Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective: At Lindsey Graham’s funeral, Trump hails a senator who “never saw a war he didn’t like”
The official funeral of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, held Tuesday at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., was a spectacle of reaction that underscores certain fundamental truths about American and world politics.
First, American imperialism is irrevocably committed to a global policy of militarism, seeking to use its military power in a desperate effort to maintain its dominant world position despite decades of economic decline.
Graham was one of the most persistent and aggressive supporters of American military operations around the world, summed up in Trump’s statement, in the course of his tribute to Graham, that “he was truly hawkish; he never saw a war he didn’t like.”
This was not an offhand or joking remark, as Trump read out an obviously scripted tribute, filled with mawkish language crafted by his speechwriters. Trump praised Graham’s record in the Senate, pushing through record military spending, huge tax cuts for the wealthy and the Supreme Court nomination of reactionary Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But his main focus was on Graham’s advocacy of the use of American military power.
Second, on the twin fronts of Ukraine and Iran, American imperialism is in the initial stages of a world war targeting not only Russia and Iran but ultimately China, perceived by all factions of the US ruling elite as its most dangerous economic and military rival. The merging of these two fronts was signaled this week by the Ukrainian attack on an Iranian cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea.
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Third, the most reactionary forces in American society are being mobilized behind the program of war abroad and dictatorship at home. Trump was followed to the rostrum of the funeral service by Sean Hannity, the fascist commentator from Fox News; Tony Perkins, president of the fundamentalist Family Research Council; Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the fanatical anti-abortion group Pro-Life America; and evangelical minister Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham.
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Fourth, the program of global war against the rivals of American capitalism has the unstinting support of the Democratic Party. Leading Democrats paid tribute to Graham during a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda before the funeral service. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sat in the front row and helped lay a wreath, and other Democrats were seen touching the casket in a gesture of affection.
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Fifth, there is the role of the corporate media, which treated the event at the National Cathedral with the greatest respect. Fox News, of course, broadcast the entire proceeding live. All the evening television news programs gave prominent coverage, while being careful not to focus on Trump’s declaration of Graham’s love for war. NBC, for example, did not even mention it.
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Perhaps the most important aspect of the Graham funeral, however, was the enormous security cordon around the event. The National Cathedral audience was carefully vetted, surrounded by Secret Service agents and other police, to ensure that no one seeking to speak the truth about Graham’s record as an advocate of militarism and an apologist for mass murder—including the Israeli genocide in Gaza—could get within miles of the ceremony.
The denizens of official Washington, Democrats as well as Republicans, live in constant fear of the American population. Their main concern is that the program of world war, requiring massive attacks on the living standards and democratic rights of the American working class, is leading to an explosion of the class struggle in America. They are right to be afraid.
2. UPS worker killed at Horsham, Pennsylvania hub
On July 24, a UPS worker was struck and killed at the company’s distribution hub on Blair Mill Road in Horsham Township, Pennsylvania. Police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel were dispatched at 12:36 p.m. after reports of a worker trapped at a loading dock. The fatality occurred inside the sprawling complex during the middle of the workday.
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Four days later, police had still not released the worker’s name, and neither UPS nor the authorities had provided a substantive account of how the fatality occurred. No public statement from his family or friends could be located as of this writing. The silence has left his coworkers and the public without even the elementary facts about a death that took place inside one of the largest logistics corporations in the world.
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UPS is currently carrying out a vast restructuring. The company eliminated approximately 14,000 positions, primarily in management, and reduced its operational workforce by approximately 48,000 positions in 2025, including 15,000 fewer seasonal positions. It announced plans to eliminate approximately 30,000 additional operational positions in 2026. UPS closed daily operations at 93 buildings in 2025. During the first quarter of 2026, it closed 23 more, 22 of them permanently, and identified another 27 buildings for closure during the year.
On Tuesday, four days after the unidentified Horsham worker was killed, UPS reported its second-quarter results. The company recorded $22.8 billion in revenue and $2.1 billion in adjusted operating profit. Adjusted operating profit in its US domestic package division rose 21 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, to nearly $1.2 billion.
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The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 5,070 workers died from occupational injuries in 2024—nearly 14 every day. The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget request sought to cut OSHA funding by nearly 8 percent, eliminate 223 full-time-equivalent positions—a 12.3 percent reduction—and reduce planned federal workplace inspections to 24,929. Congress ultimately enacted a much smaller funding cut, appropriating $629.3 million compared with $632.3 million in 2025.
3. Postal workers in Britain condemn death threat against Will Lehman by UAW official
Postal workers at Royal Mail in Britain have added their voices to the growing international condemnation of the public death threat made against Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and candidate in the United Auto Workers (UAW) presidential election, by a senior UAW official.
Postal workers expressed outrage over the threat, which took the form of an AI-generated image depicting Lehman—an officially certified candidate for UAW president—bound and gagged while a masked gunman points an automatic rifle at his back.
The UAW apparatus is seeking to silence Lehman’s campaign because it fears growing support for a socialist program that challenges the pro-corporate union apparatus and advances the independent organisation of the working class.
George, a postal worker in Scotland, said:
“I stand in solidarity with Will Lehman and encourage UAW workers in the US and the working class to stand up and show support in opposing the death threat made against a rank-and-file worker and a socialist standing in the UAW Presidential election."
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A colleague John, added:
“It was sickening to see the image put up by the UAW official about Will Lehman. This type of intimidation has been going on for a long time but its normally carried out behind the scenes by the bureaucracy. I know this from my own experience, but this takes it to a different level.
“Will is telling the truth, why else would they be going after him? They cannot discredit him as he has a clean slate, so they make violent threats. I think they are taking advantage of political climate created by Trump and the threats he put out on social media.
