Lehman addressed UAW corruption in its last election
In approximately one and a half hours, at 6 PM US Eastern Standard Time (11:00 UTC), Will Lehman will participate in a debate of the candidates running for president of the UAW (United Auto Workers union).
All workers and youth are invited to view what promises to be an exciting and important event which should be available to access HERE.
It will be the one opportunity to hear every candidate side by side and judge where each stands.
The 2026 UAW International President Candidate Forum features the six nominated candidates running for the union's top leadership position:
Shawn Fain (Incumbent International President)
Rich Boyer (UAW Vice President and Stellantis Department Head)
Tricia Geiger (UAW International Servicing Representative)
Brian Keller (Stellantis worker)
Will Lehman (Mack Trucks worker and Socialist)!
Greg Mooney (General Dynamics Land Systems worker)
Moderator: Independent labor journalist Steven Greenhouse
WHO IS WILL LEHMAN?
Will Lehman's Road to a Socialist Campaign for UAW President
Here's
how a Mack Trucks assembly line worker from Macungie, Pennsylvania
went from turning wrenches on the shop floor to running for president
of one of the biggest unions in the country on an openly
socialist program.
Hired
at Mack Trucks (Around 2017)
Will
Lehman got hired at the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania,
a facility that builds heavy-duty trucks. He was a regular guy on the
line not a lawyer, not a politician, not a union staffer. Just a
worker who showed up every day, did his job, and saw up close what
was happening to his coworkers: wages getting eaten up by inflation,
speedup on the line, mandatory overtime that left people with no life
outside the plant, and a union that seemed to work more for the
company than for the people paying dues.
The COVID
Pandemic and the Mack Workers Rank-and-File Committee (2020–2021)
When
COVID hit, the Mack plant didn't shut down. The company and the UAW
kept the line moving while the virus spread through the workforce.
Lehman and other workers started organizing not through the union
bureaucracy, which was doing nothing, but by building the Mack
Workers Rank-and-File Committee.
They put out statements demanding real safety protections. They
called out the company and the union for sacrificing workers' lives
for production quotas.
This was
the kind of experience that made Lehman understand that the union
apparatus wasn't just useless it was actively working against the
people it claimed to represent.
Calling Out
Biden at the Plant Gate (July 2021)
In
July 2021, President Joe Biden came to the Mack Trucks plant for a
photo op —
the classic politician move of standing in front of
workers while doing nothing for them. Lehman responded publicly,
calling Biden's visit "both a show of force against workers at
the company and an effort to stir up competition against our working
class brothers and sisters in other countries." He
wasn't buying the act.
This was
an early sign of something that would become central to his politics:
the refusal to put any faith in the Democratic Party or any
capitalist politician, no matter what they claimed.
Supporting
the Volvo Trucks Strike (2021)
In
2021, Volvo Trucks workers in Dublin, Virginia —
also UAW members —
went on strike for three months against a rotten contract. They built
their own rank-and-file committee to lead the fight. The Volvo
workers reached out to Mack workers for solidarity, and Lehman and
the Mack committee answered. They understood that workers at
different plants, even different companies, are fighting the same
enemy. The
Volvo strike was a lesson in what workers can do when they organize
themselves, outside the control of the bureaucracy.
First
Campaign for UAW President (2022)
In the
summer of 2022, the UAW was holding its first direct election for top
officers in over 70 years forced by a federal corruption
investigation that had sent more than a dozen top UAW officials to
prison for embezzlement and taking bribes from the auto companies.
Lehman, then 34 years old, decided to run.
He
sent a letter to tens of thousands of UAW members that pulled no
punches. He called the UAW "a union in name only." He
pointed out that the 15 top officers pulled in over $3 million a year
combined while workers were struggling to afford gas to get to work.
He called for abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to
rank-and-file committees on the shop floor. And he said it plainly:
"I am a
socialist."
He got on
the ballot, campaigned at auto plants across the country — Ford,
Stellantis, GM, Volvo, and his home plant at Mack and won nearly
5,000 votes, close to 5% of the ballots cast. That might not sound
like a lot, but it happened under massive voter suppression by the
union apparatus. Out of 1.1 million eligible voters, only about
104,000 even got to cast a ballot the lowest turnout for any
national union election in American history. The bureaucracy made
sure most workers never even knew an election was happening.
The 2023
Contract Fight and the Mack Trucks Strike
Then came
the Mack Trucks contract. Fain endorsed a deal that included
sub-inflation raises, no cost-of-living protection, continued
two-tier wages, and a longer workday. Lehman and the Mack Workers
Rank-and-File Committee led the fight against it. Workers voted it
down overwhelmingly and walked out on October 9, 2023 — nearly
4,000 of them.
While
they were on strike, Lehman went to the picket lines at the Toledo
Jeep plant to talk to Big Three workers. He
told them, "What Fain tried to ram through at Mack is a warning
to workers." He argued that the strike fund was workers'
money and should be used to support an all-out fight, not hoarded by
the bureaucracy. He raised the need for a shorter workweek with no
loss of pay, and said that if the companies couldn't provide that, it
raised the need for public ownership of the industry under workers'
control.
Fain flew
down to Pennsylvania to try to put out the fire. At a local meeting,
Mack workers challenged him to his face. Fain's response? He claimed
he didn't really know much about the contract he had publicly
endorsed.
The
Legal Fight (2024)
After the
2022 election, Lehman didn't just walk away. He filed legal
challenges over the massive voter suppression that had kept turnout
at rock bottom. In June 2024, a federal judge ruled in his favor,
finding that the Biden administration's Department of Labor had acted
"arbitrarily and capriciously" in dismissing his
complaints. Bloomberg Law called it a "rare rebuke" of the
Labor Department. Both the Biden and Trump administrations then
sanctioned the illegitimate vote anyway showing once again that
both parties protect the union bureaucracy, not the workers.
