Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Supreme Court backs Trump purge of regulatory agencies—except for Federal Reserve
In a sweeping decision Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled that the president of the United States has absolute authority over all agencies of the executive branch, including those explicitly established by Congress with limited independence.
The decision in Trump v. Slaughter ratifies Donald Trump’s firing without cause of a member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), overturning 90 years of practice and precedent.
Trump v. Slaughter was decided 6-3 along the usual ideological lines, six conservatives vs three moderates. The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts upholds Trump’s March 2025 summary termination of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. Trump fired both Democratic members of the FTC, Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, and did not nominate Democratic replacements, although the FTC is by law bipartisan.
The court ruling overturned a 90-year-old precedent, set in the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v. FTC, which upheld the power of Congress to establish regulatory agencies at least somewhat insulated from the White House. The president appoints the members of these agencies, who are confirmed by the Senate, but cannot dictate their decisions or fire them without cause.
Moreover, these agencies, such as the FTC, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission, generally have five-member boards, with no more than three from the same party.
In Trump’s first term, he complied with this legal requirement. Slaughter was a Democratic member of the FTC, whom he nominated in 2018, and she was reappointed by Joe Biden in 2023. But since taking office for his second term, Trump has asserted far more sweeping authority, firing most Democratic members of independent agencies and placing them under unchallenged control by his own nominees, such as Brendan Carr at the FCC, a leading advocate of media censorship.
Slaughter sued to keep her position on the basis that Congress created the FTC and dozens of similar regulatory commissions to be independent of direct executive control. The enabling laws provide that commissioners must be confirmed by the Senate to serve for a set term and can only be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Roberts flatly declared in his majority opinion, “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.” He added, “We hold that such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.”
This amounts to codifying into law the ultra-right “unitary executive” theory which treats the entire US executive branch as though it were embodied in a single individual in the White House, who can dictate the actions of every federal employee.
Trump gloated on Truth Social, “It is such an Honor to be the sitting President who won this Historic and Unprecedented Ruling, one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor spelled out the ominous implications of the decision by reading her dissenting opinion from the bench.
“Today, the Court discards that democratic regime in favor of one that distorts the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control,” she wrote. “The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him.”
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A second decision issued Monday, however, exempts from this new “at-will” rule Federal Reserve Board governors. The Fed manages transactions among banks, and sets interest rates. Formally, it is little different from other independent federal agencies, in that the president nominates its members, and the Senate confirms them, but the board then operates on its own, without taking direction from the White House.
In a contorted 5-4 ruling, also written by Roberts, joining the three moderates and right-wing Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court ruled in favor of Fed governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump attempted to remove on the basis of an alleged minor misrepresentation on a mortgage application prior to her appointment and Senate confirmation.
Cook sued on the basis that she had no opportunity to dispute the charge, which she said was “flimsy” and “conveniently timed following the President’s criticism of the board’s policy decisions.” The lower courts ruled that Cook should remain in office while her litigation continues, the ruling affirmed Monday.
Flagrantly contradicting his own opinion in the Slaughter case, Roberts wrote that were Cook not provided an opportunity to contest the charge, it “would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”
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In Monday’s other decisions, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that mail-in ballots postmarked before but received after an election date can be counted, with Roberts and the three moderates joining the majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and by a vote of 6-3 that police seeking cellphone location data from providers must obtain a warrant.
The narrow margin in the mail-in voting decision shows how close the United States is to the open rigging of elections by Trump and his fascist cohorts. The mail-in ballot is the predominant form of voting in a half dozen states, including California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, and is permitted in most states. It is the main target of Trump’s “Save America Act,” which would place federal elections under direct control of his administration, despite constitutional provisions that clearly reserve such authority to the states.
In a personal setback for Trump, the Supreme Court finally denied his petition for certiorari seeking review of the $5 million personal judgment obtained against him by E. Jean Carroll that had been pending since last February. The jury findings are now a final judgment that Trump defamed her after she publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her in a department store in 1996. Trump is expected to file another petition in a subsequent defamation case that resulted in an $83 million verdict in Carroll’s favor.
Workers at auto seating maker Bridgewater Interiors in Warren, Michigan are voting Tuesday on a four-year contract. The vote is being rushed through by the United Auto Workers without workers being given the opportunity to see the full agreement or time to carefully study its details.
In May, the workers, members of UAW Local 400, voted down a tentative contract by a 95 percent margin. Workers said the deal was insulting. The UAW bureaucracy ignored the will of the membership and instead of calling a strike extended the contract behind workers’ backs and continued negotiations.
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There is no doubt the massive rejection of the first proposed UAW-backed contract set off alarms at Solidarity House, which then allocated substantial resources to try to put out the fire spreading throughout the auto parts industry. The snap vote takes place just days after [UAW President Shawn] Fain and the UAW rammed through a vote on the fourth tentative agreement for 1,700 workers at the Nexteer Automotive plant in Saginaw, Michigan.
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Workers at Bridgewater are in a powerful position. The factory supplies seating for Ford, Stellantis, General Motors and Honda, including highly profitable vehicles like the Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram light trucks. With parts workers at Magna and Dana in negotiations, conditions exist for a united fight. The obstacle is the UAW bureaucracy which is determined to impose management friendly agreements to maintain the profits of the giant auto transnationals.
The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter calls for workers at Bridgewater to reject the tentative contract and take the struggle into their own hands through the building of rank-and-file committees independent from the UAW bureaucracy and democratically run by workers themselves. These committees should discuss and adopt demands that workers want and need and demand the setting of a strike deadline. The fight must be broadened to include parts workers at Dana, Magna, Nexteer and workers at the Big Three in a common fight.
3. Europe’s record heatwave: Climate catastrophe or world socialism
The worst European heatwave on record is sweeping across the continent, burning through records in country after country as temperatures soar up to 18 degrees Celsius (32.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above their seasonal average.
Hundreds of millions of workers are slaving through 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) heat as the super-rich glide through air-conditioned homes, private lounges, luxury cars, planes and offices. Their bank balances, global temperatures and extreme heat deaths tick inexorably upwards together.
Over 1,300 excess deaths have already been attributed to the heat, primarily among the elderly and the very young. Based on previous heatwaves in 2022 and 2024, the final toll will be in the high tens of thousands, if not higher.
These mass casualty events are the result of capitalism-driven climate change and criminal government neglect. Decades after warnings were made of global heating, and nominal targets set, carbon emissions continue, and nothing has been done to prepare society for the consequences.
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Every inhabited continent confronts the same dangers. A looming heatwave in the US threatens 40-degree C (104-degree F) temperatures in major US cities by July 4 and will be met with the same shocking headlines, and the same official indifference.
The impact in the two richest continents in the world, home to barely 15 percent of the global population, serves to emphasize the far worse social catastrophe facing most of the world’s working class in Asia and Africa.