“This is not just a problem with the UAW; we need to look at all the unions. They are meant to be protecting our rights but instead they are the ones attacking them. Jensen who threatened Will is on £200,000, here Dave Ward is on £140,000 [Communication Worker Union general secretary]. When did we get a vote on their six figure salaries? They are not accountable to us but in bed with management and the companies looking after their profits."
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Members of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee drafted the following statement, which was sent to the UAW leadership on July 21. To date, the UAW leadership has remained silent despite growing calls to repudiate the threat made against Lehman. The statement is being shared with postal workers to explain the issues at stake and broaden support for opposition to this act of violent intimidation:
“The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) in the UK registers its strongest opposition to the death threat posted against UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman by UAW official Raymond L. Jensen Jr.
“The AI-generated image depicting Lehman bound, gagged and bleeding, with a masked man pointing a rifle at his back is deeply disturbing. It recalls the violent and inflammatory propaganda used against political opponents by President Trump and cannot be interpreted as anything other than both a death threat and a direct incitement to violence against a certified candidate for the highest office in the UAW.
“That this was issued by a senior UAW official as part of the campaign for Shawn Fain’s re-election as president raises grave concerns about the climate of retribution within the UAW leadership and the risk it poses to workers’ safety and democratic rights.
“We note that Will Lehman is campaigning on a platform calling for the abolition of the union bureaucracy, the building of rank-and-file committees in every plant, and the transfer of power to workers on the shop floor. This threat is therefore not directed at Lehman alone. It is aimed at silencing every UAW member exercising their democratic right to organise and have their voice heard against union-management collusion.
“We therefore demand:
- The immediate suspension of Raymond L. Jensen Jr. without pay, pending a full investigation.
- A clear and unequivocal public repudiation of the threat by the UAW leadership.
- A formal public apology to Will Lehman.
- Full cooperation with any investigation by the UAW Monitor, the Department of Labor, and relevant law enforcement authorities.
- Concrete measures to guarantee that the 2026 UAW election is conducted free from intimidation, threats, and retaliation.
Any failure by the UAW leadership to act decisively will be seen as implicit endorsement of gangster methods against the members they claim to represent.
“Postal workers here in the UK have supported Will Lehman’s campaign and the struggle he is waging to organise the rank-and-file. The right of workers to decide who speaks and acts in their name is non-negotiable. It cannot be handed over to bureaucrats, corporations, or any institution that denies workers a genuine voice.
“Will Lehman’s campaign has won support from workers in many countries who recognise the common issues we face. The principle ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ has renewed urgency in today’s globalised economy. Workers confront common attacks on our jobs, rights, and democratic freedoms. In defending Will Lehman and all UAW members against intimidation and violence, we affirm our solidarity with workers everywhere who are fighting for the right to speak, organise, and decide their own future.”
Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee UK
(Affiliated to the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees)We call on workers to register their opposition to this incitement to violence against Will Lehman by emailing the UAW at feedback@uaw.org and copying the Will Lehman campaign at info@willforuawpresident.org.
On July 20, the US State Department published a 100-page document titled “Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism.” Its thesis is that the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, the New Left, the anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century, the mass protests following the police murder of George Floyd and the present-day movements against ICE raids and the genocide in Gaza were all, in substantial measure, the handiwork of the government of a Caribbean island of less than 10 million people.
The report is an instrument to justify total war abroad and at home, including the genocidal economic blockade against Cuba that a small group of Democratic Representatives aptly called a “silent Gaza” after a trip to the island this month.
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The report is absurd on its face, turning the reality of the US-Cuban relationship inside out to advance its agenda. Cuba, a historically oppressed former semi-colony of the United States, is presented as the aggressor, even though the US has a GDP 300 times larger than the island nation and spends roughly 5,000 times more on its military. It ignores the thousands of terrorist attacks launched from the US, whose victims number roughly 3,500. Nor does it recount the inumerable CIA assassination attempts
And it makes no mention of the US economic blockade of the island, which has led to a 148 percent increase in the infant mortality rate between 2018 and 2025, claiming the lives of 1,800 Cuban babies. Thousands more have died because of the blockade depriving Cubans of essential medicines and sufficient nutrition. Things have only gotten worse in 2026 with the Trump administration’s blockade of all energy supplies.
It charges that the movement led by Fidel Castro was “a revolution against Western civilization itself,” but doesn’t go on to describe how this “civilization” manifested itself in pre-1959 Cuba. There is no mention of the bloodthirsty US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, which murdered and tortured tens of thousands, nor of the flourishing Mafia-run casinos and prostitution, not to mention an economy controlled almost entirely by foreign corporations and the grinding poverty faced by Cuba’s rural workforce, including the many toiling in the sugarcane fields.
Instead, the report presents a potted history of the 20th century, with Cuba becoming a chief protagonist of its second half. According to this account, Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech and the suppression of the Hungarian workers uprising had shattered the authority of the Stalinist Communist Parties, a process further compounded by Moscow’s doctrine of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States, which meant active opposition to world revolution. Into this vacuum stepped the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
The report acknowledges that Fidel Castro denied being a communist until 1961, and that the CIA had reached the same conclusion internally, but holds that his subsequent alliance with Moscow produced something other than Stalinist orthodoxy—a Marxism that did not wait for revolutionary conditions, but rather “made the Revolution.”
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The decisive turn, the report says, was when Havana allegedly decided to expand the anti-colonial struggle “into the imperial metropoles themselves, to the racially oppressed peoples living within the Western powers.” And here the document is explicit: “The black American in Detroit, in this telling, was not a ‘worker,’ first and foremost; he was a colonized subject, a revolutionary brother of the Vietnamese peasant and the Congolese rebel, a member of a distinctive Third World colony embedded in the heart of the empire.”