The 2026
Campaign and Convention Nomination
In
February 2026, Lehman — now 38 — announced he was running again.
His program had four main planks: abolish
the dictatorship of the bureaucracy and build rank-and-file
committees,
end the UAW's
collaboration with the corporations,
reject
nationalism and fight for international workers' unity,
and mobilize
the union's power to defend democratic rights and oppose war.He
made clear he wasn't running to get a cushy office at Solidarity
House — he'd stay on the shop floor.
On July
16, 2026, a high-ranking UAW official named Raymond L. Jensen Jr. —
an organizer on the UAW staff, former assistant director of Region 9
(Lehman's own region), pulling in about $202,000 a year and a public
supporter of Shawn Fain posted an AI-generated image on Lehman's
campaign Facebook page. It showed Lehman bound with rope, gagged,
blood running from his mouth, with a masked man aiming an automatic
rifle at his back.
Will
Lehman's path isn't the story of a guy climbing a career ladder. He
didn't go to law school, didn't work his way up through the union
staff, didn't get groomed by the Democratic Party. He's a Mack Trucks
worker who looked at what was happening to himself and the people
around him, figured out that the union bureaucracy was the main
obstacle to fighting back, and decided to do something about it.
His
campaign is built on a simple idea that used to be common sense in
the labor movement: the union belongs to the workers, not the
officials. The power is on the shop floor, not in some headquarters
in Detroit. And you can't win against multinational corporations by
thinking like a nationalist you have to unite with workers in
other countries who work for the same companies.
Will calls
himself a socialist because he's concluded that as long as a handful
of billionaires own the factories, the hospitals, and the banks,
working people will always get the short end of the stick. The only
way out is for the working class to take democratic control of the
economy and run it for human need instead of private profit. That's
what he's fighting for not just a better contract, but a different
kind of society.
The Ukrainian attack on an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea
marks a new stage in the fusion of the NATO war against Russia with the
US-Israeli war against Iran. It confirms David North’s 2026 May Day
warning: “World war is not a future threat but a presently unfolding
reality.”
*****
The Ukrainian long-range
drone strike killed one sailor and wounded another. It targeted an
Iranian-owned vessel, the Ana, in the Caspian Sea—a body of water
bordered by Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, but
not Ukraine. Kiev claimed the ship was transporting drones and missiles
to Russia. Tehran denounced the attack as aggression against a
commercial vessel.
The attack exposes the central fraud of the
propaganda surrounding the Ukraine war. For years, the war has been
presented by the imperialist powers and their media as a purely
defensive struggle by Ukraine against an “unprovoked” Russian invasion.
This lie has been used above all in Germany, to justify the largest
rearmament since Hitler and a renewed military offensive against Russia.
*****
This completely exposes the pseudo-left tendencies that claim the
Ukraine war is the “good war,” while Gaza and Iran are the “bad wars.”
Zelensky himself has shattered this fiction. Ukraine is not standing
apart from the US-Israeli war in the Middle East; it is actively
intervening in it. To support NATO’s war through Ukraine while
denouncing the genocide in Gaza or the assault on Iran is to support one
front of the same global imperialist onslaught.
It is impossible
to oppose the genocide in Gaza or the US-Israeli war against Iran while
remaining indifferent to, or actively supporting, the NATO war against
Russia in Ukraine. Zelensky has made this explicit. By attacking an
Iranian ship and presenting Ukraine as useful to Washington in the
conflict with Tehran, Kiev is showing that it is prepared to serve
imperialism wherever this secures more weapons, money and political
support. Ukraine is offering itself as an attack dog of the imperialist
powers.
*****
The bourgeois press is beginning to acknowledge, in distorted form, the process long analyzed by the World Socialist Web Site. The Financial Times cited the Ukrainian strike in the Caspian in a column titled “Ukraine, Iran and how regional wars go global.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
welcomed the attack as a message not to Tehran, but to Trump: Zelensky
was showing that Ukraine and the US have “the same enemies” and that
Kiev is “not only a supplicant,” but can make itself useful to
Washington.
The attack is being applauded in Germany because it
presents Russia and Iran as a single enemy complex and binds the United
States more firmly to the Ukraine war. Berlin fears that Trump could
seek a separate arrangement with Putin that would reduce US involvement
and cut across German and European aims in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
Its answer is to intensify the war and fuse the fronts together.
*****
Ukraine is not acting as an independent national force. Its long-range
war against Russia has been politically covered, financed, militarily
enabled, technologically supported and strategically coordinated by
NATO, above all by Germany, Britain and the United States. Whatever the
precise operational chain of command behind the Caspian attack, it was
carried out within this broader NATO war framework.
The route targeted is of major strategic significance. Astrakhan, on the
northern Caspian, is a key logistics hub between Russia and Iran, and
the Caspian corridor has become an alternative route for commerce,
energy and military supplies. Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy
infrastructure, US-Israeli threats against Iran’s oil export
infrastructure and the Strait of Hormuz, and NATO’s military pressure on
China are interconnected fronts. Ships, ports, refineries, pipelines
and sea lanes are becoming direct targets in a war over the arteries of
the world economy.
The official justification for the Caspian attack is that Iran has
supplied Russia with drones and other weapons used against Ukraine. But
the same argument can be made by every state involved. Iran may claim
the right to attack Ukrainian or NATO-linked targets because NATO arms
Israel and the United States bombs Iran. Russia may claim the right to
attack NATO logistics hubs because NATO arms and directs Ukraine. This
is the logic of world war: every front becomes the justification for
escalation on another.
