USA/Canada

New York police conducted a late-night raid on 14 November to clear the Occupy Wall Street protest, arresting at least 70 people. The raid, which was began suddenly, saw armed riot police heavy-handedly remove protesters, including through the use of tear gas, and smash up the infrastructure of the camp. Press were barred from reporting on the eviction, leading to an effective media blackout with Al-Jazeera the only major media outlet to cover the raid from the frontlines. Other media sources such as the New York Times were prevented from gaining access to Zucotti Park, where the raid was...

By Gabriel Bayard and Rachel Sandalow-Ash On Wednesday 2 November there was a citywide education walkout in Boston against rising costs of education. Student debt has just exceeded $1 trillion in the US, which is more than credit card debt. We walked out of our course (Economics 10) because we found it was emblematic of the ideology that has created the economic collapse. Our tutor, Gregory Mankiw, was an advisor to Bush Junior and now advises Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Republican administrations are known for cutting taxes on the wealthy while not doing anything for the...

By Isaac Steiner (Solidarity USA) On 2 November, tens of thousands of people responded to a call for a “general strike” from the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland in California. Tens of thousands of protesters marched on the city’ s port, forming flying pickets which were respected by members of the International Longshore Workers’ Union (ILWU), some using a contractual loophole that allows them to refuse to cross picket lines and others using health and safety loopholes to refuse to work. The general strike and national solidarity actions, built in under a week and with the severe deficit of...

Hugo Pouliot Le Canada est un pays impérialiste fondé depuis 250 ans sur l’oppression nationale des Québécois, des Autochtones, des Acadiens et des autres communautés francophones réparties à travers le pays. Version remaniée de cette article à http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/04/29/réflexions-sur-la-questi… . Le droit de ces nations à l’autodétermination, c’est-à-dire de décider librement leur avenir politique, n’a jamais été reconnu par la monarchie britannique et ensuite par la bourgeoisie canadienne. La lutte contre le statu quo anglo-chauvin est une tâche...

Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help has just been turned into a film. Both are enjoyable, but there are political problems with them and, in the case of the film, these problems are aggravated by conventional Hollywood presentation and story-telling. The Help is set in early 1960s Mississippi, in the semi-apartheid set-up which existed from the late 1870s until the victories of the Civil Rights movement won at least formal legal equality for black Americans. Many of the black women in the small town of Jackson are maids for white women, cleaning their houses and bringing up their children, who...

Violence has increasingly marred anti-capitalist protests around the world as police have attempted to clear occupations away. Last week Oakland in the US saw particularly coercive tactics deployed by the police, who used tear gas to break up hundreds of protesters marching on City Hall. The police justification for using force on unarmed protesters was to claim that the demonstrators were throwing rocks and bottles at them. It has since come to light, however, that the trouble may have been started by an undercover police officer who was embedded in Occupy Oakland’s camp from the start. Back...

By Dan La Botz A handful of young people started Occupy Wall Street in mid-September, as a protest against the banks and corporations that have grown rich while most Americans have grown poorer. Within weeks they had attracted hundreds and then thousands to marches and demonstration in New York City - one of them leading to the arrest of hundreds on the Brooklyn Bridge. The movement’s chant “We are the 99%” rang out not only in the Wall Street canyon but also across the country.” Now there are scores of Occupy groups across the United States camping out in public places, marching and rallying...

American socialist Dan La Botz explains the mood behind the sit-in protests on Wall Street, New York which are now spreading across the US, including his home city, Cincinnati. Cincinnati is a microcosm of the country. Thousands of Cincinnatians face high unemployment, live in poverty, or lack of health insurance, while a handful of multimillionaires live in luxury on the salaries paid by the national and multinational corporations headquartered here. Like the rest of America, we in the 99% watch our community’s economic situation deteriorate while the 1% at the top increase their salaries...

A New York public sector worker and member of the US socialist group Solidarity reports on the round-the-clock protests at New York’s financial centre. For the past week most of my coworkers and activist networks have been talking about “Occupy Wall St” (OWS) constantly. There’s definitely a buzz, and it extends beyond the “usual suspects” of New York’s progressive/left scene. I went down to OWS on Thursday [29 September] (while the “grievances” were being debated) and again on Saturday [1 October], towards the end of the attempt to march across the Brooklyn Bridge. With the arrests of more...

By Graeme Kemp The so-called US Tea Party is indeed “chilling” ( Solidarity 218). If the next US president is a Republican, the Tea Party will move closer to power. Obama’s modest health care reforms will be rolled back. It will literally be “business as usual” as the heath care companies boost their profits even more. Yet the US health care system was always pretty costly and less efficient than its right-wing supporters claim. There is a warning here for the UK, I think. As Tory cuts affect the NHS, further privatisation of health care will be presented to us as inevitable and the only way...