It took an entire term for President Obama to catch up with the majority of Americans (7 out of 10) who support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (Gallup, 2/5/13).

The Ku Klux Klan staged a rally in Memphis, in response to the renaming of Nathan B. Forrest Park by city officials. The KKK promised to make it “the largest Klan rally [Memphis] has ever seen.”

Socialist Alternative leaflet distributed at the protests against the KKK and neo-nazi's in Memphis, Tennessee on March 30

"I look at my 11 month old son and I am fearful for his future if I am retrenched [dismissed],” commented one mineworker at the historic conference of the Democratic Socialist Movement of South Africa (DSM). Another mineworker defiantly declared: “You cannot buy the bravery of the South African mineworkers: no surrender!”

The corporate news media coverage of Christopher Dorner’s eleven page manifesto as a deranged gun man with deep psychological problems (particularly with women) hell-bent on revenge against those that were involved in his firing from the LAPD and his discharge from the Navy is misleading. Yes, revenge is a central theme of the manifesto, but what is not dissected in the media is Dorner’s charge of racism, violence within the LAPD, and events surrounding his firing from the force after reporting police brutality to his supervisor and internal affairs.

The Idle No More movement of First Nations (Canada’s indigenous people) is the biggest challenge to Canadian Prime Minister Harper’s right-wing agenda since he won a majority government in May 2011. Idle No More was started by four women in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in November 2012, with the first National Day of Action on 10 December. Just over a month later, there have been hundreds of rallies and demonstrations in every city and many smaller communities across Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the U.S. border to the North West Territories.

Even in villages that had been wiped out by the Nazis in the second world war, such as Distomo and Kalavryta, Golden Dawn averaged 6%. Why is this happening? Can it be stopped, and how?

Today the United States of America has become the leading society in world history to incarcerate its own population, standing shoulders above Iran, China, and even Stalin’s monstrous gulags in the Soviet Union, with 2.3 million men and women warehoused in prison cells and six million under criminal “justice” supervision.

Mass prison incarceration and police violence are reaching a fever pitch in this country. The police and prison state apparatus is relying more and more on the use of solitary confinement and torture (e.g. sensory deprivation and lack of human contact) to control and punish prisoners, a barbaric practice more synonymous with Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay than with any sense of real justice. It is estimated that 80,000 men and women are held in solitary confinement daily in the U.S. prison system.

Socialist Alternative wishes to express our condolences to the families and friends of the victims of the tragic shooting at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The horror of what happened on August 5 shocked and saddened people across the country and worldwide.

It has been over twenty years since the police beating of the now deceased Rodney King and the explosion of the Los Angeles Riots which followed the acquittal verdict for the police officers. Last weekend, the police killed two more men within a span of 24 hours in Anaheim, California, home to Disneyland: Manuel Diaz, 25, and Joel Mathew Acevedo, 21. On July 21, Manuel Diaz reportedly ran away when a group of police confronted him in the street. He was shot first in the back of the legs, and later he was shot in the back of his head, as though he were undergoing an execution.

After the historic Georgia state prisoners’ strike in December 2010, the prisoners of the GDCP in Jackson are facing daily violence. The case of Georgia state prisoner Miguel Jackson speaks volumes to the harsh and vile conditions prisoners face. Miguel’s wife Delma Jackson tells his story.

The case of Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, a 23-year-old African-American transgender woman who was attacked outside a bar in South Minneapolis, highlights both the abuse experienced as a way of life by many trans people and the all-too-prevalent official neglect they experience.

New Yorkers of color, particularly in the city’s poorest and most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, know this is a farce. To them, the NYPD is an occupying army, controlling their areas to make the city “safe” for consumption and finance. Recently, however, the tide has begun to turn against this blatantly racist — and, it appears, unconstitutional — practice.

Immigrants’ rights movements have won significant reforms over past decades. But the movement today must build a united movement for full legal rights among wider layers of the working class and other social movements, or else it will have to continue to rely on the two major parties to negotiate and renegotiate the terms of immigrants’ indentured servitude. This strategy is needed today more than ever due to the deep crisis of the economy and the capitalist system, which drives both parties to exploit immigrants for cheap labor.