Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: July 20-26
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Jordanian King Abdullah I assassinated by Palestinian gunman
100 years ago:
French government collapses under impact of franc devaluation
2. As grieving widow speaks out, details emerge of ICE agent who killed man in Biddeford, Maine
Taken before he was murdered, a photo of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and his daughter[Johan (Joan) Sebastián] Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant working legally in the United States with an active asylum case, was shot multiple times through the windshield of his car shortly after 7 a.m. on July 13 at the intersection of Pool and Hill Streets, a block from his home. ICE agents were conducting surveillance related to a warrant for someone else entirely. Durán Guerrero was not the target of the operation. As he tried to drive away, an agent opened fire, killing him in front of neighbors who ran outside to find his wife and young daughter screaming over his body. None of the agents on the scene wore body cameras.
Durán Guerrero’s death came less than a week after ICE agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston under nearly identical circumstances, gunning him down as he drove to a construction job with coworkers. Neither man was the target of the operation that killed him.
The back-to-back killings briefly forced Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to order ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division to suspend most vehicle stops while agents received additional training. The pause lasted barely a day.
Trump, who was reportedly not informed of the pause before it was announced, became furious after conservative media personalities cast the decision as a retreat. Steve Bannon used his “War Room” program to denounce Mullin, with guest Mike Davis declaring on air, “You work for President Trump, you don’t work for Senate Democrats, you don’t work for Susan Collins.” Fox personality Tomi Lahren and disgraced former Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino piled on as well.
Mullin, who days earlier had ordered the pause, promptly reversed himself, insisting he and Trump were “on the same page.” The about-face came as ICE faced internal pressure to meet Trump’s target of 2,000 arrests a day.
Durán Guerrero’s wife, Karolina Rojas Alvarez, spoke publicly for the first time Thursday at a news conference at the Lincoln Hotel in Biddeford, flanked by her husband’s sister Daniela and Keyko Torres of the immigrant rights group Presente! Maine. Speaking through a translator, with attorney Ben Gideon at her side, she described a devoted partner and father.
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She recalled how her husband doted on their three-year-old daughter from the day she was born, saying, “From the moment he held her in his arms and held her tiny hand, he never let her go.” Now, she said, she cannot bring herself to explain his absence to their daughter. “Now my daughter asks for Papá, and I don’t have the strength to tell her that Papá isn’t coming, that she can’t hug him anymore or tell him, ‘Papi, I love you.’”
All that remains, she said, are photographs and a blanket printed with the three of them together that he had given his daughter weeks before he was killed.
ICE has refused to officially confirm the identity of the agent who killed Durán Guerrero, with a spokesperson describing press efforts to name him as “doxxing.” But the shooter has been identified through multiple independent channels as David Michael Brouillette, 37, of Manchester, Maine. His own ex-wife corroborated reports that he was the killer, saying that he called her to admit he had fired the shots and to ask her to “lie for him” and “cover for his character.”
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His first ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, told the Associated Press he has a long history of psychiatric issues and became physically abusive after the birth of their daughter. Court records further show that Brouillette once sued a Maine college over a 2021 workplace injury, when a steel beam struck his head, alleging the resulting concussion left him with lasting “cognitive deficits” that impaired his memory and daily functioning.
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The WSWS has called for the mobilization of the working class through independent rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees to fight ICE terror, demanding that Guerrero’s and Salgado Araujo’s killers be identified, arrested and prosecuted, that ICE and Customs and Border Protection be dismantled, that National Guard and federal paramilitary forces be withdrawn from American cities and that all detained immigrants and all those imprisoned for opposing ICE be released. Behind Trump’s reversal of even a token pause on traffic stops, and the Democrats’ refusal to move beyond calls for hearings, lies the reality that both parties are committed to the deportation apparatus itself.
3. Germany abandons its post-war nuclear commitments as Merz and Macron forge atomic alliance
On Friday, the German-French Security and Defense Council met in a maintenance hangar at the Nörvenich military airfield near Cologne, under the chairmanship of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron. The fact that two heads of government of major European states chose to hold their political consultations between fighter jets and hangar doors is no coincidence—it is deliberate theater. Flanked by two French Rafale and two German Eurofighter jets, the image being conveyed to the public was unambiguous: the two largest economies in the European Union are preparing for nuclear war.The day before, immediately prior to Macron’s arrival in Germany, two Rafale jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons had practiced aerial refueling together with two Luftwaffe Eurofighters, using a French tanker aircraft. On Friday at the air base, further joint “maintenance exercises” followed, with German and French soldiers working on each others’ aircraft. What sounds like mutual maintenance assistance has in reality enormous political significance: the preparation of the logistical and operational integration of the two national air forces into a joint nuclear command structure.
