Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: June 29-July 5
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
World Court rules against Iran in British oil nationalization dispute
100 years ago:
Mexican government puts restrictions on Catholic Church
2. US strikes Iran again, as Trump threatens the country “will no longer exist”
As he has done repeatedly, Trump is using genocidal language, threatening to annihilate a country and exterminate large portions of its population. As with his earlier outbursts, the vow to make Iran “no longer exist” carries an implicit threat to use nuclear weapons.The attacks and threats come amid a deepening political crisis within the American ruling class over the ceasefire Trump announced on June 17. In the 11 days since, the deal has come under sustained attack from dominant sections of both the Republican and Democratic parties, which have denounced it as a surrender to Tehran.
*****
Over the weekend, as the bombing resumed, the demands across the political establishment for an escalation of the war only sharpened. On Sunday the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, a major voice of American finance, declared in its headline that “Iran Is Winning the Battle of Hormuz” and called on Trump to escalate. It dismissed the renewed US strikes as “love taps.” The regime, the board concluded, “is leaving the President a choice: surrender Hormuz to Iranian terror or fight for it, like he always should have once he started the war, and reopen the Strait by force.”
3. Victory of Mamdani-backed candidates heightens crisis in Democratic Party
In each of these campaigns, the DSA candidate’s opposition to the Gaza genocide and the arming of Israel by the Democratic Party establishment played a critical role, as did opposition to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) anti-immigrant rampage and the astronomical cost of living, especially in housing.
In response to the primary results, the Washington Post quoted Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut as saying, “What’s happening in New York will be really irrelevant” by the time of the elections in November.
Jeffries, the likely speaker of the House should the Democrats gain control of that chamber in November, said in a statement on election night, “A handful of primaries that go in one direction or the other, in a given state or two, aren’t going to reshape who we are as House Democrats.”
*****
A group of Democrats in the House signed an open letter titled “Promise to America” on Thursday. Co-leading this initiative are Thomas Suozzi of New York and Adam Gray of California. Signatories also include Representatives Josh Gottheimer (New Jersey), Susie Lee (Nevada), Don Davis (North Carolina), Vicente Gonzalez Jr. (Texas), Laura Gillen (New York), Janelle Bynum (Oregon), Kristen McDonald Rivet (Michigan), Maggie Goodlander (New Hampshire) and Jessica Killin (candidate in a Colorado Democratic primary).
The “Promise to America” declares, “We are capitalist, not socialist.” It affirms the signatories’ belief in “innovation, entrepreneurship, and ownership.” It supports “secure borders.”
Under the heading “Fiscal Discipline” it declares, “We will prioritize tackling the national debt honestly. We must pay our bills.” Since the document says nothing about foreign wars or record military spending, the commitment to a balanced budget can only mean support for more drastic cuts in social spending.
*****
The Republican Party has reacted with anti-communist hysteria, with Trump in the lead. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s 2026 Policy Conference on Thursday, he said of the DSA, “Assassinations are a big deal for them. They’re animals… The Democrats have taken a tremendous turn left… they’re people that want to destroy our country. They hate our country. They hate our people.”
The Wall Street Journal in a June 24 editorial urged its readers to take the election results seriously, writing: “The victories by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s slate of leftists will change the Democratic Party—and perhaps the politics of the country.”
In an interview on ABC’s Sunday talk show “This Week,” Mamdani repeatedly advanced the DSA mantra of turning the Democratic Party into a party that “must stand for working people.” He made clear that he and the DSA remain loyal to the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street, the Pentagon and the CIA, referring several times to the Democrats as “our party.”
The Federal Monitor overseeing the United Auto Workers issued a new report June 25 substantiating allegations that UAW President Shawn Fain abused the powers of his office to pursue personal financial and family interests, then retaliated against another top official through false and pretextual charges.
The report by UAW Monitor Neil Barofsky found that Fain “acted improperly in seeking financial benefits for his fiancée” through a bonus for non-UAW employees at the Stellantis National Training Center, where she worked. Vice President Rich Boyer, then head of the UAW-Stellantis Department, had declined to approve the bonus. The Monitor stated that Boyer’s failure to approve the payment “may have contributed” to Fain’s retaliatory action against him, while withholding further details pending consultation with the parties to the federal consent decree.
In a separate matter, the Monitor found that Fain abused presidential authority after his fiancée’s sister was injured while working at a Stellantis plant. Rather than allow the workers’ compensation issue to proceed through the normal plant and local union channels, Fain pressed the matter through Stellantis senior management and multiple senior UAW officials who reported to him.The report says Fain pursued the case through four separate channels: directly with Stellantis Senior Vice President Chris Fields, with Boyer, with a UAW benefits representative and assistant director and with one of Fain’s top administrative assistants.
