USA/Canada

Socialists, and rational people everywhere, can only rejoice that vile conspiracy-monger Alex Jones has been ordered to pay close to a billion dollars damages to parents whose children were murdered in the gun massacre at Sandy Hook school, Connecticut in 2012. Jones’s far right website InfoWars claimed the school shooting was “fake” — a plot organised by the Federal government to tighten gun control laws — and parents of slain children were “crisis actors”. Fellow scumbags waged a campaign of harassment against those grieving for their lost ones. This included death and rape threats...

On 18 September, US president Joe Biden declared that “the [Covid} pandemic is over”. His chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, has rebuffed the claim, and Fauci is right. The USA has not yet reported an autumn-winter revival of infections, but is likely to follow the pattern of other countries, including Britain, where hospitalisations have tripled since 10 September (though levelling off since 4 October). A group of US health experts has written : “We need a robust national booster campaign, more investment in tests, treatments, and next-wave vaccines, better protections for the...

Kim Moody’s new book Breaking the Impasse brings together an argument that the US left needs to look at the recent labour upsurges (Amazon, teachers’ strikes, nurses) as the way forward in breaking from the broken two-party model of American politics. He criticises the “New Social Democratic Nostalgia” which exists in wings of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for a rose-tinted view of how major reforms from the New Deal and Civil Rights era were won, supposedly by coalition politics. In short the book is a rejection of both the Communist Party popular front and the “realignment”...

The recent death of country and western singer Loretta Lynn evokes the biographical film Coal Miner’s Daughter (Michael Apted, 1980). With Sissy Spacek as Loretta the film traces her early life in a remote coal mining community in Kentucky, and her move with her husband (played by Tommy Lee Jones) to the Pacific North West, where her singing and musical ability is discovered. She befriends fellow country and western singer Patsy Kline and goes on to a glittering career. Her songs, many of which she wrote herself, often portrayed the hardships of her early life, as in the song Coal Miner’s...

Want to gain easy access to Mar-a-Lago? Just drive through the gates in a brand new Mercedes and claim you are a Rothschild. Inna Yashchyshyn managed it with ease, ingratiating herself with various Trump associates by passing herself off as Anna de Rothschild. Her word that she was a super rich scion of a historically famous banking family was enough to gain acceptance and get her a golf course photo op with Trump and his Georgia lickspittle Lindsey Graham. Fake Anna was actually a Russian speaking Ukrainian immigrant whose dad earns a living as an Illinois truck driver. It is unclear who...

On Friday 23 June the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the first time in history the Supreme Court has overturned one of its own rulings in order to roll back the rights of citizens. Roe v. Wade was a 1973 ruling that established federal protection for abortion rights on the grounds that abortion is ultimately a private decision between a patient and healthcare providers. The right to privacy is widely recognised as being implied by the liberty clause in the 14th amendment of the US constitution, so the right to abortion must also be protected at the federal level. The 1973 court ruled...

In the last few days, NASA has twice had to abort launches of the Artemis mission to the Moon. By the time this article appears in print, there may be another attempt, a successful launch or a failure. Regardless of what will happen, I will watch the launch attempts with enthusiasm — and I say this as a socialist. Watching a weekend politics programme this morning on the BBC, I saw a journalist attempt to coax a Labour politician to say something positive or negative about the Artemis mission — with little success. There is a sense that many on the Left either take no interest in exploring...

Sacheen Littlefeather at the 1973 Oscars The recent apology to Native American Sacheen Littlefeather for her treatment at the 1973 Academy Awards Ceremony when she declined an Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando is about 50 years too late, but welcome all the same. While attempting to speak for the cause of Native American rights she was booed and, some allege, threatened by John Wayne. Officials told her to keep her speech to one minute or face arrest. It could well be the case that Native Americans have been subjected to more racist abuse, onscreen, than any other ethnic minority in the world...

The various threats of legal jeopardy long promised to put Donald Trump in court, yet never seeming to arrive, are now unfolding fast. The search and seizure by the FBI of stolen classified documents Trump held in the basement of his Mar-a-Lago golf-club home even added new crimes to the mix — contraventions of the Espionage Act and additional examples of obstruction of justice. Reasons posited for why Trump held box-loads of official documents, many deemed highly confidential, include blackmail and financial gain. They could be seen as a bargaining chip to be released should the state ever...

The distinction often made by socialists between "liberal parties" and "labour parties" has been undermined somewhat by recent developments on both sides of the Atlantic. Here in the U.K., much has been of Labour leader Keir Starmer's decision to sack Sam Tarry, who had been serving as the party's shadow transport minister. Tarry was accused of joining an RMT picket line and showing his solidarity with striking workers. On the one hand, this is not surprising as Labour's links with unions have grown ever more tenuous going back to the emergence of New Labour in the 1990s -- and perhaps even...