Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The way forward in the struggle against Trump's attack on immigrants
The working class must reject all attempts to divide it along national or ethnic lines. The fight to defend immigrant workers can succeed only through the united mobilization of the working class as a whole— Black, white, native-born, immigrant, documented and undocumented alike. This means building rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees to oppose the deportation operations and prepare collective actions using the immense social power of the working class.
The defense of immigrants and the democratic rights of all is inseparable from the fight to abolish the capitalist system. It requires the building of a mass socialist movement committed to ending all borders, ending imperialist war, and securing the right of all people to live and work wherever they choose, free from repression, exploitation, or fear.
“Punishing individuals for the purported actions of their relatives is a feature of medieval justice systems or police state dictatorships, not democracies,” Eric Lee, one of the family’s attorneys, told the World Socialist Web Site. “The Trump administration’s vindictive attack on this young family echoes the methods of Nazi Germany, where authorities used kin punishment— Sippenhaft— to intimidate the population.
*****
The World Socialist Web Site opposes individual acts of violence, which serve only to disorient the working class and hand the capitalist state a pretext to escalate police-state repression against all political opposition. As with last month’s killing of Israeli diplomatic staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, Sunday’s desperate, demoralized attack will do nothing to end the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine or advance the cause of equality.
4. Trump’s universal school voucher proposal—another handout to the rich
In a sweeping escalation of the attack on public education, the Trump administration has embedded a nationwide private school voucher scheme in its new federal budget proposal. If passed, it will establish a universal voucher program for the first time in US history, bankrolled by an unprecedented $5 billion annual tax credit giveaway to wealthy donors.
*****
The big lie is that these are grassroots parental campaigns for “choice”; they are not. Polls consistently show that voters reject vouchers when given the chance. In fact, since 1970, voters have never approved a statewide ballot measure to create or expand private school vouchers, according to the National Coalition for Public Education.
*****
Indeed, voucher programs do not primarily serve students escaping underfunded public schools— as their proponents maintain— instead, they subsidize families already enrolled in private education. For good reason, public opposition remains widespread despite the aggressive and well-funded rollout of pro-voucher propaganda.
5. Israeli forces have killed or wounded over 600 people at aid centers over the past week
Prior to the launch of the US-Israeli “aid” operation, humanitarian and human rights groups, including the UN, warned that the scheme was merely a means to lure Gaza’s remaining population to the south, where they could be trapped in concentration camps in preparation for the US-Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza by expelling its population.
It has since emerged that the purpose of the “aid” centers is even more sinister: they are launching points not only for indiscriminate massacres of aid-seekers, but for what appear to be targeted assassinations of members of the crowd. Rather than being a humanitarian lifeline, they are killing fields.
*****
One survivor told [a Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor], “At around 3:50 a.m. today, an Israeli quadcopter flew over and photographed the civilian crowd. Then, the army opened fire from a crane in the area. I personally carried three people who had been shot in the head. Most of the injuries were to the head. People came looking for food to ease their hunger, but they went back dead or wounded.”
In another testimony, A. B., 38, told the Euro-Med Monitor team, “Around 5:45 a.m., we managed to enter the center, and I was able to get an aid package. On my way out, I met a woman in her 40s who said she couldn’t continue forward and that she and her children were suffering from hunger and poverty. I gave her my package and returned to try to get another one, but there was nothing left. A quadcopter was overhead, broadcasting insulting remarks: ‘You animals, go away, the supply is out.’”
He continued, “As I was leaving and nearing the chute’s exit, I saw a child crying out loudly, ‘Mom, get up, Mom, get up.’ I went closer and found the woman I had given my package to lying in a pool of blood. She was dead,” he said. “A group of young men and I carried her outside and placed her in an ambulance. I accompanied her son to the hospital. On the way, along the sea road, I saw seven bodies lying on the side of the road.”
Alleged “harassment” is a major issue for the Whitney, association with the Israeli murder machine, however, is not.
7. Providence, Rhode Island: Butler Hospital plans to permanently replace striking workers
The announcement by Butler to replace the striking workers with scabs is a declaration of war. The move follows the cutoff of strikers’ health insurance, including medical, dental and vision coverage, as of June 1. Other benefits, including life, disability and accident insurance, had been cut off earlier in May by the company in retaliation for the strike.
