Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Communist Party Marxist - Kenya defends counter-revolutionary Maoist strategy against Trotskyism—Part 3

This four-part series examines the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, its defence of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism. 

2. United Kingdom: Sheffield Hallam university staff to take strike action—Unite the city’s three higher education disputes!

What is unfolding across Sheffield is a concentrated expression of a broader, 15-year assault on higher education, accelerated under the Starmer Labour government.

3. United Kingdom: Vote No and reject blackmail by CWU’s Martin Walsh to enforce pro-company agreement with Kretinsky

Workers do not need better union leaders — they need independent organizations of their own, built in opposition to the bureaucracy, fighting for a socialist program against the billionaire ownership class and the capitalist state that enables it. 

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UK postal workers at Royal Mail — recently taken over by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky's EP Group — are voting on a new work agreement. The union leadership, represented by the CWU (Communication Workers Union) deputy general secretary Martin Walsh, is trying to pressure workers into voting Yes to what is effectively a management restructuring plan. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee is calling for a No vote and explaining why Walsh's arguments are not genuine negotiations — they are blackmail. 

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The agreement at the heart of this dispute — rebranded as "DM26" — requires three workers to do the work previously done by four, slashing jobs by 25% while intensifying workloads on those who remain. New workers receive a near-insulting 1.75% pay raise that leaves them close to minimum wage, without paid meal breaks. More established workers get a 3% raise — below inflation — meaning a real pay cut. The deal also ties any future cost-of-living adjustments to further "reforms," i.e., more job cuts and heavier workloads down the road. 

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The restructuring of Royal Mail is not a uniquely British story. Everywhere, the privatization of public services, the push toward gig-economy employment (Kretinsky's vision is essentially to turn postal work into Amazon-style contractor exploitation), and the role of union bureaucracies in managing — rather than resisting — this decline are common features of global capitalism in crisis. The CWU leadership's accusation that No voters are being manipulated by unnamed "political parties" with an "agenda" is the same smear used by union bureaucrats the world over against workers who fight back.

4. Global warming is heating rivers, endangering human food supplies

More than two-thirds of all farmed aquatic species (such as carp, tilapia and catfish) are freshwater species. These facilities rely heavily on river systems for water, nutrients and feed, making rivers foundational for about half of all fish consumed worldwide.

Riverine species are critical lifelines for indigenous communities and developing nations. In parts of Asia and Africa, populations rely on these species for more than half of their animal protein. They also provide vital micronutrients—like iron, zinc and omega-3 fatty acids—that are difficult to get from strictly land-based diets. 

This is not to mention the use of river water for irrigation agriculture. The availability of river water for this purpose is becoming increasingly problematic as global warming causes more frequent and persistent droughts. 

With global warming resulting from the uncontrolled emissions of greenhouse gases, global weather patterns are becoming increasingly extreme and unpredictable. 

Unless urgent and concerted efforts are made to rapidly lower greenhouse gas emissions, the loss of riverine resources will inevitably result in mass population displacements with drastic social, economic political consequences. Capitalism demonstrates clearly and on a daily basis that is incapable of mounting such an effort. Only the working class, armed with a socialist program, can avert an otherwise catastrophic future.

5. Nexteer workers: Vote NO! Prepare to walk out! The fight is ours to win!

In a statement that deserves the attention and solidarity of every worker in the auto industry and beyond, the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee urges the 1,300 workers at the Saginaw, Michigan auto-parts manufacturing plant to:

 Reject the Third Sellout, Strike Without Delay because: 

The Contract Is a Fraud

The UAW Bureaucracy Is the Enemy

Workers Have Already Disproved the "Best We Can Get" Lie 

Workers Are Not Alone — A Parts Industry Uprising Is Possible 

The Rank-and-File Must Lead

6. US warplanes fly over Caracas in provocative show of semi-colonial dominance

On Saturday morning at approximately 10:00 a.m., two enormous Boeing MV-22B Osprey military cargo planes flew provocatively low over the Venezuelan capital before landing at the U.S. Embassy. The warplanes delivered a large group of troops and Gen. Francis L. Donovan, head of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which oversees Pentagon operations across Central and South America.

While ostensibly a visit to hold talks with leaders of the US puppet regime and to conduct an emergency response drill at the Embassy compound, the show of force was aimed squarely at intimidation and demonstrating who is in control. Top generals and warplanes can land and depart as though the country were a military outpost on US soil. 

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The Saturday flyover directly revived the trauma Caracas suffered during Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3, a brutal predawn military assault openly aimed at seizing Venezuelan oil. That morning, high-rises and the city center trembled as helicopters dropped troops, the Presidential Guard was annihilated, and President Nicolás Maduro was seized with his wife Cilia Flores from his compound and flown out of the country. At least seven explosions ripped across northern Venezuela, with strikes on military infrastructure, including the Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base, Fort Tiuna, Higuerote Airport and La Guaira port, while a blackout across southern Caracas cloaked the operation. 

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Protesters connected to Chavismo and the pseudo-left demonstrated in several sectors of Caracas against the US military drill. A university professor among them declared: “We have been in a state of war from the moment they bombed us.” Another protester warned: “We are practically already under tutelage— perhaps tomorrow we will be a colony.”

In fact, the Trump administration now exercises comprehensive political, economic, judicial and military control over Venezuela. The Pentagon is now using Venezuela as a forward base overseeing the Caribbean as the Trump administration escalates preparations for a military assault against Cuba and continues Operation Southern Spear—the bombing of 59 fishing boats, killing nearly 200 people in Latin American waters since September, on baseless charges of drug trafficking.

Venezuelan oil proceeds flow directly into U.S. Treasury accounts to be administered by Washington. Military control over Venezuelan territory is openly demonstrated. Social austerity is being enforced by Wall Street firms. 

