A further 52 people were arrested at the White House on August 22 for taking part in an ongoing sit-in. They are trying to push President Barack Obama to stand up to Big Oil and deny the permit for a huge new oil pipeline.
Obama will decide this year on TransCanada’s permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. This would send 900,000 barrels a day of the world’s dirtiest oil to US refineries, allowing further development of the Alberta tar sands in Canada.
The pipeline would pass through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
United States
Nearly half a year after workers revolted over Wisconsin Republican Govenor Scott Walker's February announcement that he intended to bust Wisconsin's public-sector unions, voters went to the polls in nine recall elections.
Unions and their supporters hoped the polls would put the state Senate in the hands of Democrats ― whose 14 Senators left the state for a month after Walker announced his anti-union bill in a bid to block it.
Despite an obscene amount of money flowing into the state over the past few months, the union movement fell just one seat short of its goal.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing,” African American revolutionary Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965 at the age of 39, once said in a comment on the capitalist media that applies to contemporary reporting on English riots or refugees.
As I write these words, out-of-control hordes are swarming throughout downtown Manhattan.
Their disregard for human decency, for the sanctity of people’s homes, jobs, property and health is beyond anything seen since the Dark Ages.
These men and women, almost all of them white and disturbingly antiseptic for people living in a filthy and crowded city, are dressed in bizarre outfits.
US President Barack Obama's war on whistleblowers has suffered several setbacks.
Two high-profile prosecutions against whistleblowers failed and the mistreatment of alleged WikiLeaks source, military analyst Bradley Manning, has been confirmed.
The cases show a pattern of vindictive harassment against anyone involved in leaking information the US government deems “secret”.
These cases are part of a broader attack on the public's right to know what governments do behind closed doors.
Luz Smedbron ― a disabled mother of three originally from Ecuador ― and about a dozen housing rights advocates, stood together on Smedbrons' porch in Addison, Illinois on July 29.
With protest signs in hand, they chanted: "The people united, will never be defeated!"
DuPage County sheriffs moved in, but protesters stood their ground.
As news cameras arrived on the scene, the officers slunk back to their patrol cars, looking confused and embarrassed. They radioed for reinforcements.
As the United States prepares itself for the approaching 2012 presidential election, voters in primaries to select the Republican candidate find themselves inundated by a selection of arch-conservative contenders vying for the opportunity to seize the nomination.
Guided by “God”, free-market economics and corporate tax cuts, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, darling of the right-wing Tea Party, appears at the forefront of such arch-conservative efforts to enter the White House and set in motion an uncompromising far-right agenda.
The article below is an abridged August 2 editorial from Socialist Worker (US).
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If your eyes are glazing over at the large numbers and the complicated mechanics of the deal to cut US$2.1 trillion from the United States federal budget over the next decade, here’s a short summary of the agreement: Screw the sick, poor and the elderly while imposing a permanently lower standard of living for working people, all while helping bankers and the rich grab a greater share of society’s wealth.
United States: The nonsense battle over debt
Dean Baker
Policy debates in Washington are moving ever further from reality as a small elite moves to strip benefits that the vast majority need and support. The battle over raising the debt ceiling is playing a central role in this effort.
The United States is running extraordinarily large budget deficits. The size of the annual deficit peaked at 10% of GDP in 2009, but it is still running at close to 9% of GDP this year.
The Grammy awards have long been the kind of thing that one simply has to deal with if you're going to approach music under capitalism.
It comes wrapped in all the elitism, commerce and segregation that necessarily has to accompany the music industry, but it's still something of a great salt lake for any artist — even those who are the most socially conscious — if they want to navigate the most treacherous waters of their craft.
Like any money-making venture, it can be just as susceptible to public pressure as it is to the forces of the market.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives threw down the gauntlet to President Barack Obama on July 19 by voting to cut federal spending by US$6 trillion and demand a constitutional balanced budget amendment in exchange for agreeing to raise the federal debt ceiling.
The US must raise the debt ceiling by August 2 or default on its debts for the first time, potentially leaving the government unable to pay its employees and plunging the world into a second credit crunch.
The bill is unlikely to pass into law.
How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned.
Something had happened. But what?
Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to the horrors of Pol Pot, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant’s rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.
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