1. Famine officially declared in Gaza
The UN-affiliated body that monitors mass hunger has for the first time officially declared a famine in Gaza City and warned that other areas of Gaza will soon face famine.
The announcement by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) is the first time that the organization has declared a famine outside of Africa.
The declaration of a famine in Gaza stands as yet another piece of evidence that Israel, with the support of the imperialist powers, is deliberately seeking to exterminate the Palestinian people through mass starvation.
The IPC noted that recent months have seen the “most severe deterioration” since the Israeli onslaught on Gaza began in October 2023.
The report warned that “this famine is entirely man-made.” It added that “after 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution, and death.”
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the report in Hitlerian fashion, not only denying the famine but claiming that the occupying force imposing it on the Palestinian population is seeking to save them from hunger. “Israel does not have a policy of starvation. Israel has a policy of preventing starvation,” he said. “Israel will continue to act responsibly, ensuring aid reaches Gaza’s civilians while destroying Hamas’s terror machine.”
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The declaration of famine came just days after the Israeli military announced the launch of its long-planned attack on Gaza City, which is aimed at the total military conquest of Gaza in preparation for the roundup of its population to concentration camps and their forcible displacement from their ancestral land.
On Friday, President Donald Trump threatened to extend the current military occupation of Washington D.C. to other major US cities, including Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. His threats to essentially impose martial law on major American cities came the same day the Pentagon confirmed that the over 2,000 National Guard soldiers currently occupying D.C. would begin carrying weapons of war.
Speaking first at the Kennedy Center and again inside the Oval Office, Trump, wearing a red hat with the phrase “Trump Was Right About Everything,” said he was receiving calls “from politicians begging me to go to Chicago, begging me to go to New York, begging me to go to Los Angeles.”
Leaving the door open for an extended military deployment, perhaps through the mid-term elections and beyond, Trump said, “And the big question is how long do we stay? Because if we stay, we want to make sure it doesn’t come back.”
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Revealing that there are ongoing discussions and plans at the highest levels of the government to supplement the deployment of National Guard forces with active duty military elements, Trump said the National Guard “has done such an incredible job, working with the police” that “we haven’t had to bring in the regular military, which we are willing to do if we have to.”
He continued, “And after we do this we’ll go to another location and we’ll make it safe also.”
“Chicago is a mess,” Trump said. “You have an incompetent mayor. Grossly incompetent, and we’ll straighten that one out probably next. That will be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”
Trump claimed he did “great with the black vote” and that “African American women” were “screaming” for Trump to flood the city with police and military. “I think Chicago will be next and then we’ll help with New York,” he added.
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Trump’s deployment of the military in D.C. and threats to expand to other cities must be taken with deadly seriousness. Trump is arrogating to himself the powers of dictator, with no resistance from the nominal opposition party.
At the White House and at the Kennedy Center, Trump threatened D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. He said:
I’m tired of listening to these people say how safe it was before we got here. It was unsafe, it was horrible, and Mayor Bowser better get her act straight or she won’t be mayor very long because we will take it over with the federal government, run it like it is supposed to be run.
Asked by the Washington Post to respond to Trump’s plans to arm the military elements currently in the city, Bowser “declined to comment on the authorization of weapons.”
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Trump’s attacks on alleged “phony” crime stats produced by the Metro Police serve several purposes. His fascist and racist narrative that D.C. is overrun with crime is aimed at demonizing the working class and justifying military occupation of the capital—a major step in the erection of a dictatorship. At the same time, it normalizes the presence of armed agents of the state in public life and shifts attention away from the real criminality of US imperialism: the genocide and forced starvation campaign in Gaza, the mass deportation operation, the gutting of democratic rights by the Supreme Court and the ongoing transfer of wealth from the working class to the parasitic ruling class.
A wave of sellout contracts has swept through the grocery industry this summer. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is engaged in a calculated campaign to block strikes sand impose pro-company agreements across the country.
Within the last week, the UFCW announced the ratification of three separate agreements. Between August 15 and August 21, three deals were declared “ratified” by the UFCW:
August 15 — Stater Bros.: Covers 12,000 workers across Southern California.
August 21 — Kroger Indiana: Covers 8,000 workers, passed by a dubious 56 percent after two rejections.
