The speech itself, manic and at times barely coherent, was the
expression of an administration and a ruling class in the grip of a
staggering crisis. Trump rambled through a litany of absurd and
unsubstantiated allegations—that China had stolen the files of 220
million American voters, that “burn bags” of incriminating documents
left behind by Obama had escaped incineration through “gross
incompetence,” that voting machines had been rigged in league with
Venezuela “in ways that could not be detected even with an audit.”
The
United States military bombed bridges, a railway station, an airport
and the control tower of Iran's only deep-water ocean port on Friday,
the seventh consecutive day of strikes, extending its assault from
military targets to the infrastructure of civilian life.
*****
Iran’s energy ministry asked citizens Friday to use less electricity and
air conditioning, as American strikes on the power system strained the
grid in extreme heat. Since the fighting resumed, the strikes have
killed at least 38 people and wounded more than 400, Iran’s Health
Ministry said Friday.
Attacks on civilian infrastructure are war crimes. The Rome Statute
of the International Criminal Court defines “intentionally directing
attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not
military objectives” as a war crime, and customary international
law—binding on Washington and Tehran alike, though neither ratified the
treaties—specifically protects “drinking water installations and
supplies.”
A spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres
said Friday that Guterres is “particularly concerned about attacks on
civilian infrastructure in Iran and across the region,” adding, “Such
attacks are unacceptable.”
*****
The bombing of Iran is part of a broader war. In Gaza, the Health
Ministry counted 73,250 dead as of this week, and Israel has sharply
escalated its strikes—more than 40 in June, the most of any month since
the ceasefire that took effect in October 2025.
On Friday a drone strike on a funeral procession outside a mosque in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed eight people, Al Jazeera reported. The Times of Israel
wrote Thursday that the Israeli military “ramped up its strikes” in
Gaza after the first round of the war against Iran wound down in April.
The
line of mourners wrapped around the building, cars continued to pull
into the parking lot throughout the evening, and people brought flowers
and condolence cards and spoke together in Spanish and English as they
waited.
*****
As mourners were arriving, newly-installed US Attorney Aaron Reitz released the federal government’s first detailed “account”
of the shooting. He said officers had been looking for two Guatemalan
men associated with a white van when they encountered Salgado’s work
vehicle.
According to Reitz, agents tried to stop the van twice.
During the second encounter, their vehicles “successfully surrounded”
it. He said Salgado shifted into reverse and then forward while an
officer was “partially inside the van or immediately next to it,” after
which the officer fired a single shot.
Significantly, his
formulation omitted the earlier Department of Homeland Security claim
that Salgado had tried to ram an agent, indicating the government’s
story is shifting as earlier claims fall apart.
The account flatly
contradicts eyewitness testimony that ICE vehicles struck and boxed in
the van, after which an agent fired almost immediately in to the
passenger side.
The three other men in the van remain locked
inside the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe. They face no criminal
charges. The evident purpose of their detention is to prevent them from
exposing the government’s account.
An attempt by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation to smear Salgado by claiming they discovered a
bags of a “white crystalline substance,” implying narcotics, in his van
has quickly been exposed. Ruby Powers, an attorney for Salgado’s family,
said the bags contained salt
prepared each morning by Salgado’s wife. The workers mixed it with
lemon and water to replace electrolytes while working construction in
the Texas heat.
*****
Local and national Democrats have postured as opponents of the
national ICE rampage, but their role as enablers and supporters of it
was exposed in a Houston Police Department report released Friday. Houston’s city government is controlled by Democrats.
Between
April 1 and June 30, [the Houston Police Department (HPD)] encountered 103 people with civil warrants.
Police turned 19 of them over to ICE. Fourteen percent were charged with
new crimes, while 57 percent were released. Officers detained people
for an average of 39 minutes, with some detentions lasting nearly two
hours. According to councilwoman Alejandra Salinas the monthly rate of
HPD calls to ICE had doubled.
The report appeared three months
after Whitmire and the City Council abandoned nearly all of an ordinance
limiting HPD collaboration with ICE when Republican Governor Greg
Abbott threatened to withhold $114 million in state funding. The
quarterly reporting requirement was the lone provision left standing.
Mayor
John Whitmire, a Democrat who has close working relations with the
extreme-right Texas Republican Party, attended Salgado’s viewing. So did
Letitia Plummer, the Democratic nominee for Harris County judge.
One woman at the viewing told the WSWS the Republicans and Democrats “all work together.”
“I’m
not even going to blame a party,” she said. “I think there’s one side
that is actively causing the disease, and then there’s another side that
keeps selling us the medicine every single cycle.
The
Committee for Public Education, a rank-and-file educators’ network,
calls on teachers and educators to repudiate the government-AEU
conspiracy against their rights, including by voting “no” in the union’s
rushed ballot.
As
hazardous wildfire smoke filled the air and workers collapsed from the
heat and contaminated air, production continued full tilt at factories
and worksites across the affected regions with the full support of the
all the various trade union bureaucracies.
The
president of PEN America has resigned over an article published by the
organization that blames discrimination against Israeli and Jewish
writers on cultural boycotts by anti-genocide activists.
The
streets of Berlin have become the center of a growing confrontation
with the German state over the presence in the heart of the city of the
Rheinmetall armaments factory.
Federal
health officials identified the agribusiness giant behind the worst
parasite outbreak in American history, then left it to the company to
decide when to tell the public and what to withdraw.
The
far-right and anti-immigrant One Nation is a toxic byproduct of the
reactionary program implemented by Labor and the corporatized trade
union bureaucracy.
The
Korean Metal Workers’ Union is isolating the Hyundai strike from other
sections of the working class and limiting its impact while
orchestrating a sell-out deal behind the scenes.
Wages
fell 6.4 percent between 2021 and 2026, the biggest decline among OECD
countries, while the banks made tens of billions of dollars and the
fortunes of the super-rich hit record levels.
Rebecca Bill Chavez, deputy assistant secretary of defense under
Barack Obama, articulated the function of the Malvinas issue with
inadvertent candor: “This is an issue that unites everyone. It doesn’t
matter in Argentina: left, right, center—you’re all for the Malvinas.”
That
unity is precisely what Milei’s government requires. It is four general
strikes deep into a political crisis, with poverty growing and social
anger mounting. The Malvinas theater performs the same function now that
the 1982 invasion performed under the Leopoldo Galtieri military junta:
substituting a territorial claim for a class confrontation, channeling
the fury of an enraged population away from the Argentine ruling class.