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Leon Trotsky’s analysis of the 1930s semi-colonial world contains a grave warning to workers as the Trump administration moves to recolonize the region.

In 1938, Trotsky explained that fascism in Latin America is not the expression of an aggressive domestic imperialism, as in Germany or Italy, but rather “the expression of the most servile dependence on foreign imperialism.” The ruling clique is the instrument to smash any independence of the working class that could block the extraction of profits by Wall Street. This is the logic that is being followed by the Rodriguez regime.

“The ascending national bourgeoisie cannot launch a serious struggle against imperialist domination out of fear of unleashing a mass movement that would in turn threaten their own social existence,” Trotsky wrote. Instead, the bourgeoisie, structurally incapable of independence, must suppress the proletariat in order to guarantee the “stability” demanded by its imperialist overlords.

The Chavistas and their bourgeois nationalist allies Lula da Silva in Brazil, Sheinbaum in Mexico and Petro in Colombia have now completed that arc as they accommodate to Trump. Having spent two decades dressing the management of a capitalist petro-state in the language of “anti-imperialism” and “socialism,” the Chavistas have surrendered the country to Wall Street, while already turning their riot police on workers demanding higher wages in Caracas.

The workers of Venezuela and across Latin America face not a series of local crises but a single, internationally coordinated offensive of imperialism directed from Washington and enforced by regional proxies to impose neo-colonial shackles and social misery. No bourgeois nationalist leadership or trade union bureaucracy will defend workers against this offensive—Those forces are its transmission belts for imperialist domination.

The answer to Trump’s dreams of a “Greater North America” and hemispheric hegemony is the revolutionary unity of workers across the entire Americas, including those in the United States itself, fighting to end capitalist exploitation and to establish the United Socialist States of the Americas.

7. Israel escalates rampage in Lebanon

Israeli forces struck Lebanon with more than 120 air raids on Tuesday, the sharpest single-day escalation since Israel resumed its bombing of the country in early March. The Lebanese health ministry said at least 31 people were killed and 40 wounded in attacks across the south and the Bekaa Valley.

The ongoing destruction of Lebanon takes place within the framework of the US-Israeli war on Iran launched February 28. While the US media is focused on the terms of negotiations with Iran, Israel is expanding its campaign of mass murder and annexation in Lebanon. The bombing extends the US-Israeli onslaught across the region that began in October 2023 with the genocide in Gaza.

Israeli forces killed fourteen people in the overnight bombing of Burj al-Shamali, including two children and three women. At Mashghara in the Bekaa Valley, Israeli strikes killed 11, including a woman and two children. They killed five at Kawthariyat al-Ruz and four at Habboush, with two children among the dead at each.

The Lebanese health ministry put the cumulative toll since Israel resumed its bombardment of the country on March 2 at 3,213 dead and 9,737 wounded. The World Health Organization has recorded 608 killed in Lebanon since the cease-fire that took effect April 16. 

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US President Donald Trump is moving, meanwhile, to make normalization with Israel a central war aim. In a Truth Social post over the weekend he wrote that he was “mandatorily requesting that all Countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords,” naming Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan.

The escalation in Lebanon coincides with a deepening crisis within the US political establishment over the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran. Democrats joined Republicans across the Sunday morning talk shows in attacking Trump from the right, denouncing his prospective Iran deal as insufficiently advantageous to US imperialism.

Senator Cory Booker told CNN Sunday that Trump was “being played as a fool.” “He’s got us in a situation that’s worse than it was before.” The United States, Booker told CNN, had “let go of billions of dollars” in negotiations to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. Giving Iran more money, he warned, would enable Tehran to “fuel their terrorist proxies.”

The commentary being published in the US media reflects the air of desperate crisis facing US imperialism. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times asked on Tuesday “How Much Crow Will Trump Have to Eat on Iran?” “Only two questions remain regarding the U.S. war with Iran,” Friedman wrote. “One, how big a plate of crow will President Trump have to eat to end this conflict with at least some achievements? And two, will he tell us the crow he’s eating is lobster or filet mignon?”

Bret Stephens, in a Times column Tuesday, made the case for escalating the war regardless of cost. “Heed the words of Robert Frost,” he wrote: “The best way out is always through.” Stephens called for the US to “destroy a facility of military significance to the regime pending a material Iranian concession, and make good on the threat. The next day, two targets, and so on.”

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial Tuesday titled “Iran’s ‘Skirmish’ Strategy in the Strait,” charging that Hezbollah had fired “more than 900 rockets and 1,300 drones since the April 17 Lebanon ‘cease-fire’ began” and demanding “decisive U.S. or Israeli action” to “reverse the dynamic.”

American imperialism, confronted with crises it has no answer to, can only escalate its effort to secure global hegemony through military means. Whatever agreement is made with Iran, if any, will follow the pattern of the 2025 Gaza cease-fire and the Lebanon cease-fires of November 2024 and April 2026, each of which opened the way for a deeper offensive.

8. Industrial slaughter in Washington: 1 dead, 9 missing after chemical tank implosion at paper mill

At least one worker is dead and nine remain missing after a massive chemical tank ruptured at Nippon Dynawave, a Washington paper mill with a record of safety and environmental violations. 

9. Worker killed, dozens of firefighters injured in Staten Island shipyard fire and explosion

Xiaoyuan Li, an immigrant worker, was killed and dozens of firefighters injured when fire and explosions tore through the May Ship Repair shipyard in Mariners Harbor, Staten Island. 

10. Report reveals impact of Australian school crisis on principals

An Australian Catholic University report on the well-being of school principals points to intolerable conditions.

11. Enough is Enough: Catastrophe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

“Enough is Enough!”–it’s true. But this has to be directed toward the central problem: world imperialism, which needs to be overthrown as rapidly as possible, by the international working class. The present system spells catastrophe, and not only in the DRC. 