From this, the report derives its central claim: “It was Havana, not Moscow, that emerged as the capital of the new ideology of revolution.” Where the old left was built on “the party, labor unions, and Marxist theories of economic class struggle,” the New Left “was animated by Black Power, radical feminism, Third World liberation, and—above all else—the radical rejection of Western culture, history and identity in all its forms.” Cuba, it concludes, “has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.”
The remaining chapters supply the mechanisms through which this “shaping” supposedly took place. Cuba exported guerrilla warfare across Latin America through the Tricontinental and OLAS conferences. It ran an espionage empire that placed agents inside the State Department, the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Venceremos Brigade established by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Cuban officials allegedly shaped the Weather Underground, which the report holds Cuba “actively facilitated” during a period in which the FBI attributed to the group 2,500 bombings in 18 months. Havana cultivated black nationalism as a weapon, from Robert F. Williams to Assata Shakur. And it built a network of “front groups”—supposedly ranging from the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples, to the National Network on Cuba, the National Lawyers Guild, the People’s Forum, Code Pink, and even the Democratic Socialists of America.
The conclusion draws the line to the present. Cuba’s aim, the report states, remains “a hemispheric Marxist revolution that erases the United States from the earth,” pursued “not from without but from within—to turn Americans into instruments of their own nation’s undoing.”
It continues: “Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history—from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses—can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.”
In some way, shape, or form. After a hundred pages, that is the causal claim.
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This report did not appear in isolation. It was published four days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened at the State Department a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” attended by delegations from 66 countries. There, Rubio summed up the political framework behind the Cuba report. Those who oppose the existing order, he declared, “can call themselves anti-capitalists, or anti-imperialists, Communists, or anarchists, or Marxists … But the fundamental character is always the same.” He called upon “the people of the civilized world to defend themselves,” and concluded: “It is time to crush this evil forever.”
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...[T]he report’s final chapter reveals the full scope of what is being prepared. Titled “Anti-American Internationale,” it presents Cuba not merely as the author of American protests but as the node connecting social unrest to the geopolitical adversaries of the United States. Havana, it charges, “continues to act as a force multiplier for a much broader anti-American coalition, positioning itself as a staging ground for a wide range of foreign adversaries to conduct operations against the United States,” and functions as “a kind of concierge service for anti-American actors, providing them with access to domestic influence and intelligence within the United States.” China and Russia, it asserts, have tripled their intelligence personnel on the island in three years, with China operating signals intelligence facilities. Iran is folded in through decades of intelligence cooperation and naval agreements.
This is where the report comes full circle. A demonstration against ICE in Chicago is traced to a nonprofit; the nonprofit to Havana; Havana to Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. Domestic opposition and geopolitical rivalry are fused into a single enemy, so that the working class at home appears as the internal detachment of the adversary abroad. Opposition to war becomes, by definition, service to the enemy in that war.
The report’s falsity does not diminish its danger. It must be treated as a serious, official statement of state doctrine, not only for the United States, but for forging a network of mass repression internationally.
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The report is not an ordinary exercise in state propaganda. The language employed by Rubio and the report is that of Joseph Goebbels, particularly his speech at the Berlin Sportpalast in February 1943. Speaking after the destruction of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Goebbels demanded “total war”—the total mobilization of German society against an enemy he defined as simultaneously foreign and internal. The purpose of that speech was not to explain the crisis of German imperialism, but to transfer responsibility for it onto a fabricated enemy, and to license unlimited violence at home and abroad against that enemy. That is the practical conclusion of the DOS report.
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It would be a fatal error to present this as the scheme of a single administration. The Trump government is not the cause of the crisis of American democracy. It is its outcome.
The forms of bourgeois democracy in the United States have been disintegrating for well over three decades, under both parties, because they can no longer contain the social antagonisms produced by a level of wealth concentration without precedent in modern history. In 2000, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes in Florida and installed a president. The “war on terror” that followed produced indefinite detention without trial, Guantánamo Bay, torture for which no official was ever prosecuted, warrantless mass surveillance of the entire population, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and the assassination of American citizens by executive order under Obama. Each measure was introduced by one party and consolidated by the other.
Nowhere is this continuity clearer than in the legal instrument Rubio now wields. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. The PKK and the LTTE were designated [as Foreign Terrorist Organizations] by Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in 1997. When human rights organizations sought protection from prosecution for advising those groups on peaceful dispute resolution and petitioning the United Nations, it was the Obama administration that appealed, with Solicitor General Elena Kagan arguing the government’s case. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Kennedy and Stevens, upheld the criminalization of speech itself, on the grounds that advocacy on behalf of a designated organization lends it legitimacy. The penalty is up to 15 years.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time:
The US Secretary of State can designate any “foreign organization” as “terrorist” based on “classified information” establishing that it “engages in terrorist activity” which “threatens the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States.”
Rubio is not merely the author of the narrative contained in this report. He is the officer empowered to convert that narrative into criminal liability—unilaterally, on the basis of secret evidence, without a court, a jury or any disclosure to the accused. The 100-page report and the designation authority sit in the same pair of hands.
Nor is new legislation required. The apparatus was built for him across 30 years by both capitalist parties. He requires only the assertion of a foreign tie, which is precisely what this report exists to supply. Once a domestic organization is declared an extension of Havana, it becomes reachable through a statute written for foreign entities—and the protections the Supreme Court once extended to members of the Communist Party, as Justice Breyer noted in dissent, are bypassed entirely.
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The World Socialist Web Site identified the character of this government on the day of Trump’s second inauguration, in a perspective titled “‘Führer’ Trump declares war on the world, and the working class,” which noted his announcement that criminal gangs in Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela would be designated as foreign terrorist organizations, providing “a pseudo-legal justification for US attacks on those countries.” Eighteen months later, the same instrument has been extended to left-wing and anti-war organizations within the United States.
