On
Friday morning, for the third time in less than two months, 1,300
workers at the auto parts plant voted down a pro-company tentative
agreement brought forward by the United Auto Workers apparatus.
Workers’
share of US economic output has fallen to its lowest level since the
government began keeping records in 1947, according to data the Commerce
Department released Thursday.
Following
intense domestic backlash and a strike threat, Kenya’s High Court
halted a bilateral agreement with the Trump administration to open a
50-bed foreign Ebola containment facility.
For decades, establishment parties and leaders of their affiliated trade
unions have sought to discredit the SEP by branding it a
“foreign-funded” group and associating it with NGOs. Such allegations
are political smears aimed at undermining the SEP’s intransigent
struggle against all forms of capitalist rule and its uncompromising
opposition to the Sri Lankan ruling elite and its attacks on the working
class.
*****
The attempt to equate the SEP’s international political collaboration
with NGO financing is particularly reactionary. The SEP is an
internationalist socialist party. Its political collaboration with the
ICFI is not a financial or organizational dependency of the type alleged
by the defense, but a conscious political association based on shared
socialist principles and the perspective of unifying the working class
internationally.
The SEP openly fights for the unity of workers
across national boundaries. Its perspective is based on the
understanding that the root cause of the problems confronting workers
and youth in Sri Lanka—war, austerity, unemployment, repression, and
social inequality—is the global crisis of capitalism, which can only be
resolved through the unified struggle of the international working
class.
The party’s affiliation with the ICFI is a matter of
Marxist political principle. Its international connections are openly
acknowledged and flow from its socialist and internationalist program.
The World Socialist Web Site is the daily Marxist publication
of the ICFI. An international campaign launched in response to the
attack on Wasantha and Fernando won wide support from workers and young
people around the globe.
The
unions’ endorsement of Labor’s budget is a clear statement that they
stand ready to enforce the brutal cuts to social spending, jobs and
wages demanded by the federal government and the corporate elite it
represents.
The
political logic underlying these operations is suppression of all
opposition amid mounting attacks on social conditions and expanding
imperialist violence.
Members
of the IYSSE spoke with students in Wellington who opposed the increase
in student fees and other attacks, and the diversion of billions of
dollars to the military.
The
outbreak has exposed once again the catastrophic failure of the
capitalist state to guarantee the most basic conditions of life for the
working class.
The
new BJP government in West Bengal is using communalism, repression and
anti-poor demolition drives to divide workers and impose the burden of
economic crisis, now aggravated by the Iran war, on the working class.
The
growing intensity of drone strikes between Ukraine and Russia has made
incursions into neighbouring countries a regularity, presenting
opportunities for the European leaders to warmonger.
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.
This
five-part series examines the politics of the Communist Party
Marxist-Kenya, its defense of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the
National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism.
The DOJ is considering whether to charge Carroll with perjury—not in
her testimony about Trump’s sexual assault 30 years ago, but about a
detail of how her long-running lawsuit was funded.
Carroll said in
a sworn deposition in 2022 that no one else was paying her legal fees
in her lawsuit against Trump for defamation. Her lawyers filed papers a
year later declaring that Carroll “now recalls that at some point her
counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to
offset certain expenses and legal fees.”
The nonprofit organization which paid for some of Carroll’s legal
expenses was set up by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a large
donor to the Democratic Party and Trump critic. There is no suggestion
that Hoffman’s assistance to the suit was improper, and a federal judge
ruled that the issue was not relevant to the merits of the lawsuit.
A
federal appeals court upheld that ruling, finding: “Ms. Carroll
plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside
funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first
posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate
otherwise. Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in
the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs.”
Carroll had publicly discussed her allegations that Trump raped her in a
department-store dressing room in the 1990s, when both were in their
early forties.
After Trump denied her claims and accused her of lying to boost sales of
a book, Carroll filed suit in 2019, while he was in his first term as
president. The lawsuit was only possible, given the long period of time
since the event, because of a recently passed New York state law, the
Adult Survivors Act, which gave those subjected to sexual assault as
adults a one-year window to file suits over offenses for which the
statute of limitations has expired. The law did not permit criminal
charges to be brought against alleged perpetrators, so Trump faced no
criminal liability.
After Trump left office but continued to denounce Carroll on social
media, she filed a second lawsuit in 2022, charging Trump with both
sexual assault and defamation.
The second lawsuit went to trial in
May 2023, and Trump’s attorneys did not put on a defense, confining
themselves to cross-examining Carroll and challenging her credibility.
The federal jury found in favor of Carroll, awarding her $5 million in
damages for sexual abuse. Contrary to Trump’s claim that the jury found
him not guilty of rape, New York state law limits rape charges to cases
of penetration, and Carroll had fought off her attacker and forced him
to retreat.
The first lawsuit went to trial in January 2024, with the jury
limited to assessing damages, since defamation had been proven in the
earlier trial. The jury awarded Carroll $83 million. A court of appeals
panel upheld both civil judgements and the total amount of the awards.
Trump
has appealed both decisions to the Supreme Court, where they are now
pending. As late as Wednesday, May 27, the court deferred any decision
on whether to take up the appeal. As long as it delays, Trump can avoid
paying the judgements.
The investigation of Carroll is yet another example of Trump using the
Department of Justice to target his enemies, personal and political.
There are multiple conflicts of interest, given that Trump’s attorney in
the Carroll lawsuits, Alina Habba, was later appointed US Attorney for
the northern district of New Jersey, although she was never confirmed by
the Senate and is now relegated to the role of an “adviser” to the
department.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did some legal work on the
Carroll case and has recused himself, but Justice Department attorneys
who work for him are overseeing the investigation, and both Blanche and
Trump are undoubtedly kept up to date on the case.