8. Tanzanian regime tortures East African activists
Once the party of Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa, advancing a nationalist program of limited social reforms and state-led development, [the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) government] has long since abandoned even the pretense of socialism. Under the dictates of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, it embraced neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, dismantling public services and privatizing key sectors of the economy.
What remains today is a capitalist state ruled by a narrow elite that has profited from the exploitation of Tanzania’s vast agricultural lands and mineral wealth, including gold, uranium, and rare earths, while most of the population is mired in poverty. The working class and rural poor face unbearable conditions: skyrocketing food prices, decaying infrastructure, collapsing healthcare and education systems, and joblessness that particularly affects the youth.
*****
Bolstered by the Trump administration’s efforts to install a dictatorship in the US, East African regimes are resorting to state terror. [the East African activists] Mwangi and Atuhaire have spoken out bravely, but their case is just one of countless others. Their prominence as foreign nationals ensured some media attention. Yet many Tanzanians, especially youth and political activists, have disappeared or been tortured in silence.
Workers and youth across East Africa must see in these events the brutal reality of capitalist rule in its most naked form. These coordinated assaults by the ruling class across Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda must be met with the coordinated resistance of the working class across borders and ethnic divisions.
The prosecution alleged that the former executives knowingly developed fraudulent software and used it in millions of diesel vehicles. This allowed the vehicles to pass emissions tests, whereas on the road they emitted many times more toxic nitrogen oxides into the air. Through this fraud, VW circumvented strict emissions limits in the United States and the European Union. The ultimate goal was to conquer the American market with diesel cars.
*****
The emissions scandal at Volkswagen and the so-called transformation to electric mobility raise fundamental questions for VW employees.
This is not limited to VW, but is taking place in one form or another throughout the global auto industry and beyond. The globally operating corporations, which fight bitterly for market share, are not using technological progress to make work easier and raise wages, but to increase profits and intensify capitalist exploitation.
In 2023, 1,075 construction workers died in the United States, marking the highest number of fatalities in the sector since 2011, BLS reported. The leading causes of death in construction are falls, struck-by objects, caught-in/between incidents, and electrocutions, collectively known as the “Fatal Four.” Falls to a lower level were the most common cause of death, accounting for 39.2 percent of all construction fatalities.
The two construction workers are only the latest to be sacrificed for corporate profit in America’s industrial slaughterhouse. According to the AFL-CIO, over 140,000 workers die each year in the US from hazardous working conditions—more than 5,000 from traumatic injuries and the rest from occupational diseases like cancer, respiratory illness and heart failure. That is more than 380 preventable deaths every day.
Yet with fewer than 1,800 federal and state safety inspectors overseeing 11 million workplaces, there is just one inspector for every 85,000 workers, with OSHA spending about $3.92 to protect each worker in America.
The agreement was worked out under pressure from the DMK-led Tamil Nadu state government, which has bitterly opposed the Samsung workers’ challenge to poverty wages and brutal working conditions for fear that their militant example would encourage broader worker resistance and scare away investors.
The CITU is affiliated with the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), which is itself a close ally of the DMK.
Signed on May 19 in the presence of DMK Labour Minister CV Ganesan, the agreement ignores virtually all of the workers’ demands. It provides no relief from long working hours and a punishing pace of work. The 25 militant workers who have been victimized by management remain suspended and under threat of further disciplinary action.
12. 22,000 metalworkers strike in northern Spain's Cantabria region
The resistance of Cantabrian metalworkers is entirely justified. For years, they have borne the brunt of Spain’s drive to maintain “competitiveness” on the global market, resulting in stagnant wages, longer hours, and a growing transfer of wealth to the capitalist class. These conditions have only worsened as inflation, driven in large part by NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine, devoured workers’ incomes.
*****
The unions, CCOO, UGT, and USO, have been compelled by workers’ rising anger to call this strike. However, their role remains that of containment, isolation, and—once they judge the time is ripe—betrayal. These organisations no longer function as genuine instruments of class struggle, but as bureaucratic enforcers working to preserve the authority of the employers and the capitalist state.