12. Cargill locks out Colorado beef plant, as struggles of meatpacking workers intensify

The lockout followed an overwhelming rejection of the last contract offer by 85 percent. 

13. Chemical tank disaster averted in Southern California; owner GKN Aerospace is major military contractor cited for safety violations

The near-disaster comes as the Trump administration is calling for an unprecedented 50 percent increase in the annual military budget to $1.5 trillion.

14. As New York transit workers prepare to fight MTA austerity, former union president Toussaint defends no-strike affidavit

Over 40,000 New York City subway and bus workers face serious MTA austerity demands — below-inflation raises, higher insurance costs, and restrictions on overtime and sick leave — but the biggest obstacle to their struggle is not the MTA itself. It is the Transit Workers Union (TWU) bureaucracy. 

15. Measles outbreak in Bangladesh kills over 500 children

The death and suffering of children from a preventable disease is a political indictment of policies that have prioritized profits over universal public health.

16. Australia: NT laws to permit police interrogation of children without legal guardian

These laws are the latest escalation in a bipartisan offensive to essentially criminalize the poverty, chronic housing shortages and lack of secure employment that Australian capitalism has inflicted upon many working people, particularly Indigenous people.

17. Mine disaster in China: Another tragedy in the global industrial slaughterhouse

The mine explosion is another graphic example of the dangers facing miners and other workers around the world as their lives and health are subordinated to the rapacious corporate drive for profit. 

18. Students and workers in Germany demand the release of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk

For Bonn student Jonas, the case has immediate significance for Germany: “Bogdan’s struggle for the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian working class poses a threat not only from the perspective of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie but also for German imperialism, as it shows workers in this country a real way to stop the current development of war. Therefore, all workers who oppose the war against Russia should campaign for his liberation.”

19.  Help free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

 

The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

 1. Communist Party Marxist - Kenya defends counter-revolutionary Maoist strategy against Trotskyism—Part 2

This four-part series examines the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, its defense of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism. 

2. Law-and-order frenzy dominates final weeks of D.C. mayoral primary campaign

Washington D.C.‘s Democratic establishment is responding to youth gatherings by adopting Trump’s law-and-order agenda, criminalizing the impoverished children of communities its own policies have hurt.

3. Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda passes 1,000 cases, as Italy reports 2 suspected cases

With the Ebola toll past 1,000 cases, the gap between the WHO's recommendations and conditions in the eastern DRC has erupted in the torching of two treatment facilities.

4. Trump administration targets Hasan Piker, Medea Benjamin over Cuba trip

In a video posted on her social media accounts, Benjamin responded to the investigation, saying it “looks like the Trump administration” was targeting her, Piker and others for bringing “medicines and medical supplies to Cuba’s pediatric hospitals. Basically we want to help save babies. And that, according to Trump, is something that must be investigated. Because how dare we wanna help the Cuban people. How dare we love the Cuban people? And if indeed the charge is that we love Cuban people: guilty!”

She added, “I want my government to leave the Cuban people alone! Not to be strangling them by keeping oil from the island, by sanctions that are so brutal. I want them to stop threatening to invade Cuba… So please, if any government officials are watching, don’t investigate us for trying to save Cuban babies. Investigate yourselves for what you are doing to kill Cuban babies and make lives of the Cuban people miserable.”

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The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party have well-established political differences with Piker’s reformist politics and his attempts to shepherd workers and youth into the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street and war no less than their “Republican colleagues.” 

But we unequivocally oppose the Trump administration’s McCarthyite investigation into him, Benjamin and anyone else targeted by the administration for traveling to, and providing aid to, the Cuban people.

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The bipartisan silence over the investigation underscores the central fact: The attack on Piker, Benjamin and others is part of a broader campaign to criminalize opposition to US imperialist policy, from the blockade of Cuba to the genocide in Gaza and the expanding wars in the Middle East.

The defense of those targeted cannot be left to the Democratic Party, which has helped construct the machinery of repression now being deployed by Trump. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class in defense of democratic rights and against war, dictatorship and the capitalist system that produces them.

5. US launches missile strikes on Iran in advance of talks in Qatar

The US military launched new strikes on southern Iran late Monday as Iranian officials arrived in Doha for negotiations involving Qatari intermediaries acting under the direction of the Trump administration.

The attacks were described by US Central Command (CENTCOM) as “defensive” to “protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.” The US strikes reportedly targeted missile launch sites and mine-laying boats in the Strait of Hormuz. 

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The new strikes were announced by CENTCOM spokesman Hawkins, who said they were defensive, although he did not provide details or evidence of any alleged Iranian threats. Hawkins said, “US Central Command continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire.” 

The strikes were no doubt timed with the arrival of Iranian negotiators in Doha. Multiple reports said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser were part of the Iranian delegation.

The reports said they were there for talks with Qatari officials tied to a potential US-Iran deal and the unfreezing of Iranian assets and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

On Monday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that negotiations were “proceeding nicely,” but then added a threat: “It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all — Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before — And nobody wants that!”

This sequence follows a repeated pattern used by the Trump White House to carry out illegal military aggression while publicly talking about negotiations.

The justifications for the strikes also expose the claims by Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and other officials that the 38-day US-Israeli air campaign had degraded or destroyed Iran’s military power. How can Iran threaten US forces in the region if, as Hegseth has repeatedly asserted, Iran’s missile capability has been rapidly crushed, “functionally defeated” and “destroyed”?

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Qatar has been mediating the current round of talks with Tehran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief and a halt to hostilities. The talks have been presented by the White House as moving toward an agreement.

The Trump administration faces both a military and political crisis over its inability to achieve its goal of regime change when it launched the war on February 28 and, with the assistance of Israel, killed the entire political leadership of Iran. After first claiming the war would be over within days, Trump later shifted to saying it would end “pretty quickly” in four-to-six weeks. None of this has come to pass.