August 21 — Gelson’s: Covers roughly 2,000 Southern California workers.
This coordinated betrayal is taking place under conditions of escalating attacks on workers and democratic rights by the Trump administration, which is carrying out a coup d’état in Washington D.C. The UFCW bureaucracy, working hand in glove with corporate management and the state, is systematically isolating struggles, rushing votes, withholding information and forcing through poverty contracts. In the end, it presents every betrayal as a “historic victory.”
Yet cracks are emerging. Despite the UFCW’s efforts, the revolt at Kroger in Indiana—where workers twice rejected agreements before a highly suspicious ratification—signals growing rank-and-file opposition to the union’s stranglehold and exposes the unsustainability of its pro-corporate strategy.
These deals share the same playbook: suppress strike action, limit information, restrict worker discussion and ram through agreements that protect corporate profits while locking workers into poverty.
The poverty imposed on grocery workers stands in stark contrast to the billions generated by the companies and the six-figure salaries of corporate executives and union officials alike. In California’s urban centers, where rents, food, transportation and healthcare costs are skyrocketing, the average grocery wage of $16 to $18 an hour falls far below what is needed for a decent living.
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To break out of this cycle of betrayal, workers must take matters into their own hands by forming independent rank-and-file committees, democratic bodies controlled by workers, not the union bureaucracy.
These committees must:
Rank-and-file auditing of the vote: Workers must have access to the balloting records to ensure the integrity of the vote. But no contract vote pushed under threats, or before workers have had a chance to review it, should be considered legitimate.
Seize control of negotiations: Bargaining sessions must be livestreamed for full transparency.
Unite across workplaces: Link workers at Stater Bros., Ralphs, Gelson’s, Safeway, Kroger, and beyond, from logistics to teachers to health care workers.
Prepare mass action: Organize general strikes independent of UFCW or other union control.
Fight for workers’ needs: Demand what workers require, not what corporations claim they can afford.
Confront the political establishment: Oppose both the Trump administration and the Democratic Party, which jointly defend corporate interests and suppress worker struggles.
4. Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour: A political trap to promote the Democratic Party
Sanders’ events have drawn large audiences because workers and young people are seeking a way to oppose the immense crisis engulfing the United States. Trump is implementing a dictatorship—deploying troops in Washington D.C. and threatening to extend military occupations to Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities—while carrying out a fascistic assault on immigrants and democratic rights. The genocide in Gaza is continuing, part of an escalating global war.
These conditions, combined with staggering levels of social inequality, have produced deep frustration and anger in the working class and among young people.
But Sanders’ role is not to lead a fight against this crisis, but to capture and divert opposition back into the Democratic Party—the very party of Wall Street, war, and repression. By insisting that the Democrats can be pushed to the left, he works to dissipate the anger of workers and youth and prevent the emergence of an independent movement of the working class, which is what is above all necessary.
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A central claim of Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour—and of his politics more broadly—is that the Democratic Party was once a party of the working class and can be pushed back in that direction. In Asheville, North Carolina,, he told the audience, “The Democratic Party in many, many respects, has turned its back on the working class of this country … If Democrats want to win elections, they’re going to have to stop taking money from billionaires.” In Mingo County, West Virginia, he told the attendees, “You can take over the Democratic Party.”
The claim that the Democrats were once, or could again be, a party of the working class is contradicted by the party’s entire history.
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As capitalism expanded, the Republicans emerged as the party of the robber barons, while the Democrats postured as reformers to contain working class unrest. Woodrow Wilson introduced the graduated income tax but at the same time took the US into World War I, unleashed the Red Scare, and sent troops against the Russian Revolution.
During the Great Depression, the Democrats under Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to insurrectionary class struggles with the New Deal—a program of social reforms designed to contain these struggles and prevent the emergence of an independent political movement of the working class. Roosevelt also led the US into World War II, jailed Trotskyists under the Smith Act, and oversaw the internment of Japanese-Americans.
In the 1960s, Johnson’s “Great Society” enacted Medicare and Medicaid to contain upheavals such as the civil rights movement, the urban rebellions, and mass strikes. This was the last gasp of social reform in the US, which was shipwrecked by the imperialist war in Vietnam. As the ruling class lurched to the right, it dismantled past social reforms while presiding over the expansion of American militarism.