The developing world war does not arise
from the alleged aggressiveness of an “axis of adversaries,”
encompassing Iran, North Korea, Russia and China, as the imperialist
press claims. It is rooted in the historic crisis of world capitalism
and the drive of US and European imperialism to reverse their decline
through war. Iran, Russia and China are being targeted because they are
viewed as obstacles to the domination of Eurasia and the world economy
by the imperialist powers.
*****
Workers in Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Israel, Europe, the United States and
China have no interest in killing one another for the profits and
strategic ambitions of their ruling classes. The urgent task is to build
an international anti-war movement rooted in the working class, break
with all capitalist parties, develop rank-and-file committees to oppose
arms production, military transport, conscription, austerity and
repression, fight for the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk and all anti-war
prisoners, and build the International Committee of the Fourth
International as the revolutionary leadership of the international
working class.
Chinese and Philippine forces clashed three times in the South China Sea
on July 20, 23, and 24, marking a week of confrontations that coincided
exactly with the week-long Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) Foreign Ministers’ summit. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio
arriving in Manila for the summit seized on the incidents to denounce
Beijing and justify further militarization of the region.
The timing of the three incidents follows a longstanding pattern of
manufactured confrontations, engineered in Manila under Washington’s
direction, and furnished the pretext for the summit’s real business: the
further entrenchment of US military and economic domination over
Southeast Asia.
*****
The honorific “bagong bayani / new hero” has been long applied
to Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW), the remittances from whose poverty
wages sustain much of the Philippine economy. With KBBM [a government program], the Philippine
state, backed by American money and training, has created a form of
internal OFW, subsidizing impoverished fishing families to remain
semi-permanently at a militarized flashpoint. Their households are
sustained by periodic government fuel handouts and fish purchases whose
settlement mechanics are never disclosed, in exchange for maintaining a
“presence” whose sole strategic value is to generate the recurring
friction that Washington and Canberra can invoke, on cue, as so-called
unprovoked Chinese aggression.
The
Trump administration has opened another front in its mass deportation
operation, deploying plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) agents to seize workers and travelers at airports throughout the
United States
Immigration agents have carried out arrests at check-in counters,
arrival gates and jetways at no fewer than 15 airports in recent weeks,
according to documents reviewed by the New York Times and interviews with lawyers representing more than 25 people from over a dozen countries.
Those
seized include an engineer awaiting an extension of his work visa,
several newlyweds married to US citizens, a former au pair with
government-issued work authorization, and a Ugandan asylum seeker with
sickle cell anemia who uses a wheelchair. None was accused of committing
a crime.
The arrests are being facilitated by the Transportation
Security Administration (TSA), which is supplying ICE with passenger
information originally collected under the pretext of aviation security.
Documents
obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight reveal that ICE and
the TSA signed a formal data-sharing agreement in May 2025. Under the
agreement, ICE supplies names to the TSA, which runs them through its
Secure Flight databases and informs immigration agents when a person is
scheduled to travel.
The arrangement transforms every airport
security checkpoint into an immigration dragnet. Airline passengers who
have expired visas, pending applications for permanent residency or
unresolved requests for extensions can have their information turned
over to ICE before they arrive at the airport.
*****
“This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in
our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country
to self-deport,” the Department of Homeland Security declared.
The
statement is a declaration that hundreds of thousands of people are to
be stripped of the ability to fly within the United States. It also
demonstrates that the airport arrests are intended to terrorize
immigrants into abandoning pending legal claims and leaving the country.
*****
The deployment of ICE at airports began during the partial government
shutdown earlier this year. The Democrats responded with silence. Five
days after immigration agents were dispatched to major airports, Vermont
Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now
promoted as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, had
said nothing.
At the time, the World Socialist Web Site
warned: “ICE at the airports is particularly sinister. It will be used
to block not only immigrants from leaving the country but also political
opponents of the government. It is the physical prefiguration of a
police state.”
That warning has been vindicated.
In addition to the Democratic Party, the collaboration of the trade
union bureaucracy in the expanding ICE airport dragnet was exposed by
the July 14 seizure of Southwest Airlines flight attendant Lorenzo
“Enzo” Thompson at Nashville International Airport after he returned
from a work trip.
Thompson came to the United States legally from Jamaica in 2021 seeking protection from life-threatening abuse. According to a fundraiser organized on his behalf, he has no criminal record, possesses a valid work permit and has a pending immigration case.
Thompson
is a dues-paying member of Transport Workers Union of America Local
556, the AFL-CIO-affiliated union representing Southwest flight
attendants.
The union waited eight days before issuing a statement
acknowledging that “one of our Members was detained” by ICE while at
work. It did not name Thompson.
The statement said the union was
“in communication” with his family and attorney and would “continue to
monitor the situation closely.” It informed members that Thompson’s
friends and family had established a fund for his legal expenses and
expressed hope for a “swift resolution.”
The union did not demand
Thompson’s immediate release. It did not condemn ICE, call a strike or
propose any collective action by Southwest workers. Instead, it directed
members disturbed by the kidnapping of their co-worker to the union’s
Critical Incident Stress Management team for “confidential peer
support.”
Nothing more clearly exposes the role of the trade union
apparatus. A union member with work authorization is seized by the
immigration Gestapo while performing his job, and the bureaucracy
responds by “monitoring” his imprisonment and directing workers to a
fundraiser and a stress management hotline.
The transformation of airports into checkpoints of a domestic police
state could not proceed without the complicity of the Democratic Party
and the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. They seek to isolate each victim, reduce
every kidnapping to an individual legal case and prevent the
mobilization of the immense social power of the working class.
