Around 120 members of United Steelworkers Local 5 at Marathon
Petroleum’s Martinez, California refinery have been locked out after the
company refused their offer to return to work while contract
negotiations continued.
The workers went on strike April 27 over
chronic understaffing, forced overtime and unsafe conditions, as well as
Marathon’s refusal to extend to Martinez the four-year national
agreement covering most US refinery workers. In June, the USW offered to
return unconditionally and continue bargaining without a contract.
Marathon refused to bring the entire workforce back, turning the strike
into a lockout.
Workers say Marathon is seeking to eliminate 46
jobs despite staffing studies showing the need for additional operators,
while also pushing for more overtime and shorter training periods for
new operators.
The attack at Martinez is aimed at further breaking
up the national bargaining framework covering roughly 30,000 refinery
and petrochemical workers. More than 800 workers at BP’s Whiting,
Indiana refinery have also been locked out since March 19 after
rejecting a concessions contract by 98.3 percent.
Last August,
workers voted for a mandatory National Oil Bargaining Program calling
for a 25 percent wage increase over four years, protections against job
losses from artificial intelligence and improved healthcare.
Instead,
the USW and lead company Marathon reached a pattern agreement in
February providing only 15 percent over four years, with no guarantees
against job losses from AI. Refinery workers across the country reacted
with anger, and many told the WSWS they wanted strike action to enforce
the program they had voted for. But outside of the two lockouts, the
United Steelworkers has kept refinery workers on the job.
Conditions
exist for a far broader struggle. Around 23,000 USW members at US Steel
and Cleveland-Cliffs are working under 30-day contract extensions
following the September 1 expiration of their agreements. In Hamilton,
Ontario, more than 1,200 National Steel Car workers have been on strike
since August 12 against the piecework system and other attacks.
At
Martinez, workers said chronic understaffing is at the center of the
safety crisis at the plant. Several staffing studies had already
established the need for more operators, they said, but the company
refused to discuss staffing during bargaining. It later proposed
eliminating 46 jobs while demanding still more overtime.
The
normal schedule is supposed to be four 12-hour shifts followed by four
days off. But two of the four “off” days can be made mandatory workdays.
“Some guys were working 13-in-ones,” one veteran operator said, meaning
13 days straight followed by a single day off. “At the 14th day, the
company’s like, ‘Okay, you have to take a day off.’”
*****
Workers increasingly see the company’s objective as breaking their
organization and establishing a precedent for future attacks. One said
he feared Marathon was “trying to write the playbook on how to break
[us] here.”
The offensive is taking place amid enormous corporate
profits. Marathon reported $5.1 billion in net income in the second
quarter, more than four times the $1.2 billion it made in the same
quarter of 2025, and returned $2.8 billion to shareholders. Its refining
and marketing earnings soared as refining margins rose sharply.
*****
The discussion broadened to the cost-of-living crisis and growing
social inequality. One veteran operator said he was poorer in real terms
than when he first hired in, despite years of work and enormous amounts
of overtime.
“Everything’s gone up. Medical, everything, and
wages are not keeping up. And my story is not unique. It’s going across
the entire country.”
“We’re working 60-plus hours a week just to
try to float, stay ahead,” he added. “At some point, we’re going to have
to make a stand as all workers in this country. We need to make a stand
that enough is enough.”
*****
The National Steel Car strike provides a concrete example of how
workers can begin overcoming the isolation of separate struggles. The
National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee (NSC-RFC), founded by
shop-floor workers during the 2023 strike, has called for workers to
take control of the present struggle and expand it throughout North
America.
It has appealed directly to steelworkers in the United
States to form their own rank-and-file committees and prepare common
action. It has also called on railroad workers in Canada and the United
States not to handle NSCX cars that continue generating revenue for
National Steel Car during the strike.
Martinez workers responded strongly when WSWS reporters described the NSC struggle.
“I
support him. I support him,” one operator said when asked what he would
say to a Canadian USW striker. “You have to strike for your rights.”
*****
The discussion turned to the trade war between Washington and Ottawa
and the attempt to present workers in different countries as
competitors.
Asked whether US and Canadian workers had the same
interests, one operator replied, “Yeah. Absolutely. I don’t think we’re
enemies or competitors.”
He extended the same point to Mexico.
“Everybody just wants to provide for their family and live a good life,”
he said. “I don’t think the borders change that in any country.”
*****
These sentiments point to the way forward. The Martinez and Whiting
lockouts, the National Steel Car strike and the developing contract
battles at US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs must be united into a common
movement, rather than kept separate by company, industry or national
border.
The example of the NSC-RFC shows that the initiative must
come from workers themselves. Rank-and-file committees should be built
at Martinez, Whiting and throughout the refinery industry to establish
direct communication with one another, send delegations to steel plants
and other workplaces and prepare coordinated action.
These
committees should link up with the NSC-RFC and the International Workers
Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees to organize the broadest possible
fight against job cuts, unsafe conditions, falling living standards,
trade war and war.
“Eventually at some point we’re going to have
to draw a line in the sand and say no more,” a Martinez worker said.
“Maybe that’s what it’s going to take. Everybody coming out together and
striking.”
Isolated and feeling “abandoned,” a figure like Hemingway, still a
self-styled maverick, was appalled by the emergence of McCarthyism, the
Cold War and the “Iron Curtain,” the national security state, but unable
to grasp or seriously oppose those developments, or make his revulsion
and disapproving view of postwar life a meaningful part of his art. This
was an objective, generalized problem, but the writer was not in a
position to grasp that.
As a result, Hemingway was largely thrown
back on himself, his intuitions and his feelings about himself, his
life, his artistic career, his memories, his “honor” and reputation as a
writer, much of all that distorted, magnified, malformed, by
disappointment and crushed or semi-crushed hopes.
The limits of
his intense, “objectiveness,” facticity, separated from a broader view
of society and history, made themselves sharply felt. A powerful
subjectivism and often incoherent self-absorption filled up a good deal
of the space.
Bel’s death came weeks after Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) forced him to wear a GPS ankle monitor following the termination
of Temporary Protected Status for approximately 350,000 Haitians.
Although he had committed no crime and had a pending asylum case, the
aspiring doctor was shackled with an electronic device used by ICE to
track immigrants it is preparing to imprison and deport.
Bel was
one of more than 100 Haitian immigrants in Springfield fitted with what
amounts to a modern-day yellow star: a GPS ankle monitor that brands its
wearer as a criminal while allowing ICE to track every movement in
preparation for kidnapping and deportation. Hundreds more have been
summoned to ICE offices, where agents confiscate their passports and
order them to report back every few weeks.
At 8:03 a.m. Monday,
Bel called his father by video. “I’m not feeling OK mentally because of
the bullying,” he said. His father urged him to come home so they could
talk. Roughly three hours later, police arrived at the family’s door and
told them their eldest son was dead.
The
real offense, it turns out, was criticizing a genocide the Left Party
itself has supported—in parliament, in coalition budgets, and now on the
campaign trail.
Educators
are furious at the Queensland Teachers Union’s claim that they had a
“significant win” last week when the state’s industrial relations judges
granted a supposed 3 percent wage rise.
We
spoke to residents of Gary, Indiana who spent 14 days without power
after a storm damaged electrical infrastructure owned by NIPSCO, the
local power monopoly.
A whistleblower report by an anonymous United States Postal Service
official made public on Tuesday warns that under an executive order
issued by President Donald Trump, USPS will withhold mail ballots from
millions of voters.
The report, together with a letter to
Postmaster General David Steiner, was published Tuesday by Senator
Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), the top Democrat on the Senate
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations. Blumenthal received the report Monday through
Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group.
