Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Thousands feared dead in Venezuela after strongest earthquake in 125 years
The earthquake has exposed the decrepit state of the country’s broader social scaffolding—especially the housing, healthcare and public infrastructure—that has been systematically strangled by over a decade of US economic and political sabotage.
Washington’s sanctions regime against Venezuela—sustained across multiple administrations—has been explicitly designed” to subjugate Venezuelans through hunger, illness and mass suffering. As far back as 2021, UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan found that US sanctions had “exacerbated pre-existing crises” and blocked the importation of “machinery, spare parts, medicine, food, agricultural supplies and other essential goods.”
As a result, the capacity to treat thousands of injured victims is virtually nonexistent.
For years, these sanctions prevented Venezuela from importing construction materials capable of upgrading the housing stock, medical equipment to treat mass-casualty events, water treatment chemicals, and components to maintain the electrical grid. When the earthquakes struck Wednesday evening, the hospitals were already crippled, the infrastructure already degraded, the population already weakened by years of deliberately imposed deprivation.
Now Trump has announced on social media: “The two major earthquakes that just hit the great people of Venezuela are both massive in scale and have left a devastating number of deaths. The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help!” Washington announced it would send search-and-rescue teams, medical and humanitarian supplies, and other resources.
This is the same Trump administration that on January 3, 2026 dispatched US special forces to abduct President Nicolás Maduro in what constituted an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law. Trump himself boasted of the operation as a “snatch and grab” and declared that Venezuela would be “run” by his cabinet officials.
Just as Washington used the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti as the pretext for sending in some 20,000 US troops, so the current disaster will undoubtedly be seized upon to facilitate the deployment of occupation forces to Venezuela to better control the country.
In the six months since the invasion, Venezuela has been turned into a semi-colony, wholly subordinate to the imperialist strategy of US imperialism, and which has surrendered control over the extraction and commercialization of the world’s largest proven oil reserves to Washington and its corporate partners.
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The criminal neglect of Venezuela’s housing stock also falls at the feet of the Chavista governments of Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro and now Delcy Rodríguez, that have held power since 1998.
For nearly three decades, they presided over one of the world’s largest oil-export revenues and proclaimed themselves the vanguard of a “Bolivarian Revolution” and “Socialism of the 21st Century.” Yet the mid-20th century concrete-and-adobe apartment blocks that pancaked Wednesday night in Los Palos Grandes and La Guaira stand as a monument to their legacy.
A genuinely socialist government committed to placing human life and safety above profit considerations would have used those decades of petroleum wealth to systematically retrofit, rebuild, and bring the country’s housing, healthcare and public infrastructure into compliance with modern seismic codes.
When oil prices collapsed and US imperialism escalated its sanctions, having failed to develop the country, the Chavistas imposed the crisis on the backs of the working class.
The pseudo-left organizations—the Pabloites, the Morenoites, and the academic defenders of “Bolivarianism” across Latin America and beyond—bear a heavy share of responsibility for this debacle. For two decades, they channeled working-class opposition into illusions in bourgeois nationalism, promoting Chavismo as a progressive alternative and blocking workers from an independent and internationalist socialist program.
2. Alan Greenspan (1926–2026) and the crisis of capitalism
Alan Greenspan, whose death at the age of 100 was announced on Monday, was chairman of the US Federal Reserve for 19 years, from 1987 to 2006.
He will go down in history as the individual who did more than any other to create a financial and economic system of parasitism and speculation, which characterizes the US today and which has led to the creation of a financial oligarchy and a level of social inequality never before seen in history.
Marxist political economy is far removed from and is firmly opposed to any kind of historical subjectivism.
It does not ascribe the motion, the development of capitalism and its recurring crises to the role of individuals. It insists they are driven by objective contradictions rooted in the profit system based on the private ownership of the means of production—the irresolvable conflict between global production and the capitalist nation-state system and between the social character of production and private ownership.
Marx explained that the individual members of the capitalist class and those who carry out its interests, as Greenspan did, were, in the final analysis, the personification of objective socio-economic processes.
But individuals do play a role, at times a powerful one, and Greenspan was such. He was a living embodiment of free market ideology, the theoretical mainstay of the capitalist mode of production.
It is the ideological weapon, wheeled out time and again against socialism, with the assertion that socialism is inherently impossible. That while human beings may be able to plumb the depths of the atom, gain knowledge of the outer reaches of the universe, and examine the very structures of life itself, they cannot consciously control and regulate their own daily economic activity according to reason and need, and that the blind anarchy of the market must, of natural necessity, prevail.
Greenspan was an ardent promoter of this misanthropic outlook, the operation of which in practice has led to an ever deepening crisis of the global profit system, from which all sections of the capitalist class, with US imperialism in the lead, now seek to extricate themselves by means of war and deepening attacks on the working class, coupled with authoritarian and fascist regimes to enforce this program.
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The policies of Greenspan facilitated the creation of the dot.com bubble which collapsed at the beginning of this century. Greenspan’s response was to make more cheap money available, which then inflated a bubble in housing.
But even as it was clear a bubble was developing, Greenspan denied its existence, claiming in a major speech in 2003 that any resemblance to behavior in stock markets was “rather a large stretch.”
