Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The militarist agenda at the center of Trump’s tariff war against the world
The executive order issued by US President Trump on Thursday evening, imposing sweeping tariffs on virtually every trading partner of the US, is a milestone in the decay and breakdown of American and global capitalism.
The US has now created a tariff wall around itself equivalent to that imposed, with disastrous consequences both economically and politically, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and which played a decisive role in creating the conditions for the eruption of World War II, the greatest bloodbath in human history.
The consequences of Trump’s economic war against the world will be no less significant. It will bring about a rapid descent into intense economic conflict leading inexorably to the eruption of war.
2. Trump enacts tariffs, sanctions state officials and invokes “national emergency” against Brazil
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing devastating 50 percent tariffs against Brazil, which take effect next week.
Trump’s order represents, in every sense, an unprecedented escalation of US imperialist aggression against Latin America.
Written as a declaration of war against an enemy country, the order declares a “national emergency,” classifying the Brazilian government as a “threat to the security” of the United States.
The document wastes no time trying to justify the tariffs as a means of ensuring supposed “economic justice” for the US, which enjoys a substantial trade surplus with Latin America’s largest economy. It crudely presents them as an instrument to subjugate the constitutionally established government to Washington’s dictates and intervene directly in Brazil’s internal politics.
The main political development used by Trump to justify this intervention is the ongoing trial of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro and his fascist military clique for the attempted coup d’état that culminated in the January 8, 2023, insurrection in Brasília.
In a grotesque inversion of the facts, Trump—who works relentlessly to impose a presidential dictatorship in the United States—accuses the Brazilian government of “politically persecuting a former President of Brazil, which is contributing to the deliberate breakdown in the rule of law in Brazil, to politically motivated intimidation in that country, and to human rights abuses.”
3. US Israeli ambassador Mike Huckabee praises IDF and GHF killers in visit to Gaza
In comments to Fox News Friday, Huckabee, a far-right Christian Zionist, presented the-US backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) which began distributing limited food at four distribution sites in Gaza beginning in May as the pinnacle of success.
“Look, here’s what we saw,” Huckabee said, “the GHF food program is working, its working very well. In fact today we passed over 100 millions meals having been served in two months.”
While there are many reasons to doubt this figure, even if true, 100 million meals for 2.1 million people over 60 days is approximately .79 meals per day, that is less than one per day. In other words, Huckabee is explicitly endorsing and praising a program that provides less than a meal per day, nowhere near enough to sustain life, let alone improve health under conditions of siege and forced displacement.
Huckabee’s boastful admission is proof that the purpose of the GHF, and the visit by US officials was not to uncover the “truth” but to provide political cover for the Trump administration, the Israeli government and GHF, all of whom are implicated in crimes against humanity.
In social media posts and interviews, Huckabee claimed that Hamas is responsible for the famine, stealing “as much as 80 percent of the food,” a lie debunked by the Israeli military, hardly neutral arbiters, last week.
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The criminal character of the bureaucratized forced starvation operation has prompted one former GHF contractor to speak out. In multiple interviews with US and international media over the last week, Anthony Aguilar, a former US Army Green Beret has explicitly and powerfully condemned the starvation operation.
In an interview on the internet news show Breaking Points this week, Aguilar said “Are we complicit and engaged in war crimes? Yes.”
4. Australia: Winter surge of respiratory disease ignored by government
Australia is currently facing a surge of viral illnesses. A combination of factors has exacerbated the winter rise in respiratory disease, with record case numbers of COVID, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), and influenza overwhelming public hospitals and endangering lives.
The surge has been met with near total indifference by the Federal Labor government of Prime Minister Albanese and various state governments, with no efforts organized to reduce disease transmission or even warn the public of the risks. This neglect combined with reduced vaccination rates have allowed diseases to spread more rapidly and cause a greater severity of illness.
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The surge in COVID has driven a large wave of outbreaks in nursing homes, whose elderly and vulnerable residents have been most heavily impacted throughout the pandemic, a result of the “let it rip” program adopted by all Australian governments. At its peak, 300 simultaneous outbreaks were reported at the end of June, with 1,700 residents infected and 34 dying in the last week of that month alone. Overall, at least 138 nursing home residents died because of COVID in the month June, with 48 deaths reported in the first two weeks of July, compared with just 16 in May.