Milei’s
posturing is pure hypocrisy. He has openly praised Margaret
Thatcher—the prime minister who sent the fleet in 1982—and previously
appeared to accept the 2013 referendum in which 99.8 percent of the
islands’ Kelpers voted to remain British. His government has worked with
Trump and the US Southern Command to convert the South Atlantic into an
area under Washington’s imperial control.
The jingoism,
moreover, came hours after Reuters reported that an internal Pentagon
memo had floated reviewing US diplomatic support for the British
position on the Falklands—in retaliation for perceived lack of British
support on Iran.
There is a deeper process that runs across the
exploitation of sport internationally. As the WSWS wrote following the
New York Knicks’ championship celebrations earlier this year, sporting
fervor of this intensity reflects deeper social contradictions:
[T]he
fervor reflects the absence of any mass progressive outlet for the
social anger and desire for solidarity that exist within the working
class. In an earlier period, broad layers of workers and youth were
connected to mass working-class organizations and socialist political
movements.
*****
The colonial crimes of the British seizure of the islands in 1833 and
the military invasion by the Royal Navy in 1982 are real, and the
working class has a legitimate interest in the question of the Malvinas.
But that struggle can only be waged by a working class that
maintains irreconcilable political independence from its own
bourgeoisie. Wherever a tendency calling itself Trotskyist proposes
instead to stand in the “same military camp” as that bourgeoisie,
whether the camp is a fascist junta in 1982 or the patriotic clamor of
the fascistic Milei, it is assisting imperialist oppression. It delivers
the working class, bound hand and foot, to its class enemies at home
and abroad alike.
*****
Workers in Argentina, Britain, the United States, Iran and every
other country are connected by globalized production in ways that make
the resolution of every major social question—mass unemployment,
poverty, war, the drive toward fascism—a matter of international class
struggle, not national competition.
Today, workers globally are
joined by a million threads through the production process and the great
social questions of our time, which can only be resolved by making
workers conscious of this objective connection around a revolutionary
socialist program.
The antidote to the nationalist poison being
dispensed through this World Cup is not contempt for the genuine popular
enthusiasm behind football. It is political class consciousness: the
recognition that workers everywhere hold the levers of a globalized
economy and are exploited by the same international financial oligarchy
that has turned this tournament into an instrument to divide them. That
oligarchy must be expropriated, its control over sport, culture, media
and every social institution broken, and replaced by the democratic
control of working people internationally.
The
Alternative for Germany (AfD) is poised to take power in September’s
state election in Saxony-Anhalt. Its government program reads like a
fascistic wish list for authoritarian rule.
Burnham’s path to party leadership was laid down because Britain’s
ruling class had determined that Starmer failed to fully implement its
dictates. In particular, he had balked before the savage cuts to social
spending required to ramp up military expenditure and pursue Britain’s
predatory war aims.
Burnham has promised to do precisely that,
while also claiming that he can deliver “growth in every postcode” and
address the mounting social problems faced by millions of working people
through a combination of devolution and partnerships with private
capital. Such claims will not withstand their first encounter with
economic and political realities.
*****
Not only will Burnham continue in all fundamentals Starmer’s agenda
of austerity and war, he will escalate it. Whatever temporary reprieve
he may or may not bring to the government, the next period will see a
further alienation of broad masses of workers and young people from
Labour.
Required now is the development of a new socialist
political leadership of the working class, prepared for escalating class
struggles between workers and the oligarchy which Labour serves just as
surely under Burnham as Starmer. It is to the task of building this
leadership and equipping it with a socialist internationalist program that the Socialist Equality Party is dedicated.
This
crisis is a landmark in the decomposition of the post-Cold War order
and the descent of the capitalist powers into military conflict over the
re-division of the world.
July
17 marked the ninetieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War. The coup was a decisive event in the Spanish Revolution
(1931-39). The defeat of the revolution was a seminal experience of the
20th century whose lessons are critical for the class struggle in the
21st century.
Police
detained 52 teachers in Ankara on Thursday as they marched between
ministries demanding a legal base salary. The government says there is
no money — while military spending reaches $US30 billion.
On June 25, the World Socialist Web Site hosted an
extraordinary panel of eminent historians at a webinar to mark the 250th
anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American
Revolution.
The full webinar, “The American Revolution and Its
Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings,’” can be
accessed at wsws.org/1776.
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.
Wildfire
smoke from Canada and Minnesota has given Detroit the worst air quality
in the world. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees calls for workers to take independent action to protect their
health and lives.
Labor
is presenting itself as a bystander to an illegal war that it has
enthusiastically supported and actively participated in, including
through the deployment of troops and military hardware.
In
June, limited 24-hour strikes at Lyell McEwin Hospital and Flinders
Medical Centre demonstrated nurses’ determination to fight, even as the
union leadership worked to keep these actions isolated and under tight
bureaucratic control.
The
same failures recur every monsoon: breached embankments, inadequate
drainage, delayed relief and infrastructure designed to serve commercial
interests rather than human need.
In its 2025 report, presented on 30 June, the Verfassungsschutz—Germany’s
domestic intelligence service, formally known as the Office for the
Protection of the Constitution—no longer lists the Sozialistische
Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) as a so-called
“left-wing extremist” organisation. The removal shows that there was no
legal basis whatsoever for the party’s earlier designation. It was a
campaign against socialist perspectives that was purely politically
motivated.
The Verfassungsschutz had first listed the SGP as “left-wing
extremist” in its 2018 report. At the time, it justified this on the
grounds that the SGP’s activism was directed “against the existing state
and social order, invariably slandered as ‘capitalism,’ against the EU,
supposed nationalism, imperialism and militarism, as well as against
Social Democracy, the trade unions, and the Left Party.”
In doing
so, the intelligence service expressly confirmed that the SGP pursues
its goals by legal means—that it “attempts to gain public attention for
its political ideas through participation in elections and through
lecture events.” From the very beginning, the surveillance was therefore
based exclusively on the party’s political ideas, not on any unlawful
conduct.
*****
Yet the removal of the SGP from the report does not signify a retreat
from the government’s authoritarian offensive. A party can still be
monitored by the intelligence services even if it is not listed in the
report. Just recently, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (Christian
Social Union, CSU) announced that he would comprehensively expand the
powers of the Verfassungsschutz. According to a draft bill that became known in early July, the Verfassungsschutz and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Foreign
Intelligence Agency) are in future to be permitted not only to engage
in surveillance but also actively to “intervene covertly.”