With dire consequences for food production, a University of Oxford study indicates that the number of people experiencing extreme heat will double by 2050 from 1.54 billion people to 3.79 billion. A separate study from the Climate Impact Lab reports that 90 percent of the deaths resulting from these rising temperatures will come in poorer countries in Northern Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
In all these events, the working class is immediately confronted with the struggle to protect life and health and secure access to essential social services. A halt should be called to work in extreme heat with no loss of income. Resources must be secured for retrofitting homes and places of work—with a priority on schools, hospitals, old age homes and essential industries—to keep them cool.
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Heatwaves are not a purely natural threat to society. The incredible development of human productive power has brought the planet’s climate, indirectly, under our control. That this increasingly results in the degradation and worsening of environmental conditions for the majority of humanity reflects the exercise of that control by a tiny capitalist class in its own destructive social interests.
4. Australian citizen to return from Syria under police-state conditions
In a bid to thwart a potential legal and constitutional challenge, the Albanese Labor government last week lifted a ban on the return of an Australian citizen from Syria, but only under conditions that resemble those of a police-state.
The government is clearly seeking to evade a possible High Court ruling that could clarify the constitutional and basic democratic right of citizens to leave the country and return.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he had received legal advice that he had no choice other than to grant a return permit to a young mother Hodan Abby, 29. He had earlier subjected Abby to a Temporary Exclusion Order (TEO) barring her from returning home following seven years of detention in squalid camps following the crushing of the Islamic State caliphate.
After Burke issued the TEO, Abby was reportedly detained in a Syrian prison with her nine-year-old daughter, who has serious shrapnel injuries to her head, hip and back, and requires urgent medical treatment. Abby herself has a piece of shrapnel in her chest. Abby had left western Sydney in 2015 when she was 18.
Abby and her daughter were the last of a group of 11 women and 23 children, all Australian citizens, whom the Labor government had for months tried to prevent from returning to the country, despite them holding valid Australian passports.
Burke said the federal police and intelligence agencies would impose a “very high level of surveillance” on Abby, applying every possible restraint under the TEO legislation. These included having to report where she lives, works, studies and travels.
Abby also will be barred from using any telecommunications device, including a phone, email account or social media platform, without 24 hours’ notice to authorities. This applies to use of the internet “for any reason.” Burke declared: “Even if you want to use a public phone, it is 24 hours’ notice.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese personally backed the decision, claiming that it showed that his government respected the rule of law and the rights of Australian citizens, even while referring to the possible consequences of legal challenges.
In fact, the government is trying to prevent a test case on constitutional rights. Its move also sets far-reaching precedents for political use against returning citizens. The vague and arbitrary TEO laws, imposed by the previous Liberal-National government in 2019 with Labor’s support, allow the government to ban an Australian citizen from returning home if the home affairs minister declares a “reasonable suspicion” that an exclusion order would “substantially assist” the prevention of a possible terrorist-related act.
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The right to return is recognized to some extent under international law. For example, Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter their own country, thus potentially rendering them stateless. But Australian governments have frequently defied international law, such as by militarily turning back or detaining refugees seeking asylum under the international refugee convention.
The police-state restrictions imposed on Abby are also echoed in the bail conditions set last week for another member of the group that the Albanese government finally permitted back home, with three of the women arrested to face criminal charges, mainly for entering a proscribed zone in Syria.
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Labor’s assault on fundamental democratic rights has escalated since the December 14 Islamic State-linked terrorist shootings at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, for which the federal and state Labor governments have blamed—and sought to shut down—the widespread demonstrations in Australia against the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, falsely accusing participants of antisemitism.
The Labor leaders are vying with their Coalition counterparts to outdo Senator Pauline Hanson’s far-right anti-immigrant One Nation party. They are all trying to make immigrants, particularly Muslims, scapegoats for the declining living and social conditions confronting working-class households, like their counterparts internationally, such as the Trump administration in the US, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany.
5. Millions in US face cutoff of food aid, healthcare
Arizona is only the worst of the 50 states. According to figures published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), SNAP enrollment is down in every state, down by 5 percent or more in 42 states, and down by 10 percent or more in 21 states. States recording double-digit cuts in food stamp enrollment include Florida (down 21 percent) Louisiana (down 20 percent), Oklahoma and Tennessee (down 16 percent), Wyoming (down 11.6 percent) and Virginia (down 13.7 percent).
In Virginia, the new Democratic-controlled state government is headed by Governor Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA agent. Other Democratic-run states with double-digit cuts in SNAP enrollment include Illinois, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Kansas and Nevada have divided party control over the state government and double-digit cuts. Such figures demonstrate that the attack on the poor and the deliberate creation of mass hunger are the bipartisan policy of the entire US ruling elite, not just of Trump and the Republicans.
The CBPP found that in the 13 states where such data was collected, 808,000 children had been cut off food stamps as part of the nationwide cuts, nearly half the total losing benefits in those states.
While the Wall Street Journal hailed the reduction in food stamp enrollment as a sign of progress in reducing poverty and unemployment, the CBPP found “economic conditions haven’t been improving as the number of people receiving SNAP has plummeted in recent months, representing the sharpest decline in decades.” It concluded, “This dramatic six-month drop cannot be explained by a rapid improvement in people’s economic well-being or reduced need for help affording food. Labor force data show that the unemployment rate was flat between July 2025 and March 2026…”
The penalty of $200.5 million facing Arizona is far from the worst burden imposed on states under the provisions of the OBBBA. By the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2027, nearly all states will have to pay between 5 percent and 15 percent of the total costs of food stamps, and the total bill, based on USDA data, is roughly $9 billion.
The estimated totals for individual states include $300 million for Michigan, $350 million for Massachusetts, $410 million for Pennsylvania, $725 million for Texas, $900 million for Florida, $1.15 billion for New York and a staggering $1.9 billion for California.
The direct cuts are to be compounded by further restrictions on what SNAP recipients can buy with their food stamps. States have sought to ban purchases of sweets, sugary soft drinks, and other items claimed to be inappropriate, in what amounts to a demeaning effort to micromanage the lives of the poorest section of the American population.
Similar cuts are taking place in healthcare benefits for a slightly less poor section of working people, those who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but are eligible for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to purchase private insurance on the state exchanges set up under Obamacare.
The current federal budget, enacted after a 45-day federal shutdown last fall, eliminated most of these subsidies and raised premiums for some ACA plans by as much as 100 percent. The predictable result was a plunge in the number of people enrolled in ACA plans from 23.1 million for 2025 to an estimated 19.2 million this year, a drop of more than 16 percent.
These figures were released June 27 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and refute the claims by Trump and the Republicans that the removal of subsidies would not result in a sharp rise in the number of uninsured. At the same time, the scale of the social disaster demonstrates the impotence of the Democratic Party, which forced the federal shutdown supposedly to fight the cutoff of subsidies but then capitulated abjectly.
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According to an analysis by the nonprofit Community Service Society, those cut off in New York will include 6,000 recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), immigrants brought here by their families as children who have been protected from deportation. Many more are immigrants on Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—now facing deportation under the Trump administration policy affirmed by the Supreme Court last week.