Any housing bubbles, he said, would be local rather than national in scope. But a national collapse did take place and manifested itself in the crash of 2008 triggered by the subprime crisis.
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In 2008, with the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers and the threatened bankruptcy of the insurance giant AIG because of collateral calls on billion of dollars in credit default swaps, one of the forms of derivatives that had mushroomed in the preceding period, the crisis broke.
While the bankers and speculators were bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, as many as 10 million Americans lost their homes, with unemployment rising to 10 percent and more—one of the highest levels since the Great Depression— delivering a hammer blow to the working class, the effects which are still being felt.
While subsequent investigations revealed that bank chiefs and executives had engaged in criminal activity, particularly at Goldman Sachs, not one was jailed, and in 2014 when Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder was asked why this had not happened, he said it would cause too much disruption to the financial system. The finance giants were “too big to fail” and their chiefs “too big to jail.”
Though now out of the Fed chair, Greenspan was called to testify before Congress in October 2008 as the effects of the crash continued to roll through the US and around the world.
His testimony might well form the core of his epitaph. He confessed that his entire intellectual framework—based on the doctrines he had imbibed from Ayn Rand and the most vociferous defenders of the profit system—had collapsed.
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But the crisis was not simply the failure of an ideology. It was the demonstration of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system itself—that crises, each one more serious than the last, were not the result of some external forces disrupting a self-regulating machine, but were endemic to the profit system itself.
The aftermath of the devastating crisis which Greenspan facilitated, both via his reactionary ideology and his actions, has not been the introduction of reforms that can prevent a recurrence. Rather, the reaction of the capitalist state, through its economic arms such as the Fed, has been to pour still more money into the financial system, thereby creating the conditions for an even bigger disaster.
Above all, the working class must draw the lessons. There are no reforms possible within the framework of the profit system. It must be overthrown. The working class must fight for the conquest of political power to enable the complete reorganization of the economic structure of society, based on the meeting of human needs and not the insatiable demands of the financial oligarchy that Greenspan did so much to create.
3. The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to “No Kings”
Introductory remarks delivered by David North, chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, to the webinar “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings,’” held to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.
This anniversary unfolds amid an escalating assault on democratic rights and the foundations of American democracy. The president has spoken openly of dictatorial rule. After losing the 2020 election, he attempted to overturn its result and block the peaceful transfer of power. His return to office in 2024, despite this criminal act, is a sign of not only a breakdown of democratic institutions but also a profound erosion of democratic consciousness.
Under these conditions, the American Revolution assumes immense contemporary significance. These are times, as Tom Paine said, that try men’s souls.
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The Civil War, which arose out of the first Revolution, likewise had world-historical significance: it destroyed slavery and posed anew whether the democratic principles proclaimed in 1776 could be made real. As the most thorough bourgeois democratic revolution in history, it created the conditions for the explosive development of capitalism and the emergence of the United States as the dominant world power. It also gave rise to a massive working class and a history of violent class conflict, with which the development of the great civil rights movement of the last century was inseparably linked.
Today, however, the political attack on democracy is accompanied by a repudiation of the revolutionary and democratic legacy itself. Within academia, and within much of what describes itself as the left, the American Revolution is presented not as a world-historical advance, but as a reactionary event. All the documents and political structures that prepared and emerged out of the Revolution are dismissed.
The Declaration is treated not as a statement of universal principles whose implications exceeded the intentions of its authors, but as hypocrisy and deception.
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Conflict over the meaning of historical events is legitimate and unavoidable. No serious history can proceed through patriotic mythmaking. The American Revolution was born in contradiction: its promises were denied to enslaved people, women, Indigenous peoples, propertyless laborers, and many others. It was, to define the event in appropriate historical and socio-economic terms, a bourgeois democratic revolution.
The revolution did not accomplish all that it promised. Life and liberty, to say nothing of happiness, are increasingly problematic in the United States. And given the massive concentration of wealth that characterizes contemporary society, what rules today in Washington is not by a long shot what Lincoln had in mind when he spoke of government of, by and for the people.
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Slavery, colonialism and racial oppression have played a major role in American history. But they cannot be understood apart from property, labor, class power, imperialism and the state.
The Declaration was revolutionary not because its authors were morally pure, but rather because it indicted the existing social and political order and called for its overthrow in the most sweeping and universal terms. It provided the political and ideological impulse for the subsequent extraordinary economic development, territorial expansion and social transformation of a colonial outpost into an independent and increasingly powerful capitalist nation state.
At the same time, the democratic principles that it evoked transcended the objective limitations imposed upon it by its own time. Herein lay the great and enduring power of the Declaration. It was both of its time and of the future.
The Declaration expressed in the most profound sense the dialectic of history. As Marx explained: “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.” In 1776 the conditions for the abolition of slavery were only beginning to emerge. By 1861, the conditions for the completion of that task were at hand.
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In the discussion of the Revolution, what is at stake is not only the interpretation of the past, but the political consciousness and perspective required for the future. If the left abandons the revolutionary-democratic tradition, if it treats equality, rights, popular sovereignty and universal emancipation as rank deception, it risks surrendering that tradition to reaction. And that is what is happening.
