1. Trump to American workers: Let them pay for the war
The imminent danger of an Iranian atomic bomb has been the “big lie” peddled by the White House since the beginning of the war. The threat is universally dismissed by commentators with any knowledge of Iran, as well as by the US military-intelligence apparatus. There is no reason to believe that Trump believes this fairy tale either—especially given that he claimed that last summer’s airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities had “totally obliterated” them.
That leaves Trump’s declaration that he does not care about the impact of the Iran war on the cost of living for American working people to stand on its own. He said it, and he meant it. The American ruling class demands that the working class pay the cost of this war.
Trump’s claim that he doesn’t think about the financial position of any American is of course a lie. He thinks constantly about the financial position of the billionaire oligarchs, his sole constituency, the social layer which spawned him. This was on display as Air Force One landed in Beijing, carrying Trump and many top aides, as well as a Who’s Who of American capitalists—Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, Boeing CEO Robert Ortberg, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, and CEOs of Cargill, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Micron Technology, Qualcomm, Visa and others.
The combined net worth of Trump’s entourage of oligarchs, which required two planes to accommodate, is over $1 trillion.
While Trump seeks to cut deals that will enrich Wall Street and Silicon Valley, working people are being crushed by a renewed surge in the cost of living. Real wages fell in April as prices outstripped paychecks. Energy costs—driven in large part by the Iran war and the disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—have been a major accelerant. Headline inflation rose to 3.8 percent in April, up from 3.3 percent in March, the highest since 2023. Gasoline prices jumped 28 percent, and fuel oil surged 54 percent. Even excluding food and energy, core inflation climbed to 2.8 percent, up from 2.6 percent the month before.
The shock is now rippling through the entire supply chain and into grocery bills. The Labor Department reported that wholesale prices rose 6 percent in April, the largest jump in three years, as higher fuel and transport costs are passed along before reaching consumers. Core producer prices, excluding food and energy, were 5.2 percent higher than a year earlier. Diesel fuel—the lifeblood of trucking and shipping—soared 12.6 percent in April. Food inflation, with NBC reporting that grocery prices jumped in April, was reflected in the price of fresh vegetables, which are over 44 percent more expensive than three months ago on an annualized basis.
These runaway price hikes are colliding with stepped-up layoffs, particularly those tied to AI-driven restructuring—an ominous combination historically associated with “stagflation.” Compounding the crisis is Trump’s tariff war against virtually every country in the world, which is disrupting supply chains and pushing up the price of imported goods.
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Congressional Democrats seized on Trump’s remarks with the practiced indignation of people who think politics is a branch of theater. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared Wednesday, “Donald Trump has made clear that he and the Republican Party don’t give a damn about the personal finances of the American people. It’s an extraordinary admission.” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, the senator from Wall Street, then posed in front of a giant blowup of Trump’s quote to denounce the president as “uncaring,” as if the problem were a shortage of empathy.
No one should be fooled by this performance. It was the Democratic administration of Joe Biden that helped touch off rampant inflation by pumping trillions into the financial system to bail out banks and speculators during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, while pouring hundreds of billions into the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. The Democrats are not horrified by the policy. They are annoyed that Trump says the quiet part out loud.
While there are tactical differences within the ruling class, particularly elements of foreign policy, there is no disagreement between the two capitalist parties on making the working class pay for the crisis and escalating war.
Trump made demagogic promises to halt rising prices and shrinking paychecks in his 2024 presidential campaign, and the Democrats seek to do the same in the 2026 midterms. But both parties defend the interests of the giant corporations, banks and billionaire oligarchs, not the working people who are the vast majority of the country.
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Trump speaks for a political order permeated through and through with oligarchy. As the WSWS remarked in relation to the wealth-infested Met Gala earlier this month, “Expropriation of the mega-millionaires and billionaires is a social necessity. The United States is controlled by an oligarchic ruling class that is as shameless as it is brutal. It has rendered itself intolerable by its own conduct. Society cannot afford the rich.”
There is an enormous social anger erupting in the United States and internationally—over soaring prices, mass layoffs, war and the open contempt of the oligarchy for the lives of working people. The rampage of the oligarchy has its corollary. Future historians will describe it as an inevitability: social revolution.
A major struggle is looming Saturday in New York City, when a contract for 40,000 transit workers expires and 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers will be legally free to strike. The struggle, in the center of world finance, is a fight by the working class against the financial oligarchy and its political representatives in the Democratic Party.
The World Socialist Web Site urges transit workers to prepare now for a direct confrontation against New York State Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City’s “democratic socialist” mayor Zohran Mamdani. This means forming rank-and-file committees to gather support and retain the initiative from below which is needed to defeat attempts to block a struggle through the courts, including through the state’s hated anti-strike Taylor Law.
This also requires a fight against the union bureaucracy, which is totally integrated with both levels of government and with management. What is taking place are not “negotiations” in the traditional sense but a three-way conspiracy involving the city and state governments and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) to impose concessions and prevent organized opposition.
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During the 2021-2022 election cycle, the Transport Workers Union’s PAC, ran by the International, gave $50,000 to the Democratic Party of New York and $47,100 to “Friends for Kathy Hochul,” according to records tabulated by Open Secrets. In addition, Local 100 paid out more than $69,000 to Hochul in April of 2022 and more than $117,000 to the Democratic Committee in New York State in May.
On March 15th, 2022, less than a month before the TWU’s endorsement, Samuelsen and Utano hosted Kathy Hochul at the TWU’s Quill Connolly Day—the first time a governor visited the union hall in 30 years. Local 100 posted photos of the event, including a smiling John Samuelsen standing next to the governor. Both Samuelsen and Utano gave Hochul a standing ovation.
Utano gave Hochul a groveling introduction. Afterwards, Samuelsen gave a speech where he declared: “Certainly, anyone who listens to me—I spend enough time bashing the Democrats because I just don’t think that they’re doing as much as they can do to advance working people … But in this case, if it wasn’t for the Democrats, half of us would be out of a job. We’d be dead in the water.”
Samuelsen lauded Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer for passing the Payroll Protection Program during the pandemic. Here, his choice of words (“dead in the water”) was poorly chosen at best. More than 160 transit workers died in the initial stages of the pandemic due to working with inadequate protections.
At the time, the top legislative priority of Schumer (one of the top Senate recipients of Wall Street campaign donations) and Pelosi (a notorious insider trader worth approximately $275 million) was rushing through more than $2 trillion in corporate bailout money.
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Samuelsen and the TWU have also offered their backing at times to the Republicans and the fascistic administration of Donald Trump. Samuelsen penned an op-ed in the New York Daily News last year backing Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, promising the potential for “incredible gains” and claiming, “she will put families’ livelihoods ahead of enriching corporations and their lackeys.”
