Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. California Democrats lead unanimous attack on free speech with AB 715
Every so often, the political representatives of the ruling class let down their masks and act in lockstep, momentarily dispensing with their factional squabbles to make plain the fundamental unity of their class rule. When this happens, it sends a clear signal: whatever their differences on secondary matters, the Democrats and Republicans are fully united in preserving the dictatorship of capital.
Such is the case with Assembly Bill 715, a dangerous and reactionary measure that passed the California State Assembly with a unanimous 68–0 vote, now heading for Senate. Not a single dissenting voice—no “progressive” objection, no liberal caveat, no democratic handwringing. The political establishment, in perfect harmony, just advanced one of the most authoritarian bills in recent memory.
Sponsored by Assemblymembers Rick Chavez Zbur and Dawn Addis—both Democrats—AB 715 claims to enhance protections against discrimination in public schools, especially against antisemitism and Islamophobia. In reality, the bill has nothing to do with protecting students and everything to do with silencing political dissent.
The following are the main features of AB 715:
Redefining discrimination: The bill redefines “discrimination on the basis of religion” to include antisemitism and Islamophobia—terms deliberately left broad and ambiguous. In practice, this paves the way for equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, a conflation used to criminalize criticism of Israel and its genocidal assault on Gaza.
Censorship of curriculum: It prohibits schools from using any instructional material that might be construed—by the state—as discriminatory. This is a gateway to book bans, map erasures, and historical distortions, particularly around the subject of Palestine. It weaponizes the classroom as a site of ideological purification, policed by the state.
Expanded complaint procedures: Teachers, board members, and even third-party contractors (custodians, food workers, librarians) would be subjected to rapid and severe disciplinary measures if found “in violation”—not of proven discrimination, but of the state’s politically-motivated definitions.
A state antisemitism czar: The bill would establish California’s first “state antisemitism coordinator,” a new bureaucratic role that functions more like an ideological overlord than a civil rights official. This person would be tasked with enforcing conformity to the state’s definition of acceptable political discourse.
Arbitrary definitions of nationality and religion: By extending “nationality” to include perceived ancestry or residency in a country with a dominant religion, the bill sets up a dangerous mechanism for policing thoughts, associations, and affiliations. It opens the door to the persecution of marginalized communities, dissidents, and left-wing organizations under the guise of protecting identity.
Unprecedented executive power in schools: All of this would come with vast new powers for school officials and administrators, who would be given the authority to investigate, discipline, and dismiss based on vague and ideological criteria.
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There is historical precedent for this. In the 1930s, the Nazi regime in Germany similarly conflated criticism of the state with attacks on the “national community.” They imposed rigid ideological conformity on schools, universities, and public life—always in the name of “protecting the people.” The Democrats are not Nazis. But they are on the same road: one of repression, militarism, and dictatorship.
2. Paramount/CBS caves in to Trump, to pay $16 million in “60 Minutes” lawsuit
For the billionaire who controls Paramount, Shari Redstone, daughter and heir of Sumner Redstone, considerations of journalism and democracy could not hold a candle to the huge financial interests involved in her proposed sale of Paramount to Skydance Media, which is currently being reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission, under the control of Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump loyalist installed earlier this year.
Skydance Media is controlled by David Ellison, son of mega-billionaire Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle Corp. and an adamant Trump supporter. Redstone stands to realize $2 billion from the $8 billion takeover. In return, CBS will pass under the editorial control of an oligarch whose political views are indistinguishable from those of Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire owner of Fox.
3. Philadelphia city workers strike: A sign of rising class struggle in the US
Workers in Philadelphia are battling the devastating consequences of decades of austerity. The workers, who were offered an insulting 13 percent wage increase over four years by the mayor, are confronting the collapse of public services that have been slashed to the bone. The school district, where 14,000 teachers have also voted to strike, is facing a $300 million deficit, and the city’s transit agency is preparing a “doomsday” budget that would cut services in half.
Workers are rejecting with contempt the claim that there is “no money” for the vital services on which millions rely. In 2023, the Philadelphia metro area had a gross metropolitan product of $557.6 billion and is home to 13 Fortune 500 corporate headquarters. The real issue is that the city’s working class is being bled dry in the interests of corporate profit.
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Just as the American colonists once rose up against the “long train of abuses” of King George III, the ground is being prepared today for a mass rebellion against the dictatorship of finance capital.
Class battles are emerging that will inevitably pose revolutionary questions. Even the defense of workers’ already low standard of living is impossible without a frontal assault by the working class on the prerogatives of wealth. What is required is the expropriation of the oligarchy and a massive redistribution of its wealth, to the working class that created it.
