Against the Current

America at 250: Our rights and our lives are on the line!

THE UNITED STATES of America marks its 250th anniversary in July 2026 with its multiple divided legacies. As we know, the country was founded in the perpetuation of racial slavery, in genocide of the Indigenous nations, in ambitions of vast colonial dominion — and simultaneously in the struggles against those things, producing contradictions persisting throughout its history.

SINCE DONALD TRUMP returned to office, a series of shocking far-right disasters have snowballed. These include open violations of international law under the banner of “anti-drug” operations, a “decapitation strike” to intervene in Venezuela and arrest President Maduro, along with threats to seize Greenland, and launching his “excursion” in Iran.

His pursuit of racist policies at home are reflected in ICE’s abuses of power and acts of violence. All this reflects how Trump’s far-right position is heaping harm and upheaval on the world’s geopolitical landscape....

IN DECEMBER 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.

The Colombian National Election Council declared Abelardo de la Espriella the winner in the presidential run off June 21. When on the campaign trail he saluted to the slogan "Steadfast for the homeland," May 25, 2026. CC0 1.0

SPRAWLING OVER THE southern hills of Bogotá, Ciudad Bolivar is a vast proletarian neighborhood of 700,000 people. On July 20, the first of Colombia’s two Independence days, it was the center of a national celebration of the country’s independence, replete with military ceremony -- combined with the start of a mass campaign of resistance against the unprecedented attack against Colombian sovereignty represented by U.S. interference in the presidential election that appears to have placed an extreme rightwing candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, in the office of the presidency of this country.

More than 100,000 people filled the parking lot of the Gran Plaza El Ensueño shopping mall and all the surrounding streets for blocks, to hear the farewell speech of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, the first ever leftwing president of this country....

The Ragged Edge of Freedom:
Race, Capitalism and Class Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland
By Matthew E. Stanley
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026, 469 pages, $35.

TO APPRECIATE THIS wonderful and hefty volume fully, or perhaps with a combination of appreciation and dread, it might help to have lived within or near the geographic zone explored so intensively. The “borderland” of the title actually covers a large chunk of Illinois and Indiana, with frequent references to Ohio.

Would-be farmers and merchants streamed in during the first half of the 19th century, often traversing westward and northward from the upper South, bringing along their genetic Anglo-Saxonism and their cultural politics....

Europe is in the middle of a heatwave, which is reflected in this satellite image showing daytime land surface temperatures. The image was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on Tuesday 26 May. European Space Agency CC BY-SA 3.0

IN LESS THAN two months, Europe has been hit by three heatwaves that are exceptional in terms of their early onset, intensity, duration and geographical extent.

The health impacts are numerous and dramatic: respiratory problems caused in particular by ozone formation (from nitrogen oxide emissions from internal combustion engines — ozone levels exceeded safe limits in June for 300 out of 450 million Europeans); cardiovascular events; infectious diseases; acute kidney failure; air pollution from forest fire smoke....

By the time Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre was released in October 2025, Giuffre’s story and the larger story of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were well known. The book was published a few months after her untimely death by suicide in April 2025.

The book was the result of years of intense collaboration between Giuffre and writer Amy Wallace. Wallace worked tirelessly to speak in Giuffre’s voice and the result is a powerful testament to Giuffre’s strength and resilience but also a poignant reminder of the devastating and lifelong impact of sexual abuse on survivors....

THE SUPREME COURT ruled on June 30 that President Trump could not end birthright citizenship by Executive Order. In practical terms, the Court upheld the plain language of the 14th Amendment that children born in the United States are and remain U.S. citizens at birth,

While the vote was 6 to 3, Vice President JD Vance said it was actually 5 to 4 since Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion, told the Trump regime how it can....

Palestinians from Tantura are expelled to Jordan, June 1948. Benno Rothenberg/ Meitar Collection/National Library of Israel/The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection/CC BY 4.0

MUCH ATTENTION AND controversy has surrounded the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and its exhibit “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present.” Indeed, there was a veritable tsunami of criticism before the exhibit even opened....

THIS ARTICLE TAKES a look at striking features of the immigration system historically with a view towards its latest phase during Trump’s second presidential administration, and how we might respond by building rapid response networks rooted in local community.

The article begins with a “Historical Background” section. If you’d like to read that later, you can skip to Part II, “A Lower Public Profile?”

I. Historical Background

The grim continuity of Trump’s...

I VISITED CUBA over the 2026 May Day week with a delegation from Building Relations with Cuban Labor. The effects of the 65+ year U.S. embargo and recent blockade of oil were everywhere to be seen....

There will be no Gulag under the new socialism.

Introductory note by Mikhail Orlov, /Spichka (Matches): “There will be no Gulag under the new socialism” — an article by Boris Kagarlitsky.

It is time to arrive at a shared understanding of what kind of socialism we want to build — and how.

Q&A:

STUDENT ACTIVISM ON American campuses in response to the war in Gaza has become a national debate over where to draw the line between political dissent and antisemitism.

Even as many universities have moved to restrict, disperse or discipline protest activity, demonstrations — and the arguments about how to describe them — have continued, raising questions about free speech, campus safety and whether criticism of Israel is being conflated with anti-Jewish hatred.

Alan Wald, the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is a historian of the 20th-century U.S. cultural Left. He discusses parallels to Cold War-era campus politics, Zionism and how debates over the meaning of antisemitism shape campus protests over Israel and Palestine....

The cry for "Woman Life Freedom" is an emancipatory slogan. (Middle East Institute)

A REVOLUTIONARY FEMINIST position on Iran must refuse the false and damaging binary that demands choosing between defending the Islamic Republic and endorsing US-imperialist and Zionist intervention. This is a constructed choice designed to collapse political judgment into campism. It converts solidarity into a competition of moral allegiances and leaves ordinary people,...

Tom Alter

Contact the Committee to Defend Tom Alter for more information and to get involved in this important defense work.

On October 12 Suzi Weissman interviewed Professor Tom Alter, a tenured professor at Texas State University and author of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth the Transplanted Roots of Farmer Labor Radicalism in Texas for KPFK's "Beneath the Surface" program. A popular professor, he was fired on the basis of a well-known neo-fascist's filming of an online conference where he was discussing different methods of movement organizing.

Suzi Weissman: Welcome to "Beneath the Surface." I'm Suzi Weissman. Professor Tom Alter, a tenured historian at Texas State University, was fired on September 10th after he was accused of inciting violence in a video of him speaking at a socialist conference. His remarks about organizing and defending workers was secretly recorded....