Wildfire
smoke from Canada and Minnesota has given Detroit the worst air quality
in the world. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees calls for workers to take independent action to protect their
health and lives.
Labor
is presenting itself as a bystander to an illegal war that it has
enthusiastically supported and actively participated in, including
through the deployment of troops and military hardware.
In
June, limited 24-hour strikes at Lyell McEwin Hospital and Flinders
Medical Centre demonstrated nurses’ determination to fight, even as the
union leadership worked to keep these actions isolated and under tight
bureaucratic control.
The
same failures recur every monsoon: breached embankments, inadequate
drainage, delayed relief and infrastructure designed to serve commercial
interests rather than human need.
In its 2025 report, presented on 30 June, the Verfassungsschutz—Germany’s
domestic intelligence service, formally known as the Office for the
Protection of the Constitution—no longer lists the Sozialistische
Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) as a so-called
“left-wing extremist” organisation. The removal shows that there was no
legal basis whatsoever for the party’s earlier designation. It was a
campaign against socialist perspectives that was purely politically
motivated.
The Verfassungsschutz had first listed the SGP as “left-wing
extremist” in its 2018 report. At the time, it justified this on the
grounds that the SGP’s activism was directed “against the existing state
and social order, invariably slandered as ‘capitalism,’ against the EU,
supposed nationalism, imperialism and militarism, as well as against
Social Democracy, the trade unions, and the Left Party.”
In doing
so, the intelligence service expressly confirmed that the SGP pursues
its goals by legal means—that it “attempts to gain public attention for
its political ideas through participation in elections and through
lecture events.” From the very beginning, the surveillance was therefore
based exclusively on the party’s political ideas, not on any unlawful
conduct.
*****
Yet the removal of the SGP from the report does not signify a retreat
from the government’s authoritarian offensive. A party can still be
monitored by the intelligence services even if it is not listed in the
report. Just recently, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (Christian
Social Union, CSU) announced that he would comprehensively expand the
powers of the Verfassungsschutz. According to a draft bill that became known in early July, the Verfassungsschutz and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Foreign
Intelligence Agency) are in future to be permitted not only to engage
in surveillance but also actively to “intervene covertly.”
Specifically,
the intelligence services are to be allowed to penetrate IT systems,
redirect or cut off data streams, provide “false information for those
involved” and delete or falsify stored information—in other words, to
hack, sabotage and deploy targeted disinformation. All of this affects
people who are not even accused of a criminal offense and who will never
learn that the intelligence services have taken action against them,
let alone be able to take legal action against this.
In the new Verfassungsschutz report
for 2025, any fundamental criticism of capitalism and war continues to
be defamed as anti-constitutional. The report expressly warns against
“Trotskyism” and declares that “left-wing extremist activities” were
directed “to abolish the existing state and social order and replace it
with a socialist or communist system.” Anyone who opposes militarism and
war is defamed as “extremist.” By contrast, the real danger—the
right-wing extremist terror networks within the police, the Bundeswehr
(Armed Forces) and the intelligence services themselves—is
systematically played down.
*****
The SGP will continue and intensify its struggle against the intelligence services and for democratic rights. The Verfassungsschutz,
which is riddled with right-wing extremist networks and whose
previously long-serving president is now himself classified as a
right-wing extremist, must be dissolved immediately. The removal of the
SGP from the Verfassungsschutz report is no cause for the
all-clear. The struggle against the revival of the Anti-Socialist Laws
and of thought-crimes continues.
The
most chilling remarks came from Stephen Miller, who presented a
Nazi-style characterization of the “left” as a biological deformity that
had to be eliminated.
Voting
is set to begin Friday on the deal, which increases top pay to $30 an
hour by 2030 for current workers but expands the tier system and offers
no job protections as parts suppliers slash costs through AI and
automation.
During
nearly five hours of questioning, Democrats remained virtually silent
on ICE murders, National Guard deployments and the prosecution of
left-wing opponents of the Trump administration.
WSWS
reporters spoke to protesters in Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine
this week, the sites of two daylight murders of workers on their way to
work by ICE gestapo agents.
Jacobincites
recent DSA election victories to argue, in the form of friendly advice,
that the Democratic Party establishment and trade union bureaucracy
should not be distracted by the supposed “socialism” of the DSA. For
their own good, they must instead embrace the DSA and accept the
organization’s offer to lend them a “left” cover.
Billions
in Venezuelan assets withheld from earthquake relief, debt payments
prioritized over reconstruction, and oil wealth redirected to Wall
Street all demonstrate that US operations have nothing to do with aiding
the population.
When
1,700 workers at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan opened their
first paychecks after the UAW narrowly rammed through a fourth contract,
they found that 32 hours of vacation time had disappeared.
The
spread of two diseases in New York City, Legionnaires’ disease and
Cyclosporiasis, highlights the failure of the capitalist system to mount
effective measures to control known threats to human health and life.
The
scheduling and execution of death sentences in Florida are made
possible by a peculiarity of state law, in which the governor holds
almost singular authority over the machinery of capital punishment and
decides when death warrants are signed and executions scheduled.
For
all those groups playing a leading role in the Stop the War Coalition
and the Gaza protests, this is either made a secondary issue or ignored
entirely as they tout Graham’s supposed role in reviving trade union
militancy presented in entirely uncritical fashion.
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.
There is enormous anger in Biddeford, Maine, a working class city of
about 22,000, over the murder of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old
worker from Colombia gunned down by federal immigration agents Monday
morning as he drove to work. Guerrero, a husband and the father of a
3-year-old daughter, held a valid work permit, had been issued a Social
Security number and had an active asylum claim. He was not the person
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was looking for.
Neighbors
heard as many as seven gunshots ring out at about 7:15 a.m. at the
corner of Pool and Hill streets. Eyewitness video shows agents dragging
Guerrero from his bullet-riddled car and handcuffing him as he bled from
his head. His last words, according to a witness, were, “I tried to
stop.” His wife and daughter, still in her Bluey pajamas, watched from
the sidewalk as he died. His body remained handcuffed on the pavement
for five hours. None of the agents wore body cameras. Federal officials
refuse to release the name of the shooter, who has been placed on
administrative leave.
Guerrero, originally from Bucaramanga, Colombia, worked as a cleaner and DoorDash delivery driver.
*****
WSWS reporters visited Mechanics Park in Biddeford Tuesday, where
flowers, candles, handwritten notes and a Bluey blanket and stuffed toy
line the fence near the site of the killing. Hundreds of residents have
rallied there since Monday, at one point flooding into the Main Street
office of Republican Senator Susan Collins chanting “Vote her out!”
Kelsey
lives and works a block from where Guerrero was killed. “I’m angry,”
she said. “We’ve been screaming about this for a long time. We always do
what we’re told. I attend meetings. I call. I email. I show up when I
can, and they [the politicians] don’t listen.”
Kelsey’s remarks point to the social reality underlying the events in
Biddeford: the ICE rampage is unfolding in working class communities
already being hit by soaring rents, taxes and the destruction of jobs
and local businesses.
Asked about the difference between the
official narrative and what actually happened Monday, Kelsey replied,
“They’re already trying to cover things up … But it doesn’t matter.
Someone was murdered on my street, a block away from where I live, a
block away from where I work. I’m gonna show up; I’m gonna show up for
my community. It doesn’t matter who you are. We don’t kill people on the
street. If someone’s guilty of something, we bring them in and we hold
them accountable. You don’t just murder people. And it’s happened too
many times.”
*****
The anger and determination to fight expressed by workers in Biddeford
must be armed with a political program. The Socialist Equality Party and
the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees call for
building independent workplace and neighborhood committees, uniting
workers across industries, nationalities and immigration status, to
prepare mass action, up to and including a general strike, against ICE
terror and the drive to dictatorship.
DHL
worker and Verdi union rep Christopher Tersch won his employment
tribunal case on July 8 after being dismissed without notice for giving a
speech against arms deliveries to Israel at a Palestine protest in
Leipzig.