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The report layers uncorroborated defector testimony and anonymous officials: the allegation that Castro claimed the power to trigger race riots in American cities is introduced as something about which he “reportedly boasted,” according to what “one Senate testimonial later recounted.”
But the decisive refutation is chronological. Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. The Montgomery bus boycott began in December 1955 and lasted 381 days. Federal troops escorted nine students into Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The Bandung Conference met in 1955. India won independence in 1947, Indonesia in 1949, Ghana in 1957, Guinea in 1958. The Algerian war of independence began in 1954.
All of this preceded Castro’s leading his guerrilla fighters into Havana on January 1, 1959.
These movements arose from the conditions of the 20th century: from Jim Crow and lynch terror; from a conscript army sent to destroy a peasant nation, at a cost of 58,000 American and some 3 million Vietnamese lives; from the greatest strike wave in American history in 1945-46; from the disintegration of colonial empires bankrupted by two world wars. To attribute them to Cuban direction is to revive, as official state doctrine, the segregationist theory of the “outside agitator” as the source of all unrest.
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The report and the Cuban regime share an identical founding legend: that a small guerrilla force in the Sierra Maestra overthrew a state. The report presents this as a replicable model exported across a hemisphere under the direction of the strongman Castro.
Both are false. Of the approximately 20,000 Cubans killed under US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, some 19,000 died in the cities. The principal impetus for the dictatorship’s collapse came from urban, political strikes and mass resistance, the majority of it outside the control of Castro’s July 26th Movement. The guerrilla forces numbered at most a few thousand; the largest engagement of the war involved no more than 200 fighters. A substantial section of the Cuban bourgeoisie supported Castro, and Washington had imposed an arms embargo on Batista before the end.
Castro was not a Marxist and did not claim to be one. In April 1959 he declared in the United States: “I have stated in a clear and definite manner that we are not communists.” Only in late 1961, after nationalizations undertaken in response to American economic strangulation had made a break with Washington irreversible, did he announce his adherence to Marxism-Leninism and turn to Moscow and the Cuban Stalinists for aid and the means of creating a state apparatus that he did not possess.
The revolution was bourgeois in character, led by a petty-bourgeois nationalist movement, and produced a Bonapartist regime organized along military lines. This was the assessment of the International Committee of the Fourth International from the beginning. In 1961, while the Pabloite revisionists were hailing Castro as a model of “unconscious Trotskyism,” the ICFI wrote: “It is not the job of Trotskyists to boost the role of such nationalist leaders.”
There has been no restoration of capitalism in Cuba, because capitalism was never abolished. What has occurred since 1991 is the transformation of the regime into a broker of Cuban labor for foreign capital. In the 1990s, Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina oversaw an “economic opening with full guarantees for foreign investors.” Workers were contracted to these enterprises through the state—a strike-free labor force guaranteed by a police state trained in Stalinist methods. Today, the Castroite government has responded to the blockade through mass privatization and de-regulation.
The Trotskyist movement extends no political support to this regime. It jailed Cuba’s Trotskyists and destroyed their press. Julio Antonio Mella, who founded the Cuban Communist Party in 1925, broke with Stalinism in 1929 in solidarity with Trotsky’s struggle against the bureaucracy and was assassinated shortly afterward. The DOS document titled “The Capital of 21st Century Communism” is written about a state that imprisoned the Marxists.
Internationally, “Che” Guevara’s call for “two, three, many Vietnams” and Castro’s declaration at OLAS that guerrilla warfare was the sole solution for the continent led a generation of revolutionary-minded youth away from the industrial working class and into isolation and annihilation. Across the continent, these adventures and guerrilla methods supplied the local militaries and imperialism with the pretext for dictatorship.
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The report’s assertion that “the Cubans have always seen revolution in America as an end unto itself” inverts the truth. The nationalist perspective of the Cuban regime, and of every tendency that promoted it as socialism, rested on the explicit rejection of the American working class as a revolutionary force. A genuine revolutionary movement in the United States, moreover, would have threatened Havana and Moscow no less than Washington.
At the same time, the working class must oppose unconditionally the war being prepared against Cuba. The fuel blockade and economic sanctions are criminal acts of imperialist violence against a small and oppressed country, responsible for the blackouts, the medicine shortages and the sharp rise in preventable deaths now afflicting the Cuban population. The aim is not democracy but the installation of a client regime and the seizure of Cuban resources, following the pattern already executed in Venezuela.
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The International Committee of the Fourth International has irreconcilable political differences with the organizations named in this report. They are not organizations of the working class. Their orientation is to the Democratic Party and to sections of the state, and their politics of racial and national identity have functioned to divide workers.
Nonetheless, workers everywhere, must oppose Washington’s witch-hunt without reservation. The designations, subpoenas and prosecutions now being prepared are an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, and every precedent established will be turned against strikes, immigrants, and socialist-minded workers and students.
The State Department has produced a hundred pages on the danger of socialism not because it actually sees Havana as a threat, but because millions of workers and young people in the United States and internationally are turning toward socialism, and the ruling class cannot acknowledge the cause without indicting itself. The document is a measure of the ruling elite’s fear.
Fearing that a weeks-long student protest was becoming the flashpoint for an eruption of mass social anger, India’s Narendra Modi-led, far-right government grudgingly accepted the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Saturday, July 25.
Pradhan’s resignation had been the main demand made by leaders of a student agitation initiated on June 20 by the newly-founded, satirically-named Cockroach Janata Party (CJP).
With the encouragement of forces allied with India’s Congress Party-led parliamentary opposition, the CJP leadership responded to Pradhan’s resignation by quickly moving to shut down the agitation. They sought to pass off what was manifestly a modest tactical retreat on the part of Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government as a signal of “victory.”
