Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: May 25-31
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Britain appeals to world court to reverse Iranian oil nationalization
100 years ago:
Part one of a four-part series examining the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, this article exposes the party’s defense of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism.
3. Another gruesome week on America’s death row: two executions, another halted amid bungled procedure
The three cases, unfolding within 24 hours, share a disturbing set of commonalities: fundamentally unfair sentencing proceedings, defendants whose severe mental illness, unaddressed childhood trauma and neurological damage went largely unaddressed at trial, and execution protocols the subject of legal challenge.
4. Texas cuts education jobs, shutters dozens of schools
Districts face budget deficits amid declining enrollment, budget crises, inflation and war.
5. West Lafayette, Indiana government fast-tracks SK Hynix memory chip factory construction
The city and county governments in West Lafayette, Indiana have approved road construction projects and issued building permits for SK Hynix to proceed with plans to build a massive microchip factory on a Purdue University site, against ongoing community opposition including a pending lawsuit filed by residents.
6. Virginia Governor Spanberger vetoes collective bargaining and immigrant protection bills
The veto of these two bills confirms—for the thousandth and first time—this fundamental reality of American politics: the Democratic party is a capitalist party charged with diffusing and disorienting popular hostility to the profit system.
The Anti-Weaponization Fund is not an anomaly. The language of rights, free speech, due process and protection from state persecution is being selectively deployed in the service of the ruling class which is suppressing its opponents, and now turning to openly authoritarian methods.
Tennessee’s Charlie Kirk Act, now awaiting the governor’s signature, makes that principle permanent and institutional. Recently passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, the law forbids public universities from disinviting speakers in response to threatened protests, restricts protesters from disrupting invited speakers, and mandates adoption of “institutional neutrality” policies modeled on the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report which was written at the height of Vietnam-era campus unrest.
The principle has been a useful tool for administrators ever since. It was most recently deployed against students protesting the Gaza genocide, when chancellors across the country invoked institutional neutrality to justify refusing to take any position on the mass killing of civilians while simultaneously calling police on the students demanding they do so.
The Charlie Kirk Act also creates litigation mechanisms that right-wing organizations can use to sue universities into preemptive compliance. What Weems did to Bushart with a warrant, the Charlie Kirk Act does to Tennessee’s campuses with a lawsuit.
The same legislature’s Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act requires public universities to teach the positive influence of Judeo-Christian religion on American history. Taken together, these laws expose “institutional neutrality” for what it has always been: a class principle, invoked against the opponents of the ruling class and discarded when the ruling class advances its own politics.
Bushart’s settlement was won despite this apparatus, not because of any principle it embodies. The liberal framing, “the system works,” “free speech prevailed” must be rejected. Bushart fought for months through a civil rights organization and a federal lawsuit to vindicate rights that were revoked by the deliberate exercise of state power on the personal authority of a sheriff who already knew, before signing the warrant, that no crime had been committed. That is not a functioning democracy. It is a political system in which every institution is compromised, one that can only be challenged through the independent political mobilization of the working class against the capitalist oligarchy that controls it.
8. AI-fueled Wall Street frenzy raises concerns
Either the US stock market has entered a kind of financial heaven where earthly economic laws no longer apply, or the conditions are being created for a crash and a consequent financial crisis of major proportions.
The market boosters adhere to the former, basing themselves on the enormous changes being wrought by AI and its tremendous potential for lifting the productivity of labour. Others, however, are sounding increasingly loud warnings.
A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal dismissed the latter with remarks typical of many.
Commenting on the initial public offering (IPO) of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and those to come shortly of OpenAI and Anthropic, it said that “amid the elegies [highlighting growing problems] about American capitalism, the latest mini-IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of US markets that no other country can match.”
The IPO for SpaceX, founded in 2002 for space exploration but which has now extended into broadband, mobile satellite service and data centres for AI, was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last Wednesday. It is said to be the largest in history.