The defense of immigrants and democratic rights requires the
construction of independent rank-and-file committees at every airline,
airport, workplace and neighborhood. These committees must organize
collective action demanding the immediate release of Thompson and every
worker imprisoned by ICE, an end to the TSA-ICE surveillance dragnet and
the abolition of ICE and Customs and Border Protection. The working
class must oppose the attack on all workers, regardless of nationality
or alleged immigration status.
More than a week after the Teamsters proclaimed an “industry-leading”
agreement in principle covering more than 11,000 mechanics and related
workers at United Airlines, the union has still not released the
proposed contract, a term sheet or even an official wage schedule.
Nevertheless,
the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) has already announced
that it “fully recommends ratification” and has flooded social media
with declarations that it took on one of the world’s largest
corporations and “won ... yet again!”
The contradiction is made
more extraordinary by the Teamsters’ own account....
*****
The circumstances indicate the contract is a
major sellout. If the agreement contained the enormous gains claimed by
the Teamsters, the bureaucracy would publish the figures and language
and trumpet them from the rooftops.
*****
Workers across the airline industry want to fight. In July 2025, 71
percent of flight attendants rejected a tentative agreement after five
years without a raise. As for mechanics, in February 2016, more than 93
percent rejected United’s final offer, which would have established a
lower wage and benefit scale for new hires, with starting pay in the low
$20s compared with top pay of $46.15 and an eight-and-a-half-year
progression.
United can easily afford major improvements. In the
second quarter of 2026, the airline reported $17.7 billion in revenue,
up 16 percent from the previous year, net income of $805 million and
$19.6 billion in available liquidity. It raised its full-year earnings
forecast even while projecting nearly $6 billion in additional fuel
expenses. CEO Scott Kirby received $32.3 million in total compensation
in 2025.
On Wednesday, Kirby appeared beside President Donald
Trump at the White House for the announcement of a $22 billion
reconstruction of Washington Dulles International Airport, United’s
principal Washington hub. The project includes 5 million square feet of
new or renovated space. United handles approximately 70 percent of
Dulles traffic, and Trump said the carrier would partly finance the
project, although its precise contribution has not been disclosed.
The airline industry is in the midst of a major global restructuring. The Wall Street Journal reported
Sunday that Kirby approached Delta Air Lines in 2025 about combining
the two most valuable US carriers. This followed Kirby’s attempt to
merge United with American Airlines, an idea he pitched to Trump earlier
this year. At the same time, United has scrapped plans to launch
service from Chicago O’Hare to 10 regional airports after the Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) extended caps on flights.
A sharp
rise in fuel prices is intensifying the pressure for mergers, capacity
reductions and higher fares across the global industry. The combined
second-quarter fuel expenses of Delta, United, American, Southwest and
Alaska were nearly $8 billion higher than a year earlier. United
nevertheless says it expects to recover all of its higher fuel costs by
the fourth quarter. Its yields rose 12 percent in the second quarter,
and it now expects fourth-quarter capacity to be lower than currently
published schedules, with further reductions possible if fuel prices
remain elevated.
The Teamsters bureaucracy has a record of using
contracts passed under false pretenses to pave the way for huge
corporate restructuring. In 2023, a so-called “historic” UPS agreement
which blocked a strike by 340,000 workers was followed by the “Network
of the Future” program. UPS subsequently eliminated 48,000 positions and
closed daily operations at 93 buildings in 2025. It has announced plans
to eliminate up to another 30,000 jobs and close at least 24 more
facilities in 2026.
Airline workers operate under the Railway
Labor Act (RLA), which prevents them from striking until the National
Mediation Board releases the parties from mediation—normally after an
offer of binding arbitration is rejected—and a 30-day cooling-off period
expires. During that period, the president may establish an emergency
board, delaying strike action for roughly another 60 days.
The
union apparatus does not fight this state-controlled system. It uses its
endless procedures to isolate workers, suppress strike action and wear
down resistance while the companies continue operating and accumulating
profits. In 2022, Teamsters-affiliated railroad unions refused to call a
legal national strike after workers rejected a deal brokered by the
White House. Instead, they delayed long enough to give Congress the time
it needed to pass legislation pre-emptively banning a strike and
imposing the deal workers rejected.
United mechanics should demand
the immediate publication of the complete agreement, every side letter,
wage and benefit schedule and the disposition of all scope grievances.
No vote should take place until workers have had adequate time to study
and discuss the full language.
Senate Republicans staged a McCarthyite witch-hunt against Anthony
Fauci Wednesday, an inquisition against science convened for the
declared purpose of provoking him into committing perjury.In response
to an unending torrent of lies and slander, Fauci answered not a single
question, invoking his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times.
Fauci,
who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) for 38 years, appeared under subpoena from Republican committee
chairman Rand Paul, who has pledged repeatedly to see Fauci imprisoned.
Days earlier, Paul published more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s private
diaries, together with a 465-page collection of records reaching back to
2001, which were provided by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a blatant violation of Fauci’s right to
privacy.
*****
The press reported the spectacle and passed over its purpose, treating
the hearing as one more round in a personal feud, in effect lending
legitimacy to the proceedings. In reality, the hearing was the sharpest
expression yet of a fascistic campaign to establish that scientific
advice which constrains profit is a criminal act and to clear the
political ground for the total destruction of public health now being
carried out by the Trump administration.
The felony mechanism was announced by Paul and others in advance. Joe
Biden’s preemptive pardon of Fauci, issued in January 2025, covers
offenses only through the date it was signed, so a false statement under
oath Wednesday would have been a new crime beyond its reach. “If he
lies to Congress, that’s a new felony, committed in real time, with no
pardon waiting to cover it,” Paul wrote before the hearing. When the
trap failed, Paul advanced the theory that a pardoned witness has no
Fifth Amendment right at all, conceding the argument has “probably never
been tested legally.”
