Yes, and heavily so. China's debt is massive and growing, concentrated above all at the level of local governments and the real-estate sector. The most recent major development came in November 2024, when Beijing announced a $1.4 trillion package to help local governments cope with their debts. As the World Socialist Web Site explained in its analysis of the plan, this was not really a bailout but a "debt swap" — a mechanism to bring so-called "hidden debt," carried off the books by local government financing vehicles, onto official balance sheets. The official figure for this hidden debt was put at $2 trillion, but private economists estimate it is actually between $7 trillion and $11 trillion, with the IMF estimating around $8 trillion. The debt level of most local governments doubled between 2018 and 2023.
The roots of this debt lie in China's growth model: local governments borrowed heavily to finance infrastructure and real estate, with the loans repaid from land sales. Real estate, construction and related industries accounted for roughly a quarter of GDP. When the property sector entered crisis around 2021 — with the collapse of giants like Evergrande — land sales fell, hitting local government revenue so hard that some fell behind on paying their own employees' wages. Economists were blunt that the 2024 package did not solve the problem; it merely pushed maturity dates into the future — "kicking the can down the road." The WSWS has been documenting this trajectory for well over a decade, from its 2011 warning that China was "an economic giant with feet of clay" to its analyses of the 2013 debt "black hole" and the growing signs of financial crisis. Far from being a model for the world, China's mounting debt is itself an expression of the deepening crisis of the world capitalist system.
What do the Chinese think of Trump's grandiosity — his gilded "ballroom" appearing almost pithy compared to the routine monumental construction that takes place in China?
"The Chinese" is not one subject with one opinion. There is the Beijing ruling elite, whose view of Trump is a matter of strategic calculation, and there is the Chinese working class, whose view is essentially irrelevant to how either regime behaves. On the regime's attitude toward Trump, the mood in Beijing after his 2016 victory was one of "nervousness and bravado" — anxious to reach an accommodation while preparing for an "historic collision." The regime's strategic orientation has been to avoid an open clash with Washington for as long as possible. Beijing does not view Trump's grandiosity as something to sneer at; it views him as a dangerous and unpredictable representative of the imperialist rival it must manage.
On the comparison itself: there is something genuinely pithy about Trump's grandiosity — a gold-plated ballroom, a name on a tower — and it does look quaint next to the scale of Chinese state construction. But this is not a contrast between American vulgarity and Chinese sophistication. It is a contrast between two different forms of the same thing: bourgeois nationalism projecting power. Trump's grandiosity is the personal vanity of a real-estate speculator; Chinese monumental building is the state-directed projection of national grandeur, inseparable from the regime's nationalist propaganda apparatus. The WSWS described the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony as a $43 billion party for China's new capitalist elite to celebrate their arrival on the world stage, and the 50th-anniversary parade as a "grotesque celebration of Chinese nationalism, military muscle and free market economic reforms". The "routine monumental building" is not a sign of effortless national greatness — it is intimately bound up with the debt-driven, real-estate-centered economy, much of it financed by the very local government borrowing that is now a $7–11 trillion problem. Both Trump's ballroom and China's megaprojects are expressions of rival national bourgeoisies competing for global position. The difference in scale reflects a difference in the institutional form of that projection, not a difference in substance. And the working classes of both countries have no stake in either spectacle.
One may hear of how the wealth of one country is squandered — what might one understand of how the wealth of the world is squandered?
The answer must be understood at the level of the system, not the nation. The squandering of the world's wealth under capitalism is not an accident or a policy failure but a structural feature of the system itself, taking several connected forms.
First, the squandering inherent in the anarchy of production. Capitalism produces not to meet human need but for profit, and without any plan. Production has become social — carried on by millions of workers in an integrated world economy — while appropriation remains private. This is the central contradiction Engels identified in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. The result is periodic crisis, in which society's productive forces are not merely idle but actively destroyed: factories shuttered, crops ploughed under, ships left rusting, while millions go hungry. Marx's analysis in Capital, Volume III shows this is bound up with the falling rate of profit and the over-accumulation of capital: the system produces more than it can profitably realize, and it "resolves" this by destroying productive capacity and immiserating the producers.
Second, the squandering of human beings. The most colossal waste is not of things but of people. The world possesses the productive power to meet the basic needs of every person on earth, yet capitalism maintains a permanent reserve army of unemployed and underemployed labor, precisely because their exclusion from production is a condition for disciplining those who work. The most important productive force on earth, human labor, is systematically wasted: lives cut short by poverty, by preventable disease, by dangerous work, by the denial of education.
Third, the squandering of militarism and war. A decisive portion of the world's wealth is diverted into armaments and war. Rosa Luxemburg, in The Accumulation of Capital, analyzed militarism as a "province of accumulation" — a mechanism by which the state taxes workers' purchasing power and channels it into armaments, creating a market for capital that would otherwise face stagnation. Militarism both absorbs surplus value and prepares the ground for imperialist war, which then destroys wealth on an even more massive scale. The WSWS has documented this for a quarter century through the US drive for global hegemony, collected in David North's A Quarter Century of War. Trillions of dollars — resources that could transform the lives of billions — are consumed by the rival military machines of the imperialist powers and the wars they wage. As Jerry Isaacs put it in 2003, "War means an intensification of the exploitation of the US working class" — and of every working class.
Fourth, the squandering of speculation and debt. Vast sums of the world's wealth exist as fictitious capital — speculation, derivatives, real-estate bubbles, government debt — rather than as productive investment. The financial system has become an end in itself, a casino in which enormous wealth is created and destroyed without producing anything.
The common thread in all these forms is the contradiction that the forces of production have been socialized to a planetary scale, yet remain under private, profit-driven control. The "squandering" is not a defect of particular governments or greedy individuals; it is the necessary expression of a system in which production serves profit rather than need. That is why the answer cannot be reform or better management. The wealth of the world can only cease to be squandered when it ceases to be privately appropriated — when the working class takes hold of the productive forces and organizes production consciously, according to a plan, for the satisfaction of human need.
Tom Hall: The global eruption of the class struggle and the rebellion against the union bureaucracies
The World Socialist Web Site presents the report delivered by Tom Hall to the Ninth
National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held August 2–7,
2026, introducing the fourth resolution, “On the international class
struggle and the building of the IWA-RFC.”
To enhance study, what follows is a bulleted outline of Tom Hall's report, made with the assistance of Socialism AI::
I. The origins of the IWA-RFC and the fight for workers' power
Rank-and-file committees are instruments of class struggle and organizing centers of an anti-bureaucratic insurgency, but also "anticipatory forms of genuine workers' democracy and workers' power" (quoting David North's opening report)
The IWA-RFC was developed over decades from the party's analysis of the contradictions of world capitalism
After the USSR's dissolution, union bureaucracies suppressed opposition to plant closures, wage cuts, and the destruction of social rights
Beneath this "outward stability," capitalism carried out an international reorganization of production predicted to produce revolutionary consequences
The upsurge was anticipated in advance:
1988 ICFI perspectives document: the next stage of proletarian struggles would develop "along an internationalist trajectory"
1993 Workers League perspectives (The Globalization of Capitalist Production…): the League must initiate new forms of organization independent of the trade union apparatus
By 2018, teachers' rebellions and a resurgence of strikes signaled the breakdown of the decades-long suppression
The Fifth Congress resolution called for an interconnected network of workplace and neighborhood committees, independent of the union apparatus (citing Trotsky: committees raise the question "Who shall be the boss of the factory?")
