The annual “State of Teaching” survey, conducted between August and
November 2025 among 5,802 educators nationwide, found that approximately
45 percent of California teachers expect to retire or quit within 10
years, significantly above the national estimate of roughly 35 percent.
California teachers recorded a slightly higher morale score than the
national average, but the so-called “Teacher Morale Index” remained
abysmally low overall, with California at 16 on a scale ranging from
-100 to +100, compared to the national average of 13.
*****
A January 2026 survey by the California Teachers Association found
that 40 percent of educators were considering leaving the profession in
the near future. Nearly half cited financial pressures as a central
factor, while 54 percent said they personally knew coworkers who had
already quit because they could no longer survive economically.
Teachers
pointed to chronic overwork, expanding class sizes and deteriorating
school conditions. They demanded more planning time, smaller classes,
mental health days and stronger support in dealing with disruptive
classrooms increasingly shaped by social misery, poverty and years of
institutional neglect.
These conditions are not unique to
California. The teacher shortage is an international phenomenon. Across
the US, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands and numerous other
countries, public education systems are hemorrhaging educators after
decades of cuts, privatization and impossible workloads. During the
pandemic alone, roughly 2.6 million US educators left K-12 and higher
education jobs.
The global character of the crisis exposes the
fraud of claims that the problem stems from local “mismanagement” or
isolated policy failures. What is unfolding is the consequence of a
worldwide capitalist system that treats education not as a social right,
but as an expense to be minimized in favor of war and austerity.
*****
Overcrowded classrooms are not accidental. They are the direct
product of systematic defunding stretching back decades. While billions
flow to corporations, military spending and tax breaks for the wealthy,
public schools are forced to operate with fewer teachers, crumbling
infrastructure and increasingly inadequate support services.
California,
home to some of the largest concentrations of wealth on Earth,
exemplifies this contradiction. The state boasts hundreds of
billionaires and massive technology fortunes while teachers struggle
with unaffordable housing, stagnant wages and exhausting workloads. In
many districts, educators work second jobs or commute hours because they
cannot afford to live in the communities where they teach.
*****
Central responsibility for this catastrophe lies with the Democratic
Party and the trade union apparatus that functions as its industrial
police force.
California is effectively a one-party Democratic
state. The governor’s office, legislature and most major school
districts are controlled by Democrats. The destruction of public
education has occurred under their watch and with their active
participation.
Governor Gavin Newsom has repeatedly imposed
austerity budgets while presenting himself as a defender of progressive
values. Democratic administrations across California have overseen
school closures, budget cuts and the continued expansion of charter
schools that siphon funds from public education into privately managed
operations.
The teacher unions, affiliated with the National
Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, have
played a critical role in suppressing opposition.
For years, these
organizations have subordinated educators to the Democratic Party while
isolating and sabotaging struggles by teachers seeking to defend public
education. During the pandemic, the unions collaborated in the
reopening of schools despite widespread opposition from teachers and
parents concerned about unsafe conditions and mass infection.
Teacher strikes in Oakland, Los Angeles and Sacramento
were systematically shut down before educators could mobilize broader
support from other sections of the working class also entering struggle.
Contracts were pushed through containing wage increases that failed to
keep pace with inflation while fundamental issues such as class size,
staffing shortages and deteriorating working conditions remained
unresolved. What followed were layoffs.
*****
The survey’s findings are the accumulated result of these betrayals.
The unions function as labor-management apparatuses tasked with
containing social opposition. Their primary political role has become
channeling educators into support for the Democratic Party, including
early endorsements of administrations that have done nothing to reverse
the collapse of public education.
The human cost will fall
overwhelmingly on working class communities. Affluent districts, backed
by private fundraising and concentrated wealth, are better positioned to
absorb staffing shortages. Poorer communities across South Los Angeles,
the Inland Empire and the Central Valley face escalating instability,
overcrowding and the replacement of experienced educators with
undertrained or temporary staff.
This deepening inequality is
entirely consistent with the class logic of capitalist education policy.
Public schools serving working class students are systematically
starved of resources while privatization schemes funnel billions into
charter school chains, testing companies and educational technology
corporations seeking new profit streams.
Public education cannot be defended through appeals to the same
political and union forces responsible for dismantling it. Teachers must
build independent rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled
by educators and linked with parents, students and the broader working
class, to organize a genuine struggle against austerity and
privatization. Recent experience has shown that the union apparatus,
tied to the state and corporate interests, cannot be reformed.
The
crisis facing educators is not simply about wages or retention, but
about the priorities of society itself. Vast resources exist to provide
high-quality education, smaller classes, fully staffed schools and
decent living standards for teachers. The real obstacle is capitalism,
which subordinates social needs to private profit. The growing teacher
exodus exposes a social order incapable of guaranteeing quality public
education as a democratic right.
The
deepening hantavirus outbreak and the Trump administration’s response
to it expose the catastrophic dismantling of US public health and
scientific infrastructure six years after the start of the COVID-19
pandemic.
Asked about what he saw of South Africa in Israel-Palestine, Coetzee
resorted to acute and sustained irony. At first, he expressed concern
about using the word “apartheid” in regard to “the present situation in
Palestine,” because it “diverts one into the inflamed semantic wrangle.”
However, he went on:
Apartheid [in South Africa] was a
system of enforced segregation based on race or ethnicity, put in place
by an exclusive, self-defined group in order to consolidate colonial
conquest particularly to cement its hold on the land and natural
resources.
In Jerusalem and in the West Bank—to speak only of
Jerusalem and the West Bank—we’ve seen a system of enforced segregation
based on religion and ethnicity, put in place by an exclusive,
self-defined group to consolidate the colonial conquest, in particular
to maintain and, indeed, extend its hold on the land and its natural
resources.
Draw your own conclusions.
Coetzee joins a lengthening list of prominent writers who have denounced
Israel’s brutal war against the Palestinian people, a list that
includes Nobel prize winners Annie Ernaux and Jean-Marie Gustave Le
Clézio, Arundhati Roy, Sally Rooney, Rachel Kushner, Ian McEwan, Elif
Shafak, Michelle de Kretser, Hanif Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith,
David Grossman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Irvine Welsh and many others.
US
Navy aircraft attacked two Iranian-flagged oil tankers in the Gulf of
Oman on Friday as part of the US naval blockade of Iran, in a major
escalation of the war.
The
Brazilian president’s posturing as a “left-wing” opponent of war
collapsed with a single phone call from Trump—who reportedly signed off
with “I love you.”
