Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Truckers’ blockade shakes both US and Mexican governments: build binational rank-and-file committees
This month’s courageous blockade of the Mexicali–Calexico commercial crossing by Mexican truck drivers protesting the mass revocation of their B-1 visas was an opening shot against the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, facilitated by the Sheinbaum government.
For four days, over 300 drivers parked their trucks at the commercial crossing lanes, holding up an estimated $800 million per day in cargo—costing corporations some $150 million daily—and sent both governments into crisis mode. Drivers were protesting the mass revocation of 25,000 B-1 work visas from commercial drivers along Mexico’s northern border. Some 19,000 of them are binational B-1 truckers who cross daily. Sixty percent of those affected are from Mexicali and 40 percent from Tijuana and Tecate, according to the National Chamber of Freight Transport (CANACAR).
Federal authorities, including US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the US Department of Transportation, accused the drivers of violating cabotage laws—rules that historically bar B-1 drivers from moving a container between two points both within the United States. They transport either components or finished goods which have been loaded at a Mexican facility and deliver it to manufacturers, retailers, distribution centers, and warehouses across the US, a fact of which most are entirely unaware.
The blockade was lifted Sunday, September 6, on the basis of a single closed-door meeting between Mexican state officials, business organizations and a handful of “representatives” for the drivers.
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The visa revocations must be seen as one front in a coordinated offensive against the international working class. The protests must broaden into a wider fight against ICE arrests, deportations, world war, genocide and the capitalist system that produces these.
The revocation of B-1 visas is part of the same campaign producing the Non-Domiciled CDL Final Rule, which will strip roughly 200,000 immigrant truck drivers of their licenses, along with the mass revocation of CDL training-center accreditations and the sudden enforcement of English-proficiency requirements never before applied.
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Alan Verdugo has emerged as the principal “spokesman” for the movement in Mexico. The facts about Verdugo must be stated plainly. He is a Mexican truck driver with a large TikTok following—some 69,000 followers. While not a B-1 binational driver, his “mandate” comes not from a democratic appointment by the rank and file but from his social-media clout.
Verdugo has clearly been tapped within the closed-door meetings to discipline the movement. He has circulated a seven-year-old customs-broker video teaching the cabotage rules and spent his nightly broadcasts instructing drivers to obey them. He has told drivers to avoid the Calexico crossing rather than to fight the regime that makes it a trap and has presented the state’s own procedural formalities—the “supervisor review” that was already a legal requirement—as “victories.” He has also monetized the struggle, insisting “everything I do is totally free” while soliciting “gifts, flowers, hats, donations” and followers.
Most revealing is the company he keeps. Verdugo has sought meetings with Taylor Farms and Church Brothers, “in hopes of having them act as spokesmen for the truckers.” Taylor Farms, the agribusiness giant based in Salinas, California with $7 billion in annual revenue, donated $1 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC in 2025 and has directed more than $3.8 million to Republican-aligned committees this decade. It is the same company whose shredded lettuce poisoned thousands in this summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak and which has caused repeated pathogen outbreaks since 2013 without ever facing a penalty.
Most significantly, Verdugo announced the formation that he and his associates would try to launch a “trade union” for the truckers, the “Coalición de Operadores 5ta Rueda” (Coalition of Fifth-Wheel Operators). This is not the result of Verdugo acting alone. The Sheinbaum government and the Mexican state are moving to channel the drivers’ movement into the official union apparatus as a means of restoring labor discipline.
As in the United States and throughout the world, the Mexican union bureaucracies are tasked with straightjacketing workers into contracts and enforcing no-strike clauses to ensure no wildcat action such as this blockade ever recurs. With the blockade having demonstrated that the rank-and-file drivers can, on their own initiative, bring cross-border commerce to a halt, the state, CANACAR and the corporatist union bureaucracies tied to Sheinbaum’s Morena party are seeking to bring the B-1 drivers under the unions’ thumb—to contain and demobilize them precisely at the moment their independent action has revealed the enormous strategic power of the working class over the critical logistics of both economies.
The experience of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos stands as a prime example of what the ruling class fears. In December 2021, the 26-year-old Cuban immigrant truck driver was sentenced to 110 years in prison for a crash on a Colorado mountain pass caused by brake failure on his truck which was owned by a Houston company cited for violations.
Outraged truck drivers across the country mounted a boycott of Colorado under the slogan “No Trucks to Colorado,” which within a month forced Governor Jared Polis to cut the sentence to ten years. That episode demonstrated the enormous power of the working class when it acts collectively and independently. It is precisely this power that the Mexican state, the employers and the union bureaucracies are now seeking to strangle by dragging the B-1 drivers into unions whose function is not to defend them but to discipline them.
Verdugo spews a Mexican variety of the same nationalist poison promoted by Trump and his fascistic cabinet. Asked about the crackdown, Verdugo answered: “The problem is with the damn Hindus. Five guys go in one truck and only one has a license. And they all drive with their feet up on the truck. All stinking.”
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Drivers must throw out Verdugo and democratically elect their own leadership on the political principles of international working-class unity, and not social-media clout. Tellingly, Verdugo has yet to respond to the brutal stabbing having fueled the flames himself.
Immigrants of all ethnicities are being scapegoated to attack democratic rights and due process, and to construct the massive prisons and torture cages revealed at Alligator Alcatraz—cages tested on immigrants today that will tomorrow be used to hold US citizens, youth and workers as they come into conflict with the Trump administration.
The experience of the Matamoros workers in 2019 is an indispensable lesson. There, 70,000 maquiladora workers rose in wildcat strikes against the employers, the state and the gangster-ridden or charro unions—and were defeated not by the police or the companies alone, but by a leadership that steered the struggle back into legal channels. Similarly to how Verdugo intervened, labor lawyer Susana Prieto arrived in Matamoros, having a large social media presence, and monopolized the microphones at mass assemblies.
At a time when workers were widely discussing the internationalist program of the World Socialist Web Site and even marched to the US border to call on American workers to join their struggle, Prieto promoted a nationalist orientation, along with the lies that new “independent” unions would differ from the old unions and that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador would support their struggle. Prieto ended by joining the ruling Morena party—the same party whose government sent troops against the workers. The Matamoros rebellion posed the same question the truckers now face: independent workers’ power and internationalism or the state-sponsored and nationalist unions?
And the struggle is spreading. In Piedras Negras, truckers are threatening to blockade the Eagle Pass crossing over the Mexican government’s ban on empty trucks returning across the border, which affects 30 percent of crossings. At the Cucapah checkpoint in San Luis Río Colorado, lines of trailers stretch five kilometers.
