Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: June 15-21
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Truman signs into law the Universal Military Training and Service Act
100 years ago:
German workers vote to expropriate the princes
2. Capitalist oligarchy, the UAW and the class struggle
The United States is about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication on July 4, 1776 of the Declaration of Independence. The obscene concentration of wealth in one man, on a scale unimaginable in world history, makes a mockery of Jefferson’s claim that “all men are created equal.”
The size of Musk’s fortune virtually defies comprehension. One trillion is a thousand billions or a million millions. If a trillion dollar bills were laid end to end, they would extend out to approximately 96 million miles, greater than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Measured in the wages of an autoworker, a trillion dollars is the equivalent of 20 million years of work.
Musk’s wealth is only the most grotesque example of the plundering of society by a capitalist oligarchy. He is the first trillionaire. It will not be long before other present-day mega-billionaires join the trillion-dollar club.
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What has this to do with the opening of the UAW’s Constitutional Convention? In one word, everything. It is impossible to understand the explosion of social inequality in the United States without examining the role played by the United Auto Workers over the past half-century.
The bureaucrats in Solidarity House adopted policies whose primary aim was the suppression of all working class resistance to capitalist exploitation and the corporate drive for profits. Without decades of sell-outs, the virtual outlawing of strikes, the imposition of concessions contracts, wage cutting, the slashing of benefits, the elimination of the 40-hour week, massive increases in productivity, and the resulting collapse of working class living standards, the oligarchic accumulation of wealth would not have been possible.
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The consequences for workers have been devastating. UAW membership has fallen from 1.5 million at the end of the 1970s to roughly 370,000 today. Autoworkers make up only half of this total, as the UAW has recruited dues-paying members in other sectors, particularly at the universities. These workers, as Harvard academic workers just discovered, are subject to the same betrayals and anti-democratic maneuvers as the autoworkers.
The 2009 Obama bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, carried out with the union’s full collaboration, halved wages for new hires and entrenched the two-tier system. The apparatus oversaw the spinning off of the parts operations, Delphi from GM and Visteon from Ford, into a lower-paid parts sector.
Over the same decades, productivity soared while wages stagnated or fell. The real top assembly wage is roughly where it stood in 1978, and average real wages in auto fell by more than 19 percent between 2008 and 2023 alone. Pensions were stripped from new hires, retiree healthcare shifted into union-controlled VEBA (Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association) trusts and labor costs driven down to a tiny fraction of the price of a vehicle.
The collapse in membership and workers’ living standards has not weakened the material position of the apparatus. On the contrary, the UAW controls $1.25 billion in assets. Top executives, including UAW International President Shawn Fain, make more than a quarter million dollars a year. The income, perks and institutional position of the apparatus depend on the suppression of class struggle and the preservation of its partnership with the corporations.
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This raises the need for the nationalization of the auto corporations and the major industries under the democratic control of the working class, so that production is organized to meet social need, not private profit.
This struggle is international in its very essence. The growth of the class struggle in the United States is one part of a movement erupting on every continent, as workers across the world confront the same escalating war, the same turn to dictatorship, the same capitalist crisis. The auto and auto parts giants operate as global enterprises, whipsawing the workers of one country against another to drive down wages everywhere. They can be answered only through the international unity of the working class, coordinated across every border.
The dictatorship of the oligarchs—of which Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune is the most blatant expression—will not be ended by tinkering around the edges. It can be ended only through the fundamental reorganization of society: the wresting of economic life from the hands of the financial aristocracy and its refounding on the basis of social need and genuine equality.
This is the perspective of socialism. Its realization demands the conscious revival of the great revolutionary and socialist traditions of the American and international working class—traditions the bureaucracy has labored for generations to bury. We call on every autoworker, and every worker, to take up this fight: Build the rank-and-file committees, and join the struggle for a socialist future.
3. US government forces shutdown of Anthropic’s most powerful AI models
On Tuesday, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model ever released to the public. Just three days later, the Trump administration forced it offline by executive fiat, invoking national security to bar its use by any foreign national. The shutdown, the first the US government has imposed on a deployed AI model, lays bare the growing fusion of the capitalist state with the technology monopolies and the ruthless drive to harness AI for war.
Fable 5 is the public version of Mythos, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, which the company first released in early April to a small group of technology and cybersecurity firms, and submitted to the government for review, withholding it from the public as too dangerous given its ability to find and exploit critical software flaws. The company described it as its strongest public system yet in software engineering, data analysis and reasoning, and the first “Mythos-class” model for ordinary users. Its unrestricted twin, Claude Mythos 5, which runs on the same model, remains confined to vetted corporate and government partners through Project Glasswing.
From its release, users found the public model heavily censored. Fable 5 carried classifiers across four declared high-risk areas: cybersecurity, biology, chemistry and the distillation of its capabilities by rivals. When a prompt tripped them, the model refused or silently handed the request to Anthropic’s older Opus 4.8 system. Reviewers found it would not answer basic biology questions about mitochondria or mRNA vaccines, and security researchers said it blocked routine code review. Anthropic called its safeguards “overly conservative” and said they were meant to keep adversaries of the US state from using these more capable models.
This was the model the Trump administration moved to suppress. At 1:15 p.m. on Friday, administration officials called Anthropic and gave it 90 minutes to take Fable 5 and Mythos 5 down, citing a national security threat but providing no details. By 5:21 p.m., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had sent Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a letter requiring they obtain a special license to distribute the models “to all destinations worldwide” and to share them with non-US citizens, warning that “failure to comply will result in prompt criminal and civil penalties.” Because the order reached every foreign national, including Anthropic’s own foreign-born employees, the company disabled both models worldwide.
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The stated justification does not withstand scrutiny. The administration claimed it had learned of a method to “jailbreak” Fable 5, that is, to trick the model into ignoring its built-in restrictions, here the safeguards against using it to find software vulnerabilities. Anthropic responded that the technique was narrow, not universal, and that the same capability is available from other models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.
The Commerce Department’s own testing had revealed no significant concerns, and several officials acknowledged that Amazon’s document was misleading, since the same capabilities exist in rival models that face no restrictions. Katie Moussouris, chief executive of Luta Security, who reviewed the underlying research, said it was not a jailbreak at all but a defensive technique to limit misuse. “If national defense is the goal, this is an own goal,” she said.
