Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Bernie Sanders’ AI letter: A bankrupt appeal to the oligarchs

On August 10, Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter to Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta demanding that they “pause AI development” and “stop building machines that humans cannot control,” promoting it with an accompanying video.

The letter is characteristic of Sanders’ politics. It is full of demagogy and empty rhetoric that educates no one about anything. It is calculated to stoke fear, while covering up every basic question the technology poses: Who owns it? Who controls it? In whose interests is it being developed?

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On July 21, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models had broken out of a test of their hacking abilities and attacked Hugging Face, the company through which the world’s open AI models are distributed. The models were being scored on a hacking benchmark. They determined that the answer key was stored on Hugging Face’s servers, got themselves onto the internet and took control of much of that company’s technical infrastructure.

Clément Delangue, the cofounder of Hugging Face, wrote that it “might be the first incident of its kind.” Michael Dalton of OpenAI’s technical staff called it “a watershed moment for computer security as an industry,” adding that “AI orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now, and the actions we have discussed today were an unintended side effect of running evaluations on frontier AI.”

Notably, the direct cause of the OpenAI hack was a decision taken by the company to test the models without the safeguards that would have prevented this type of behavior, combined with insufficient oversight. OpenAI ran the evaluation without the classifiers that stop its models from carrying out attacks and stated that “these deployment safeguards were intentionally not enabled during this evaluation.”

These attacks were the product of the operations of the companies and their contractors—evaluations outsourced to cut costs, systems rushed ahead of rivals, safeguards treated as obstacles to the next funding round. The incidents are serious, but what they indict is not the technology. It is the corporations that own it, to whose good faith Sanders addresses his appeal.

AI is currently dominated by the three billionaires to whom Sanders writes, along with the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. Sanders does not challenge any of this. Indeed, he cites as an authority on the danger of AI Trump’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who calls the frontier models “akin to digital nuclear weapons” and “almost like a doomsday device.” Ratcliffe added, in remarks Sanders does not quote, that the United States is on “the right side of the equation” against its foreign competitors. In citing the CIA as an authority, Sanders accepts the premise: The “wrong hands” are the targets of American imperialism. 

Sanders does not mention how imperialism is currently using AI. While he conjures up the specter of a future bioweapon, the technologies are already killing. Palantir’s Maven Smart System—incorporating the Claude model built by Anthropic—generated some 1,000 bombing targets in the first 24 hours of the assault on Iran. The same class of systems has been used by Israel in the genocide in Gaza.

Sanders is equally silent on the social catastrophe underway. In the first seven months of 2026, US employers announced more than 477,000 job cuts, with AI the leading cited reason for the fifth consecutive month. Automation is striking directly at professional and intellectual labor, while studies project the displacement of hundreds of millions of workers worldwide by 2030.

Instead of addressing any of this, Sanders appeals to the conscience of the executives, urging them, “in the interest of humanity,” to “stand by your words,” while he himself catalogues how every safety commitment these companies made was abandoned the moment it obstructed the race for market share, a race driven by the massive speculative bubble in AI.

“If you do not take appropriate action now,” the letter concludes, “my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.” This is pure demagogy. Neither Sanders nor the Senate and its assemblage of representatives of the ruling class will do anything to challenge the oligarchic control of AI.

2. Anglicare report shows deepening rental crisis for Australian workers and welfare recipients

The report found almost no rental properties in the country were affordable for low-income workers and those relying on meager government welfare payments.

3. Australian war crimes whistleblower David McBride released from prison

McBride’s release is welcome news, but the Labor government has maintained his convictions and the precedent they seek to establish of preventing whistleblowers from exposing war crimes.

4. Australia: Labor government tightens war-related powers over universities

As in the US and Europe, a wartime-style atmosphere is being created, backed by threats of punishment of researchers and universities that fail to comply. 

5. IG Metall union and works council toast brutal cuts at German steel plant

At least 7,000 jobs are being destroyed in the Duisburg steel industry—organised and enforced by IG Metall. The union apparatus and its works council representatives cynically sell these brutal cuts as a measure to secure jobs. 

6. Sailor jumps overboard in suicide attempt on USS Abraham Lincoln

The USS Abraham Lincoln sailed from San Diego on November 21, 2025, on what was initially presented as a Pacific deployment, less than a year after it returned from a 162-day deployment in December 2024. It was redirected to the Middle East and arrived in January, remaining in the Arabian Sea to support US combat operations against Iran that began on February 28.

By early August, Navy officials said the carrier had logged 250 consecutive days at sea and had supported 40 continuous days of combat operations in the Fifth Fleet region. The carrier has now been deployed for more than eight months, with its originally anticipated May return postponed and no publicly announced date for its return home.

By contrast, aircraft carriers generally make a port call every 30 to 45 days for resupply, maintenance and crew rest. The Lincoln, however, went much of its deployment without such calls. It had only a brief visit to Guam in December, during which many sailors reportedly could not disembark, and in early July for a short stop in Oman, where personnel were restricted to a secure compound.

Sailors and family members have reported food rationing, shortages of drinking water and basic supplies, dysfunctional air conditioning, disrupted mail, long workdays, limited time off and more than a week during which personnel could not do laundry. Other accounts presented by families have included moldy showers, broken toilets, no hot water for weeks and meals reduced to half a cup of rice and two tortillas.

The Navy stated that its leadership was “continuously conducting assessments to monitor and sustain the psychological readiness of every sailor” and that more mental health professionals were being sent to the carrier. Yet the command’s refusal to disclose the number of attempted suicides or self-harm incidents makes independent assessment impossible.

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The Lincoln’s crisis has revealed the real social character of the imperialist war against Iran. The strategic aims of the conflict—an effort to impose US dominance over the Middle East by military means—are determined by the financial aristocracy while the cost is to be borne by working class sailors, soldiers and their families. 

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Speaking on Friday at the David S. Mack Center for Training and Intelligence, a Nassau County police training facility in Garden City/Uniondale, New York, Trump asserted, “After we finish defeating Iran—which is being very badly defeated—pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” Carrying out the annexation of the Strait of Hormuz—something which US imperialism has been planning for decades—requires a military campaign that will sacrifice the lives of both American and Iranian military personnel in the interests of the American oil monopolies and financial oligarchy. 