Her “incredible gains” before leaving office in April included efforts to rewrite or repeal over 60 workplace regulations. OSHA’s penalties for violations of federal labor law dropped a staggering 83 percent in the first nine months of 2025, while wage theft enforcement cases declined by 97 percent.
Samuelsen was also appointed by Zohran Mamdani to serve on his transition team as a member of the Committee on Transportation, Climate & Infrastructure. Samuelsen’s alliance with both is a sign of the seamless integration between the openly right-wing Hochul and the “socialist” Mamdani. He was elected on the basis of deep hatred of capitalism and Wall Street. He has since abandoned all of his campaign promises. He held meetings with Wall Street executives, visited Trump in the White House and entered into open alliance with Hochul, dropping proposals for even modest tax increases on the wealthy.
The issue is not a question of Samuelsen as an individual, and there is nothing about his activities that are unusual by the standards of the union bureaucracy. Rather, its integration with management and government is the logical outcome of its acceptance of the capitalist “right” to profit and, with it, the domination of Wall Street over the working class.
Not one of the demands transit workers are raising can be won without a redistribution of wealth and a direct challenge to the property “rights” of the oligarchy. That requires building the working class as an independent political force.
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As Wednesday’s WSWS perspective concluded: “The rank-and-file committees that transit workers build now are the organizational embryo of a broader movement, one that breaks politically from the Democratic Party, rejects every attempt to subordinate workers to Wall Street’s ‘budget realism,’ and takes aim at the wealth and power of the financial oligarchy itself.”
3. Pentagon admits $25 billion price tag for Iran war is an underestimation
In congressional testimony Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine and Pentagon Comptroller Jay Hurst told the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Defense that the running cost of the Iran war has grown to $29 billion—and that this figure does not include damage to US military bases.
The figure, up from the $25 billion Hurst disclosed two weeks earlier, was extracted from Pentagon officials only under direct questioning. The actual cost of the 74-day war, according to media reports and independent economists, is far higher.
The hearings took place as the US-Israeli war on Iran entered its third month with no settlement in sight. US President Donald Trump on Sunday rejected Iran’s latest peace proposal as “totally unacceptable,” telling reporters the April 8 ceasefire was “on massive life support.” Iran’s proposal had demanded the lifting of the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz before any talks on Iran’s nuclear program, terms the Trump administration refused. The Pentagon, per Tuesday’s testimony, is preparing to resume the war at any moment.
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University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers, writing in the New York Times last week, called the Pentagon’s $25 billion estimate “more of a headline than a real number.” His own analysis, Wolfers wrote, “suggests the Iran war will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and very possibly trillions.” His accounting included oil-price increases, inflation, higher interest rates, slower economic growth and a stock-market loss of roughly $3 trillion in equity values.
Linda Bilmes, the Harvard Kennedy School lecturer who with Joseph Stiglitz authored the major study of the true cost of the Iraq war, has been more direct. In April she told Fortune that she was “certain we will spend one trillion dollars for the Iran war,” with current expenditure running at roughly $2 billion a day.
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The most significant admission Tuesday was that the $29 billion figure does not include damage to American bases. Pressed by Rep. Ed Case (Democrat-Hawaii) on whether the total incorporated military-construction costs to repair bombed-out facilities, Hurst said it did not. “We have a lot of unknowns there,” Hurst testified. “We don’t know what our future posture is going to be. We don’t know how those bases would be reconstructed, and we don’t know what percentage our allies and partners will pay for that reconstruction.” Sen. Patty Murray (Democrat-Washington) called the $29 billion figure “suspiciously low” given the scale of Iranian retaliatory strikes.
That scale has been documented by the US press in recent weeks. NBC News reported on April 25 that Iran “caused more extensive damage to U.S. military bases than publicly known,” striking more than 100 targets at 11 US installations across seven countries. The Washington Post’s May 6 satellite-imagery investigation documented damage to 228 structures across the bombed bases, with more than half concentrated at the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar—the central hub of U.S. Central Command operations—was also struck.
At least one fighter jet, more than a dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones, two MC-130 tankers and four helicopters were destroyed in the conflict; at least two air-defense systems sustained damage. Thirteen US service members were killed. The American Enterprise Institute has estimated that infrastructure repair alone will run to roughly $5 billion.
Hegseth made clear Tuesday that the administration intends to resume the war at the moment of its choosing. Asked by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Republican-Alaska) whether the Trump administration would seek a congressional authorization for the use of military force—the 60-day War Powers clock having expired April 28—Hegseth replied: “Should the President make the decision to recommence, we would have all the authorities necessary to do so.” Pressed on whether an Article I authorization would be useful, Hegseth said the president “has all the authorities he needs under Article 2 to execute.”
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) condemns the brutal repression carried out by Kenyan police against protesters opposing the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi. We demand the immediate release of the 12 who have been arrested.
The summit was held under the auspices of French imperialism led by President Emmanuel Macron and co-hosted by Kenyan President William Ruto.
On May 12, a small demonstration by the Pan-Africanism Summit Against Imperialism (PASAI) set out toward the statue of Dedan Kimathi, leader of the Mau Mau uprising against British imperialism in Nairobi’s Central Business District. Police refused to allow protesters anywhere near the summit venue at Kenyatta International Convention Centre.
The PASAI counter-summit was convened by the Communist Party Marxist–Kenya (CPM-K) together with allied Stalinist, Pan-Africanist and Maoist organizations, including international delegations.
The demonstrators had reportedly agreed their revised route with the police and marched to demand the revocation of the recently approved Kenya-France security partnership, which permits the deployment of French military forces in Kenya and grants France access to the port of Mombasa, enabling Paris to project power across the Indian Ocean.
Kenya’s ruling elite is set to benefit from a pledge by French shipping giant CMA CGM to invest $823 million in modernizing the port of Mombasa, a key outlet for transporting billions of dollars’ worth of minerals from Central and East Africa.
Barely 30 minutes after the demonstration began, police vehicles arrived and officers began tearing down the protesters’ banners. As the march continued, police fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades at the demonstrators. After the assault subsided, police swarmed the area and seized protesters at gunpoint.
Those detained include Lee Sang-hun, former representative of the People’s Democracy Party of South Korea, a Stalinist-nationalist organisation; Song Dan-bi, director of the party’s International Department; Joti Brar, chair of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a Maoist party; Dimitris Patelis, a professor of philosophy at the Technical University of Crete and a founding member of Greece’s Revolutionary Theory Group; and Guy Bremond, a French activist.
Also arrested were Kenyan activists Gacheke Gachihi, Sayialel Mankuyio, Juliaus Kamau, John Kamau. Brian Mwanzi, Derivk Opiyo, Fredrik Yara and Colins Otieno.
The day before, the Kenyan police had illegally arrested five students of the student front of the CPM-K, the Revolutionary Student Commission, for “unlawful assembly” in front of the summit: Beres Omondi, Tracy Auma, Patience Nyambura, Jobunga Samuel, and Kenneth Obiero. The students spent the night at Central Police Station in Nairobi and have not been released as of yet.
