Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
Two years ago, California’s political establishment declared victory when the state’s insured rate reached 95 percent, claiming “universal access to healthcare coverage” was becoming a reality. Eligibility for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, had been expanded to undocumented adults, ultimately covering 1.4 million adults and 217,000 children regardless of immigration status.
Now even that inadequate coverage is being systematically dismantled by both big-business parties, at both levels of government, in a coordinated bipartisan assault. At the federal level, the instrument is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law by Trump on July 4, 2025, which cuts $911 billion from Medicaid over a decade, mainly through imposing onerous work requirements on recipients.
California never introduced universal healthcare. It was a patchwork of means-tested, market-based insurance programs administered through private insurers, riddled with barriers to care and dependent on the fiscal priorities of a government that simultaneously lavished billions in corporate subsidies.
Research by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research estimates that California’s uninsured population could climb to nearly 15 percent by 2030, almost double its current level. Over the next four years, an estimated 2.2 million residents are expected to lose health coverage as the combined impact of state and federal spending reductions takes effect. Undocumented immigrants and low-income households bear the greatest burden; the share of uninsured black and Asian Californians is expected to more than double.
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California’s Democratic-controlled government began dismantling Medi-Cal before Trump’s legislation took effect. Newsom’s 2025–26 budget slashed Medi-Cal by over $5 billion, freezing enrollment for undocumented adults and leaving an estimated 86,000 people without full-scope coverage. The state also eliminated routine dental care and long-term coverage for undocumented enrollees, while introducing monthly premiums and lower asset thresholds. Alongside expiring ACA subsidies, these cuts are expected to strip insurance from 800,000 residents.
The 2026–27 budget, signed June 29, accelerates safety-net rollbacks. It shifts 2 million undocumented immigrants from managed care to fee-for-service, lays the groundwork to strip refugees and asylees of non-emergency care by 2027, and reinstates asset limits for low-income seniors. Yet, in the same budget, lawmakers expanded the state’s film and TV tax credit from $330 million to $750 million a year to subsidize Hollywood conglomerates.
The $326 billion being stripped from Medicaid over a decade amounts to barely one-fifth of a single year’s Pentagon budget. While Medi-Cal recipients are told to document 80 hours of labor each month to prove they deserve care, the administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget demands $1.5 trillion for the military, the largest single-year increase since World War II, adjusted for inflation. Billions more are earmarked for the war against Iran.
The gutting of healthcare and the drive to war are the domestic and foreign faces of the same process: a ruling class that is simultaneously immiserating the population at home and preparing for catastrophic military conflict abroad.
The trade union apparatus and the pseudo-left perpetuate the fatal illusion that universal healthcare can be achieved within capitalism. The California Nurses Association bureaucracy, which has donated millions to the Democratic Party, backs Bernie Sanders and his promises of universal care, promises that leave the pharmaceutical monopolies, insurance conglomerates and hospital chains intact, and therefore guarantee that any reform will be reversed the moment budgetary pressures intensify.
The nurses themselves, who confront the brutality of the profit-driven system daily, are genuinely fighting for a rational healthcare system. But their struggle is betrayed by a union leadership that subordinates their demands to the electoral calculations of the very party implementing the cuts.
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The consequences of inadequate access to healthcare are equally severe for low-income workers. Delayed diagnoses and the inability to obtain timely medical care continue to result in preventable deaths from diseases that are highly treatable when detected early. Many surviving family members have been left to raise children alone while working multiple jobs, yet still remain dependent on Medi-Cal because employers increasingly rely on part-time positions that do not provide health insurance.
For many workers, earning too much to qualify for public coverage but too little to afford private insurance leaves them trapped in an impossible position, pointing to the broader social toll of a healthcare system that denies millions access to essential care.
Claims that California nearly achieved universal healthcare are preposterous. A 95 percent insured rate is not universal healthcare when access to treatment remains constrained by costs, provider networks, deductibles, copays and employment status. The remaining uninsured were overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants, the very people now being removed from Medi-Cal first.
Nor can a single state establish genuine universal healthcare while healthcare remains organized on capitalist lines. California cannot abolish pharmaceutical monopolies, eliminate private insurance or expropriate hospital chains. Reforms leave the profit system intact and remain vulnerable to reversal whenever budgetary pressures intensify, as the current cuts demonstrate.