Specifically,
the intelligence services are to be allowed to penetrate IT systems,
redirect or cut off data streams, provide “false information for those
involved” and delete or falsify stored information—in other words, to
hack, sabotage and deploy targeted disinformation. All of this affects
people who are not even accused of a criminal offense and who will never
learn that the intelligence services have taken action against them,
let alone be able to take legal action against this.
In the new Verfassungsschutz report
for 2025, any fundamental criticism of capitalism and war continues to
be defamed as anti-constitutional. The report expressly warns against
“Trotskyism” and declares that “left-wing extremist activities” were
directed “to abolish the existing state and social order and replace it
with a socialist or communist system.” Anyone who opposes militarism and
war is defamed as “extremist.” By contrast, the real danger—the
right-wing extremist terror networks within the police, the Bundeswehr
(Armed Forces) and the intelligence services themselves—is
systematically played down.
*****
The SGP will continue and intensify its struggle against the intelligence services and for democratic rights. The Verfassungsschutz,
which is riddled with right-wing extremist networks and whose
previously long-serving president is now himself classified as a
right-wing extremist, must be dissolved immediately. The removal of the
SGP from the Verfassungsschutz report is no cause for the
all-clear. The struggle against the revival of the Anti-Socialist Laws
and of thought-crimes continues.
The
most chilling remarks came from Stephen Miller, who presented a
Nazi-style characterization of the “left” as a biological deformity that
had to be eliminated.
Voting
is set to begin Friday on the deal, which increases top pay to $30 an
hour by 2030 for current workers but expands the tier system and offers
no job protections as parts suppliers slash costs through AI and
automation.
During
nearly five hours of questioning, Democrats remained virtually silent
on ICE murders, National Guard deployments and the prosecution of
left-wing opponents of the Trump administration.
WSWS
reporters spoke to protesters in Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine
this week, the sites of two daylight murders of workers on their way to
work by ICE gestapo agents.
Jacobincites
recent DSA election victories to argue, in the form of friendly advice,
that the Democratic Party establishment and trade union bureaucracy
should not be distracted by the supposed “socialism” of the DSA. For
their own good, they must instead embrace the DSA and accept the
organization’s offer to lend them a “left” cover.
Billions
in Venezuelan assets withheld from earthquake relief, debt payments
prioritized over reconstruction, and oil wealth redirected to Wall
Street all demonstrate that US operations have nothing to do with aiding
the population.
When
1,700 workers at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan opened their
first paychecks after the UAW narrowly rammed through a fourth contract,
they found that 32 hours of vacation time had disappeared.
The
spread of two diseases in New York City, Legionnaires’ disease and
Cyclosporiasis, highlights the failure of the capitalist system to mount
effective measures to control known threats to human health and life.
The
scheduling and execution of death sentences in Florida are made
possible by a peculiarity of state law, in which the governor holds
almost singular authority over the machinery of capital punishment and
decides when death warrants are signed and executions scheduled.
For
all those groups playing a leading role in the Stop the War Coalition
and the Gaza protests, this is either made a secondary issue or ignored
entirely as they tout Graham’s supposed role in reviving trade union
militancy presented in entirely uncritical fashion.
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
There is enormous anger in Biddeford, Maine, a working class city of
about 22,000, over the murder of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old
worker from Colombia gunned down by federal immigration agents Monday
morning as he drove to work. Guerrero, a husband and the father of a
3-year-old daughter, held a valid work permit, had been issued a Social
Security number and had an active asylum claim. He was not the person
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was looking for.
Neighbors
heard as many as seven gunshots ring out at about 7:15 a.m. at the
corner of Pool and Hill streets. Eyewitness video shows agents dragging
Guerrero from his bullet-riddled car and handcuffing him as he bled from
his head. His last words, according to a witness, were, “I tried to
stop.” His wife and daughter, still in her Bluey pajamas, watched from
the sidewalk as he died. His body remained handcuffed on the pavement
for five hours. None of the agents wore body cameras. Federal officials
refuse to release the name of the shooter, who has been placed on
administrative leave.
Guerrero, originally from Bucaramanga, Colombia, worked as a cleaner and DoorDash delivery driver.
*****
WSWS reporters visited Mechanics Park in Biddeford Tuesday, where
flowers, candles, handwritten notes and a Bluey blanket and stuffed toy
line the fence near the site of the killing. Hundreds of residents have
rallied there since Monday, at one point flooding into the Main Street
office of Republican Senator Susan Collins chanting “Vote her out!”
Kelsey
lives and works a block from where Guerrero was killed. “I’m angry,”
she said. “We’ve been screaming about this for a long time. We always do
what we’re told. I attend meetings. I call. I email. I show up when I
can, and they [the politicians] don’t listen.”
Kelsey’s remarks point to the social reality underlying the events in
Biddeford: the ICE rampage is unfolding in working class communities
already being hit by soaring rents, taxes and the destruction of jobs
and local businesses.
Asked about the difference between the
official narrative and what actually happened Monday, Kelsey replied,
“They’re already trying to cover things up … But it doesn’t matter.
Someone was murdered on my street, a block away from where I live, a
block away from where I work. I’m gonna show up; I’m gonna show up for
my community. It doesn’t matter who you are. We don’t kill people on the
street. If someone’s guilty of something, we bring them in and we hold
them accountable. You don’t just murder people. And it’s happened too
many times.”
*****
The anger and determination to fight expressed by workers in Biddeford
must be armed with a political program. The Socialist Equality Party and
the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees call for
building independent workplace and neighborhood committees, uniting
workers across industries, nationalities and immigration status, to
prepare mass action, up to and including a general strike, against ICE
terror and the drive to dictatorship.
DHL
worker and Verdi union rep Christopher Tersch won his employment
tribunal case on July 8 after being dismissed without notice for giving a
speech against arms deliveries to Israel at a Palestine protest in
Leipzig.
The
PTS and its coalition partners are being called upon by the ruling
class to channel the growing political radicalization behind bourgeois
politics.
A chapter in How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism,
“The Malvinas War: How Healy Worked as an Imperialist Stooge”, is
republished as a means of taking forwards the political education
of the younger cadres of the ICFI and the readers of the WSWS.
Ten years have passed since the military coup attempt of July 15,
2016, which aimed to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
government. As the Erdoğan government marks the anniversary with “The
Will is Ours, the Victory is Ours” events celebrating it as a “triumph
of democracy,” the real lessons of that night and of the decade that
followed lie entirely outside the official narrative.
