On the windswept plains of south-central North Dakota, hundreds of miles from any major city, a slowly simmering drama has exploded suddenly into public consciousness. The Standing Rock Sioux's battle to defend their water and lands while facing down vicious repression by private security forces and the state is the largest mobilization of Native unity and resistance in the US in decades. It also represents an important opportunity to unite the labor and environmental movements.

The world waits with bated breath as the "leader of the free world" is selected. Election 2016 has been a rollercoaster for voters, pollsters, pundits, and candidates alike. The campaign has been like no other seen in the US for a century or more.

It is now quite clear that the US establishment has made its choice: Hillary Clinton is the favorite of the decisive sectors of bankers, industrialists, military brass, the conservative trade union leaders, and even key leaders of the Republican Party itself.

On Sunday evening, the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees met at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri for their second televised debate. In a country besieged by killer clowns, the liberal media's most hated buffoon and "Killary" Clinton took center

Colin Kaepernick, a second-string NFL quarterback of former Super Bowl fame, provoked an eruption of vitriol and solidarity when he refused to stand during the national anthem. His explanation reverberated around the country: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

In ancient Rome the ruling class maintained its hold on power by offering the people bread and circuses. Yesterday millions of people watched the first US presidential debate, held at Hofstra University, New York. This was the modern equivalent of the kind of circus that served as a spectacle to divert the attention of the masses from their miserable conditions of existence.

Childhood is supposed to be a simple, happy time, the ascendant years of a human’s life when, according to the traditional bourgeois world view, the possibilities for the future are wide open. Having lived through the relative prosperity of the postwar boom themselves, Baby Boomer parents confidently assured their children that they could be anything they wanted to be when they grew up.

The champions of the free market never miss an opportunity to extol its virtues: peace, prosperity, efficiency, integrity, a wide range of freedoms, and let’s not forget: lots and lots of choices. If you work hard and play by the rules, you too can get ahead. However, far from the myth peddled by the free marketeers, capitalism is organically and incurably irrational, exploitative, and corrupt.

With the crowning of Hillary Clinton at the DNC in Philadelphia, the 2016 election cycle appears to have come full circle. She began as the frontrunner twelve months ago, and she is now officially the party's nominee. However, what we have passed through over the last few months is not a circle, but a contradictory spiral of development. The river of American political struggle has overflowed, and while Sanders' capitulation will inevitably lead to a temporary ebbing of the tide, its course has been changed forever.

The grisly images on television and social media are unrelenting: car bombings, nightclub massacres, killer cops, and cop killers. It is what Lenin called capitalist “horror without end”—without end. Not only in “far away” Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mexico, but in some of the most prosperous cities in the richest country on earth. This is the gruesome face of the capitalist crisis, the crisis of a system that threatens to take the entire human species down with it.

On June 28, 2016, Bernie Sanders penned an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “Democrats Need to Wake Up.” In it, he highlighted the following facts: the 62 richest people on planet earth own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion; the top 1% owns more than the bottom 99%, and the top one-tenth of 1% own almost as much as the bottom 90%. He wrote that his campaign was a fight for a political revolution, to take political power away from the super-rich, and he correctly identified Hillary Clinton as part of the

Many decades ago, Lenin characterized capitalism as “horror without end,” As if to prove the point, in the early hours of Sunday, June 12, an armed Omar Mateen stormed into a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida and massacred those inside, leaving forty-nine people dead and fifty-three wounded.

The results are in from the final state primaries and the outcome is no real surprise. With the media, the Democratic Party machine, and big money behind her, Hillary Clinton has more pledged delegates than Bernie Sanders, and with the hundreds of superdelegates in her pocket, is all but the party’s nominee. Nonetheless, Bernie Sanders won primaries and caucuses in 22 states and more than 11 million votes. Sanders’ strong showing, including his latest victories in North Dakota and Montana, is proof that millions do not want to settle for Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

The results are in from the final state primaries and the outcome is no real surprise. With the media, the Democratic Party machine, and big money behind her, Hillary Clinton has more pledged delegates than Bernie Sanders, and with the hundreds of superdelegates in her pocket, is all but the party’s nominee. Nonetheless, Bernie Sanders won primaries and caucuses in 22 states and more than 11 million votes. Sanders’s strong showing, including his latest victories in North Dakota and Montana, is proof that millions do not want to settle for Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

In a recent press release, Dr. Anne Schuchat, a senior Obama administration official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), stated that “Everything we look at with this [Zika] virus seems to be a bit scarier than we initially thought.” As of April 2016, there have been 700 confirmed cases related to the Zika Virus in the United States.