This is not an American phenomenon alone. Across Europe, governments are dismantling public healthcare systems to fund rearmament. Germany is slashing hospital funding and health insurance benefits while pushing through a constitutional amendment to pour hundreds of billions into a war machine directed against Russia. Britain’s National Health Service, starved of resources for over a decade, is being further gutted as the ruling class demands increased military spending.
France, Italy, Spain and every major EU economy is following the same trajectory: cut beds, cut staff, cut coverage and channel the savings into tanks and missiles. The ruling classes of every capitalist country are making working people pay for a crisis they did not create, and they are doing it through the same mechanism: the systematic transfer of social wealth from healthcare to war.
Healthcare is a social right, not a negotiable commodity earned through 80 hours of documented labor. Defending that right requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, fighting for a socialist program: free, universal, high-quality healthcare for all, financed through the expropriation of the pharmaceutical companies, insurance conglomerates and hospital chains, and by redirecting the vast resources squandered on war toward human need.
2. German interior minister exploits Berlin Pride attack to demand police-state expansion
On July 25, the Islamist terrorist Abdul Ballout drove a delivery van into the Berlin Christopher Street Day parade, one of Europe’s largest annual LGBTQ+ pride events. One woman was killed and 31 further people injured. On August 4, the parliamentary Interior Affairs Committee met in special session to—as the stated aim had it—shed light on the background to the terrorist attack.
Yet as became apparent, not a single pressing question was answered. The response followed the familiar pattern that has repeated itself regularly since the 9/11 attacks in New York: the perpetrators are known to the security authorities, even act under their very eyes, yet the background to the attack is not clarified, and instead the security authorities receive new powers.
Federal Interior Minister Dobrindt (Christian Social Union, CSU) is falling over himself with demands for a further strengthening of the police state: preventive detention is to be expanded and standardized nationwide, the use of electronic ankle tags is to become standard practice and juvenile criminal law tightened.
The questions facing the Interior Committee are in fact highly explosive. Abdul Ballout, 21, a German citizen who grew up in Berlin, had been known to the authorities for almost five years as a fanatical Salafist. He had made several attempts, most recently in 2025, to join the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria. Arrested and imprisoned in Lebanon, he was extradited to Germany last November. Since January he had been under surveillance by the Joint Counter-Terrorism Center (GTAZ), in which 40 police authorities and the intelligence services of the federal states and the federal government exchange information.
On May 12, 2026, 10 weeks before the attack, Ballout was convicted in Berlin of preparing a serious act endangering the state and sentenced under juvenile criminal law to one year and 10 months imprisonment. Yet the 21-year-old was released on the same day on “pre-probation” under juvenile criminal law. Since then, Ballout had been under surveillance around the clock. According to Berlin’s state Interior Senator (minister) Iris Spranger (Social Democratic Party, SPD), use was made of “preventative police warnings,” as well as covert measures and surveillance. His phone was monitored and a camera positioned outside his flat.
Yet shortly before the Berlin parade, the close-mesh surveillance was scaled back. Abdul Ballout was able to hire a delivery van unhindered, drive it into the crowd in Tiergarten, subsequently injure numerous people with a bladed weapon and then escape.
Only one day later, SEK specialized tactical police units tracked down Ballout in an allotment garden in Spandau. He was shot dead on the spot....
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The case is strongly reminiscent of the attack by Anis Amri on the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin 10 years ago. There, too, the background to the attack remained in the dark. Anis Amri was also kept under unbroken surveillance by several police and intelligence service authorities. Yet shortly before the murderous assault, the surveillance was discontinued. Later, documents were leaked to leading media suggesting that the authorities were aware of Anis Amri’s plans for an attack.
Both cases, the attack on Breitscheidplatz and the attack on the Christopher Street Day event, were abominable and reactionary crimes that must be condemned unreservedly. But the federal government’s current outrage is fraudulent. It has itself stoked hostility towards the LGTBQ+ movement. Only last year, Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) refused to fly the rainbow flag over the Bundestag for the Christopher Street Day events, with the sneering remark that parliament was “not a circus tent.” [Federal Interior Minister Alexander] Dobrindt himself long opposed the equal treatment of homosexual couples.