7. Sri Lankan government rejects returning wartime military-occupied land

More than a decade and a half has passed since the 26-year communal war waged by successive Colombo governments against the LTTE ended, yet thousands of acres of civilian land remains occupied by the military forces and enclosed behind barbed-wire fences.

8. Johannes Stern on RT: Bogdan Syrotiuk convicted “for socialist thoughts”

Johannes Stern, editor-in-chief of the German-language edition of the WSWS, appeared live Friday on RT to discuss the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk, the 27-year-old Ukrainian Trotskyist sentenced to 15 years in prison for his articles opposing the war.

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Stern told RT’s viewers that Bogdan

is a socialist internationalist. He has opposed the Russian intervention. He opposes, of course, the NATO war, the imperialist war against Russia... He has put forward a socialist perspective, has called for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war. And that’s his crime. So it’s basically a thought crime. It’s a frame-up. It’s a political case.

“He’s convicted for socialist thoughts, for an internationalist position opposing the war,” Stern said.

The interview carried the case to an international television audience four days after the Pervomaisk City District Court in Ukraine’s Nikolaev region handed down the sentence. The leading Western newspapers, broadcasters and wire services—from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the BBC, CNN, Reuters and the Associated Press—have not reported the verdict, or the case at any stage since his arrest in April 2024.

9. Three executions in a single day in America: Far more than a scheduling coincidence

There has been little examination of who these men were, the brutality of what took place, or the fact that the killings occurred amid the most sweeping campaign of domestic and foreign repression in modern American history.

10. US CEO pay surges to record highs

The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio The median CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 2025 was 198 to one. A majority of S&P 500 CEOs received more in one day than the median US worker earned during the entire year.

11. Australian and New Zealand students and youth demand freedom for Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk

“Bogdan Syrotiuk has not committed any crime. He has been made a criminal because of his opposition to both the war of the Putin regime against Ukraine and the US-led proxy war against Russia.”

12. Colombian president sanctions US military operations amid earthquake disaster

Following the deadly earthquake, the government’s response has been marked by curfews, militarization and an invitation to foreign troops.

13. Trump’s DHS carried out vast spying operation against unions and left-wing groups in Minnesota

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted a sweeping domestic spying operation against unions, left-wing organizations and opponents of the Trump administration during the federal occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul, according to government documents reviewed by the New York Times and made public Thursday in a federal court filing.

Undercover agents infiltrated meetings in churches, libraries, parks, schools, restaurants and union halls. They secretly recorded political discussions, entered encrypted Signal chats, collected license plate numbers, and compiled dossiers containing names, photographs, home addresses, employment and family information. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of DHS, also used administrative summonses to obtain years of financial records belonging to national unions and nonprofit organizations without identifying any underlying criminal conduct.

The dragnet was directed not at the agents who murdered Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, but at those who protested their killings, the federal occupation of Minnesota and Trump’s mass deportation operation.

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This is a modern-day version of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. From 1956 to 1971, federal agents infiltrated, disrupted and sought to discredit the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, civil rights organizations and anti-war groups in the absence of any criminal activity.

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The Minnesota dragnet is not an aberration. It is the implementation of NSPM-7, issued by Trump on September 25, 2025. HSI explicitly cited the memorandum as authority to open the case.

NSPM-7 orders federal agencies to investigate the “organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions” behind vaguely defined political violence. It identifies opposition to “traditional American views on family, religion and morality” and to “support for law enforcement and border control” as suspect motivations.

In other words, the memorandum turns political disagreement with the fascist program of the White House into evidence of potential “domestic terrorism.”

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The financial oligarchy is terrified by the growth of socialist sentiment, mounting opposition to imperialist war and genocide, and seething anger over levels of inequality without precedent in modern American history. The most powerful oligarchs, including Elon Musk, placed their money, media platforms and political influence behind returning the fascist Trump to the White House after his failed January 6 coup. They require a massive assault on the working class and democratic rights to defend their wealth and power.

14.  Nine months after El Teniente disaster, report finds Chile’s state-owned giant ignored seismic warnings, concealed unsafe mining

The Sernageomin report documents, in exhaustive technical detail, what happens when the drive for profit is given priority over human life.

15. United Kingdom: East Midlands Railway workers continue strikes over safety faults with Hitachi fleet linked to Bedford crash

Rail workers have stepped in to enforce safety against the regulator and the Labour government.

16. Lively discussion at Socialist Equality Party (UK) public meetings on the collapse of Your Party

The Socialist Equality Party (UK) has concluded a series of public meetings, “Your Party's collapse—Time to build the Socialist Equality Party”. Important discussions followed the opening report at each meeting.

17. Forklift accident leaves worker with “life-altering” injuries at General Motors Flint Truck Assembly; workers told to keep line moving

According to a worker at the plant, the affected worker was 71 years old and had just signed her retirement papers last week.

18. Netanyahu rejects Trump’s Gaza plan, pursues Greater Israel agenda

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has categorically rejected the US disarmament roadmap for Gaza that President Donald Trump described as “HISTORIC” and “monumental”.

Insisting that Israel will not withdraw its armed forces until Hamas has completely disarmed, Netanyahu made clear that the future he envisages for Gaza remains one emptied of its Palestinian citizens through ethnic cleansing.

The Israeli military’s three-year-long campaign has killed more than 73,300 Palestinians, at least two thirds of whom were women and children, while an untold number have died from disease, malnutrition and lack of medical treatment. Much of the 2.3 million population has been rendered homeless.

Israel has transformed Gaza into a wasteland, destroying agricultural land, water purification facilities, local markets, communal food pantries, municipal infrastructure, roads, hospitals, mosques, schools, universities and the social infrastructure on which modern life depends. The remaining population has been made almost entirely dependent on an aid infrastructure that Israel can turn on and off at will to terrorize the Palestinians into submission.

Trump’s plan for Gaza, signed amid much fanfare at Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2025, was never more than the official endorsement by Washington and its European and Middle Eastern allies of an Israeli policy already in operation—but with the US, not Israel, reaping the economic rewards of the development of land seized. The arrangement would be partially managed by some coalition of Arab powers to give it a more acceptable face.  

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Accepting Trump’s Gaza proposal would have exposed Netanyahu’s long-promised “total victory” over Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza as a fiction, while enraging the far-right coalition partners on whom he depends to remain in power after the October 27 elections. His Likud bloc is trailing in the polls and his long-running corruption trial is at a critical point. 