In total, 581 deaths from COVID were confirmed nationally in the first four months of 2025. This death toll, the impacts on nursing homes and the elderly, and the increase in long-COVID and other severe complications of COVID have been callously dismissed by state and federal governments.
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RSV case numbers have also exceeded their peak last year, with 27,243 infections recorded in June alone. While overall RSV is less deadly than influenza, it is particularly dangerous for some people, including infants and children under 2 years old, as well as the elderly and anyone with a compromised immune system. Among infants, RSV is the leading cause for admission to hospital. In 2024, 49 percent of the 175,000 recorded RSV infections were in children less than 4 years of age.
5. Family of Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre raises: What did Trump know and when did he know it?
The family of Virginia Giuffre, one of the most prominent public accusers of financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, issued a statement Wednesday and gave an interview on Thursday suggesting that President Donald Trump was aware of the criminal actions of Epstein while he associated with the abuser of teenage girls.
Two brothers and two sisters-in-law of Giuffre were responding to Trump’s statement on Tuesday that Epstein “stole” Giuffre, then 16, from his Mar-a-Lago club, where she was working as a spa attendant in the summer of 2000. Giuffre committed suicide this past April.
Florida carried out its ninth execution of 2025 on Thursday, July 31, putting Edward J. Zakrzewski to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, near Starke. Florida has executed one-third of the 27 executions carried out in the US so far this year. There were 25 executions in the country in all of 2024.
Zakrzewski, 60, was sentenced to death for the 1994 slayings of his Korean-born wife, Sylvia, 34, and their two young children, Edward, 7, and Anna, 5, at their home in Okaloosa County. Trial testimony revealed he committed these murders after his wife sought a divorce, using a crowbar, rope and machete in a brutal attack. He pleaded guilty to the murders in 1996.
The condemned inmate’s final words indicate he had little grasp of reality or understanding of his impending punishment. He bizarrely thanked “the good people of the Sunshine state for killing me in the most cold, calculated, clean, humane, efficient way possible,” adding, “I have no complaint.” He was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. local time.
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In addition to the nine executions in Florida, state killings so far this year have included four in Texas, four in South Carolina, three in Alabama, two in Oklahoma, and one each in Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
Florida is currently scheduled to send two more individuals to their deaths this year: Kayle Barrington Bates on August 19, and Curtis Windom on August 28. Two executions are planned in Texas, two in Tennessee, and one each in Utah, Alabama, Indiana and Missouri, putting the US on track to execute 37 people in 2025.
7. Readers protest against the closure of Mehring Verlag’s bank account
In an act of political censorship, Postbank, which is owned by Deutsche Bank, terminated the accounts of Mehring Verlag and its managing director Wolfgang Zimmermann over a month ago. As Mehring Verlag, the German-language publishing house of the World Socialist Web Site, states, the closure is aimed at sabotaging its work and obstructing the distribution of its books.
Workers, academics and many other readers have expressed outrage at the censorship in protest emails and statements, declaring their solidarity with the publishing house.
The bank has provided no reason for this arbitrary harassment and, despite the protest, remains silent. In a reply to the Mehring Verlag, it wrote: “You are dissatisfied and cannot understand why we issued the termination. Now you are requesting an explanation from us.” The “explanation” in the letter consists of refusing to provide one, citing the terms and conditions: “We are not obliged to provide a justification for our decision. We ask for your understanding.”
This brazen and undemocratic action by Deutsche Bank, targeting left-wing opponents of war, underscores the urgent need to build a socialist movement to abolish the entire criminal and parasitic system of finance capitalism. As reader Doug N. wrote in a protest email to the bank: “You provide yet another argument for the nationalization of the banks.”
8. Secretive overhaul of New Zealand terror law targets protests
In a little publicized visit to Wellington on July 30, US FBI Director Kash Patel, opened a new permanent agency office in the capital, targeting China. Meeting with Intelligence Agencies Minister Judith Collins and others, Patel said the office will, partnering with NZ, have responsibility across the southwest Pacific to “investigate and disrupt” activities such as terrorism, cybercrime and “foreign intelligence threats.”
