Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: June 1-7
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
US Supreme Court upholds anti-democratic Smith Act in Dennis v United States
100 years ago:
2. The reality of US-Israel relations—Part One
Reducing the origins of the war to the manoeuvres of the Israel lobby or the decisions of Israel’s government sidelines the historical, geopolitical, socio‑economic and class dynamics that have shaped the conflict. It ignores the US National Security Strategy of 2025, written by Trump’s own national security apparatus, that stated quite categorically, “America will always have core interests in ensuring that Gulf energy supplies do not fall into the hands of an outright enemy, and that the Strait of Hormuz remain open.”
It detaches the war from its historical roots in the long strategic drive of American capitalism to dominate the Persian Gulf, from its connection to the broader US confrontation with Russia and China, and from the objective class interests of the American financial oligarchy. It abandons imperialism as an analytical framework and leads to the conclusion that the solution is to remove Israel’s malign influence and replace it with a “good” foreign policy that defends genuine American interests. All of which is left unstated.
Applied to the US–Israel war on Iran, commentators who focus narrowly on Israel’s influence overlook the fact that the war forms a third front in an emerging global confrontation that includes the war in Ukraine, the US seizure of President Maduro in Venezuela and its blockade of Cuba—theaters that lie outside Israel’s strategic priorities. And they have nothing to say about US preparations for war against its major rival, China.
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Marxists, including the Bolsheviks, had consistently opposed Zionism as a reactionary nationalist ideology that divided the Jewish and Arab working class, directed the Jewish workers away from the socialist struggle and toward alliance with imperialism, and could only be realized through the colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people. The Palestine Communist Party in the 1920s had fought for the unity of Jewish and Arab workers against Zionism and British imperialism—until the Stalinization of that party destroyed it from within, eventually splitting it along ethnic lines before the end of World War II.
In his writings in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky described the Zionist project as utopian because it promised a national solution to a problem rooted in global capitalism, and reactionary because it diverted Jewish workers from the international class struggle into a nationalist project aligned with imperialism.
In his interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in Coyoacán, Mexico in December 1937, Trotsky argued that a Jewish state in Palestine would be established only through the support of imperialist powers. He warned that the Zionist project would lead to “bloody clashes” and that the Jewish population would be “in a permanent state of siege”. Zionism offered no real solution to antisemitism. He insisted that Zionism could only be realized through colonial methods and imperialist patronage, and that the salvation of the Jewish people was “bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.”
In 1947, the Fourth International published “Against the Stream”, opposing the establishment of the state of Israel, as its response to the UN proposal for the partition of Palestine.
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Britain became the Zionist movement’s first major sponsor during World War I, fought in no small part for control of the Middle East and its oil. Once the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of Germany, Britain moved to dismantle it. In doing so, it issued a series of mutually contradictory commitments: promising Arab independence to secure a revolt against Ottoman rule; secretly agreeing with France to divide the region into spheres of control; and designating Palestine for “international administration” while ensuring Britain held the strongest position on the ground.
The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, issued just as British forces advanced into Palestine, gave a deliberately vague promise of a “national home for the Jewish people”. This reflected Britain’s determination to secure Palestine against French influence and to use a loyal settler population as an instrument of imperial control. Zionism also appealed to British officials as a counterweight to Bolshevism. Winston Churchill, then Minister of Munitions, framed the issue as a struggle “for the soul of the Jewish people.”
US President Woodrow Wilson endorsed the Balfour Declaration and later supported the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922), which formalized Britain’s control. The Mandate incorporated Balfour’s terms and recognized the Jewish Agency as the official representative of the Jewish community, tasked with cooperating with the administration in building the “national home.” France received Syria and Lebanon, completing the Anglo‑French partition of the western Ottoman provinces.
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By the early 1920s, Britain had created the political framework for a Zionist‑colonial project it believed would stabilise its rule in Palestine and secure its strategic position. The Mandate’s legal structure, its recognition of the Jewish Agency, and its territorial engineering all laid the foundations for Zionist state‑building under British protection.
For the two decades after World War I, Britain and the Mandate authorities fostered the growth of the Zionist movement. Britain facilitated large‑scale Jewish immigration—by 1936 Jews made up roughly 30 percent of the population—and allowed the Jewish Agency to function as a proto‑state while preventing the emergence of comparable Palestinian institutions. British legal frameworks enabled Zionist land purchase and institutional consolidation.