Netanyahu’s position points to a strategy of permanent war—not only against the Palestinians, but against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Iran. His statement follows Israel’s de facto rejection of a US-brokered Lebanon ceasefire and support for the continuation of the US-led war against Iran.

Israel’s relentless war flows from the logic of the Zionist state, founded on the expulsion and dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the refusal to allow them or their descendants to return to their homes. This established a political order dependent upon permanent confrontation with its neighbours.

The Israeli state has consequently built much of its political identity around the narrative of a permanent existential threat. Any form of accommodation between Washington and Tehran, however partial or temporary, would fundamentally undermine that narrative. 

Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas has made it a major obstacle to Israel’s regional ambitions, while removing Iran as a regional power would facilitate Israel’s attempt to complete the dispossession of the Palestinians and establish unchallenged regional hegemony—described by Netanyahu as “redrawing the map of the Middle East”. The Iranian threat has also provided successive Israeli governments with a means of diverting attention from domestic crises, deteriorating economic and social conditions and deep political polarisation.

Israel has been able to pursue this strategy because it can ultimately rely on Washington, which provides it with $3.8 billion a year in military aid and treats it as its principal regional proxy. What unites them, despite repeated clashes, is a shared class interest in crushing any Palestinian, Arab nationalist, Iranian or working-class challenge to their domination of the world’s most strategically vital, oil-rich region—a domination that Washington regards as essential to preparing for confrontation with China.

19. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia

Australia:

Striking allied health professionals rally outside Melbourne hospital

 

University of Sydney staff to strike for 24 hours

 

BHP Port Hedland mining workers hold two-day strike

 

Outsourced water workers strike in Victoria 

Bangladesh:  

Garment workers demand new wage board

 

Former Grameenphone employees demand settlement of long-running dues dispute 

India:  

Haryana power workers call off planned three-day strike

Gurugram municipal workers extend strike

 

Assam National Institute of Technology workers stage hunger strike

 

New Delhi sanitation workers protest sewer and septic-tank deaths

 

Tamil Nadu Exide contract workers protest for wage increase

Sri Lanka:  

Grama Niladhari officers hold two-day sick-leave strike

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

Bogdan Syrotiuk

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

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. The Socialist Equality Party and the struggle against imperialist war

“The SEP and the Struggle Against Imperialist War,” is the first of six resolutions adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2 to 7, 2026. The resolution was introduced by the opening report to the congress, given by David North, national chairman of the SEP.

The SEP and the struggle against imperialist war

1. The Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party convenes under conditions of escalating imperialist war, deepening economic crisis, the turn of the ruling classes to dictatorship, and a mounting assault on the jobs, wages and social rights of the working class. There is no longer a question of the danger of a world war; its initial stages have already begun. Across the world, the ruling elites are turning to fascism and dictatorship. A concentration of wealth without historical precedent is coupled with a global wave of inflation and the accelerating destruction of jobs, devastating the conditions of life of billions. But the same conditions are driving a political radicalization and the resurgence of the class struggle internationally. It is amid the collision of these two tendencies that the SEP must define its tasks.

2. This Congress meets five months into the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, launched in the early morning hours of February 28. The assault began while negotiations between American and Iranian representatives were still underway, and its opening salvo included the assassination of Iran’s head of state. As the Socialist Equality Party declared in its statement of March 2, “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!,” the assault is “a criminal act of war waged in flagrant violation of the United States Constitution and international law”—precisely what was described at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders in 1945–46 as a “crime against peace,” the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

3. Trump’s genocidal declaration of April 7 that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” will live forever in infamy. On July 11, he threatened to “completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.” These statements are themselves war crimes under international law. The methods of extermination proclaimed openly from the White House express the barbarism into which the capitalist system is dragging humanity.

4. Successive “ceasefires” and memoranda of understanding have collapsed, each breakdown followed by a new round of escalation. Whatever agreements of a temporary character may be reached, the war is driven by the fundamental geostrategic interests of American imperialism: the domination of the Middle East, its natural resources, and the strategic trade routes upon which the world economy depends. Control of these resources—and the power to deny them to rivals—has been the central preoccupation of American policy in the region for more than seven decades. The war against Iran is the culmination of a bipartisan campaign, waged under every administration since the 1979 Revolution deprived Washington of its puppet regime.

5. This Congress endorses the analysis presented in the opening report to the 2026 International May Day Rally: the war against Iran is “not only another episode in a long series of military operations. The repercussions of this war impart to this conflict an explicitly global character, specifically, a global war waged by the imperialist powers against the international working class.” The consequences have been catastrophic for workers throughout the world. The naval blockade of Iranian ports has convulsed world trade and energy supplies, feeding a new surge of inflation on every continent and forcing tens of millions into food insecurity or famine globally.

6. The assault on Iran is one front in a general eruption of imperialist violence, aimed at a redivision of the world. Venezuela was invaded on January 3 and its president kidnapped. At least 221 fishermen and workers have been blown apart in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific in the Pentagon’s illegal strikes. Cuba is being strangled and threatened with invasion. Israel has initiated a new war against Lebanon. And the genocide in Gaza continues into its third year: the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, the deliberate destruction of hospitals, schools, water systems and housing, and the use of starvation as a weapon of war have reduced an entire society to rubble before the eyes of the world.

7. The escalating global imperialist war is directed above all against Russia and China. There are divisions within the American ruling class over which conflict is to be prioritized, but these are tactical differences within a ruling class united on the essential aim. The vast resources of Russia—its energy, minerals, and territory spanning eleven time zones—are to be conquered and opened to imperialist exploitation. And the central conflict of the epoch remains the long-planned war against China, whose economic rise American imperialism regards as an existential threat. Whatever the differences among its factions, the American ruling class will not accept any challenge to its global hegemony. Trump’s $1.5 trillion military budget is, in the most direct sense, a budget for world war.

8. American imperialism is the most disruptive force on the planet. In its drive to reverse its decline, it is breaking up all the relationships and institutions of the postwar order that it once constructed. The United States bullies and extorts its nominal allies, wages tariff war against their economies, demands the annexation of Greenland (the territory of a NATO member, Denmark) and threatens to reduce Canada to the “fifty-first state.” Trotsky’s warning of 1928 assumes staggering relevance and acuity: “In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom. The United States will seek to overcome and extricate herself from her difficulties and maladies primarily at the expense of Europe, regardless of whether this occurs in Asia, Canada, South America, Australia, or Europe itself, or whether this takes place peacefully or through war.” Six years later, Trotsky foresaw that history was bringing mankind “face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.”