For him and others, the attack came at an opportune moment. They are cynically exploiting it to implement their surveillance and police state plans. The expansion and nationwide standardization of preventive detention is particularly important to Dobrindt. In Bavaria, where he was CSU general secretary for years, the Bavarian state government already introduced virtually unlimited preventive detention with its “dangerous individuals law” in July 2017. Only following a constitutional appeal did the law have to be amended and preventive detention limited to a maximum of two months.
Incarcerating people preventively, without them having been convicted of a criminal offense, amounts to a massive infringement of the civil liberties of those concerned, as guaranteed by the German constitution. The presumption of innocence is circumvented. It is reminiscent of the Nazis’ “protective custody,” when political opponents of the Third Reich were thrown into prison and concentration camp by the Gestapo allegedly for the “protection” of the population.
Today as well, this measure is not directed only against “dangerous individuals.” That was demonstrated by a decision of the Bavarian state government in September 2023, when it placed 27 known climate activists from the “Last Generation” group in preventive detention during the IAA motor show. The legal instrument could in future also be used against workers in oppositional struggle, for example, against Berlin being transformed into a center of war production.
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For Dobrindt, the attack on the Christopher Street Day parade is a welcome occasion to take further steps in the construction of a police state: with his demands for preventive detention, ankle tags and the tightening of juvenile criminal law. It fits his project of a sweeping reform of the intelligence service apparatus, with which he wants to expand the powers of the domestic and foreign intelligence agencies whilst simultaneously making parliamentary oversight more difficult. Instead of merely using surveillance as before, the intelligence services are in future to be permitted to intervene actively.
While government politicians are expanding the police state in order prepare for resistance from the working class, they simultaneously have no difficulty whatsoever collaborating with brutal Islamists when political calculations demand it.
Only six months ago, [Chancellor Friedrich] Merz visited Saudi Arabia with a large business delegation, where he met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Bin Salman is known for personally ordering the bestial murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and under his rule, the number of executions grows every year. The German government has for years approved massive arms exports to the regime, which is waging a devastating war against the desperately poor Yemen. Berlin also maintains vigorous economic relations with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
All these regimes are known for the brutal, systematic persecution of homosexuals, who face draconian prison sentences, torture and even execution.
3. First-ever “left-wing terrorism” charges planned in Australia
For the first time since unprecedented terrorism laws were imposed in Australia in 2002, the police and intelligence agencies are preparing to lay terrorism-related charges against alleged left-wing activists. This marks a revealing political shift.
Despite the murky character of the accusations, an unknown group of people, said to be motivated by opposition to the Labor government’s support for the Gaza genocide, could face the most severe punishment currently legally available in Australia—imprisonment for life—for allegedly causing damage to three vehicles at a factory producing military equipment components.
4. CIA launches Cuba task force amid new sanctions and UN warnings of a “silent Gaza”
Announcing a new round of sanctions against Cuba on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that President Donald Trump’s “resolve is ironclad: the United States will not tolerate a rogue state harboring hostile foreign military, intelligence, and terror operations just 90 miles from the American homeland.”
The threat was issued against a country whose electrical grid collapsed twice within 24 hours this week, whose hospitals operate without reliable power and whose population is being deprived of food, medicine and fuel by a deliberate US energy blockade.
On Thursday, United Nations human rights rapporteurs condemned the US measures and warned of a “silent Gaza” unfolding on the island, declaring that food “must never be used as an instrument of political pressure,” and that measures knowingly depriving a population of the means to survive strike at the most basic guarantees of the right to life.
What the Trump administration is carrying out is an undeclared war of extermination against nearly 10 million people, criminal under international law and aimed at driving an entire society back a century in order to turn it into a colony.
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With the debacle in the war against Iran and social anger mounting over ICE raids, healthcare cuts and the cost of living, an operation against Cuba is being contemplated as an “October surprise.” Some of Trump’s advisers believe the Cuban government “could be gone by the time of the midterm election in the United States in November,” according to the [New York] Times.
Such a move would not be aimed at boosting popularity for the Republican Party—only 15 percent of Americans support a war against Cuba. It would provide the pretext to manipulate or even cancel the 2026 elections and criminalize opposition.
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Since Trump’s declaration of a national emergency over Cuba in January, US aggression has turned genocidal. Washington has imposed an energy embargo threatening punitive tariffs against any country selling the island oil, along with successive sanctions packages freezing the assets of dozens of Cuban entities and officials.