By the mid‑1930s, Jewish capital in Palestine exceeded that of the larger Arab population. Jews in Palestine built a separate economy, financed by European Jewish capital, refugees from Nazi Germany, and philanthropic networks in the US. They developed banks, cooperatives, development funds, industry, services, and urban centers—most notably Tel Aviv.
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By contrast, the Palestinian economy remained predominantly agrarian. With limited access to international capital and wealth concentrated among landed elites, there was little reinvestment in industry. Zionist institutions, backed by British policy, were able to purchase land from absentee landlords, leading to the displacement of peasants and the eviction of entire villages.
These economic inequalities, combined with accelerating Jewish immigration, triggered the Arab General Strike and Revolt of 1936–39 against British rule. Britain crushed the uprising with extreme brutality—destroying homes and crops, imprisoning and exiling leaders, and fragmenting the Palestinian national movement. This decapitation of the Palestinian leadership was a decisive factor enabling the later establishment of the Zionist state and the 1948 displacement of Palestinians.
As World War II approached, Britain—seeking Arab support—distanced itself from Zionism. A 1939 White Paper reversed its earlier policies: it capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years, restricted land sales, and rejected partition in favour of an independent Palestine within ten years with shared Arab–Jewish governance. Britain enforced these limits during the war, treating further Jewish immigration as “illegal” and detaining refugees in Cyprus.
Zionist leaders rejected the White Paper and came into increasing conflict with British imperialism over immigration restrictions and the terms of any future settlement. The Irgun, the armed faction of the right-wing Revisionist tendency, launched terrorist attacks to force a British withdrawal and press for a Jewish state across all of Mandate Palestine. It was at this point that David Ben‑Gurion and other mainstream Labour Zionists shifted their strategy decisively toward US imperialism, formalized at the 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York that set the stage for the decisive US role in 1947–48.
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By the end of World War II, Britain could no longer contain the conflict in Palestine. Exhausted by war, financially bankrupt, and facing anti-colonial revolts across its empire, it was being replaced by the US as the dominant imperialist power in the Middle East. Britain’s proposal for a bi‑national state was rejected by both Arabs and Jews, and London referred the issue to the United Nations, expecting to regain control through an international trusteeship.
Washington saw an opportunity to reshape the region in line with its own interests. By 1947, the wartime alliance between the imperialist powers and the Soviet Union had broken down, the Cold War had emerged and was hardening into confrontation. The Truman Doctrine (March 1947) announced American support for Greece and Türkiye against “communist subversion”, explicitly targeting Soviet influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Marshall Plan (June 1947) aimed to rebuild Western European capitalism and consolidate American hegemony in Europe. The Palestine question was part of a broader struggle to secure the region’s oil, trade routes, and strategic position.
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The US had barred large‑scale Jewish immigration during the Holocaust. It saw a Jewish state both as a destination for Europe’s refugees and as a means of asserting American influence in the Middle East at the expense of Britain and France, preventing Soviet penetration, countering Arab nationalism that threatened US control of oil, and creating a settler state dependent upon Western support.
Washington used diplomatic pressure, UN vote‑whipping, refugee policy, and close coordination with Zionist organisations to secure the votes of smaller states for the partition plan in November 1947 and to facilitate the rapid consolidation of a Jewish state, wrapped up in the language of moral responsibility after the Holocaust. America granted de facto recognition to Israel within minutes of its declaration of independence on 14 May 1948.
President Harry S. Truman’s backing at this formative moment—political, diplomatic, and later military—established the US as the primary external guarantor of Israel’s legitimacy and security. It shaped the regional order that followed, defining US alliances, its confrontation with Arab nationalism, and its long‑term role as the dominant imperialist power in the Middle East.
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The Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union acted as the second midwife of the Zionist state. Joseph Stalin’s abrupt shift in April 1947 to support the partition of Palestine reflected the accelerating pressures of the emerging Cold War. Until then, Moscow had largely aligned with the Arab states in opposing partition and the elevation of a Zionist movement traditionally tied to Britain. But as the post‑war confrontation with London and Washington deepened, Stalin reassessed Palestine through the prism of an escalating imperialist offensive.
He came to see the creation of a Jewish state as a means of weakening British power, challenging the US and establishing a foothold in the Middle East. At the time, significant sections of the Zionist leadership—including Ben‑Gurion’s Mapai and the broader Labour Zionist tradition—deployed socialist and even Marxist rhetoric. The kibbutz movement, the corporatist Histadrut, and the general ethos of Labour Zionism presented themselves as progressive and collectivist. Stalin and his advisers may well have calculated that the new Israeli state could be drawn into the Soviet orbit as a nominally “socialist” bridgehead in the Middle East.
