Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Democrats to Trump on Iran: “Win the war!”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified alongside General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday to demand $67 billion in emergency funding for the Iran war.
Held amid mounting casualties, the hearing revealed the deepening crisis of American imperialism in Iran, where it faces a military debacle to which the Trump administration has responded with renewed bombing and the active discussion of deploying ground troops and using nuclear weapons.
Hegseth, admitting that the cost of the war had surged to $37.5 billion, conducted himself as a belligerent bully. “Shame on you and others who call this a quagmire and a failure!” he raged.
In the face of growing popular opposition, the Democrats made every effort to show that they are a loyal opposition, accusing the administration of incompetence in the prosecution of the interests of American imperialism.
The most significant statement came from Democratic Michigan Senator Gary Peters, who called Hegseth a “failure” and declared, “You don’t have a strategy. You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war. Win the war!”
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Under conditions of mass popular opposition to the war, which is being used by the Trump administration as a pretext to cut food stamps and other social services, the position of the Democratic Party is not “Stop the war,” but “Win the war!”
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The Democrats’ other critique was that the “war of choice” against Iran is taking up funds from their central focus: the war against nuclear-armed Russia. “We’re in a moment in history where we can win the war in Ukraine,” Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois declared. “But instead of finding the money that they need now for air defenses, we’re putting more money into this exchange with Iran, a war of choice which we never should have entered.”
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Not one senator, Democrat or Republican, proposed cutting off funds for the war.
In more than three hours of testimony, exactly one senator asked about the administration’s active discussion of a ground invasion of Iran. “The next step would be escalation by ground combat. Do you anticipate that escalation?” asked Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Caine refused to answer.
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Despite the efforts of the Democrats to solidarize themselves with the efforts of the US military to dominate the world, they could not deny the criminal character of the war being waged by the Trump administration, whose defense secretary earlier vowed “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”
In her opening statement, Murray said that Trump “is threatening escalation and war crimes.” Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon asked Caine about US attacks on water infrastructure: “You are aware that infrastructure that civilians rely on to survive is not generally considered legitimate military targets?”
These insincere qualms, however, will not stop the Democrats from funding the war.
The supplemental contains $21 billion for fuel and the replacement of equipment used up in the war, and $46 billion to expand the production of weapons: rocket motors, guided bombs, hypersonic missiles and counter-drone systems. It also funds far more than the Iran war: nearly $1 billion to keep the National Guard deployed in Washington, over $1 billion for the Army on the Southern border, $900 million for the administration’s illegal boat strikes in the Caribbean and over $18 billion in bombs and missiles already requested through the regular budget.
The package is designed as a bridge to the administration’s $1.5 trillion military budget for next year, a roughly 50 percent increase over this year’s record $1 trillion. The weapons production lines it opens are to be kept running by the larger budget, which Hegseth and Caine presented as a generational investment in preparing for the wars of the future.
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Tuesday’s hearing made clear that all factions of the US political establishment support the war and its aim of subjugating Iran to US domination. The fight against war can be taken forward only through the independent mobilization of the working class—in the United States, in Iran and internationally—against the capitalist system that is its source.
2. United States: LAUSD facing bankruptcy: Nearly 6,000 layoffs, healthcare cuts, furlough days
The way for these cuts was paved by a massive betrayal by the union bureaucracy in the district. On the morning of April 14, nearly 70,000 LAUSD workers, including administrators, were set to walk out together for the first time in the district’s history. Teachers authorized strike action by 94 percent; classified staff voted by 97 percent. Then UTLA and AALA (Associated Administrators of Los Angeles) settled and left SEIU members isolated.
But in the middle of the night before picket lines were to go up, SEIU99 President Max Arias, then‑UTLA President Cecily Myart‑Cruz (who is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America), and other union officials met behind closed doors with Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. The City Council, which includes four DSA members, passed a unanimous resolution urging settlement. At 2:00 a.m., SEIU99 announced a tentative agreement, and the strike was canceled.
The very next day, April 15, the county demanded a new stabilization plan, the second in 12 months. The district had promised reductions under the first, and as of March, $231 million of them had been neither carried out nor even identified. It nonetheless eliminated 657 positions in May, mostly in the district office. In June the board adopted the present plan.
On July 2, the county arrived to collect, naming the contracts first among the causes: $1.13 billion this year, rising to $1.44 billion in 2027–28, a “severe fiscal event” reflecting what Duardo calls “mismanagement” of the collective bargaining process. She also finds the district never provided the certification that state law requires.