In a massive miscalculation, the failure of the US-Israeli war to break Iranian resistance led to the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. The consequences for the world economy from the shutdown are severe since roughly one-fifth of global oil flows through the strait.

The renewed bombing in southern Iran shows that the Trump administration’s propaganda about negotiations is inseparable from the use of military violence. Washington continues to demand surrender while it prepares the next stage of a region-wide imperialist war.

6. The international significance of Erdoğan’s preemptive coup against the CHP in Türkiye

The regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye is staging a preemptive political coup before the eyes of the entire world. Erdoğan first removed the elected leadership of the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—the main parliamentary opposition party and leading party in the polls—through a politically motivated court ruling, then ordered riot police to forcibly seize the party’s headquarters.

What is unfolding in Türkiye is not a purely national event but a manifestation of an international collapse of democratic forms of rule rooted in the deepening crisis of the capitalist system. US President Donald Trump, having lost the November 2020 elections, mounted a failed coup on January 6, 2021, seeking to remain in power illegally. Erdoğan, for his part, is attempting to forestall a likely defeat in the next elections by neutralizing his principal rival.

Workers and youth must oppose this preemptive coup—which threatens fundamental democratic rights and whose target is ultimately the working class.

The Turkish working class is entering this struggle in a mood of explosive opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US war against Iran. In the first days of the war against Iran, workers at the Polyak mine in İzmir tore down a gendarmerie barricade and seized control of the mine. Last month, Turkish politics was dominated by the struggle of Doruk Mining workers in Ankara.

Though polls show that more than 90 percent of the Turkish population opposes the war against Iran and the presence of US military bases in Türkiye, Erdoğan has effectively aligned himself with the Trump administration’s aggression in the Middle East and continues to facilitate the flow of oil from Azerbaijan to Israel. Across the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of the population is seething with anger at their ruling elites’ collaboration with US imperialism and Israeli Zionism.

Erdoğan and his allies are working to suppress the emergence within the Turkish, Middle Eastern and international working class—already battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis—of a movement against genocide and imperialist war.

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Erdoğan and his allies are working to suppress the emergence within the Turkish, Middle Eastern and international working class—already battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis—of a movement against genocide and imperialist war.

The repression directed at the CHP has a historically unprecedented character. The CHP is not a Kurdish political movement that has been violently suppressed throughout the history of the Republic, nor is it a left-wing party. It is the party of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the Turkish Republic in 1923. The judicial coup that has ousted its leadership under Özgür Özel and restored Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu—who has assumed the role of “His Majesty’s loyal opposition”—amounts to a declaration that, amid explosive class and international tensions, even the mildest political opposition will not be tolerated.  

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It is no coincidence that Erdoğan held phone calls with Trump both before İmamoğlu’s arrest and before the latest judicial operation against the CHP. He does not expect anything more than token statements from his European allies, who have declared war on the working class’s living conditions to finance military spending in their own countries and attacked democratic rights.

Özel’s response to Erdoğan’s unlawful operation to remove him as CHP leader underscores that democratic rights cannot be defended under the leadership of a bourgeois party like the CHP. As the leader of a party bound by a thousand threads to imperialism and finance capital, Özel swiftly capitulated to the preemptive coup despite his initial rhetoric of “resistance.” He talked to Kılıçdaroğlu—after first refusing to do so—then accepted the court ruling he had vowed to reject and vacated the party headquarters he had pledged never to leave. He has now called for a new CHP party congress and new elections. 

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The ruling elites in Türkiye and across the Middle East sit atop a social powder keg. As Türkiye ranks among the most unequal societies in Europe, the polarization between the working class and the bourgeoisie has reached unprecedented dimensions. The Erdoğan government’s policies, enriching a financial oligarchy while driving workers into destitution, only intensify class tensions and the threat of social revolution. The domination of the capitalist oligarchy over economic and social life, under conditions of expanding global war, is incompatible with democracy even in its most limited form.

The Erdoğan regime’s operation against the CHP further exposes as a brazen fraud the claim—promoted by the DEM Party, the CHP and pseudo-left tendencies—that the very same government can resolve the Kurdish question through “peace and democratization.”

As Leon Trotsky explained in his theory of Permanent Revolution, in countries of belated capitalist development, no faction of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist epoch is capable of establishing a democratic regime or establishing independence from imperialism. The task of building a regime that stops imperialist wars and secures the basic democratic rights of the Kurdish people and all other oppressed masses in Türkiye and across the region falls to the working class. This means the struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. 

7. 16,000 Orange County, California residents still displaced due to toxic emergency at global defense contractor GKN Aerospace

The incident lays bare, in the starkest terms, the subordination of working class communities to the profit demands of global military-industrial corporations. GKN Aerospace, headquartered in Birmingham, UK and owned by the investment firm Melrose Industries PLC, is one of the world’s largest aerospace and defense suppliers, generating annual revenues of £3.4 billion ($4.6 billion). It operates in 12 countries with more than 16,000 employees across 30 sites worldwide. In Garden Grove, it sits directly adjacent to residential neighborhoods, a sports complex and schools. It has now emerged that the facility has been cited repeatedly for safety and environmental violations for years. 

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Jose, a self-employed renter who has lived for 12 years near the GKN facility, said: “Since we’ve been living here, we never imagined that this company had such dangerous chemicals. It’s surrounded by residents living here for so many years who probably never thought we were breathing contaminants on a daily basis, day and night.”

He described the anxiety of not knowing when residents will be allowed to return and the real fear about what return will mean. “Many people won’t be feeling secure going back home knowing that company still operates in that same location,” he said.

Jose also pointed to the economic devastation facing homeowners in the area. “Who knows about your own property value? There are many years of work going down, their savings and home value, because of that situation.” The surrounding community, he noted, is predominantly working class, drawn from Asian, Latino and black families, many of them immigrants. 

