Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
Sara Nadal-Melsió
Sara Nadal-Melsió:
"What really breaks my heart, why I came forward with public support despite the risks, is that I told them, the ISP is a safe space for the kind of difficult political conversations we are no longer having in academia. But the ISP wasn’t safe either in the climate of fear and suppression that dominates the country. Nowhere and no one is safe in US right now is unless we all come forward and strengthen the practice of solidarity and coalition building."
"To me, one of the striking things about Gaza is that it literally shatters the category of victim or perpetrator as fixed and absolute identities. We assume that if you have been a victim of a genocide, you cannot perpetrate one. But we can no longer sustain such an identitarian fallacy. There's also the problem of settler colonialism, imperialism, extractivism, plunder and generalized exploitation. Right now Gaza is a nexus of the lethal network of entanglements that capitalism truly is, and it is not the only one.
In my work, I argue that Europe's most enduring export is the violence of the border. Zionism takes on the disturbing exclusionism of the European nation-states that made refugees of Jews to begin with! We need to get rid of this notion of the sovereign nation-state, this obsession with the border and this obsession with self-enclosed identities, this notion of a subject that must be violently protected because he (it is very much a “he”) is always at risk, always in danger."
2. New York City educators union purges oppositionists on staff
Educators, like millions of workers and young people, are moving to the left in response to war, genocide, mass poverty and the ongoing drive by the Trump administration to destroy democratic rights. The union apparatus is determined to stamp out even the most limited opportunities for workers to express their opposition to the status quo.
Most of the dead came from working-class immigrant families—families, which are doubly vulnerable. On the one hand, they face the daily risks of exploitative labor, without job security, benefits or safety. On the other, they live under the constant threat of ICE raids, deportation and police harassment. This dual terror creates the conditions in which immigrant workers are most easily used and discarded like refuse.
New revelations about the company behind the Esparto disaster have only added to the outrage. Kenneth Chee, the CEO of Devastating Pyrotechnics, had long been banned by the federal government from possessing explosives due to a felony conviction related to firearms. And yet, despite this, Chee was able to operate one of the largest fireworks businesses in the Western United States—with the blessing of California regulators.
The US Department of Labor has unveiled proposals eliminating over 60 different rules protecting the rights of workers as part of the deregulatory drive by the Trump administration aimed at removing all restrictions on corporate profit-making.
In a statement announcing the changes, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the darling of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and other union bureaucrats, declared, “The Department of Labor is proud to lead the way by eliminating unnecessary regulations that stifle growth and limit opportunity.”
*****
Among the most significant proposed changes, the Labor Department wants to severely weaken the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) General Duty Clause, which requires employers to maintain a workplace “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees” and comply with OSHA rules more broadly. The General Duty Clause is a foundational principle laid down with the creation of OSHA in 1970.
*****
The argument that OSHA must exclude hazards that “cannot be eliminated without altering the activity” would essentially give employers the right to kill and maim with impunity.
A statement from the Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee:
The so-called “tentative agreement” announced early this morning by the AFSCME apparatus and the Parker administration is a complete sellout. It must be rejected by every worker. We must organize mass meetings to override the decision to end the strike, which was taken in direct violation of the clear will of the rank and file and without any vote.
The strike must be renewed immediately, and expanded to include transit workers, white-collar employees and all other sections of the working class in Philadelphia.
No matter what they claim, this is not over—because we have not yet had our say. Not a single worker was consulted. This is an outrageous violation of our democratic rights, including the basic principle of “no contract, no work.” They ordered us back to work at 4 a.m., while we were asleep, before we had even seen the deal, much less voted on it.
Tens of millions of workers across India joined a one-day general strike Wednesday, July 9, to protest the far-right Narendra Modi-led government’s class war assault.
The strikers voiced their opposition to the lengthening of the work day, the spread of precarious contract-labor jobs, privatization, the evisceration of public services, and legislation that will illegalize most strikes and introduce new impediments to union organization.
*****
Workers in India, as around the world, cannot assert their class interests unless they build new organizations of class struggle, independent of the pro-capitalist unions and in political opposition to the phony anti-worker establishment “Left” parties.
These include a network of workplace action committees that will unite all workers, contractual and permanent, across all sectors and communal and caste divisions, and strive to unite their struggles with workers internationally, while opposing the Indian bourgeoisie’s reactionary great-power interests and anti-working class actions.
Above all, the working class needs a mass revolutionary party founded on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution to rally the rural toilers behind it in the fight to overthrow Indian capitalism and world imperialism, eradicate casteism and communalism and secure social equality through the establishment of the United Socialist States of South Asia.
7. The Texas flood disaster: Trump’s Hurricane Katrina
Katrina devastated New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast, killing as many as 1,833 people and causing some $125 billion in damage. It exposed the lack of preparation and response by the George W. Bush administration and all levels of government and the degradation of the social infrastructure.
Despite efforts by government officials to deflect blame, the catastrophe along the Guadalupe River was not a “natural” disaster but the product of decades of social decay and political reaction. The needless deaths of nearly 300 people—many of them young girls—are the direct result. Those who uphold this system, like President Trump and Governor Abbott, have blood on their hands.