The
PTS and its coalition partners are being called upon by the ruling
class to channel the growing political radicalization behind bourgeois
politics.
A chapter in How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism,
“The Malvinas War: How Healy Worked as an Imperialist Stooge”, is
republished as a means of taking forwards the political education
of the younger cadres of the ICFI and the readers of the WSWS.
Ten years have passed since the military coup attempt of July 15,
2016, which aimed to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
government. As the Erdoğan government marks the anniversary with “The
Will is Ours, the Victory is Ours” events celebrating it as a “triumph
of democracy,” the real lessons of that night and of the decade that
followed lie entirely outside the official narrative.
Erdoğan’s
“triumph of democracy” rhetoric is refuted by the political coup his
government is mounting against the elected representatives of the
Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP)—which emerged as the largest
party in the 2024 local elections—and by the unprecedented erosion of
democratic rights. As Erdoğan seeks to hold down through repression the
social inequality and class tensions that have grown even sharper than a
decade ago, Özgür Özel, the elected leader of the CHP that claims to be
his “democratic rival,” meanwhile appeals to the very same imperialist
powers that have sanctioned Erdoğan’s crackdown, while warning of a
social explosion. The United States and European leaders—who were
accused a decade ago of being behind the coup attempt—were welcomed with
a red-carpet reception just a week ago at the NATO summit in Ankara, as
hundreds of people who oppose war, genocide, and NATO intrigues were
unlawfully detained.
According to the indictments, more than 8,600
soldiers took direct part in the coup attempt, roughly 3,000 of them
enlisted soldiers and military cadets who did not know what they were
doing. In the subsequent purge, 40 percent of the generals were removed.
A team was dispatched to seize Erdoğan in Marmaris but failed.
Erdoğan’s call, through the media, for the population to take to the
streets against the coup was a critical turning point in its defeat. Yet
the appeal to the masses subsequently and deliberately avoided
targeting the imperialist-capitalist machinery behind the coup—a
machinery of which Erdoğan, though discarded by it for the time being,
was an important part.
The coup officers used more than 200
armored vehicles, dozens of tanks, helicopters and F-16s. The Turkish
Parliament, the Presidential Complex, the Special Operations Department
and TÜRKSAT satellite company were bombed by warplanes. According to
official figures, 287 people were killed, 253 of them while resisting
the coup. Incirlik Base, used jointly by US-NATO, was used to refuel the
coup jets in mid-air; and when the attempt collapsed, the Turkish
commander tried to take refuge at the US headquarters on the base.
After
the coup was defeated, more than 125,000 public employees were
dismissed, tens of thousands were arrested, and hundreds of
associations, media outlets and unions were shut down. Having defeated
the coup attempt, Erdoğan used it as the basis for a counter-offensive
to build a presidential dictatorship in which he crushed all of his
opponents. The purges and arrests targeted not only the coup-plotters
but also leftists, Kurdish politicians and the workers’ movement.
Immediately
after the coup, Labor Minister Süleyman Soylu declared that “the United
States is behind the coup,” while Erdoğan attributed it to a
“mastermind” at work since 1960. This was a reference to the undeniable
role the United States had played in previous military coups, above all
that of September 12, 1980. The fact that tens of thousands took to the
streets during the coup attempt, and that the overwhelming majority of
the population did not support the coup, was bound up with the fact that
these bloody coups remain vivid in the consciousness of the working
masses.
The official narrative, however, was quickly narrowed to a framework
focused entirely on the US-based Islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen and
his organization; no effort was made in the trials to expose the hand of
the US and NATO; any withdrawal from NATO or seizure of US-NATO bases
and interests in Türkiye was out of the question. Adil Öksüz, alleged to
be Gülen’s right-hand man, who was captured at the Akıncı Air Base near
Ankara on July 16, was released on July 18 and vanished. Berlin
allegedly declined to confirm or deny claims that he is in Germany.
That
these matters were all swept under the carpet by Ankara is the
political expression of the Turkish bourgeoisie’s powerful orientation
to restabilize its military-strategic alliance with the US and NATO.
*****
The responses of NATO’s principal powers during the coup made clear
that, even if they did not directly organize it, they turned a blind eye
to it. US Secretary of State John Kerry’s first official comment was an
evasive one that did not condemn the coup and merely expressed the hope
for “stability, peace and continuity” in Türkiye. Washington and Berlin
declared their support for Erdoğan’s “elected government” only after it
had become clear that the coup would fail.
There was no sign that
these powers would have greeted the coup’s success with displeasure. In
the days after the coup, the American and German political and media
establishment, rather than condemning the coup attempt and its plotters,
focused on condemning Erdoğan’s suppression of them, hypocritically
emphasizing their “democratic rights.” On July 18, the Washington Post
reported Kerry’s remarks at a press conference, saying, “NATO will be
scrutinizing Turkey in coming days to ensure that it fulfills the
alliance’s requirement that members adhere to democratic governance.”
*****
The coup was the product not merely of a power struggle between
Erdoğan and Gülen, but of the deepening crisis of the global capitalist
system. Before the coup, Ankara had entered into sharp conflict with the
US and its other NATO allies over fundamental geopolitical questions.
In 2013, when the administration of US President Barack Obama gave full
backing to the military coup in Egypt against the elected Islamist
president, Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Erdoğan sharply
condemned it.
In the regime-change war launched in Syria in 2011,
in which Ankara was deeply involved, Washington’s growing reliance on
Kurdish nationalist militias in place of its Islamist proxies was seen
as a major threat by the Turkish bourgeoisie and state: the emergence of
a US-backed Kurdish enclave on the southern border could produce
similar consequences in Türkiye, home to the largest Kurdish population.
The Erdoğan government responded by ending its ongoing negotiations
with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Ankara’s Islamist proxies in
Syria were backed against the US-supported Kurdish forces, and a violent
crackdown was launched against elected Kurdish politicians at home.
This conflict in Syria could allow Iran and Russia, Washington’s real
targets, to increase their influence in the country and across the
region. Indeed, after the coup attempt Ankara established a tripartite
mechanism with Iran and Russia in Syria and placed the goal of
suppressing the Kurdish movement ahead of its effort to topple the
Damascus regime. While NATO leaders awaited the outcome of the coup
attempt, the leaders of Iran and Russia were among the first to condemn
it.
After Moscow intervened in the war to defend the regime of
President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Türkiye’s downing of a Russian
aircraft on the border in November 2015 brought the two countries to the
brink of war. In June 2016 Erdoğan sent a letter of apology to Putin,
turning toward rapprochement with Moscow and toward a settlement in
Syria outside Washington’s control.
The threat that the largest army on NATO’s southern flank would shift
toward an alliance with Moscow was unacceptable to the imperialist
powers. Just eight days before the coup, on July 8, 2016, the NATO
summit in Warsaw devoted its central focus to escalating the
confrontation with Russia. Barely two years had passed since the
anti-Russian, far-right coup of 2014 in Kiev, and the NATO powers were
increasingly moving to provoke a war with Russia through Ukraine.
All these conflicts arose from the fact that the US-led imperialist
aggression unleashed after the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the
Soviet Union in 1991 was drawing Türkiye into its vortex. The Turkish
bourgeoisie had been complicit, in pursuit of its own interests, in the
aggression of the US and its allies against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and
Syria and in NATO’s eastward expansion targeting Russia and was being
forced to confront the consequences.
After the coup was
suppressed, Erdoğan escalated the drive to crush the Kurdish movement in
Türkiye and Syria; direct military operations were launched into Syria
and the country’s northwest was brought under control. This was a move
directly against US policy.
*****
The regime-change war in Syria succeeded in December 2024 through an
operation spearheaded by Islamist proxies backed by the Erdoğan
government, toppling Assad and dealing a heavy blow to the influence of
Iran and Russia in the region. As Ankara increasingly abandoned its
balancing policy with Moscow, the Black Sea became an arena for
Ukraine’s NATO-backed attacks on Russian military and commercial assets.