This movement is neither local or national, but international—and it will not be contained by the “diplomatic channels” that Verdugo and the business councils have constructed. Across the United States, truckers are discussing on social media a strike on October 1 to oppose rising fuel costs.
The drivers must link their struggle to the workers on the other side of the border and beyond it. American truckers, warehouse workers and port workers face the same employers and the same state, and they themselves must come to the defense of the Mexican and Indian workers. The campaign of Will Lehman—the Mack Trucks worker running for UAW president on a rank-and-file program against the union bureaucracy—points the way forward. The Mexican and the American driver are divided by a border that serves only their exploiters. A program of socialist internationalism, of international working-class unity, is what must be fought for.
2. Cuba suffers grid collapse, as US sanctions block humanitarian and critical supplies
The asphyxiation of the Cuban economy is part of an unprovoked US war against 9 million people, waged to reduce the island once again to a semi-colony of the United States. It is moreover a punishment of historical character, aimed at obliterating all social gains that the working class and the anti-colonial movements of the 20th century wrested from imperialism.
At the same time, CBS News has reported that the Trump administration has quietly examined options for military action against Cuba, including an Army-led air assault. A population stripped of power, water, fuel and medicine is being threatened with a far bloodier catastrophe.
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The September 17 sanction designations were issued under Executive Order 14404 of May 1, whose decisive provision is aimed not at Cuba but at the world. Any foreign company operating in Cuba’s energy, defense, mining, financial or security sectors is, in the order’s words, “at risk of sanctions.”
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Cuba is one front in an offensive by US imperialism to recolonize the hemisphere, as a base for world war. Following the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, the Pentagon has taken a stake in Venezuelan oil fields, becoming a shareholder in the plunder of the country it invaded.
In March, Washington founded the Shield of the Americas, a hemispheric military coalition, and has announced joint military operations with Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala. On Friday, the day Cuba went dark, Trump announced a deal with Denmark granting the United States “permanent control over security” in Greenland and a “large Military presence” there.
The trade war against Canada has driven Ottawa to impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on more than 700 American products, with analysts warning of 100,000 job losses. Prime Minister Mark Carney declared in August that his country is “at war” with the United States.
Workers are already paying for the US war against Iran, facing steep increases in oil and food prices. Plants are closing and workers are being laid off as a consequence of the trade and military wars.
What is being inflicted on Cuba portends the logical conclusion of this process and the fate US imperialism reserves for the population of any country seen as obstructing its redivision of the world.
Against this aggression, the Cuban ruling elite has no answer except for concessions to imperialism to secure its privileges. According to a recent Miami Herald report citing official sources, the Trump administration secretly offered oil and US investment in exchange for the privatization of the state energy company CUPET, American investor control over it, and the departure of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. The proposal was carried in February to Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson of Raúl Castro.
Havana’s answer was that Cuba could accept the economic changes, but that Washington could not dictate changes in government. It’s objection was not to handing the island’s energy industry to American capital. It was to the demand that the ruling clique give up its offices.
Having failed to sell CUPET, Díaz-Canel now appeals to a wing of the same ruling class that is strangling the island. On Saturday he publicly thanked Democratic Representative Maxine Waters for confronting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, praising “the dignified North Americans who denounce the crime.”
The Democratic Party enforced the blockade for six decades and has approved the budgets used to fund the Pentagon’s siege on Cuba and its operations across the hemisphere.
The Cuban working class cannot be defended by the Castroite ruling elite or by any wing of the American bourgeoisie. They must turn consciously to the international working class—the dockers who handle the stranded containers, the autoworkers thrown out of the plants by the trade war, and all workers in the United States itself—and fight for the independent political mobilization of workers throughout the hemisphere against capitalism, which produces war. This is the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
3. US-UK relations in turmoil over Falklands and Ireland
The Trump administration has moved on multiple fronts over the past fortnight to undermine the Labour government of Prime Minister Andy Burnham, to keep British imperialism subordinated to Washington’s “America First” agenda and thwart moves towards a rapprochement with the European Union.
In the space of little more than a week, US President Donald Trump called into question Britain’s control of the Falkland Islands, and called for a united Ireland—each intervention calculated to remind London of its subordinate position to Washington amid a fracturing post-war order. These attacks came ahead of the first face to face meeting between Trump and Burnham, to take place Tuesday, on the sidelines of the United National General Assembly in New York.
Trump used a two-day visit to Ireland on September 12 and 13 to deliver the most provocative of his blows. Days after calling into question Britain’s control over the Falklands, known in Argentina as the Malvinas and secured by London as the result of a war in 1982, he declared his backing for a united Ireland.
Sitting beside Taoiseach (prime minister) Micheál Martin at Farmleigh House in Dublin on September 12, Trump said he would “love to see it unified”, that it was “going to happen eventually” and “may as well happen now”. He repeated the sentiment hours later at the US ambassador’s residence, calling unification “a very cool thing”. On September 13, Trump brushed aside Burnham’s opposition to a border poll, dismissed him with the words, “Everybody says that. Then things happen.”
The Financial Times noted that the off-the-cuff remarks broke with decades of careful American diplomacy. Washington played a pivotal role in securing the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, ending the three-decades of conflict known as the Troubles. This allowed US corporations to rake in super-profits from successive governments in the Republic, while constitutionally enshrining sectarian divisions in the north as the basis of power-sharing between Unionist and Irish republican parties, led by Sinn Féin.
Downing Street could only restate Burnham’s position that there was no majority support for a referendum, so a border poll remained “off the table”, while Communities Secretary Angela Rayner said nothing more than “Donald Trump is Donald Trump”.
Sinn Féin, which seeks a unity referendum this decade, seized on the intervention. Party president Mary Lou McDonald said she acknowledged Trump’s comments, adding, “The conversation on Irish unity has shifted, and the onus is on the Taoiseach to begin planning.” She continued: “We have secured peace, and as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement our national journey is now reunification, which is organized, planned and a peaceful transition.”
The following day, September 14, the leaders of the three nationalist parties signed a memorandum of understanding in Cardiff coordinating their campaigns to effectively break-up the UK. For the first time, all three devolved administrations are led by nationalist parties—Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Scottish Nationalist Party in Holyrood, and Plaid Cymru in the Welsh Senedd following its rout of Labour in May.