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On Sunday, GKN Aerospace issued a formal apology, expressing “deep regret” for the disruption to residents’ lives. The statement pledged cooperation with authorities and committed to “the safe resolution of this incident.” It offered no explanation for how the situation was allowed to develop, no acknowledgment of its prior regulatory record and no concrete commitments to affected residents beyond the immediate crisis response.

Absent from the official response has been any serious reckoning with the fundamental question: Why is a multinational defense manufacturer storing thousands of gallons of volatile, explosive chemicals in a 34,000-gallon tank directly adjacent to a densely populated working class neighborhood in one of the most expensive and overcrowded regions of the United States? Why have years of regulatory citations and settlements not produced safe storage conditions? And who, if not the workers, renters, disabled, elderly and children now sleeping in cars and evacuation shelters, bears the cost of corporate cost-cutting?

8. Japan and the Philippines to deepen military collaboration against China

Under the cover of collaboration and so-called “collective self-defense,” Tokyo is building military networks in the Indo-Pacific through agreements with nations like the Philippines. 

9. Vote No to the Australian Education Union/Labor sell-out deal! Build independent rank-and-file committees in every school!

The proposed AEU agreement in the state of Victoria amounts to a further real pay cut, does nothing to address crushing workloads or class sizes and strips educators of the right to strike until 2030. 

10. New York subway and bus workers enter second week without contract, as MTA demands austerity

The claim that there is “no money” to meet transit workers’ demands is absurd in New York City, the center of the global economy and the richest city in the world. In reality, trillions are hoarded by Wall Street firms. The MTA’s position amounts to a refusal to accept even the most microscopic concessions to workers, indicating that the contract struggle is a fight of the working class against inequality and the power of the financial oligarchy.

11. The Nexteer workers’ revolt and the case for rank-and-file committees throughout the auto parts industry

The Nexteer rebellion is the concentrated expression of decades of betrayal by the UAW bureaucracy, breaking to the surface across the entire auto parts sector. 

12. Beef Season 2: “The people in charge have made it impossible for us”

Series creator, co-director and co-writer Lee Sung Jin makes the pressures of capitalism and class society a persistent theme and source of crises in the series.

13. Workers Struggles: The Americas

Argentina:

Mass rally to support Bolivian workers

Brazil:

Workers demand end to six-day workweek

Canada:

Nova Scotia long-term care workers’ strike continues to expand

Ecuador:

Health workers and chronic patients protest budget cuts

Mexico:

Tens of thousands of educators protest on Teachers’ Day

Puerto Rico:

Students continue protests at University of Puerto Rico

United States:

Cargill locks out Colorado meatpackers

 

Jefferson Health to close four pediatric facilities in Philadelphia

 

Workers rally to demand higher wages at California news station KEYT

 

 14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

 

The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today: 

1. This week in history: May 25-31

• 25 years ago:

 US government convicts four in Africa embassy bombings   

• 50 years ago:

Syrian forces intervene in Lebanon

• 75 years ago:

  Britain appeals to world court to reverse Iranian oil nationalization

• 100 years ago:

Ukrainian rightist leader assassinated in Paris

2. Communist Party Marxist - Kenya defends counter-revolutionary Maoist strategy against Trotskyism—Part 1

Part one of a four-part series examining the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, this article exposes the party’s defense of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism.

3. Another gruesome week on America’s death row: two executions, another halted amid bungled procedure

The three cases, unfolding within 24 hours, share a disturbing set of commonalities: fundamentally unfair sentencing proceedings, defendants whose severe mental illness, unaddressed childhood trauma and neurological damage went largely unaddressed at trial, and execution protocols the subject of legal challenge.

4. Texas cuts education jobs, shutters dozens of schools

Districts face budget deficits amid declining enrollment, budget crises, inflation and war.

5. West Lafayette, Indiana government fast-tracks SK Hynix memory chip factory construction

The city and county governments in West Lafayette, Indiana have approved road construction projects and issued building permits for SK Hynix to proceed with plans to build a massive microchip factory on a Purdue University site, against ongoing community opposition including a pending lawsuit filed by residents.

6. Virginia Governor Spanberger vetoes collective bargaining and immigrant protection bills

The veto of these two bills confirms—for the thousandth and first time—this fundamental reality of American politics: the Democratic party is a capitalist party charged with diffusing and disorienting popular hostility to the profit system. 

7. Jailed 37 days for a Charlie Kirk meme: Tennessee man’s settlement exposes the fraud of Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund

The Anti-Weaponization Fund is not an anomaly. The language of rights, free speech, due process and protection from state persecution is being selectively deployed in the service of the ruling class which is suppressing its opponents, and now turning to openly authoritarian methods. 

Tennessee’s Charlie Kirk Act, now awaiting the governor’s signature, makes that principle permanent and institutional. Recently passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, the law forbids public universities from disinviting speakers in response to threatened protests, restricts protesters from disrupting invited speakers, and mandates adoption of “institutional neutrality” policies modeled on the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report which was written at the height of Vietnam-era campus unrest.

The principle has been a useful tool for administrators ever since. It was most recently deployed against students protesting the Gaza genocide, when chancellors across the country invoked institutional neutrality to justify refusing to take any position on the mass killing of civilians while simultaneously calling police on the students demanding they do so.

The Charlie Kirk Act also creates litigation mechanisms that right-wing organizations can use to sue universities into preemptive compliance. What Weems did to Bushart with a warrant, the Charlie Kirk Act does to Tennessee’s campuses with a lawsuit. 

The same legislature’s Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act requires public universities to teach the positive influence of Judeo-Christian religion on American history. Taken together, these laws expose “institutional neutrality” for what it has always been: a class principle, invoked against the opponents of the ruling class and discarded when the ruling class advances its own politics. 