The NATO summit held in Ankara in July 2026 glorified both rearmament
and Ukraine’s growing strikes deep into Russia.
Today, Türkiye
under Erdoğan is also seen as indispensable to the US war against Iran
and to its drive for full domination of the Middle East; despite its
growing rivalry and conflict with Israel, Ankara participates in Trump’s
“Board of Peace” for Gaza. Türkiye is considered vital to US aggression
aimed at China and its major economic projects such as the Belt and
Road.
Ten years after the July 15 coup attempt, the international
geopolitical and class tensions that gave rise to it have grown sharper
than ever. In the United States, the center of world imperialism,
Trump’s failed coup of January 6, 2021 was the sharpest expression of
the collapse of democratic forms of rule globally. Trump’s return to the
White House in 2025 was made possible only because the Democrats, far
from prosecuting and jailing him, cleared his path. Both coup attempts
have proven once again that no faction within the bourgeoisie can
consistently defend democratic rights or oppose imperialism.
As
Leon Trotsky explained in his Theory of Permanent Revolution, in this
epoch of imperialist war and the world socialist revolution, these tasks
can only be accomplished through the working class’s seizure of power
and on an international scale. It is based on this perspective that the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi
(Socialist Equality Party), Turkish section of the International
Committee of the Fourth International, was founded on the basis of a
relentless political struggle aimed at mobilizing the working class
against both the imperialist powers and the Erdoğan regime and the
bourgeois opposition.
Two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the
Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a
Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the epidemic
has entered a devastating new phase. Just back from a week in Ituri
province, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, executive director of the WHO Health
Emergencies Programme, delivered the starkest assessment yet at a July 14 briefing in
Geneva. The virus, he warned, “continues to outpace the response
efforts by the national authorities, international partners, including
WHO, and the communities most affected.”
WHO modeling now
indicates the true number of cases is “at least two to four times the
number of cases that we have found.” The official tally is a floor
beneath a far larger epidemic. Roughly 80 percent of new cases are
detected outside any known chains of transmission. “Perhaps the most
alarming finding,” Ihekweazu said, “is that many newly reported cases
are individuals who died in their communities, without ever reaching a
health facility and receiving care.” The case fatality rate has climbed
rather than fallen as the response matures, from roughly 23 percent in
mid-June toward the mid-30s, signifying that the response is falling
behind the disease.
The
union leadership is desperately seeking to regain control of the
dispute, having entered backroom negotiations with the government
shortly after its sellout deal was rejected by teachers.
This
public lecture, hosted by the SEP and IYSSE, will discuss the lessons
of Sri Lanka’s 2022 mass uprising for working people entering into
struggles against the JVP/NPP government’s implementation of IMF
austerity, authoritarian measures and the unfolding world war.
In the face of mounting popular opposition, Trump is escalating his
attacks on democratic rights. Trump responded to mourning protests
against the ICE murders Wednesday by doubling down on allowing federal
immigration thugs to carry out the type of traffic stops that led to the
murder of the two innocent men. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most
important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” he
posted on Truth Social, telling the agency: “go back and do your very
important job.”
In every respect, the killings of Araujo and
Guerrero were as violent and brutal as the murders of Renée Good and
Alex Pretti. The Trump administration treats murder at the hands of the
agencies of the state as part of normal operations.
Abroad, US forces have carried out five consecutive days of
airstrikes against Iran through Wednesday, reimposed a naval blockade of
Iranian ports Tuesday and struck coastal defense and missile sites from
Bushehr to Greater Tunb Island. Iran’s government spokesperson Fatemeh
Mohajerani said Wednesday that the strikes on southern Iran had killed
more than 30 civilians. The Health Ministry counted more than 260
wounded.
These are two fronts of the same war. American
imperialism wages war abroad to subjugate Iran. It wages the war at home
against the class that must pay for it and whose opposition must be
broken. The police state erected at home is the domestic requirement of
the wider war carried out abroad.
*****
A ground invasion of Iran would mean American dead and wounded on a
scale not seen in decades—not since the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The
Pentagon acknowledged 14 American dead and 414 wounded as of Monday, a
count that is systematically understated and completely ignored in the
media.
The Pentagon publicly puts the war’s cost at some $30
billion, but NBC News reported Tuesday that the department’s internal
estimate—counting damaged bases, destroyed aircraft and expended bombs
and missiles—runs as high as $100 billion. In estimates published in Fortune
in late June, Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School put the war’s
long-run cost above $1 trillion, including $200 billion to $300 billion
to repair 228 damaged American military sites. All of this would be a
down payment on the cost of a ground invasion of Iran.
Where is
the money to come from? The US government is functionally bankrupt. The
federal debt stands at $39.4 trillion. Debt held by the public has
passed 100 percent of the country’s annual output. In this fiscal year’s
first seven months, the Treasury paid $628 billion in interest, which
is more than it spent on Medicare.
The American ruling class can finance such a war only through massive
attacks on social programs. These attacks will provoke enormous
opposition to a deeply unpopular war. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed
Sunday, just 37 percent of Americans backed the resumption of the
bombing.
American imperialism can achieve its aims only by
escalating the war against Iran and slashing social spending, and it can
impose both only through a frontal assault on democratic rights.
*****
At 9:00 p.m. Thursday, Trump will deliver a prime-time address billed
as a speech on election integrity and voting machines, while the
bombing of Iran continues. The administration is building this apparatus
ahead of the November elections, which will take place amid an immense
political, social and economic crisis. But the elections are only the
occasion. Social inequality is soaring, the war is swelling the oil
companies’ profits while workers pay for it at the pump, and a police
state is the only means of defending such a social order.
The
Democratic Party opposes none of this. It is a faction of the same
ruling class, and its criticisms of Trump are that he is not effectively
defending the interests of American imperialism. When US and Israeli
forces assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, the war’s
first day, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer welcomed the murder from
the Senate floor, declaring, “I will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei,
the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was killed in the initial rounds of
airstrikes.”
As the failure of Trump’s war aims has become clear,
the Democrats have turned to condemning the administration for failing
to achieve victory against Iran. Schumer denounced the “ceasefire” Trump
signed in mid-June as the “art of surrender.”
When the killings of Good and Pretti produced mass outrage, the
Democrats arranged a deal with Trump that kept ICE funded without a
single condition. When millions joined the “No Kings” demonstrations
against the administration, the Democrats and their political allies
worked systematically to exclude the question of war from the protests.
This is a party of war and Wall Street, and its function is not to fight
the establishment of a dictatorship, but to contain the opposition to
it.
The defense of democratic rights falls to the working class, and it
cannot be separated from the fight against war. Both dictatorship and
war arise from the same source: a capitalist oligarchy that can no
longer rule by democratic means or maintain its world position by
peaceful means. The struggle against ICE terror and against the war on
Iran must be unified in an independent movement of the working class, in
the United States and internationally, directed against the capitalist
system itself.
At least 26 people have been reported dead in the Philippines from
landslides and flooding associated with Super Typhoon Bavi, while the
enormous storm forced millions to evacuate and caused widespread
disruption from the US-controlled Mariana Islands to Taiwan and China.
In the Philippines, where Bavi was named Inday, the storm did not
make landfall. However, its vast circulation intensified the southwest
monsoon producing days of torrential rain. As of Wednesday, the Office
of Civil Defense reported 26 deaths from drowning and landslides, with
14 people still missing. More than one million people were affected,
about 22,000 remained in evacuation centers, and 766 houses had been
destroyed.
The heaviest loss of life was on the impoverished
southern island of Mindanao. Ten deaths were recorded in Sarangani,
seven in Lanao del Sur, four in Davao Occidental and two in Bukidnon.
These deaths occurred in areas with fragile housing on floodplains and
unstable slopes, without adequate drainage, protective works or ready
access to safe accommodation, meaning these deaths were not simply the
inevitable product of extreme weather.
