Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. American workers and youth are turning towards socialism
This is a vindication of a basic principle of Marxism: that social being determines consciousness. The Socialist Equality Party anticipated precisely this development. Its 2010 founding program stated that “the change in objective conditions”—the deepening crisis of American and world capitalism—”will lead American workers to change their minds” about socialism. What was then a scientific projection has become a broad phenomenon.
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Self-identified democratic socialists overwhelmingly oppose the war against Iran, a sentiment shared by the American public as a whole. A separate poll conducted by Quinnipiac College and published Wednesday found that 66 percent opposed Trump’s handling of the war, while 60 percent opposed the war itself. Both figures were the highest since Trump launched the war of aggression on February 28.
*****It is noteworthy that the growing support for socialism comes under conditions where both capitalist parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, are despised by a majority of voters. Asked by CNN which party was the party of change, which cared about people like them, which fought corruption, and which got things done, more voters answered “neither” to each question than backed either party. A majority told CNN that most members of Congress should be ousted in November.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last weekend found exactly the same level of support for democratic socialist ideas and for the ideas of MAGA Republicans, at 27 percent each—a remarkable figure, given that fewer than half of respondents said they understood democratic socialist policies, while MAGA policies are given non-stop publicity by the corporate media, the Republican Party and the Trump administration.
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The initial leftward movement of millions of working people, under the impact of the mounting dangers of war, dictatorship and economic dislocation, has taken the initial form of electoral victories of the DSA. But the DSA is not the vehicle of the movement developing in the working class. It is an obstacle to it—a faction of the Democratic Party, one of the two parties of Wall Street and the military, whose function is to channel the growing opposition of workers and youth back into the framework of capitalist politics.
The essential content of this radicalization, however, is not reformist, and it will not be contained within that framework. The same crisis turning workers and youth against capitalism will bring them into conflict with the Democratic Party. As the WSWS declared in its New Year statement of January 4, 2025: “The past five years have been dominated by the response of the ruling class to the capitalist crisis. The next five years will be dominated by an explosive eruption of the class struggle, which is already under way.”
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Workers and young people must seriously examine the fundamental historical issues of the 20th century, above all, the struggle waged by Leon Trotsky against Stalinism. Workers and young people today must heed the admonition of Trotsky, “Young people, study politics!”
Socialism can and will be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the working class in struggle against the capitalist system, in the United States and throughout the world.
This requires a genuine socialist program: the political independence of the working class from both parties of the ruling class; the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the transformation of the banks and corporations into public utilities under democratic control; and the reorganization of economic life to meet human need rather than private profit. The polls record a beginning. The essential question is its conscious political direction—the building of a revolutionary leadership in the working class, in the United States and internationally.
This means building the Socialist Equality Party in the United States and the International Committee of the Fourth International. We urge workers and youth to join us.
The Trump administration’s rule implementing Medicaid work requirements formally takes legal effect Friday, July 31, the same day the public comment period on the nearly 400-page regulation closes. With this deadline, the machinery for the most sweeping restructuring of Medicaid since the program’s founding six decades ago has locked into place, stripping coverage from millions of people.
The vehicle for this liquidation is the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), signed into law by President Trump on July 4, 2025. The legislation cuts federal Medicaid spending by an estimated $911 billion over 10 years and is projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to leave 7.5 million more Americans without health insurance by 2034.
The single largest source of “savings” is the work requirement provision now taking effect, which the CBO estimates will cut $326 billion and strip coverage from 5.3 million adults. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warns that as many as 15 million people could be placed at risk once the full apparatus is operating. States are now legally bound to begin building the verification systems that will strip healthcare coverage from millions of working class people and must complete the first round of notices to tens of millions of enrollees by August 31.
This seismic change in how Medicaid benefits are distributed has largely flown under the radar. There has been no primetime address, no congressional showdown, no sustained media coverage. The transformation is being carried out through the gray channels of administrative rule-making precisely because its architects understand that the policy is deeply unpopular and its consequences lethal. The Democratic “opposition” has facilitated this broadside against the working class through its refusal to fight Trump’s class war policies and support for the ruling oligarchy’s drive to war, which is literally robbing Medicaid recipients of life-saving healthcare services.
Medicaid was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 30, 1965—61 years ago this week—as part of the Social Security Amendments that also created Medicare. Jointly funded by the federal government and the states, Medicaid has grown from an appendage to the Medicare legislation into the largest single source of healthcare coverage in the United States, insuring one in five Americans. As of February 2026, an estimated 74.9 million people were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), including 35.7 million children. The program pays for 40 percent of all births, covers 60 percent of nursing home residents and is the nation’s largest payer of both behavioral health services and long-term care.
It is this program that President Trump, speaking at a closed White House Easter lunch in April, dismissed—along with Medicare and Social Security—as “little scams.”