All Kenyans who were arrested have now been released, with the charges withdrawn after Ruto’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions found no basis to prosecute. This exposes the arrests for what they were: an intimidation tactic. Meanwhile, the foreign delegates to the PASAI counter-summit remain in detention.
The ICFI has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the CPM-K, and political tendencies represented among sections of the arrested international delegates, which have been clearly elaborated on the World Socialist Web Site. But despite these differences, and in accordance with fundamental democratic and socialist political principles, the ICFI supports the CPM-K’s demands:
- The immediate and unconditional release of all arrested individuals.
- An end to police harassment, abductions and repression against activists, organizers and progressive movements.
- The immediate halt to all imperialist military, political and economic agreements being imposed upon Kenya and Africa.
- Respect for the democratic rights of all participants attending anti-imperialist and Pan-African gatherings.
The arrests are part of a systematic clampdown by the “broad-based unity” Kenya government of Ruto, which unites his United Democratic Alliance (UDA) with the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). This repression is directed against all left-wing opposition, including the Communist Party Marxist–Kenya (CPM-K), but its fundamental target is the Kenyan working class and youth.
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This repression is inseparable from the escalating violence of the Ruto regime since it came to power in 2022, as it seeks to erect a dictatorship modeled on that of Ruto’s political mentor, the Western-backed autocrat Daniel arap Moi, who ruled Kenya from 1978 to 2002.
Since Ruto took office, police and security forces have killed at least 246 protesters, including during the 2023 protests against the soaring cost of living, the 2024 Gen-Z protests against Ruto’s IMF-backed Finance Bill, and those last year against police repression and the regime’s renewed attacks. Hundreds more have been injured, maimed, disappeared or abducted.
The regime has banned demonstrations, deployed military-style checkpoints across Nairobi, shut down internet access and media coverage during protests, created intelligence units tasked with abductions and torture, and, in an unprecedented escalation, deployed the military against unarmed protesters.
Now Ruto is preparing a new austerity offensive contained in the Finance Bill 2026, including a 25 percent excise duty on mobile phones, VAT on digital and platform-based financial services, higher taxation on second-hand clothes, an increase in monthly rental income tax from 7.5 percent to 10 percent, and tighter tax-compliance rules that will strengthen the Kenya Revenue Authority against small businesses and informal workers.
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Ruto has also intensified Kenya’s role as an imperialist proxy. His government secured Washington’s designation of Kenya as a major non-NATO ally, backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and condemned Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes. Among broad layers of workers and youth, he is seen as a direct accomplice of the imperialist war machine—groveling before Washington, London, Brussels and now Paris, while transforming Kenya into a platform for military, financial and diplomatic operations against the oppressed masses of Africa and the world.
Moreover, Ruto’s repression was undoubtedly coordinated in advance with Macron, whose own government has carried out savage repression inside France and in French-controlled territories. During the mass struggle against Macron’s pension cuts, French police violently attacked demonstrations and strikes, while the notorious BRAV-M motorized police units were deployed to intimidate, assault and arrest protesters.
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The fight against repression in Kenya cannot be separated from the fight against Macron, European militarism and imperialist war. It requires the unity of workers in the imperialist centers with workers and youth in the former colonies, in a common international movement against war, dictatorship and capitalist exploitation, based on a socialist program.
5. Impeachment of Philippine Vice President sets off sharp political crisis
Gunfire in the Philippine Senate is the latest and most graphic expression of a deepening political crisis that has been building in Manila for months. On May 13, more than a dozen shots were fired in or near the Senate building where Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former police chief who oversaw Rodrigo Duterte’s drug‑war campaign of mass murder, remained holed up under “protective custody.” Authorities were attempting to enforce an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for his arrest. No one was hurt, but the incident made clear that the bitter struggle within the ruling class over control of the state’s repressive apparatus is beginning to spill over into armed confrontation.
The gunfire was the most dramatic event in a tightly linked sequence of moves and countermoves over the last three days. On May 11, the House of Representatives voted by 257 to 33 to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte for the second time and transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate. In the Senate, a bloc of pro‑Duterte senators pulled off a parliamentary coup, ousting Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto III and installing Alan Peter Cayetano in his place by a 13–9 vote. Simultaneously, the ICC made public an arrest warrant, issued on 6 November 2025, for dela Rosa on charges of crimes against humanity. Agents of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) then attempted to seize dela Rosa, who had been in hiding for the past six months, as he entered the Senate compound to vote for Cayetano; he fled through the corridors and up staircases, protected by the Senate’s assertion of “co‑equal” status and Cayetano’s grant of “protective custody.” Two nights later, armed men tried to enter the locked‑down Senate building, and gunfire rang out as the standoff escalated.
The logic of this escalation can only be understood by situating it in the political war within the Philippine elite over the impeachment of Sara Duterte. This conflict is a struggle between rival factions of the elite over how to respond to the immense social and geopolitical crisis that confronts the Philippines—the mounting anger of the working class at unbearable social conditions and skyrocketing prices, and Washington’s aggressive drive to transform the country into a forward base for war against China.
Four years ago, Marcos and Duterte shared a common platform and perspective. They represented layers of the ruling elite, headed above all by former president Rodrigo Duterte, who sought to develop the country’s infrastructure, particularly to the advantage of capitalists in provincial regions long excluded by Manila’s dominance, by securing economic investment from China. This required distancing the Philippines from Washington’s preparations for war in the region. On taking office, under immense pressure from Washington, Marcos re-oriented, firmly integrating the Philippines into the US campaign against China. Ties with the Duterte camp ruptured. Former President Duterte was arrested and brought on charges of crimes against humanity to The Hague. Vice President Sara Duterte, his daughter, took the reins of their political faction. Earlier this year she declared her intention to run for president in the 2028 elections.
The political war between the camps of Marcos and Duterte is at the same time a conflict within the ruling class over how best to deal with growing social unrest. Marcos, son of the former dictator, represents a well-oiled tendency to resort to military rule in response to social instability. Duterte, whose political rule grew out of the reactionary political modes of behavior that emerged in the chaos of the 1986 overthrow of the Marcos regime, represents open fascism, paramilitary death squads and the rule of the police. There is not a shred of support for democratic rights in either camp.
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Like all major faction fights in Philippine politics before it, this one bears the imprint of US imperialism. The ICC’s decision to keep dela Rosa’s warrant under seal for six months and then unseal it on May 11, precisely as the impeachment moved to the Senate, was at the same time a discretionary judicial act and an overtly political intervention. The AMLC, which supplied the evidence against Duterte, is the Philippines’ Financial Intelligence Unit and operates as a partner of the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). It has been the conduit through which foreign financial intelligence has repeatedly entered Philippine political life, as in the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona.