The precondition for serious debate must be a scrupulous attitude toward facts. The twentieth century has shown the catastrophic consequences of historical falsification, above all in the falsification of the Russian Revolution, where lies justified betrayal, repression and mass murder. We have not reached that point in the United States. The bloated orange colossus who imagines that he bestrides the Potomac has feet of clay. Social opposition is steadily growing. But the opposition of workers and youth must be armed with a knowledge of history and its lessons.
This important anniversary should be an opportunity to ask what was revolutionary in the Revolution, what was limited, what was betrayed, what was carried forward, and what remains unresolved.
4. Extreme heat has devastating effects on agriculture and workers
The impact of global warming on agriculture and agricultural workers is mounting. Given the likely temperature increases anticipated by the end of this century, it is projected that conditions in much of South Asia, tropical sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Central and South America could result in up to 250 days a year being so hot that the bodies of agricultural workers cannot sustain meaningful physical labor.
A recent report (Extreme Heat and Agriculture) prepared jointly by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) finds that elevated temperatures around the world threaten the food security and livelihoods of over a billion people. The human impact is already evident. The report states that:
Extreme heat is increasingly defining the conditions under which agrifood systems operate. Rising temperatures and heatwaves, occurring with greater frequency, duration and intensity, are often accompanied by prolonged drought and other climate extremes. Together, these hazards are exerting mounting pressure on crops, livestock, fisheries and forests, and on the communities and economies that depend upon them.
Furthermore:
Extreme heat magnifies existing weaknesses across agricultural systems. Higher temperatures parch soils, reduce harvests, strain livestock, disrupt fisheries and increase wildfire risk. When combined with water scarcity, the consequences intensify, cutting production, lowering incomes, and tightening food supplies.
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Increasing heat and drought negatively impact the ability of soil to support crops. In addition to insufficient water, hot and dry soil bakes hard, reducing its ability to absorb the occasional intense rain, which rapidly runs off and/or causes erosion, stripping nutrient-rich topsoil. This will be compounded by the imperialist war against Iran, which has resulted in a severe reduction in the available supply of fertilizer during the critically important planting season in the northern hemisphere. As previously reported, such extreme climate conditions can negatively impact riverine fisheries, as well as those in the oceans as well.
Approximately one billion people worldwide work in agriculture, representing about 28 percent of the working population, nearly half as wage labor, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). If present climate change trends continue, extreme heat could make agricultural work unsafe for up to 250 days a year by the end of the century. The effects of heat stress on crop yields would be devastating. It is estimated that every 1 degree C. increase in temperature, crop yields would be cut by 7.5 percent. The effect of this year’s anticipated “Super El Nino” will only intensify these dire effects.
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Record-breaking heatwaves have already been experienced this year in India and Europe. In India, as of late May, temperatures had crossed 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). The human body can withstand 35 degrees C, beyond which it can no longer cool itself. The country recently experienced 40 consecutive days when the high temperature exceeded 40 degrees C.
The callous indifference of the ruling class is typified by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a long-time climate change denier, who told a group of students, “Climate has not changed. We have changed. Our habits have changed.”
As the evidence of global warming-induced climate change is becoming increasingly evident, governments around the world are denying, belittling or actively promoting processes that drive it forward. In the US, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has openly declared that fighting climate change by curbing greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles is “futile,” because the problem is too big to be addressed by reducing this one source.
At the same time, Trump is moving to halt the construction of offshore wind electric generation project on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and, at the same time blocking the shutdown of several coal-fired plants. And, in order to hobble the ability to track the effects of global warming, Trump has ordered the removal of a series of automated climate monitoring stations along the US coast. This is part of the effort to disband the National Center for Atmospheric Research....
The capitalist system has clearly demonstrated that it is incapable of undertaking the necessary measures to address the existential crisis. The world’s food supply along with workers, both agricultural and industrial, will be severely impacted. Meanwhile, the ruling class is willfully downplaying the danger and instead hurtling toward world war.
On the morning of Saturday, June 20, hours after President Rodrigo Paz announced a nationwide state of exception by national broadcast, soldiers and police fanned out across the Andean highway network. Supreme Decree 5636, invoking a “states of exception” law promulgated only weeks earlier, suspended the right to demonstrate and to block roads, authorized the Armed Forces to clear highways without a prior judicial order, and established an extraordinary 90-day regime over the entire country.
Paz justified the offensive by branding the 51-day workers’ uprising “an attempted coup d’état from narco-terrorism.”
The characterization is not Paz’s invention. He’s reproducing the narrative manufactured by US imperialism under the fascist Trump administration to justify its direct intervention across the region—the same “narco-terrorism” charge is deployed to justify bombing fishing boats in the Caribbean, to invade Venezuela and abduct its president and to put troops on the ground in Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico.
Bolivia’s place within that offensive was clearly spelled out by Paz’s defense minister Ernesto Justiniano when he announced the preparation of the military response to the protests remarking: “Bolivia once again takes its place in the democratic defense of the continent,” affirming that the country “is and must remain part of the Shield of the Americas.”