The whistleblower
wrote to Blumenthal: “Potentially millions of American voters may not
receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or
at all.”
Trump has stacked the USPS Board of Governors with
Republicans who parrot the lie that Biden’s 2020 election victory was
the result of fraud. The whistleblower’s report asserts that USPS has
rushed to set up a portal for vetting mail ballots in defiance of court
orders blocking implementation of Trump’s March 31 executive order
curtailing mail-in voting.
The executive order is based on the
pretext that mail-in voting has allowed hundreds of thousands of
non-citizens to vote, a total fabrication. In 2024, 47 million
Americans, or 30 percent of the electorate, voted by mail. Of these, the
Brookings Institution found four documented cases of fraud out of 10
million ballots.
The attack on mail-in voting is part of a broader
effort to disenfranchise working class and poor voters. The
authoritarian drive includes the “Save America Act,” which would require
proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a
ballot. Trump is also threatening to deploy federal troops and/or
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at polling stations,
seize voting machines, and otherwise manipulate, overturn or suspend the
November 3 midterm elections, which the Republicans are expected to
lose.
The executive order directs the secretary of Homeland
Security to compile lists in each state of US citizens 18 and older and
eligible to vote, and to send the lists to the states prior to any
federal election. The states are then required to send lists of all
registered voters to whom they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots
to the federal government and USPS. The Postal Service is tasked with
verifying these lists and withholding mail ballots from voters not on
the lists of citizens compiled by federal agencies.
Finally, the
Department of Justice is directed to investigate and prosecute state and
local election officials who issue ballots to individuals deemed by the
federal government to be ineligible to vote in federal elections. The
order also directs the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots
in states that do not comply with the new rules.
The very attempt
of the Trump administration to overhaul the election system is
unconstitutional. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution explicitly
delegates the manner of holding federal elections to the states, while
giving Congress the power to “make or alter regulations” concerning
federal elections. The Constitution grants the executive branch no power
to administer or regulate federal elections.
*****
The whistleblower report describes a chaotic and largely untested
drive by USPS to put in place a portal for receiving mail voter lists
from the states in time to be used in the midterm elections. The report
cites, in the run-up to the planned September 1 launch date, “multiple
USPS officials describing the election ballot mail IT system development
process as ‘a shit show.’” It adds that “A number of workers familiar
with the IT process believed that the entire process seemed to be a
‘mess.’”
The whistleblower focuses on the adoption by USPS of a
zero percent failure rule in verifying lists of voters sent by the
states to receive mail ballots. He reports:
Given
states often deliver ballots to the USPS in large ballot batches, a zero
percent failure rate during verification can derail vast numbers of
ballots. The new scanning verification process is designed so that after
a single failed bar code verification, USPS will stop the sample
scanning and refuse to accept the entire batch of ballots.
He
adds, “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification
cycles, and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of
ballots.”
States constantly update their voter rolls, and the
lists they send to the Postal Service could be out of date within
minutes as new voters register and existing ones update their
registrations because they’ve moved.
Under these conditions, the
whistleblower report speaks of “raising questions about whether
catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug”—whether, in
other words, the entire system is intended to exclude millions of
eligible voters and sow chaos.
*****
The Trump administration’s attack on the right to vote will not be
halted by the courts or by appeals to the Democratic Party. Only the
mass, independent mobilization of the working class against the entire
political and economic system will halt the assault on democratic rights
and the drive to dictatorship.
The American Postal Workers Union held its 28th Biennial National
Convention in Los Angeles last month as the US Postal Service prepares
the deepest cuts in its history. Despite repeated declarations that
postal workers face an existential threat, the convention proposed no
meaningful action to stop the attack.
Postmaster General David
Steiner has set the period after the New Year as the starting point for
major measures if Congress does not act. He has threatened changes to
service standards, higher prices and the closure of “thousands of
unprofitable post offices.” A July Inspector General white paper
compiling possible measures to close USPS’s financial gap included an
option for a 10 percent workforce reduction, fewer delivery days and
reductions in universal service.
The attack also extends directly to the November elections. Trump has sought to use the Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting,
part of a broader drive to overturn longstanding democratic norms and
place the conduct of elections under greater federal control. In August,
USPS issued rules requiring states to provide lists of mail-ballot
recipients and use unique barcodes on ballot envelopes, with the Postal
Service empowered to reject ballots that do not comply. A federal judge
temporarily blocked the rules on August 28, but the Trump administration
is appealing the decision as states prepare to begin mailing ballots.
On the opening day of the APWU convention, the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee published a statement
calling for committees in every workplace, uniting clerks, city and
rural carriers, mail handlers and other crafts, and preparation for
collective action, including a national strike, to stop layoffs and
service cuts. A rebellion of this kind—postal workers taking control of
the struggle themselves and breaking through the divisions imposed by
the union apparatus—is precisely what Smith and the other union
officials are working to prevent.
The postal union bureaucracies
have suppressed opposition to the restructuring of USPS for years. The
National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) supported major elements
of the earlier Delivering for America restructuring plan,
while the National Rural Letter Carriers Association defended key
elements of it and warned against reversing its initiatives wholesale.
NALC and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union are both moving to send
contracts into binding arbitration, preparing the ground for the cuts
to begin.
The National Rural Letter Carriers Association (NRLCA) also held its convention this month. The union has helped impose the Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System (RRECS),
which grew out of a 2012 interest arbitration award and has cut the
annual pay of some rural carriers by thousands and even tens of
thousands of dollars.
APWU has taken a somewhat different tack
from openly declared collaboration, instead posturing as an opponent of
closures and service cuts while refusing to organize action capable of
stopping them. The APWU held rallies at more than 90 locations on July
28, generally drawing crowds numbering only in the dozens. One of the
principal demonstrations in New York attracted about 50 people.
*****
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler addressed delegates on the third day.
Her speech focused heavily on union growth, electoral politics and the
introduction of artificial intelligence and automation. COPA (Committee
on Political Action) captains also worked the convention floor
soliciting contributions to APWU’s political action fund so that, as the
union put it, APWU could make its voice heard “on Capitol Hill.”
Shuler
devoted substantial attention to the attack on mail-in voting. “Vote by
mail is going to be absolutely essential to making sure our voices are
heard,” she told postal workers.
The defense of mail voting and
democratic rights is an urgent issue, as Trump is seeking to place the
distribution of mail ballots under federal control, require states to
submit voter lists and standardized ballot materials, and empower USPS
to withhold ballots from voters or states deemed noncompliant with his
administration’s rules.
But American democracy is rotting on its
feet precisely because of the domination of the country by a capitalist
oligarchy. This is why democratic rights can only be defended through an
independent movement of the working class against the oligarchy and the
state apparatus it dominates.
The AFL-CIO bureaucracy works
deliberately to prevent the emergence of such a movement, subordinating
workers instead to the Democratic Party, Congress and the electoral
process.
The appearance of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE)
President Everett Kelley was even more revealing. The federal workforce
has already undergone an assault of the dimensions now being prepared at
USPS. It has shrunk by more than 270,000 since Trump returned to office
through layoffs, reductions in force, deferred resignations,
retirements and hiring restrictions, while executive orders stripped
more than a million federal employees of collective bargaining rights.
Under conditions of the deepest attacks on USPS in history, and ongoing
conspiracies from the White House, the postal unions are attempting to
divide workers and prevent a counter-offensive in defense of jobs and
democratic rights.