A 2018 internal memo addressed the relationship between committees, the party, and uneven political consciousness
Committees were not restricted to workers who had already reached socialist conclusions
Instilling confidence to act independently of the bureaucracy is "more than 75 percent of the struggle"
But hatred of the bureaucracy is not yet a complete break with its program
The bureaucracy is the crystallization of the historic bankruptcy of national reformism
Dangers on both sides: retreating from irreconcilable struggle for immediate demands; or a "political struggle" detached from the living struggles
The connection between workers' democracy and socialism: attempts at actual control over production bring workers into conflict with the capitalists' "right" to determine everything by profit
The 2022 Congress resolution: the IWA-RFC is not a replacement for the party, nor merely an instrument of conventional trade union struggles; committees are "the fighting organizations and schools of revolution of the present period"
II. The significance of the Will Lehman campaign for UAW president
The 2022 Lehman campaign was the most concentrated practical expression of this conception
Received 4,777 votes under conditions of vote suppression (only 9% of membership returned ballots)
Established a national audience and brought workers across plants and companies into contact
The campaign dealt a blow to the bureaucratic maneuver to rehabilitate the apparatus
The pseudo-left promoted Shawn Fain as proof the union could be renewed by changing personnel at the top
Lehman alone rejected this, fighting for a program of workers' power against the apparatus as an institutionalized agency of corporate management and the state
The claims for Fain's "democratic" unions have been demolished:
Thousands of temporary workers fired after the 2023 Big Three contracts; layoffs spread
Federal monitor reports exposed a "gangster regime" in Solidarity House
"Historic" contracts followed within weeks by sweeping cuts (Chicago teachers' 3,700 eliminated positions; Philadelphia teachers' strike blocked; AFSCME ending the DC 33 strike after eight days without a membership vote)
General rule formulated: the stronger the objective possibility of a united struggle, the more directly the apparatus intervenes to break it apart
Lehman's opponents denounced him for injecting "politics" into the unions — meaning socialist politics, not bourgeois politics
The apparatus is being integrated ever more directly into the capitalist state (trade policy, industrial discipline, preparation for war)
During the 2023 "stand-up strike," the White House maintained close contact to limit the strike and impose a sellout; Biden appeared alongside Fain
Fain functioned as a de facto member of the Biden administration (Export Council, state dinner, Biden authoring Fain's Time 100 entry)
Preparation for world war is central to the growing together of apparatus and state
Fain's "Arsenal of Democracy" invocations; Biden's description of the AFL-CIO as his "domestic NATO"
Fain's shift from Biden to Trump (especially trade policy) expressed the continuity of the apparatus's orientation to the state
Endorsed Trump's tariffs; boasted of UAW participation in USMCA discussions and work with Trump's trade representative
The UAW's June white paper, "Trade and the American Dream," developed this corporatist program
"Build Here to Sell Here" would devastate Mexico's auto industry and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs
Demands a "tri-national commission" of unions, governments, and academics — offering the apparatus as personnel for trade war and labor discipline across North America
Fain and his defenders (including the Workers World Party) present the federal investigation as retaliation for a supposed anti-genocide position — false
The toothless UAW resolution on Gaza avoided identifying the genocide and appealed to Biden and Congress
The apparatus endorsed Biden and had ceasefire-demanding delegates dragged from the hall; delayed and restricted the UC anti-genocide strike
Trotsky traced the underlying tendency in "The Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay" (1940): the "drawing closely to and growing together" of unions with state power
III. Trotsky's advice in the Transitional Program and its application
In the Transitional Program, Trotsky explained that during periods of acute class struggle, the leading bodies of the unions "aim to become masters of the mass movement in order to render it harmless"
During war or revolution, "trade union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers"
Therefore the Fourth International had to "create in all possible instances independent militant organizations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society" and, when necessary, face "a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade unions"
This advice is now being applied concretely through the IWA-RFC's fight against corporatism:
Corporatism has long been the program of the social layer from which the pseudo-left emerged (e.g., 1979 Democratic Left hailing UAW President Doug Fraser's entry onto the Chrysler board, followed by concessions and 60,000 destroyed jobs)
The elevation of the DSA and Labor Notes milieu into union leadership develops this same policy under more explosive conditions — figures with "left" credentials are brought forward to contain opposition, rehabilitate the apparatus, and serve as policy advisers, preparing historic concessions and even threats of violence against revolutionary opponents
Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) is a model of this bureaucratic faction: after decades of demanding direct elections, TDU helped return the openly pro-Trump Sean O'Brien without opposition at the June convention, denying 1.3 million Teamsters any vote
TDU co-chair Antonio Rosario's Jacobin defense ("If you're against Trump… I am personally 100 percent with you. But TDU is not for that") defines TDU's function — not organizing class struggle but enforcing an anticommunist, nationalist bureaucracy
The pseudo-left is not making a mere intellectual mistake but is the political expression of a definite social layer — privileged sections of the upper middle class whose material interests are threatened by a working-class movement
This is why the pseudo-left universally opposed Will Lehman; his demand to abolish the bureaucracy threatens their positions and their pathway into the capitalist state
The accusation that the campaign seeks to "destroy the union" identifies the union with the apparatus
This organic hostility has developed enormously, with the pseudo-left now occupying responsible positions within the bureaucracy and the capitalist state itself
Zohran Mamdani: brought to office by popular opposition to inequality, then reassured Wall Street, made pilgrimages to Trump, and allied with Governor Hochul — "a process resembling Syriza in Greece on an American scale and at American speed"
During the NYSNA strike, Mamdani appeared on picket lines while aligning with Hochul, whose emergency orders facilitated scab nurses; his administration supplied police power while the bureaucracy isolated the strike
During the LIRR strike, Mamdani refused to support workers and directed commuters to strikebreaking shuttle buses
The DC 37 agreement covering ~90,000 workers expires November 6, setting up a direct confrontation with his administration
As the crisis deepens, workers' struggles will acquire an increasingly political character, bringing direct conflict with the state and the pseudo-left officials enforcing its policies
IV. The general strike demand and the work of the rank-and-file committees
The general strike demand in Minneapolis anticipated this future dynamic
It arose spontaneously from below amid outrage over ICE killings and federal occupation — not from the unions, the Democratic Party, or any existing institution
The union apparatus intervened to prevent organized strike action; the Minnesota AFL-CIO and Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation nominally "endorsed" the January 23 protest but insisted workers obey no-strike clauses
The pseudo-left concealed this: Left Voice claimed the unions were "raring to go" and later hailed "notable concessions" when Trump tactically reduced visible deployment while ICE operations continued
Jacobin, the DSA, and Labor Notes blurred the distinction between pressure from below and the official apparatus, transforming a protest into "something approaching a general strike in words" while directing workers back to the same officials
The SEP's January 29 statement began from the decisive fact that the demand emerged "from below," and called for rank-and-file committees, emergency meetings, elected delegates, worker-formulated demands, and international links through the IWA-RFC
Work of the rank-and-file committees:
Autoworkers: During the 2023 Big Three struggle, the Autoworker Network of Rank-and-File Committees fought for a program uniting workers across the US, Canada, and Mexico, opposing the bureaucratic limits on the "stand-up strike"
Fired temporary workers (early 2024) formed a committee demanding reinstatement and the unification of temporary/full-time, employed/unemployed workers
Ronald Adams Sr. investigation (2025): with his family's support, the IWA-RFC interviewed workers and specialists, exposed bypassed lockout protections and altered machine software, culminating in a public hearing and the demand for elected safety committees with authority to stop unsafe production — exercising functions abandoned by the apparatus
Dakkota, Chicago (2024): workers rejected four UAW-backed agreements; the committee established contact with Ford Chicago Assembly workers and called on them to refuse scab-produced parts
Nexteer, Saginaw (this year): ~1,300 workers rejected three UAW-backed agreements (96%, 73%, 55%) and voted 86% to authorize a strike the UAW refused to call; workers formed the Nexteer Rank-and-File Committee and declared "the workers will become the authority"
The bureaucracy secured ratification of a fourth agreement through collaboration with management (firing Antwiane Sanders, holding the vote inside the factory); but the committee continued fighting layoffs, victimization, and unsafe conditions (188 call-offs in extreme heat; near standstill at Ford's Michigan Assembly Plant)
A Nexteer worker compared the committees to the Committees of Correspondence that prepared the American Revolution
VW Action Committee (Germany): organizing against massive cuts, including up to 100,000 jobs at Volkswagen alone, which IG Metall is preparing to sign off on; its statement declares "Workers have no fatherland"
Postal workers: active committees in Britain, Canada, and the US; USPS Committee investigations into workplace deaths (four deaths over two years at the Palmetto center near Atlanta, exposing absent emergency protocols and defibrillators)
Postmaster General David Steiner declared the universal-service obligation "unsustainable," demanding power to cut delivery days, close "unprofitable" post offices, and raise prices — threatening most offices in the country
The postal unions are preparing to enforce this restructuring (NALC's rejected agreement imposed through binding arbitration; next contract may go directly to arbitration, denying workers even a ratification vote)
Defense of the Postal Service raises democratic questions (established during the American Revolution for circulating political information; Trump's attacks on mail-in voting link postal privatization to the assault on democratic rights)
In Minneapolis in January, hundreds of postal workers, residents, and students marched against ICE's use of postal property as a staging ground for raids
V. Lehman's second campaign and the response of the bureaucracy
Lehman's second campaign proceeds at a far higher level of development than the first
The apparatus recognizes the danger more clearly, giving the 2026 campaign a more direct and bitter character from the outset
The apparatus barred workers from the convention, suspended its own rules to block discussion, and cultivated an atmosphere of intimidation — yet Will secured the nomination and took the campaign into the plants
The candidates' debate gave concentrated expression to the class divide:
Five candidates argued over who should administer the apparatus; only Lehman challenged its right to rule
Fain defended the "stand-up strike" as a success and boasted of collaboration with the Trump administration on trade
Every candidate except Lehman supported tariffs; he alone opposed the nationalist framework, explaining tariffs raise prices and divide workers internationally, and advanced rank-and-file committees, internationalism, and socialism
The debate revealed the apparatus's attitude toward a genuine rank-and-file challenge:
Raymond Jensen (Region 9 assistant director, International staffer paid over $200,000 last year) posted an image of Will bound, gagged, and bleeding with a masked gunman aiming a rifle at his back
Confronted in the debate, Fain said "I don't condone that stuff," then added "If you're running for president, get ready, brother, because you'll be getting them every day" — announcing no action against Jensen
The message: threats of violence are a normal consequence of challenging the apparatus
The bureaucracy feels under siege because it confronts an expanding wave of contract rejections, spontaneous job actions, and an organized rank-and-file opposition
The death threat expresses the ruthlessness with which a privileged apparatus defends its interests when its power is seriously threatened
But the answer cannot be retreat or adaptation — the defense of Will Lehman and his right to campaign must become the basis for deepening and expanding his support among autoworkers and throughout the working class
VI. Conclusion
Hall urges passage of the resolution, anticipating an enormous development of all the processes reviewed: the eruption of the class struggle, the growth of the rank-and-file committees, the political collision with the bureaucracy and pseudo-left, and workers' increasingly conscious striving for a revolutionary way forward
The conscious factor will be decisive:
It would be a serious error to assume the objective crisis will resolve itself, or that the party's role is confined to observing and commenting after the fact
Objective conditions create the possibility and necessity for socialist revolution but do not automatically provide the program, organization, and leadership required for victory
The task is to intervene: identify and act upon what is objectively revolutionary; develop the committees as organs of independent working-class struggle; bring the historical lessons and political program of Trotskyism into the class struggle; and through this work build the Socialist Equality Party as the revolutionary leadership of the working class
The death toll in the catastrophic flood that struck Nepal’s northern
border region on Wednesday rose to at least 579 people as of 8 p.m.