As with food stamps, tightened work requirements are one of the principal means of enforcing the cutoff of health insurance eligibility. In one particularly perverse case outlined in the press, a woman able to work because of successful chemotherapy for her cancer could lose her health insurance if she has a bad week and cannot work, thus cutting her off from the treatment that is saving her life.
6. Solomon Islands PM visits Australia, NZ in shift away from China
The new prime minister of the Solomon Islands, Matthew Wale, installed by a special parliamentary vote on May 15, undertook his first international visit to Australia and New Zealand in early June.
After years of tensions over the Pacific archipelago’s strategic ties with China, the trip was designed to reassure the regional imperialist powers of his government’s reliability. The Solomon Islands, a former British colony, occupies a key strategic location in the Southwest Pacific and was a major battleground in World War II, including the six-month 1942–43 Battle of Guadalcanal.
Like other impoverished Pacific nations, it is confronted with Washington and its local allies, Australia and NZ, seeking to secure unchallenged economic and geostrategic dominance over the region. Amid advanced US preparations for war against China, the Pacific Island states, which depend heavily on Beijing for financial and aid support, are being drawn into an intensifying geopolitical confrontation.
The Solomons have been on the front line since the government of Manasseh Sogavare signed a security pact with Beijing in 2022. The pact was met with open threats of military intervention and regime change by Washington and Canberra. Sogavare defied the threats, welcoming Chinese financial aid and policing support.
In talks with Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on June 3, Wale made clear a sharp pivot by his government. He declared he wanted to “reset” the relationship with Canberra, agreeing to start negotiations on a comprehensive treaty with Australia and promising to “review” the country’s agreement with China.
Wale, who leads the Solomon Islands Democratic Party (SIDP), was a fierce critic of the China pact when it was signed, but later softened his tone in light of the country’s critical economic relationship with Beijing.
The joint statement issued by Wale and Albanese declared that officials from both countries would promptly begin negotiations on the new treaty. They asserted it would bring “transformational change” and see a “significant enhancement of the bilateral development assistance partnership between the two countries.”
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China’s Foreign Ministry has downplayed the strategic implications. When questioned about Wale’s statements, spokeswoman Mao Ning emphasized continuity in bilateral relations, stating that Beijing stands “ready to expand pragmatic cooperation with the new government of the Solomon Islands across all fields.”
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Domestic politics in the Solomons has always been subject to intense neo-colonial interference. A previous Sogavare administration was ousted in 2006–07 as a result of Canberra’s machinations, during the protracted Australian-led military occupation of the Solomons, the 2003-2017 Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), which left the country wracked by an economic and social crisis.
After shifting diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019, a new Sogavare government was destabilized by a right-wing separatist movement in Malaita province, encouraged by Washington. The Malaitan forces led a failed coup attempt in November 2020 that involved three days of anti-Chinese looting and arson in the capital Honiara.
The turmoil around the Solomons’ China policy continued under Manele. As chair of the regional Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), his government blocked Taiwan from attending the body’s annual gathering last August. The US State Department said it was “disappointed” with the decision.
A vast gulf separates the political elite in the Solomon Islands from the majority of its 858,000 inhabitants, who have no say in the government’s foreign policy maneuvers or domestic horse-trading. Despite being rich in natural resources, the country has the lowest per capita income in the Pacific region and many of its people are reliant on subsistence agriculture.
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While the new administration will do nothing to address collapsing living standards and rundown public services, the country’s ruling elite is aligning itself with the US-led militarization of the Pacific directed against China.
7. Justice Minister visits mass grave of Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka
On June 19, a delegation led by Jantha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government Justice and National Integration Minister Harshana Nanayakkara visited the excavation site of the Chemmani Siththupaththi mass grave in northern Jaffna, which contains the remains of hundreds of Tamil civilians murdered by the Sri Lankan military during its war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Speaking to the media, the minister declared that while the excavation work was progressing successfully, “the government wants to conduct investigations to find justice and truth to bring an end to this matter within two years.”
Accompanied by officials from the Office on Missing Persons (OMP), Nanayakkara visited the site just as hundreds more skeletal remains had been uncovered during recent weeks. His visit, however, was not aimed at delivering justice to the relatives of the victims but at defusing mounting anger among the Tamil masses over decades of state cover-ups.
Although hundreds of people held protests demanding justice, the minister and the delegation ignored them.
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Chemmani has become the largest mass grave discovered in Sri Lanka, surpassing the mass grave at the Mannar Wholesale Cooperative premises mass grave, where 380 skeletal remains were found.
Attempting to present the government as committed to uncovering the truth, Nanayakkara further stated that his government had allocated sufficient funds and was ready to release additional funds.
The government’s own record exposes this claim as false.
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Such empty phrases are used only to prevent a genuine investigation. The government fears any independent investigation that would reveal the extent of the Sri Lankan military’s wartime atrocities and the state’s responsibility.
Only five days earlier, speaking to relatives of the disappeared at the Jaffna District Secretariat, the same minister had promised: “Our government will carry out all necessary processes to ensure accountability and truth” and “will not deceive the Tamil people.”
These promises are no more credible than those repeatedly made by previous governments over the past quarter century.
Information about the Chemmani mass grave first emerged in 1998 when an army lance corporal, Somaratne Rajapakse, one of those convicted of the rape and murder of schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, and the murder of her mother, brother and a neighbour, made a confession in court. He revealed that he knew about 300 to 400 Tamil civilians who had been buried at Chemmani.
The corporal implicated senior military officers in the killings and cover-up. He identified 20 army officers allegedly involved in torture and murder and described the rape and killing of Tamil civilians.
The period he referred to was after the war had resumed in 1996, when the so-called peace talks between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and the LTTE broke down.
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Excavations began after Rajapakse’s testimony, but investigators dug at only three locations before abruptly ending the search after recovering a limited number of bodies. Investigations continued into 2000, and in March that year warrants were issued for the arrest of seven military personnel. All the suspects were subsequently released on bail, and by 2004 the entire case had effectively been buried.
For more than two decades, successive governments ensured that the truth remained concealed. In February 2025, workers digging the foundation for a crematorium accidentally rediscovered the mass grave.
Court-ordered excavations began on May 15 under a team led by archaeologist Professor Raj Somadeva. During the first 45 days, approximately 240 skeletal remains were recovered before the excavation was halted because of the government’s failure to provide sufficient funding.
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The government insists that the investigation remain entirely under the control of the Sri Lankan state while rejecting meaningful international forensic participation.
Nanayakkara declared that “if evidence is provided that military forces had committed crimes, then the government will take harsh legal action against the military.”
At the same time, speaking to relatives of the disappeared, he said they could expect justice to be gained through prosecutions, but added that sometimes this would not happen. “It all depends on the evidence and information,” he said.
This argument deliberately ignores the fact that the Sri Lankan military has spent decades destroying evidence of its crimes. Nevertheless, substantial evidence had already emerged from the Chemmani investigations since 1998, including the sworn testimony implicating senior military officers.
The central obstacle is not the absence of evidence but the determination of successive governments to shield the military from prosecution.