The disaster comes amid a
far-reaching corruption scandal over Philippine flood-control
infrastructure. At least 9,855 projects worth more than 545 billion
pesos ($8.8 billion USD), undertaken since the Marcos administration
took office in 2022, are under investigation. The scandal involves
allegations of substandard, overpriced and non-existent works, as well
as demands for political kickbacks.
While no direct connection
has yet been established between projects under investigation and the
communities struck by Bavi, the scandal underscores that infrastructure
essential to protecting human life has been subordinated to contractors,
political patronage and private enrichment.
*****
As much as 90 percent of the Pacific Ocean has been experiencing
marine heat-wave conditions since January with persistence hot spots
lasting for six months. There is a high probability that climate change
is the major contributor to the warming along with a developing El Niño
weather pattern in the regime.
Autoworker and socialist Will Lehman fights for workers to control the UAW
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania running
for UAW president, issued a statement this week on the federal criminal
investigation into UAW President Shawn Fain.
“What the
investigation confirms is what many of you have long known and what my
campaign has said since I first ran for this office,” Lehman wrote in a
statement posted on his website.
“This bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished, and power
must be transferred to workers on the shop floor. That is what I am
running for UAW president to do.”
Speaking to workers, Lehman
wrote, “Disgust with corruption is not enough. The question is: What are
we going to do about it? It is not enough to complain. We must act.”
*****
In his own July 12 statement, Fain postured as a martyr, declaring,
“This is what happens when you go against corporate America and their
allies, and I’m not going to be intimidated or harassed out of serving
our membership.” He claims the [federal] Monitor is persecuting him over the UAW’s
stance on Gaza.
“These claims deserve nothing but contempt,”
Lehman responded. “When anti-genocide delegates chanted ‘Ceasefire now’
at the conference he assembled to endorse Joe Biden, the man supplying
Israel the bombs, Fain watched as Secret Service agents and UAW thugs
dragged them out.”
Far from defying the war machine, “the UAW
bureaucracy strangled the University of California strike and blocked
action at Columbia” in defense of protesting students, Lehman continued.
“When GE Aerospace workers struck a major defense contractor supplying
weapons to Israel, Fain shut them down within weeks.”
Lehman also castigated the Monitor, saying he was installed not to
defend the democratic rights of UAW members but to refurbish the image
of the union bureaucracy. The Monitor, he said, “knew about Fain’s
conduct before the convention, sat on his findings until Fain was
already nominated, and let stand Fain’s sworn certification that he had
not engaged in corrupt conduct, which Barofsky knew was a lie.” Lehman
continued, “This is the same monitor who signed off on the 2022-23
elections, rejected my documented evidence of deliberate voter
disenfranchisement, and blessed an outcome in which Fain won with the
votes of just 6 percent of the membership.”
Lehman insisted that workers’ anger over the scandal must be
transformed into organized action. “I am not running for UAW president
to reach the top of the garbage heap at Solidarity House,” he wrote.
“This campaign is not about replacing one official with another. It is
about abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to the rank and
file.”
The growing opposition of the rank and file to every
faction of the bureaucracy is already expressed in the mass rejection of
UAW-backed contracts and in overwhelming strike votes. “What that
fighting spirit needs is organization: rank-and-file committees in every
plant, independent of the apparatus and answerable only to you,” Lehman
concluded.
Ganesh—as he was known among party comrades—joined the RCL in 1970.
He quickly became a full-time cadre and was elected to the RCL’s Central
Committee and Political Committee (PC). He played an important role in
the struggle to build the Trotskyist movement in the Indian
subcontinent, but had been unable to carry on active political work for
nearly a decade and a half due to difficult health issues.
Ganesh
was born on May 15, 1939, in Malaysia, where his family had settled.
When Ganesh was 16, the family returned to their native village of
Alavai in northern Sri Lanka, about 30 kilometres from Jaffna city. He
completed his studies in the science stream in the English medium at
Nelliady Central College, near his hometown.
The decade following
the family’s return to Sri Lanka was marked by sharp political
upheavals. The Sri Lankan ruling elite, fearing the growing influence of
the Trotskyist movement in the working class, resorted to vicious
campaigns of anti-Tamil chauvinism to divide workers on communal lines.
That began soon after independence in 1948 when the United National
Party (UNP) government abolished the fundamental citizenship rights of
hundreds of thousands of Indian-origin Tamil-speaking plantation
workers.
*****
When Keerthi Balasuriya visited Madras at the end of 1985 and held
discussions with Ganesh and other comrades, Ganesh enthusiastically
supported the ICFI’s positions. In 1986 and 1987, David North, now
chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, visited Madras with
Balasuriya and held extensive discussions with Ganesh and other comrades
on the issues involved in the split.
Ganesh and the group of ICFI
supporters issued a statement on December 12, 1986 that fully endorsed
“the struggle waged by the majority sections of the International
Committee against the renegade clique of Healy, Banda and Slaughter [WRP
leaders] who, through their attacks on the political and theoretical
foundations of the ICFI, sought to subordinate the vanguard of the
international working class to Stalinism, Social Democracy and the
national bourgeoisie and thereby to imperialism itself.”
*****
Ganesh was very enthusiastic about the ICFI’s important advance in launching the World Socialist Web Site in 1998. He wrote articles himself and co-authored others on important issues for the WSWS in the years that followed.
Those
who worked with him recall his dedication, energy and persistence under
difficult conditions. Even in his later years, when increasingly
incapacitated by illness, he remained active, bringing his experience
and determination to the task of educating younger comrades and
defending the principles of Trotskyism.
Indian supporter Akash
Dev, who helped Ganesh during his last years and his final hospitalization, explained to this writer: “Ganesh was very enthusiastic
about the political analysis developed by the WSWS on a daily basis. He
used to ask me to explain what was in the WSWS because he was unable to
read the site. He had great confidence in Trotskyism and the ICFI.”
The
memory of comrade Ganeshadev’s lifelong dedication to the fight for
Trotskyism in the working class will live on among workers and party
comrades in Sri Lanka and internationally.
Pianist
Jayson Gillham has shown himself to be not only an acclaimed artist but
also a principled one, willing to take a stand against imperialist
barbarism and official censorship.
The attempt by the Trump administration to extradite American
philanthropist James “Fergie” Cox Chambers Jr. from Spain is part of the
state-led campaign to criminalize support for the Palestinian people
and attack basic democratic rights under the guise of
“counterterrorism.”
*****
The US indictment accuses Chambers of “international money
laundering” and providing material support to foreign organizations
designated as “terrorist.” US officials point to financial transfers
from US bank accounts to Tunisia, where Chambers has resided since late
2023. His supporters say these transfers funded legal activities,
including local investments and sponsorship of Club Africain, the
Tunisian football club that recently won the national championship.
Family
members and close associates have denounced the arrest as a politically
motivated attack on his democratic rights, directly tied to his support
for Palestine and his outspoken condemnation of Israel’s genocidal war
on Gaza. His partner, actor Stella Schnabel, stated that “Fergie is
being imprisoned because he uses his wealth to support Palestine and
people suffering genocide in Gaza,” explicitly connecting the case to
the Trump administration’s drive to criminalize solidarity with
Palestinians.
Chambers is an heir to Cox Enterprises, a vast
US-based conglomerate in media, automotive and telecommunications
headquartered in Atlanta. In mid-2023, after a political and personal
break with his family, he received a payout of roughly $250 million
representing his share of the Cox fortune. This separation freed him
from direct corporate control and enabled him to channel significant
resources into social, artistic and explicitly political causes.
*****
One of the most
serious charges in the sealed US indictment is allegedly tied not to any
violent act but to his transfer of money to Tunisia and his sponsorship
of Club Africain, which the Trump Justice Department claims as evidence
of funding Palestinian resistance. Chambers and his supporters insist
that this is a political fabrication designed to turn legitimate
international solidarity—financial, cultural and athletic—into evidence
of “terror support.”
The defense of James “Fergie” Cox Chambers is
a matter of principle for the working class and all defenders of
democratic rights, regardless of his personal wealth or elite family
background. The key question is not his social origin but the precedent
being set: a billionaire who uses his resources to oppose imperialist
genocide and is then pursued internationally as a “terrorist financier”
by the US state.