What is presented as a dispute over safety is in reality a conflict within the ruling class over the terms on which AI is harnessed to the US imperialist war machine. Anthropic is no opponent of that process. Its Claude system, built into Palantir’s Maven targeting platform, generated more than 1,000 targets on the opening day of the US-Israeli war against Iran. Amodei has proclaimed his belief in “the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States” and has said his company has “never raised objections to particular military operations.” The quarrel concerns control, not principle.
The real content of “national security” lies in the preparations of US imperialism for war with China, the central preoccupation of broad sections of the American ruling class. One person familiar with the decision told Semafor that the government acted partly on suspicion that a China-linked group had accessed Mythos. China’s open-weight models are far cheaper but have stayed at least several months behind the American frontier models, above all behind Anthropic’s, which has dominated over the past year, and Washington means to preserve that lead.
These restrictions express the eruption of American militarism across the globe, most recently in the war on Iran, which is a prelude to direct confrontation with China. In every theater of this unfolding global war, AI is being bound ever more tightly to the machinery of war.
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The episode lays bare the process which the World Socialist Web Site analyzed last week in examining Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposed AI “sovereign wealth fund.” Sanders presents state co-ownership of the AI monopolies as a democratic measure to wrest the technology from the billionaires. But the Fable takedown reveals the same fusion of the capitalist state and the AI corporations, imposed by executive fiat rather than through shares and board seats.
One official described the new arrangement to Axios as “a de-facto licensing regime,” adding that companies “will not screw with the White House.” Another said any future model at the Mythos level or above “would need to go through the administration.” This is the meaning of the executive order Trump signed on June 2, requesting that companies submit their most powerful models for review before release. The state is asserting the power to decide what may be built, what may be deployed and for whom.
The same “national security” pretext drives the global assault on democratic rights. All of the major imperialist powers, from the United States to Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia, are abolishing online anonymity, breaking encryption and placing the population under permanent surveillance, as always in the name of “safety.” AI is the indispensable engine of this apparatus, generating kill lists abroad and tracking immigrants and political opponents at home. The power over Anthropic extends the same drive to bring all communication under the eye of the state.
The significance of this action has been deliberately obscured by the corporate media. The Sunday morning talk shows did not even mention the first government shutdown of a deployed AI model, and the major newspapers buried the story on the front pages of their online publications.
That this cage match was presented under the banner of “Freedom 250”—as part of the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence—is a historical obscenity of the first order. The Declaration invoked the highest and most humane Enlightenment ideals, asserting that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “certain unalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It was a revolutionary document, the product of a democratic revolution that swept away feudal and colonial forms of rule.
Trump’s administration is dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal—that a handful of billionaires should possess everything, that the president stands above the law, that immigrants are not people and that political opponents are “the enemy within,” to be crushed by the machinery of the state. The substitution of a cage match for a commemoration of democratic principles is not an accident. It is a blunt expression of what the Trump administration represents.
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Media critics, Democratic politicians and their pseudo-left allies portray Trump’s fascistic ideology merely as a matter of his individual personality. This covers up the real significance of his domination of American politics. In fact, Trump is the product and representative of a financial oligarchy that concentrates in its hands more wealth than any previous ruling elite in history. It dominates every facet of American—and world—society: government power, the economy, the media, art and culture, academia.
Just two days before Trump’s cage fighting event, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. The initial public offering of his SpaceX company—which has never made a profit and lost $4.9 billion in 2025—increased his wealth by some $300 billion. His, and the vast fortunes of his fellow multi-billionaires, bear no relationship to any actual process of production. They are based on parasitic speculation, through the vastly inflated financial markets, on previously existing wealth.
These galactic fortunes drive the ever more brutal impoverishment and immiseration of the working class—the destruction of jobs, wage-cutting, the gutting of Medicaid, food stamps, Medicare, Social Security and education. American labor’s share of the nation’s gross domestic product has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1947. Globally, 60,000 multimillionaires own three times more wealth than the bottom half of humanity—some 4 billion people.
Democratic forms of rule are incompatible with such levels of social inequality. To maintain their system, under conditions of rising working class resistance, the ruling elites turn to dictatorship, war and fascism. Musk, a fascist who backs far-right and fascist movements across Europe, embodies the American oligarchy and its abandonment of democracy.
The Democratic Party’s response to the White House cage match was entirely characteristic. The Democrats and their allied organizations—No Kings and the Committee for the First Amendment—staged a counter-programming event: “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment” at Town Hall in New York City, featuring Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, Bette Midler and former MSNBC host Joy Reid. Tickets retailed for over $330.
The No Kings concert invoked an “inclusive” patriotism and framed the struggle against Trump in racial and identitarian terms—“white supremacy” rather than capitalism. There was virtually no mention of the war in Iran, the police state operations of ICE or the reality of oligarchic rule. The purpose was to channel popular outrage safely back into the Democratic Party and toward the 2026 midterm elections.
This is a strategy of containment, not opposition. The Democrats fear a genuine movement from below—a movement of the working class, independently organized and armed with a socialist and internationalist program—far more than they fear Trump. The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street, war and police repression. It cannot and will not fight fascism, because it represents the same ruling class whose crisis has produced fascism.
The cage match is a warning. The ruling class is signaling, with ever-greater openness, that it is prepared to resolve social contradictions through violence. The steel cage on the South Lawn is a metaphor made literal: the American political system has become an arena in which the working class is to be beaten into submission for the amusement of the oligarchy.Dictators and fascists are not defeated by benefit concerts, and they are not stopped by the Democratic Party. The American Revolution was not carried out through celebrity appearances and appeals to the British Parliament. The revolutionaries of 1776 formed committees, organized militias and built the Continental Army to overthrow the old order. What was historically progressive in their struggle was the assertion of universal democratic principles—principles that cannot be realized today through either party of American capitalism.
5. Trump, Iran announce ceasefire agreement
While the terms of the settlement remain undisclosed, this much is already clear: The Trump administration achieved none of the aims for which it went to war. It set out to overthrow the Iranian government, destroy its nuclear program, break its military and seize the Strait of Hormuz. It accomplished none of this.
Trump responded to the failure by denying he had ever sought to overthrow the Iranian government. “As far as regime change, I never cared about regime change,” he told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
In reality, his administration had spent the entire year trying to bring the government down. Early on, it funded and armed protesters inside Iran. “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them,” Trump said in April.
