Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. As Palestinian death toll tops 56,000, Israel massacres dozens of aid seekers in one day
After each massacre, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claims to be “reviewing the incident” and insists that its actions are for crowd control and to prevent security threats. However, as the Associated Press and Al Jazeera report, witnesses and humanitarian organizations have consistently stated that the shootings are unprovoked and indiscriminate, with no evidence to support claims of militants among the crowds.
Israel’s fascist political leaders echo these lies, asserting that the killings are necessary for “security” and to “prevent infiltration by militants”—a lying narrative that is exposed by the eyewitness testimony and the scale of the civilian casualties.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly emphasized, the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians is not an isolated atrocity, but the opening phase of the reorganization of the Middle East to serve the interests of US imperialism—with Israel as its henchman—in preparation for a new world war.
2. The political significance and implications of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City
The election has shattered a number of myths of American politics. First, there is the myth that socialism is “toxic.” Mamdani openly identified as a “democratic socialist.” His reform proposals—related to soaring housing costs, child care, and other social problems—clearly struck a chord with workers and young people, along with layers of the middle class, in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Second, there is the claim that criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza amounts to antisemitism. The billionaire-backed smear campaign led by Cuomo, which centered on accusations of antisemitism against Mamdani, backfired. Mamdani received tens of thousands of votes from among New York’s 1.2 million Jewish residents. Popular opposition to war and what Mamdani explicitly called a genocide was a major factor in his electoral victory.
Third, Mamdani’s win refutes the media narrative that Trump’s re-election in 2024 marked a right-wing shift in the American population. Mamdani’s campaign benefited from mounting popular opposition to the Trump administration, with the candidate pointing out that Cuomo was backed by the same billionaires bankrolling Trump. Just ten days before the vote, the largest anti-government protests in American history were held against Trump’s dictatorship, and Mamdani pledged to resist Trump’s attacks on immigrants.
Fourth, the basic questions animating the great mass of the population center not on issues of race and gender politics, relentlessly promoted by the Democratic Party and their affiliated media outlets, but class.
The sentiments animating the vote for Mamdani are bringing masses of people into conflict with the entire political order. What terrifies the ruling class is not Mamdani’s relatively milquetoast program, advanced within the framework of the Democratic Party, but that his victory shows socialism can gain mass support in America, and in a far more radical form.
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The New York election demonstrates that there exists enormous possibilities for the development of a genuine socialist movement. Conditions are ripe, indeed overripe, for such a development.
This makes all the more essential a correct understanding of the basic political issues, which those who have given their support to Mamdani, and for that matter Mandani himself, will have to confront.
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The Socialist Equality Party has insisted that the predominate tendency within the working class, both within the United States and internationally, is toward political radicalization and opposition to capitalism. The New York mayoral election is a confirmation of this assessment. However, we do not mistake the indication for the fulfillment. While the SEP recognizes the significance of Mamdani’s victory, it does not adapt its political program to the illusion that his electoral success will lead to a change in the nature of the state, the class character of the Democratic Party, and the violent and oppressive character of American capitalism.
3. Kenya’s Ruto government bloodbath against Gen Z protests
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Kenya Wednesday, with protests erupting in at least 27 of the country’s 47 counties, marking one year since the Gen Z uprising that culminated in the storming of Parliament on June 25, 2024.
President William Ruto once again resorted to mass violence, unleashing a brutal crackdown involving live ammunition, teargas, water cannons, and the deployment of state-funded thugs to attack demonstrators.
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Organized largely through social media, with no backing among the main bourgeois parties and trade unions, the protests were mobilized via platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and X, using hashtags such as #OccupyStateHouse, #OccupyUntilVictory, #RutoMustGo and #SiriNiNumbers, which trended for days.
What unfolded was a nationwide political revolt. Entire swathes of the country ground to a halt, with major businesses, banks, and markets closed across urban centers. As with last year’s uprising, the protests transcended the tribal and regional divisions long exploited by the Kenyan ruling elite to maintain power. This was a movement united in a common struggle against police brutality, authoritarian rule, austerity, and the soaring cost of living.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has stressed, the crisis unfolding in Kenya is not an isolated event, but part of a growing international upsurge of youth and workers against austerity, authoritarianism, and imperialist war. One year of struggle, punctuated by protests, uprisings, strikes, and betrayals, has demonstrated that courage alone is not enough. The central task that now confronts the Gen Z movement and the broader working class is the building of a conscious political leadership, rooted in the working class and armed with a socialist and internationalist program.
4. Trump’s destruction of Medicare: An update
The Trump administration has launched an unrelenting offensive against Medicare—a centerpiece of American social policy that once stood as a minimal, yet vital, bulwark against poverty, illness, and suffering in old age.
