U.S.

On May 14, the U.S. Supreme Court “kicked the can down the road” on medical abortion, saving some votes for Trump cronies in the mid-term elections but signaling to the rest of us that tele-health prescribing of mifepristone remains in danger. The Court decided that a lower-court decision from Louisiana that required patients, including those living in states with complete abortion bans, to visit a doctor’s office to get a mifepristone prescription would remain “paused.”  In the meantime, the issue would continue to be litigated in the lower courts and the part of the Republican base that remains pro-abortion would not be stirred up before voting. This maneuver has allowed the high court to expediently delay, but be ready use its powers to further erode the availability of reproductive health care when it is more politically convenient.

The meeting underscores what a segment of the global left denies: the Trump-Xi Jinping summit is a meeting between the world’s two leading imperialist powers. And this is far more significant than Trump’s last visit, during his first term.

Nearly 5000 protesters assembled in Montgomery, Ala., on Saturday, May 16, as part of the emergency mobilization dubbed All Roads Lead to the South.  The Montgomery rally followed the recreation of a segment of the first Selma to Montgomery march of 1965, when 600 protesters were attacked by state troopers on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, an event that has come to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”  Faith leaders, politicians, and activists joined figures like the “oldest living foot soldier” from that original crossing, 84-year-old Annie Mae Avery, and Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who was an eight-year-old participant and victim of the police assault. These mobilizations were a response to the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling on the case of Louisiana v. Callais, which granted Louisiana the right to gerrymander voting districts to make Black representation to Congress nearly impossible. Within days of the verdict, other white Southern state governors and legislators rushed to use the ruling to squash the electoral voice of the Black community. This includes efforts in Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

For working-class people, the crisis of affordability has become more dire. Prices have been rising, rents are out of control, and many people work more than one job just to run in place. Many young workers are saddled with high debt from student loans. It’s not lost on them that the government, which is quick to bail out banks and corporations, has done nothing to help them. The Affordability Agenda highlights the basic bread and butter questions that form the affordability crisis, calling for affordable housing, good well-paying jobs and an end to wage stagnation, affordable universal needs such as “child care with fair provider wages, free school meals and expanded food assistance alongside anti-gouging measures.” The Agenda also calls for free higher education, comprehensive health care for all, free public transit, and publicly controlled utilities. While the planks in this program are both correct and supportable, there are limitations. If there is one lesson of the recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act, it is that no reform, no matter how hard won it might be, is permanent as long as capitalism continues to exist.

How can we defend unconditional support for the Palestinian liberation struggle—including the right to resistance—within the space of bourgeois democracy, especially when the government seeks precisely to suppress that support? The answer lies neither in adapting to the rules of the game nor in an abstract rejection of the legal arena. It is possible—and necessary—to use the very contradictions of bourgeois democracy against it. How can revolutionaries and those in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle use the formal freedoms of bourgeois democracy—freedom of speech, assembly, and the press; due process of law—to defend the right to self-determination, which includes, as the UN itself recognizes, “the struggle by all available means, including armed struggle”? This is the central contradiction we face. On the one hand, liberal democracies have been passing laws that equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, criminalizing BDS, banning slogans like “from the river to the sea,” and persecuting activists. On the other hand, we know that abandoning the legal arena means abandoning the working class and the youth to repression without defense.

Around the world, Zionist organizations have been leading a charge against free speech based on cynical, false charges of antisemitism.

The demonization and attack on immigrants remains a bipartisan project. Case in point, this past week the governor’s office of California announced that it will be turning over the driver’s license data of all 1 million undocumented immigrant drivers in the state to a federal database where their names, information, and addresses can be looked up. While implementation may be dependent on the legislature voting funds for the process, this decision has not yet been legally challenged and as of yet there have been no rallies opposing it. This is coming from the Democratic Party—the party that says it stands with immigrants! If they are willing to do this today, what will they do next?

Between Monday, March 16, and Saturday, April 4, a predominately immigrant workforce shut down one of the largest beef processing plants in the country. Beyond the “bread and butter” issues of wages, healthcare and safety this strike had much larger political implications about the ability of immigrant workers to organize and fight back against employer and government attacks in the workplace and community. The strike certainly raised questions about the difficulties workers face in winning contracts that deliver big economic packages and make meaningful long term gains. But what the strike lacked in financial impact it made up for as an example of fearless union members coming together from dozens of different ethnic backgrounds to stand up and fight.

Whether it's taking jobs, pricing out utilities or polluting neighborhoods, capitalist AI is an obvious menace. The fightback it's provoking also has immense potential

Pakistan’s role as an international mediator is not a sign of structural change, but a reconfiguration within the same system. The state uses its geographic position to enhance its relevance among competing global powers while managing internal instability. This external role is transformed into an ideological narrative domestically. State media and official discourse present Pakistan as an emerging global actor and an indispensable force for peace. At a time when the population faces inflation, unemployment, and severe economic pressure alongside repression, this narrative functions as a substitute form of hope—that international recognition is improving and future conditions will become better.

The recent detention of Guillermo Medina Reyes by ICE agents in San Jose, Calif., is a direct attack against immigrants and against the entire working class of this country. His arrest is part of a state offensive that combines immigration repression, the criminalization of protest, and a detention apparatus that clearly serves the interests of the ruling classes. Guillermo’s case cannot be understood outside the concrete functioning of the capitalist state—a set of institutions (police, courts, legislatures, national and local executive bodies, prisons, ICE) designed by the boss class to control, divide, and discipline the working class, particularly its immigrant sectors.

Six weeks into Trump’s Big Iranian Misadventure, fuel and food prices are soaring because of massive supply chain disruptions caused by the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran. In the context of the U.S.-Israeli war and Iranian retaliatory attacks, the price of oil rose worldwide. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively shut down with no end in sight. Approximately 20.3 million barrels of petroleum and crude oil, 25% of the world’s maritime oil shipments, passes through the Strait of Hormuz daily. Currently, about 95% of all traffic through that vital waterway is stopped.

Dr. Alter is one of many teachers, professors, and student activists on the front lines of attacks under the New McCarthyism, especially targeting the teaching of ideas about gender, race, and settler colonialism in Palestine. These attacks are only escalating as the ruling class increasingly turns to authoritarian methods.

The No Kings mobilization on March 28 was a powerful outcry against the forces of war and reaction. It was the largest single-day outpouring of street protests in U.S. history. The massive flood of people was fueled by widespread opposition to the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, as well as by the resistance to ICE’s immigrant roundups shown by the people of Minneapolis in the winter.

Far from being a personal whim of Trump's or a trap set by the Mossad, the US-Israel war on Iran is the logical conclusion of decades of imperialist policy, with bipartisan and European approval backing it up.

For the Iranian people to be able to choose their destiny, Trump’s offensive must first be defeated. History demonstrates—from the partisans of Yugoslavia to the revolutionaries of China, and including the lesson of the MEK’s failure when Iraq invaded Iran, and the crimes committed by the recent U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan—that the working class can only advance if it joins the struggle against the invader.