Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. United States of America: 250 years since the Declaration of Independence
Today marks 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” that governments derive their powers from reason and the “consent of the governed,” and that the population has a duty to “alter or abolish” any governments that stand in the way of their “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The radical proclamation of universal human equality reverberated in the French Revolution of 1789, the Haitian Revolution of 1791, the revolutions of 1848, and the struggles for national unification and democratic rule that swept Europe and the Americas. It was in this sense that Marx, in the preface to Capital, wrote that the American War of Independence “sounded the tocsin” for the European bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Marxist movement has always viewed the American Revolution, like the French Revolution that followed it, within its historical context. As bourgeois democratic revolutions, they could not realize the principles they proclaimed except in the most limited sense. Most directly, in what would become the United States, the Declaration raised as a problem the persistence of slavery, which it could not resolve. But it set that process in motion, culminating in the abolition of slavery in the Second American Revolution, the Civil War (1861-65).
If the two American revolutions marked the ascent of the democratic principles proclaimed in 1776, the 250th anniversary is being marked under conditions of their staggering crisis and decay. The present government, and the social order over which it presides, are in every sense a repudiation of the American Revolution and of the principles that found their most profound expression in the Declaration of Independence.
The words of the Declaration of Independence, like those of all great revolutionary documents, come suddenly alive in periods of social struggle. Its denunciation of George III, a ruler “marked by every act which may define a Tyrant … unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads today like a condemnation of the Trump administration. As the historian Adam Hochschild observed in the webinar held by the World Socialist Web Site on June 25, the Declaration’s indictment of the king reads as if it “were written this morning.”
In the language of the Declaration, the military has been rendered “superior to the Civil Power” through the deployment of troops into American cities. Immigrants are “transported beyond Seas” without charge or trial to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Federal agents are protected “from punishment for any Murders which they should commit,” as in the cases of the ICE agent who shot Renée Good and the CBP agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
The Declaration’s statement that “all men are created equal” stands as an indictment of a society that has just minted its first trillionaire, Elon Musk. Nearly 1,000 billionaires command $8.4 trillion, and the top 1 percent holds as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. American society is mired in corruption and criminality, with President Donald Trump having reaped $1.43 billion in a cryptocurrency scam during his first year in office.
The country that once proclaimed, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” commemorated the 250th anniversary of its birth with a surge of immigration raids. More than 10,000 people were arrested over a period of just five days, according to a new report in The Independent, as the Trump administration campaigns openly against the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. While the American Revolution announced a “wall of separation” between religion and government, the Trump administration recently released a 224-page report announcing that the “wall” would be replaced with a “bridge.”
The wallowing of the ruling class and its state in filth and criminality cannot be attributed to Trump alone. He is the personification, the expression and the outcome of an extended process. A globally integrated economy has undermined the nation-state system upon which capitalist rule depends. Monopolies long ago replaced the so-called “free” markets, and production has been subordinated to financial speculation and the accumulation of fictitious capital. American capitalism, in protracted decline relative to its rivals, has waged imperialist war continuously since 1991 in an effort to offset its economic decline through military violence.
Out of this decay has arisen a financial oligarchy that has broken with all legality—in its operations within the United States, where it treats the Constitution, the courts and the law as obstacles to be swept aside, and throughout the world, where it tramples on international law, waging wars of aggression and underwriting genocide.
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The right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is entirely bound up with the struggle for social equality. They mean nothing without the right to a secure and decent-paying job, to healthcare, education, housing and culture, to a life free of war and repression—rights that are incompatible with the domination of society by a financial oligarchy.
There are clear signs of the social and political radicalization of broad sections of workers and young people, in the United States and around the world. Millions have taken to the streets in the “No Kings” demonstrations and in the mass protests against ICE murders. The class struggle is intensifying internationally. The critical task is to arm this growing movement with a historical perspective and a socialist program.
The revolutionaries of 1776 did not petition the existing order; they overthrew it. The third American revolution will be a socialist revolution, made by the working class as part of the world revolution against capitalism. That is the meaning of the anniversary, and the living heritage of the Declaration proclaimed to the world 250 years ago today.
Federal judges in Texas have now sentenced 15 defendants in the Prairieland Detention Center case to a combined 556 years and two months in prison, one of the most draconian political prosecutions in modern American history and a test case for the Trump administration’s campaign to brand opposition to Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), fascism and capitalism as “domestic terrorism.”
On Tuesday, seven additional defendants were sentenced to a combined 106 years and two months in federal prison. All but one of the seven defendants sentenced Tuesday had pleaded guilty, several of them cooperating with prosecutors in an effort to reduce their exposure to decades in prison. Nevertheless, every one of them received more than a year in federal prison, and most received many years. Ines Soto was sentenced to 50 years; Joy Gibson and Rebecca Morgan to 15 years each; Lynette Sharp and John Thomas to 110 months each; Seth Sikes to six years; and Nathan Baumann to 22 months.
The scale of the sentences is extraordinary. Comparable prison terms are typically imposed in cases involving murder, attempted murder of police officers, child sex trafficking or the repeated sexual abuse of children. The 50-year sentence for Ines Soto, a virtual life sentence, is especially appalling. She was not involved in planning the protest, she arrived separately, and left when guards ordered demonstrators to disperse. She had already left the scene before former Marine Benjamin Song allegedly shot and wounded an Alvarado police officer. For this, the government branded her a “terrorist” and secured what amounts to a virtual life sentence.
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The case stems from a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, an ICE facility operated by the private prison company LaSalle Corrections. Prosecutors allege that members of the group protested outside the facility, vandalized vehicles, and set off fireworks, and that Song later shot and wounded an Alvarado police officer who responded to the scene with his own gun drawn.
The savagery of the sentences cannot be explained by the underlying facts of the case. They are political sentences, imposed to create a precedent for treating opposition to ICE and the Trump administration as terrorism.
The Prairieland case is the first major “Antifa” sentencing since Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, his executive order targeting “Antifa,” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 2025 memorandum directing federal prosecutors against left-wing opponents of the administration, and the fascistic “counterterrorism” strategy issued under far-right operative Sebastian Gorka. Together, these measures provide the pseudo-legal scaffolding for a campaign to criminalize socialist, anti-fascist and anti-ICE opposition as terrorism.
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The Prairieland case is the most advanced expression of a broader campaign by the Trump administration and the capitalist state. Across the country, federal prosecutors are using conspiracy statutes, “terrorism” language, and distorted claims of threats or obstruction to trample on the First Amendment and transform left-wing political activity into criminal conduct.