Speaking Saturday to the crowd at the Jantar Matnar—the site in the heart of New Delhi where students and their supporters were in the 36th day of a continuous sit-in—CJP leader Abjheet Dipke declared, “Dharmendra Pradhan has resigned, and this is proof that if you don’t get scared, you can win.” He continued, “You should not be scared to speak in a democracy. Only if you raise your voice will they stay in line because they are sitting in power because of us.”
Joined by other CJP spokespersons, Dipke, who until recently was an operative for the right-wing, pro-capitalist Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party, then urged the protesters to disperse in a show of “good faith” to the Modi government. In justifying their decision to shut down the agitation at the very point that it was beginning to galvanize popular support across India, the CJP leaders claimed to have secured additional verbal pledges from the Modi regime. Chief among these were that it would withdraw all charges (First Information Reports) laid against those involved in the student agitation, financially compensate the families of youth who committed suicide as a result of the criminal leaks of government-supervised university entrance exams, and formally respond to the CJP’s demands for educational reform within four weeks.
This “agreement” now appears to be unraveling. The authorities have apparently reneged on a promise to put the additional points in writing by Tuesday and are insisting that they never agreed to the dropping of charges against those involved in what a news report, citing unnamed government officials, called “social miscreancy” or who have prior criminal convictions.
True to its authoritarian playbook, the Modi government has repeatedly tried to smear the protesters as “anti-national” and violent. In reality, it was the Delhi Police, acting on the orders of the government, that brutally attacked those congregated at the Jantar Matnar protest site on the evening of July 19, and then used lathi charges, tear gas and pellet guns to attack a peaceful but defiant 50,000-strong march to the parliament complex the next day.
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A significant feature of the student protest movement is that it has united students across the communal divides that have been incited by the BJP and the Indian ruling class as a whole.
That the CJP leaders would respond to the sudden surge in support for the student agitation after it challenged the Modi government in the streets of Delhi is, to say the least, not surprising. As the WSWS previously explained, from the outset they sought to limit the protest to the narrowest demands, as if the ouster of one reactionary BJP minister, however warranted, will change anything. The CJP is not even calling for a vast expansion of funding for all levels of the education system and a living wage to be paid university students, let alone raising demands that would challenge the domination of socio-economic life by India’s capitalist elite or encroach on the massive sums expended on India’s military.
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The most pernicious role is played by the various Stalinist parties, which in the name of opposing the Hindu supremacist BJP, have systematically suppressed the class struggle and serve as anchors of the Congress-led INDIA electoral bloc.
Within hours of Pradhan’s resignation, the two traditional Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, and the Communist Party of India (CPI)—and the Maoist Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and its student wing, the All India Students’ Association (AISA), all rushed to proclaim it an “historic victory.” In what was couched as praise for the undoubted self-sacrifice of the students, they all promoted politically fatal illusions in the possibility of the students—and more broadly India’s workers and rural toilers—to advance their interests through appeals to the capitalist establishment, as it lurches, in India and globally, toward dictatorship and war. Thus the CPM Politburo declared, “The courage and determination shown by the youngsters augers well for Indian democracy.”
None of these ostensibly “Communist” organizations called for the students to turn to the working class, beginning with the Noida and Manesar workers, and to assist it in mobilizing its immense social power in opposition to the BJP government and India’s venal capitalist elite and in the fight for a workers’ government, leaning on the support of the rural masses, to implement socialist policies.
The situation remains explosive. Despite the best efforts of the CJP leaders and the opposition parties, the student protest movement may erupt anew. Socialist-minded students must fight for the understanding that none of the major problems blighting the lives of their peers—from the lack of university places and economic opportunities, to communal reaction, state repression and war—can be resolved outside of a working-class-led struggle for international socialism.
6. New Zealand election: Green Party AGM postures against social inequality, silent on war
The Green Party is seeking to neutralize mounting anger among workers and youth by pretending it will pressure a Labour-led government to address inequality and poverty.
7. Over 300,000 Haitians targeted for deportation as Trump administration guts asylum rights
On Monday, more than 300,000 Haitian immigrants were stripped of their legal status and work authorization through the cancellation of their Temporary Protected Status (TPS). This savage move exposes workers and their families to arrest, imprisonment and deportation to a country devastated by decades of US imperialist intervention.
One day later, the Department of Homeland Security imposed a sweeping new rule allowing asylum officers to send hundreds of thousands of applications directly into deportation proceedings without first interviewing the applicant. The measure could affect as many as 444,724 pending cases, in addition to an estimated 132,000 future applicants every year.
Heavily armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were reportedly being mobilized in cities with large Haitian populations, including New York City, Boston, San Diego, Orlando, Miami and Springfield, Ohio. Locals have reported that normally busy streets teeming with life are empty as residents stay home to avoid the immigration Gestapo.
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In Springfield, Ohio, the targeting of Haitian workers is the culmination of a years-long campaign initiated by neo-Nazis and elevated by Trump, Vice President JD Vance and the Republican Party.
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The administration is ordering Haitians to return to conditions that its own State Department declares are too dangerous for Americans. A State Department advisory updated July 10 designates Haiti “Level 4: Do Not Travel” because of “crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” It acknowledges that Haiti has remained under a national state of emergency since March 2024 and that the US government has an “extremely limited ability” to provide emergency services.
Nor can Haitians simply purchase a ticket to Port-au-Prince to escape the ICE dragnet. “US commercial flights are not currently operating to or from Port-au-Prince,” the State Department states. The Federal Aviation Administration prohibits US carriers from flying there because of “ongoing instability.”
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The road to Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the right to asylum was paved by the Democrats and the Biden administration. In June 2024, Biden issued a Trump-style executive order closing the southern border to most asylum seekers once an arbitrary daily threshold had been reached. He revived deportation flights to Haiti despite the country’s catastrophic conditions and dispatched mounted Border Patrol agents against Haitian refugees in Del Rio, Texas. His administration expanded the detention, deportation and border police state apparatus now being wielded by Trump.
