Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Mobilize the working class against Trump’s fascistic attack on immigrants!
As part of the Trump administration’s attempt to establish a presidential dictatorship and overturn what remains of the US Constitution, the government is rapidly expanding its war on immigrants.
Recent developments underscore the advanced state of the crisis and the need for the working class to intervene independently against both parties and their shared anti-immigrant agenda. What is being done to immigrants will soon be used against all opponents of the financial oligarchy.
In response to the shooting of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent Saturday in New York City, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem threatened to “flood” major cities with ICE agents at a Monday press conference.
Homan declared, “Sanctuary cities are now our priority. We are going to flood the zone ... sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want, more agents in the community and more agents in the worksite.”
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The defense of immigrants is inseparable from the defense of all democratic rights. To defeat fascism and stop the drive to war and dictatorship, workers must take up the fight for socialism. As Karl Marx wrote in 1848, “The working men have no country.” The solution to national fascism is international socialism: “Workers of the world, unite!”
2. Democrats silent as House speaker shuts Congress to block Epstein resolution
It is estimated that some 1,000 young girls were sexually exploited by Epstein and his wealthy clients, but not a single one of the hundreds who abused the victims has been named, let alone prosecuted.
The Epstein scandal has become the focal point of a profound political and social crisis rooted in the crisis of the capitalist system. Social anger is mounting as the fascistic Trump administration, with the compliance of the Democratic Party, guts all that remains of the social safety net, making living conditions intolerable for tens of millions of workers. At the same time there is surging opposition to Trump’s pogrom against immigrants, his support for genocide in Gaza and war against Russia, and his erection of a presidential dictatorship. Even the poll numbers reflect the increasing isolation and unpopularity of the government.
The Democrats, despite their verbal efforts to profit from the disarray of the Trump administration and the GOP, are no less fearful of releasing the Epstein files than their Republican counterparts. They reacted with barely a whimper to the early shutdown of the House, even though, with 12 Republicans on board, they have the votes to pass the resolution co-sponsored by Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued no public statement and had nothing on social media on Johnson’s move, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X a denunciation of Trump for showing “his weakness to the Chinese Communist Party” over trade in computer chips.
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In a frenzied attempt to change the subject from Epstein and go on the offensive against the Democrats, Trump at a White House press conference Tuesday accused former President Barack Obama of “treason” for backing the probe beginning in 2016 of alleged Russian interference in that year’s election, supposedly against Democrat Hillary Clinton and in favor of Trump.
3. Zelensky appoints new prime minister in major government shakeup
Yulia Svyrydenko, 39, was confirmed as the country’s new prime minister on Thursday and will replace former Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, who has served as prime minister since 2020. Shmyhal will remain part of the Zelensky government as the newly appointed defense minister.
Svyrydenko previously served as first deputy prime minister and minister of economic development and trade. She played the leading role in negotiating the “critical minerals deal” this past spring between Ukraine and the Trump administration that saw Ukraine hand over vast sections of its economy to US imperialism in exchange for continued military aid in the war against Russia.
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Despite a concerted effort to remake a cabinet dedicated to pleasing the Trump government, Zelensky’s political standing in Washington is still very much in question, according to recent reports.
On Friday, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that US officials have tired of Zelensky and could move to have him replaced within a “few months” by former top General Valery Zaluzhny. Now ambassador to the UK, Zaluzhny has long had extensive ties to the far right. Nearly a year and a half following his dismissal in February 2024, he remains one of the most popular figures in Ukraine and well connected within NATO.
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A recent poll showed that 70 percent of Ukrainians believe that their leaders use the war to enrich themselves. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed in the war so far, with many more maimed and wounded.
4. Israel massacres more than 300 Palestinians in three days as “hunger knocks on every door” in Gaza
At least 21 children have starved to death in the past three days. Of the 101 Palestinians confirmed to have died from hunger, 80 were children, almost all perishing over recent weeks.
5. German Chancellor Merz announces massive cuts to social welfare benefits
Bourgeois commentators are certain that fierce class struggles are imminent. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried the headline: “Now it’s going to be expensive for all of us,” and the Süddeutsche Zeitung declared: “Friedrich Merz must take money from all citizens.”
Under the headline “The last summer before the great distribution struggle,” Wirtschaftswoche drew a long arc from Friedrich Engels’ 1845 work The Condition of the Working Class in England to Emile Zola’s novel Germinal, which depicts the misery and struggles of French miners, and Thomas Piketty’s analyses of today’s “wealth gaps between rich and poor.” Piketty concludes “that we are now dealing with a new class society that is divided into a (small) property-owning class of the wealthy, rentiers, and heirs on the one hand, and a (large) working class of service providers on the other.”