Very few of the company’s shares will be available to public investors; most will initially be in the hands of Musk. But under new rules recently introduced by the NASDAQ exchange, it will be included in indexes which are tracked by Exchange Traded Funds, meaning that billions of dollars will flood into the market to buy its shares.
According to estimates by JP Morgan, if 50 percent of the company’s shares are eventually floated, the market valuation will reach $2 trillion.
The IPO boom comes on top of a surge on Wall Street over the last two months. Since April and the announcement of a “ceasefire” in the war on Iran, it has powered ahead, with the S&P 500 index rising by 12 percent.
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It is calculated that just five tech stocks—Alphabet (Google), Nvidia, Amazon, Broadcom and Apple—have accounted for more than 50 percent of the recent gains in the S&P index. At the start of the year the prevailing sentiment was that there would be a broadening of market gains.
According to Bloomberg, the AI chipmaker, Nvidia, which has been likened to the sun at the center of an AI planetary system, has been responsible for nearly a fifth of the rise in the S&P since the start of the year and 15 percent of the $32 trillion rise in the market capitalization of the index since 2023.
One of the key features in the rise of Nvidia and its role in powering the market is the degree of circularity involved. The company either invests in or lends money to companies which then buy its chips for AI development. Over the past 16 months Nvidia has committed some $90 billion in investments and partnerships with companies in such deals.
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And much of this boom is not based on profits made by the AI firms today but the expectation that the investments, amounting to hundreds of billions even trillions of dollars, will bring massive returns in the future. The three major firms at the center of the new round of frenzied activity are all making losses.
Anthropic has said it expects to turn a profit in the second quarter of this year. OpenAI has said it expects to burn through $600 billion cash before becoming profitable in 2030. SpaceX, whose operations are “something of a financial mystery” in the words of the New York Times, boosted its revenue by 33 percent in 2025 to $18.7 billion. But it lost $4.9 billion in 2025 and in the first quarter of this year recorded a $4.3 billion loss.
The contrast between the Wall Street surge and developments in the economy and the global financial system—oil prices set to rise further, yields on bonds rising to their highest levels in nearly two decades and the prospect that central banks are moving to raise rates—has prompted warnings that some sort of “correction” is bound to come, with the question being how far it might go.
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Amid warnings by investors that 80 percent of all jobs could be done by AI within years, the initial numbers are in. In the first four months of this year American employers announced more than 300,000 job cuts with technology and AI cited as the main reason.
The argument is sometimes advanced that, as in the past, while technological developments destroy jobs, they will also create new ones, and that this will be the case with AI. What this argument ignores is that those “new” jobs will likely be able to be done by AI itself.
There is no question that AI is a massive development in the productivity of labour and lays the basis for a tremendous advancement for humankind. But for that to take place it must be freed from the destructive grip of the capitalist profit system through the taking of power by the working class and the reorganization of the economy on new, socialist, foundations.
The frenzied boom on Wall Street and the growing indications of its direction is a warning that the political struggle by the working class to achieve this task is not something for the distant future but has become an urgent necessity.
9. New Zealand budget attacks workers and students, boosts the military
Ahead of the release of the budget on Thursday, the government has announced an increase to student fees, nearly 9,000 public sector redundancies and cuts to welfare payments.
10. Rising unemployment in Australia points to Iran war’s deepening impact
These results provide an indication of the worsening price being paid by working-class households, and especially young people, for the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran.
11. Trump administration moves to force green card applicants out of the US
The May 21 policy memorandum from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) declares that adjustment of status, the process by which eligible immigrants already in the US obtain lawful permanent residence without leaving the country, is not a right but an “extraordinary” form of discretionary relief granted as a matter of “administrative grace.” USCIS announced the policy May 22, stating that the government would grant adjustment of status only in “extraordinary circumstances.”
For decades, adjustment of status has allowed workers, students, refugees, asylum seekers and spouses of US citizens to receive green cards while remaining in the country. The new policy threatens to force applicants to return to countries they may not have lived in for years, or where they may face poverty, repression, war or political persecution, in order to attend interviews at US consulates.