Eastern Daylight Time Friday. Another 1,924 are missing according to
Nepal’s disaster relief agency. Five people have died in Tibet with 588
individuals reported missing.
The flood was triggered by a massive
ice-and-rock avalanche from a glacier-covered Himalayan slope, a
calamity that is inextricably linked to accelerating global warming and
inadequate public preparation combined with decades of government
neglect internationally.
Satellite evidence indicates that a large
mass detached from a glacier-covered slope in Tibet and plunged into
the valley below. The avalanche was so immense that it generated a
seismic signal measured at magnitude 5.2 by instruments in Germany and
by the United States Geological Survey.
The collapsing mass
descended through the valley, gathering rock, earth and debris before
blocking a river and creating a temporary dam. When water broke through
or overtopped the obstruction, it sent a torrent of water, boulders and
mud downstream through towns, settlements, roads and tourist areas on
both sides of the Nepal-China border.
Those missing residents,
workers and foreign tourists caught in isolated areas after roads and
communications were severed. Hundreds of tourists were among those
reported unaccounted for and the official estimate says that 517 are
foreign nationals.
Meanwhile, the avalanche and landslide have
created a barrier lake near the confluence of the Tsogyal and
Purupqiangzangbu rivers. Chinese water authorities initially described
the landslide dam as facing a “high risk of breaching,” as the blockage
impeded river flow and impounded a rapidly growing body of water.
The
lake was reported to hold roughly 3 million cubic meters of water, with
as much as another 3 million cubic meters projected to accumulate in
the following days. Such a buildup poses a grave threat because an
earthen and debris-filled natural dam can erode suddenly, releasing
accumulated water in a destructive surge downstream.
Chinese
authorities judged the immediate risk from an overflow more manageable
and permitted suspended rescue work to resume. This does not eliminate
the underlying danger of unstable slopes, blocked rivers and saturated
debris that remain in an area where roads, bridges and communities have
already been battered by the first flood.
The International Centre
for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a Kathmandu-based
regional climate and mountain research institution, warned that this new
blockage is part of a wider hazard across the Himalayas’ river systems.
The formation of temporary lakes can turn the initial avalanche into a
prolonged emergency, leaving downstream populations exposed to a
secondary sudden flood.
Search crews are working across terrain
buried under mud, rock and destroyed structures, and the task is made
more difficult by damaged roads, unstable ground and the continuing risk
of further flooding. Numerous videos posted on social media show rescue
workers pulling and carrying mud-covered survivors to safety.
The
rescue workers have searched through the remains of communities
engulfed by water and mud, seeking any survivors and recovering the
dead. Those who escaped did so under conditions of extreme danger as a
wall of muddy water, rocks and debris raced down narrow valleys, as
depicted in social media videos, leaving little time to flee.
*****
Scientists have identified the glacial avalanche as the immediate
trigger, but the broader cause lies in the accelerating destabilization
of high-mountain environments under global warming. Saswata Sanyal, a
disaster-risk-reduction specialist at ICIMOD, emphasized that the event
was not unprecedented.
*****
The responses of US and European imperialism to
the unfolding crisis are themselves a measure of the negligence of the
world’s ruling classes to the man-made disaster. The White House issued a
statement on Wednesday that the US “extends its deepest condolences to
the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives in the
devastating flash floods.”
President Trump called the flooding
“terrible” and said the US had contacted Nepal’s leadership. He further
said that Washington would provide “anything” Nepal needs. The
“anything” that Trump was talking about apparently includes a miniscule
$500,000 for emergency shelter, relief supplies and water, sanitation
and hygiene assistance through Catholic Relief Services.
*****
Capitalist governments internationally have failed both to halt
climate change, to prepare populations for its foreseeable consequences
and, when the inevitable happens, they offer up a pittance in a
desperate situation. The devastating flood, the mass death and
disappearance of residents and tourists and the continuing threat posed
by the barrier lake are all a concentrated expression of the failure of
the capitalist system.
The emergency in Nepal and Tibet is a
warning that the intensifying instability caused by the warming
Himalayas is colliding with threadbare public infrastructure and the
absence of an internationally coordinated response capable of preventing
disaster.
Amid the horrific scenes emerging from Nepal and China following massive
flooding on Wednesday, the Australian Labor government has displayed
the utter indifference of the imperialist powers to the plight of the
poor and oppressed victims.
Labor Foreign Minister Penny Wong accompanied empty statements of
concern and condolence with a pledge of just $5 million to the rescue,
recovery and relief effort. Describing that as a drop in the ocean
would, if anything, risk overstating the contribution. Wong unveiled the
pitiful spend even while declaring that the “scale of the destruction
is devastating.”
The flood is one of the worst disasters in the
region in years, if not decades. While the full impact is still
emerging, entire villages were swept away. The official death toll in
Nepal rose today to 579 and 7 in Chinese-controlled Tibet. However, with
at least 2,478 people missing, the tragic losses are certain to rise.
The
Australian government’s $5 million pledge is divided into $3 million
for the emergency response and $2 million in food relief.
Even if
Labor ultimately increases its contribution, the initial display of
contempt will remain. Under conditions of thousands of people still
missing and rescue operations ongoing, the assistance is obviously time
critical.
*****
The miserable contribution is not an aberration but the continuation
of a longstanding pattern under successive governments, including the
current Labor administration that has been in office since 2022.
For instance:
*
Following six tropical cyclones in the Philippines in late 2024, which
affected millions of people, Australia announced $5 million in
humanitarian assistance.
* Following the devastating Cyclone
Ditwah in Sri Lanka in 2025, Australia initially announced just $1
million, subsequently increasing the response to $3.5 million.
*
Across a succession of cyclones, floods, earthquakes and landslides
throughout the Indo-Pacific in October–December 2025, the government
announced that its combined assistance had reached only “over $14
million.”
*****
Labor habitually cloaks those exercises in imperialist foreign policy
with references to its concern for the “Indo-Pacific family” and its
supposed bonds of commitment to the welfare of the people of the region.
The literal pocket change that it is grudgingly giving to the people of
Nepal gives the lie to those claims.
In reality, Labor’s
participation in global war, a central driver of humanitarian crises, is
inextricably linked to its contempt for the oppressed. For almost three
years, Labor has politically, diplomatically and materially aided the
Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, in one of the worst war crimes
of the 21st century.
Alongside insisting on the “right” of the
Zionist regime to bombard Gaza and to kill tens of thousands, Labor
directly aided Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war,
suspending its already paltry funding to UNRWA, the United Nations
agency responsible for feeding and providing aid to the Palestinians, in
early 2024.