Gunfire and putschist conspiracies are not new to Philippine politics. Since the overthrow of Marcos in 1986, the Philippines has seen a long series of coup attempts and mutinies. But now we see the security forces of rival factions of the elite shooting at each other in the very halls of the legislature. It is a measure of how far bourgeois rule has degenerated, and how sharp its political crisis has become.
6. May Day and Morenoite opportunism in the face of Argentina’s revolutionary crisis
Argentina is approaching a revolutionary confrontation. Two and a half years of the Milei government have produced a systematic destruction of working class living conditions, the fascistic transformation of the state apparatus, and the direct subordination of the country to the interests of US imperialism. The Labor Modernization Law pushed through in February authorizes twelve-hour workdays, eliminates industry-wide contracts and slashes severance pay. It is a massive assault on labor rights won over more than a century of struggle.
The closure of the FATE tire factory with 920 layoffs, the chronic police repression of pensioners at their weekly protests outside Congress, the authorization of US troops to enter Argentine naval bases and the $20 billion IMF bailout coordinated last September by Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are all paving the way to an escalating social explosion. This is a regime, as the WSWS wrote in March, consciously designed “to take the country back 100 years.”
Against this backdrop, May Day 2026 was a politically charged event, watched closely by the Argentine bourgeoisie, the major press and sections of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. For the first time since the formation of the pseudo-left Left and Workers’ Front–Unity (FIT-U) in 2011, its four component parties held two separate rallies on the international workers’ holiday. While the Partido Obrero (PO), Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (MST), and Izquierda Socialista (IS) held a joint rally at Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, the Socialist Workers Party (Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas, PTS)—the largest party of FIT-U and the leading section of the Morenoite Permanent Revolution Current (PRC-FI)—drew a more substantial crowd of over 5,000 to a separate rally five miles away, at the Ferro indoor stadium.
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In Salvador Allende’s socialist-Stalinist “Popular Unity” coalition, elected in 1970 in the midst of a revolutionary upsurge, carried out the program of the “Chilean road to socialism”: partial nationalizations combined with the intransigent defense of the bourgeois state and the Chilean Armed Forces as “the granite foundation of the revolutionary process.” When workers began forming cordones industriales and autonomous organs of power in response to the employers’ conspiracy of October 1972, the government applied the Arms Control Law to disarm them and appointed General Augusto Pinochet commander-in-chief of the Army. The result was the coup of September 11, 1973, tens of thousands of workers and youth detained, tortured and murdered, and two decades of fascist dictatorship.
The decisive factor in that defeat was the absence of a revolutionary Marxist party capable of orienting the Chilean working class in breaking from Stalinism and social democracy and in the struggle for the seizure of power. That absence was bound up with the Pabloite revisionist attack on the Fourth International. The Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR), Chilean section of the Fourth International, broke with the International Committee in 1963 under Pabloite leadership and subsequently dissolved itself, merging in 1965 with Castroite and Maoist forces to form the centrist Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). The MIR offered “critical support” to Allende and channeled workers and peasants breaking from Stalinism and social democracy into an orientation of “pressuring” the Popular Unity government rather than organizing the fight for workers’ power. It was the Pabloite dissolution of the Trotskyist party and its replacement by the centrism of the MIR that prevented the Chilean working class from overcoming its treacherous leaderships and opened the road to the defeat of 1973.
In Argentina during the same years, the Morenoite operation played an analogous role. The Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT), formed in 1965 by the fusion of the Morenoite group with Mario Santucho’s Frente Revolucionario Indoamericanista Popular, split in 1968 on the eve of the Cordobazo: Nahuel Moreno progressively integrated himself into the bourgeois Peronist apparatus, while Santucho adopted the methods of guerrillaism.
In 1973, under the Perón government—as the death squads of the Triple A were carrying out a systematic wave of assassinations against the left—the Morenoites declared: “Our party is the only one in the Argentine revolutionary left that has publicly proclaimed its support for the ‘institutionalization process.’” Following Jorge Rafael Videla’s March 1976 military coup, the Morenoites maintained that the Videla regime was “neither objectively nor subjectively” counterrevolutionary. What followed was the physical destruction of the Argentine workers’ vanguard: 30,000 murdered or disappeared.
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The political task facing the Argentine working class cannot be carried out within the framework of the FIT-U, nor on the basis of the politics of the PTS, whose objective function is that of a centrist obstacle to the development of revolutionary leadership. It cannot be carried out by the PO, IS and MST, whose political convergence with the PTS on the orientation of integration into the Argentine political system was confirmed on May Day. It cannot be carried out by the CGT bureaucracy or its dissident wings, committed to containing the class struggle; nor by any Peronist dissident tendencies, committed to continuing Peronism’s historical function as mediator between Argentine national capital and US imperialism.
The task is the construction, in Argentina, of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the international revolutionary party of the proletariat and the authentic programmatic continuity of Trotskyism. This requires a conscious programmatic break with the entire Morenoite and pseudo-left tradition and the assimilation of the ICFI’s historical struggles against Pabloism, Stalinism and all variants of opportunism. It requires the political formation of Marxist cadres in the midst of the very eruption of the class struggle that is being prepared.
The ICFI’s May Day rally held this same year gave substance to this task. Unlike the “internationalism” of the Ferro rally—an accumulation of greetings to struggles in different countries without programmatic articulation—the ICFI rally brought together 18 interventions from 14 countries across five continents, with captioned transmission in 11 languages, articulating from a single international strategic orientation the political tasks facing the working class on each continent. The ICFI is today the only political tendency in the world that approaches the world crisis as the eruption of the historical and insoluble contradictions of the capitalist system, and that identifies the international working class as the revolutionary force capable of resolving it. The authentic language of Marxism is spoken nowhere else.
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The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) operates as the instrument for mobilizing the international working class independently of the national union bureaucracies, building rank-and-file committees in factories, logistics platforms, schools and universities across countries. Both the world party and the Alliance give political expression to what Morenoism is structurally incapable of conceiving: the objective existence of a globally integrated working class whose interests are in direct conflict with the form of capitalist domination organized around the nation-state and national union bureaucracies. Morenoite “internationalism” remains trapped within the Argentine national framework because its political structure and strategic horizon are entirely determined by the electoral conjuncture of the Argentine nation-state.
The WSWS calls on Argentine workers and youth who follow the political crisis in their country with seriousness, and who feel drawn by the apparently combative positions of the PTS and the FIT-U, to rigorously study the history of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the program of revolutionary Trotskyism. The political legacy of Pabloism and Morenoism—Chile 1973, Argentina 1976, MAS 1982—is not a past to be rhetorically evoked; it is the objective test of what such traditions produce at moments of revolutionary crisis. The repetition of that pattern is not destiny, but it is the inevitable consequence of the continuity of Morenoite political leadership. The alternative is the conscious construction of an international revolutionary leadership in Argentina as an immediate political task, amid the explosion of the class struggle.