Bushart’s settlement was won despite this apparatus, not because of any principle it embodies. The liberal framing, “the system works,” “free speech prevailed” must be rejected. Bushart fought for months through a civil rights organization and a federal lawsuit to vindicate rights that were revoked by the deliberate exercise of state power on the personal authority of a sheriff who already knew, before signing the warrant, that no crime had been committed. That is not a functioning democracy. It is a political system in which every institution is compromised, one that can only be challenged through the independent political mobilization of the working class against the capitalist oligarchy that controls it.

8. AI-fueled Wall Street frenzy raises concerns

Either the US stock market has entered a kind of financial heaven where earthly economic laws no longer apply, or the conditions are being created for a crash and a consequent financial crisis of major proportions.

The market boosters adhere to the former, basing themselves on the enormous changes being wrought by AI and its tremendous potential for lifting the productivity of labour. Others, however, are sounding increasingly loud warnings.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal dismissed the latter with remarks typical of many.

Commenting on the initial public offering (IPO) of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and those to come shortly of OpenAI and Anthropic, it said that “amid the elegies [highlighting growing problems] about American capitalism, the latest mini-IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of US markets that no other country can match.”

The IPO for SpaceX, founded in 2002 for space exploration but which has now extended into broadband, mobile satellite service and data centres for AI, was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last Wednesday. It is said to be the largest in history.

Very few of the company’s shares will be available to public investors; most will initially be in the hands of Musk. But under new rules recently introduced by the NASDAQ exchange, it will be included in indexes which are tracked by Exchange Traded Funds, meaning that billions of dollars will flood into the market to buy its shares.

According to estimates by JP Morgan, if 50 percent of the company’s shares are eventually floated, the market valuation will reach $2 trillion.

The IPO boom comes on top of a surge on Wall Street over the last two months. Since April and the announcement of a “ceasefire” in the war on Iran, it has powered ahead, with the S&P 500 index rising by 12 percent. 

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It is calculated that just five tech stocks—Alphabet (Google), Nvidia, Amazon, Broadcom and Apple—have accounted for more than 50 percent of the recent gains in the S&P index. At the start of the year the prevailing sentiment was that there would be a broadening of market gains.

According to Bloomberg, the AI chipmaker, Nvidia, which has been likened to the sun at the center of an AI planetary system, has been responsible for nearly a fifth of the rise in the S&P since the start of the year and 15 percent of the $32 trillion rise in the market capitalization of the index since 2023.

One of the key features in the rise of Nvidia and its role in powering the market is the degree of circularity involved. The company either invests in or lends money to companies which then buy its chips for AI development. Over the past 16 months Nvidia has committed some $90 billion in investments and partnerships with companies in such deals. 

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And much of this boom is not based on profits made by the AI firms today but the expectation that the investments, amounting to hundreds of billions even trillions of dollars, will bring massive returns in the future. The three major firms at the center of the new round of frenzied activity are all making losses. 

Anthropic has said it expects to turn a profit in the second quarter of this year. OpenAI has said it expects to burn through $600 billion cash before becoming profitable in 2030. SpaceX, whose operations are “something of a financial mystery” in the words of the New York Times, boosted its revenue by 33 percent in 2025 to $18.7 billion. But it lost $4.9 billion in 2025 and in the first quarter of this year recorded a $4.3 billion loss.

The contrast between the Wall Street surge and developments in the economy and the global financial system—oil prices set to rise further, yields on bonds rising to their highest levels in nearly two decades and the prospect that central banks are moving to raise rates—has prompted warnings that some sort of “correction” is bound to come, with the question being how far it might go. 

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Amid warnings by investors that 80 percent of all jobs could be done by AI within years, the initial numbers are in. In the first four months of this year American employers announced more than 300,000 job cuts with technology and AI cited as the main reason.

The argument is sometimes advanced that, as in the past, while technological developments destroy jobs, they will also create new ones, and that this will be the case with AI. What this argument ignores is that those “new” jobs will likely be able to be done by AI itself.

There is no question that AI is a massive development in the productivity of labour and lays the basis for a tremendous advancement for humankind. But for that to take place it must be freed from the destructive grip of the capitalist profit system through the taking of power by the working class and the reorganization of the economy on new, socialist, foundations.

The frenzied boom on Wall Street and the growing indications of its direction is a warning that the political struggle by the working class to achieve this task is not something for the distant future but has become an urgent necessity.

9. New Zealand budget attacks workers and students, boosts the military

Ahead of the release of the budget on Thursday, the government has announced an increase to student fees, nearly 9,000 public sector redundancies and cuts to welfare payments. 

10. Rising unemployment in Australia points to Iran war’s deepening impact

These results provide an indication of the worsening price being paid by working-class households, and especially young people, for the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran.

11. Trump administration moves to force green card applicants out of the US

The May 21 policy memorandum from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) declares that adjustment of status, the process by which eligible immigrants already in the US obtain lawful permanent residence without leaving the country, is not a right but an “extraordinary” form of discretionary relief granted as a matter of “administrative grace.” USCIS announced the policy May 22, stating that the government would grant adjustment of status only in “extraordinary circumstances.”

For decades, adjustment of status has allowed workers, students, refugees, asylum seekers and spouses of US citizens to receive green cards while remaining in the country. The new policy threatens to force applicants to return to countries they may not have lived in for years, or where they may face poverty, repression, war or political persecution, in order to attend interviews at US consulates.

The consequences could be catastrophic. Applicants who depart the US after overstaying a visa can trigger either a three-year or a 10-year ban on reentry. Others may be unable to obtain an appointment at all because US consular services are suspended, limited or overwhelmed in their country. In some cases, immigrants could be forced to leave spouses, children, jobs and schools in the US for months or years, with no guarantee of return.  