Scottish First Minister John Swinney, Welsh First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth and Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill declared each nation within the UK had “the right to determine its own future, through democratic means”. Swinney, demanding a second independence referendum following the last in 2014, predicted that Burnham “will be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom”. Fawning before Trump, Sinn Féin’s McDonald, alongside O’Neill, told reporters it was hardly startling that a New Yorker would see “the logic, the good sense of unity”.
Greeting the endorsement of American imperialism’s most ruthless representative—presiding over the war on Iran, the arming of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and his repression of democratic rights at home, such comments only demonstrate the political bankruptcy of these pro-capitalist forces. Their drive is to establish new capitalist states, beholden to the same oligarchic interests imposing austerity on both sides of the border on the island of Ireland and throughout Britain.
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In pursuit of its strategy to control the western hemisphere from Greenland to the Falklands, and to deny all other global powers any foothold, Washington moved quickly to bolster’s Argentina’s military. This pointedly ignores Britain’s strict export controls that prevent the sale of equipment that would enhance Argentina’s military capability.
With US officials lauding Argentina as a major non-NATO ally—whose military build-up would advance American security objectives in South America—on September 10, the State Department notified Congress of a sale to Argentina of four UH-60L Black Hawk helicopters, two T700-GE-701D engines and navigation and radar equipment, valued at $140 million (£103 million). Buenos Aires had already agreed to acquire 235 US-built Stryker armored vehicles from the United States, while previously purchasing 24 second-hand F-16 fighters from Denmark.
Trump’s policy towards British imperialism is a warning not to buck Washington in any way—on Iran, on NATO spending, on China.
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Britain retook the Falklands in 1982, not just because it had a far larger navy from which it assembled a 127-vessel “Task Force”, but because Ronald Reagan’s Washington administration backed British imperialism over the Argentine junta it had previously armed—supplying intelligence, fuel and logistics for a war waged 8,000 miles away.
4. Trump threatens to reignite war on Iran as Houthi/Saudi conflict escalates
The war that US President Donald Trump claimed would be over in weeks is threatening to reignite as the conflict spreads across the region. The latest escalation came after Houthi forces claim they had bombed Saudi Aramco’s facilities in the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh, prompting Trump to threaten to “wipe Iran out” unless Tehran submits to US dictates.
On Sunday, Trump reiterated his threat in a telephone interview with Fox News to blow up the entire country. He said the only options on the table were “wiping Iran out,” or letting its economy “rot,” unless Iran reaches a deal with Washington.
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While threatening Tehran with destruction, according to the New York Times, Trump told advisers on September 16 that he did not favour strikes on the Houthis, but ordered the Pentagon to prepare for them after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called the next day to demand them. By midday Sunday, the newspaper reported, officials were saying there would be no US strikes on the Houthis for the time being. However, two people briefed on the operation told the Times that US plans to bombard the Houthis were so advanced that when Trump reversed his decision to launch the strikes, commanders had already approved target lists, troops were loading bombs onto warplanes and the first wave of attacks was about to begin.
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Renewed clashes have taken place between the Houthis and the dysfunctional Yemeni coalition forces on the ground in the oil-rich province of Marib, as well as in Taiz, Lahj, al-Jawf and al-Bayda as part of the military escalation that began in early July. The Saudi Air Force has carried out strikes on key Houthi positions, including the capital Sana’a, and deployed elite units such as the Giants Brigade to prevent further Houthi advances on the capital in Aden, Marib province and the city of Taiz.
For the Yemeni people, the resumption of hostilities has been catastrophic. Already the poorest country in the Middle East before the civil war, around 4.5 million Yemenis have been displaced, nearly half of the country’s health facilities are not functioning, and more than 18 million of its 43 million people face acute food insecurity, including 2.2 million acutely malnourished children. More than 3,000 casualties have been reported and at least 126,000 people have fled their homes in the past two weeks.
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On July 25, a Ukrainian drone hit an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea, killing a sailor. On July 28, Iran fired ballistic missiles at US forces in Jordan, for the first time acting proactively rather than in response to an attack. On July 28-29, US and Saudi aircraft struck Iran-aligned groups in Iraq, Riyadh’s first publicly acknowledged participation in such attacks. On July 29, a drone hit two liquefied natural gas vessels at Egypt’s Damietta port, near the Suez Canal, though no party has claimed responsibility.
What began as separate conflicts in Iran, Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere is in this way becoming an interconnected regional confrontation, in which each new attack risks opening another front and every act of retaliation creates the conditions for the next.
Two hundred and fifty years ago this month, on September 28, 1776, a convention meeting in Philadelphia ratified the Pennsylvania Constitution. Written in the same city and the same year as the Declaration of Independence, it took the principles of that revolutionary manifesto further than any other frame of government produced by the American Revolution.
The Pennsylvania Constitution extended the vote to every taxpaying man. It created a single-chamber legislature, so that no aristocratic upper house could check the popular will and replaced the governor with an executive council, so that power was held collectively and not by one man. It set annual elections, guaranteed freedom of conscience, the press and assembly, and separated church from state. And it was written not by the propertied gentry but by revolutionaries acting through insurgent popular committees that had swept aside the old colonial government.
Among its provisions was Section 44, the first constitutional mandate for public education in American history, which stated:
A school or schools shall be established in each county by the legislature, for the convenient instruction of youth, with such salaries to the masters paid by the public, as may enable them to instruct youth at low prices: And all useful learning shall be duly encouraged and promoted in one or more universities.
The mandate followed from the revolution’s central principle. As the historian James Oakes argued in a recent World Socialist Web Site webinar, the Declaration of Independence established an entirely new standard: that all people possess the rational capacity to govern themselves. If sovereignty belonged to the people and not to a king, then their education became the business of the state, a precondition of self-government.
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The 250th anniversary of Section 44 arrives amid the systematic attack on the right to education. The US ruling class, implementing a presidential dictatorship and embarking on world war, is dismantling the public school system as part of the same drive. The American oligarchy faces an insoluble crisis, burdened by a federal debt above $40 trillion and the erosion of its position in the world economy. It means to resolve that crisis by imperialist war abroad, repression at home and making the working class pay.
The present attack on public schools serves three connected ends: the seizure of nearly $1 trillion a year in education spending for war and profit; the destruction of what remains of democratic control over the schools; and the imposition of thought control over students and teachers, what the Nazi regime in Germany called Gleichschaltung, the synchronization of education with the state.