What government communiqués describe as “deepening cooperation on nuclear deterrence” is the practical launch of a policy agreed between Merz and Macron in March this year. As the next concrete step, the Security Council resolved that German soldiers will participate actively in a French nuclear exercise for the first time this autumn. This means that Germany—which hitherto, within the framework of NATO nuclear sharing, has relied on US nuclear bombs and German carrier aircraft—will for the first time be directly incorporated into the nuclear doctrine of a second nuclear power.
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German-French nuclear cooperation is the direct response to the changed stance of the United States under President Donald Trump. His punitive tariffs against the European Union, his threat to annex Greenland and his attempt to reach an understanding with Russia over the heads of the Europeans have brought Paris and Berlin closer together. The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran—which Washington is waging not through NATO or a “coalition of the willing” but together with Israel alone—has accelerated this development.
Behind the façade of German-French unity staged at Bensberg and Nörvenich, however, deep rivalries and conflicts of interest lie concealed. The most spectacular expression of these tensions is the collapse of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the Franco-German-Spanish project to build a sixth-generation combat aircraft. In early June, on the margins of the Western Balkans summit in Montenegro, Chancellor Merz had informed Macron that he would not be pursuing the project further.
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French military circles fear that Germany is overtaking France militarily. In a closed hearing before the Senate finance committee, French Chief of the Defence Staff, Fabien Mandon, warned that Germany could soon massively outpace France militarily and in terms of arms production. He called for a drastic acceleration of French rearmament.
The price of nuclear rearmament and war preparations is enormous—and it is being loaded onto the shoulders of the working class. On July 6, one day before the start of the NATO summit in Ankara, the German government approved a historic war budget. The regular budget of the Defence Ministry will rise in 2027 by 32.7 percent within a single year—from 82.7 billion to 109.7 billion euros. Together with the “special fund” for the Bundeswehr and aid for Ukraine, military expenditure amounts to 151.3 billion euros.
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The German-French nuclear axis makes clear how far the drive to war has advanced and how urgent it is to take up the struggle against it. All parties in the German parliament, the Bundestag, support the pro-war policy. The media insist that nuclear rearmament is urgently necessary and circulate the absurd argument that nuclear war can only be prevented through nuclear deterrence.
The only party opposing the war conspiracy is the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP). Its manifesto for the Berlin state parliament elections taking place in September opens with the words:
The danger of a nuclear war has never been greater than today. The Merz-Klingbeil government is rearming on a scale not seen since Hitler and is brazenly preparing for a war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power. The cost of this madness is being borne by the workers through mass redundancies, cuts to social services and, ultimately, with their lives.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) is standing in the Berlin House of Representatives elections to oppose this warmongering, which is being pursued by all the parties in the Bundestag, and to build a socialist movement. We declare openly: A catastrophe can only be prevented if the masses themselves intervene in political affairs and put an end to capitalism and its logic of profit.
4. Immigrant detention center employee shoots protester in Aurora, Colorado
An employee of the Aurora ICE Processing Center in Aurora, Colorado, 42-year-old Brandon Booth, shot Emma Landis, a 21-year-old waitress, during a protest outside of the facility on Thursday night. The ICE facility is operated by the GEO Group, a $4 billion company that operates a network of ICE detention centers and state prisons across the country. Former GEO Group CEO David Venturella was appointed the acting director of ICE in June.
According to police reports and an interview by Lamis with the Colorado Sun, Booth and three other GEO Group employees were unable to enter the facility to begin their shifts because of the protest. Lamis and another protester began taking pictures of the employee’s license plates and yelling at them over the reported abuses of those detained at the facility, including inadequate food, lack of air conditioning and a tuberculosis outbreak.
Booth then reportedly exited his vehicle and engaged in a verbal altercation before firing a single shot at the protesters with his personal firearm. According to Lamis she had turned her back on the GEO Group employees and was walking away when she was shot in the foot. Booth then re-entered his vehicle and drove away before he was apprehended by police nearby.