This is part of a national pattern in which contract ratifications have been followed immediately by cuts which the bureaucracy had worked to conceal. In Oakland, a 91 percent strike authorization ended in a tentative agreement as the district eliminated 421 positions. In San Francisco, the union shut down a four-day strike, and layoff notices followed within days under a multiyear fiscal recovery plan. In Chicago, the CTU concluded a contract in April 2025; three months later, more than 1,450 educators and staff received layoff notices. In Philadelphia, a 94 percent strike authorization was followed by a contract without a walkout in August 2025; the next April, the board voted to close 17 schools.
The assault on public education is bipartisan. While Trump and the Republicans move openly to liquidate the Department of Education, the Democrats administer austerity, expand charters and preside over district‑level collapses like that unfolding in Los Angeles.
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The teachers unions are dominated by an unaccountable bureaucracy that enforces the demands of the state and corporations. They present false one-page “highlights” of contracts, rush votes, withhold information and collaborate in implementing layoffs and cuts while presenting themselves as defenders of “public education” and rewarding themselves with six‑figure salaries.
Gloria Martinez, who became UTLA president on July 1 and makes about $198,000, told the Los Angeles Times: “Labor contracts are not the issue.” School funding, she added, is set at the state level. SEIU Local 99 President Max Arias, whose total compensation is $242,000, dismissed the district’s dire warnings as its typical fear mongering every few years. But neither union is preparing any action, let alone joint strike action, to fight the coming assault.
The appeal to Sacramento is a diversion. Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration is itself preparing cuts against a $21 billion state deficit.
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The claim that there is “no money” for public education is a lie. The resources exist many times over to fully fund high‑quality public education, pay living wages, guarantee pensions and healthcare, and provide housing and cultural access for all. The issue is who controls the wealth of society and in whose interests it is used: for the enrichment of a tiny oligarchy and for war, or for the needs of the working class.
In the 12 months to March 2026, California’s 246 billionaires increased their wealth by $487.2 billion, to $2.061 trillion, nearly half the state’s annual economic output. Twenty‑three of the largest fortunes in America are held in Los Angeles County, where a cafeteria worker earns $35,500. The sum of $3.649 billion triggering the district’s crisis is a minuscule fraction of the wealth of this oligarchy. Trump’s 2027 budget meanwhile seeks $1.5 trillion for the military while cutting non‑defense spending by $73 billion and pushing the burden back onto states and districts, in other words, the working class.
3. How Trump uses Truth Social to manipulate markets and pocket millions
Following the release of President Donald Trump’s financial disclosure filing for 2025, showing that in the first year of his second term he pocketed $2.2 billion, including $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency deals, the World Socialist Web Site wrote, “The scale of Trump’s self-enrichment renders the great corruption scandals of American history almost quaint by comparison.”
Recent analyses of the disclosure report, which were filed with the Office of Government Ethics, have brought into sharper relief Trump’s use of the presidency to line his own pockets and those of family members.
On July 17, CNN published an investigative report documenting the fact that in 2025 Trump made at least 44 stock purchases of 21 different companies within a week of posting a complimentary Truth Social message about the firms, their executives or their products. Trump also made other stock purchases shortly before posting more general messages highlighting policy changes that could benefit those companies, but without naming them.
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By such criminal actions, the Trump White House has institutionalized at the height of state power the insider trading that pervades the wheeling and dealing of the financial oligarchy. Unlike every US president going back at least five decades, Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust. He has refused to divest from his businesses and placed them instead in a trust he can still access. One of the trustees is his son Donald Trump Jr.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly responded to CNN’s report with the brazen lying and impudence that typifies the Trump administration:
President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public—which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to his office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.
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The fact that none of the official institutions of American capitalism—least of all the Democratic Party—are willing or able to rein in Trump’s criminality testifies to the rule of a staggeringly wealthy and parasitic financial oligarchy, which has installed a fascistic product of the New York real estate and gambling mafia in the White House.
When asked by the New York Times in January why he’s so open about using politics for personal profit, Trump said, “I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.”
A federal judge in Florida issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on July 15 barring thousands of CSX railway workers, represented by SMART-TD, from engaging in any strike, work stoppage, slowdown or sickout over the company’s new attendance policy—and ordered the union to discipline any member who defied the ban. The five-day TRO expired on July 20, after SMART-TD had complied with its orders.
The TRO, issued by Judge Wendy W. Berger of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, came in response to an emergency motion filed by CSX Transportation after SMART-TD indicated its opposition to System Notice 502, a June 30 policy update that dramatically narrows workers’ ability to take medically necessary absences without facing termination. CSX workers have written to the World Socialist Web Site confirming that their locals have been polled on strike action and approved it near-unanimously, indicating overwhelming rank-and-file support for a walkout.
No strike had been called, though the union’s general committees had formally objected that the Notice constituted “an unlawful unilateral modification of the parties’ Collective Bargaining Agreement in violation of the Railway Labor Act.” When CSX demanded assurances that operations would not be disrupted, SMART-TD union officials pledged to “use every lawful means available to preserve the negotiated status quo.”