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The Democrats have responded to these attacks on democratic rights with silence. The WSWS has found no statement from any Democratic politician condemning the 556 years and two months in combined prison terms imposed on the Prairieland defendants. Nor have Texas Rep. James Talarico, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders or other DSA-backed and “left” Democratic politicians responded to WSWS requests for comment.
Their silence is of a piece with their entire record. The Democrats have repeatedly voted to fund ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security, building up the very agencies now carrying out mass kidnappings, raids and political prosecutions. Even as immigration police kidnapped more than 10,000 people in five days, part of a “major surge” ordered by the Trump White House, the Democrats have done nothing to mobilize opposition.
The trade union apparatus is no less complicit. The WSWS has found no statement from the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the UAW or IATSE opposing the Prairieland sentences. Their silence is a signal to the state that the union bureaucracy will do nothing to mobilize workers against the criminalization of left-wing opposition, even as the same police state methods are being prepared for use against strikes, protests and every form of working class resistance.
This collaboration is personified by Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024 and has worked openly to cultivate relations with Trump and the far right. His support for Markwayne Mullin’s elevation to secretary of the Department of Homeland Security underscored the union bureaucracy’s alignment with the agencies overseeing ICE, CBP and the broader assault on immigrants and democratic rights.
The defense of the Prairieland defendants and all those targeted for opposing ICE, dictatorship, war and genocide cannot be entrusted to the Democrats, the Democratic Socialists of America, a faction of the Democratic Party, or the trade union bureaucracy. These forces are not allies, but collaborators in the attack. The defense of democratic rights requires the independent political mobilization of the working class against both parties of big business and the capitalist system.
3. The political significance of the Colombian and Peruvian elections
Within days of each other, far-right candidates were declared winners of presidential elections in Colombia and Peru, adding two more governments to the roster of Latin American regimes aligned with the Trump White House. Outside of Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay and Nicaragua, the map of Latin America is now dominated by governments that openly mimic the fascistic politics of Donald Trump. This map could soon extend further with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva facing a real possibility of defeat in October to Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the convicted coup plotter Jair Bolsonaro.
The corporate media is presenting these results as a popular mandate for the far right on the basis that Latin American voters have turned decisively against the “left” governments that emerged out of the 2018–2023 wave of protests.
This is false. What the elections in Colombia and Peru actually reflect is not the will of the masses, but the terminal crisis of bourgeois democracy in both countries, the outcome of naked intervention by US imperialism, and the political bankruptcy of the governments that promised reform and delivered austerity.
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In Colombia, Abelardo de la Espriella—a fascistic lawyer personally endorsed by Trump was declared the winner over Iván Cepeda, the candidate handpicked by outgoing President Gustavo Petro, by a margin of under one percentage point: 49.66 to 48.70 percent. De la Espriella has vowed to abandon the negotiated peace process with guerrilla groups and resume Colombia’s decades-long internal war with direct US military participation.
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In Peru, Keiko Fujimori—daughter of the late imprisoned dictator Alberto Fujimori and leader of the far-right Fuerza Popular—was declared the winner over Roberto Sánchez by fewer than 50,000 votes. In the first round alone, 30.8 percent of voters cast null or blank ballots or simply stayed home, more than the combined vote share of the top two finishers. While the opposing candidates have conceded and the election authorities certified the results, both results are clouded by credible allegations of manipulation that cannot be dismissed.
In particular, the results from both elections bore Washington’s fingerprints. Trump endorsed de la Espriella throughout the campaign, violating Colombian sovereignty. In Peru, the US ambassador declared that the American embassy was “monitoring the electoral process,” a claim with no basis whatsoever in Peruvian law.
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Predictably, the Western press has celebrated what The Economist calls an “Orange Wave”: in barely a year, the magazine notes, right-wing candidates have won seven consecutive presidential elections across the region.
Yet the organs of finance capital cannot fully suppress their doubts. The Economist itself warns that El Salvador under Nayib Bukele, the supposed model for the region’s new right, has attracted less investment relative to the size of its economy than any other country in Central America since he took power. It casts similar doubt on de la Espriella’s promised 7 percent growth and cheap mortgages, or José Antonio Kast’s pledge of 4 percent growth in Chile, given a decade of regional stagnation.
A Latin Times analysis found that the five riskiest investment markets in Latin America are all governed by Trump’s closest regional allies: Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and El Salvador. Access to Washington, it concluded, does not translate into confidence on Wall Street.
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A New York Times op-ed by Michael Reid concedes that what drives these results is not enthusiasm for the right but fear of “a failed left-wing dictatorship next door”—a reference to Venezuela—compounded by the failure of the previous “pink-tide” governments to secure stable work, affordable food or basic safety for the poor.
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This is not a movement of the masses toward the right. It is the volatile anti-incumbency of a working class and poor left without any political vehicle of their own.
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The Associated Press captured half of the picture in a survey published as the Colombian and Peruvian results were being finalized. At the start of this decade, it noted, so-called progressives “seized on public outrage over entrenched inequities exacerbated by the pandemic,” and were swept to power across Chile, Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia.
What the AP account omits is what happened next. Under Gabriel Boric, Pedro Castillo, Gustavo Petro, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Luis Arce, the inequities that propelled these governments into office did not recede. They deepened, or at best stagnated at extreme levels.
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This is the material substrate that the corporate press occludes whenever it debates whether Latin America has swung right or left. Mass poverty and precarious, informal employment—not any shift in political consciousness—remain the two most persistent features of Latin American social reality under governments of every stripe. It is this same reality that fuels the extortion rackets, gang recruitment and desperate migration that the far right exploits as an “insecurity” crisis, and that fuels the strikes and protests.
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What is taking place, in other words, is not a shift to the right in the consciousness of the working class or broad sections of the middle class. It is a deliberate, coordinated policy carried out by US imperialism, in alliance with the dominant sections of the regional oligarchies, to aggressively tilt elections—through media bias, financial pressure and direct manipulation of the electoral machinery—toward far-right governments answerable to Washington. This is the content of what amounts to a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: the explicit declaration, in the administration’s National Security Strategy, of the goal of restoring American “preeminence” throughout the Western Hemisphere.
This corollary has been enforced through the January 3, 2026 military kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who remains illegally jailed in New York while an “interim” government signs away control over Venezuela’s oil reserves to Washington; through an energy blockade of Cuba producing what has been described as “a Gaza without bombs”; through the designation of Brazilian gangs as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” following Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Flávio Bolsonaro; and through direct political and financial backing for far-right candidates from Argentina to Honduras to Colombia and Peru.