The right to seek asylum was incorporated into international law after the Second World War and the Holocaust, when governments had barred Jews and other refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Its destruction is inseparable from the fascistic character of Trump’s mass deportation campaign and the repudiation of the democratic principles proclaimed by the US ruling class after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The defense of Haitian immigrants and all workers cannot be entrusted to the courts or capitalist politicians. Workers must organize independently to prevent ICE raids and deportations, demand the immediate restoration of legal status to every affected immigrant, close the detention camps, abolish ICE and guarantee the right of all workers to live and work wherever they choose.
The National Education Association (NEA), the largest union in the United States, with 2.8 million members, held its Representative Assembly July 3-7 in Denver, while the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), with 1.9 million members, met July 16-19 in Washington.
Educators who hoped these gatherings would honestly assess the destruction of public education and mobilize millions of school workers against Trump’s fascistic attacks were bitterly disappointed. In fact, neither convention gave any hint that the very existence of public education—the achievement of two American revolutions and decades of working-class struggle—is at stake.
*****
The NEA and AFT gatherings exuded the upper-middle-class complacency of the bureaucracy. There was no serious discussion of the crisis, much less a call for unified strike action against the destruction of public education and culture. There was no call for a mass mobilization to uphold the democratic rights of children and families against the ICE gestapo.
The AFT convention was staged instead as a Democratic Party rally, its podium handed to House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Raphael Warnock, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, former Attorney General Eric Holder and Stacey Abrams. Not one speaker mentioned the sustained, bipartisan assault on educators that has left teachers paid 26.9 percent less than comparably educated professionals, healthcare costs skyrocketing, class sizes mushrooming, and more than 1,000 schools closed nationwide.
Most revealing was the silence on the central struggle of educators over the past year: the “We Can’t Wait” campaign, a joint NEA-AFT operation of the California Teachers Association (CTA) billed as uniting the bargaining power of “77,000 educators in 32 districts serving a million students.” In practice, the year-long campaign was a public relations stunt while the union bureaucrats forced teachers to “wait.” The unions forced teachers to work for months without a contract, isolated them district by district, and shut down the walkouts they could not prevent outright.
The betrayal reached its climax in Los Angeles, where 75,000 school workers, including 35,000 teachers, were poised to strike on April 14 against inadequate pay, rising healthcare costs and job insecurity. The United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union called off the strike at the last moment, clearing the way for Democratic policymakers and district officials to impose nearly 6,000 job cuts.
*****
The NEA and AFT bureaucracies are a privileged social layer bound to the Democratic Party by material interest: six-figure salaries, control over pension fund investments, and a shared stake in Wall Street’s fortunes. What this layer fears above all is not Trump but the prospect that opposition among educators escapes its control and becomes an independent movement of the working class, arriving at revolutionary and socialist conclusions.
It is incumbent upon educators to create an insurgent movement and launch a national movement to halt every attack on public education and the social rights of the working class.
That fight requires the formation of rank-and-file committees in every school, democratically controlled by working educators and independent of both capitalist parties—linking teachers with classified staff, bus drivers and cafeteria workers regardless of union affiliation, and joining them to workers across the country and internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Only the independent, unified mobilization of the working class, armed with a socialist program, can defend public education against the ruling class and its two parties. That is the fight the NEA and AFT leaderships were elected to prevent. It is the one educators must now take up.
9. Florida carries out first double execution in six decades as US death toll mounts
Florida on Tuesday carried out its first double execution in more than 60 years, putting to death James Aren Duckett, a former police officer who maintained his innocence for nearly four decades, and Dominick Anthony Occhicone, an 80-year-old man who became the oldest prisoner executed in the state’s history since modern record-keeping began a century ago.
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The pairing of the two executions, ordered six hours apart by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, is itself a marker of the pace at which the state has been killing its prisoners. Duckett and Occhicone became the state’s 11th and 12th executions this year.
DeSantis, who leaves office in January, oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, more than any Florida governor since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1976. The previous high was eight, set in 2014. Taken together, Duckett and Occhicone bring the total for DeSantis’s final two years in office to 31, compared with just nine executions during his first six years as governor.
The governor’s office has offered little explanation for the acceleration. “Some of these crimes were committed in the ’80s,” DeSantis said at a November 2025 news conference. “Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them [the victims] to make sure this ran very smoothly.” The remark treats four decades of legal process, appeals, and judicial review not as due process but as an inconvenience to be corrected through the accumulation of death warrants.
DeSantis’ exercise of this power has been unilateral and largely unaccountable. He has not explained why he scheduled Duckett’s and Occhicone’s executions on the same day, six hours apart, and Florida prison officials have not said whether the compressed timeline posed added risks to the condemned men. Attorneys for both prisoners argued precisely this in a last-ditch appeal, telling courts that pairing the executions “exponentially increased” the risk of a botched procedure by placing additional strain on prison staff not accustomed to carrying out two executions in a single day.
That claim, along with the men’s separate emergency petitions, reached the US Supreme Court overnight Monday. The justices denied all the applications, including the certiorari petitions challenging the double execution itself, in a series of short orders issued without explanation and without noted dissents. The orders came roughly an hour after Duckett’s execution had been scheduled to begin. In its brief to the court, the state Court dismissed the claim of heightened risk as “pure conjecture that the execution team will fail to perform Florida’s lethal-injection procedures correctly”—a response that treats the demand for basic safety as an insult to the state’s competence rather than a legitimate concern raised by men facing death.
*****
Nationally, 19 executions have been carried out so far in 2026, 12 of them in Florida. This compares with 47 executions nationwide in 2025, itself the highest national total in 16 years, and 25 in 2024. Florida alone accounted for 19 of last year’s 47, or 40 percent of all executions carried out in the US.