Erdoğan’s
“triumph of democracy” rhetoric is refuted by the political coup his
government is mounting against the elected representatives of the
Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP)—which emerged as the largest
party in the 2024 local elections—and by the unprecedented erosion of
democratic rights. As Erdoğan seeks to hold down through repression the
social inequality and class tensions that have grown even sharper than a
decade ago, Özgür Özel, the elected leader of the CHP that claims to be
his “democratic rival,” meanwhile appeals to the very same imperialist
powers that have sanctioned Erdoğan’s crackdown, while warning of a
social explosion. The United States and European leaders—who were
accused a decade ago of being behind the coup attempt—were welcomed with
a red-carpet reception just a week ago at the NATO summit in Ankara, as
hundreds of people who oppose war, genocide, and NATO intrigues were
unlawfully detained.
According to the indictments, more than 8,600
soldiers took direct part in the coup attempt, roughly 3,000 of them
enlisted soldiers and military cadets who did not know what they were
doing. In the subsequent purge, 40 percent of the generals were removed.
A team was dispatched to seize Erdoğan in Marmaris but failed.
Erdoğan’s call, through the media, for the population to take to the
streets against the coup was a critical turning point in its defeat. Yet
the appeal to the masses subsequently and deliberately avoided
targeting the imperialist-capitalist machinery behind the coup—a
machinery of which Erdoğan, though discarded by it for the time being,
was an important part.
The coup officers used more than 200
armored vehicles, dozens of tanks, helicopters and F-16s. The Turkish
Parliament, the Presidential Complex, the Special Operations Department
and TÜRKSAT satellite company were bombed by warplanes. According to
official figures, 287 people were killed, 253 of them while resisting
the coup. Incirlik Base, used jointly by US-NATO, was used to refuel the
coup jets in mid-air; and when the attempt collapsed, the Turkish
commander tried to take refuge at the US headquarters on the base.
After
the coup was defeated, more than 125,000 public employees were
dismissed, tens of thousands were arrested, and hundreds of
associations, media outlets and unions were shut down. Having defeated
the coup attempt, Erdoğan used it as the basis for a counter-offensive
to build a presidential dictatorship in which he crushed all of his
opponents. The purges and arrests targeted not only the coup-plotters
but also leftists, Kurdish politicians and the workers’ movement.
Immediately
after the coup, Labor Minister Süleyman Soylu declared that “the United
States is behind the coup,” while Erdoğan attributed it to a
“mastermind” at work since 1960. This was a reference to the undeniable
role the United States had played in previous military coups, above all
that of September 12, 1980. The fact that tens of thousands took to the
streets during the coup attempt, and that the overwhelming majority of
the population did not support the coup, was bound up with the fact that
these bloody coups remain vivid in the consciousness of the working
masses.
The official narrative, however, was quickly narrowed to a framework
focused entirely on the US-based Islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen and
his organization; no effort was made in the trials to expose the hand of
the US and NATO; any withdrawal from NATO or seizure of US-NATO bases
and interests in Türkiye was out of the question. Adil Öksüz, alleged to
be Gülen’s right-hand man, who was captured at the Akıncı Air Base near
Ankara on July 16, was released on July 18 and vanished. Berlin
allegedly declined to confirm or deny claims that he is in Germany.
That
these matters were all swept under the carpet by Ankara is the
political expression of the Turkish bourgeoisie’s powerful orientation
to restabilize its military-strategic alliance with the US and NATO.
*****
The responses of NATO’s principal powers during the coup made clear
that, even if they did not directly organize it, they turned a blind eye
to it. US Secretary of State John Kerry’s first official comment was an
evasive one that did not condemn the coup and merely expressed the hope
for “stability, peace and continuity” in Türkiye. Washington and Berlin
declared their support for Erdoğan’s “elected government” only after it
had become clear that the coup would fail.
There was no sign that
these powers would have greeted the coup’s success with displeasure. In
the days after the coup, the American and German political and media
establishment, rather than condemning the coup attempt and its plotters,
focused on condemning Erdoğan’s suppression of them, hypocritically
emphasizing their “democratic rights.” On July 18, the Washington Post
reported Kerry’s remarks at a press conference, saying, “NATO will be
scrutinizing Turkey in coming days to ensure that it fulfills the
alliance’s requirement that members adhere to democratic governance.”
*****
The coup was the product not merely of a power struggle between
Erdoğan and Gülen, but of the deepening crisis of the global capitalist
system. Before the coup, Ankara had entered into sharp conflict with the
US and its other NATO allies over fundamental geopolitical questions.
In 2013, when the administration of US President Barack Obama gave full
backing to the military coup in Egypt against the elected Islamist
president, Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Erdoğan sharply
condemned it.
In the regime-change war launched in Syria in 2011,
in which Ankara was deeply involved, Washington’s growing reliance on
Kurdish nationalist militias in place of its Islamist proxies was seen
as a major threat by the Turkish bourgeoisie and state: the emergence of
a US-backed Kurdish enclave on the southern border could produce
similar consequences in Türkiye, home to the largest Kurdish population.
The Erdoğan government responded by ending its ongoing negotiations
with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Ankara’s Islamist proxies in
Syria were backed against the US-supported Kurdish forces, and a violent
crackdown was launched against elected Kurdish politicians at home.
This conflict in Syria could allow Iran and Russia, Washington’s real
targets, to increase their influence in the country and across the
region. Indeed, after the coup attempt Ankara established a tripartite
mechanism with Iran and Russia in Syria and placed the goal of
suppressing the Kurdish movement ahead of its effort to topple the
Damascus regime. While NATO leaders awaited the outcome of the coup
attempt, the leaders of Iran and Russia were among the first to condemn
it.
After Moscow intervened in the war to defend the regime of
President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Türkiye’s downing of a Russian
aircraft on the border in November 2015 brought the two countries to the
brink of war. In June 2016 Erdoğan sent a letter of apology to Putin,
turning toward rapprochement with Moscow and toward a settlement in
Syria outside Washington’s control.
The threat that the largest army on NATO’s southern flank would shift
toward an alliance with Moscow was unacceptable to the imperialist
powers. Just eight days before the coup, on July 8, 2016, the NATO
summit in Warsaw devoted its central focus to escalating the
confrontation with Russia. Barely two years had passed since the
anti-Russian, far-right coup of 2014 in Kiev, and the NATO powers were
increasingly moving to provoke a war with Russia through Ukraine.
All these conflicts arose from the fact that the US-led imperialist
aggression unleashed after the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the
Soviet Union in 1991 was drawing Türkiye into its vortex. The Turkish
bourgeoisie had been complicit, in pursuit of its own interests, in the
aggression of the US and its allies against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and
Syria and in NATO’s eastward expansion targeting Russia and was being
forced to confront the consequences.
