Horrific massacre in Orlando

After a month of negotiations on an Arms Trade Treaty at the United Nations in New York, the discussions came to an ignominious end last Friday when, first the United States and then Russia and China, pulled the plug on any agreement.

"The scenes of despair and explosions of anger like those of 1981 will be back on our streets. "Deprived areas of major cities - if not the central areas, then the ’banlieus’ or outskirts as in France - will be the scene of new conflagrations." This is the warning that the Socialist Party gave just four months ago, in our article on the anniversary of the Brixton riots. This morning thousands of people have woken up to the devastation of their communities.

The oftentimes brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Chris Hedges summed things up: “The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat.”