*****
That initiative must now be consciously organized on a national scale
through rank-and-file committees independent of the bureaucracy. Postal
workers must unite all crafts, prepare collective action to stop
closures and layoffs, reject binding arbitration and the strike ban, and
demand full public funding of USPS as a public service. The privately
owned logistics giants—UPS, FedEx and Amazon—must be transformed into
public utilities under workers’ democratic control.
Kirpichenok’s
arrest is an attack on the democratic rights of the entire working
class and speaks to the utter lawlessness and criminality with which the
Israeli state suppresses its critics, regardless of their faith and
nationality.
Ron
Mark, who wants to be the defence minister again, said New Zealand must
be “mentally prepared to start arming ourselves” for war against China,
Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Andrew
“Andy” Block was killed at the Kaiser Aluminum plant in Kalamazoo,
Michigan two weeks ago when he was crushed by a powered scrap shoot clam
shell that closed on him while he was performing a welding repair.
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.
Roman is part of an extended international effort to probe the very
foundations of the structure and history of the universe. In the early
twentieth century, the universe was discovered to be expanding
everywhere, from a distinct origin now known to be about 13.8 billion
years ago. From that discovery arose the question of its fate: Will the
expansion continue forever, or will gravity overcome it and produce an
eventual collapse?
Many surprising discoveries came from the
pursuit of this fundamental question. Around 1970, it was found that
galaxies are bound together by far more mass than that of their gas and
stars, a “dark matter” of unknown composition that has mass and
therefore gravity, but does not emit any sort of light. Studies of the
most distant exploding stars, seen as they were in the early history of
the universe, showed that the expansion is accelerating, driven by a
repulsion operating on a cosmic scale, now termed “dark energy.”
One of the most perplexing aspects of both dark matter and dark
energy is that they make up the vast majority of the mass/energy of the
universe. Dark matter consists of about 27 percent and dark energy about
68 percent, with the remaining 5 percent being ordinary “baryonic”
matter.
Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, described
the origins of the mission in a pre-launch interview on NASA’s Curious
Universe podcast:
In the late 90s, we realized that
the universe was behaving much more strangely than we imagined, and that
instead of coasting out at the constant speed forever or slowing down,
it in fact is accelerating. [It was a] huge, unexpected mystery. Many
scientists wanted to figure out what can we do to take the next step to
understand the fundamental nature of our universe?
A
central task of the last few decades across both astronomy and physics
has been to identify the concrete origins and character of these
attractive and repulsive components that shape the evolution of the
universe.
*****
The launch of Roman is testament to extraordinary developments in
science, and to the technological foundations that make the mission
itself possible (the semiconductor manufacturing behind its
300-megapixel infrared camera, the computing that will process and
transmit 1.4 terabytes of data each day, the precision optics that can
cancel the light of a star to reveal the planets beside it). All of this
highlights all the more starkly the irrationality of the social
relations that prevail on the world Roman leaves behind.
The
rocket that lifted the telescope belongs to Elon Musk, the world’s first
trillionaire, a racist ignoramus whose diatribes against immigrants and
refugees have been combined with political and financial support for
Donald Trump, the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany and other fascist parties.
SpaceX was built on public money via NASA and Pentagon contracts and now
trades near a $2 trillion valuation, a massive vehicle for speculation
and the enrichment of the oligarchy.
And as the Roman telescope
climbed out of the atmosphere Sunday morning, rescue workers in Nepal
were searching flooded Himalayan valleys, where 903 people were dead by
Monday’s count and more than 4,000 were missing. The danger had been
warned of for years. The Himalayas, warming faster than the global
average, hold thousands of swelling glacial lakes above some of the
poorest valleys on earth.
The satellite monitoring and
valley-level warning systems that could have saved hundreds of lives are
built on the same infrared and remote-sensing technologies that Roman
carries into space, and cost a pittance beside any military budget. They
were never built. Even now, a newly formed lake of loose debris hangs,
unstable, above the rescue crews, and hundreds of workers are trapped in
tunnels under the ground.
In the realm of public health, the
United States has confirmed 2,777 measles cases this year, the most
since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, and Pennsylvania
recorded its first measles deaths in 35 years. Cases of the foodborne
parasite Cyclospora have passed 17,000, roughly four times the recent
annual count.
The response of the American government, and its
counterparts internationally, to every social disaster has been to
attack the underlying science and those who carry out the research. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has cut its foodborne
illness surveillance from eight pathogens to two. The National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, whose scientists model floods and
forecast storms, fired more than 800 workers in February 2025. The
Environmental Protection Agency has lost a quarter of its staff in a
year and is now smaller than at any time since Reagan.
Roman
itself was nearly killed four times. The first Trump administration
proposed eliminating the telescope, then called WFIRST, in three budgets
running, and in April 2025 a White House budget document proposed
eliminating it again. At the same time, both the Republicans and
Democrats have consistently voted billions to fund ICE and trillions for
the military and corporate bailouts.
The knowledge, technique and organizational capacity plainly exist to
contain the floods, provide universal vaccinations, rebuild
infrastructure and replace coal and oil plants with renewable energy. It
is the control of society’s resources by a tiny financial oligarchy,
and the subordination of every social decision to profit and war, that
hold that capacity out of reach.
Over the coming years, the Roman
Space Telescope will map the universe. The task on Earth is to place the
advances of science at the service of mankind: to take the oligarchy’s
wealth into public hands, end the wars and turn the productive forces to
human need.
Fernando Cerimedo, the Argentine political operative who served as
top adviser to Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, is being held in
preventive detention in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, accused of hiring
gunmen to murder his former partner, Bolivian lawyer and activist Nadia
Beller.
Beller, who is pregnant, was shot three times outside a
hotel on the night of August 17 by two assailants dressed as delivery
drivers. She survived. Cerimedo was arrested the next morning attempting
to board a flight to Buenos Aires and has been ordered to remain in
pre-trial custody for 180 days. Bolivian authorities have since granted
Beller protected-witness status and are holding her at an undisclosed
location.
Three further investigations have been opened against
Cerimedo in Bolivia: for illicit enrichment, following searches that
turned up an initial $40,000 in cash and, according to subsequent
reports, as much as $500,000 in cash and suspect assets; for the
protection of irregular flights out of the Beni municipality of Santa
Ana, allegedly carrying illicit substances toward Brazil; and in
connection with a case known as the “narcoencomiendas,” involving the
irregular movement of 350,000 bolivianos with the participation of a
pilot and three police officers.
On August 29, a Bolivian tribunal ordered a second preventive detention for Cerimedo on the illicit enrichment charge.
Cerimedo
has wept publicly at several of his hearings, complaining at the most
recent that his life had been ruined. What is being ruined is something
larger. The man behind digital publicity operations of Trump’s allies
throughout the region is now in the public eye, and the material
emerging from his telephone threatens to bring down entire governments.
*****
What this case exposes are the anti-democratic mechanisms through which
Washington has reshaped the hemisphere. Vast sums—their ultimate sources
still unestablished—have been channeled into bot farms, disinformation
networks and micro-targeting operations to manufacture public opinion
and install governments that function as instruments of US policy.
Hundreds of workers remain trapped in the flooded tunnels of Nepal’s
hydropower plants after a wall of glacial debris tore through the
country’s northern valleys, and rescue crews from Nepal, India and China
are drilling, digging and blasting to reach them.
Five days after
a glacier-triggered landslide and flash flood devastated Nepal’s border
region, the country’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management
Authority reported 939 confirmed deaths, 1,473 injured and 3,925 people
missing or unaccounted for as of Monday.
The fast moving, dense
slurry—a churning mix of meltwater, glacial ice, rock, boulders, mud and
uprooted material—behaved like wet concrete racing downhill and
destroyed settlements, transport links and hydropower sites across the
Himalayan watershed last Wednesday morning.