When this failed, the United States and Israel turned to assassination. The opening strikes on February 28 killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Pakpour and Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, along with much of the military command. The government did not collapse. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba succeeded him, and it was the younger Khamenei’s national security council that approved Sunday’s deal.
There followed a bombing campaign across Iran that has killed at least 3,468 people, by the Iranian health ministry’s count, and a naval blockade imposed on April 13. American warplanes destroyed water reservoirs in Sirik that supplied more than 20,000 people and fired on oil tankers running through the blockade, killing three Indian sailors aboard the Settebello this week. After two months, the blockade failed to force Iran’s surrender, and the Strait of Hormuz remained shut by Tehran’s decree until Sunday.
No agreement with American imperialism is worth the paper it is written on. In 2015, the Obama administration signed the nuclear accord known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which Iran accepted strict limits on enrichment and intrusive inspections. Iran kept to its terms—the International Atomic Energy Agency certified as much in report after report—but in May 2018 Trump tore the agreement up anyway, calling it a “horrible, one-sided deal.” Obama, who signed that accord, said Sunday it was “doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place... before we, the United States, pulled out of it.”
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The agreement nominally covers Lebanon, where Israel has waged a parallel war that has killed more than 3,700 people. Hours before the announcement, Israel bombed the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing three, in a strike that nearly wrecked the deal. Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had shown “no judgment” and told all sides to “stand down.” Israel, which was not a party to the talks, has not endorsed the agreement, and Israeli politicians across the spectrum denounced it.
The Democrats’ response to Trump’s moves toward an agreement with Iran centered on the accusation that he had failed to secure the interests of US imperialism. Democratic Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts called the emerging terms “basically a surrender document from Donald Trump to the supreme leader of Iran.”
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A warning must be made. Whatever the failures and setbacks of the past four months, American imperialism will only redouble its efforts to dominate the Middle East and the world by military force.
On June 12, Justice Johnson handed down draconian sentences totaling more than 26 years in prison to four young Palestine Action activists, ruling for the first time in legal history that acts of criminal damage carried out during a protest constitute offenses with a “terrorist connection.”
The sentencing at Woolwich Crown Court of Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, and Fatema Rajwani—the Filton Four—marks a watershed moment in the Labour government’s escalating war on democratic rights and the criminalization of opposition to war and genocide.
The Filton Four are part of a wider group of activists, the Filton 24, being prosecuted by the British state under Keir Starmer’s Labour government. The four have received substantial prison sentences despite not being charged with or convicted of a terrorism offence after two separate trials by two juries.
The four were among six defendants—known collectively as the Filton 6—tried at a retrial in May at Woolwich Crown Court for their roles in a direct action by Palestine Action on the Elbit Systems UK weapons factory near Bristol in August 2024. All six had previously been acquitted of aggravated burglary at the first trial in February. On violent disorder, Rajwani, Rogers and Devlin were formally acquitted by the jury; the jury hung on those charges against Head, Corner and Kamio, and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped them before the retrial.
At the retrial, Jordan Devlin was acquitted of criminal damage and was not sentenced. Zoe Rogers was acquitted of all charges. The remaining four—Head, Corner, Kamio and Rajwani—were convicted of criminal damage. Corner was additionally convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent for striking a police officer during the raid.
On August 6, 2024, the defendants entered the Filton site in the early hours of the morning and smashed computers, drones, and other military equipment with sledgehammers and crowbars. They targeted Elbit Systems, Israel’s primary private defense contractor, due to its manufacturing weapons used to kill Palestinians in the Gaza genocide.
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Prior to sentencing, Justice Johnson announced his finding of a “terrorist connection” under Section 69 of the Sentencing Act 2020. This was after the CPS applied, on the day of the sentencing, to have the four young people sentenced as terrorists.
The application allows a judge, not a jury, to find that an offence meets the statutory definition of terrorism and to impose significantly harsher punishment as a consequence.
Johnson ruled, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to influence the UK government and to intimidate a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political cause.”
His ruling delivered the verdict required by the Starmer government, which has backed Israel’s genocide.
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Having obtained a criminal damage verdict, the prosecution used the sentencing process to achieve what it knew a jury would very likely not have sanctioned.
Before the sentencing hearing, one of Britain’s foremost human rights lawyers, Michael Mansfield KC, described the prospect of sentencing protesters as terrorists as a “constitutional threat”. He was among more than 50 lawyers and legal experts, coordinated through the organization Defend Our Juries, who signed an open letter denouncing Johnson’s planned use of Section 69.
Speaking to the Guardian, Mansfield said, “It’s recategorizing the offense without a trial. It’s particularly insidious for the obvious reason that they weren’t allowed to explain their motivation to the jury — that was denied to them. And yet the state says ‘we’re actually going to elevate what the offenses are’ when the jury might well not have convicted had they known they were going to be treated as terrorists.” He concluded: “The fundamental principle is that you should not be convicted on any statutory offense for which you have not been charged.”
Among other signatories to the open letter are Liz Davies KC, Gudrun Young KC, Penny Green, David Whyte, Neve Gordon, Yvette Russell, Bill Bowring, and Richard Vogler. Vogler, an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Sussex and a leading authority on trial by jury, protested, “For an offense to be characterized at sentencing in a completely different and much more serious way than it was presented to the jury on conviction is an affront to the basic principles of criminal justice.”
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The signatories establish that which was concealed from the jury, stating that they “consider it vital to the integrity of the criminal justice system that the Filton 4 are sentenced on the same basis that they were convicted—causing damage to drones and other property of an Israeli weapons manufacturer—with the conscientious motive of saving lives, upholding international humanitarian law and preventing unimaginable human suffering.”
The defendants’ conscientious motivation “is a mitigating factor, and it would be perverse, and contrary to basic legal principle, to treat it as an aggravating factor.”
The use of Section 69 to sentence the four as terrorists sets a precedent for any future protest to be punished just as brutally by the state. It came after another attack on democratic rights by Judge Johnson—also unprecedented in British legal history. It emerged, once reporting restrictions were lifted, that following the February trial Johnson launched contempt proceedings against lead defense counsel Rajiv Menon KC for remarks defending the jury’s independence that he made in closing arguments.
The Court of Appeal subsequently ruled that the procedure was unlawful, but as the letter of the 50 notes, a “troubling legal precedent has already been set in these proceedings.”