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The central demand raised by the mobilized masses since mid-May was that Paz must fall. The COB not only trampled upon the will of the rank-and-file, but legitimized the demoralized capitalist government at the precise moment it prepared bloody repression against the Bolivian people.
The legal apparatus for repression had been assembled in plain view over the preceding weeks. On May 28, Paz signed the abrogation of Law 1341, the statute that had constrained the deployment of the armed forces against the population—removing, in the words of a deputy of the ruling alliance, “the principal obstacle” to a state of exception.
The legal obstacle had fallen; what remained was the political one, which the Bolivian bourgeoisie counted on the union bureaucracy to remove. Less than 24 hours separated Argollo’s signing of the “pacification” agreement at the Casa Grande del Pueblo and the government’s deployment of troops in the streets.
None of this was unforeseen. In January of this year, the same COB leadership called off the previous general strike against Paz’s austerity package, ending the strike, as the WSWS wrote at the time, “to prevent it turning into a struggle to bring down the government.”
The pattern of betrayals is the constant feature of the confederation’s 70-year history. From its foundation amid the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, the COB was held under the control of the bourgeois nationalist Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement – MNR) that aimed to suffocate a workers’ revolution. It subordinated the working class to General Torres in 1971, delivered the miners to President Victor Paz Estenssoro’s (the current president’s great uncle) austerity in 1985, facilitated the 2019 coup and entered the Áñez government, and called off strike after strike whenever the movement threatened to escape its control.
The Bolivian workers and peasants have sustained a 50-day uprising against the reactionary national bourgeoisie and its imperialist backers. The counterrevolutionary conspiracy assembled by Paz and Trump against it is a measure of its strength, not its weakness. The determination of the masses was never in question. What remained, as we wrote on June 5, “the most dangerous terrain of the conflict,” was the gap between that determination and the political leadership at the workers’ disposal. The task facing the working class was and remains to break from the bureaucratic agencies of the bourgeois state and establish its political independence.
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The Morenoites make a cult of “self-organization,” “open assemblies” (or “cabildos”), and speak of “building socialist and revolutionary hegemony.” Through the use of such rhetoric, they cloak their rejection of the conscious construction of a Marxist leadership in the working class.
To be continued
6. Call for inquiry into dropping of charges over New Zealand’s Pike River mine disaster
Christopher Harder, a former criminal lawyer, has called for police to investigate the unlawful deal to drop charges against the company’s chief executive Peter Whittall.
7. German government launches frontal assault on pensions
The pension reforms seamlessly follow the abolition of Bürgergeld (welfare benefits) and the so-called “health reforms.” Billions are being redistributed from the pockets of the needy, the sick, pensioners, the low-paid and workers into rearmament into the accounts of the super-rich.
8. SGP and WSWS call for the release of Ercan Akpolat and all political prisoners in Türkiye
On June 24, SGP Chairman Christoph Vandreier and Johannes Stern, editor of the German-language World Socialist Web Site, read out an open letter to Ambassador Gökhan Turan in front of the Turkish Embassy in Berlin. In it, they demand the immediate and unconditional release of Ali Ercan Akpolat, the mayor of the municipality of Adalar, which includes Büyükada, the historic island of Prinkipo, as well as all political prisoners in Türkiye.
Akpolat was arrested together with numerous other representatives and employees of the municipality of Adalar as part of a large-scale police operation. The charges brought against him are baseless. They are clearly directed not against actual crimes but against elected mayors and opposition politicians.
Akpolat is known in Türkiye and internationally for his commitment to preserving historical truth and cultural heritage. Of particular significance is his work in connection with the “Trotsky House” on Büyükada, where Leon Trotsky lived in exile from 1929 to 1933 and wrote some of his most important works.
The embassy refused to accept the open letter. When Vandreier and Stern attempted to place the letter in the embassy mailbox, the police prohibited them from doing so on the grounds that the mailbox was located on embassy territory. This incident underscores the arbitrary and politically motivated character of the arrests and of the repression directed against oppositionists, workers, youth and anti-war activists in Türkiye.
The SGP and the WSWS demand the immediate release of Ali Ercan Akpolat, all those arrested as part of the operation against the municipality of Adalar, the more than 200 imprisoned anti-NATO activists and all political prisoners.
9. Detroit Federation of Teachers pushes through contract, as school closures, austerity continue
Detroit Federation of Teachers members have voted to ratify a tentative two-year agreement with Detroit Public Schools Community District covering the 2026–2028 school years. The agreement is being presented by union officials as a major step forward. Reported “highlights” include a top teacher salary of $100,100 by 2027–28, continued special education bonuses, new compensation for general education teachers serving some students with disabilities and expanded due process protections.
But the contract cannot be judged by its headline figures alone. It was negotiated inside a district budget framework that includes school closures, staffing shortages, reliance on non-pensionable bonuses and a new operating millage campaign. Taken together, these facts point not to a reversal of austerity but to its continuation.
The clearest expression of this came from Superintendent Nikolai Vitti himself. At a May board meeting, Vitti explained that the district accelerated the phase-out of Ann Arbor Trail, J.E. Clark, Catherine Blackwell, and Greenfield Union because of budget pressures, inflation, federal uncertainty and the need to offset wage increases in the next contract.