Within days, CSX was in federal court, and Judge Berger classified the dispute as “minor” under the Railway Labor Act (RLA), meaning workers are prohibited from striking and must submit to compulsory arbitration. The legal standard, as the court itself noted, requires only that the carrier’s position be “arguably justified” by the contract. Any “reasonable doubt” defaults against the workers.
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The legal mechanism deployed against CSX workers is the same one used against 17,000 BNSF railway workers in January 2022, when Judge Mark Pittman issued a near-identical TRO blocking a strike over the “Hi-Viz” point-based attendance policy. In both cases, the court relied on the Railway Labor Act’s distinction between “major” and “minor” disputes—a framework that functions as a juridical trap.
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The Railway Labor Act, enacted in 1926, is an anti-worker law which has served to all but ban strikes on American railroads for the past century. If a dispute is ruled “minor,” strikes are illegal and workers must submit to compulsory arbitration before the National Railroad Adjustment Board, a process that can drag on for years while the company’s policy remains in effect.
As BNSF’s own lawyers boasted in 2022, the unions have “never prevailed” under this framework in 33 years. This record follows from a legal standard weighted heavily in the carriers’ favor.
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In fact, the union bureaucracy has accepted and defended this system for decades. SMART, the parent organization of SMART-TD, reported nearly $450 million in assets to the Department of Labor, while its leading officers received salaries of between $341,000 and $462,000 in 2025. The TRO makes this relationship explicit and legally enforceable.
The decisive confirmation came in the 2022 national contract struggle, which pitted 120,000 railroad workers not only against the carriers but against the Biden White House, Congress and the union apparatus. Members of several unions voted by margins above 99 percent to authorize strike action. Biden then appointed Presidential Emergency Board 250, whose recommendations failed to provide paid sick days or abolish the carriers’ punitive attendance regimes. A last-minute agreement brokered at the White House adopted this pro-company framework as the final RLA cooling-off period was expiring. Even after the RLA’s restrictions had been exhausted, the unions kept workers on the job.
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Workers rebelled. The Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee (RWRFC) was founded in September 2022 in collaboration with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). It organized informational pickets, online meetings involving hundreds of railroaders and a nationwide campaign for strike action and rank-and-file control. The White House-backed agreement was rejected by SMART-TD conductors and yardmen and by workers in three other unions. The union bureaucracies staggered ballots and repeatedly extended strike deadlines, buying time for the state to intervene. At Biden’s request, Congress passed and Biden signed legislation imposing the rejected contract and blocking a national strike.
The near-unanimous strike votes at CSX show that rank-and-file railroad workers are still determined to fight. But that determination must be directed against the entire framework of “labor control” on the railroads, in which the union bureaucracy is acting as the company police. What is required is the development of rank-and-file committees, linked through the RWRFC across carriers and crafts, to transfer decision-making power to workers themselves, prepare collective action and mobilize the broadest support throughout the working class.
The expansion to well over 10,000 soldiers serves the preparation of a comprehensive NATO war against Russia, whilst simultaneously creating an armed structure for the deployment of the Bundeswehr against domestic opposition.
6. Andy Burnham’s cabinet of austerity and war
Incoming UK Prime Minister Burnham’s declaration that his was a “cost-of-living government” amounted to a pledge to scrap VAT sales tax on domestic electricity, saving a typical household just £45 annually, or 86 pence a week. Even this provoked a right-wing media backlash.
7. Petro and De la Espriella use Colombia's Independence Day to promote military
Colombia's July 20 Independence Day, marking 216 years since the break from Spanish colonial rule, became the occasion this week for both outgoing President Gustavo Petro and President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella to place the armed forces at the center of the country's political life.
Beneath their apparently opposed postures—Petro's invocation of a “people's army” and de la Espriella's promise of restored “authority”—both pointed to the same institution as the ultimate guarantor of the existing social order: an armed force built, financed and trained by US imperialism since the 1960s and vastly expanded under Plan Colombia to suppress social opposition and defend the interests of capital.
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The convergence around the military was reinforced by the rest of the political establishment. The Senate-appointed attorney general, Gregorio Eljach, confirmed De la Espriella could be sworn in at a military garrison if Congress approves, while Senate president Lidio García said conditions were favorable for such approval.
De la Espriella's transition team had already convened its own cabinet of designated ministers in Barranquilla, weeks before taking office. Petro responded to such an affront to his term by insisting his government retains full authority until the transfer of powers on August 7.