The consequences could be catastrophic. Applicants who depart the US after overstaying a visa can trigger either a three-year or a 10-year ban on reentry. Others may be unable to obtain an appointment at all because US consular services are suspended, limited or overwhelmed in their country. In some cases, immigrants could be forced to leave spouses, children, jobs and schools in the US for months or years, with no guarantee of return.
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Doug Rand, a former senior USCIS official under the Biden administration, told CBS News that the changes could affect hundreds of thousands of cases, since roughly half a million people get green cards each year through adjustment of status. He warned that immigrant spouses of US citizens who are in the country on student and other temporary visas would likely be among those most affected. “The primary impact of this appears to be to make it difficult or impossible for very large numbers of US citizens to get on with their lives with the people they’ve chosen to marry who came here legally,” Rand said. He added that many could be stranded abroad, citing Iran, Russia and “114 different countries” where, if applicants return to seek permanent residency, “the Trump administration will not let you in.”
The administration’s claim that immigrants must return to their “home countries” is therefore a trap. For many, the country they are being told to return to is one from which they fled, where the US provides limited or no visa services, or whose nationals are now barred or restricted from entering the United States.
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The attack is aimed not only at immigrants but at their families, including US citizen spouses and children. Spouses of US citizens could be ordered to leave the country for consular processing and then be trapped abroad by delays, travel bans, visa freezes or reentry bars. Workers who entered legally and followed the rules could be forced to abandon their jobs. Students could be driven out of universities. Refugees, trafficking survivors and abused children could be compelled to return to countries where they face danger.
This is not a policy directed at “public safety.” It is a direct assault on the right of workers to live, work, study and form families across borders. The administration is seeking to transform every immigration benefit into a revocable privilege, granted or withheld at the discretion of the executive branch.
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The democratic rights of immigrants are inseparable from the democratic rights of the working class as a whole. A government that can force a worker’s spouse to leave the country, deport a student for opposing genocide, or prosecute a man for successfully challenging his illegal removal will use the same methods against every section of the working class that comes into struggle.
These policies must be opposed by workers everywhere. The right to live, labor, study and love across borders is a basic democratic and social right. Its defense requires the independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalist nation-state system, which divides workers by citizenship, nationality and immigration status while granting capital unrestricted freedom to exploit labor across the globe.
12. Chemical disaster at Garden Grove, California aerospace plant displaces 50,000 people
Decades of regulatory negligence in the Democratic Party-dominated state turned a preventable chemical hazard into a crisis threatening thousands of lives.
13. Democrats join Republicans to attack Trump over Iran negotiations
The announcement Saturday by the Trump administration that it had “largely” reached an agreement with Iran has drawn denunciations from broad factions of the US political establishment, with Democrats joining Republicans to attack the proposed agreement as insufficiently advantageous to US imperialism.
On Truth Social Saturday, Trump said “an agreement has largely been negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He said he had spoken with Arab leaders and the heads of Pakistan and Turkey but offered no details.
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, told CNN Sunday that Trump was “being played as a fool.” “He’s got us in a situation that’s worse than it was before,” Booker said, “with a more extreme regime.”
The United States, Booker told CNN, had “let go of billions of dollars” in negotiations to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. Giving Iran more money, he warned, would enable Tehran to “fuel their terrorist proxies.”
Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, told CBS “Face the Nation” Sunday that the agreement was a “blunder.” “It sounds like we will go back to opening the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, was open before the war started,” Van Hollen said.
“It looks like Iran will retain more control over those straits. We also know Iran has an even more hard-line regime in place now, and we’re talking about releasing some of Iran’s frozen assets.”
Their attacks echoed talking points already laid down by Republicans and the far-right press. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial Sunday headlined, “Will Trump Bail Out Iran’s Regime?”, calling the emerging deal a “strategic setback” that ends US pressure “before dismantling the nuclear program.”
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The war Trump launched February 28 has killed thousands of Iranians, decimated Lebanon and pushed gasoline prices to a four-year high.