After the coup was
suppressed, Erdoğan escalated the drive to crush the Kurdish movement in
Türkiye and Syria; direct military operations were launched into Syria
and the country’s northwest was brought under control. This was a move
directly against US policy.
*****
The regime-change war in Syria succeeded in December 2024 through an
operation spearheaded by Islamist proxies backed by the Erdoğan
government, toppling Assad and dealing a heavy blow to the influence of
Iran and Russia in the region. As Ankara increasingly abandoned its
balancing policy with Moscow, the Black Sea became an arena for
Ukraine’s NATO-backed attacks on Russian military and commercial assets.
The NATO summit held in Ankara in July 2026 glorified both rearmament
and Ukraine’s growing strikes deep into Russia.
Today, Türkiye
under Erdoğan is also seen as indispensable to the US war against Iran
and to its drive for full domination of the Middle East; despite its
growing rivalry and conflict with Israel, Ankara participates in Trump’s
“Board of Peace” for Gaza. Türkiye is considered vital to US aggression
aimed at China and its major economic projects such as the Belt and
Road.
Ten years after the July 15 coup attempt, the international
geopolitical and class tensions that gave rise to it have grown sharper
than ever. In the United States, the center of world imperialism,
Trump’s failed coup of January 6, 2021 was the sharpest expression of
the collapse of democratic forms of rule globally. Trump’s return to the
White House in 2025 was made possible only because the Democrats, far
from prosecuting and jailing him, cleared his path. Both coup attempts
have proven once again that no faction within the bourgeoisie can
consistently defend democratic rights or oppose imperialism.
As
Leon Trotsky explained in his Theory of Permanent Revolution, in this
epoch of imperialist war and the world socialist revolution, these tasks
can only be accomplished through the working class’s seizure of power
and on an international scale. It is based on this perspective that the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi
(Socialist Equality Party), Turkish section of the International
Committee of the Fourth International, was founded on the basis of a
relentless political struggle aimed at mobilizing the working class
against both the imperialist powers and the Erdoğan regime and the
bourgeois opposition.
Two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the
Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a
Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the epidemic
has entered a devastating new phase. Just back from a week in Ituri
province, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, executive director of the WHO Health
Emergencies Programme, delivered the starkest assessment yet at a July 14 briefing in
Geneva. The virus, he warned, “continues to outpace the response
efforts by the national authorities, international partners, including
WHO, and the communities most affected.”
WHO modeling now
indicates the true number of cases is “at least two to four times the
number of cases that we have found.” The official tally is a floor
beneath a far larger epidemic. Roughly 80 percent of new cases are
detected outside any known chains of transmission. “Perhaps the most
alarming finding,” Ihekweazu said, “is that many newly reported cases
are individuals who died in their communities, without ever reaching a
health facility and receiving care.” The case fatality rate has climbed
rather than fallen as the response matures, from roughly 23 percent in
mid-June toward the mid-30s, signifying that the response is falling
behind the disease.
The
union leadership is desperately seeking to regain control of the
dispute, having entered backroom negotiations with the government
shortly after its sellout deal was rejected by teachers.
This
public lecture, hosted by the SEP and IYSSE, will discuss the lessons
of Sri Lanka’s 2022 mass uprising for working people entering into
struggles against the JVP/NPP government’s implementation of IMF
austerity, authoritarian measures and the unfolding world war.
In the face of mounting popular opposition, Trump is escalating his
attacks on democratic rights. Trump responded to mourning protests
against the ICE murders Wednesday by doubling down on allowing federal
immigration thugs to carry out the type of traffic stops that led to the
murder of the two innocent men. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most
important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” he
posted on Truth Social, telling the agency: “go back and do your very
important job.”
In every respect, the killings of Araujo and
Guerrero were as violent and brutal as the murders of Renée Good and
Alex Pretti. The Trump administration treats murder at the hands of the
agencies of the state as part of normal operations.
Abroad, US forces have carried out five consecutive days of
airstrikes against Iran through Wednesday, reimposed a naval blockade of
Iranian ports Tuesday and struck coastal defense and missile sites from
Bushehr to Greater Tunb Island. Iran’s government spokesperson Fatemeh
Mohajerani said Wednesday that the strikes on southern Iran had killed
more than 30 civilians. The Health Ministry counted more than 260
wounded.
These are two fronts of the same war. American
imperialism wages war abroad to subjugate Iran. It wages the war at home
against the class that must pay for it and whose opposition must be
broken. The police state erected at home is the domestic requirement of
the wider war carried out abroad.
*****
A ground invasion of Iran would mean American dead and wounded on a
scale not seen in decades—not since the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The
Pentagon acknowledged 14 American dead and 414 wounded as of Monday, a
count that is systematically understated and completely ignored in the
media.
The Pentagon publicly puts the war’s cost at some $30
billion, but NBC News reported Tuesday that the department’s internal
estimate—counting damaged bases, destroyed aircraft and expended bombs
and missiles—runs as high as $100 billion. In estimates published in Fortune
in late June, Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School put the war’s
long-run cost above $1 trillion, including $200 billion to $300 billion
to repair 228 damaged American military sites. All of this would be a
down payment on the cost of a ground invasion of Iran.
Where is
the money to come from? The US government is functionally bankrupt. The
federal debt stands at $39.4 trillion. Debt held by the public has
passed 100 percent of the country’s annual output. In this fiscal year’s
first seven months, the Treasury paid $628 billion in interest, which
is more than it spent on Medicare.
The American ruling class can finance such a war only through massive
attacks on social programs. These attacks will provoke enormous
opposition to a deeply unpopular war. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed
Sunday, just 37 percent of Americans backed the resumption of the
bombing.
American imperialism can achieve its aims only by
escalating the war against Iran and slashing social spending, and it can
impose both only through a frontal assault on democratic rights.
*****
At 9:00 p.m. Thursday, Trump will deliver a prime-time address billed
as a speech on election integrity and voting machines, while the
bombing of Iran continues. The administration is building this apparatus
ahead of the November elections, which will take place amid an immense
political, social and economic crisis. But the elections are only the
occasion. Social inequality is soaring, the war is swelling the oil
companies’ profits while workers pay for it at the pump, and a police
state is the only means of defending such a social order.
The
Democratic Party opposes none of this. It is a faction of the same
ruling class, and its criticisms of Trump are that he is not effectively
defending the interests of American imperialism. When US and Israeli
forces assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, the war’s
first day, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer welcomed the murder from
the Senate floor, declaring, “I will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei,
the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was killed in the initial rounds of
airstrikes.”