This proved to be a profound miscalculation: within a year of its founding, Israel was firmly aligned with American imperialism.
Stalin’s previous opposition to Zionism had nothing to do with defending the interests of the Jewish people, let alone adopting a principled position on the national question in Palestine. Rather, Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps were regarded with deep suspicion by the Soviet regime: many had spent time in Western countries, had contacts with non‑Soviet Jews, or were seen as potential purveyors of “cosmopolitan” influence. At the very moment he was supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, Stalin launched a virulent antisemitic campaign that culminated in the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1952–53 and preparations for a potential mass deportation of Soviet Jews — halted only by his death in March 1953.
The Stalinist bureaucracy supported partition in Palestine while persecuting Jews at home because both policies served the short‑term tactical positioning of the Soviet state in the international arena. It was a betrayal of the Arab masses and of the working class of the entire region, including the Jewish working class. Indeed, Stalinism’s betrayals and its antisemitism helped drive many socialist‑minded Jews toward Zionism.
The broader mass support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the aftermath of the Holocaust was itself the product of the catastrophic defeats inflicted on the international working class by Stalinism—above all the defeat of the German working class and the rise of Hitler, which produced the Holocaust and the mass of displaced Jewish survivors. By approving the establishment of a Zionist state, Stalinism completed its betrayal of a socialist solution to the Jewish question and helped create a political disaster for the Palestinians and all the peoples of the Middle East.
Within Palestine, Stalinism had already played a disastrous role. The Palestine Communist Party (PCP), founded in 1920, was perpetually divided between its Jewish majority and Arab minority, repeatedly torn apart by factional splits. This was the direct responsibility of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow, which had abandoned the internationalist strategy of the October Revolution and the Theory of Permanent Revolution in favor of the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country.” The PCP, like every section of the Third International, was subordinated to the shifting foreign‑policy needs of the Kremlin.
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Moscow delivered the crucial votes from the Soviet bloc to ensure the UN General Assembly reached the required two‑thirds majority on partition. The USSR became the first state to grant de jure recognition to Israel and supplied arms during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war via Czechoslovakia, playing a significant role in Israel’s military success.
Despite Stalin’s political support for the state’s creation, Moscow soon reverted to a pro‑Arab orientation once Israel’s alignment with Washington became clear. Israel’s Communist Party (Maki), which had supported the establishment of the state, found itself politically marginalized.
The Fourth International’s 1948 position stood in the starkest contrast to the Stalinist betrayal. In “Against the Stream” it declared: “The Fourth International rejects as utopian and reactionary the ‘Zionist solution’ of the Jewish question. It declares that total renunciation of Zionism is the sine qua non condition for the merging of Jewish workers’ struggles with the social, national and liberationist struggles of the Arab toilers.”
The Palestinian question could be resolved only through the unity of Arab and Jewish workers against Zionism, imperialism, and all factions of the Arab bourgeoisie—a unity that the establishment of the Zionist state made immeasurably more difficult.
The result of Stalin’s betrayal was the political disorientation and demoralization of the Communist parties of the Arab world and the undermining of the Palestinian working class’s capacity to resist dispossession. It played a significant role in creating the permanent catastrophe of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whose consequences we are living through today in the most barbaric form—the Gaza genocide.
To be continued.
In its 2024/25 budget, Oldham Council proposed cutting £2.8 million from health and social care, reducing care contracts, and cutting 12 social worker posts.
4. Long COVID affects twice as many Americans as official counts show, new AI study finds
A new AI study from Mass General Brigham finds that roughly one in six Americans who contracted COVID-19 developed long COVID, more than double the rate captured by official surveillance, exposing the human and economic toll hidden by flawed diagnostic systems.
5. Chile under the fascistic Kast government: Preliminary assessment of a social counterrevolution
The Kast administration has issued a battery of anti-democratic and pro-market executive decrees that will deepen already extreme social inequality, while vastly expanding police state structures built up under Boric.
6. Mamdani’s “COGE” commission to prepare deeper cuts to New York City social programs and regulations
On Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the formation of a Committee on Government Efficiency (COGE) to examine the New York City Charter for efficiencies: that is, to search for ways in which social programs can be cut.