Throughout the war, the JVP, which has been steeped in Sinhala chauvinism since its inception, vehemently supported the military campaign against the separatist LTTE. The JVP opposed every attempt at limited peace negotiations with the LTTE and campaigned aggressively for military recruitment.
The JVP celebrated the military crushing of the LTTE in 2009 despite the enormous loss of civilian life. It has consistently rejected calls for investigations into war crimes, covering up the responsibility of political leaders and the military top brass.
Today, the JVP/NPP government continues to rely heavily on the military, the police, the courts and the state apparatus to impose its rule. It has established a separate Tri-Force reserve incorporating nearly 40,000 retired military personnel, many of whom served during the final stages of the war.
During the 2024 election campaign, the JVP/NPP, which had never previously been in power, exploited the anger of the masses against the traditional bourgeois parties by making numerous false promises. JVP leader and current president Anura Kumara Dissanayake promised the Tamil people in the Northern and Eastern provinces that his government would release all lands held by the military to their legitimate owners and deliver “justice” regarding the missing persons.
All these promises have since been abandoned. Deputy defence minister, retired Major General Aruna Jayasekera, recently held discussions with the military top brass in the East and said that the government was looking for a “balance” in returning military-held land to civilians—that is, keeping part of the land under military control.
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Seventeen years after the war, more than 100,000 military personnel continue to occupy the North and East and play a major role in administration while maintaining surveillance over the population.
The Tamil nationalist parties have consistently diverted people into seeking the support of the so-called international community for investigating war crimes. Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) leader S. Sritharan said that “the Chemmani mass grave indicates genocide against Tamils” and that the “international community must accept this at least now.”
The leaders of the Tamil National People’s Front, organizations of the Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared, and various civil society organizations repeat the same demand. During the protest against the minister’s visit, they declared: “We need an international investigation. We do not have any hope in an internal investigation. We do not want reparations. We don’t need death certificates.”
But the so-called international community, including the US, India and European powers, backed the Sri Lankan governments in prosecuting the communal war. In recent months, they have backed Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran.
The Tamil parties in Sri Lanka did not condemn the genocide in Gaza or the war against Iran, indicating their political alignment with Washington and Israel. Tamil workers and rural toilers cannot rely on these imperialist lackeys for justice or democratic rights. Their allies are the working class throughout Sri Lanka, India and internationally.
Discrimination against the Tamil masses and other minorities is rooted in the efforts of the Sri Lankan ruling class to defend capitalist rule by dividing the working class along ethnic lines. Ending all forms of oppression and securing genuine democratic rights for Tamils can be achieved only through the united struggle of the working class, rallying the rural poor to overthrow capitalism and establish a workers’ and peasants’ government based on an international socialist perspective.
8. Bank for International Settlements warns of AI “investment bust”
The annual report of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the umbrella organization of the world’s central banks, released on Sunday, presents a picture of a global economy full of triggers that could set off a major financial and economic crisis.
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Pointing to what it called the “current AI exuberance” it said that not all the investors would make the returns on which their decisions have been based.
“Disappointments in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex [capital expenditure] boom into a protracted investment bust, with potential knock-on effects on financial conditions.”
Turbulence was already evident as the report was about to be released. The beginning of last week saw a major selloff of tech stocks around the world. At one point on Tuesday the South Korean KOSPI index, which is heavily dependent on the semi-conductor giants Samsung and SK Hynix, dropped by 10.5 percent, prompting a 20-minute halt in trading.
On Wall Street, the previous day, shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX lost $400 billion in market value, 16.4 percent, leaving them 31.5 percent below the high they reached after $86 billion initial public offering earlier this month.
Markets subsequently bounced back on higher-than-expected earnings announced by the chipmaker Micron and lower oil prices, but the high volatility was described as “unnerving.”
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The report recalled the canal mania of the 1830s, the British rail mania in the 1840s, electrification of the roaring 20s and the dotcom boom of the late 1990s “which shared a common trait: a genuine technological breakthrough that attracted capital in excess of what commercial returns could ultimately justify.”
It went on to note that two features of the present situation further added to instability and impact the broader economy.
“Should inflation rise significantly or AI-led investment turn to a bust, the macroeconomic consequences could be amplified by existing financial vulnerabilities. A tightening of policy rates needed to contain inflation could precipitate a sharp pullback in asset prices after a prolonged period of exuberant risk-taking, triggering disruptive macro-financial feedback loops.”
On top of this, any reversal of “AI optimism” could also have major financial consequences “given AI firms’ rising leverage and growing footprints in credit markets.”
It warned that a major equity market correction could have larger macroeconomic consequences than in the past. The seriousness of such a warning comes into sharp relief when the effects of the 2008 crisis are considered. Up to 10 million homebuyers in the US lost their homes and millions were thrown out of work with the unemployment rate in the US rising to as high as 10 percent.
And because of the extent of the share market boom in the US, with US shares accounting for 64 percent of the MSCI global index, “the wealth impact from the US-led repricing could propagate globally.”
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While the thrust of the report was directed to AI, the BIS made some significant observations about the operations of governments and central banks in what it calls “shifting financial markets.”
“Central banks,” it said, “face mounting challenges from the interplay of near record-high public debt with the growing role of non-banks in sovereign debt markets. This new fiscal-financial stability nexus amplifies and accelerates the transmission of markets stress.”
This means that conditions can change very rapidly such that government bond market liquidity can be ample for prolonged periods, but can “dry up quickly in response to shocks, raising borrowing costs.”
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As the report noted, on top of the increase in government debt, the structure of the sovereign bond market has changed markedly with hedge funds “playing an increasing role in intermediating government debt, often through highly leveraged and funding strategies that hinge on both banks and other non-bank financial institutions.”
It said that “hedge funds employ highly leveraged strategies that rely on short-term financing on favourable terms, creating risks of fire sales and de-leveraging feedback loops. Financial stresses can now propagate quickly and broadly through funding markets, across borders and between banks and non-banks.”
The report did not spell out the implications of such a development, but they are nonetheless clear. Not only are the stock market, currency markets and commodity markets arenas for highly speculative activities but so too are bond markets which provide the basis for governments to finance their activities. They too are assuming the character of a giant casino.
9. Canada: Police mobilized to break picket lines in 6-week Ontario community services workers’ strike
Tensions continue to rise at picket lines across the province as about 4,500 Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU/SEFPO) community and social services workers in 27 union locals enter their sixth week on strike or lockout.
On Tuesday, June 23, police were called to break up pickets at a London Sheraton hotel. Management had been billeting scab labor at the hotel and using vans to shepherd the replacement workers across the lines to strikebound Community Living facilities in the city.
After the incident, OPSEU President JP Hornick told reporters, “What we’re seeing across the province is that some of these so-called replacement workers, I call them scabs, are not actually licensed appropriately. They don’t have relationships with the clients. We’ve seen agencies up here like they’ve been moving people into buildings that are meant for offices but now are being used to house clients. It’s actually disgusting and immoral.”