Washington’s aims are to expel Chinese economic influence from the hemisphere, install pliable client regimes, and ready the repressive state apparatus for the social explosions this program guarantees.
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The governments elected following the 2018-2023 protest wave bear direct responsibility for this outcome....
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Petro’s Colombia is the paradigmatic case. Elected in 2022 in the wake of the 2021 national strike, Petro declared within months that his government would “develop capitalism.” His healthcare, pension and labor reforms were gutted or abandoned; the hated riot police were merely renamed. Colombia’s six wealthiest oligarchs saw their combined fortune surge from $28.3 billion to nearly $50 billion under his presidency. Petro then flew to Washington to praise Trump as “terrific.” Now, his response to de la Espriella’s victory has been to propose a “national agreement” with the fascist right and to appeal to the US administration that endorsed his opponent to guarantee it.
The same trajectory—mass upheavals, a government elected on reformist promises, capitulation to imperialism and the oligarchy, and the channeling of the resulting disillusionment toward the far right—runs through Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Peru, where Pedro Castillo’s 2021 election on a wave of urban-rural revolts gave way within months to guarantees for the bond markets, then to a CIA-backed parliamentary coup and the massacre of 50 protesters under Dina Boluarte.
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The clearest proof that these elections express no rightward shift in mass sentiment is the immediate eruption of resistance to the very governments the far right has installed. Protests broke out shortly after election results were announced in Bogotá and Cali in Colombia, and Lima, Puno and Juliaca in Peru, with demonstrators burning American flags and denouncing foreign intervention.
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The growing militancy is also evidenced where the “left” nationalists still governs. In Brazil, strikes rose 14 percent in 2025, with more than 50 universities on strike and app-based workers walking out in four states. In Mexico, truckers and farmers have blockaded roads in 20 states while teachers have carried out repeated national strikes.
The economic shocks flowing from the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the US-Israeli war against Iran—surging fuel and fertilizer costs, rising food inflation—are only accelerating this eruption of class struggle across the continent. Such disruption has historically always fueled mass struggles across Latin America with revolutionary potential.
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The tasks posed by this crisis can be resolved only through the political independence of the working class from every faction of the bourgeoisie and their apologists. The same ruling US oligarchy seeking neocolonial dominion over Latin America is simultaneously engaged in the destruction of democratic and social rights within the United States itself. Building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Colombia, Peru, Brazil and across the hemisphere, uniting the struggles of Latin American and North American workers under a common socialist program, is the only viable answer to the drive toward fascism, war and social counterrevolution now unfolding across the Americas.
4. "Let them eat wedding cake": the Swift-Kelce spectacle at Madison Square Garden
The media frenzy surrounding the “Wedding of the Century” between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden (MSG) in New York City on Friday night is a case study of the way the lives of the wealthy and famous are packaged as entertainment, while very serious and far more important questions facing the public are pushed out of view.According to major news outlets, the couple’s celebration at Madison Square Garden on Friday had to be treated as a major cultural event. Speculation over guest lists, security logistics, celebrity arrivals and the estimated cost of the affair were all discussed with great enthusiasm.
The wall-to-wall media coverage speaks volumes about the priorities of the ruling establishment and its media apparatus, which is fixated on fame, wealth accumulation and social status while intensifying the attacks on the living standards and fundamental rights of the working class.
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Reuters reported the couple had donated $26 million to charities in New York and elsewhere this week. This, however, did not alter the character of the grotesque goings on in a city with the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world, while one in four people lives in poverty.
The security arrangements for the wedding also exposed the class character of the affair. Barriers were installed around the venue, streets were closed by the New York Police Department, pedestrian walkways were blocked, and blacked-out SUVs entered through protected access points.
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The timing of the event was also especially significant. While the coverage unfolded as the United States approached the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the press often devoted at least as much energy to the Swift-Kelce event as to the historic national anniversary.
The juxtaposition was not accidental. The entertainment establishment knows how to generate clicks, ratings and advertising revenue by converting the activities of the rich and famous into a mass distraction.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are both famous. Swift is one of the most successful musicians of all time, a performer whose public stature rests on record-breaking tours, chart dominance and a global fan base. She has 82 million followers on X, and her net worth is estimated at $2 billion.
Most of her assets are invested in her media empire, Taylor Swift Productions, Inc., which has an estimated Wall Street value of $12.1 billion. Like all billionaires, she has a property portfolio—valued at over $110 million—that includes a historic mansion in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, multiple penthouses in Tribeca, New York City, and properties in Beverly Hills.
The chasm between the scale of Swift's modest talent and the enormity of her fortune would be, in the hands of a gifted writer or film maker, the stuff of absurdist comedy. In saying this, our aim is not to insult Swift. She is, it is said, a nice person; and that, in the milieu of celebrities, is a rare quality. Swift is also a competent craftsman of commercial pop—melodically conventional, lyrically confined to the diary of personal grievance and romance, without a single formal innovation to her name.
But Swift is not compensated for artistic achievement at all. She is valued as a financial asset—a vertically integrated brand for the monetization of parasocial attachment, whose 'Eras' tour was analyzed by the business press in the language of a bond offering. Her billions are the cultural expression of fictitious capital: valuation utterly detached from underlying substance.
Kelce is one of the greatest tight ends in American professional football history, a three-time Super Bowl winner whose visibility expanded further through his podcast and relationship with Swift. While his personal wealth is considerably less than Swift’s, it is estimated at between $70 and $90 million. He just signed a three-year, $54.7 million contract to remain with the Kansas City Chiefs.
The Roman satirist Juvenal diagnosed the worship of gladiators and charioteers as the symptom of a citizenry whose civic capacities had been deliberately atrophied: bread and circuses. The charioteer Gaius Appuleius Diocles, idol of the second-century Roman crowd, was by some modern calculations the highest-paid athlete in human history—a distinction earned as the empire entered its long decline.
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In the present degraded environment where fame and wealth are worshiped, the New York City wedding appeared not only as semi-public nuptials, but as the commingling of two highly monetized public brands. The point is not simply that celebrity gossip is being covered by the media outlets, but that it is being covered as if it were a profoundly important event. Even the details that emerge—guest arrivals, carpet colors, rumored performances, the layout of floral displays—are treated as headline material.
5. Canada to host new multilateral bank to fund imperialist war
Canada has been named host nation of the Defence Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB), a new multilateral financial institution designed to facilitate a massive rearmament drive by NATO members and their allies. The DSRB aims to raise up to $185 billion for its member countries to spend on their militaries, by providing low-cost loans and credit guarantees for the purchase of military goods.