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Sanders’ two presidential campaigns stand as the clearest expression of his political role. In both 2016 and 2020, Sanders won mass support by presenting himself as a critic of the “billionaire class” and advocate of a “political revolution.” But each time, after securing millions of votes and mobilizing workers and youth, he backed the candidate of the Democratic Party establishment, Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden—the chosen representatives of Wall Street and the military.
Sanders’ subsequent support for the Biden administration, which oversaw unprecedented handouts to the banks and the prosecution of imperialist war, further demonstrated his function as a prop of capitalist rule. Until the eve of the 2024 elections Sanders was telling workers and young people that Biden was the “most progressive, pro-worker president since FDR.” This created the political vacuum that enabled Trump to channel social anger in a reactionary direction.
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The real politics of Sanders is most clearly exposed in his positions on foreign policy. However much he postures as an opponent of the “billionaire class” at home, Sanders has never opposed the global interests of American capitalism.
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On all fundamental issues, Sanders is in full agreement with the foreign policy objectives of American imperialism. Even in relation to Trump, he has for the most part maintained a criminal silence on the fascistic assault on immigrants, declaring in March of this year, “Nobody thinks illegal immigration is appropriate.” At the same time, he champions a program of economic nationalism that dovetails with Trump’s trade wars, which are direct preparations for war abroad and attacks on the working class at home, driving up the cost of living and fueling mass layoffs.
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The question posed is not simply the role of Bernie Sanders as an individual, but of an entire type of politics that seeks to capture the anger of workers and youth, preserve the authority of the Democratic Party, and block the development of an independent movement of the working class.
This is the politics of middle-class pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which promote Sanders and his myths about reforming the Democrats. As the rise, consolidation, and now return of Trump have demonstrated, such politics, in fact, strengthen, rather than weaken, the far-right.
The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) proclaims an agenda shared with all of Britain’s pseudo-left groups of joining and supposedly imparting a revolutionary character to the new party announced by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and MP Zara Sultana.
Unlike its competitors, it has the additional task of reversing its claim, barely a year-and-a-half old, that Corbynite reformism is a dead letter in the working class and among young people. This was the basis for the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) relaunching itself as the Revolutionary Communist International.
Their U-turn was so abrupt, following immediately on Sultana’s July 3 resignation from Labour and declaration of a new party, that even Corbyn was still insisting at the time that discussions were “ongoing”.
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The turn towards Corbyn based on the transparently spurious assertion that he can be persuaded to adopt a revolutionary perspective is a return to political form for the RCP.
The group, now led by Alan Woods, was founded by Ted Grant. He broke from the Fourth International following the Second World War and subsequently built his entire perspective for decades on the argument that the postwar restabilization of capitalism, made possible only by the suppression of revolutionary struggles by Stalinism, had disproved Trotsky’s revolutionary prognosis. Instead, for a protracted historical period, independent revolutionary action by the proletariat was impossible thanks to the completion of the “democratic counter-revolution,” necessitating extended entry into the Labour Party in Britain while advocating an essentially left reformist program of achieving socialism through Labour’s nationalization of the top 200 monopolies.
The entire activity of what became known as the Militant Tendency, and continued by its splinter led by Woods, was based on the assertion that entry work in Labour—justified above all by its base in the trade unions—could push it to adopt a socialist program. Woods and Grant stuck rigidly to this scenario throughout the leadership of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. And no tendency was more enthused when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of Britain’s Labour Party in 2015.
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In any event, the RCP, while standing “on the program of socialist revolution”, will stand side by side with Corbyn in fighting for reforms without which “the socialist revolution would be an impossible utopia.”
Woods develops an entirely novel and anti-Marxist critique of reformism, wholly devoid of an historical or class character. “Our criticism of the right reformists is precisely that they do not fight effectively for reforms”, he writes, rather than identifying them as the unalloyed political servants of the bourgeoisie. He then urges his readers to recognize that, in contrast to the right-wing, the left reformists sincerely “believe that it is possible to achieve ambitious reforms and improvements in living standards within the limits of the capitalist system.”
Recognizing such good intentions, therefore, “Whenever Jeremy Corbyn takes a step in the right direction, we will support him. But whenever he takes a step back, whenever he shows equivocations and vacillations (which he has done on many occasions) we reserve the right to criticize him in a firm but comradely manner.”