Booth had worked at the GEO Group facility for two and a half years and in state juvenile corrections facilities before that. According to the Aurora Police Department, Booth was booked on suspicion of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, attempted first-degree assault, felony menacing and unlawful carrying of a concealed weapon.
While Booth does not have an official violent criminal history, the Colorado Sun reported that the ex-wife of Booth’s brother, Destiny Winter, alleged that Booth gave her a concussion in 2015 by slamming her into a wall after she asked him to turn down the TV because children were sleeping in the house. “He goes above and beyond to show he’s in charge. He’s the king,” she said.
In a statement on the shooting, Aurora Chief of Police Todd Chamberlain said, “This is a tragedy on all fronts, and the Aurora Police Department will investigate this incident with the same commitment to transparency and integrity as we do all shootings. We remain committed to ensuring an ethical, thorough, objective and comprehensive review of this case. Violence of any kind will not be tolerated in Aurora. Constitutional rights are a pivotal part of a just society—violence is not.”
Such a statement is an outrageous display of hypocrisy. The Aurora Police Department has committed multiple murders over the past several years, shooting and killing seven people in 2022, two people in 2023, four people in 2024 and three in 2025. Many of these victims were unarmed.
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The fact that an employee of a detention center decided to shoot at a protester after these nationally publicized ICE killings is an indication of the pervasive attitude of impunity felt by these officers and their corporate allies. After ICE agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year with no repercussions, the immigration Gestapo has been empowered to deploy violence with little concern for the consequences.
The speed with which Booth was arrested and charged testifies to the fears in the ruling class and the political establishment that runaway violence from immigration enforcement will unleash mass opposition in the working class. It is also an indication of the repercussions that could be brought against murderous ICE agents by local authorities if they wished to do so, demonstrating the cowardice and complicity of the Democratic Party for not pushing for charges against ICE agents. Federal law enforcement officers have immunity from state and local prosecution if they are acting within the scope of their official duties. The use of excessive force, such as the summary execution of bystanders, does not fall within this scope.
Since Booth is not a federal officer, local officials will see the charges against him as a way to demonstrate to the public that they are committed to justice without offering any real challenge to Trump’s fascistic assault on immigrants.
5. As American deaths mount, Trump escalates war against Iran
Iranian missiles killed two American soldiers in Jordan on Friday. On Sunday the US military announced that a third soldier had been killed in northern Iraq and that additional remains, not yet identified, had been recovered at the base in Jordan. The Washington Post put the war’s American toll Sunday at 17, possibly 18, dead and more than 430 wounded.*****
Nearly five months of war have not destroyed Iran’s capacity to strike American bases across Jordan, Kuwait and the Gulf, or to keep the strait closed. An Iranian strike hit a Kuwaiti power-and-water plant for the second straight day Sunday, Jordan shot down three missiles, and attacks were reported on the port and airport of Aqaba. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard declared July 15 that with “American bandits” blocking Iran’s oil and gas exports, “they must await the closure of other oil and gas export routes that serve the interests of the U.S. and its allies.”
Military analysts told the Post that US forces were in no condition for ground operations inside Iran, which Trump has refused to rule out. “I think it would be a mistake to put ground forces anywhere in islands in the strait or onshore,” said Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I don’t think U.S. forces are prepared for standoff strikes from Iranians.”
American troops landing on Kharg Island would be subjected to waves of missile and drone strikes from the shore, and the casualties already sustained would be only a down payment. Each new loss would intensify the pressure for further escalation—up to the use of the nuclear weapons Trump has already discussed.
The logic of the war drives American imperialism to escalate because a retreat would mean a crippling loss of global prestige—the fear that gripped the ruling class throughout the Vietnam War, when President Richard Nixon declared in April 1970 that the United States must not act like “a pitiful, helpless giant.” But each escalation has widened the war and multiplied the dangers, and a landing of American troops on Iranian territory, against a prepared enemy and with depleted stocks, would be an act of colossal recklessness.
The war against Iran is part of a conflagration that now extends from Ukraine, where Ukrainian weapons, provided and funded by the NATO powers, are raining down on Russian cities, to the economic strangulation of China. The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that Iran’s precision in striking sensitive targets has raised concerns among US officials that China or Russia is providing targeting assistance. Whether or not this claim is true, the Iran war is one front of a far broader global war.