“The Commission on Government Efficiency will take a hard look at how City government functions and identify the reforms we need to deliver faster, smarter and more effectively for working people,” Mamdani told the media.
The Charter is essentially New York City’s constitution. It defines what authority belongs to the mayor and other officials and what to the City Council; laws, timelines and mandatory minimum rules for city reserve funds; the multi-step public review process required to build housing, change zoning laws or approve major infrastructure; and the scope, duties and enforcement powers of every city department.
The Charter does not control funding but does dictate the operational rules that heavily control, protect or limit social spending. For example, the Charter legally mandates the existence of agencies like the Department of Social Services and the Human Resources Administration, which a mayor cannot simply abolish to save money. The Charter also sets the exact legal procedures for how the city buys goods and hires outside nonprofits to run homeless shelters, daycare centers and after-school programs.
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Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has already broken his campaign promises of even minor reforms, such as free buses. He has allied himself with right-wing Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul in shelving a wealth tax, kept on billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, met with President Donald Trump in the White House, supported Long Island Rail Road strikebreaking, appointed former Biden strike suppressor Julie Su as deputy mayor for economic justice, and continued to cooperate with ICE.
The very acronym of the committee, COGE, is a warning to workers. It is meant to echo the infamous DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) run by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, which drove the layoff of hundreds of thousands of federal workers during the first months of the second Trump administration.
Mamdani announced that he was appointing Patrick Gaspard, a top official in the Obama White House, as chair of COGE. Gaspard is a former Democratic National Committee executive director, former Obama administration ambassador and longtime Democratic Party operative. The choice of Gaspard as chair of COGE represents a further step in Mamdani’s integration into the Democratic Party, which represents the oligarchy.
His appointment of Ann Cheng as executive director of COGE is also significant. She has served directly under Hochul as director of strategic initiatives, and coordinated with the state legislature and Hochul to allow Mamdani to close the budget gap. It is likely that she left this position late last month specifically to work in COGE.
“Government efficiency” is itself a ruling-class buzzword of long standing. “Efficiency,” in the framework Mamdani has adopted, means lower costs to the political-economic establishment—fewer agency staff, less environmental review, less labor protection, less community input, less democratic accountability for capital. COGE will exclude limitations on Wall Street tax subsidies, real-estate industry exemptions that produce the affordability crisis, and executive compensation at city-affiliated entities.
The COGE initiative is part of a deepening collaboration with Hochul and the Democratic Party leadership to permanently reduce spending in the city, as was shown last month when Mamdani announced that the city budget, as contained in his executive proposal, had been balanced.
This action followed an announcement from Hochul that the state would provide $3 billion in immediate aid to the city and close a revenue gap that had been estimated at $5.4 billion, the city’s largest deficit since the Great Depression. On May 27, the state passed its own $269 billion budget that contains much of this aid to the city.
To meet Mamdani’s citywide savings initiative, agencies appointed chief savings officers who identified over $300 million in vacancy reductions. This means thousands of empty city jobs are being permanently erased from the books. For existing city workers, this translates to heavier workloads, severe burnout and fewer teammates, rather than direct layoffs.
A large portion of the savings ($2.3 billion over two years) will come from Mamdani’s decision to delay payments to municipal pension funds. This proposal from the self-professed socialist is a major attack on city workers who plan to retire in the coming decades. It would leave the pension funds in a weaker position in the event of a stock market crash, a disaster that is distinctly possible, given the current economic turmoil. Delaying payments to the pension funds would also open the door to future benefit cuts, which would be carried out under the pretext of fiscal necessity.
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Mamdani and Hochul—who represents the Democratic Party leadership—collaborated to avoid, for the moment, mass layoffs and cuts to social programs in the city. At the same time, they sought to avoid any infringement on the wealth of the handful of ultra-high-net-worth individuals who dominate the economy of New York. The budget has bought time for Mamdani and Hochul to use COGE to implement much sharper attacks on the working class.
7. Why are art schools disappearing in America?
Across the US, the arts and arts education are under attack. A recent article in Hyperallergic titled “The Death of Art School” pinpoints some of the destructive forces: financialization, ballooning administrative bureaucracies, and ideological hostility—all converging to systematically convert institutions of learning into market-driven enterprises.
The article’s author, State University of New York-Purchase art professor Hakan Topal, situates the attack on arts education within the context of the commodification of education as a whole, cogently observing, “Students become customers, knowledge becomes a product, and faculty become service providers. The institution is increasingly run like a business rather than a public good.”