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Woods’ proposed “comradely” criticisms, amid “fruitful and honest collaboration with the left reformists” have nothing in common with Marxism, which demands a relentless exposure of these “lefts”.
Above all they repudiate the central insistence of Trotsky that social revolution in Britain depends on breaking the working class from the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy and that this depends on the systematic exposure of its left representatives, whose rhetoric is designed to chime with the socialist sentiment of the leftward moving masses to prevent this taking revolutionary forms.
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For the RCP, their emphasis is not on the inevitable clash between the workers and their leaders but the temporary alignment. They write in “The struggle against reformism”, published July 15, that “We must take as our starting point the consciousness of the masses as it is now, including any illusions they might have”.
Obviously, and this means participating in the struggles of the working class as they exist. But there are two big problems with how this general truth is applied by the RCP to the specific circumstances of the new Corbynite party.
Firstly, what struggles even for reforms are its leading figures associated with? The RCP acknowledges of the likes of Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Syriza that “None have delivered a single meaningful reform” because they have never waged a political struggle against the right-wing.
And secondly, a “bridge” cannot be built from the reformist struggles of the working class to revolutionary ones without doing the political work to “dismiss the ‘reformist illusions’ of the masses… to inform the workers that they are making a mistake, that their leaders will betray,” raised in disparaging terms by the RCP. This, they claim, is “all well and good in the abstract… But it would still be utterly self-defeating and false, precisely because it is so abstract.”
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Outlining its attitude towards the Corbyn/Sultana party, the Socialist Equality Party explained that, objectively, this was “a milestone in the ongoing breakup of the Labour Party. Millions of workers and young people have drawn the conclusion that Labour, under the leadership of Keir Starmer, is an irredeemably right-wing, pro-business party of warmongers and defenders of genocide in Gaza.”
But we also stressed:
Although Corbyn has been forced to make an organizational break from Labour, his new party does not represent a political break from Labourism. It advocates only limited reforms to be pursued through parliament—a Labour Party Mark II…
None of this is changed, or will be changed in the future, by the immediate and universal support for this initiative given by numerous pseudo-left tendencies which profess to be revolutionary. The role of groups such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and Socialist Party (SP) will be as cheerleaders and apologists for this new reformist party. It is they who will adapt to the politics of Corbyn, and not the other way around.
A statement of the the Socialist Equality Group in Brazil (GSI):
The Trump administration has launched a violent escalation of imperialist threats against Venezuela with the dispatch of an armada to within striking distance of the South American nation’s shores. The deployment of three guided missile destroyers and an attack submarine, together with 4,000 personnel, to the southern Caribbean has been followed by the dispatch of three amphibious assault ships carrying an expeditionary force of 2,000 Marines.
The military siege of Venezuela marks a new stage in an unprecedented escalation of US imperialist aggression against Latin America as a whole.
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The action was preceded by the absurd designation of Maduro and his government as the leaders of the Cartel de los Soles—a supposed drug trafficking organization whose very existence lacks any credible evidence. Classifying this cartel as a “terrorist organization,” Washington has placed a $50 million bounty on the Venezuelan president’s head.
The inflammatory attack against Venezuela is directed at creating an ominous precedent for the entire planet; US imperialism is proclaiming its right to intervene violently against any regime it considers an obstacle to its interests.
Although the attack on Venezuela has advanced systematically under previous Republican and Democratic administrations alike, Trump’s actions mark a qualitative leap.
Washington has abandoned the hypocritical pretensions of “restoring democracy” and “human rights,” which served as a cover for its previous interventions. Trump is not bothering to reprise the farcical attempt to pass off a nonentity like Juan Guaidó as the “legitimate” president in furtherance of regime change. It is instead resorting to naked armed force.
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The escalation against Venezuela is part of a coordinated offensive that—combining military, economic and political means—aims to establish unrestricted US domination over Latin America.
This imperialist onslaught has advanced by leaps and bounds in the first months of the second Trump administration.
The first days of his term were marked by the neocolonial bullying of Panama, threatening military invasion if the country did not cede to the US total control over the Panama Canal.