The Democratic Party is playing its assigned role: demobilizing the widespread popular opposition to that war.
This weekend, as the war stood on the brink of a massive expansion, the Democratic Party staged more than 700 “Good Trouble Lives On” rallies, nominally in opposition to Trump’s attacks on democratic rights. At the flagship Good Trouble rally in Atlanta, three-and-a-half hours of speeches passed without the word “Iran.”
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Trump’s resumed bombing of Iran carries out the demands that leading Democrats have been making for weeks. Their effective position is that the war should continue.
The Democrats support the war because they are a party of the same ruling class as Trump. Their conduct continues the policy of the Biden administration, which armed the Gaza genocide, and, as its adviser Amos Hochstein has acknowledged, made active preparations for strikes on Iran. They have focused their criticisms on complaints that the war has not succeeded in imposing US domination of the Middle East and its energy resources.
The Democratic Party’s function is to corral the overwhelming popular opposition to the war into a get-out-the-vote operation for the midterm elections. The Trump administration is able to ignore public opinion because the Democratic Party works to suppress it. In doing so, the Democrats clear the road to a wider war.
6. Australia: BHP iron ore strike in Pilbara—first in decades
Reports of exactly how many workers walked off the job range from almost 200 to just 63, with the company anxious to downplay the industrial action as an ineffectual fiasco.
7. Australia: Local council authorizes seizure of homeless people’s belongings
A local council in inner Melbourne—Australia’s second largest city—has empowered its officers to seize the bedding and belongings of homeless people.
The City of Port Phillip Council voted 5-3 last month, with one abstention, to authorize the confiscation of homeless people’s belongings—including sleeping bags, tents and personal possessions.
This is part of a broader nationwide offensive against the poorest and most vulnerable, carried out amid a worsening cost‑of‑living crisis and an intensifying transfer of society’s resources into military spending and the enrichment of the ultra‑wealthy.
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The government allocates just $1.6 billion annually to housing and homelessness, yet has pledged $368 billion over 30 years to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program—part of a broader militarization tied to US war plans against China. By the mid 2030s, annual defense spending is projected to reach nearly $100 billion, more than 60 times the annual housing contribution.
Simultaneously, the Albanese Labor government is implementing the largest single cut to a government program in Australian history through the NDIS Amendment Bill 2026. That legislation provides the framework to slash more than $35 billion from the National Disability Insurance Scheme over four years and remove up to 300,000 disabled participants by 2030, throwing hundreds of thousands of people into poverty, insecurity and potential homelessness.
Melbourne’s inner regions, including Port Phillip, recorded 4,200 people experiencing homelessness at the start of support in 2024–25, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the federal government’s independent health and welfare research body. Roughly 25 people sleep rough in Port Phillip, according to the ABC.
The homelessness and housing crisis is the predictable consequence of governments at every level treating housing not as a social right but as a vehicle for enriching developers, landlords, and financial speculators—alongside record profits extracted by the banks.
According to the AIHW’s Specialist Homelessness Services Annual Report 2024–25, 288,970 people sought help from homelessness services in the year to June 2025, but tens of thousands were refused assistance because no accommodation was available. Victoria recorded the largest number of homeless service clients of any state—105,126 people—and more than 30,000 of them were turned away over the year.
The right to high quality, affordable housing for all cannot be realized within the framework of the profit system, which treats homes as assets for developers, banks and superannuation funds rather than as a fundamental social necessity. Ending homelessness requires not appeals to the very parties and institutions orchestrating these attacks, but the independent mobilization of the working class on a socialist program.
8. Australia: Labor’s royal commission intensifies slanders against Gaza genocide protests
Last week’s fourth set of public hearings of the Albanese Labor government’s Antisemitism and Social Cohesion Royal Commission highlighted the anti-democratic and witch-hunting purpose of the inquiry.
Labor set up the inquisition on the pretext of responding to the December 14 terrorist attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. However, the entire focus has been to demonize and defame mass opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the Labor government’s complicity in this historic crime.
This is under conditions in which the killings of thousands of people by the US-backed Israeli regime are intensifying in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon, and Washington’s barbaric aggression has re-escalated in Iran—all without mention by those conducting the inquiry.