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The policy compels adults aged 19–64 enrolled through the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion to document at least 80 hours per month of work, community service, education or job training—or, alternatively, monthly income of at least $580, the equivalent of 80 hours at the $7.25 federal minimum wage—or lose their coverage. More than 20 million adults are enrolled through the expansion in the 41 states that adopted it. Verification is required at least every six months, with states free to demand monthly reporting.
In one of the legislation’s cruelest provisions, the work rule does not apply to a “parent, guardian, caretaker relative, or family caregiver of a dependent child 13 years old or under or a disabled individual,” but a parent whose youngest child is age 14 through 17 is fully subject to the requirement, same as a childless adult.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates the amount an adult received in recent years in Medicaid expansion funds at $6,000–$6,500 annually. This means the benefit these recipients “earn” for their 80 hours a month, if they can prove their eligibility, works out to somewhere between $6.25 and $6.75 per hour—well below the federal minimum wage of $7.25, and a fraction of any state minimum wage where these people actually live.
These sums must be measured against war spending. The administration is demanding $200 billion for its illegal war against Iran and has advanced a $1.5 trillion military budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2027, up from the roughly $1 trillion level reached last year. The $326 billion to be extracted from Medicaid recipients over an entire decade—purchased with the health and lives of millions—amounts to barely a fifth of what the Pentagon will consume in a single year. The money stripped from the sick does not disappear; it flows upward through the tax provisions of the same legislation to the corporations and the financial oligarchy, and outward into war.
The interim final rule issued by the CMS on June 1 shocked even the state officials tasked with carrying it out. Most significantly, the rule imposed a restrictive two-part test for the “medical frailty” exemption: It is not enough to have cancer, HIV, Parkinson’s disease or a disabling mental illness—the enrollee must also demonstrate that the condition “significantly impairs” their ability to work. States are explicitly prohibited from categorically exempting people with serious diagnoses.
Democratic attorneys general from 24 states and the District of Columbia, joined by two Democratic governors, filed suit in late June challenging the rule, arguing that the frailty test defies the plain language of the statute and puts cancer patients, diabetics and the mentally ill at risk of losing coverage they need to survive. Twenty-six states separately asked the federal court in Boston to postpone implementation, arguing they lacked the staff and capacity to meet the CMS timeline and that the rollout would “cause harm and chaos.”
On Thursday, July 30, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns of Massachusetts denied the states’ request for a preliminary injunction. The ruling means the deadlines stand: The rule took effect the following day, the August 31 notification deadline stands and the work requirements must be operational by January 1, 2027. Nebraska began enforcing the requirements May 1; Arkansas—site of the notorious 2018–19 experiment in which 18,000 people lost coverage in a matter of months—launched its program July 1, with Montana and Iowa to follow.
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The propaganda portrait of the Medicaid recipient—the “able-bodied” adult “sitting at home watching television,” in the words of CMS administrator Mehmet Oz—bears no relationship to reality. A Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) analysis of federal survey data found that nearly eight in 10 adults subject to the new requirements were either already working the required hours, attending school or not working for reasons—illness, disability, caregiving—that should qualify them for an exemption. Adults aged 50–64 are at greatest risk for losing benefits: Fewer than half work 80 or more hours in a given month, and more than one in 10 describe themselves as retired, a status the law does not recognize.
Nor does steady work guarantee safety: Among adults who met the 80-hour threshold in one month, roughly one in 10 failed to meet it consistently over the following six months. A seasonal roofer, a laid-off autoworker, a home health aide with no pay stubs, a rideshare driver with no employer, a cancer patient whose exemption paperwork arrives a week late—Data for each will be fed into an apparatus built to find reasons for termination. In Arkansas, the vast majority of the 18,000 people terminated were working or exempt. They lost coverage because they could not navigate the bureaucratic gauntlet. Only about 1,900 ever got their coverage back.
The verification apparatus prescribed by the rule reveals the policy’s real design. At application, states must “look back” one to three months to confirm compliance; at every six-month renewal, at least one month more. States are directed to mine payroll and claims databases first, then demand documentation from the enrollee when the databases come up empty.
Self-attestation is permitted only through 2027. After that, the medically frail may attest to their own condition just once per enrollment period. Those flagged as non-compliant receive a mailed notice and 30 days to prove otherwise before disenrollment—a system that presumes stable housing and reliable mail and internet access among the poorest people in the country. For this massive undertaking Congress appropriated a total of $200 million to be divided among the states, against a CBO estimate that implementation will cost state governments $65 billion over a decade. This is the mechanism working as designed: the administrative maze is not a defect but the instrument through which the “savings” are generated.