Across the border in
China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, authorities had reported at least 16
additional deaths and 546 missing people.
The hydropower sector
has emerged as one of the hardest-hit parts of the disaster. Authorities
said 639 hydropower workers from sites across Nepal were missing as of
Monday, while the Independent Power Producers’ Association had
previously put the number of missing or unaccounted-for people connected
to the sector at about 933.
The most difficult operation involves
workers trapped in hydropower tunnels after the flooding. Nepal’s Prime
Minister’s Office said 350 people had been rescued from a tunnel, but
more than 100 remained trapped as operations continued; another 533
residents had been moved to safety from flooded areas.
At the
Trishuli 3A plant in Rasuwa District, army rescue teams drilled into the
upper section of the mud-choked tunnel on Saturday evening, pumped in
air and lowered a camera to search for survivors. On August 29 alone,
208 workers were brought out of a third Trishuli project, 43 of them
foreign nationals, including 38 Chinese and five Indian workers. India
and China have sent specialist rescue teams and equipment to support the
operation.
Rescuers face a hazardous underground environment as
tunnels can be blocked by sediment and debris, flooded by seepage,
damaged by shifting rock, or cut off by collapsed entrances and
destroyed roads. The situation also limits the use of heavy equipment
and makes ventilation, communication, lighting, food, water and medical
care urgent operational concerns. The BBC reported that a controlled
explosion was detonated as part of attempts to reach the trapped
workers.
The rescue effort has resulted in a substantial number of
evacuations. Nepal’s disaster-response agency said more than 7,500
people had been rescued since the flood struck on August 26.
The
sharply rising scale of the human devastation reflects the difficulty of
compiling a reliable count in remote, mountainous terrain where roads,
bridges, communications infrastructure and work camps have been swept
away.
Earlier in the response, Nepalese authorities said hundreds
of tourists, including large numbers of foreign nationals, had been cut
off or unaccounted for. The numbers are escalating as officials receive
reports from isolated villages and industrial sites.
*****
Scientists from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain
Development, based in Kathmandu, and climate specialists said an
avalanche from a glacier was the likely cause of the release of the
destructive mixture into river valleys.
Scientists warn that a
warming Himalayan environment raises the probability of cascading
hazards. Rising temperatures can destabilize glaciers and slopes, alter
snow and ice melt, expand or create glacial lakes, and increase the
danger that an avalanche, landslide or lake outburst will transform into
a fast-moving flood. The Himalayan region is warming faster than the
global average and is particularly exposed to rainfall-driven floods and
landslides.
Nepal’s foreign minister called for a global effort
to tackle climate change, arguing that Nepal is among the countries
suffering acutely from rising temperatures despite its relatively
limited contribution to global emissions. The statement framed the
catastrophe not solely as a national emergency but as evidence of a
shared global climate problem requiring international action.
A
second emergency is still developing upstream as the landslides and
debris have blocked river channels, forming barrier lakes. These
temporary lakes can become highly dangerous when water accumulates
behind unstable natural dams, because a breach can send another sudden
surge downstream.
*****
Nepal’s flood catastrophe cannot be understood as an unavoidable
“natural” disaster solely caused by the glacial collapse which triggered
the raging deadly torrent. The scale of deaths, displacement and
infrastructure loss is directly attributable to capitalist-induced
climate change, resulting from decades of neglect internationally by a
social system that places profit and austerity above public safety and
preparedness.
A primary role has been played by the major
imperialist powers, especially the US, in the criminal neglect of the
climate crisis that is having a disproportionate impact on billions of
working-class and poor people around the world. Fragmented national
responses to the crisis are incapable of addressing cross-border climate
hazards, which are impacting every country in the world.
Nurses at New Zealand’s North Shore Hospital in Auckland last month
declared a “state of emergency,” saying chronic understaffing and severe
overcrowding are putting patients at risk.
About 120 nurses,
healthcare assistants and other staff signed a letter, which was sent by
the NZ Nurses Organisation (NZNO) to Health NZ chief executive Dale
Bramley declaring they could “no longer remain silent” about the
appalling conditions. It explained that the Emergency Department (ED) is
staffed for 40 patients but is operating at twice that, while running
at 200 to 300 percent over capacity at critical times. Patients are left
sitting in their own waste and being treated in corridors.
“We
will not accept the normalization of preventable harm or the continued
degradation of our public health system,” the letter said. The NZNO,
however, has not announced any industrial action.
A surge of
Influenza A is hitting New Zealand, with Auckland recording its worst
week for flu-related hospitalizations in a decade. Radio NZ (RNZ)
reported on August 14 that hospital admissions in the city doubled in
the space of a week, rising to 3.781 cases per 100,000 people from 1.574
the week before.
*****
Starship Children’s Hospital is deferring less urgent cases to cope
with a “flood” of very young children with flu symptoms. The St John
Ambulance Service reported that in August it had its highest volume of
emergency calls on record, with 2,562 in a single day, many of them for
respiratory illnesses.
The North Shore Hospital staff letter said
Health NZ had failed to plan properly for winter and had not hired the
nursing numbers it had agreed to. It described patients taking 90
minutes to be triaged with some waiting more than 50 hours in ED to be
admitted to hospital. Some missed essential medication while others had
urgent heart scans delayed for hours. Charge nurse Jean Classey told
RNZ: “It’s an absolute nightmare. It feels like we’re at war.”
Health
Minister Simeon Brown has flatly rejected all the evidence, maintaining
there is no crisis. In a statement, he falsely claimed the health
system is improving: “More people are being treated, wait times for
surgery are shorter, and patients are waiting less time in emergency
departments,” he boasted.
*****
Public hospitals have for years been over-run due to chronic shortages
of doctors and exorbitant costs of GP visits. Wellington Hospital’s ED
went into its most critical code-red status on average twice a day
between January and October 2025, as demand repeatedly outstripped
available staff and beds. More than 3,200 patients, around 10 a day,
left the department without being treated.
*****
The crisis has been worsening under austerity measures imposed by
successive governments, including the last Labour Party government and
the current National Party-NZ First-ACT Party coalition.
Last
month it was revealed that more than 1,300 nursing positions remained
vacant nationwide with full-time nursing roles increasing by just 54
between March 2024 and 2026. Only 47 percent of graduating trainee
nurses (about 800) secured jobs at the end of 2025. Many are being
forced to look for work overseas.
*****
The government’s 2025–26 budget
allocated $NZ13 billion for the military over four years, but health
increased by just 4.77 percent ($1.37 billion) amid high
inflation—insufficient to address the crisis of unmet need. According to
documents cited by the Post on August 25, a “headline” $96
million annual boost to GP practices, previously announced by Brown, is
being funded by equivalent funding cuts for hospital and specialist
services.
The government is exploiting the crisis of its own
making to outsource thousands of operations to private hospitals. Health
NZ recently announced $300 million in long-term contracts with private
hospitals to treat backlogs of orthopedic patients. Boosting the
private sector further entrenches the two-tier health system and serves
as a wedge for a program of wholesale privatization.
*****
With a general election looming on November 7, the major capitalist
parties are competing over who will impose the most brutal attacks on
working people and the services they depend on.
On August 22, acclaimed novelist Richard Flanagan delivered a powerful
45-minute speech in Sydney condemning the escalating persecution in
Australia of opponents of Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in
Gaza. He called for a determined fight to defend freedom of speech and
basic democratic rights.