The population is deliberately being kept in the dark about the chilling attacks on basic democratic rights. The ongoing expansion of its draconian laws is a blunt warning of the escalating political suppression and censorship as the government further commits itself, in defiance of widespread anti-war sentiment, to what would be a catastrophic global war involving nuclear-armed powers.
9. Initial results of the IWA-RFC investigation into the death of Ronald Adams Sr.
A joint legislative hearing was held Thursday in the town of Kerrville, Texas to review the response to the July 4 flooding on the banks of the Guadalupe River leading to the deaths of at least 135 people and the displacement of thousands more from their homes.
The hearing was conducted by the joint Texas House and Senate committees on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding. It heard testimony from a group of invited officials involved in the disaster response as well as community members directly affected by the flooding.
Noticeably absent from the hearings Thursday and a previous such event held July 23 were Texas governor Greg Abbott and officials from either the Trump administration or the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), who bear the lion’s share of blame for the disaster. The highest figure present at both events was Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
Both Abbott and Trump have diverted billions of dollars from natural disaster response and prevention in order to provide tax breaks and subsidies to the ultra-wealthy along with massively boosting the repressive apparatus of the state to attack working class immigrants, using the pretext of a non-existent border “invasion.”
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The Trump administration has made no mention of the flood over the past several weeks, while the mainstream media has either dropped the issue or provided the most minimal coverage of the disaster. Official aid organizations have long since left the devastated area, leaving residents to recover entirely on their own.
11. The lessons of the Philadelphia municipal strike and the way forward
The Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee reports:
It has now been two weeks since we had our contract forced on us by the AFSCME District Council 33 leaders. It was made clear then that they would not be fighting for us by claiming the below-inflation raises and other concessions made behind our backs were the “best that we could get.”
In fact, this contract is an act of calculated sabotage. As we stated when the tentative agreement (TA) was announced: “The union officials sprung this deal on workers behind their backs and ended the strike without a vote. This shows that they are working hand in hand with the city to prevent the strike from developing into a broader fight against inequality and the Democratic Party.”
The events in the past two weeks have proven this to be the case. Last Thursday, white-collar workers in our sister union, District Council 47, were forced to accept a sellout contract offer as well in another low-turnout vote. Their contract offered just 8.5 percent raises over three years, ignoring key demands like remote work. The TA was announced immediately after a strike vote revealed strong support for action, with DC 47 members voting 76 percent to authorize a strike on July 14. The very next day, July 15, the union announced the tentative agreement.
These weren’t tentative agreements but strike-breaking injunctions by another name.
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Across the country, the same playbook is used: contract violations, budget cuts, union treachery and bipartisan demands for “fiscal responsibility” at workers’ expense. Each betrayal further incites the need for independent, militant rank-and-file organization.
The Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee underscores these urgent lessons:
Austerity and attacks on living standards are not isolated “negotiation issues,” but part of a coordinated effort between both established parties and the union bureaucracy.
DC 33 and other union leaderships are instruments of the political establishment, blocking, demobilizing and betraying workers’ struggles in the name of “realism.”
It is necessary for workers to establish their own independent organizations as these struggles approach in order to effectively combat the combined will of management and the union bureaucracy.
Any real fightback—whether among teachers, transit workers, sanitation workers, or any other public sector group—depends on breaking from the union apparatus and building rank-and-file committees that unify and coordinate resistance. The Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee was formed explicitly for this task: to resist sellouts, to rally the broadest possible unity and to ensure struggles are led by workers themselves.
12. New Zealand nurses strike against wage cuts, staffing crisis
An estimated 36,000 nurses, healthcare assistants and midwives in New Zealand’s public hospitals struck for 24 hours on July 30 to protest below-inflation pay offers from the government and a severe staffing crisis.
Rallies and pickets were organized at 33 locations across the country. In Wellington healthcare workers marched to the headquarters of the government agency Health NZ Te Whatu Ora and to parliament.