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The response of the Democratic Party has been confined to the courts, where predictably they have lost the opening round, and to the ballot box, where they are attempting to convert the destruction of Medicaid and other social programs into a campaign asset for the November midterms. This pitiful stance is not generating a wellspring of support for Democrats. A new CNN poll shows 51 percent of respondents holding an unfavorable view of the party.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s stopgap funding proposal last September, which would have restored the $930 billion in Medicaid cuts, was rejected as expected by the Republicans and quietly abandoned. In January, Senator Bernie Sanders staged a vote on an amendment to shift $75 billion from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Medicaid. It failed 49–51 and was never intended to do anything but fail, providing the entire Democratic caucus a cost-free “yes” vote. These are not fights, but theatrical gestures unconvincingly performed for the electorate while the party continues to supply the votes that fund the war machine, including the framework financing the war against Iran.
The Democratic Socialists of America and its public faces play their key role in this operation. Sanders, appearing on Face the Nation Sunday, July 26, devoted himself to boosting “progressive” Democratic primary candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Maine, declaring that voters are “sick and tired of the status quo”—as though the Democratic Party were not itself half of that status quo. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has toured the country with Sanders denouncing the “oligarchy” while directing every ounce of popular anger back into the party of Wall Street and the CIA. Neither Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez nor the DSA has called for, or will call for, any mobilization of the working class against the cuts. Everything is subordinated to the November midterm elections and the demand that workers entrust their fate to the party that co-authored the crisis.
The Socialist Equality Party insists that the defense of Medicaid cannot be separated from the fight against the capitalist system that is destroying it. Healthcare is a social right, not a commodity or a privilege to be earned through 80 hours of documented labor. The $326 billion being clawed from the sick is a down payment on war. The fight against austerity is therefore inseparable from the fight against imperialist war and the drive to dictatorship.
That fight requires the independent political mobilization of the working class—in workplaces, hospitals, schools and neighborhoods—through rank-and-file committees free of the Democratic Party and the union apparatus that serves it. Against the “little scams” slander, workers must advance their own program: free, universal, high-quality healthcare for all, funded through the expropriation of the pharmaceutical companies, insurance conglomerates and hospital chains, and the redirection of the trillions now consumed by war toward human need. The millions facing Medicaid termination notices in the coming months are not supplicants who must prove they are worthy. They are the class whose labor produces everything—and whose independent struggle, armed with a socialist program, is the only force that can halt this assault.
3. The deadly Atlantic route: Over 140 people die while fleeing from West Africa to Europe
At least 143 of a total of 180 refugees who faced disaster at sea while traveling from West Africa to the Canary Islands are dead or missing. Their boat was rescued off the coast of Mauritania on 18 July. According to the UNHCR, the route to Spain is considered “one of the deadliest in the world” because the boats—which are usually overloaded and unseaworthy—have to cover great distances and have little chance of a swift rescue. The crossing from West Africa to the Canary Islands can be between 800 kilometers (Mauritania) and as far as 2,400 kilometers (Guinea), depending on the point of departure.
The people on board the overcrowded refugee boat endured a hellish journey. Just 10 days after setting sail from Bafuloto, a town in Gambia, they had run out of food and water and were forced to drink seawater. Many women, men and children are believed to have starved or died of thirst along the way. After about three weeks, the boat also ran out of fuel, leaving it adrift on the high seas.
It was not until 25 days later that the boat was found off the Mauritanian port city of Nouadhibou and brought ashore by the local coastguard and fishermen—with numerous bodies and 38 survivors on board. Among the few rescued were two children who lost their entire family during the journey and are now being treated in hospital.
In total, between 14 and 18 July, 387 people were rescued from stricken boats during three rescue operations in Mauritania; one further person died. According to the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras, in the first five months of 2026 alone, 1,317 people have already lost their lives or are missing while attempting to reach the Spanish coast, including 129 children. Unlike official authorities or UN agencies, this NGO also includes in its figures reports from relatives as well as distress calls from boats that never arrived. During the period in question, 27 boats disappeared without trace in the Atlantic with all their passengers on board.
Many refugees are turning to the Atlantic route because the European Union (EU) is systematically blocking the Mediterranean routes to Greece and Italy. The EU’s criminal policy of sealing its borders, in collaboration with regimes in North and West Africa, is forcing people fleeing poverty, war and environmental destruction in their home countries to take ever more dangerous routes, putting their lives at risk in the process.
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Human rights organizations repeatedly emphasize that deterrence policies do not stop people from fleeing. They set out on their journeys nonetheless because they are persecuted in their home countries or have no prospects there.
The 38 survivors on the boat come from countries including Gambia, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Mali. All these countries are plagued by extreme poverty, unemployment and repression. The consequences of decades of colonial rule and today’s neo-colonial exploitation are devastating. These countries’ natural resources —such as gold, bauxite, cocoa and, increasingly, oil and natural gas—are being plundered by international corporations from North America and Europe, while China is also gaining influence.
