Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. A World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Perspective: Stop the war against Iran!
Through war, the would-be dictator Donald Trump and the financial oligarchy that rules via the Republican and Democratic parties hope to:
- Reimpose the shackles of neo-colonial subjugation on Iran, 45 years after the Iranian people toppled the monarchical dictatorship of the US-installed Shah.
- Secure unbridled US imperialist control over the world’s principal oil-exporting region and key global ocean trade routes, so as to prepare for war with Washington’s principal strategic adversaries, China and Russia.
- Stave off economic crisis and financial collapse through plunder.
- Divert attention from a massive domestic crisis and mounting social opposition.
The consequences of this reckless gamble will be catastrophic for the Iranian people, the Middle East and the entire world.
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In the US, all factions of the Democratic Party and its chief media voice, the New York Times, are supporting a war that has been organized by a president they themselves admit is systematically violating the Constitution and seeking to establish a presidential dictatorship.
Trump is waging war on two fronts: abroad against Iran, and at home against democratic rights and the working class. These are two sides of the same process. A war with Iran will inevitably be accompanied by an escalation of political repression and social austerity. With the war budget already over $1 trillion, the working class will be forced to foot the bill.
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This war, like World War I and World War II, arises out of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism: between a globally integrated economy and the outmoded nation-state system, and between private ownership of the means of production and the social character of modern economic life.
The International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties call for mass opposition to the Trump administration’s plans to launch a direct war against Iran. We call for protests, demonstrations and walkouts to oppose this act of imperialist aggression.
Only the international working class, armed with a revolutionary socialist program, can put an end to imperialist war and the capitalist system that breeds it. The ICFI insists that the fight against war must be fused with the fight for workers’ power and the socialist reorganization of global economic life.
The immediate impetus for the strike, supported by a 70 percent strike vote within the National Union of Healthcare Workers membership, is the university’s so-called “Integration Plan,” which would unilaterally fire all unionized workers and rehire them as University of California employees.
Although University of California claims workers would retain current pay levels, substantial increases in healthcare costs and other benefit cuts would cut take-home pay for workers by as much as $10,000. In addition, dozens of unionized workers would be converted to non-union “at will” employees.
3. Ninth Circuit grants Trump control over California National Guard in Los Angeles
On June 12, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer—a Clinton appointee—issued a temporary restraining order in response to Newsom’s lawsuit, directing that control of the Guard be returned to the governor. The Trump administration immediately appealed the decision, and the Ninth Circuit issued an administrative stay on Breyer’s order, blocking it from taking effect.
Thursday’s 3–0 ruling—issued by Judges Mark J. Bennett and Eric D. Miller, both Trump appointees, and Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee—extends the stay and marks a clear victory for the Trump administration and its ongoing drive to establish a presidential dictatorship. The ruling underscores the reality that the working class cannot rely on any bourgeois institution, including the courts, to defend democratic rights.
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The decision paves the way for Trump to similarly deploy soldiers around the country in response to any protests against the immigration Gestapo that impede disappearing and deportation operations.
4. Philadelphia transit system facing “death spiral” in coming fiscal year
The failure of the state’s political leaders to resolve the SEPTA funding crisis reflects a deeper realignment of the political superstructure. This restructuring, tailored to today’s oligarchic rule, has overseen an assault on workers, manifesting in attacks on democratic rights, public resources and scientific institutions. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has led this assault on behalf of the ruling class at the federal level. Now, with COVID-19 relief funds expiring, there is no political will to replace them in the interests of the greater public good. Instead, public resources are diverted to subsidies for the wealthy and war funding.
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While mass transportation is a necessity in a modern society, it also entails large maintenance and operating costs, which must be born as a public expense if private capital cannot turn a profit. This is not stopping the ruling class from cutting public funding for mass transit at the expense of the functioning of society.
5. SpaceX Starship explodes during test amid string of other failures and explosions
While the Apollo program represented American capitalism at its height, the string of disasters of the Starship program represents American capitalism in its death spiral.
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There is a certain money-mad aspect to the whole endeavor, as if throwing cash at the problem can overcome the fundamental difficulties inherent in space travel. But such an approach flows logically from a member of an oligarchy increasingly detached from reality.
While it would be a mistake to remember fondly such ruthless and unprincipled representatives of American capitalism as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the emergence of figures such as Musk and Trump also testify to the deep cultural and intellectual decline of the American bourgeoisie.
Faced with this historic decline, American capitalist politics consists more and more of desperate, increasingly reckless improvisations, from attempts to impose dictatorship at home to ever more dangerous new wars.
But just as the launch attempts of the Starship have run up against the laws of physics, so too have the efforts to set up a dictatorship run up against the development of the class struggle. As the ruling elites the world over have moved sharply to the right, the international working class has moved to the left, opposing the attacks on immigrants and democratic rights and marching in their millions against genocide and war.
For rank-and-file Ford workers Dickerson’s rise signals not progress, but a continuation of the UAW’s decades-long record of betrayals. Her career, based at UAW Local 600 and Ford’s global flagship Rouge complex, spans a period during which the destruction of jobs, safety, and living standards have defined the union’s partnership with corporate management.
7. Two central bankers foreshadow challenges to US dollar
The multi-polar economic, trading and financial world of the 1920s and 1930s was the breeding ground for conflicts which led to World War II.