President
Dissanayake’s claims to head “a workers’ government” are absurd. The
JVP/NPP presides over a capitalist government carrying out sweeping
attacks on workers and the poor, including higher taxes, higher prices
and wholesale privatization.
Nexteer
workers in Saginaw, Michigan, are determined to vote down a second
pro-company tentative agreement handed to them by the UAW Local 699
leadership just five weeks after they rejected an initial TA by 96.2
percent on April 2.
Britain’s Scottish and Welsh parliament and UK local council
elections have marked a deepening in the collapse of the Labour Party.
Having
long ago lost power in Scotland, historically a stronghold for Labour,
it has now been wiped out in the devolved Welsh Senedd, where it has
been the ruling party since the Senedd’s creation 27 years ago. Labour
fell from 30 out of 60 seats to nine out of a newly expanded 98-seat
parliament. This marks the end of a century in which Labour dominated
Wales.
In local council elections across the UK, the party lost
close to 1,000 seats out of roughly 2,550. At the time of writing, it
was losing four out of every five seats where it previously held a 5-10
percent majority and one in every two where its majority had been higher
than 30 percent.
Among the lost councils were multiple major
cities with long Labour histories: Birmingham, Sunderland, Hartlepool
and Leeds. Manchester and Wigan would have fallen too if all their seats
had been up for election this year.
Not only do the vast majority of workers see no reason to cast a
ballot for Labour, most actively despise it. They were promised “change”
from the Tories and have received more of the same.
The faces
are new but they speak the same lines: austerity in the interests of the
“bond markets,” “fiscal discipline,” and “financial headroom”; more
military spending for the war in Ukraine, to carve out a niche amid the
ongoing US-led war on Iran, and to reinforce Britain’s support for
Israel.
Among young people and Britain’s Muslim population in
particular, Labour will never be forgiven for its complicity in the Gaza
genocide—reflected in gains for the Green Party, especially in the
capital London.
But by far the biggest beneficiary of Labour’s
collapse is Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK. The party took 34 seats
in the Welsh Senedd and gained over 1,000 councillors across the UK.
*****
That a party characterized above all by its attacks on welfare
recipients and migrants—led by a multi-millionaire former stockbroker
and advocate of privatizing the NHS—is leading the polls in Britain,
with its support concentrated in more working-class constituencies, is a
devastating indictment of what has passed for the “left”.
*****
Only the Socialist Equality Party told the truth of what Corbyn was
doing and its consequences. When what most workers were hearing was that
his insipid semi-reformism and anti-socialist scheming was what
constituted left-wing politics, many turned away. As long as this
political fraud is allowed to continue, the inevitable result will be an
ongoing march to the right.
Thursday’s results also expose the
bankrupt character of the Together Alliance and all organizations which
seek to subordinate politics to the slogan “Stop Reform” and the
strategy of tactical voting and parliamentary alliances between the
other capitalist parties. Workers know what these parties are and they
will not be persuaded to vote for them.
The only way forward is
the fight for a genuinely socialist party opposed to all the others, for
which great opportunities are now opening up.
The
Socialist Equality Party treats the rise of Reform deadly seriously.
But we have nothing in common with the middle-class despair over the
rise of the right.
Starmer’s refusal to “plunge
the country into chaos” by resigning as prime minister and Labour
leader, is about more than personal arrogance. He knows the significance
of shattering the de facto two-party system which has been a
straitjacket on British politics. He knows the radicalizing effect that
the consequences of the war on Iran will have.
The working class
is asking new political questions, which only the socialist movement can
ultimately answer. It will increasingly be pitched into struggles,
international in scope, which reveal the real class interests served by
each political tendency. Through those experiences, workers can be won
to socialist politics by a policy of intransigent opposition to all
forms of capitalist inequality and oppression.
The same issues are
posed across Europe and internationally. The old social democratic and
liberal parties are in freefall. Their nominal “left” alternatives, from
Polanski to France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the German Left Party,
oppose a struggle by the working class for socialism, advocating meager reformist measures.
Voting closes Tuesday for a second tentative agreement (TA) covering
30,000 flight attendants at United Airlines. The vote by members of the
Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) is taking place under
conditions of acute crisis in the airline industry, marked above all by
the sudden collapse of Spirit Airlines on May 2 and the layoff of its
17,000 workers without notice or severance.
United flight
attendants have not received a pay raise since 2020, though their
previous contract became amendable in August 2021. They have been kept
on the job through the joint operation of the airline and the union
apparatus under the federal Railway Labor Act of 1926, which imposes
heavy limits on the right to strike for railroad and airline workers.
The law has been wielded for a century by the American bourgeoisie, and
loyally enforced by the trade union bureaucracy, to suppress the class
struggle.
Workers rejected the first tentative agreement last July
by 71 percent on a 92 percent turnout. The current TA emerged after
eight months of further mediated talks and was announced March 26
following a four-day session in Washington D.C. It runs from May 31,
2026 to May 31, 2031.
*****
Spirit’s collapse is only the first casualty in a wave of
bankruptcies and consolidations likely to break out across the industry.
The immediate trigger is the oil price shock due to the US attack on
Iran. Jet fuel was roughly $80 per barrel in March; by the week ending
April 24, the International Air Transport Association recorded an
average of $179 per barrel. Industry analysts now predict JetBlue is
highly likely to go bankrupt in the next year. Frontier is already
returning aircraft and deferring deliveries.
But the oil shocks
are being seized upon to carry out a further series of consolidations
and job cuts. The Trump administration refused to bail out the airline,
absurdly declaring the government did not have “half a billion dollars
lying around.” Since the US airline industry was first deregulated in
1978, workers have been continuously under attack, especially through
the mechanism of bankuptcies and mergers.
Only three “legacy”
carriers—United, American and Delta—survive of the 10 major carriers
from 1978. The legacy carriers are themselves preparing for further
consolidation. United approached American Airlines about a merger
earlier this year.
The situation demands that airline workers begin organizing now in
defense of their jobs and the flying public against the next round of
corporate attacks. The billions of dollars being squandered every week
in criminal wars and the trillions of dollars controlled by Wall Street
must be used instead to ensure a high quality, fully-staffed industry at
affordable prices for the public.
*****
Whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s vote, mass layoffs are coming, the
struggle is not over but entering its next phase. The defense of jobs
across the industry requires the formation of rank-and-file committees,
independent of the AFA bureaucracy and the two capitalist parties. New
organs of power, accountable to workers and with no ties to management
and Wall Street, must coordinate joint action across the industry.