Flanagan won Britain’s most prestigious literary award—the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. By winning the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for his book Question 7,
he became the first and only author in history to win both Britain’s
premier fiction and non-fiction prizes. The popular writer has just
published Heresies, a collection of essays, articles and speeches.
Titled
“The New McCarthyism: Gaza and Australia,” Flanagan’s speech, which was
presented to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas and received a prolonged
standing ovation from a sold-out audience of 1,000 people,
systematically exposed the state-backed pro-Zionist campaign that
falsely equates opposition to Israel’s war crimes with antisemitism. The
address explained how this false claim, aided and abetted by the Labor
government, is being used to unleash serious attacks on basic democratic
rights.
Flanagan began his speech by reflecting on his upbringing
in Tasmania, a society that, he said, was shaped by a “shrill,
deafening silence” about its foundation as a convict slave system and
the near-total genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines. This background, he
explained, established his lifelong commitment as a writer: “To name, to
point, to bear witness.”
*****
Flanagan’s speech follows similar warnings over the past two years by
other prominent Australian writers and creative workers: two-time Miles
Franklin Award and Stella Prize winner Michelle de Kretser and veteran publisher Louise Adler,
the former director of the Adelaide Writers’ Week. Adler was forced to
resign from the Writers’ Week over inviting award-winning author,
leading Palestinian scholar and Macquarie University academic Randa
Abdel-Fattah to speak at the prestigious event.
Flanagan warned
earlier in his speech: “The guarantee of Australian democracy is not to
be found in parliament nor with our elected representatives but in
freedom of speech and expression and the right to protest.”
Towards
the end, he declared: “We are free and we must not surrender that
freedom. Yet, it is under attack, and we must now fight for it.”
Flanagan warned that if the escalating attacks were not resisted, “all
Australians would quickly understand that there is now a sphere of human
life about which they must be silent—or risk being blacklisted. That’s
the new McCarthyism.”
Mass opposition to the genocide and the
related turn to authoritarianism, expressed in the statements of Flanagan
and other courageous artistic figures, raises the question of how such a
struggle will be developed, on what program and which class will take
it forward.
There is growing concern, reflected in the rise of the yield on
government bonds in the US and other major economies and in the analysis
by some economic commentators, that the rise in interest rate payments
is heading in the direction of a financial crisis.
Analysis by the Financial Times (FT),
published over the weekend, found that since the increase in bond
yields, which started with the US war on Iran in February, the “cost of
borrowing for the world’s biggest economies [has risen] by tens of
billions of dollars.”
The G7 economies have already taken a hit of $16 billion in
additional debt financing costs since the war began and could be faced
with a total of an extra $34 billion by the end of the first quarter of
next year if the rise in yields persists.
The lion’s share, some
$10.6 billion, has been incurred by the US and it is set to face total
additional costs of $21.6 billion by the beginning of next year.
Reporting
on its findings, the FT said that while the additional amounts were
“relatively small in comparison to overall public commitments,” they
'threaten to pile additional pressure on already stretched government
balance sheets.”
And the effects may spread into the stock market and financial system more broadly.
The fourth of six resolutions adopted unanimously
by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US),
held from August 2–7, 2026.
1. The period since the Eighth Congress has seen a significant
acceleration of the class struggle on every continent. In the first
quarter of 2026 alone, 458 strikes were recorded across just eight
European countries, including five general strikes at the national or
regional level: national general strikes in Belgium and Italy, regional
general strikes in Andalusia and the Basque Country and a general strike
in Northern Cyprus. A national general strike swept Argentina in
February; some 1.7 million state employees struck in the Indian state of
Maharashtra; and general strikes have swept Africa.
2. The class
struggle is also intensifying in the United States. Sixteen major
strikes erupted in the first five months of 2026, ahead of the pace of
30 for all of 2025. These included the strikes by 31,000 Kaiser
healthcare workers, 15,000 New York City nurses, 42,000 University of
California workers, 6,400 San Francisco educators, 3,800 JBS meatpackers
and the ongoing rebellion among auto-parts workers in the Midwest,
expressed in massive contract rejections at Nexteer, Dana and other
plants. Alongside the strike movement have come the “No Kings”
demonstrations involving millions and the mass protests against ICE
raids in Minneapolis and other cities.
3. This Congress affirms
the assessment made in the opening report to the 2026 International May
Day Rally, that the first months of 2026 “mark the point at which the
resistance of the working class has emerged as a global force,
contending against the offensive of the oligarchy on a scale that places
the fundamental questions of the epoch—war or peace, dictatorship or
democracy, socialism or barbarism—directly on the historical agenda.”
4.
These struggles are unfolding increasingly in direct conflict not only
with employers and governments, but with the trade union bureaucracies
that function as an anti-strike corporate police force. This Congress
reaffirms the analysis developed in the 2018 resolution “The Resurgence
of Class Struggle and the Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party” and the
Seventh Congress resolution “Build the IWA-RFC in the United States!”
(2022), which stressed that the nationally based, pro-corporate
bureaucracies, whose degeneration is rooted in the globalization of
production, are structurally incompatible with the defense of an
internationally integrated working class.
5. Against the
apparatus, this Congress advances the building of the International
Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), founded by the
ICFI in April 2021. The IWA-RFC is based on an international strategy.
Its purpose is not to influence the existing trade union bureaucracies
but to organize a rank-and-file insurrection against them and to
transfer power to the growing network of factory, shop floor and
workplace committees. The rank-and-file committees assembled under the
banner of the IWA-RFC are the fighting organizations and schools of
revolution of the present period, as the committees of correspondence
and safety were the schools of the American Revolution in 1773–76.
6.
The strategy of the SEP proceeds from the understanding that the
development of the class struggle creates the conditions for the growth
of socialist consciousness, the building of revolutionary leadership and
the conquest of power. There is no revolution without the entry of the
working class into struggle. Conversely, the artificial suppression of
the class struggle by the labor bureaucracy over the past 45 years has
produced a massive reversal in the social position of the working
class—labor’s share of GDP has fallen to the lowest level on record,
going back to 1947—and created the conditions for the domination of
right-wing politics and reaction. To this must be added the
bureaucracy’s relentless promotion of economic nationalism and “buy
American” chauvinism, which has fed directly into the poisonous
atmosphere on which the far right thrives. The building of rank-and-file
committees is aimed at breaking the grip of the bureaucracy and
creating the means through which the enormous social opposition now
developing can find a revolutionary expression.
7. This strategy
is counterposed to that of the tendencies that rejected the fight for
socialist consciousness in the working class and devoted themselves
instead to the supposed reform of the bureaucracy. The Teamsters for a
Democratic Union, founded a half century ago, is the model. Promoting
one “reform” bureaucrat after another, it blocked the development of the
political struggle of the working class at every point, even as the
bureaucracy integrated itself into the structure of corporate management
and the capitalist state. Fifty years later, these tendencies have
themselves been absorbed into the apparatus they promised to reform,
where they function as anticommunist defenders of war and of the
suppression of workers’ democratic rights. TDU’s chosen “reformer,” Sean
O’Brien, appeared on the platform of the Republican National
Convention.
8. This Congress gives its strongest support to the
campaign of Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist, for
president of the UAW in the 2026 elections. In the 2022 elections, Shawn
Fain was presented as a “reformer” by the pseudo-left organizations
that operate in and around the apparatus and the Democratic Party,
including Jacobin, the DSA, Labor Notes and others.
Over the past three years, Fain has presided over the betrayal of tens
of thousands of auto and auto parts workers, collaborated with the Trump
tariff regime, preemptively shut down academic-worker struggles, and
suppressed all opposition at the 2026 Constitutional Convention, while
the court-appointed monitor recently documented a “toxic culture of
division and retaliation at the highest levels of the organization.” The
bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished.