9. The European imperialist powers are not bystanders but full participants. The NATO powers are engaged in a de facto war against Russia in Ukraine, escalating toward direct confrontation between nuclear-armed states, and are rearming at the fastest pace since the early 1950s, demanding that a new generation be prepared to fight and die as in the two world wars of the last century. German imperialism once again stands at the head of this drive, adopting war laws that create the framework for conscription and the subordination of civilian life to war production, while Finland has repealed its ban on nuclear weapons, opening its 1,300-kilometer border with Russia to NATO nuclear deployment.

10. The eruption of the present war was foreseen by the International Committee of the Fourth International, whose statements over the past 35 years have a prophetic character. In its manifesto of May Day 1991, “Oppose Imperialist War and Colonialism!,” issued in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and as the Stalinist bureaucracy completed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the ICFI warned that the plunder of the former colonial countries was being resumed. Already in August 1990, on the eve of the first war against Iraq, the ICFI had explained: “It marks the beginning of a new imperialist redivision of the world. The end of the postwar era means the end of the postcolonial era… In its brutal assault against Iraq, imperialism is giving notice that it intends to restore the type of unrestrained domination of the backward countries that existed prior to World War II.”

11. Everything that has followed—the unending wars in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine—has confirmed this analysis. As David North wrote in the preface to A Quarter Century of War (2016): “The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.”

12. Every one of these wars intensified, rather than resolved, the crisis of American imperialism. As North wrote in March 2003, at the outset of the invasion of Iraq: “American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties and mounting resistance engendered by war will intensify all of the internal contradictions of American society.” Iran will prove no different.

13. Thirty-five years of unending war have failed to reverse the economic decline of American capitalism. The US trade deficit stands at record levels—$1.2 trillion in goods in a single year—and total US government debt is approaching $40 trillion, sustained only by the world’s continued willingness to hold dollars. The position of the dollar as the world reserve currency, which allows the United States to command the resources of the planet in exchange for paper, has entered into open crisis. But American imperialism will not accept a diminution of its world position. Confronted with the failure of each war, it responds not with retreat but with ever greater escalation, up to and including nuclear war, which would threaten the destruction of human life on the planet.

14. The fight against imperialist war must be rooted in the working class and based on a socialist and internationalist program. This Congress reaffirms the principles established in the ICFI’s February 2016 statement, Socialism and the Fight Against War: the struggle against war “must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population”; the new antiwar movement “must be anti-capitalist and socialist,” must be “completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organizations of the capitalist class,” and “must, above all, be international, mobilizing the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle against imperialism.”

15. At its root, imperialist war is the outcome and expression of the two essential objective contradictions of the capitalist system itself: first, between private ownership of the means of production and the social character of production; and, second, the contradiction between the global character of economic production and the nation-state system within which political power and capital accumulation continue to be organized. The eruption of imperialist war and the eruption of the international class struggle are products of a single crisis, and the war now underway is preparing revolutionary explosions.

16. The SEP opposes every act of imperialist aggression, and it does so independently of and in opposition to the existing states. It upholds the right of the Iranian people and other targets of aggression to defend themselves against the imperialist onslaught. It rejects the designation of Russia and China as imperialist powers—a designation employed by pseudo-left political tendencies to legitimize the foreign policy objectives vis-a-vis the principal targets of US war plans. But the SEP’s principled positions have nothing in common with support for, let alone the attribution of a progressive character to, the Moscow and Beijing regimes.

17. The Putin regime is the political instrument of the capitalist oligarchy that arose out of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the USSR and its plunder of state property—the bureaucracy that, as the 2026 May Day opening report stated, “having begun as the gravediggers of the October Revolution, ended as the most venal and rapacious faction of the new Russian oligarchy, led today by Putin.” It combines military escalation with appeals for accommodation with the imperialist powers, while its Great Russian nationalism divides the Russian from the Ukrainian working class. The Beijing regime, for its part, presides in the name of “socialism” over the restoration of capitalism and the exploitation of the largest working class in the world, which it fears far more than it fears imperialism.

18. The SEP likewise rejects the theory of “multipolarity” advanced by academic and pseudo-left theorists, according to which the “unipolar” hegemony of American imperialism can be replaced by a consortium of capitalist states presiding harmoniously over a more peaceful division of global resources. The contradiction between the global economy and the capitalist nation-state system leads not to a negotiated equilibrium but to war. Underlying the theory of “multipolarity” is opposition to a struggle against capitalism, the attempt to balance between conflicting capitalist states rather than to mobilize the working class against them all.

19. The fight against imperialist war must therefore be bound up with an international and class strategy. As Trotsky wrote in War and the Fourth International, we “follow not the war map but the map of the class struggle.” From this standpoint, the most important consequence of the war is the intensification of social tensions within the United States and every imperialist country. As the party foresaw in 2003, the war is intensifying all the internal contradictions of American society—and it is out of these contradictions that the force capable of stopping the war is emerging.

20. Imperialist war is, at the same time, a war against the working class. The resources demanded by world war cannot be extracted from society without the virtual enslavement of its population: the destruction of social programs, the driving down of wages, the militarization of labor and the erection of dictatorship to suppress the resistance these measures provoke. War is the foreign policy of the oligarchy, and the oligarchy makes the working class pay for it—in declining living standards, in the evisceration of democratic rights, and in blood. The fight against dictatorship and the fight against war is one fight, against one enemy.

21. The Socialist Equality Party does not advance an “antiwar policy” as something separate and apart from the fight against the capitalist system. Its strategy has nothing in common with the protest movements that appeal to the conscience of imperialist governments, or with popular fronts that subordinate the working class to one or another faction of the bourgeoisie. The fight against war is a fight for the political independence of the working class. It is the most concentrated expression of the struggle of the party to build a revolutionary movement of the working class.

22. There is no peace to be negotiated within the imperialist system, and no faction of the ruling class—Democratic or Republican, European or American—to which an appeal against war can be directed. The war will be ended not by the diplomats of imperialism but by the international working class, the only social force with the power and the objective interest to stop it.