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The principled response of the lawyers and law professors was backed up by another letter, coordinated by Artists for Palestine UK, signed by around 150 public figures. These included the writer Sally Rooney, activist Greta Thunberg, actor, comedian, writer and producer Steve Coogan, and Lord John Hendy KC.
Their letter called on the judge to drop the terrorism connection, warning that its use would constitute “an extremely grave miscarriage of justice.” The four “were not charged with terrorism offenses, were not tried under terrorism laws” and “the jury was never informed of any proposed terrorism connection during the trial.”
The repression inside the court was reflected in the clampdown on protesters outside. Around 500 people gathered in solidarity with the Filton Four. By the end of the day, 107 had been arrested, their offense being the expression of support for Palestine Action, including by holding signs reading “Saving lives is not terrorism… I support Palestine Action.”
Police had already arrested over 3,300 people since last July under the Terrorism Act 2000 for supporting Palestine Action in similar mass round-ups, despite the High Court—in February this year—ruled the proscription of the organization by the government unlawful. The Court of Appeal is expected to rule on Monday on the government appeal of the High Court’s ruling.
7. Kenyan police kill three amid anti-Ebola facility demonstrations
Police have killed three protesters in Nanyuki, Laikipia County, during demonstrations against a US Ebola quarantine facility.
Nanyuki became a battleground on June 1 and June 9, as police violently suppressed protests at Laikipia Air Base, a Kenya Air Force installation that hosts British military personnel. Thousands of workers, youth and small traders took to the streets to oppose the quarantine facility project. They were met with tear gas, live ammunition and mass arrests.
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The Ebola quarantine will be for US citizens only, including aid workers, military personnel and health officials with or potentially exposed to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Protestors are angry that they should be made to bear the risks of a deadly viral disease that has already led to the deaths of at least 138 out of 695 confirmed cases in Congo, for the benefit of Washington. The facility is not being built to serve Kenyans, even as hospitals across the country are starved of funds, staff, medicine and basic equipment by Ruto’s IMF austerity and siphoning off money.
On Saturday it emerged that the US has already deployed AFRICOM personnel to Kenya to support the construction and operationalization of the facility. The troops reportedly include medical, engineering, communications, security and contract-planning specialists, although Washington has refused to disclose their number.
This deployment has gone ahead even after Kenya’s High Court issued conservatory orders temporarily barring the establishment and operationalization of the facility, following a petition by the Katiba Institute, a constitutional rights body, challenging the secrecy of the Kenya-US agreement and the absence of public participation. The case is due back before the High Court on June 16.
The deployment of US troops refutes Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale’s claims that construction has been paused in compliance with the court order. Ruto is making clear that the facility will proceed whatever the High Court rules.
Ruto’s pact with Donald Trump lays bare the real class character of the Kenyan state. Since taking office, he has dispatched Kenyan police to Haiti in a US-orchestrated intervention aimed at propping up a neocolonial order in the Caribbean. He has backed Israel as it wages genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the US-Israeli imperialist war against Iran. Most recently, has courted French imperialism, seeking to insert Kenya into Paris’s efforts to reassert influence across Africa after being driven out of its former colonies in the Sahel.
For Washington, Kenya is to serve as a forward operating base in East and Central Africa, a staging ground for military, intelligence and counterinsurgency operations, and now a dumping ground for health risks the American ruling class is determined to keep off US soil.
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Ruto is now preparing a new assault through the Finance Bill 2026. Among its measures are 16 percent VAT on digital payment-processing services, expanded withholding taxes on card and digital transactions, an increase in excise duty on mobile phones from 10 to 25 percent, and a rise in monthly rental income tax from 7.5 to 10 percent.
The memory of the 2024 Gen Z uprising, when millions of youth opposed Ruto’s tax hikes and protesters stormed parliament, still terrifies the political establishment. The lessons of that struggle is that courage and spontaneity, however immense, are not enough. The movement was strangled above all by the absence of a revolutionary leadership and a socialist program, as Odinga and ODM entered the government to rescue Ruto, the trade union bureaucracy isolated workers from the youth, and the Stalinists and pseudo-lefts promoted illusions in leaderless protest, constitutional reform and pressure politics.
Two years later, the same fundamental issues remain. Workers and youth must reject all attempts to subordinate their struggles to the opposition parties and build independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces, schools, universities and neighborhoods, as part of the fight for a socialist and internationalist program, the building of a Kenyan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and the struggle for world socialism.
A government beholden to big business and not social needs has seized the drop in pupil numbers to slash public services to fund its key priority, military spending.
9. Join the fight for socialism! Become a Socialist Equality Party Supporter!
The Socialist Equality Party (UK) is launching an initiative to sign up hundreds of new SEP Supporters and involve them in the party’s campaigning and educational work.
10. ICE escalates violent enforcement operations across Detroit metro area
Within a span of less than three weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have conducted two violent vehicular pursuits in residential Detroit neighborhoods, leaving two asylum seekers severely injured and triggering a growing outcry from immigrant communities and civil rights organizations.
The incidents expose the lawless character of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and its deliberate targeting of vulnerable workers who entered the United States legally seeking protection. Both victims—a Venezuelan woman and a Mauritanian man—had applied for asylum through official channels. Both were subjected to high-speed chases through city streets by federal agents operating in plainclothes and unmarked vehicles. Both were denied access to their families while hospitalized.
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These two cases are not aberrations. They are the visible bloody surface of a deportation machine operating with deliberate brutality and near-total impunity. The Trump administration has granted ICE an expansive mandate to conduct enforcement with no meaningful constraint—no requirement to identify themselves in plainclothes operations, no obligation to notify families, no accountability for injuries caused during pursuits or arrests.
The conduct of hospitals in both cases reveals the extent to which ICE intimidation has penetrated civilian institutions. Both the Detroit Medical Center and Corewell Health Dearborn refused to provide medical updates to family members of ICE detainees—abandoning elementary obligations of care and transparency in deference to federal agents. The GEO Group’s North Lake detention center, where Moreno López was transferred, refused to comment to reporters, deferring entirely to ICE. These are private corporations and nominally independent medical institutions that act as extensions of a police-state apparatus.