The
investigation is reportedly run by the US Attorney’s office in Chicago,
headed by Trump appointee Andrew Boutros. Since last fall, Boutros’s
office has been heavily involved in prosecuting immigrants’ rights
protesters who have demonstrated outside the ICE detention center in the
Chicago suburb of Broadview, as well as defending agents who engaged in
violent attacks and then lied in court about their actions.
At
the time of the jury verdicts against Trump, the WSWS explained that he
was undoubtedly guilty of the civil charges brought against him, but
that the case was being promoted by the Democratic Party and their media
allies as a substitute for charging Trump with the crimes he committed
as president. We wrote:
The Democrats have
consistently refused to conduct a struggle against Trump for mass social
and political crimes ranging from attacks on immigrants, as in the
separation of children from their parents, to the attempted political
coup of January 6, 2021, when he sought to overturn the outcome of the
2020 election, mobilizing his fascistic supporters in a violent assault
on Congress. More than two years after the attack on the Capitol, the
chief instigators still walk free and face no criminal charges.
That
said, there is no argument about the reality of Trump’s crude and
brutal treatment of women. This is underscored by the speed with which
the jury brought back a unanimous verdict, including one juror whom
Carroll’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to disqualify because he
regularly listens to ultra-right podcasts.
Even this
limited accountability collapsed after Trump won the presidency a second
time in November 2024. One month later, ABC paid $16 million to settle a
lawsuit brought by Trump against the network and news anchor George
Stephanopoulos, for comments Stephanopoulos made during an on-air
discussion, in which he referred inaccurately to Trump being “convicted
of rape” in the Carroll case, when it was in fact a civil judgement for
sexual abuse.
Now the Trump Justice Department is investigating
and seeking to harass or even prosecute the 82-year-old Carroll for
having the temerity to tell the truth about his private conduct and his
public smear campaign against her.
The
shutdown of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show by CBS after 11 years
raises important questions about the consolidation of the corporate
media with the drive by the financial oligarchy and the Trump White
House to silence opposition and control what the public has access to.
*****
The finale had a reported 6.74 million viewers, the largest ever
audience for Colbert on CBS. The number of viewers highlighted the fact
that the cancellation was a political rather than a business decision as
originally claimed by the network.
Colbert treated the night as a
significant ending, honoring the people who had worked on the program
and the musicians who had helped define it. Rather than offering a
sentimental closure, the finale focused on the show’s significance and
became a protest against CBS management’s actions.
*****
In a typically stupid, vindictive manner, Trump celebrated the show’s
cancellation and posted on social media that Colbert was “finally done
at CBS.” The post also included a crude AI-generated video image of
himself grabbing Colbert by the collar and throwing him into a trash
dumpster. This sort of open interference by a US president in what
people see on their television screens is without precedent.
Colbert first became a major national figure through The Daily Show and then The Colbert Report on
Comedy Central, where he built a comic persona modeled on conservative
punditry. That persona was a sustained satire of right-wing politics and
gave Colbert a platform to mock both the inanity of the far right and
the way corporate news media content is manufactured.
During the period from 2005 to 2014, Colbert’s work on Comedy Central
helped move late-night comedy more directly into political commentary,
even if it remained limited within the framework of official American
capitalist politics.
One of Colbert’s better moments was his appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in May 2006 at which, noted the WSWS,
he delivered “a biting, ironic monologue directed at President George
W. Bush and the media establishment.” Under Barack Obama, however, three
years later, Colbert disgracefully solidarized himself with the US war effort in Iraq on a well-publicized trip to Baghdad.
*****
Colbert’s jokes during his monologues moved between criticism of
government policy and cultural commentary, and he turned his desk into a
place where political satire was front and center. He became a vocal
critic of both the first and second Trump administrations and this made
the show a target. Again, there were very distinct limits to this
criticism. In February 2017, for example, Colbert, along with the rest
of his talk show confreres, signed up for the anti-Russian (and anti-communist) hysteria, suggesting only half-jokingly that Trump was “being run by the Kremlin.”
Colbert’s
CBS years coincided with a period of significant corporate media
consolidation and the growing shift to the right within American
bourgeois politics. As the television networks became increasingly
controlled directly by the financial oligarchy and abandoned
any pretense of independent news gathering or commentary, Colbert
remained one of the few mainstream figures who openly ridiculed the
president with consistency and bite.
Colbert’s response to Trump was direct and unambiguous. When Trump
gloated over his show’s cancellation months earlier, Colbert answered on
air in a way that made clear he viewed the decision as part of the
larger political assault on free speech rights, not as a programming
adjustment by CBS, as the latter claimed.
The significance of the
show’s cancellation lies, above all, in the relationship between the
corporate media and political power. The decision to cancel The Late Show was
made as Paramount was seeking regulatory approval for its merger with
Skydance, a company owned by David Ellison, son of Trump supporter and
mega-billionaire Larry Ellison, who now serves as chairman and CEO of
the combined company.
The Ellison family’s investment vehicles
hold the controlling voting interests, and while Larry Ellison’s wealth
helped finance the deal, David Ellison is the public face and
operational controller of the new company and control of its properties
sits with the Ellison family and their partners, including RedBird
Capital.
The creation of Paramount Skydance is part of a broader consolidation
of media power among ultra-wealthy owners closely aligned with Trump’s
fascist politics. Media ownership is not politically neutral; it
controls who gets airtime, what is said and the limits within which
satire can operate.
Of the five existing media entities that
control most US entertainment, News Corp (owned by the Murdoch family)
and Paramount Skydance (owned by the Ellison family) are open supporters
of Trump, while two dominant operators of local television markets are
aligned with the Trump administration, Sinclair Broadcast Group and
Nexstar Media Group.