In May, the US Department of Justice indicted the 94-year-old Raúl Castro on charges arising from the 1996 downing of two aircraft operated by CIA-linked provocateurs. Combined with a military buildup in the Caribbean and now covert operations on the ground, the indictment is a patently fabricated pretext to justify a military attack.
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Confronted with this onslaught, the Cuban government has appealed not to the working class but to the American ruling elite.
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The regime that survived 66 years of CIA terror campaigns and provocations now negotiates the terms of its own submission with the CIA’s director and offers the island back to the US oligarchy that ran it as a casino and brothel under Batista.
This is the dead end of bourgeois nationalism. Neither Havana nor the “left” governments of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia—complicit throughout in the fuel blockade—will defend the Cuban people.
The only force capable of halting this crime is the international working class. Dockworkers, transport, oil and logistics workers in the United States and internationally must refuse to enforce the blockade and demand its immediate end, along with the delivery of the fuel, food and medicine Cuba requires. The threat of war against Cuba, the buildup of dictatorship at home and the persecution of socialists are a single process and must be answered by the industrial and political mobilization of workers everywhere against war and fascism, on the basis of a socialist program.
5. Economic costs of climate change soar in Europe, leaving working class to pay
The strain falls on economies already being brought to breaking point by the parasitic growth of the super-rich oligarchy and its monopolization of social wealth, coupled with the rapacious demands of the military.
The centerpiece of USW Local 7135’s 2026 contract campaign—the elimination of the “incentive” program,” i.e., piecework—has evaporated over the last two weeks. The union now proposes to get involved in administering the piecework program rather than abolish it.
7. German government uses discovery of drone in Leipzig to escalate war on Russia
The discovery of an explosive-laden drone at Leipzig/Halle Airport, along with the provocative and irresponsible reactions to it, show just how close Germany is to a direct war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power. A single unexpected incident—or a provocation—would suffice to transform the proxy war that NATO is currently waging against Russia in Ukraine into an open war that would also affect large parts of Germany and Europe.
Although neither the origin of the drone nor who brought it to the airport and controlled it is yet known, numerous media outlets, politicians and so-called “security experts” immediately accused Russia of carrying out a terrorist attack on German soil. “The incident fits the pattern of Russia’s ‘hybrid’ escalation in Europe,” read a typical commentary by the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND), which begins with the words: “We are not at war, but we have not been at peace for a long time either.”
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According to official reports, the drone, to which an explosive device was attached, was discovered shortly before midnight on Tuesday by an airport bus driver who had previously been driving tourists around. It was hovering at low altitude between two Antonov cargo aircraft belonging to the Ukrainian state-owned airline. The bus driver kicked it, causing it to crash. Flight operations were subsequently suspended. A DHL cargo aircraft that was taking off collided with an object, which is believed to have been another drone.
According to press reports, the drone found is a high-performance, non-commercial model. It was controlled via the mobile phone network using a SIM card, meaning it went undetected by the airport’s defense systems.
It was carrying 800 grams of the highly explosive substance Semtex, which can generate considerable explosive force. This quantity is sufficient to bring down load-bearing walls, shatter window panes over a wide area and blow through ceilings. In the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, less than half this amount of the same explosive tore a fully occupied Boeing 747 apart in mid-air.
One of the two Antonov aircraft near which the drone was discovered had, just the day before, transported military ammunition from France to Leipzig, which was intended for onward transport. However, the aircraft was empty when the drone was found. Had the bomb gone off on the fully loaded aircraft, it would have triggered an inferno.
Leipzig/Halle Airport is a key logistics hub for NATO. It plays a significant role in the supply of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine. DHL also operates a hub there, employing around 6,000 people, through which a large proportion of European and German parcel volumes are handled. Ukraine uses the airport to transport military goods. The massive Antonov aircraft, the largest cargo planes in the world, are stationed in Leipzig almost permanently.
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It is telling that even the German security authorities doubt whether Russia is responsible for the drone in Leipzig. They also consider a Ukrainian provocation a possibility. Die Zeit reported on Thursday:
Investigators are, however, also pursuing the hypothesis that Ukrainian perpetrators could be behind the current Leipzig incident, similar to the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline. The attempted attack, according to the theory, was intended to look like a Russian one and thus serve the purpose of stoking fear of Russia shortly before the East German state elections.