Attacks on Chambers are part of a broader assault on the right to
political speech and association. If the government succeeds in
extraditing and imprisoning him on fabricated charges, it will
legitimize the use of anti-terror legislation to criminalize any
substantial support for Palestinians or any movements resisting
imperialist aggression.
*****
While the Spanish government of Pedro Sánchez has publicly criticized
Israel’s actions in Gaza and clashed with the Trump administration for
refusing to allow the US to use air bases in Spain to conduct the war
against Iran, its security apparatus is now detaining a US citizen whose
alleged “crime” is using his fortune to aid the very population being
massacred.
Chambers’ arrest is part of a systematic pattern during Trump’s
second term of targeting pro-Palestinian activists, especially students
and non-citizens, through immigration, criminal and financial law. Since
early 2025, the administration has wielded deportation proceedings,
detention and surveillance as tools to chill outspoken public opposition
to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Hundreds of students had their visas
revoked and were detained or threatened after participating in protests
denouncing Israel, including Columbia University graduate students
Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil. Mahdawi was pulled into detention
during a naturalization appointment and later ordered deported by an
immigration judge, while a federal court found that the Department of
Homeland Security and the State Department “acted in concert” to misuse
their powers to target non-citizen pro-Palestinian activists simply for
their political speech.
Khalil, another Columbia graduate, spent
months in immigration custody including around the time of his child’s
birth and now faces renewed deportation proceedings after a federal
appeals court ruled that a lower court lacked jurisdiction to order his
release.
Similar repression has forced students like Tufts
University’s Rümeysa Öztürk and Cornell’s Momodou Taal to leave the
United States under pressure from the security state, while activists
such as Leqaa Kordia have endured a year-long incarceration in ICE
prisons for their participation in campus protests.
According to Mother Jones,
newly unsealed documents show that federal authorities explicitly
monitored and punished student speech critical of Israel, confirming
that deportations and arrests were not incidental but designed to
silence dissent and create a climate of fear. The attempt to extradite
Chambers extends this campaign to high-profile US citizens, signaling
that no one is immune from retaliation if they use significant resources
to challenge the US-Israeli war policy.
The international workers’ movement must respond by demanding the
immediate release of James “Fergie” Cox Chambers from Spanish custody,
the rejection of the US extradition request and the dropping of all
charges against him. Linked to this, the deportation and criminal cases
against pro-Palestinian students and activists in the US must be opposed
through a unified struggle that connects the defense of democratic
rights with the fight against imperialist war and genocide.
On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (Democrat-New York)
sent a “dear colleague” letter to all 214 Democratic members of the
House of Representatives informing them that he would vote “no” on an
amendment to eliminate $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel.
Reflecting the crisis in the Democratic Party over its support for
Israeli genocide, Jeffries said in his letter that he would not “whip”
the vote on the amendment, a tacit acknowledgment of popular hostility
to the Zionist regime.
The amendment, sponsored by Kentucky
Republican Thomas Massie, was part of an annual foreign affairs spending
bill called the National Security, Department of State, and Related
Appropriations Act, 2027. The amendment did not affect $500 million in
so-called “defensive” military funding, most of which goes to Israel’s
Iron Dome missile defense system.
In the vote, held Wednesday, the
Massie amendment was defeated, with 104 voting in favor and 314 voting
against. A majority of Democrats failed to support cutting off military
aid to Israel. 103 voted“yes” on the amendment, 98 voted “no,” 10 voted
“present,” and four did not vote. Most of the Democratic House
leadership, including Jeffries, Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, Vice
Caucus Chairman Ted Lieu, and Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee, voted against cutting off military
aid.
Jeffries’ opposition to the military aid cutoff did not come
as a surprise. He is a notorious defender of the Zionist regime and
major recipient of campaign funding from the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In this, he speaks for the Democratic Party
leadership, which is fundamentally in agreement with the Trump
administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza , itself a
continuation of the policy of the Democratic administration of Joe
Biden.
*****
In his letter, Jeffries demonstrated his solidarity with US
imperialism’s criminal policy in the Middle East, writing that “the
so-called Massie amendment would restrict our country’s ability to
confront Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations in the
region who are sworn enemies of both the United States and Israel.” He
declared that the US and Israel needed a “new security arrangement” that
would “undergird the maintenance of Israel’s qualitative military edge
against Iran and other malign actors in the region.”
Three weeks
before Jeffries’ letter, voters in New York City gave expression to
their growing opposition to capitalism and disgust with the Democratic
Party’s complicity in the crimes of the Trump administration by voting
in Democratic primary elections for congressional candidates endorsed by
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America,
in two cases ousting Democratic incumbents.
A major issue in the
leftward swing, with some 125,000 New Yorkers voting for self-described
“socialist” and “progressive” candidates, was opposition to the
US-backed Israeli genocide. The Mamdani-backed candidates denounced the
Israeli war as genocide and attacked their opponents for taking campaign
money from AIPAC. Separately, a majority of surveyed Democratic voters
told AP-NORC (National Opinion Research Center) pollsters they believed
Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Jeffries’ letter expresses
the contempt, hostility and fear of the Democratic Party for the
mounting opposition of broad masses of the population to the existing
parties and economic system and growing interest in a socialist
alternative. It is of a piece with the statement released recently by “centrist” House Democrats pledging support for capitalism, law and order, austerity and patriotism.
This
is the party into which Mamdani and the DSA seek to channel mass
opposition so as to block the development of an independent movement of
the working class. Their so-called “democratic socialism” is not
socialism at all, but rather the delusion that capitalism can be
reformed—that the ruling corporate-financial oligarchy does not have to
be expropriated and overthrown.
The relationship of Mamdani and
the DSA to Jeffries exposes the hypocrisy of their denunciations of
Zionism and their claims to be in rebellion against the Democratic Party
establishment. Mamdani himself has repeatedly made clear that he will
support Jeffries becoming Speaker of the House should the Democrats take
control of the House of Representatives in the November midterm
elections. Last November, following his election as mayor, Mamdani said
on Meet the Press that he wanted to see Jeffries become House
Speaker. That came just days after Jeffries was one of the signatories
of a House resolution condemning socialism.
At Mamdani’s urging,
the New York City DSA voted last November against endorsing a primary
run in the 8th Congressional District by DSA City Council member Chi
Ossé to unseat Jeffries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Ossé’s primary
challenge was “not a good idea.” Ossé obediently withdrew his candidacy,
allowing Jeffries to gain the nomination unopposed. More recently,
Ocasio-Cortez, who voted last year in favor of $500 million in funding
for Israel’s Iron Dome, reiterated her support for Jeffries remaining
the Democratic leader.
On June 25, two days after the primary sweep of his candidates, Mamdani met privately with Jeffries. According to a Jewish Insider
report, Mamdani framed the meeting in advance as cooperative, telling
reporters he was looking forward to working with Jeffries.
More
than 130 doctors at Allina Health's Mercy and Unity hospitals in
Minnesota have voted by 90 percent to authorize a strike while 65
hospice nurses held a one-day walkout, as Sacramento-based Sutter
Health's takeover of Allina threatens AI-driven mass layoffs.
The temporary suspension itself was a transparent fig leaf. It
restricted only ICE-initiated vehicle stops, which account for a small
minority of the agency’s arrests, and exempted stops involving criminal
warrants and joint operations. ICE could continue workplace raids,
arrests at homes and courthouses, detention operations and the rest of
its nationwide rampage.
But Trump’s refusal to tolerate even this
token restriction makes clear that the ICE killings have the backing of
the federal government, who are using the immigration Gestapo to
terrorize immigrant workers as part of a broader attack on the
democratic rights of the whole working class. The administration is
doubtlessly also seeking to provoke a confrontation, as it did when an
ICE surge in Minneapolis led to mass protests following the murders of
Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, which it can exploit to expand police
state measures.