It gained momentum with the announcement of crippling tariffs against Brazil, openly justified as a political intervention against the Brazilian government to prevent the trial of the country’s fascist former president Jair Bolsonaro for his 2023 coup attempt.
In a historic shift, Washington has adopted the kind of aggressive hostility toward Brazil—the region’s largest power and a longtime US ally—previously reserved for Venezuela and countries it has labeled the “Axis of Evil.”
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A day before dispatching ships and troops to the Caribbean, Trump hosted a NATO crisis summit at the White House. Creating huge rifts with the European imperialist powers, the meeting was prompted by Washington’s turn away from the war against Russia in Ukraine.
This strategic shift is guided by the Trump administration’s openly stated goal of concentrating US forces for war against China, within which Latin America constitutes a major battleground.
The grotesque conspiracy theory used to justify the US incursion into a region it has historically considered its “own backyard,” which combines the phony pretexts of the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror,” has as its corollary the blaming of China and its “evil agenda” for destabilizing the Western Hemisphere.
This narrative, modeled on Hitler’s “Big Lie,” was explicitly formulated in SOUTHCOM’s strategic guidelines presented in February. The Pentagon stated that “transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) ... use enormous revenue from drug trafficking ... to corrupt and co-opt portions of regional governments” in Latin America, and thus “open space for China, Russia, and other malign actors to achieve strategic ends and further their agendas.”
In other words, what begins nominally as a fight against drug trafficking evolves seamlessly into the overthrow of targeted governments and a war between great powers for control of strategic resources and chokepoints.
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US imperialism’s struggle for domination of the Western Hemisphere and the rest of the planet merges directly with efforts to impose a dictatorial regime within the United States itself.
The war plans of the capitalist oligarchy require massive attacks on the working class in the United States and the crushing of its power of resistance.
The Trump administration is mobilizing military forces to wage war not only against its “strategic rivals” but against the American people as well. On August 11, it began a military occupation of Washington D.C., mobilizing nearly 9,000 police and military troops.
This military occupation represents the high point of a systematic effort to impose a presidential dictatorship, continuing the objectives of the fascist coup attempt of January 6, 2021.
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The response to the attacks of U.S. imperialism demonstrates the profound crisis of the bourgeois nationalist governments of the so-called Pink Tide.
The government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party (PT), recently declared to the press a genuine concern that Washington is preparing a regime change operation in Brazil.
The solution sought by Lula is emblematic. Internally, the PT seeks to move closer to the extreme right on the basis of a reactionary nationalist ideology; externally, it seeks to strengthen relations with the right-wing regimes in the region and with European imperialism.
Lula’s desperate initiatives have included an appeal for collaboration with Ecuador’s fascistic President Daniel Noboa to combat organized crime in the region; in other words, to legitimize the bogeyman created by Washington for its hemispheric interventions. The same attitude pervades among all the failed governments of the Pink Tide.
7. 20,000 New Zealand high school teachers strike
Almost 20,000 high school teachers took part in a nationwide one-day strike on August 20 to protest a wage-cutting proposal from the government. Pickets and protest rallies were organized in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and many other cities and towns across the country.
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The government responded to the strike with a campaign of misinformation. A statement on August 13 by Education Minister Erica Stanford and Public Service Minister Judith Collins falsely claimed that a senior teacher was currently paid $147,000. Collins was later forced to apologize, saying she got “mixed up.”
The statement declared that the 1 percent offer “reflects the current fiscal constraints and the substantial increases teachers have received over the past three years—an average increase of 14.5 per cent.”
In fact, 14.5 percent over three years was an effective pay cut. According to Statistics NZ’s household living-costs price index, the average household’s costs increased 8.2 percent during 2022, 7 percent in 2023 and 3 percent in 2024—i.e. more than 18 percent over three years.
The claim that there is “no money” to increase pay for teachers and nurses—who recently went on strike after rejecting a similar offer—is another lie.
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For decades, the state and big business have relied on the trade union bureaucracy to ensure that strikes, if they cannot be shut down, remain limited to one-day or half-day actions, and that different sections of the working class are kept isolated from each other. The aim is to drag out disputes and wear down workers’ resistance to a below-inflation deal—as happened repeatedly during the last Labour government.
Another sellout is being prepared.
