United States

While poverty levels grow and living standards fall, the American bosses keep up the pressure to drive down real wages even further. The latest example is what is happening at Delphi (that supplies parts to GM) where the bosses asked workers to take a 63% pay cut. In December the UAW votes on what response to give and GM are bracing themselves for possible strike action.

With the situation in Iraq deteriorating, his approval ratings steadily dropping, the aftermath of Katrina still haunting the nation, divisions in his own party, and the DeLay case causing a widespread erosion of faith in the government, Bush may well be threatened with impeachment. But even if the reactionary Bush Administration goes the way of Richard Nixon, where does that leave the working class in the United States?

The events of the past year have awakened millions of Americans to the bitter reality of life under capitalism. To many, the entire planet appears to have gone insane. The world has been shaken from top to bottom by natural disasters, wars, famines, political crises, riots, and revolutionary uprisings. This is a graphic reflection of the impasse of capitalism in the epoch of its decay and decline: an era of wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions. Editorial statement of the US Socialist Appeal.

The recent blackout on the US East coast highlights the inability of the capitalist class to provide even the most basic services in the heart of imperialism. The ability of capitalism to keep even something as important as its global headquarters, New York,  has been undermined by the blind mechanics of the profit-drive, the central component of capitalism itself. By Kurt Penca. Originally published on the new issue of the American Socialist Appeal.

In a first in US Labor history, nearly 100,000 grocery workers are on strike or locked out in California, St. Louis, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky, demanding a halt to the ever-increasing bosses' assault on one of the working class' most essential needs: health care. Under the heavy skies of recession, these multi-billion dollar companies want to make the workers pay the full bill for the economic downturn. In order to maintain their huge profits, the capitalists are more than willing to put the physical health of the working class to the ax. This is a threat that the Labor Movement cannot tolerate, despite the braking action of their own leadership...

This summer the Teamsters, SEIU, UFCW, and UNITE HERE split from the AFL-CIO union federation at their annual convention in Chicago. For the first time in half a century, the US trade unions are officially divided into large, separate camps.  The break up of the AFL-CIO came as a shock to many trade unionists and activists.  These four unions alone represent over one third of the federation’s 13 million members. But is it a step forward for US workers?

Venezuela was the first country to offer help to the United States in dealing with the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Chavez has offered money and personnel to help in the relief operations. The answer of an unnamed "senior State official" was that “unsolicited offers can be counterproductive." They would rather some of their own people died than have the people of the USA see Venezuela for what it is, a country where its people are challenging the very capitalist system upon which so much poverty and devastation is based.

Hurricane Katrina will be remembered for years to come as an important turning point in the USA. Thousands, tens of thousands of poor people have been left to fend for themselves, many dying dehydrated, in what is the richest country in the world. People are noting that the Bush administration, very quick to mobilize a huge army to invade Iraq, has been painfully slow in helping the people of New Orleans. The class question is emerging clearly and this will have profound effects on the whole of US society.

The recent terrorist attacks in London only confirm the volatile position the world finds itself in at the beginning of the 21st century. Bush and Blair’s war on terror and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have done nothing but further destabilize the situation. In the United States, the mood is finally turning against the war. This is the editorial of the latest issue of the American Socialist Appeal.

Titanic sums of money - the taxes paid in mostly by the working class - have been spent by the Bush Administration primarily on two things: the continuing slaughter in Iraq and the further enrichment of the top 10 percent of Americans. Millions of working people in the United States continue to worry about whether or not they will have a job two months from now or even next week. And how does the ‘compassionate conservative’ in the White House soothe the nation’s anxiety? By handing out billions of dollars to the modern-day robber barons of Capital.

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin's atypically frank condemnation of the treatment of U.S. prisoners around the world cause a storm of criticism. The bulk of the critics purposely skewed Durbin’s apt comparison, ignoring the widespread tactics used in the war on terror which without question include torture. The ugly truth is that prisons in Iraq are merely a reflection of the prison system here in the U.S.

Every victory by working people in the struggle to improve their lives is a step forward that must be applauded. Working people have power when they organize. But it is not enough to petition the bosses and their cronies in government to throw a few crumbs to those at the bottom. From the latest issue of the American Socialist Appeal.

After Bush’s reelection, many around the world thought the end of the world had come. According to them, the American “sheeple” had been duped once and for all, and Bush would effortlessly ram through his ultra-reactionary policies at home and abroad. However, Bush’s honeymoon period disappeared in a flash. Now, seemingly overnight, the mood of the American people has finally turned against the war in Iraq.