Workers across the United States reacted furiously Tuesday to Trump’s
threat to “annihilate” the civilization of Iran, a country of more than
93 million people. While a two-week ceasefire was announced shortly
before his 8:00 p.m. deadline to destroy power plants, bridges and other
civilian infrastructure across the country, there is no reason to
believe this represents a step back from the brink. Previous rounds of
“negotiations” served only as a ruse for the United States to
assassinate top Iranian officials, including the February 28 murder of
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Regardless of what happens, Trump’s
utter lawlessness has already exposed the brutality of American
capitalism before workers across the world. It will contribute to a
growing radicalization in the working class, convincing workers of the
need for the socialist reconstruction of society.
The World Socialist Web Site reports responses from:
a Massachusetts nurse
a General Motors worker
a locked-out BP refinery worker in Whiting, Indiana
an engineer from Northern California
a United States Postal Service worker
a worker from Massachusetts
a California higher education employee
a student and member of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE)
a Nexteer auto parts worker
Thomas Adams, retired auto worker and author of the study UAW Incorporated: The Triumph of Capital
and a worker at General Motors’ Flint Truck Assembly
The 11th hour agreement... will be seen as a retreat by Trump.
His threats had failed to intimidate Iran, but they have intensified the
political crisis within his government.
*****
Trump’s threat to annihilate a civilization of 93 million
people—which by itself is a war crime—and the war as a whole have
produced a political crisis of historic proportions. The statements have
exposed the American government as an outlaw regime, headed by the
criminal underworld. It generated shock and revulsion throughout the
United States and internationally. Whatever remained of the supposed
moral authority of the United States has been permanently and
irreparably shattered, with the most far-reaching consequences for
American society.
Washington and its allies launched a war they
assumed could be decided by assassination and terror, but they seriously
miscalculated the level of resistance from the Iranian people. American
imperialism now confronts an insoluble dilemma. Escalation deepens the
stigma of criminality in a war that it cannot win and risks explosive
domestic consequences; retreat will be read internationally as a defeat
and will further destabilize the political situation inside the United
States.
The events of Tuesday underscore just how extraordinary the crisis has
become. Within the military, those tasked with executing Trump’s orders
were being placed in the position of carrying out operations universally
recognized as war crimes, amid growing unease that the armed forces
could be left “holding the bag” for whatever actions were taken.
*****
The official statement issued by the House Democratic leadership
Tuesday declared that “Donald Trump is completely unhinged” and that
“The House must come back into session immediately and vote to end this
reckless war of choice in the Middle East before Donald Trump plunges
our country into World War III.”
Just over one week ago, more
than 8 million people took to the streets in “No Kings” protests against
Trump. While opposition to the war against Iran was a dominant
sentiment among those participating, the Democratic Party organizers
systematically excluded any serious reference to the war against Iran,
let alone warnings about “World War III.”
Now, the Democrats
write that the world is on the brink of world war, which would
inevitably involve the use of nuclear weapons. Their appeal, however, is
not to the population but to the Republican Party. “It’s time for House
Republicans,” the statement concluded, “to put patriotic duty over
party loyalty and join Democrats in stopping this madness.”
*****
The Democrats appeal to Trump’s better judgment and to Republican
“patriotism,” while refusing to mobilize the immense opposition that
exists in the population, because such a mobilization would immediately
raise issues they fear far more than Trump.
*****
If the ruling class confronts an insoluble dilemma in foreign policy,
it faces a corresponding insoluble dilemma in domestic policy. It has
brought the political underworld to power, embodied in Trump, to
prosecute global war and social counterrevolution—policies that cannot
be carried out through legal or democratic methods. But the attempt to
impose them is detonating the very social forces the ruling class fears
most: the growth of explosive class conflict within the United States.
All
factions of the bourgeoisie are unalterably opposed to such a movement
from below, because it threatens not merely a particular administration
but the foundations of capitalist rule itself. The response of the
ruling class will not be to retreat but to escalate and to intensify
domestic repression.
Whatever the immediate developments, the war
is generating consequences the political establishment cannot control
and from which it cannot escape. The crisis cannot be resolved through
the normal mechanisms of the corporate-controlled political system.
The Socialist Equality Party insists that the decisive issue is the
independent intervention of the working class as a social and political
force. The two-week ceasefire, if it lasts, will be a period of
escalating political crisis. This period must be used to build mass
working class opposition to the war and the Trump administration.
[The 76th Berlin International Film Festival–Part 8]
The documentary Scenario (Szenario) by Berlin-born
Marie Wilke, screened in the Forum section at this year’s Berlin film
festival, documents, in fact, the normalization of German militarism—in a
sense that its director did not necessarily intend.
The film
follows the activities of the German army (Bundeswehr) at the Altmark
military training area in the Colbitz-Letzlinger Heide [heath] in
Saxony-Anhalt—a 232-square-kilometer site that ranks among Germany’s
largest training areas. In the north of the site lies Schnöggersburg,
Europe’s biggest training center for urban combat: a ghost town of
exposed concrete, complete with checkpoints, hotels, a slum, a subway
station and a religious building.
Wilke’s film shows students on guided tours of the area, along with
swearing-in ceremonies, street festivals for the local population and
staged press events. The director’s camera observes; it does not comment
or judge. She observes in the Berlinale press kit: “The film does not
attempt to make a statement or construct a narrative. It consists of
fragments; the scenes stand on their own. I was interested in what
becomes visible in popular vernacular language regarding Germany’s
relationship to war.”
The result is a film that shows the
Bundeswehr exactly as it wants to be seen—not because Wilke intended it
that way, but because the decision to let the Bundeswehr speak produces
precisely this effect.
*****
It is revealing what Wilke herself says about the film’s funding
history. In one interview, she reports that the project was
“unfinanceable” in 2015: “There was no hook and no interest.” Now,
however, following the official “turning point,” funding “came together
pretty quickly.” Particularly striking is the funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM)—a state that is rearming also promotes the culture intended to pave the way for it.
Scenario
does not gloss over the site’s Nazi history. Recruits are
matter-of-factly instructed by their superiors that Hitler’s Wehrmacht
established its testing grounds here, that villages were forcibly
evacuated. At the same time, the film argues the Wehrmacht is not part
of the Bundeswehr’s identity. That is the official propaganda lie. And
the film fails to ask the question that should follow: What is the
significance of the fact that a new training infrastructure has been
built on the same ground today by Rheinmetall—the same corporation that
supplied the Wehrmacht?
*****
Marie Wilke made this film with honest curiosity and technical
precision. But honest curiosity is no political shield. When Wilke says
she had “real images of war in her mind” while filming and wonders “in
what context I see them”—then “context” is precisely what is missing
from her film.
€100 billion in special funds, additional war
credits of up to one trillion euros, €140 million for Schnöggersburg
alone, conscription, the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall as a state
partner, the renewed drive of German imperialism toward the East, and
the global resurgence of German militarism. A policy rejected by the
vast majority of the population, but supported by all of the main political parties, who therefore gratefully accept any form of approval or supposedly “neutral” standpoint.
More than 850 BP oil workers remain locked out at the company’s
Whiting, Indiana refinery, the largest in the Midwest. After workers
overwhelmingly rejected an insulting fourth offer negotiated by BP and
the United Steelworkers Local 7-1, the company locked them out on March
19.
That agreement would have led to 100 fewer union workers and
broader use of contract workers, $8-$10 hourly wage cuts, the closure of
the environmental department and attacks on seniority and
implementation of AI with no job protections. Worse still, the six-year
agreement would have removed the facility from the national pattern
bargaining timeline, creating a precedent for the oil companies to
divide and conquer workers one refinery at a time.
*****
One Whiting worker told the WSWS, “They will pay more than double the
current operator wages for strikebreakers, yet say they cannot afford to
pay our nationally bargained pay increases everyone else agreed to pay.
It’s union busting, and it’s as simple as that.”
*****
After months of negotiations and a 98 percent strike authorization
vote, Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) locked out 1,700
members of the United Steelworkers Locals 12775 and 13796 on April 2.
The lockout came after the union unanimously rejected the company’s
fourth “last, best and final” offer. NIPSCO stated the lockout “will
remain in place until the Union agrees to the Company’s last, best and
final offer.”
NIPSCO is the largest natural gas distribution
company in the state, and the second largest electric distribution
company. Its parent company NiSource has reported a full-year net income
of $905.2 million. Yet NIPSCO is using the lockout to force through
concessions that will lower living standards, undermine safety, and gut
union job security. NIPSCO President Vince Parisi claimed the offer “is
one of the strongest proposals in our history.” The company has already
announced it will continue operating with “trained non-represented
employees, qualified contractors and support from the company’s family
of companies.”
*****
While USW officials promote local Democrats, workers are in a
struggle against both big business parties and the corporations they
defend. Workers are facing a relentless attack on jobs, wages, benefits
and social provisions at every level in the US, and old forms of
repression are being revived.
South Chicago and northwest
Indiana have been particularly hard hit. According to a recent report,
employment in northwest Indiana’s primary steel mills has fallen from
65,000 workers at its peak to roughly 9,000 today. Between 1990 and
2017, jobs at Gary Works, ArcelorMittal and Indiana Harbor in Northwest
Indiana declined by 58 percent. The industry, which has not seen
significant updates to production technology and methods in about 100
years, loses about 500 jobs per year in the region.
Steelworkers’
proud history of struggle stands in the sharpest contrast to this
destruction of jobs and productive infrastructure by the parasitic
financial aristocracy.
On Memorial Day in 1937, Chicago police
opened fire on unarmed workers demonstrating against Republic Steel in
the midst of the “Little Steel” strike of 1937, killing 10 people and
wounding dozens more. Most of the workers were shot in the back as they
fled. Another 28 were injured by police clubbing, nine of them
permanently disabled. The workers, members of the Steelworkers
Organizing Committee, were demonstrating for recognition of their union
which would later become the USW (United Steelworkers).
The USW
bureaucracy long ago abandoned these traditions. For decades it has
worked as a tool of corporate management overseeing the destruction of
workers’ jobs, pensions and working conditions. BP and NIPSCO long ago
took the measure of the USW apparatus and are now locking out roughly
2,500 workers in northern Indiana at the same time.
*****
BP and NIPSCO workers—with the support of workers at US Steel’s Gary
Works, Cleveland Cliffs, Arcelor and autoworkers at Ford Assembly
Stamping, Dakkota, Flex-n-Gate and other USW and UAW facilities—must
mobilize independently against this blatant strikebreaking that has been
aided and abetted by the USW bureaucracy.
The tragic death of Danhao Wang, a brilliant Chinese postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Michigan (U-M), is the direct and fatal
consequence of a vicious xenophobic campaign of harassment and
intimidation orchestrated by the federal government and enabled by the
university administration. The suicide of this young scientist,
following his interrogation by FBI agents, must be understood as a
homicide in a moral and political sense—the foreseeable result of state
terror and institutional complicity.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at U-M
and the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) demand that all those responsible
for this tragedy be held accountable, from the federal agents and Trump
administration officials who directed the persecution of Wang and other
Chinese researchers, to the U-M Board of Regents and interim president
Domenico Grasso.
*****
Danhao Wang took his own life on the night of March 19, jumping from
an upper floor within the G.G. Brown Laboratory building just one day
after being subjected to hostile interrogation by federal agents. For
more than two weeks, a conspiracy of silence reigned over Ann Arbor,
Michigan and the nation. The U-M administration did not even inform the
student body and faculty of this tragedy. An internal email not naming
Wang was sent to faculty and staff of the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science Department on March 20, but no official communications
were sent to the broader university community. The Michigan Daily student newspaper published nothing on the event. On April 2, the World Socialist Web Site was the first to report the identity of Wang in English-language media.
Now
this cover-up has collapsed. The tragedy has become an international
incident, forcing the local corporate media to finally break their
silence. With the Detroit News featuring the story on its April 6 front page, the university and the political establishment can no longer hide this crime.
The
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Consulate in
Chicago have issued statements and lodged diplomatic protests. They
correctly state that Wang’s death is the result of unprovoked harassment
and political intimidation by US law enforcement under the guise of
“national security.” They are demanding a full explanation and an
investigation, which the US government and the U-M administration are
seeking to avoid.
*****
Danhao Wang is a casualty of a nationwide dragnet targeting Chinese
scholars on unscientific and fabricated charges of terrorism, espionage,
and smuggling. This is a politically motivated witch-hunt designed to
terrorize a targeted demographic. The charges against previous U-M
researchers Yunqing Jian, Chengxuan Han, Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang, and Indiana University researcher Youhuang Xiang, were utterly without merit, as those responsible well knew.
*****
The campaign has been driven from the top by fascist political
operatives of the Trump administration. Former Attorney General Pam
Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have publicly advanced the narrative
of widespread Chinese “sabotage” and “espionage” in US universities.
Patel, in particular, sought to stoke anti-Chinese hysteria with
inflammatory social media posts and statements framing routine
scientific exchange as a national security threat. He falsely claimed
that the nonliving plasmid DNA in Xiang’s case was the pathogenic
bacteria E. coli.
This is a political operation against
immigrants and Chinese scholars, an assault on democratic rights, an
effort to whip up national chauvinism and racism. It is part of the
erection of a presidential dictatorship and the preparation for war
against China, a nuclear power.
The hands of the U-M administration are stained with blood. The role
of interim president Domenico Grasso is particularly despicable. A week
after the death of Danhao Wang, Grasso, who had suppressed the news of
his death, boasted before a hearing of the House Committee on Education
and the Workforce of U-M’s support for the witch-hunt against Chinese
researchers.
In a display of subservience to the national security
state, he detailed the university’s “team player” collaboration with
federal intelligence agencies to “safeguard our research” from alleged
foreign adversaries. The chair of this committee, far-right Michigan
congressman Tim Walberg,
praised Grasso’s cooperation. To protect its institutional funding, the
U-M administration and the Board of Regents willingly handed over their
own students and researchers to Kash Patel’s FBI.
*****
The defense of democratic rights and the opposition to imperialist
war cannot be entrusted to the university administration, the courts, or
any faction of the capitalist political establishment. The only social
force capable of stopping this descent into barbarism is the
international working class, mobilized independently and in opposition
to all the institutions of the ruling financial oligarchy.
The
IYSSE and the SEP are taking the lead in this fight. We call for the
immediate formation of a committee of U-M students, faculty, campus
workers and researchers to conduct a full, independent investigation and
mobilize workers and students at U-M and beyond.
We raise the following demands:
A
full independent investigation: The U-M administration and federal
authorities must immediately release all documents, communications and
footage regarding the harassment and interrogation of Danhao Wang.
Hold
the perpetrators accountable: The Republican and Democratic officials
spearheading the anti-Chinese witch-hunt must be driven from office and
prosecuted; the federal agents involved in the hostile interrogation,
along with the U-M officials who facilitated the environment of terror,
including President Grasso, must be identified, fired and held
accountable.
End the witch-hunt: All investigations,
surveillance and harassment of Chinese scholars based on fabricated
“national security threats” must cease immediately.
Restore the
victims’ rights: Drop all charges against those researchers who have
been victimized and deported and offer the restoration of their resident
rights and their university positions.
ICE off campus and out
of our communities: An immediate end to the terrorizing of immigrants
and citizens alike at airports, hospitals and universities. Abolish ICE
and the Border Patrol.
Stop the drive to World War III: End the provocations against China and the war against Iran.
Workers at the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado returned to
work Tuesday after the United Food and Commercial Workers suddenly
canceled their powerful three-week strike without any progress at the
bargaining table.
The Greeley JBS plant occupies a pivotal role in
the food processing industry, processing more than 6 percent of all
beef production in the United States. The industry is highly
concentrated: Four conglomerates, including JBS, Tyson, Cargill and
National Beef account for 85 percent of all beef sold in the United
States. JBS and Tyson also dominate the chicken and pork industries,
with the two alone accounting for more than 50 percent of all US chicken
meat production. JBS and Tyson along with Smithfield and Hormel account
for nearly 70 percent of the US pork market.
Workers at the
Greeley beef plant receive abysmally low wages while safety procedures
are routinely flouted at the plant. In the last six years alone, JBS has
been fined for 184 health and safety-related offenses, 40
employment-related offenses and has been found to have violated 85
environmental regulations as well. Six workers died in the first year of
the coronavirus pandemic and a seventh died in an industrial accident
in 2021.
Despite such consistently high numbers, the majority of
such incidents go unreported with workers often dealing with severe
injuries and management maltreatment in silence.
During multiple visits to the picket line by World Socialist Web Site reporters,
strikers relayed horror stories of their fellow workers losing limbs or
suffering other devastating injuries. One young worker related how the
skin on his hand was peeled away after getting caught in machinery,
while another showed a terrible chemical burn on his skin.
Such
incidents happen on a near daily basis, but management refuses to halt
production to care for the injured workers. Line speeds are kept
absurdly high to increase output. In order to maintain these speeds,
workers are often denied bathroom breaks, with stories of workers
soiling themselves on the line a common occurrence.
JBS was the largest single donor to Trump’s second inaugural committee,
giving half a million dollars to the would-be dictator. Their efforts
were rewarded when US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced
waivers to individual plants in March 2025 allowing them to exceed
regulated speeds. Rollins justified this with the lying claim that
“extensive research has confirmed no direct link between processing
speeds and workplace injuries.”
The press release was accompanied by the announcement that the federal
government’s Food Safety and Inspection Service would no longer require
plants to submit worker safety data, all but insuring that the resultant
increase in worker injuries would be kept secret.
*****
The Greeley strike was called after the union and JBS had reached a
national agreement preventing union-sponsored sympathy strikes among the
14 plants covered in the agreement, which together employed 26,000
meatpacking workers. This included the JBS meatpacking plant in Cactus,
Texas, which went on to process diverted beef from Greeley during the
strike, forcing Texas meatpacking workers to scab on their brothers and
sisters in Colorado.
UFCW Local 7, which covers grocery and
agricultural workers across the greater Colorado and Wyoming regions
including the Swift Beef plant, had also shut down a powerful strike of
Colorado grocery workers at the King Soopers and Safeway chains last year.
At
the Greeley plant, Local 7 even allowed scabs to cross picket lines in
the midst of the strike so that some production could be kept going and
to make the plant ready for workers once the union called off the
strike. Asked by WSWS reporters about why scabs were being allowed into
the plant without resistance, one UFCW official replied that they were
“not scabs but ‘replacement workers.’”
Despite these efforts, the
Greeley strike put workers in a powerful position. US cattle numbers had
already hit a 75-year low prior to the strike and efforts to divert
product and keep production running at the plant only resulted in
recouping a small fraction of its normal output.
*****
As a result of the UFCW’s sudden surrender, however, JBS has not
improved its meager offer by a single cent, staying at the initial 60
cent per hour increase the first year followed by 30 percent in the next
two years of the contract. Many workers on the picket lines believe
that even these small amounts will largely be absorbed by increased
healthcare costs. This is from a company that made $415 million in
profits in the fourth quarter of 2025 and has an overall market
capitalization of $18.7 billion.
*****
Greeley workers should be under no illusions that a major sellout
agreement is underway which will address none of their concerns for
decent compensation or safe conditions. The UFCW bureaucracy’s primary
concern is to maintain their highly paid conditions and perks as payment
received for successfully policing their own members. Local 7 president
Kim Cordova herself made nearly $250,000 in 2024, nearly six times the
salary of a typical Swift worker and her compensation has doubtless
increased since.
Instead, Greeley workers will only be able to
take the struggle forward if they form their own rank-and-file
committees independent of the bankrupt union apparatus. The strike
itself has found broad support including that of healthcare workers in
Greeley who issued their own statement supporting the Swift workers’ struggle. Similarly, JBS workers in Brazil issued statements of support last month.
Canada Post confirmed last week that, on the orders of the Mark
Carney-led Liberal government, it is moving ahead with “consultations”
on implementing a far-reaching restructuring plan. Dictated by the
federal Liberal government, the transformation of the postal service
into an Amazon-style employer of precarious “gig workers” will result in
the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs.
The announcement
marks a decisive escalation in the ruling class’ effort to remake the
Crown corporation into a hyper-exploitative, profit-driven logistics
operation. Their goal is to use the restructuring of Canada Post as the
spearhead of a broader assault on public sector workers and the working
class as a whole.
Reports indicate the government has already
authorized the implementation of the initial restructuring proposals
unveiled in September 2025 and ordered Canada Post to return within
another 45 days with a further round of “transformation” measures. This
sets in place a rolling process of continuous cuts and restructuring,
dictated directly by the big business Liberal government, in which one
wave of attacks prepares another.
Behind demands for
“modernization” and “financial stabilization,” the measures outlined
last September and now being enforced entail a program of social
devastation: the elimination of home mail delivery, the closure or
sell-off of rural and suburban post offices, the scrapping of the
five-day delivery standard, shifting non-urgent mail from air to slower
ground transport, and the expansion of precarious weekend parcel work.
These measures will destroy Canada Post as a universal public service
and turn those workers who remain into a precarious, low-wage workforce.
The
mandated consultations, to begin with the Canadian Union of Postal
Workers (CUPW) and then extend to municipal leaders and other
“stakeholders,” are a fraud. The essential decisions have already been
taken behind closed doors by Canada Post management and the federal
government. Management’s restructuring blueprint, submitted late last
year to Ottawa, remains hidden from workers and the public alike. Even
the corporatist “partners” in the leadership of the union bureaucracy
have not been granted access to the secret plan worked out between
management and the government. Its implementation will require shredding
the current Canadian Postal Service Charter, which mandates universal
door-to-door delivery.
*****
Former Canada Post executive and Carleton University business
professor Ian Lee has repeatedly insisted that up to 40,000 jobs, out of
roughly 55,000 current workers, must be cut. This would reduce the
workforce to a skeletal operation focused on rural and remote delivery.
Canada Post’s reported losses, totaling more than $5 billion since 2018,
are being cynically invoked to justify this social counterrevolution,
even as the government of former central banker Prime Minister Mark
Carney lavishes tens of billions on the military and corporate subsidies
and tax cuts.
The latest government announcement comes as postal
workers prepare to vote between April 20 and May 30 on concessionary
contracts that will pave the way for the imposition of the restructuring
plan. They will at the same time be voting on strike action.
As the World Socialist Web Sitehas explained,
the two agreements covering the urban and rural and suburban
units—endorsed by a majority of the CUPW bargaining committee—accept
management’s core demands for “flexibility,” expanded part-time and
weekend work, wages that lag inflation, and the erosion of longstanding
protections. They are, in substance, a framework for dismantling secure,
full-time postal employment and aligning working conditions with the
requirements of the restructuring.
A minority faction within the
union leadership, headed by CUPW President Jan Simpson, has postured as
opposing the deal by calling for a “No” vote. This maneuver is a
transparent attempt to distance the bureaucracy from the consequences of
a sellout it has itself facilitated. Simpson has for well over two
years led CUPW as it has confined the opposition among rank-and-file
workers to the straitjacket of the “collective bargaining” system. She
oversaw the sabotage of two national strikes, above all by
systematically isolating postal workers on the picket line by refusing
to call for a broader mobilization of the working class in defence of
public services and worker rights.
*****
By insisting that workers remain confined within the pro-employer
“collective bargaining” framework, the CUPW bureaucracy is blocking any
struggle against what is fundamentally a political offensive by the
Liberal government. Opposing the destruction of Canada Post requires a
political fight against the government’s austerity and war agenda, a
fight which the union apparatus rejects.
The government and
management have made clear they will proceed with restructuring
regardless of what is said in the review or the outcome of the contract
vote. The agreements are designed to secure labor peace and impose the
initial concessions required for the transformation plan. A “No” vote
combined with a strike mandate, while vitally necessary, will not stop
the government-management assault.
*****
The Carney government’s assault on public sector workers is
accelerating. It has issued thousands of layoff notices across federal
departments, including in healthcare and scientific research, while
preparing massive increases in military spending and corporate handouts.
The attack on postal workers is a test case for the dismantling of
public services across the board.
This agenda is being pursued
with the full support of the trade union bureaucracy, which has for
decades pursued “partnership” with government and business interests.
Across sectors, unions are enforcing concessions and suppressing
resistance in the name of “competitiveness” and “fiscal responsibility.”
Under the banner of “Team Canada,” they are also pitting Canadian
workers against their class brothers and sisters in the US, where
workers confront the same attacks on their democratic and social rights
at the hands of the fascist Trump administration.
Workers must
take matters into their own hands. They can do this by building sections
of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) in every postal
office, depot and sorting plant across Canada. Established in 2024, the
PWRFC provides the means to unite workers across workplaces, break
through the information blackout imposed by CUPW and Canada Post, and
develop a common independent strategy.
In response to Carney’s wrecking operation, the central demand must
be the transformation of Canada Post under workers’ democratic control
into a genuinely public service, run to meet social needs, not profit.
This means defending universal door-to-door delivery, expanding
services, and guaranteeing secure, well-paid jobs. Technological
advances must be used to improve working conditions and service, not
eliminate jobs.
Postal workers cannot fight alone. Their struggle
must be linked with that of workers across Canada and internationally,
including postal and logistics workers confronting similar attacks. This
requires a conscious break with nationalist and pro-capitalist politics
and the adoption of an international socialist perspective.
On February 27, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth released a memorandum,
“Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities with American Values,”
announcing the revamping of the US military’s Professional Military
Education (PME) program “to ensure alignment with the warrior ethos,
National Defense Strategy, and American values.”
The memo marks a major step in the Trump administration’s drive to
mold the US military into a US version of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, based on
an ultra-nationalist and fascistic ideology.
According to the
summary statement released by the Department of War (DoW), “the
Department is discontinuing all graduate-level PME fellowships and
certificate programs with Harvard University” starting in the 2026-2027
academic year. The statement goes on to say that the DoW will end its
“legacy Senior Service College Fellowships (SSCFs) at Ivy League and
other universities that similarly diminish critical thinking, have
significant adversary involvement, or fail to deliver rigorous education
grounded in realism.”
*****
The decision to sever PME links with Harvard flows directly from the
Trump administration’s broader political and financial campaign to
subordinate higher education to the state and punish institutions that
resist its ideological line. Harvard, Columbia and other former-PME
institutions, despite their suppression of opposition among students,
faculty and staff to the genocide in Gaza during the Biden
administration, found themselves at odds with Trump’s demands to
escalate the on-campus crackdown on democratic rights.
Harvard’s
legal challenge to the administration’s move to freeze $2.2 billion in
federal grants and the public dispute over campus protests provided a
pretext for escalation. Trump threatened an additional $1 billion in
funding cuts and the elimination of the university’s tax‑exempt status.
The
discontinuation of Harvard’s PME status and other DoW-linked programs
is part of the Trump administration’s punishment of Harvard and other
universities that failed to comply with sufficient speed with its
fascistic demands.
*****
The remolding of the PME system is part of the Trump administration’s
reorientation of the US military and intelligence apparatus on an overly
fascist basis so as to carry out US imperialism’s wars of
extermination, as in Iran, and the violent suppression of workers and
youth at home. In this, the Democratic Party, which dominates the U-M
Board of Regents and most elite private universities, is complicit.
On April 2, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters announced the
signing of a new Defence and Security Declaration with the government of
the Cook Islands, which he said would establish “a shared certainty”
about the “special constitutional relationship” between the two
countries.
The declaration cements New Zealand’s colonial domination over the
Pacific archipelago. It gives the NZ military unimpeded access to the
land, territory and airspace of the Cook Islands, including its vast
exclusive economic zone covering an area of 1.96 million square kilometers, roughly the size of Mexico.
The Cook Islands, with a
population of just 15,000, is ostensibly self-governing, but it remains
part of the colonial Realm of New Zealand, which also includes the
islands of Niue and Tokelau. The new declaration reaffirms that the Cook
Islands is obligated to share any information with NZ relating to defense or security. It gives Wellington the right to veto any agreement
between the Cook Islands and another country on the grounds of “defense and security” of the Realm.
The agreement brings to an end a
year-long rift between the two governments, after the Cook Islands
signed commercial deals with China without consulting New Zealand
beforehand. The NZ National Party-led government retaliated by blocking
$30 million worth of aid in June and November 2025, which is vital for
the functioning of basic public services, including health and
education, in the islands. This was nothing less than an attempt to destabilize the Cook Islands government led by Prime Minister Mark
Brown.
The cancellation of aid was accompanied by a belligerent
and hysterical media campaign that accused China of attempting to “take
over” the Cook Islands and establish a military presence there. One New Zealand Herald columnist even suggested that NZ troops should invade the territory.
In
fact, the Cook Islands-China deal centred on maritime exploration,
transport and civilian infrastructure development. While the New
Zealand, Australian and US militaries have a heavy presence throughout
the Pacific, China does not.
This anti-China campaign—which was backed by the opposition Labour Party
and its allies—fed into demands for New Zealand to build up its
military forces and integrate further into the aggressive US-led
preparations for war against China.
*****
The Pacific experienced extremely bloody battles during World War II.
Now the region is once again being placed on the front lines of
preparations for a catastrophic US-led war against China, the main
economic and strategic rival of US imperialism.
Meanwhile, people
across the Pacific continue to suffer from poverty, soaring prices and a
lack of public services, and vulnerability to climate change-related
disasters. Countries such as Fiji and PNG are recording high levels of
drug addiction, as well as HIV, diabetes and other diseases. All of this
is the legacy of more than a century of colonial domination, which is
continuing and becoming ever more entrenched.
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation is visiting Sri Lanka
from late March to early April to ensure the government’s continued
adherence to the IMF’s austerity agenda amid a deepening global crisis
triggered by the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.
The
IMF mission is expected to conclude the combined fifth and sixth reviews
on April 9 with a “positive assessment,” allowing for the disbursement
of about $US700 million in two tranches of the Extended Fund Facility
(EFF). This endorsement is a clear indication of the government’s strict
adherence to IMF dictates, which impose the full burden of the crisis
on the working class and rural masses.
The IMF delegation met with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake on
April 2 to discuss “Sri Lanka’s ongoing economic reform program and
progress.” The president has proven every bit as ruthless as his
predecessor President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who negotiated the $3
billion IMF emergency loan in 2023. The country defaulted on foreign
debts in 2022 amid an acute foreign exchange crisis sparking soaring
inflation and shortages of food and fuel that triggered mass protests
and strikes.
The IMF commended President Dissanayake, noting that
“the country has transitioned toward a more resilient footing through
the achievement of growth targets, improved revenue management, and the
strengthening of foreign reserves.”
Referring to the Iran war, the
delegation lauded the government for “managing the situation
prudently,” including measures taken to address mounting pressures on
fuel prices and the energy sector. In response, Dissanayake, proving
himself an obedient servant of finance capital, boasted that “Sri Lanka
has met all targets set under the program and has reached a position
of relative stability.”
The IMF’s praise confirms that the ruling Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) is carrying out the demands
of international finance capital to the letter. The measures include
restructuring and privatizing some 400 state-owned enterprises,
including the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), prioritizing debt
repayments, adopting market-driven exchange rate policies, and
implementing price-cost recovery—namely, reducing or eliminating price
subsidies for energy and utilities.
*****
The entire political establishment—including opposition parties and
trade union leaderships—supports the IMF program which is having a
devastating impact on the social conditions of working people. On April
1, the opposition parties made a token appeal for the government to
remove taxes on fuel to reduce prices. The opposition Samagi Jana
Balavegaya (SJB) leader Sajith Premadasa, unlike on previous occasions,
did not meet the IMF delegation in a cynical attempt to distance himself
from its austerity demands.
The only viable alternative is the mobilization of the working class independent of the capitalist parties
and treacherous trade unions that support the IMF’s austerity agenda.
The Socialist Equality Party calls on workers to break from the trade
unions and build independent action committees in workplaces and neighborhoods to fight for their social and democratic rights. We
advocate the repudiation of all foreign debts, oppose all privatization and call for the banks and big business to be placed under the
democratic control of the working class as part of the socialist reorganization of society.
The war in Iran has also plunged Italy and other European nations into a diplomatic crisis with the Trump Administration. In recent days, US President Trump has repeatedly attacked both European allies and NATO for their limited support for his unbridled war.
Meloni responded, “Even after Sigonella [ajoint Italian-U.S. military base in Sicily], what are our relations with the
United States? I continue to believe that on the geopolitical level,
Europe does not have much to gain from a divergence with the United
States. However, our job is above all to defend our national interests.
And when we disagree, we have to say it. And this time we disagree.”
*****
While all Italian political parties hypocritically invoke Article 11
of the Italian Constitution, which rejects war as an instrument of
national policy, Italy remains deeply integrated into the US-led war
machine. It hosts a dense network of bases, logistical hubs and
intelligence facilities central to US military operations across the
Mediterranean and Middle East.
The Italian coalition government’s official line, “We are not at war,
and we do not wish to enter one,” is one of “national autonomy”. It
proclaims that this “is not our war.” However, Italy is supplying the
Arab oil sheikdoms in the Persian Gulf with weapons to counter Iranian
retaliatory attacks and is assessing further requests as they are made.
Italy’s
investment in the Gulf is a two-way $50 billion strategic corridor:
Italy invests through its energy, defense and industrial corporations,
while Gulf sovereign wealth funds invest in Italy’s AI, infrastructure
and clean-energy sectors. This has become central to Meloni’s economic
policy. The largest Gulf partners are the United Arab Emirates,
estimated at $40 billion, Saudi Arabia, estimated at $10 billion, and
Qatar, estimated at $8 to $10 billion.
Meloni’s trip to the Gulf
is both a diplomatic mission and an exercise in domestic political
damage control. Her government faces mounting unpopularity after last
month’s failed national referendum, while anger continues to grow over
its unequivocal support for the Gaza genocide. The widening war against
Iran is fueling hostility among workers and youth not only in Italy but
across all the NATO countries.
The Committee for Public Education urges all public school teachers
and workers in Tasmania to reject the offer published last Thursday by
the Australian Education Union (AEU) and the state Liberal government.
Make
no mistake: By calling off its work bans the AEU is signalling its
willingness to force this offer through. The union officials are
preparing a massive sellout that does nothing to address the enormous
crisis wracking public education.
Over the past year, Tasmanian teachers have staged repeated
stoppages, including rolling regional strikes, half day actions and,
just late last month, a series of full day walkouts, expressing anger at
decades of cuts, crushing workloads and real wage erosion.
The latest walkouts in Tasmania coincided with a statewide strike by
Victorian teachers which directly poses the need for unified action
across the two states and nationally. But the AEU has repeatedly acted
to limit, isolate and channel the unrest into narrow, staged actions and
closed door negotiations that prepare sellouts rather than a genuine
fight.
*****
Having let teachers blow off steam, the AEU is now working to shut down
any escalation of industrial action amid rising unrest and opposition.
Overseen by both Labor and Liberal governments, at federal and state
level, and enforced by the union bureaucracy, the decades-long assault
on the public education system is being deepened.
*****
Tasmanian public schools have the second worst staff shortages in
Australia, with the AEU reporting that 82 percent of schools in the
state face critical staff shortages. Staff shortages lead to high levels
of stress and burnout for other staff and increased workloads, with 83
percent of teacher respondents saying they have taught split or merged
classes.
The government’s offer merely outlines that full-time
teachers will receive an additional half an hour a week planning time,
rising to 40 minutes a week next year. The union has boasted of the
proposed meeting caps, to be phased in over three years. But these
measures are to be implemented by local agreements, opening the way for
staff being pressured to “agree” to more onerous arrangements.
Likewise,
the promise to employ seven more school psychologists to service 185
public schools with approximately 57,000 students is far from the mass
hiring and permanent resourcing levels educators need to reduce
workloads and ensure safety, and the same goes for a proposal to have
just over 8 full-time equivalent staff to implement a Violence in
Schools action plan.
*****
The AEU’s role must be recognized for what it is. Far from being
defenders of teachers, union leaders have been integrated into the
ruling establishment. The AEU leadership has been complicit in the
driving down of conditions and wages of educators for years. Across
Australia, union bureaucracies have subordinated members’ struggles to
negotiations with state governments, limiting action to token stoppages
and then bargaining away workers’ demands in secret.
While
governments claim there is no money for pay rises or to address staffing
shortages, billions of dollars are being channeled into preparations
for war, including through the AUKUS agreement. The US-led war against
Iran has exposed the entire political establishment in Australia as
supporters and participants in an illegal war that threatens to plunge
the world into World War III. Regardless of whether Liberal or Labor are
in office, capitalist governments of every ilk are committed to
corporate profit and war over social need.
Three workers were killed and one injured in a horrific accident at
the Çolakoğlu Metallurgy plant in Dilovası, Kocaeli on Sunday, April 5.
The injured worker was reportedly discharged from hospital on Tuesday.
The plant’s section manager, an engineer, and an occupational health and
safety specialist have been arrested.
Three maintenance workers
and one subcontracted cleaning worker, who were performing routine
maintenance on top of an arc furnace, plunged approximately 10 meters when the rotating platform they were standing on collapsed. It appears
the workers had been sent up onto the platform without any safety
measures in place—most notably, without lifelines.
*****
The events that claim the lives of countless workers every year in
Türkiye and around the world are not accidents. They are murders
produced by the capitalist profit system. The millions of workers who go
to work each morning to support their families may not know that the
conditions awaiting them could end their lives. But corporations, the
union apparatus, the establishment parties and the state apparatus as a
whole are fully aware of which legally mandated safety measures are not
being taken at their workplaces, and of what the consequences may be.
Behind every link in this chain of killings—stretching back decades—lies
a safety violation ignored for the sake of profit, a maintenance job
never carried out, and a sentence never handed down by any court.
The
necessary lessons from decades of experience must be drawn. Bringing
these killings to an end and ensuring safe working conditions cannot be
left to the good will of corporations. Appeals to the authorities or
faith in the courts will likewise prove futile. In the Soma massacre
of 2014, which claimed 301 miners’ lives, the mine owner served only
eight days in prison for each worker killed, while not a single official
faced any punishment.
Workers must intervene against corporate
indifference, official negligence and willful blindness, and union
complicity. To do so, independent rank-and-file committees must be built
in every factory as part of the International Workers Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). These committees must independently
investigate workplace incidents and intervene to enforce safety measures
in the strictest and most uncompromising manner. This struggle must be
guided by the understanding that putting a definitive end to workplace
killings requires the working class to take power and abolish the
capitalist profit system.
The French government’s response to Trump’s threats to annihilate
Iranian civilization is an infamous mixture of cynicism and cowardice.
While seeking to distance itself from Trump’s most undeniably genocidal
statements, it has made itself complicit in crimes against humanity.
President Emmanuel Macron did not bother to comment after Trump
pledged to destroy Iran’s bridges and electrical infrastructure,
threatening: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought
back again.” Macron left it to Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot to
issue a statement. On France2 television, Barrot trivialized Trump’s
threats, calling them “excessive” and declaring, “Everything that is
excessive is insignificant.”
Barrot completely sidestepped the
politically criminal and genocidal character of US policy. He naturally
claimed that “France is firmly opposed to strikes on civilian
infrastructure,” while ignoring French attacks on civilians like the
January 3, 2021 bombing of a wedding in Bounti during the war in Mali.
But when asked point-blank whether US actions are war crimes, Barrot
refused to answer, stating: “We must first analyze their strikes and
their consequences in order to say.”
*****
Barrot’s response exemplifies the bankruptcy of the French
bourgeoisie’s response to Trump’s war on Iran. Relations between the US
and European ruling classes are disintegrating, particularly after Trump
threatened to invade the Danish territory of Greenland earlier this
year. Yet despite admitting that Trump launched the war outside of
international law, the French government has not taken any significant
action to halt the war.
It has refused to denounce Trump as a
criminal, and his war as one of aggression and extermination. It has
remained in the NATO alliance and continues to allow US supply planes
carrying matériel to the Middle East to use its airbase at Istres.
Despite its refusal to allow US fighter jets to fly out of French
airbases to go bomb Iran, Paris thus remains complicit in US war crimes
against the population of the Middle East.
Moreover,
Macron has not publicly spelled out the disastrous impact on the French
and world economy of the cutoff of Persian Gulf oil and gas exports due
to Trump’s war. Even as gas prices explode to over €2 per liter across
France, there is no concrete discussion of what the collapse of energy
and fertilizer supplies means for workers. Officials are silent on the
impoverishment of the working class due to a surge in global fuel and
food prices that is set to escalate, as well as on the threat,
especially in more vulnerable countries, of famine claiming millions of
lives.
*****
The war on Iran is also exposing the reactionary character of the
European bourgeoisie’s calls for rearmament to wage an independent
foreign policy from Washington. This policy, financed by hundreds of
billions of euros in social cuts targeting workers across Europe, does
not aim to prevent or stop US war crimes. Rather, it is preparing the
European imperialist powers to pursue their own wars of plunder across
Eurasia and the world.
This was apparent this weekend, during
Macron’s trip to Japan and South Korea. He met Japan’s far-right prime
minister, Sanae Takaichi, who has applauded Japan’s genocidal war of
occupation in China during World War II as a “war for security.” In
private, Takaichi and Macron no doubt discussed their anger with Trump
amid the looming collapse of their economies due to the war on Iran.
*****
As bombs rain down on Iran, genocide continues in Gaza, and Trump
threatens to blot out a civilization and plunder its oil, it is not time
to “savor a period of calm.” The working class cannot wait. It is time
to urgently mobilize workers in France and across Europe against war, to
defend Iran against imperialist war and genocide, and to struggle
alongside their class brothers and sisters in America, where there is
explosive opposition to Trump.
Tens of thousands of National Health Service (NHS) resident doctors
in England began their 15th round of strike action since March 2023 on
Tuesday morning. The action in pursuit of “full pay restoration” will be
their longest yet, lasting for six days. The strike follows the
collapse of talks between the British Medical Association (BMA) and
Labour government Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
After
denouncing the demands of the doctors for a 26 percent pay rise as
“absurd”, Streeting warned that a strike would “torpedo the pay rises
and training posts available to resident doctors, but it also puts at
risk the recovery of the NHS.”
*****
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to striking resident doctors as they began a six-day strike.
The Guardian has published a scurrilous attack by unnamed
union officials against resident doctors backing the Starmer
government’s enforcing a below RPI inflation 3.5 percent pay award
against half of all of medics in the National Health Service (NHS).
Around
50,000 members of the British Medical Association (BMA) in England are
taking their fifteenth round of strike action since March 2023 for pay
restoration, to reverse a real-terms erosion by around one-fifth since
2008.
The April 4 article, “Unions privately voice misgivings over
BMA pay demands and doctors strikes,” is a public denunciation of
resident doctors made on the eve of the strike that began April 7. The
only thing “private” about it is the anonymity of the union officials
cited, so they are not held accountable by their members while the Guardian presents them as the “voice” of NHS workers.
The unattributed comments from “senior union figures” complain that
resident doctors are demanding too much and acting in a “chaotic
fashion.” This echoes the slanders of Labour Prime Minister Keir
Starmer, who has branded the upcoming strike as “reckless,” and his
Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who has accused doctors of “holding the
country to ransom.”
The smears against resident doctors must be rejected. NHS workers should demand to know who spoke to the Guardian claiming to speak in their name and demand their removal from leadership positions.
The
briefings by anonymous union officials against the strike is a wake-up
call for NHS workers and the entire working class. What is required is
not the suppression of the struggle of resident doctors but its
extension.
*****
Only through the independent mobilization of the working class, armed
with a socialist program, can the resources required to rebuild the
NHS be secured. This struggle is not confined to Britain, but forms part
of an international fight by healthcare workers and the working class
against austerity, privatization and war, which NHS FightBack advances as an affiliate of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Court proceedings over the deadliest rail crash in Greek history began on April 1, continuing on April 6.
The
crash occurred on February 28, 2023, in the Tempi valley of central
Greece, after a passenger train collided with a freight train, resulting
in the horrific deaths of 57 mainly young people. Among the dead were
11 rail workers. The passenger train—going from Athens to
Thessaloniki—had been traveling on the wrong track for 12 minutes and
18 kilometers before it impacted with a southbound freight train.
Harrowing
footage released in January last year indicated that 30 of the 57
victims were still alive for a period after the crash and died following
a massive explosion.
The deaths were not an accident but a crime
of capitalism. This act of social murder was made possible by the
complete absence of safety on the rail network after years of cuts by
successive austerity-imposing governments, culminating in the network’s privatization in 2017.
The disaster is still raw in the
consciousness of Greek workers and youth. Millions took to the streets
in the initial and anniversary protests over the past three years in
Greece and among the diaspora in Europe, the US and Australia. See here, here and this year’s protests here.
*****
The crime at Tempi has discredited all the main bourgeois parties.
One of the main chants at demonstrations is: “Syriza, PASOK, New
Democracy, this crime has a history”.
The political vacuum is
reflected in the high polling of the new party, “We Begin – The
Independent Citizens’ Movement”, launched on April 1 by Maria
Karystianou, former president of the Tempi Victims’ Families
Association. A poll conducted just before the April 1 announcement found
that 17.8 percent would consider voting for it.
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.
David North is the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and current National Chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US).
David North:
During the past hour, Donald Trump has issued yet another threat against the people of Iran.
He has said, “an entire civilization will die tonight.”
This
crime, if carried out, will implicate the United States in an act of
absolutely monstrous dimensions, comparable only to the crimes committed
by the Nazis during the Second World War.
Even at this late hour
the working class throughout the world must declare its opposition to
this monstrous crime. It must be stopped. It cannot be allowed to
happen.
We declare our solidarity with the people of Iran. We will not allow
this action to take place and for those who are responsible for it to go
unpunished.
This is the responsibility of the working class, indeed it is the responsibility of all of humanity.
Last fall, a group of Democratic senators and representatives issued a
video appeal to US military personnel, advising them of their
responsibility not to obey illegal orders. But now that illegal orders
are raining down from the White House and Pentagon, they have fallen
silent. They have not told the military brass that a future Democratic
administration will prosecute those responsible for war crimes, because
that future administration would be engaged in its own imperialist
schemes for which it will require the full services of the armed forces.
If
Trump carries out his threats, today—April 7, 2026—will live in infamy.
It will be remembered as one of the great crimes of the modern era.
Whatever the next turn in the war, a line has been crossed. This war has
demolished, for all time, the pretense that the United States is a
democracy. It brands the Trump administration as an outlaw regime. It
condemns the oligarchy as a ruling class that has outlived any
historical justification. It must open up, in short, a period of social
revolution.
One year ago today, Ronald Adams Sr. went to work and did not come home.
The 63-year-old skilled trades worker—a machine repairman with 19 years
at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex in Southeast Michigan—was
performing maintenance on an industrial washer in the early morning
hours of April 7, 2025, when an overhead gantry crane suddenly activated
without warning, plunging down with massive force and crushing his
upper torso. He was pronounced dead at Trinity Health Ann Arbor. He is
survived by his wife, Shamenia Stewart-Adams, his children and his
grandchildren.
*****
“A year has passed and no information has been provided to our family,”
Shamenia Stewart-Adams told the WSWS. Her family, she said, is honoring
Ronald’s memory—and “we will not stop demanding the truth.”
*****
According to the autopsy report, obtained by the WSWS through a
Freedom of Information Act request, Adams sustained catastrophic
injuries: 18 of his 24 ribs were broken, his sternum was crushed, he
suffered spinal fractures, and roughly 20 percent of his blood volume
was found in his lungs. A surgeon who reviewed the report told the WSWS
that the trauma was comparable to injuries sustained in an airplane
crash or a combat explosion. A 63-year-old man went to work to repair a
machine and was killed as if on a battlefield.
The only serious
investigation into the conditions that produced this death was carried
out not by MIOSHA, nor by the UAW, nor by Stellantis, but by the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC),
which presented its initial findings at a public hearing in Detroit on July 27, 2025.
What that investigation uncovered was damning. Workers testified that
management, with the acquiescence of the UAW, had circulated “cheater
keys”—devices that trick safety gates into registering as closed,
bypassing lockout/tagout (LOTO) protections entirely.
After Adams’ death, plant management ordered the keys returned,
threatening workers with termination. Popcorn tins were placed around
the plant to collect them. One tin outside the UAW local union office
was reportedly half full. A former OSHA compliance officer who reviewed
the findings told the WSWS that conditions at Dundee amounted to
virtually no functioning lockout/tagout system—and that the scale of the
violations approached criminal negligence.
Workers also reported
that signs indicating lockout points on machines—known as placards—were
never updated after the gantry was physically relocated within the
plant. A worker could believe a machine was locked out when it was not.
Meanwhile, contractors from Fives Cinetic, who programmed the washer and
gantry system, and who could have examined its fault history and
determined exactly what signal caused it to activate while Adams was
inside, were never contacted by Stellantis, the UAW or MIOSHA. The
control boards that held that data have since been restarted, and the
information may be gone.
*****
Asked by the WSWS to explain why its investigation into the death of
Ronald Adams Sr. remains incomplete after a full year, a MIOSHA
spokesperson offered the following: “The length of time required to
complete a fatality investigation can vary depending on the complexity
of the case and the ability to obtain necessary information. In some
instances, MIOSHA must pursue additional legal or administrative steps
to obtain information, which can extend the timeline. These factors are
outside of MIOSHA’s direct control.”
This statement requires plain translation. “Additional legal or
administrative steps to obtain information” means that someone has
refused to provide it voluntarily. MIOSHA has been compelled to seek
compulsory disclosure—meaning that a party to this investigation, in all
likelihood Stellantis or the UAW or both, has refused to cooperate
through normal channels. The WSWS asked MIOSHA to specify the nature of
the obstruction and to identify the parties responsible. A spokesman
replied saying, “MIOSHA cannot comment on the specifics of an open
investigation.” Letters were sent to both Stellantis and the UAW
requesting comment. Neither responded.
*****
The death of Ronald Adams Sr. was not an isolated incident. His death
is part of a pattern of eliminated safety guards, bypassed lockout
procedures, accelerated production timelines, and the systematic
subordination of workers’ lives to quarterly output targets.
Seven
months before Adams was killed, 53-year-old Antonio Gaston was crushed
to death on the assembly line at Stellantis’ Toledo Assembly Complex,
with workers charging that the company had deliberately removed safety
guarding from a conveyor, exposing workers to pinch points. OSHA
eventually cited Stellantis for a serious safety violation and imposed a
fine of $16,000—minutes of profit for a corporation of Stellantis’
scale. Stellantis appealed even that.
Gaston’s widow, Renita
Shores-Gaston, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in August 2025, saying she
still had not been told the truth about how her husband died. “It was
the hardest day of my entire life to hear that news,” she said, “and
then to have to call my children and tell them that their dad died at
work.”
Less than three weeks ago, on March 16, 2026, Gregory
Knopf—a 64-year-old plumber and pipe fitter at Ford Motor Company’s
Sharonville Transmission Plant in Ohio—was killed when a press machine
activated during routine maintenance and pinned him against equipment.
His death bears a direct and grim resemblance to the death of Ronald
Adams Sr.: a skilled tradesman, performing maintenance, killed by
machinery that should have been locked out.
Knopf is survived by
his wife, three children, and eight grandchildren. His daughter Miranda
remembered him as selfless. His son Corey called him the best man he
knew.
Shamenia Stewart-Adams, on this first anniversary of her husband’s
death, said she extends her solidarity and deepest sympathy to Renita
Shores-Gaston and to the family of Gregory Knopf. “I don’t want this to
happen to another family. No wife should be left without answers. No
child should grow up without knowing why their father did not come
home.”
She concluded, “I encourage workers not to be afraid to
speak out and stand up to defend the lives and you and your co-workers. I
especially appeal to workers at the Dundee plant to come forward with
information about the conditions in the factory.
*****
Will Lehman
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker running for UAW president, issued the following statement marking the first anniversary of the death of Ronald Adams Sr.:
One
year ago, Ronald Adams Sr. was killed because the safety systems
designed to protect him had been systematically dismantled—with cheater
keys, incorrect placards, bypassed lockout procedures—and the union that
was supposed to represent him stood by and said nothing. Today, MIOSHA
has still not released its investigation results. Stellantis and the UAW
refused to answer questions from Adams’ family and co-workers. That is
not a coincidence. That is a cover-up—and it must end now. I am calling
for the immediate and unconditional release of the MIOSHA investigation
results, and for the full disclosure of every act of obstruction by
Stellantis and by the UAW that has delayed this investigation for twelve
months.
But the deaths of Ronald Adams Sr., Antonio Gaston, and
Gregory Knopf make something else absolutely clear. We cannot wait for
Stellantis to act. We cannot wait for the UAW bureaucracy to act. We
cannot wait for MIOSHA. Every day workers remain dependent on a union
apparatus that enforces management's production dictates rather than
protecting our lives, more workers will be killed. The only answer is
for workers on every shop floor to build rank-and-file safety
committees—democratically controlled, answerable to workers ourselves
and not to management, with the real power to halt production over
unsafe conditions and the authority to conduct our own independent
investigations. Workers must assert control over safety and production
ourselves. No one else will do it for us.
For a full year, the
UAW bureaucracy under Shawn Fain has issued no public demand for
accountability from Stellantis over the death of Ronald Adams Sr. It has
made no public demand of MIOSHA. It moved as quickly as possible to
resume full production at Dundee Engine. The plant now runs three
shifts, producing engines on the site where Adams was killed, with UAW
approval.
These deaths are not accidents. They are the
predictable, measurable product of the capitalist system. The US
Department of Labor reported that 5,070 workers were killed on the job
in 2024. That figure itself vastly understates the true toll, as it
excludes most deaths from occupational illness—the AFL-CIO estimates
that workplace disease claims an additional 135,000 lives annually.
Across American industry, roughly 15 workers die on the job every single
day.
Our lives are sacrificed for corporate profit, and the
institutions that are supposed to protect us—the unions, the regulatory
agencies, and the corporations themselves—participate in the cover-up
when things go wrong. Now Trump makes the agenda plain: gut OSHA, defund
every protection workers have, and pour the money into war. This
slaughter must stop. Workers must stop it. The life of Ronald Adams Sr.
demands it. The lives of every worker who will go to work tomorrow
demand it.
*****
The killing of Ronald Adams Sr. did not occur in a vacuum. For
decades, Democrats and Republicans alike have overseen the gutting of
workplace protections while handing endless sums to the rich and
expanding the machinery of war. Under the Trump administration this
class policy has entered a new and more openly ruthless stage.
Since
taking office, the administration has moved to destroy what remains of
even minimal federal protections for workers. It has frozen new
rulemaking—including a proposed heat illness and injury prevention
standard—slashed inspection staffing to historically low levels, and
rolled out the so-called “OSHA Cares” program, replacing enforcement and
penalties with “voluntary compliance” by employers.
*****
Just days ago, Trump’s FY2027 budget request proposed $1.5 trillion
for military spending—a 40 percent increase over already record Pentagon
outlays, and the largest such request in modern history—arriving as the
administration wages war against Iran. To finance it, the
administration proposes $73 billion in cuts to domestic programs,
including further reductions to an already eviscerated OSHA, cuts to
housing, health care and education, and the explicit targeting of core
social programs.
At a closed Easter lunch last week, Trump stated
with blunt clarity: “Don’t send any money for day care. … We’re
fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” and went further: “It’s
not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare. … We
have to take care of one thing: military protection.” The logic is
undisguised: every dollar that might fund a safety inspector, a heat
standard or a lockout/tagout enforcement action—every protection that
might have kept Ronald Adams Sr. alive—is to be redirected to feed the
war machine. Workers are to be sacrificed twice: first on the shop
floor, then on the battlefield.
Ronald Adams Sr. was a husband,
father and grandfather. He was a skilled tradesman who worked at Dundee
for 19 years, who knew machines, who cared about safety, who was
respected by coworkers and loved by his family. He went to work in the
early hours of April 7, 2025 and was killed because a corporation
treated his life as expendable, because a union bureaucracy treated his
death as an inconvenience, and because a regulatory apparatus—shaped by
the priorities of corporate-controlled parties—bows to the dictates of
profit.
Adams’ family is still waiting. They deserve the truth. So
do the workers who will go to work today at Dundee, at Toledo, at
Sharonville and at every plant in America and around the world where the
same conditions exist and the same catastrophe waits.
The
defense of workers’ lives cannot be left to the parties of big business
or the agencies they oversee. It requires a political struggle for a
society organized around social need and the rights of the working
class—including the most basic right of all: the right to life, health
and a safe workplace.
Hundreds of thousands of people who rely on disability benefits will be
thrown into deeper poverty from April 6, as the Starmer Labour
government’s Universal Credit Act (2025) comes into force.
Universal Credit is Britain’s main welfare benefit system, combining
financial support for housing, children, and disability into one monthly
payment.
The new rules for claiming Universal Credit Limited
Capability for Work Related Activity (UC LCWRA) will affect those with
the most severe forms of disability. They will now enter a two-tier
system that penalizes those with chronic conditions, with eligibility
based on the date they applied for the benefit, and not the nature of
their condition.
*****
Most new claimants will see their extra payment cut, reducing their additional monthly benefit from the current £432 to £217.
*****
The cuts to welfare are part of a broader ruling class offensive.
Labour’s budget priorities are for a massive increase in military
spending to fund war and rearmament, tax breaks and privatization drives. The disabled, sick and the working class will bear the brunt of a
new period of war escalation through the gutting of social services
that millions rely on.
Despite efforts to normalize attacks on
the disabled and those dependent on benefits by the Labour government,
public opposition has forced repeated U-turns on attacking pensioners,
capping child benefits and attacks on PIP. There is deeply felt
hostility to targeting the most vulnerable. But Starmer and his
Chancellor Rachel Reeves are proceeding with their offensive. The
emergence of strikes by National Health Service staff, educators, and
rail and transport workers against below inflation pay rises and privatization, coupled with mass demonstrations against war, shows the
basis for a unified and organized fightback by the working class.
Workers
must demand the immediate restoration of benefits, and the necessary
funding made available for comprehensive, publicly provided health and
social care, the repeal of the DWP’s brutal disability assessment
regimes and the reallocation of spending from rearmament and corporate
handouts to social need.
US War Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday, March 29, outlined a new
strategic doctrine dubbed “Greater North America,” explicitly redefining
the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive US security perimeter under
President Donald Trump’s leadership.
Speaking at the US Southern
Command headquarters in Doral, Florida, Hegseth declared that “every
sovereign nation and territory north of the equator, from Greenland to
Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana,” falls within this “immediate
security perimeter” of the United States.
This announcement was
coupled with the State Department’s call last week for a June or July
conference of allied governments to coordinate intelligence sharing and
operations against leftist organizations under the banner of fighting
“Antifa.” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt confirmed a task
force “to focus on the threat posed by Antifa,” signaling domestic
repression fused with hemispheric domination.
This doctrine
amounts to the Monroe Doctrine on steroids—a preemptive blueprint for
hemispheric recolonization and US-backed police state regimes aimed at
crushing imminent social explosions fueled by skyrocketing gas,
fertilizer and food prices driven by the US-Israeli war of aggression
against Iran.
While Hitler invoked the fight against Bolshevism to justify subjugating
Europe, Trump and Hegseth demand the Americas unite as “Christian
nations under God” against “radical narco-communism.”
*****
The timing is no coincidence. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has
unleashed what analysts have called a “financial bomb” across
import-dependent Latin America, with oil prices surging as much as 75
percent in countries like Peru amid currency devaluations against the
dollar.
Fertilizer costs, critical for the region’s massive
agro-export economies in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Chile,
have jumped 30 percent since late February, with urea—the most widely
used fertilizer—up 74.67 percent due to the war.
These shocks recall the 1970s oil crisis, which ignited two of Latin
America’s largest mass movements: the 1978-80 Brazilian strikes
involving over 100,000 metalworkers that nearly toppled the military
dictatorship, and the revolutionary movements against US-backed
dictators across Central America.
Hegseth’s vision explicitly
continues Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” coalition of far-right Latin
American regimes, launched in early March. The World Socialist Web Site has
described this as a modern Operation Condor—a CIA-orchestrated network
of military dictatorships that coordinated repression and coups across
the continent in the 1970s and 1980s.
This counterrevolutionary
program is already in motion. Venezuela has been transformed into a US
protectorate following the January 3 operation that ousted Nicolás
Maduro, handing its oil riches to Chevron and Shell. Cuba faces
strangulation through a fuel blockade, as Trump openly threatens that
“Cuba’s next” for military action. US forces have bombed small fishing
boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing 163 men in what Pentagon
sources call “preemptive strikes” against drug smuggling. In Ecuador,
recent joint military operations with the Pentagon have involved
torturing agricultural workers and burning small farmers’ homes under
the pretext of fighting narcoterrorism. Threats to invade and bomb
Mexico, annex Greenland, seize the Panama Canal and even absorb Canada
have escalated, alongside endorsements of far-right regimes in Honduras,
Argentina, Costa Rica and Chile.
The White House earlier this year lionized the 1846-48 Mexican-American
War—during which the US stole half of Mexico’s territory to expand
slavery—framing it as a guiding precedent for today.
*****
The new strategic aim, rooted in lessons from the 1970s oil crises, is
to crush any repetition of mass uprisings that could challenge
imperialist control over key minerals, resources and access to cheap
labor. Hegseth’s framework builds on initiatives from Trump’s first
term, such as the 2017 Atlantic Council report on the “Alliance for
Prosperity” in Central America, co-chaired by war criminal John
Negroponte and presented by Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly. It
emphasized “public-private supply chain security” for physical goods
transport—code for militarizing cheap-labor corridors across North,
Central and South America to secure them for war production against
China and Russia, while undercutting ostensible European “allies.”
*****
During a World Socialist Web Site May Day online event in 2019, Bill Van Auken stressed
the “domestic component to the waving of the sullied flag of the Monroe
Doctrine” by the first Trump administration, aimed at promoting fascism
and a police state within the US itself. The entire US foreign policy
establishment—from Democrats to Republicans—backs this hemispheric Anschluss. The New York Times and Washington Post have cheered the Venezuela operation, the Cuban blockade and the “Shield of the Americas.”
This
is not mere rhetoric. It is the first stage of World War III, fusing
the Ukraine war, the Gaza and now Iranian genocides, hemispheric
subjugation and dictatorship at home, into a single counterrevolutionary
offensive.
Trump’s offhand remark at an investors’ forum last
week—“I built this great military. I said you will never have to use it
but sometimes you’ll have to use it. And Cuba’s next by the way. But
pretend I didn’t say that please”—reveals the casual normalization of
aggression.
*****
The working class, objectively united in transnational production
chains, confronts common enemies: Wall Street banks, transnational
corporations, US imperialism and Latin America’s national oligarchies.
As Van Auken concluded in 2019, “the working class ... can find a way
forward only through the conscious unification of US and Latin American
workers in struggle to defeat their common enemies.”
From the JBS
meatpackers’ strike in Greeley, Colorado, to GM Silao and Tornel in
Mexico, from Chilean pot-bangers to Argentine tire workers and Brazilian
metalworkers, the objective basis exists for an international
counteroffensive. Rank-and-file committees, independent of all
pro-capitalist unions, must coordinate across borders to defend jobs,
crush the war drive and expropriate all major corporations.
The
alternative is dictatorship and recolonization. The Greater North
America doctrine is a declaration of war on the working class of the
hemisphere. The response must be a unified socialist movement to abolish
the profit system that breeds it, establishing the United Socialist
States of the Americas.
Germany’s Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer is pursuing his
rampage against freedom of art and expression. The Office of the
Commissioner for Culture and Media (BKM) has announced a new measure to
sharply intensify censorship. According to Weimer’s instructions, all
members of juries in the field of cultural funding are to be recorded in
lists to be handed over to the government.
Apparently, this measure is intended to enable a comprehensive review
of juries by the Verfassungsschutz using the controversial Haber
method, in order to purge juries in a timely manner before they decide
on cultural funding measures that do not align with Germany’s “national
interest.” Such a selection of juries would, under certain
circumstances, make it unnecessary to reverse awards, scholarships or
funding decisions after they have been made—with the involvement of the
Verfassungsshutz —as was recently the case with the German Bookstore Prize.
Since Weimer’s censorship measures in regard to the Berlinale and the Bookstore Prize, calls for his resignation or dismissal have been mounting. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Claudius
Seidel justifies such calls by arguing that Weimer is not up to the
task, because he understands too little about culture or is simply
overwhelmed. In fact, Weimer’s course is in alignment with the
reactionary, anti-democratic concept the ruling CDU/SPD government (a
coalition of the Christian Democratic Union CDU, Christian Social Union
CSU and Social Democratic Party SPD) has assigned to cultural policy.
Chancellor
Friedrich Merz has confirmed this. Weimer’s actions meet with “broad
approval” not only from him but also “across the entire cultural and
media sector,” though “not from everyone and not at all times,” Merz
claimed. Weimer is fulfilling the task for which he was appointed, i.e.,
enforcing a backward-looking policy and eradicating left-wing
tendencies in the cultural sector.
*****
Another of Weimer’s recent actions has also caused outrage. He
intends to halt the planned expansion of the German National Library in
Leipzig. The National Library is the country’s central archival library
and national bibliographic centre. It is legally obligated to store,
preserve and protect all German and German-language publications—both in
print and digitally—with the support of the federal government.
The
planned storage facility at Deutscher Platz in Leipzig was intended to
serve the long-term archiving of the National Library’s holdings.
Designed as a highly functional and climate-controlled repository, it
was intended to ensure the secure storage of approximately 35.5 million
media works for about 30 years.
Weimer justified halting the
project by arguing that the collection of physical media works was no
longer appropriate for the foreseeable future; the National Library
should focus more on its digital collection.
*****
While the legal battle surrounding the Bookstore Prize and the debate
over the National Library were still ongoing, a new front opened up for
the Minister of State: the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial.
Two
Buchenwald associations have issued an open letter calling on Weimer to
refrain from appearing at the commemoration of the liberation of the
concentration camp on April 12. The letter was signed by the
chairpersons of the Buchenwald-Dora Camp Working Group and the
Buchenwald Camp Community, Katinka Poensgen and Horst Gobrecht.
The
letter accuses Weimer of failing to engage positively with the legacy
of the survivors of Buchenwald and other camps. Among other things, it
cites Weimer’s repeated misuse of a quote by Heinrich Heine as evidence
of his lack of understanding.
The famous Jewish-born German writer Heine (1797–1856) had allowed
himself to be baptized as a Lutheran so he could practice law after
passing his bar exam, which was forbidden for Jews at the time. He
commented on this with the words: “The baptismal certificate is the
ticket to European culture.” As is well known, Heine abandoned this
plan, chose the profession of a writer (becoming a friend of Karl Marx
in the process) and later regretted having been baptized.
Weimer,
however, turns Heine’s scathing indictment of the oppression and
exclusion of Jews upside down, claiming that Christianity, the
“baptismal certificate,” is the true and sole foundation of European
culture.
*****
The Weimer Media Group’s business model is based on brokering
contacts with political decision-makers for large sums of money. For
instance, it organizes the Ludwig Ehrhard Summit every year at Gut
Kaltenbrunn on Lake Tegernsee and awards the “Media Freedom Prize”
there. Participation comes at a cost: €1,000 to €3,000 for regular
attendees, and between €20,000 and €100,000 for partner companies to
participate in panel discussions.
For these hefty sums,
participants gain exclusive access to high-ranking politicians or other
prominent figures who can advance their careers or economic success.
Politically,
Weimer’s views certainly overlap with those of the far-right
Alternative for Germany, AfD. For instance, he has criticized what he
considers Germany’s overly lax migration and integration policies as “a
form of reparations through cultural self-destruction.” He referred to
the basic income security benefits as “migrant money.” He has also cast
doubt on whether climate change is manmade and railed against
“compulsory fees” for public broadcasting.
The European Union’s (EU) murderous anti-immigration agenda claimed the lives of scores more people over the last week.
On
Saturday, at least 70 migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea after
their boat capsized off the coast of Libya. Only 32 survived on the
small wooden vessel that was filled with at least 100 people who left
Libya hoping to enter Europe. Those who survived said they were rescued
not by any coastguard, but by a commercial ship which took them to the
island of Lampedusa.
There is no end to the grotesque suffering faced by desperate migrants attempting the perilous journey across the Med.
In
the early hours of April 1, the Italian coast guard recovered 19 bodies
from a migrant boat adrift around 85 miles off Lampedusa. 58 people
were rescued but five were reported to be in critical condition. A
spokesperson for Doctors without Borders (MSF) and the UN’s
International Organization for Migration (IOM) said they appeared to
have died of hypothermia.
Survivors said that after their boat
broke down, they were drifting for several days in severe weather. The
boat left western Libya around March 30, containing migrants from
African countries including Sudan, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Gambia,
Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia.
Europe’s governments have all but
ceased monitoring and assisting small boats attempting the crossing.
This task is largely being carried out by a few charities run by
volunteers such as Sea-Watch. The organization said a recent surge had
seen at least 100 deaths in just the three days to April 1. Among these
were another 19 victims of hypothermia, including a baby, that drowned
when their inflatable boat capsized off western Turkey on April 1.
According to Deutsche Welle, 21 were rescued.
*****
Vast numbers of deaths take place after boats leave Libya
headed for Europe, as its ports operate as transit points for refugees
fleeing Asia, the Middle East and Africa—leaving behind home countries
devastated by imperialist war and grinding poverty. Those who manage to
escape the shores of Libya represent a small minority. Fully 70 percent
of the world’s refugees never get further than a neighbouring state,
with most contained in hellish conditions in slums and refugee camps
throughout Africa and Asia.
Libya is nothing more than a massive dungeon for refugees, paid for
by the European Union. In February, the United Nations Support Mission
in Libya and Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights released a harrowing report noting: “Across the country,
migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees are forcibly rounded up, abducted,
separated from their families, arbitrarily arrested and detained, and
transferred without due process – often at gunpoint – to official,
unofficial, or illegal detention facilities. There, they endure
prolonged detention and are coerced through torture and inhumane
treatment into paying for their release.”
The most recent
Mediterranean deaths are part of a gruesome toll, making 2026 the
“deadliest start to a year” since 2014, when the IOM began to record
this data.
That assessment was made on February 23, by which point
at least 606 people had already been reported dead or missing trying to
reach Europe. The IOM updated the death toll to 683 on April 5.
Such figures underestimate the actual death toll in the Med. Over the
past year, there have been reports of hundreds more missing at sea that
cannot yet be verified. In just two weeks in February, 23 human remains
were washed up on southern Italian and Libyan coasts not associated
with any reported sinking.
According to the IOM’s Missing
Migrants dataset, a staggering 34,570 refugees have lost their lives in
the Mediterranean since 2014.
The rising toll of mass deaths is the inevitable result of the
“Fortress Europe” policy enacted by the continent’s major imperialist
powers for more than a decade.
Anti-immigrant policies once
associated with the far-right have been adopted by parties of the ruling
class, whether nominally conservative or social democrat. Fascistic
forces spewing xenophobia and scapegoating asylum seekers for all social
ills—such as Italy’s Mussolini-admiring Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen
in France, the Alternative for Germany, and Reform UK—are all now part
of mainstream bourgeois politics.
*****
Europe’s onslaught on immigrants and asylum seekers is one foul
expression of a global process. Everywhere, impoverished migrants face
closed borders and state-sanctioned demonization designed to divert
social anger over poverty, unemployment and cuts in vital social
services away from the super-rich oligarchy despoiling the planet.
*****
Workers and youth must not allow this brutality against asylum
seekers and migrants to continue. It is the spearhead of a right-wing
assault—led by fascist and far-right forces—aimed at the destruction of
the social position of the entire working class, and the bitter product
of wars that threaten the destruction of humanity.
“Fortress
Europe” must be torn down and replaced by the United Socialist States of
Europe, with the defense of immigrants, migrants and asylum seekers a
clarion call in this struggle. This is conceivable only as part of a
unified struggle by the international working class to end the division
of a global economy into antagonistic nation states based on the private
ownership of the essential means of production, which the root cause of
wars, economic exploitation and oppression and the destruction of
democratic rights.
Last week, workers at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan,
voted by more than 96 percent to reject a concessions contract pushed by
United Auto Workers Local 699 and the UAW International. In the days
since, UAW officials have kept 1,300 workers at the key auto parts
supplier on the job despite the massive no vote and expiration of their
five-year agreement in mid-March.
The following is a statement from the Nexteer Rank-and-File Committee:
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
We have rejected the UAW-backed
sellout contract—by 96.2 percent. This near-unanimous vote is a powerful
statement of unity and determination by workers in every department,
tier and age group. We rejected a deal that expands tiers, locks newer
hires into poverty wages and raises healthcare costs, while Nexteer and
the big automakers continue to profit from our labor.
With one
voice, we are saying: We will not accept anymore sellout deals from the
UAW International and their toadies in the Local 699 leadership! Now we
must decide what comes next—and we must do it on our terms, not theirs. A
“no” vote is only the beginning. If the same officials who brought this
agreement back from closed-door “negotiations” remain in control, they
will do what they always do: stall, delay and try to force revotes until
they get the outcome they want.
We cannot leave power in their hands. Workers must enforce the
principle of “no contract, no work” and prepare strike action now. Any
delay will only give management the opportunity to stockpile parts and
time to prepare its strikebreaking plans.
The most dangerous
illusion we could have is that the rejection of the sellout contract
will convince UAW officials to bring back something better. Their
contract surveys are for show only. UAW President Shawn Fain and Local
699 officials know exactly what we want—but they are opposed to our
demands because they cut across their cozy relations with the corporate
bosses.
Everything depends on what we, the rank-and-file workers
on the shop floor, do. We are forming the Nexteer Rank-and-File
Committee to outline the concrete steps to put workers in control of the
struggle. This is what we demand:
Hold a mass membership meeting now to vote for an immediate strike. The
membership has spoken. We must enforce the will of the membership by
preparing for strike action now. Nexteer and the Big Three automakers
behind them will not make any concessions unless we use our collective
power, halt production and cut off the source of their profits.
Double strike pay to $1,000 a weekto ensure we have sufficient resources to sustain our fight.
The UAW’s nearly $1 billion strike and defense fund, financed through
our dues money, belongs to the membership, not to the highly paid
bureaucrats.
Remove the Bargaining Committee that brought back this pro-company contract.
Elect a rank-and-file committee, consisting of the most militant and
trusted workers, to oversee bargaining and fight for our non-negotiable
demands, including the abolition of all tiers, fully paid pensions,
healthcare benefits and inflation-busting wage increases and COLA for
all.
Full transparency—Release all information. Every
proposal, company demand and bargaining update must be reported to the
membership in real time. No secrecy, no backroom deals.
Mass meetings and democratic oversight. Decisions
must be made in regular membership meetings where workers can discuss,
propose demands and vote. No intimidation, no pressure, no union
bureaucrats hovering at the voting site.
No return to “vote first, read later.” No
tentative agreement should be brought back without the full text
distributed in advance, with a full week for members to study, discuss
and vote on it. Rank-and-file oversight of the ratification process to
ensure the integrity of the vote.
*****
The Rank-and-File Committee proposes the following minimum demands for a contract workers can accept—demands that should be discussed, expanded and voted on by the membership:
Abolish all tiers—Equal pay and benefits for equal work.
Major wage increases for all and COLA to keep up with inflation—No more stagnation while executives enrich themselves.
Areal living starting wage and a sharply reduced progression to top pay.
Affordable healthcare for every worker and family—No premium hikes, no doubled weekly contributions.
Enforceable limits on overtime and scheduling abuse, including binding notice requirements (ending contract violations like the “ninth hour” manipulation).
Job security and anti-outsourcing protections—Full transparency and the right to oppose shifting work to lower-wage operations.
Real grievance rights with enforcement, not a toothless process where the company faces no consequences.
Workers’ control over safety and staffing, with elected rank-and-file safety reps empowered to halt unsafe work.
*****
We understand that Nexteer will threaten to shift production to lower
wage countries if we strike. That is why the Nexteer Rank-and-File
Committee fights to link up with workers in Mexico, Canada, Poland and
everywhere Nexteer operates. We all face the same corporate bosses and
have the same interests.
We have taken an important first step.
Now we must organize our power—democratically and independently—to win
the contract we need and deserve. Join the Nexteer Rank-and-File
Committee, help build communication across shifts and departments, and
prepare for a real fight for workers’ power.
Newly released government camera footage
has demolished the official account used by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), the FBI and the Trump administration to justify the
January 14 shooting of Julio C. Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
and the felony prosecution of Sosa-Celis and Alfredo A. Aljorna.
The shooting of Sosa-Celis took place at the height of the federal
occupation of the Twin Cities by federal immigration agents. It occurred
one week after ICE thug Jonathan Ross murdered Renée Nicole Good on
January 7, and it would end up being the second of three shootings
conducted by federal agents that month in the city. The third was the
murder of Alex Pretti on January 24. The shootings provoked mass
protests from Minnesota residents on January 23 and January 30.
The New York Times and local outlets obtained the video and
published it Monday. The tape, which does not include audio, directly
contradicts the ICE agent’s claim that he was beaten by three men
wielding a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes before opening
fire. Instead, the confrontation shown in the footage lasts about 12
seconds, shows only two men struggling with the agent, and shows no
sustained attack with a shovel.
The reason the street camera was
pointed in that direction in the first place was because Valentina
Tiapa, Alfredo A. Aljorna’s partner, called 911 after Aljorna told her
ICE agents were chasing him on Interstate 94 and appeared to be trying
to cause a collision. Begging the dispatcher for Minneapolis police to
intervene, Tiapa said through an interpreter, “They are coming” and
“They are just five minutes away.” The city camera that later captured
the shooting was positioned at the nearby intersection, recording the
route of the chase as it came off the highway and onto their block.
The
report exposes not only the lies of the agents involved, but the
criminal character of the entire federal operation. The federal
government had access to the city-owned camera footage within hours of
the shooting, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told the Times.
Yet prosecutors filed felony charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna
without watching the video, relying instead on an ICE agent’s statement
and an FBI agent’s affidavit describing the footage. Nearly three weeks
passed before a prosecutor actually viewed the recording, by which point
the government’s case was already collapsing.
The two Venezuelan men were jailed and prosecuted on the basis of a
narrative the government either knew was false or made no serious effort
to verify. The U.S. Attorney’s office moved to dismiss the charges only
days before the deadline to secure a grand jury indictment, cynically
describing the footage as “newly discovered evidence,” even though
authorities had possessed it from the beginning.
*****
While Sosa-Celis was not seriously injured after being shot, workers
and young people continue to die at alarming rates inside ICE custody.
On Monday, the Senate Judiciary Democrats reported that another person
has died in ICE custody, bringing the number of deaths this year to 15
and to more than 45 since Trump took office again. This mounting toll is
the foreseeable outcome of a fascistic system built on overcrowding,
medical neglect, abuse and profit.
Over the weekend, the funeral
for Royer Perez Jimenez, a 19-year-old Mexican immigrant from Chiapas
who died on March 16 in ICE custody in Florida, was held. Speaking to
CBS, Jimenez’s family denounced the charges that led to his detention as
fabricated, insisting he had been confused during his arrest because he
did not speak English fluently. His uncle, Manuel Perez, declared, “He
was unjustly accused as a criminal. ... They fabricated a crime.”
As
in Minneapolis, the government has advanced an account that serves only
to shield itself from responsibility. ICE claims Jimenez died of an
apparent suicide, but the official cause remains under investigation,
and the family categorically disputes that version, demanding a full
inquiry and stating that they suspect homicide. In their announcement on
Jimenez’s death, ICE noted that he had been screened by medical staff
and answered “no” to all suicide-risk questions when he entered the
detention center.
While Democrats periodically denounce the worst
outrages, they do not fundamentally oppose these attacks on immigrants,
which are being used to destroy the democratic rights of the entire
working class and establish a presidential dictatorship. Last month, New
York Senator Chuck Schumer boasted that Senate Democrats had secured a
deal to fund TSA, FEMA and other DHS functions and that Democrats would
continue fighting for “serious reforms” at ICE, not for its abolition,
which is supported by a majority of self-identified Democrats.
*****
The defense of immigrants, democratic rights and the lives of all
workers requires the abolition of ICE and the entire apparatus of
repression. That task cannot be entrusted to either capitalist party. It
falls to the working class, immigrant and native-born alike, united
across borders in a common struggle against the ruling class and the
capitalist system.
Concerns about the stability of private credit and its potential for
triggering a financial crisis via its connections to insurance companies
has reached the top level of the US financial system.
Last week
the US Treasury announced that it would initiate a series of meetings
with domestic and international insurance regulators starting this month
and continuing into the summer. This would “allow participants to
survey recent market events, emerging risks, risk management practices
and outlooks for the sector.”
Central to the concerns in the
Treasury is the rapid, largely opaque and unregulated growth of private
credit and its intertwining with insurance companies, which have turned
to private credit to try to boost their returns, as well as with banks
which have financed them.
The head of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, who last October warned of
“cockroaches” in the financial system following the failure of two
companies backed by private credit, has again pointed to emerging
dangers in his annual letter to shareholders issued yesterday.
“I
do believe that when we have a credit cycle, which will happen one day,
losses on all leveraged lending in general will be higher than expected,
relative to the environment,” he wrote. He said inflation could lead to
a rise in interest rates, which would act “like gravity” on almost all
asset prices, leading to a “flight to cash.”
The rise and rise of
private credit is one of the most significant changes in the financial
landscape since the 2008 global financial crisis. The global private
credit market has expanded from around $500 billion in 2008 to about
$3.5 trillion today.
*****
The financial risks arising from the explosive growth of private
credit have now increased with the US war on Iran and its flow-on
effects through inflation not only in oil but across commodity markets,
pressures on already stretched government finances and the prospect of
interest rate rises, according to a report by the Bank of England (BoE)
at the start of the month.
The report of the central bank’s
Financial Policy Committee (FPC) said while the financial system had
been resilient so far, the shock of the war “will weigh on growth,
increase inflation and tighten financial conditions.”
“This is likely to interact with vulnerabilities previously
identified by the FPC in sovereign debt markets, risky asset valuations
and risky credit markets, notably in private credit.”
It noted
that many sovereign debt markets, where government bonds are bought and
sold, have been “characterized by a relatively high use of leverage by a
small number of hedge funds pursing similar strategies across
jurisdictions.”
The similarity of the strategies employed meant
that all the heavily involved hedge funds react in the same way to an
adverse event increasing the risk of what the BoE report called a
“disorderly unwind of positions causing a jump to illiquidity in core
markets.”
This is what happened in the freeze of the US Treasury market in
March 2020 when no buyers could be found for US bonds for a number of
days requiring a massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve to the
tune of around $4 trillion.
The report made clear that because of
the interconnectedness of financial markets and the involvement of a
small number of major hedge funds a crisis could start anywhere and then
spread everywhere.
*****
On the issue of AI, the report noted that it had the potential to
raise productivity and promote long-term economic growth but pointed out
that valuations for US technology companies focused on AI remained
“particularly stretched.” What it called “AI repricing,” that is a fall
in the market valuation of these companies, “could transmit widely
throughout the financial system and impact the real economy.”
“The
conflict in the Middle East posed additional threats to AI company
valuations, given the energy-intensive nature of the supply chain for
key components and the operation of data centers. In addition, supply
chain disruption for key input chemical elements and materials could
similarly act as a bottleneck on the buildout of infrastructure
capacity.”
The report highlighted the extent of growth of private
credit markets and warned that they had not been tested by
“macroeconomic stress at their current stage.”
It said concerns
about “opacity, valuation methodologies and asset quality deterioration
amplified by structural liquidity mismatch [a reference to the desire by
investors to have short-term access to their funds which are tied up in
long-term investments], were central to recent redemption episodes.”
The
report concluded that the UK banking system and by implication that of
other major economies had the capacity to support households and
businesses “even if economic and financial conditions were to be
substantially worse than expected.”
But as the saying goes: They would say that wouldn’t they.
Last
week’s oral argument on Trump’s executive order to revoke birthright
citizenship raised historical questions dating back to the Civil War on
whether the offspring of immigrants have full citizenship rights.
*****
D. John Sauer, who as Trump’s personal attorney argued for immunity
in the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, defended the order as U.S.
Solicitor General. Trump attended—a first for a sitting
president—glaring with his arms crossed like a Mafia boss trying to
intimidate a turncoat witness. He left during the hearing, after Sauer
was sliced and diced, including by several of the right-wing justices.
Trump
then posted, “Kangaroo court!!” and, falsely, that “We’re the only
Country in the World Stupid enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”
There are at least 30 others, including Canada and Mexico.
Birthright
citizenship is guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment, ratified three years after the Civil War. It states: “All
persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state
wherein they reside.”
The Citizenship Clause ingrains jus soli
into the Constitution, that all persons born on US soil are vested with
equal citizenship, in contrast to the hereditary rights of jus sanguinis,
citizenship by blood, the reactionary conception still in use by
European capitalism, Middle Eastern monarchies and much of the rest of
the world to deny immigrants and their offspring rights of equal
citizenship, thus creating an oppressed caste of workers for increased
exploitation.
Trump’s executive order is based on a novel theory
that children born in the US to non-citizen parents are not subject to
federal jurisdiction, an absurdity that would strip millions of their US
citizenship.
The jurisdictional exception has only been applied
to offspring of foreign diplomats, who inhabit a jurisdictional bubble
when in the US and, prior to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, certain
Native Americans.
Trump’s crude and ignorant assertion that the
Citizenship Clause protects “the babies of slaves,” but not immigrants,
is based on the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford that
people of African descent imported as slaves cannot be US citizens.
During the run-up to the Civil War, however, official discrimination
extended to the waves of European immigrants. Representatives of the
Know Nothing Party enacted state laws barring them from government
employment and imposing other legal disabilities.
During the Civil
War, those same immigrants, many whose families fled the defeats of the
1848 democratic revolutions in Europe, enlisted in the Union Army. One
example is Patrick Henry “Paddy” O’Rorke, born in Ireland but named
after the Revolutionary War hero. Rising to the rank of colonel, he died
at Gettysburg leading the 140th New York Regiment, comprised largely of
immigrants, in defense of the key Union position on Little Round Top,
fighting next to the 20th Maine regiment led by Joshua Chamberlain.
Given
this historical background, the Supreme Court in 1898 emphatically
rejected any contention that the Citizenship Clause applied only to
“babies of slaves,” ruling in favor of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San
Francisco to Chinese nationals, traveled abroad and then was denied
reentry to the United States.
*****
The argument by ACLU National Legal Director Cecillia Wang, who
represents a class of children and families affected by Trump’s
executive order, went smoothly, suggesting sympathy among most justices.
The
exception was Alito. A supposed “textualist,” he found the Citizenship
Clause undecipherable, telling Wang, “‘subject to the jurisdiction
thereof’ is like the puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery.”
“A
boy is born here to an Iranian father who has entered the country
illegally,” Alito continued. “That boy is automatically an Iranian
national at birth, and he has a duty to provide military service to the
Iranian government. Is he not subject to any foreign power?” Alito
asked.
Wang responded, “Again, Justice Alito, that would have
meant that the children of Irish, Italian, and other immigrants, to
which Wong Kim Ark refers … would not have been citizens either
because, if the only test is whether that US-born child is considered a
citizen by another country under their jus sanguinis laws, then no foreign national’s children would be included in citizenship.”
Wang
ended her argument with a ringing endorsement of the democratic
principles at stake, explaining that the Citizenship Clause’s framers
rejected concerns that the offspring of immigrants “characterized as
invaders, trespassers, and-law breakers” will become birthright citizens
“without regard to parentage.”
Wang pointed out that when the
Fourteenth Amendment was drafted, “there had just been 15 or 20 years of
unprecedented immigration from Ireland,” and in response “the Know
Nothing Party was dominant in the 1850s, just a decade earlier, and they
were vehemently opposed to Irish immigration.
“Contrary to the
government’s arguments now,” Wang concluded, the framers of the
Citizenship Clause “had an intuition that was consistent with the
founding aversion to inherited rights and disabilities.”
The written decision is expected before the July 4 holiday.
The new aspects of spaceflight being probed by Artemis II largely
concern the impacts of radiation on the spacecraft and the astronauts
themselves. The dangers of radiation beyond Earth’s protective magnetic
field, above all coming from our Sun, were poorly understood a
half-century ago, and almost cost the lives of the crews of Apollo 16
and 17. Today, the different types of energy output from the Sun,
broadly grouped under the term space weather, are far more studied, but
the impacts they might have on humans traveling in deep space have only
been theorized since no humans have traveled past low Earth orbit since
1972.
To that end, Orion carries six active Hybrid Electronic
Radiation Assessors at various positions inside the crew module,
supplemented by individual Crew Active Dosimeters worn by each
astronaut, the same equipment used on the International Space Station.
Germany’s DLR space agency contributed an updated version of its M-42
radiation sensor, the M-42 EXT, which is six times more sensitive than
the version flown on Artemis I. Four of these sensors are affixed at
points around the cabin. Together they will measure total radiation dose
and distinguish between different types of energetic particles,
including the heavy ions considered most hazardous to human tissue at
the cellular level.
The mission is also serving as a live test of
two forecasting models for space weather developed by researchers at the
University of Michigan. One is a machine-learning system that uses
satellite imagery of the solar corona to estimate the probability of a
dangerous solar particle event up to 24 hours in advance. The second is a
physics-based model designed to simulate particle acceleration in the
Sun’s outer atmosphere itself and predict how particle storms will
propagate toward Earth and the Moon.
These forecasting tools are
being evaluated by NASA’s Space Radiation Analysis Group, and their
performance during Artemis II will determine whether they are
incorporated into mission planning for future flights.
*****
Artemis II’s reentry is scheduled for Friday. The heat shield problem
carried over from Artemis I, in which portions of the char layer
separated in fragments rather than ablating as designed, has not been
fixed. NASA instead altered the reentry trajectory. The crews’ safe
return is dependent on how well that decision holds.
In 1957–58, during what was called Operation Grapple, Britain
deployed some 14,000 servicemen, supported by 276 Fijian troops and two
New Zealand Navy frigates, to Malden Island and Kiritimati (Christmas)
Island in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. These are now part of
Kiribati, which has a population of about 138,000 and is spread across
33 atolls, halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
The UK conducted
nine atmospheric nuclear explosions involving atomic and hydrogen bombs.
The program culminated in the UK becoming the third recognized nation
to possess thermonuclear weapons and saw the restoration of the nuclear
Special Relationship with the United States in the form of the 1958
US–UK Mutual Defense Agreement.
The US also carried out 24 nuclear tests near Kiritimati in 1962 in Operation Dominic.
Through
a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, McCue Jury has obtained a 2014
internal report by the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), part of the
UK Ministry of Defence, (MoD) titled Review of environmental monitoring data for Christmas Island (CI) 1957–1958.
Writing
on Substack on March 20, Oli Troen, a senior associate acting for test
veterans and their families, argues the document points to a
long-running institutional effort to deny the extent of radioactive
fallout at Kiritimati.
The paper reveals that environmental data
from the 1950s in fact showed alarming fallout levels in areas where
troops were stationed and indigenous populations lived. Elevated
radiation readings were taken at Port Camp, where Royal Navy personnel
were based during one detonation. None of this had ever been disclosed.
Troen writes that officials classified the paper as a “draft” and then
buried it.
For decades, the British ruling elite maintained that
there was no dangerous fallout. The MoD claimed that few people were
exposed to any radiation or contamination and that studies had shown
little or no health effects. Successive governments dismissed repeated
claims for compensation.
*****
Operation Grapple was a crime carried out by British imperialism to
further its interests. The British ruling class sought nuclear status at
the expense of poisoning the Pacific and its people. The tests were
bound up with boosting the geopolitical position of Britain as its
empire and economic strength waned by proving to Washington that Britain
had a place among the nuclear powers.
*****
In the wake of the criminal World War II bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the Pacific islands were treated as expendable nuclear
laboratories. Between 1946 and 1958, the US carried out 67 atmospheric
and underwater nuclear explosions and biological weapons tests in the
Marshall Islands. France, in defiance of intense local opposition,
conducted 193 tests in French Polynesia from 1966–1996.
Throughout
the Cold War, the imperialist powers sought to assert their strategic
domination against the USSR with the construction of potentially
catastrophic nuclear weapons. The colonial territories in the Pacific
were cynically used as dumping grounds for radioactive contamination,
while workers and island populations bore the health, environmental, and
social consequences.
This history is a stark reminder that
nuclear weapons remain fundamental instruments of predatory state power.
The entire Indo-Pacific region is being re-militarized by US
imperialism and its allies in preparation for war against China. Last
October Trump announced the resumption of US nuclear weapons testing, escalating the threat of a nuclear war.
On March 31, the Teamsters announced a tentative agreement (TA) with
First Student covering more than 17,000 school bus drivers, thereby
preventing a nationwide strike that had been scheduled to begin on April
1.
The union issued a statement praising a new “national
foundation for economics” while withholding the full text of the
agreement, leaving rank-and-file members to wonder what exactly had been
agreed upon.
The Teamsters’ press release claims the deal will
deliver “stronger retirement benefits, improved access to healthcare
benefits, and robust contractual protections for all members,” and
asserts these national minimums will “boost bargaining on important
issues at the local level.”
The refusal to release concrete
details is a typical sign that the deal is worse than the bureaucrats
let on. If it was a major victory, they would be shouting the details
from the rooftops.
Budget crises are proliferating across the country.
In California, districts have warned of layoffs affecting thousands of classified employees, including bus drivers. In SanDiego, more than 200 positions have already been cut, with routes consolidated and workloads increased. In SanFrancisco, school closures are being advanced as a cost-cutting measure due to funding shortfalls. In NorthCarolina, the state has yet to pass a budget for the 2025–2026 school year, leaving teachers and staff without raises amid rising costs.
*****
When asked for specifics, a union official replied that members “will
know prior to when you vote.” This would keep workers in the dark about
key details until right before the vote, allowing the bureaucracy to
control the narrative.
Drivers should insist that the full text of the TA must be published
immediately and distributed to every member. There must be a meaningful
review period and open, democratic meetings in every depot and local to
debate the terms. Any ratification vote must follow such democratic
discussion.
More fundamentally, core conditions must be secured in binding
national language. Guaranteed hours, overtime standards, paid sick leave
and holidays, and protections against surveillance must not be left to
local negotiation.
But legal language and demands are not enough.
The only reliable safeguard against bureaucratic betrayals is
organization from below. Drivers must build rank‑and‑file committees in
every terminal that are: elected, recallable and accountable to the
membership.
Polling published by the Australian yesterday
has underscored an historic crisis of the official two-party system, of
Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition, that has been in place and
politically-led the capitalist order for the past 80 years or more.
As
with all polling, the data undoubtedly has its limitations. It is,
however, a quarterly analysis collating and cross-referencing the
results of four Newspolls conducted between January 12 and March 26,
meaning that the figures have some longer term significance than a
one-off poll.
The data shows a continuing plunge in support for the
Liberal-National Coalition, which has been in a meltdown particularly
since its disastrous loss in the May, 2025 federal election. But it also
reveals growing disaffection with Labor, whose primary vote was already
nearing record lows at that election of just 34 percent. And the data
confirms the rise of the far-right One Nation, which is capitalising on
widespread social discontent.
The latter of the polls encompass
the period since the US launched its utterly criminal war on Iran, which
has been fully supported by the Labor government. As a consequence of
the war, fuel prices have surged to record levels, with some analyses
indicating that families are spending up to $60 more on petrol per week.
*****
The consolidated polling has One Nation, at 30 percent of the primary
vote, leading both Labor (27 percent) and the Liberal National Party
(23) percent in the north-eastern state of Queensland.
That is the
only state in which One Nation is ahead of both Labor and the Coalition
parties. But even still, it is potentially unprecedented in modern
polling for a “third” party to be ahead of the two parties of government
in any state poll. Other “minor” parties that have at times capitalized on discontent with the two-party set-up, such as the now-defunct
Democrats, the Greens and One Nation in its first, 1990s iteration, have
never come close to such a polling result.
*****
The Australian reported that “Dissatisfaction with Mr
Albanese’s performance as prime minister has spiked across all age
groups, genders, states, education backgrounds, wage classes, homeowners
and renters.”
The polling has underlined the existential
character of the Coalition’s crisis. As the WSWS has previously
analysed, its 2025 election result was not an aberration. The Liberals,
the urban component of the Coalition, received their lowest vote since
their founding in 1944 and retained just nine of 88 metropolitan seats
across the country.
That was an expression of a collapse in the
sizeable middle-class of the post-World War II period, which had formed
the base of the Liberals, after decades of social polarisation. It had
already been reflected in the emergence of “Teal” independent
candidates, who took traditionally Liberal seats on the basis of a pitch
to affluent layers of the upper middle-class, and in a deepening
factional warfare between “moderate” and more hard-right elements.
Since
the May election, those ructions have only deepened, expressed in a
federal leadership change and two breakups of the Coalition, both of
which were patched up but only tenuously.
*****
The Coalition’s status as the second party of Australian capitalist rule
is now questionable. It was outpolled in every single state bar
Victoria by One Nation. And some 35 percent of people who voted for the
Coalition at the 2025 federal election, have now swung behind the
right-wing outfit.
*****
While elements of the Coalition are seeking to compete with One
Nation, by calling for a more populist and Trumpian pitch, that hardly
seems likely to resolve its increasingly intractable crisis. Such a
shift would only further alienate “moderate” Liberals, strengthening the
hand of the Teals.
The Coalition’s competition with One Nation
risks ceding further supporters to that party, by depriving it of any
point of distinction And in any event, the Coalition, as an
establishment party par excellence, simple cannot make the phony
anti-establishment pitch that One Nation as a “third” party is able to.
*****
One Nation, supported and funded by the wealthiest person in
Australia, Gina Rinehart who has led the support for Trump and the MAGA
movement in Australia, is a frothingly anti-immigrant and right-wing
party that defends capitalism and is hostile to the working class. The
ability of such an outfit to pitch to widespread discontent is above all
an indictment of Labor and the unions.
Both are thoroughly
corporatized entities that abandoned any connection to the working class
decades ago, instead inflicting decades of cuts to jobs, wages and
social conditions in the interests of the corporations. At the same
time, Labor, founded on the racist program of “White Australia,” has
spearheaded a persecution of refugees and immigrants and a promotion of
militarist nationalism that One Nation taps into.
Under conditions
of a crisis of capitalism globally and immense social tensions, the
two-party system is in breakdown and there is an immense social vacuum.
To prevent it being filled by the far-right, it is necessary to build a
socialist movement of the working class, against Labor, the entire
political establishment and their capitalist program of war and
austerity.
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.