There is no brick wall between the attitude of
imperialist governments to the oppressed masses of the world and to the
working class domestically.
*****
As the WSWS noted, the scale of the disaster in Nepal, and the
increasing frequency of such events globally, underscores the impact of
climate change. The Labor government has facilitated the continued
expansion of Australia’s fossil fuel industry, approving new and
expanded coal and gas projects while insisting that new sources of gas
supply will be required for decades.
In its May budget, Labor
unveiled the biggest single cut to a government program in history, a
$38 billion reduction in funding to the National Disability Insurance
Scheme (NDIS) over four years. The policy will kick 241,000 disabled
people off support and prevent more than 100,000 others from accessing
it, in a brutal austerity measure that will claim the lives of some of
the most vulnerable. In the same budget, Labor rejected calls for any
increased tax on the super-profits of the coal and gas conglomerates.
An indictment released by the Scottish courts service this week
reveals that seven people charged over a pro-Palestinian protest at
Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Ayrshire are accused of an offense “aggravated by reason of having a terrorist connection”.
Seven
people are charged over the March 8, 2025 action: Kieran Robson (aged
35); Uzma Bashir (56); Ricky Southall (34); Autumn Taylor Ward (22);
Rebecca Sian Davies (29); John Moxley (58); and Dylan Chiaramello (24).
Their
first appearance at the High Court in Glasgow, due on August 31, was
adjourned to October. Robson, Bashir and Davies face an additional
charge of attempting to “defeat the ends of justice”, with prosecutors
alleging that they drove to and from the resort on false registration
plates.
The 16-page indictment describes damage to a luxury golf
course where non-residents pay up to £1,000 a round. The accused, it
states, “did maliciously damage property there in that you did
maliciously dig up turf on the golf course, spray glyphosate [weed
killer] or similar substance on the fairways and greens, spray a
building and signpost with paint, paint political and offensive slogans
on the grass, score a political slogan into the turf, paint political
and offensive slogans on a building, walls and pillars, damage a
sprinkler system causing flooding, and damage a light”.
The “political and offensive slogans” were “Free Gaza”, “Free
Palestine” and “Gaza is not 4 sale”—a reference to Trump’s plan to expel
the Palestinian population and redevelop Gaza as a “riviera” resort. No
terrorism offence has been formally charged. The Crown is attaching a
terrorism aggravation to a charge of malicious mischief, permitting far
longer sentences for what is, on the prosecution’s own account, the
spraying of paint and weedkiller.
The timeline demonstrates a
conspiracy at the highest levels of the Trump administration and
Britain’s Labour government to label political protest “terrorism”.
Within weeks of the action, Trump branded those responsible “terrorists”
who should be “treated harshly”. On March 13, 2025, Scottish First
Minister John Swinney met Trump’s son Eric and, the official note
records, “offered reassurance that the relevant authorities would
continue to take the incident seriously”.
Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed appeared at two
campaign events Wednesday—an afternoon event in Ann Arbor, where he was
joined by Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell and Maryland congressman
Jamie Raskin, and a larger evening rally in Farmington Hills, where
Raskin also appeared.
*****
At least as revealing as what was said at the Michigan rallies is
what was not said. In the primary campaign, El-Sayed repeatedly attacked
Haley Stevens for her support for Israel and the $30 million in funding
she received from AIPAC. He made no mention of Gaza at Wednesday’s
events.
Nor did he mention the U-Mich Eight, who
face federal conspiracy charges for protesting against the Gaza
genocide. One of his primary campaign staffers is among the eight
students and campus workers framed up by Trump’s Justice Department.
He
called the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran merely “dumb” at the
Ann Arbor press conference. He was silent on the US-NATO proxy war
against Russia in Ukraine. He said nothing about the pogrom against
immigrants, the ICE paramilitary rampage or the deportation camps. Nor
did he speak about Trump’s preparations to rig or overturn the midterm
elections.
The 118-page report
submitted to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on August 18,
2026, by the Department of Economic Opportunity reads, in its cool
bureaucratic language, like an autopsy of a still-living body. It
examines the economic impact of Paramount Skydance’s proposed $110
billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a merger that would unite
two of the six remaining major Hollywood studios under a corporate
structure dominated by the Ellison family fortune and $82 billion in
debt.
The projected losses are staggering: 10,360 job-years at risk in Los
Angeles County, an additional 14,000 corporate job-years of
consolidation globally through 2030, $1.26 billion in wages, $2.79
billion in economic value, $4.06 billion in business output and $547
million in tax revenue. These are the modeled consequences of
management’s own plans, including Paramount CEO David Ellison’s pledge
to extract $6 billion in annual cost “synergies” from the combined
company.
But the most important finding is the baseline. Los
Angeles County motion-picture employment averaged just 93,263 jobs in
2025, a record low and 35.7 percent below the 2022 peak. California has
lost 52,016 film and television jobs since 2022, with 99.6 percent of
those losses occurring in Los Angeles County. Major US film and
television releases fell from 2,122 in 2022 to 1,629 in 2025. Cable
series, historically a foundation of recurring employment, collapsed
from 992 releases in 2019 to 579 in 2025.
The report’s estimates
are, in fact, highly conservative. They focus narrowly on the direct
economic consequences of the merger and do not attempt to measure the
broader consequences of the Trump administration’s policies, including
the assault on social programs, the escalating drive to war abroad, the
disruption of global supply chains resulting from the war with Iran and
the extreme volatility of the financial markets. The merger is
intensifying a crisis already underway. That crisis is the product not
of one corporation or political party but of the capitalist system
itself.
Paramount Skydance plans to finance the acquisition with
$54 billion to $57.5 billion in bridge loans from major banks, while
Larry Ellison has guaranteed up to $45.7 billion in equity from his
Oracle holdings. The combined company will begin with roughly $82
billion in gross debt and leverage approaching seven times EBITDA
(Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization),
placing it in junk-bond territory.
The merger is a financial
operation to extract value through the consolidation and rationalization
of two enormous enterprises. Workers are the raw material. The promised
$6 billion in annual “synergies” is the mechanism through which
management intends to service the debt and protect the Ellison family’s
investment.
Corporate layoffs are only the beginning. Writers, crews, craftspeople,
post-production workers and vendors will be hit as fewer buyers mean
fewer “greenlights.” The merger combines two of the leading unscripted
and talk-show producers, reducing competition for commissions.
Approximately 895 creators hold exclusive deals with the two companies.
When development budgets are cut, those creators and the workers around
them lose work.
*****
The WGA, SAG-AFTRA and Teamsters have issued warnings about the
dangers. But statements are not a strategy. None calls for independent
mobilization by workers. None challenges the domination of the industry
by finance capital. None advances a program for workers to take control
of production.
The WGA’s 2026 contract,
negotiated without a strike authorization vote, guarantees labor peace
through 2030, precisely as AI-driven restructuring accelerates.
The
union bureaucracies cannot be explained simply as weak or mistaken
organizations. Their officials’ careers, salaries and social
relationships are bound up with the corporations and capitalist
political parties. They constitute a privileged social layer whose
function is to suppress the independent struggle of workers.
The Paramount-Warner merger is part of a broader transformation in which media, technology and state power are being fused under the control of a financial oligarchy.
Oracle,
the company built on an early CIA contract and now providing cloud
computing and AI infrastructure to the Pentagon and all 17 US
intelligence agencies, is at the center of this process. The same
corporate empire poised to control CBS News and CNN is embedded in the
machinery of war, battlefield analytics, autonomous decision-making and
global surveillance.
This is the Military-Industrial-Media
Complex. Under this system, journalism and art are increasingly treated
as data and commodities, subordinated to financial and geopolitical
interests. A media empire tied to the White House and deeply integrated
into the national security state will possess enormous power over news,
films, historical narratives and the boundaries of permissible political
thought.
The defense of artistic freedom, democratic rights and
truthful reporting cannot be entrusted to billionaires, regulators or
union bureaucracies tied to corporate management.
According to the latest Infratest-Dimap poll, the Alternative for
Germany (AfD) holds a commanding lead with 42 percent, ahead of the
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 22 percent, the Left Party on 11
percent and the Social Democrats (SPD) on 8 percent. The Greens, the
Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and the Liberal Democrats (FDP) are all
fighting to clear the threshold for entry into the state parliament.
Whether the AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, becomes the new state
premier depends on how many parties fail to clear the 5 percent
threshold and whether he receives support from other parliamentary
groups. The BSW has already signaled its willingness to cooperate.