As the failure of Trump’s war aims has become clear,
the Democrats have turned to condemning the administration for failing
to achieve victory against Iran. Schumer denounced the “ceasefire” Trump
signed in mid-June as the “art of surrender.”
When the killings of Good and Pretti produced mass outrage, the
Democrats arranged a deal with Trump that kept ICE funded without a
single condition. When millions joined the “No Kings” demonstrations
against the administration, the Democrats and their political allies
worked systematically to exclude the question of war from the protests.
This is a party of war and Wall Street, and its function is not to fight
the establishment of a dictatorship, but to contain the opposition to
it.
The defense of democratic rights falls to the working class, and it
cannot be separated from the fight against war. Both dictatorship and
war arise from the same source: a capitalist oligarchy that can no
longer rule by democratic means or maintain its world position by
peaceful means. The struggle against ICE terror and against the war on
Iran must be unified in an independent movement of the working class, in
the United States and internationally, directed against the capitalist
system itself.
At least 26 people have been reported dead in the Philippines from
landslides and flooding associated with Super Typhoon Bavi, while the
enormous storm forced millions to evacuate and caused widespread
disruption from the US-controlled Mariana Islands to Taiwan and China.
In the Philippines, where Bavi was named Inday, the storm did not
make landfall. However, its vast circulation intensified the southwest
monsoon producing days of torrential rain. As of Wednesday, the Office
of Civil Defense reported 26 deaths from drowning and landslides, with
14 people still missing. More than one million people were affected,
about 22,000 remained in evacuation centers, and 766 houses had been
destroyed.
The heaviest loss of life was on the impoverished
southern island of Mindanao. Ten deaths were recorded in Sarangani,
seven in Lanao del Sur, four in Davao Occidental and two in Bukidnon.
These deaths occurred in areas with fragile housing on floodplains and
unstable slopes, without adequate drainage, protective works or ready
access to safe accommodation, meaning these deaths were not simply the
inevitable product of extreme weather.
The disaster comes amid a
far-reaching corruption scandal over Philippine flood-control
infrastructure. At least 9,855 projects worth more than 545 billion
pesos ($8.8 billion USD), undertaken since the Marcos administration
took office in 2022, are under investigation. The scandal involves
allegations of substandard, overpriced and non-existent works, as well
as demands for political kickbacks.
While no direct connection
has yet been established between projects under investigation and the
communities struck by Bavi, the scandal underscores that infrastructure
essential to protecting human life has been subordinated to contractors,
political patronage and private enrichment.
*****
As much as 90 percent of the Pacific Ocean has been experiencing
marine heat-wave conditions since January with persistence hot spots
lasting for six months. There is a high probability that climate change
is the major contributor to the warming along with a developing El Niño
weather pattern in the regime.
Autoworker and socialist Will Lehman fights for workers to control the UAW
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania running
for UAW president, issued a statement this week on the federal criminal
investigation into UAW President Shawn Fain.
“What the
investigation confirms is what many of you have long known and what my
campaign has said since I first ran for this office,” Lehman wrote in a
statement posted on his website.
“This bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished, and power
must be transferred to workers on the shop floor. That is what I am
running for UAW president to do.”
Speaking to workers, Lehman
wrote, “Disgust with corruption is not enough. The question is: What are
we going to do about it? It is not enough to complain. We must act.”
*****
In his own July 12 statement, Fain postured as a martyr, declaring,
“This is what happens when you go against corporate America and their
allies, and I’m not going to be intimidated or harassed out of serving
our membership.” He claims the [federal] Monitor is persecuting him over the UAW’s
stance on Gaza.
“These claims deserve nothing but contempt,”
Lehman responded. “When anti-genocide delegates chanted ‘Ceasefire now’
at the conference he assembled to endorse Joe Biden, the man supplying
Israel the bombs, Fain watched as Secret Service agents and UAW thugs
dragged them out.”
Far from defying the war machine, “the UAW
bureaucracy strangled the University of California strike and blocked
action at Columbia” in defense of protesting students, Lehman continued.
“When GE Aerospace workers struck a major defense contractor supplying
weapons to Israel, Fain shut them down within weeks.”
Lehman also castigated the Monitor, saying he was installed not to
defend the democratic rights of UAW members but to refurbish the image
of the union bureaucracy. The Monitor, he said, “knew about Fain’s
conduct before the convention, sat on his findings until Fain was
already nominated, and let stand Fain’s sworn certification that he had
not engaged in corrupt conduct, which Barofsky knew was a lie.” Lehman
continued, “This is the same monitor who signed off on the 2022-23
elections, rejected my documented evidence of deliberate voter
disenfranchisement, and blessed an outcome in which Fain won with the
votes of just 6 percent of the membership.”
Lehman insisted that workers’ anger over the scandal must be
transformed into organized action. “I am not running for UAW president
to reach the top of the garbage heap at Solidarity House,” he wrote.
“This campaign is not about replacing one official with another. It is
about abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to the rank and
file.”
The growing opposition of the rank and file to every
faction of the bureaucracy is already expressed in the mass rejection of
UAW-backed contracts and in overwhelming strike votes. “What that
fighting spirit needs is organization: rank-and-file committees in every
plant, independent of the apparatus and answerable only to you,” Lehman
concluded.
Ganesh—as he was known among party comrades—joined the RCL in 1970.
He quickly became a full-time cadre and was elected to the RCL’s Central
Committee and Political Committee (PC). He played an important role in
the struggle to build the Trotskyist movement in the Indian
subcontinent, but had been unable to carry on active political work for
nearly a decade and a half due to difficult health issues.
Ganesh
was born on May 15, 1939, in Malaysia, where his family had settled.
When Ganesh was 16, the family returned to their native village of
Alavai in northern Sri Lanka, about 30 kilometres from Jaffna city. He
completed his studies in the science stream in the English medium at
Nelliady Central College, near his hometown.
The decade following
the family’s return to Sri Lanka was marked by sharp political
upheavals. The Sri Lankan ruling elite, fearing the growing influence of
the Trotskyist movement in the working class, resorted to vicious
campaigns of anti-Tamil chauvinism to divide workers on communal lines.
That began soon after independence in 1948 when the United National
Party (UNP) government abolished the fundamental citizenship rights of
hundreds of thousands of Indian-origin Tamil-speaking plantation
workers.
*****
When Keerthi Balasuriya visited Madras at the end of 1985 and held
discussions with Ganesh and other comrades, Ganesh enthusiastically
supported the ICFI’s positions. In 1986 and 1987, David North, now
chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, visited Madras with
Balasuriya and held extensive discussions with Ganesh and other comrades
on the issues involved in the split.
