US foreign policy is dictated by its role as an imperialist power. Some of the most glaring cracks are opening in the Middle East. Obama is being forced by the objective conditions to change the specific approach of US imperialism without changing the general course whatsoever.

California is facing the worst budget crisis since the Great Depression. The “Governator” is now threatening to order 200,000 state workers to take a third furlough day off per month without pay. The state is going to cut aid to county and local governments, causing them to layoff employees, cut services and raise taxes on working people.

Fightback and IMT activists have participated in numerous demonstrations and events in solidarity with the Iranian Revolution in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. In Toronto, Fightback organized a very successful panel discussion the beginning of the Iranian Revolution.

With the much ballyhooed “first 100” days of Barack Obama’s Presidency long past, we are starting to see signs of disillusionment from many of his more vocal supporters. Obama, the man who was supposed to usher in a new era of “change,” is now increasingly being seen as “more of the same.”

For decades, the mantra “Capitalism = good” and “Socialism = bad” was driven into our heads. But even the most sophisticated apparatus for influencing public opinion – the mainstream media – cannot mold opinion as powerfully as experience itself. From the dizzying heights of the boom to the economic implosion of the last 10 months, dramatic events are shaking up and transforming the way Americans look at the world around them.

Canada has stood almost alone on the international stage, going so far as to say that Zelaya should not return back to Honduras. This should not come as a huge shock for Canadians as the Canadian state has been pursuing an increasingly interventionist role in Latin American affairs for a while now.

As workers and trade unionists continue to be attacked by the Colombian state, we look at the involvement of Britain in assisting in this murderous process.

Here we publish a picture gallery of the mass demonstration at the Toncontin airport in Tegucigalpa on Sunday when people broke through police lines trying to make sure Zelaya's plane could land. The photographs were taken by a Nicaraguan comrade who travelled to Honduras on Friday as part of a solidarity delegation.

Over the last few decades we have seen the official unemployment figures massaged and fiddled time and time again in order to make them seem more 'acceptable' in the official reports and, of course, the newspapers. Michael Roberts has a look at the real rate of unemployment in the US.

On 28 June 2009, a US-backed military coup removed the democratically elected president of Honduras Mel Zelaya from power. The heroic resistance of the Honduran people over the next few months failed to defeat the coup. This is what we wrote at the time (29/06/2009).

In 1998 five members of Cuba’s intelligence agency were arrested in Miami and indicted on 26 counts. Their crime? Risking their lives to prevent the deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of unscrupulous murderers. In May 2009, on behalf of President Barack Obama, Solicitor General Elena Kagan filed a brief asking that the review of their trial be denied and on June 15th, 2009 the Supreme Court denied the review.

One year ago the SIDOR plant was nationalised. Since then there has been ongoing battle between the workers who want to implement genuine workers’ control and those elements who are doing everything possible to make the attempts to build a ”socialist enterprsie” fail. This is part of the general struggle between revolution and reformism within the Venezuelan labour movement.

The Workers' International League held its first National Marxist School over the weekend of June 13th and 14th. As part of the School, a public event was organized jointly with Hands Off Venezuela, to discuss the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the lessons for Latin America.

On 5^th June 2009 the Quebec Marxists launched a new publication, La Riposte (the Fightback). The launch of La Riposte is of extreme significance for the work of the Marxists in Québec. By having a French paper, the Marxists are able to diffuse their ideas to the broadest layers of the overwhelmingly francophone working class and youth.

On Thursday, the 4^th of June, the Société Bolivarienne du Québec/Hands off Venezuela held a public conference on the subject “From Caracas to Montreal: Another World Is Possible.”