USA/Canada

Since October last year, Solidarity has been carrying weekly articles by Eric Lee, convenor of London for Bernie, the London branch of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign.

Nevada: a bump in the road? (19 February 2020)

How can Sanders beat Trump? (12 February 2020)

Sanders and the unions (5 February 2020)

Bernie Sanders, dangerous Trotskyist (29 January 2020)

The Bernie blackout is now over (15 January 2020)

Sanders and Soleimani (8 January 2020)

Sanders, Corbyn and antisemitism (18 December 2019)

Sanders, Debs and the lessons of 1920 (4 December 2019)

Sanders campaign: impeachment, what

Next Saturday (22 February) voters in Nevada will participate in caucuses to choose their 48 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Early voting has already begun. According to the latest poll, Sanders has a 7 point lead over Biden, with no other candidates reaching the 15% threshold required to win delegates. This represents a major shift, as Biden had been leading in all the polls in Nevada up until very recently.

A Sanders victory in Nevada would represent more than just a hat trick, following his victories in the popular vote in Iowa and New Hampshire. It would mean that he has

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), arguably one of the most militant unions in the U.S., has been hit with a union-busting $93.6 million dollar court-imposed fine for a secondary boycott deemed illegal under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.

Justine Canady spoke (alongside Eric Lee) at the London Workers' Liberty forum on 31 January 2020 about "Feeling the Bern".

In early June, voters in the U.S. territory of the Virgin Islands will go to the polls to choose their delegates for the Democratic National Convention. When that happens, the primary season will be officially over, though it is likely to end well before that.

If polls today are accurate and nothing much changes in the next few months (rather large assumptions, obviously), according to The New York Times and the respected FiveThirtyEight website, Bernie Sanders is likely to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.

He is already generally acknowledged to be the front-runner due to the implosion

Since the general election, the "community union" Acorn has been growing.

On 22 December the Guardian reported on Acorn’s “glut of applications” after the 13 December exit poll. Acorn UK national organiser Nick Ballard was quoted saying “We’ve had hundreds of new members join.”

Acorn has branches in Bristol, Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle, and Brighton, and is best known as a renters’ union. The organisation has been able to turn out pickets of a hundred people to block evictions and has pressured Santander, TSB and NatWest to get rid of rent increase and “no DSS” clauses in buy-to-let

Bernie Sanders has introduced a new phrase into American politics: “working class.”

For decades, hardly anyone has used those two words together. It was far more common to speak of the “middle class” or, more recently, “working families”. By employing the language of class, Sanders has staked out his claim to be the candidate of the trade unions.

In early 2016, when Sanders’ chances of getting elected were considered to be around zero, the leaders of most major American unions rushed to endorse Hillary Clinton. In most cases, members were not asked who they supported, and to many union leaders

In the hunt for dirt on Bernie Sanders, hostile journalists have come up with very little. He had his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. He wrote some dodgy stuff in an alternative newspaper as a very young man. And that’s pretty much it.

It’s hard to find anything really juicy in Sanders’ past because his politics have been fairly consistent from the time he joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) in the early 1960s until today. It was in the YPSL that he learned to be a democratic socialist and he remains a democratic socialist even now.

But one story has recently surfaced which is

Orthodox Jews in the New York metropolitan area alone have been the victims of no less than a dozen attacks in the last few weeks.

Women have been smacked across the face, spat upon, and had their wigs ripped off. Men have been assaulted with chairs and one whacked so hard with a brick that he lost all his teeth. A woman and her child were pelted with eggs, another mother beaten with her child in tow. Jews have been harangued and baited on public transportation. Jews have been targeted in the streets, in their houses of worship and online.

And in the most dramatic attacks, three people were