23. The SEP demands the immediate and unconditional cessation of all US and Israeli military operations against Iran and the lifting of the naval blockade; the end of the genocide in Gaza; the withdrawal of all US forces from the Middle East and Latin America and the release of Nicolás Maduro; the end of the blockade of Cuba; the ending of the war against Russia; and the dismantling of the machinery of world war being assembled against China. It opposes all moves to reintroduce the draft, institute automatic registration for the Selective Service, and dragoon American youth to kill and be killed in the wars of American imperialism.

24. The Socialist Equality Party also renews its demand for the immediate and unconditional release of Bogdan Syrotiuk in Ukraine. Seized by the Ukrainian secret service in April 2024, he faces charges of “treason” for his socialist and antiwar activity, which could bring between fifteen years and life. The Zelensky regime has refused to release him even after a forensic report by a leading Ukrainian criminologist exposed the case as a political frame-up. His persecution lays bare the real character of the regime: not a defender of democracy, as the imperialist powers proclaim, but a police state that outlaws all socialist and internationalist opposition to the war.

25. Not one of these demands can be realized through appeals to the existing governments. They constitute a program of struggle, the fight for which leads the working class into direct conflict with the capitalist state and poses the question of power.

26. This Congress resolves to fight for the unity of the workers of all countries against imperialism; to connect the fight against war with the developing strike movement of the international working class and the fight for its political independence; and to build the international antiwar movement of the working class on the program of world socialist revolution. More than a century ago, amid the slaughter of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg warned that humanity confronted the alternative: socialism or barbarism. Barbarism is no longer a warning but a present reality. Whether it consumes civilization, or is overthrown by the international working class, will be decided by the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. This Congress therefore resolves, above all, to build the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International as the revolutionary leadership of the working class—the party through which the fight against imperialist war becomes the world socialist revolution.

2. Climate crisis: Western Europe experiences its hottest summer on record

The summer of 2026 has proven to be the hottest on record in Western Europe. According to measurements by the European Union’s (EU) Copernicus Climate Change Service, June and July were the hottest since temperature records began.

3. Nvidia and Wall Street propose “exotic” money line to continue AI boom

The longer the AI-fuelled stock market boom continues, the more new and risky schemes are developed to try to sustain it. The AI boom has already seen the growth of circular financing in which companies provide money to others to enable them to buy their products.

Now a new mechanism is being developed. Earlier this week, the leading chipmaking firm Nvidia, the biggest company in the world by market value at more than $5 trillion, announced that it had reached an understanding with some of Wall Street’s biggest names to provide financing for purchase of its AI chips.

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Wall Street has developed a complex system of credit and debt arrangements based on assets such as cars, housing, buildings and income streams. But this system has assumed that the underlying asset will retain at least some of its value over time. But the value of computer chips is notoriously volatile—a chip can be top of the range at one point and then rapidly become obsolescent at another as a superior or cheaper product is developed. 

*****

To organize the operation, the big Wall Street funds will seek money from pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds, tying them into any possible failure.

The proposed agreement is illustrative of the dynamic of the AI-based financial bubble. Nvidia’s motivations are clear: it is a way of lessening the circularity of its present financial arrangements, though it will still be on the hook for 25 percent of any losses.

But what of the involvement of major Wall Street firms and their boosting of the scheme? It is an expression of the need to preserve the value of their existing investments—running into hundreds of billions of dollars—by ensuring that the boom continues.

In other words, not to back the development of ever more exotic and risky financial mechanisms risks bursting the entire bubble. But such a process—sometimes likened to riding a bicycle where forward momentum must continue to stop it falling over—cannot continue indefinitely.

4. Return of the Gestapo: Germany tears down barrier between police and secret services imposed after Hitler

The considerable legal package approved by the German cabinet on Wednesday massively expands the powers of the domestic and foreign intelligence agencies — and erases the line between them and the police established after the defeat of the Nazis.

5. Australia: Teachers on the front line of the NDIS cuts

Alongside people with disabilities and their families, the Labor government’s gutting of the National Disability Insurance Scheme will have a devastating impact on teachers and education support staff in Australia’s already crisis-ridden public schools. 

6. Escalating strikes between Ukraine, Russia threaten global food supplies

The escalating war between NATO-backed Ukraine and Russia increasingly targets economic infrastructure in the Black Sea region, a critical area for global food supplies.

7. The popularity of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

The Odyssey moviegoers in the US are a mixed demographic, drawing people of all ages. However, it has notably attracted a younger baseline than typical “blockbusters,” with roughly 55 percent of the audience falling under the age of 35.

What accounts for the wave of interest?

In the broadest sense, life-and-death themes embodied in a classic, treated seriously and generously, have encountered a sizeable global viewing public clearly starved for challenging material.

There is a double significance to this. In the first place, The Odyssey, with its strengths and weaknesses, focuses on the horrors of war, the foul role of a usurping and cruel aristocracy, and the need to treat strangers, guests–immigrants–with hospitality and kindness. And, not a secondary matter, Nolan’s effort depicts the immense difficulties and struggles facing those who oppose all that. The resonance should be clear. People are going to the film in part because it corresponds to how they increasingly feel about the world and about America in particular–and the need to make immense sacrifices in a big cause.

An “odyssey” has come to be defined as a long wandering or voyage usually marked by numerous changes of fortune–or an intellectual or spiritual wandering or quest. Isn’t the depth and danger of the present situation beginning to convince many in America and elsewhere that there are no quick fixes, no easy solutions, that a protracted, complex struggle lies ahead? There is some moral, intellectual connection here to the life-conditions and challenges facing masses of people.

*****

...With Oppenheimer and now The Odyssey, Nolan has taken a considerable jump, contributing two substantial and complex films about issues that matter, and doing so in an accessible and visually imposing fashion. Equally important, their success must inspire others to break out of the twin ruts of infinitely tedious middle-class self-appraisal, which goes and arrives nowhere, on the one hand, and mindless “action” films, intended to deaden all remotely human thought and feeling, on the other. 

*****

Whatever its shortcomings, this Odyssey is a genuine and heartfelt attempt to come to terms with Homer’s work and its many complexities and even ambiguities. Audiences are not being cheated. And the logic of what has begun here, we suspect, is only likely to pick up steam. Many things can become contagious, including “the classical,” the principled and a feeling for what is enduring and authentic in life.

8. Germany: The privatization of Berlin’s local rail system and the role of the Left Party

As always with the Left Party: it talks left but in practice acts right! The new contract for Berlin’s S-Bahn is being portrayed in political circles and the media as a major step forward. Quite the opposite is the case.