Petro, however, has confirmed that he will not attend the inauguration, tying his absence to allegations of an 848,000-vote fraud carried out through the Colombian consulate in Los Angeles, allegedly orchestrated with the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube. Colombia's own intelligence services and independent election monitors have found no evidence substantiating these claims.
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Petro has also alleged, also contradicted by the intelligence agencies, that a whistleblower was targeted through a hacked electric vehicle. Despite these still unclear claims of fraud, it is a matter of public knowledge that the Trump administration violated Colombian sovereignty by intervening openly and endorsing repeatedly De la Espriella over Petro’s candidate, Senator Iván Cepeda.
Facing what he calls attempts to jail him, Petro has called for a “permanent national strike” to defend labor gains, declaring: “I am not waiting for the next election; the opposition is exercised from the streets.” This is not a call to independent working-class action but a sign that Petro intends to use the threat of unrest as leverage within the existing bourgeois order, offering his services to contain and channel opposition into safe channels—a capitulation, in advance, to the reactionary administration set to succeed him.
8. Peru’s president-elect Keiko Fujimori calls for mega-prisons modeled on Bukele's CECOT
Far-right Popular Renewal (Renovación Popular) party leader and former presidential candidate Rafael López Aliaga has confirmed that president-elect Keiko Fujimori intends to apply El Salvador’s prison model in Peru through the construction of five mega-prisons. “She told me: ‘Rafael, I’m going to use the Bukele method. In El Salvador it took eight months. I’ll do it in seven,’” López Aliaga recounted to RPP on July 17.
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The right-wing parties have celebrated Fujimori’s ascent as extending the Trump-Monroe Doctrine policy of asserting near-absolute US domination over South America. The aim: expel Chinese influence, deliver vast lithium and rare mineral reserves to US imperialism, and secure Pacific coast territory for attacks against Washington’s strategic rival [China]. This project is already underway: Ecuador plans to host two US bases; Washington will invest $1.5 billion to modernize the Callao naval base, 60 kilometers from the Chinese-owned Chancay mega-port; and Javier Milei has agreed to finance an Integrated Naval Base in Ushuaia.
Fujimori’s anti-crime credentials are nonexistent. Since 2016 she has run Peru from a corrupt Congress, forming pro-business alliances and toppling several presidents. She was at the center of an illegal fundraising operation channeling Odebrecht money through elite gatherings known as “the cocktail parties.” She was jailed twice during investigations and has promoted laws shielding extortion mafias and their accomplices in Congress, the police, and prosecutors’ offices.
The real question is what definition of “criminality” Fujimori will deploy to fill her prisons. She will not touch the corrupt networks tied to her own political machine. The target will be the militarization of working-class neighborhoods, not for the purpose of suppressing the extortionist mafias that have killed over 70 public transportation drivers in Lima and Callao this year, but rather to drown in blood any social opposition to the austerity and repression her government is preparing. Three out of four residents of Greater Lima—population 10.13 million—live in neighborhoods under mafia control.
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Keiko Fujimori’s pledge to impose El Salvador’s prison model in Peru requires a clear-eyed understanding of what that model entails.
The CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center), the world’s largest prison with a 40,000-inmate capacity, operates as a concentration camp. Prisoners are held in windowless cells under constant artificial light, deprived of sleep, water and basic necessities. Testimonies document systematic beatings, humiliations and sexual assaults. Hunger strikes are violently suppressed; some detainees resorted to “blood strikes” and were ignored. The government has threatened inmates with starvation.
Fully 1.9 percent of El Salvador’s population is imprisoned—equivalent to 650,000 Peruvians. The NGO Socorro Jurídico Humanitario documented 517 prisoner deaths during the state of exception: nine out of ten them were never convicted of any crime. One third died from violence or torture. Internal intelligence documents reveal that 36 percent of detainees had no prior criminal record.
The CECOT is directly intertwined with Washington’s immigration policy. The Trump administration deported hundreds of migrants to the CECOT without due process.
The regime rests on the annihilation of due process: mass hearings of up to 500 defendants, warrantless arrests including of children as young as 12, 45-year sentences, and suspension of press freedoms. Far from combating the causes of violence—extreme inequality and decades of imperialist intervention—the CECOT is the centerpiece of an authoritarian regime applauded by Washington, ultimately directed against the Salvadoran working class.
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For years, the Peruvian press has stoked xenophobia against Venezuelans, plastering them on front pages whenever a crime is committed. The reality is that the vast majority are hardworking people who found a welcoming country, married and raised families. The Peruvian CECOT, in the hands of a president who is herself a criminal, will be an instrument for carrying out a witch hunt and pitting the working class against one another along national lines. There is no chance she will jail her cronies who accompanied her through a decade of congressional corruption.
