A recent article on this site analyzed the recent period in the US that many were calling Striketober. The purpose of today’s piece is to look at developments since then.
United States
Assange facing extradition to US: Where is the outrage?
Earlier this year an investigative report from Yahoo! News revealed that leading figures in the US government had discussed the possibility of kidnapping or assassinating Assange during the seven years he was taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Beyond Striketober: The class struggle today
The purpose of this presentation is to examine Striketober, the series of strikes that received a great deal of media attention this Fall.
Failing to learn the lessons of Vietnam, again
Successive US presidents vowed to learn from the Vietnam war, relying on technology, ‘smart’ weapons and local proxies instead of US troops on the ground. Yet still they embark on unwinnable conflicts.
Jacobin’s new poll gives a left cover to Democrats’ standard messaging about the working class
The Jacobin effort is not a project designed for socialists to understand how better to recruit workers to socialist organizations. It’s a project designed to advise progressive Democrats about how to win more elections to the U.S. House and state legislatures.
The Democrats’ election debacle
The mainstream media are full of interpretations on the deep meanings of the vote and the long-term prospects of the two ruling-class parties. Yet, the explanation for the November results is pretty simple, and it starts with last November’s national election.
‘Making a killing’ amid pandemic, Pfizer boosts vaccine sales forecast to $36 billion
“The apparently unquenchable thirst for profits of big pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer, is fueling an unprecedented human rights crisis.”
‘Pelosi absolutely destroyed’ tax on billionaires, says Democratic insider
“The idea that Manchin is to blame for killing the billionaires’ tax is too convenient,” argued a journalist who spoke with party aides about the moribund proposal.
“Dire crisis of poverty”: NYC taxi drivers launch hunger strike to demand relief from medallion debt
Since 9/11, thousands of taxi drivers have accrued massive debt largely due to the city artificially inflating the cost of taxi medallions, the permits required to drive a taxi.
Why is a socialist praising war criminal Colin Powell?
The war, based on a lie that Iraq harbored “weapons of mass destruction”—of which none were found—killed hundreds of thousands. For that, Powell and the other architects of the war should have found themselves in the dock at a war crimes tribunal, rather than being hailed as elder statespersons.
John Deere: Labor puts its Big Battalions into the field
It is the largest strike in the country since the Chicago Teachers Strike in 2019 and the largest private sector strike since the General Motors walkout in the fall of that year. This means that it’s important to follow this strike carefully.
‘Entirely unsurprising’: Merck slammed for 4,000% markup of taxpayer-funded Covid drug
Heidi Chow of the Jubilee Debt Campaign decried the $700-per-patient price the U.S. government paid for molnupiravir as “another example of Big Pharma reaping billions from public investment into research by charging extortionate, rip-off prices for lifesaving Covid drugs.”
While Americans sleep, our corporate overlords make progress impossible
Right now, both Parties are readying to give over $50 billion of your tax money to the very profitable under-taxed computer chip industry companies like Intel and Nvidia, so they can make more profit-building plants in the U.S.
From chips to cookies to tortillas! Bakery workers struggles continue
Terrible working conditions and speed-ups in that industry have now led to an important workers struggle at the El Milagro tortilla factory in Chicago.
The profits of war: How corporate America cashed in on the post-9/11 Pentagon spending surge
The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented — a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University’s Costs of War project.