4. As the end of the “pause” approaches, where to for Trump’s tariff war?
Yesterday, Trump announced that an agreement had been struck with Vietnam to cut the tariff on its exports to 20 percent, with a 40 percent tariff on those goods deemed to have been trans-shipped through Vietnam from other countries. Under the deal, US goods will be able to enter Vietnam with zero tariffs.
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The hostility of the US towards its supposed allies is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in its attitude to Japan. Its chief trade negotiator has made seven trips to Washington but so far has come up empty.
On the Japanese side, one of the main sticking points has been the US demand that it takes more of its rice in return for any concessions on cars and auto parts.
The issue has a significant political dimension. The Japanese rice sector, which is dominated by small farmers, has long been a protected area of the economy and many members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), including Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, rest on the farmers for electoral support.
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So far, the only agreement to be announced is with the UK. It was a preliminary deal to lower some mutual trade barriers, including reduced tariffs on British cars. But the UK is something of an outlier. It was not a target of reciprocal tariffs because the US has a trade surplus with it.
There is also a deal with China. This did not cover the impost announced on April, but only the subsequent Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports and some export controls introduced by the US.
Other deals, or framework agreements, may be announced in the next days. India is reported to be on the verge of making an interim agreement with the US to avoid the “liberation day” tariffs of 26 percent.
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The Trump administration is proceeding unconcerned with legality, as in so many other issues, because it is confident that if the issue goes as far as the Supreme Court, it has the numbers there to rule in its favour.
No one can say what will happen on July 9—Trump himself probably does not even know.
But one thing is certain. The entire post-war trading system has been shattered, never to return. In the complex and integrated global economy of today, this will have major consequences, if not immediately, then not too far into the future.
5. British parliament votes to proscribe Palestine Action: a historic assault on democratic rights
The House of Commons voted Wednesday to support Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s order banning Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. It was a stampede, with 385 MPs approving proscription, versus just 26 against. Their vote brings the state within touching distance of branding peaceful protests against genocide an act of terrorism.
When the order is approved in the House of Lords Thursday, Palestine Action will be defined as a terrorist organization at Friday midnight. Being a member of or uttering support for Palestine Action will be a crime under the Terrorism Act, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
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Britain’s parliament voted in open defiance of several United Nations Special Rapporteurs who wrote to the government on Tuesday protesting its moves to proscribe PA. They said, “According to international standards, acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people, should not be treated as terrorism.” They warned, “This would have a chilling effect on political protest and advocacy generally in relation to defending human rights in Palestine.”
6. Trump halts $7 billion in funds to public schools triggering mass cuts
In a major escalation of its assault on public education, the Trump administration announced this week that it would withhold nearly $7 billion in immediate federal funding for K-12 school districts across the United States. Delivered with less than 24 hours’ notice before the July 1 deadline, the announcement has thrown districts into chaos, forcing them to scramble for alternatives and brace for immediate cuts to staff, programs and essential services.
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The Supreme Court’s recent ruling restricting nationwide injunctions has emboldened the Trump administration to carry out sweeping, unlawful actions—including the freeze on federal education funding—without fear of immediate judicial intervention. The ruling Trump v. CASA effectively allows Trump to bypass constitutional and legislative restraints, acting with near impunity. The funding freeze is a direct result of this new legal landscape, accelerating the administration’s drive toward authoritarian rule.
Trump administration’s funding freeze is an outright illegal impoundment, defying Congress by withholding funds that were already lawfully appropriated. California is at the forefront of these attacks, but the real aim is to establish a precedent for using federal funding as a weapon to impose authoritarian, far-right policies nationwide. By targeting states over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and related policies, the administration is preparing to withhold billions more—including Title I and IDEA funds for low-income and disabled students—using executive power to override both Congress and democratically enacted laws in service of its reactionary agenda.
7. Germany’s Social Democrats reaffirm rearmament and Great Power policy
Whereas the party once enjoyed broader support among workers, it has now been reduced almost entirely to its apparatus, which is intimately intertwined with the state. Maintaining capitalist rule has become second nature to the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which imposes social cuts and war by every available means—even at the cost of its own collapse.
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When the SPD now calls for banning the AfD, this is not about fighting the far-right but about further strengthening the state apparatus of repression. The collection of evidence concerning the AfD’s unconstitutionality is to be carried out by the Verfassungsschutz (domestic intelligence service). It is precisely Germany’s intelligence agency—infamous and despised for its chronic right-wing bias, which stretches back to the Nazi era—that is to prepare an expert report concerning which parties may exist and which may not.
Such strengthening of the intelligence services and the state security apparatus is aimed directly against the vast majority of the working class, who are increasingly coming into conflict with policies of militarization and the associated social attacks—and are beginning to resist them.