Workers at the Nexteer auto components plant in Saginaw, Michigan, are voting today on the second sellout tentative agreement brought back by United Auto Workers Local 699 and the UAW International bureaucracy. On March 31, the workers rejected in a landslide 96.2 percent vote the first deal reached between the UAW officials and the company.
A “no” vote on the new TA and strike by the 1,300 Nexteer workers could spark a mass movement of auto parts workers and galvanize production workers at the Big Three factories. Nexteer supplies steering components and other parts that are essential to the production of some of the most profitable auto and truck models at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, as well as companies based outside of the US. Under the “just-in-time” delivery system, key parts and supplier strikes can quickly shut down assembly lines.
A number of major auto parts and supply firms have contract expirations in the coming days. On Monday, workers at American Axle’s Three River, Michigan, plant voted by 98 percent to authorize a strike; and Dana, Bridgewater Interiors and Magna Seating have expiring contracts. Among the workers there is explosive anger over concessions and layoffs alongside soaring company profits and disgust over the betrayals of the UAW bureaucracy, beginning with UAW President Shawn Fain.
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The Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee is calling for rejection of the new TA and strike action under the principle of “No contract! No work!” Solidarity House’s $850 million strike fund must be used to provide strike pay of at least $1,000 a week.
The rank-and-file committee is calling for the dismissal of the bargaining committee and its replacement by a committee of trusted rank-and-file workers chosen by and accountable to the shop floor workers. It is also calling for coordination with autoworkers across the US and internationally, including parts workers with expiring contracts, to honor Nexteer picket lines and refuse to handle scab parts. This is part of a fight to abolish the union bureaucracy and place power in the hands of the rank-and-file workers.
Beginning Friday, May 8, UAW Local 699 held contract “roll-out” meetings in the plant. The World Socialist Web Site spoke to a 20-year veteran worker about the fight to reject the latest sellout and carry out a strike under rank-and-file control.
She said, “I’m voting ‘no.’ I mean, everybody wants this strike because right now we’re in control. … We’ll hit them right away, right in the gut.”
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The Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee is advancing the following demands:
- Abolition of all tiers;
- Immediate substantial wage increases that exceed the rate of inflation, with cost-of-living adjustments;
- A livable starting wage and rapid progression to top pay;
- Full healthcare coverage for all workers and their families;
- Enforceable limits on overtime, speedup and scheduling abuse;
- Job security and anti-outsourcing protections;
- Workers’ control over safety and staffing;
- Explicit, enforceable prohibitions on the new cycle-time surveillance or the use of tracking data for discipline.
The committee is calling on all Nexteer workers to fight to win these demands by joining and helping to build the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee.
8. The new scramble for Latin America and the road to revolution
This speech was delivered by Tomas Castanheira, leading member of the Socialist Equality Group in Brazil, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
9. The 1926 General Strike and the fight for Trotskyism today
This speech was delivered by Thomas Scripps, Socialist Equality Party (UK) assistant national secretary, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
10. Trotsky and the British General Strike of 1926
To mark 100 years since the end of the 1926 General Strike (on May 12, 1926), the World Socialist Web Site is republishing a lecture by Chris Marsden, the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK). The lecture, "Trotsky and the British General Strike of 1926" was delivered at the SEP (US) International Summer School, held August 2-9, 2025.
11. Death of autoworker in Mexico exposes contempt of GM and union apparatus for workers' lives
The death last week of a worker at the General Motors Silao Complex in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, after suffering a heart attack and reportedly going without emergency care, is the latest expression of the expendability of the lives of autoworkers for capitalist profit.
On May 4, Jesús Martín Olivera died from a heart attack while working in the GRX transmissions plant of the GM complex in Silao. Martín was a veteran at the plant with 18 years of experience at only 36 years of age. He leaves behind four children.
Workers at the plant have responded with outrage, denouncing what they describe as a company medical service whose overriding purpose is to return injured and ill workers to the line as quickly as possible, as well as a total lack of trained personnel and equipment for resuscitation. Some have called for a work stoppage until safer conditions are guaranteed.
One worker, speaking with Diario Irapuato, captured the sentiment: “At GM we don’t have good medical service inside the company. If we feel ill, the doctor just gives us a pill for dizziness or a headache and doesn’t bother to do a proper examination—she just sits there and supposedly works. A colleague just died because of her utter lack of medical knowledge and first aid. I am calling on my colleagues for a work stoppage until they guarantee they will hire someone qualified to do their job.”
The death remained unreported to the broader public by management, the leadership of the Independent Union of the Auto Industry (SINTTIA), or government authorities until May 8, when a minority faction of the union, the Movimiento Azul, issued a statement denouncing the company’s negligence.
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This death is inseparable from the grinding conditions imposed on workers at the complex, where 12-hour shifts are the norm. Workers at the plant must wake as early as 3:30 or 4 in the morning to arrive at the plant by 5:45 for a shift beginning at 6 a.m., not returning home until 7:15 or even 7:40 at night.
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When machinery stops, workers are compelled to carry heavy equipment manually rather than halt production. Breaks are inadequate, and any appeal for relief is treated by management as insubordination. Workers have described being prevented by team leaders from taking a drink of water or going to the restroom for arriving a few minutes late. “It was torture because we were in the hot season,” one chassis assembly worker told the WSWS.
In this context, a cardiac event suffered by an exhausted worker on the floor is not a matter of misfortune—it is the foreseeable result of conditions that management and the unions have deliberately imposed.
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For workers at GM Silao and throughout the international working class, the question of what to do is posed with increasing urgency as a matter of life and death. The unions — whether the CTM, SINTTIA, or the UAW—have demonstrated time and again that they function as instruments of corporate exploitation, not workers’ interests.
The only way forward is for workers to build rank-and-file committees: genuinely democratic organizations, independent of the trade unions and all pro-capitalist forces, capable of uniting with autoworkers across North America and beyond—including for setting production speeds and shutting down the line when conditions are unsafe. Jesús Martín Olivera deserved emergency care. He deserved a safe workplace. His death must become a spur for workers to take matters into their own hands.
12 Michael: An exercise in image control
... Explicitly approved by Jackson’s estate, the film banishes all complexity and turns an essentially tragic story into a tale of public success and personal triumph. It is an attempt by the estate to burnish Jackson’s legacy, capture a new audience and extend the singer’s brand.
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Michael depicts Motown founder Berry Gordy and entertainment lawyer John Branca as benevolent figures who protected Jackson. This portrayal is surely one-sided if not outright false. Gordy and Branca are part of the industry that sought—and still seek—to extract as much profit as possible from Jackson. Not coincidentally, Branca is one of the movie’s producers.
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Michael leaves out far more than it includes. For starters, it provides no insight into the time in which Jackson lived. For the movie, as for Jackson himself, the outside world barely exists.