Ganesh and the group of ICFI
supporters issued a statement on December 12, 1986 that fully endorsed
“the struggle waged by the majority sections of the International
Committee against the renegade clique of Healy, Banda and Slaughter [WRP
leaders] who, through their attacks on the political and theoretical
foundations of the ICFI, sought to subordinate the vanguard of the
international working class to Stalinism, Social Democracy and the
national bourgeoisie and thereby to imperialism itself.”
*****
Ganesh was very enthusiastic about the ICFI’s important advance in launching the World Socialist Web Site in 1998. He wrote articles himself and co-authored others on important issues for the WSWS in the years that followed.
Those
who worked with him recall his dedication, energy and persistence under
difficult conditions. Even in his later years, when increasingly
incapacitated by illness, he remained active, bringing his experience
and determination to the task of educating younger comrades and
defending the principles of Trotskyism.
Indian supporter Akash
Dev, who helped Ganesh during his last years and his final hospitalization, explained to this writer: “Ganesh was very enthusiastic
about the political analysis developed by the WSWS on a daily basis. He
used to ask me to explain what was in the WSWS because he was unable to
read the site. He had great confidence in Trotskyism and the ICFI.”
The
memory of comrade Ganeshadev’s lifelong dedication to the fight for
Trotskyism in the working class will live on among workers and party
comrades in Sri Lanka and internationally.
Pianist
Jayson Gillham has shown himself to be not only an acclaimed artist but
also a principled one, willing to take a stand against imperialist
barbarism and official censorship.
The attempt by the Trump administration to extradite American
philanthropist James “Fergie” Cox Chambers Jr. from Spain is part of the
state-led campaign to criminalize support for the Palestinian people
and attack basic democratic rights under the guise of
“counterterrorism.”
*****
The US indictment accuses Chambers of “international money
laundering” and providing material support to foreign organizations
designated as “terrorist.” US officials point to financial transfers
from US bank accounts to Tunisia, where Chambers has resided since late
2023. His supporters say these transfers funded legal activities,
including local investments and sponsorship of Club Africain, the
Tunisian football club that recently won the national championship.
Family
members and close associates have denounced the arrest as a politically
motivated attack on his democratic rights, directly tied to his support
for Palestine and his outspoken condemnation of Israel’s genocidal war
on Gaza. His partner, actor Stella Schnabel, stated that “Fergie is
being imprisoned because he uses his wealth to support Palestine and
people suffering genocide in Gaza,” explicitly connecting the case to
the Trump administration’s drive to criminalize solidarity with
Palestinians.
Chambers is an heir to Cox Enterprises, a vast
US-based conglomerate in media, automotive and telecommunications
headquartered in Atlanta. In mid-2023, after a political and personal
break with his family, he received a payout of roughly $250 million
representing his share of the Cox fortune. This separation freed him
from direct corporate control and enabled him to channel significant
resources into social, artistic and explicitly political causes.
*****
One of the most
serious charges in the sealed US indictment is allegedly tied not to any
violent act but to his transfer of money to Tunisia and his sponsorship
of Club Africain, which the Trump Justice Department claims as evidence
of funding Palestinian resistance. Chambers and his supporters insist
that this is a political fabrication designed to turn legitimate
international solidarity—financial, cultural and athletic—into evidence
of “terror support.”
The defense of James “Fergie” Cox Chambers is
a matter of principle for the working class and all defenders of
democratic rights, regardless of his personal wealth or elite family
background. The key question is not his social origin but the precedent
being set: a billionaire who uses his resources to oppose imperialist
genocide and is then pursued internationally as a “terrorist financier”
by the US state.
Attacks on Chambers are part of a broader assault on the right to
political speech and association. If the government succeeds in
extraditing and imprisoning him on fabricated charges, it will
legitimize the use of anti-terror legislation to criminalize any
substantial support for Palestinians or any movements resisting
imperialist aggression.
*****
While the Spanish government of Pedro Sánchez has publicly criticized
Israel’s actions in Gaza and clashed with the Trump administration for
refusing to allow the US to use air bases in Spain to conduct the war
against Iran, its security apparatus is now detaining a US citizen whose
alleged “crime” is using his fortune to aid the very population being
massacred.
Chambers’ arrest is part of a systematic pattern during Trump’s
second term of targeting pro-Palestinian activists, especially students
and non-citizens, through immigration, criminal and financial law. Since
early 2025, the administration has wielded deportation proceedings,
detention and surveillance as tools to chill outspoken public opposition
to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Hundreds of students had their visas
revoked and were detained or threatened after participating in protests
denouncing Israel, including Columbia University graduate students
Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil. Mahdawi was pulled into detention
during a naturalization appointment and later ordered deported by an
immigration judge, while a federal court found that the Department of
Homeland Security and the State Department “acted in concert” to misuse
their powers to target non-citizen pro-Palestinian activists simply for
their political speech.
Khalil, another Columbia graduate, spent
months in immigration custody including around the time of his child’s
birth and now faces renewed deportation proceedings after a federal
appeals court ruled that a lower court lacked jurisdiction to order his
release.
Similar repression has forced students like Tufts
University’s Rümeysa Öztürk and Cornell’s Momodou Taal to leave the
United States under pressure from the security state, while activists
such as Leqaa Kordia have endured a year-long incarceration in ICE
prisons for their participation in campus protests.
According to Mother Jones,
newly unsealed documents show that federal authorities explicitly
monitored and punished student speech critical of Israel, confirming
that deportations and arrests were not incidental but designed to
silence dissent and create a climate of fear. The attempt to extradite
Chambers extends this campaign to high-profile US citizens, signaling
that no one is immune from retaliation if they use significant resources
to challenge the US-Israeli war policy.
The international workers’ movement must respond by demanding the
immediate release of James “Fergie” Cox Chambers from Spanish custody,
the rejection of the US extradition request and the dropping of all
charges against him. Linked to this, the deportation and criminal cases
against pro-Palestinian students and activists in the US must be opposed
through a unified struggle that connects the defense of democratic
rights with the fight against imperialist war and genocide.
On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (Democrat-New York)
sent a “dear colleague” letter to all 214 Democratic members of the
House of Representatives informing them that he would vote “no” on an
amendment to eliminate $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel.
Reflecting the crisis in the Democratic Party over its support for
Israeli genocide, Jeffries said in his letter that he would not “whip”
the vote on the amendment, a tacit acknowledgment of popular hostility
to the Zionist regime.