Paul has presided over this congressional crusade against science in
close coordination with Trump and Kennedy. They have targeted Peter
Daszak, whose EcoHealth Alliance conducted bat coronavirus surveillance
in China, barring him from federal funding and shutting down his
organization. David Morens, Fauci’s longtime adviser, was indicted in
April on charges relating to federal records, a prosecution the journal Science
called unusual if not unprecedented. In June, National Institutes of
Health (NIH) virologist Vincent Munster was charged over the import of
biological specimens.
At the University of Michigan, the Justice
Department has jailed one Chinese researcher after another for shipping
harmless roundworms and plasmids without customs paperwork, branding one
doctoral student an “alien from Wuhan” before dismissing the charges
against three others in February. Last year, the White House replaced a
federal public health website with a page declaring the laboratory
origin of COVID-19 as a settled fact.
More broadly, Kennedy has
forced out more than 20,000 HHS employees since taking office, including
roughly a quarter of the workforce at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC). In June 2025, he dismissed all 17 voting members
of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced
them with anti-vaccine loyalists. He has terminated 49 scientific
advisory committees at the NIH and canceled $500 million in mRNA
research, the platform on which rapid response to the next pandemic
depends.
*****
The consequences are already measurable. There have been 2,318
confirmed measles cases in the United States so far this year, more than
in any year since 1991, and the country is expected to lose the measles
elimination status it has held since 2000 come November.
The
underlying aim of the attacks on Fauci and the HHS more broadly are to
subordinate science to religious obscurantism, conspiracy theory and the
demands of the market. This found expression at Wednesday’s hearing
with Senator James Lankford’s grievance that “churches and places of
worship were forced to be closed down,” Senator Joni Ernst’s
denunciation of the use of fetal tissue in federally funded research,
and other fundamentalist proclamations.
The Democrats mounted no serious opposition to this reactionary
freakshow. Senator Gary Peters, the committee’s ranking member who last
week demanded that Trump “win the war” against Iran, merely complained
that the Fauci hearing “looks backwards” and diverted the panel from
“national security challenges.” Senator Richard Blumenthal praised the
COVID-19 vaccines now under attack as “undoubtedly President Trump’s
greatest accomplishment.”
The World Socialist Web Site
unequivocally defends Fauci against this witch-hunt, while retracting
nothing we have written about him. He is not being persecuted for the
policies he actually carried out. Fauci issued genuine warnings in early
2020 and was vilified by the fascistic right for them, but he never
broke with Trump. When the Democrats took office in 2021, he supplied
scientific authority for every attack on public health they carried out:
the unsafe reopening of schools, the denigration of masking, the
dismantling of testing and reporting, and finally Biden’s premature
declaration that the pandemic was over.
In an interview with the BBC in August 2023, at the start of the seventh
wave of the pandemic, Fauci said that “the vulnerable will fall by the
wayside, they’ll get infected, they’ll get hospitalized and some will
die.” This was a justification for ongoing mass death and debilitation
with Long COVID.
When Biden took office on January 20, 2021, roughly 400,000 people had
officially died of COVID-19 in the United States. By the end of his term
the official toll had passed 1.2 million, with two out of every three
American deaths occurring under his administration. Excess mortality
estimates, a far more accurate measure, place the real US toll at
roughly 1.4 million and the global toll at some 30 million. The dying
has not stopped. The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative estimates between
109,000 and 175,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, comparable to annual
US deaths from lung cancer.
The diaries Paul released to humiliate Fauci disclose something he
did not intend. “The situation with my national and international fame
is explosive and really unimaginable,” Fauci wrote on May 21, 2020, as
the US death toll approached 100,000. On Trump: “POTUS seems to be
enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We
are developing a very unique and interesting relationship.”
There
are entries on the Fauci bobbleheads, the murals, and his Hollywood
admirers. This is the outlook of a definite social layer, a once serious
scientist absorbed into the affluent milieu around the Democratic
Party, for whom a social catastrophe became an occasion for personal
elevation. Undoubtedly, these social pressures had a corrupting effect,
priming Fauci to play his assigned role in normalizing the pandemic.
The fascistic campaign against Fauci must be opposed unconditionally,
and its purpose understood. Its aim is not to establish how the pandemic
began but to criminalize science and public health as such, leaving
society defenseless before the next pandemic. Measles is already
spreading unchecked. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the
fastest-growing Ebola epidemic on record has killed 1,437 people since
May, caused by a strain for which no vaccine or treatment exists.
Deforestation and climate change are accelerating the spillover of
pathogens from animals to humans that could produce the next pandemic at
any point.
*****
Neither capitalist party will defend science. The Democrats prepared
the ground for this assault and answer it with appeals to bipartisan
decorum, while the scientific establishment, picked off institution by
institution, answers with open letters.
The defense of scientific
truth falls to the only social force with an objective interest in it,
the international working class, and it requires the reorganization of
society on socialist foundations: production for human need rather than
private profit, public health conducted as a global enterprise, and the
vast resources now devoted to war turned to medicine and research. This
is the perspective for which the Socialist Equality Party and the
International Committee of the Fourth International fight.
Across
both the Trump and Biden administrations, official public health policy
forced working-class and minority Americans to bear the pandemic's
highest death toll.
On July 18, the New York Times published a lengthy, sympathetic
interview conducted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro with New York City Mayor
Zohran Mamdani. The interview reflected the Democratic Party
establishment’s grappling with electoral victories by candidates backed
by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its most prominent
figure, Mamdani.