While two other primary US media
corporations—The Walt Disney Company (ABC) and Comcast
(NBCUniversal)—are not owned by Trump supporters, media watchdog groups
have noted a wave of corporate capitulation across almost all major
networks. Billionaire owners like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (Los Angeles Times) have blocked political endorsements to protect their business interests and align with the White House editorially.
*****
One day after the end of The Late Show, Colbert resurfaced on Monroe County, Michigan’s, public-access TV show Only in Monroe,
and delivered a low-budget satire about his own transition out of
national television. The special was a one-hour episode featuring Jack
White, Jeff Daniels and even a cameo from Eminem—all from Michigan—that
spread quickly online.
Stephen Colbert appears on Only in Monroe
As of this writing, the YouTube recording
of the show has had a viewership of over one million and more than one
thousand comments. CBS initially used copyright claims against
third-party uploads, but viewer backlash forced the company to reverse
course.
*****
The orchestrated attack on Colbert can only be understood as part of the
broader attack on fundamental democratic rights by politically
connected media empires to restrict what the public can watch, hear and
read. The hysterical effort to silence Colbert and his lampooning of
Trump is a warning about the implications of the concentration corporate
and financial power as a critical element of the descent into an
authoritarian dictatorship.
Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, which encompasses significant
working class areas in Philadelphia, is by some measures the most
Democratic Party-leaning district in the country. Rabb faces no
Republican opponent in November, so he is the certain successor to
retiring Democrat Dwight Evans.
Rabb won his congressional seat posturing as a political outsider, declaring in an interview with the DSA-aligned Jacobin
magazine, “Socialists need to expose the role of both parties in our
crisis and point toward a future where the working class holds power.”
Such rhetoric will not stop Rabb from following the dictates of the
pro-capitalist Democratic Party leadership.
The Rabb victory
demonstrates the deep-going radicalization of the working population,
witnessed in the election last year of New York City mayor and fellow
DSA member Zohran Mamdani and other nominally “left” politicians in the
US and internationally, as well as the groundswell of mass opposition to
war, genocide and fascism—all of which are byproducts of capitalism.
Like
Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and several other DSA members now in
Congress, Rabb operates with the bankrupt political perspective of
reforming the Democratic Party and “pushing it to the left.” This
platform was made explicit in the days following the win. On Wednesday,
May 27, Rabb hosted an online mass call titled “How to Take Over the
Democratic Party,” featuring other “progressive” Democratic Party
congressional candidates.
The Democratic Party is not an empty
vessel that can be filled with left-wing “content.” The Democratic and
Republican parties are political instruments of the American ruling
class, and the two-party system as a whole is the principal means for
suppressing any independent political initiative from below. The task of
socialists and the working class is not to reform the Democratic Party
but to break with it and put an end to the capitalist system which it
defends.
*****
Rabb’s family is deeply involved in Democratic Party politics. His
mother, Madeline Murphy Rabb, served in the administration of Harold
Washington, Chicago’s first black Democratic mayor, who held office from
1983 until his death in office in 1987. Rabb began his political career
in the 1990s as an aide to US Senator Carol Moseley Braun
(Democrat-Illinois) and briefly worked in the Clinton administration.
In 2010, while a visiting researcher at Princeton University, Rabb published the book Invisible Capital.
In it, he argued that entrepreneurship generates inequality, but that
the solution is to make capitalism more equitable so that the working
class can themselves become entrepreneurs.
His foray into trade
union organizing led him to become a leading organizer at Temple
University, helping to establish the Temple University Adjuncts
Organization (TUAO). Today, a TUAO member teaching a typical load of
four courses per year earns roughly $27,000—a wage that falls below the
federal poverty line for a single-person household in Philadelphia.
That
union was one of two American Federation of Teachers (AFT)-affiliated
unions which stood idly by as Temple University graduate
workers—themselves AFT members—went on strike in 2023. Both had signed
“no strike” clauses forbidding their members from engaging in solidarity
action as the underpaid student workers fought for a living wage.
Rabb’s
invocation of socialism does not mean the overthrow of the capitalist
system, but rather minor reforms that leave the fundamentals unchanged.
In his interview with Jacobin, Rabb states he aims at “fixing a
system that’s been rigged to benefit billionaires and instead making
the real investments needed in workers.” In other words, Rabb believes
gross inequality is not the inevitable outcome of capitalism, but the
product of a few corrupt individual capitalists.
If Invisible Capital is any guide, his aim is not to fight for
revolutionary change but to seek a more humane capitalism that can be
bent in favor of workers—so that they, too, can become
“entrepreneurs”—i.e., capitalists. A truly “classless” society!
Rabb is also backed by “Patriotic Millionaires,” an organization
chaired by former BlackRock Managing Director Morris Pearl, which
describes itself as “a collection of wealthy Americans fighting against
the destabilizing concentration of wealth and power in the United
States.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is another Democrat to
receive donations from the group’s Political Action Committee.
On
foreign policy, Rabb bases his opposition to the war in Iran not on
international law or anti-militarism, but on budgetary grounds. In the
same Jacobin interview, Rabb correctly called the conflict “an
illegal war,” but added that “war in Iran is costing US taxpayers over
$1 billion a day. … [instead] we should be investing those funds in our
communities.” This statement implies it would be acceptable waging war
abroad so long as it did not impose too great a burden on the population
at home.
Rabb’s position resembles a variant of the “guns and
butter” policy of the Cold War era. Under both Democratic and Republican
administrations, social programs and the economy expanded alongside a
massive military buildup as the US consolidated its post-World War II
dominance while simultaneously staging coups and waging wars to maintain
it. The killing fields of Korea and Vietnam, alongside CIA-backed coups
in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and Brazil in 1964—to name only a
few—were defining features of this period.