Last week’s testimony largely consisted of untested descriptions of “lived experiences” by Jewish students and academics who claimed they were subjected to antisemitic slurs or felt personally threatened during anti-genocide encampments at some universities in 2024.
None of this had anything to do with addressing the many unanswered questions about how and why the police and intelligence agencies failed to prevent two alleged Islamic State-inspired gunmen from killing 15 people at a Bondi Hanukkah event.
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The false identification of anti-genocide protest with “hate speech” underscores the threat posed by the Labor government’s “hate group” legislation, introduced in January. It gives a minister arbitrary powers to outlaw organizations, including political parties, simply on the basis of being “satisfied” that they support vaguely-defined “hate crimes” or “may do so” in the future.
These “hate crimes” can consist of any expression of dissent that allegedly makes members of any group defined by race, ethnicity or nationality feel threatened by fear of suffering harm of any sort, including to their mental health.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has personally denounced the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Monash University informed students last year that they will face “immediate academic discipline” if they use the “from the river to the sea” chant.
The Labor government is now making unprecedented threats to strip accreditation and funding from any university that it alleges fails to sufficiently silence anti-genocide campaigns by staff and students.
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To fight this offensive, students and university workers need to work together to build genuinely democratic new forms of organisation—rank-and-file committees, totally independent of the complicit trade unions.
The Western Sydney University (WSU) Rank-and-File Committee is hosting an online lunchtime meeting this Tuesday to oppose new union-backed enterprise agreements that further cut real pay, increase workloads and facilitate Labor’s agenda:
Oppose the sellout union agreements at WSU! Build rank-and-file committees!
Tuesday July 21, 12:30 to 1:30 PM (AEST)
9. Trump administration threatens to imprison state officials who resist federal takeover of elections
Mullin spoke from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building one day after Trump delivered a fascistic nationally televised address aimed at manufacturing a new conspiracy theory that the 2026 midterms were already under foreign and domestic attack, above all from China. The purpose of Trump’s speech was to establish in advance a pretext for interfering in the elections and overturning Republican defeats. Mullin announced that the administration would use federal grants, the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration databases and the threat of criminal prosecution to impose its dictates on state election systems.
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Mullin’s threats of federal prosecution and financial blackmail are a direct assault on the Constitution, which leaves the administration of elections to the states, subject to laws passed by Congress. The executive branch has no authority to unilaterally dictate state voting procedures or prosecute election officials for refusing presidential orders.
Mullin declared that voting machines must be “secured” and state voter-registration lists “scrubbed.” He repeated Trump’s lie that the intelligence agencies had concealed evidence of Chinese interference in the 2020 election.
“What’s frustrating is that the Biden administration knew this and our intel community knew this,” Mullin claimed.
Neither Trump nor Mullin has produced evidence that China changed votes or manipulated election systems in 2020.
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Mullin also announced that Trump had ordered the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a component of DHS, to produce an updated election infrastructure plan. According to Mullin, it will be released within 30 days, that is, less than 75 days before the November elections.
The response from the Democratic Party to Mullin’s threats to imprison election officials has been muted and commensurate with its political cowardice and complicity in the growth of presidential dictatorship.
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Those who respond to Trump’s conspiracy by telling workers to wait and vote for Democrats in November are selling political snake oil.
There is no guarantee that elections will take place under anything resembling normal conditions. The Trump administration is preparing to determine which states have “secure” voter rolls, which voting machines may be used, which voters are eligible, and which state officials may be prosecuted.
At the same time, masked and heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement death squads continue to roam American cities with impunity. None of the federal agents responsible for murdering Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo or Johan Guerrero has been charged with a crime. Most of the killers have been identified only through independent journalism, not government disclosure.
The Democrats will not protect workers, citizens or longtime residents from Trump’s immigration Gestapo. There is no reason to believe they will defend democratic rights or oppose the transformation of the presidency into a dictatorship.
The Democratic Party surrendered the 2000 election after the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush. It paved the way for Trump’s first election, defended the institutions responsible for his rise and refused to prosecute Trump and his leading co-conspirators for the January 6 coup.
The Democrats’ passivity is not the result of confusion or a failure to appreciate Trump’s intentions. They are far more frightened of an independent movement of the working class than they are of Trump. Such a movement would threaten not only the fascist president, but both parties of Wall Street and the capitalist system they defend.