“We have a new set of contracts that we have to negotiate with all of our unions starting next year,” said Vitti. “So, with that in mind, the board did approve the acceleration of those phase-out schools so that we could generate more revenue to address the need to increase salaries once again.”
This is the basic contradiction behind the tentative agreement. The district is offering limited raises while closing schools. It is maintaining special education bonuses while disrupting school communities that include exceptional-needs students. It is announcing compensation for general education teachers serving students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), emotional impairment (EI), and cross-categorical eligibility while leaving the underlying staffing crisis unresolved.
Detroit schools are placing students with significant needs into general education settings without sufficient specialized staffing. Rather than solving that crisis by hiring the special education teachers, paraprofessionals, interventionists, and mental health professionals students need, the agreement compensates existing teachers for absorbing more work.
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The claim that there is “no money” for Detroit schools must be rejected. In 2017, public education tax revenues were cleared for use in subsidizing Little Caesars Arena. The Downtown Development Authority is projected to capture hundreds of millions in school property tax revenue through 2051. Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock received a $618 million transformational brownfield package, part of an “up to $1 billion” tax-capture mechanism created under the so-called Gilbert bills, and later obtained a $60 million tax abatement for the Hudson’s site. At the state level, more than $9.5 billion in School Aid Fund dollars have been diverted away from K-12 education and into postsecondary budgets over the past 15 years.
Detroit is not an isolated case. More than half of the nation’s 50 largest school districts are cutting budgets, preparing cuts or facing reported deficits. In virtually every major urban district, this austerity is being carried out under Democratic Party administrations, while the bureaucrats in the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association work to contain opposition through rushed settlements, often followed immediately by budget cuts.
Teachers need a different strategy. Every DPSCD building should begin forming rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by educators and school workers and independent of the DFT apparatus. These committees should link up with educators in Ann Arbor, Pontiac and across Michigan to prepare a common fight.
The demands should be clear: Halt all school closures; make educators whole for decades of concessions; fully fund special education, mental health services and English-learner support; convert bonuses into pensionable base pay; open all future negotiations to rank-and-file scrutiny; and hold a genuine strike authorization vote before any new settlement is accepted.
The resources exist. The issue is who controls them: educators, students and working class communities, or the corporate developers, bondholders, landlords and political officials who have looted public education for decades.
Voting began Thursday at the Nexteer Automotive plant in Saginaw, Michigan, where the United Auto Workers is trying to intimidate 1,700 workers into ratifying a fourth pro-company tentative agreement (TA4). There is widespread opposition to the deal—which differs little from the three previous ones workers voted down—and deep anger over the way the UAW bureaucracy has repeatedly defied the will of the membership and employed underhanded methods to impose management’s dictates.
Instead of holding the vote at the UAW Local 699 union hall where workers openly campaigned to defeat the three TAs, union officials are holding the vote at three separate locations inside of the Nexteer factory, under the threat of management retaliation against any opposition. Earlier this month, Antwiane Sanders, a worker with more than 10 years at Nexteer, was terminated after criticizing a UAW International rep during an in-plant contract rollout meeting.
From the moment voting opened Thursday workers witnessed scenes that made the bureaucracy’s intent unmistakable. A woman who walked into one of the polling locations was told to “round up all the new hires and tell them to vote yes.” The new hires, according to a worker who reported the incident to the WSWS, “looked bewildered and not understanding what was happening.”
Rather than achieving its intended effect, the worker said, “The way the vote is being conducted is making workers more angry and causing them to vote no.” On social media pages, many workers have posted photos of their ballots with an X mark in the “no” box.
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The in-plant vote is the product of a three-month conspiracy by the UAW bureaucracy and Nexteer management to wear down, intimidate and coerce workers into accepting terms they have repeatedly and decisively rejected. Any contract that is “ratified” under the conditions must be considered illegitimate and non-binding.
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Socialist UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman
Will Lehman, the rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker nominated at last week’s UAW Constitutional Convention to run for UAW president, condemned the entire proceeding in an open letter to Nexteer workers. Lehman, who ran for UAW president in 2022 on a platform of transferring power from the bureaucracy to the rank and file, called the in-plant vote “a shotgun affair designed to silence opposition to a pro-company deal and get the contract passed by whatever means necessary.”
Invoking historical parallels to poll taxes and literacy tests to deny African Americans the right to vote in the southern US during segregation, Lehman said, “What the UAW and management are doing at Nexteer belongs in the same category.” He named the architects of the scheme—Fain, Dawes and Tuck— and placed the Nexteer struggle within “a growing revolt across the auto parts sector and the broader working class.”
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The fight that began in April—when workers rejected the first contract by 96 percent—will continue. Workers at Nexteer, American Axle, Dana, Bridgewater Interiors and across the auto parts sector face the same corporate assault, the same bureaucratic betrayal, and the same need for an independent, democratically controlled organization answerable to the rank and file alone. That organization is the rank-and-file committee, and expanding it is now the central task.
Workers interested in joining the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee can contact the committee at nexteerworkersrfc@gmail.com, text (947) 622-2198, or visit tinyurl.com/nexteerrfc. Workers at other plants who want to contact the WSWS can write to wsws.org/contact.