In
particular, airline workers must raise the demand that Spirit’s 17,000
workers must be made whole, financed by the expropriation of the war
profits of the oil majors and the major banks. The Railway Labor Act
must be abolished and the unconditional right to strike recognized. Such
measures would be the first step towards bringing the airline industry
under public ownership, under the control of workers, and operated as a
public utility, not private profit.
Ignoring
protests from archaeologists and local Native Americans, a border wall
construction crew knowingly cut a wide swath through a pre-Columbian
geoglyph site. This is just one of many such impacts to archaeological
sites by this project.
Canada’s Liberal government is pouring hundreds of billions of
additional dollars into the military as part of the ruling class’s drive
to rearm and violently lay claim to “its share” of the spoils in the
imperialist redivision of the globe.
Ottawa pledged to ramp up defense spending to 5 percent of GDP at a NATO summit last summer in
what observers have noted is the largest peacetime military buildup in
the nation’s history. The eye-watering sums involved—projected to reach
nearly $160 billion annually by 2035—will exceed the size of all federal
transfers to the provinces for healthcare, social welfare,
post-secondary education and equalization.
The fact that this agenda entails the creation of a war economy was outlined earlier this year in the government’s Defense Industrial Strategy.
This comprehensive document not only presents Prime Minister Mark
Carney’s roadmap to massively expand military procurement and production
to reach the 5 percent spending target. It also proposes policies to
strengthen Canadian “sovereignty” in recognition of the fundamental
breakdown in the Canada-US military-strategic partnership, which for
over eight decades served as the basis for Canadian imperialism to
aggressively pursue its worldwide interests. In this, Ottawa is heading
in the same direction as all the imperialist powers in Europe, the
Asia-Pacific and North America, first and foremost the United States,
which is planning a record budget of $1.5 trillion under the fascist
dictator Trump.
Amid Trump’s threats to annex Canada as the 51st
state and crash its economy, the strategy document sets as a target
sourcing at least 70 percent of all military procurements domestically.
It also announced the creation of a new Defence Industrial Agency,
staffed by unelected civil servants, to ensure that decisions on
military procurement and investment are even more insulated from any
democratic control.
The strategy outlined five main pillars
designed to help the ruling class prepare for world war. These include
engaging more effectively with industry, securing supply chains,
procuring strategically and working with Indigenous groups and other
domestic actors, particularly in the North. One of the pillars,
“Investing purposefully to strengthen an innovative Canadian defense sector,” is largely devoted to integrating the country’s colleges and
universities into Canadian imperialism’s war machine, and recruiting
students and professors to serve as the brains behind new killing
machines for future wars of plunder.
*****
Ottawa will deepen its links with colleges and universities as
incubators of talent by “establishing mechanisms to better connect
universities and colleges to defense priorities,” the document
announced. The new budget earmarks $1.6 billion to “attract and equip
world-class researchers.”
*****
The government is also planning to dramatically increase the size of
the armed forces. Chief of the Defense Staff Jennie Carignan told CBC
recently that she will soon present a detailed proposal to government on
how to increase the military
to 85,000 regular troops, 100,000 reserves, and an additional 300,000
reserves with light training who can be called upon in an emergency.
Noting
the difficulties of marshaling such immense resources, one think tank,
the Institute for Research on Public Policy, wrote of how universities
could be utilized to facilitate Ottawa’s plans (while claiming not to
seek the militarization of campuses). It argued that schools could
support logistics, personnel management and administration to help deal
with an influx of new troops.
There is no popular groundswell of support for Canadian imperialism
and its predatory foreign policy, with polls indicating that less than
one-fifth of Canadians would volunteer to serve unconditionally in the
armed forces. Despite the loosening of requirements including permitting
permanent residents to join the military, the Canadian Armed Forces has
consistently fallen short of its recruitment targets.
*****
The arguments advanced by sections of the so-called “left” to justify
support for Canada’s massive rearmament program are particularly
pernicious. They assert that the tens of billions being invested in war
and destruction can serve as a “job creator” and provide “skilled,
good-paying jobs” for workers. The New Democrat-aligned Mayor of
Toronto, Olivia Chow, has called for the new Defence, Security and
Resilience Bank (DSRB) to be headquartered in the city claiming it would
“create thousands of jobs.”
Spearheaded by the trade union
bureaucracy, which has been spewing out “Team Canada” nationalist
propaganda on behalf of the corporate elite in response to the trade war
with the US, supposedly “left” forces are waving the Maple Leaf while
providing ready-made justifications for expanding Canada’s military. The Tyee,
for example, published an opinion piece last year that demanded, in
response to Trump’s tariffs and threats, “we should be prepared to
defend our sovereignty—not just with military spending, but with a
population that is engaged, trained and ready.” Former NDP MP Charlie
Angus has, for his part, welcomed the CAF’s proposal to massively expand
the military reserves as a blueprint for a “people’s army.”
Leading
union bureaucrats in Unifor, the United Steelworkers, and other unions
have trumpeted their support for Canadian imperialist rearmament, while
emphasizing the need to ensure the weapon-systems are “Canadian-made”
and joining in the anti-China hysteria that the Canadian and American
ruling class are whipping up as they intensify their preparations for
war with Beijing.
Workers and young people have no interest in
being dragooned into serving the interests of Canadian imperialism in
the rapidly developing third world war. Rather they must join the fight
against militarism and war, for their futures and lives depend upon it.
This struggle requires the independent political mobilization of the
working class on a socialist and internationalist program to put an end
to capitalism, the crisis-ridden social order that is at the root of
imperialist war. Students opposed to the militarization of the campuses
and the transformation of their apprenticeships and training programs
into “pipelines” for the war machine must link their opposition to war
and rearmament with the growing working class resistance to the gutting
of public services, mass layoffs, and the ruling class’s evisceration of
democratic and social rights. All those who agree with this program
should join and build the Socialist Equality Party and its youth
organization, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.
A leak of audio recordings from Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram—published by Diario Red and
the investigative platform Hondurasgate—has exposed what amounts to a
modern-day Operation Condor: a US-backed transnational conspiracy
involving Washington, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires and the Honduran state to
destabilize governments across Latin America, erect police-state
regimes, and prepare the violent suppression of social opposition
throughout the hemisphere.