It is also significant that both victims entered the country through legal channels to seek asylum—a right enshrined in U.S. and international law. The Trump administration’s enforcement regime makes no distinction between those with pending asylum claims and those who entered unlawfully. The target is not illegality; it is the immigrant working class as a whole.
The Democratic Party’s role in this situation warrants direct scrutiny. Michigan has two Democratic U.S. senators and a Democratic governor. Detroit is governed by Democrats at every level. One of the two House members from Detroit, Rashida Talib, is a member of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA). Yet there has been no serious political challenge to ICE operations in the city—no move to withhold state resources, no legislative action to constrain the agency, no demand that hospitals be legally protected from ICE pressure on patient confidentiality. The Democratic Party has not opposed the deportation machine; it has accommodated it.
Meanwhile, Detroit police are prohibited by department policy from engaging in high-speed vehicular pursuits for low-level, non-violent offenses—a restriction enacted after years of community pressure following crashes that killed bystanders. ICE operates under no such constraint. Federal agents can chase an asylum seeker through residential streets at any speed, without identification, and when that pursuit ends in near-fatal injury, they face no investigation, no discipline and no legal accountability.
The working class—immigrant and native-born alike—must conduct its own response to this escalation. The targeting of asylum seekers is an attack on the entire class. State repression directed at the most vulnerable workers today lays the political and institutional groundwork for repression of all workers tomorrow. The defense of immigrant workers is inseparable from the defense of democratic rights and the independent political organization of the working class against both parties of American capitalism.
The mass seizure of bank accounts from over 1,500 Chilean workers with student loan debts has laid bare the class character of the capitalist state and exposed every party of the political establishment—from the fascistic right of José Antonio Kast to the “progressive” pseudo-left of Gabriel Boric—as instruments of financial capital.
What is unfolding is not a “collection controversy” or a “legal dispute.” It is a coordinated assault by the Chilean bourgeoisie, using the coercive machinery of the Treasury (TGR), to make working people pay for a system deliberately engineered to enrich a handful of banks.
The number of debtors under the State-Guaranteed Loan System (CAE) is staggering. As of December 2025, there were 1,280,904 CAE debtors in Chile. Of these, 693,710 are currently delinquent—more than half. Some 46.4 percent have already had their collateral foreclosed or their loans accelerated. The total outstanding CAE debt reached approximately 4 trillion Chilean pesos-CLP (US$4.4 billion) in 2025, an eightfold increase from 2018.
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The legal situation has been deliberately muddied in the bourgeois press to obscure a simple fact: the courts are functioning as an instrument of class rule.
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To understand the present crisis, one must understand the CAE as what it has always been: a mechanism for transferring public wealth to private banks.
The CAE was created by Law 20.027 in 2005 under Socialist Party President Ricardo Lagos. As the World Socialist Web Site noted: “The blueprint of the system is steeped in cynicism. Private banks issue loans to students. The state guarantees up to 90 percent of the capital plus interest in the event of default and the student shoulders decades of repayment. The banks assume virtually no risk; the state absorbs the losses; and the student bears the debt.”
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The student rebellion of 2011 was the largest mass mobilization in Chile since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. Hundreds of thousands of secondary school and university students took to the streets demanding free, quality public education and an end to the for-profit model.
The response of the ruling class was twofold: repression, and co-option. President Sebatian Piñera (2010-2014) responded with mounted police charges, rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon. But it also moved to absorb the movement’s energy through legislative reform. The result was Law 20.634, enacted in October 2012, which introduced Article 18 bis into the CAE law.
Article 18 bis explicitly granted the TGR authority to carry out judicial and extrajudicial collection of CAE debts held by the State, using “coercive, ordinary or executive collection procedures.” It authorized the TGR to negotiate payment agreements, forgive penalties and interest under approved criteria, and even sell or assign delinquent state-held CAE credits to third parties.
This was the reform that the student movement was offered in exchange for demobilization: a reduction in the CAE interest rate to 2 percent, coupled with a dramatic strengthening of the state’s collection apparatus. The pseudo-left student leaders who would later form the Broad Front—Gabriel Boric, Giorgio Jackson, and others—accepted this framework. They channeled the movement into parliamentary negotiation rather than revolutionary confrontation. The legal architecture that is now being used to seize workers’ wages was built, in significant part, by the very reform that was sold to students as a “victory.”
If the 2012 reforms laid the groundwork, it was Gabriel Boric’s government that supplied the weapons now being deployed. Law 21.713, the so-called “Tax Compliance Law” or “anti-evasion law,” was published on October 24, 2024, under Boric’s administration. Boric himself hailed it as “an act of justice for Chile,” declaring that “the state now has better tools to combat tax avoidance and evasion by the wealthy.”
The reality is precisely the opposite. The law modified Article 170 of the Tax Code, expanding the types of assets the Treasury could target during collection proceedings. The amended provision allows embargoes to reach not only wages but also money, credits, and other monetary claims belonging to the debtor. It streamlined the TGR’s authority to issue writs of execution and seizure, allowing for a more rapid, less judicially supervised process.
Boric’s recent social media intervention—denouncing the “untimely emptying” of debtors’ accounts and asking “where are the priorities?”—is the height of political cynicism. He promised universal CAE debt forgiveness during his 2021 presidential campaign, but failed to deliver. Instead, his government strengthened the very collection mechanisms now being used against the people who voted for him. The pseudo-left armed the state, and the fascistic right is now pulling the trigger.
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The CAE is not an aberration or a policy mistake. It is a logical expression of capitalism in its imperialist stage. The banks that profited from student debt are the same banks that dominate the Chilean economy. The state that guarantees their profits and then hunts down debtors is the same state that protects the Luksic, Matte, Angelini, Piñera, and Paulmann families—oligarchic clans whose combined wealth exceeds tens of billions of dollars.
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The student movement cannot afford a third cycle of illusions in the pseudo-left, after 2011 and 2019. The debtors now seeing their wages seized, their accounts emptied and their families thrown into crisis must draw the necessary conclusions. The fight against the CAE is a fight against capitalism. It can only be won through the international unity of the working class, under the banner of the Fourth International, for the United Socialist States of the Americas and the world socialist revolution.
The ICFI calls on workers, students, and youth in Chile and internationally to study our program, to break decisively with all forms of pseudo-left and nationalist politics, and to join the fight for the revolutionary transformation of society.