*****
The interview brought to the fore Mamdani’s conciliatory attitude toward
the ruling class and the Democratic Party establishment. He and the DSA
claim that significant social reforms can be grafted onto the profit
system. They call this “socialism,” but it is actually a perspective of
reforming capitalism, one that is completely unrealizable and can lead
only to disaster.
*****
Mamdani himself pointed to the social disaster facing millions of New
Yorkers, inadvertently exposing the contradiction between his minimal
reform proposals, including expanded child care and free bus service,
and the vast resources required to provide a decent standard of living
for New York workers. Mamdani noted that “one in four are living in
poverty” in New York City. “Right now in our city,” he said, “to afford
child care for a two-year-old, as a family you need to make $334,000.
That is an extraordinary amount of money.”
Indeed. The median
household income in New York is just over $80,000 a year. The gap
between what is needed to live and the income at the disposal of the
working class will not be overcome by a token increase in taxes on the
rich, even were the multi-millionaires and billionaires to agree to it,
which they will not.
Regarding housing, Mamdani added, “too many
working people, if you ask them where they live, they won’t tell you a
neighborhood across the five boroughs. They’ll tell you a neighboring state.”
He mentioned Jersey City as an example, which is only slightly less
unaffordable than New York City, with 39 percent of households burdened
by excessive rents. Mamdani’s rent freeze on regulated apartments will
not bring down housing costs to affordable levels.
The premise
that underlies the perspective of Mamdani and the DSA is that there is
no objective, irreconcilable conflict between the working class and the
owners of capital—the banks, real estate interests, corporate boards and
billionaire speculators, whose stratospheric fortunes are based
ultimately on the surplus value produced by workers. This is in a city
with the most billionaires in the world alongside mass poverty,
homelessness, and a multi-millioned working class. Billionaires occupy
gilded towers with views of Central Park while nearly one in seven
public school children lacks a permanent home.
Mamdani implicitly
denies the reality of the class struggle. But propelling this class
struggle forward, whether Mamdani acknowledges it or not, is the decline
in the world economic position of American capitalism and the insoluble
crisis of American and world capitalism, what Trotsky called
capitalism’s “death agony.”
Decades of deindustrialization,
financialization, spiraling national debt, and the erosion of the
dollar's world position have produced the consolidation of a tiny
oligarchy controlling more wealth than any ruling class in previous
world history. But this wealth is overwhelmingly derived not from the
production of useful goods, but from speculation on previously existing
wealth, i.e., fictitious capital. The US national debt of $40 trillion
means that American capitalism is, from a fiscal standpoint, bankrupt.
For
35 years, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the American
ruling class has sought to overcome its economic decline through the use
of military violence and plunder of the resources of the Middle East,
South Asia and Africa. The war against Iran, alongside the escalating
war against Russia in Ukraine, the Gaza genocide, the attack on
Venezuela, the conflict with Cuba, and war preparations against China,
marks a new stage in the crisis and the initial chapters of an unfolding
world war. The cost of this war is being imposed on the working class
through the destruction of all past social gains and programs.
The
chasm between the oligarchy and the mass of working people is
incompatible with the maintenance of democratic forms of rule. The
political system is being brought into alignment with the underlying
social relations. This means the erection of dictatorship, but it also
means a massive intensification of the class struggle, with
revolutionary implications.
There was no reference in the
interview to the real character of the social and political crisis. Not a
word was uttered about the wars in Iran and Ukraine. Trump’s drive to
preemptively nullify the results of the midterm elections and establish a
presidential dictatorship was passed over in silence.
*****
What Mamdani expresses cannot be understood merely as a personal
failure to follow through on principles he espouses. His conciliation
with the defenders of genocide is inevitable precisely because he
operates within and on behalf of the Democratic Party, one of the two
political parties of US imperialism. Mamdani and the DSA are not
opponents of US imperialism. They support it while criticizing some of
its most brutal expressions.
Likewise, on the topics of
immigration enforcement and policing, Mamdani articulated at most mild
criticisms while underscoring his defense of the capitalist state.
*****
The eruption of US imperialism abroad, the turn to fascism and
dictatorship, the explosive growth of social inequality—these
developments share a common source. American capitalism, having
exhausted the conditions that sustained postwar prosperity and the
reforms built upon it, is carrying out war and authoritarianism at home
as the means of resolving its contradictions.
There is no
objective basis for realizing within the framework of the capitalist
state even the modest reforms Mamdani promotes. The fascistic oligarchy
is not interested in conciliation. It has no intention of giving up a
dime. Power must be wrested from it in struggle by the only social force
capable of doing so, the working class.
The
Greens have prostrated themselves before [accounting giant] KPMG, pledging a three-year
“Financial Resilience Plan” that will slash spending on key service
areas including housing and adult social care “where spending is high”
and which offer “the greatest opportunity” to deliver savings “through
cost reductions or increased income”.
On Wednesday, the Financial Times—mouthpiece of the City of
London’s corporations and banks—ran a front-page story: “Burnham to seek
private sector deals in growth push”. Its purpose, as the strapline
added, was a “bid to soothe ‘public control’ anxiety”.
Inside, an interview with Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, reassured the FT's
constituency that Burnham's rhetoric about bringing critical sectors of
the economy under 'public control' was an appeal for collaboration with
private investors not an attempt to control or replace them.
*****
As business secretary under Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer, Reynolds
initiated the state takeover of “British Steel”—nothing to do with the
former nationalized industry—from its Chinese owner, as an existential
crisis enveloped the Labour government. In April 2025, Jingye refused to
buy raw materials for the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe. The Starmer
government recalled parliament to force through emergency legislation in
a day, not primarily to save the 2,700 jobs at the plant but because
Britain was about to become the only G7 country unable to make primary
steel from scratch. This would strip a leading NATO power of the
capacity to produce a material without which war cannot be waged.