*****
Rabb’s cynical “anti-war” posturing is further exposed by the
political endorsements he has received from a host of nominally “left”
Democratic Party figures who have themselves voted continually to fund
the US war machine and that of its criminal partner, the Israeli state.
These include House members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar,
Pramila Jayapal, and others.
Rabb’s endorsement from
Ocasio-Cortez—who campaigned alongside him in the final days of the
primary—is particularly revealing, given that she has consistently upheld
Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Her most recent foreign policy
venture was an appearance at the Munich Security Conference in February,
where the self-described “democratic socialist” peddled
Trump administration lies used to justify the criminal war against
Iran, as well as the ongoing NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
Fellow DSA member Zohran Mamdani
won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June 2025 on a
platform strikingly similar in tone and rhetoric to Rabb’s, then
immediately set about reassuring the Democratic establishment he was a
safe pair of hands. Within weeks of his November general election
victory, he traveled to the White House to shake hands with Trump
himself—whom he had denounced as a fascist on the campaign
trail—declaring the two shared a common interest in making New York City
affordable for working people. Since taking office, Mamdani has buried
the promises that got him elected. Such an evolution should be expected
from Rabb, once he takes office.
Workers and youth must break with the Democratic Party—an imperialist
party of war and Wall Street that cannot be reformed. This includes its
satellites, such as the DSA, the main force backing Rabb, which has aided criminal sell-outs
of working class struggles in Philadelphia in recent times. A different
model exists: the Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee,
formed during last July’s municipal workers strike, which united workers
struggles against exploitation, war, deportations and dictatorship.
In its founding statement,
the committee declared, “There is a division of labor between Trump and
his enablers in the Democratic Party. The Democrats are doing nothing
to oppose him because they too represent the corporate oligarchy. Both
parties are in full agreement on bleeding the working class dry to fund
Wall Street and war.”
Through his online media activity, Piker has accumulated several
million dollars in personal wealth and a $2.7 million home in West
Hollywood.
With his record of support for the Democrats, Piker
can hardly be described as a “dangerous radical.” He has never failed to
support the Democratic Party’s candidate in any election, declaring in
one broadcast that he “never urged people not to vote. I have never told
people to vote for the Green Party. Ever. Ever. Ever.” He quickly
walked back even a passing suggestion that he would vote third party in
2028.
In an interview with Pod Save America, Piker explained his
aims plainly: “I understand that politics is in some ways the art of the
possible. My expectation is never going to be someone coming out and
advocating seizing the means of production. I’m a reformist.” He even
acknowledged his critics’ characterization: “Many to my left will say
‘you’re feeding revolutionary potential back into the Democratic Party,
you’re a shepherd for the Democrats.’” Indeed.
Piker summarized
his prescription for political action: “We have to consistently show our
discontent over and over again by way of protest, but also by
pressuring the Democratic Party. By trying to unseat bad Democrats and
replacing them with Democrats that will do the right thing.” The “left
flank candidates” he promotes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro
Khanna, Shawn Fain, Chris Van Hollen, are on record as supporters of
American imperialism, having voted for war budgets or voiced support for
NATO’s interventions. The record of every figure Piker supports is
ultimately a record of war and austerity.
Most revealing is Piker’s treatment of New York City Mayor Zohran
Mamdani, whom he repeatedly cited as proof that a “left flank”
politician could win office and exert genuine pressure from within the
system. The record of Mamdani’s first months in office demolishes this
claim entirely. Mamdani made repeated visits to the White House to forge
a political “partnership” with Trump, a president who had called for
the execution of Democratic legislators just one day before Mamdani’s
first visit. Piker’s response was to call it “Awesome,” framing the
collaboration in terms of pop-psychology and claiming Mamdani had
skillfully “wooed” Trump. At no point did Piker raise the obvious
question: What does it mean for a supposed socialist mayor to be
building a political partnership with a fascist president waging an
illegal war of aggression at the very moment that war is beginning?
*****
Contrary to his claims of “raising consciousness,” Piker actively
discourages his audience from fighting to introduce socialist politics
in the working class, by portraying workers as backward and reactionary.
He declares there is “no class consciousness in this country” and
characterizes American workers’ views as “f***ing distorted and out of
whack.” Even after calls for a general strike emerged from below in
Minneapolis in response to ICE terror, Piker insisted the US is “a
country with no class consciousness whatsoever.”
Socialists,
following Lenin and Trotsky, take the opposite approach: “Our tasks
don’t depend on the mentality of the workers. The task is to develop the
mentality of the workers.” The Bolsheviks did not abandon independent
organization because Russian workers were backward. They built the party
precisely to overcome that backwardness. Piker has inverted the method
entirely, using the limitations of working class consciousness as an
argument against building the very instrument necessary to overcome it.
*****
In response to growing interest in Trotsky’s ideas among his audience,
Piker has engaged in slanders of Trotskyism drawn from the neo-Stalinist
milieu cultivated by the DSA. In a May 6 livestream, he remarked:
“There was another guy … that decided that the peasant class would never
play a formative role in any sort of revolution and would unironically
be counterrevolutionary. He spent the rest of his f***ing days in
Mexico.”
*****
The theory of Permanent Revolution explains that in the epoch of
imperialism, the national bourgeoisie in backward countries is tied to
imperialist capital and landed property, rendering it incapable of
carrying out the tasks of the democratic revolution. The proletariat
must therefore assume the leading role. And crucially, once the
proletariat takes power, it cannot stop at the democratic tasks: the
logic of its class position drives it toward socialist measures . It was
this perspective, vindicated by Lenin’s own shift in the April Theses
of 1917, that guided October itself.
