Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Behind the US-Israeli war on Iran: The imperialist drive for global domination
Hypocrisy is accompanied by lying on a colossal scale. The propaganda to justify war against Iran mirrors the lies used to justify the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Then, lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” were used to sell an illegal war of aggression that culminated in the sectarian lynching of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of an entire society.
Today’s lies are even more brazen. Even US intelligence agencies acknowledge that Iran is not seeking to build nuclear weapons, and the country has opened its nuclear energy facilities to international inspectors. Israel, on the other hand, has amassed an arsenal of nuclear weapons in defiance of international law.
As for being a “clear and present danger,” Israel has engaged in a systematic campaign of murder and assassination of Iranian leaders and has, for the past 20 months, been waging a campaign of extermination directed at the Palestinian people.
What is the real aim of the war? American imperialism, utilizing its proxy Israel, is seeking direct domination of the vital, resource-rich region and its arterial corridors of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea. For the ruling class, this is considered critical not just in itself but as an essential preparation for a planned conflict with China.
2. Philadelphia city workers vote overwhelmingly to strike
Municipal budget crises are sweeping the country. In Denver, a $250 million shortfall has led to immediate job freezes, layoffs and cuts across core services. San Francisco is dealing with an $800 million deficit, and the mayor is proposing to eliminate around 100 city jobs and hundreds of nonprofit contracts.
Washington D.C. is confronting a $1.1 billion budget hole after Congress failed to pass a new funding bill. In Chicago, city schools and public transit face funding shortfalls, threatening school closures, over 1,600 teacher layoffs and up to 40 percent transit cuts.
Public services are being slashed to redirect funds to Wall Street and the military. President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” would include massive tax cuts for the wealthy as well as more than $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid, as well as sharp cuts to food stamps and other programs.
3. After Minnesota shootings, Trump, MAGA Republicans stoke more fascist violence
Trump and the Republican Party are appealing to their fascist base not out of strength, but weakness. They live in fear, not of the Democrats, who do nothing, but of the American working class. They lash out at the Democrats following the biggest protest in US history, involving as many as 11 million people, and the failure of Trump’s military parade to arouse any significant popular support. Their isolation from broad masses of the population will only intensify as Trump plunges the US deeper into war in the Middle East, the economic and debt crisis of US capitalism escalates, and Trump seeks to impose the cost of war and massive tax breaks for the rich on the working class in his “Big Beautiful Budget.”
4. Corporate media boosts the CIA Democrats
A gushing article published Thursday in the Washington Post promotes two former CIA agents and a former Navy officer and federal prosecutor as the rising leadership of the Democratic Party. Prominently placed on page four of the print edition, the article bears the headline, “Three centrist women aim to steer Democratic Party in 2025 elections.”
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The rise of this group of carefully vetted state operatives is a demonstration of the class character of the Democratic Party. For all the rhetoric of Senator Bernie Sanders and the “left” pretensions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America, the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, is unalterably committed to the defense of the global interests of American imperialism.
5. Court monitor’s report exposes thuggishness of UAW bureaucracy under “reform” president Fain
The revelations in this report demolish the entire narrative of Fain’s rise to the UAW presidency. His 2022 election was not the result of a democratic upsurge from below, but a carefully stage-managed operation in which the federal government played a central role.
Following the exposure of massive corruption involving former UAW presidents Gary Jones, Dennis Williams, and much of the top leadership, the union adopted a consent decree in 2021 to avoid a federal takeover. This led to a vote by UAW members for direct elections of top officers—a measure hailed by the corporate media and pseudo-left organizations as proof that the UAW was “cleaning house.”
But the report makes clear that the real character of the UAW bureaucracy has not changed one iota. It remains what it has long been: a labor syndicate bound by a thousand threads to corporate management, the capitalist state and the Democratic Party.
6. Will Lehman sues US Labor Department over refusal to follow court order on UAW election complaint
Lehman’s complaint now seeks a court order to compel the Department to reopen the 30 pre-election grievances and issue a legally adequate explanation for its handling of the case.
“The Department’s refusal to take any action … amounts to a de facto refusal to act” which remains “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with the law.”
7. Sri Lankan government to expand repressive police apparatus
The working class and young people must take the government’s bolstering of the police with military personnel and other measures as a serious warning.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his JVP/NPP government are preparing to implement further harsh measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These include the restructuring of state enterprises and the public service that will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and slash working conditions. There will also be deeper cuts to public health and education, while opening them up to the private sector among other austerity measures.
8. University of Sydney in Australia announces further attacks on free speech
While the immediate target of the new rules is clearly opposition to the intensifying Gaza genocide, they could be used to suppress any opposition to management, the government or the political establishment.
9. Frankfurt/Main, Germany: A harrowing speech on the genocide in Gaza
A man with family roots in Palestine described the impact of the Gaza genocide on his family: “While the world looks to the events in Iran, Israel is using the silence to continue bombing Gaza undisturbed.”
10. Argentina’s Peronist former president sentenced to house arrest and lifetime political ban
The political ban on Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK), who remains the de facto political leader of the most important bourgeois political tendency in the country, Peronism, represents a major escalation in the turn by the Argentine ruling class and the administration of fascist President Javier Milei toward the criminalization of political opposition and the establishment of a police-state dictatorship. Milei openly defends the crimes of the last military dictatorship.
This operation is being directed in unison with the Trump administration, which had already barred CFK from entering the United States in March, accusing her of being involved in “significant corruption.”
11. Early voting begins in NYC mayoral primary as Cuomo and DSA member Mamdani emerge as frontrunners
The mayoral election is unfolding under conditions of deep political crisis and extreme nervousness within the ruling class.