12. Rich Flu: What happens when wealth becomes a plague?
Amid wars, wildfires, floods and epidemics, the ruling class sleeps soundly in the belief that its wealth will shield it from calamity. But what would happen if wealth itself exposed the world’s financial titans and corporate chieftains to a mysterious and fatal illness? Where would the super-rich turn? What panic might ensue? The film Rich Flu (2024), which recently received its US theatrical release, imagines a disturbing answer to this hypothetical question.
13. Australia: Officeworks sacks hundreds of workers
The restructuring by the office supplies retailer is another demonstration of the relentless corporate drive to lower labour costs, and the complicity of governments and trade unions.
14. Political issues in the Karmelo Anthony murder case
The trial and sentencing of black track-and-field athlete Karmelo Anthony, found guilty of murdering Austin Metcalf, who was white, has become a major political flash point in Texas. Anthony’s 35-year prison sentence stands in sharp contrast to far more lenient sentences and outright acquittals given to defendants in similar “self defense” cases, namely those in which victims were political targets of the Trump administration and the far right.
In April 2025, both Anthony and Metcalf, who were both 17-years-old, were competing at a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas, and which was interrupted by a sudden rainstorm. Metcalf’s team, from Memorial High School, sheltered from the rain in their team’s tent while Anthony’s team from Centennial High School had no such shelter. Anthony sought shelter in the Memorial High School tent as a result. Coaches at the trial testified that the sharing of tents by competing teams is not an uncommon practice even in the absence of severe weather events.
After he entered the tent, Metcalf’s brother Hunter told Anthony to leave and was soon joined by several other Memorial High School teammates, including Hunter’s brother Austin.
Soon after the initial confrontation it appears that at least one of the Memorial High School students threatened to physically remove Anthony, whereupon Anthony allegedly responded, “Touch me and see what happens.”
Austin Metcalf and Anthony, who had no contact prior to the incident, then began shoving each other, with witnesses stating that Metcalf, the physically larger of the two, started the altercation. Anthony then reached inside his backpack and stabbed Metcalf in the chest with a folding knife.
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On January 24, 2026 a grand jury indicted Anthony on charges of murder even though the circumstances of the event clearly pointed to a lesser charge of manslaughter.
The trial started on June 4 with the guilty verdict reached five days later on June 9. The jury deliberated for less than three hours and ignored Judge John Roach’s instruction that they could consider charges of manslaughter rather than murder, which would have carried a shorter 20-year maximum prison term.
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The jury had no black members after all potential black candidates were struck by the prosecution. The trial went ahead nonetheless despite the fact that Frisco is 10 percent black, while the state of Texas as a whole has a population that’s 12 percent black. The racial composition of the jury was a significant factor in popular claims that the verdict was racially motivated.
Furthermore, while there’s no clear evidence that hostility towards Anthony by the Metcalf brothers and their teammates was racially motivated, Jeff Metcalf, father of the deceased, who claimed during the trial that “this was never about race”, was recently recorded on a racist TikTok rant, calling Anthony a “watermelon felon,” and saying that black people “get all the free sh*t we give you.”
Moreover, during the course of Anthony’s trial, fascist provocateur Jake Lang, who was pardoned by Donald Trump for his role in the president’s attempted coup of January 6, 2021, and is a champion of the racist Great Replacement Theory, told a local rally that 19-year-old Anthony should be lynched.
Another proponent of the Great Replacement Theory, newly-minted trillionaire Elon Musk, did his part to fan the flames, posting on X, “Murderers should be executed,” in response to an anti-Karmelo Anthony post.
Needless to say, there was no such outrage by Musk, Lang and their supporters after the acquittals of Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny and George Zimmerman, each of whom had far less legitimate claims of self defense than Anthony since they initiated the confrontations which culminated in them killing unarmed people.
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These differing outcomes have made abundantly clear that two systems of justice operate in the United States.
Those perpetrators who can be utilized as foot soldiers of an emerging fascistic movement to carry out extreme violence against minorities, the poor and the political left are to be let off scot-free while the working class and student youth are to feel the full force of the law with their crimes exaggerated to enact the most extreme punishments possible.
15. Australian High Court rejects Labor government’s demand for immunity for illegal detentions
The Albanese government’s extraordinary bid to block a false imprisonment case essentially sought to protect governments being sued for any illegal action.
Nearly one month has passed since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in central Africa a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on May 17. While official tallies of suspected cases have recently declined in certain health zones, this apparent improvement is illusory. The rate of confirmed cases continues to climb, and the drop in suspected cases reflects the catastrophic collapse of disease surveillance and testing rather than genuine containment of the virus.
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The infiltration of the Bundibugyo virus into the sprawling internal displacement camps of the eastern DRC marks a dangerous new phase of the epidemic. Reporting by Gradel Muyisa and Benoit Nyemba for Reuters highlights fatal confirmed cases in the Kpangba displacement camp, which alone traps approximately 30,000 people who have fled decades of imperialist-backed proxy wars. Residents endure severe overcrowding and inadequate sanitation, with hundreds forced to share a single toilet while open defecation remains common. Caitlin Brady, the country director for the Danish Refugee Council, warned that the virus will spread extremely quickly under these conditions, sparking panic and mass flight.
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According to a report in Stars and Stripes by John Vandiver, the United States Africa Command has placed boots on the ground at the Laikipia Air Base in central Kenya. Hundreds of military personnel, including engineers and security forces, were dispatched to construct a 50-bed temporary isolation unit. While US officials insist the project is necessary to protect Americans potentially exposed to the virus, the facility is explicitly oriented toward serving US personnel.
The Kenyan government, led by President William Ruto, is making eager accommodations with the imperialist powers. Despite massive protests by Kenyan youth and a High Court order temporarily suspending the facility, construction has proceeded. The Ebola crisis is being actively weaponized for US hegemony. Under the pretext of a health emergency, the Laikipia facility functions essentially as a forward medical and quarantine installation for American troops and government officials deployed across East Africa. It offers no serious contribution to outbreak control in the DRC. Instead, building high-containment infrastructure inside a friendly military base strengthens the logistical backbone of US military operations in a region rich in strategically important resources.
This is not a sudden or opportunistic intervention but the extension of an established military posture. In January 2026, Washington broke ground on a $70 million State Department-funded expansion of the runway at Manda Bay and Camp Simba, key air bases used for operations against al-Shabaab. That investment itself built on a five-year defense cooperation agreement signed in September 2023 by then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Kenyan Defense Minister Aden Bare Duale. The Laikipia facility is the latest layer of this years-long militarized alliance, not a one-off humanitarian gesture.