Meanwhile, another death in ICE custody has
brought the total to four dead in eight days. On Wednesday, ICE
announced that Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a 45-year-old Venezuelan
immigrant, allegedly died of cardiac arrest Monday while agents were
transferring him between detention centers in Georgia. ICE arrested him
July 9, only four days before he died. His family and immigrant
advocates say ICE denied him necessary medication. He was the 22nd
person to die in ICE custody this year.
On Tuesday, a 28-year-old
Mexican immigrant was chased into traffic by ICE and fatally struck by a
tractor-trailer near St. Augustine, Florida.
The FBI is adding on to Salgado’s murder with smears after the fact.
Houston Public Media reported an FBI search-warrant affidavit for
Salgado’s impounded vehicle Wednesday for “what appeared to be a white
crystal-like substance packaged in small bags,” which they claim was
“consistent with methamphetamine.”
The bureau is using the
insinuation of drugs to criminalize Salgado after his death and divert
attention from the agents who killed him. In reality, Salgado and the
other three occupants of his van were not even the targets of the
operation. The pretext of the drugs smear is completely flimsy. The
affidavit reports no chemical testing and the description of the “small
bags of white crystal-like substances” could easily fit packets of table
salt.
*****
WSWS reporters spoke with workers and young people at Tuesday’s
demonstration outside Houston City Hall. Their comments expressed the
outrage and fear spreading through immigrant communities, deep distrust
of both capitalist parties and a growing conviction that only
independent action by the working class can halt the ICE terror.
A father and daughter at a happy time and a beloved father celebrating a birthday: Joan Sebastian Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Salgado Araujo
On Monday morning, at the corner of Pool and Hill streets in the
small city of Biddeford, Maine, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old
worker from Colombia with a valid work permit, Social Security number
and active asylum claim, was murdered by federal immigration agents.
Neighbors heard as many as seven gunshots ring out around 7:15 a.m.
Eyewitness video shows agents pulling Guerrero out of his bullet-riddled
vehicle, dropping him on the concrete and handcuffing him as he bled
from his head.
His last words, according to witness Daniel
Boucher, were, “I tried to stop.” Guerrero’s partner and his 3-year-old
daughter, “wearing Bluey pajamas,” with a “pink rolling backpack,”
according to the Portland Press Herald’s account, watched from the sidewalk as he bled out and died. His body remained handcuffed on the pavement for five hours.
The lie that has now become standard issue for Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), that the victim had “weaponized his vehicle,”
fell apart within hours. That was the story the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) first gave Senator Angus King, the same story told about
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, murdered in Houston six days earlier as he drove
his co-workers to a construction site. When witnesses and video
demolished that pretext, ICE retreated to the claim that Guerrero had
“attempted to flee the scene” and that the officer fired “fearing for
public safety.”
This second lie is, if anything, more sinister
than the first. It abandons even the pretense of a threat. It is a
public declaration that federal agents may gun down anyone, anywhere,
for supposedly trying to drive away—an assertion of the right to murder.
*****
These murders raise critical political issues. It is now over six
months since ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good in her
car in south Minneapolis and just under six months since Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) agents gunned down Alex Pretti as he sought to
protect a woman being assaulted by the agents. These murders came amidst
a violent federal occupation of the Twin Cities that provoked weeks of
protests, culminating in demonstrations in January involving tens of
thousands in downtown Minneapolis. The call for a general strike against
ICE became the central demand.
Confronted with a movement of the
working class demanding the expulsion of ICE and the prosecution of the
killers, the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus worked
systematically to shut it down. Governor Tim Walz mobilized the National
Guard and state police against protesters. The trade union bureaucrats
ordered workers to obey no-strike clauses in their contracts, converting
the demand for a general strike into a “day of action.”
When the
visible federal presence in Minneapolis was reduced through a deal
between Walz and the Trump administration, the Democrats and their
pseudo-left apologists proclaimed victory. The World Socialist Web Site
warned against these complacent pronouncements. The paramilitary forces
were being redeployed and the drive to dictatorship was being stepped
up. That warning has been completely vindicated.
The agents withdrawn from Minneapolis street corners were dispersed
as part of a nationwide occupation. ICE has been deployed to the
nation’s airports and more than 40 states, reaching towns that
previously had not suffered a federal enforcement presence. Meanwhile, a
$45 billion detention buildout proceeds. The military occupation of
American cities continues, with more than 2,600 National Guard troops in
Washington D.C., 1,500 in Memphis—where a Guard soldier shot and killed
20-year-old Tyrin Johnson this month—and more in New Orleans.
The
Posse Comitatus Act, which for nearly 150 years barred the military
from domestic law enforcement, is a dead letter. On Tuesday, House
Speaker Mike Johnson defended the Pentagon’s request for an additional
$350 billion, on top of a record $1.1 trillion budget, by declaring:
“We’re fighting communism on our very own shores.”
Meanwhile, the killers remain under Department of Justice protection.
Good’s killer and Pretti’s killers are free and uncharged. Only this
week did Minnesota prosecutors finally obtain evidence federal
authorities had withheld for half a year, prompting Hennepin County
Attorney Mary Moriarty, a Democrat, to thank her “federal partners” for
helping “promote public trust.”
The Democrats’ toothless “reforms”
of immigration enforcement were advanced to contain the popular
movement and rehabilitate the deportation apparatus, not dismantle it.
Before the killings, the Democrats had funded Trump’s mass deportation
operation without meaningful conditions. Once the protests receded, they
dropped even their token reform proposals.
*****
Now, confronted with two more corpses, the Democrats are playing off of
the identical script. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared
Tuesday that “the killings won’t stop until we stop the impunity that
Trump and Republicans want to preserve.” He knows that impunity is
bipartisan. It was Schumer and the Democratic leadership who engineered
the cynical maneuver that cleared the way for nearly $70 billion in
additional money for ICE and the Border Patrol through 2029. This is the
money that hired, armed and dispatched Guerrero’s killers.
Maine’s congressional delegation issued a joint letter appealing to
the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general for a
“comprehensive, transparent, and expedited investigation.” The letter
does not demand the identification or arrest of the killer, does not
call for a halt to ICE operations, does not even condemn the killing,
which it describes euphemistically as a “fatal shooting involving” ICE
personnel. Its stated concern is that “timely and factual answers”
provide “closure” and ensure that future operations are conducted
“safely” and “lawfully.”
Maine’s Democratic Attorney General Aaron
Frey knows the name of Guerrero’s killer but is withholding it from the
public, announcing only that the officer has been placed on leave.
A particularly foul role is played by Bernie Sanders, who has said
nothing about either murder. His silence follows from his embrace of
Trump’s anti-immigrant framework. Sanders has repeated the nationalist
claim that without borders “you don’t have a nation” and praised Trump
for having “done a better job” than Biden in securing the border. His
role, like that of the Democratic Party’s entire nominal left, is to
legitimize the deportation apparatus and block an independent movement
of the working class against it.
The determination to fight exists in Biddeford, in Houston, in
Minneapolis and throughout the country. What is required is an
independent organization and program. Every official channel is a
mechanism for strangling the movement while the machinery of terror is
expanded and perfected for use against the entire working class.
The erection of a police state goes hand in hand with the waging of
wars of conquest, as in Iran, to steal oil and other resources,
including new sources of cheap labor. The cost is imposed on the working
class, in the form of skyrocketing prices and the destruction of
healthcare, education and jobs. State repression is the inevitable
response to the mounting resistance of workers.
*****
The defense of democratic rights falls to the working class. It requires
the fight for socialism and the reorganization of economic life to
serve social needs, not the wealth of the oligarchs and their wars.
Nearly six months after his arrest by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agents, former Chilean intelligence officer Armando
Fernández Larios is living comfortably at home in a South Florida gated
community, awaiting an August 5 appearance before an immigration judge
on his deportation proceedings.