This flurry of executions does not occur in isolation. It comes amid a marked escalation in police and immigration enforcement violence nationally, from the ICE killings in Houston and Biddeford, Maine to a pattern of aggressive immigration raids and use of lethal force by federal agents across the country. The expansion of the state’s willingness to kill on death row and the expansion of its murder in the streets and at the border are not separate developments. They are two faces of the same growth in the repressive power of the capitalist state, exercised with diminishing restraint and accountability against working people, immigrants and the poor.
On Saturday, July 25, Argentina’s President Javier Milei gave the main speech at the National Convention of the Liberal Party (PL), in São Paulo that officially launched the presidential candidacy of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. Breaking every diplomatic protocol, the foreign head of state intervened directly in the Brazilian election campaign on behalf of the son of the former president, convicted and imprisoned for a coup d’etat attempted in the last presidential elections of 2022.*****
The trip is not the personal initiative of an eccentric head of state. It forms part of Washington’s escalating offensive against Brazil ahead of October’s election. The previous week, the Trump administration imposed an additional 25 percent tariff on Brazilian products, in effect since July 22, on top of the 50 percent tariffs imposed a year earlier to force the reversal of the case against Bolsonaro. In June, following Flávio Bolsonaro’s meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, the US government designated Brazilian criminal gangs as “foreign terrorist organizations.” The WSWS has characterized both measures as open imperialist interventions in the Brazilian election, aimed at installing in Brasília a government aligned with the plans to convert Latin America into a US neocolonial protectorate.
The Milei government is itself a direct product of this type of intervention. In September 2025, with the Argentine president’s popular support collapsing ahead of legislative elections, the US Treasury announced a $20 billion currency swap, followed by purchases of Argentine sovereign bonds and new packages from the World Bank, the IDB and the IMF. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly presented the operation as an “endorsement” of Milei. Backed by Washington, Milei has ceded control of the South Atlantic to the Pentagon, rammed through a labor “reform” aimed at erasing more than a century of Argentine workers’ gains, and promoted the rehabilitation of the 1976–83 military dictatorship.
*****
The “blue wave” celebrated at the Bandeirantes Palace was set out by Milei as a sequence to be completed in October: “today Latin American socialism is being defeated election after election: Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and, we hope, in October, a liberal Brazil too.”
As the WSWS wrote, the recent election results are not the expression of a rightward turn by the Latin American population. The victories of Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia and Keiko Fujimori in Peru, both by razor-thin margins and clouded by allegations of vote fraud, were produced by direct intervention from Washington and by the bankruptcy of the “pink tide” governments, which came to power promising reform and delivered austerity.
*****
The choice of Milei as the main speaker at the launch of Flávio Bolsonaro’s candidacy is revealing of the character of the PL’s electoral campaign itself. By associating it with the most reactionary figure in Latin America, directly subordinated to Washington, it has publicly announced the content of its political strategy.
That strategy is the direct continuation of the conspiracy carried out by Jair Bolsonaro and the military high command in the 2022 election, which culminated in the fascist attack in Brasília on January 8, 2023. Milei’s speech left no room for doubt:
You’ve already seen this four years ago, in the last presidential election, and you will see it again. Get ready. Because the left has no problem playing dirty. Get ready for a great battle.
This advance denunciation of fraud was accompanied by an inversion of the very definition of coup. Milei accused Argentina’s parliamentary opposition of having tried, in last year’s legislative election, to “provoke a coup d’état, generating panic in the markets and a run on the dollar.”
*****
Milei’s trip to Brazil confirms that the preparation of a dictatorship in Brazil is not a Brazilian affair alone, and that the defense against it cannot be delegated to the Lula government, the state apparatus, or any faction of the Brazilian bourgeoisie. The offensive running through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Cuba is the same one Trump is conducting within the United States itself. It can be confronted only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, unifying Brazilian, Argentinian and American workers on a common socialist program. This is the task posed in the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Brazil and throughout Latin America.
11. Major global selloff in chip stocks
The sharp fall in the stocks of chipmaking firms has been triggered by concerns over the continued viability of the AI investment boom to which they are tied. First among these is whether AI buildout is going to generate a sufficient return on the massive investment outlays.
The AI “business model” assumes that the major US firms developing the AI platforms, the so-called hyperscalers such as Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Meta (Facebook), will be able to reap super profits because they will retain the lead in producing superior AI platforms, giving them a monopoly position.
But this assumption is increasingly being called into question by the development of Chinese AI models which can rival the efficiency of those produced by the US firms OpenAI and Anthropic at a much-reduced cost.
Then there is the question of circularity in the AI boom. This issue, which has been of concern for some time, was highlighted again this week when the Wall Street Journal revealed that Nvidia, which supplies graphic processing units for AI, was engaged in talks to provide $250 billion for a massive OpenAI data centre project in Ohio.
The Journal said that the report “intensified investor concerns about circular financing in the artificial intelligence economy—and about the extent to which Nvidia is investing in its own customers, which in some cases need the chipmaker’s financial backing to purchase its chips.”
Needless to say, a situation in which a company supplies another firm the money with which to buy its products, enabling it to book a profit, is hardly a viable business model.
12. Trump meets with Zelensky and Netanyahu in the White House on Russia and Iran war crises
In the leadup to the beginning of his second term, Trump repeatedly boasted that he could “wrap up” the war with Russia quickly, promising that he would deliver a settlement in a single phone call to Vladmir Putin. In a similar vein, Trump insisted the war against Iran would not be a ‘quagmire’—like previous US wars in Vietnam and Iraq—but a short, winnable campaign. The President spoke of operations that will be “over in short order,” in a matter of weeks rather than months or years.
The reality, however, is that Russia has entrenched its positions. A June 2026 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that combined Russian and Ukrainian military casualties (killed, wounded and missing) may be as high as 1.8 million and could reach around 2 million by spring 2026.