Piker has also repeated the slander that Trotskyism “leads to
neo-conservatism,” citing figures such as Irving Kristol and David
Horowitz. This is a fabrication. Kristol was an early Shachtmanite who
was never a Trotskyist; Horowitz was long associated with the Pabloite
IMG. The true political lineage of the neoconservatives runs through Max
Shachtman, who broke with Trotsky in 1940 over the defense of the
Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state. Shachtman’s “third camp”
theory refused to defend the USSR against imperialism. Trotsky fought
bitterly against this capitulation in the final months of his life,
documented in In Defense of Marxism.
Ironically or not, it is the political heirs of Shachtman who are the
founding figures of the Democratic Socialists of America, the
organization whose candidates Piker consistently promotes. Shachtmanism
is not a form of Trotskyism but a petty-bourgeois tendency that rejected
Trotskyism’s most essential political positions. It is not Trotskyism
which leads left-radicals to neo-conservatism but their abandonment of
Trotskyism.
*****
Because Piker writes off the working class as a revolutionary force, he
has no choice but to look to capitalist states as the vehicle of
anti-imperialism. Trotsky responded to such arguments, writing, “A
‘socialist’ who preaches national defence is a petty-bourgeois
reactionary at the service of decaying capitalism. Not to bind itself to
the national state in time of war, to follow not the war map but the
map of the class struggle …”
*****
Piker is a media personality whose social function is to capture the
leftward energy of a generation and redirect it into the thoroughly safe
channels of the Democratic Party and its satellite organizations. The
fact that this role is performed with profanity, a veneer of
anti-capitalist rhetoric, and even with quotes from Lenin and Marx, does
not change its fundamental character.
The WSWS has been
unequivocal in its opposition to the attacks on Piker, including the
recent moves by the Trump administration to target him
and Medea Benjamin for traveling to Cuba, as well as Piker’s earlier
detention and interrogation at Chicago O’Hare Airport in May 2025. That
is part of the broader fascist offensive against free speech.
But
at every decisive juncture when the question of what to do arises,
Piker’s answer is: Support the left Democrat, back the DSA candidate,
vote for the Democratic Party.
*****
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality calls on young
people to break completely with both capitalist parties and their
agencies, and to turn to the working class as the only social force
capable of stopping genocide, imperialist war and the rise of fascism.
We call on all workers, youth and students to join the IYSSE and the
Socialist Equality Party, and take up a serious study of what Marx,
Engels, Lenin and, above all, Trotsky actually argued—assimilating the
theory, method and history of the Trotskyist movement.
Even
if the case succeeds, it will not stop the state Labor government’s
criminal wrecking operation; just require Homes Victoria to hold a
consultation process.6.
The Financial Stability Review (FSR) issued by the European Central Bank
(ECB) this week says the Iran war, combined with the other disruptions
to the global economy resulting from the Trump administration, could set
off a major financial crisis as it points to a series of potential
triggers.
According to the report, at the start of the year the global
financial system had been “remarkably resilient” despite a series of
“uncertainty shocks” all of which had been set off by the Trump
administration. These included the issue of Greenland’s sovereignty, the
US military intervention in Venezuela, the threat to US central bank
independence and uncertainty over US tariff policy.
But this
resilience was “now being tested by a major geoeconomic shock triggered
by the war in the Middle East” which posed upside risks to inflation,
downside risks to global growth which could also “increase market
volatility and challenge debt servicing capacities as financing costs
rise.”
*****
The immediate impact of the Iran war has been the rise of inflation and in the view of the ECB this is going to worsen.
In
an interview with Reuters last week Isabel Schnabel, a member of the
executive board of the central bank, said that inflation was set to rise
further, reaching 4 percent by the end of the year as a result of the
war.
“Our hope that this conflict would be resolved quickly has
not materialized. The shock,” she said, “is much more persistent and we
have actually moved beyond the adverse scenario, which assumed a rapid
normalization of prices with the futures curve of oil prices suggesting
they are expected to remain elevated over a significant period of time.”
Foreshadowing
a rise in the ECB interest rate, she said that “given the size and
persistence of the current shock, looking through [in which central
banks treat inflation as a one-off occurrence and not a persistent
trend] is no longer an option.”
*****
With inflation on the rise, global bonds are being sold off, lifting
their yields or interest rate in contrast to the elevation of stock
markets. The FSR characterized bond markets as a “central transmission
mechanism through which adverse shocks spill over globally, including to
the euro area bond markets.”
The growing presence of
price-sensitive hedge funds in the euro area bond market could “amplify”
an abrupt repricing of sovereign risk and raise the risk of spillovers
to the funding costs of corporations and banks.
“The potential for
these highly interconnected risks to materialize simultaneously,
possibly amplifying each other further, increases the risk to financial
stability.”
*****
So far nonbank financial institutions had been able to weather the
storm of war “but face risks from broad-based market downturns” but in
an uncertain environment “sudden and correlated price drops in financial
markets and spikes in volatility—potentially leading to margin calls
[where banks demand more collateral from hedge funds and others to which
they have lent money to finance their operations]—could quickly trigger
liquidity stress.”
The growth of nonbank financial institutions
and the valuation of their assets which are increasingly not market
tested and the “opaque” nature of their operations, of which there is
precious little knowledge let alone supervision, is of concern for the
ECB as it has been for other major central banks.
*****
In a globally interconnected financial system, there is no national
or regional solution to the mounting threat of a major crisis. The FSR
noted that while private credit markets in the euro area remained
relatively small, despite their recent rapid growth, “the risks stemming
from spillover from the United States are significant,” and it could be
said the same applies to every other “national” financial system.
The
FSR report of the ECB is along the same lines as other analysis in the
recent period. It reveals a financial system in which the potential for a
crash, even more significant than that of 2008, not least because of
the growth of debt and complex financial mechanisms since then, hangs
over the global financial structure. And moreover, that financial
authorities have very incomplete information on what is taking place and
certainly no measures to deal with it.