Over the last three months in particular the scale and intensity of the assault have plumbed new depths. Through a combination of executive orders, regulatory sabotage, and covert restructuring, the administration has moved aggressively to privatize and dismantle what remains of this already frayed public health program.
The groundwork for this onslaught was laid by the Democratic Party—most notably under the Obama and Biden administrations—which facilitated a gradual but decisive shift toward privatization through their expansion and promotion of Medicare Advantage (MA). The Democrats’ bipartisan complicity with the Republicans has been essential in converting Medicare from a guaranteed public benefit into a goldmine for private insurers, eager to profit from taxpayer funds while offering seniors narrower care options and fewer protections.
What Trump has done—openly and without apology—is push the program closer to the edge of total privatization. His administration’s decisions reflect a calculated strategy of the financial oligarchy to gut federal oversight, reward corporate interests, and leave millions of elderly and disabled Americans at the mercy of private profiteers.
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In the long term, the privatization agenda is unsustainable. The Medicare Trust Fund is expected to become insolvent by 2033, a crisis exacerbated by the hemorrhaging of public dollars into private MA plans. With enrollment in MA projected to reach 60 percent by the end of the decade, traditional Medicare risks becoming a neglected relic—underfunded, underutilized and available only to those unable to “opt into” private care.
This trajectory points to the emergence of a two-tiered healthcare system: a profitable, selectively accessible private system for those who can afford it, and a stripped-down, increasingly inadequate public option for everyone else. Such a future is not inevitable—but it is the logical outcome of bipartisan policy choices that treat healthcare as a corporate asset instead of a social right.
The Trump administration’s attack on Medicare is nothing short of an assault on the working class and elderly population of the United States. It is driven by the demands of Wall Street and the healthcare industry, which view Medicare as a lucrative source of revenue—not a lifeline for tens of millions. Meanwhile, unlimited funds are allocated for war and repression by a bipartisan alliance.
5. Amazon founder Bezos and company flaunt their wealth in Venice
[Jeff] Bezos’ marriage to [Lauren] Sanchez is an ultra-luxurious event for a super-rich elite spanning several days. The canal-dominated city is closed off to autos, meaning that the invited guests, arriving in over 90 jet planes, will be transported primarily by boat and helicopter. This requires the renting of numerous yacht moorings, helicopter pads and the virtual takeover of the city’s central municipal transport for the duration of the event.
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In the midst of all this, Bezos flaunts his wealth in Venice. As the world confronts world war, the re-emergence of fascist authoritarians and climate catastrophe, the nonchalance and arrogance of today’s insatiable and grasping super-rich, epitomized by Bezos and his entourage, recalls the withering indictment of the rich in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The wealthy, wrote Fitzgerald, “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …”
6. ILA dockworkers union president Harold Daggett celebrates Trump’s attack on Iran
In an extraordinary letter to President Donald Trump, Harold Daggett, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), offered gushing praise and enthusiastic support for the criminal bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the US military. Moreover, he pledged the ILA’s backing for Trump in future acts of aggression.
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Presuming to speak on behalf of all 85,000 ILA members, Daggett praised Trump’s “bold and courageous decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.” With these words, Daggett celebrated an attack on a country that had neither attacked nor threatened the US. Parroting the propaganda of the American ruling class, he called Iran “an enemy of the United States.”
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The criminal character of Daggett’s letter is underscored by the man himself. The US Department of Justice has previously alleged that Daggett is an associate of the Genovese crime family and attributed his rise in the ILA to mob influence. In his slavish praise of Trump, Daggett—a gangster in charge of a union bureaucracy—has offered his full support to a gangster at the head of American capitalism.
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There is a political logic at work here that goes beyond the crude thuggishness of Daggett. His support for war flows naturally from the nationalist policies which the ILA shares with the entire union bureaucracy. UAW President Shawn Fain, who postures as a progressive, has tried to square the circle by claiming it is possible to support Trump’s tariff policies while opposing some of his other far-right policies.
But Daggett’s letter demonstrates that this is a political fraud. Having accepted the logic of economic nationalism, the unions cannot avoid its consequences. If they accept “America First” trade policy, they must also accept war.
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It is impossible to defend workers in the US while killing and maiming their class brothers and sisters in Iran, China or elsewhere. The real allies of American dockworkers are not in the White House or the ILA headquarters, but among workers in Iran and around the world.
The working class is the only force capable of opposing war because its social interests are bound up with the fight for equality, not conquest.
7. Nato summit in The Hague: a milestone on the way to a third world war
The NATO summit, which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday in The Hague, Netherlands, will go down in history as a milestone in the imperialist powers’ slide toward a third world war. The 31 members of the world’s most powerful military alliance agreed on the most comprehensive rearmament of Europe since World War II.