He warns that what colleges must produce is not “consumers,” but “a capacity for thinking, for argument, for questioning without a predetermined answer.”
Topal’s article is timely and urgent. Arts education has suffered an unprecedented reversal in the past few years. Art schools, a number of which have served students and communities for over 100 years, have been abruptly closed.
Among recent casualties are: the Oregon College of Art and Craft, founded in 1907 (closed 2019); Memphis College of Art, founded in 1936 (closed 2020); the San Francisco Art Institute—the oldest art academy west of the Mississippi, founded in 1871 (closed 2022); the Delaware College of Art and Design (closed 2024); the 154-year-old University of the Arts in Philadelphia (closed 2024); and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which ended its degree programs after the 2024–25 academic year. Even the for-profit Art Institutes shuttered their final eight locations in September 2023.
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Within the corporatized university, arts programs are the first to be cut. Studio arts, music, theater, and fine arts require expensive physical infrastructure—kilns, darkrooms, print studios, practice rooms, performance spaces—that cannot be scaled as easily as a lecture hall can. Small class sizes are pedagogically essential.
Faculty-to-student ratios necessary for genuine instruction look inefficient on a spreadsheet. And as tuition has risen and the job market for working artists has been squeezed, enrollment in fine arts programs has declined—which then “confirms” their inviability and justifies further cuts, in a self-fulfilling cycle.
The Trump administration is now moving to codify this logic as federal policy. In May 2026, the Department of Education proposed a rule—stemming from Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”—that would strip federal student loan eligibility from programs whose graduates fail to meet earnings benchmarks. Fine arts, music and studio arts programs are among those explicitly identified as most at risk. Close to 2,000 colleges and universities have at least one program that could fail the test, potentially cutting off over 600,000 students from federal aid.
The ideological thrust is unmistakable. The government is using federal funding policy to direct young people toward education that serves industry, the military, or “measurable” career training. STEM fields, defense-adjacent research, and vocationally oriented programs are implicitly favored. The arts and humanities—history, philosophy, literature, creative and critical thought—are rendered not merely unprofitable but ineligible for public support.
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The financial picture becomes clearer when one looks at who has benefited and what has been funded. The retreat of public funding for higher education coincided precisely with the rise of hedge funds and private equity in university governance. These financial actors did not simply take advantage of a crisis—in many cases they helped engineer it.
Yale University appointed a Lehman Brothers and Salomon Brothers veteran to lead its endowment in 1985. Harvard gave the Baupost Group hedge fund $1.96 billion in endowment assets to manage by 2017. The University of California system, under private equity billionaire Richard Blum—appointed to its Board of Regents by Democratic governor Gray Davis—responded to budget shortfalls with tuition hikes, bond borrowing and enrollment freezes that shut out thousands of qualified California students.
When deficits appear, the well-heeled and politically connected consultants move in. Purchase College paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Gray Associates, an enrollment consulting firm, for recommendations that were, as Topal notes, “obsolete within a few years.” The University of California’s turn to Wall Street “reformers” produced mounting debt, enrollment freezes, and tuition hikes—while the financiers collected their fees.
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Since 1980, inflation-adjusted US military spending has grown by more than 60 percent—rising from roughly $500 billion to over $820 billion annually—while state funding for public higher education collapsed as a share of university revenue, falling from nearly 80 percent to closer to 50 percent, and students absorbed the difference through a 165 percent real increase in tuition. The choice of what to fund, and what to abandon, is a political one.
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A ruling class committed to war, oligarchy, and the suppression of dissent has no use for institutions whose purpose is the free development of critical human faculties. As the WSWS has observed, quoting Lenin: finance capital, in both its foreign and domestic policy, “strives not for democracy but for dictatorship.” Endless war requires not only the diversion of social resources toward military budgets, but the direct suppression of political and cultural opposition.
Artistic consciousness—by its nature thoughtful, exploratory, and very often critical of the dominant social order—is incompatible with the imperatives of imperialist war, oligarchic rule and the drive toward authoritarian governance. Art “has the ability to alter the thinking and feeling of masses of human beings”—an ability that requires freedom to pursue knowledge without market justification, and freedom to challenge rather than satisfy.