The defense of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, the courts or the trade union bureaucracy. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class against dictatorship, imperialist war and the capitalist system that produces both.
At a rally for Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Abdul El-Sayed held in Detroit Saturday, the speakers, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and UAW President Shawn Fain, remained silent on the escalating US war against Iran and downplayed Trump’s open threats to interfere with the November elections and establish a presidential dictatorship.
The event, held at the Detroit Opera House, drew upwards of 2,000 people. The turnout reflected a radicalization taking place among young people and broader layers of the population outraged by declining living standards, soaring prices, anti-immigrant terror, the Gaza genocide and expanding imperialist wars. This has been reflected in recent electoral victories of Democratic Socialists of America and DSA-backed candidates, many of whom call themselves “socialist,” in New York, Washington D.C. and Colorado.
However, the role of Bernie Sanders and DSA members Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib is to divert and neutralize this anger by channeling it behind the Democratic Party, the oldest capitalist party in the United States.
The presence of UAW President Fain on the platform was particularly telling. Fain presides over a corrupt union apparatus that is fully integrated into corporate management and systematically suppresses and betrays the struggles of autoworkers and UAW members in other sectors. He is under federal investigation for nepotism and threatening his rivals within the UAW bureaucracy and has been preoccupied in recent months with battling a rebellion by rank-and-file auto parts workers who have repeatedly voted down sell-out contracts at firms, such as Nexteer, Dana and Bridgewater Interiors.
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The support of Sanders and the DSA for Fain embodies their fear and hostility, and that of the entire Democratic Party, to an independent movement of the working class against Trump and the capitalist oligarchy. They seek to provide a “left” cover for the labor bureaucracy, which serves as the ruling class’s industrial police force.
One reflection of the growing radicalization of wide layers of workers and young people has been the rise in the polls of El-Sayed, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. Sayed is running against Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who has the backing of the Democratic establishment. El-Sayed, whose parents immigrated from Egypt, has won support from workers and young people for his opposition to the Israeli genocide against the people of Gaza. The primary election will he held on August 4.
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It is particularly significant that amid the hot air directed against the oligarchs, none of the speakers referenced the illegal and criminal war against Iran. This expresses the fact that all sections of the Democratic Party, including its DSA faction, support the war and are in agreement with its essential aims. The only criticism raised against the Trump administration by leading Democrats is that Trump has “sold out” the interests of US imperialism by failing to topple the Iranian government and bring the country under the control of US oil companies.
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib have all voted at various times in favor of increased military spending to fund the US war machine.
There were no calls for a mass mobilization of the population to stop the murders and abductions by ICE, oppose the expanding war in Iran or block the imposition of dictatorship. All the social anger and energy should instead, the speakers insisted, be directed toward marking ballot papers for Democratic candidates on election day.
While Sanders, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez criticized the Democratic Party establishment, they all aggressively supported Biden in 2024 until he dropped out, and then backed his hand-picked replacement, Kamala Harris. Both Biden and Harris were supporters and enablers of the Gaza genocide, the US/NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the vast enrichment of Wall Street and the creation of a record number of billionaires.
Neither El-Sayed nor any other speaker referenced the eight University of Michigan students and employees arrested on frame-up terrorist conspiracy charges related to anti-genocide protests or the 15 anti-ICE defendants in Prairieland, Texas sentenced collectively to more than 500 years in prison on bogus terrorism charges.
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Of all the speakers, Ocasio-Cortez seemed most conscious of and appealed most directly to the palpable social anger building up among workers and young people. She noted Trump’s speech Thursday night, warning, “They will do everything they can to try to overturn our democracy in November.” She pointed to “a government of, by, and for the oligarchs.” She said that “paramilitary agents are shooting Americans in the street with no further questions,” taking note of the murders of immigrant workers Araujo and Guerrero, as well as the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
However, instead of focusing anger toward the source of the problem, capitalism, she instead, echoing Trump, sought to deflect anger toward the overseas rivals of US capitalism, pointing to “bad trade deals,” as well as the supposed “bigotry and racism” of workers themselves.
In his remarks, Fain postured as a champion of workers and demagogically denounced billionaires. He attempted to present the recent contract at American Axle in Three Rivers, Michigan as a victory. At American Axle, Fain shut down a 10-day strike and imposed a management-friendly contract in a snap vote on the eve of the UAW Constitutional Convention.