Other union locals in the province have also mobilized to protest the deployment of scab labor by demonstrating outside third-party contractors, who are recruiting the strike-breaking workforce. In Toronto, police have intimidated strikers at every shift change at a downtown Sistering facility. Earlier this month, strikers reported being pushed and shoved by police to move pickets protesting the deployment of strike-breakers at a Sistering drop-in center for vulnerable women and gender-diverse clients.
The community service workers are the lowest paid public sector workers in the province. Due to miserable contracts which did not keep pace with inflation, they actually earn less today than they did in 2018. The workers perform critical community support functions in autism programs, palliative care facilities, psychiatric treatment centers, disabled development centers, substance abuse programs, women-in-crisis units, homeless shelters, youth programs and many other fields servicing the most vulnerable people in the province. Prior to the strike, the workers campaigned for over a year demanding that the government of right-wing Premier Doug Ford address the crisis of systemic underfunding for the community services sector but were entirely ignored.
*****
There are two main issues in the strike. Workers are demanding the government reverse its massive funding cuts to community and social services programs. The government’s 2025-26 budget projected a $1.5 billion budget shortfall for the Ministry of Community and Social Services even as some 70,000 children with autism and 52,000 people with developmental disabilities remain on waiting lists for services. Social services researchers have argued that the Ford government has been funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into private, for-profit intermediaries, while underfunding public frontline services.
Secondly, the strikers are demanding wage increases, including compensation for the government’s wage-suppression legislation that was ruled unconstitutional by the courts in 2022 and again on appeal in 2024. The Ford government’s Bill 124 capped annual compensation increases for most public sector workers at 1 percent during the three years of spiking inflation following the 2019 legislation. Since the repeal of the legislation, public sector workers have bargained for retroactive wage increases of 6.5 percent or more. However, the government continues to resist settlements, or even discussion, in the broader public service that includes the community service workers.
The community services sector is not the only area being starved of funding. The government has a projected deficit of $13.8 billion and is using this to justify further austerity for public services and public sector workers. Critical social services like healthcare, education and housing are already chronically underfunded due to cost-cutting budgets enforced by Ford since taking power in 2018. Prior to that, governments led by the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP imposed strict fiscal discipline for public spending since the 1990s, while slashing taxes for big business and the rich, producing an explosion in poverty and the growth of a super-rich elite.
*****
The politics of Hornick and other “left” union bureaucrats have an especially debilitating impact on the emerging working class opposition to austerity and war. Hornick and Co. bluster loudly about their support for “militant” worker action and even deliver the occasional swipe at government policy. But they work tirelessly to confine workers to isolated job actions. Whenever conditions arise where a mass movement could develop into a politically independent direction, challenging the ruling class’s “right” to plunder workers and public services, the “left” bureaucrats are no less ruthless than their more conventional colleagues in sabotaging the fight.
*****
The developments in the community services workers’ strike underline that the striking workers are not simply in a contract struggle but a political fight that pits them against the class war agenda spearheaded by the Ontario Tory government and Carney’s Liberals, backed up by all of corporate Canada. In this, despite their hollow claims of “solidarity,” the OFL, alongside the OPSEU officialdom, rejects any call to mobilize the immense power of the working class across the province and country to make the struggle by the community services workers part of a political offensive to defeat the Ford government.
The immediate task facing the strikers is to appeal for support from broader sections of workers, all of whom confront the same threats of precarious employment, layoffs, wage cuts and worsening public services, to join a worker-led industrial and political counteroffensive to secure decent-paying, secure jobs and well-funded public services for all. If community service workers and the working class as a whole are to make real advances, they must move independently of the unions by forming rank-and-file committees in every workplace to arm workers with a socialist and internationalist program to oppose the never-ending attacks on workers’ rights that flow inevitably from the capitalist profit system which breeds austerity and war.
10. A letter from historian Steven Mintz on “The American Revolution and Its Place in History”
The World Socialist Web Site received a letter from Steven Mintz, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, on the webinar “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings.’” A leading social and cultural historian, Mintz is the author of numerous published works, including Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004), winner of the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award and the Association of American Publishers’ R. R. Hawkins Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book.*****
Dr. Mintz:
What struck me about all the speakers was their willingness to describe the American Revolution clearly and unapologetically as a bourgeois revolution: a revolt against mercantilist trade restrictions, caste and ascribed status, aristocratic privilege, inherited dependence, and British efforts to restrict westward expansion.
*****
I find it striking how rarely younger historians now speak about ideology in this fuller sense—the way historians such as Eric Foner and David Brion Davis did. Too much contemporary scholarship moves directly from material structures to discourse, identity, or power without adequately explaining how ideas acquire authority, how they mobilize people, or how they become forces in history.
That, for me, was one of the broadcast’s greatest strengths. It treated the American Revolution neither as a sacred national myth nor as a hypocritical fraud, but as a historically specific and genuinely transformative revolution whose contradictions helped generate struggles far beyond anything its original leaders intended.
*****
I find it extraordinary that the AHA [American Historical Association] and OAH [Organization of American Historians] appear to have so little interest in this work—even at their annual meetings, which should be among the principal forums for sustained debate over the historical meaning of contemporary and past events.
It is equally telling that many of the scholars whom I and others regard as the very best are eager to speak with you. They recognize that serious scholarship flourishes through argument, criticism, and open exchange—not through professional caution or the avoidance of difficult questions.
11. Haitians charged in Chile with people smuggling: The historical context of a right-wing frameup
An offensive against immigrants in Chile is unfolding within a broader crisis gripping Latin America, where political establishments across the continent are lurching to the right in alignment with the strategic requirements of the Trump administration in Washington. Chile’s new rightist regime headed by President José Antonio Kast is closely following in the footsteps of the fascistic government in the United States, deploying racialized dog whistles in an attempt to drive a wedge between “foreign” and “native-born” sections of the working class. In both countries, the aim is to divert public attention from the savage assault being waged against the social and economic position of the entire working population.
This is the context in which for more than ten days, the Kast government and its parliamentary wing—backed by the entire corporate media—manufactured a scandal following a June 15 leaked preliminary report from the Comptroller General’s Office claiming that 64 of 105 Haitian children who had entered Chile between January and October 2025 under family reunification programs could not be located at their registered addresses.
Within hours, the entire state machinery lurched into action while right and extreme right deputies speculated about trafficking networks and even organ harvesting. The corporate media amplified every lurid claim. By June 23, the Investigative Police (PDI) had located all 64 children: 63 were in Chile with their families, in good health, enrolled in school and registered in the healthcare system, and the last, a teenage girl, was in Mexico.
Then on June 25 the PDI arrested Ezechiel Rome (34) and Jean Chery Dormeus (33) two Haitians with permanent residency in Chile. The arrests were seized upon by the government and media as vindication of the trafficking narrative in a case that is riddled with contradictions, and which exposes the state’s own complicity.
*****
What is most damning is the timeline of state inaction. The PDI had been aware of Rome and Dormeus since at least 2024 and had filed formal complaints with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in April and October of that year. Dominican police arrested network operatives at Santo Domingo airport on October 1, 2024, as part of an Interpol operation, intercepting 11 Haitian citizens, six of them minors aged between 4 and 16, who were being transported without legal entry records or notarized parental authorization. The PDI’s human trafficking unit formally wrote to SERMIG on October 14 requesting information about the detained operative. SERMIG responded a week later, confirming only his residency status. And then… nothing.