The trajectory of Owen’s career—from a police officer involved in a notorious killing to a convicted fraudster—highlights the persistent problems of corruption, impunity, and lack of oversight within American policing. The crisis of police violence and misconduct is not primarily the result of “bad apples” or racism—although both are in large abundance within American police departments—but reflects systemic issues deeply embedded in class society itself.
Despite widespread public outrage and calls for reform, meaningful accountability remains elusive. Officers involved in misconduct or violence are rarely prosecuted, and when they are, sentences are often lenient. According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks federal prosecutions of public officials, including police, there has been a massive drop in conviction rates of almost 70 percent since the early 2000s. At that time, there were almost 900 federal corruption prosecutions yearly.
14. Families continue fight to expose cover-up of Pike River mine disaster
Nearly 15 years after the series of underground explosions at Pike River coal mine in New Zealand, some of the families of the 29 workers killed in the disaster are fighting to expose the full truth about the unlawful back-room deal to drop charges against Pike River Coal’s chief executive Peter Whittall.
15. Australian study finds more than 10 percent of Queensland tunneling workers at risk of silicosis
The authors concluded, “in a cohort of around 2,000 workers who serviced the Queensland tunnel projects, it was estimated that between 20 and 30 cases of lung cancer and between 200 and 300 cases of silicosis would develop over their lifetime as a result of exposure to RCS [respirable crystalline silica].”
*****
The ongoing exposure of workers to dangerous silica dust and other industrial safety risks raises broader political questions. Fundamentally, what workers are up against is the capitalist system, under which every concern of workers, including their health and lives, is subordinated to the demands of big business and finance capital for ever greater profits.
16. Democrat Lee Jae-myung wins South Korea’s presidential election
He declared in his inaugural address on Wednesday, “It is time to restore security and peace, which have been reduced to tools of political strife; to rebuild livelihoods and the economy damaged by indifference, incompetence, and irresponsibility; and to revive democracy undermined by armored vehicles and automatic rifles.”
The last remark was in reference to soldiers who stormed the National Assembly in an attempt to arrest lawmakers in December during [former president] Yoon’s failed coup attempt.
Lee, however, will impose the demands of the ruling class no less ruthlessly than [Yoon's] PPP. The new president has no progressive solutions to any of the crises that grip South Korea, which include a stagnating economy worsened by Trump’s trade war and Washington’s accelerating militarization of the Indo-Pacific region.
17. Voting concludes on sellout contract for CSX train engineers
Touted by both management and [union] officials as a breakthrough, the agreement in fact continues decades-long declines in working conditions, paves the way for automation-driven job cuts and further cements partnership between unions and management to suppress rank-and-file opposition.
18. Milwaukee immigrant worker faces deportation after being framed up for threatening to kill Trump
The chain of events began in September 2023, when Morales Reyes was the victim of a violent robbery and assault. Demetric D. Scott, the perpetrator, knocked Morales Reyes off his bicycle, cut him with a box cutter and stole his bike. Scott was arrested and charged with armed robbery and aggravated battery, with Morales Reyes set to testify against him at trial.
Attempting to avoid prosecution, Scott devised a plan to have Morales Reyes deported from the US. While in jail, Scott wrote multiple letters threatening to assassinate Donald Trump, signing them with Morales Reyes’ name and return address. These letters were sent to state and federal officials, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in hopes that Morales Reyes would be arrested and removed from the country before he could testify.
*****
The treatment of Morales Reyes is of a piece with Donald Trump’s criminalization of immigrant workers and DHS attacks on basic democratic rights. The rush to utilize the fraudulent charges against Morales Reyes as an example to justify the ongoing ICE raids, mass arrests, brutalization, intimidation and deportation of immigrants is a measure of the crisis-ridden nature of the Trump White House.
19. Canadian wildfires kill 2 and force over 33,000 to evacuate so far
The response from capitalist politicians at all levels of government has followed the predictable pattern of declaring emergencies while offering wholly inadequate resources to address the crisis.
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