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To prevent a sellout and carry out a real struggle, the Socialist Equality Group calls on teachers and other school staff to take matters into their own hands by organizing rank-and-file committees, independent of the union apparatus. Such committees must link up with primary and early childhood teachers, healthcare workers and others, to build a mass movement capable of defeating the government’s agenda of austerity and militarism.
8. Gas exposure at Colorado dairy farm kills 6
Six farm workers died in an accident at a dairy farm in Keenesburg, Colorado about 40 miles northwest of Denver. Fire crews responded at 6pm local time Thursday to a “confined space rescue” at a site owned by Prospect Valley Dairy LLC. The site is comprised of a 32,500 square foot milking parlor and several barns spanning over half-a-million square feet. Authorities reportedly responded to reports of unaccounted for people within a confined space at the facility.
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Limited details of the incident are available to the public as of this writing, but preliminary reports suggest that the six victims were exposed to hazardous gas. Initial reports from the coroner's office indicated that all six dead were adult men except for one victim who may have been just 17 years-old.
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Farm laborers work in one of the most dangerous industries in the United States. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupations categorize as agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing are the fourth largest group for workplace fatalities at 448 per 100,000 workers and an injury rate of 4,200 per 100,000 in 2023. Dairy farms specifically saw a total of 21 deaths and a rate of 3,100 injuries per 100,000 in 2023.
9. Trump-Putin summit exposes Mélenchon’s New Popular Front
The shift in US foreign policy with the holding of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska triggered an outburst of anger from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the France Unbowed (LFI) party and its New Popular Front (NFP) alliance. He did not call, however, to mobilize workers against US war threats against Iran or Venezuela, or the escalation of war and military spending from Paris to Moscow. He issued nationalist calls for France to grab a bigger share of the spoils of war.
His article, titled “In Alaska, the cruel beginning of a new world order,” lays out a policy that, in its content if not in its rhetoric, could be embraced by right-wing politicians.
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He who wants the ends wants the means. Macron’s plan to double French military spending by 2030 is to be financed by Prime Minister François Bayrou’s plan for €45 billion in social cuts, just as Berlin’s plans for €1 trillion in military spending are to be financed by attacks on German workers. Supporters of militarization like the NFP will try to delay, disorient, disorganize, and ultimately disband workers struggles against austerity and military-police rule.
In an era of globalized supply chains and global war, there is no national road to salvation. Were he teleported into the Elysée presidential palace, Mélenchon claims, the French capitalist state would fearlessly defy Washington, Moscow, Berlin all at once, and capitalism would suddenly be different. This is what he says, but what is the situation, and what does his record show?
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Defeats suffered by the NATO-backed regime in Ukraine and Trump’s summit in Alaska have exposed the European imperialist powers. They spent hundreds of billions of euros to boost their armies, staking everything on winning a war with Russia alongside the United States. Now, they have been wrong-footed, as the far-right US president tries to broker a peace deal to end the war they made their key justification for austerity and plans to wage “high-intensity war.”
LFI, in line with similar middle class parties across Europe like the Left Party in Germany and Podemos-Sumar in Spain, did not oppose this policy. While Left Party officials applauded German re-militarization, and Podemos sat in a government that sent anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, LFI formed the NFP alliance with the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS), the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) and the Greens. Mélenchon wrote into the NFP’s election program Macron’s wildly unpopular call to send French troops as “peacekeepers” to Ukraine.
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As workers in France prepare strikes against Bayrou this autumn, their best allies are their class brothers and sisters in Germany and internationally, not the NFP’s union bureaucracies and openly pro-austerity parties like the PS. Workers in France must coordinate their struggles against imperialist war, austerity and police-state dictatorship with workers in Germany. For this, workers on both sides of the Rhine will have to build new organizations of struggle and adopt a Trotskyist political perspective against the nationalism promoted by Mélenchon.
10. Suspect in Nord Stream pipeline explosion arrested
Almost three years after the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022, one of the alleged perpetrators has been arrested for the first time. Italian police arrested Ukrainian ex-officer Serhii K., whom the German Federal Prosecutor's Office accuses of coordinating the attacks and, as a member of a group, planting the explosive charges on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. The 49-year-old had been vacationing with his family in the Rimini area, even though there was an international arrest warrant out for him.