The Monitor concluded:
President Fain inappropriately used the powers of his office to pursue a personal matter on behalf of a family member, an abuse of his authority. Fain took a matter in which he had a personal interest—the treatment of his fiancée’s sister’s injury—and pursued it through the powers of the UAW presidency, pressing it on Stellantis’s senior management and on senior Union officials who ultimately reported to him. In doing so, he expended Union resources—his own time and that of a Vice President, an Assistant Director, and his Top Administrative Assistant—to seek relief from requirements that apparently applied to other Stellantis UAW members injured on the job.
*****
The findings underscore the significance of the campaign of Mack Trucks worker and socialist Will Lehman, who was nominated for UAW president at the convention for a second time in a row. Lehman is running on a platform of abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to the rank and file. He first ran in the 2022 UAW election, the first direct election of top officers in the union’s history.
That election was conducted under the supervision of the Monitor and produced a first-round turnout of only 9 percent. Lehman’s protests over the effective disenfranchisement of the membership were dismissed by the Monitor, helping install Fain as the supposed candidate of “reform.”
The new report confirms, in another form, that state-supervised “reform” has not been aimed at defending the democratic rights of workers, let alone abolishing the UAW bureaucracy’s dictatorial control over the union. Instead it has helped refurbish the apparatus under new management, while the same methods of suppression, factional warfare and betrayal continued.
The findings involving Fain’s fiancée and her sister are only the latest in a growing record of misconduct at the top of the UAW. Earlier Monitor reports exposed investigations into misuse of union resources, obstruction of document production, deletion of text messages, threats, retaliation against Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock and what the Monitor called a “culture of fear or retaliation” inside the UAW apparatus.The Monitor found that none of the seven allegations Fain used to remove Boyer from oversight of the Stellantis Department justified the action. In several cases, the report found Fain knew his claims were false or exaggerated when he made them.
The rift between Fain and Boyer emerged from the bureaucracy’s effort to contain anger over the 2023 Stellantis contract betrayal. The apparatus had promoted the limited “Stand Up Strike” and the national agreements as a victory, while concealing unresolved issues and concessions from the membership. This campaign had the explicit support of the Biden White House, who appeared at a rally alongside Fain promoting the deal.The consequences were devastating: Thousands of Stellantis workers lost their jobs, Belvidere remained in limbo, temporary and supplemental workers were discarded or denied promised gains, and concessions on absenteeism were imposed. Only after anger among Stellantis workers mounted did Fain attempt to make Boyer a scapegoat for a contract betrayal carried out by the entire UAW apparatus, from the President’s Office to the Stellantis Department and the International Executive Board.
*****
All of this has been simply ignored in the DSA-aligned press. Labor Notes has likewise avoided the substance of the Monitor’s findings. Its article on the report largely reproduced Fain’s claim that Barofsky was carrying out a political vendetta triggered by the International Executive Board’s November 2023 Gaza ceasefire resolution.
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker from Macungie, Pennsylvania and socialist candidate for UAW president, has issued a statement to workers at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan following the fraudulent ratification of a fourth tentative agreement (TA4) by UAW Local 699 officials on June 26.
Lehman, who was nominated to run for UAW president at the union’s Constitutional Convention in Detroit earlier this month, declared that the ratification vote—conducted under conditions of intimidation, management collaboration and the firing of a worker who opposed the deal—should be considered “null and void.” His statement calls on Nexteer workers to guard and expand their rank-and-file committee, demand the reinstatement of fired worker Antwiane Sanders and continue fighting the UAW bureaucracy’s imposition of a contract that leaves workers worse off in real terms than they were in 2005.
Local 699 officials announced the ratification of TA4 by 57 to 43 percent overall, with production workers—who make up the majority of Nexteer’s 1,700 employees—voting 54 to 46 percent to approve. The narrow margin came after workers had previously rejected three tentative agreements: by 96 percent on April 2, by 73 percent on May 15, and by 55 to 45 percent on May 29. Workers also delivered an 86 percent strike authorization vote on May 21, a mandate the UAW apparatus proceeded to ignore.
Lehman condemned every step of the bureaucracy’s conduct. “At every point, the UAW bureaucracy acted not as your representatives but as your enemies,” he wrote. “They extended your contract behind your backs. They declared it illegal to strike. They ignored your 86 percent strike mandate.”
When those methods failed to break workers’ resistance, the bureaucracy escalated. The fourth tentative agreement, Lehman noted, differs in no essential respect from the previous three that the workers had already rejected—the same top rate of $27 an hour that Saginaw Steering workers were earning in 2005, with the cost of living up more than 70 percent since then, the same signing bonus and COLA gimmicks, and no protection against the automation cuts slated to eliminate hundreds of jobs.
*****
Central to Lehman’s statement is the case of Antwiane Sanders, a Nexteer worker with more than 10 years in the plant who was fired after standing up at a June 12 contract rollout meeting held on company property and criticizing UAW International Servicing Rep Jason Tuck. Members of the UAW Local 699 bargaining committee responded by calling a supervisor. Sanders was subsequently terminated.