9. Disease outbreaks multiply, as Trump and Kennedy wage war on science

The largest cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history, a returning measles epidemic and the worst Ebola epidemic in Congolese history are expressions of a single crisis.

10. Notes on US political repression and state violence

This column reports on the increasingly dictatorial and repressive actions taken by the Trump administration and its allied state governments.

• Third immigrant from Delaney detention center dies

• Former Southern Poverty Law Center employee arrested

• Three states execute prisoners on the same day

• US Attorney for Washington DC convenes special grand jury

11. Opposition mounts worldwide against 15-year sentence for Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk

Letters of protest and petition signatures from more than 30 countries are demanding the release of the 27-year-old socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison for his antiwar writings.

12 New Zealand government in turmoil after failed leadership challenge

Underlying the instability within the National Party and the coalition government are tensions over how overtly New Zealand should align with US-led warmongering against China.

13. Chile: Pinochet’s Operation Colombo: A fascist crime and its cover-up

Fifty-one years have passed since the DINA, the Pinochet regime’s secret police, orchestrated one of its most heinous crimes: the kidnapping, torture and disappearance of 119 political opponents, followed by a transnational media hoax designed to convince the world they had killed each other abroad. The crime and its cover-up were a single operation, planned from within the heart of the repressive apparatus, executed across three countries, and amplified by a corporate press that served willingly as the dictatorship’s propaganda arm.

*****

Between May 1974 and February 1975, agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) seized 119 people from their homes, from the streets, from their workplaces. The overwhelming majority were members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). They were students, social workers, textile workers, teachers, a concert pianist, a filmmaker, a radio announcer. Nineteen were women; at least two were pregnant at the time of their arrest.

They were taken to torture and extermination centers, whose names are now seared into Chile’s collective memory: Londres 38, Villa Grimaldi, José Domingo Cañas, “Venda Sexy.” There they were interrogated under torture. Then they were made to disappear.

The number 119 was not chosen at random. It was a deliberate reference to 11.9—September 11—the date of the CIA-backed coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973. It was, as one investigating judge later observed, a “cabalistic signature” of the DINA’s strategists, a mark intended to ensure the country would never forget who held absolute power.

By mid-1975, international pressure was mounting. The United Nations had taken up the case of Chile’s disappeared. Human rights organizations were documenting the regime’s crimes. The DINA needed an answer. The answer was Operation Colombo.

14.  Drought in Puerto Rico: mass suffering as Trump weaponizes the island against Latin America

In Puerto Rico, roughly half a million people have been cut off from running water for 48 hours at a stretch, going three and four days a week without service.

15. Corewell Health nurses in Michigan denounce sellout Teamsters deal

The contract is the result of a strategy by the Teamsters bureaucracy, not of fighting for what workers need, but of expanding its dues base while establishing the same corrupt relations with management that it has at other employers.

16. Company offers worse contract after SEIU shuts down strike of 950 Pennsylvania healthcare workers

Despite workers voting nearly 99 percent to strike, the SEIU moved to control and shut down the walkout. The company returned with a worse offer, and workers remain without a contract.

17. United Kingdom: North London bus drivers strike against extreme heat

On Wednesday, drivers at Arriva North London’s Tottenham garage told the World Socialist Web Site that even when the “air-cooling” system is on, temperatures inside can reach 39 to 40 degrees Celsius [102.2 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit].

18. United Kingdom: Financial Times embraces Burnham’s “public control” agenda for crisis-ridden water companies

Since Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government sold off the country's water authorities in 1989, water and sewerage charges have risen by around 40 percent in real terms.

19.  Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East

Africa

Egypt: 

Textile workers continue strike over broken promise on pay

Kenya:  

Nurses and midwives continue strike, defying state pressure

Libya:  

Thousands take to the streets over power cuts during heatwave

Nigeria:  

University workers walk out over unpaid wages

University workers in Akure protest unpaid allowances

South Africa: 

Workers and community members protest proposed closure of Premier Foods’ Tulbagh fruit-canning plant in Western Cape

 

Europe

France:

Confectionery workers in Marseilles in ongoing strike over pay

Türkiye:

Hundreds of miners in Ankara protesting unpaid wages and insecure employment met with state repression

United Kingdom:

Rail workers’ stoppage at East Midlands Railway over safety concerns

Bus drivers at Arriva North London set to strike over dangerous work conditions during heatwave

Workers from London’s Institute of Cancer Research on indefinite strike over pay

Council workers at Great Yarmouth Services in Norfolk walk out demanding parity pay

Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland staff in stoppage over cuts

Middle East

Iran:

Protests continue as living conditions plummet

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

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

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today: 

1.  Ankara plane incident shows panic and disorientation of Trump White House

Nothing disclosed by the White House and Pentagon, as well as “leaked” to corporate media outlets like the Post and the Times, can be taken at face value, above all, the claim that Iran was seeking to shoot down Air Force One.

It is more than likely that this claim originates in the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which has been raising claims of Iranian assassination plots against Trump as a reason for resuming full-scale bombing of Iran. The Trump administration could use this allegation as the pretext for all-out invasion.

But the sequence of events involving Trump’s own movements reveals, first and foremost, the panic and hysteria now gripping the administration.

*****

Except for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who joined Trump on the military jet, all other top officials who attended the NATO summit flew out of Ankara on Air Force One. These included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, as well as top White House aides like Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff and counter-terrorism chief, and Steven Cheung, the communications director.

As for the traveling press pool, consisting of dozens of reporters, producers and technicians, their lives were treated with complete contempt. Those aboard Air Force One were not simply left in danger through negligence. In effect, they were assigned a military function: to serve as unwitting decoys, to draw enemy fire, to be the target in the president’s place. 

What if the plane had been hit by a missile and destroyed, taking more than a hundred people with it, while Trump made a cowardly escape? The political repercussions for the president, the man who has, in the media parlance, “his finger on the nuclear button,” would have been catastrophic. Even the belly-crawling Democratic Party leaders would not have been able to save him.

*****

As for the faux outrage over Iran’s alleged threats to assassinate Trump, it should never be forgotten that the first action of the joint US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran was to use bomb and missile strikes to exterminate the top leadership of the Islamic Republic, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and most of his family, children and grandchildren among them. This was followed by the deliberate bombing of a school near the Strait of Hormuz, in which more than 160 schoolgirls and their teachers were killed. 