Fernández Larios was quietly
released on parole in March, despite the Department of Homeland Security
having posted his name and mug shot on its website entitled “Arrested:
The worst of the worst.” The site is designed to cherry pick individual
cases to cast all of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants being
arrested and deported as violent criminals, even though only one out of
20 has been convicted of a violent crime, and three-quarters of them
have no criminal record whatsoever.
“Worst of the worst,” however,
is an epithet that is decidedly appropriate as a description of the
former Chilean secret police agent. He is one of the principal
architects of the first act of state-sponsored terrorism in the history
of the US capital, murdering two people with a car bomb.
He is
wanted in connection with multiple homicides both in his own country,
Chile, and in neighboring Argentina. He is still remembered and reviled
as one of the most murderous and sadistic members of Pinochet’s
repressive apparatus, which tortured and slaughtered tens of thousands
of workers, students and other perceived opponents of the dictatorship.
And relatives of his victims continue to clamor for him to be brought to
justice, even half a century after his terrible crimes.
How is it
that the doors to the Krome Detention Center swung open for the
convicted murderer and terrorist, while tens of thousands of working
mothers, fathers and their children, whose sole “crime” is to be
immigrants, remain locked up under abysmal conditions in for-profit
concentration camps like Krome?
*****
The fate of Fernández Larios remains to be seen, but his release from
ICE detention is in line with the decades of protection offered by the
US government, leaving intact the the extraordinary impunity enjoyed by
one of the surviving participants in some of the most notorious crimes
of the Pinochet era.
What was behind his arrest, brief detention
and speedy “humanitarian” release? The most likely explanation is that
he was “collateral damage” in a frenzied anti-immigrant crackdown by an
agency that increasingly resembles an American Gestapo. With the Trump
administration reportedly demanding 2,000 arrests daily, ICE agents are
grabbing anyone and everyone they can, including many immigrants with
the legal right to be in the country.
It is highly improbable that
his arrest reflected any change in policy in relation to his crimes and
those of the Pinochet dictatorship. Washington is pursuing a policy of
promoting and installing regimes across Latin America that defend and
even celebrate the repression and mass murder carried out by the
continent’s most savage dictatorships. This includes Milei in Argentina,
Kast in Chile, Fujimori in Peru and De la Espriella in Colombia.
Some
US locations have already seen the highest temperatures ever recorded,
as a heat dome moves east, creating unhealthy and dangerous conditions
at workplaces and factories that lack adequate cooling.
The
violation of fire safety measures was not an isolated case, but
indicative of widespread practices in Thailand where public welfare is
subordinated to private profit.
Unifor President Lana Payne announced late Saturday evening that the
union had reached a tentative agreement for a new three-year contract
with Ford Canada more than two months before the union’s current
contracts expire with Ford and with the two other Detroit Three
automakers—GM and Stellantis.
The sudden announcement included no
information about the contents of the agreement apart from its
three-year duration, and none has been divulged in the three days since.
The Unifor bureaucracy even abandoned its standard practice of holding a
post-agreement press conference.
Ratification meetings are now
being convened for the July 17-19 weekend. The union apparatus intends
to corral Ford workers into the ballot booths to vote “Yes” to the
tentative agreement literally minutes after giving them an entirely
self-serving and deceptive “Highlights” summary of its terms.
Workers
should be under no illusion. If the union apparatus feels compelled to
use such flagrantly anti-democratic methods, it is because it is
attempting to ram through a massive sellout.
*****
The global auto industry is being reorganized at autoworkers’ expense
and with the support and complicity of the nationalist and
pro-capitalist trade unions. Unifor in Canada, the UAW in the US and the
auto unions in Europe are all complicit in job cuts, production
speed-up, plant shutdowns, and attacks on worker rights. During the same
week that Unifor announced its tentative agreement with Ford, Germany’s
Volkswagen, where the IG Metall union controls a majority on the
automaker’s supervisory board, revealed plans to slash up to 100,000 jobs across its global operations and close four sites in Germany.
Corporations
are deploying AI, automation and restructuring as instruments of a
class war strategy: slashing labor costs and extracting ever greater
profits from workers to sustain a crisis-ridden financial system, while
governments divert social wealth to rearmament and war.
*****
Over the past four decades, Unifor has trampled on all the militant
traditions of earlier generations of autoworkers and evolved into little
more than a cheap-labor contractor for the Detroit Three. Ever since
the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), Unifor’s predecessor, split from the
UAW on a thoroughly nationalist basis in 1985, the unions on both sides
of the Canada-US border have systematically pitted workers against each
other, whip-sawing jobs and conditions back and forth across the border,
in the name of defending “Canadian” and American jobs.” As the globally
mobile automakers have launched a sustained onslaught on the working
class, transforming what was once one of the best-paying and secure
industrial jobs into a precarious, multi-tier low-wage industry, Unifor
and the UAW have offered their services as corporatist “partners” to the
relevant executives and national governments, while whipping up
poisonous Canada and American nationalism.
Thus the UAW is a
champion of Trump’s “America First” trade war, while Unifor cheers for a
“Team Canada” based on the supposed common interests of workers and the
corporate executives and capitalist oligarchs who profit from their
exploitation.
*****
Already, the struggle to build rank-and-file committees among
autoworkers has taken root in auto plants in the United States, with
committees rallying workers at Nexteer and other auto parts companies to
defeat UAW sellout agreements.
This movement is exemplified in the campaign of Will Lehman
for the presidency of the United Auto Workers in the membership vote to
be held later this year. A rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker from
Pennsylvania, Lehman is running in the UAW on a socialist program to
abolish the union bureaucracy and place power back in the hands of
workers on the shop floor.
Lehman opposes the
nationalist-protectionist policies of both the UAW and Unifor, which
divide workers, for the benefit of the auto bosses, and corral them
behind their “own” governments in trade war and the developing global
war.
Lehman is a leading representative of the International
Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, which exists to coordinate
workers’ struggles around the world in opposition to the globally
organized auto corporations. The IWA-RFC fights to unify autoworkers in
Canada with their fellow workers in the US, Mexico and internationally,
alongside all workers entering into struggle amid the skyrocketing cost
of living due to the criminal US/Israeli war on Iran. This
organizational form expresses the reality of the class struggle today,
which unfolds across national borders and cannot develop outside of a
frontal assault on the dictatorial power exercised over society by the
financial oligarchy, opposition to imperialist war, and the fight for
the reorganization of social and economic life to meet the needs of the
vast majority, not provide greater profits for the few.
The series suffers from this sponsorship from birth. The rot is not in
this sketch or that one; it lies in the central conception and the
assumptions that go along with that. A history of America underwritten
by the man who presided over the world’s most predatory imperialist
power for eight years was never going to be permitted to discover or
uncover anything of significance.
It is revealing and rather pathetic that individuals like David, who has
some brains and a sense of humor, seem to genuinely believe that
Obama—the initiator of “Terror Tuesday” and “kill lists,” the president,
frankly, of the intelligence agencies—is the apotheosis of civilized
behavior and political sagacity. This WSWS perspective from 2017
effectively sums up Obama’s period in office: “Obama's legacy of war, repression and inequality.”
On
the day Burnham secured the party leadership, he assisted outgoing
Labour Prime Minister Starmer in pushing through vicious
anti-immigration policies. Burnham will take over from Starmer on Friday
and oversee their enforcing.
US President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to destroy Iran’s power
plants and bridges, as the United States reimposed its naval blockade of
Iranian ports and bombed the country for a fourth day.
“We’re
going to hit them very hard tomorrow night. We’re going to hit them very
hard the night after, and then next week it gets really bad for them,
because next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges,”
Trump told Fox News. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants.
We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table
and negotiate.”
The deliberate destruction of civilian
infrastructure is a war crime under international law. In April, Trump
threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” In June he posted that
the United States might be “forced to militarily complete the job,” and
that if that happened, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer
exist!”
Trump’s genocidal threats to destroy Iranian civilization,
and his renewed attacks, are a testament to the deepening crisis of the
war. Trump has achieved none of the war’s objectives, from overthrowing
the Iranian government to controlling the Strait of Hormuz.