*****
Texas embodies the degradation of American capitalism, where staggering inequality is combined with political reaction and brutality. Despite—or rather because of—the immense wealth accumulated by billionaires in oil, gas, tech, weapons, ranching and healthcare, the social conditions facing the majority of Texans are among the worst in the country.
*****
A survey conducted by the state government last year identified more than $50 billion in flood control needs, but the state government has provided only $1.4 billion, less than 3 percent of what is required. Infrastructure spending represents less than 0.5 percent of the $322 billion state budget. This particularly affects rural areas like the flood zone along the Guadalupe River.
Texas has 84 billionaires, with a combined net worth of $722 billion, but no personal income tax, no corporate income tax, no estate tax and no inheritance tax. This has made it a haven for enormous private wealth, side by side with dire poverty and abysmal living conditions. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk ($342 billion), lives in Texas, as well as Michael Dell ($101 billion), founder of the computer manufacturer, Alice Walton ($101 billion), one of the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, and a lengthy list of oil barons, financiers and property developers.
The entirely preventable Texas catastrophe embodies the social policies of the Trump administration. It is the outcome of government by and for the financial oligarchy: the combination of anti-scientific bigotry with brutal austerity. Many of the people who fell victim to this disaster likely voted for Trump, but they are now confronting, through bitter experience, the consequences of the policies he champions.
*****
The central lesson of the Texas flood is that the most basic requirements of a modern society are incompatible with a system that subordinates everything to the enrichment of a financial oligarchy. The immense resources hoarded by the super-rich must be expropriated and used to meet urgent social needs, including safe housing and infrastructure, universal healthcare and education, climate adaptation and disaster preparedness.
Two weeks after Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, the election has emerged as a focal point of national politics. Mamdani has become the target of near daily denunciations and threats from Donald Trump and the fascist right, and a substantial section of the Democratic Party is working actively to ensure his defeat in November.
In the latest effort by sections of the Democratic Party establishment to block Mamdani in November—despite his own assurances that he will not threaten business interests—several Democratic members of Congress have launched baseless accusations of antisemitism.
*****
Mamdani enters the general election with a significant advantage, as Democrats outnumber Republicans in New York City by a 6-to-1 margin. Eric Adams is running as an independent, having skipped the Democratic primary after corruption charges against him were dropped by the Trump Justice Department in a quid pro quo.
Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Mamdani by a humiliating 12-point margin despite spending $30 million—largely from billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman, a vocal Trump supporter—has also left open the possibility of an independent run. The remaining candidates are lawyer Jim Walden and Republican Curtis Sliwa, who founded the notorious vigilante anti-crime group the Guardian Angels decades ago.
*****
Several major union bureaucracies that had backed Cuomo in the primary, including the Hotel Trades Council and Local 32BJ of the Building Service Employees, have now shifted their support to Mamdani. The United Federation of Teachers, which had previously withheld an endorsement citing a divided membership, has also come out in support of Mamdani.
The union bureaucrats, an integral part of the Democratic Party, are endorsing Mamdani because they expect him to become the next mayor and plan on doing business with him—and that business will include close collaboration in the betrayal of their own members.
The opposition to Mamdani from within the political establishment has less to do with the policies he proposes—centered on a series of minor reforms—than the broad political radicalization expressed in the support for his campaign, including opposition to extreme social inequality and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
9. New mass grave uncovered at Chemmani in northern Sri Lanka
In a chilling reminder of the decades-long anti-Tamil racist war, a new mass grave has been discovered at Sittupatthu in Chemmani, on the outskirts of Jaffna town in northern Sri Lanka. This is one of several mass grave sites that have been accidentally found at various places in the North in recent years.
The graves are further evidence of the atrocities committed during the brutal communal war unleashed by successive Colombo governments, which deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
During the 26-year war, which ended in May 2009 with the LTTE’s defeat, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people—mostly ethnic Tamils in the North and East—were killed. Thousands more were forcibly disappeared. The UN has estimated that about 40,000 civilians were killed during the final months of the war.
*****
Since 2011, the so-called Sri Lanka core group in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), led by the US, UK, Canada and France, has sponsored resolutions on human rights violations during the conflict in Sri Lanka.
However, far from being concerned about war crimes, the US in particular exploited the resolutions to pressure Sri Lankan governments to distance themselves from Beijing and to align with Washington-led military preparations against China.
Under Trump, the US withdrew from the UN human rights body, accusing it of bias against Israel. The UK now heads the so-called core group.
*****
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) won office for the first time last year by capitalizing on widespread opposition to traditional capitalist parties and promises to protect democratic rights, including those of the Tamil population. It has since abandoned its commitments, along with its other empty election promises.
Tamil people can place no trust in either the imperialist powers or Sri Lankan capitalist politicians—Sinhala or Tamil—to defend their democratic rights. The only political party that has consistently opposed the Colombo government’s racist war and gross violations of democratic rights from the outset is the Socialist Equality Party (SEP).