Central to his “Productive State” agenda,
Burnham promotes “public control”, not “public ownership”, as his
policy. Reynolds made clear that despite all the fuss over “public
control”, it didn’t threaten private sector corporations but rewarded
them. He pointed to Greater Manchester’s transport system as the model
of Burnham’s approach, telling the FT, “He [Burnham as mayor] took
public control of the bus network in a way that has genuinely improved
the network… but it is still delivered by private companies.”
*****
The FT was happy, commenting that “Reynolds played down the prospect
of sweeping nationalisations. ‘The UK is always going to be a safe place
to do business,’ he said.”
Burnham has been installed to complete
the assignment the ruling class handed Starmer, which he proved
incapable of carrying out: a vast expansion of military spending by
hundreds of billions of pounds, paid for by a corresponding assault on
the welfare bill. Burnham has pledged both, with Reynolds to play a
major role in enforcing the welfare-to-work policies required.
*****
As the WSWS has noted, in opposition to the claims of the numerous
pseudo-left groups, Burnham’s government is implacably hostile to the
“pressure from below” that they insist can push it to the left.
Burnham
takes his marching orders from the boardrooms of the FTSE 100
companies, and the financial speculators. On offer now to address the
social crisis facing millions is a handful of small change: capping a
single bus fare nationally at £2, but not for another six months, and a
miniscule 86 pence a week off electricity bills, but only from October 1
and to last just six months.
Even this is deemed unaffordable by
the ruling elite. On the same day as the Reynolds interview, the
National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) warned that
Burnham faced a “challenging inheritance”, with plans to revamp public
services meeting severe pressure from persistently higher prices.
Roger Waters & Mona Miari – Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined (Official Music Video)
Roger Waters’ new nine‑minute remake
of the popular Pink Floyd track “Comfortably Numb,” recorded with
Palestinian singer Mona Miari, is a powerful creative reworking of a
classic rock music lament into an indictment of the Gaza genocide and an
appeal for international solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Across several new English and Arabic verses, the song modifies the
original, satirical refrain of resignation, “I have become comfortably
numb,” into a vow: “I will never become comfortably numb / لن أسمحَ أن
أُصبحَ مُخدَّرًا ومرتاح.” Waters closes the new version with, “Palestine
must be free… with equal rights, for everyone, from the river to the
sea.”
“Comfortably Numb–Reimagined,” released on June 12 and credited to
both Waters and Miari, is an arrangement built around piano, strings,
percussion and layered vocals. The project is explicitly framed as a
response to what Waters and Miari describe as the “continued genocide in
Gaza.”
The release is also raising funds for the Palestine
Children’s Relief Fund and is linked to a network of political
education, grassroots organizing and independent media projects centered
on Palestine.
*****
In an interview with Wired, Waters says he hopes listeners will
eventually recognize that “there is a right and a wrong. This is not
complicated, and this song is on the right side of history,” connecting
the refusal to be numb with moral clarity and political awareness.
*****
Responding to persistent smears that he is antisemitic, from apologists
for the mass murder in Gaza, Waters told an interviewer this year: “I
don’t have an antisemitic bone in my body, I never did and I never will
have. … I’m interested in human rights for my brothers and sisters,
whoever they are. Color of the skin, religion, nationality, politics—I
couldn’t care less.”
*****
The haunting melody and familiar refrain are deployed to highlight the
need for those who watch, read and listen to take action against the
bombing, starvation and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. Waters and
Miari counterpose sumüd—steadfastness—to passivity and inaction and
appeal to the public to overcome “comfortable numbness” and join the
global movement to fight for the Palestinians.
Bolivia has just passed through its most explosive social
confrontation in two decades. For 53 days, from May 2 to June 23, a
general strike, accompanied by as many as 70 roadblocks, isolating La
Paz and El Alto, paralyzed the country. Miners, transport workers and
indigenous peasants took to the streets against the elimination of fuel
subsidies, uncontrolled inflation, and an agrarian reform threatening
indigenous territorial rights.
The strike erupted against a
government barely six months old. Rodrigo Paz Pereira, sworn in as
president in November 2025, has swiftly aligned his government with the
Trump administration in Washington. Having campaigned on what he
presented as a moderate, pro-corporate program. Once in power, he lifted
fuel subsidies, imposing in one day an 87 percent rise in gasoline
prices and a 162 percent rise in diesel.
A recently published survey lays bare the social context for these measures and the revolt from below that they sparked.
*****
Mounting poverty, the experience of the 53-day strike and its betrayal,
and the danger of military dictatorship pose before the Bolivian working
class this overriding task, which requires the construction of a
revolutionary party—a Bolivian section of the International Committee of
the Fourth International.
On June 15, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa was received at the
Pentagon by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who thanked him for being a
founding member of Donald Trump's “Shield of the Americas” coalition.
“You have been a model partner with us,” Hegseth told him.
*****
On
June 8, Monika Silva Koniuszek—who had spent months investigating the
ties between the Noboa family's banana empire and international cocaine
trafficking—was found dead on the floor of her home in Montañita, Santa
Elena, with a noose around her neck. She was 41 and the mother of two
daughters, aged four and nine.
On June 14, prosecutor Gloria
Alexandra Bravo Cedeño, whose active files included the drone attacks on
Ecuadorian fishing boats carried out under Washington's Operation
Southern Spear, was gunned down in central Manta.
Neither killing
has produced an arrest, and both expose the criminal foundations of the
regime Washington has armed, trained and proclaimed a model for the
hemisphere.
