USA/Canada

In Wisconsin, the movement against the anti-union Walker Bill is entering a new phase. Protestors have been cleared out of the Capitol building, which they had been occupying since 15 February. But trade unions and other grassroots campaigners against the bill are still rallying and organising actions and demonstrations outside the Capitol building; and fourteen Democratic senators are still in hiding in Illinois, thereby making it constitutionally impossible for the Wisconsin state senate to pass the Bill into law. Meanwhile, similar bills are being passed in other states — there are ongoing...

The corporations, and the politicians in their service, have launched what they hope will be a decisive offensive against America’s unions. In the past weeks, hundreds of bills have been introduced seeking to weaken, if not to effectively ban, unions in virtually all fifty states, facilitated by the corporate media’s message about states going broke because of government workers’ wages, pensions and benefits. In the living experience of the American working class, we have not confronted such a threat. It isn’t as if these types of attacks are new; what’s different is their scale and their real...

The Great Recession and its aftermath have generated a wholesale and unprecedented assault on the living conditions and future prospects for the American working class. This is the backdrop for the dramatic conflict now unfolding in Wisconsin. The organized working class in the United States is a shell of its former self, pummeled by protracted neo-liberal policies of aggressive union busting, globalization, and the relative decline of the manufacturing sector. While, at the same time, the Chamber of Commerce rebooted itself from a network of small town grandees into a confrontational and...

Thousands of workers demonstrated at the state capital in Madison, Wisconsin on Feb. 15 and 16 to protest plans by that state’s Republican Governor Scott Walker to take away the state workers’ union rights. Walker, cleverly attempted to divide the public workers by excluding police and firefighters from his anti-union law, and the media have worked to divide public employees against private sector workers. Yet, both firemen and private sector workers showed up at the statehouse to join public workers of all sorts in what has been one of the largest workers demonstrations in the United States...

A labour war has broken out in the state of Wisconsin, USA. Republican Governor Scott Walker has proposed a Bill to remove the right of public sector unions to engage in collective bargaining on any issue other than pay (and then they are forbidden from negotiating above-inflation pay increases). Thousands of teachers across Wisconsin shut down schools for five days through a “sick-in”, effectively an illegal strike. Thousands of workers have been staging a sit-in in the capitol building in Madison, holding up a vote and using the mass occupation as a centre for organising. School students...

There are two competing economic narratives in the American economics and business press explaining why, with recovery of the stock market and the purported increase in corporate profits, the economy is failing to produce job-generating expansion. The Keynesians — for lack of a better description — worry that the anemic government stimulus package is an insufficient offset to the overall decline in private sector spending. Consequently, they argue, the economy is poised on the precipice of a deflationary spiral. Businesses are therefore hesitant to add to productive capacity or use more of...

Texas is in bad shape. Rick Perry was re-elected for another term as governor and the Republicans have a two-thirds majority in the State House. The Republicans are committed to solving a deficit without a tax increase. Texas is one of the few states with no state income tax, and the Tea Party has stiffened the resolve of the “less government, less tax” current. Cuts are proposed to funding for public schools, colleges and universities, and to health coverage for poor people and children. There is little in the Texas state budget that is discretionary, so cuts are necessarily savage on the...

There’s not a clean, pleasant capitalism in one place –— glitzy, high-tech, full of good food and happy people — and a separable, unfortunate area of poverty, unemployment and misery. The whole system contains both. Capitalism’s scientists create fantastic drugs that are then denied to people who haven’t enough money to pay for them; amazing electronic gadgets are made by people paid pennies; shiny new products are produced, as rivers and skies are polluted and the planet heads for meltdown. Jammed up against the 3,200km US-Mexican border, on the Mexican side, is an area which appears to...

When capitalism crashes, the ambulances first come for the wealthy. The next wave of ambulances comes for their luggage and their attendants. When it is time to come for the working-class victims, there is a budget crisis and the ambulance corps is decommissioned. The walking wounded are left to fend for themselves, dazed and disoriented. Where is the outrage? Where is the fightback? Where is the left? It is not that the American left lacks a sophisticated understanding of power, of how wealth subverts democracy or how it domesticates the media and pollutes public opinion. It is not that the...

Click here to download pdf. Workers' Liberty 14 Reviews section The real history of US labour (Dianne Finger and Barry Finger review a book by Kim Moody) It takes all sorts? (Liz Millward reviews a book on the Krays) As modest as Stalin (Jim Denham reviews Jon Halliday's biography of Enver Hoxha) Helter skelter and stage by stage (Martin Thomas reviews books by Ken Livingstone and Seumas Milne Marxism without bullshit? (Jon Pike reviews a handbook of "analytical Marxism" by Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene) "I have made enough voices" (Lilian Thomson writes on Greta Garbo)