“The union had a worker fired for opposing the union’s contract,” Lehman wrote. “I want to say plainly what that is. That is not a labor organization. That is a company police force with union dues paying the salaries.”
*****
Lehman drew attention to the strategic power Nexteer workers hold and the broader movement their struggle was threatening to ignite. Nexteer produces steering components that feed directly into GM, Ford and Stellantis assembly lines. A genuine strike, he wrote, would shut down Big Three production within days. “That is why the entire UAW apparatus—that just voted itself raises of $10,000 to $30,000 at the Detroit convention—was determined to prevent a strike. Not because it would fail, but because it would succeed.”
The UAW convention, Lehman noted, featured appearances by Democratic politicians, including former GM executive Debbie Dingell, who voted in 2022 to ban a railroad strike and impose a contract on workers they previously rejected. UAW Region 1D Director Steve Dawes, who drew a salary of $229,813 last year, was celebrated at his retirement. These were not incidental details but a window into the apparatus which the workers had been fighting.
Lehman connected the Nexteer struggle to a series of rank-and-file revolts unfolding across the auto parts sector: Dana workers who have rejected UAW-backed contracts by 90 percent margins, Bridgewater Interiors workers fighting the same fight, and American Axle workers in Three Rivers, Michigan whose 10-day strike the bureaucracy strangled on the eve of the convention—giving workers less than 48 hours to review 118 pages of contract language under threats of scab replacement. “Their mission was containment,” Lehman wrote. “Yours was the opposite.”
*****
Lehman identified the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee (NWRFC) as the most decisive achievement of the 12-week struggle. The bureaucracy repeatedly warned workers not to listen to “unauthorized social media”—by which it meant the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter and the Nexteer Workers RFC—precisely because the committee gave workers’ opposition a conscious organizational form.
“Without the committee, the spontaneous fury of workers who had voted down a contract by 96 percent would have had no organized form,” Lehman wrote. “With it, that fury became a force: exposing each new sellout, warning workers about bureaucratic methods, reaching out to American Axle and Dana workers in a common fight.”
*****
Lehman called on Nexteer workers to reject any attempt by the bureaucracy to sow divisions between younger and older workers over the ratification outcome. He laid out a series of immediate demands: the reinstatement of Antwiane Sanders with full back pay; the recall of the bargaining committee, including members who secured personal transfers to electrician programs paying nearly double the production rate as their reward for delivering the contract; and preparation to resist the automation cuts that will eliminate hundreds of jobs under cover of the agreement.
Lehman is running on a socialist program aimed not at managing the union apparatus more humanely but at transferring power from the bureaucracy to the rank and file.
“I am not running to get a seat at the table with GM and Ford and the Democrats who serve them,” he wrote. “My campaign is for the transfer of power from the bureaucracy to the rank and file, in every factory and every workplace.”
Lehman also called on Nexteer workers to join the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), which connects workers across plants, industries and borders—including in Mexico, Canada, China and internationally.
“Build the committee. Support my campaign. Drive out the traitors. Fight to reinstate Antwiane Sanders. Oppose every victimization. Mobilize against the coming automation cuts,” Lehman concluded. “The fight is yours to win.”
6. World Press Photo 2026 in Amsterdam: Striking images of crisis-ridden capitalism
The 2026 World Press Photo of the Year, “Separated by ICE,” was shot by Carol Guzy for the Miami Herald. Taken on August 26, 2025, inside New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, the photograph captures the moment Luis, an Ecuadorian immigrant, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents immediately following an immigration hearing.
The strength of Guzy’s photograph lies in its immediacy and physical intensity. No courtroom, no official document is visible within the tightly cropped frame. Instead, the viewer is confronted with profound helplessness—the anguish of family members watching their loved one being taken away, powerless to intervene. Luis stands close to the camera, his face only partially visible, blurred in the midst of the sheer force of physical struggle. The focus falls instead on the frantic hands and distressed faces of his family members as they cling to his T-shirt with all their strength. The stretched fabric becomes a powerful visual metaphor for a family fighting—both literally and figuratively—against being torn apart by the police apparatus of the fascistic Trump administration.
Furthermore, at the centre of the photograph, the anguished face of one of the children dominates the composition. Her expression conveys terror, grief and anger. The image transcends the fate of a single family. Made with a short focal length and from close range, the photograph possesses a claustrophobic intensity. Bodies press against one another in a confined space, hands grasp desperately and faces emerge in varying states of panic and distress. The viewer experiences the scene almost at arm’s length, as though trapped within the struggle themself.