*****
The Trump administration claims that it can wage war again because it
had a pause. The White House maintains that the June “ceasefire” ended
the earlier hostilities and that its July 10 letter to Congress
restarted the 60-day clock of the War Powers Resolution.
The response in major pro-war publications demonstrates the degree of the crisis gripping the Trump administration.
*****
Establishing US control over the Strait of Hormuz would require a
massive escalation. Holding the strait would take a ground war, military
analysts told the Associated Press Tuesday. “It’s very difficult to
envision any scenario where you could satisfactorily secure the Strait
of Hormuz absent ground forces,” said Jason Campbell of the Middle East
Institute, a former Pentagon official—an operation, he said, that would
require tens of thousands of troops, months of preparation and “very
high costs.”
The forces such an operation would draw on are in
place. The Abraham Lincoln and George H.W. Bush carrier groups, the
assault ships Tripoli and Boxer with thousands of Marines aboard, and
more than 20 warships in all are on station, with more than 50,000 US
troops in the Middle East—by the military’s own account its largest
force in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Reports from global institutions, such as the International Monetary
Fund, generally try to present the state of the world capitalist economy
in the most favorable light, albeit with increasing difficulty.
But
every so often an insight is gained into the discussion which goes on
behind closed doors that presents a truer picture of the state of
affairs.
Such is a recent op-ed piece published in the New York Times
last week by the former IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas,
who stepped down in June. The article was published in the wake of the
IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook update.
It described the
global economy as being caught in the “crosscurrents of war and
technology.” It said there was a “modest slowdown” in global growth—to
3.0 percent in 2026 and 3.4 percent in 2027, compared to the average of
3.5 percent in 2024-25. The slowdown reflected the effect of the war in
the Middle east which had been partially offset by investment in AI
technology.
“Global economic activity and the outlook are being
shaped by two major forces, pushing in opposite directions … First is
the negative supply shock induced by the war in the Middle East. Second
is the ongoing positive technology shock manifesting in accelerated
momentum of the global technology cycle, in no small part driven by
advances in and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools.”
This characterization, based on the assertion that war and the development
of AI technology are pushing in opposite directions is, to say the
least, extremely short-sighted. While AI has the potential to bring
enormous advances in the productivity of labor, its development within
the framework of the profit system and deepening global conflicts is
intensifying all the contradictions of global capitalism.
In the
first place, the “success” of AI, which depends on its capacity to
generate a sufficient rate of return on the trillions of dollars being
invested, requires the slashing of costs and the elimination of
potentially millions of jobs—a process that has already started with the
mass layoffs in the US high-tech sector.
Secondly, the
development of AI, far from acting as a counterweight to the effects of
war, is at the very center of the struggle being waged by the US to
maintain its dominance of the global economy against its rivals, above
all China.
The projections of the IMF update for only a “modest”
decline in global growth became outdated almost as soon as they were
issued because these calculations “assume that the reopening of the
Strait of Hormuz begins in mid-July, with conditions broadly returning
to the prewar state of affairs by March 2027.”
These assumptions
have been effectively blown out of the water with the escalation by the
Trump regime of the military attacks on Iran amid the clamor from all
sections of the US political establishment that he “finish the job.”
Even on the assumption of a return to “normal,” the IMF forecast
growth in the advanced economies is just 1.7 percent in 2026 and 1.8
percent in 2027, with world trade volume growth slowing from 5.0 percent
in 2025 to 3.5 percent in 2026.
And it warned that “AI hype and exuberant financial markets could … sow the seeds of macro-financial instability.”
Freed
from the constraints imposed by his official position as the IMF’s
chief economic spokesman, Gourinchas set out a more accurate assessment
of the situation in his op-ed piece. He said his term, starting with the
Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, followed by Trump’s “volley of
tariffs” and then the war in the Middle East, had posed the challenge of
managing the economic fallout of wars.
“Too often,” he wrote, “these shocks are viewed as isolated disruptions.
They are not. They are interconnected symptoms of a deeper
fragmentation reshaping the global economy. This fragmentation, both
geopolitical and geoeconomic, risks ushering in what could become a new
age of war. One defined not necessarily by constant military
confrontation but by a persistent undercurrent of strategic economic
rivalry and coercion and rising economic insecurity. And yes, also
increased risks of actual wars.”
*****
The analysis of this “paradox” was provided more than 100 years ago by the leader of the Russian revolution, Lenin, in his work Imperialism,
published amid World War One. There he detailed that the very dynamic
of capitalism meant that any equilibrium, which provided the basis for
peace at one point, must inevitability give rise to war at another
because of the changes in relations between the major powers which
disrupt the previous equilibrium.
The realities of the capitalist
system, he wrote, meant that “general alliance of all the imperialist
powers” was nothing more than a “truce” in periods between wars.
“Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow
out of wars; the one conditioning the other, producing alternating forms
of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one of the same basis of
imperialist connections and relations within world economic and world
politics.”
*****
Gourinchas called for a “course correction” based on a “more
cooperative system built on shared rules and continued integration.”
But in the next sentence he noted that developments are proceeding in the opposite direction.
“Increasingly,
the world’s superpowers are searching for strategic advantages,
identifying choke points, adopting inward-looking policies and
increasing military expenditures, all in the name of resilience and
sovereignty.”
Gourinchas could offer no solution to the deepening
crisis, save for a vacuous appeal to return to the supposed “ideals” of
the IMF for cooperation contributing to growth and shared prosperity,
because there is none within the framework of the of capitalist profit
and nation-state system.
There is no realistic and viable solution
to the deepening crisis of global capitalism as it plunges towards a
new world war outside of the perspective of socialist revolution—the
taking of power by the working class to open the way for the
reconstruction of the world economy on socialist foundations.
The German government is swiftly pressing ahead with the construction of
a police and surveillance state. At the center of this stands the
so-called “Security Package 2.0” and the amendment of the Federal Police
Act. Both greatly expand the powers of the security authorities and are
directed against the vast majority of the population.
The new Section 98e of the Code of Criminal Procedure (StPO) allows
investigative authorities to network existing police databases and
search them automatically for connections. The Federal Bar Association criticized that this would allow far-reaching movement and personality
profiles to be created.
The new section also permits biometric
data, such as photographs from criminal proceedings, to be automatically
compared with publicly available images from the internet, allowing a
person’s whereabouts to be determined within a short space of time. The
analysis software in question could include the controversial Gotham
system from the US company Palantir, which state police forces in Hesse,
North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are already
using.
Palantir was co-founded by the American right-wing
extremist and JD Vance supporter Peter Thiel. The company has never made
a secret of its hostility to democracy and is therefore subject to
massive public criticism. Critics assume that under the draft law, the
data used for biometric matching could also be transmitted to private
providers and abroad. This is the basis for mass surveillance of the
entire population.
In several cities, AI-supported video
surveillance is already underway. In Frankfurt am Main, a pilot project
for biometric real-time facial recognition has been launched; in
Mannheim and Heidelberg, the police are using intelligent video
analysis; in Hamburg, it is being trained; and in Berlin, the General
Security and Order Act was correspondingly tightened at the end of
2025.
*****
These massive attacks on fundamental democratic rights coincide with
Germany’s vast rearmament program and the escalation of the war
against Russia. To finance both, draconian cuts are being made to health, care, pensions and education.
At the same time, jobs are being destroyed on a massive scale in the
factories, forcing hundreds of thousands into unemployment. Popular
opposition to this is growing. The government and the establishment
parties’ only response to this is the curtailment of fundamental
democratic rights and the criminalization of any opposition.
Nearly
7,000 people have been sickened and 141 hospitalized, while the federal
apparatus that would trace the outbreak to its source has been
dismantled by the Trump administration and Health Secretary Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.
On June 25, the World Socialist Web Site hosted an
extraordinary panel of eminent historians at a webinar to mark the 250th
anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American
Revolution.
The full webinar, “The American Revolution and Its
Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings,’” can be
accessed at wsws.org/1776.
_in_1992_May_Day_march.png)