10. Australia: Parliamentary inquiry legitimizes public housing tower demolition in Melbourne
The Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Victorian Legislative Council has set up an inquiry into the proposed demolition of 44 public housing towers by the Victorian state Labor government, to report by December.
The inquiry is a thinly disguised exercise in defending the Labor government’s decision to smash up the tower residents’ homes and communities.
11. US Supreme Court permits Trump to move ahead with mass layoffs and destruction of federal agencies
In an attack on workers’ democratic and social rights, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has cleared the way for the Trump administration to proceed with mass layoffs of federal employees.
The tens of thousands of job cuts target the infrastructure of government and public services, the focus of the assault by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly led by billionaire oligarch Elon Musk.
The decision, which overrides a lower court injunction, marks a new stage in the offensive by the Trump administration against US government services dating back to the New Deal reforms that were implemented to forestall social revolution in the 1930s.
*****
As it has done in other recent critical decisions, SCOTUS refused to address the substance of the matter while granting Trump precisely what he wanted: the green light to proceed with his fascist agenda.
The Supreme Court’s order is notably terse, offering little in the way of legal language. There is no engagement with the catastrophic real-world consequences of the layoffs or the constitutional questions raised by the lower courts.
*****
The Democratic Party has played a critical role in enabling the Trump administration’s offensive. In March, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he would vote to keep the government running by supporting a Republican-led continuing resolution, providing Trump with the votes needed to avert a shutdown and continue his policies.
Schumer insisted a shutdown would be worse than giving Trump the means to further attack federal employees. This maneuver, combined with the Democrats’ reliance on stunts and legal challenges with little hope of success, has allowed Trump and his fascist Republican allies to push through their “Big Beautiful Bill”—a massive transfer of wealth to the billionaire elite which balloons the federal deficit while destroying public services and kicking more than 11 million workers off Medicaid.
12. Southern California grocery workers must reject the UFCW’s sellout!
After an overwhelming strike authorization vote last month by 45,000 Southern California grocery workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is attempting to ram through an insulting sellout deal behind workers’ backs.
Ignoring the strike authorization vote, the union has moved swiftly to prevent a strike that would have sent shockwaves through the industry. On July 2 the union announced a tentative agreement without providing any details.
*****
The contract’s most glaring betrayal lies in its insulting wage proposals—and even these refer only to the highest-paid workers in each job classification. The figures presented in the factsheet are top rates, meaning they apply exclusively to a limited layer of long-tenured employees. Thousands of grocery workers earn significantly less, with many starting at rates below $17 an hour.
*****
In a further blow to workers, the agreement formalizes the expansion of self-checkout systems, a major driver of job losses. The token requirement that a single full-service lane be kept open, or that one employee monitor multiple self-check stations, is laughably insufficient to stem the tide of automation.
In anticipation of artificial intelligence (AI) replacing thousands of workers without compensation in the near future, the union has revealed it has effectively negotiated away these jobs in exchange for vague promises of state funding grants to “train employees for future jobs” in bakery, service deli, and meat departments.
Their so-called plan to retrain workers for roles supposedly less vulnerable to automation is absurd—No job is truly irreplaceable. Moreover, this training will be funded through state grants, not directly by the employer. This means the cost ultimately falls on workers and taxpayers, while the company is free to eliminate countless jobs without responsibility to retain displaced employees.
13. South Korean autoworkers face attacks on working conditions from Trump tariffs
South Korea’s auto industry is facing growing opposition from the working class in the face of Trump’s trade tariffs. Workers at companies like GM Korea have voted to strike, signaling their desire to fight back against the attacks on their jobs and working conditions.
Washington has already imposed a 25 percent tariff on vehicles and auto parts from South Korea. On Monday, Trump announced that he would go ahead with his threat to impose a 25 percent “reciprocal” tariff on other South Korean imports as well. The new rate will go into effect on August 1, extending by a few weeks the deadline for Seoul and Washington to potentially reach a trade deal.
*****
Auto companies have long planned to carry out job cuts as part of the transition to electric vehicles and turn to “smart” technology and AI, but they are exploiting the Trump tariffs to accelerate their attacks on jobs, pay and conditions. This is driving workers into struggle. Last month, workers at GM Korea overwhelmingly voted to strike, with 88.2 percent of the 6,851 union members supporting a walkout. This was the highest figure in the union’s history for the company.
Philadelphia city workers are outraged after AFSCME District Council 33 abruptly shut down their powerful eight-day strike. The tentative agreement, announced in the dead of night, meets none of the workers’ core demands and amounts to a deliberate act of sabotage by the union bureaucracy.
The new contract includes a paltry 9 percent wage increase spread over three years—just one percent more than the city’s initial offer, which so outraged workers that they had authorized strike action in the first place.
“Folded like a lawn chair smh,” one worker said in a comment on the union’s Facebook page that was later removed by administrators. Another said: “We did all this for an extra 37 dollars a check! This union is a joke! We missed damn near 2 weeks of pay for absolutely nothing! Smfh, stand for something or fall for anything.”
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