*****
The first finalist, Aid Emergency in Gaza, was photographed by Palestinian photojournalist Saber Nuraldin for the European Pressphoto Agency. Taken July 27, 2025, the image shows Palestinians swarming an aid truck entering Gaza through the Zikim Crossing—one of the northern access points used for humanitarian aid entering Gaza from Israel—as they struggle to secure bags of flour during what the Israeli military described as a “tactical suspension” of military operations.
The photograph condenses an immense social and human catastrophe into a single frame. Bodies are compressed into a dense mass surrounding and climbing over the truck, itself barely visible beneath the crowd. The people in the image appear exhausted and emaciated, struggling for food after months of deprivation, while the devastated landscape visible in the distance on either side of the frame bears witness to the relentless destruction wrought by US-backed Israeli bombardment.
There is no central figure in focus. The subject is an entire people driven to the brink of survival. The elevated perspective reveals the scale of the crisis, transforming individual acts of hunger into a collective struggle for existence. The harsh daylight and muted palette underscore the brutal conditions confronting Gaza’s population.
*****
Furthermore, the photograph was made by a Palestinian journalist, which is itself significant. Since October 2023, Gaza has become one of the deadliest places in the world for media workers. Hundreds of journalists and media personnel have been killed by the Zionist military while documenting events on the ground. This systematic destruction of life has been accompanied by efforts to suppress and intimidate those seeking to expose the truth.
That photographs such as this continue to emerge testifies to the extraordinary courage and persistence of Palestinian journalists. Working under conditions of bombardment, hunger and constant danger, they have consistently produced an irreplaceable visual record of the ongoing genocide in Gaza—one of the defining tragedies of the 21st century.
*****
Robert Capa once famously remarked, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” The statement referred not merely to physical proximity, but to a deeper engagement with the human reality being documented. From Lewis Hine’s exposure of child labour and Jacob Riis’s documentation of urban poverty to W. Eugene Smith’s photo essays on war and industrial poisoning, documentary photography has historically been animated by a profound concern for objective truth and a commitment to revealing conditions that the ruling elite often prefer to keep hidden from the public.
*****
Photography, like every other art form in contemporary society, has a profoundly contradictory character. Our age has produced an immense number of images documenting social decay, circulated instantly and widely across social media—an image culture that itself carries explosive social significance. The problem is not that too many photographs depict too much misery. The problem is that misery is too often presented stripped of its social, political, class and historical context.
Photography, in its most serious form, must mean more than the mere witnessing of suffering. It must do more, in other words, to place that suffering within a broader historical and social framework. People must be assisted in seeing the truth of the suffering.
7. The earthquake disaster in Venezuela: A crime of US imperialism
The invasion, the removal of Maduro and the chaos and disorganization it has thrown the country into are a major factor in the catastrophic response to the earthquake. They followed years of economic sabotage that had already crippled the country's hospitals, power grid and ability to import the most basic supplies.
The Trump administration has exploited the disaster to deepen its control over Venezuela, sending warships, transport planes and troops to take over the airport while families dig through concrete with their bare hands.
*****
Child survivors arrive at hospitals alone, identified only by adhesive tape with their names on their wrists, while hospitals and morgues overflow with victims.
“No machinery has arrived, nothing,” one Catia La Mar resident said Friday. “We are without power, without water. The apartment blocks have begged to be evacuated because the damage is so severe.” A woman who lost everything in Caracas told reporters: “Nobody has come to tell us anything about shelter. Here, everything is up to the neighbors.”
*****
The election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 provoked mounting hostility from Washington, culminating in a US-backed coup in April 2002 that briefly deposed him before mass protests forced his reinstatement. Following Chávez’s death and Nicolás Maduro’s succession, the Obama administration declared Venezuela a “national security threat” and imposed punishing sanctions.
The US economic war escalated relentlessly under the first Trump administration and was maintained by Biden, deliberately strangling Venezuela’s capacity to import machinery, spare parts, medicines, food and construction materials. UN Special Rapporteurs concluded that the sanctions regime produced mass suffering and contributed to over 100,000 excess deaths.
*****
While selfless rescue teams from the US and other countries will save lives, Washington has primarily sent a military invading force. Two US warships—the USS Fort Lauderdale and the USS Billings—are deployed in Venezuelan waters. Five C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft are ferrying a Contingency Response Element to take over management of Simón Bolívar International Airport from Venezuelan aviation authorities. MV-22 Ospreys, UH-1Y Super Huey helicopters, and Army CH-47 Chinooks pre-staged on Curaçao complete the picture.
This military footprint is entirely consistent with the operations that Washington and the government headed by the US puppet, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, have already been conducting jointly in Venezuela’s interior. US and Venezuelan forces have bombed and swept through the gold and coltan mining zones of the Orinoco Arc to clear informal miners and secure control by the mining transnationals—operations that included the extrajudicial killing of Héctor Guerrero Flores, the alleged Tren de Aragua leader.