*****

As for the faux outrage over Iran’s alleged threats to assassinate Trump, it should never be forgotten that the first action of the joint US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran was to use bomb and missile strikes to exterminate the top leadership of the Islamic Republic, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and most of his family, children and grandchildren among them. This was followed by the deliberate bombing of a school near the Strait of Hormuz, in which more than 160 schoolgirls and their teachers were killed. 

2. Student protests against the far-right in Australia: The fight against One Nation is a fight against the Labor government and capitalism!

The rise of the far-right One Nation party is the result above all of the pro-business policies of Labor and the union bureaucracy and can only be fought by building a socialist movement of the working class.

3. UK Conservatives and far-right Reform UK pledge mass eviction of foreign nationals from social housing

Reform leader Nigel Farage in June published a 6,800-word essay, “Britain is a two-tier state—against white people”, asserting that “anti-white racism was embedded into the state” and that equality legislation constitutes “social cleansing”.

4. Left Party leader offers a prop for Germany’s Christian Democrats

The ZDF interview with Left Party leader Luigi Pantisano shows that even under its new chairman, the party is offering itself as a reliable prop for the bourgeois state and the Christian Democrats.

5. Canada: National Steel Car workers in Hamilton, Ontario launch strike for second time in three years

More than 1,200 workers at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario went on strike at 12:01am Wednesday, August 12. The walkout followed a decisive vote to reject the company’s “last, best, and final offer,” which was handed out to workers over the heads of the United Steelworkers Local 7135 Friday afternoon.

6. Official who threatened rank-and-file candidate Will Lehman suspended from UAW membership, but might remain on union payroll

The court-appointed monitor overseeing the United Auto Workers has suspended Raymond Jensen Jr. from union membership for posting a death threat against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president—but may leave it to the union apparatus to decide whether Jensen continues to collect his $202,000 annual salary from the UAW International.

According to Lehman, when his legal team asked the Monitor’s office to verify that Jensen had been removed from his position as a UAW International organizer, “we were told that while Jensen is suspended from the UAW, it would be up to the union apparatus to determine whether or not he will still be paid by the UAW.” Lehman’s attorneys immediately challenged this position, and the Monitor’s office said it would look into the matter. That was last week. It has yet to provide an answer.

*****

“From the beginning, I said this thuggish behavior was not aimed at me alone,” Lehman stated. “It was aimed at every UAW member who speaks out against the backroom deals and treachery of the apparatus. The image was meant as a warning: this is what happens to you if you vote down a contract, if you speak up at a meeting, if you challenge the bureaucracy in your own local.”

The image was the product of a bureaucracy that has, for decades, employed intimidation, retaliation and physical threats to suppress opposition from the workers it claims to represent. The UAW apparatus sits atop $1.25 billion in net assets and spent $118 million on its own officers and staff last year—14 times what it paid out in strike benefits. It functions as an arm of management, and it responds to any challenge from below with the methods of management’s enforcers.

Jensen, a former assistant director of UAW Region 9, Lehman’s home region, is listed as an “organizer” in the UAW’s Department of Organizing and Bargaining Strategies. The department, which works under Fain’s direction, has played a central role in trying to beat back the rising rebellion of autoworkers, particularly parts workers who have rejected a series of UAW-backed contracts at Nexteer, Dana, Bridgewater and other suppliers.  

*****

The Monitor acted only because rank-and-file workers forced his hand. Lehman’s campaign rallied support from UAW members in Detroit and around the country, from workers in other industries, and from workers and young people in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Türkiye, Australia and New Zealand. Autoworkers gave video interviews at Stellantis Warren Truck and Sterling Stamping and at Bridgewater Interiors. A young worker at Bridgewater told Lehman’s campaign team, “They’re trying to shut you up. And they usually only do that when somebody’s telling the truth.”

The Monitor has every authority to take action preventing Jensen from continuing receive a paycheck from the UAW. In December 2025, the Monitor forced out Fain’s top administrative assistant, Chris Brooks, after finding that Fain, Brooks and UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman concocted fabricated charges to strip UAW Secretary Margaret Mock of her oversight of eleven Union departments in “retaliation for, among other things, Mock’s refusal or reluctance to authorize improper expenditures of funds at the request of and/or for the benefit of those in the President’s Office.” Barofsky also found that Brooks and Fain made false or misleading statements to the Monitor to conceal this conspiracy.

*****

The oversight by the court-appointed monitor has not prevented further corruption, it has not stopped the victimization of workers who speak out. Antwiane Sanders, a Nexteer worker with more than 10 years on the job, was fired last month for speaking out against UAW officials at a contract roll-out meeting inside the plant. Workers are victimized, isolated and driven out of their jobs for opposing this apparatus in plants across the country, week after week, and almost none of it is ever investigated or penalized.

“I call on workers to demand that the Monitor remove Jensen from his post and cut off his salary,” Lehman stated. “Otherwise, the UAW bureaucracy will see this as a green light to attack not only opposing candidates but the rank and file. But workers cannot rely on the Monitor to protect our rights. We must achieve this ourselves.”

*****

The July 30 presidential debate made it clear that Lehman is the only candidate who speaks for the rank and file. Every other candidate represents a section of the apparatus. Fain is under federal criminal investigation. Boyer negotiated the 2023 Stellantis contract that opened the door to mass firings. Brian Keller endorsed Fain in the 2022 runoff. Greg Mooney is a supporter of Autoworkers for Trump. And Tricia Geiger, a highly paid UAW International servicing representative, has just received the endorsement of Ray Curry, Rory Gamble and Ron Gettelfinger—three former UAW presidents who presided over decades of concessions, plant closures and the systematic betrayal of the membership.

In his remarks, Lehman said the rank-and-file committees he is fighting for will be based on “class struggle, not class collaboration. Internationalism not nationalism.”

In an earlier statement, Lehman put his campaign in a broader context, saying, “There is a rebellion already underway in this union, in the contract rejections and the strikes and the anger on every shift. Deepen it. Organize it. Make it something the apparatus cannot threaten its way out of.”

7. Trump administration moves to arm ICE agents with electric-shock torture gloves

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million on electric-shock gloves designed to inflict intense pain through direct physical contact, including during kidnapping operations, detention and forced deportations. 

A Department of Homeland Security contracting notice published Monday and first reported on by AP lists a planned purchase of the CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E., or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. The notice estimates the contract at between $10 million and $20 million and indicates that there will be no competition.

