USA/Canada

A dismaying factor for Donald Trump in 2017-2020, a mitigating factor for the USA, was his inability to cohere a team to push through what he wanted

American Compass (AC), a right-wing US think-tank, has proposed replacing workers' unions by joint worker-employer organisations

Eric Lee’s article in Solidarity 683 is rather misty eyed about the shift in Bayard Rustin’s politics after the March in Washington in 1963. Rustin’s piece for Commentary came just before the start of another mass protest movement against the war in Vietnam which would bring millions into the streets. And Rustin would eventually find himself on the wrong side of that movement. One of Rustin’s first manoeuvres as a political operator rather than as an organiser was to support the compromise of Johnson and Humphrey to seat only two of the Mississippi Freedom Democrat delegates at the 1964...

Introduction Kim Moody argues in his book, Breaking the Impasse , written in 2020, that American politics is in a political cul de sac. This “impasse” is characterised by the Republican Party lurching further right and the Democratic Party taking a more centrist political and neoliberal economic positions. He argues against left-wing and socialist ventures into the Democratic Party and instead for building a mass working-class based party which “should seek to be a central piece in building the organized power of the working class” independent of positions this party may hold or seek to hold...

Bernie Sanders speaking on "Alex Wagner tonight", 31 August

On an average day, US corporation United Parcel Service (UPS) moves the equivalent of 6% of US and 2% of global GDP! A strike by its heavily unionised US workforce – 330,000 International Brotherhood of Teamsters members out of half a million workers – would have been an event of global significance. That seemed to be in the offing this summer, but now won’t happen. On 22 August it was announced that 86% of Teamsters members voting on a new “contract” (collective agreement), on a 58% turnout, had opted to accept. This despite a vocal and by many accounts unexpectedly vigorous No campaign. In...

Your honour, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government; that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means…. So spoke Eugene V Debs, Socialist Party candidate for the US presidency, on trial for sedition in 1918. Debs had campaigned against conscription in World War I, opposed as he was to the slaughter of millions of working people in what was an inter-imperialist war. He proudly pleaded guilty, was sentenced to ten years and launched his 1920 presidential campaign...

Think-tanks in the USA are working hard to sketch policies and prepare personnel

While Republican politicians are queuing up to take on Donald Trump for the party’s nomination next year, there’s hardly anything going on in the other camp. Unless he falls ill or changes his mind, Joe Biden will undoubtedly be the Democratic Party candidate. Only three people with any name recognition have challenged him inside the Democratic Party or to its left. They are a diverse crowd, but one thing unites them — and it’s not what you’d expect. To the left of the Democrats, Cornel West has announced he’s running for president. It’s unclear which party will support him as he initially...

Contrary to what is being reported, the Republican-controlled US Supreme Court has not prohibited affirmative action. It has only prohibited affirmative action that does not benefit white people. For example, the Republican majority on the court allowed “legacy” admissions. That means that if your daddy (and it probably was your daddy) went to Harvard (and your grandpa also probably preceded him there), then it’s fine for you to have a leg up. But since legacies inevitably favor those who were privileged in the past — meaning white people — then this means that pro-white affirmative action is...