The
leading media outlets and establishment parties are going to great
lengths to present themselves as opponents of the AfD. On August 14,
news weekly Der Spiegel ran with a cover photo of AfD lead
candidate Ulrich Siegmund under the headline “Germany’s most dangerous
man.” The incumbent state premier and CDU lead candidate, Sven Schulze,
insists on maintaining the so-called “firewall” against cooperating with
the AfD, as does Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The Left Party is prepared
to vote for a CDU state premier in order to stop the AfD. And the
campaign organization Campact is spending more than €600,000 urging
people to vote “tactically” and give their second vote to the SPD or the
Greens to prevent an AfD single-party state government.
These are
attempts—some naive, some deliberate—to mislead the public. Siegmund is
not “Germany’s most dangerous man.” The fascist danger does not stem
from the person of this 36-year-old businessman, who spent his earlier
career studying the influence of scents on customers’ purchasing behavior. He switched from the CDU to the AfD 12 years ago, when he
surrounded himself with neo-fascist advisers.
Nor does it stem
from the person of AfD leader Alice Weidel, who rails against climate
protection during prime time on Germany’s public broadcaster ZDF and
demands the deportation of 1.3 million Syrian refugees and an end to the naturalization of migrants.
No one would take these bizarre
figures seriously if they were not riding a right-wing wave that was
generated not by themselves but by the ruling elites. They are the
supply meeting a demand that comes not from the population but from the
ruling class.
*****
The rise of the AfD can be understood only as part of the
international shift to the right through which the ruling class is
responding to the deepening crisis of world capitalism. Donald Trump in
the United States, Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Marine Le Pen in France
are all expressions of this development. Trade war, war, rearmament,
social cuts, mass layoffs and the boundless enrichment of the wealthy
are incompatible with democracy. They call for authoritarian forms of
rule. This is why the ruling class, as in the 1930s, is once again
turning to fascist parties.
The brutal sealing off of Europe’s
borders to refugees, Germany’s return to militarism and war, the
diversion of hundreds of billions of euros from social spending to
rearmament, the devastation of the car industry, the decline of entire
regions, the construction of a police and surveillance state and the
downplaying of Hitler’s Nazi regime by right-wing professors have
created the poisoned climate in which the AfD flourishes
*****
Invoking the “firewall” against the AfD serves to divert attention from
this convergence of programs and political goals. The CDU will not
hesitate to make common cause with the AfD once it judges the time to be
ripe. The same applies to the other parties.
*****
At the international level, the Merz-Klingbeil government has long
worked closely with far-right figures, including Donald Trump, Giorgia
Meloni and Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky glorifies Nazi collaborators
responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands as national heroes. His
government has banned left-wing parties and imprisoned the socialist
anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk on charges of high treason. The German
government has even declared support for Israel to be a “reason of
state,” although the Israeli government is carrying out a genocide
against the Palestinians and includes fascist ministers.
For its
part, the AfD will have no trouble forgetting its tirades against the
“legacy parties” as soon as it obtains even a small share of power. It
will likewise quickly abandon its criticism of the war in Ukraine, since
it fundamentally supports Germany’s return to militarism and an
aggressive foreign policy.
The AfD’s entire populist demagogy is
designed to capture the growing anger over the catastrophic consequences
of government policy and channel it in a reactionary direction. In
doing so, it does not shrink from any political deception. The party,
which has anti-communism embedded in its DNA, has indulged in nostalgia
for the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the election campaign.
Siegmund has organized motorcades featuring hundreds of East German-made
Simson “Schwalbe” motorcycles.
This has always been the method of
the fascists. Hitler’s Nazi Party, whose goal was to smash the
socialist workers movement, carried the words “socialist” and “workers’”
in its very name. It agitated against international finance capital
but, once in power, revealed itself as a naked dictatorship of capital.
Hitler crushed the workers’ parties and trade unions while leaving the
captains of finance and industry untouched, provided they were not
Jewish. Rearmament and the exploitation of forced labour allowed them to
pocket enormous profits.
Donald Trump, the real estate swindler
and casino operator from the New York establishment, posed during his
election campaign as a champion of the excluded and oppressed.
*****
This right-wing demagogy only finds a resonance because there is no
serious opposition to war and capitalism from the left. The trade
unions, which smother every act of resistance against wage and social
cuts and co-manage the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs in a
“socially responsible” manner, and the Left Party, which mouths
left-wing phrases while pursuing, in government, the same right-wing
policies as every other party, bear particular responsibility for the
rise of the AfD.
*****
Leon Trotsky once described fascism as the “party of despair” and
socialism as the “party of hope.” A vigorous struggle by the working
class would give hope to many of those who are now voting for the AfD
out of protest and despair; and would transform the political situation.
But such a struggle is being blocked by the Left Party and the trade
unions.
*****
The election program of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei
(Socialist Equality Party, SGP) for the September 20 Berlin state
election states:
The struggle against the AfD
therefore requires a break with all capitalist parties and the
independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of
an international socialist program. It is time to oppose the bankrupt
profit system with an egalitarian, democratic and socialist society.
At France Unbowed’s (La France Insoumise, LFI) summer school,
Jean-Luc Mélenchon made a significant warning on the emerging 2027
presidential election campaign. Noting that it will likely be a contest
between himself and the neo-fascist National Rally (Rassemblement
National, RN), he said: “France’s back is to the wall. In each voting
booth, in each conscience, a personal choice will make history. What
principle will prevail: individualism or everyone together, racial
supremacism or collectivism?”
Stressing that large sections of the
French capitalist oligarchy aim to install a far-right dictatorship,
Mélenchon compared the situation to the 1930s. He pointed to the
pro-Nazi hysteria that seized the ruling class after the 1936 French
general strike, leading to the fall of the Popular Front government and
preparing the collaboration with Nazi occupation in 1940:
The
Republic is on fire and is breaking apart. But the dominant ones have
other obsessions to propose to you. We see the great conversion of the
right wing and the center parties to a unified ideological bloc with the
National Rally. They are already there, all of them lined up … those
who, seeing us advancing towards victory, are already starting to say:
rather Hitler than the Popular Front.
The comparison between the bourgeoisie’s outlook today and its reactionary treachery 90 years ago is not exaggerated. The RN
leads in every poll, driven by favorable media coverage. From Ukraine
to Iran and France’s wars in the Sahel, a new world war is erupting.
France and all Europe’s major countries, facing unsustainable levels of
debt, are spending tens or hundreds of billions on war while imposing
austerity policies rejected by an overwhelming majority of the
population.
But the comparison between the bourgeoisie today and during the Nazi
collaboration shows precisely why workers cannot entrust the struggle
against neofascist dictatorship, austerity and war to a Mélenchon, who
is a pro-capitalist politician.
*****
In 1936, France elected a Popular Front government backed by
bourgeois Radical, social democratic and Stalinist parties, and shortly
afterwards, the 1936 general strike erupted. But the bourgeoisie used
the services of the Stalinists to impose a return to work, making social
concessions to workers in the Matignon Accords. It then took back these
concessions with inflation and speculation against the state debt
before repudiating them completely, after Marshal Pétain with the
support of the entire ruling class imposed surrender to the Nazi
invasion in 1940.
What is Mélenchon
proposing faced with the
grandsons of the bourgeoisie of 1940? He did not call for the
mobilization of the class struggle or the transformation of society via a
social revolution overthrowing capitalism. Based on his anti-Marxist
populism, he proposed an election campaign oriented to the
constitutional refoundation of the French capitalist state, passing from
the Fifth to the Sixth Republic by introducing ecological planning at
the regional level:
The citizens’ revolution proposed
by LFI is a cultural revolution, a concrete change in the references
society has. That is why our proposition of eco-regions is a central
project for our Sixth Republic. The eco-region is the basis closest to
the ground, articulated together with municipal governments, to do
effective ecological planning.
Mélenchon insisted
that this refoundation of the capitalist state would democratize it and
stop the austerity measures through which the bourgeoisie responds to
the budget and debt crises. He added, “We are the serious, responsible
people. … We pledge, once we are in government, to get public finances
back in order, because we are the ones who can do it, by finally
imposing taxation on the tens of thousands of big fortunes and the
multinational corporations who do not pay taxes.”
This policy,
which avoids calling for the expropriation of the capitalist monopolies
and major fortunes, is a political dead end in a struggle against
neofascism and militarism.
If there is one unforgettable lesson of the 1936-1940 catastrophe, it
is that the workers cannot seize the wealth of the oligarchy by using
the capitalist state. Even when, faced with the eruption of the class
struggle, the bourgeoisie temporarily beats a retreat, it returns
afterwards with an even more violent and desperate policy. To preserve
its wealth, it is prepared to trample everything underfoot, from the
most fundamental democratic rights to its invocations of the “sacred
honor” of the nation.