The attack on the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022, which caused damages worth €10 billion and irrevocably cut Germany off from its most important natural gas supplier, was carried out by Ukrainian agents. This is now considered a certainty.
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The bombing of Nord Stream has not prevented Berlin from continuing to cooperate closely with Kyiv and arm it to the teeth. This is not, as official propaganda would have us believe, about defending freedom and democracy against a Russian aggressor, but about German great-power interests.
Against a backdrop of intensifying global competition among the imperialist powers for raw materials, markets and profits, German imperialism is once again pursuing the same objectives as it did under Kaiser Wilhelm and under Hitler: control of Ukraine and the subjugation of Russia. The discovery of the drone in Leipzig is also being exploited for this purpose.
8. NZ First Party youth leader linked to neo-Nazi groups
Amid a rapidly worsening social crisis, fascistic ideas are being encouraged and normalized by New Zealand’s political establishment.
9. Türkiye’s new bill demands the Kurdish PKK’s liquidation, offers nothing in return
Erdoğan’s government has submitted a bill to parliament formalizing the PKK’s dissolution. It offers no amnesty, leaves Öcalan imprisoned and places the fate of those covered entirely in the hands of the Turkish security apparatus.
9. United States: Ukraine and Iran votes expose support by Democrats and Republicans for global war
In an overwhelming bipartisan vote, the US Senate approved legislation to tighten sanctions on Russia, empower President Trump to impose 100 percent tariffs on countries buying Russian oil and gas or other exports, as well as extending sanctions on Iran, even as US military forces continue to bomb and blockade that country.
The 86-11 vote saw hefty majorities of both capitalist parties support the legislation. Republicans voted 49-1, with three members absent, while Democrats backed the bill 37-10. The lone Republican opponent was Rand Paul, the fascist who only the day before pushed through a Senate committee resolution finding Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress and referred him to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.
The 10 Democrats who voted no, including nominal independent Bernie Sanders, comprise the “left” wing of the caucus. Not one of them opposed the sanctions. Their objection was to the tariff provision, on the grounds that it would provide back-door congressional authorization for tariffs the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional—a procedural complaint over the separation of powers, not political opposition to war with Russia.
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The legislation was written by the late Senator Lindsey Graham, the war-hawk Republican who died suddenly last month, shortly after returning from a visit to Ukraine, and Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. “Today, President Zelensky is watching from Ukraine—and Putin is watching from Moscow,” Blumenthal declared during the debate on the bill. “Today we say to the people of Ukraine: You are not alone. And today we say to Vladimir Putin: You will not conquer Ukraine.”
The purpose of the US-NATO war in Ukraine, to which the sanctions are an adjunct, is not to defend Ukraine from Russian conquest. It is to prepare the conquest and dismemberment of Russia itself by the imperialist powers, a goal which has been pursued ruthlessly since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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The Senate action came only two days after a devastating Russian missile strike on Kiev, after which Zelensky said the Ukrainian military had been unable to shoot down a single missile because it had run out of interceptors, mostly US-built and supplied through European NATO powers.
The US military’s own stockpiles of anti-missile and anti-drone weapons have been severely depleted by the war against Iran, now in its sixth month, with Pentagon officials warning that it will take years to rebuild the supplies needed for wars with larger military powers like Russia and China.
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The principal conflict between the congressional Democrats and the Trump White House is not over his attacks on democratic rights, his preparations for dictatorship, or his assault on what remains of social provision. It is over Ukraine. On that question their demand is that he wage war more aggressively.
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As the WSWS noted, the funeral of Lindsey Graham became a bipartisan mobilization for war, with the Democrats’ eulogies for the most ferocious supporter of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Iran demonstrating that on the central question of imperialist aggression—the war in Ukraine above all—the two parties are united.
Now the passage of the bill he drafted, and which will be named after him, has become the occasion for the Democratic Party to show its unwavering support for the military-intelligence apparatus and its overseas operations on behalf of American imperialism.
10. Sri Lankan educators protest low pay and impossible working conditions
The teachers’ unions, which have suppressed opposition to the JVP/NPP government’s austerity measures, called a limited protest on August 4.
11. Australia: Greens promote bankrupt parliamentary appeals at NDIS protests
Opposed to any independent mobilization of the working class, the Greens insisted that the far-right, big-business Coalition can be pressured into defending disabled people.
12. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
Pakistan:
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