We get no sense of the social conditions in Jackson’s hometown of Gary, which rose and fell with the steel industry. Jobs were already disappearing in the 1960s, when Jackson was a boy. Nor is there any reference to the civil rights struggle, including the riot that broke out in Gary after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This struggle helped create opportunities for workers, students and artists like Jackson.
The Jackson 5 shot to fame at a time of swelling opposition to racism, the Vietnam war and exploitation. Artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield were bringing political themes into their songs, often against music executives’ wishes. In contrast, the Jackson 5 played bubblegum soul, which, even at its best, was as innocuous as it was infectious.
As a solo albeit intensely gifted artist, Jackson never showed a great deal of social insight. Off the Wall was compatible with the moods of social layers turning to hedonism and “self-discovery” in the late 1970s. Thriller was released during the Reagan years, when the worship of wealth and celebrity was promoted relentlessly. As enduring as many of its songs have proven, the album was highly polished and “safe” for mass audiences. It fit in with—and epitomized—the era of blockbusters such as Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
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In an early scene from Michael, an impressed Gordy tells the young Jackson, “You’ve got something to say.” In a sense, he is right. The feeling and technical skill in Jackson’s singing conveyed genuine exuberance and joy, as well as the pain and yearning that were hidden from public view.
But in another sense, Gordy is wrong. Even when Jackson’s lyrics addressed racism or other social issues, they never rose above banalities or appeals for harmony. How could they, when Jackson lived in a show-biz bubble from the time he was 10 years old? In a scene in which he is talking to producer Quincy Jones, Jackson describes his music as “pure escapism.” But the movie does not explore the implications of this honest comment.
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Most glaringly, Michael omits the last 20 years of the artist’s life. During this period, Jackson had more surgeries and ever-lightening skin. The media focused less on his talent and more on his increasingly eccentric behavior. The superstar became a notorious oddball, a subject of tabloid gossip and mockery rather than of concern and sympathy.
Not surprisingly, given the involvement of Jackson’s estate, the movie refuses to acknowledge the allegations of child sexual abuse that were made against him. The singer was the victim not only of politically motivated district attorney Tom Sneddon, a conservative Republican, but also of the media, which denied Jackson the presumption of innocence and gloried in the scandal. Jackson was visibly devastated by the ordeal but ultimately acquitted of all charges. Rather than showing this persecution for what it was, the filmmakers have avoided it entirely so that they can continue to profit from his legacy.
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In 2009, Jackson announced a series of concerts that he hoped could reduce his debt, which totaled almost $500 million. About three weeks before the tour was to begin, he died of an overdose of propofol and benzodiazepine. But Jackson’s sad fate is excluded from the movie, which ends with a title reading, “His story continues,” as if to tease a sequel.
Michael does not do its subject justice by examining him objectively. Rather, it perpetuates the image of the genius pop star that was cultivated in the 1980s: an image that conceals the singer’s humanity and true social significance. It makes no attempt to explain why Jackson’s music touches so many people. Instead, it uses this music to pander to fans’ nostalgia and to sell movie tickets. In death, as in life, Jackson continues to be exploited by the entertainment industry.
13. Los Angeles homeless authority guts workforce, destroying 284 jobs and enabling private profiteers
On April 30, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), a joint agency funded by both the County and City of Los Angeles, issued layoff notices to 284 employees, with their final day of employment set for June 30, the end of the fiscal year. Another 130 now-vacant positions are being eliminated, bringing the total number of lost jobs to 414, including 216 represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 721.
The union, which signed the contract establishing the 60-day layoff notice procedure now being used against its own members, offered no opposition. President David Green pledged only to “support” workers “throughout this transition,” surrendering 216 jobs without a fight.
The layoffs follow an April 2025 vote by the Democratic Party-controlled County Board of Supervisors—unanimous with one abstention—to withdraw more than $300 million in annual funding from LAHSA for the new County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, launched on January 1, 2026, with an $843 million budget funded largely by Measure A, a half-cent sales tax projected to generate roughly $1 billion per year.
LAHSA interim “CEO” Gita O’Neill—a typical governmental bureaucrat—called the mass firings a “necessary evolution,” claiming the new County agency would be “narrowing our focus to macro-level governance, data management, and securing federal funding.” She described the diminished role as LAHSA “stepping into our true role as a strategic architect of the region’s homelessness response system.”
Talking out of both sides of her mouth, O’Neill had to acknowledge that LAHSA staff being eliminated had been “the driving force behind the historic reductions in street homelessness” by housing nearly 80,000 people over three years.
The discarded workers see it differently. For example, Hashim Afanan, after receiving his layoff notice, said the cut was painful because his work was important and his absence would be “detrimental to the homeless response system.”
County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath—a Democrat and former entertainment advertising executive—rationalized that “audit after audit has made clear why this action is necessary.” Republican Supervisor Kathryn Barger, named “Elected Official of the Year” in 2020 by the Building Owners and Managers Association of Greater Los Angeles, cynically mused that under the old system “LAHSA blames the County, the County blames the City of Los Angeles, and the City blames LAHSA.”
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Democrat Mayor Karen Bass, who is facing a tough re-election campaign, proposed a budget for the 2026–27 fiscal year that allocates $788 million for homelessness—a 17.3 percent decrease. Federal and state funding streams are expiring, and Measure A revenue has come in below projections.
The County’s draft budget includes cuts of more than 25 percent to existing homeless services: closing 20 of 30 temporary housing sites, halving county street outreach staff, eliminating housing navigation programs, cutting prevention funding and removing $12 million for legal and job services.
Perhaps most coldhearted, the proposed budget eliminates funding for “Safe Parking,” a program to provide people forced to live in their vehicles with secure locations, access to hygiene facilities and connections to housing services. According to the 2024 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count over 23,000 people live in their vehicles. LAHSA describes Safe Parking as “a low cost and high impact program” and yet it is being cut anyway.
The dismal track record of the private contractors and opportunist nonprofits maneuvering to absorb LAHSA’s functions is well documented.
For example, in 2025, court-appointed monitors discovered that the Lincoln Safe Sleep Village, operated by the nonprofit Urban Alchemy under a multimillion-dollar LAHSA contract, had reported 88 beds to a federal court when only 44 actually existed. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter called the discrepancy “obvious fraud.”
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Mayor Bass’s “Inside Safe” program costs approximately $6,900 per participant per month. The money flows through hotels, service providers, consultants, and security firms without creating permanent housing. A ProPublica investigation found that hotels continued to receive Inside Safe funding despite numerous health and safety violations.
The City has spent nearly $6 million on private law firms to resist independent oversight of these programs.
The City and the County are not replacing mismanagement with accountability. They are consolidating control over hundreds of millions of dollars channeled through new mechanisms that will be even less transparent and more favorable to the private interests that have already grown rich from this crisis. Every audit, every scandal, every exposed fraud has been answered with institutional reshuffling that preserves the flow of public money into private hands.