9. The
Lehman campaign’s program gives concrete form to the perspective of the
IWA-RFC: the end of the dictatorship of the Solidarity House apparatus
and the transfer of power to a network of rank-and-file committees on
the shop floor; the replacement of nearly 50 years of pro-corporate
policies with a strategy of class struggle; full recovery of wages lost
to concessions and inflation, a zero-layoff policy, company-paid
healthcare, and a 30-hour week with no loss of pay to stop
automation-driven job cuts; the repudiation of the bureaucracy’s
nationalism, counterposing an international strategy based on the
unified struggle of American, Canadian and Mexican workers against
transnational corporations; the defense of immigrant workers against the
ICE raids and deportations; and the mobilization of the industrial
power of the membership against dictatorship and war.
10. The fear
of the apparatus towards the rank-and-file rebellion embodied in
Lehman’s campaign has now found expression in open death threats. On
July 16, a high-ranking UAW official and prominent Fain supporter, until
recently the assistant director of Lehman’s own region, posted a death
threat on Lehman’s campaign page: an AI-generated image depicting Lehman
bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked gunman
aiming a rifle at his back. This Congress calls for the broadest
campaign in defense of Will Lehman, demanding the public repudiation of
the threat by the UAW. The defense of Lehman is the defense of the
democratic rights of the entire working class against the gangster
methods of the labor bureaucracy.
11. This Congress resolves to
mobilize workers and youth behind the Lehman campaign and the campaign
to defend him against the death threat issued by the UAW apparatus; to
build rank-and-file committees in every factory, workplace, school, and
neighborhood in which the party is active; to extend the IWA-RFC into
logistics, healthcare, education and the public sector, and to develop
its international coordination with the sections of the ICFI in the
fight against the global assault on jobs and against war and
dictatorship; to defend science and culture as social rights, connecting
the struggles of educators, scientists and artists against censorship
and the profit-driven assault on intellectual labor to the fight to make
the cultural achievements of humanity accessible to all; and to recruit
the most class-conscious workers into the SEP.
On his way to his job as a construction worker in April, Brian José
Morales García, a 25-year-old from Austin, Texas, was arrested by US
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. He spent five days in
the Gillespie County Jail, where agents berated him as a liar. Morales
García had told the truth: he was born in Denver, Colorado, a
native-born American citizen.
But he spoke no English, was denied
a phone call to his family or a lawyer and was told he faced five years
in federal prison for immigration fraud unless he signed papers
consenting to his own “voluntary” departure. On April 7, under coercion,
he signed papers containing fabricated details of an unlawful border
crossing, which ICE then used to expel him to Mexico.
Only in late
August did the Department of Justice, confronted with certified
hospital records, Colorado vital statistics and witness affidavits
produced by attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, agree to permit his return.
The government has yet to admit wrongdoing, and litigation over his
wrongful exile continues.
*****
The implications are sinister: if a certified birth record, a Social
Security file and a prior lawful entry are insufficient, then no
document is. Citizenship ceases to be a fundamental right and becomes a
temporary privilege granted by law enforcement.
*****
The regime and its apologists present the deportation campaign as a
targeted operation against “criminals” and “illegals.” The facts expose
this lie: according to a ProPublica investigation, 170 documented
citizens were detained in the first nine months of Trump’s second term;
data from TRAC indicates that approximately 70 percent of individuals in
ICE detention have no criminal convictions.
The state violence
has already proved lethal: Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were shot
dead by ICE/CBP agents during enforcement operations in Minneapolis;
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed during an immigration raid in Houston;
and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed by federal agents during a
raid in Biddeford.
As the resolution adopted
last month by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality
Party states, the war on immigrants is “the spearhead of a broader drive
toward dictatorship.” A force that can, with impunity, seize a
construction worker on his way to work, hold him incommunicado, coerce a
false confession and expel him from the country of his birth is a force
that can and will be turned against strikers, demonstrators and every
form of working-class opposition.
Morales García's lawyer is
right to warn of a malignant precedent. But litigation, legislative
reform and statutory liability cannot stop what is being built. The
state and all its agencies have spent decades dismantling the very
accountability mechanisms on which such a strategy depends, while the
Democratic Party stages performative 'no' votes even as it helps fund
ICE and CBP to the tune of $69.5 billion through 2029 under the Secure
America Act, on top of the $170 billion for the Department of Homeland
Security in last year's One Big Beautiful Bill..
The defense of
immigrants cannot be separated from the defense of the working class as a
whole. The world’s wealth is produced by the collaborative labor of
workers of all countries; the immigrant worker is the living embodiment
of the international unity of the working class.
No worker, citizen or immigrant, should be subject to a regime of
deportations. Workers must demand the immediate and unconditional
abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol and the entire Department of
Homeland Security; the release of every detainee; full rights for all
workers regardless of where they were born. None of this can be
accomplished outside the independent mobilization of the working class
in a struggle for socialism.
A mob of Hindu supremacist thugs attacked students at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, West Bengal, on the night of August 19–20, just
days after India’s far-right prime minister, Narendra Modi, called for
left-wing opponents of the government to be “identified and isolated.”
The attackers—members of the ABVP along with outside
goons—entered the campus through Gate 4 at approximately 12:37 a.m. on
August 20. They vandalized university property, burned flags and posters
of left-wing student organizations, and targeted students sheltering
inside the Aurobindo Bhavan administrative building. Video footage shows
fires, stone-throwing, and attempts to force entry into university
buildings. Students were trapped inside as the mob attempted arson.
Jadavpur
University is one of India’s leading public institutes of higher
education, and has a long history of left-wing student political
activity.
*****
Only after a public outcry did the university administration lodge a
police complaint over the August 19-20 goons. Although the ABVP’s role
in the attack was manifestly evident, Vice Chancellor Chiranjib
Bhattacharjee’s complaint charged “unknown outsiders/persons” for
rioting, vandalism and criminal intimidation.
As of last Friday,
no arrests had been made. On August 26, some six days after the attack,
police entered the university and took away CCTV footage.
Earlier, the Times of India
had reported that the CCTV footage showed the mob entering without
resistance, raising questions about whether individuals inside the
university facilitated their entry.
*****
The Jadavpur violence must be understood in the context of the BJP’s
“historic” victory in West Bengal’s May 2026 state assembly election,
when it won 208 of 294 seats, ousting the 15 year-long Trinamool
Congress (TMC) government and captured power in India’s fourth most
populous state for the first time ever.
Immediately upon taking
office, the newly installed Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari—a former TMC
leader who defected to the BJP—unleashed widespread police violence
against poor slum-dwellers, especially Muslims and other minorities.
The
West Bengal BJP government is using its shock troops, including the
ABVP and other Hindu supremacist groups, to suppress any form of
opposition, most of all from the youth and the working class. The
violent attack by the ABVP at Jadavpur is part of this pre-emptive
strike against mounting social opposition.
*****
The attack at Jadavpur is not an isolated incident. Attacks on
left-wing students and faculty—who are frequently derided as
“anti-national”— have occurred throughout the BJP’s now 12-year-long
national government.
Perhaps the most notorious case is that of
the activist and student leader Umar Khalid. In 2018, Khalid was shot at
by an unidentified gunman in New Delhi while attending a program titled
“Khauf se Azaadi” (Freedom Without Fear) at the Constitution Club, organized to highlight the increasing attacks on minorities, students
and rationalists. Khalid survived the assassination attempt. But in
September 2020, under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act
(UAPA), he was arrested for leading peaceful protests against the
religiously discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Khalid’s
continued incarceration remains one of the most abhorrent acts of the
Indian state in targeting student and worker solidarity.