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The distinction between a subject and a citizen was the hinge of the American Revolution. Gordon Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, describes the world it overturned. “Monarchy, as Americans later came to describe it,” he writes, “implies a society of dependent beings, weak and inferior, without autonomy or independence, easily cowed by the pageantry and trappings of a patriarchal king.”
Under such a system the education of the common people is of no consequence, because subjects are required to obey and not to reason. The revolution made a different kind of person. “Subjects look up to their master,” in the words of revolutionary-era physician David Ramsay, “but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others. Each citizen of a free state contains within himself, by nature and the constitution, as much of the common sovereignty as another.”
Section 44 of the Pennsylvania Constitution was where that principle first reached the schoolhouse. The framers set themselves against tyranny, corruption and the concentration of wealth in a few hands. What they could not foresee was that, a quarter millennium later, an oligarchy of wealth more formidable than the aristocracy they had overthrown would treat the destruction of public education as the precondition for restoring the unaccountable power the Revolution was fought to prevent.
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The Pennsylvania Constitution was itself an act of the revolution. By June 1776 a situation of dual power existed in the colony, with two governments claiming authority in the province: the official Provincial Assembly, controlled by a Quaker and merchant establishment that had resisted independence to the last, and the committees and militia associations through which artisans, mechanics and farmers had organized their communities since the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. When the Assembly could no longer muster a quorum, the committee movement acted in its place. A Provincial Conference at Carpenters’ Hall levied troops, formed a Council of Safety, and called a constitutional convention founded, in its own words, “on the authority of the People only.” The Assembly voted itself out of existence. “The revolution is now begun,” a Philadelphia correspondent wrote that month, “and must be supported.”
The Provincial Conference abolished the property qualification and extended the vote to every taxpaying man and every militia associator, enfranchising at a stroke the two-thirds of adult men the old order had excluded. The historian J. Paul Selsam, whose 1936 study The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 remains the standard account, described it as the rebellion of “the unfranchised artisans and frontiersmen who constituted two-thirds of the population” against the Quaker property owners, and did not flinch from calling the convention’s seizure of legislative, executive and judicial powers a “usurpation.” So it was: the people asserting their sovereignty against a legality that had existed to protect property and wealth in a colony that was still nominally the possession of the descendants of William Penn.
Under the rules the Conference had set, voters chose delegates to the constitutional convention on July 8, 1776, the same day the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in the State House yard. The men who spent the next 10 weeks drafting the Pennsylvania Constitution were, in the words of its contemporary critics, “plain country folks” whose “damned simplicity” threatened to turn all Pennsylvanians into “simple freemen.”
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Tom Paine had arrived in Philadelphia not quite two years earlier and quickly immersed himself in this radical milieu. He held no seat, but his Common Sense, published that January, had done more than any document to radicalize the atmosphere in which the convention met. The pamphlet could do so because it addressed a people who could read it. On the eve of independence roughly 90 percent of men and half of women in the northern colonies were literate, remarkable figures for the 18th century. Paine’s pamphlet sold by the tens of thousands, passed hand to hand and was read aloud in taverns and militia camps. “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God,” Paine had written, “than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” These were tradesmen, teachers and farmers, not the gentry, and they were themselves the proof of what Section 44 asserted.
The revolutionary committees that produced them were, in the phrase of the historian T.H. Breen, “schools of revolution,” the bodies in which ordinary people learned to govern by governing. They drew in the young as well. Steven Mintz, in his history of American childhood Huck’s Raft, records that boys and girls enforced the boycott of British goods, citing one example of an 11-year-old who served the committees as a scout tracking loyalist movements. The committees demonstrated in practice, before it was set down in law, the democratic premise on which Section 44 rested.
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Section 44 was only the earliest of these demands. In November 1779, the revolutionary legislature gave the principle an important institutional expression. Distrusting the Loyalist sympathies of William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia, it revoked the college’s proprietary charter, transferred its assets to a newly established University of the State of Pennsylvania and placed the new institution under state authority. For 12 years, until the legislature united it with the restored College of Philadelphia in 1791 to create the University of Pennsylvania, it stood as the first American university created and governed by a state legislature.
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In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, who was politically close to both Paine and Rush, introduced his Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge in 1779, arguing that the surest defense against tyranny was to “illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.”
These were the aspirations of a bourgeois democratic revolution, genuinely progressive within the limits imposed by its time and class nature. A rising capitalism had a real interest in a literate population, but the same society rested on slavery, wage labor and private property. Reactionary elements did not intend to tax themselves to educate the children of the poor. The mandates went largely unmet. Jefferson’s bill failed repeatedly, and Virginia established no statewide system of free schools until 1870 during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. As for Pennsylvania, its Section 44 was already diluted by the conservative constitution of 1790, which also restored the governor and upper house the radicals had abolished. In 1791 the state university was returned to private hands.
Across the republic the growth of schooling was profoundly uneven, advanced in the commercial North, stunted in the slave South, everywhere limited by property. The revolution had proclaimed universal principles it could not universally realize. Behind this was a more fundamental truth: The democratic ideal of education was never conferred from above. It had to be won in struggle and then defended in struggle.
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That struggle produced its first organized form half a century after Section 44, in the common-school movement of the 1820s to 1840s, driven both by middle-class reformers and by the workers’ movement. The Philadelphia Working Men’s Party, founded in 1828 as the first labor party in the country, placed free public education at the center of its program alongside the 10-hour day.
The victory was protracted and hard fought. In 1834, Pennsylvania enacted a statewide common-school law, an important successor to the educational principle proclaimed in Section 44. The following year, propertied interests moved to repeal it. With 38 of 51 counties petitioning against the law, and the House chaplain praying that the state be saved from having property “wrested” from the wealthy “for the education of all the children,” Thaddeus Stevens rose in the House and helped turn back the repeal effort. Stevens, of poor Vermont origins, would later lead the Radical Republicans in Congress and become the most uncompromising congressional champion of the freed slaves during Reconstruction.
Stevens grounded his defense of the 1834 law in the requirements of republican self-government. Education, he insisted, was not a private concern but a public obligation: Its “cultivation and diffusion is a matter of public concern, and a duty which every government owes to its people.” Where people possessed “the means of knowledge” and met in common schools “on equal terms,” he continued, they were “seldom in danger of having their rights invaded by their rulers.” Since the permanence of republican government depended upon such knowledge, “it is the duty of government to see that the means of information be diffused to every citizen.
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Horace Mann of Massachusetts, the leading figure of the middle-class educational reform movement, called the common school “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Indeed, the common school was not, as some academics and the pseudo-left maintain, simply a device of “elite control” of industrial capitalism for stamping out obedient factory hands. It carried a real democratic content inherited from the revolution and was won in large part by struggle from below against opposition from the propertied interests.