In Iran, US-Israeli strikes—which killed the leadership of the Iranian government on the first day of the war—did not result in regime change in Tehran. In fact, not one of the ever-sliding objectives stated by Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for the criminal war against Iran have been achieved.
Far from offering an anti-war alternative, the Democratic Party’s opposition focuses on tactical disagreements over funding, duration and legal cover for the Iran campaign, while fully accepting the underlying strategic orientation of US imperialism. In many cases, Democrats are demanding that Trump finish the job and “win the war.”
Other Democrats have emphasized that the war‚ which a solid majority of the US public opposes, is further discrediting the US government and the entire American two-party political establishment. They warn that, “going it alone does not work,” and argue for a more multilateral and better-packaged form of imperialist aggression.
Viewed in context, the White House summits with Zelensky and Netanyahu, the Caspian Sea strike, and the bipartisan support for war in Washington reveal an imperialist offensive in which Ukraine and Israel serve as instruments of US policy in Eurasia and the Middle East. The Tuesday meetings have accelerated the intermingling of Washington’s wars and the mounting historic crisis of US imperialism.
13. Major earthquake hits southern Japan
A powerful earthquake struck the Kumamoto Prefecture on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu yesterday at 4:27 p.m. local time. At least 13 people are dead and hundreds have been hospitalised. The death toll is likely to rise as search-and-rescue teams scour damaged buildings looking for those people who are still missing.
The US Geological Survey initially put the magnitude of the quake at 7.1, but later revised the figure downwards to 6.8. The main tremor was followed by significant aftershocks in the next half hour: one of magnitude 5 at 4:29 p.m. and two more of magnitude 4 at 4:39 p.m. and 4:59 p.m. More than 60 tremors of a smaller magnitude have followed. Tsunami warnings were issued but lifted at 6:10 p.m.
The Aeon shopping mall in Kumamoto City was extensively damaged after part of its second floor collapsed followed by an explosion that ripped through the huge complex blowing out some of the walls. Two women in their 20s were killed and another person reportedly suffered from a cardiopulmonary arrest. While several hundred people were evacuated from the mall, some are still missing. The explosion may have resulted from the ignition of leaking gas, but that is yet to be confirmed.
The mall, one of the region’s main shopping and entertainment centers, was only re-opened last month after being badly damaged in a devastating earthquake in 2016 that struck the same region, killing 275 people, injuring more than 1,800 and destroying nearly 8,000 houses.
The Nippon paper factory in Yatsushiro City also suffered serious damage with images showing one of its chimneys snapped off. Local officials reported that two people were found in a “state of cardiopulmonary arrest” but could not confirm if they were alive or not. Nine other workers were still missing.
More than 350 people have been treated in hospital with at least some facilities suffering damage from the earthquake. Saiseikai Kumamoto Hospital has suspended non-emergency hospitalisations and has asked people to refrain from outpatient visits, except in emergency cases. The hospital has water leaks and collapsed walls in some buildings.
“People injured by furniture that fell during the earthquake, such as those with fractures, are being brought in one after another. We have 400 beds, but we are already at full capacity,” the hospital’s public relations director told Japan’s public broadcaster NHK.
Around 300,000 people have been evacuated. As of early Wednesday morning local time, 178 facilities had been shut, including libraries, community centers, public parks and sports facilities, some of which have been turned into temporary shelters.
As of 6 p.m. yesterday, more than 48,170 households in Kumamoto Prefecture were without power, according to Kyushu Electric Power. NTT Docomo and KDDI Corp. reported that the quake knocked out or disrupted mobile phone services in some areas.
Transport has also been disrupted with the runway at Kumamoto Airport closed immediately after the earthquake for inspection. The airport office also said that some people had been trapped in elevators in the airport’s terminal building due to the quake.
A number of roads have been closed and the region’s high-speed shinkansen train services were suspended after the quake. At JR Yatsushiro Station, the quake derailed and overturned a freight train, but there is no news about possible casualties.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi yesterday evening issued a pro-forma expression of “heartfelt sympathy to all those affected by this disaster” and declared that the government would put “human lives first” and respond with its “full force” to support communities affected by the disaster.
However, apart from mobilizing 3,600 military personnel to assist in rescue and relief efforts, the government has offered little more than basic supplies including food and water along with portable air conditioners and power generators to help prevent heatstroke amid Japan’s hot summer weather. Takaichi’s popularity is falling as public frustration and anger rises over inflation and increased living costs.
Mindful of the catastrophic consequences of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the Nuclear Regulation Authority was quick to reassure the public that there would be no repetition of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It reported no abnormalities in the safety functions at the three nuclear power plants closest to yesterday’s earthquake.
The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, as it is known, was a magnitude 9.1 quake that triggered a massive tsunami reaching as high as 16.7 meters, and devastated Japan’s northeast Tohoku region. The tsunami struck the inadequately protected Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, leading to meltdowns in three out of six reactors in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
An estimated 18,500 people were killed, while ten years after the event approximately 2,500 people officially remained missing. Nearly half a million people were forced to evacuate from their homes. Tens of thousands are still unable to return to their homes in the contaminated areas. The decommissioning and clean-up of the nuclear plant is still decades from completion.
Japan is located along the “ring of fire”—the series of fault lines around the Pacific Ocean basin that produces volcanoes and quakes. It is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and accounts for about 20 percent of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6 or more.
While governments in one of the world’s most developed economies have been compelled to devote resources to mitigate the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis, the 2011 triple disaster is a terrible reminder that, under capitalism, private profit overrides all consideration of human life and health.
14. Australia: Victorian premier removed as Labor seeks to assuage big-business concerns
The sudden leadership change points to a developing crisis of Labor not only in Victoria but federally, which its stage-managed national conference sought to cover over with a confected display of total “unity.”
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.
