USA/Canada

On 13 September, one of Donald Trump’s political dirty tricksters, Roger Stone, signposted a Trumpian future. Though convicted, Stone has avoided prison thanks to a presidential pardon. To pay back the favour, he has suggested that should Trump lose the 3 November election, he should declare martial law and arrest political opponents such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg. According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump has made over 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency. The serial liar did however let the truth slip when he admitted that the Republican Party...

The USA currently has a much higher rate of infection than the UK, with a Covid-19 death rate about 120 times bigger (proportional to population) than the UK, and a proportion of tests showing positive about 10 times bigger. In most big cities in the USA, schools are restarting online-only. New York was the hardest-hit area early on, but now has a lower rate of infection than many areas in the USA: about three times as many confirmed infections and deaths per day as the UK, relative to population. New York City’s schools are due to reopen to students on 21 September, with workers going into...

By now, you have probably already heard about the American conspiracy theory known as QAnon. What exactly do QAnon followers believe? The answer is complicated. By this point, QAnon has snowballed into an all-encompassing super-conspiracy. Believers frequently disagree with each other on details, but there’s room for you in the movement whether you believe that the Earth is hollow or that it is flat. QAnon centres around a supposed military intelligence officer, “Q”, who is exposing a corrupt cabal in the US government by posting cryptic messages on anonymous imageboards. The first “Q drop” —...

Healthcare in pregnancy, or lack of it, is one of the starkest examples of racial health inequalities in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Work in the UK by University of Oxford researchers has found that between 2014 and 2016 the rate of death in pregnancy was 8 in 100,000 white people, compared with 15 in 100,000 Asian people and 40 in 100,000 black people. It’s a similar picture in the US, where African-American, Native American, and Alaska native pregnancies are three times more likely to result in death, according to a May 2019 report by the Centers for Disease Control. The...

It was only a matter of time before a white supremacist vigilante murdered opponents of Donald Trump. The surprise was that it hadn’t happened sooner. There will be more of this in the run-up to the Presidential election. This fresh outrage in the Wisconsin town of Kenosha followed days of protest after local police shot unarmed black man Jacob Blake seven times in the back. 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse (above, left), a keen attender of Trump rallies, answered the call of a vigilante website and his mother drove him and his illegally owned AR-15 rifle twenty miles across the state line to...

Mrs America is a mini-series charting the battles in the 1970s between the rising feminist movement in the United States and its enemies over the Equal Rights Amendment (an amendment to the Constitution which still hasn’t been ratified by enough states to become law). It shows us well-known figures from the American women’s movement at that time, like Gloria Steinem (played by Rose Byrne) and Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), but focuses also on the woman who set out to defeat them, Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett). Steinem herself, and others, have criticised the series for overstating this...

As workers were furloughed and schools closed, confining families to the home, housework and childcare increased. Articles and blog posts told of pressure on women to take on more and more. Research coming out of USA, Canada, Germany, Turkey and the Netherlands has found men doing more domestic work during the pandemic than they did before it. But they haven’t closed the gap with women, “Across the board, whether it’s dishwashing, laundry, childcare, reading to kids, physical care, we’re seeing a universal movement toward more egalitarian sharing,” says Dan Carlson, a sociologist at the...

Robert Cuffy (above) is a member of the Socialist Workers Alliance of Guyana, currently based in New York, where he is a public sector worker, trade unionist, and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He spoke to Daniel Randall from Solidarity. DR: What’s your assessment of where the Black Lives Matter movement is at, and what perspectives and ideas class-struggle socialists involved in it should be advocating and building for? RC: This iteration of the black liberation struggle, which is the second uprising happening under the hashtag or label “Black Lives Matter”, comes at a...

Above: Howie Hawkins, longstanding socialist activist, is running on the Green Party ticket alongside Angela Walker Re-posted, with thanks, from the New Politics magazine website. A bumper sticker displayed with increasing resonance these days reads: “2020, any responsible adult.” This is undoubtedly the mood of Democratic Party voters as was made abundantly clear by the abrupt collapse of the Sanders momentum. The US is in free fall under a regime that represents an exceptional threat not only to democratic life but to human life itself. The need for an American socialist answer has rarely...