El-Sayed spoke last. This supposed “progressive” and rebel against the Democratic Party establishment in a recent television interview declared: “I am not a socialist... I am a capitalist.”
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All that needs fixing, Sayed went onto explain, were certain problems, blemishes on an otherwise healthy American society, including the domination of politics by corporate money and “sending bombs and tanks abroad, rather than to invest in schools and healthcare.”
Like other speakers, El-Sayed promoted economic nationalism as the solution to the problems facing workers, again demonstrating the basic alignment of the Democratic Party with the policies of Trump.
Workers must find a way forward independent of the Democratic Party and its “left” promoters like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA. These forces serve as the “left” face of the capitalist state and its war machine, not a genuine opposition to it.
Workers and young people looking for a way to fight war, fascism and austerity must turn to the socialist internationalism advanced by the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Chile is sliding into a technical recession, and the government of President José Antonio Kast is using the crisis to launch the most sweeping assault on the democratic and social rights of the working class since the Pinochet dictatorship. What is unfolding is a class offensive in which every measure advanced aims to make working people pay for a crisis they did not create, while the corporate oligarchy and finance capital reap a bonanza.*****
The international financial institutions and credit rating agencies are monitoring closely to ensure that the working class pays the price demanded by global capital. In its latest consultation on Chile, the IMF slashed the country’s growth forecast to 1.8 percent while issuing blunt demands for “additional fiscal efforts,” the technocratic euphemism for austerity, to keep public debt below 45 percent of GDP. The IMF further insisted that the government’s National Reconstruction Plan be “prioritized and carefully sequenced” and that the “fiscal costs” of tax and other reforms be weighed against “fiscal sustainability,” in plain language, no reform may proceed unless it is compatible with the uninterrupted flow of wealth to the financial oligarchy.
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These are the demands of finance capital, transmitted through its institutional mouthpieces, that the working class bear the full weight of the crisis. The credit rating agencies are the enforcers of the bond market who are threatening to downgrade Chile’s debt, raise borrowing costs and trigger capital flight unless austerity is intensified.
The Rail Accident Investigation Branch’s (RAIB) preliminary report found that Burton’s train passed a caution signal and then a red signal before colliding with the stationary train. The emergency brake was put into full service nine seconds before the collision, reducing the train’s speed from 76 mph to 49 mph. The stationary train had stopped after an Automatic Warning System (AWS) fault had applied the brakes automatically.
The RAIB is not an independent body and has stressed that it has not determined why Burton’s train passed the signal at danger. Based on decades of experience, [a 35-year veteran rail worker] Martin said “There is a well-known remark I heard after joining the railway that ‘dead men cannot defend themselves’. I understood what was meant when a highly respected colleague was killed in a tragic incident. The inquiry focused on his actions and not the circumstances.
The veteran rail worker to the WSWS:
“Governments and rail operators have demanded billions of pounds in “efficiency savings”, while thousands of maintenance, engineering and operational jobs have been targeted for elimination through ‘voluntary’ redundancy. When I began on the railway in the 1980s the National Union of Railwaymen (now the Rail Maritime Transport Workers Union) said there was no such thing as voluntary redundancy. Now they have adopted it as their way of collaborating with job cutting.
“My colleagues put in a tremendous effort every day into ensuring the railway operates safely. From track inspections, maintaining signal systems, repairs and train operations. It involves high levels of concentration and is exhausting. Every maintenance job lost, inspection delays, each unfilled vacancy has a cumulative effect on safety. We cannot yet prove cuts caused the Bedford crash, but a workers’ investigation would be carried out in this context.
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Martin demanded an end to cost cutting and job losses in maintenance “You would think in the immediate aftermath of the Bedford crash a halt would be called to all cuts to engineering and maintenance jobs. Instead on June 26 the RMT announced a campaign with the Trades Union Congress to protect 67 Balfour Beatty engineering contractors jobs at Crewe and Preston depots. They are calling on the Labour government to act, not their members.
“I want to speak on the Great British Railways project that was touted by the Starmer government as a way forward. It’s not a return to 1947-style nationalisation. It’s a systemic government-level cost-cutting exercise to reduce staffing to a bare minimum."
13. WSWS begins posting highlight clips from webinar on the American Revolution
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.
Here is another clip:
14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