Droughts and other effects of climate change are depriving people of their livelihoods. The NATO war against Libya in 2011 destabilized the entire Sahel region. According to the latest UN figures, there are almost 6.8 million internally displaced persons and 1.3 million refugees and asylum-seekers in West Africa and the Sahel region.
Mali has been ravaged for years by armed conflicts and military interventions by its former colonial power, France. Since April, Paris has been indirectly supporting an offensive by nationalist and Islamist militias seeking to overthrow the military regime in Bamako. According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, most of the refugees who arrived in Europe in 2024 were from Mali. Many report murder, torture and sexual violence in their home country.
Gambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, with high levels of unemployment and underemployment. In Senegal, equally high youth unemployment—with a median age of just 18—is driving many young people to flee. In Guinea, protests have been violently suppressed since the military coup of 2021. Around 21,700 people fled from Guinea to Europe in 2023 alone.
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The latest disaster in the Atlantic has received little to no attention in the bourgeois media and political circles in Europe, let alone caused an outcry. No prominent headlines, no widespread debate, no commemoration, not even crocodile tears and hypocritical expressions of grief, as were once customary.
The fact that the deaths of over 140 people are treated merely as a footnote is no coincidence, but a deliberate choice. What is presented in the media as a ‘tragedy’ is in reality a deliberate and systematic policy of murder at the EU’s borders. The mass deaths of refugees in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are being normalized just as much as the smear campaign against migrants within the EU.
The persecution and demonization of refugees serve to direct anger over social inequality and mass redundancies towards a scapegoat, in order to divert attention from the actual cause of this social crisis—the ruling class and its capitalist profit interests. Bourgeois parties of all stripes, whether conservative or social democratic, are adopting the far-right positions of Meloni, Le Pen, Farage or Höcke and making them socially acceptable. One more or one fewer dead refugee child makes no difference to them—the main thing is that the number of arrivals in the EU falls.
Using death as a deterrent is part of this strategy. The EU has effectively ceased sea rescue operations, is preventing NGO rescue missions and is outsourcing ‘border security’ to governments and militias that lock refugees up in camps, torture and enslave them.
This is also illustrated by the example of Mauritania, a key departure point on the Atlantic route. The country, with a total population of almost 5.5 million, is now home to over 300,000 refugees, most of whom are from Mali.
In 2024, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signed a migration agreement with the Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani. Mauritania received €210 million, of which almost €60 million is earmarked for combating “illegal immigration” to Europe in cooperation with the EU border agency Frontex. A driving force behind this agreement was Spain under the social-democratic government of Pedro Sánchez.
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The EU is funding a vast machinery of repression and death at the borders of Fortress Europe. It previously concluded similar agreements to deter migrants with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. Refugees are abandoned in the desert or left to their fate at sea on the EU’s behalf. If they do manage to reach land, they are stripped of their rights, detained, tortured and deported.
Since the agreement was signed, the Mauritanian police have been hunting down migrants, as European broadcaster Arte described in a video report. Thousands of refugees are rounded up in raids and deported en masse without due process.
According to the UNHCR, the number of arrivals in the Canary Islands has also fallen sharply since the agreement was signed. In 2024, nearly 47,000 refugees arrived; a year later, the figure was just around 18,000. And in the first half of 2026, the number was 61 per cent lower than in the same period the previous year.
As the traditional departure points in Mauritania are subject to tighter controls, departures are shifting further south—for example to Gambia, where the boat that now suffered disaster also came from. The routes are becoming ever longer and more dangerous.
This downward spiral will continue unless the European working class intervenes to defend and protect people from Africa and other regions. Humanitarian appeals and demands, such as those made by NGOs and UN organizations to European governments, have fallen on deaf ears for years.
The mass deaths in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean will only cease when the EU and its member governments are overthrown and brought to trial for their crimes and the murder of thousands of refugees. To achieve this, it is necessary to build a revolutionary working-class movement that abolishes the capitalist system and fights for the establishment of the United Socialist States of Europe.
4. Keiko Fujimori’s inaugural speech: A class war agenda for Peru’s oligarchy and US imperialism
As she was sworn in Tuesday as president of Peru for the 2026-2031 term in a session of the newly established bicameral Congress, Keiko Sofía Fujimori Higuchi delivered a first message to the nation that laid out seven government objectives. The ceremony was attended by King Phillip VI of Spain, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and several heads of state from the region. Before she began to speak, opposition legislators held up photographs of those killed in the protests of 2022-2023 and walked out of the chamber.
Fujimori’s speech must be examined not merely as a government program in the naive sense attributed to it by bourgeois commentators, but as what it really is: the political presentation of a class war agenda. Each of the seven “objectives” she announced—whatever their technocratic and conciliatory trappings—expresses the interests not simply of Fujimorism, but fundamentally of the Peruvian financial oligarchy and US imperialism, at a moment of acute crisis of bourgeois rule and of extreme social polarization.