For the German government, the arrest comes at a very inopportune time. If the suspect reveals who was behind the attack, it could lead to serious tensions with Kiev and Washington. This comes at a time when Berlin and Kiev are pulling out all the stops to prevent President Trump from striking a deal with Moscow and to persuade him to continue supporting the war.
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The movements of the attackers are now well documented based on GPS data, images from surveillance and speed cameras, and witness statements from local residents. Traces of explosives were also found on the “Andromeda,” confirming that the boat was used for the attack.
However, the question of who was behind the attacks remains controversial. Neither the German nor other investigative authorities have shown much interest in pursuing the matter so far. In Denmark and Sweden, where the attacks took place in their territorial waters, the investigations were discontinued after a short time.
However, Der Spiegel’s report leaves little doubt that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Ukrainian military were involved and that the highest government circles were informed. The German government was also warned by the Dutch intelligence service, but ignored the warning or did not take it seriously.
11. FBI raids home and office of former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton
On Friday, the FBI raided the Maryland home and Washington D.C. office of former Trump National Security Adviser and subsequent critic of the president, John Bolton. A longtime neo-con war hawk, Bolton served as Trump’s third national security advisor for 17 months during his first term. Bolton clashed with Trump over Iran and North Korea and was fired in 2019.
Previously, Bolton served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration and held positions in the Reagan administration.
Trump’s Justice Department filed suit against Bolton in 2019 seeking to block publication of his tell-all memoir, released in 2020 and titled The Room Where It Happened. The suit claimed Bolton illegally published classified information in his book. The suit languished and was dropped in 2021 during the Biden administration.
The Justice Department refused to comment on the FBI raid, but press reports said it was linked to a criminal investigation of Bolton’s handling of classified information both in his book and over subsequent years.
In fact, the raid, carried out in broad daylight, with news footage showing FBI agents carrying sacks of documents from Bolton’s home and office, marked a major escalation in Trump’s targeting of political critics for retribution by the state. This crackdown and intimidation of political opponents is a critical aspect of Trump’s erection of a presidential dictatorship and police state.
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The criminal investigation and FBI raid against Bolton are part of a broader attack by Trump and the Justice Department against Trump’s political opponents. Last month, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, publicly accused former President Barack Obama of “treason” for having launched an investigation into allegations of Russian interference into the 2016 election to harm the campaign of Hillary Clinton and boost that of Trump. Gabbard released a previously classified 2020 report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and issued a criminal referral to the Justice Department to investigate Obama.
The Justice Department is separately conducting mortgage fraud investigations into Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump and his company. Also under criminal investigation is former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who laid charges against Trump for his efforts to overthrow the 2020 election and his removal and retention of presidential records, including highly classified materials, from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office.
12. Confusion, unclarified issues and a gaping hole in this year’s Berlin Biennale art exhibition
The Berlin Biennale is a contemporary art exhibition held every two to three years since 1998 at a number of venues across Germany’s capital city. This year’s event, the 13th, is taking place in four separate venues from June to September and features 170 works by 60 artists from nearly 40 countries. The central motif for this year’s Biennale is explicitly political.
According to Biennale curator Zasha Colah, introducing the exhibition, art has “the ability to define its own laws in the face of lawful violence in unjust systems and to assert itself even under conditions of persecution and militarization—sending messages that can be passed on.”
At the program presentation in Berlin, Colah further commented: “We find ourselves in a time of fear in Germany, in which the media landscape, the cultural landscape and the political landscape are characterized by enormous unrest.” The Biennale presents itself as offering curators the possibility of taking “bold artistic / political approaches beyond the market.”
Against a background of immense political and social tension—including the danger of a Third World War between nuclear-armed nations (80 years after the nuclear devastation in Japan); the rapid familiarization of society; support for the Gaza genocide by every major power; ecological breakdown; and unprecedented levels of social insecurity—the holding of an art exhibition in the middle of Europe seemingly devoted to tackling such issues through the medium of art is to be welcomed.
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A perusal of the artworks on show at the Biennale at its four centers, however, disappoints, in one major respect is deeply troubling and makes clear that enormous questions of orientation remain unresolved.