Since the 1993 Fujimorista Constitution, job security in Peru has been destroyed and trade unions decimated. Today, seventeen family clans hold a combined fortune of $35 billion—equal to the earnings of 9.5 million informal workers in Micro and Small Enterprises, which constitute 48 percent of the workforce.
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President Keiko Fujimori will use the Peruvian CECOT to imprison, torture and murder any opposition to her plans to satisfy national and foreign capital. The working class cannot place the slightest confidence in any faction of the Peruvian bourgeoisie. From Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular to the pseudo-left pretenders, all are united in subservience to US imperialism and the billionaire clans. The mega-prisons are not an aberration of Peruvian democracy—they are its logical culmination. The same ruling class that destroyed job security, starved public services and handed the country’s resources to foreign capital will now construct concentration camps to crush the inevitable resistance of the exploited masses.
The struggle against fascist prisons and imperialist war can only be waged under the banner of world socialist revolution. This requires the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Peru and across Latin America.
9. Deadly storms strike central Chile: A political and social indictment of capitalism
The social character of this disaster is unmistakable. The hills of Valparaíso are areas where drainage is inadequate, where informal and semi-formal housing predominates, where the terrain is steep and the risk of landslides endemic. The storm activated at least 12 sites identified as potential landslide zones in Valparaíso alone, involving 600 families. Meanwhile, the wealthy have never suffered flooding. This is not an accident of geography but a product of the capitalist organization of urban space. The same families evacuated from the Ribera del Río camp in Talagante, the same communities in Quilpué still recovering from the massive wildfire of 2024, are paying the highest price for a precariousness that did not begin with the rain.
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The same institutional framework that allowed water rights to be privatized and hoarded during the drought is the framework that prevents the state from capturing and storing excess water now. The two phenomena, the drought crisis and the flood crisis, are products of the same failure to assert public control over an indispensable resource that was privatized under a dictatorship and never reclaimed.
At the root of this failure lies the 1981 Water Code, one of the most radical experiments in water commodification ever attempted, imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship and enshrined in the 1980 Constitution. Under this code, water rights were transformed from state concessions into fully private property, separated from land title, granted in perpetuity, and subject to no beneficial use requirement.
Rights could be hoarded indefinitely by mining companies, agribusiness and hydroelectric firms. The result has been the creation of what are known in Chile as “Zones of Sacrifice.” Entire communities, such as Petorca in Valparaíso, where avocado plantations holding legally valid water rights accumulated over decades effectively dried out the population’s access to water.
Gabriel Boric’s 2022 reform, Law 21.435, was touted as a breakthrough: it declared access to drinking water a human right, established a hierarchy prioritizing human consumption, and introduced time-limited concessions for new rights.
But the Constitutional Court struck down the provision that would have imposed forfeiture on existing rights for non-use, declaring it a violation of constitutionally protected property rights. The vast accumulated stock of water rights (80 percent of which are controlled by corporate interests in agribusiness, mining and energy) remains untouched. The constitutional lock installed by the dictatorship held firm, as it was designed to do.
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No faith can be placed in the fascistic Kast government to address this crisis. Kast, the son of a Wehrmacht Nazi officer, came to power heading a “government of emergency” committed to deepening the very free-market policies that produced this catastrophe: corporate tax cuts, public sector austerity, deregulation and the defense of private property at all costs. His administration has already slashed health and education budgets, militarized schools and criminalized migrants. It is utterly indifferent to the suffering of the masses.
Nor can any faith be placed in the Chilean “left,” the Socialist Party, the Stalinist Communist Party, the Broad Front, which under Boric erected the most expansive police state since the return to civilian rule, defended capitalist property relations and normalized relations with the defenders of Pinochet. It was these very parties that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, used a State of Exception to regiment the country through curfews and military deployment, demonstrating that the “left” is as committed as the right to the defense of bourgeois order.
The working class and communities must establish their own rank-and-file committees to begin the reorganization of society to meet social needs. The resources and scientific know-how exist to carry out this work. What is lacking is not technical capacity but political power.
Chilean workers have the historic experience of the Cordones Industriales, the rank-and-file industrial and neighborhood organs established in 1972-73, in the midst of a putschist attempt by the ruling class to destabilize the country. Amid a profound crisis, these bodies set themselves the task of running production, distributing goods and services and defending the needs of their class.
That experience, written in blood by the heroic Chilean proletariat, points the way forward. The task of securing the conditions for the socialist planning of the world’s economic resources and the reorganization of society on a rational basis falls on the shoulders of the international working class, which must first wrest power from the bourgeoisie and overthrow its state, ending the subordination of economic life to private profit and the division of the world into rival nation-states.
10. Australia: Staff and students oppose sellout union deals at Western Sydney University
The resolution passed at yesterday’s lunchtime meeting was part of the campaign for a No Vote by all WSU staff members on the regressive enterprise agreements that management and the two campus trade unions are trying to rush through.