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As [New Zealand's} economic crisis deepens, the government is making working people pay through stepped up attacks on jobs, conditions and vital services. At the same time, it is doubling the military budget to prepare for new imperialist wars. The union apparatus, composed of well-paid officials loyal to capitalism, is enforcing this agenda.
Healthcare workers want to fight, but to do so they need new organizations: rank-and-file committees that are controlled by workers themselves and are independent of the union bureaucracies. These committees will provide the means to link up with other workers in New Zealand and internationally, including Australia and the UK, where nurses and doctors are entering into struggles.
Healthcare workers should base their struggle on a socialist perspective. This means rejecting the lie that properly resourced hospitals, with well-paid staff providing care to all who need it, is “unaffordable.” The necessary resources can be found by expropriating the super-rich and by ending the diversion of billions of dollars to the military.
13. Buzz Hargrove and the rotten corporatist legacy of the Canadian Auto Workers—Part 2
During Hargrove’s 16 years as CAW president and in tandem with its ever more naked role as an enforcer of concessions and job cuts, Canada’s largest industrial union lurched politically sharply right.
Hargrove emerged as a keen advocate of closer ties with the big business Liberals in national politics and in Ontario, the country’s most populous and industrialized province. From 1998 on, Unifor championed so-called “strategic voting”—that is, votes for Liberal candidates in preference to those of the social-democrats of the New Democratic Party (NDP), if they were better placed to defeat the Conservatives. Inside the NDP, with which Unifor remained formally affiliated until 2008, Hargrove and the CAW bureaucrats pressed for governmental alliances with the Liberals when parliamentary arithmetic allowed.
Hargrove was thus among the principal architects of the union-NDP-Liberal alliance, which has been used to politically suppress the working class for the past quarter-century. Just three months after Hargrove stepped down as CAW president, the NDP agreed to serve as the junior partner in an abortive Liberal-led national coalition government pledged to implementing more than $50 billion in corporate tax cuts, ensuring “fiscal responsibility,” and waging neo-colonial war in Afghanistan through 2011.
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Hargrove’s lengthy tenure at the head of the CAW set the stage for the union to move sharply further to the right and deepen its anti-worker corporatist ties with big business and the state following his retirement.
Together with the UAW in the US, the CAW worked closely in 2009 with the Big Three auto bosses, the Obama administration in Washington, and the federal Conservative and Ontario Liberal governments to impose massive wage and benefit cuts and multi-tier wage structures to restore the profitability of the North American auto industry. Although Ford Canada eschewed a government “bailout,” which was conditional on the unions’ reopening of workers’ contracts, the CAW “in fairness” imposed the same concessions on Ford workers.
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Hargrove’s career exemplified the evolution of the trade union bureaucracy in Canada and internationally. In response to the globalization of production and capital’s drive to intensify worker exploitation, the caste of well-heeled union officials integrated themselves ever more fully into corporate management and the state, imposing concessions and suppressing working class resistance to the dismantling of public services and the evisceration of workers’ rights.
Workers seeking to fight today against capitalist austerity and war must not simply repudiate Hargrove, but the entire nationalist, pro-capitalist perspective of trade unionism that he so avidly promoted.
14. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Bangladesh:
Gazipur police attack ceramic factory workers
India:
Tamil Nadu middle school teachers demand equal pay
Retired Tamil Nadu transport workers demand increased pension and allowances
Jharkhand 108 Emergency ambulance workers strike for better wages and conditions
Karnataka commuter transport workers protest before indefinite strike
Australia:
Industrial action by Queensland nurses and midwives enters third month
Queensland teachers to strike for better pay and conditions
Townsville City Council workers strike over low pay
Scenic Rim council workers strike for better pay offer
Boom crane crew in Queensland strike for pay increase
Schindler Lifts electricians in Western Australia strike for better pay
Infrabuild Mesh workers in Queensland strike for pay rise
GE Aerospace workers at Brisbane Airport strike for increased wages
Queensland Department of Transport engineers begin industrial action for pay rise
Northern Territory public hospital pharmacists threaten to take industrial action over staffing
Public sector healthcare workers in South Australia strike over low pay
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