The
German government's friendly reception of Syrian Islamist leader Ahmed
al-Sharaa and its plans to deport up to 80 percent of Syrian refugees
have sparked massive fear among those who have sought asylum in Germany.
US indictments of and attempts to extradite 10 high-level Mexican
political figures for allegedly protecting, if not consorting with,
narcotics cartels continue to shake Mexico’s political establishment.
Those
figures include Rubén Rocha Moya, the governor of Mexico’s central
Pacific Sinaloa State and its sole senator; Enrique Inzunza Cázares;
Gen. Gerardo Mérida Sánchez, Sinaloa’s security minister under Rocha
from September 2023 to December 2024; and Enrique Díaz Vega, its
administrator and finance minister under Rocha from November 2021 to
September 2024.
Díaz Vega turned himself in to US authorities in Arizona, and Mérida Sánchez in New York. Inzunza Cázares told the newspaper La Jornada that there was “no chance” he would turn himself in to US authorities.
Mérida
Sánchez, a former commander in the Mexican Army, is accused by the US
of conspiracy to import narcotics, possession of machine guns and
destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and
destructive devices. His indictment alleges he “received bribes from the
Chapitos” and, in exchange, provided them with, among other things,
“advance notice of law enforcement raids on drug labs, so that the
Chapitos could move their drugs and lab equipment before the raids.” The
charges against the others are along the same lines.
All four
Sinaloa politicos, as well as the mayor of Sinaloa’s capital city
Culiacán, Juan de Dios Gámez, undoubtedly have been fingered by the
“Chapitos,” the sons of Sinaloa Cartel capo Chapo Guzman jailed in New
York City. Like the Chapitos, Mérida Sánchez and Díaz Vega likely
likewise figured that turning state’s evidence is their best bet.
On
May 12, Terrance Cole, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency,
warned that the accusation against Rocha is “just the beginning of what
is to come in Mexico,” alluding to other officials and politicians
allegedly linked to drug trafficking.
Mexico’s President Claudia
Sheinbaum has said on repeated occasions that her government will not
shield anyone who has committed a crime. Rocha, who is now “on leave,”
and Inzunza, both members of Sheinbaum’s ruling Morena Party, continue
to deny the accusations against them.
Sheinbaum and her
government say that the evidence provided to them is thus far
“insufficient” to turn those accused over to Washington. However,
Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit has “temporarily frozen” their bank
accounts, along with the accounts of their children and several senior
members of the Rocha administration.
On Thursday, May 21, Sheinbaum met with U.S. Homeland Security
Secretary Markwayne Mullin at the Mexican presidential palace. After the
meeting, Sheinbaum shared a brief post on X saying that both nations
“will maintain cooperation based on mutual respect.” She claimed to
“rule out” discussing the cases of the 10 indicted officials.
In a
statement issued after the meeting, the Mexican Foreign Ministry
emphasized “respect for sovereignty” and “coordination without
subordination” as some of the key principles agreed upon for
cooperation. It also emphasized the importance of cooperation on
migration. It cited the successful reduction of Mexican citizens
crossing the border, which has reached a 50-year low.
Undoubtedly
there are calculations by Sheinbaum that some cooperation with the US
could prevent indicting bigger fish in the Mexican government. The
biggest fish would be Morena’s founder and “populist” president before
Sheinbaum, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO.
AMLO has not been accused in the past of outright bribes from narcos but
rather of receiving campaign contributions from them in return for
looking the other way from cartel activity.
*****
After his election López Obrador pursued a “hugs, not bullets”
campaign, nominally concentrating on social programs to attack the
sources of criminality, rather than confrontation with the cartels.
During his presidency in a visit to Sinaloa’s capital city Culiacán,
AMLO hugged Chapo Guzman’s mother in public.
AMLO, however,
combined this rhetoric with a massive buildup of the military and a
perpetuation of its domestic deployment. The lethality of these
operations also far exceeded that of his predecessors and points to
widespread extrajudicial executions, with five suspects and civilians
killed for every one injured. Now, responding to US pressure, Sheinbaum
boasts of even greater militarism.
*****
US-Mexico bilateral relations were shaken after a report of the
deaths of two CIA agents on April 19, along with two officials from the
Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office, when the vehicle they were
traveling in plunged into a ravine in the mountains between Chihuahua,
which borders Texas, and Sinaloa, where a clandestine synthetic drug lab
had been dismantled. On April 22 the Los Angeles Times
reported that the raid involved a total of four CIA agents and marked at
least the third time CIA operatives have joined Chihuahua state
officials on operations this year.
The incident prompted a formal
protest from the Sheinbaum administration to Washington that it had not
been informed of the presence of the CIA agents in Mexico or of their
activities in the opposition-governed state of Chihuahua. What seemed
most to irk Sheinbaum was that the opposition right-wing National Action
Party (PAN) governor of Chihuahua, Maria Eugenia Campos, was in on the
operation, while Sheinbaum was not. Sheinbaum blamed the latter for the
unauthorized involvement. But she emphasized that she wants to “avoid
conflict” with the Trump administration over the incident.
CNN reported on May 13 that the CIA facilitated a targeted
assassination of Francisco Beltrán, known as “El Payín,” a member of the
Sinaloa cartel, on a highway on the outskirts of the State of Mexico’s
Felipe Ángeles International Airport, using plastic explosives. This
fueled a firestorm in Mexico. According to CNN, the Beltrán operation
was part of an expanded, and previously unreported, CIA campaign inside
Mexico—spearheaded by the agency’s elite and secretive Ground Branch—to
dismantle the entrenched cartel networks.
Absent the express
authorization of the Mexican federal government, the direct
participation of foreign agents in security operations is prohibited by
Mexico’s Constitution.