The Liberal government, led by former central bank governor Mark Carney, has played the leading role in the development of this new multilateral bank, as part of its effort to drastically increase Canada’s military spending and cultivate military ties with powers other than its historic military-strategic ally south of the border. The immense cost of this rearmament drive will be paid for by equally drastic cuts to government spending on social services and attacks on the living standards of the working class.
With the establishment of this new financial mechanism to fund a vast increase in military spending, Canadian imperialism and its European allies are racing to bolster their independent capacity to wage war, as the increasingly desperate attempts of the US to maintain its economic hegemony by military means at the expense of its erstwhile allies and enemies alike disrupt long-established inter-imperialist alliances.
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Earlier this year, the Liberal government announced its new Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS), a blueprint for the subordination of economic life to war production and a plan for the largest sustained militarization of Canadian society since the Second World War. With plans to spend $290 billion on defence-related infrastructure and $180 billion on domestic military procurement by 2035, the DIS promises an immense flood of capital into Canada’s military industrial complex—a wave of investment that low cost loans from the DSRB would no doubt facilitate. The Liberals aim to more than double the size of the workforce in the military industry and increase Canada’s arm exports by over 50 percent.
The Canadian bourgeoisie has been compelled to more aggressively assert “sovereignty” over military production due to the breakdown in the decades-long military-strategic partnership with US imperialism. The American financial oligarchy’s embrace through Trump of an “America First” agenda based on Washington’s “right” to unchallenged dominance over the Western hemisphere has exacerbated conflicts between North America’s twin imperialist powers. Indeed, the very existence of the Canadian federal state is at stake, given Trump’s repeated threats to make Canada the 51st state.
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The concept of a multilateral financial institution dedicated to funding a rearmament drive for European and Canadian imperialism originated in NATO headquarters. The former NATO Head of Innovation Rob Murray, who is currently the CEO of the DSRB Development Group, proposed the bank as a means of correcting the recurring problem of military “underinvestment” in the imperialist alliance. The DSRB is one of the mechanisms by which the warmongers hope to overcome popular opposition to exploding military budgets, driven by NATO’s target of spending at least 5 percent of the GDP on war and military-related infrastructure.
In the introduction to his detailed report explaining the purpose of the DSRB, published by the pro-NATO foreign policy think tank the Atlantic Council in late 2024, Murray openly admitted that the problem is that “the public in many European nations and Canada prioritize spending on healthcare, education, and public infrastructure” over the military. The DSRB, its proponents argue, would be a means of overcoming the popular opposition in the working class to rearmament.
In a set-up akin to multilateral lending institutions like the World Bank, the member countries of the DSRB will provide the initial capital for the bank in the form of paid-in capital—cash provided directly to the DSRB and counting towards the member country’s NATO 5 percent target—and pledges of “callable capital” that the member country would provide to the bank if it was ever in crisis. The DSRB would then leverage these assets, collectively underwritten by a core group of member countries with strong credit ratings on international financial markets, to issue AAA rated bonds. The proceeds of these bonds would then be used to provide member countries with low-cost financing to fund the purchase of military goods and infrastructure.
The DSRB loans would allow NATO members and their allies to access financing for military spending at lower interest rates and over longer terms than they might otherwise have been able to access—essentially pooling the strong credit ratings of a proposed core group of countries to provide more favorable financial terms for countries with weaker credit ratings.
The stated goal of the proponents of the DSRB is to facilitate massive expenditure over time on long-term military procurement and infrastructure projects, to upgrade the military capacities of NATO members and their allies in the face of rapidly spiraling international crises. With the Trump administration focused on ruthlessly pursuing the interests of US imperialism, from the war in Iran and the drive for a “New Middle East” to its interventions in the Americas, its NATO allies can no longer depend on the US guarantee of military protection and must devote hundreds of billions to rearm themselves for the wars to come.
A second function of the DSRB would be to provide credit guarantees to commercial banks and institutional investors, like pension funds and private equity firms, for the financing that they provide to companies across the supply chain for military goods, from large contractors manufacturing fighter jets, tanks, drones, warships and submarines, to those producing munitions, and start-ups in military tech and AI. The bank would underwrite the credit provided to companies in the military supply chains, in an effort to “de-risk” these loans and facilitate access to capital for the firms that profit from producing the means of destruction. In so doing, the DSRB would allow its member nations to encourage the flow of capital to strengthen their own “national champion” companies in the military industry, as well as the established giants of the US military-industrial complex.
While the concept of a multilateral bank to fund military spending has been promoted by NATO International staff for years, formal negotiations to establish the DSRB began earlier this year. The initiative has found an eager champion in Prime Minister Carney, who prior to becoming the governor of the Bank of Canada and of the Bank of England, worked for 13 years at Goldman Sachs.
The negotiations to draft a charter outlining the DSRB’s governance and operations took place earlier this spring in Montréal, with 19 founding member countries participating. Prior to the negotiations, Carney issued a statement promoting Canada’s “leading role” in establishing the bank and calling the DSRB a “cornerstone of collective security.” Isabelle Hudon, the CEO of the Business Development Bank of Canada, was Canada’s chief negotiator at the talks in Montréal, and indicated that Canada’s initial contribution of paid capital to the DSRB could be more than $1 billion.
At the end of negotiations, which reportedly took less time than anticipated, Canada was unanimously named as the host country for the headquarters of the new bank. The headquarters would bring, according to estimates, up to 3,500 high-paid jobs in military finance to its yet-to-be-determined host city.
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With the announcement that the headquarters of the DSRB would be located in Canada, different regional sections of the Canadian political elite immediately began to position themselves as the best suited to host the bank. The cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal and Vancouver have all launched competing bids to be the host city of the DSRB, with the Carney government to decide the winner.
In a statement announcing the city of Toronto’s bid to host the DSRB, Ontario’s hard-right Conservative premier Doug Ford argued that “a successful DSRB has the potential to turn Canada into a global capital for defense financing and manufacturing... as our nation’s financial capital, with a skilled workforce and unparalleled global connectivity, there’s no better place for the bank to be headquartered than Toronto.”
Lining up with the right-wing premier and echoing his enthusiasm to host the bank that will accelerate the drive to rearm Canadian imperialism, the “progressive” mayor of Toronto Olivia Chow—former NDP MP and the widow of former NDP leader Jack Layton—told the press: “This institution will bring more than 3,500 jobs to Canada. It will elevate our profile on the world stage and reinforce our credibility as a trusted ally in a moment when that credibility genuinely matters... Toronto is where Canada’s financial leadership lives. It is where the DSRB should live too.”