On Sunday Trump partly walked the announcement back, writing that he had told his representatives “not to rush into a deal” and that the US naval blockade of Iran would “remain in full force and effect until an agreement is reached, certified, and signed.”
The New York Times reported Sunday that the framework under discussion would extend the cease-fire that took effect April 8 by 60 days, gradually reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift the US naval blockade. The Times wrote that Iran would pledge “in principle” to dispose of its highly enriched uranium, though the mechanism remained unsettled.
Iran holds roughly 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade material, enough by US estimates for a dozen bombs if further refined. The Times also reported Sunday that three senior Iranian officials had disclosed that the deal would halt fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon, and release $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets.
The Trump administration confronts a deepening crisis over its failure to achieve its aims in the Iran war. It had hoped that murdering Iran’s leaders would trigger rapid regime change.
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Meanwhile Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon continues. On Sunday Israel ordered residents of at least 10 Lebanese villages to evacuate ahead of further air strikes.
In al-Duwayr, Israel bombed a building around 10:20 p.m. and struck the same location 30 minutes later, killing one person and wounding eight. At Arab Salim, two more were killed and 10 wounded, six of them paramedics, the Lebanese health ministry said Sunday.
Since Israel renewed its onslaught on Lebanon March 2, the ministry has counted 3,151 dead and 9,571 wounded from Israeli air strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Trump that his government will not compromise on its “freedom to act,” including in Lebanon.
The economic toll of the war is mounting. Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst told a House Appropriations panel last Tuesday that direct US costs had reached $29 billion.
14. United States: Gerrymandering in the South: The working class and the defense of democratic rights
Across the South, Republican state legislatures are redrawing congressional district lines to eliminate seats held by black Democrats for more than three decades. Legitimized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais and accelerating in Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama and other states, this gerrymandering offensive is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, of which the assault on black voters in the South is one element.
The immediate mechanism is the dilution of black votes in majority-minority districts, which are being broken up and folded into majority-white districts gerrymandered for Republican advantage.
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The current gerrymandering campaign, however, must be understood within the broader crisis of American democracy and, in particular, Trump’s effort to establish a presidential dictatorship. Redistricting is being combined with proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID schemes, attacks on mail-in voting such as the Save America Act, threats to have federal agencies usurp the role of local authorities in the administration of elections, and preparations for the use of armed federal agents and even the military at the polls, under the pretext of combating fraud or disorder.
The attempt to eliminate districts with significant black majorities therefore has a dual character. It draws directly on the long history of black disenfranchisement in the South, from Jim Crow to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. But it is not merely an attack on black voters. It is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, directed especially against urban, poor, immigrant, minority and young people whose votes stand in the way of the fascistic Republican Party and Trump’s authoritarian project.
The Callais decision is itself the culmination of a decades-long assault on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most significant legislative product of the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This legislation put teeth in the largely unenforced 15th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, which guaranteed the right of the freed slaves to vote.
Under the Jim Crow system of segregation in the South, black voters were almost entirely disenfranchised, partly through legal restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests, partly through straight-out terrorism, as blacks who sought to register and vote were routinely subjected to violence and intimidation by local police and the Ku Klux Klan. The South was effectively a one-party state, dominated by the Democrats, who had been the party of the slave owners and remained the party of the wealthy aristocracy that controlled the South.
The Voting Rights Act provided for federal oversight of elections in those parts of the United States with a history of voter suppression, including not only the segregated South, but also Arizona and Alaska, for discrimination against Hispanic, Native American and Alaska Native voters, and scattered counties in many other states.
Black voter registration and turnout skyrocketed across the South, but initially led to the election of only a handful of African Americans to Congress. The vast majority of African Americans now vote for the Democratic Party, crediting it for the reforms of the civil rights era. Racist Democratic politicians in the South shifted en masse to the Republican Party, which made increasing gains in the region.
After the 1990 census, however, black Democratic leaders reached an agreement with the Republican Party to create more than a dozen new majority-minority districts in the region. These would provide safe seats for black Democratic politicians, and in 1992 the number of black representatives from the South jumped to 20.