The defense of art, culture and intellectual life, as well as jobs and living standards, requires mobilizing the only social force capable of abolishing capitalism, the working class. Young people fighting to end the subordination of social life to the profit system should turn to the working class, break with both Democrats and Republicans, and take their place in International Youth and Students for Socialist Equality.
8. Australia: Victorian education support staff speak out against AEU-Labor sellout
“If members can’t ask questions or raise concerns without being censored, what sort of democracy is that? The union clearly works for the government not for us.”
9. New Zealand budget deepens austerity to make workers pay for war
The budget starves public healthcare and cuts education and welfare, while pouring money into prisons and the military.
10. New Jersey Democrats unleash police riot against anti-ICE protesters outside Delaney Hall
As immigrants inside Delaney Hall continue their hunger and labor strike, Democratic officials have deployed state and local police to attack protesters, journalists and residents outside the facility.
11. Germany’s Council of Economic Experts demands “U-turn” on care, health and pensions
The German Council of Economic Experts is demanding deep cuts in social spending to pass the costs of the Iran war, rearmament and the enrichment of the rich onto the weakest in society.
12. US murder spree in Latin American waters moves beyond 200 killed
The death toll from US military strikes on alleged drug vessels off the coast of Latin America has now surpassed 200 people. In the latest attack, the fourth in a single week, the US military released video on Saturday of a small boat erupting in flames in the Eastern Pacific. The three men reportedly killed bring the estimated total to 205 since the mass murder campaign began in the Caribbean on September 2, 2025. The campaign expanded to the Eastern Pacific in October and has destroyed approximately 60 vessels.
Mass murder has been turned into a daily, bureaucratic operation, with extrajudicial killing a part of imperialist policy. This unfolds alongside the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran and Lebanon—which the Lebanese health ministry counts at 3,371 dead in Lebanon since March 2 and which the human rights group HRANA puts at 3,636 in Iran—and is built on top of the genocide in Gaza that has killed over 70,000 people.
This campaign of mass murder also carries a direct warning for workers inside the United States: The methods being tested in the Caribbean are being imported home.
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The Trump administration’s allegations are entirely unproven. Moreover, even if they were proven, the killings would still be crimes. The state has declared that it can execute people on suspicion alone, without charges, without a trial, without any judicial process anywhere in the world. That is the definition of an extrajudicial killing—and it would remain one even if every person killed had been guilty of exactly what Washington claims.
The criminal character of the campaign was established on the very first strike. When two men survived the initial missile strike and were left clinging to the wreckage, a second strike was ordered to finish them off. Killing wounded survivors is a textbook war crime under the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post reported November 28 that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had ordered the entire crew killed.
The two strikes killed all 11 aboard—nine in the first, the two survivors in the second. US President Donald Trump posted video of the first strike on Truth Social that day. The murders are advertised as spectacle and a threatening demonstration that the state can kill anyone, anywhere, with total impunity.
Analysts at InSight Crime found the strikes have not meaningfully disrupted trafficking flows. This is because disrupting trafficking was never the purpose.
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The administration’s pseudo-legal basis for the campaign of mass murder rests on a confidential Justice Department memo of nearly 50 pages asserting that drug cartels are in “armed conflict” with the United States—a fraud designed to erase the distinction between policing and war so the executive can exercise unchecked lethal violence.
Foreign terrorist organization designations, however, have never authorized military force, which requires an act of Congress. There is simply no statutory basis or credible claim of imminent threat. Legal specialists have almost unanimously described the strikes as an unconstitutional usurpation of war powers.
The boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific set a far broader precedent. The same “terrorist” justification used for the maritime killings was invoked by Trump’s deputies to explain away the killing in Minneapolis of Renée Good, shot by an ICE agent on January 7 while observing an operation from her car, and of Alex Pretti, a nurse and protester shot by a Border Patrol agent on January 24.
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Despite the blatant illegality and dangerous precedent, there is no serious effort to stop these attacks from within the political establishment.
The reaction of regional governments has exposed the bankruptcy of every variety of bourgeois nationalism. Argentine President Javier Milei and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa have openly aligned themselves with Trump. Supposedly aimed at cartels, US and Ecuadorian forces launched “Operation Total Extermination” in March, leaving a trail of reports of destroyed farming plots and tortured agricultural workers.