But the common school movement was also confined by the class relations out of which it grew: Protestant in its assumptions, often racially exclusive, and halting at the mine and the mill, where the children of Pennsylvania’s coal districts were sent to work. Mann’s “great equalizer” expressed both a genuine hope and a bourgeois illusion, the belief that schooling could reconcile rich and poor without touching property. Education can widen access to knowledge. It cannot by itself abolish inequalities rooted in the ownership of the means of production.
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By 1860 the common schools were spreading throughout the North, but the South had nothing comparable. Stevens grasped that the schools could not be completed while slavery stood. The two questions would be put on history’s agenda side by side in the Civil War, the Second American Revolution.
6. Fatherland: A moving film about Thomas Mann’s trip to Germany in 1949
At a press conference in Cannes, Pawlikowski said that Fatherland was his most personal film. In several interviews, he mentions his own family history, which made him familiar with the Mann family’s experiences amid the turmoil of European history, war and exile.
Born in Warsaw in 1957, Pawlikowski left Poland with his mother at the age of 14 and subsequently lived in Germany, Italy and, beginning in 1977, in Great Britain. There, he studied literature and philosophy and later worked as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC. His personal experiences moving between East and West are reflected in his later feature films, particularly in the Oscar-winning film Ida (2013) and in Cold War—The Latitude of Love (2018), which won the award for Best Director at Cannes as well as five European Film Awards. Today he once again lives in Warsaw.
His father and grandmother, both doctors, were Jewish. His grandmother was murdered in Auschwitz, as Pawlikowski only learned much later. His father, Wiktor, always described himself as a secular Jew, an atheist, a humanist and a freethinker. After the war, he had reestablished himself in Warsaw, but when the Stalinist Polish government began promoting anti-Semitic tendencies following the March 1968 unrest, he left the country and his family—a devastating blow for his son.
Pawlikowski also sees his film Fatherland as his most personal film for another reason, as he emphasizes in an interview with Cineville magazine.
Referring to Klaus Mann’s state of mind at the beginning of the film, he explains: “I think many people are feeling something similar right now. A sense of powerlessness, a sense of unease. The feeling that we’re stuck in a dead end.” At the same time, he empathizes with Thomas Mann, “who isn’t that much older than me in the film,” and who tries to understand the new world, a task at which Klaus Mann fails. “But this world is moving in a completely different direction, over which he has no control.”
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It is also noteworthy that Fatherland was produced as a Polish-German-Italian-French co-production and is simultaneously generating a strong response. It is precisely in these countries that nationalist and far-right forces are gaining strength today, while the political establishment continues to shift further to the right. The fact that, in this situation, an international film crew has made the experiences of fascism, war, exile and the destruction of European culture the subject of a major feature film evidently taps into a deep need to grapple with these historical issues. The growing interest in such subject matter suggests that, in the face of militarism, a shift to the right, and social crisis, many people are seeking guidance and answers in history and culture.
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In his commemorative speech on July 25, 1949, at Frankfurt’s Paulskirche and later on August 1 at the Weimar National Theater, Thomas Mann declared: “I know of no zones” and made it clear that he was neither a West German nor an East German writer, but a German writer whose true homeland was the “free German language, untouched by occupation.”
Goethe, he said, was the antithesis of Hitler; he stood for education, humanity, cosmopolitanism and intellectual freedom—while Hitler, by contrast, stood for nationalism and barbarism.
Born in 1875, Mann had evolved from the national-conservative educated bourgeois of the war years to a position far to the left during the Weimar Republic. Deeply affected by the political catastrophes of his time, he became increasingly critical of his own earlier positions. He came to realize that the bourgeois world, from which he himself came, could not defend democracy, peace and culture, and turned his attention more and more toward the labor movement. Even before 1933, he had begun to embrace socialist ideas and spoke out explicitly in favour of workers’ governments and “social democracy.”
As Thomas Mann put it, with regard to “political and social life,” the “national idea can no longer claim leadership, or the future, for itself today.” The period of its historical mission had been the nineteenth century. “It is an idea of the past and not of the future.” Every person “of feeling and reason,” he continues, knows that “the peoples of Europe today are no longer able to live and prosper individually and in isolation, but that they are dependent upon one another and form a community of shared destiny, …” (“Speech to Workers in Vienna,” 1932, from Collected Works, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, vol. XI, p. 890).
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Regarding the claim made by the bourgeois parties in the Weimar Republic that they represented democracy, Thomas Mann says: “No, democracy has not been realised—the social democracy in which the peoples wish to live, while their governments thwart it in the name of the fatherland. Another League of Nations would be necessary, one other than that of Geneva: a league of peoples against their governments, which fail to carry out their will for peace; and the intellectual person born into the bourgeoisie must say to himself today that, if worker governments stood at the head of the principal states of Europe today instead of bourgeois or feudal governments, the continent would have advanced a good deal further than, unfortunately, is the case, along the path of order, reason and recovery.”
Given the current dangers of escalating war and the rise of nationalist and fascist tendencies, these words are once again highly relevant.
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Mann was not a revolutionary socialist. But his experiences with the Weimar Republic, fascism and war led him to the realization that the defense of democracy, culture and peace could not be achieved within the framework of capitalism.
Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is an important work that deserves a wide audience.
A memorandum issued September 15 by Independent Investigations Officer (IIO) Timothy S. Hillman recommends charges against three officials at Teamsters Local 399 in Hollywood over a violent assault at a union meeting that left member Franz Holzinger with multiple facial fractures.
Those named include Lindsay Dougherty, who serves as international vice president, director of the union’s Motion Picture and Theatrical Trade Division and Secretary Treasurer and Principal Officer of Local 399, a heavily promoted “militant” leader of the union.
Holzinger, a movie-location driver who had been out of work for almost a year, said he came to the January 28, 2024 General Membership Meeting at the Burbank Airport Marriott to find out what was happening with work and approached Local 399 Business Agent and Political Coordinator Edward Duffy afterward with questions about taxes and production incentives.