For 20 months, the Public Prosecutor’s Office authorized no investigative measures against Rome and Dormeus, even as the network continued operating, more families paid millions of pesos, and children were abandoned in Dominican Republic shelters. Some of those children, including a seven-year-old boy whose father in Chile had paid 2.7 million pesos, spent eight months in a Santo Domingo shelter before being deported back to Haiti, a country suffering an imperialist-generated collapse, ravaged by gang violence and state disintegration. The Chilean state, which had absorbed the labor of these children’s parents for years, took no action to locate, claim or reunify them. The raids and arrests on June 25 were authorized not because the investigation had matured, but because the attempt to mount a political scandal around the Comptroller report was failing and fresh provocations were needed.
The corporatist media has served as the transmission belt for this deeply reactionary agenda. The June 25-26 headlines across the major outlets screamed about “millions in payments,” “abandoned children,” “transnational criminal organizations” and “lucrative migrant trafficking rings.” El Mercurio led with the claim that the network had earned more than CLP$800 million from “migrant smuggling, particularly of Haitian children,” while emphasizing that one of the accused also ran an NGO that received government funding—a detail calculated to delegitimize migrant community organizations as fronts for criminality.
The media has systematically conflated the Rome-Dormeus criminal case with the Comptroller’s administrative findings, presenting the two as a single narrative of Haitian criminality threatening Chilean children, when in fact the prosecution itself has formally distinguished them. This yellow journalism is in service of a government whose agenda requires the Haitian community to be seen as a threat.
While the media whips up hysteria over non-missing children, the Kast administration is carrying out a real assault on the actual living conditions of children, adolescents and students across Chile.
*****
Kast is committing a social crime, and the Chilean state has long experience in such crimes. José Antonio Kast is the son of Michael Kast, a member of the Nazi Party in Germany before fleeing to Chile after the Second World War. The Kasts were directly implicated in the Paine massacre, in which military forces rounded up and executed 70 peasants in the commune of Paine over several months following Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 US-backed military coup. His brother Miguel Kast was one of the principal architects of the dictatorship’s economic policy, serving as Planning Minister and Labor Minister and as a central figure in the implementation of the “Chicago Boys” shock therapy that immiserated millions.
Kast has consistently defended the dictatorship and its criminals. He has visited the Punta Peuco prison, built specifically to house those convicted of dictatorship-era crimes in conditions far superior to ordinary Chilean prisons, and upon meeting Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, the notorious secret police (DINA) brigadier serving over 1,000 years for crimes against humanity, declared: “I do not believe all the things said about him.” Krassnoff is the officer identified by a military helicopter mechanic as the man who personally threw three bound, blindfolded, and living prisoners into the sea from a Puma helicopter. Krassnoff is also linked to the disappearance of at least ten pregnant women detained by DINA, including Michelle Marguerite Peña Herreros, an engineering student eight and a half months pregnant when abducted, whose mother spent decades receiving messages that a boy had been born from her daughter but never received confirmation.
Of the many thousands detained and disappeared between 1973 and 1990, 150 were children and adolescents who were executed, 40 were forcibly disappeared and 956 suffered political imprisonment and torture. Kast has now restored Punta Peuco’s exclusive character as a facility for dictatorship criminals, transferred out the common prisoners placed there by the Boric government. He also has at least 29 formal pardon requests from convicted human rights violators sitting on his Justice Minister’s desk.
That Justice Minister is Fernando Rabat Celis, a figure whose biography encapsulates the continuity between the dictatorship’s political project and the current government. Rabat forms part of the law firm founded by Pablo Rodríguez Grez, the founder and head of the Patria y Libertad Nationalist Front, the fascist paramilitary organization that carried out terrorist acts against the government of Salvador Allende.
Patria y Libertad was involved in the 1970 assassination of General René Schneider, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army whose constitutionalist “Schneider Doctrine” was a principal obstacle to the CIA’s coup plotting. The group conducted a sustained campaign of bombings, sabotage of infrastructure and assassinations, including the sniper killing of Allende’s naval aide Captain Arturo Araya. It subsumed itself into the DINA after the coup, with former members receiving monthly payments from the dictatorship’s secret police for their operational work.
Rabat, as a member of Rodríguez Grez’s firm, was part of the legal team that defended Augusto Pinochet following his detention in London in 1998 and later defended the dictator in the Riggs case concerning his secret accounts and in criminal cases including Operación Colombo. Sixteen organizations of the families of the detained-disappeared issued a public declaration describing the rejection of his appointment as “an ethical and moral duty.”
Kast has not merely appointed a Pinochet defender to his cabinet. He has systematically dismantled the institutional memory infrastructure built since the transition. The National Search Plan for Truth and Justice, created by Boric in 2023 to locate the 1,469 disappeared persons whose whereabouts remain unknown, has had its budget cut and its strategic personnel dismissed, while museums and historical sites dealing with the dictatorship’s crimes have been denied funding.
The expropriation of 117 hectares of Colonia Dignidad, decreed by Boric to transform the enclave into a memory site and documentation center under a bilateral agreement with Germany, has been halted by Kast. The German Foreign Ministry expressed official concern over the decision.
Colonia Dignidad was not merely a detention center. Founded by Paul Schäfer, a fugitive Nazi pedophile who fled Germany in 1961, the 13,000-hectare enclave in the Maule region functioned as a torture camp, a weapons manufacturing facility, and a site of systematic child sexual abuse. Walter Rauff, the SS colonel who designed the mobile gas vans used to murder Jews and disabled people during the Holocaust, trained DINA agents in torture methods at Colonia Dignidad. DINA used the colony’s underground tunnels and medical facilities to torture and disappear political prisoners. The chemist Eugenio Berríos worked for DINA at Colonia Dignidad developing chemical weapons.
In 2005, excavations uncovered clandestine graves and weapons caches. Schäfer fled to Argentina in 1997 after being charged with the sexual abuse of 26 children who had been raised in the colony and was eventually convicted in Chile in 2006 on charges including the rape of minors and illegal possession of weapons. The colony’s history is the history of the dictatorship’s darkest operations—and Kast has now ensured it will not become a site of public memory.
The stolen children’s cases, centered during the dictatorship era but beginning before 1973 and continuing well into the 1990s, reveal that these crimes were not aberrations of an exceptional period but expressions of the capitalist state’s treatment of the working class and poor. An estimated 20,000 Chilean children were taken from mothers—predominantly young, poor, living on the outskirts of Santiago or in rural areas, disproportionately Indigenous, who had been protagonists of the mobilizations during the Allende years—were told their babies had died at birth or were being held for “scientific research.”
Hospitals were run by the military; mayors were appointed by the regime; neighborhood councils were controlled. The policy was articulated through Pinochet’s 1978 National Childhood Plan. The networks that carried out these adoptions were not external criminal elements but embedded within the state apparatus itself. A Chilean congressional committee investigating state involvement later described the stealing of children as a “lucrative business for real mafias” and concluded that “the state is responsible for what happened.” The mechanisms of this child theft did not end with the dictatorship; they persisted under civilian governments.