The eastern provinces of the DRC possess immense wealth in gold, cobalt, coltan and other critical minerals essential to global supply chains. The outbreak is being used as a humanitarian justification to deepen the US military footprint in East Africa. This militarization belongs to the rivalry between the great powers. Over the past two decades, China has vastly expanded its economic footprint across Africa, concentrating its investments in energy, mining and infrastructure. US strategists view this integration as a major challenge to American dominance, and Washington is recalibrating its engagement through military partnerships and the expansion of bases. For the United States, public health crises have become opportunistic avenues to project military power against geopolitical rivals.
The class character of this response is starkly revealed by contrasting the resources devoted to military infrastructure with the chronic underfunding of regional health systems. While the State Department coordinates a $220 million whole-of-government response that includes deploying troops and establishing US-centric Ebola facilities in Kenya, public health systems in the DRC, Uganda and surrounding countries are systematically starved of funds. The resources used to build and staff the Kenyan installation could have financed primary care centers, diagnostic laboratories, safe water infrastructure and community health workers directly in the outbreak zone.
This is not a question of technical capacity but of political priorities. Within the framework of global capitalism, the lives of Congolese workers and peasants are treated as expendable compared to the safety of a small number of US troops and defense contractors. The American response to the Bundibugyo outbreak exposes an imperialist system that places the militarization of the African continent and the pursuit of corporate profit above the survival of the international working class.
17. Manslaughter charges filed over Hong Kong’s Wang Fuk Court fire
Hong Kong authorities have filed manslaughter and corruption charges against seven individuals and two companies over the Wang Fuk Court inferno in Tai Po, confirming that the city’s deadliest residential fire in decades was the result of a criminal conspiracy of cost‑cutting and fraud, not an unavoidable tragedy. The prosecutions, however, leave intact the broader social crime of a housing regime that condemns hundreds of thousands of people to unsafe, overcrowded and extortionately priced dwellings.
On 26 November 2025, fire erupted on the exterior scaffolding of the Wang Fuk Court estate, an eight‑block complex housing thousands of working‑class residents in Tai Po. Fed by substandard mesh netting and flammable foam insulation wrapped around the high‑rises for a major renovation project, the blaze raced up the façades and into the apartments, engulfing seven of the eight towers and killing 168 people, injuring scores more and leaving some 1,800 households homeless in the worst fire Hong Kong has seen in generations. It was immediately clear this was no “natural disaster”: fire alarms and smoke detectors failed across the estate, residents said bells never rang as smoke and flames swallowed corridors and stairwells, and survivors described being trapped in narrow, cluttered hallways crammed with combustible items that were never cleared despite repeated warnings.
After a months‑long joint investigation by the police and the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the authorities announced on 10 June that they had filed 25 charges against seven people and two firms directly involved in the renovation. Will Power Architects Co., the consultancy hired to inspect and supervise works, and Prestige Construction & Engineering Co., the main contractor, both face multiple counts of manslaughter over the deaths. Three senior figures—Prestige directors Ho Kin‑yip and Hau Wa‑kin, and Will Power director Wong Hap‑yin—have each been charged with manslaughter, accused of creating and overseeing a renovation scheme that turned the estate into a death trap.
The charges go far beyond negligence. Prosecutors allege that Will Power and Prestige conspired to defraud Wang Fuk Court’s owners’ corporation, rigging the tender process to guarantee Prestige a contract worth hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars. Prestige’s litigation history and poor record were concealed; its evaluation scores were secretly inflated so that it emerged as the “sole preferred” bidder in a field of dozens of contractors. The consultancy and its registered inspector are accused of filing sham inspection reports, certifying that fire‑safety and maintenance works had been properly supervised when, in reality, inspections were cursory or non‑existent. Wong, along with a subordinate and his wife, is accused of laundering some $HK40 million in illicit proceeds over six years, while a close associate faces charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice by hiding bribe money and pressuring a registered inspector to falsify documents and mislead investigators after the blaze. These charges make explicit what residents already knew: that safety rules, inspection regimes and tender procedures were treated as obstacles to be circumvented in the pursuit of profit.
Yet these prosecutions, significant as they are, capture only a fraction of the criminal apparatus that produced the Wang Fuk Court disaster. Even before the fire, the building‑maintenance sector in Hong Kong was notorious for bid‑rigging, collusion and triad infiltration: competition authorities have exposed a vast syndicate coordinating “cover bids” across multiple estates, including Wang Fuk Court, so pre‑chosen contractors could milk owners’ corporations with inflated contracts. An industry insider told the local press that people with triad backgrounds openly boast that rigging maintenance tenders is more lucrative than the drug trade.
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Meanwhile, the survivors of the inferno continue to pay the price. Around 1,800 households—some 6,000 people—were evacuated and remain displaced, scattered among temporary accommodations, relatives’ homes and hotels, with no clear timetable for permanent rehousing or return. Among the most severely affected are the foreign domestic workers—the maids—who lived and labored in Wang Fuk Court. Hundreds of helpers worked in the estate; at least 10 Indonesian and Filipino women were killed, and many more lost both their employers and their lodgings overnight. Hong Kong’s immigration regime ties helpers’ right to stay in the city to a specific employer and live‑in arrangement, the death or displacement of their bosses meant instant unemployment and homelessness. Despite being hailed in the media as “heroes” for carrying children down smoke‑filled stairwells and waking sleeping families, survivors have had to rely on migrant networks, churches and charities for shelter and basic necessities, all while facing the threat of deportation if they cannot quickly secure new contracts.
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The manslaughter charges against a handful of directors and firms are, in this sense, both an important admission and a political diversion. They acknowledge that 168 people were killed because of criminally reckless decisions taken in boardrooms and site offices, not because of fate or “human error.” But they leave untouched the developers, financiers and senior officials who preside over a housing order in which safety is subordinated to profit at every level. The Wang Fuk Court inferno is part of the same global pattern as the Grenfell Tower fire in London: working‑class homes wrapped in flammable materials to cut costs, safety warnings ignored, regulators acting as rubber stamps, and then the resulting mass deaths presented as “tragic accidents” rather than the predictable outcome of a profit‑driven housing regime. In both cases, the poorest layers of society were forced to live in death traps so that developers, contractors and financiers could save money and extract rent.