Business Agent Calvin McDowell then asked Flint Hardman to “keep an eye” on Holzinger. Hardman is a member of the Hells Angels, which the US Justice Department classifies as an outlaw motorcycle gang involved in assault, extortion, homicide and other criminal activity. Hardman is charged with physically assaulting Holzinger. Dougherty, Local 399 secretary-treasurer and head of its Motion Picture and Theatrical Trade Division, and Kenneth Farnell, then Local 399 president, are charged not with participating in the assault but with breaching their fiduciary duties by failing to investigate it. Hardman had also been accused in 2016 of assaulting retired Teamster Ray Holmgren while Holmgren was distributing campaign literature for an opposition candidate in a Local 399 election.
Hardman acknowledged striking Holzinger. Medical records documented multiple displaced facial fractures, a nasal fracture and reported hearing problems. Hardman claimed Holzinger had reached for a knife, but the IIO found serious problems with that account: Dougherty saw no knife, Vice President Joshua Staheli admitted that his “near certainty” Holzinger had drawn one was an assumption, and the only person who admitted carrying a knife was Hardman. Holzinger testified that Hardman struck him after he asked his name and that he produced a can of mace only afterward.
Dougherty heard the blow and chairs clattering and walked toward the incident, but never interviewed Holzinger, established what had happened or determined the extent of his injuries. Instead, she repeatedly spoke with Hardman and helped coordinate representatives for those later called to provide sworn statements. She did not speak with police at the scene and never returned a detective’s call, claiming that she had not witnessed the fight. Dougherty later testified that she believed Holzinger was “on the spectrum” and described him as “mentally unstable.” The IIO found no factual basis for either assertion and called the remarks “derogatory and dismissive.”
Farnell likewise failed to investigate. When Holzinger contacted him the next day, Farnell told him he had 10 days to request charges, then admitted that no constitutional or bylaw provision established such a deadline and that he may have invented it to “quicken the process.” The IIO concluded that the officials “failed to interview the injured member, failed to establish the extent of his injuries and failed to determine their own responsibilities under the Union’s rules.”
Dougherty’s handling of the assault exposes the media image built around her as a new model of militant union leadership. The Los Angeles Times profiled Dougherty as “The writers’ strike’s top ally: an F-bomb-throwing Teamster with a Jimmy Hoffa tattoo.” But this was manufactured around a career union official who has collected nearly $2.35 million in salary from workers’ dues since 2014 and negotiated a measly 3 percent annual wage increase in 2021 that was promoted as a “victory” even as inflation rendered it a net pay cut.
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The Local 399 case has now been referred to O’Brien, a Trump supporter, whose own record includes punishment for threatening union opponents. In 2013, while O’Brien headed Boston Local 25 and New England Joint Council 10, the Independent Review Board charged him with threatening retaliation against members backing an opposition slate in Rhode Island after he declared that they “need to be punished.” O’Brien accepted a 14-day suspension without pay.
On June 16 this year, O’Brien secured a second five-year term without a rank-and-file vote because no opposition candidate received the 5 percent of convention delegate votes required to reach the membership ballot. The next day, the Teamsters and Justice Department jointly moved to end the 37-year federal monitorship. On September 3, the court approved the termination, with O’Brien declaring that the union had developed a “culture of vigilance” and had proven it could “police our own.”
The timing is especially significant because direct rank-and-file election of the union’s top officers was one of the central changes imposed by the 1989 consent decree following the federal RICO suit over Mafia influence. Before the decree, international officers had been chosen by convention delegates; direct voting and independent discipline were presented as the machinery that would break organized crime’s grip on the union. But changing the method of selection—and candidates for the “direct elections” are still tightly controlled by the bureaucracy—did nothing to change the social interests of the apparatus itself as an agent of management.
Thirty-seven years later, the court has ended the federal disciplinary monitorship and returned primary responsibility for investigating corruption and disciplining officials to the Teamsters apparatus itself. Independent supervision of International elections remains in place, while the Independent Investigations Officer will remain only through the end of 2026 and the Independent Review Officer for another three years.
This exposes the purpose of the intervention all along had nothing to do with fighting “corruption,” but with propping up a bureaucracy upon whom capitalism relies to police the class struggle, but which was severely discredited by decades of open criminality.
A similar operation is currently underway in the United Auto Workers. In July, UAW official Raymond Jensen Jr., a supporter of President Shawn Fain, posted an AI-generated image on rank-and-file presidential candidate Will Lehman’s public Facebook page depicting Lehman bound and gagged, bleeding and facing a gunman. The UAW’s court-appointed monitor found that Jensen violated election rules, suspended his union membership for two years and barred him from office and campaigning. However, it allowed the UAW to decide whether to keep him on the payroll to collect his $200,000 union salary.
The persistence of these methods after 37 years of federal supervision demonstrates that the bureaucracy cannot be reformed. The intervention that began under RICO left the apparatus itself in place, and the state is now withdrawing supervision while that apparatus retains control over contracts, dues and internal discipline.
Workers must overthrow that control through rank-and-file committees in every workplace, independent of the union bureaucracy and all of its factions, including Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the pseudo-left organizations that have promoted figures such as O’Brien and Dougherty as militants. These committees must defend workers victimized for challenging officials and unite workers across workplaces, industries and national borders.
8. Venezuelan puppet Delcy Rodríguez to meet Trump in New York
Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez arrived in New York on Monday to address the United Nations General Assembly and to meet Donald Trump on Tuesday, in the first encounter between a US and a Venezuelan head of state in more than 11 years.
It will take place a few miles from the federal jail in Brooklyn where president Nicolás Maduro has been held since US forces seized him during an unprovoked invasion of Venezuela on January 3.
She was received on the tarmac by John Barrett, the US chargé d’affaires in Caracas, who is the latest official assigned to act as her handler.
The White House announced the meeting last Friday. US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz specified that it would be “informal” rather than a “formal bilateral.” On the same day Trump will deliver his General Assembly address, hold a formal bilateral with the British prime minister, chair a meeting of Gulf leaders, and return to Washington that night.
Meanwhile, the acting president of a country whose oil he has just taken gets a “pull-aside” in the corridor. This is part of the message: Washington has established a protectorate, whose administrator gets treated with disrespectful informality.
It is a demonstration staged for every government in the hemisphere of the terms on which Washington now proposes to do business. The Pentagon and Trump’s own lackeys have taken Venezuela’s oil openly, outside any constitutional or legal framework, and the government in Caracas has signed for it.
Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores have been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since January. Both pleaded not guilty to cocaine trafficking charges and have moved to dismiss the indictment on grounds of head-of-state immunity, which Washington rejects. Their trial is set for June 1, 2027.
Despite having the legal standing to request a visit, there is no indication she has sought one. In no meeting with US officials since January has Rodriguez even raised the release of the abducted president.