8. Trump’s DHS council targets Democratic mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani
Mamdani acknowledged the escalating danger, stating, “I had a Republican City Council member call for me to be deported. The mayor refused to denounce that as well. What concerns me is that we know these are threats that invite further threats by others. I have received death threats—against myself, and against my family.”
Mamdani claimed that he fights “for working people ... the same people that [Trump] said he was fighting for,” and argued that Trump targets him “because we know he would rather speak about me than speak about the legislation he is shepherding through D.C.”
In fact, Trump has been relentlessly promoting his massive spending package—combining border militarization, expanded military funding and sweeping tax cuts for the oligarchy. His attacks on Mamdani are not a “distraction” but a calculated effort to normalize the criminalization of opposition to the rule of the financial elite.
9. US Secretary of State hosts anti-China QUAD meeting in Washington
The QUAD statement repeated the usual litany of false US accusations against China used to justify Washington’s aggression in the region.
The foreign ministers were “seriously concerned about the situation in the East China Sea and South China Sea.” They denounced “dangerous and provocative actions” in the South China Sea, such as “unsafe use of water cannons,” interference with “freedom of navigation” and “dangerous maneuvers.”
All of that was clearly a reference to China, but it is a complete inversion of reality. In fact, the US has for more than a decade deliberately inflamed low-level territorial disputes in the sea, between China and several Southeast Asian nations, deliberately transforming them into flashpoints for a major war.
10. The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism
For over 20 months, the fascistic Zionist government of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, with the full support of the imperialist powers, has inflicted upon the Palestinian people a level of barbaric violence comparable to the Nazi mass slaughter of European Jewry during World War II. The unfolding catastrophe and the role of Israel as an unhinged attack dog of world imperialism in the Middle East raises fundamental questions of historical perspective: How can Zionism be fought?
This requires, first of all, a historical understanding of the emergence of Zionism and its ideology. Two recent books by the German historian Mario Kessler provide important historical and theoretical material on the struggle of the Marxist movement against antisemitism and Zionism. In 2022, he published an edited volume of writings by Leon Trotsky on antisemitism — the most comprehensive of its kind in any language — and a monograph reviewing the fight of the socialist movement against antisemitism. That volume also includes a significant collection of articles by Marxists on the fight against antisemitism.
11. Entertainment unions campaign for $750 million handout to California corporations
Many studies have indicated that rather than creating new production opportunities, tax incentives merely shift production from one location to another. In other words, the Entertainment Union Coalition (composed of entertainment unions, notably the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the Teamsters, the Writers Guild of America West , the American Federation of Musicians and the Directors Guild of America) is actively working against its membership in other locales.
This makes an obvious and disgraceful mockery of the official AFL-CIO slogan of “solidarity.” Every union official who signed on to this campaign, including those who showed up to fawn at the feet of California Governor Gavin Newsom at a July 2 news conference, should be branded as traitors.
12. Australia: Teachers rally against Queensland government’s pay “offer”
While teachers at the rally showed their determination to fight, speakers sought to divert them into appeals for a deal with [the state] government. In January, when the Queensland Teachers Union began its closed-door negotiations with the state education department, the union stated that all options were on the table, including potential strike action.
However, speakers at the rally urged teachers to write to their local MPs, an activity designed to demobilize them and sow illusions that letters of protest would shift the government.
No speaker at the rally foreshadowed strike action. Union leaders also put forward no concrete salary demand but continued to use the vague formulation, “nation leading salaries.”
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Francesca Albanese is a widely respected expert on international law, who, in her official function for the UN, declared in March 2024 that she saw “reasonable grounds” for assuming genocide in Israel’s military action in Gaza. Albanese expanded and concretized this claim with her report for the UN last October, which stated that the actions of the Israeli government following its invasion of Gaza fulfilled all the criteria, according to international law, for the crime of genocide.
15. UFCW announces deal to block strike by 45,000 California grocery workers
As is frequently the case with the union bureaucracy, the Tentative Agreement was announced with zero details and a few empty phrases. According to the union, the agreement supposedly includes “higher wages, more money for pension contributions, additional health and welfare improvements, staffing and more,” without explaining what these supposedly are. In the announcement, union officials also patted themselves on the back, citing an “intense 40-plus hour bargaining session.”
Workers cannot accept this betrayal! They must organize themselves in rank-and-file committees at groceries across the region to overturn this decision, reject the contract and impose their will to strike. They must appeal for unity with their brothers and sisters across the country and break through the isolation the pro-management United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) officials are trying to impose.
Within minutes of the announcement, UFCW Local 324’s Facebook page was flooded with angry comments.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