The recordings, reportedly
authenticated using the forensic software Phonexia Voice Inspector,
reveal discussions involving former Honduran president and convicted
drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), current Honduran President
Nasry Asfura, Vice President María Antonieta Mejía and other right-wing
operatives about building “information cells,” financing disinformation
campaigns, imprisoning or assassinating opponents, and coordinating a
continental offensive against the “cancer of the left.”
The
significance of the leaks extends far beyond Honduras. They emerge amid
the Trump administration’s open embrace of what it calls the “Shield of
the Americas,” the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, and the
broader “Greater North America” strategy aimed at reasserting direct US
hegemony over the Western Hemisphere through military force, economic
coercion and political subversion.
These plans are not only
directed outward. They are inseparable from the rapid development of
authoritarian forms of rule inside the United States itself.
*****
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded publicly to the
leaks this week. While denouncing the existence of an international
right-wing network, she focused on the role of Argentina—not
Washington—and dismissed any threat that these conspiracies will affect
her own administration.
For his part, Colombian President Gustavo
Petro merely denounced Netanyahu for freeing JOH “to destroy the
Colombian and Mexican governments,” exempting Trump or the US government
from any wrongdoing. Significantly, presidential elections will be held
in Colombia on May 31. Petro-backed candidate Iván Cepeda leads the
polls, but is expected to face a second round against the fascistic
Abelardo de la Espriella.
Amid the scandal, on Thursday Brazilian President Lula da Silva followed
Petro’s footsteps earlier this year in kissing Trump’s ring in
Washington. The consistent accommodation to Trump by the three nominally
“left” governments in the most powerful countries in the region is the
clearest demonstration that bourgeois nationalism offers no way to
oppose imperialist oppression or fascism.
*****
The exposure of the “Hondurasgate” conspiracy comes half a century
after the launching of Operation Condor. Like today, the savage terror
of Operation Condor did not emerge in a political vacuum.
The
reformist governments that preceded the military dictatorships —
Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition in Chile, João Goulart’s
nationalist administration in Brazil, and the Peronism in Argentina
—defended the capitalist state and its repressive apparatus against
pre-revolutionary movements of the working class, and systematically
subordinated their governments to Wall Street and US imperialism.
Meanwhile, their Stalinist and Pabloite allies insisted that workers
must first support “progressive” nationalists and promoted popular front
coalitions with them. Acting as a political brake on the independent
mobilization of workers, these forces left the field open to US-backed
military coups and dictatorships, with tens of thousands paying with
their lives for these political betrayals.
With the full backing
and encouragement of the US government, and with the CIA playing the
leading role, right-wing military regimes were established in Brazil,
Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. These dictatorships joined forces
with regimes in Paraguay and elsewhere to launch Operation Condor, a
joint enterprise between Latin American secret police agencies and the
CIA to hunt down and murder leftists and revolutionary exiles across
national borders.
Operation Condor was formally launched in
October 1975, when Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras convened
representatives from Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil in Santiago
to establish a joint “information bank” and multinational “task
forces.” Political exiles could be kidnapped, tortured, disappeared and
murdered anywhere on the continent without judicial authorization,
turning Latin America into what the World Socialist Web Site has aptly described as a “labyrinth of horror.”
Secret
police death squads crossed borders freely while exiles were hunted
down and returned to torture centers and execution chambers. Contreras
himself later testified that assassinations carried out by Chile’s DINA
secret police had been jointly organized with CIA approval.
The
Israeli government played a critical auxiliary role in sustaining these
terror networks, as a conduit for US arms and covert operations where
Washington sought plausible deniability. Israeli advisers trained the
Guatemalan military under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt.
When Congress restricted arms sales to Chile after the 1976
assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, Israel stepped in to
arm the Pinochet dictatorship.
The “Hondurasgate” scandal demonstrates that this machinery of imperialist repression was never dismantled.
One crucial difference, however, is that the original Condor network
operated largely in secret. Today, US imperialism no longer even
attempts to maintain the façade of defending “democracy” or the “free
world.”
*****
“Hondurasgate” exposes the far-advanced implementation of the methods
of Operation Condor—the CIA’s continental machinery of terror—under
conditions of deepening global crisis and class conflict.
Workers
throughout the Americas must draw the necessary conclusions. The defense
of democratic rights and opposition to dictatorship cannot be entrusted
to any faction of the ruling class, whether in Washington or among the
bourgeois nationalist governments of Latin America.
Significantly, precipitation in many places did not decline for the
western US. However, much of it fell as rain instead of snow during the
winter, leaving much of it to runoff instead of staying in reserve as
snow. Washington saw 104 percent of median precipitation but similar
snowpack figures to Oregon and California.
Snowpack is an
essential part of western water supplies, holding water in reserve to
melt during the dry summer months. If snowpack melts too soon those
reserves are disrupted and a significant portion of that melt water is
lost as evaporation. Recent research has also shown that drier
conditions in late spring and early summer are causing natural
vegetation to consume more ground water and snow melt as they attempt to
compensate for reduced spring rains caused by climate change.
While
conditions in the Pacific Ocean are developing for a “Super El Niño,”
which will bring greater moisture to the western US but also hotter
temperatures later this year. A warmer winter may convert snow into rain
and weaken what should be a year of respite from reduced snowpack.
*****
Across the entire Colorado Basin the sudden implosion of snowpack
exacerbates threats to the water supply for 40 million people and 5
million acres of farmland in seven US states and Mexico.
Arizona,
California and Nevada have issued a proposal to conserve nearly 3
million acre-feet over the next two years to stabilize the reservoirs
but it is only a temporary effort to contend with a more than 25-year
problem.
This major snow drought will also be felt on the other
side of the Rocky Mountains. Snow melt from mountains in Colorado,
Wyoming and New Mexico feeds major rivers like the Rio Grande, Arkansas,
Missouri and Platte rivers, many of which are tributaries to the
Mississippi.
This is significant because the southern US, from Texas to Virginia, is
experiencing severe to exceptional drought, according to the US Drought
Monitor. Reduced headwater flows from the Rockies will only amplify
these conditions.
*****
As is the case with much of the western US, the issue is a
fundamental divide between supply and demand. In the Colorado River
Basin and California the largest water users are large agricultural
interests that consume upwards of 90 percent of all water used. For
Corpus Christi the crisis is fed by declining supplies from climate
change and increasing demand from the local petrochemical industry.