This is why the French bourgeoisie preferred
Hitler to the Popular Front’s reforms in 1940 and why it is
increasingly behind the RN today.
*****
Workers must organize independently, at the level of the rank and
file, building the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees (IWA-RFC). This is the lesson of the union bureaucracies’
strangling of the 2023 mass strikes against Macron’s pension cuts, which
unfolded amid a wave of strikes by millions of workers in Germany,
Britain and across Europe.
Mélenchon limited himself at the time
to raising once in a speech the possibility of a general strike. The
union bureaucracies for their part, terrified by the mass protests that
erupted against Macron, shut down the movement as soon as Macron’s
illegitimate cuts were adopted. Turning his back on French workers’
class brothers and sisters across Europe and the struggle for the United
Socialist States of Europe, Mélenchon adapted to the union sellout.
But
for the working class to be able to struggle on a revolutionary
perspective independently of the union bureaucracies, the defenders of
such a perspective must first rally together. This cannot be done based
on the pro-capitalist perspective of LFI. This is the task that the
Parti de l’égalité socialiste gives itself, following Trotsky’s warning
in the years before World War II:
What can save the
situation in France is the creation of a genuine revolutionary vanguard
of several thousand men, clearly understanding the situation, completely
free from the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois public opinion
(“socialist”, “communist”, “anarcho-syndicalist”, etc.) and ready to go
to the end. Such a vanguard will know how to find the road to the
masses.
On November 15, 2025, Russell Scruggs Jr.,
a 44-year-old postal worker, died just weeks after starting his job at
the United States Postal Service (USPS) Palmetto Processing and
Distribution Center in Georgia. Coworkers told the World Socialist Web Site that
Scruggs suffered a head injury after falling and hitting his head on
machinery in the plant. Coworkers also reported that he complained
earlier in the day that he was not feeling well and was denied a request
to go home.
His death was one of four at Palmetto
since 2024—this June, Demarcus Little also died at the facility.
Workers say the facility has no cell phone service, leaving employees
dependent on management to summon help, and that supervisors called
security before calling an ambulance.
His death also came one week after Detroit postal worker Nick Acker was killed on the job in a mail sorting machine accident.
The
Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee, part of the International
Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), has initiated an
independent, rank-and-file inquiry into these deaths, carried out by workers themselves rather than USPS management or the American Postal Workers Union.
*****
Barbara Scruggs, Russell’s ex-wife of seven years and mother of three
of his children, spoke with the WSWS in support of the IWA-RFC’s
independent inquiry and is encouraging Russell’s coworkers from Palmetto
to come forward with any information.
“Russell was a hard worker,
a great father, really loved his daughters, always provided for them
and always provided for the household. He was just a really great person
with a big, big heart,” she said. “Russell would give you the shirt off
his back. He wanted to help everyone. He wanted everybody to live
comfortably. He really loved his children and wanted to make sure they
had everything they needed. And while we did separate, he always wanted
to make sure that I wasn’t struggling to take care of them by myself. He
still wanted to make sure that I was good and that they were good.
Everybody loved him. He was always smiling, always laughing, just a hard
worker. I remember at one point he had three different jobs just
because he didn’t want me working while I was pregnant.”
She told
the WSWS that Russell suffered from heart problems and that his doctor
advised him to quit his old job at a furniture moving company to avoid
heavy lifting. “He’d told me things would be getting better because he
had a new job. He was always working. He hated having to change jobs and
not being able to work due to his condition. He definitely took the
[USPS] job to care for the kids.”
*****
Barbara, a former warehouse worker, knows the difficult conditions
inside plants that workers are up against. “You never know who could be
next. Workers have to stand up and do something about this, especially
if you’re going to keep working there [at Palmetto],” she said.
She
addressed herself directly to the Palmetto workers. “I understand your
position in the company. Of course, you don’t want your name out there.
You need that job to provide for your family. But you also need a safe
work environment. You need to feel that you’re important. You are the
one there working in these conditions, and it needs to be safe so that
you can go home to your family afterward. I would like for you guys to
come forward and tell us what you know, about what happened to Russell,”
she said. “Come forward so that we can make a difference in the work
environment you are in.”
Barbara still has not been called by USPS, the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA) or the American Postal Workers Union
(APWU). “I have not been contacted, no nothing. It was like, ‘Okay, he
lost his life,’ and that was it. They [USPS] were not really caring
about who he left behind, just not caring about him as a person at all.
Even the steps they took after him falling, I just heard it wasn’t good.
A couple people who witnessed it were encouraged to just ‘Go back to
work, go clock in.’
*****
Barbara continued: “One of his children, seven, is too young to fully
understand, but she knows he’s gone. They’ve had to go through three
birthdays and Christmas without him. Russell’s birthday was in May, so
we did celebrate it. They couldn’t sing happy birthday because it was
just too much for them, but we did have a birthday cake and blow out the
candles and got some pictures which they have on their nightstand. It’s
just really hard. They’re still dealing with it. I’m still dealing with
it because it’s so unexpected—you just never think in a million years
this would happen. My daughter even asked, ‘Why my dad?’”
She made
a final appeal for Palmetto workers to get in touch with the WSWS and
to support the independent inquiry. “Please don’t be scared to talk, to
come forward. This is someone’s life. He left children behind, and we
just want answers. We want to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
These conditions are a microcosm of the state of public education
across Chile at municipal schools, schools administered by the Local
Public Education Services (SLEPs), and subsidized private schools alike.
The Pinochet constitution’s “subsidiary state” established the
principle that the state does not provide for social needs. It devolves
responsibility downward to municipalities with radically unequal tax
bases, or outward to private operators who extract profit from per-pupil
subsidies while minimizing every cost.
Across the length of
Chile, from Coquimbo to the southern archipelagos, schools in
working-class and rural communities are in such a state of decay that
they were infested with rodents.
*****
The rodent infestations in Chile’s schools are not merely a matter of
disgust and indignity. They represent a direct and potentially lethal
public health threat.
While the rodents infesting urban areas are overwhelmingly the introduced commensal species (Rattus rattus, Rattus norvegicus, Mus musculus), this is not the case in rural settings. The primary reservoir of hantavirus in Chile is the long-tailed pygmy rice rat (Oligoryzomys longicaudatus),
a native wild rodent found from Atacama south to Aysén, whose range
overlaps with school buildings in rural or peri-urban settings.
Moreover, research conducted in 2008 confirmed the Andes virus in urban Rattus norvegicus in the Metropolitan Region.
As
of Epidemiological Week 31 of 2026, Chile had recorded 49 confirmed
hantavirus cases and 19 deaths nationally, reaching a lethality rate of
39 percent. This is a dramatic deterioration from 2025, when 44 cases
produced 8 deaths, a lethality rate of 18 percent. Argentina’s 2025-2026
epidemiological season, running from July 2025 to June 2026,
accumulated 101 confirmed cases and 32 deaths, a lethality rate of 31.7
percent.
The Andes variant of the virus, which predominates in
Chile and Argentina, is one of the most dangerous strains and the only
hantavirus known to be transmissible from person to person. The standard
transmission route remains inhalation of viral particles from rodent
excreta, precisely the risk created when rodent feces accumulate in
enclosed, poorly maintained school buildings, kitchens, storerooms and
workshops.
The virus became international news earlier in the year with the outbreak aboard the Dutch expedition cruise ship MV Hondius.
*****
The conditions documented are not the result of one government’s
negligence, but the cumulative impact of a system imposed by the
Pinochet dictatorship and preserved by every administration since.
The
Pinochet constitution established the “subsidiary state”—the principle
that the state exists to facilitate private profit, not to provide for
social needs. In 1981, education was municipalized, and the voucher
system introduced in which funding was tied to enrollment and attendance
rather than need. The dictatorship’s labor reforms resurrected unions
that lacked even the limited defensive qualities of the reformist
organizations of the previous period.
The Christian Democrat and
Socialist Party administrations that followed did not reverse this
architecture but built on it. A 2012–2013 National School Infrastructure
Cadastre found an average deterioration rate of 20.3 percent. A decade
and a half later, a new cadastre finds it at 22 percent, meaning the
rate of investment has not even compensated for the rate of decay.
The
2006 student rebellion, the “Penguin Revolution,” demanded the repeal
of Pinochet’s education system and an end to the privatization and
inequality it fostered. The first Bachelet government responded with
tear gas, water cannon and a presidential advisory council designed to
co-opt and demobilize the movement from below.
