United States

On August 24, Trump was arrested for the third time in recent months, this time in Atlanta, on felony charges stemming from alleged efforts to manipulate Georgia’s vote count during the 2020 election. He was booked, fingerprinted, and photographed in Fulton County Jail. While the Democrats and their liberal hangers-on lauded the mugshot in celebration of bourgeois “justice,” Trump monetized it. Within 24 hours, his campaign raised $4.18 million in political donations and sales of mugshot merchandise. This broke the campaign’s one-day fundraising record and is well over half of the amount raised since he officially announced his candidacy ...

The Hawaiian island of Maui has been devastated by wildfires, leaving nearly 100 dead at the time of writing. The inferno has been described as the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the state of Hawaii. But in fact, there was little natural about this tragedy. It was an accident waiting to happen, facilitated by the capitalism-created climate crisis, and disproportionately affecting poorer neighborhoods on an island treated as a luxurious plaything by the wealthy.

We are witnessing a profound crisis of legitimacy and moral decomposition of the entire capitalist system. Former US President Donald Trump's latest legal drama is just one more in a ceaseless succession of establishment scandals, blunders and internecine disputes at all levels. From parliament, to the police, to the press, to religious institutions – every pillar of bourgeois rule is rotting from the inside out. Why is this happening, why now, and what does it mean for the class struggle?

In a break from his usual Hollywood blockbusters, Christopher Nolan’s latest release offers a dramatic and tense look at the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the bomb’, exploring the politics of McCarthy-era America along the way.

It turns out the biggest drama of the summer isn’t Barbie or Oppenheimer, it’s the labour struggle unfolding in Hollywood. It’s a team-up between beleaguered writers and actors against a supervillain as bad as any you’d see in an action movie: the big studios and streamers, including Disney, Netflix, and Amazon.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the summer of 2020 shook the edifice of US capitalism. At its height, the movement involved over 20 million people in 2,500 cities and towns, making it the largest mobilisation in the nation’s history. There were many factors that contributed to the movement ending up at an impasse, not least the lack of revolutionary leadership. But for years, it was alleged state infiltrators had a hand in undermining BLM. However, there was little irrefutable evidence – until now.

Hunter Biden, son of Democratic President Joe Biden, will likely avoid prison under the terms of a plea deal unveiled on Tuesday, June 20. The younger Biden has agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay federal taxes in excess of $200,000 in a timely manner. In exchange, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) will recommend probation for the tax charges and has agreed not to prosecute a separate felony firearm offense.

On June 3 and 4, some 230 communists gathered in Philadelphia for the largest-ever National Congress of Socialist Revolution, the US section of the International Marxist Tendency. The atmosphere was electric throughout the entirety of the event, which featured no fewer than a dozen thunderous standing ovations.

Joining the massive wave of labor action on campuses throughout the country, academic workers at New Jersey’s largest public university went on strike on April 10. Over 9,000 workers represented by three unions took to the picket lines in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick. A first since the school’s founding in 1766, the strike lasted five days with energetic rallies and pickets, before a tentative framework, brokered by Democratic Governor Phil Murphy, put the strike on ice, diverting the struggle to the bargaining table. As of May 8, some 93% of members had voted to ratify their contracts. Enormous potential was on display during this inspiring strike and important lessons for the

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The deadline for reaching a deal on the US debt ceiling is just days away, and Capitol Hill is deadlocked. On or around 1 June, the federal government will no longer have the money to continue paying its bills, potentially resulting in an unprecedented default that would send catastrophic shockwaves across the world economy.

Hollywood is known as a “dream factory,” but for film and television writers it’s become simply a factory like any other, with all the drudgery and exploitation that entails. Sea changes in the industry brought about by streaming and artificial intelligence (AI) technology have made writing all but untenable as a career. To confront what it calls an “existential crisis”, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) presented the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) with a list of demands including major changes to how writers are paid, staffing guarantees, and safeguards against being replaced by AI. After six weeks of negotiations, the AMPTP refused to even counter many of

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When the workers of Warrior Met Coal downed tools on April 1, 2021, they didn’t realize they were launching the longest miners’ strike in US history. But these miners had every reason to prepare for a serious fight, and they held their picket line for over 600 bitter days—until the union leadership threw in the towel. Just shy of the strike’s two-year anniversary, president Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) submitted an “unconditional offer to return to work.” He justified the surrender by arguing that the strike was at an impasse.

US officials are reeling from a major leak of over 100 pages of highly sensitive intelligence, uploaded to the internet by persons unknown [now alleged to be 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, Jack Teixeira – 14/4], and first shared by gamers on Discord. The wide-ranging documents lift the lid on the extent of US involvement in the Ukraine War, the serious difficulties faced by the Ukrainian side, the role of the Israeli secret services in fomenting mass protests against the Netanyahu regime, and much more besides.