The role of the capitalist Democratic Party in this process deserves particular scrutiny. Every member of the Los Angeles City Council—including DSA-affiliated members Nithya Raman and Ysabel Jurado—voted unanimously in March and April 2025 to begin dismantling LAHSA and redirecting its funds.
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Homelessness in Los Angeles is not the product of bad administration, but of an economic system based on extreme social inequality, in which housing is priced beyond the reach of many, wages are stagnant, healthcare is inaccessible and social programs are gutted to fund tax cuts for billionaires at home and imperialist wars overseas. Only the independent mobilization of the working class, fighting for housing as a social right in opposition to capitalism, offers a way forward.
The fact that Streeting could conceivably become Labour leader and prime minister points to the putrid state of the Labour Party, and its advanced stage of political collapse.
15. Turkish independent textile union leader Mehmet Türkmen acquitted
On Tuesday, one of the landmark cases of state repression against the independent workers’ movement in Türkiye came to a close in Gaziantep. Mehmet Türkmen, the general president of BİRTEK-SEN, who had been in prison for almost two months, was acquitted of the baseless charge of “publicly disseminating misleading information” and released.
The acquittal came in the wake of a solidarity campaign for Türkmen, which was carried out both in Türkiye and internationally. The sympathy shown by large sections of the working class towards him was in stark contrast to the union bureaucracy’s guilty silence.
On the same day as the trial, the DİSK leadership—which failed to issue a single statement in defence of Türkmen—hosted Labour and Social Security Minister Vedat Işıkhan. This is no coincidence: the union bureaucracy, integrated with the state, views such leaders as a challenge. Türkmen founded the independent BİRTEK-SEN after being expelled from DİSK in 2022.
From the beginning, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi—Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party—Fourth International) have characterized Türkmen’s arrest and persecution as state repression aimed at crushing the developing independent workers’ movement, expressed in a growing number of wildcat strikes and acts of resistance. We have called on workers and young people to fight for Türkmen’s freedom and democratic rights. At the 2026 International May Day Online Rally, demands were made for the release of Türkmen and other prisoners of the class struggle.
State repression is carried out in the context of a rising cost of living and deteriorating working and living conditions. As economic hardship intensifies due to the devastating consequences of the US-Israeli war against Iran, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government continues to implement a severe austerity program on behalf of the capitalist oligarchy. The overwhelming majority of the public opposes the war against Iran, and the government, which condemns Iran’s right to self-defense, faces growing opposition to its war and austerity policies.
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Even by the standards of bourgeois legal norms that are constantly being violated, convicting Türkmen for his remarks would have been a highly controversial decision. As workers increasingly question the reliability of the legal system, there is a growing sense that wildcat strikes and struggles are the only way to secure their rights. The recent struggle by the Doruk Mining workers is a clear example of this.
The Türkmen case is not an isolated one. As the class struggle intensifies, state repression against workers’ leaders acting independently of the union apparatus is also increasing. Leaders of Bağımsız Maden-İş and miners who led the struggles at Polyak Mining and Doruk Mining have been detained on multiple occasions; workers have faced repression from the police and gendarmerie.
At the end of March, Esra Işık, a village leader who has been fighting against the handover of the Akbelen Forest and its lands in Muğla to mining companies, became the target of the same state repression mechanism. Although the 6th Chamber of the Council of State suspended the implementation of the presidency’s “emergency expropriation” decision last week, Işık was released on Monday under a travel ban that prevents her from leaving the country.
Although the charges against Türkmen have been dropped, the disinformation law and the judicial system that enforces it remain in place. Workers in Gaziantep, across Türkiye, and around the world continued to work under the same precarious conditions, to be exploited, and to fall victim to workplace accidents.
In late April 2026, a federal grand jury unsealed an indictment against Dr. David M. Morens, the former senior adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The charges, which include five counts spanning conspiracy, destruction and falsification of federal records, and aiding and abetting, carry a theoretical maximum sentence of 51 years in prison.
The government’s case rests on informal email exchanges routed through a personal Gmail account, collegial scientific coordination with EcoHealth Alliance and the acceptance of two bottles of wine from a longtime friend and collaborator, Dr. Peter Daszak. The disproportion between alleged conduct and threatened punishment is so extreme as to be self-revealing. This is not a prosecution in service of justice but a political vendetta against scientific truth and inquiry into the social crimes behind the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, for which those bringing the prosecution against Morens are squarely to blame.
Morens is 78 years old. He is board-certified in pediatrics. He served in the Epidemic Intelligence Service and wore the uniform of the U.S. Public Health Service, deploying into outbreak zones and spending two years doing high-risk research on Lassa fever in Sierra Leone. For decades, he served as Fauci’s principal specialist on emerging viral threats, the person responsible for synthesizing the latest unpublished science from the field and getting it into the hands of decision-makers before a crisis became a catastrophe.
This is precisely what his indictment criminalizes. His job was to talk to scientists. His job was to ensure that the director of NIAID and, through him, the White House operated based on the best available evidence. That the Trump administration has now constructed a federal conspiracy from the performance of those duties tells us everything about the nature of this prosecution and about the political project it serves.
The indictment of Morens cannot be understood in isolation. It is a single element within a coordinated campaign to weaponize the COVID-19 pandemic narrative for geopolitical and domestic political ends. What began in early 2020 as a fringe conspiracy theory promoted by figures like Steve Bannon and Miles Guo, the claim that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered and deliberately released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was elevated over the following years into mainstream Republican doctrine, with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic serving as its institutional engine. That committee publicly vilified Morens in 2024, using his informal email practices as the fulcrum to validate a broader campaign against the scientists who advocated for an evidence-based pandemic response. The indictment is the legal culmination of what began as a McCarthyite show trial.
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In early April 2026, the MV Hondius, a luxury expedition vessel, departed Ushuaia, Argentina, bound for Antarctica and the South Atlantic—carrying passengers who were almost certainly already infected. The leading hypothesis among Argentine investigators is that a Dutch couple, experienced birdwatchers who had spent months traveling through South America, contracted the Andes strain of hantavirus at a rodent-infested landfill on the outskirts of Ushuaia before boarding. The Andes strain is the only known hantavirus capable of human-to-human transmission, with a case fatality rate approaching 40 percent. The first passenger died aboard ship on April 11 under circumstances recorded as unexplained. No samples were taken. By the time the World Health Organization (WHO) was formally notified on May 2, some passengers had already disembarked and dispersed across multiple continents. Three people linked to the voyage have since died.
However, the institutional scaffolding that might have contained this outbreak at the source has been methodically dismantled. The West African Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases (WAC-EID), part of the NIH-funded CREID network specifically tasked with studying zoonotic spillover pathogens including hantavirus, was shut down by a stop-work order in June 2025. The CDC’s vessel sanitation program, the very program responsible for monitoring disease on international ships, lost all its inspectors to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts. The United States has withdrawn from the World Health Organization, severing the formal communication channels through which outbreak data flows. The scientists who spent careers building these systems are being prosecuted, fired or silenced.
