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Yesterday morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.3 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. That’s on top of the 48.7 million workers who were laid off during the preceding fifteen weeks.

The second round of the French local elections, at the end of June, was bad news for president Emmanuel Macron, whose candidates did very poorly. In response, Macron switched prime ministers, replacing high-profile operator Edouard Philippe with an unknown right winger, Jean Castex, whose previous experience consisted mostly of being mayor of a town with 6,000 inhabitants.

People talk about the upcoming school year as if we have a choice between in-person classes or distance learning.

The ruling class, having worked out its strategic response to the pandemic in February and March, has carried out an unrelenting assault on workers ever since. The working class must respond with equal determination and ruthlessness. It must fight for the socialist overturn of the capitalist system, which threatens the lives of millions of workers and youth around the world.

Third episode of VA’s “In Commune” series, focusing on the combative Panal 2021 Commune in Caracas.

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps around the world, statist and capitalist structures predictably continue to fail us in many ways. Underlying that failure is the stress on individual responses: stockpile, isolate, and care for yourself.

Millions of U.S. households are already facing desperate crises.

The world is at an existential crossroads involving a pandemic, a deep economic recession, devastating climate change, extreme inequality, and an uprising against racist policies. Running through all of these challenges is the longstanding neglect of extreme poverty by many governments, economists, and human rights advocates.

The worldwide push for racial justice has sparked discussion within some Muslim communities on the overly white illustrations of key figures in the Islamic tradition, particularly the twelve imams so revered in Shiaism.

The Biden campaign recently held an event outlining the presidential hopeful’s “vision for Venezuela.” Spoiler alert: it barely differs from President Trump’s.

Being the biggest rich capitalist country, the U.S. also has the largest number of wealthy people. Quite how many will come as a bit of a surprise for those who have heard the ‘1% versus 99%’ slogan; it is not just Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

Make no mistake about it: this is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.

The Black movement will be asphyxiated by the ubiquitous fingers of the Democratic Party if it does not build independent nexuses of people’s power.

The Cosmonaut team inaugurates the ecology series by discussing John Bellamy Foster’s seminal book Marx’s Ecology on its twentieth anniversary.

THE ADIRONDACK CORRECTIONAL Facility is tucked away in the mountainous North Country of New York State, less than a two-hour drive from the Canadian border. Three years ago, it was converted to incarcerate teens aged 16 to 17, automatically prosecuted as adults under pernicious state law. As of this May, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, all of the young people were transferred out of the facility: It will now serve as a nursing home prison.

The most important economic problem the United States is facing is the failure to contain Coronavirus and the unethical decisions politicians have been making to reopen without the administrative capacity to limit the virus’s spread.

I want to start by acknowledging the significance of what has happened in the last ten days. We’re now in the midst of what we can definitively say is the biggest wave of mass protests in the United States since the 1960’s

Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows two months in a row of payroll employment gains, an increase in jobs of 4.8 million in June on top of 2.7 million in May. But, because so many jobs were lost in March and April, we are still 14.7 million jobs below where we were in February, before the pandemic spread.

Juan Guaido’s UK “ambassador” claims that she is working with the FBI in an investigation exposing a “transnational criminal network” of journalists and outlets, including Venezuelanalysis.

Cutting police budgets without establishing public control over their behavior doesn’t solve the problem, and invites politicians to shuffle budget numbers around like a three-card monte swindle.