11. Autoworkers denounce threat by UAW official against rank-and-file presidential candidate Will Lehman
Autoworkers, retirees and other workers have issued statements demanding immediate action against the United Auto Workers official who issued a death threat against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president.
Raymond Jensen Jr., an organizer for UAW Region 9 whose Facebook profile carries an “I Support Shawn Fain” campaign badge, posted an AI-generated image on Lehman’s public Facebook page last week showing the candidate bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked gunman training an automatic rifle on his back. According to the UAW, Jensen was paid $202,000 in salary and other expenses last year. As of this writing, neither Fain nor any officer of the UAW International Executive Board has repudiated the threat, and Jensen remains on the union’s payroll.
Lehman has denounced the threat as an attempt to intimidate the growing rank-and-file opposition his campaign is giving voice to. In a letter to the legal counsel of the court-appointed monitor overseeing the UAW, Lehman’s attorney Eric Lee demanded: an immediate investigation, Jensen’s suspension without pay, a public repudiation by the union and referral of the matter to the Department of Labor and federal law enforcement.
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Thomas Adams, a retired GM worker and author of UAW, Inc., an investigation of the corporatist degeneration of the UAW, condemned the death threat and pointed to the significance of the region Jensen works for: “I find it interesting that Raymond Jensen Jr. is from Region 9. In my 2019 essay, ‘Tale of Corruption by the United Auto Workers and the Big Three American Automakers,’ I discuss a nonprofit corporation called the UAW Region 9 New York Training Initiative tasked with training Perry’s Ice Cream workers.
“The UAW leadership learned that they could establish these training centers funded by state training money—in this case, the New York State Department of Labor. New York State was funding the Perry’s Ice Cream training fund to the tune of $579,463. It speaks for itself. It had FBI agents laughing that ‘127 ice cream makers were the best trained ice cream makers in the history of making ice cream.’
“The Administration Caucus is like an overarching fatal disease that’s infected the labor movement, not just the UAW. I call for a full and open investigation of these threats and a public statement defending the right of Brother Lehman to campaign.”
Lyle Roussey, a retired Michigan autoworker, pointed to the responsibility of the UAW monitor, installed after the federal corruption prosecutions that sent more than a dozen union officials, including two former UAW presidents, to prison for embezzling union dues and taking corporate bribes. “Isn’t it the monitor’s duty during an election cycle to assure honesty and integrity of the union election? So if it is, it’s time for them to take action against this horrendous display from the UAW leaders.”
Far from intimidating and isolating Lehman, the threat has provoked anger from rank-and-file workers and growing support for his campaign to abolish the corrupt UAW apparatus and transfer power to workers on the shop floor through the building of rank-and-file committees independent of the union bureaucracy.
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A Warren Truck worker told the [WSWS reporting] team anyone responsible for the threat “should be in prison along with Shawn Fain too. Come on, you don’t go on and threaten people.”
Asked what he thought about Will’s call for power to be transferred from the UAW apparatus to the workers on the shop floor, he said, “That would be better. We have enough problems trying to get the union to fight for us or do anything.” As an example, he pointed to the smoke in the factories due to the Canadian wildfires. “The smoke days were real bad. They gave us masks, but they were only made for dust. They aren’t made for any kind of chemicals or fires. You need a respirator, and if you don’t have that forget about it, those dust masks do nothing. The factories should have shut down. Even the news said you need to stay in your house, don’t leave.”
A fuller account of the exchanges is available on Lehman’s campaign website willforuawpresident.org. Lehman’s campaign has urged workers to demand that the UAW publicly repudiate the threat by writing to feedback@uaw.org, with copies to info@willforuawpresident.org.
12. Mexican father killed by tractor-trailer while fleeing ICE operation in Florida
The man struck and killed by a tractor-trailer on July 14 while fleeing federal immigration officers in St. Augustine, Florida has been identified as Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, a 28-year-old husband and father from Mexico.
Coronilla Durán, a native of San Luis de la Paz in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, had legally entered the United States three weeks earlier on a valid tourist visa. Isaret Jeffers, a spokesperson for the farmworker advocacy group Colectivo Árbol, told the Miami Herald that Coronilla Durán had already made arrangements to return home. He had been in Florida for only two days and had already purchased a plane ticket to return to Mexico the following Saturday.
“He had already bought a flight,” Jeffers said. “Now, unfortunately, if he is returning, his return is different.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has refused to say whether Coronilla Durán was the target of its kidnapping operation. In repeated statements, the agency has said only that its agents “conducted an operation near St. Johns, Florida” and that the Florida Highway Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations were investigating “an incident resulting in the death of a Mexican national.”