Now, leading the US public health response to the hantavirus outbreak is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic by attacking lockdowns and social distancing and who now simultaneously serves as NIH director and acting CDC director, or, in effect, CDC director. His first public appearance on the outbreak, a CNN interview in early May 2026, was a spectacle of incompetence. He was unable to articulate what his own agency was doing. He repeated the refrain that has now become the administration’s signature approach to infectious disease—that this is not COVID, and all measures are being taken to protect the public, even as passengers are being released to self-monitor at home despite the known human-to-human transmission with this strain.
This is not a matter of administrative incompetence. It is a deliberate policy. As Peter Daszak observes in the conversation that follows, the destruction of pandemic preparedness serves a coherent ideological function. It advances what might be called “health freedom,” or the doctrine that individuals and not governments bear sole responsibility for their survival in the face of infectious disease. This doctrine is the public health expression of the same class logic that has governed the response to COVID-19 from the beginning, the logic that permitted more than a million Americans to die rather than impose costs on capital. The pandemic was not mismanaged; it was managed in the interests of the ruling class, at the expense of the working class.
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Dr. Peter Daszak: It is a vindictive political prosecution—an attempt to cruelly and deliberately make an example of someone who is not the real target. David Morens is not the real target. The real targets are Fauci and the Biden administration and the broader effort to bolster Trump’s narrative that other people mismanaged the pandemic. Not him. Not the president who demonstrably failed to act on expert advice, who pushed back against the very science his own administration was receiving.
The specific allegations—using a personal Gmail account for some of his communications with close associates, coordinating informally with scientists in the field and accepting two bottles of wine from a longtime friend—are these the alleged crimes for which he’s being prosecuted? Ivanka Trump used private email for government business. Hillary Clinton ran a private server. Colin Powell used his AOL account. How do we interpret all this but to say that the selective application of the law is itself politically revealing. What distinguishes David Morens is not the severity of his conduct but the usefulness of his prosecution to the Trump administration’s political objectives.
17. Australian local government employees strike against real wage cuts
More than 1,000 Melbourne local government workers held a 24-hour strike last week. The action included workers in waste collection, maternal and child health services, aged care, childcare, libraries and parks maintenance.
19. Australian local government workers at strike rally speak against pay cuts and worsening conditions
“My pay has gone down 12 percent since 2021. That’s a sharp fall, not a minor fall. Since the economic uncertainty prompted by COVID, it hasn't improved. So now we're forced here today to vent our frustrations.”19. Workers at Hersheypark theme park in Pennsylvania voting to strike
Workers at Hersheypark in Hershey, Pennsylvania, are voting this week on whether to strike against the amusement park management and its parent company, The Hershey Company.
More than 200 members of Chocolate Workers Local 464—including ride and auto mechanics, welders, carpenters, central plant operators, electricians, HVAC technicians, laborers, machinists, plumbers, painters and sign artists—have rejected multiple contract offers, including management’s final offer on May 7. This sets the stage for a potential strike that could shut down Hersheypark, the Giant Center and the Hotel Hershey at the beginning of the summer season.
Hershey workers are demanding higher wages, improved pay differentials for night, weekend, and early-morning shifts and affordable healthcare plans. According to workers, rising insurance costs could consume as much as 60 percent of any wage increase. Management is also attempting to lower starting wages for maintenance workers and restructure skilled trades into a more casualized labor force.
Economic pressures are driving workers into struggle. Trump’s criminal war against Iran and the subsequent blockades of the narrow Strait of Hormuz has also been a war on working people, driving gas prices to nearly $5 per gallon, increasing the cost of food and basic goods and cutting into workers’ disposable income.
A movement against the rise in the cost of living is underway among workers in hospitality and entertainment. In October 2025, Philadelphia hotel workers launched a strike against some of the world’s most powerful real estate giants, while Writers Guild members fought a union bureaucracy that imposed a sellout contract in April—slashing healthcare and ignoring AI threats. These struggles are also taking place worldwide: theater and entertainment workers in Greece, hospitality staff at London bars and hotels and Telugu film industry workers in India in late 2025 and into early 2026. In each instance, workers have walked out over pay and job conditions.
Hershey workers are in a strong position to win their demands. The strike vote comes just a week before Hersheypark plans to open for seven days a week to maximize profiteering during the warmer months. A strike would significantly impact Hershey’s bottom line, potentially shutting down operations over Memorial Day weekend and the start of the summer season. The water park is scheduled to open on May 23, while the Giant Center is hosting comedian Nate Bargatze on May 16, singer Khalid on May 23 and Australian pop rock band 5 Seconds of Summer on May 31.
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Despite management’s claims that there is no money available to improve wages, benefits and job security, Hershey remains one of the most profitable companies in the United States and the world. The Hershey Company, a separate entity, reported $11.693 billion in revenue in 2025, with fourth-quarter operating profits of $444.9 million. The Hershey Trust Company holds a controlling stake in both organizations.
Hersheypark itself draws more than 3 million visitors annually and generates several hundred million dollars in revenue each year, with profits in the tens of millions. It is part of Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, which also includes The Hotel Hershey, Hershey Lodge, Hershey Country Club, the Hershey Bears, Hershey Theatre and ZooAmerica.
While the more than 200 members of Local 464 have shown determination in rejecting multiple contract proposals, a major obstacle remains: the stifling bureaucracy of the union. Workers have pointed to previous contracts that failed to keep pace with rising living costs, resulting in declining real wages and reduced benefits. Past negotiations have prioritized company profitability over workers’ needs, setting the stage for the current dispute.
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Hershey workers now face a decisive moment. They should vote to strike and must prepare for a historic job action. The determination to fight, expressed in the rejections of previous sellout offers, must be parlayed into the organizing of a rank-and-file committee beholden only to the membership and independent of the pro-company union bureaucracy. It should establish lines of communication with both non-union workers at the park and rank-and-file union members in the surrounding area to maximize the impact of their work stoppage.
Hershey has a proud and complex history of labor struggle. In 1937, workers at the Hershey plant organized against Milton Hershey’s paternalistic labor system, speedups and working conditions. They carried out a sit-down strike and affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers. The strike, occurring at a high point of working class militancy during the Great Depression, ultimately contributed to union recognition at Hershey under what is now the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) union.
Since then, BCTGM has become a reliable tool of corporations and the state, as have other bureaucratic organizations that once called themselves labor unions. In mid-2021, 600 Frito-Lay workers in Topeka went on strike and rejected four consecutive sellout deals, only for the BCTGM to ultimately push through an agreement while paying workers a paltry $105 a week in strike benefits. Then in August–September 2021, Nabisco workers struck across five states, and the BCTGM colluded with management to isolate the strikes, rushing through a sellout vote giving workers less than an hour to read the contract before casting a ballot.
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