While billionaires like Bloomberg have no hesitation in openly backing Cuomo as the best candidate to beef up the police force and slam the door shut against the demands of the working class, the New York Times, which speaks for dominant sections of the ruling class, has been somewhat hesitant. It announced no official endorsement in its major editorial of June 16, while the editors essentially gave a reluctant nod to Cuomo.
12. Australian Labor government backs war against Iran
The Australian Labor government, like its imperialist counterparts internationally, has backed Israel’s unprovoked assault on Iran, while legitimising the Trump administration’s preparations for a catastrophic all-out war on Tehran.
This is a continuation of the Labor’s support for the US-funded Israeli rampage throughout the Middle East over the past 19 months. It has defended the Zionist regime’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and its repeated attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
All of these illegal operations have been part of an overarching plan to establish a “new Middle East,” completely dominated by Washington, which has long regarded Iran as the chief obstacle to its ambitions in the region and the necessary preparation for a US-led war with China.
13. Starmer government in the UK doubles down on austerity to fund war spending
NATO is demanding that member states commit to at least 3.5 percent of GDP on “pure” military spending, and 5 percent including necessary infrastructure projects as early as 2032. This would require an additional £40 billion annually in the UK’s military budget, dictating the evisceration of health, education, housing and welfare spending.
14. Anorexic teenager in New Zealand starves to death alone
The fact that a vulnerable, extremely unwell person, who was not yet an adult, was left alone to starve to death is an outrageous scandal.
It is an indictment of the Labour Party-led government of Jacinda Ardern, which was in office at the time. Among its many hollow election pledges in 2017, Labour promised to improve mental health services, especially for young people, who have the highest suicide rate in the OECD.
Ardern is currently promoting her book about “kindness” and “empathetic leadership,” A Different Kind of Power, which is being glorified by the world’s media. This is a scam. Her government oversaw rising social inequality, child poverty, homelessness, and a profound public health and mental health crisis.
15. UBS Wealth Report 2025 exposes exponential growth of inequality internationally
Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) is a global financial services firm that offers wealth, asset and investment services to assist the capitalist ruling elite in the management and investment of its wealth. It is headquartered in Switzerland and operates in over 50 countries worldwide, serving individual, corporate and institutional investors.
UBS publishes its annual Global Wealth Report to provide insights into the dynamics of wealth accumulation by the ultra-rich and to bolster its role as a leading financial services firm.
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The exponential growth of wealth for the few amidst an exponential suffering for the many is not a malfunction of capitalism: it is its fundamental operating principle.
These figures powerfully underscore the fundamental contradictions that validate the analyses of Marxist theory. Capitalism, by its very nature, is driven by the accumulation of capital, leading to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a parasitic ruling class. The reports vividly demonstrate that the wealth of the billionaires and millionaires is not simply a reward for their “innovation” or “entrepreneurship,” but is derived from the exploitation of the working class on a global scale.
In an interview on www.allaboutjazz.com, Moholo-Moholo kept his distance from the big business exploitative music industry and stated: “I know I would have made a lot of money playing pop music. A lot of pop bands wanted me to join them; John Lennon and Frank Zappa had an interest; I turned them down.”
If Louis was a rebel, he was also loyal. But above all, he was a survivor. The last of the Blue Notes, he was also the only one to have seen the dismantling of the apartheid regime. He often returned on holiday to South Africa before going back definitively in 2002 to work with local musicians. Expressing his feelings about his homeland, he said: “I just want to feel that I belong, that I’m not a minority” (www.allaboutjazz.com).
Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE) and Sumar coalition government, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, is engulfed in a deepening corruption scandal that threatens to bring down the administration.
The mounting crisis is raising the prospect of snap elections which, according to most polls, would likely hand power to the right-wing Popular Party (PP) and the far-right Vox.
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In the 2023 elections, the WSWS warned that no support should be given to the PSOE and Sumar in the name of opposing the far right. We insisted that only an independent political movement of the working class could fight austerity, militarism, and dictatorship. That warning has been vindicated. The very parties hailed as a “progressive alternative” have spent two years clearing the path for the far right to return to power.
This pattern is not unique to Spain. In the US, the Democrats prepared the ground for Donald Trump’s return. In Germany, the Social Democrats, Greens and the Left Party paved the way for the most militarist and far-right government since the Second World War under Friedrich Merz. In Britain, Starmer’s Labour Party is indistinguishable from the Tories. The turn by the ruling class toward fascism and dictatorship flows from an economic system wracked by deepening inequality, social decay, and global war.
18. Birmingham, UK bin workers strike: The lessons so far and the way forward
The defiant stand by the bin workers is endangered by the continued isolation of their struggle by Unite under General Secretary Sharon Graham, which has done nothing to organize its million-strong membership against Labour’s strikebreaking.
19. Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa
France:
Museum workers at the underfunded Louvre in Paris strike over working conditions
Greece:
Rail workers in nationwide strike over safety conditions and lack of investment
Doctors strike for better pay, conditions and working hours
Store workers at Dyson shops demonstrate for negotiating rights around pay and conditions
Plastic packaging workers at plant in Wigan strike over imposed shift changes
Teachers at school trust walk out over plans to extend school day
Underground rail system workers in Glasgow, Scotland to strike over working conditions
Hundreds of support staff at Liverpool University, England to strike over hybrid working dispute
Health workers continue strike in the face of government intimidation
Judicial staff on indefinite strike in Ondo State
Municipal workers in Umhlathuze Local Municipality walk out over pay and horrendous conditions
Teachers in Manicaland protest over low pay
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and portrait of Leon Trotsky (April, 2023)