This
is a recurring theme around the world in which the imbalance between
supply and demand cannot be rectified without a complete restructuring
of how water is used. A recent report from the United Nations defined
this condition as “water bankruptcy,”
in which much of the world’s water systems are so overburdened that
only a complete rebalancing of demand to match supplies could prevent a
system collapse.
While climate change intensifies these
conditions, global capitalist governments have proven wholly incapable
of effectively responding. This is not for a lack of knowledge or
solutions but because of the incompatibility of capitalist interests
with the necessary measures needed to restructure global economies.
Eighty-one
years after the end of World War II in Europe, the specters of war and
fascism are back. The IYSSE calls for building an international,
socialist anti-war movement against conscription and militarism.
Mehmet
Türkmen, an independent union leader who has been in prison since
mid-March, was placed in solitary confinement for drawing attention to
the dire conditions of a fellow inmate.
The
closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven fuel prices in Africa up by
as much as 80 percent. Inflation is rising, and food production is in
jeopardy, with governments scrambling to avert agricultural collapse.
Pointing
to the company headquarters where CWU officials are in constant
discussion with management, a worker from Mt Pleasant said: “Them lot
upstairs are not interested in us, it's how much profit they can make.”
As
Ukrainian soldiers continue to perish in the NATO-backed proxy war, new
revelations make clear that the Ukrainian ruling class is enriching
itself to obscene levels in Europe’s poorest country.
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.
The Trump White House released a new US Counterterrorism Strategy on
Wednesday that openly lays out the framework for a fascist police state.
The 16-page document, unveiled under the direction of White House
counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka and signed by Trump on
Tuesday, identifies three central targets of the Trump administration’s
counterterrorism apparatus: “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,”
“Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists,
including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” The document then declares, “We
can defeat every single one of these groups, but the threat is
significant and pervasive.”
This is the language of political proscription. The document’s
promise that “counterterrorism operations will be executed apolitically”
is immediately contradicted by its own content, which defines “violent
left-wing extremists” as one of the three principal threats facing the
United States.
The political character of the document is
underscored by the role of Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant and
senior director for counterterrorism. Gorka, born in Britain to
Hungarian parents, served in the British Territorial Army from 1990 to
1993 and later moved to Hungary, where he became involved in right-wing
nationalist politics. In 2007, he helped found the New Democratic
Coalition, a Hungarian nationalist party formed with former members of
Jobbik, an openly antisemitic and neo-fascist organization.
Gorka
is a member of the Historical Vitézi Rend, a reconstitution of the World
War II-era Vitézi Rend, or Order of Heroes, established under Admiral
Miklós Horthy, the antisemitic dictator of Hungary and ally of Hitler.
Under Horthy, the Hungarian Communist Party was banned, political
opponents were repressed and hundreds of thousands of Jews were
delivered to the Nazis.
*****
The counterterrorism document produced under such auspices is
saturated with the language of far-right conspiracy and fascist
repression. It declares: “Americans should be safe to live their lives
without the fear of terror attacks, the threat of Jihadists, the
flooding of our communities with deadly drugs at the hands of foreign
narcoterrorists, or violent left-wing extremists who have adopted
radical ideologies antithetical to the principles upon which our
Republic was founded.”
It then goes further, pledging the use of
the national security apparatus against political tendencies before any
crime has been committed. “Our national CT activities will also
prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent
secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically
pro-transgender, and anarchist,” the document states. It promises to
“map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to
international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools
to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the
innocent.”
This is a blueprint for preemptive political
repression. It authorizes the state to “map” domestic political
organizations, identify their members and “cripple” them on the basis of
ideology. Its explicit references to “radically pro-transgender”
politics repeat the framework of National Security Presidential
Memorandum-7, announced last September, which used the killing of
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk to justify a sweeping campaign of
police repression against the left.
*****
The purpose of the document is not to assess political violence
objectively, but to designate the left, which is virtually anyone who
opposes the Trump administration and its fascist agenda, as the “enemy
within.”
*****
The historical parallels are unmistakable. When Hitler came to power
in Germany, the first inmates of Dachau were not foreign terrorists, but
communists, socialists, trade union militants and other opponents of
the Nazi regime. The category of “left-wing extremism” was the
ideological preparation for dictatorship.
The Trump
administration’s counterterrorism strategy must be understood in this
historical and political context. It follows the infusion of vast sums
into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection
and the Department of Homeland Security, including the roughly $170
billion allocated last year for immigration enforcement and detention
infrastructure and the additional tens of billions now being prepared
for the immigration police. The US government is not building this
apparatus merely to deport immigrants. It is preparing a police-state
infrastructure for use against the working class as a whole, regardless
of citizenship status.
The same government claims there is no money for Medicaid, food
stamps, public education, health care or social services, while
funneling hundreds of billions into immigration police, military
operations and war. The counterterrorism document’s fusion of domestic
repression, anti-immigrant hysteria and global military violence points
to the real trajectory of American capitalism: dictatorship at home and
war abroad.
The response of the corporate media and the Democratic
Party has been near-total silence. The major cable networks have not
treated the document as a warning of dictatorship. Figures such as
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have said nothing of
substance about its implications. This silence is not an oversight. The
Democrats and the corporate press do not want to alert the working class
to the danger, because they support and defend the same national
security apparatus now being turned ever more openly against political
opposition and the population as a whole.
The fight against fascism cannot be waged through appeals to the
Democratic Party, the courts or any agency of the capitalist state. It
requires the independent mobilization of the working class against both
parties and the military-intelligence apparatus they defend. The
greatest source of terror in the world is not immigrant workers,
anti-fascists, socialists or opponents of genocide. It is the US
government itself, which has waged illegal wars, backed the genocide in
Gaza, killed hundreds of fishermen in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific,
and now seeks to use the same violent and illegal methods against
workers and their families in the US.
The
conviction of five Palestine Action activists at Woolwich Crown
Court on May 5 marks a major escalation in the Labour government’s
criminalization of opposition to the genocide in Gaza, and the right to
protest.
Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio, Fatima Rajwani and Samuel
Corner were convicted of criminal damage. Jordan Devlin was convicted of
violent disorder. Zoe Rogers was acquitted of all charges. Corner was
also convicted of grievous bodily harm, but was cleared of grievous
bodily harm with intent.
The verdicts follow a retrial and relate to a break-in at Israeli
arms manufacturer Elbit Systems UK’s Filton site near Bristol in August
2024.