Fujimori takes power as the 10th person to occupy the presidency of Peru in a decade, a fact that by itself reveals the uninterrupted disintegration of the Peruvian bourgeois regime. She arrives in office fundamentally through the determination of the ruling class and of Washington to block any hint of social reform that could feed the class struggle now erupting.
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What are President Fujimori's seven objectives? Following is a summation assisted by Socialism AI:
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Declaration of two “fronts of national emergency” — the El Niño climate phenomenon and “citizen security” — during which the Armed Forces will temporarily assume leadership over security and domestic control, backed by emergency decrees and extraordinary powers delegated by Congress.
- A foreign policy of subordination to US imperialism and its European allies, emphasizing the Pacific Alliance, the Andean Community, APEC, and casting Peru as a “bridge” between the Asia-Pacific and Latin America — an offer of national territory as a logistical platform for transnational capital.
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The “Youth with a Future” program, aiming to halve youth unemployment from 10 percent, paired with an increase in the minimum wage from 1,130 soles to 1,300 soles (roughly US$384) per month.
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An ambitious infrastructure plan — metro lines, commuter rail, highways, and ports — presented as national development but, as the article details, serving the penetration of foreign capital and the US-China inter-imperialist rivalry centered on the Chancay mega-port.
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A sweeping deregulation package to “free the citizen, the entrepreneur and the investor from bureaucratic burdens” — in substance, the elimination of labor, environmental, and social protections that remain as conquests of past working-class struggles.
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Creation of a “National Digital Authority” with “the backing of artificial intelligence” and a “digital identity for every citizen” — an apparatus of centralized surveillance and social control.
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Doubling of Pensión 65 from 350 soles to 700 soles every two months (about US$3.45 a day), presented as a step toward a “universal pension.”
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The close of the speech—“There are not two different Perus; there is only one Peru,” “without ideological distinctions, because hunger, disease and crime have no political color”—is the same bourgeois discourse advanced by every previous government: the call for class collaboration, for the exploited to accept their exploitation in the name of supposed “national unity.”
But there are indeed two Perus. Not the two imagined by bourgeois mythology—the “deep” Peru against the “modern” one—but the Peru of the working majority against that of the bourgeois class. On one side, the 17 family clans that have accumulated US$35 billion, on the other, the nearly 9 million living in poverty and the more than two million in extreme poverty. There is the Peru of the congressmen who amend laws to guarantee themselves impunity, and the Peru of the 64 drivers murdered in the first five months of the year by extortion mafias operating under state protection.
“Hunger has no political color,” says Fujimori. But hunger does have a cause: the capitalist system and the regime of property that her government exists to defend.
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Fujimori’s speech confirms what Marxism teaches: the bourgeois state, however much it clothes itself in technocratic language and conciliatory gestures, is an instrument of class domination. The “seven objectives” are a plan to administer misery, facilitate exploitation and repress the resistance of the workers and the poorest, all of it under the cover of a “rule of law” that is today a farce.
On July 1, 2026, Daniel Hoffman, director of the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS), appointed Associate Professor Asli Cansunar as the permanent director of the school’s Middle East Center. The appointment follows three months of administrative turmoil sparked by the political removal of the previous director, Aria Fani, on the pretext that he had used the center’s email “improperly.”
In reality, Fani, an associate professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures, was removed from his leadership position on March 27 following a coordinated campaign of online harassment and political pressure by right-wing forces opposed to his criticism of the war against Iran. In his communications, Fani condemned US foreign policy, opposed the military actions of the United States and Israel and characterized the ideology of Zionism as “cancerous.”
Fani’s removal followed months of coordinated right-wing agitation. Beginning in January, Fani, who immigrated to the United States from Iran at the age of 18, was subjected to a doxxing and harassment campaign after organizing an academic symposium titled “The World as Palestine: On Advocacy, Activism, and Justice.” Local conservative talk radio commentator Ari Hoffman led the public denunciation of Fani, branding the academic event antisemitic and publicly questioning University of Washington President Robert Jones over Fani’s leadership.
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The University of Washington’s attack on opposition to the war against Iran expresses its role in defending the interests of the US state. UW has longstanding ties to the Democratic Party, which took the lead in arming and financing the genocide in Gaza, has collaborated with Trump and the Republicans in the war against Iran and continues to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations throughout the country.
The university also maintains deep institutional connections with major military contractors and technology corporations, including Boeing and Microsoft, as well as the fossil fuel industry.
UW has repeatedly deployed riot police and SWAT teams against opponents of the genocide in Gaza, including to break up a peaceful demonstration last May. In 2023, it prevented CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin from holding a meeting at the University Book Store opposing the war in Ukraine, citing objections from a “pro-Ukrainian student group” at UW.
By contrast, the university has permitted Turning Point USA to hold multiple meetings on campus. The organization was founded by the late fascist political operative Charlie Kirk and has played a central role in normalizing fascist politics on college campuses across the United States.