*****
The parallel with the Haiti earthquake in 2010 is chilling. Then, Washington exploited a catastrophic earthquake to deploy 20,000 troops, seize control of the Port-au-Prince airport, and impose direct military administration over a country it had dominated for a century. Relief planes from Médecins Sans Frontières carrying desperately needed medical equipment were turned away from the US-controlled airport while patients died. The mission was not rescue. It was occupation.
The political analyst Ricardo Rios of the Caracas consultancy firm Poder & Estrategia stated what bourgeois commentators rarely acknowledge so plainly: the earthquake “is going to be very well exploited to increase the presence of the United States and its control over Venezuela. And also, for Rodríguez to lean on the United States as her primary ally.”
Trump himself provided the most revealing statement of colonial arrogance. In a speech following the earthquake, the would-be US Führer declared: “Venezuela has been fantastic, we have a great relationship. It was a one-day war, we hit them so hard, and now we’ve taken out millions of barrels of oil and we’ve paid for the war many times over... it is a happy country again. The people are happy. They are dancing in the streets.”
*****
Rosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg, writing in 1902 about the eruption of Mount Pelée that killed 40,000 in Martinique, gave eloquent expression to the character of such moments. She described the imperial powers that rushed to offer aid to the survivors after inflicting far more death over decades of oppression as “weeping carnivores” and “beasts in Samaritan’s clothing.”
Luxemburg concluded her essay with a vision of the coming reckoning: a “volcano” of social revolution that would sweep away the oppressive social order, after which humanity would at last confront its only true and final enemy: “blind, dead nature.” Earthquakes and other natural phenomena do not choose their victims. It is the social order based on capitalist profit and imperialist domination that determines who dies.
8. Trump religion commission attacks separation of church and state
A Religious Liberty Commission appointed by President Trump issued its 224-page draft report Friday, June 26, denouncing the separation of church and state and recommending dozens of actions to force fundamentalist Christian dogma into public schools and other government institutions.
This effort to promote right-wing political and religious indoctrination is being carried out under the rubric of defending the First Amendment, although that history-making document begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
In reality, the First Amendment is being repealed in favor of theocracy, with religion crammed down the throats of school children in states like Texas, whose lieutenant governor Dan Patrick is chair of Trump’s commission. The state has just issued a required reading list for elementary school children which includes sections of the Bible, some to be read out loud in class. The state is also posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
*****
In a justly famous presidential letter in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the First Amendment had created a “wall of separation between Church & State,” words that have been cited repeatedly in court decisions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
*****
One would not know, plowing through the 224-page report, that 10 of the original 13 states had established churches at the time of the adoption of the Constitution—Congressionalist in New England, Anglican/Episcopalian in the southern slave states and New York. Only Rhode Island, founded by dissenters fleeing Puritan Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Delaware (heavily Quaker) had no established church.
But by the early 19th century, under the impulse given by the revolution (and the Bill of Rights) all states had disestablished their churches, cutting off the flow of public money into church coffers, creating indeed Jefferson’s “wall of separation.” As the public school system developed, religious education in the classroom faded out (banned outright in 1825 by the New York City Council) and became the purview of private religious schools and churches.
The Trump commission’s report ignores this history and invents its own, according to which secularism was imported into the United States in the 1950s, under the influence of European intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche. Why this purportedly foreign doctrine was then supposedly embraced by the Warren Court, the authors of the report do not explain—nor does it make any sense, historically or factually.
Like all such official documents, what is left out of the religious liberty report is in many ways even more revealing than the lies, distortions and false arguments that it contains. There is no mention of deism, the quasi-atheist agnosticism of Jefferson and many other “Founding Fathers.” Indeed, the words atheism, agnosticism and unbelief simply do not appear.
*****
Rev. Paul Raushenbush, a plaintiff in a lawsuit by liberal and interfaith groups challenging the composition of the commission, said in a statement that its report: “reflects the narrow, Christian nationalist worldview of the illegitimate commission. … A betrayal of the original intention of the promise of religious freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment, the report and the commission behind it fail to represent and uplift the importance of religious diversity and tolerance for all faiths in our country—not just a special, chosen few. The report is a wish list of divisive, unpopular ideas far-right religious groups have pushed for years.”
The commission issued “12 Key Recommendations to Strengthen Religious Liberty for All Americans,” which effectively require all departments of the federal government to intervene against the (nonexistent) “persecution” of religious Americans. This includes the creation of snitch lines for anonymous reporting of “religious liberty violations,” the repeal of the “Johnson Amendment,” a legal provision that bars tax-exempt organizations like churches from endorsing and donating to political candidates, and allowing far wider use of religious exemptions from vaccination, particularly for members of the military.
As opposed to the absurd portrayal of Christianity being under attack from the US government—in no other advanced capitalist country is there such an assiduous official promotion of the “Judeo-Christian” heritage—the real crisis of the religious establishment is the growing popular rejection of all forms of religion, particularly among young people, where nonbelief in god is by far the largest segment of the population.