The 2011 student
uprising brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets under the slogan
“Put an end to profit” (Fin al lucro) in education. The first Piñera
government deployed the Carabineros; a teenager was killed. The
Communist Youth, the Socialist Youth, student radicals Gabriel Boric,
Giorgio Jackson and others worked to channel the movement back into
parliamentary negotiations that produced nothing and brought them into
the corridors of state power. Bachelet II’s “New Public Education” law,
which created the SLEPs to replace municipal administration, was sold as
a reform. But it maintained the same funding logic: per-pupil subsidies
that starve schools in poor communities of resources.
Then in
2019 the largest mass uprising in Chilean history erupted, with millions
chanting “It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years” expressing the
understanding that every party of the post-dictatorship order was
complicit.
*****
The ex-student radicals in the Broad Front and the Communist Party
again channeled the incipient revolutionary energy into the dead end of
constitutional reform and to the parliamentary process—Boric, as a
presidential candidate, was elected on promises that he would “bury
neoliberalism” and introduce the most “progressive” constitution in the
world. Instead he brought in austerity, slashed spending, funded the
Carabineros, maintained the state of emergency against the Mapuche, and
handed power to the Pinochetista Kast in an “orderly and exemplary
transfer.”
Now Kast is accelerating the destruction while bringing
in methods that belong to Chile’s former dictatorship. The “Protected
Schools” law, rammed through Congress, is a mechanism for militarizing
schools, placing armed agents of the state inside classrooms and
granting them disciplinary powers over children. The fascistic Kast
government intends to use brute force to deal with the social crisis
consuming Chile’s schools and society at large. This will produce a
social explosion that dwarfs all others.
On Thursday, US Northern Command announced the use of an Army
Multipurpose High Energy Laser to shoot down three drones in the Rio
Grande Valley along the US-Mexico border late Tuesday and early
Wednesday. If confirmed, it would be the first time a high-energy laser
has been fired at aircraft the US military attributes to Mexican drug
cartels.
The military would not say precisely where the drones
were downed, which cartels they supposedly belonged to, or whether the
shots were fired over US or Mexican airspace.
None of this can be
taken at face value. Six months ago, in February, the same class of
laser system shot down a US Customs and Border Protection drone by
mistake, forcing a shutdown of airspace around El Paso International
Airport.
The claims accompanying these strikes have the same
character as the Trump administration’s assertions about the fishing
vessels it has been bombing in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, where
no evidence of drug trafficking has ever been produced. What is being
established is not a counter-narcotics capability but a precedent: that
US forces may fire weapons across the border.
The attack on Mexico came in the same week that Rubén Rocha Moya, the
Morena party governor of Sinaloa, was driven from office as the result
of a campaign launched by Washington.
*****
Corruption is the pretext, not the motive. Trump has pardoned the
Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in the same New
York courthouse of importing cocaine. His closest allies in the
region—Noboa in Ecuador, whose family’s banana shipping operations have
been repeatedly used to move cocaine; and officials of the Milei
government in Argentina—have been implicated in trafficking without
consequence. For decades Washington’s closest partner in Mexico was
Genaro García Luna, convicted in Brooklyn in 2023 of taking millions
from the Sinaloa Cartel while running Mexico’s security apparatus with
US backing.
[President Claudia] Sheinbaum invokes García Luna’s conviction to accuse
the opposition of hypocrisy. But the continuity runs directly through
her own government. AMLO secured the release of former defense secretary
Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos from US custody on cartel charges. García
Harfuch, the current security secretary, was the protégé of García
Luna’s right hand, Luis Cárdenas Palomino; his father ran the DFS secret
police that spawned the first generation of cartel leaders; his
grandfather helped orchestrate the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre with the
CIA.
*****
Over the weekend, Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of
Canadian goods; on Thursday he signed an executive order renaming Lake
Ontario “Lake America,” following the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico
last year.
In the context of this major trade war, Mexican
economy secretary Marcelo Ebrard stated the aim: to hold “the best
position relative to all other countries.” Some 85 percent of Mexican
exports still enter the US tariff-free. Meanwhile Sheinbaum made a point
this week that she has held 21 calls with Trump—roughly one a month
since taking office. The strategy is to trade everything else for market
access.
Each concession invites the next. On Friday, The Trump
administration objected to Mexico’s modernized trade agreement with the
European Union, because it protects European food names—Parmigiano,
feta, manchego—that US dairy producers call generic.
*****
The Austrian bourgeoisie also believed it could manage Hitler by
accommodation. On July 11, 1936, Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg signed an
agreement in which Nazi Germany formally recognized “the full
sovereignty of the Federal State of Austria” and both governments
pledged non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. The price was
that Austria declared itself “a German state,” amnestied the Nazis
imprisoned for the July 1934 putsch and admitted the Nazi intermediaries
Edmund Glaise-Horstenau and Guido Schmidt into the cabinet. Sovereignty
was to be bought back in installments.
Schuschnigg’s own
explanation of what came next is the most instructive. Summoned by
Hitler to Berchtesgaden in February 1938, he hurried to complete a
further package of internal concessions beforehand, so that he could
show Hitler, in his words, that Austria had already made the maximum
concessions “of our own accord” and could pay no higher price.
Hitler’s
method—at Berchtesgaden as at Munich seven months later—was to take
what had already been conceded as the new starting point and demand far
more. On February 12, Schuschnigg surrendered the Interior Ministry, and
with it control of the police, to the Austrian Nazi Arthur
Seyss-Inquart, and lifted the ban on the Nazi party.
The Austrian
establishment pronounced itself satisfied. Vienna’s minister in Rome
assured the US ambassador that Berchtesgaden had been “beneficial,” a
reasonable compromise, and that Seyss-Inquart was loyal to Austria and
no real Nazi.
Berlin, meanwhile, had informed Seyss-Inquart that
Gestapo agents were to have freedom of action inside Austria. The
agreement guaranteed in writing 18 months earlier had already ceased to
exist.
On March 11, Schuschnigg was ordered to resign. The US
chargé’s cable to Washington notes how in his last radio broadcast,
Schuschnigg began to say the troops were ordered to offer “no serious”
resistance to Germany and corrected himself mid-sentence to “no
resistance.” The Wehrmacht entered the next morning unopposed.
The
lesson is not that Mexico in 2026 is Austria in 1938, or that Sheinbaum
is a far-right politician like Schuschnigg. It is that a national
bourgeoisie, whose interest is to maximize its gains from the
exploitation of the working class as it attempts to purchase its
position through concessions to a far stronger imperialist neighbor will
find that each concession is banked and the next demanded—and that it
will not be spared in the end.
A photomontage tribute to Oscar Robayo, the worker killed at the Montreal airport.
Oscar Robayo, a 39-year-old ground handling worker at
Montréal–Trudeau International Airport, was crushed to death Monday
while performing a routine pushback operation on a passenger jet. The
fatal incident occurred due to systemic violations of basic security
protocol by the subcontractor Samsic, a French-based multinational
conglomerate that has played a major role in an accelerating race to the
bottom in working conditions in airport operations across North
America.
In an initial report and a detailed interview with a co-worker of the deceased, the World Socialist Web Site
exposed how Oscar was forced by the absence of an extension cable to
stand close by the front wheel of the massive jet while it was towed
into its departure position by a tractor. He was run over by the jet as
the tractor driver tried to maneuver the plane away from a remote port.
The co-worker reviewed a litany of violated safety procedures, broken
equipment and corner-cutting by Samsic that contributed to the extremely
dangerous working environment that claimed Oscar’s life.
“I used
to work with Oscar and met him at Samsic when I started. He was a great
friend, great at his job, a smart and happy person with such an amazing
personality,” the worker wrote. “Accepted people for who they were and
such a kind heart.”
The outpouring of sympathy and anger following
Oscar’s death has found expression in a broad readership for the WSWS’s
coverage of the tragedy, as well as numerous comments on articles
posted to social media. In our initial analysis, we stressed the
necessity of airport workers taking the struggle for workplace safety
and improved conditions into their own hands by establishing a
rank-and-file committee.
The deregulation of airport operations, triggering a race to the
bottom in conditions for workers, has been spearheaded by the Liberal
government. The trade unions have facilitated this process with their
support for the collective bargaining framework, through which they
have partnered with ruthless subcontractors like Samsic.
This
underlines the need for workers to mobilize independently in a political
struggle to end the dominance of corporate profit over basic services
like air travel, and the safety and well-being of workers responsible
for providing them. They should expect no redress from the official
federal and provincial investigations launched into Oscar’s death.
The
first visit by a CIA director to Moscow since the eve of the Ukraine
war comes as the NATO powers pour weapons, money and intelligence into
an escalation that brings a direct clash with nuclear-armed Russia ever
closer.