*****
Two weeks ago, Trump himself threatened to launch ground offensives
against the cartels in Mexico, after praising attacks targeting vessels
that Washington accuses—without evidence—are involved in drug
trafficking. “If they’re not going to do the job, we will,” the
president said. During a hearing in the House of Representatives,
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called on Mexico to take action
against the cartels so that his country “doesn’t have to do it.”
CNN
reports that the CIA’s “deadly attacks” in Mexico have been occurring
for at least a year, mostly targeting mid-level cartel members, such as
El Payín. The network cites unnamed Mexican officials who claim that
“the lethality of their operations has been seriously ramped up.”
*****
The increasing US military involvement in Mexico has major political
and historical implications. In the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA and
Pentagon were deeply involved in Mexico’s “dirty war” against left-wing
student and guerrilla groups, much as it was in Operation Condor in
South America. During the war, government forces carried out systematic
torture, extrajudicial executions and an estimated 1,200 disappearances.
For US imperialism those unfettered days are returning.
As to
AMLO, for all the US complaints about his populist rhetoric, he did
little to interfere with US economic, immigration or security policies.
Taking him down, however, would deflate the populist impulses of the
Mexican masses. So Morena is a target, no doubt.
The US focus on
battling drug trafficking is a front for its larger and more fundamental
goal—control of Latin America and its immense mineral resources, in an
increasingly failing attempt to contain China.
The US has looked the other way as to cocaine trafficking in exchange for arming the Contras against the Nicaraguan revolution.
In
December, Trump exercised his executive clemency to pardon Juan Orlando
Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was serving a 45-year
sentence in a US federal penitentiary for drug trafficking and weapons
offenses, because he was viewed as useful.
The aim of the Trump
administration is to operate freely in a neocolonial Mexico, as shown by
the treatment of Venezuela and the Honduras-gate conspiracy against any
government resisting that level of subservience.
For all her rhetoric, the Sheinbaum administration is substantially permitting pursuit of that US goal.
The
Mexican government’s continuing capitulation on migrants, extraditions,
Cuban oil, operations by US troops and spies and its approval of a US
intelligence complex on the border in Ciudad Juarez has only emboldened
the Trump administration. This amounts in substance to aligning
politically with US imperialism.
The
far-right coalition government is seeking to narrowly define the words
“woman” and “man” in order to demonize and discriminate against
transgender people.
While the US and international press are focused on the terms of
negotiations between the Trump administration and Iran, Israel is
massively expanding its rampage across the Middle East—moving to
permanently occupy Gaza and escalating its bombardment of Lebanon.
Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Thursday that he had
ordered the Israeli army to seize control of 70 percent of the Gaza
Strip—well beyond the 53 percent Israel was allowed to hold under the
cease-fire that took effect in October.
“We now control 60% of the
territory in the strip. You know, we were at 50, we moved to 60. My
directive is to move to … 70%,” Netanyahu told a conference in an
occupied West Bank settlement. The directive would confine the strip’s
2.1 million Palestinians to less than a third of the territory.
*****
In Lebanon, an Israeli air strike on the Southern Beirut suburb of
Choueifat killed a woman, her infant daughter and a Syrian child on
Thursday—the first Israeli attack near Beirut in three weeks. The
Lebanese Health Ministry put Thursday’s countrywide death toll at 14
killed, including a strike on a vehicle near Sidon that killed six
people, among them a mother and her two children.
The Israeli army
Wednesday ordered the entire city of Tyre to evacuate, declaring all
areas south of the Zahrani River—about 15 percent of Lebanese
territory—to be a combat zone.
Israel is systematically breaking
the ceasefires it agreed to. A Gaza “ceasefire” took effect October 10,
2025. The Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli attacks have killed more
than 900 Palestinians since the ceasefire took effect.
In Lebanon, a US-brokered ceasefire that took effect November 27,
2024, required Israel to withdraw from the south within 60 days; Israel
never withdrew and continued bombing throughout. A further ceasefire
that took effect April 16 is being broken by Israeli air strikes on a
near-daily basis.
What Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon, with
full support of the Trump administration, demonstrates the actual
content of any US agreement made with Iran. It will not mean peace but
only serve as the prelude for further attacks by the imperialist powers
and Israel, aimed at expanding their domination of the Middle East.
*****
Despite the massive violence unleashed against Iran, the United
States has failed in its central war aims. It has not overthrown the
Iranian government, broken the resistance of the Iranian population or
gained control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The war has triggered a
deepening political crisis in Washington. Democrats and Republicans
alike have attacked Trump from the right for what they cast as his
insufficient defense of the interests of US imperialism.
On the
ground in Gaza, Israeli forces have steadily advanced past the so-called
“yellow line” marking the supposed ceasefire boundary. Israeli-aligned
militias have evicted Palestinian families on threat of death.
Sri
Lanka’s opposition parties, including the SJB, are signaling that they
are ready to join hands with the JVP government to suppress workers’
struggles.
The
workers at the plant have already rejected two deals and voted to
strike. But rather than honor that mandate, the UAW extended the
contract, lied to workers that a strike would be “illegal,” and has now
brought back a third agreement.
The
fine is a reduction from the initial figure of $66,200, equivalent to
10 seconds worth of USPS revenue and likely not even half of what
Acker’s yearly salary was at the post office.
Over the second week of May, Greece’s armed forces took part in
NATO’s Trojan Footprint 2026, which the military alliance described as
the “premier and largest Special Operations Forces exercise in the
European theater”.
The United States-led event took place across
10 countries spanning the Mediterranean, Baltic Sea, and Black Sea, with
Greece serving as the exercise’s key operational hub in the Eastern
Mediterranean. Involved were approximately 1,000 US special operations
forces personnel, along with 2,000 from NATO allies and partner forces.