11. Trump administration requests approval of $87.6 billion for Iran war
In mid-March the Pentagon had sought roughly $200 billion in additional funding for the Iran war when it ran into opposition in Congress. The current request is less than half that size, which suggests the White House is trying a reset and presenting a package that is more likely to be approved.
Reuters reported that the new supplemental was still expected to generate conflicts because lawmakers have attacked the White House for blundering in the war with Iran and some demanding that Trump “finish the job.” In the Senate, Democrats on the Foreign Affairs Committee have criticized the administration for demanding that taxpayers finance an open-ended war without a clear strategy or legal basis.
However, as has been clear all along, these positions do not represent opposition from Democrats to the military assault on Iran, but objections to the refusal of the Trump White House to include Congress in the planning and decision to go to war.
In fact, much of the talk about “conflicts” between Congress and Trump over the military funding is for public consumption, given the massive opposition that exists within the US to the war. The way the budget request has been structured indicates that the new components have been discussed and a deal will be worked out—perhaps with some additional modifications—so Trump will likely once again get what he wants.
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The war against Iran, which was launched by the US and Israel on February 28, has been a debacle for Trump. It has not produced any of the results claimed by the White House or Pentagon at the outset: Iran’s government has not collapsed, the Strait of Hormuz remains under Tehran’s control and the Iranian nuclear program is intact.
The ceasefire and peace negotiations have been a disaster since Trump announced them and signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on June 17. Meanwhile, the Israeli military occupation of Lebanon continues.
12. Australian ruling elite fawns over alleged war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith
Since former special forces soldier Ben Roberts-Smith was charged with five war crimes, allegedly committed during the neo-colonial occupation of Afghanistan, he has been accorded extraordinary treatment by the political, legal and media establishment.
The official attitude to Roberts-Smith goes far beyond adhering to the presumption of innocence, to which he is legally entitled. It amounts to a brazen embrace of an individual accused of the most heinous violations of international law.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that after his arrest in April, Roberts-Smith was personally ushered into Sydney’s Silverwater prison by its governor, Patrick Aboud, as though he were a visiting dignitary.
Despite being accused of murder and earlier police allegations of witness interference prior to his being charged, Roberts-Smith was granted bail. Aboud personally escorted Roberts-Smith out and hatched a plan for him to leave via the back entrance with prison personnel stationed to shield him as he left, to escape media attention.
Roberts-Smith was at liberty in time for Anzac Day, the militarist national holiday, and attended a commemoration event on the Gold Coast where corporate reporters politely interviewed him.
The accord reached a new level this week, with the red carpet almost literally rolled out for Roberts-Smith by a quasi-government institution. The federally funded Australian War Memorial invited the alleged war criminal to its reopening on Tuesday evening, after a major renovation.
That posed a problem, however. While Roberts-Smith was rapidly released from prison, under conditions of a ballooning remand population, he is still subject to bail conditions that limit his movements.
Roberts-Smith’s lawyers duly applied for a variation of those conditions, to permit him to attend the event, even though there could hardly have been an argument that it was essential business. But despite that, the prosecutors, who rarely give an inch to people charged with far more minor offenses, did not oppose the application.
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The welcome mat for Roberts-Smith, whatever the ultimate outcome of his criminal trial, was a retrospective legitimization of the neo-colonial assault on Afghanistan.
More broadly, it was a signal of military hawkishness, under conditions where Labor is an active participant in a global war that is already underway. Labor has supported the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, was among the most enthusiastic supporters of Trump’s criminal assault on Iran and is completing Australia’s transformation into a frontline state for a US war against China.
At the same time, it greenlit the prosecution of David McBride, a former military lawyer who blew the whistle on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. While Roberts-Smith is feted, despite the charges against him, McBride is behind bars, accused, not of perpetrating crimes but of revealing them to the public.
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Amid the crisis of the opposition Liberal-Nationals and widespread hostility to the pro-business Labor government, the far-right populist One Nation party has come to prominence. Alongside its demonization of immigrants, One Nation has openly identified itself with Roberts-Smith, featuring placards of him during campaigns and alleging that the criminal charges amount to a betrayal.
One Nation’s most prominent supporter is the mining magnate Gina Rinehart, the country’s wealthiest individual. A longtime supporter of Roberts-Smith, she unveiled dwellings for homeless veterans in Perth yesterday. They are named “Ben Roberts-Smith Beach Houses.”
Other figures in a developing right-wing ecosystem, cultivated by sections of the ruling elite, have also come to Roberts-Smith’s defense.
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Ironically, the only component of the political establishment that appears to be torn by the Roberts-Smith saga is the opposition Liberal-National Coalition. But that is not by virtue of any opposition to war.
Instead, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, a far-right figure and one with leadership aspirations, is an antagonist of Roberts-Smith. Hastie, a former special forces operative, testified against Roberts-Smith, during the unsuccessful defamation actions brought by the latter against Nine publications that had accused him of war crimes.
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For the working class, the stampede to the right must be viewed as a warning. The political establishment in Australia, as internationally, is turning to authoritarianism, in line with the program of war and austerity determined by the crisis of the global capitalist system. Opposition to war and the defence of democratic rights can only go forward through a political movement directed against all the official parties and the profit system itself.