The nominally “left” governments have been no less complicit. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum dropped her objections to the boat strikes after negotiating an arrangement for the Mexican Navy to intercept suspected vessels off Mexico’s coast, even as she faces a scandal over secret CIA operations within Mexican soil, including targeted assassinations of alleged drug lords. Her focus has remained deepening military and intelligence collaboration with Washington to appease Trump’s threats to deploy US troops across the border.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has criticized the boat strikes, but this criticism has not gone beyond calling for emergency UN and OAS meetings after the abduction of Maduro, even as Colombian citizens are among the boat-strike dead. Both Petro and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after their White House meetings—February 3 and May 7, respectively, each kissing Trump’s ring and praising the serial killer to his face—have not issued a single public protest against the boat strikes.
In April, Lula signed a partnership with Washington for joint drug and weapons interdiction; on May 29 he denounced the US “terrorist” designation of Brazilian gangs as a threat to Brazilian sovereignty.
In all three cases, the largest regional powers are ruled by “left” nationalists that have accommodated Trump and remained complicit in the neocolonial coup against Venezuela, the deepening strangulation of Cuba and the US campaign of murder on the high seas. US imperialism’s drive to recolonize Latin America cannot be opposed by relying on any section of the capitalist ruling elites.
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The response by the Democratic Party in the United States only confirms that the militarist onslaught to recolonize Latin America is a bipartisan policy. Democrats introduced war-powers resolutions that failed, knowing that they would not pass or stop a single strike. Some Democratic members of Congress said they emerged from classified briefings “disturbed” and “frustrated” but did not go beyond demanding Hegseth turn over unedited strike footage or risk losing 25 percent of his travel budget.
Meanwhile, the same Democratic caucus has voted for the military budgets and appropriations that sustain the strikes.
The boat strikes escalate the bipartisan “war on drugs,” long a cover for imperialist efforts to dominate Latin America, which disbursed billions for the murderous Plan Colombia and Plan Mérida in Mexico with support from the Democratic Party.
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This accelerating effort to impose fascist forms of rule is an international process and fighting it cannot be entrusted to the Democrats or any bourgeois nationalist tendency. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class in the United States, across the Americas and internationally to abolish the source of war and dictatorship: the capitalist profit system.
On June 2, voters in Los Angeles will cast ballots in the mayoral primary amid a billion-dollar budget crisis, mass layoffs and the still-smoldering wreckage of a wildfire catastrophe. There are fourteen candidates, but only three are competitive, while none represents the interests of the working class. The race distills, in miniature, the bankruptcy of the entire political order: an incumbent defending austerity, a pseudo-left “change agent” whose record is indistinguishable from the incumbent’s and a right-wing celebrity recycling Trump’s playbook for a city in genuine social crisis.
Since no single candidate is likely to get a majority, the top two will advance to a November runoff. The latest UC Berkeley poll, released May 28, shows a virtual three-way dead heat: incumbent Karen Bass at 26 percent, City Councilmember Nithya Raman at 25 percent and former reality-television personality Spencer Pratt at 22 percent.
The mayor of Los Angeles presides over a city of nearly four million people with a budget of roughly $15 billion. The office carries significant executive authority but must operate through a 15-member City Council. The result is a political structure that diffuses accountability while concentrating power in the hands of real estate developers, the police union and, fundamentally, the Democratic Party machine that dominates every level of city government.
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What none will say, because none of them can, is that the crisis in Los Angeles is not a failure of management but the outcome of a social order in which housing costs are too high, wages are grossly inadequate and stagnant, healthcare is inaccessible and public resources are gutted to fund tax cuts for billionaires at home and imperialist wars abroad.
So far, 2026 has seen more than 100,000 Los Angeles workers engaged in labor battles, with many more on the horizon. They will find no advocate among these three candidates. What is needed is not a new mayor but the independent political mobilization of the working class—organized in rank-and-file committees, outside and against the union bureaucracies and both capitalist parties—in a common struggle against the profit system that produces these conditions.
A predawn fire at Penn Station, injuring five workers, is the second major rail disruption in two weeks and a result of the systematic neglect of public infrastructure in the shadow of Wall Street.
15. Three miners killed in the US over three days
Together they expose a single reality: The mining companies, the federal and state regulators and the union apparatus are all part of the same machinery that treats miners' lives as a cost of production.
16. Australia: Bondi terrorist was on ASIO radar in 2022
What little information that has emerged about the antisemitic terrorist attack on last December’s Hanukkah event at Bondi Beach that claimed fifteen lives only raises further questions about the failure of the security agencies to prevent it.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic spy agency, revealed last week that the younger attacker, Naveed Akram, had been on a security threat list in 2022. That means Akram was on the radar of the intelligence agency some three years later than first admitted and only three years prior to the attack.