6. Australia: Karl Stefanovic’s turn from breakfast compere to the far-right
Longstanding Channel Nine breakfast anchor Karl Stefanovic’s rapid transformation from “jovial presenter” to the frontman of an increasingly right-wing podcast is neither an aberration nor merely a cynical bid for clicks and sponsorship. It is a sharp expression of a definite political trajectory within the Australian media and the ruling elite: the conscious cultivation of reactionary narratives aimed at criminalizing protest, silencing opposition to imperialist war and genocide, and rehabilitating militarism and state violence.Stefanovic launched “The Karl Stefanovic Show” as an “independent” podcast in early 2026, promoting it as a space where he could “get curious” and deploy his “bullshit meter” away from the formal constraints of breakfast television. The fact that he was simultaneously the face of the “Today” show, earning a salary of more than $2 million annually, did not appear to be a constraint on either him or his employer, the Nine Network—at least not for the first several months.
While the podcast emerged in the immediate aftermath of the December 2025 Bondi Beach terror attack, it was only one example of a rightward shift underway among sections of the ruling class and the media in response to the crisis of rule gripping the Australian political establishment, most sharply expressed in the crisis of the Liberal-National Coalition.
Labor’s answer to the terrorist shootings at the Jewish Hanukkah celebration, which killed 15 people, was to exploit the shock of the population to rush through legislation that equated opposition to the genocide in Gaza with antisemitism. The aim was to illegalize protest, freedom of speech and to enable the banning of some political organizations.
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Once a frontman for the federal government's 2021 COVID-19 vaccination campaign, Stefanovic’s foray into right-wing podcasting has coincided with his public disavowal of that stance. In podcast interviews and social media clips, he declares “deep regret” about receiving the COVID jab himself and states that “to mandate someone to get a vaccine… is inherently wrong.” Stefanovic has apologized for “not questioning the science.”
That Stefanovic has embraced the “let it rip” policy of state and federal governments, along with the far-right and reactionary forces who coalesced in opposition to lockdowns, masking and vaccination programs, places him at one with the positions not only of One Nation and the Liberal-National Coalition, but also of the extreme right-wing and fascistic layers.
In December 2021, the Labor-dominated “National Cabinet” joined forces with the Morrison Coalition government to welcome the Omicron strain of COVID-19 into the country—with NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard declaring that “pretty well everybody… at some point will get Omicron.”
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However, the clearest indicator of Stefanovic’s ideological trajectory is his June 2026 episode with UK far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Robinson is a fascist — the founder of the English Defence League and a provocateur who whips up race hatred against Muslims and asylum seekers to divide the working class.
In a promotional clip, Stefanovic is seen arm-in-arm with Robinson on a London street, describing him as “the ultimate disruptor,” advertising an hour-long interview that gave Robinson largely unchallenged airtime for his attacks on immigrants and Muslims. Stefanovic praised Robinson’s “tenacity” and “courage… in trying to stand up for what you believe is right,” and engaged in speculative discussion of how “the right” can “seize power.”
The program was taken down the next day after objections from Nine. But the deeper significance lies in the fact that Nine tolerated and promoted Stefanovic’s right-wing podcast for months before drawing a line at Robinson, whose international profile as a far-right extremist made the reputational and advertiser risks too obvious to ignore.
In other words, the corporate break was not with the right-wing trajectory as such. It was a tactical move to distance the network from one highly toxic figure, while continuing to function as a platform for militarist narratives, anti-China and pro-US coverage, and relentless attacks on protesters and youth.
Stefanovic’s trajectory—from highly paid, comfortable breakfast-TV host to defender of war crimes and promoter of Hanson and Robinson, to his ultimate dismissal—shows that layers of the media and ruling elite are consciously cultivating a right-wing narrative to contain, deflect and ultimately suppress the growing anger in society. The working class must build its own independent political movement, based on a socialist and internationalist program, to fight the drive to authoritarianism and war.
7. New Zealand: Labour’s hollow promises in lead up to November election
New Zealand’s opposition Labour Party held its annual congress on June 28, marking the start of its campaign for the November 7 election. In his keynote address, leader Chris Hipkins declared that a Labour government would deliver “a fair go for everyone” and “better jobs, affordable healthcare, and household bills you can finally pay.”
The purpose of the speech was to conceal Labour’s fundamental agreement with the National Party-led government’s program of austerity and expanding the military. It reflected deep concerns in the ruling establishment that workers and young people are moving to the left and are increasingly hostile to all the capitalist parties.
The election year is unfolding amid a global economic crisis, deepened by the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran, which is part of a developing world war.
New Zealand’s ruling class demands the full cost be imposed on working people. The government’s May budget increased public housing rents, slashed welfare entitlements and announced thousands of public sector job cuts. Wages for teachers, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers have been cut, with the assistance of the union bureaucracy.
Unemployment has risen to 5.3 percent, and youth unemployment is 17.3 percent—the highest rate in more than 30 years. After housing costs are deducted, 16.5 percent of the population is living in poverty, including one in five children.
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Labour is running what the media calls a “small-target” campaign: criticizing the government’s funding cuts while revealing little about Labour’s own positions. This is because it has no intention of reversing the major attacks on working people, and will in fact deepen them in order to keep taxes low for the rich and to pay for war.
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To divert attention from the real causes of social inequality, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government—which also included the right-wing NZ First Party in its first three years—sought to scapegoat immigrants, imposing increasingly harsh restrictions to bar working class migrants from the country.
During the pandemic, the Labour government delivered tax breaks and subsidies for big business and, with the unions’ assistance, froze or reduced pay for healthcare workers and teachers. Ardern scrapped the successful COVID-19 elimination policy in late 2021, allowing the virus to spread rapidly, killing thousands of people and overwhelming public hospitals.
The Ardern government strengthened New Zealand’s alliance with US imperialism, including by sending troops to Britain to help train Ukrainians to serve as cannon fodder in NATO’s proxy war with Russia. Military spending increased year after year, and the government labelled Russia and China the main “threats” to the world, as it dragged the country into US-led war preparations.
Hipkins, who became prime minister after Ardern resigned, supported the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza in late 2023, describing it as self-defense.
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Like social democratic parties internationally, Labour ditched any association with policies of social reformism four decades ago. It is today a party of big business and war, just like its counterparts in Britain and Australia. Whichever capitalist party leads the next government come November, it will escalate the militarisation of the country to place it on a war footing, which will be paid for with a deepening assault on social programs and workers’ living standards.