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Despite its political pretensions, the Biennale contains a gaping hole. It fails to include a single work dealing with the most abominable social and political crime taking place at present—the systematic genocide/ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Zionist regime and its imperialist backers in the US and Europe.
The absence of any treatment of the genocide currently taking place under the horrified gaze of the world’s population is shameful.
*****
Artists today do not have the example of an October Revolution to inspire them, but the masses are globally on the move. Instead of sniping from the sidelines, as was the case with many of the figures featured at the Berlin Biennale, artists will find it necessary, in order to create genuinely “new art,” in Trotsky’s words, to be “at one with their epoch” and its tumultuous, ultimately revolutionary character.
Details have now emerged of the backroom concessions contract struck between the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and Air Canada early Tuesday morning, and of the thoroughly anti-democratic methods that the bureaucracy is now employing to ram it through.
The tentative agreement sabotaged the courageous defiance by over 10,500 flight attendants of a Liberal government strikebreaking order. That order was dictated by Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu on Saturday, August 15, less than 12 hours after the strike began, using the arbitrary, anti-democratic provisions of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.
In bringing a quick end to the strike, the CUPE leadership, working in close concert with the top brass of the Canadian Labour Congress, came to the rescue not only of the management and shareholders of Canada’s largest air carrier. They stanched a working-class challenge to the big business Mark Carney-led Liberal government that had manifestly thrown it into crisis, and could have become the catalyst for a mass movement against capitalist austerity, war and state-strikebreaking.
Under the proposed four-year contract, Air Canada is not offering a single penny more in wage increases to the majority of flight attendants above its derisory pre-strike offer.
14. Australia: Disability services cuts spearhead Labor’s productivity “roundtable”
Just three months after being re-elected, the Albanese Labor government used a three-day “Economic Reform Roundtable” this week to outline far-reaching measures to boost corporate profits and cut social spending, none of which were mentioned during the campaign for the May 3 election.
With the full complicity of the trade union chiefs, who eagerly took part in the closed-door sessions of 25 handpicked participants from the corporate and political establishment, the event became a vehicle to launch deeper cuts to social programs, starting with the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
In the middle of the “roundtable,” after months of promising there would be no changes to NDIS eligibility, Health Minister Mark Butler announced plans to restrict children’s access to the NDIS, with the goal of shaving billions of dollars from government outlays, primarily to make way for sharp increases in military spending.
Tens of thousands of children diagnosed with autism and other developmental conditions will be barred from the scheme from 2027, supposedly to be shunted into yet-to-be devised cost-cutting programs in partnership with the state and territory governments, to be cynically called “Thriving Kids.”
*****
Corporate media outlets hailed the gutting of the NDIS as just a first step toward what they and the government have labelled “budget repair.” That is a euphemism for axing social programs as part of an agenda of austerity and war preparations.
The Murdoch media’s Australian welcomed the NDIS attack as an initial downpayment, saying: “Anthony Albanese has taken a major first step in using the mandate from his dominant 94-seat election victory to tackle a deeply sensitive and politically challenging issue that governments have been unable to address.
“The shake-up was not taken to voters before the May 3 election but it is the right decision, done early… It is part of a bigger challenge to break what is now a widespread community expectation that it is possible for government to cater for every need.”
15. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Asia:
Bangladesh:
Thousands of MPO private education teachers demand federal recognition
Garment workers protest unpaid wages and factory closure
India:
IDBI bank workers hold national strike against proposed privatization
Karnataka ASHA workers hold three-day protest in Mysuru
Chenai corporation conservancy workers’ strike enters third week
Telangana: Telugu film industry workers remain on strike
Sri Lanka:
Public sector workers protest
Public sector workers protest
Australia and the Pacific:
WesTrac heavy machinery maintenance workers in New South Wales strike
Townsville City Council workers hold rolling stoppages for pay increase
Opal Specialty Packaging workers in NSW strike for improved pay
Getinge electricians remain locked out after 8 weeks, without pay
Glencore Ulan underground coal miners continue industrial action
Schindler Lifts locks out its NSW electricians
Crown Sydney casino workers strike for pay parity
Qantas engineers strike over low pay
Hydro Tasmania electricians prepare for industrial action
Brophy Family youth workers in Victoria strike for pay rise
16. Demand the freedom of Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky