Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: September 14-20
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Tripartite conference in Washington between US, UK and France approve German rearmament
100 years ago:
Sacco and Vanzetti lawyers petition for new trial
2. The appeal of Bogdan Syrotiuk exposes a political frame-up
The appeal against Bogdan Syrotiuk’s 15-year sentence demonstrates that political views, journalism and socialist opposition to war were transformed into alleged acts of high treason without evidence of assistance to Russia or any other subversive activity.*****
The decisive force in securing his freedom is the international working class. The WSWS will intensify and expand the international campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk. We call on workers, young people, journalists, academics, artists and all defenders of democratic rights to take up this fight and bring it into workplaces, trade unions, schools and universities throughout the world.
3. The DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” program: “Socialism” for the privileged middle class
Broad layers of workers and young people are moving to the left in the United States. The obscene concentration of wealth, the police state attack on immigrants, the war in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the genocide in Gaza, the assault on social programs and living standards, and the palpable sense that the existing order offers no future are fueling a growth of class struggle and pushing millions to look for an alternative to capitalism.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is a beneficiary of the initial stage of this radicalization. Its membership has increased to 120,000, and its candidates have won a series of Democratic Party primary elections. At the same time, the contradiction between the socialist pretensions of the DSA and the pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist content of its politics emerges all the more sharply the greater its electoral successes.
This is the context in which the DSA held its “Socialists Summit” at the end of July, for which it published its program, titled “Workers Deserve More!” Both the program and the event highlight the reformist and anti-socialist character and function of the DSA. They define a political tendency whose “socialism” expresses the interests not of the working class, but of privileged sections of the middle class. The DSA is run by social layers that seek not the overthrow of the corporate-financial oligarchy, but rather a bigger share for themselves of the wealth extracted from the labor of the working class, while channeling opposition behind the Democratic Party.
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The DSA is setting a trap for hundreds of thousands of workers and youth who are genuinely seeking a way to fight against oligarchy, war and dictatorship. The danger is that absent the building of a genuine socialist and revolutionary leadership in the working class, the DSA’s discrediting of socialism will benefit the fascist right. History has demonstrated where the betrayal of mass expectations leads. Bernie Sanders promised a “political revolution” and then threw his support behind the Democratic Party establishment, helping to create the political conditions for the rise of Trump.
What is required is the total rejection of the Democratic Party and both parties of capitalism. The working class must establish its political independence by breaking with both capitalist parties and the entire framework of bourgeois politics. The capitalist state, an instrument of class rule that cannot be reformed, must be dismantled and replaced by a workers’ state, based on democratic organs of workers’ power. The struggles of American workers must be unified with those of workers internationally against imperialism and war.
The decisive question is the building of a revolutionary leadership in the working class, armed with a socialist and internationalist, i.e., Trotskyist, program. The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International are building that leadership. We urge workers and youth who are looking for a way to fight, who understand that socialism is a historical necessity, to join the SEP.
4. Support in Manchester, England for freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk
Socialist Equality Party campaigners in Manchester have won support among postal workers, students and anti-war demonstrators for the release of Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, sentenced to 15 years for opposing the NATO-war.
5. Forty years since the attempted assassination of Pinochet
The pseudo-left cannot defend its track record, so it flees into an idealized past. It cannot offer a program, so it offers assassination of an individual dictator as a substitute for the overthrow of an entire social system.
6. Rubio in Lima: Peru joins Trump's “Shield of the Americas”
On Thursday, September 10, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Peru’s far-right President Keiko Fujimori, concluding a three-day tour to further integrate Colombia, Ecuador and Peru into Washington’s so-called “Shield of the Americas.”
At the conclusion of the meeting, Fujimori and Rubio proclaimed the “success” of their talks. Fujimori said Peru was pleased to be admitted to the Shield, a paramilitary alliance of governments launched by Trump on March 7, 2026, that now includes 14 countries. Its orientation, while nominally aimed at drug cartels, is that the governments of the hemisphere must use their militaries to stop any challenge to US hegemony and corporate interests across the Americas.
It amounts to the implementation of Trump’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: America— the two continents—for the Americans, meaning US capitalism. Its purpose is to expel Chinese influence from the continent, which Washington regards as an economic and military threat, not so much to Latin American countries as to US imperialism.
Rubio declared that “America must discover its own destiny” and called for strengthening “the bonds of prosperity, order and peace” between the two countries. He cynically invoked the historical ties uniting both nations since their beginnings, as though two centuries of relations between the United States and Latin America had been characterized by mutual benefit rather than the plundering of oppressed peoples by US imperialism, working through their own bourgeoisies and landed oligarchies.
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The road to the far right’s rise to power in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America was paved by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Stalinist and Social Democratic mass parties and a globalized capitalist economy’s destruction of the material basis for left nationalism in the former colonial world. This was followed by the bankruptcy of the bourgeois nationalist populism associated with the discredited “Pink Tide” of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and similar governments.
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Answering Rubio’s accusations, the Chinese Embassy in Peru posted on X that China has been Peru’s largest trading partner for 12 consecutive years and that Peru is the third-largest Latin American exporter to China, on a basis of mutual benefit. In another post, the embassy stated that Chinese investment in Peru exceeds $30 billion and has created “opportunities for development, employment, tax revenues, trade surpluses and international reserves, without generating a single cent of debt.”
The disparity in economic weight is stark. US foreign direct investment in Peru amounts to approximately $6.7 billion, compared with $30 billion to $38 billion from China — 4.5 to 5.7 times as much. Chinese investment in Peru as a percentage of GDP far exceeds that in any other South American country. Beyond mining and infrastructure, China plans an industrial park near the Chancay megaport— the largest Pacific port on the South American coast—to manufacture electric vehicles and other consumer goods, integrating Peru more deeply into Chinese supply chains.
A central aim of Washington is to wrest control of Chancay from China. Given China’s economic importance to Peru and the country’s strategic role in Beijing’s regional plans, the private discussions between Rubio and Fujimori can hardly have been as tranquil as their public statements suggest.
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Only six weeks into her presidency and lacking a popular mandate, Fujimori is aligning her government with pro-Trump forces throughout the hemisphere while assembling her own administration along the same lines. She selected Carlos Espá as foreign minister; Espá has more than 15 years of experience at the US Embassy in Peru and was the presidential candidate of the tiny far-right Sí Creo party. She named Álvaro Vargas Llosa ambassador to the United State. The son of the late novelist and right-wing politician, Mario Vargas Llosa, he is a political chameleon who has successively backed presidents of differing political stripes, including Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, Martín Vizcarra and, finally, Keiko Fujimori.
While Rubio met Fujimori inside the Government Palace, hundreds demonstrated nearby against US intervention in Peru.
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The militarization proclaimed by the Shield of the Americas is aimed at setting the stage for military dictatorship. Its most direct precedent is Operation Condor, secretly established in 1975 with CIA support to crush opposition to South America’s military dictatorships. These dictatorships disappeared between 35,000 and 60,000 people, while the broader toll of those who suffered political and labor repression, imprisonment, torture and exile between 1964 and 1983 numbers in the hundreds of thousands, overwhelmingly workers and youth.
This time the carnage threatens to be far greater, because the military buildup is directed against a vastly larger and more concentrated working class confronting an increasingly explosive social crisis. The same globalization of production that Washington is attempting to fracture has united workers in Peru, across South America and in the United States itself into a single class with common interests against a common enemy.
The opposition to imperialism expressed by the demonstrators outside the Government Palace must be given a conscious political form. That requires building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Peru and throughout the Americas, to arm the working class with a revolutionary socialist and internationalist program.
7. Student protests against ICE re-emerge as the war on immigrants escalates
The opening weeks of the 2026–2027 school year have brought a renewed eruption of student protests against the immigration Gestapo, as the mass deportation operation extends its reach directly into the nation’s schools and campuses. Statewide walkouts in Colorado, a campus confrontation in San Diego, and a federal court fight in Miami mark the resumption of a movement that first exploded last winter in response to the murder of working class people by ICE and Border Patrol agents.
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The demonstrations follow directly on the mass walkouts of January and February 2026, when the killings of Renée Nicole Good, a Minneapolis mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a nurse and union member shot by Border Patrol agents, brought 100,000 people into the streets and set off walkouts across the country. On February 6 alone, nearly 12,500 students walked out of more than 85 Los Angeles schools.
What the press presents as a conflict over “immigration policy” is in fact the spearhead of a police state directed against the working class as a whole. Fifty-two immigrants died in ICE custody in the first 500 days of the second Trump administration. Since the murders of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis, immigration agents have killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a construction worker who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years, in Houston, and left Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero to bleed to death in front of his family in Maine. A force that can murder a worker on his way to his job and face no consequences can and will be turned against strikers and demonstrators.
The targeting of schools is not an excess of enforcement but its logical extension. ICE arrested parents and students at schools across Southern California at the beginning of the previous school year, terrorizing entire communities. The “sensitive locations” protections now rescinded were always a fiction—arrests took place within steps of school grounds even when the doctrine nominally remained in force. The same applies to the “sanctuary” and district “non-cooperation” policies the current protests largely demand: The 287(g) program now encompasses 2,485 agreements across 39 states and two US territories, converting every encounter with a police officer into a potential kidnapping under a federally financed bounty system.
The decisive political fact is that the apparatus now wielded by Trump was constructed on a bipartisan basis. Section 287(g) was enacted in 1996 under Bill Clinton. Obama expelled more than three million immigrants. Biden maintained the concentration camps and deported more people in his final year than in any single year of Trump’s first term. After the Minneapolis killings, the Democrats did not oppose the raids—they supported increasing ICE funding—while Minnesota’s Democratic governor deployed troopers to shield agents from the population. Most decisive was the betrayal of the trade union bureaucracy, which refused to organize even a single work stoppage amid growing calls for a general strike.
The current protests are organized, in significant part, by organizations advancing this same political orientation. MEChA, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Brown Berets and the 50501 coalition are not instruments of working class struggle but vehicles of identity politics, cultivated by the ruling class to divide workers along national, ethnic and religious lines and channel their opposition into the Democratic Party. The demands of the current protests reflect this orientation: written “non-cooperation policies,” enforcement of district procedures, a First Amendment lawsuit through the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). None of these demands touches the deportation machine itself.
8. Manitoba NDP government breaks Dynacare strike, joins nationwide assault on right to strike
Aligned with Carney’s nationalist “Team Canada” campaign, the NDP and union bureaucracy are helping enforce a mounting assault on workers’ right to strike.
9. Canada: Windsor Ventra Assembly auto parts workers vote by 99 percent to authorize strike
Workers at Ventra Assembly in Windsor, Ontario, members of Windsor-based United Auto Workers Local 251, voted on August 31 to authorize a strike action. The vote was 207 in favor and two against—a 99 percent margin. There are 220 workers at the plant which makes plastic-molded automotive exterior/interior components for Stellantis and Ford.
Local 251 is the only UAW unit in Canada. It has about 1,000 members in southwestern Ontario, employed in auto parts, healthcare, railroad and other sectors. Most UAW members in Canada split from the union in the United States in 1985 to form the Canadian Auto Workers, now Unifor.
Workers at a sister plant, Ventra Plastics, also in Windsor, belong to Unifor. The two sections of Ventra workers have separate contracts with different expiration dates. Thus, the two unions have effectively divided the Ventra workforce and undermined any joint struggle.
Both Ventra plants sit close to the Ford Essex Engine plant and Stellantis Windsor Assembly plant. A joint strike by workers at the two plants would have the potential to shut down production on both sides of the US-Canada border.
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Ventra is part of Flex-N-Gate, the privately owned auto parts giant controlled by billionaire Shahid Khan. Flex-N-Gate acquired the Ventra Group in 2001.
The company operates in 12 countries—including the US, Mexico and Canada—and its plants are strategic choke points supplying the Big Three. The workers at these plants occupy powerful positions in the supply chain. However, in contract after contract the UAW has intervened to block or shut down strike action and impose management-friendly contracts.
According to Local 251, new hires at the Windsor facility start at $18.75 per hour (US$13.37), a starvation wage that compares poorly even with the poverty wages at other Ventra facilities in the United States.
This is not an aberration, but reflects the role of the UAW bureaucracy, which has deliberately sought to drive down wages at parts supplier plants to boost profitability for the Detroit-based car companies. Four decades of UAW-administered concessions have widened the auto parts/assembly plant wage gap from 15 percent in 1980 to over 30 percent today.
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Workers at Ventra Assembly seeking to wage a real fight against these miserable conditions will not find it in the UAW or Unifor bureaucracies. Workers at Ventra should take a warning from previous sellouts imposed by the UAW apparatus. The 207–2 vote will mean nothing unless workers organize independently to force the strike the authorization presupposes.
The contract talks take place in the aftermath of a series of sellout contracts imposed by the UAW onto the backs of auto parts workers across the US.
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The negotiations at Ventra coincide with the September contract expiration for 17,000 workers at the Canadian operations of Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. Unifor is seeking to pre-empt strike action. It held a snap contract vote in July for 5,000 Ford workers and 4,600 GM workers in August, securing ratification of a pathetic 3 percent annual wage increase. Unifor is now seeking to ram through the “pattern” at Stellantis. Last week, Unifor announced a “pause” in negotiations before the September 20 contract expiration because Stellantis is pushing to close and sell off its plant in Brampton, Ontario, where more than 2,000 workers are currently laid off.
Far from fighting to unite US and Canadian workers, UAW President Shawn Fain has embraced Trump’s trade war policies and hailed Stellantis’ decision to move Jeep production from Brampton to an assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois in the US.
Workers at Ventra Assembly in Windsor should follow the example of striking workers at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario as well as at Nexteer, who have formed rank-and-file committees independent of the union apparatus. The immediate task is fight for these concrete steps: (1) demand the full contract and full disclosure with adequate time to study any agreement; (2) throw out the appointed bargaining committee and re-elect a strike committee from the shop floor; (3) reach out now to Ventra Plastics (Unifor), the other Flex-N-Gate/Ventra plants, and Big Three workers across the river in Detroit.
10. The Thirteenth COVID-19 wave and the further dismantling of US public health
The United States has entered what the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC), an independent modeling group led by Michael Hoerger of Tulane University, numbers as the 13th wave of the pandemic. The surge is being reported, where it is reported at all, as a routine item in a seasonal respiratory forecast alongside influenza and RSV. A disease that has killed more than 1.2 million Americans, and by excess mortality estimates upwards of 20 million people worldwide while disabling tens of millions more, is now described in the tones of a traffic and weather report.
The PMC estimates for September 7 put roughly one in 86 Americans, or 1.2 percent, actively infectious, with about 567,000 new infections a day and 3.69 million over the past week. A single week at this level produces between 900 and 1,600 excess deaths. The figures rest on wastewater surveillance, the last national measure of transmission still in effect which detects virus material shed into municipal sewage.
Transmission ran below the six-year median through spring and early summer before turning sharply upward in early August, leaving the population entering September with less recent infection-derived immunity than in comparable years. Outbreaks are underway in at least 33 states and territories, concentrated across the South, Southwest and Pacific Coast, with Texas the highest at one in 15 people actively infectious. The PMC counts only counties with observed data, citing South Carolina and Oklahoma as states where inadequate monitoring fails to register outbreaks.
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Each week of transmission at the present level produces between 185,000 and 740,000 new cases of Long COVID, by PMC’s estimate. A feature in the September-October issue of the Smithsonian magazine reports that roughly 21 million American adults, more than 8 percent, have experienced Long COVID, with more than a million kept out of the workforce. Amy Proal of the PolyBio Research Foundation estimates the severe, disabling form affects about 2 percent of those infected. The Patient-Led Research Collaborative has catalogued more than 200 symptoms, led by post-exertional malaise, a collapse in function following exertion.
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On August 27, the FDA approved four updated COVID-19 vaccines targeting the XFG variant: Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty, Moderna’s Spikevax and mNexspike, and Novavax and Sanofi’s Nuvaxovid. Each is approved for adults 65 and older, and for younger people only with a qualifying underlying condition. Blanket approval for the general adult population no longer exists. CDC surveillance places SW.2 as the most prevalent lineage at roughly 21 percent of sequenced cases, closely related to XFG, implying the current vaccines should offer adequate coverage despite the changing dominant strains of SARS-CoV-2.
A study by Ruth Link-Gelles and colleagues at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, published in JAMA Network Open on June 23, examined 85,725 emergency and urgent care visits and 26,073 hospitalizations across seven states. Adults without immune compromise who received the 2025-2026 vaccine were about 50 percent less likely to need emergency care and 55 percent less likely to be hospitalized.
Nonetheless, coverage remains low, and the cause is access rather than refusal. CDC survey data show 17.5 percent of adults had received the dose by February 22, down from 21 percent the season before. Child coverage stood at 9.7 percent, and vaccination among pregnant women at 11.1 percent. In the same season 43.9 percent of adults took an influenza vaccine against 16.1 percent for COVID-19, which rules out a general turn against vaccination. A cohort study found 39 percent of adults who said they were willing to be vaccinated had still not received it by March, with non-vaccination tracking food insecurity, difficulty reaching health care and never having been offered the vaccine by a physician. While flu vaccines are oftentimes readily made available even at work, COVID-19 vaccines require individuals to seek them through their doctors or pharmacies.
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The vaccine works, and the government study proving it was suppressed. Transmission is rising, and the measurements were retroactively relabeled downward. Repeated infection is documented to cause lasting chronic disease, and the institute that would study it has deleted pandemic preparedness from its plan while transferring the work to the Pentagon.
These are not errors of judgment or failures of knowledge. They are the systematic defense of a policy that treats mass infection as cheaper than public health. Pathogens are an objective feature of modern social life and require a coordinated collective defense, which no economy subordinating human survival to private profit is willing to support any further.
Public health is a social right the working class must wrest from the ruling class. That requires rand-and-file committees of healthcare workers, educators, scientists and parents, independent of both capitalist parties, health research and provision placed under democratic working-class control, and the pharmaceutical monopolies must be taken out of private hands.
11. Australian Labor government backs demolition of Victorian public housing towers
The federal Albanese Labor government has sprung to the defense of the determination of the Victorian state Labor government to demolish 44 public housing towers in Melbourne, despite a United Nations complaint and a legal challenge in the Australian High Court.
The UN Rapporteur for Adequate Housing Koldo Casla issued a letter in July posing objections to the demolitions. He asked the Australian government to provide information about the basis of the decision to demolish the towers and the resulting evictions and forced displacement of approximately 10,000 residents.
Casla also asked about the absence of prior meaningful consultation with affected communities, the lack of transparency or consideration of possible alternatives and the potential loss of public housing stock, as well as the adequacy of relocation arrangements, the absence of a guaranteed legal right of return and the possible impact on vulnerable groups and individuals.
Clare Walsh, the Albanese government’s UN ambassador released a 15-page reply on August 25, reproducing to the letter the justifications of the Victorian government agency Homes Victoria. She asserted that Australia fulfills its human rights obligations under various international covenants, and that Homes Victoria is acting completely in line with these obligations.
In fact, residents were threatened that if they did not accept one of two relocation offers they would be relegated back to the Victorian Housing Register, where 80,000 people languish without homes for decades.
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The UN rapporteur stated: “With around 30,000 persons experiencing homelessness, and 80,000 persons on waiting lists for public housing in Victoria, Australia and the Victoria State Government are already failing to ensure the satisfaction of the enjoyment of essential levels of the right to adequate housing to a significant number of persons in their territory in violation of the right to adequate housing.”
To camouflage Labor’s intent to hand over valuable inner suburban land to property developers, Walsh defended Labor’s blurring of the distinction between public and community housing, by labeling both as social housing.
She stated: “Social housing is made up of both public housing and community housing. Public housing is managed by the Government of Victoria, while community housing is managed by registered not-for-profit community housing providers. Despite differences in management, the eligibility requirements for public and community housing are the same.”
In reality, community housing is more expensive than public housing, has much weaker security of tenure and the non-government providers can cherry-pick applicants from the Housing Register, whereas public housing is allocated by length of time on the waiting list.
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Demolition in the three towers has been halted until the High Court hands down its ruling, expected in October.
Even a positive outcome for the residents in the High Court will not prevent demolition. It would at best delay the process to meet the formal requirements of procedural fairness, involving some form of supposed consultation.
What is crystal clear, however, is that the Albanese government fully backs the plan by its state counterpart, now headed by Premier Ben Carroll, to carry through a wholesale privatization of public housing, regardless of the basic legal and democratic rights of the public tower residents.
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The demand must be raised for the allocation of billions of dollars for the construction of new high-quality public housing to provide for those on waiting lists and everyone in dire need of secure housing, with rents capped at no more than 25 percent of a household’s income.
That means a political struggle by the working class against the capitalist profit system and the refashioning of society from top to bottom on socialist lines. The vast resources created by the working class must be used to meet the pressing social needs of the majority, including for decent affordable housing, not the profits of the wealthy developers.
The Neighbourhood Action Committee has been established by residents with the support of the Socialist Equality Party to spearhead this fight. We urge residents and their supporters to join us. Contact us at: nacodpht.publichousingaus@gmail.com.
12. Postal Workers: Refuse to withhold ballots! Defend mail-in voting and the post office!
To All USPS Workers,
The Post Office is being turned into a weapon against the right to vote.
Our answer is already given: We will not do it. We refuse to carry out any order to withhold, delay or “verify” mail-in ballots. We will not be the instrument of the disenfranchisement of the American people.
On March 31, Trump signed an executive order that will strip millions of Americans of their mail-in ballots. The Department of Homeland Security is directed to compile federal lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state. Every state must then hand over the names and addresses of all registered voters receiving a mail ballot to the federal government and the USPS. The Postal Service is ordered to “verify” these lists and withhold ballots from any voter not on the federal roster. For states that do not comply, election officials face prosecution by the Department of Justice, and the USPS is directed to refuse to deliver their ballots.
Trump claims mail-in voting has allowed “hundreds of thousands of non‑citizens” to vote. This is a lie. Forty-seven million Americans—30 percent of the electorate—voted by mail in 2024, and the Brookings Institution found just four documented cases of fraud out of 10 million ballots. The real aim is to lay the groundwork for manipulating or even suspending elections that do not go Trump’s way. This is an attempt to rig the 2026 elections.
A whistleblower report by a USPS official concludes that “potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.” The scheme rests on a chaotic, untested computer portal and a “zero percent failure” rule under which a single mismatched barcode in a batch of 10,000 ballots can cause the Postal Service to refuse the entire batch. As the report put it, the question is whether “catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug”—whether the system is designed to exclude millions of eligible voters and sow chaos.
Why the Post Office is the target
This ballot attack is inseparable from the attack on our jobs. It is part of the same strategy moving to privatize the USPS, through Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and Postmaster General David Steiner, a former FedEx board member installed by Trump to prepare the Post Office for sale to private profiteers.
The cuts now being planned are the deepest in the history of the post office. Steiner has told Congress that the USPS will shift the workforce toward lower-paid, non-career employees. He has called on Congress to strip away the Universal Service Obligation—the legal requirement to deliver to every address at uniform prices—and to allow the closure of “thousands of unprofitable post offices” and an end to six-day delivery. The Postal Service’s Inspector General has floated a 10 percent workforce reduction, roughly 60,000 jobs, alongside fewer delivery days and the outsourcing of transportation and retail operations. Management has already suspended payments into our pension fund and frozen hiring.
This is the gutting of a public service that was an achievement of the American Revolution. The Post Office was founded under Benjamin Franklin in 1775, and the generation that fought the Revolution regarded the free flow of information as essential to the new republic. Congress subsidized the distribution of news so that the population could take part in political life. The Post Office was never designed to be profitable. It was built to reach every farmhouse and working-class neighborhood, where no private carrier would go. The fight to defend mail-in voting and the fight to defend the post office are the same fight.
As lawyers challenging the order wrote, “USPS is no longer merely a carrier of ballots; it is instead transformed into the gatekeeper of voter eligibility.” Our Post Office is being converted from a public service into an instrument of election rigging and political surveillance.
Why no one else will fight for us
The Democrats will not defend the right to vote. They are a party of Wall Street, more afraid of a working-class movement from below than of fascism. Their response has been a pro forma promise to “fight in court”—while they grovel before Trump and vote to hand him everything he asks. And the courts have been vacillating on the legality of Trump’s executive order. We can’t rely on judges to save us.
Nor will our union officials. The NALC, NRLCA and APWU have not proposed, much less organized, a serious struggle. They tell us to write letters to Congress and respect anti-strike laws. NALC President Brian Renfroe’s answer to privatization is an arbitrated contract cooked up behind closed doors, deprived of the right of the rank and file even to vote on it. The union bureaucracy has worked hand-in-glove with USPS management to introduce the piecework pay, surveillance and speed-up that are bleeding us dry. They are integrated with the state apparatus. They are collaborators, not allies.
What we must do: Build rank-and-file committees
The only force that can stop this is the working class—the most powerful social force on earth. But it can act only if it is organized independently, through rank-and-file committees in every station and distribution center, across all crafts: city and rural carriers, clerks, mail handlers, vehicle operators and technicians.
We must begin now, before the 2026 elections. The committees must:
Refuse to carry out any order to withhold, delay or “verify” mail-in ballots. We refuse it now, and we refuse it together, across all crafts and stations. We will not wait for the courts to decide our answer for us, or for management to issue the first withholding order before we respond. An order that management can impose on one isolated worker can be imposed on all of us; an order that the workforce refuses, collectively and openly, cannot be carried out.
Vigilantly monitor every attempt to put this executive order into practice. We are the ones who will see the withheld ballots, the rejected batches, the new verification procedures. No one is better placed than postal workers to document how this scheme operates and expose it.
Share information across stations, districts and crafts. What happens in one workplace must be known in every workplace. Management will try to carry out the sabotage quietly, station by station. Our answer is to make every act of ballot suppression public.
Coordinate action to oppose it. Link the refusal, the monitoring, and the exposure into a single, unified campaign and build the broadest possible support for it among the public we serve.
We demand:
The defense of universal mail-in voting as a basic democratic right.
A fully funded, fully staffed public post office—no job cuts, no service reductions, no privatization.
An end to the piecework pay and surveillance systems that punish us for doing our jobs.
The independent organization of the working class, in opposition to both corporate-backed parties and their enforcers in the trade union apparatus.
This is a political fight, decided by a struggle between social forces: the working class against the corporate oligarchy that rules through Trump and the Democrats alike. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and every program on which tens of millions rely are also at stake.
Unite with workers everywhere
We must link up with workers in every city and neighborhood where we make deliveries—federal workers, teachers, industrial workers—to build a unified class movement against dictatorship. Workers in other countries and immigrants in the US are our allies; our real enemies are the oligarchs within the US.
Many rank-and-file committees have already been built at key workplaces and are affiliated in a world movement, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Postal workers in Canada, Britain and Germany are fighting similar privatization schemes. We must link up with them and prepare joint actions.
The question is how these demands can be won. They will be won only by the organized, united action of the working class—by strikes, by mass mobilizations, and ultimately by the struggle to replace the dictatorship of capital with a society run in the interests of working people.
If you agree, join us. Contact the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee today.
In Solidarity,
13. Trump presses attack on midterm election as deadline looms for mail ballots
The Trump administration is escalating its efforts to disrupt the November 3 midterm election with a series of legal appeals directed to the US Supreme Court, as well as efforts to mobilize immigration agents and other federal police at polling places, and an appeal by Trump himself to his followers to “cheat” as much as possible in the vote.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling this week on the legal challenges filed against Trump’s executive order, issued in March, for the US Postal Service to impose new rules for the handling of mail ballots. Last month the court blocked a district court order against Trump and USPS, on the grounds that USPS had not formalized the rules and state governments therefore did not have standing to file suit.
Within days, however, USPS did issue the rules, and in a number of cases has rejected ballot envelopes submitted by state and local governments, claiming they did not meet its standards. The same district judge has issued a new temporary restraining order blocking the rules, and her order was upheld by the First Circuit Court of Appeals. The Department of Justice appealed to the Supreme Court even before the appeals court took action.
The timing of a Supreme Court ruling could well be driven by the September 19 deadline, set by federal law, for states to mail out absentee ballots to soldiers stationed overseas who wish to vote. USPS has not even completed work on the online portal through which states were supposed to submit lists of registered voters for verification, under the terms of Trump’s executive order.
North Carolina began sending out mail ballots last week to voters who requested them, and Wisconsin and Alabama have also begun doing so. Some North Carolina voters have even marked their ballots and returned them to the state, meaning that the election has actually begun in that state. Nearly two dozen states will send out mail ballots by September 19 to any voter who requests them. Eight states conduct their entire election process by mail ballots, returned either through the USPS or ballot drop-boxes.
In addition to the civil rights groups that have filed lawsuits against the Trump executive order, as well as 22 state governments controlled by the Democratic Party, a group of Republican secretaries of state and local election officials have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court seeking a stay on the mail-ballot order on the grounds that there is not enough time to implement it before the midterm vote, now just seven weeks away.
These include secretaries of state in Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Dakota and South Dakota. They cited the longstanding principle that rules should not be changed so late in the election process, writing: “The principle rests on incontestable facts about voters and about the people who run elections: that late changes breed confusion, that confusion keeps eligible voters from voting, and that a chaotic election erodes confidence in the result.”
Noting the federal deadline for all states to send ballots to overseas military personnel, and the mailing out of ballots more generally in many states, they argued, “In many respects, the election is already underway.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—who in 2020 rejected Trump’s telephone appeal that he “find” the 11,780 votes needed to overcome Trump’s defeat in the state by Democrat Joe Biden—said that tens of thousands of absentee ballot applications were already awaiting processing. “We’ve already accepted 50,000 applications, and we expect probably upwards of 200,000 people that will want to vote,” he said.
The appeals court ruling, which is now before the Supreme Court, agreed with the conclusion of district court judge Indira Talwani that the mail-ballot rule issued by Trump “will likely result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the country while providing minimal—if any—gains in combating voter fraud.”
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The political atmosphere in Washington is increasingly tense ahead of the Supreme Court decision on the mail ballot rules, and Trump’s response to any adverse ruling, which is likely to be explosive. This was reflected in a headline in the Washington Post, which read, “The new threat election officials fear: Trump’s federal government.”
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A group of congressional Democrats has been conducting tabletop exercises for possible responses to Election Day provocations, including efforts by Trump to suspend the vote entirely. However, the responses are limited to preparing legal briefs and drafting court orders ahead of time. There will be no appeals to the American people to defend their democratic rights, because the Democratic Party is far more afraid of the social and political consequences of such an appeal than of anything Trump might do.
The Post reported that Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA officer and Pentagon official, has received a letter from General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuring her that the military had no plans to use troops to seize ballots, voting machines or other election material. “I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections,” he wrote.
The very fact that the question was raised and answered—with a careful denial of receiving “any unlawful order,” leaving open the possibility of a “lawful order”—is an indication of how far down the path of presidential dictatorship the United States has moved.
14. Judge dismisses soprano Anna Netrebko’s defamation suit against Met Opera
A US district judge has dismissed soprano Anna Netrebko’s suit against the Metropolitan Opera for defamation of character. The ruling, issued earlier this month by Judge Annalisa Torres, found that Netrebko had not proved that Met managing director Peter Gelb had “acted with actual malice when he made the alleged defamatory statements.” The soprano is continuing her suit for gender discrimination against the Met, citing the fact that Russian male singers, including bass Ildar Abdrazakov, performed at the Met after Netrebko’s appearances were cancelled.
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Netrebko has not been “cancelled” in the rest of the world, however. Although she has also been excluded in Russia, she is singing to almost universal critical and popular praise, filling opera houses to capacity throughout the rest of Europe. Small protests by supporters of the Ukrainian regime outside a few performances have been completely rejected or ignored by audiences. In the coming few months, Netrebko will be singing the title role in Puccini’s Turandot in Vienna, the role of Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto at La Scala in Milan, and Abigaille in Verdi’s Nabucco in Berlin. In addition, there is a concert tour and appearances, including in Verdi’s Requiem.
The soprano made her debut 32 years ago. She has been a household name in the world of opera for close to a quarter of a century. At 54, her career has been noted for its vocal longevity, as she has transitioned from the famous lyric and coloratura roles—including Violetta in La Traviata, Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and the title roles in Aida and Tosca—into heavier and more dramatic parts like Lady Macbeth and Turandot.
The district court ruling is political, but also in some respects a Pyrrhic one as well. Gelb has already been forced by an arbitrator’s decision to shell out $200,000 for breaking contractual agreements for a total of 13 scheduled appearances by Netrebko at the Met. This case has additionally added to the Met’s financial crisis, so deep that the company was forced to dip heavily into its endowment to meet current costs. The company is mounting 17 separate productions in the coming season, down from as high as 25 before the pandemic. It also announced significant layoffs and revealed that the famous Marc Chagall murals in the opera house’s lobby were up for sale, with the stipulation that they could not be moved.
Even as he was prattling on about Ukrainian “democracy,” Gelb also signed a memorandum of understanding for a multi-year $200 million performance residency that would have had the Met performing for three weeks each winter in Saudi Arabia, under the notorious dictatorship of de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman. To add to Gelb’s humiliation, the Saudis, citing fiscal constraints in light of its own wars, pulled out of this tentative deal last April.
The Met has not only been forced to pay Netrebko $200,000 for its breach of contract, it has also undoubtedly spent as much or more than this sum in its own legal costs. Most important, the opera company has lost its biggest draw at the box office at the peak of her career.
The continued success of Netrebko in Europe is politically significant. Opera houses in Europe, in contrast to their counterparts in the US, have refused to ostracize the soprano. This is not due in any way to official policy; the various European bourgeois governments are as determined as Washington, if not more so, to step up the war drive against Moscow. The reason for the Russian soprano’s continued success in Europe is clearly related to the experiences of two bloody world wars fought out largely on that continent, and the especially strong antiwar feelings among the descendants of earlier victims of imperialism.
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The proxy war in Ukraine is one front in the emerging third world war. Ukraine and other wars reflect the unprecedented depth of the crisis of imperialism. That crisis lies behind the campaign against Netrebko. It also finds expression in a very different and far more consequential attack on democratic rights: the sentencing of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk to 15 years in prison for the “crime” of writing six articles calling for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against the fratricidal war, for the World Socialist Web Site.
Resistance to imperialist war as well as inequality and the threat of fascism is growing. There is a connection between the outpouring of support for Bogdan—most recently the public statement by La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), the second largest political party in France, calling for Bogdan’s freedom—and the refusal of opera professionals and opera listeners alike to go along with Netrebko’s blacklisting.
15. How to stop the far-right Alternative for Germany
The trade unions, the SPD and the Left Party bear the main responsibility for the growth of the AfD. They are preventing the widespread opposition to war and social inequality from finding left-wing expression.
16. Solomon Islands embroiled in ongoing tensions over China
While fending off, for now, a challenge to his leadership, Prime Minister Wale has signed up to a series of anti-China strategic agreements.
17. Drone hits Mykolaiv detention center holding Bogdan Syrotiuk—all prisoners reported safe
A drone struck the Mykolaiv pre-trial detention center where Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk is imprisoned. Bogdan and the other prisoners were not injured. The incident underscores the urgency of the campaign for his immediate release.
18. Migrant workers face harsh conditions on Australian farms
With tight restrictions on their visas, often tying them to a specific employer, the hundreds of thousands of overseas workers in the Australian food picking and processing industry are especially vulnerable to exploitation.
With three weeks remaining before the October 5 deadline for mail ballots to be returned and counted, the election of top United Auto Workers officers—including UAW president—is taking place amid mounting economic assault on the working class. Automation-driven job cuts, inflation fueled by the Trump administration’s criminal war against Iran and its trade-war policies, and ever-worsening conditions in the factories have produced widespread opposition to incumbent president Shawn Fain, who oversaw the sellout of the 2023 contract struggle.
That sellout led to the elimination of thousands of jobs at GM, Ford and Stellantis, the workplace deaths of four Detroit Three autoworkers and long hours of forced overtime. At the same time, the Fain administration has faced growing opposition from low-paid auto parts workers who have repeatedly rejected UAW-backed contracts at Nexteer, Dana and other suppliers, and UAW academic workers at University of California, Columbia and other universities who have sought to strike not only to improve their wages and conditions but to oppose Trump’s witch hunt against anti-genocide protesters and other opponents of imperialist war.
Fain was promoted as a “union reformer” by the corporate media and such political forces as the Democratic Socialists of America. He backed Joe Biden while the Democratic president oversaw the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, and since Trump’s election he has been one of the president’s most fervent supporters on tariffs against Canada, Mexico and other countries.
Fain faces five challengers: Vice President Richard Boyer, the lead negotiator of the UAW-Stellantis sellout agreement; Tricia Geiger, a long-time UAW functionary; Greg Mooney, a supporter of Autoworkers for Trump; Brian Keller, a Stellantis worker who backed Fain in the 2022 runoff and is a fervent economic nationalist; and Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president.
Lehman has won growing support for his call for the abolition of the UAW apparatus and the transfer of power to workers on the shop floor. He has also called for the unity of US, Canadian and Mexican workers against Trump’s tariffs and the attack of the global auto corporations—underscored by the recent announcement that Volkswagen is cutting 50,000 to 100,000 jobs.
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Lehman has posted a series of videos on his campaign web site outlining the fundamental issues facing autoworkers, beginning with opposition to the escalating drive toward world war.
In one video, posted September 6, Lehman demanded the immediate and unconditional release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and opponent of war sentenced on August 10 to 15 years in prison for writing that Russian and Ukrainian workers have no reason to kill each other and calling on them to unite against the war.
“We have been told for four and a half years that Ukraine is fighting a war for democracy, but it has become a police state that jails its left-wing opponents,” Lehman said. He noted that Zelensky’s term expired in May 2024 and that he has ruled by decree ever since under permanent martial law, with 11 opposition parties suspended, the largest banned outright and strikes prohibited.
The war in Ukraine, Lehman warned, is “a central battleground in the opening stages of a third world war, which is now merging with Trump’s criminal war against Iran.”
Lehman pointed out that UAW members build weapons at General Dynamics Electric Boat, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics Land Systems and plants across the country being retooled for war. “The means of destruction must be converted into means of production geared for human needs, with every job guaranteed and the workers who do the work deciding what’s getting made.”
He contrasted this with Fain’s record. Despite Fain’s posturing as an opponent of war, Lehman notes, the incumbent has promoted UAW plants for years as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” was among Biden’s closest labor allies during the Ukraine war, and endorsed “Genocide Joe” at the UAW’s January 2024 political conference while the slaughter in Gaza was underway—as delegates chanting “Ceasefire Now” were dragged from the hall by UAW security and the Secret Service.
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In a second video, posted September 7, Lehman outlined the conditions facing the working class this Labor Day. More than 21,000 auto industry jobs have been wiped out since the start of 2024, and for every dollar workers produce, less than 53 cents comes back in wages—the lowest share since the government began measuring it in 1947. “Our paychecks do not cover groceries and rent,” he said.
On June 12, three days before the UAW Constitutional Convention opened, Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in human history. The richest 1 percent own nearly a third of everything in the country; the bottom half own barely 2.5 percent. More than 5,000 workers are killed on the job every year. This summer, workers were carried out of plants on stretchers while wildfire smoke filled the buildings and management kept the lines running.
“These are not separate problems,” Lehman said. “They are part of the same offensive of the ruling class, which is cutting our wages, waging world war, sending ICE agents after immigrant workers, and tearing up our democratic rights.”
The working class has enormous social power, he insisted, but “our hands are tied because the unions are run by a layer of bureaucrats whose salaries, whose investments, and whose whole position in life are tied to the companies and not to us.”
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A third video, posted September 10, addressed the obstacles workers face in even casting a ballot. Ballots went out on August 21, but if a member has not received one, they have only until September 23 to request a replacement at uawvote.com; September 30 is the last day to be current on dues; and October 5 is the deadline for ballots to be received.
Lehman documented what he called the apparatus’s “systematic voter suppression.” Four years ago, in the first direct election of international officers in the union’s history, only 9 percent of the membership voted—the lowest turnout of any national union election in American history. More ballots came back marked undeliverable than were ever cast. At one California university local with more than 11,000 members, only 29 ballots were returned.
“This was not because of apathy. It was because of voter suppression,” Lehman said. “A worker who does not get a ballot cannot mail one back.” Fain was installed in the runoff with the votes of only 6 percent of the membership. Lehman sued over the suppression, and in June 2024 a federal judge ruled the Labor Department had acted arbitrarily and capriciously—yet the result was allowed to stand under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
“No court and no federal agency will fix this,” Lehman concluded. “The only people who are going to tell the workers in your plant that this election is even happening are you and your co-workers, united in a rank-and-file election committee.”
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A fourth video, posted September 10, captured the exchange. “This isn’t a union. I can tell you that,” the worker said. “It makes absolutely no sense that we got Detroit people driving to Toledo and people living in Toledo driving to Detroit. Everything is set up for us to go against each other. Nothing is for us to work together.”
Lehman replied that the UAW is “a union in name only. What we need is to abolish the layer that keeps blocking us. That’s the reps that are detached from the shop.”
Referring to Gaston and other workers killed in the plant, the worker said: “We’re losing too many men and women in accidents. It’s just not acceptable. They force us in here. People are tired. People are overworked.”
She recalled the March 2020 walkout over COVID-19, when workers were fainting and falling and management said, “Work, work, work”—until workers, including young mothers, stormed the UAW office and forced the shutdown. “I heard them on the news later saying they closed the plant because ‘we love you guys.’ That is not what happened. It was a walkout and it was the workers who forced that.”
“All the leaders up there, wherever they are, none of them are doing what they are supposed to do,” she said. “There’s too much lying, cheating, and stealing.”
Lehman agreed that the walkout was “an action led by the workers. We need organization and leadership. That is what I am saying about establishing what I call rank-and-file committees. It’s about leading from the floor.”
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