The working class can only oppose this agenda by building its own party to fight for the socialist reorganization of society as part of the struggle for socialism on a global scale. We urge readers in New Zealand who agree with this perspective to contact the Socialist Equality Group.
8. Latest jobs report shows labor force participation dropped by 720,000 workers in June
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday that nonfarm payrolls rose by just 57,000 in June, far below economists’ expectations and accompanied by sharp downward revisions to previous months’ figures. Payroll gains for April and May were revised down by a combined 74,000 jobs.
The headline unemployment rate fell from 4.3 to 4.2 percent, a figure seized on by the Trump administration to present the report as a sign of economic strength. But the lower unemployment rate did not reflect a strengthening labor market. It came as 720,000 people left the labor force and household employment fell by 507,000. The labor force participation rate dropped by 0.3 percentage point to 61.5 percent, its lowest level since March 2021.
The official unemployment rate conceals the real scale of joblessness and underemployment. The BLS reported 6.0 million people outside the labor force who nevertheless want a job. Of these, 1.8 million were marginally attached to the labor force, meaning they wanted and were available for work and had searched in the previous year but not in the previous four weeks. The number of discouraged workers stood at 477,000. Another 4.7 million people were working part-time for economic reasons because their hours had been cut or they could not find full-time work. The broader U-6 measure of labor underutilization stood at 7.9 percent, nearly twice the official unemployment rate.
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The attack on immigrant workers is also bound up with the worsening labor market. Foreign-born workers make up a major share of the workforce in service industries, including leisure and hospitality. The BLS monthly employment report does not identify workers’ legal status, but its nonseasonally adjusted nativity table shows the foreign-born labor force at 31.9 million in June, down from 32.6 million a year earlier.
The Trump administration’s campaign of raids, deportations and intimidation is aimed at terrorizing immigrant workers while intensifying exploitation throughout the working class. It is a mechanism for dividing workers, driving sections of the workforce underground, and strengthening the hand of employers.
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AI was cited as the leading reason for job cuts for the fourth consecutive month. Challenger reported that AI accounted for 14,029 announced cuts in June, or 31 percent of the total. So far this year, AI has been cited in 101,743 job-cut announcements, roughly 23 percent of all announced cuts.
Major corporations are openly using AI to slash headcount while redirecting resources toward profits, stock valuations and infrastructure for further automation. Oracle disclosed that it had cut 21,000 jobs over the past 12 months, about 13 percent of its workforce, citing the adoption and deployment of AI. Meta laid off about 8,000 workers while shifting thousands of employees into AI-focused roles. Cloudflare cut roughly 20 percent of its workforce after reporting record quarterly revenue. Block eliminated 4,000 jobs, nearly half its workforce, with CEO Jack Dorsey declaring earlier this year that most companies would reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.
These cuts are not the workings of an impersonal market. They are the product of a deliberate class policy. The financial oligarchy is using every lever available—AI, inflation, war, anti-immigrant repression and the Federal Reserve’s high-interest-rate regime—to impose the cost of capitalism’s crisis on workers.
Financial markets treated the weak hiring figures as good news because they reduced expectations that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates in the near term. Stocks rose, Treasury yields fell and the dollar weakened after the report, while investors recalculated the likely path of Fed policy.
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The June jobs report is a warning. Beneath the official unemployment rate, millions of workers are being pushed out of the labor force, forced into part-time work, priced out by inflation, terrorized by immigration raids or targeted for replacement through AI-driven restructuring. The defense of jobs and living standards requires the independent organization of the working class against the corporations, the Trump administration and the capitalist system they defend.
9. Australia: Union rams through sellout endorsement in small meeting at Western Sydney University
In a sparsely attended National Tertiary Education Union online members meeting at Western Sydney University (WSU) on Thursday, NTEU representatives bulldozed through in a typically anti-democratic manner, a 45 to 18 vote, with 7 abstentions, to endorse proposed 2026–2030 enterprise agreements for academic and professional staff.
This was despite many objections in the Zoom chat to both the content of the sellout deal and the lack of time to discuss and debate it. The NTEU had released copies of the agreements only three days earlier, after five months of closed-door discussions with management. That gave staff totally inadequate time to read and properly review the documents—which have about 120 pages each.
Numbers of members reported in the chat that they had not even been notified of the meeting until the last minute. Others had difficulty accessing and downloading the documents.
The meeting was conducted, as usual, in a way that left no time for a debate after a lengthy and misleading report by the branch president, David Burchell. He claimed that the deal was a victory and that the WSU NTEU branch was “leading the charge” nationally.
In reality, the agreements inflict another four years of sub-inflationary pay rises—this time averaging just 3.5 percent, far below the soaring cost of living. They also impose more onerous workloads on both academic and professional staff and provide no protection from the kind of restructuring that saw nearly 200 jobs cut at WSU last year, along with almost 4,000 at universities nationally over the past two years.
The Western Sydney University Rank-and-File Committee will be campaigning for a “no” vote by WSU staff, union and non-union members alike, when management puts the agreements to an all-staff ballot as required under the Fair Work industrial relations legislation.
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There is considerable anger among WSU staff members over higher workloads, unfilled vacancies and severe under-staffing, including in student services, student advising and IT services—all facilitated by the NTEU-CPSU deals with the management.
As the WSU Rank-and-File Committee and the Committee for Public Education, the educators’ rank-and-file network initiated by the Socialist Equality Party, have warned, the Albanese government is starving the universities of adequate funding, along with public schools, public hospitals, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and other social programs, while allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for the military.
For decades, the NTEU and CPSU have imposed one enterprise agreement after another in the universities, cutting wages in real terms, driving up workloads and assisting restructuring.
10. Sahra Wagenknecht offers to cooperate with far-right Alternative for Germany
It has long been evident that there are similarities in the political programs of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). When it comes to inciting hatred against migrants and strengthening domestic repression, the two parties hardly differ at all. But now the BSW is going a step further and offering the far-right party political cooperation.
On June 26, Wagenknecht’s party sent a letter to “Dear Dr Weidel” and “Dear Mr Chrupalla,” the two co-chairs of the AfD. The letter is signed by BSW co-chairs Fabio De Masi and Amira Mohamed Ali, as well as by Secretary-General Oliver Ruhnert. After the Bild tabloid and Der Spiegel magazine had reported on it, the BSW posted the letter on its website.
It begins by stating that the BSW has always criticised the “firewall” against the AfD—that is, the refusal to cooperate with it at parliamentary and government level. “It is undemocratic and does not solve any problems,” the letter states. This is followed by a series of proposals on how cooperation between the BSW and the AfD could be structured in the future.