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NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte wrote in a private text message to US President Donald Trump: “Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do. It makes us all safer.” Trump immediately published the message on his social media channel. The Israeli genocide in Gaza, which continues unabated, is also supported by NATO members.
The European powers—especially the so-called E3: Germany, France and Britain—are determined to continue the war against Russia at any cost, even if Ukraine is militarily and financially exhausted. A significant part of the summit preparations was aimed at keeping the US on board and preventing Trump from pulling out of the war and reaching an agreement with Putin over the heads of the Europeans.
8. India’s Modi government tacitly backs the US-Israeli war on Iran
New Delhi professes to be an ally of Iran, and it has been seeking to develop port facilities at Chabahar on Iran’s southeastern coast, with the aim of expanding India’s influence and trade ties with Afghanistan and Central Asia more broadly. Even more importantly, India doesn’t want to in any way harm relations with the Gulf States, which supply much of its oil and provide employment for 10 million overseas Indian workers.
Modi’s Hindu supremacist BJP recognizes, and to some degree champions, its political-ideological affinity with the Zionist far-right. But the government is also aware that the mass of India’s workers and toilers are sympathetic to the Palestinian people and hostile to imperialism and Washington’s global bullying and aggression.
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Much has been made of the Modi government’s failure to support the US-NATO war on Russia, and its insistence on preserving India’s longstanding close military-strategic ties with Moscow, which date back to the Cold War, as well as the possibility of getting large amounts of Russian oil at discount.
To be sure, this has miffed Washington and the other NATO powers, but India has responded by aligning itself still more fully with the US in regards to China. Moreover, during the course of Israel’s Gaza and broader Mideast war, the Modi government has expanded its ties with the Netanyahu regime to the point that India and Israel are increasingly acting as partners in crime.
9. Sri Lankan government fails to condemn US strikes on Iran
The failure of the ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) to criticise, let alone condemn, the naked aggression of US imperialism against Iran is to lend legitimacy to this criminal US-led war.
10. Deadly heat dome engulfs Eastern US, as infrastructure fails and workers suffer
The heat wave starkly illustrates the class divisions within American society. While wealthy areas maintain reliable air conditioning and cooling systems, as well as more stable power distribution, working class communities face disproportionate risks. An estimated 12 percent of US households—approximately 39 million people—lack air conditioning entirely. Even those with cooling systems face a cruel choice between financial hardship and heat-related illness, as many cannot afford the electricity bills required to run air conditioning.
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The ongoing heat crisis demonstrates that addressing climate change and protecting working people from extreme weather requires fundamental changes to the economic system. The profit motive that drives capitalism is incompatible with the rational, scientific approach needed to combat climate change and ensure workers’ safety.
A socialist reorganization of society would prioritize human needs over corporate profits, implementing comprehensive workplace safety standards, ensuring universal access to cooling systems, and rapidly transitioning to renewable energy sources. Only through the expropriation of the wealth of the capitalist class and democratic workers’ control of production can society address the climate crisis and protect workers and future generations from its devastating effects.
11. Dallas, Texas letter carrier Jacob Taylor dies in extreme heat, second USPS worker to die in June
The working conditions in the USPS have been shaped not only by management but by the active complicity of the union bureaucracy. Taylor was a member of Lone Star Branch 132 of the National Association of Letter Carriers. The current NALC contract was imposed earlier this year through binding arbitration with the union’s backing, after workers had rejected it by 70 percent. It enshrined sub-inflation wage increases and did nothing to guarantee safe working conditions during extreme weather. Worst of all, it cleared the path for the privatization of USPS.
12. Australian court rules ABC illegally sacked journalist Antoinette Lattouf for opposing Gaza genocide
The judgement is not only a damning indictment of the ABC and a vindication of Lattouf. It is an exposure of the entire political and media establishment, extending from the federal Labor government to the press and every institution of official society.
13. Australian workers and youth oppose US-Israeli attacks on Iran and ongoing genocide
As at previous demonstrations, speakers denounced Israel, the US and the complicit Labor government. They criticised the fraudulent premise that the unprovoked attack on Iran was a necessary “preemptive strike” to stop the imminent development of nuclear weapons, drawing a parallel with the “weapons of mass destruction” lie used by the Bush administration in 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq.
But, having identified the persistent lies and hypocrisy of the imperialist powers over decades, the rally organizers promoted the illusion that war and genocide can be stopped through appeals to the same governments that are perpetrating them. This was starkly illustrated by the culmination of the protest march outside the US consulate.
14. The underlying geostrategic reasons behind the US-Israeli war against Iran
China, Iran’s largest trade partner, is the ultimate target behind this war. The Trump administration, focused on preparing for war against China, sees the kowtowing or removal of the Iranian regime as a critical strategic step towards war with China. It clears the path to reclaim vast energy reserves and to reassert US dominance over two of the world’s most critical geopolitical chokepoints: the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea.