Will
Lehman, a candidate for the presidency of the United Auto Workers in
the ongoing election, was sent a death threat by a top union official
and close ally of current President Shawn Fain. Workers across
Canada have responded angrily to Jensen’s thuggish behavior and sent
statements of solidarity to the WSWS.
[Fed Chair Kevin] Warsh is not only under pressure from the bond markets but from the
other side in the form of US president Trump who, after repeatedly
denouncing his predecessor Jerome Powell for not lowering rates,
appointed Warsh in the hope his demands would be met.
In comments
on the eve of the meeting Trump continued to insist that the US should
have the lowest interest rates in the world as he backed his appointee
while switching his ire to the Fed’s governing body.
“Kevin’s
fantastic, but he’s got a board, and the board members are very
political, I would say. He wants to do the right thing. I know what he
wants to do.”
But the Fed is operating in an environment where
inflationary pressures are being driven by forces over which it has no
control. The rising price of oil and related commodities is being driven
by the war on Iran and could undergo a major increase in coming weeks
as US oil reserves, the use of which has constrained the price hikes to
some extent, continue to be run down.
The violence at Negombo Prison, which resulted in the deaths of 21
remand prisoners and 13 prison guards on July 5 and 6, has shocked the
country, exposing the brutal character of the capitalist state and the
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government
of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake.
All those killed were being
held in the prison on remand awaiting trial. Seventeen suffered gunshot
injuries, while others were beaten to death. Reports about the prison
authorities’ provocative actions that ignited the clashes have been
buried. Now prison authorities are reportedly preparing to charge some
200 prisoners with “rioting.”
Justice Minister Harshana
Nanayakkara defended the deadly shooting and beating of unarmed
prisoners, claiming that the use of what he called “minimum” force was
necessary. To deflect attention from the government, a spate of media
columns and editorials have appeared offering advice on how to address
the problems in the prison system. President Dissanayake himself has
been involved in discussions with ministers and prison authorities about
plans for “prison reforms,” supposedly to prevent future violence.
The
various fake left organizations have chimed in, not to denounce the
government and prison authorities for their brutality, but to join the
chorus calling for prison reform and how to run the jails more
efficiently.
*****
The overwhelming majority of prisoners come from the poorest layers
of society, held because they cannot afford bail or legal
representation. Around 75 percent of the prison population consists of
remand prisoners awaiting trial. In 2023, of those prisoners who had
been convicted, 67.8 percent were jailed due to their inability to pay
fines. Former Human Rights Commissioner Ambika Satkunanathan correctly
branded this as “the criminalisation of poverty.”
The prisons are
part of the capitalist state which Marxists have always characterized as
armed bodies of men created to enforce the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie over the working class and oppressed masses. The bourgeois
judicial system itself defends capitalist property relations and criminalizes poverty while leaving the crimes of the ruling class
untouched.
The working class must draw the necessary political
conclusions. As we wrote on the WSWS, “Prison massacres are not
aberrations; they are the logical expression of a capitalist state that
responds to the deepening social crisis with ever more brutal forms of
repression. The fight against prison violence and state killings cannot
be separated from the fight against the capitalist system itself.”
This
outcome, after three limited strikes and 15 months of closed-door
negotiations, is a warning of the retrograde enterprise agreements that
the trade unions are trying to impose at public universities across the
country.
More than 500 public defender workers are now on strike in New York
City and Detroit, in an expanding rebellion against poverty wages,
healthcare cuts and crushing caseloads. The strikers—attorneys, social
workers, paralegals, investigators and clerical staff—are members of the
Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA)-UAW Local 2325.
Some
230 workers at the Neighborhood Defender Service (NDS) walked out on
July 24 at offices in Harlem, New York and in Detroit. They were joined
Monday by roughly 300 workers at the Bronx Defenders, which provides
free representation to Bronx residents facing criminal, family,
immigration and housing cases. Informational pickets have also been set
up by public defenders in Houston, San Antonio and San Marcos, Texas.
NDS
management has proposed ending no-premium, no-deductible healthcare
over the life of a three-year contract while offering a 1 percent
cost-of-living adjustment against inflation running at roughly 3.5
percent—a cut in real wages every year of the agreement.
Management
has responded by pleading poverty. NDS deputy executive director
Shannon Anglero declared that funding is “tightly constrained” and that
“the cost of healthcare is not going to go down.” Bronx Defenders
Executive Director Juval O. Scott acknowledged the organization is
hemorrhaging attorneys because of inadequate pay but insisted there “was
limited funding available to us.”
These claims are an indictment
of the capitalist system itself. The Wayne County Criminal Justice
Center, where Detroit NDS workers are picketing, cost the county $502.8
million, while billionaire developer Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock company was
handed the prime downtown properties the county vacated as part of the
deal. Money for a 2,500-bed jail complex and a real estate windfall for a
billionaire is always available; money for the workers who stand
between a poor person and jail never is.
On Tuesday, Will Lehman, a
Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania and the rank-and-file
socialist candidate for UAW president in this October’s election, issued
a statement of solidarity with the strikers and a call for the walkout to be expanded across the entire legal services sector and beyond.
“I
send you my unconditional solidarity, and I call on all UAW members and
workers in every industry to give your strike active support,” Lehman
said. “I am a socialist, and I am running to abolish the apparatus that
sits on top of this union and transfer power to rank-and-file workers.”
Lehman took up management’s claims of financial constraint directly.
Anglero “may be describing her budget accurately, and that is the
point,” he said. “What is handed to you as unavoidable financial reality
is a political decision about who this society exists to serve.”
The
report found that between 2012-25 there were six avoidable maternal
deaths, 94 avoidable stillbirths and 62 neonatal deaths of babies on the
threshold of life at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.
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.