13. Senate hearing on US Postal Service lays out proposals for delivery cuts, post office closures
Postmaster General David Steiner, a former CEO of Waste Management who took over USPS last year, claimed that USPS is “out of cash” and that Congress must either pay for the universal service mandates imposed on the agency or allow management to “shed” them. In his written testimony, Steiner declared that USPS had accumulated nearly $31 billion in cumulative defaults through fiscal year 2025 and was “borrowing from our employees’ retirement funds to continue operations.”
In his oral testimony, Steiner identified the basic functions of the Postal Service themselves as the problem. USPS, he said, is required to deliver to more than 170 million addresses six days a week. As a result, he claimed, 84 percent of city delivery routes and 52 percent of rural delivery routes are “financially underwater,” while 58 percent of post offices—about 18,000 locations—lose money. “In a normal business,” he said, “you would adjust the routes or close the stores. We are not allowed to do either.”
This statement captures the significance of the hearing. Providing affordable mail to all Americans, no matter how remote and “unprofitable” the route, was a major achievement of the American Revolution. It was organized on the principle that communication, political information and participation in public life should be made accessible to all.
But now, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States, these rights are under sustained attack. The same hearing raised President Donald Trump’s illegal executive order directing USPS to refuse to provide mail-in voting for states that do not provide the federal government with voter registration lists. Under questioning from Peters, Steiner was asked whether USPS would still mail ballots from a state that refused to turn over its absentee voter list. “Under our proposed regulation, no,” Steiner answered, adding that USPS would tell the state it needed the “manifest” in order to match ballots to what was being sent out.
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The Republican chairman of the committee, Senator Rand Paul, gave the most explicit expression to the right-wing agenda. He denounced the conversion of 285,000 postal workers into career positions, claiming this raised pay and locked in pension and health obligations. He demanded a hiring freeze, increased use of private contractors, a halt to capital spending without a “clear return,” consolidation of facilities, and proof that the service mandate could be met “without permanent losses.”
During questioning, Paul pushed for even more drastic measures. He suggested that going from six-day to four-day delivery could save $6 billion, and floated making households pay extra if they wanted six-day service. “You could outsource,” he said. “Contractors cost less than government employees.” In his closing remarks, Paul told Steiner that USPS must “aggressively outsource and maintain the hiring freeze,” adding, “You can fix the bottom line by going to four-day delivery.”
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The postal union bureaucrats are trying to block all resistance to these historic attacks. In a series of livestreams, American Postal Workers Union President Jonathan Smith sought to cover up the scale of the proposals and dissipate opposition through Congressional letter-writing campaigns.
But the Senate hearing shows that Congress is the one preparing the attacks. This was the same basic dynamic as the House hearing in March, where the “financial future” of USPS was treated as a problem of modernization, revenue maximization and restructuring.
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The Senate hearing makes clear that appeals to Congress are a dead end. The defense of the post office requires the organization of postal workers independently of both management and the union bureaucracy. Rank-and-file committees should be built in every facility to oppose closures, outsourcing, delivery cuts, unsafe conditions and attacks on workers’ compensation, and to link postal workers with the communities that depend on the mail.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, one of the oldest democratic institutions in the country is being prepared for dismantling. Postal workers must take the lead in stopping this. The defense of the post office as a public service and democratic institution must become a rallying point for the entire working class against austerity, privatization and the dictatorship of profit.
14. Chile’s “missing” Haitian children: Kast manufactures a scandal to vilify migrants
On June 15, 2026, Biobío news site published a leaked preliminary report from the Comptroller General’s Office, dated April 14, 2026, setting off a political firestorm that has dominated Chilean public life. The report examined a sample of 105 Haitian children who had entered Chile between January and October 2025 under family reunification programs and found that 64 could not be located at their registered addresses.
It is part of a broader criminal investigation covering the years 2022 to 2025 into dozens of charter flights carrying hundreds of children. The investigation is looking into the potential bribery of public officials, all of them from the previous government headed by Gabriel Boric.
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A broader criminal investigation involves charter flight agencies, repeat adult escorts with no family ties to children, potential bribery of public officials and the unknown whereabouts of the 80 children who disappeared between Haiti and Santiago on a World Atlantic Airlines flight (WAL-801). On October 15 last year, WAL-801 departed Haiti with approximately 150 passengers, of whom around 124 were children aged 6 to 15. Its original itinerary was Miami–Port-au-Prince–Guayaquil–Santiago. It made an unscheduled stop at Lima’s Jorge Chávez International Airport, where the children were offloaded and redistributed onto a second aircraft, also designated WAL-801 and operated by Caribbean Sun Airlines. That replacement aircraft arrived in Santiago more than ten hours late, with 154 passengers total of whom only 44 were children.
But the damage to the Haitian community had been done and purposefully so. The Haitian community understood the nature of this campaign from the outset. Michel-Ange Joseph, a migrant rights activist, told El País: “This is destroying Haitian culture. We love our children. If there had been a kidnapping, we would have reported it. Now we’re afraid to leave our documents behind when we go out because any Haitian is a potential child trafficker—we’re viewed as suspects in the eyes of society.”