The revelation was contained in ASIO’s written submission to the Royal Commission purportedly examining the attack. The real character of the commission, as a cover-up, has been evident over the past week, with most sessions in the segment of the inquiry examining the policing and intelligence response held behind closed doors.
ASIO chief Mike Burgess was not questioned about the revealing admission. The inclusion of the statement in his written submission had the character of a limited disclosure, aimed at minimizing the threat of future exposures of the agency.
The statement blandly reported: “Naveed Akram had been subject to residual risk processes in NSW [New South Wales] in 2022.”
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As with those revelations, the information that Naveed Akram was on a “known entity” list in 2022 raises a whole host of questions. They include:
- Why, as per the SMH, was he placed on the list in 2021 or 2022, two or three years after the ASIO investigation of him had purportedly ended. Had new information about his terrorist sympathies or connections come to light?
- What surveillance and monitoring was he subjected to while on the list?
- Why was he removed from the list in 2022, if that is what occurred? Notably, the ASIO statement is vague on that point. It declares that Akram was “subject to residual risk processes…in 2022,” a formulation that leaves open the possibility that he remained on the list over the following years.
Two issues make the 2022 date particularly significant.
In another case of information leaking out to the media, rather than being revealed by the government, it was reported by the ABC and other outlets that the Akrams had travelled together to Uzbekhistan in 2022.
That seems an exceptionally unlikely holiday destination. There is no indication that the Akrams had any familial connection to the austere Central Asian country. Together with the broader region, however, it has been a site of Islamist extremist groups who have done battle with the despotic regimes established there in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Uzbekistan shares a border with Afghanistan, and has been targeted by ISIS-K, the Islamic State branch in that country. If someone on a terror watchlist were traveling to such a country, their visit would be a subject of interest, not only for ASIO and the Australian authorities, but also for their international counterparts, particularly the US Central Intelligence Agency.
The other issue is the gun license that was granted to Sajid Akram in 2023, with which he assembled the arsenal that would be used in the Bondi attack. Akram had initially applied in 2020, but for reasons that have never been explained, the application was not approved for three years.
The 2022 date of Naveed Akram remaining on the “known entity” list indicates that for most of the time that the gun license was pending, Sajid’s son was on the radar of ASIO. Given that the entire ostensible purpose of the “known entity” list is to manage the risk of those previously subjected to terrorist investigations, the ability of the pair to take steps towards assembling a high-powered arsenal, in the open and through official channels, is completely inexplicable.
Even more questions were raised by a Sky News report on Sajid Akram. Sky News is a frothingly right-wing component of the Murdoch media stable. Its interest in the Bondi attack is to exploit it to push for a deeper assault on democratic rights, including through the demonization of all Muslims. Its reports must be taken with a grain of salt.
Sky claimed in an exclusive last week that Sajid Akram had first been reported to the security agencies in 2007, via a tip off to the national security hotline warning that he had a disturbing interest in explosives.
That was only six years after Al Qaeda’s September 11 attack on New York, five years after the 2002 Bali bombing that claimed dozens of Australian lives and two years after another terrorist blast in that city targeting tourists, including Australians. If Sky’s report is true, Sajid Akram was reported to the authorities near the height of the “war on terror,” under conditions where it was being used to justify a massive assault on democratic rights.
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There is a longstanding history of Islamist extremists being utilised by imperialist governments, abroad, to prosecute proxy wars and regime-change operations. That is what occurred with the massive CIA backing of forces that would go on to establish Al Qaeda, in the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It is also what the imperialist agencies carried out in a massive regime-change operation in Syria, based on funneling guns and money to groups that founded ISIS.
Domestically, terrorist attacks have frequently served as the pretext for far-reaching attacks on the civil liberties of the population, aimed at suppressing opposition and buttressing the rule of the state. That has been the case with Bondi, which has been invoked by the federal Labor government to introduce “hate speech” legislation potentially barring strident condemnations of Zionism and imperialist war, and parallel laws providing for the illegalization of groups or even political parties that fall foul of those strictures.
The more that emerges about the Akrams, the more sinister the unanswered questions become. Were they allowed to go about their activities, largely unhindered, because monitoring their networking and travel provided useful sources of intelligence? Did elements of the state know that the Akrams were preparing something last December, but made a decision not to intervene to use the attack for political purposes?
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