Immediately following the verdicts, Mr Justice Johnson
ordered that Corner, Head, Kamio and Rajwani be remanded in custody
pending sentencing, provisionally scheduled for June 12. They face the
prospect of heavy sentences, as their case has been flagged by the Crown
Prosecution Service and the police as terrorism related.
The
convictions are a continuation of the activists’ punishment at the hands
of the British state, with their imprisonment now stretching back
nearly two years since their arrest in August 2024, barely four weeks
after the election of the Starmer Labour government.
The case has been central to the efforts of the Labour government,
courts, police and media to construct the narrative that Palestine
Action is a “terrorist” organization and that opposition to Israel’s
mass slaughter in Gaza be equated with “antisemitism” and hatred of
Jews.
*****
On February 18, a jury in that trial acquitted all six defendants
of aggravated burglary, the most serious charge against them and one
carrying the possibility of life imprisonment. The acquittals shattered
attempts by the prosecution to portray the defendants as violent
extremists and terrorists.
However, the jury failed to reach
verdicts on charges of criminal damage and violent disorder. Under
British law, prosecutors may seek a retrial where jurors cannot agree on
a verdict.
*****
In July 2025, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper formally proscribed Palestine
Action under terrorism legislation, claiming the organization met the
statutory definition of terrorism. Cooper cited Elbit as an example of
why PA’s proscription was necessary, telling MPs in June 2025, “In
several attacks, Palestine Action has committed acts of serious damage
to property with the aim of progressing its political cause and
influencing the Government.”
The ongoing Filton prosecution was repeatedly invoked by the media to justify the ban.
The
acquittals at the first Filton trial represented a second major setback
for the government’s efforts to criminalize opposition to the Gaza
genocide. On February 13, the High Court ruled that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful
and that it represented a disproportionate attack on democratic rights,
including freedom of speech and assembly. Yet mass arrests have
continued with the Starmer government doubling down on the banning order
in the face of mounting public opposition.
Against this backdrop, convictions in the retrial became essential to
the state’s efforts to legitimize the branding of PA activists as
“terrorists” and to intensify the wider crackdown on the right to
protest and free speech.
*****
At the conclusion of the retrial, Charlotte Head and four
co-defendants felt compelled to dismiss their barristers shortly before
closing speeches and addressed the jury themselves. Head explained,
“after some decisions made by the court, I no longer feel like they are
permitted to represent me in a way that does us all justice.”
She
continued, evoking powerfully the history of democratic legal procedures
being trampled by the British courts: “I was unsurprised to learn that,
in 1898, when the first person was allowed to answer the charges they
faced from the witness box and testify to their own defence, many
people, including prosecutors and judges, were worried about what would
happen. Not because they feared that the defendants would lie but
because they feared the jury sympathizing more with normal people than
the elites of the legal profession.”
Addressing her actions in the Elbit factory, Head asked of evidence not
heard by the jury: “Why is there no precise inventory of what was
damaged or destroyed? You might feel it’s because they don’t want to
highlight the weapons they’re making on British soil or that the
narrative spun by the prosecution is incorrect. You might consider the
contrast between Elbit Systems on one hand and me and my co-defendants
on the other and wonder which one has been more open, honest and human
with you.”
Yet further outrages followed. After the guilty verdicts, Rajiv Menon
KC was re-engaged to represent Head and another defendant in an
unsuccessful application for bail.
Only after final verdicts, as
reporting restrictions were lifted, could it be revealed that Menon
himself was the target of extraordinary judicial measures. Menon is one
of the most prominent human rights barristers, having worked on the
Stephen Lawrence inquiry, the Hillsborough inquests, the Grenfell Tower
inquiry and the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
Following the end of
the February trial, Menon was threatened with contempt proceedings by
Judge Johnson over his closing speech to the jury.
During his
closing address, Menon stated on six occasions that the trial judge
could not direct the jury to convict the defendants. Menon referred to
Bushell’s Case of 1670, the historic ruling establishing the
independence of juries from state coercion. He read the inscription
displayed at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court of England and
Wales) in London commemorating the case, which “established the right of
juries to give their verdict according to their convictions.”
In
response, Johnson accused Menon of defying court orders which had
prohibited any reference to the jury’s historic right to acquit
according to conscience. He declared, “The effect of Mr Menon’s speech
was to invite the jury to disregard my directions that they should put
views of the Middle East and the war in Gaza, and emotion, to one side.”
The contempt proceedings against a senior KC for remarks defending the
jury’s independence are unprecedented in British legal history.
*****
The evisceration of centuries old legal and democratic rights signified
by Menon’s targeting was underscored outside the court during the
retrial when police arrested nine people under the Public Order Act for
holding signs reading: “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit
according to their conscience” and “Jurors deserve to hear the whole
truth.”
*****
The retrial unfolded amid a renewed campaign by the government,
police and media demanding intensified measures against what they
falsely portray as an epidemic of antisemitism and indifference to the
fate of British Jews.
This hysteria was cynically inflamed
following the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, north London,
by Essa Suleiman, a British national, whom police later revealed had
severe mental health problems.
Ignored in the mass media coverage
was the fact that Suleiman had allegedly attacked another man earlier
the same day—Ishmail Hussein, a Muslim man, who suffered knife injuries
following an altercation with Suleiman.
The
methods employed in
the Filton case are establishing sinister precedents for the suppression
of all political opposition by equating civil disobedience and protest
with terrorism. That the courts have collaborated so openly in
restricting political defenses, curbing jury independence, and
criminalizing appeals to conscience demonstrates the advanced decay of
democratic rights in Britain.
It
is hardly surprising that a book on democracy and its history written
by a far-right professor is steeped in anti-democratic ideas,
trivializes Nazi terror and hails the fascist Alternative for Germany
(AfD) as a revitalization of democracy. What is remarkable, however, is
that Jörg Baberowski’s latest treatise, Am Volk vorbei—Zur Krise der liberalen Demokratie
(Bypassing the People—On the Crisis of Liberal Democracy), is being
hailed and praised in countless media outlets. This can only be
understood as a deliberate political campaign to secure the AfD a place
in government.
The historian of Eastern Europe at Humboldt University previously
played a key role in ideologically justifying the return of German
militarism and dictatorial tendencies. In February 2014, he argued in Der Spiegel
for a re-evaluation of the Nazis and claimed that Hitler had not been
“vicious.” He trivialized the Holocaust by comparing it to the
executions during the Russian Civil War: “Essentially, it was the same
thing: industrial killing.”
This trivialization of the past
crimes of German militarism went hand in hand with a call for brutal
military force. During a discussion at the German Historical Museum that
same year, Baberowski spoke out
in favor of military operations against terrorists and declared: “And
if one is not willing to take hostages, burn villages, hang people and
spread fear and terror, as the terrorists do, if one is not prepared to
do such things, then one can never win such a conflict and it is better
to keep out altogether.”
The IYSSE protested
vehemently against this falsification of history and
war propaganda at the German university. Meetings attended by hundreds
of participants and numerous student councils across Germany criticized
Baberowski and drew public attention to the matter. Various lawsuits
brought by Baberowski, claiming he should not be called a “right-wing
extremist,” “racist” or a “falsifier of history,” were dismissed by the
respective courts. Yet the vast majority of the media and
representatives of all parties in the Bundestag (German parliament)
rallied behind the far-right professor and defended his right-wing
agenda.
Nevertheless, following the storm of student resistance, Baberowski
largely withdrew from day-to-day political issues and left the field to
others for almost 10 years. The fact that he is now making a comeback
with an open plea for the integration of the AfD and is being celebrated
by countless media outlets is an expression of a fundamental shift to
the right across the entire political establishment. No fewer than six
major media outlets—Der Spiegel, Die Welt, the Frankfurter Rundschau, Austria’s Der Standard
and public broadcasters ARD and Deutschlandfunk—have published detailed
and favourable interviews with Baberowski about his book. Cicero and the NZZ also published positive reviews, while only the Süddeutsche Zeitung published a mildly critical review and Die Zeit a somewhat stronger one.
While
Trump terrorises immigrant workers with his ICE Gestapo, murders
political opponents in broad daylight and openly calls for war crimes in
his brutal war of aggression against Iran, the ruling elite in Germany
is also falling into line with this course. With his pseudo-academic
treatise, Baberowski is the man of the hour. From the ruling class’s
perspective, the horrendous military build-up and the associated fierce
social attacks require authoritarian methods of rule to suppress
resistance.
*****
Baberowski’s central political thesis is as simple as it is pernicious:
The so-called “populists”—by which, despite every effort to maintain
academic detachment, he primarily means the far right—are not a threat
to democracy but rather its corrective. “Populism,” writes Baberowski,
“is also a corrective, an antidote to the self-empowerment of the
privileged, a wedge that breaks through the prescribed consensus, and in
this way it contributes to the revitalization of politics” (p.150).
*****
Stylistically, Baberowski goes to great lengths to maintain a distance
from the “populists,” but time and again his own views emerge, which
essentially overlap with those of the AfD.
This begins with his conception of globalization, which he does not
understand as a stage in the development of capitalism but as the work
of a “cosmopolitan elite”: “They declared globalization to be a
democratic interplay of free forces in order to conceal the fact that it
was about nothing other than instrumentalizing the governments of
nation states for self-serving interests.” (p.88) These elites then
profited from globalization because they “find their way easily in a
world without borders, because they are mobile and possess cultural
capital” (p.88).
*****
Baberowski’s juxtaposition of unbridled global capitalism with the
supposedly familiar nation-state is also at the heart of every
right-wing and far-right ideology.
Historically, the emergence of
the nation-state and democracy are closely intertwined. They shaped the
era of the bourgeois revolutions, which shattered the rule of the
nobility, overcame feudal fragmentation and, with the nation-state,
created a broader framework for the development of the productive
forces.
Yet by the end of the 19th century at the latest, the
division of labor and world trade had burst the boundaries of the
nation-state. It had become an obstacle to the modern forces of
production. The First and Second World Wars were an expression of this
fact. The imperialist powers attempted to resolve the contradiction
between the world economy and the nation by forcibly redividing the
world at the expense of their rivals. Nationalism became the weapon of
the most extreme reaction. It was directed against the working class,
which is closely linked to the modern forces of production and fought
under the banner of socialist internationalism.
Hitler idolized the nation, which he traced back to race and blood. Yet
he did not strive for national self-sufficiency. His nationalism served
to rally all the forces of society to conquer first Europe and then the
world; it was the ideological shell of a supranational imperialist
programme that tolerated no social or political opposition and could
only be implemented through the means of a fascist dictatorship.
Today’s far-right extremists—from Trump’s MAGA movement to Germany’s
AfD—stand in this tradition. They preach nationalism and wage
imperialist wars. They are smashing the democratic rights of the working
class, which is today more international than at any time in history.
Almost every product passes through hundreds of hands and dozens of
countries before it reaches the consumer. Revolutionary technologies in
IT, communications, medicine and countless other fields would be
unthinkable without the international division of labor.
Contrary
to what Baberowski claims, drawing on Carl Schmitt, democracy is not
based on “nation” and “people.” Its defense is inextricably linked to
the overcoming of the nation-state and the capitalist private property
it defends.
*****
It is not without a certain irony that Baberowski, of all people, should
write a book on democracy. The professor, who sought to establish a
research center entitled “Dictatorships as Alternative Orders” and
physically assaulted a student critic, has hitherto openly placed
himself in the tradition of the reactionary and anti-democratic right.
*****
From this reactionary standpoint, Baberowski writes a highly
selective history of democracy. Ultimately, his main aim is to justify
the banal notion that representation and popular sovereignty are
contradictions that have been weighted differently. On this basis, he
then argues in the later chapters that fascists must be integrated in
order to do justice to popular sovereignty.
But along the way,
Baberowski repeatedly reveals his essentially authoritarian ideas. One
is reminded of Dr. Strangelove, who, in his description of nuclear war,
cannot bring his right arm under control.
Baberowski discusses the
relationship between representation and popular sovereignty without any
reference to concrete social conditions, class struggles or uprisings.
For Baberowski, democracy is always something granted to the people, not
something that has been fought for. The great social upheavals that
made democratization possible in the first place are systematically
ignored or marginalized.
The French Revolution is virtually absent from his book, even though
it was the first major democratic mass revolution of the modern era,
which overthrew absolutism and established the principle of popular
sovereignty. The American Revolution is mentioned but only in terms of
its conservative elements: Baberowski emphasizes the Federalist
compromise, the restriction of the will of the majority through
constitutional law, and the institutional safeguards against direct
democracy. Not a word, however, about the Declaration of Independence of
1776, which stated that “all men are created equal” and have the right
to overthrow a tyrannical government—a revolutionary impulse that had a
global impact.