A series of Supreme Court decisions over the last 15 years has sought to counter the impact of the rising tide of secularism and the growing support for democratic rights of gays, lesbians, Muslims and other minorities, which are anathema to the Christian fascists.
Moreover, among military-intelligence officials and the decisive sections of the super-rich, there is a clear understanding that religious illusions are vital for the mobilization of the American population in imperialist wars, particularly those of the future in which millions could be forced to give their lives.
9. VIDEO Report: Teenage girls in Rotherham violently assaulted by South Yorkshire police
Had it not been for neighbors and onlookers videoing the police riot and posting clips to social media, this assault would have passed largely unnoticed by the outside world.
*****
Responding to public anger, South Yorkshire Police (SYP) stated on Monday that video footage of “the police response to an incident in Rotherham over the weekend appears nothing short of shocking.”
Oliver Coppard, South Yorkshire Mayor, declared, “On the face of what I’ve seen, I was appalled by it.” He called on SYP’s Chief Constable to review the evidence “as a matter of urgency” and “take the strongest possible action against the officers if they are indeed found to have done wrongdoing.”
But on Tuesday, SYP announced:
Our Professional Standards Department has now reviewed all available footage, including body worn video, and written accounts from all officers. The assessment has determined that there is an opportunity for learning around de-escalation but, considering what happened before and during the clip, the use of force was proportionate, necessary, and justified to keep all involved safe.
*****
Events in Rotherham have not only exposed the police’s vicious actions but also the hostility of the entire political establishment towards the working class.
Despite footage of the police assault going viral and news reports by the BBC, the Guardian and elsewhere, not a single media outlet has spoken to the victims or their families. Neither social services, civil liberties groups, nor supposedly “left” politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn have spoken up for the girls or challenged the police violence and lies.
10. Finland amends laws to allow deployment of nuclear weapons
Finland’s parliament voted 17 June to repeal the country’s ban on nuclear weapons to remove any obstacles to the deployment of NATO bombs and missiles to the country, which has a 1,300-kilometre border with Russia. Overturning decades of official support for non-proliferation and disarmament, Finland is now helping to promote the deployment of nuclear weapons throughout Europe under conditions in which the major imperialist powers are recklessly escalating the war in Ukraine against Russia.
The right-wing government led by the National Coalition Party (NCP) and including the far-right Finns Party was joined by the opposition Center party to carry the vote with a majority of 125 for, to 61 against. On social media, Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen remarked ahead of the parliamentary vote, “By dismantling the Cold War-era total ban on nuclear explosives, we are aligning our legislation with that of our closest NATO allies.” He proceeded to denounce the opposition Social Democratic Party (SDP), ex-Stalinist Left Alliance (LA), and Greens for voting against the change.
The parties that voted against the measure are not opponents of nuclear weapons, as shown by their argument that NATO’s nuclear strategy does not require deploying weapons to Finland to be effective. These “left” parties led the charge for Finland’s NATO membership, portraying it as a “defensive” move in the face of “Russian aggression” in Ukraine. They all ignored the three decades of US-led aggression and NATO expansion that preceded the nationalist and capitalist-restorationist Putin regime’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. All of the parliamentary parties voted for joining NATO under the previous prime minister Sanna Marin (SDP).
Since joining NATO in 2023, Finland and its Nordic neighbor Sweden have been among the most vocal European agitators for war preparations against Russia. Russia’s 2022 reactionary invasion of Ukraine was seized upon by Helsinki and Stockholm to drop their longstanding cloak of neutrality and stampede the public into accepting membership in the US imperialist-led aggressive military alliance.
The Finnish government has already gone far beyond merely voting to repeal the country’s ban on nuclear weapons. One day after the vote, Häkkänen attended a meeting of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, after which the body issued a statement that it would “continue enhancing NATO’s nuclear deterrence mission.”
*****
A major factor accelerating Finland’s abandonment of restrictions on nuclear weapons was French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement in March that Paris would consider deploying its arsenal more widely across Europe and launch joint exercises with allied countries. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo discussed the proposal in a one-on-one meeting with Macron in Paris earlier this month, following which the French government promised to send more information to Helsinki before it takes a decision on participating.
Speaking following a separate meeting in Paris with the commander in chief of the French armed forces, Häkkänen told Finnish television, “The nuclear deterrent is a key part of Europe’s defense capability and also constitutes a major preemptive deterrent to possible Russian aggressive actions. Currently, it is based on the nuclear deterrent produced by NATO and the US, but the French now want to launch a French nuclear deterrent initiative that offers added value.”
The US has a bilateral defense cooperation agreement in place with Finland that gives American military personnel unimpeded access to several air bases and other military sites in the country. US nuclear weapons could therefore also be deployed to the country.
