United States

As more people start to share scientists' long-expressed concerns over climate change, revelations of big bank energy market manipulations highlight Wall Street's entrenched stake in the fossil fuel economy that is heating up the planet.

One year after a huge explosion and fire at the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, California, there was a demonstration of thousands of people directed against the oil giant on August 3. Richmond is part of the sprawling San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. A significant aspect of the action was that it brought together environmentalists from the Bay Area and nationally, and activists from the Richmond community.

For more than a month, more than 400 prisoners in seven Californian prisons have refused to eat in protest at the use of long-term solitary confinement and other abuses. This is the longest hunger strike in California’s history and is provoking a predictably savage response from prison authorities. Prisoners are being denied medical attention, those accused of being representatives of the strikers are put in administrative segregation to further isolate them and many are being denied their mail.

A rally, titled '1984 Day' was held in New York on August 4 to protest the National Security Administration’s surveillance programs exposed by whistleblow Edward Snowden.

The critical moment in the political trial of the century was on February 28 when Bradley Manning stood and explained why he had risked his life to leak tens of thousands of official files to WikiLeaks. It was a statement of morality, conscience and truth: the very qualities that distinguish human beings. This was not deemed mainstream news in the United States; and were it not for Alexa O'Brien, an independent freelance journalist, Manning's voice would have been silenced.

The 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr will take place on August 24. In 1963, a quarter of a million people marched for jobs and freedom. They gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial where King got up to deliver his “I have a dream” speech. A year later, in 1964, the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It outlawed racial segregation in public places, introduced equal employment opportunities, and guaranteed the right to vote regardless of colour.

Detroit hit the Trifecta on July 18 — the third in a series of body blows that politicians have landed on the city’s working people. The Michigan legislature passed “right-to-work” in December and gave the governor the right to impose “emergency managers” on cities two days later. When Detroit’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr announced Chapter 9 bankruptcy on July 18, he was following a predicted trajectory that will lead to further impoverishment and privatisation.

The mainstream press has focused on the decision of the judge in the military courts-martial of Bradley Manning to find him not guilty of “aiding the enemy”. However, judge Denise Lind's conviction of of the whistleblower who exposed war crimes for 20 other charges amounts to a full-scale assault on democratic rights. The courts-martial now enters the sentencing phase. Manning faces a maximum of 136 years behind bars. Whatever the final sentence is, it is widely believed it will be decades in the military stockade.

The Barack Obama administration has proposed new regulations for hydraulic fracturing on 756 million acres of public and tribal lands. The rules were written by the drilling industry and will be streamlined into effect by a new intergovernmental task force, established by the president, to promote fracking ― a practice that has been linked to water poisoning, air pollution, methane emissions and, most recently, earthquakes.

The suffocating heat wave that struck the north-east United States in recent days brought new attention to the harsh conditions that thousands of low-wage workers endure every day of the year. While millions of New York City residents pondered how to escape from stifling temperatures, workers at a McDonald's in Manhattan's Washington Heights were being forced to work in a real-life “Hell's Kitchen”.

The hunger strike by more than 1000 prisoners in California's jails entered its third week on July 23.

Protesters were out in more than 100 US cities on July 20, venting their anger after George Zimmerman was cleared of murdering Trayvon Martin. They demanded federal prosecutors bring civil rights charges against the former Florida neighbourhood watch leader who successfully argued he acted in self-defence after trailing the unarmed black teen, confronting him and then shooting him dead. The Justice for Trayvon rallies were organised by civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network.