Fani’s removal has generated substantial opposition within the university. The Faculty Senate passed a resolution demanding transparency regarding the grounds for his termination, while hundreds of students and faculty members signed petitions and letters of appeal opposing the decision. Hoffman himself was forced to resign his position in the Comparative History of Ideas department after faculty members issued a joint letter expressing concern over his actions.
Notably, Seattle’s “socialist” mayor, Katie Wilson, has issued no statement opposing Fani’s removal. Neither the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) nor its Seattle and campus youth chapters have defended him. Their silence is in line with Wilson’s and the DSA’s political orientation to the Democratic Party.
It is equally revealing that United Auto Workers Local 4121, which represents graduate students at UW, has issued no statement defending Fani. The UAW apparatus has played a critical role in suppressing opposition to war and genocide on campuses across the country. In the University of California system, the UAW contained a strike by graduate students and assisted the police in dismantling the anti-genocide encampments. At Harvard, the union apparatus betrayed a 40-day strike earlier this year in deference to Trump’s demand that the university be brought into line with the administration’s war aims.
The political censorship at the University of Washington is not an isolated local incident that can be resolved through petitions and appeals to the administration. It is one expression of the turn by the capitalist state and its academic institutions toward authoritarian methods of rule. Students and youth must turn to the working class, the only social force capable of defending democratic rights, as part of the broader struggle against imperialist war and for socialism.
6. Four water main ruptures in two weeks: The collapse of social infrastructure in Los Angeles
The West Hollywood-Fairfax rupture and flooding are the local expression of a national collapse. In June 2024, the water system in Atlanta, Georgia failed catastrophically when corroded pipes installed in 1907 and 1924 ruptured at a critical junction, shutting down water service across downtown, forcing Emory University Hospital Midtown to divert patients and prompting a state of emergency.
In Jackson, Mississippi, 150,000 residents were left without clean drinking water in 2022 after decades of underfunding and corporate looting by Siemens and Veolia rendered the city’s water and sewage infrastructure inoperable. The ASCE has identified 56,007 structurally deficient bridges, 15,500 dams classified as “high hazard potential” and a total infrastructure repair bill exceeding $2 trillion.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget requests $1.5 trillion for military spending—a 40 percent increase over already record Pentagon budgets—to finance the bombing of Iran, the encirclement of China and the construction of a “Golden Fleet.” The $1.5 trillion demanded for war in a single year exceeds the ASCE’s estimated 25-year water infrastructure funding gap. The money exists; it is being spent on bombers and war.
As Trump stated bluntly at a closed Easter lunch: “Don’t send any money for day care. … We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” Trump expresses in the most unvarnished form a class policy supported by both parties. The Democrats have voted for the massive military and intelligence budgets that fund the war machine Trump now expands without restraint.
7. US resumes strikes on Iran as global war escalates
Trump ordered a pause to 13 nights of US air strikes on Iranian targets Friday under conditions in which US munition stockpiles, especially for its missile defense systems, are running low. However, recent days have underscored that American imperialism and its allies continue to systematically escalate the war.
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The events over recent days fully vindicate the assessment of the US/Israeli war on Iran made by the World Socialist Web Site. In its first statement on the war, issued just hours after Trump launched the war without any democratic consultation in the dead of night, the WSWS noted that in retrospect, the 28 February assault would be compared with Hitler’s 1 September, 1939 invasion of Poland, a criminal act that marked the outbreak of World War II. WSWS International Editorial Board chairman David North continued,
He [Trump] has set the United States and the entire world on a disastrous course. This war will not solve the internal social crisis of American society, nor will it reverse the protracted deterioration in the global position of US capitalism.
All these contradictions, domestic and international, will be intensified. The war itself will inevitably escalate and engulf the entire planet.
Less than six months on, the war has already engulfed the entire Middle East and is merging with the war on Russia into a zone of conflict embracing much of the Eurasian landmass.
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Stopping this descent into barbarism depends upon the political mobilization of the international working class on the program of world socialist revolution to put an end to imperialist war and its root cause: the capitalist profit system.
8. Gordie Howe bridge opens amid Trump’s tariff blackmail against Canada
The Gordie Howe International Bridge opened to traffic on July 27, establishing a second major crossing between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario along one of North America’s most important industrial corridors.
The six-lane bridge is expected to relieve congestion at a crossing that has long been a bottleneck for freight moving between the United States and Canada. This is especially important for the auto industry, where just-in-time production depends upon the rapid and predictable movement of parts across the border.
The bridge’s opening demonstrates the extraordinary integration of production across North America. At the same time, the conflict surrounding it exposes how the economic nationalism of the Trump administration, the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy collides with the interests of the working class and the international character of modern production.
The Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association estimates that $29 billion worth of US-made auto parts enters Canada every year, much of it through Windsor. MichAuto, an organization representing the Michigan auto industry, said the bridge and its highway connections would improve the reliability of just-in-time supply chains.
The new crossing connects Interstate 75 in Michigan directly with Highway 401 in Ontario, bypassing the city streets used by trucks approaching the nearly century-old Ambassador Bridge.
Days before the bridge opened, US President Donald Trump threatened to impose 50 percent tariffs on a broad range of Canadian goods. The Canadian government responded by canceling a planned joint inauguration and holding a Canada-only ceremony on July 24.
Trump then denounced Canada for supposedly “disinviting” the United States and declared that the tariffs meant the original bridge agreement “no longer stands.” He claimed his administration had changed the agreement so that the United States would receive “50% of the Profit.”
The statements were another exercise in imperialist blackmail. Trump sought to use the opening of a piece of critical infrastructure as leverage to extract concessions from Canada and intensify a trade war whose costs will be imposed upon workers in both countries through higher prices, factory closures, layoffs and demands for wage cuts.
Behind Trump’s intervention was the direct influence of a billionaire whose private toll monopoly was threatened by the new publicly owned crossing.
Matthew Moroun and his family own the Ambassador Bridge, the older and less expansive Detroit-Windsor crossing. The opening of the Gordie Howe bridge threatens to divert a significant share of commercial traffic away from the Ambassador Bridge and reduce the lucrative toll monopoly the family has controlled for decades.
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As the new bridge neared completion, the Moroun-controlled Detroit International Bridge Company renewed its relationship with Ballard Partners, one of Washington’s most powerful Trump-connected lobbying firms.
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In July 2025, Moroun donated $250,000 to the Republican National Committee. On January 16, 2026, he gave another $1 million to MAGA Inc., the super political action committee supporting Trump.
Weeks later, Moroun reportedly met Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in Washington. Within hours of that meeting, Trump escalated his threats against the Gordie Howe bridge and demanded that Canada surrender additional control and toll revenue to the United States.
The deal eventually reached by Washington and Ottawa reportedly gives the United States a share of future profits after Canada recovers the cost of financing the bridge, along with greater influence over toll increases. Trump then used the agreement to proclaim another victory for his policy of threats and economic coercion.
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Trump’s intervention was not simply a favor to one billionaire. It formed part of a broader effort to subordinate Canada economically and politically to US imperialism. Every international relationship is treated as an opportunity for plunder, with tariffs, access to the American market and control over vital infrastructure employed as weapons.
The Canadian ruling class offers no progressive alternative. Its response combines appeals to Canadian nationalism with retaliatory trade measures and negotiations over what concessions can be granted to Washington. Whatever agreement is reached, the corporations and governments on both sides will seek to make workers pay through attacks on jobs, wages, social programs and living standards.
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The bridge itself demonstrates the opposite of the nationalist mythology promoted by both ruling classes. Auto parts cross the border repeatedly during production. Factories, suppliers, logistics networks and assembly plants operate as components of an internationally integrated system.
The bridge is named after Gordie Howe, the Canadian hockey player born in Floral, Saskatchewan in 1928 who spent most of his career with the Detroit Red Wings. Howe became one of the most famous and beloved figures in professional sports on both sides of the border. The bridge’s towers were designed to evoke hockey sticks swinging through a slap shot.
Its engineering scale is substantial. The 853-meter main span is the longest cable-stayed bridge span in North America. Construction began in 2018 and involved more than 11,000 workers and over 13 million hours of labor by mid-2024. Workers from the United States and Canada met above the Detroit River in June 2024 when the two sections of the bridge deck were joined.
That achievement was the product of the internationally coordinated labor of thousands of workers. It demonstrates in concrete form that the working class has an objective and organic basis for international unity.
The United Auto Workers bureaucracy has worked continuously to suppress that unity. It promotes “American jobs” nationalism and tells US workers that their enemies are workers in Canada, Mexico and China. Unifor advances the same reactionary argument in Canada, demanding that Canadian workers subordinate themselves to “their” corporations and government.
Economic nationalism has never saved a single job. It divides workers while the transnational auto corporations move capital and production throughout the world in search of the lowest labor costs and the greatest profits.
The bridge also exposes the historic decline of American capitalism. Major infrastructure projects in the United States have become increasingly rare, delayed for decades by private interests, political corruption and the refusal of the ruling class to devote social resources to anything that does not produce an immediate private return.
The US government can allocate trillions of dollars for war, bank bailouts, mass deportation and the construction of a police state. Yet the repair and expansion of basic infrastructure is treated as prohibitively expensive. The Gordie Howe bridge itself was built only because Canada agreed to finance the project.
The opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge exposes the fundamental contradiction between an internationally integrated system of production and the division of the world into rival capitalist nation-states.