Finland is joined in its nuclear ambitions by the other Nordic countries, which have responded favorably to Macron’s call for support and coordination in expanding its nuclear arsenal. So far the governments of Norway, Denmark and Sweden have signed up to the plan. Discussions have even begun in academic and policymaking circles on the viability of an independent Nordic nuclear weapons program, marking a complete break with these countries’ post-World War II image as advocates of disarmament.
Last year, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen answered a reporter’s question if Denmark would host nuclear weapons with the statement, “Everything has to be on the table now.” So far, Denmark has maintained its ban on the stationing of nuclear weapons, but Finland’s repeal is likely to embolden other governments to make similarly drastic changes.
As part of war preparations against Russia and China, NATO has emphasized the importance of militarizing the Arctic region. “The Arctic and the High North are of growing strategic importance to our security,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte declared at the NATO meeting of defense ministers in Brussels earlier this month. As the Arctic Ocean becomes increasingly ice free due to climate change, the imperialist powers see the opportunity to control emerging shipping routes and critical resources.
*****
Eighty-five years ago, the Finnish government invited Nazi Germany to occupy the country. They sold this to the public as necessary to protect against the Soviet Union, while secretly collaborating with Hitler’s preparations for a war of annihilation against the USSR. Far from protecting Finland, this threw the country into the maelstrom of the Nazi war of extermination and the Holocaust. After helping the Nazi war machine slaughter millions of innocent people, Finland suffered renewed military defeat as the Red Army rolled back the fascist forces.
The Finnish ruling class is once more transforming the country into a frontline state against Russia, increasing the risk of a catastrophic war fought with nuclear weapons. Russia’s second largest city, St. Petersburg, lies just 150km from the Finnish border, minutes away for missiles stationed in Finland. Whether these missiles are deployed by the US or European imperialists, the Putin regime could not but interpret such a move as making Finland a legitimate target in a future war that European imperialism is preparing at breakneck speed.
The University and College Union (UCU) declared a “global academic boycott” of the University of Sheffield (UoS) this month, calling on academics worldwide to refuse conferences, guest lectures, visiting positions and new external examiner contracts, while urging honorary graduates and external examiners to resign.
UCU General Secretary Jo Grady said the boycott was in response to the university’s strike-breaking operation, denouncing Vice-Chancellor Koen Lamberts of trying to force staff to “scab on their own strike” by withholding pay both during the action and after members had returned from the picket line to work. Such strikebreaking, she declared, “should have died out with the Pinkertons.”
The boycott is the latest phase of a dispute that intensified sharply in November 2024, when management announced a £50 million budget shortfall and plans to cut £23 million from the wages bill. More than 500 jobs have since been cut through “voluntary” severance. Workers in chemistry and materials science have been told that around 20 percent of faculty could be made redundant, and jobs in East Asian studies and six further schools are under review.
The trigger was management’s withholding pay, a de facto lockout without precedent in the history of UK higher education. Having already docked pay for strike days, the UoS withheld further pay from 50 staff who declined to reschedule missed teaching without compensation.
*****
The lockout is designed to make the exercise of the legal right to strike financially ruinous. Within months, management at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Edinburgh had adopted the same mechanism against staff conducting marking boycotts, declaring all work performed in the meantime “voluntary.”
*****
The conduct of the UCU apparatus throughout this dispute is the suspension of industrial action on the flimsiest pretexts, the isolation of the three Sheffield disputes (the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, and the privately run Sheffield International College) from one another, and the channelling of confrontation into ACAS arbitration. This was all overseen by UCU General Secretary Jo Grady—a left talker recently handed an £18,000 rise in annual pay, taking her salary to £127,690 plus benefits.
The UCU bureaucracy is a privileged social layer increasingly integrated into management of the marketized university system. Grady confines her criticism to appeals that “overpaid vice-chancellors” behave more reasonably, accepting the framework of creeping privatization while pleading for a negotiated administration of the cuts required.
Successive Conservative and Labour governments have starved the university sector of funding while imposing damaging visa restrictions, creating the conditions for the present crisis.
The transformation of higher education into a market has proceeded over decades. By 2017–18, government teaching grants accounted for just 20 percent of university income, with the remaining 80 percent coming from private sources, increasing universities’ dependence on tuition fees and other commercial revenue.
Tuition fees were introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour government in 1998 and tripled to £9,000 under the Tory–Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010. The Starmer government has sanctioned a rise above £10,000 for the first time in 2027–28, with automatic inflation-linked increases thereafter—making the UK one of the most expensive countries in the world in which to study.
These attacks have met determined resistance from education workers. Industrial action, including national strikes, against falling pay, job cuts, worsening conditions and pensions cuts culminated in the 2022–24 national strike wave. But the corporatist trade union bureaucracy systematically demobilized these struggles while promoting illusions in an incoming Labour government that has deepened austerity, intensified attacks on higher education, and presided over worsening social inequality amid a continuing cost-of-living crisis. An estimated 30,000 jobs have been lost in universities over the course of the last three years—the bulk of these under the Starmer government the UCU backed into office.