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The entire affair must be understood within the trajectory of Kast’s criminalization of immigrants as entry-point to a broader social counterrevolution. Aping the fascist in the White House, he has launched a program of border trenches and walls and a military deployment against migrants. Legislation has been introduced to criminalize irregular entry and extend administrative detention to 180 days, along with bills obligating health and education workers to report undocumented migrants to immigration authorities, and the stripping of access to healthcare, education and housing from undocumented immigrants and their children.
The Haitian children scandal serves as a political cover for Kast’s National Security agenda. He manufactured a crisis where a voiceless and disenfranchised sector of the population was used to justify the further moves to a police state under the emotionally charged allegations of child smuggling, child prostitution and organ trafficking.
Moreover, the Haitian children scandal erupted amid a growing political crisis for the Kast government; one poll recorded a disapproval rating of 30.4 percent in mid-June. The government’s flagship National Reconstruction Project of corporate tax cuts combined with savage public spending cuts and deregulation is facing popular opposition.
This is the context in which the reunification of Haitian children with their families is being weaponized for nefarious purposes. Kast’s sudden, feigned concern for the welfare of Haitian children is grotesque beyond measure. This is the same man who paraphrased Donald Trump by claiming that among immigrants were “criminals, hired assassins, members of international gangs, rapists and abusers,” and who has cited El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center as a model for Chile.
15. Kenya’s President William Ruto locks down Nairobi to prevent Gen-Z protests
The Kenyan government of President William Ruto moved to suppress demonstrations in Nairobi on Thursday.
Demonstrations had been called across social media and backed by sections of the capitalist opposition to commemorate those killed in the Gen Z-led protests of 2024 and 2025, and to demand justice for the killings, abductions and mass arrests by the government and the state.
Since taking office in 2022, Ruto has killed over 250 protesters, carried out thousands of arbitrary arrests, overseen the abduction of at least 74 protesters—23 of whom are still missing—deployed the army, banned protests, and mobilized state-funded goons to disrupt demonstrations. At least 200 protestors remain languishing in jail on trumped up charges.
The protests were anticipated to be large. To prevent this, thousands of police officers were deployed across the capital to lock down large sections of Nairobi.
The scale of the security operation revealed a government sitting atop a social powder keg. From as early as 2 a.m., police mounted roadblocks throughout Nairobi, choking routes into the Central Business District and severely restricting the movement of motorists and pedestrians. Businesses and restaurants in the city centre shut their doors, while police fired tear gas at groups attempting to gather.
Parliament Buildings were transformed into a fortified enclave by the General Service Unit (GSU), the paramilitary force established by the British colonial administration during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising. Long associated with the violent suppression of political opposition, the GSU has remained a central instrument of post-independence governments, used against workers’ strikes and popular rebellions.
Major roads around the complex were sealed off with layers of razor wire, barbed wire and metal barricades, while police vehicles and water-cannon trucks were stationed outside the precincts.
The operation was aimed at preventing any repetition of the 2024 uprising, when youth protesters stormed Parliament and set sections of it ablaze. Ruto’s government was determined that the building, which had become the symbolic center of the previous year’s revolt, would not again be approached by mass demonstrators.
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The government now confronts growing opposition to its alignment with the imperialist powers. This includes the proposed US-backed Ebola quarantine facility at Laikipia Air Base, Washington’s deal with Ruto for access to Kenya’s strategic mineral resources, and the expanding military and commercial partnership with France, including French interests in the port of Mombasa and wider Indian Ocean region.
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Workers and youth are not confronting Ruto alone, nor can the crisis be resolved by removing him and replacing him with another representative of the Kenyan ruling class. They confront the capitalist state, its police and military apparatus, the courts, the trade-union bureaucracy, the bourgeois opposition parties and the financial aristocracy whose wealth is protected through austerity, repression and the destruction of democratic rights. And behind Ruto stand the major imperialist powers.
The struggle must therefore be developed as one against capitalism and imperialism. Kenyan workers are part of a growing global struggle against austerity, inequality, war and police state rule. The way forward lies in building an international socialist movement, capable of uniting workers across Africa and internationally against the capitalist system.
16. UK Labour “left” prostrate before Burnham as he assembles cabinet for austerity and war
If any single image captured the Labour “left” as the cowardly wretches they are, it was McDonnell welling up while appearing in LBC Radio’s studio as he watched Burnham’s election victory speech.
17. Workers Struggles: Africa & Europe
Africa
Kenya:
Namibia:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Belgium:
Thousands of public sector workers in Brussels in one-day strike and protest against austerity
Cyprus:
Thousands of essential public sector workers strike over poverty wages
France and Germany:
IKEA workers strike for better pay and working conditions
A thousand Decathlon store workers strike for more pay and better conditions
Greece:
Stoppage by hospitality workers against low pay and intolerable working conditions in the tourism industry
Netherlands:
Rail workers in national strike against austerity attacks on state pensions and benefits
United Kingdom:
Staff at rail support company walk out over pay
Strikes by doctors in Northern Ireland over pay
Strike by teaching staff at London schools over pay
18. 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.