Colectivo Árbol is assisting Coronilla Durán’s wife, Yésica Alamilla López, with returning her husband’s remains to Mexico. The couple had been married for 10 years and owned a small business together in San Luis de la Paz. They had two children, ages 7 years and 7 months.
According to Jeffers, Alamilla López learned that her husband had been killed while watching television.
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Coronilla Durán’s death was the direct and entirely predictable product of the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation. More than a week later, the Department of Homeland Security has refused to identify the agents involved, explain why they were chasing someone who was legally present in the United States, or even disclose whether Coronilla Durán was the intended target.
He was at least the third immigrant father to die within eight days during violent operations conducted by the immigration Gestapo.
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Appearing on television Monday, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan declared that those killed during immigration operations had brought about their own deaths by refusing to submit unconditionally to armed and masked federal agents.
“You can attack the men and women of ICE all you want,” Homan said. “It comes down to one simple fact: These people failed to comply with law enforcement.”
Homan ignored the fact that Salgado Araujo, Durán Guerrero and Coronilla Durán were not identified as the targets of the operations in which they were killed. Nor were they given any opportunity to “comply” with law enforcement, who did not identify themselves and aggressively attacked the men.
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Homan’s defense of police state executions means that any person confronted by masked agents in an unmarked vehicle must instantly submit or accept death as the legitimate punishment.
His cynical invocation of the courts came as the administration was using the same judicial system to intimidate and imprison workers and opponents of ICE.
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Alongside the mass prosecution of anti-ICE protesters, the Trump administration is attempting to activate a secretive court created to deport alleged “alien terrorists.”
The Justice Department last week filed the first application in the 30-year history of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. Established by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the five-judge body had never previously received an application or heard a case.
The identity of the person targeted remains secret because the application was filed under seal. Chief Judge Joan Ericksen ordered the government to provide additional information after questioning whether it had established the required connection between the unnamed person’s conduct and the statutory provisions cited in its application.
Under the law, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer and political hatchet man, can seek the removal of a noncitizen accused of involvement in “terrorist activity.” Proceedings may rely on secret evidence withheld from the targeted person and the public.
The activation of this court is an ominous development. The administration is systematically expanding the label “terrorist” to encompass socialist, anti-capitalist, antiwar and other left-wing opposition.
*****
Alongside the mass prosecution of anti-ICE protesters, the Trump administration is attempting to activate a secretive court created to deport alleged “alien terrorists.”
The Justice Department last week filed the first application in the 30-year history of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. Established by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the five-judge body had never previously received an application or heard a case.
The identity of the person targeted remains secret because the application was filed under seal. Chief Judge Joan Ericksen ordered the government to provide additional information after questioning whether it had established the required connection between the unnamed person’s conduct and the statutory provisions cited in its application.
Under the law, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer and political hatchet man, can seek the removal of a noncitizen accused of involvement in “terrorist activity.” Proceedings may rely on secret evidence withheld from the targeted person and the public.
The activation of this court is an ominous development. The administration is systematically expanding the label “terrorist” to encompass socialist, anti-capitalist, antiwar and other left-wing opposition.
At a State Department summit last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller delivered fascistic speeches portraying left-wing opposition as an enemy of civilization that must be destroyed.
Days later, Rubio’s State Department issued a 100-page McCarthyite report portraying Cuba as the center of a worldwide “anti-American” conspiracy. The document seeks to attribute virtually every expression of anti-capitalist, antiwar and anti-police sentiment in the United States and internationally to foreign subversion.
The simultaneous activation of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, mass prosecution of anti-ICE protesters and execution of immigrant workers is not accidental. These measures are interconnected components of the Trump administration’s erection of a presidential dictatorship and criminalization of all opposition from the working class and the left.
13. US cyclosporiasis lettuce recall expands to 27 states as Taylor Farms dictates response
Over the weekend, the recall of iceberg lettuce linked to the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in US history expanded to 27 states, reaching grocery shelves and the national foodservice chain. What Taylor Farms had described on Thursday as a limited “voluntary withdrawal” of lettuce from a single farm responsible for “less than 1%” of US iceberg lettuce supply had, by Sunday, become a formal, nationwide recall, and the corporation, not the government, was setting the terms of the response.
The outbreak has not slowed. Michigan, its epicenter, reported 6,571 cases as of Tuesday, up more than 1,500 since Friday and roughly four times the 1,645 laboratory-confirmed cases the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has processed nationally across 34 states. The federal count has barely moved in four days, even as more than 5,100 illnesses await analysis. The gap is a measure of the gutted federal surveillance that allowed the outbreak to spread undetected for seven weeks. So far, Michigan has reported 102 hospitalizations and no deaths.