The answer to Trump’s tariff war is not Canadian nationalism or retaliatory protectionism. Workers in the United States, Canada, Mexico and internationally must reject the efforts of the capitalist parties and union bureaucracies to pit them against one another and organize across national borders on the basis of their common class interests.
9. Widespread protests in Bangladesh against poverty wages, mass layoffs
Workers across Bangladesh have mounted a new wave of protests in recent months against deepening attacks on wages, jobs and working conditions.
In the most recent action on July 30, hundreds of workers at Fortune Shoes Ltd. blocked the Natun Bazar Road in Barishal to demand payment of two months’ overdue wages and unpaid overtime. According to the Business Standard, workers said when they had complained to management about the issue “they were subjected to harassment and various forms of pressure.”
This is one of many recent actions that points to escalating social anger and class tensions, which the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party (BNP) government has been unable to quell. The BNP came to power in February 2026 through an election held after the Yunus interim government banned the rival Awami League (AL). The AL government of Sheikh Hasina was ousted in August 2024 after mass demonstrations, fueled by pent-up anger over social inequality and the brutal killing of hundreds of protesters.
The BNP government quickly discarded its “democratic” rhetoric and continued to impose IMF-backed austerity. It has slashed public spending and raised taxes to force workers to bear the burden of soaring energy prices triggered by the US-Israeli war against Iran. Repressive state structures remain intact and foreign policy is firmly aligned with US imperialism.
The renewed upsurge is centered in the garment sector, which is in a severe crisis. Bangladesh’s heavy dependence on Gulf energy—the source of approximately 95 percent of the country’s oil and gas—led to power shortages, soaring fuel and transport costs and a depreciating currency. Western buyers reduced orders and refused to pay higher prices.
The Fashion Business Journal reported on June 30 that there are “fresh doubts about [Bangladesh’s] ability to retain its position as the world’s second-largest apparel exporter [after China].” It added that “production capacity at many plants has fallen by 25 to 30 percent in recent months.” This has triggered layoffs, wage arrears and factory closures.
The apparel industry, the backbone of Bangladesh’s economy, employs approximately 4 million workers, mostly women. An estimated 40 million people—around 25 percent of the population—depend directly or indirectly on the industry.
A July 15 report by the human rights organization JusticeMakers Bangladesh in France found that 20,783 workers at 80 garment factories lost their jobs between January and June this year. Between August 2024 and June 2026, 457 garment and textile factories closed, leaving more than 240,000 workers unemployed.
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Conditions for workers are unbearable. Many live in overcrowded slums and cannot afford adequate food, healthcare and education for their children. An apparel worker’s monthly wage ranges from 12,500 taka ($US103) to about 20,000 taka. A four-member family required roughly 45,000–50,000 taka ($US370–410) for essential expenses in 2025.
Job losses are plunging families deeper into destitution, often forcing them to leave cities. Samoli Khatun, a worker laid off by Coretex Apparels in Madhabpur on June 7, told the Economist: “It will be very hard for me to find another job, and, as a woman, my options are limited. I may have to return to my village.”
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Farmer protests have also emerged, driven by diesel and fertilizer shortages. In May, onion growers demonstrated in Rajbari against collapsing crop prices and soaring costs. Across northern Bangladesh, farmers reported severe diesel shortages during the Boro irrigation season, while government officials denied any widespread supply crisis.
For more than four years, prices for essential goods have outstripped wage growth. Annual inflation for the year to June was 9.16 percent, while wages grew by 8.18 percent.
The trade union bureaucracy has assisted in driving down wages by suppressing resistance from workers, negotiating sellout agreements behind closed doors, and promoting the dead-end perspective of “pressuring” capitalist governments and parties. Workers are deeply alienated from these organizations, which serve as instruments of the corporations and the state. According to the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, only 11.35 percent of workers are union members. Although Bangladesh officially has about 4,000 apparel factories, only 30 percent have registered trade unions.
The Bangladeshi workers’ and farmers’ upsurge is part of a broader strike wave in South Asia and internationally. This year, Indian gig workers held nationwide protests, West Bengal tea plantation workers struck over poverty wages, and Pakistani public sector employees protested against austerity. French rail workers have brought the state-owned French National Railway Company to a near standstill, Belgian rail workers conducted a five-day strike, dockworkers shut ports across Europe, and Nigerian health workers held a nationwide strike.
This global strike wave must become a conscious and organized rebellion against the capitalist system, which offers only poverty, war, and dictatorship.
10. New Zealand students condemn death threat against US socialist auto worker Will Lehman
The IYSSE’s club at Victoria University of Wellington passed a resolution condemning the threat made by United Auto Workers official Raymond Jensen Jr. against Lehman, who is running for president of the UAW on a socialist platform.
In Labor’s doublespeak, getting the National Disability Insurance Scheme “back on track” means stripping it to the bone.
12. 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.