Just four
days before the Jadavpur attack, on August 15, Modi used his
Independence Day address to call for action to be taken against those he
called “dimaagi Naxals”—“intellectual Naxals.” Modi boasted that the
Indian state has largely succeeded in suppressing the armed Naxalite
Maoist insurgency, but claimed that people with a “Naxal mentality”—that
is, who oppose the government from a left-wing perspective—remain and
must be “identified and isolated.”
The term “dimaagi Naxals” is deliberately vague—akin to the Trump administration’s targeting of the non-existent antifa
movement—and is meant to legitimize state surveillance of, and
vigilante attacks, on left-wing students, intellectuals and other
political opponents. It echoes the BJP’s established use of “urban
Naxal” as a label to criminalize dissent.
*****
The violence at Jadavpur University must be unequivocally condemned.
Students, educators and workers have a common interest in defending
freedom of speech, political association and education from the BJP’s
authoritarian assault. But this defence cannot be entrusted to the
Stalinist organizations or to any section of the Indian bourgeoisie. The
CPM, the TMC and the Congress Party have all, in different ways, paved
the road that led to the BJP’s ascendancy.
The fight against the
Hindu supremacist right requires a decisive break with all forms of
bourgeois nationalism and Popular Front politics. The working class must
be mobilized as an independent political force, united across communal
and caste divisions, on the basis of an internationalist socialist
program. Only through the development of such a movement—fighting for a
workers’ government and world socialist revolution—can the growing
authoritarianism of the Indian ruling class be defeated and the
democratic and social aspirations of hundreds of millions of workers and
young people be secured.
On Saturday afternoon, a flash flood tore through Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, killing at least two people and leaving more than 20
missing or unaccounted for. At least 62 people were evacuated by
helicopter from the Bright Angel Canyon and Phantom Ranch areas.
An estimated 0.84 inches (2.1 centimeters) of rain fell within a
single hour, sending water, mud, boulders and other debris surging
through the canyon.
The flooding was intensified by the burn scar
left by last year’s Dragon Bravo Fire, which burned nearly 150,000 acres
along the North Rim, including portions of the Bright Angel Creek
watershed. By stripping the slopes of trees, brush and ground cover that
absorb rainfall and hold soil in place, the fire left the terrain less
able to contain the downpour, accelerating runoff, mudslides and debris
flows into the canyon.
The flood destroyed trails and nearly every
footbridge across Bright Angel Creek while damaging or destroying
roughly 40 percent of the Transcanyon Waterline.
The 12.5-mile
(20-kilometer) pipeline supplies potable water and fire protection to
every facility on the South Rim and parts of the inner canyon. It serves
millions of visitors annually, roughly 1,600 residents of Grand Canyon
Village and as many as 2,500 residents across the broader South Rim and
inner-canyon service area.
*****
Governments from Washington to Kathmandu have subordinated public
safety to private profit. Nepal lacked adequate monitoring, warning
systems and resilient infrastructure, while the Trump administration has
fired park workers, weakened scientific agencies and delayed repairs to
the Grand Canyon’s only water pipeline. Vast resources that could
protect lives and eliminate dependence on fossil fuels are instead
diverted to war and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
Humanity
possesses the technology and productive capacity to provide safe
infrastructure, clean energy and a high standard of living for all.
Implementing these measures requires taking the energy corporations and
banks out of private hands and reorganizing the world economy through
socialist planning based on human need, not profit.
Two Detroit public defenders who faced criminal contempt charges and up
to 93 days in jail for participating in a lawful strike had the charges
dismissed Friday. The dismissal came only after Wayne County judges used
the threat of imprisonment and $7,500 fines to intimidate legal
services workers and attack the right to strike.
*****
Workers striking to preserve their healthcare and win wages that keep
pace with inflation are not pursuing “lucre.” They are defending their
living standards against an employer that pleaded poverty while paying
managers $500-a-day bonuses to cross the picket line and proposed a 1
percent cost-of-living adjustment with inflation running at 3.5 percent.
Giles’ interpretation of the oath, which is taken by individual lawyers
on a personal level, implicitly attacks collective action by attorneys
to fight for their living standards. Casting striking attorneys as
“reject[ing] ... the cause of the defenseless or oppressed” while they
had secured alternate legal coverage for their clients is deliberately
dishonest.
*****
The posture of judicial concern for the “defenseless or oppressed” is
grotesque coming from a court whose physical home, the Wayne County
Criminal Justice Center, is a $670 million boondoggle that transferred
prime downtown real estate into the hands of billionaire developer Dan
Gilbert.
The contempt campaign was not the work of one impulsive
judge. Two judges issued essentially identical show-cause orders against
three attorneys, all striking workers at the same employer, within days
of one another. This reflects the institutional character of the
judiciary, which recognized the NDS strike as a threat to the smooth
functioning of the carceral apparatus and moved to suppress it.
The
strike threatened to reveal that the workers who staff the public
defense system are themselves workers, share fundamental interests with
the clients they defend and are capable of withholding their labor. The
contempt threats were an attempt to deny this reality and insist that a
lawyer’s duty to the court supersedes the right to defend their own
living standards.
*****
The dismissals are a real, if limited, victory. Three workers faced
the prospect of jail for striking and none will sit in a cell. Gokey and
Eichinger have returned to defending their clients. “It’s small
potatoes compared to what our clients are facing,” Eichinger said.
But
the fact that two judges felt free to threaten imprisonment under these
circumstances remains a warning. The contempt threat was itself a form
of punishment. Its chilling effect did not require a conviction. It
began the moment workers understood that a judge could threaten jail for
walking a picket line, even after they had secured alternate legal
coverage for their clients.
The attack on the right to strike is
increasingly conducted through the courts and criminal law. When judges
can threaten striking workers with jail through show-cause orders and
then walk away without consequence, the working class is being told that
its most fundamental rights exist only at the pleasure of the state.
The NDS strike was part of a developing national movement. Some 500 public defender workers
walked out in July across New York, Michigan and Texas, including
workers at Brooklyn Defender Services, NDS offices in Detroit, Harlem
and San Marcos and the Bronx Defenders. They were fighting the same
attacks: healthcare cuts, poverty wages and crushing caseloads.
The
UAW bureaucracy, headed by President Shawn Fain, worked systematically
to isolate these strikes from one another. On July 22, Local 2325
officials shut down the Brooklyn Defender Services strike with a
tentative agreement. Two days later, NDS workers walked out alone. Three
days after that, the Bronx Defenders did the same. The bureaucracy’s
strategy, dividing each workplace and settling one at a time to prevent a
unified walkout, is the same one it has applied to autoworkers,
aerospace workers and every section of the union.
Fain’s visit to
the Detroit picket line, where he theatrically peppered a social media
video with cursing and told workers to “keep doing what you’re doing,”
was the pretense of militancy by an apparatus whose actual function is
to suppress it. His subsequent denunciation of the contempt cases as
“unacceptable intimidation” did not alter the bureaucracy’s role in
isolating the strikes. His threat that “UAW members remember at election
time” pointed workers not toward independent class action but toward
the dead end of the Democratic Party.
Will Lehman, the socialist
Mack Trucks worker running for UAW president on a program of abolishing
the bureaucracy and transferring power to rank-and-file committees,
warned legal services workers of precisely this. He called for a unified walkout across the entire sector,
the formation of rank-and-file committees with full control over
negotiations and the rejection of any strategy that subordinates workers
to the Democratic Party.
