The ugly face of Obama's “hope we can believe in” has been starkly revealed. The extrajudicial killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, all unarmed black males killed by white police officers, have set off an emotional firestorm of protests and outrage on a scale not seen in the US in many years. Even more than the deaths

America is number one . . . in its prison population. In the “land of the free,” several million humans languish in cages in the name of law and order. Since its exponential growth in the past four decades, there is not another nation on this planet that comes near America’s incarceration rate. Instead of being given the help they need most, the workers and youth who are hardest hit by the poverty, unemployment, and social decay endemic to capitalism are brutalized by the police and traumatized by hellish prison conditions until they no longer become a problem to the system. Furthermore the expansion of the prison system is used as a battering ram by the bosses against any resistance

First came Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, with sickening revelations of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the cynical conduct of US diplomacy. Then Edward Snowden exposed the full extent of NSA information gathering: anything and everything you have read, written, or spoken on the phone or internet in the last decade or more has been recorded and archived and can be retrieved at will. Branded as enemies of the state, traitors, and threatened with the death penalty, all three of them are either in prison or

Millions of US immigrants, their families, co-workers, friends, and supporters had their hopes for relief from their difficult conditions built up by advance hype for President Obama’s November 20 speech on immigration policy reform. All such hopes were cruelly shattered once the outlines of his policy shift became more clear—an outline with an ...

Private ownership of the means of production has hit a dead end on a world scale. The system is dying on its feet, and this inevitably has profound political and social consequences in the country par excellence of capitalism. Francis Fukuyama, who, upon the fall of the USSR, famously declared “the end of history,” now says that America “suffers from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems.” In plain English: capitalism and its institutions are in big trouble.

More than a month after the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black youth, Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot him multiple times despite Brown having raised his arms in surrender, remains free and safely in hiding. The St. Louis region is tense in anticipation of the grand jury's ruling on whether or not to file charges against Wilson. Brown's shooting has drawn attention to the chilling fact that an average of two black men are killed by police every week in the United States. Michael Brown's killing, however, is not just another repetition of this tragic cycle. In many ways, it was "the straw that broke the camel's back," opening up a new stage in the changing

What if they held an election and nobody came? In some ways, the 2014 midterm election was very much like this. Just 36.6 percent voted, only 13% of them under age 30, and as many as 70 million eligible voters are not even registered. The main capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans—do not deal with real issues related to the lives of the overwhelming majority of the population. This is true bourgeois democracy. That is, democracy for the top 1% or 2%, but not for the rest of us!

We republish below the transcript of a speech delivered by​ WIL member Martin Michaels ​on ​November 1 in Minneapolis, MN​,​ at the March Against​ ​Corruption.​ ​

Join members of the International Marxist Tendency and the Marxist Student Association for this year's North East Regional School on 1 November. Speakers from Belgium and Canada will speak on the Arab Revolution and the Student and Youth movements throughout the Americas. More info below.

Many Americans are justifiably horrified by the atrocities being perpetrated by the ISIS gangsters. But imperialist intervention, which led to this wreck in the first place, is no solution. There is no short-term way out. Only a socialist revolution can transform the region and the world.

Today’s youth, the so-called millennials, face a bleak future under capitalism. They carry the highest student debt in history and have entered “adulthood” at a time when housing prices have skyrocketed and the labor market has imploded. More than half of recent graduates are unemployed or underemployed, often in low-wage jobs having nothing to do with their degrees. Nonetheless, they must make monthly payments on an average of $20,000 in student loans.

There is a lot activity and buzz around the struggle to raise the minimum wage in the United States. Here we provide an article by Tom Trottier of the US Socialist Appeal that explains the role of wages under capitalism and what has actually been achieved so far.

The “Ice Bucket Challenge” has gone certifiably viral. Countless videos showing people dousing themselves with buckets of ice water have flooded social media. Everyone from GW Bush to Will Smith to Britney Spears to your next-door neighbor to half your High School classmates are joining in the late-summer antics and nominating someone else to do it. If the challenge is not met within 24 hours, the nominee is supposed to donate to

As the protests in Ferguson, MO, enter their 12th day, following the shooting of Michael Brown by local police, the Workers International League (US section of the IMT) continues to intervene in this spontaneous upsurge, in Ferguson itself, and on the campuses in the area. These events mark a qualitative turning point in the class struggle in the United States. It is already being recognized as an event for which there will be a “before” and an “after,” even by the talking heads in the media and the representatives of the capitalist political establishment.

Leaflet for demonstrations against police repression in Ferguson, MO can be downloaded here.