*****
In assessing Russian policy, it must be understood that Putin’s
hatred of the Bolshevik Revolution, and of anything that tends to
legitimize its policies, is a major factor in his interpretation of
events. “Imperialism” is a concept that he cannot accept either
ideologically or politically, because it undermines the legitimacy of
the entire post-Soviet project.
Writing in 1938, on the eve of the
Second World War, Leon Trotsky observed that the bourgeoisie “toboggans
with closed eyes toward an economic and military catastrophe.” The same
is true today. Facing mounting social, political and economic crises at
home, the European governments see in war a desperate way out. All the
relationships and mechanisms that previously prevented war are breaking
down, and as desperation and recklessness rise, any incident could spark
a full-scale war, or even a nuclear exchange, with little warning.
The
JVP/NPP government aims to suppress opposition to the deliberate
running down of railway services and its privatization agenda.
*****
There is widespread anger over the state of the rail network. Last
year’s disastrous Cyclone Ditwah caused severe damage to the Udarata
(up-country) Railway, also known as the main line, impacting hundreds of
thousands of passengers. Trains currently run on that route only
between Colombo Fort and Rambukkana and between Nanuoya and Badulla. The
service on the Matale route that passes through Kandy has been
completely stopped.
The number of daily train journeys in Sri Lanka, which was previously
410, is currently limited to 184 journeys, according to S.R.C.M.
Senanayake, secretary of the Engine Drivers’ Union (EDU).
More
than one-quarter of the roughly one million daily train passengers had
used the Colombo–Kandy and Colombo–Badulla lines, but the
damage—estimated by railway sources at more than $300 million—has
remained unrepaired eight months after the cyclone because of inadequate
funding.
Already burdened by the rising cost of living, hundreds
of thousands of people, including government and private sector
workers, have been forced to use more expensive and inconvenient forms
of transport.
*****
Decades of underfunding and the deterioration of train services are part
of a deliberate strategy to justify eventual privatization.
*****
The social media ban is aimed at silencing rail workers and stifling
opposition as the government prepares the next round of attacks on their
jobs and conditions.
Social media platforms have become
indispensable tools for workers to expose workplace conditions, share
information about harassment by management, coordinate protests and
build solidarity across workplaces. Workers and youth used social media
extensively to organize the 2022 popular uprising in Sri Lanka that
ousted the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government, and the uprising that ousted
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government in Bangladesh.
The lesson the ruling class has learned is that workers’ free communication is a threat to their rule.
*****
In the railway sector, successive governments have banned strikes,
deployed the military against rail workers, and used essential services
laws to criminalize industrial action. The social media ban is the
latest attack on these workers’ rights.
In what probably could best be described as an exercise in damage
control, Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh has sought to dampen down
fears in financial circles that he is not prepared to react to
persistent inflation by raising interest rates.
Warsh had come
under fire following the Fed meeting in July, after his remarks
following a decision to keep rates on hold were regarded as not
sufficiently clear on what his reaction to continuing inflation would
be.
Delivering the keynote address to the Jackson Hole, Wyoming banking symposium yesterday, he sought to address those concerns.
There were two key sections of his address regarded as being crucial to his commitment to tackle this issue.
Setting out his principles, he said: “There should be no
misunderstanding. The Fed’s price-stability objective of 2 percent, as
measured by the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, is a
firm, fixed target. Let’s be equally clear about another aspect of the
objective: Price stability is not self-executing, nor is inflation
necessarily mean-reverting. It is the Fed’s job to deliver stable
prices.”
He took issue with concerns that a weakening of the labor market could indicate a slowing of the economy, maintaining that
it was “consistent with full employment.”
But on the
price-stability side of the Fed’s mandate, “the numbers are more
concerning,” with the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, the PCE
index, at 3.7 percent and the six-month change at 4.1 percent. The
consumer price index (CPI) was also elevated.
“None of these
measures are perfect, but they all tell a similar story: Inflation is
running above our 2 percent target. So the Fed’s predominant focus right
now should be on prices.”
And then to emphasize the point, he
added that while the summer PCE and CPI readings had been “better than
expected, they do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully
improved.”
“Here is my standard: we must be confident that
underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at
sufficient speed,” he said. “Otherwise, we have work to do.”
There
was a significant market reaction to these remarks. The probability of a
rise in the Fed rate at its meeting next month jumped from 35 percent
the previous day to 62 percent. The yield, interest rate, on two-year
Treasury debt rose by as much as 0.11 percent points to 4.34 percent, a
significant increase.
*****
If the Fed does raise rates at its September meeting, just two months
before the mid-term elections, it could set up a clash with US
President Trump, who relentlessly denounced former Fed chair Jerome
Powell as a “numbskull” and a “moron” for not lowering rates.
He
appointed Warsh in the hope that he would be more accommodating, and has
said that while Warsh wants to lower rates, he is constricted by a
“political” governing body. The continuing attempts by the
administration to remove governor Lisa Cook are an indication he is
working to try to change that situation.
One of the most discussed
features of Warsh’s tenure so far is the abandonment of so-called
“forward guidance,” where the Fed gives an indication of how it will
react to changes in market conditions. He maintains that this creates
the conditions where markets are not reflecting changes in the economy
but are basing themselves on what they think the Fed might do.
Warsh used his speech to defend his opposition to forward guidance, saying it set up a “hall of mirrors.”
*****
Besides the possible conflict with Trump if rates are raised, there
is already another conflict developing, in this case between the
Treasury and the Fed.
This has arisen from the decision of
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that purchases of long-term bonds could
be increased from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation, and possibly
even more, in an attempt to lower their yields.
This was denounced in a scathing op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal
by long-time Wall Street trader Stanley Druckenmiller—a one-time mentor
of both Bessent and Warsh. He said the market’s verdict on the
announcement, as yield initially fell and then rapidly rose again, was
“swift and correct.”
“This wasn’t liquidity management, it was price management—a mistake far larger than $4 billion suggests,” he wrote.
Druckenmiller
then indicated one of the underlying issues—the demand by key sections
of the financial oligarchy for attacks on spending for key social
services and facilities.
“The long-term Treasury yield is the most
important price in the world. It is also the only fiscal disciplinarian
the US has left. Neither party will run on entitlement reform.”
So-called “reform” is the code phrase used by the oligarchs for a deep offensive against the working class.
*****
If the Fed, as indicated by Warsh, does go ahead with an interest
rate increase at its next meeting—with at least three members of its
interest-rate setting body indicating that they favored such a rise at
the July meeting—it will conflict with the Treasury intervention at the
long end of the market.
This is because the Treasury will finance
its bond purchases by issuing more short-term debt under conditions
where interest rates will be rising as a result of an increase in the
Fed rate. In other words, the two economic arms of the capitalist state
will be pulling in opposite directions—another expression of the
deep-seated tensions and contradictions within the US financial system.
In a decision that smacks of intervention by a Labor
government—essentially in defiance of a judge’s order—the Parole
Authority in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) last week
refused for the second time to release a young prisoner on parole.
Mohommed
Farhat, 22, was initially due to be released on parole last December,
having served 10 months of a 20-month prison sentence after being paid
by people with criminal links to commit acts of arson and vandalism in
Sydney in November 2024 supposedly directed against Israel.
Farhat’s parole was denied despite NSW Supreme Court justice Desmond
Fagan writing to the Parole Authority to warn of a “serious miscarriage
of justice.” This development points to the Labor government’s contempt
for judicial rulings.
It also indicates a further unravelling of a
farrago of lies and misinformation by the media, Zionist groups and the
state and federal Labor governments to depict 13 such attacks,
featuring spray-paintings of anti-Israel slogans, in Sydney in the
summer of 2024–25 as antisemitic terrorism. The Labor governments
exploited the incidents to impose far-reaching “hate speech” laws that
seek to outlaw opposition to the US-backed Gaza genocide.
Himka has supported Ukraine in the present NATO-backed war
against Russia, and his political standpoint therefore differs from that
of the World Socialist Web Site and Bogdan Syrotiuk. However,
Himka denounces the Ukrainian regime’s “cult of Holocaust perpetrators”
and has written a powerful condemnation of Syrotiuk’s prosecution and
imprisonment.
*****
Dr. Himka:
How can one continue to defend Ukraine as a democracy when someone is
sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for expressing opinions that in
no way jeopardize Ukrainian security? I have written a long monograph
on the war crimes of OUN-UPA:
I
thank God that I am a Canadian citizen, where there is no official cult
of Holocaust perpetrators and ethnic cleansers and where I am allowed
to express my opinion.
I am an emeritus professor of Ukrainian
history and have been publishing academic works on Ukraine for no less
than fifty-five years. I was banned from entering Russia in November
2022. I have been active in Ukraine's defence in several organizations
and have publicized Ukraine’s plight in leftist media:
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.