Friedrich Engels termed this “social murder”: the conscious maintenance of social arrangements that place people in conditions where an early death is not just possible but inevitable. The prosecution of a few contractors in Hong Kong, like the limited scapegoating after Grenfell, leaves intact the capitalist system that treats housing as a speculative asset rather than a social right; preventing future Wang Fuk Courts and Grenfells requires the independent mobilization of the working class to expropriate the big property interests, place housing and maintenance under democratic control, and reorganize social life on a socialist basis.
18. New Zealand train crash exposes inadequate safety systems
Four passengers and two workers were injured when a passenger train in Wellington crashed into a concrete stop block south of Khandallah station on Saturday June 6. The incident raises serious questions about safety on the rail network in New Zealand’s capital city.
According to media reports, the crash occurred around 7.20pm when a two-car suburban commuter service traveling from Johnsonville to Wellington entered a runoff siding—a dead-end safety track whose purpose is to intentionally divert out-of-control trains—just south of Khandallah station. The train, traveling at 30 kilometers per hour, collided with a concrete buffer at the end of the siding.
Nine people were on board: seven passengers, a locomotive engineer and a train manager. Six were taken to hospital, including three children.
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It is not clear why the train entered the siding. Transdev has said publicly that it may have passed a red light—termed a signal passed at danger (SPAD)—but this has not been confirmed. It is not known whether the accident involved a signalling fault, a braking problem, other equipment malfunction, a problem with the track, human error or a combination of factors.
The protracted nature of the official investigation itself raises serious concerns. Thousands of passengers use the Wellington region’s rail network every day. The Johnsonville line remains suspended and replaced by buses while repairs and investigations continue. No date has been announced for the full restoration of rail services. Management has not explained what measures are being taken now to ensure a similar incident cannot happen again.
Despite these unanswered questions, government officials declared that all safety mechanisms had worked as intended.
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The assertion that the system functioned as intended does not answer whether the system itself is adequate. The safety mechanism in question involved diverting the train onto a siding where it struck a concrete barrier with enough force to cause serious injuries.
The Saturday evening service had only a handful of passengers. Had a similar incident occurred during a weekday peak-hour service carrying hundreds of people, including schoolchildren, the consequences could have been catastrophic.
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The Khandallah crash was not an isolated event. Wellington’s rail network has experienced repeated signalling failures, infrastructure faults, service disruptions and ongoing operational problems associated with ageing infrastructure and decades of underinvestment.
According to Stuff, if investigators ultimately determine that the Khandallah accident involved a train passing a red signal, it would be the fourth SPAD involving Wellington passenger services in the past 12 months.
One of the most important issues highlighted by the crash is the absence of automatic train protection technology, which is standard in many countries.
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Responsibility for Wellington’s rail network is divided. The state-owned company KiwiRail is responsible for maintaining the rail infrastructure, while the GWRC contracts private operator Transdev, a French-based multinational company, to run the services.
There have been decades of privatization, cost-cutting and pro-business restructuring by successive governments and councils. Infrastructure has aged, major upgrades have been delayed and investment decisions repeatedly postponed while workers and passengers face deteriorating conditions. Train workers face chronic staffing shortages, heavy workloads and roster pressures that contribute to fatigue.
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The Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU) has suppressed opposition to worsening conditions for decades. The union has not called a meeting of Transdev Wellington workers to discuss the Khandallah incident. Instead, it joined the company and politicians in promoting complacency. According to RNZ, RMTU Secretary Todd Valster “said train crashes were incredibly rare and this was the first significant incident involving these types of train.”
Meanwhile, Transdev is telling workers not to speak to the media or to post comments on social media about the crash. The WSWS calls on workers to defy this gag order. Workers and passengers have every right to openly discuss their concerns about the safety of the network, and should demand the immediate disclosure of all safety-related information.
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Workers should demand billions of dollars in investment in modern rail infrastructure, with safety systems to prevent such crashes. The claims by governments and councils that there is “no money” for this must be rejected: the government is diverting billions of dollars into tax cuts for the rich, and to the military to prepare for war, while gutting public services across the country.
19. USPS workers discuss 4 deaths at Palmetto facility, privatization drive in public meeting
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee held an online public meeting Sunday on the deaths at the Palmetto, Georgia Regional Processing and Distribution Center. Participants discussed the broader safety crisis throughout the U.S. Postal Service, ongoing restructuring and privatization efforts and the need for workers to organize independently of the union apparatus.
The meeting brought together postal workers from across the United States as well as rank-and-file representatives from Britain and Canada. Speakers reviewed the circumstances surrounding the four deaths at the Palmetto facility, examined the implications of Postmaster General David Steiner’s restructuring plans, and discussed the common experiences of postal workers internationally as governments and corporations seek to slash costs and expand private control over mail delivery.
The discussion took place in the wake of the death of Demarcus Little, the fourth worker to die at Palmetto in two years. Opening the meeting, David Harrison, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, said the attack on USPS was “not just an attack on our jobs, wages and pensions” but “an attack on a 250-year-old public institution that serves every home in America.”
Tom Hall, another WSWS writer, gave the opening report. “We’re meeting under urgent and tragic circumstances,” he said. “Four workers have died in two years at the Palmetto Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Georgia.” He named Shannon Barnes, Eric Smith, Russell Scruggs Jr. and Demarcus Little, saying their names “must not be buried in incident reports or forgotten after a brief statement of condolence.”
Hall said management presented each death “as an isolated tragedy,” but the deaths were “part of a national safety crisis produced by cuts, speedup, understaffing, restructuring and the subordination of workers’ lives to budgets and corporate interests.” Reports from workers and evidence gathered by the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee, he said, had pointed to delays in calling 911 because of blocked cell phone signals, inadequate first aid supplies and training, EMS access problems and reports that Palmetto had operated without proper written safety protocols.
The report then reviewed the broader restructuring of USPS. Postmaster General David Steiner, Hall said, “has warned that USPS is running out of cash.” But “the issue is not simply accounting.” The cash crisis was being used to demand “sweeping changes,” including “ending or weakening six-day delivery, closing unprofitable post offices, cutting jobs, reducing services and undermining the universal service obligation.”
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.