The defense of jobs, pay and working conditions requires new rank-and-file organizations of struggle, independent of the union apparatus and the parties of the ruling class.
12. New Zealand Greens advance fraudulent wealth tax policy
On June 21, the New Zealand Green Party released a 2.5 percent wealth tax policy, which it claims will “make sure the super-rich and big corporations contribute their share,” reduce taxes for workers and boost public services.
It was the party’s first major policy announcement ahead of the election scheduled for November 7. Amid rising opposition to war and social inequality, and hostility towards the political establishment, the Greens—backed by the union bureaucracy and sections of the media—are seeking to steer workers and young people back behind illusions that capitalism can be reformed.
*****
In 2017 the party called for increased welfare benefits and in 2020 it proposed a mild wealth tax. In government, however, the Greens voted for budgets that starved public services, delivered tax breaks and other handouts to the rich, and increased spending on the military, police and intelligence agencies.
The Greens’ latest wealth tax proposal must be assessed in light of this record. Even if it was implemented, the tax would not substantially reduce the vast gulf between rich and poor.
*****
Workers should not be taken in by the Greens’ election-year rhetoric. Across the world all capitalist governments, whether openly right-wing or nominally progressive, are ratcheting up the exploitation of the working class by driving down wages and slashing social programs, while spending vast sums on militarism and war.
The only way to stop the descent into world war and mass poverty, is to build a party of the working class, based on the socialist and internationalist program of the Trotskyist movement. The vast wealth hoarded by the corporate and financial elite must be expropriated, not mildly taxed, and the banks and major corporations placed under public ownership and democratic workers’ control. We call on readers who agree with this perspective to join the Socialist Equality Group.
13. Australia: Permanent jobs under attack at Smith’s Brisbane chip factory
Global food and beverage manufacturer PepsiCo is seeking to impose significant cuts to working conditions at its Smith’s Snackfood factory in the Brisbane suburb of Tingalpa.
The multi-billion dollar company aims to slash already limited protections for permanent employment and step up its use of labor-hire working arrangements.
The attack on Smith’s workers mirrors developments throughout the working class. As workers’ cost of living skyrockets, corporations are slashing real wages, demanding ever greater productivity and imposing increasingly insecure forms of employment.
While no union has called a protected action ballot at Smith’s, there is already a growing sentiment of opposition to the company’s proposed assault on conditions among the factory’s more than 400 workers.
*****
PepsiCo is trying to create the conditions where it can slash full- and part-time jobs and replace them with labor-hire workers, who lack many of the basic rights of permanent staff, such as sick leave and annual leave.
Most significantly, such workers have no guarantee of regular or ongoing employment, so the company is free to scale production up or down at will and immediately dismiss any worker who raises issues over conditions or refuses to comply with management demands for speed-ups.
While PepsiCo has made clear it is waging a war on job security and workers’ conditions, the response of the unions has been tepid and evasive.
*****
To avoid yet another betrayal, Smith’s workers need to take matters into their own hands. This means building a rank-and-file committee to direct the struggle, led by workers on the shop floor, not highly paid union bureaucrats. This committee must be open to all workers, permanent or casual, directly employed or labour-hire, union or non-union.
The limited demands advanced by the union bureaucracy will not resolve the growing social and cost-of-living crisis for workers, nor the company’s open threat to their job security. What is needed are demands based on workers’ needs and a plan of action through which to fight for them, including strikes and other industrial action.
As a starting point, these could include:
- An immediate 40 percent pay rise across the board, to recoup previous losses.
- Monthly cost-of-living adjustments to prevent further real wage cuts amid soaring inflation.
- No more labour-hire—secure jobs for all! All existing labour-hire workers to be offered direct employment, with no loss of hours. All casuals to be offered permanent positions after 6 months of service.
- No speed-ups! A safe workload clause, so production targets cannot be used to justify unsafe pace or unreasonable pressure.
- Workers must be paid on time, with penalties for management if wages are late or incorrect.
- All improvements to wages and conditions to be extended to all Smith’s employees, including at the Adelaide factory and warehousing/distribution facilities across the country, and vice versa.
Corporations and their union bureaucrat allies enforce defeats on workers by dividing them up, factory by factory. The way forward is through a unified struggle—bringing Smith’s workers together with those in other PepsiCo facilities, throughout the food manufacturing industry and beyond, across Australia and globally—against the onslaught on wages, conditions and job security confronted by workers everywhere.
The attack on Smith’s workers is part of a broader offensive against the working class being waged by big business, aided by the union bureaucracy and spearheaded by the federal Labor government, which is slashing social spending and diverting vast billions to preparations for war.
14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