The Kast regime’s sudden, theatrical concern for the welfare of Haitian children is obscene. This is a government headed by a man whose family helped build the dictatorship, whose Justice Minister defended Pinochet, whose Defense Minister calls convicted torturers “old gaga men,” and whose political project involves pardoning the perpetrators of crimes against humanity while cutting the budgets of the institutions that preserve their memory.
*****
Kast has launched a multi-pronged offensive that combines xenophobia with manufactured security scares while he eviscerates whatever limited political, social and economic rights the working class gained in the post-dictatorship period. The attack on immigrants is not a diversion from the attack on the working class. It is the same attack that must be met with the same resistance: the international unity of the working class against the capitalist state and its fascistic government.
12. Deportees on flight from the United States die in Venezuelan earthquake
Almost all the Venezuelans deported from the United States who arrived on Flight 164 at Simón Bolívar International Airport were killed by the catastrophic earthquakes of June 24, having landed only six hours earlier.
The group—120 men, 19 women, five boys and two girls—had been processed through arrival protocols and taken under Venezuelan state intelligence (SEBIN) custody to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada, a spare government facility in La Guaira where migrants are locked in and subjected to medical checks and identity document procedures.
At 6 p.m., the 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes knocked down the entire building. Of the 147 deportees, only 12 survived.
Their deaths deepen and magnify the crime perpetrated by US imperialism against the Venezuelan working class: the US government expelled them like criminals after deliberately destroying their home country’s economy, where decades of US sanctions and colonial plunder left the infrastructure incapable of withstanding the earth’s movement, and then had the local puppet authorities lock them in a death trap.
The official toll across the country stands at 1,450 dead, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that more than 50,000 people are reported missing.
Several of the twelve survivors are in critical condition. Anderson Daniel Salcedo Lozano, 21 years old, arrived at Caracas’s José María Vargas hospital intubated and with both legs amputated.
Another survivor, also in the intensive care unit, described to El País what happened in the final moments before the building came down. The deportees, he said, screamed and begged the SEBIN guards to open the doors as the tremors began. The guards did not open them.
*****
Until Spanish-language media outlets broke the story Sunday night, international corporate media observed total silence on the fate of the deportees. Into Monday evening, only fragmentary references appeared buried in a handful of US outlets.
*****
To understand who the people on flight 164 were, one must understand what it took for them to reach the United States in the first place. Of the more than 8 million Venezuelans who fled the country’s economic collapse between 2014 and the present—driven by sanctions, the implosion of oil revenues and the failures of Chavismo—only a fraction ever reached US territory.
To do so, they crossed the Darién Gap, the roadless jungle on the Colombia-Panama border where thousands have died from drowning, exhaustion and violence. Those who survived continued through Central America and Mexico, traversing territory surveilled by militarized forces and controlled by criminal organizations, subject to kidnapping, extortion, rape and murder.
Those who made it to the US border after 2021 were granted Temporary Protected Status—a recognition, however minimal, that conditions in Venezuela made deportation tantamount to punishment.
Under the second Trump administration, Venezuelans have been subjected to constant, fascistic repression. On February 3, 2025, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem terminated the 2023 TPS (Temporary Protected Status) designation for approximately 350,000 Venezuelans, declaring it “contrary to the national interest.” The Supreme Court allowed the termination to take immediate effect in October 2025. Noem also vacated the eighteen-month extension of TPS that the Biden administration had granted, cutting short protections ahead of the original October 2026 deadline.
Throughout this campaign, US officials repeatedly dehumanized Venezuelan migrants, with Noem repeatedly calling them “dirtbags” and Tren de Aragua gang members in news interviews. Trump himself demanded that Venezuela accept “all of the prisoners and people from mental institutions,” portraying those expelled as insane criminals.
Venezuelan migrants were dragged from their homes, arrested while making routine appointments with immigration authorities or intercepted in the street at all hours, often by plainclothes officials, and taken to unknown locations.
*****
The timing of the disaster carries its own political symbolism. On the same day as the earthquakes, June 24, the US Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Mullin v. Doe, deciding 6–3 along ideological lines that federal courts have no power to review the Department of Homeland Security’s decisions to designate, extend or terminate Temporary Protected Status.
The decision will permit the Trump administration to return to federal court in other cases and overturn decisions that had ruled against the termination of TPS for Venezuela and other countries.
The likelihood that Trump will extend protections to Venezuelans was summed up in a speech in the wake of the earthquake, where he said: “Outside of the earthquake, the people are happy and dancing in the streets.”
Most of the 135 migrant workers who died in the Hotel Santuario La Llanada crossed the Darién on foot. They survived deserts, militaries and criminal organizations. Washington stripped them of their legal status and deported them, while the Venezuelan puppet state continued this treatment, causing their deaths.
The Supreme Court ruling issued on the same day as the earthquake—facilitating the mass deportation of over 600,000 Venezuelans into a country now experiencing its worst disaster in over a century—was not a coincidence.
*****
Every one of those responsible for the massacre of those on flight 164— in Washington, in Caracas, in the boardrooms of the oil and mining corporations now stripping Venezuela of its wealth—must be held to account.
13. Texas moves to impose Christian nationalist curriculum in public schools
On June 26, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) voted 9-5 to approve a new statewide reading list that incorporates Bible stories and passages into public school instruction from kindergarten through high school. The measure, set to begin with elementary students in 2030, is a major escalation in the attack on secular public education and the separation of church and state.
Under the plan, children will be compelled to “learn” stories of Noah’s Ark, David and Goliath, Daniel in the Lion’s Den and the creation of Adam and Eve in publicly funded classrooms. These are not historical or scientific accounts, but religious myths, including claims that directly contradict the most basic findings of modern science, now being inserted into public education under the fraudulent banner of “classical” learning.
The Bible reading list was approved as part of a broader overhaul of Texas social studies standards aimed at narrowing students’ understanding of history and the wider world. The new framework eliminates the currently required sixth-grade world cultures course, expands instruction in Texas and US history, and reduces the study of world history and geography. Donald Frazier, one of the board-appointed content advisers, has defended the emphasis on Christianity and the “collective West,” declaring, “Christianity is part of the marinade that everybody’s soaking in.”
The vote underscores the increasing centralization of curriculum control in the hands of the state. The 15-member SBOE sets education policy and curriculum standards, while the Texas Education Agency, headed by a commissioner appointed by the governor, oversees testing, accreditation, funding and teacher certification. Together, these bodies are being used to impose a state-directed ideological curriculum on districts, teachers and students.
The Bible curriculum and social studies overhaul are part of a wider censorship campaign in Texas schools. Since 2021, books in Texas school libraries have been subject to more than 22,000 challenges, with laws and regulations facilitating the removal of works dealing with race, gender, sexuality and LGBTQ themes. In some districts, the campaign has gone so far as to shut down entire school libraries.