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Rodríguez travels to New York three months after the June 24 earthquakes. As of September 10, authorities reported at least 7,422 dead and more than 226,696 injured. Estimates of the disappeared range from roughly 18,000 to 50,000, and no one can say which is nearer the truth. The Development Bank of Latin America has announced a multi-donor fund of up to $200 million to rebuild Maiquetía airport, shut for over two months. By comparison, Chevron alone is investing some $7 billion across three Venezuelan oil projects.
In this context, Venezuela remains under sanctions and on the US list of countries facing entry restrictions. “We are an appendix of the United States with many obligations and few rights,” an oil executive said.
The meeting in New York is the culmination of the “Bolivarian revolution” in which a nominally left nationalist regime has delivered the country to US imperialism and taken the office of colonial administrator in payment.
9. The 13th COVID-19 wave crests as the US heads into winter with lowest immunity since 2021
10. Canadian Pacific Kansas City conductor killed at Port of Montreal by moving train
In response to Luc Massie’s death, the railway issued a lying statement, claiming safety is “our highest priority.” As every rail worker knows, the “highest priority” for CPKC, which controls a continent-wide railroad network, is maximizing profits.
11. Mamdani hosts Trump at Gracie Mansion: The DSA’s alliance with the fascist president
On Monday afternoon, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the most prominent elected member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), welcomed Donald Trump to Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence. After an hour behind closed doors, the two walked out together to a podium on the lawn.
What followed was a disgusting spectacle, with the “socialist” mayor playing host and prop to the fascist president.
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The meeting took place under conditions of record low approval ratings for Trump—36 percent, according to the latest NBC News poll, the lowest of his second term. In few cities is Trump as hated as in New York, where he cannot attend public events without being booed. Mamdani responds not by denouncing Trump, let alone calling for opposition to him but by lending him legitimacy. In return, Trump throws him a few crumbs.
Mamdani is doing political dirty work for the ruling class. He is attempting to rebrand the fascist war criminal Trump, whose administration is dedicated to giving to the oligarchs what it takes from workers, as a champion of “affordability.” In the process, he is seeking to drag the word “socialism” through the mud.
The mayor opened by declaring that each time he and the president speak, “It is about the same topics: how to improve the lives of New Yorkers, and how to use the power of government to take on the cost of living crisis…”
What a ridiculous absurdity. The man standing beside him has launched a criminal war against Iran that has driven gasoline prices up 27 percent in a year. Trump’s budget law has thrown tens of thousands of city residents off SNAP benefits. The same law strips Medicaid coverage from an estimated 1.5 million people in New York state, just one front in the broader assault on social programs by a government of, by and for the oligarchy.
Asked what “tangible results” his relationship with Trump has produced, Mamdani could only point to an agreement to “set up a new level of that conversation” between City Hall and the White House on building over Sunnyside Yard in Queens. He commended Trump as “someone who has built quite a lot of housing here in our city,” a polite reference to the real estate swindling and criminal operations that Trump specialized in before turning to politics.
The project, like Mamdani’s “affordability agenda” as a whole, is subordinated to the interests of private developers (an Economist headline last week reads, “Developers are learning to love Zohran Mamdani”). On this, the DSA mayor and the real estate conman speak the same language.
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No doubt the apologists at Jacobin, well wadded with stupidity and deceit, will have ample explanations for this latest meeting. Such people know exactly what they are doing. Every pragmatic justification of collaboration with Trump is itself an act of collaboration.
This is not merely a question of Mamdani’s personal qualities or those of his apologists. He is the personification of what the DSA is: a faction of the Democratic Party, speaking for privileged layers of the upper middle class, brought forward to give a facelift to a political order detested by masses of people. Its real enemy is the working class and the left.
And these people have not reached the end of their journey. As the war expands and the crisis of the Trump administration deepens, the DSA and the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party will move further to the right.
The direction of travel was on display last week at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington. There, Senator Bernie Sanders thanked the organizers for bringing together “different political perspectives,” then yielded the stage to the fascist ideologue and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who praised Sanders and then called for the expulsion of all Chinese nationals. The WSWS wrote that the outlines of a new American “national socialism” were visible at that event. Gracie Mansion is the same process, in the person of the DSA’s most prominent elected official.
Poll after poll records growing support for socialism. A CNBC survey last month found that 46 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 view democratic socialism favorably, twice the share that views it unfavorably. The workers and young people moving to the left will collide with the right-wing politics of the DSA.
The development of political consciousness, however, is not automatic. Those who voted for Mamdani in the belief that he represented an alternative must draw conclusions. This requires a serious study of what the DSA is and where it comes from, why its evolution could be foreseen, and the central questions of the 20th century, above all the history of the Trotskyist movement.
The immense opposition to war, to the ICE raids and to the oligarchy cannot find expression through the DSA or any section of the Democratic Party. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United States and internationally, on the basis of a socialist program. This is the perspective fought for by the Socialist Equality Party.
12. US military AI hallucination “almost started a war” with China
In an exclusive last weekend, CNN revealed that the US military had been on the point of seizing a Chinese ship in the Middle East by force before a closer examination of the relevant intelligence report showed that it was based on an AI hallucination. One of CNN’s sources stated that the report was “entirely false” and “almost started a war,” because the US seizure of a Chinese vessel risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.
The CNN report contained few details of the incident, which has been covered up for months since taking place this year in the northern spring in the midst of the US-led war on Iran. The intelligence report, generated with AI assistance and then circulated across the US military, stated that the ship was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
According to CNN sources, the US military rapidly prepared to intercept the vessel. “According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said,” CNN stated.
Only at the last minute did officials re-examine the report to discover that a special operations command analyst had produced it with the assistance of an AI chatbot that had inaccurately identified the ship’s cargo. The analyst had queried the chatbot about intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. And the unidentified chatbot “hallucinated”—invented a fact—no doubt influenced by the prejudices and previous activity of its user.
That a US military operation was underway with the potential to escalate into war with China, before basic facts were checked, testifies to the utter recklessness of the Trump administration and American imperialism. That such an operation in the Middle East was even contemplated underscores the fact that the wars underway there and in Europe are interconnected fronts of a global conflict that has China as its chief target.
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The Trump administration is already engaged in an economic war against China that includes not only huge tariffs but bans on the export of the most advanced semi-conductors, including those required for AI. Trump, however, was compelled last November to pull back from more extensive bans when China retaliated with restrictions on the export of key critical minerals needed by US corporations for both military and civilian applications.