The gloves are slated to be issued to agents with Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE divisions responsible for raids, arrests, imprisonment and deportations. The department expects the contract to be completed by March 31, 2027.

The acronym-laden description of the glove as a “Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device” is a bureaucratic euphemism. The weapon is designed to deliver electric shocks through an agent’s hand, causing immediate and overwhelming pain until the targeted person submits.

*****

The company insists that the gloves are intended to “gain compliance,” not for “verbal defiance,” “punishment,” “torture” or “horse play.” These disclaimers are worthless.

Police agencies have always treated alleged “non-compliance” as a license to beat, tase, choke and kill. The threshold is even lower than the familiar claim that an officer “feared for his life.” An ICE agent need only assert that a worker, immigrant or protester did not submit quickly or completely enough.

On Monday, masked ICE agents in Falls Church, Virginia boxed in the vehicle of Carolina Molina, a US citizen and licensed counselor, after she cursed at agents she saw arresting two people. One agent immediately approached Molina’s window with a pistol pointed inches from her head.

The agent accused her of attempting to run the officers over. Molina’s dashcam footage does not show such an attempt. Nevertheless, DHS subsequently accused her of “weaponizing her vehicle,” recycling the same lie used to justify the killings of Renee Nicole Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.

Molina’s alleged “non-compliance” consisted of condemning ICE and refusing to accept the agent’s lies. Had he been wearing an electric-shock glove, the same agent could have reached through her window and tortured her while claiming that he was merely trying to “gain compliance.”

*****

The planned purchase is one component of the immense bipartisan buildup of the American police state. Trump’s 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill” supplied approximately $170 billion for immigration enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE and $45 billion to construct new detention camps.

The nearly $70 billion appropriated in June through the Secure America Act will fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through 2029. Although Republicans supplied the votes for final passage, the allocation was made possible by a maneuver engineered by Democratic Senate leadership.

Following the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti and the eruption of mass opposition in Minneapolis, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrats separated DHS funding from the broader government spending bill. They then voted to fund the rest of DHS while excluding ICE and Border Patrol, without securing a single restriction on the immigration Gestapo.

This allowed the Democrats to posture as opponents of ICE while they demobilized protests and suppressed growing calls for a general strike. As Democratic leaders knew would happen, Republicans then used the budget reconciliation process to pass the ICE and Border Patrol funding with a simple Senate majority.

The electric-shock gloves are being purchased from this ocean of money. They are the product of a police-state buildup carried out by the Republicans with the indispensable political collaboration of the Democratic Party.

8. United States: Democratic primary elections show volatility amid shift to the left

US primary elections were held Tuesday in six states: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alabama, South Carolina, Vermont and Connecticut. The two most watched and hotly contested contests were in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

*****

The virulently hostile response of the Democratic establishment to DSA-backed “socialists” and “progressives,” who claim that the Democratic Party can become a workers’ party and who seek to bind mass opposition from below to the Democrats, exposes the bankruptcy of the political perspective of the DSA and the rest of the pseudo-left. 

9. Australia: Vote No to the third AEU-Labor Sellout! Build the Victorian Educators Rank-and-File Committee!

The Australian Education Union is once again trying to bulldoze Victorian teachers and staff into accepting a wage and condition cutting sellout that they have twice rejected.

10. Chile’s courts seal impunity for Carabinero officer who blinded Gustavo Gatica

The legal architecture of impunity for the forces of state repression has been built through the combined efforts of the entire political establishment—right, center and pseudo-left alike.

11. Homeless people die in New Zealand winter

At least two homeless people died in recent weeks in New Zealand amid plummeting winter temperatures.

According to a report in the Press on August 7, a woman was found on the beach in New Brighton, Christchurch, by local resident Justine Balcar just before 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 25. That evening, Balcar and her husband brought the woman, Hayley, some food and then phoned emergency services, concerned that “she was possibly hypothermic.”

Balcar said “Police turned up five minutes later and told us an ambulance was on its way.” The woman died in hospital the following morning. The recorded temperature on the morning of July 26 was -4.3 degrees Celsius (24.26 F).

About a week later, at around 4.00 a.m. on August 3, a man in his early 40s was found dead on Cuba Street in Wellington. The Post reported: “He could not be revived and the cause of his death has been referred to the Coroner. He was understood to have been an occasional rough sleeper.”

Snow fell in Wellington on August 4, a very rare occurrence for the capital city, which currently has no emergency night shelter for homeless people.

*****

These appalling deaths are the foreseeable and preventable outcome of the ruthless dismantling of social welfare, public healthcare and housing programs carried out by successive governments.

Dr Bruce Arroll, a general practitioner who treats homeless people at Auckland City Mission’s Calder Centre, told Radio NZ on July 9 that the average age at which his patients die is 55 for men and 54 for women—about one-third below the country’s overall life expectancy.

12. Australian union calls off strike by Victorian doctors

In what would have been their first strike in 20 years, thousands of doctors at seven Melbourne hospitals had planned to stop work for 3.5 hours, as part of a year-long enterprise bargaining dispute with the state Labor government over wages and conditions.

13. Historian Mario Kessler denounces sentencing of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk

Professor Mario Kessler

The following statement denouncing the sentencing of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk was submitted to the World Socialist Web Site by German Professor Mario Kessler:

I, Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian in Berlin, hereby strongly protest the Pervomaisk court’s conviction of Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk.

Mr. Syrotiuk is accused of acting on behalf of the Putin regime in Russia. In court, Mr. Syrotiuk pleaded not guilty. He stated that, as a Ukrainian socialist, he condemns the Russian invasion from its beginning. The World Socialist Web Site, which is actively campaigning for his release and for which I was also interviewed, is a website registered in the United States.

The website is affiliated with a Trotskyist organization. Must I remind you that Leon Trotsky, as People’s Commissar for Defense, ensured the formation of the Red Army, which was able to curb the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews during the civil war? Must I also remind you that in 1939, Trotsky vehemently condemned the partition of Western Ukraine between Germany and the Soviet Union and advocated for a Ukraine independent of the Soviet Union—including Stalin’s Soviet Union?

How does this fit with the accusation that Mr. Syrotiuk, a self-proclaimed socialist and Trotskyist, is playing along with Putin’s game?

Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian

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

Bogdan Syrotiuk in 2015

"Peace for the world! Down with war!"