At the same time, by concentrating large numbers of minority voters in a small number of seats, the Republican Party expected to gain the vast majority of Southern congressional seats through race-based appeals to white voters. This cynical deal—spearheaded by Republican strategist Lee Atwater and Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia—was the culmination of what Richard Nixon had dubbed the “Southern strategy.” It contributed significantly to the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections.
In the three decades since, the Republican Party cemented political control of the Southern states, with the sole exception of Virginia. Side by side with the consolidation of Republican political power in the South, the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court has steadily dismantled the Voting Rights Act, not overturning it explicitly but gutting the enforcement powers through which the federal government and civil rights groups could take action against blatantly discriminatory actions.
The Callais decision completes the process, as the minority dissent written by Justice Elena Kagan argued, of rendering the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.”
The Democratic Party’s response to the mounting threats to democratic rights combines reactionary politics and impotent theatrics. There has been much howling about Jim Crow 2.0, but no action proposed beyond filing lawsuits, staging protests, and—inevitably—voting for the Democrats in the midterm elections in November … if they even take place.
The Democrats have presented the redistricting campaign entirely in racial terms. They use minority districts as electoral props, while they have presided over austerity, police violence, inequality, war and the decay of the cities where much of their minority electorate lives. They have also initiated their own redistricting efforts, particularly in California and Virginia, to create more Democrat-controlled seats. Both parties look upon the great majority of the population as an object of manipulation.
here is no significant constituency for the defense of democratic rights within any section of the American ruling class. The Republican Party has been transformed into the political instrument of a fascist would-be dictator. The Democratic Party blocks any serious struggle against mounting authoritarianism, because it fears a movement from below from the working masses, far more than it does the actions of Trump.
The defense of democratic rights now falls to the working class. It must not only defend voting rights but fight against the entire anti-democratic framework of American elections: the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, ballot access laws that exclude independent and socialist candidates, the domination of money over elections, the monopolization of the media and political power by the corporate elite.
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The defense of democratic rights is a central focus of the struggle for socialism. Democratic rights are both a necessity for working class politics within capitalism, and the indispensable basis for the future socialist reorganization of society, which will put working people, not a handful of financial aristocrats, in control.
15. Turkish police storm CHP headquarters, as court ousts elected party leadership
On Sunday, police acting on the orders of the Ankara Governorship stormed the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) using pepper spray, forcibly removing the party’s elected leader Özgür Özel and his supporters, including deputies, from the building.
This unlawful police operation followed a politically motivated judicial ruling issued under pressure from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. On Thursday, May 21, the Ankara Regional Court of Appeals declared the party’s 2023 congress “absolutely null and void” on charges of “fraud,” removing Özel and all party organs from their positions and reinstating former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu by court order.
This ruling violated the authority of the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK), which is constitutionally responsible for overseeing and approving political party congresses. The CHP’s appeals to both the court and the YSK were immediately rejected. After Kılıçdaroğlu’s lawyer applied to the Ankara Police Headquarters demanding that the party’s central building be handed over to them, the Ankara Governorship ordered police to move in, citing the need to “enforce the court ruling.”
The political nature of the court decision is also evident in its timing. It was issued just before the start of a nine-day Eid al-Adha holiday beginning on Friday, a move clearly intended to minimize mass protests. One day before the ruling, Kılıçdaroğlu posted a video on his social media account implying he would return to the party leadership, as if he had been forewarned of the impending court ruling.
The situation that has emerged from this unlawful ruling and police operation is clear. The Erdoğan government’s interference with the elected leadership of the CHP—a party that came first in the March 2024 local elections and is currently leading in polls—signals that even the limited constitutional multi-party system in NATO member Türkiye may be coming to an end. The constitutional and legal norms upon which the legitimacy of the Erdoğan government rests are being violated one after another. Özel’s response to what is an existential assault on his party, and perhaps on himself personally, however, is constrained by the limits of the CHP’s bourgeois character.
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