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Since the 1990s, the US has spent billions to fund exiled monarchists and opposition groups, while imposing crippling sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy and caused mass immiseration. These policies have failed to bring down the regime—but they have succeeded in generating enormous suffering.
Major protests broke out in 2017, spreading to 85 cities. These demonstrations were not controlled by the US but reflected widespread hatred of both the bourgeois nationalist Islamic Republic and the imperialist chokehold placed on the country.
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Today, China purchases as much as 90 percent of Iran’s oil, largely through informal or semi-clandestine channels, often at a discount. These flows bypass Western oversight and sanctions, fueling both nations’ strategic partnership and hampering US efforts to strangle Iran’s economy.
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But Iran’s importance goes beyond the sheer production of oil. Iran has virtual control over the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical oil chokepoint. More than 20 percent of all seaborne oil passes through this narrow passage. While Iran has threatened to close the strait in retaliation for the US attacks, at the time of writing, oil markets are down by several percentage points as traders bet that Iran will not shut down the strait.
Part of the reason Iran has been reluctant to use the so-called “oil weapon” is that the majority of oil flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz now heads east—to China. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE are all major suppliers to China. If Iran were to close the Strait, it would strain its relations with these Gulf states and, more critically, harm China—its largest trading partner.
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While China dominates the global refining of critical minerals, the United States and its allies still exert far greater control over global oil and gas flows. In any future confrontation with China, access to oil and gas will serve as a critical pressure point. Every day, one out of every nine barrels of oil produced worldwide is shipped to China. If that flow were cut off, the impact on China’s economy would be immediate and potentially devastating.
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For over a century, imperial powers have viewed control over Iran as key to securing influence across the Eurasian landmass. Today, US planners see Iran not only as a critical node in China’s energy security but as a potential lever to disrupt regional integration between China, Russia and their neighbors. From the US perspective, crippling Iran weakens an entire axis of connectivity that threatens to undercut American dominance across both East and West Asia.
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Wars typically produce unseen and far-reaching consequences. While the Trump administration will no doubt try to spin its actions as proof of his unparalleled “genius” and “dealmaking,” this would-be Hitler has only accelerated a global process of radicalization. As the crisis of the capitalist system deepens, billions are beginning to see more clearly the scale of violence and horror it is unleashing.
15. The Left Party in Germany justifies the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran
In a statement, Jan van Aken, co‑chair of the Left Party, called the US‑Israeli attack on Iran what it is: an “illegal war of aggression under international law.” Yet this seemingly unequivocal condemnation serves merely as a rhetorical fig leaf for the party’s unconditional backing of the imperialist war aims pursued through the attack. In reality, the Left Party stands firmly behind the aggression against Iran, once again exposing its inherently pro‑imperialist character.
Van Aken states that military attacks were not a solution to preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb, yet he simultaneously affirms that such an outcome “must in any case be prevented.” Thus, he echoes precisely the propaganda Washington, Tel Aviv and the European great powers invoke to justify their illegal attack on Iran.
Significantly, in his statement, he criticises that even the dropping of the largest conventional bombs may not have sufficed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. “Perhaps the US’s illegal attack has damaged some of Iran’s nuclear facilities today,” he writes, lamenting. “But that does not prevent an Iranian bomb—it merely delays it by a few years at best. The next facility will simply be built even deeper beneath rock.”
Van Aken’s simultaneous insistence on “negotiations” and “on‑site inspections” is the height of cynicism. It was the US that unilaterally abandoned the Vienna Agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, despite Iran’s full compliance with all agreed “inspections.” And the most recent “negotiations” were then used by the US and Israel as a cover to prepare and carry out massive attacks on Iran.
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That the Left Party aggressively defends Germany’s imperialist interests on all war fronts is no accident. Despite its name, it has never been a left‑wing or socialist party. From its inception, it was a bourgeois project intended to channel social discontent into the existing capitalist system. It represents the interests of privileged middle class strata, state functionaries and academic milieus whose political orientation is tightly bound to German imperialism.
16. Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa
Belgium:
Tens of thousands of workers in countrywide strike against government budget cuts
Tens of thousands of metalworkers strike for new contract agreement
Metalworkers in Cadiz and Murcia continue strikes for a collective agreement with employers
EasyJet cabin crew flying out of Spain strike for pay increase
Car mechanics at London dealership strike over pay
Cleaners at health centres in north-west England strike over underpayment
Underground rail system workers in Glasgow, Scotland to strike over working conditions
Health workers continue strike over pay and conditions
Workers in tertiary education join strike by teachers and council workers in Ondo State over minimum wage
Municipal workers in uMhlathuze Local Municipality continue strike over pay and horrendous conditions
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