This follows the passage of Texas Senate Bill 10, which took effect on September 1, 2025, requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments “in a conspicuous place” in every classroom.
*****
The ultimate purpose of the promotion of religion in schools is not religious education, but political control. The Texas ruling class is seeking to divide workers and youth along religious, racial and national lines, while cultivating the backwardness, chauvinism and obedience required by the capitalist state. The narrowing of students’ understanding of world history and culture is bound up with the needs of American imperialism, which requires military recruits willing to carry out violence against workers and oppressed people in other countries.
Texas is not an isolated case, but a spearhead of a national campaign to destroy the separation of church and state. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who presided over the Texas Senate during the passage of the Ten Commandments law, is also the chairman of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. Speaking at the White House alongside Trump this past Friday, Patrick declared that the phrase “separation of church and state” has “no constitutional basis” and should no longer be used by public officials.
The commission’s draft report makes explicit the aims of this campaign. Under the fraudulent banner of “religious liberty,” the Trump administration is seeking to overturn one of the democratic gains associated with the American Revolution and the Enlightenment: the principle that the state must not establish or enforce religion. This campaign is bound up with the broader attempt to falsify history, block workers and youth from understanding the revolutionary and secular traditions that animated the founding period, and subordinate public institutions to Christian nationalist politics.
*****
The Democrats, for their part, offer no way forward in the fight against Christian nationalism. Their opposition is not based on a defense of secularism, science, historical truth or the democratic rights of the working class, but on their own adaptation to religion and nationalism. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Texas and a graduate of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, has defended the separation of church and state as a means of preserving both religion and the capitalist state, warning that when religion becomes “too cozy with power,” it loses its “prophetic voice.” But Talarico’s own campaign program invokes religion and morality in the service of American imperialism, declaring support for the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, defending Israel’s supposed “right to defend its people,” and endorsing continued support for “defensive systems like the Iron Dome.”
This is the familiar two-step of the Democratic Party and its “progressive” representatives. They criticize the excesses of the Republican right while accepting the basic framework of American militarism and Zionism. Talarico calls for limiting “offensive” weapons to Israel while supporting the continued arming of the Zionist state, which is carrying out genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and military attacks throughout the region. No such “defensive” weapons are proposed for the besieged Palestinians. His appeals to defend the Uyghurs and other persecuted peoples likewise echo the language of US “human rights” imperialism, used for decades to justify interventions, sanctions and wars from Iraq and Yugoslavia to Libya, Yemen and beyond.
The drive to impose Christian nationalism in Texas schools is not a sign of confidence, but of crisis. The ruling class is terrified of the growth of a powerful, diverse and internationally connected working class in Texas, one that has nothing in common with the backward “traditional values” invoked by Abbott, Patrick and the Republican right. The promotion of religious obscurantism, nationalism and anti-Muslim chauvinism is aimed at dividing this working class and subordinating it to the needs of American capitalism and imperialism.
14. Labour’s “politics of home” and the brutal reality of Britain’s housing crisis
At the start of the month, soon to be ex-Prime Minister Keir Starmer published an opinion piece in the Guardian championing Labour’s supposed “radical program of rebuilding”. But the policies outlined in Starmer’s “politics of home” do next to nothing to address the housing crisis in Britain.
In the piece, Starmer reiterates a 2024 pledge to build 1.5 million new homes by the 2029 general election. The figure of 300,000 a year has long been widely regarded as the minimum necessary. It has not been reached since the 1970s.
In its first full year in office, Labour fell well short, with just 231,000 net additional dwellings built across the UK in the 12 months to November 2025. This was a 6 percent decrease on the previous year.
Figures are frequently worst where demand is highest. Of its 88,000 annual housing target, London met just 6 percent by new dwelling starts, or 38 percent by net additional dwellings. None of Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Bristol or Newcastle managed more than 76 percent of their targets measured by net additional dwellings.
To meet its targets, Labour would have to increase building dramatically, in a capitalist market that has no intention of doing so. Construction costs have increased sharply, with the Home Builders Federation reporting that the price of building an average home has risen by over £76,000 since 2020. According to Zoopla, developers claim development is not “viable”—that is, sufficiently profit-making—in almost half the country.
Starmer’s article touts a £39 billion social and affordable homes program which Labour claims will deliver “a decade of renewal for social and affordable housing”. In fact, it is a drop in the ocean.
*****
The number of households in temporary accommodation has increased by 155 percent in the last 15 years, to over 130,000 households: 400,000 people, including 175,000 children—one in every 47 in London. The figure increased by over 7 percent in Labour’s first year in office. According to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Temporary Accommodation, a staggering 104 children in England died between 2019 and 2025 “with temporary accommodation indicated as a contributing factor to their vulnerability, ill-health, or death.”
Sickeningly, private businesses profit from this distress. Last year, councils spent £2.8 billion securing temporary accommodation. The i newspaper reported last February based on information from roughly half of councils that most of the top 20 beneficiaries were private companies, frequently charging high fees for as little as single-room bed and breakfasts with shared kitchens and bathrooms. In some areas, the government money being creamed by private middle-men is driving up local rents—a vicious circle driving yet more workers into insecurity.
Just above these depths of the social crisis are millions of people struggling to tread water. Over two thirds of the British population, more than 45 million individuals, are affected by housing stress.
Rents have soared 40 percent since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, meaning private renters in the lowest income quintile spend 59 percent of their gross household income on rent; young people aged 18-24 also spend over half their wages simply keeping a roof above their heads, frequently forced to delay their independence well into adulthood.
For those who do enter the rental market, 619,000 privately rented homes contain Category 1 hazards posing an immediate risk to life. Many families are trapped in these potentially lethal conditions for decades.
This crisis is the product of 50 years of sustained class assault, carried out as a bipartisan project between Labour and the Conservatives. Today, 13 percent of MPs are landlords, including 44 Labour members, with a personal interest in the continued exploitation of renters.
Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy transferred over two million publicly built homes into private hands. Rent controls were abolished. Buy-to-let mortgages and financial deregulation opened housing to speculative investment on an industrial scale.
Blair built on this legacy, introducing Real Estate Investment Trusts exempt from corporation and capital gains tax. Labour also forced councils to offload housing stock to increasingly privatized housing associations and maintained the Right to Buy scheme which has bled the social housing sector for decades. Starmer’s article criticizes the outcomes while boasting that his government is “reforming” (placing some small limitations) on the Thatcherite policy!
Starmer is soon set to be replaced as Labour leader and Prime Minister by former Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham. But nothing better symbolizes the continuity between them than housing. Burnham funneled £1 billion in public loans to luxury property developers. Meanwhile, over 18,000 people are without a home across Greater Manchester, with the average person waiting three years to get one.
Colombia:
Honduras:
Canada:
Montreal Metro grocery workers continue strike despite deployment of scab labor
Niagara Falls steelworkers begin strike
Panama:
Protests continue against reopening of copper mine and in defense of public education
United States:
Utility workers to walk out July 4 unless management accedes to workers’ demands
Pennsylvania hospital workers angered by contract offer
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.