Today the palpable economic decline of the US—its transformation from the industrial powerhouse of the world at the end of the war to the center of debt and financial parasitism today—has led to ever intensifying military and economic conflict as it seeks to retain its dominant position.
8. As Trump weighs open war with Iran, Bernie Sanders announces toothless war powers bill
In his press release announcing the legislation, Sanders portrayed the US-backed Israeli airstrikes on Iran as solely the responsibility of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He wrote: “Netanyahu’s reckless and illegal attacks violate international law and risk igniting a regional war. Congress must make it clear that the United States will not be dragged into Netanyahu’s war of choice.”
The testimony, broadcast live nationwide, represents a landmark political event in Brazilian history. In a country that lived under a brutal military dictatorship for two decades, from 1964 to 1985, for the first time, generals appeared in the dock being questioned about their crimes against democracy.
The most significant fact that emerged from the testimony was the acknowledgment by Bolsonaro and the other defendants that the former president conspired with the armed forces command to prevent the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party, who was democratically elected in 2022.
9. Jacobin downplays “No Kings” mass protests and shields Democratic Party
The article is significant for what it leaves out. It gives no expression to the revolutionary crisis revealed by the protests.
10. French imperialism in New Caledonia and Pacific targets China
Amid stalled talks over New Caledonia, Macron’s summit with Pacific leaders centered on its escalating anti-China agenda.
11. John Singer Sargent at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: Sargent and Paris
“Sargent and Paris” provides ample evidence of Sargent’s brilliance, as well as his willingness to use modern compositional or brushwork techniques. It also demonstrates that Sargent embodied the restoration of capitalist order after 1871 and the bourgeois ideals of refinement and cosmopolitanism. He hobnobbed with diplomats, aristocrats and industrialists, and his paintings idealized the dazzling surface of bourgeois life. He did not examine the origins of his subjects’ wealth, not least because it could have jeopardized his own material interests.
12. Mahmoud Khalil is released from ICE detention but faces new charges in immigration court
Khalil’s wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, who gave birth to their son while Khalil was in detention, expressed her relief over the ordeal her family endured:
After more than three months we can finally breathe a sigh of relief and know that Mahmoud is on his way home to me and Deen, who never should have been separated from his father. … We know this ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family, and so many others the government is trying to silence for speaking out against Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. But today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family, and the community that has supported us since the day he was unjustly taken for speaking out for Palestinian freedom.
13. New Zealand government feigns neutrality in US-Israeli war against Iran
The reality, however, is that New Zealand is actively supporting Israeli and US military operations in the Middle East. In January 2024, a group of New Zealand Defense Force personnel were sent to Saudi Arabia to assist in the US bombing of targets in Yemen, in response to the Houthi forces’ efforts to stop ships from supplying the Israeli war machine.
New Zealand is a minor imperialist power allied with the US and a member of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, raising further questions about its involvement. Asked during a press conference on June 16 whether New Zealand had received advance notice from the US about the attack on Iran, Peters replied, “Well, we don’t make those discussions public.”
14. Michigan’s 2025 on-the-job death toll climbs to 13 following two recent school-related tragedies
Thirteen workers have lost their lives this year in on-the-job accidents in Michigan, most of which were preventable. The most recent tragedies include two school-related deaths, both likely connected to budget cuts.
This ongoing industrial slaughter underscores the importance for all workers of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees investigation into the April 7 death of Stellantis skilled tradesman Ronald Adams, Sr. The 63-year-old machine repairman was crushed at Stellantis’ Dundee Engine Complex in southeast Michigan. To this day, his family and coworkers have received no detailed account of the causes and circumstances that led to this death from the company, the United Auto Workers or state authorities.
15. Contracts expiring for GE Aerospace and GE Vernova workers in the US
Tens of thousands of workers at GE successor companies remain in non-union shops. The WSWS has learned that at the plant at Pensacola, Florida, half the roughly 500 workers are temps, earning about $20 an hour. Regular workers are divided into tiers, with the lower tier—mostly hired after the 2008 financial crash—earning around 30 percent less than senior workers. “GE is making big money. Their stock is high. No one is speaking for us,” one worker said.
Workers must make an appeal to workers at all plants regardless of union status, as well as to GE workers in dozens of plants in Europe, Latin America and other parts of the globe.
A genuine fight for workers’ interests requires that the initiative be transferred from the hands of the union apparatus to the rank and file. New organizations of struggle, independent of the IUE-CWA and the entire pro-corporate trade union structure, must be built.
The conditions exist for the development of such a movement, but it must be consciously organized on the basis of internationalism, not American chauvinism, and class struggle, not appeals to the Pentagon and corporate shareholders.
16. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Bangladesh:
Healthcare workers demand outstanding salaries and job security
Government sector workers oppose “black law”
Protesting garment workers in Gazipur arrested
India:
Telangana domestic workers demand rights and welfare benefits
Tamil Nadu gas bottling workers in Salem strike against victimisation
West Bengal teachers protest over job losses
Kerala: Sabarimala Forest region plantation workers strike
Government sector educators begin work-to-rule campaign
State sector agricultural casual employees rally for permanency
Victorian firefighters’ dispute enters ninth month
Bluescope Steel electricians in New South Wales impose bans
Striking Qube crane operators in Queensland reject pay offer
Snowy Mountains hydro-power construction workers strike again
Glencore coal miners in New South Wales strike for pay rise
Doctors and dentists strike over pay
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