The capitalist courts are not neutral
forums where workers can expect a fair hearing. They are instruments of
class rule. The lesson of the contempt proceedings is not that workers
should be more deferential to court schedules. It is that the working
class cannot rely on the institutions of the capitalist state to defend
its interests.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s abrupt abandonment of his flagship
pledge to bring Thames Water into public ownership exposes the emptiness
of his promises to “reverse Thatcherism.”
Last week Burnham
backed down at the very moment the criminal pollution record and
financial collapse of Britain’s most distrusted and environmentally
destructive privatized utility demanded decisive action and the
prosecution of those responsible. He now insists nationalization would
be “too costly,” “too complex,” “too disruptive.”
*****
If anything commands overwhelming public support for nationalization,
it is Thames Water — a company whose origins lie in the New River
Company of 1617, created to supply fresh water to London. Its successor,
the Metropolitan Water Board, became renowned for the vast
Victorian‑era water and sewerage projects that transformed public health
in the capital.
The scale of the disaster privatization has
produced is staggering. Thames Water’s debt, approaching £20 billion,
was engineered through leveraged buyouts, dividend extraction and
financial engineering. Across the sector, an estimated £78 billion has
been paid out to shareholders since 1989, while net debt has soared to
more than £64 billion.
Since 2020, Thames Water has pumped at
least 72 billion liters of raw sewage into the River Thames — the
equivalent of 29,000 Olympic swimming pools. Across England, water
companies were responsible for at least 3.6 million hours of raw sewage
discharge in 2023, leading to thousands of reported illnesses annually
from those swimming in the rivers, lakes and sea.
Thames Water has
repeatedly polluted rivers with raw sewage, discharged toxic “forever
chemicals,” and allowed its infrastructure to decay. It received a
record £122.7 million fine for sewage‑treatment failures, with
regulators concluding it had “failed to protect the environment.” It
also loses around 570 million liters of water a day through leaks — more
than any other water company — compounded by botched smart‑meter
installations that caused thousands of household leaks and flooding.
*****
Burnham’s retreat confirms the real character of his government: a
continuation of the profit‑driven order that has looted public
infrastructure for decades. He embodies what every Labour government has
represented since Blair — the imposition of austerity, privatization and war on behalf of the ruling class, wrapped in rhetoric cynically
aimed at recapturing a working‑class vote that has deserted the party.
The
WSWS has stressed that Burnham’s outlook is rooted in Blair’s “Third
Way,” the doctrine that codified Labour’s repudiation of its old
national‑reformist program and enshrined government–corporate
partnership as the foundation of economic and social policy. His entire
career is inseparable from New Labour: fast‑tracked into Blair’s
machine, elected to parliament in 2001, and proudly declaring himself a
“Blairite for Brown.” He backed the illegal Iraq war and voted to block
any investigation into it. As Health Secretary, he drove National Health
Service (NHS) privatization and earned the nickname “Flog ’em Burnham”
for his authoritarian law‑and‑order stance. He supported 42‑day
detention without charge and later abstained on the Tory welfare bill
that stripped millions of support.
Thatcher once said her greatest
achievement was “Tony Blair and New Labour.” Burnham is the embodiment
of that boast. Blair himself reminded the public during Burnham’s
Makerfield campaign that he was “an outstanding member of my
government.”
Burnham’s “Manchesterism” and “Productive State”
agenda — hailed by the Guardian as a challenge to Thatcherism —
explicitly rejected nationalization. It proposed “public ownership with a
commercial mandate,” the same Blairite public‑private partnership model
that saddled the NHS and schools with massive debts. It insisted on
strict fiscal rules and a “credible plan for engaging with bond markets”
— in plain English, austerity.
*****
The working class cannot look to Burnham or Labour to resolve the
crisis of Britain’s water system — or any essential service. Real change
requires the independent mobilization of workers for socialism, the
abolition of private ownership of essential infrastructure, and
democratic control of society’s productive forces.
It also
requires a struggle against the pseudo‑left — the Socialist Workers
Party, the Socialist Party, the Corbynite Socialist Campaign Group and
those around the Stalinist Morning Star newspaper — who claimed
Burnham’s promises would “raise expectations” and that workers should
“pressure” him to the left. The entire history of Labour refutes this.
Every supposed “left turn” has ended in capitulation and betrayal.
Corbyn
is the most recent example: he filled his leadership with Blairites,
capitulated at every turn, and ended by founding Your Party whose only
function is to channel opposition back into Labour and which has now all
but collapsed.
*****
Workers must treat Burnham’s promises with contempt, reject the
pseudo‑left’s pressure politics, and take up the fight to build the
Socialist Equality Party.
The water companies must be taken into
public ownership without compensation to the shareholders and creditors
who have enriched themselves while running down the water and sewage
system. Billions seized from the fortunes of the super‑rich must be used
to rebuild sanitation and infrastructure. Essential services must be
placed under the democratic control of the working class as part of the
broader socialist reorganization of economic life.
Just six weeks since he took office, the major press mouthpieces of
the ruling class have united to demand that Labour Prime Minister Andy
Burnham fund the rearmament of the military in preparation for war.
Last
week, Burnham deepened Britain’s direct involvement in the proxy war
with Russia in Ukraine. Britain had already supplied Kyiv with
long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles used to strike deep inside
Russia, but Burnham authorised arms manufacturer MBDA to release
classified blueprints for British-made components, allowing Ukraine to
build the weapon itself.
As the tragically pointless Russia-Ukraine war drags on and on, with
apparently no end in sight, destroying the lives of millions of people,
we must condemn in the strongest possible terms the persecution of
27-year-old journalist Bogdan Syrotiuk, who was sentenced on August 10,
2026, by a Ukrainian court to 15 years in prison on charges of treason,
essentially for six articles he wrote in which he called for solidarity
between Ukrainian and Russian workers and youth against the war.
There
has been not one word in any of his writings that supports the Russian
regime, Putin or the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, there
have not even been any allegations made against him of espionage,
sabotage or collaboration with the Russian military.
As a
socialist, Syrotiuk has consistently rejected any kind of nationalist
position. Many people have argued that, because Ukraine is the victim of
an invasion, criticism or opposition to the Ukrainian government should
be deferred until after the war is over. However, anyone who genuinely
values freedom and human rights must recognise this position as
incoherent.
Of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a
country at war would demand allegiance and loyalty from its citizens,
but however much sympathy we have for the suffering of people in
Ukraine, we cannot allow ourselves to ignore, excuse or minimise
violations of their rights to freedom of expression and of the press.
Whatever
one thinks of Syrotiuk’s politics, imprisoning someone for 15 years for
expressing political views is fundamentally incompatible with any
meaningful conception of democratic rights.
This case should concern everyone who claims to oppose authoritarianism and defend freedom.
Opposition
to a government, criticism of its historical narratives and advocacy
for an alternative political position do not become “treason” simply
because a country is at war. Ukraine’s government cannot credibly invoke
democracy as the justification for its struggle against Russia while
imposing such a sentence on a young journalist for doing his job.
Syrotiuk’s
writing might make some people uncomfortable, but that is precisely the
point. Rights are sometimes uncomfortable, and that is all the more
reason to defend them. If opposition to the government, opposition to
the war and solidarity with fellow human beings on the other side of a
national border can be redefined as treason, then the meaning of
democratic freedom becomes very narrow indeed.
If the Ukrainian
government wants us to believe that it values democratic principles at
all, this is a perfect opportunity for it to demonstrate that. The
grotesquely disproportionate sentence should be overturned, and we must
call for Syrotiuk’s immediate and unconditional release.
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.
