United States

Anger in Oakland as shooting cop declared ‘not guilty’ of murder

13 July 2010
Police officer Johannes Mehserle shot 22-year-old African‑American Oscar Grant in the back at 2am on New Year’s Day 2009.

Mass protests in US for migrants

04 May 2010
Hundreds of thousands of people marched across the US on May Day against attacks on immigrants and a new legal assault in Arizona.

Kent State: When US state shot down American students

27 April 2010
On 4 May 1970, the United States National Guard shot dead four students at Kent State University in Ohio – triggering a wave of rage that spread across the US.

Eugene Debs - the revolutionary who won a million votes

13 April 2010
Eugene V Debs (1855-1926), a heroic revolutionary socialist, did as much as anyone to make socialist ideas and politics an important current in the US working class movement.

The Angola Three: Bound, gagged and jailed in the land of the free

30 March 2010
Former Black Panther Robert King spoke to Ken Olende about his life in prison—the basis for a new film

US needs more than Obama’s health changes

23 March 2010
Barack Obama’s health bill is the biggest welfare reform in the US since the 1960s. Another 32 million people will have health insurance.

Is Obama really taking on the US bankers?

26 January 2010
"Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail. If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have."

A year of Obama: compromise, crisis and capitulation

12 January 2010
The first anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration as US president comes on 20 January.

New challenges for US movement against war

03 November 2009
The quagmire in Afghanistan is worse than it has ever been. But the US anti-war movement finds itself in a desperately floundering situation, unable to adequately mobilise protest activity around Barack Obama’s Vietnam.

Missile defence: Obama won’t drop US domination

22 September 2009
Is Barack Obama’s decision to cancel the deployment of missile defence in central and eastern Europe another sign of how the US has been weakened by the Iraq disaster? In a very obvious sense, yes.

US health plan is trapped by free market ideology

15 September 2009
US president Barack Obama addressed a joint meeting of Congress last week about the need to reform the US health system, which was one of his central electoral promises. This followed months of sniping from the right.

Obama’s tortured logic on prisons

02 June 2009
Within days of Barack Obama’s inauguration it was announced that Guantanamo Bay was to close within a year, along with the secret prisons that George Bush’s administration had set up around the world.

Obama is marching into the graveyard of empires

19 May 2009
Two events last week underlined the fact that Barack Obama is not kidding when he says he intends to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

Obama fails a foreign policy test

17 March 2009
Barack Obama was elected on a wave of hope and the expectation of a clean break with the disastrous policies of George Bush.

Death on the US-Mexico border

03 March 2009
Enrique Morones is the founder of Border Angels, a group of activists helping migrants who make the hazardous journey across the border from Mexico to the US. He is taking crosses to the rows of "John Does" graves.

Jess Hurd’s photos of the US-Mexico border

03 March 2009

Latinos face a rising tide of hostility

03 March 2009
Immigrant Latinos in the US are facing a tough and worrying future.

The real change facing Obama

17 February 2009
Barack Obama’s administration is starting to put itself about internationally. Having stayed away from the World Economic Forum in Davos, the US sent a high-powered delegation headed by Vice-President Joe Biden to the Munich security conference the weekend before last.

Barack Obama and the order to close Guantanamo

27 January 2009
US president Barack Obama has issued a number of executive orders in his first week in office that distance him from his predecessor George Bush – on Guantanamo Bay, stem cell research, reproductive rights and climate change.

A conflict of interests in Obama's different supporters

20 January 2009
The fundamental test that Obama faces is not so much about the timescale or extent of his policy changes, but about the conflicting bases of his underlying support.