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Doug Rand, a former senior USCIS official under the Biden administration, told CBS News that the changes could affect hundreds of thousands of cases, since roughly half a million people get green cards each year through adjustment of status. He warned that immigrant spouses of US citizens who are in the country on student and other temporary visas would likely be among those most affected. “The primary impact of this appears to be to make it difficult or impossible for very large numbers of US citizens to get on with their lives with the people they’ve chosen to marry who came here legally,” Rand said. He added that many could be stranded abroad, citing Iran, Russia and “114 different countries” where, if applicants return to seek permanent residency, “the Trump administration will not let you in.”

The administration’s claim that immigrants must return to their “home countries” is therefore a trap. For many, the country they are being told to return to is one from which they fled, where the US provides limited or no visa services, or whose nationals are now barred or restricted from entering the United States. 

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The attack is aimed not only at immigrants but at their families, including US citizen spouses and children. Spouses of US citizens could be ordered to leave the country for consular processing and then be trapped abroad by delays, travel bans, visa freezes or reentry bars. Workers who entered legally and followed the rules could be forced to abandon their jobs. Students could be driven out of universities. Refugees, trafficking survivors and abused children could be compelled to return to countries where they face danger.

This is not a policy directed at “public safety.” It is a direct assault on the right of workers to live, work, study and form families across borders. The administration is seeking to transform every immigration benefit into a revocable privilege, granted or withheld at the discretion of the executive branch. 

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The democratic rights of immigrants are inseparable from the democratic rights of the working class as a whole. A government that can force a worker’s spouse to leave the country, deport a student for opposing genocide, or prosecute a man for successfully challenging his illegal removal will use the same methods against every section of the working class that comes into struggle.

These policies must be opposed by workers everywhere. The right to live, labor, study and love across borders is a basic democratic and social right. Its defense requires the independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalist nation-state system, which divides workers by citizenship, nationality and immigration status while granting capital unrestricted freedom to exploit labor across the globe.

12. Chemical disaster at Garden Grove, California aerospace plant displaces 50,000 people

Decades of regulatory negligence in the Democratic Party-dominated state turned a preventable chemical hazard into a crisis threatening thousands of lives. 

13. Democrats join Republicans to attack Trump over Iran negotiations

The announcement Saturday by the Trump administration that it had “largely” reached an agreement with Iran has drawn denunciations from broad factions of the US political establishment, with Democrats joining Republicans to attack the proposed agreement as insufficiently advantageous to US imperialism.

On Truth Social Saturday, Trump said “an agreement has largely been negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He said he had spoken with Arab leaders and the heads of Pakistan and Turkey but offered no details.

Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, told CNN Sunday that Trump was “being played as a fool.” “He’s got us in a situation that’s worse than it was before,” Booker said, “with a more extreme regime.”

The United States, Booker told CNN, had “let go of billions of dollars” in negotiations to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. Giving Iran more money, he warned, would enable Tehran to “fuel their terrorist proxies.”

Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, told CBS “Face the Nation” Sunday that the agreement was a “blunder.” “It sounds like we will go back to opening the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, was open before the war started,” Van Hollen said.

“It looks like Iran will retain more control over those straits. We also know Iran has an even more hard-line regime in place now, and we’re talking about releasing some of Iran’s frozen assets.”

Their attacks echoed talking points already laid down by Republicans and the far-right press. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial Sunday headlined, “Will Trump Bail Out Iran’s Regime?”, calling the emerging deal a “strategic setback” that ends US pressure “before dismantling the nuclear program.” 

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The war Trump launched February 28 has killed thousands of Iranians, decimated Lebanon and pushed gasoline prices to a four-year high.

On Sunday Trump partly walked the announcement back, writing that he had told his representatives “not to rush into a deal” and that the US naval blockade of Iran would “remain in full force and effect until an agreement is reached, certified, and signed.”

The New York Times reported Sunday that the framework under discussion would extend the cease-fire that took effect April 8 by 60 days, gradually reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift the US naval blockade. The Times wrote that Iran would pledge “in principle” to dispose of its highly enriched uranium, though the mechanism remained unsettled.

Iran holds roughly 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade material, enough by US estimates for a dozen bombs if further refined. The Times also reported Sunday that three senior Iranian officials had disclosed that the deal would halt fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon, and release $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets.

The Trump administration confronts a deepening crisis over its failure to achieve its aims in the Iran war. It had hoped that murdering Iran’s leaders would trigger rapid regime change. 

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Meanwhile Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon continues. On Sunday Israel ordered residents of at least 10 Lebanese villages to evacuate ahead of further air strikes.

In al-Duwayr, Israel bombed a building around 10:20 p.m. and struck the same location 30 minutes later, killing one person and wounding eight. At Arab Salim, two more were killed and 10 wounded, six of them paramedics, the Lebanese health ministry said Sunday.

Since Israel renewed its onslaught on Lebanon March 2, the ministry has counted 3,151 dead and 9,571 wounded from Israeli air strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Trump that his government will not compromise on its “freedom to act,” including in Lebanon.

The economic toll of the war is mounting. Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst told a House Appropriations panel last Tuesday that direct US costs had reached $29 billion.

14. United States: Gerrymandering in the South: The working class and the defense of democratic rights

Across the South, Republican state legislatures are redrawing congressional district lines to eliminate seats held by black Democrats for more than three decades. Legitimized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais and accelerating in Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama and other states, this gerrymandering offensive is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, of which the assault on black voters in the South is one element.

The immediate mechanism is the dilution of black votes in majority-minority districts, which are being broken up and folded into majority-white districts gerrymandered for Republican advantage.

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The current gerrymandering campaign, however, must be understood within the broader crisis of American democracy and, in particular, Trump’s effort to establish a presidential dictatorship. Redistricting is being combined with proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID schemes, attacks on mail-in voting such as the Save America Act, threats to have federal agencies usurp the role of local authorities in the administration of elections, and preparations for the use of armed federal agents and even the military at the polls, under the pretext of combating fraud or disorder.

