a public-private partnership initiative which ushered in private involvement in public schools. Speaking alongside Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel she praised the initiative and made no mention of the Mayor’s hostile treatment of teachers and their...

9 April was the 150th anniversary of the surrender of the South in the American Civil War. In this speech given at recent AWL public meetings, Sacha Ismail explains why that war and what came after are so important. The American Civil War is not dry, dusty history. It is relevant to the inspiring protests against racism going on in the United States now. The US of today — a capitalist democracy, but one deeply racist and unequal even by the standards of capitalism — was created by revolution, but also the betrayal of that revolution. Between 1861 and 1865, the US fought a bloody war in which...

From the new wealth produced by the labours of the average household in the USA, the shareholders of US big business will scoop around $10,000 in the coming year. The figure was about $8,000 in 2014, and is expected to rise. It doesn't include the gains from higher share prices which shareholders may or may not cash in. It counts only the hard cash they get in dividends and operations in which businesses buy back their own shares. Some of the shareholders are also workers, contributing through their labour to the surplus value they get back via shareholdings. The USA has a much wider...