The exercise took place within the context of US imperialism’s war
against Iran and NATO’s war in Ukraine against Russia and was presented
as a dress rehearsal for escalation of these conflicts. Sky News
reported the exercise was “designed to test responses to attempts by an
unnamed enemy—most likely Russia—to infiltrate NATO territory and launch
sabotage, cyber and other attacks under the threshold of all-out war.”
The
exercise was overshadowed by the unraveling of transatlantic
relations, as US imperialism’s aggressive pursuit of its geopolitical
interests cuts across those of the European imperialist powers. This was
reflected in Trump’s withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from Germany and his
halting of the planned deployment of US intermediate-range weapons
there.
*****
The extent to which Greece is aligned with US geostrategic aims in
the region was evident following Washington’s illegal assault on Iran.
Just days after US and Israeli forces began their bombardment of Iran,
Greece was the first to respond to the drone strike on Britain’s
Akrotiri sovereign base on March 2—attributed without proof to Tehran or
its allies—deploying frigates equipped with anti-drone systems and F-16
fighter jets to Cyprus before Britain had announced the deployment of
its own warship to the region. A Greek anti-aircraft battery stationed
in Saudi Arabia shot down two Iranian ballistic missiles on March 19.
Souda
Bay in Crete has provided crucial logistical support to US forces
throughout their deployment in the Middle East. The US maintains a
permanent troop presence in Greece of around 400 mainly naval personnel,
largely at Souda Bay.
Greece’s integration into US imperialism’s
war drive is the culmination of the country’s decades-long status as a
client state for Washington. Historically, the country has been one of
NATO’s top defense spenders, consistently and comfortably exceeding the 2
percent of GDP benchmark set by the alliance. This included the years
of last decade’s financial crisis, when health, pensions and other
social provisions were gutted at the behest of the European Union and
the International Monetary Fund.
During the first half of this
decade, Greece’s defense spending amounted to an average of 3.33 percent
of GDP—including just under 4 percent in 2021 and 2022. Over the next
decade, Greece is embarking on the largest modernization drive of its
military in history, planning to spend €25 billion. This includes new
submarines, air, sea and underwater drones, and a communications
satellite. At the center of the plans is the “Achilles Shield”, an
anti-aircraft and anti-drone dome developed in partnership with Israel.
While this does not yet reach the new NATO target of 3.5 percent of GDP
for Core Defense and 1.5 percent for Security-Related Spending, it is a
staggering squandering of resources, equating to €2,500 per head of
population of around 10 million people. Were the UK to commit to such
military spending, this would require the Labour government to hand over
approximately about €174.8 billion (£149 billion) to the armed forces.
*****
An integral part of drawing Greece even closer to Washington has been
the forging of close military ties with Israel over the past decade,
centred on control of the enormous natural gas reserves discovered in
the Eastern Mediterranean by a US Geological Survey in 2010.
At
the start of 2016, the pseudo-left Syriza (Coalition of the Radical
Left) government—which had previously campaigned on ending military ties
with Israel—signed a tripartite agreement with Israel and Cyprus on
energy cooperation, counterterrorism, and military coordination. At a
summit hosted by Israel in Jerusalem last December, the leaders of the
three countries agreed to deepen cooperation on “security, defense and
military matters” to protect “critical regional infrastructure” in the
Mediterranean.
The militarization of the Eastern Mediterranean has
served to inflame Greece’s historic tensions with Türkiye, also a US
ally and NATO member and, notwithstanding President Erdoğan’s frequent
anti-imperialist posturing, no less integrated in Washington’s drive to
war in the region.
At the center are rivalries over control in the
Aegean as well as the frozen conflict in Cyprus, which have sharpened
since the discovery of gas reserves in the region. Greece’s deepening
alliance with Israel has added fuel to the fire, given Türkiye’s
escalating rivalry with Israel. In the summer of 2020, Greece and
Türkiye came dangerously close to war after Türkiye dispatched a gas
survey vessel into an economic zone claimed by Greece and Cyprus,
resulting in a stand-off between Greek and Turkish warships.
Since
then, Greece has become increasingly assertive in the region. In 2021,
its parliament extended territorial waters in the Ionian Sea from six to
12 nautical miles, the first such expansion since 1947. This move is
widely seen as a precedent for a future extension in the Aegean, which
would effectively restrict Turkish naval movement.
In 2024, Greece announced plans for a maritime park in the Aegean.
Türkiye rejected the move, stating it would not accept “fait accompli”
actions in disputed areas. Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis
reaffirmed that extending territorial waters to 12 nautical miles is a
sovereign right that Greece will exercise when it chooses.
In
response, Turkey has advanced its “Blue Homeland” doctrine into
legislation, asserting maritime claims in the Black Sea and
Mediterranean. Turkish officials describe this as defending national
rights against external pressure.
Behind these rivalries lie deep
internal crises. In Türkiye, inflation is officially 32 percent (55
percent according to independent organization ENAG), with growing
working-class unrest a major threat to the Erdoğan government. In
Greece, long-term austerity—fueled by the mass movement for justice for the Tempi rail crash victims—has produced repeated waves of strikes over wages and living conditions. Protests and strikes have brought to the fore anti-war sentiment,
with demands that funding be allocated to social spending on health,
education and housing; not to the military . This opposition will only
mount as Greece’s treasury is emptied and handed over for the planned
surge in military spending.
Espousal of nationalism and
militarism serve to redirect these social tensions outward while
advancing the predatory interests of the Greek bourgeoisie in the
Eastern Mediterranean. As the WSWS noted in 2022, Erdoğan and Mitsotakis
are “united in the attempt to use militarism and nationalism to divide
the working class and suppress the growing struggles on both shores of
the Aegean Sea.” The answer is the independent political mobilization of
Greek and Turkish workers, united internationally against capitalism
and the drive to war.
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.