The BSW offers to jointly set up “committees of inquiry into the Nord Stream pipeline explosion, the Covid-19 pandemic or the mask deals involving Jens Spahn (Christian Democrats, CDU),” should the BSW manage to enter the Bundestag following a recount of last year’s federal election, when the BSW narrowly fell short of the 5 percent hurdle for parliamentary representation. “As a matter of principle, we always decide on the merits of the issue and not on the basis of who tables the motions in parliament,” the letter states.
Following this rather hypothetical proposal, the letter turns to its main concern: the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which are due to take place in September. The AfD currently leads by a wide margin in the polls in both states, while the BSW is hovering around the 5 percent threshold.
Wagenknecht’s party offered the AfD cooperation during the election campaign and proposed a way to include it in government after the election. The BSW’s electoral goal is “to oust the incumbents and replace them with non-partisan Minister-Presidents who govern in the state parliaments with shifting majorities, with the involvement of the AfD,” the letter states. Saxony-Anhalt is currently governed by Sven Schulze (CDU) and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania by Manuela Schwesig (Social Democrats).
The BSW is therefore prepared to elect a Minister-President who governs with the support of the far right and may even include AfD ministers in their government. It goes without saying that such a “non-partisan” Minister-President would have to be largely in agreement with the AfD in order to secure its support. And if the BSW is prepared to support a “non-partisan” Minister-President backed by the AfD, why not a Minister-President from the AfD itself? That would then be just a small step further.
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If the AfD has, to some extent, succeeded in exploiting anger at the ruling elites for its reactionary ends, then the main responsibility for this lies with the Left Party, which spouts left-wing rhetoric during election campaigns only to implement right-wing, anti-worker policies once in government. The AfD is riding the wave of frustration that the Left Party has itself generated. In the eastern German federal states where the Left Party was part of the governing coalition or—as in Thuringia—provided the Minister-President, the AfD is now the strongest party.
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Hundreds of billions of euros are being poured into rearmament and war, while cuts are being made to wages, social spending and pensions, as well as to health and education expenditure. Wealth at the top of society has reached staggering proportions, as millions are barely making ends meet. Young people are being forced into military service, and state surveillance and repression are on the rise. Resistance is developing in response to this, to which the Wagenknecht party is reacting by throwing itself into the arms of the AfD.
11. USPS rural carrier kidnapped and murdered in North Carolina
Brandi Byrd Reynolds, a 35-year-old USPS rural letter carrier, was kidnapped and murdered Friday, June 26, while delivering mail on her route in Hays, North Carolina.
Deputies responding to reports of a shooting found Reynolds dead inside her USPS vehicle on Montieth Acres Road. William Craig Durham, 56, of Roaring River, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. Investigators allege Reynolds had been restrained and moved from one location to another without her consent before she was killed.
Reynolds’ murder leaves her two young daughters orphaned. Her husband, Brent Andrew Reynolds, died only six months earlier, on December 23, when the truck he was driving ran off the road, struck a tree and overturned in Wilkes County. Brent Reynolds, also 35, died at the scene, according to the North Carolina Highway Patrol.
Customers on Reynolds’ route described her as kind, caring, hardworking and attentive to the people she served. “It was always a joy to see her,” one resident wrote, adding that Reynolds “never seemed to be without a smile.” Another customer noted, “As my mail lady she was the best. She would take the time to talk.” “Brandi was the sweetest, kindest, most generous and friendly young lady I have ever known,” wrote another. “She was so kind after I had my many surgeries.”
Rural carriers responded to Reynolds’ death by sharing their own harrowing experiences on the job. A retired rural carrier in Atlanta told the WSWS, “People don’t realize how dangerous it is for carriers.” In winter, when it got dark earlier or when she delivered to cluster boxes behind buildings, she said she kept her mother or father on the phone “in case anything happened.”
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The national rise in crimes against postal workers is part of a broader safety crisis. A May 2024 Government Accountability Office report found that serious crime cases against postal workers and postal property increased almost every year from Fiscal Year 2017 through Fiscal Year 2023. In Fiscal Year 2023 alone, USPS opened about 600 robbery cases, 400 assault cases, 200 burglary cases and two homicide cases involving on-duty postal employees. Yet the authorized postal inspector workforce had not increased, and postal police staffing remained 37 percent below its authorized level.
The growth of violence against postal workers is one expression of the broader social breakdown in America, where decades of job destruction, poverty, addiction, isolation and the collapse of public services have produced increasingly desperate and unstable conditions. Reynolds was killed in Wilkes County, in the foothills of northwestern North Carolina, where median household income is only $53,189, per capita income is $28,753, 15.5 percent of residents live below the official poverty line and only 17.3 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree.
The county has also been hit by a sharp deterioration in basic social conditions. A 2025 North Carolina state resilience profile found that total employment in Wilkes County fell by 2,409 jobs between 2017 and 2022, a decline of 10.7 percent. Over the same period, opioid deaths rose from 29.2 to 32.2 per 100,000 residents, while the number of nurses per 10,000 residents fell from 140 to 128. Violent crimes per 10,000 residents rose 17.4 percent over four years.
USPS management, however, is preparing to make this social crisis worse by threatening to close “unprofitable,” mostly rural post offices. At a June Senate hearing on USPS finances, Postmaster General David Steiner identified the Postal Service’s basic public obligations as the source of its financial crisis, stating that 52 percent of rural delivery routes are “financially underwater,” adding that “in a normal business” such routes would be adjusted or stores closed.
In reality, the post office was founded during the American Revolution as a public service, not as a revenue-generating enterprise, in order to provide the entire country with affordable, reliable access to mail, newspapers and information needed to participate in a democratic society. This principle is now under attack.
USPS management is adding to the dangers faced by postal workers through deep cuts to safety, including under the hated “Delivering for America” restructuring to consolidate its network along Amazon lines.
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The response of the union bureaucracy has been to present the wave of attacks on postal workers primarily as a law-and-order issue, not as a social and workplace safety crisis. The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) is promoting the Protect Our Letter Carriers Act, a bipartisan legislation backed by Democrats and Republicans, as its central answer to assaults and robberies.
The bill would require the appointment of an assistant US attorney in every judicial district to prioritize postal crimes and would direct the U.S. Sentencing Commission to impose harsher sentencing guidelines, treating assaults and robberies against postal workers in the same manner as assaults on federal law enforcement officers.
The NALC presents this as a strategy to “deter” crime. National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association President Don Maston has endorsed the same framework, declaring that criminals are putting “the health and safety of our dedicated rural letter carriers in harm’s way.”
The bureaucracy accepts the social devastation that produces crime, accepts the USPS restructuring that places workers in danger, and then appeals to Congress and federal prosecutors after workers have already been assaulted, robbed or killed. The same Congress being asked to “protect” letter carriers is overseeing the destruction of the postal service as a public institution, while management uses the language of financial crisis to prepare deeper cuts to rural service.
The death of Brandi Byrd Reynolds exposes the need for an entirely different response. Postal workers cannot rely on management, Congress, regulators or the union apparatus to protect them. The defense of postal workers’ lives requires rank-and-file committees in every station, installation and route office, controlled by workers themselves, to fight for safe staffing, safe routes, reliable emergency communications, properly maintained postal vehicles, safe CBU placement, full transparency over injuries and deaths and the right to stop work under unsafe conditions.
12. Workers on the job amid deadly US heat wave exposes government and corporate indifference
A continuing massive heat wave across the central and eastern United States has placed more than 185 million people under heat alerts, disrupted public events and strained the power grid, while workers in factories, rail yards, postal facilities, warehouses and construction sites continue to labor in dangerous conditions.
Reuters reported Friday that heat indexes could reach as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the US. Trump's so-called 'Great American State Fair' event in Washington D.C.’s National Mall was temporarily closed after temperatures reached 101 degrees. Philadelphia canceled its Salute to Independence Parade after tying a temperature record set in 1901.
The heat wave is part of a broader climate shift driven by fossil-fuel emissions. The Fifth National Climate Assessment states that across the United States, the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme heat have increased, with people in every region experiencing warming temperatures and longer-lasting heat waves. The Environmental Protection Agency likewise notes that US heat waves have already become hotter, more frequent, larger and longer-lasting in recent decades.
These changes are already visible in the country’s major cities. Climate Central found that summer temperatures rose in 97 percent of 243 major US cities between 1970 and 2025, and that nearly every city analyzed now experiences more hotter-than-normal summer days than in the early 1970s, by 22 additional days on average.
This demonstrates the urgent necessity for measures both to halt climate change and to protect the population from the consequences already unfolding. Instead, nothing remotely adequate has been done. Governments have allowed the climate crisis to deepen while leaving workers and the poor to face its consequences through emergency advisories, temporary shelters, voluntary workplace guidance and underfunded public services.
The death toll from the current US heat wave has not yet been fully established, and official figures often lag behind the reality by weeks or months. But the danger is clear. In Europe, Reuters reported Friday that at least 3,700 excess deaths were recorded during the recent heat wave in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, including 2,025 in France alone. Health authorities warned that the toll may rise as more complete data becomes available.
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The federal government has no completed heat-specific workplace standard. OSHA’s own standards page says employers are currently covered by the General Duty Clause, related standards and state standards where applicable. This still leaves workers dependent on after-the-fact enforcement rather than a clear binding national heat rule.
Such a rule was first proposed more than a half century ago, when the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) issued criteria for a recommended occupational heat standard in 1972. OSHA appointed a heat stress advisory committee in 1973, which recommended a standard the following year. Yet OSHA did not begin its current rulemaking until October 2021, did not publish a proposed rule until August 2024, and still has not finalized it. OSHA’s public hearing ended in July 2025, and the post-hearing comment period closed in October 2025. The rule still has not taken effect.
Local governments have responded to the heat wave by opening cooling centers, extending pool hours, issuing alerts and dispatching outreach teams. In New York City, officials announced additional cooling centers, extended outdoor pool hours, mobile cooling vans, cooling stations for outdoor workers, LinkNYC directions to nearby cooling centers and outreach to more than 75,000 businesses.
These measures leave the most basic question unanswered: whether people can actually cool their homes, leave them safely, or stop working in dangerous conditions. New York Focus reported that the state’s HEAP Cooling Assistance Benefit, which provides air conditioners or fans to eligible low-income households, ran out of money in the first week of June, before summer officially began. The program is expected to spend about $15 million on cooling assistance this fiscal year, compared with nearly $300 million for heating assistance, and the number of households expected to receive cooling aid has fallen from more than 23,000 in 2024 to 18,500 this year.
The heat wave exposes a social order in which every basic protection—cool homes, safe workplaces, reliable power, medical care, functioning public infrastructure—is subordinated to corporate profit and government austerity. Workers cannot wait for employers, union officials or federal regulators who have delayed for decades. The urgent measures needed to protect life must be imposed by workers themselves, through independent organization in every workplace.
In Wolfsburg, members of the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) and the VW Action Committee distributed a leaflet headlined, “Enough is enough—Defend every job at Volkswagen!”
The early shift streamed out of the plant, the midday shift streamed in. Workers stopped, took the leaflet, and used the shift change for brief, hurried exchanges. Some read the first lines as they walked. Others pocketed the leaflet and then came back to make a remark.
The unrest among the workforce is palpable. The VW executive board is determined to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs and close several plants. While the government and corporations pour billions into rearmament and war, wages in the automotive industry are to be cut and entire workforces laid off.
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New press reports that VW intends to sell models developed in China in Europe in the future, and possibly have them manufactured in plants such as at Zwickau were the dominant topic in many conversations. Several workers had read the news on their phones during their breaks.
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The SGP members’ explanations about the international networking of action committees met with great interest. Many workers heard for the first time that in the US an ordinary worker, Will Lehman at Mack Trucks in Pennsylvania, is running as a socialist candidate in the presidential election of the autoworkers’ union, UAW, and explicitly linking his campaign to the establishment of action committees in order to abolish the union bureaucracy and transfer power to the workforce. The fact that workers in Germany, the US, Mexico, Poland, Turkey and China are confronted with the same attacks and are joining together in the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) was new to several employees and was immediately understood as a necessary response to the global strategy of the corporations.
“The corporations are also organizing internationally,” said one worker. “VW, Stellantis, Mercedes, Toyota, Tesla—they are all doing the same thing: cutting jobs, suppressing wages, closing plants. If we fight only nationally they play us off against each other. Workers in other countries have the same problem. Why shouldn’t we join forces?”
The Volkswagen Action Committee draws a clear conclusion from this: The fight against job cuts, plant closures and wage cuts cannot be left to those who have co-negotiated these measures. Employees must build their own democratically controlled combat organizations, action committees, independent of IG Metall and the works council, which unite with colleagues in all VW plants across the entire automotive industry worldwide. The alternative to the capitalist profit and war system is for the working class to take control of production and organize industry as part of a democratically planned socialist economy that serves not the profits of a small minority, but the needs of the great majority.
14. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
South Korea:
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