Wirtschaftswoche proceeds to give Merz advice on how he can best master “the great redistribution struggle of the coming years.” But this struggle cannot be mastered. Capitalist society is bankrupt. The ruling class is responding to this with war, class war and dictatorship. That is the reason for Donald Trump’s rise in the US. In Germany, Merz and Klingbeil are moving in the same direction.
6. Philippine President Marcos meets with Trump in the White House
The terms of any deal struck by Trump and Marcos on Tuesday are not yet public. However, the terms proposed in the July 16 memo of the The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) are colonial in character, giving US business interests nearly limitless access to the country’s resources and economy. The proposals included giving the US preferential access to Philippine reserves of nickel, cobalt and copper, the elimination of nearly all Philippine tariffs on US goods, import commitments favoring US exports, and approving special access to American firms in the vital areas of energy, infrastructure, and mineral resources.
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Alongside the economic negotiations, were discussions of the ongoing preparations for war with China, discussions pitched as being about the “security of the Indo-Pacific theater.”
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The tariffs threatened by the Trump White House are the desperate, bullying politics of US imperialism, which aims to shore up its own economic weakness by dominating the economies of countries around the globe, while at the same time seeking to array them into a war camp against China. The drive to dominate, however, threatens to hasten a realignment of geopolitical interests away from Washington. Every country throughout Southeast Asia feels this pressure and the politics of the region are increasingly torn asunder by it.
This phenomenon is particularly marked in the Philippines, the former colony of the United States. A political civil war is raging between rival factions of the elite, those aligned with former President Rodrigo Duterte and those with Marcos. Duterte has been arrested and stands trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity; his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, faces an impeachment trial in the Senate. Despite all of this, their political backing among significant sections of the elite remains strong.
7. Crypto market capitalization hits $4 trillion
The proponents of the crypto system endlessly claim that it represents a “democratization” of finance and provides the opportunity for ordinary people to partake of the benefits to be derived from the world of finance, ignoring the fact that, according to the FBI, Americans lost $9 billion to crypto fraud last year, a 66 percent increase from the year before.
As Hilary J. Allen a professor of law at American University Washington College of Law stated in a submission to the House Committee on Financial Services on June 24: “When roughly half of all Americans (some surveys say more) are living paycheck-to-paycheck, the problem is not lack of investment opportunities but a lack of money to invest in the first place.”
8. F1: The Movie–Hollywood formulas 1, 2 and 3
[Actor Brad] Pitt’s character [in the film] is mostly a series of hackneyed traits. A nomad, a loner, his watchword is
“Just let me drive, will you?”
If a team (or a woman) wants him to stay around or come back, he is likely to respond, “One and done.”
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F1 is a largely impersonal consumer product, assembled by committee.
The technology and skills involved in Formula 1 racing are extraordinary—the vehicles are traveling at 200 miles per hour and more, and sometimes within inches of each other. There are enough thrills and excitement in F1 to draw in audiences, especially at a time of such lethargic blockbusters, but, in the end, this is weak and undemanding material.
9. Australian health reports expose Labor’s Medicare election promises
Throughout the election campaign, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeatedly flashed a Medicare card and declared “all you should need to see a doctor for free in Australia is your Medicare card … not your credit card.” Equally cynically, the then Liberal-National Coalition leader Peter Dutton matched this pledge.
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Medicare, like its predecessor Medibank, introduced in 1975, was supposed to enable working people to see a GP without charge, via bulk-billing, and to obtain free treatment at a public hospital. Both these promises have been increasingly killed off by governments at federal and state levels.
Moreover, Medicare has never provided free, universal health care. Many essential services, such as dental care, are not covered. Long waiting times for treatment in public hospitals have forced 15 million people—more than half the population—into buying expensive private health insurance.
This has produced a two-class health system, with profit-making private clinics and hospitals prospering alongside chronically over-stretched public hospitals.
10. Pro-Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews calls for workplace “antisemitism” training
The BoD does not represent the Jews in Britain who are deeply disturbed by the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, the 17-year blockade of Gaza, and the killing of over 60,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are women and children, in the ongoing genocide. It does not speak for all those Jews who oppose the massive and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, the starvation of Gaza’s civilian population and the brutal military occupation and human rights abuses in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Thousands of British Jews, and many Jewish organizations, have joined anti-war demonstrations across Britain.
11. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