The amendment, sponsored by Kentucky
Republican Thomas Massie, was part of an annual foreign affairs spending
bill called the National Security, Department of State, and Related
Appropriations Act, 2027. The amendment did not affect $500 million in
so-called “defensive” military funding, most of which goes to Israel’s
Iron Dome missile defense system.
In the vote, held Wednesday, the
Massie amendment was defeated, with 104 voting in favor and 314 voting
against. A majority of Democrats failed to support cutting off military
aid to Israel. 103 voted“yes” on the amendment, 98 voted “no,” 10 voted
“present,” and four did not vote. Most of the Democratic House
leadership, including Jeffries, Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, Vice
Caucus Chairman Ted Lieu, and Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee, voted against cutting off military
aid.
Jeffries’ opposition to the military aid cutoff did not come
as a surprise. He is a notorious defender of the Zionist regime and
major recipient of campaign funding from the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In this, he speaks for the Democratic Party
leadership, which is fundamentally in agreement with the Trump
administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza , itself a
continuation of the policy of the Democratic administration of Joe
Biden.
*****
In his letter, Jeffries demonstrated his solidarity with US
imperialism’s criminal policy in the Middle East, writing that “the
so-called Massie amendment would restrict our country’s ability to
confront Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations in the
region who are sworn enemies of both the United States and Israel.” He
declared that the US and Israel needed a “new security arrangement” that
would “undergird the maintenance of Israel’s qualitative military edge
against Iran and other malign actors in the region.”
Three weeks
before Jeffries’ letter, voters in New York City gave expression to
their growing opposition to capitalism and disgust with the Democratic
Party’s complicity in the crimes of the Trump administration by voting
in Democratic primary elections for congressional candidates endorsed by
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America,
in two cases ousting Democratic incumbents.
A major issue in the
leftward swing, with some 125,000 New Yorkers voting for self-described
“socialist” and “progressive” candidates, was opposition to the
US-backed Israeli genocide. The Mamdani-backed candidates denounced the
Israeli war as genocide and attacked their opponents for taking campaign
money from AIPAC. Separately, a majority of surveyed Democratic voters
told AP-NORC (National Opinion Research Center) pollsters they believed
Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Jeffries’ letter expresses
the contempt, hostility and fear of the Democratic Party for the
mounting opposition of broad masses of the population to the existing
parties and economic system and growing interest in a socialist
alternative. It is of a piece with the statement released recently by “centrist” House Democrats pledging support for capitalism, law and order, austerity and patriotism.
This
is the party into which Mamdani and the DSA seek to channel mass
opposition so as to block the development of an independent movement of
the working class. Their so-called “democratic socialism” is not
socialism at all, but rather the delusion that capitalism can be
reformed—that the ruling corporate-financial oligarchy does not have to
be expropriated and overthrown.
The relationship of Mamdani and
the DSA to Jeffries exposes the hypocrisy of their denunciations of
Zionism and their claims to be in rebellion against the Democratic Party
establishment. Mamdani himself has repeatedly made clear that he will
support Jeffries becoming Speaker of the House should the Democrats take
control of the House of Representatives in the November midterm
elections. Last November, following his election as mayor, Mamdani said
on Meet the Press that he wanted to see Jeffries become House
Speaker. That came just days after Jeffries was one of the signatories
of a House resolution condemning socialism.
At Mamdani’s urging,
the New York City DSA voted last November against endorsing a primary
run in the 8th Congressional District by DSA City Council member Chi
Ossé to unseat Jeffries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Ossé’s primary
challenge was “not a good idea.” Ossé obediently withdrew his candidacy,
allowing Jeffries to gain the nomination unopposed. More recently,
Ocasio-Cortez, who voted last year in favor of $500 million in funding
for Israel’s Iron Dome, reiterated her support for Jeffries remaining
the Democratic leader.
On June 25, two days after the primary sweep of his candidates, Mamdani met privately with Jeffries. According to a Jewish Insider
report, Mamdani framed the meeting in advance as cooperative, telling
reporters he was looking forward to working with Jeffries.
More
than 130 doctors at Allina Health's Mercy and Unity hospitals in
Minnesota have voted by 90 percent to authorize a strike while 65
hospice nurses held a one-day walkout, as Sacramento-based Sutter
Health's takeover of Allina threatens AI-driven mass layoffs.
The temporary suspension itself was a transparent fig leaf. It
restricted only ICE-initiated vehicle stops, which account for a small
minority of the agency’s arrests, and exempted stops involving criminal
warrants and joint operations. ICE could continue workplace raids,
arrests at homes and courthouses, detention operations and the rest of
its nationwide rampage.
But Trump’s refusal to tolerate even this
token restriction makes clear that the ICE killings have the backing of
the federal government, who are using the immigration Gestapo to
terrorize immigrant workers as part of a broader attack on the
democratic rights of the whole working class. The administration is
doubtlessly also seeking to provoke a confrontation, as it did when an
ICE surge in Minneapolis led to mass protests following the murders of
Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, which it can exploit to expand police
state measures.
Meanwhile, another death in ICE custody has
brought the total to four dead in eight days. On Wednesday, ICE
announced that Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a 45-year-old Venezuelan
immigrant, allegedly died of cardiac arrest Monday while agents were
transferring him between detention centers in Georgia. ICE arrested him
July 9, only four days before he died. His family and immigrant
advocates say ICE denied him necessary medication. He was the 22nd
person to die in ICE custody this year.
On Tuesday, a 28-year-old
Mexican immigrant was chased into traffic by ICE and fatally struck by a
tractor-trailer near St. Augustine, Florida.
The FBI is adding on to Salgado’s murder with smears after the fact.
Houston Public Media reported an FBI search-warrant affidavit for
Salgado’s impounded vehicle Wednesday for “what appeared to be a white
crystal-like substance packaged in small bags,” which they claim was
“consistent with methamphetamine.”
The bureau is using the
insinuation of drugs to criminalize Salgado after his death and divert
attention from the agents who killed him. In reality, Salgado and the
other three occupants of his van were not even the targets of the
operation. The pretext of the drugs smear is completely flimsy. The
affidavit reports no chemical testing and the description of the “small
bags of white crystal-like substances” could easily fit packets of table
salt.
*****
WSWS reporters spoke with workers and young people at Tuesday’s
demonstration outside Houston City Hall. Their comments expressed the
outrage and fear spreading through immigrant communities, deep distrust
of both capitalist parties and a growing conviction that only
independent action by the working class can halt the ICE terror.
_in_1992_May_Day_march.png)