A one-year truce was agreed which expires in a little over a month and will undoubtedly be discussed at the summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in New York later this week. Neither Washington nor Beijing has officially commented on the CNN report. However, in talks on Sunday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng discussed the establishment of a US-China AI dialogue, including a notification system that would cover AI-related incidents involving national security.
Even if such a notification system had existed, the incident reported by CNN would still have taken place, given that the AI hallucination was only found at the last moment. As CNN reported, the US military and intelligence agencies have dramatically increased its use of AI, weaving it into nearly every facet of their work, from analysing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.
In January, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth launched the Pentagon’s “Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy” in a bid to dramatically speed up the military’s implementation of AI. A Department of War (DoW) statement declared that the aim was to extend our lead in military AI deployment and “usher in an unprecedented era of American military AI dominance.”
Hegseth declared: “We will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.” The strategy, the department, stated “will strengthen battlefield decision-making, rapidly convert intelligence data and modernize daily workflows, all in direct support of more than three million DoW personnel.”
The Trump administration’s determination to implement this strategy, regardless of the dangers of triggering new conflicts, committing war crimes or battles spiralling out of control, was underscored by the Department of War’s legal battle with Anthropic after it branded the company a “supply chain risk,” blocking all personnel from using Anthropic products.
This punitive action followed Anthropic’s refusal to remove internal safety guardrails that would prevent the military from using its Claude AI model in autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, which the company argued was not reliable enough for such purposes. While a US judge late last month ruled unlawful the Department of War’s action, the case signals a move toward the use of AI in “autonomous weapons” systems without any significant human oversight or control.*****
The CNN report prompted three Democrat senators—Mark Warner, Jack Reed and Chris Coons—to send a letter to Hegseth calling for an immediate investigation into the incident involving the Chinese ship. The letter expressed “growing concern about the extent to which agencies under your oversight have prioritised acceleration of AI capability adoption and ‘experimentation’ over effective governance.”
Significantly their primary concern was not the military use of AI, but rather its impact on public opinion and the growth of anti-war opposition. The letter said the investigation should have “a higher degree of public transparency in the ultimate findings, given the impacts these perceived failures have on public confidence in our intelligence and warfighting missions.”
The CNN report highlighting the dangers of the military use of AI feeds into the broader discussion in ruling circles in the US and internationally and calls for constraint. It is not, however, AI that threatens the “existence of mankind,” as some commentators declare, but the subordination of this powerful technology, which potentially offers great benefits to humanity, to corporate giants and the capitalist state.
The greatest danger to humanity’s existence is the unfolding world war between nuclear-armed powers as US imperialism aggressively seeks to retain global domination against all rivals, particularly China.
The IG Metall union staged its “day of action” on 21 September, with nationwide, plant-level protests in the auto and supplier industries. The VW Action Committee has issued a fighting program for auto and supplier workers, starting from the fact that IG Metall representatives voted through a further 50,000 job cuts at Volkswagen on 3 September.
14. German government to continue with war and austerity despite political earthquake in state elections
The elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (MV) have caused a political earthquake. Both were characterized by opposition to the federal government’s policies of war and austerity.
After shooting 28-year-old Wilber Rafael Garces Perez in the back, federal authorities denied his family access and imprisoned him without adequate medical care.
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The shooting of Garces Perez is at least the third shooting carried out by federal immigration agents in Texas since Trump returned to the White House. The previous two were fatal.
Seventy-five days before Garces Perez was shot, an ICE agent killed 52-year-old construction worker Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Salgado Araujo, who had spent more than 35 years building homes in the Houston area, was driving members of his construction crew to a job site early on the morning of July 7 when ICE agents in unmarked vehicles surrounded his van and shot him.
More than a year earlier, on March 15, 2025, a Homeland Security Investigations agent shot and killed 23-year-old US citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in South Padre Island. Federal authorities concealed ICE’s involvement in the killing for nearly a year. It was not publicly reported until February 2026, after records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act exposed the agency’s role.
In that case, as in virtually every case involving a vehicle and a federal agent shooting, federal authorities claimed that Martinez had attempted to ram agents with his vehicle. Body-camera footage subsequently released to the public revealed this to be a lie.
The federal agents who killed Salgado Araujo and Martinez remain publicly unidentified and uncharged. No agent has been charged in connection with the shooting of Garces Perez.
The response of the Democratic Party politicians who appeared at Monday’s press conference was to channel the widespread anger over the latest ICE injustice behind another electoral appeal to “remember in November.”
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The immigration police cannot be transformed into an institution that serves the working class through additional oversight and new regulations. Like the local, state, county and federal police, the military and the intelligence agencies, ICE is an instrument of class rule. It was created and is maintained to divide the working class, pitting native-born worker against immigrant, and to enforce the interests of the capitalist state through violence and repression.
The only way forward is a class-based strategy rooted in the understanding that police violence is not an aberration or the product of insufficient training and oversight. It arises from the capitalist system and the function of the police as defenders of private property and class rule. Ending it requires uniting workers across every division of nationality, race and immigration status in an independent political movement against both capitalist parties and the profit system they defend.
16. Australia: Qantas ground workers set to strike
Up to 650 Qantas ground workers plan to walk off the job later this week, with 24-hour strikes called for Wednesday in Victoria and Thursday across the rest of the country.
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The dispute centers on wages, conditions and job security. Qantas claims it is offering annual pay increases—although it has not publicly quantified them—and “more full-time opportunities.” But this is a workforce the airline has systematically dismantled and outsourced, most dramatically with the 2020 sacking, subsequently determined to be illegal, of 1,800 baggage handling workers.
17. Australia: Western Sydney University seeks to impose block teaching
The suggested “Western Momentum” model means even more intensive workloads for educators, at the expense of the quality of education for students.
18. A gathering crisis in the US financial system
Last week the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury bond went over 5 percent for the first time since 2007 under conditions where the national debt has risen fourfold since then and now stands at over $40 trillion.
19. United Kingdom: The political issues in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election
Neither a victory for Burnham’s Labour Party nor the Greens will advance the interests of the working class a single inch. What is necessary now is to carefully examine the bitter lessons of the political failure of Corbynism and the criminal role of those tendencies that boosted him and now promote the Greens.
20. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Brazil:
Canada:
Saskatchewan healthcare workers vote to strike
Chile:
Paraguay:
United States:
New York nursing home workers demonstrate for better wages and benefits
California nurses demand increased wages and expose unsafe staffing
Venezuela:
17. 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.