On Thursday, Taylor Farms had described only a voluntary withdrawal of iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico, a negligible share of supply by its own account. The recall it announced Friday and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) posted Saturday tells a different story. It covers lettuce distributed from June 29 to July 16 across 27 states, reaching Walmart shelves as Marketside-brand bagged and shredded lettuce, Jack in the Box restaurants, and institutions nationwide through foodservice distributors. The contaminated lettuce had not been confined to a handful of Taco Bell outlets. It had spread across the country.
Taylor Farms is one of the largest fresh-produce companies in the world. Founded in 1995 by Bruce Taylor, a third-generation grower in Salinas, California, it reports $7 billion in annual revenue and more than 25,000 employees, and by its own account makes two of every five ready-to-eat salads sold in the United States. It has been responsible for numerous prior outbreaks. In 2013, the FDA traced cyclosporiasis in Iowa and Nebraska to salad mix from its Mexican subsidiary, sickening 631 people across 25 states, and the company insisted then, as it does now, that grocery packages were not involved. In October 2024, onions it supplied to McDonald’s caused an E. coli outbreak that killed one person and sickened more than 100—no charges were brought.
The federal investigation into the outbreak, meanwhile, has produced a fiasco. On Saturday, July 18, the FDA announced that a sample of Taylor Farms de Mexico shredded iceberg lettuce, collected at the border, had tested positive for Cyclospora and that the lot had been detained. One day later the agency reversed itself, calling the result a false positive that “does not represent true amplification,” removing it from its record and, the company said, apologizing to Taylor Farms. As of July 19 there was no confirmed positive product test of any kind.
The reversal came while Taylor Farms was publicly disputing the finding, insisting the FDA had “made a mistake.” The company had direct access to the officials running the investigation. On July 16, two days before the positive result was even announced, its executives met with White House and FDA officials, by their own account to press concerns about the agencies’ handling of the outbreak.
The FDA attributed the correction to a laboratory re-review, and there is no direct evidence that the company influenced it. But a regulator that abandons its one incriminating result within a day, and then apologizes to the firm under investigation, has effectively granted that firm authority over the inquiry it should never have. Whether the reversal was sound or the product of corporate pressure, the government could not hold a single hard finding against the company for 24 hours.
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Examining the more basic question of how human excrement reached the food of thousands in the first place leads to an indictment of the whole system of food production under capitalism. Cyclospora completes its life cycle only in the human gut; decades of research have found no other reservoir. It can only reach a bag of salad through human feces, either carried on the inadequately washed hands of the workers who pick and pack produce, or in the water used to irrigate and wash it. That so many fell ill at once means human waste entered the food supply on a “surprising scale,” Matthew Moore, a food safety microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told the New York Times, and points to contaminated water as the most likely route.
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The source of that contamination lies in the conditions imposed on agricultural workers in Mexico and Central America, as well as largely immigrant workers in California, Arizona and Florida alike. Farmworkers are routinely denied clean water, working toilets, handwashing and any paid leave that would let them stay home sick. Their housing is often served by failing septic systems, and irrigation water runs past latrines and sewage. Under such conditions one sick worker becomes many, and their waste reaches the produce and the water at scale. The parasite in the lettuce is a biological measure of how the workers who grow the world’s food are forced to live.
None of this is new. Cyclosporiasis has returned nearly every summer for three decades, from the raspberries grown in Guatemala that caused the outbreaks of the 1990s to the bagged salads that cause them now, because the conditions that produce it have never been improved. What has changed is the pace of the decline in working conditions and the collapse of public health surveillance.
*****
The Trump administration has gutted the agencies that once tracked the parasite, dissolving the CDC division responsible for it and cutting foodborne-disease surveillance to a skeleton, while extracting not a single penalty from the corporations. This is the acceleration of a decades-long, bipartisan assault on public health, which only deepened after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Public school educators across Victoria will hold their second full-day strike of the year tomorrow, after rejecting the latest sellout enterprise agreement pushed by the Victorian Labor government and the Australian Education Union (AEU) bureaucracy.
Despite the attempts of the AEU leadership to stampede teachers into endorsing a deal that would lock in stagnant pay and do nothing to address soaring workloads, educators voted by 51.18 percent, in a ballot that concluded yesterday, to reject the agreement and proceed with strike action. This is the second mass repudiation of the sellout in several months.
Teachers have made clear their determination to fight, but are continually coming up against an AEU bureaucracy that works as an arm of the big business Labor government, against the interests of educators.
It was in this context that a meeting of Victorian teachers and staff was convened by the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) on Saturday. The gathering resolved to form a statewide Educators Rank-and-File Committee, completely independent of and opposed to the AEU bureaucracy.
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