The attempt to eliminate districts with significant black majorities therefore has a dual character. It draws directly on the long history of black disenfranchisement in the South, from Jim Crow to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. But it is not merely an attack on black voters. It is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, directed especially against urban, poor, immigrant, minority and young people whose votes stand in the way of the fascistic Republican Party and Trump’s authoritarian project.

The Callais decision is itself the culmination of a decades-long assault on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most significant legislative product of the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This legislation put teeth in the largely unenforced 15th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, which guaranteed the right of the freed slaves to vote.

Under the Jim Crow system of segregation in the South, black voters were almost entirely disenfranchised, partly through legal restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests, partly through straight-out terrorism, as blacks who sought to register and vote were routinely subjected to violence and intimidation by local police and the Ku Klux Klan. The South was effectively a one-party state, dominated by the Democrats, who had been the party of the slave owners and remained the party of the wealthy aristocracy that controlled the South.

The Voting Rights Act provided for federal oversight of elections in those parts of the United States with a history of voter suppression, including not only the segregated South, but also Arizona and Alaska, for discrimination against Hispanic, Native American and Alaska Native voters, and scattered counties in many other states.

Black voter registration and turnout skyrocketed across the South, but initially led to the election of only a handful of African Americans to Congress. The vast majority of African Americans now vote for the Democratic Party, crediting it for the reforms of the civil rights era. Racist Democratic politicians in the South shifted en masse to the Republican Party, which made increasing gains in the region.

After the 1990 census, however, black Democratic leaders reached an agreement with the Republican Party to create more than a dozen new majority-minority districts in the region. These would provide safe seats for black Democratic politicians, and in 1992 the number of black representatives from the South jumped to 20. 

At the same time, by concentrating large numbers of minority voters in a small number of seats, the Republican Party expected to gain the vast majority of Southern congressional seats through race-based appeals to white voters. This cynical deal—spearheaded by Republican strategist Lee Atwater and Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia—was the culmination of what Richard Nixon had dubbed the “Southern strategy.” It contributed significantly to the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections.

In the three decades since, the Republican Party cemented political control of the Southern states, with the sole exception of Virginia. Side by side with the consolidation of Republican political power in the South, the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court has steadily dismantled the Voting Rights Act, not overturning it explicitly but gutting the enforcement powers through which the federal government and civil rights groups could take action against blatantly discriminatory actions.

The Callais decision completes the process, as the minority dissent written by Justice Elena Kagan argued, of rendering the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.”

The Democratic Party’s response to the mounting threats to democratic rights combines reactionary politics and impotent theatrics. There has been much howling about Jim Crow 2.0, but no action proposed beyond filing lawsuits, staging protests, and—inevitably—voting for the Democrats in the midterm elections in November … if they even take place.

The Democrats have presented the redistricting campaign entirely in racial terms. They use minority districts as electoral props, while they have presided over austerity, police violence, inequality, war and the decay of the cities where much of their minority electorate lives. They have also initiated their own redistricting efforts, particularly in California and Virginia, to create more Democrat-controlled seats. Both parties look upon the great majority of the population as an object of manipulation.

here is no significant constituency for the defense of democratic rights within any section of the American ruling class. The Republican Party has been transformed into the political instrument of a fascist would-be dictator. The Democratic Party blocks any serious struggle against mounting authoritarianism, because it fears a movement from below from the working masses, far more than it does the actions of Trump.

The defense of democratic rights now falls to the working class. It must not only defend voting rights but fight against the entire anti-democratic framework of American elections: the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, ballot access laws that exclude independent and socialist candidates, the domination of money over elections, the monopolization of the media and political power by the corporate elite. 

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The defense of democratic rights is a central focus of the struggle for socialism. Democratic rights are both a necessity for working class politics within capitalism, and the indispensable basis for the future socialist reorganization of society, which will put working people, not a handful of financial aristocrats, in control. 

15. Turkish police storm CHP headquarters, as court ousts elected party leadership

On Sunday, police acting on the orders of the Ankara Governorship stormed the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) using pepper spray, forcibly removing the party’s elected leader Özgür Özel and his supporters, including deputies, from the building.

This unlawful police operation followed a politically motivated judicial ruling issued under pressure from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. On Thursday, May 21, the Ankara Regional Court of Appeals declared the party’s 2023 congress “absolutely null and void” on charges of “fraud,” removing Özel and all party organs from their positions and reinstating former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu by court order.

This ruling violated the authority of the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK), which is constitutionally responsible for overseeing and approving political party congresses. The CHP’s appeals to both the court and the YSK were immediately rejected. After Kılıçdaroğlu’s lawyer applied to the Ankara Police Headquarters demanding that the party’s central building be handed over to them, the Ankara Governorship ordered police to move in, citing the need to “enforce the court ruling.”

The political nature of the court decision is also evident in its timing. It was issued just before the start of a nine-day Eid al-Adha holiday beginning on Friday, a move clearly intended to minimize mass protests. One day before the ruling, Kılıçdaroğlu posted a video on his social media account implying he would return to the party leadership, as if he had been forewarned of the impending court ruling.

The situation that has emerged from this unlawful ruling and police operation is clear. The Erdoğan government’s interference with the elected leadership of the CHP—a party that came first in the March 2024 local elections and is currently leading in polls—signals that even the limited constitutional multi-party system in NATO member Türkiye may be coming to an end. The constitutional and legal norms upon which the legitimacy of the Erdoğan government rests are being violated one after another. Özel’s response to what is an existential assault on his party, and perhaps on himself personally, however, is constrained by the limits of the CHP’s bourgeois character.

16.  Defend Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk! Please add your name to our petition! 

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.