When he describes the
development of democracy in
Germany, he cannot avoid mentioning socialism as a driving force. But he
assigns it a completely subordinate role. Instead, Baberowski
emphasizes the First World War as a factor in democratization: not
because workers and soldiers fought and revolted, not because of the
Russian Revolution and the November Revolution, which cost the German
nobility the throne—but because the war mobilized everyone and thus
created a collective experience. In fact, it was the masses who wrested
democratic rights through strikes and uprisings, not the war as such.
*****
This dictatorial and reactionary line of reasoning runs like a thread
through Baberowski’s work. All the polite language Baberowski now uses
to justify engaging in democratic discourse with fascists thus turns out
to be the well-known strategy of the far right: They insist on freedom
of speech when they are criticized but attack the most fundamental
democratic rights when they are in power. It is precisely for this
purpose that they are deployed by the ruling class.
*****
The central political lesson in this context is, of course, the Nazi
dictatorship. In the last free elections in November 1932, Hitler
received only 33.1 percent of the vote—significantly less than the two
workers’ parties, the Social Democrats and the Communist Party,
combined. Yet he was brought to power through a conspiracy involving the
military, business leaders and the media, with the aim of crushing the
workers’ organizations and preparing for a new war. In March, all the
“democratic” bourgeois parties then voted in favor of the Enabling Act.
As
Peter Longerich has demonstrated, based on a systematic analysis of a
large number of intelligence and police reports, that opposition to the
Nazi regime was widespread throughout its entire reign. It simply could
not find open political expression. [5] That is why the Nazis ruled with
unprecedented terror. Immediately after seizing power, they created a
network of at least 70 concentration camps, in which tens of thousands
of communists, social democrats and trade unionists were imprisoned and
stripped of their rights. The terror continued to escalate, culminating
in the mass murder of World War II and the industrial extermination of
German and European Jews.
Not a single sentence about this can be
found in Baberowski’s book on the history of democracy in Germany! On
the contrary, he describes the brutal Nazi dictatorship as a kind of
national awakening. For instance, when he paraphrases the recollection
of a girl from the Nazi era: “By freeing itself from its
representatives, popular sovereignty found expression in the ‘Führer’ in
the first place. This is undoubtedly how many Germans understood it
when they resolved to surrender to the seducer.” He then sums it up
himself: “The idea of an all-encompassing community of destiny is
evidently capable of captivating the masses as long as dictatorships
deliver on their promises and give people what they most desire in their
everyday lives” (p.74).
*****
In addition to whitewashing Nazi terror and denigrating
anti-fascists, Baberowski’s extremely brief digression on the Third
Reich essentially serves to downplay the threat posed by today’s
fascists. Because Nazis (and communists!) openly declared that they
wanted to establish a dictatorship, but today’s “populists” do not, it
cannot be assumed that they want to abolish democracy (p.133f). The
idiocy of this claim has already been demonstrated above with regard to
Trump, who, incidentally, has also openly declared that he does not want
to relinquish power.
In reality, the parallels to the 1930s are
obvious. Trump’s open declaration of war crimes, his threat to wipe out
Iran and starve millions of people, are, in their ruthlessness,
comparable only to the Nazis. His comprehensive attacks on the
democratic and social rights of workers serve to prepare for a
full-scale war against China that threatens the very survival of human civilization.
In Germany, too, the government is rearming on a
scale not seen since Hitler, and democratic rights are under attack.
Anyone who opposes the horrific genocide in Gaza or the brutal war
against Iran must expect massive repression. Under these conditions,
even the ruling elites in Germany are taking a liking to dictatorship.
That is why Baberowski’s treatise is being celebrated and the AfD
courted.
Yet there are also significant differences from the 1930s. The
far-right groups are not mass organizations with strong militant wings.
War and militarism are rejected by the overwhelming majority, and
workers around the world are only just beginning to free themselves from
the straitjacket of the trade unions and mount genuine resistance
against the spree of cuts and mass layoffs.
This opposition must
be linked to the struggle against war and the fascist threat and
directed against the root of the problem: capitalism. Rejecting the
rampant ideological justification of fascism and war is an important
part of this struggle.
Six years after masses of people became aware of the COVID-19
pandemic following the horrific Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak, a
deadly outbreak of a far more lethal pathogen is unfolding aboard
another cruise ship. And once again, the response of every relevant
authority is to insist that the public has nothing to fear.
Eight
cases of Andes virus hantavirus and three deaths have been confirmed
aboard the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius, the first ship-borne cluster of the
virus ever recorded. Thirty passengers had already disembarked across
four continents—undoubtedly maskless on commercial flights—before
authorities knew an outbreak was underway. On Thursday, news broke that a
KLM flight attendant who had brief contact with one of the dying
passengers has been hospitalized in Amsterdam with mild symptoms, the
first potential secondary case outside the ship.
This strain of hantavirus carries a 38–40 percent case fatality rate,
roughly 40 times that of COVID-19. There is no FDA-approved vaccine, no
specific antiviral treatment, and an incubation period that can extend
up to eight weeks before symptoms emerge. No one knows how many
infections this cluster has already produced.
*****
The sense of déjà vu is palpable. As with the start of the COVID-19
pandemic, every official statement is a soporific, and nothing is being
done to warn the public of the potential dangers.
*****
What must be done now? In every workplace, school, hospital, port and
ship, the working class must act independently and raise the following
demands:
Immediate PCR and serology testing of every
passenger, crew member, Saint Helena disembarkee and flight contact,
with full public release of genomic sequencing.
Educators,
healthcare workers and transit workers must demand the safe deployment
of HEPA filtration and Far-UVC (222 nm) air disinfection in every indoor
public space.
Every layoff at the CDC, NIH and HHS must
be reversed; cruise inspection, zoonotic surveillance and pandemic
preparedness must be restored on an emergency basis.
The
criminal “let it rip” policy must be ended, and the elimination of
COVID-19, influenza and other airborne pathogens taken up as the demand
of the working class against the ruling class that has refused it.
Emergency
action on climate change must be imposed against the financial
oligarchy whose investments are driving accelerating zoonotic spillover.
This
is not a call for panic. It is a call for the public to know what is
happening, and for the working class to act on what its governments will
not. Whether the Hondius cluster becomes the next pandemic cannot yet
be known. What is certain is that the ruling class has demonstrated,
over six years and counting, that it is structurally incapable of
preventing pandemics, of arresting climate change which is increasing
the threat of zoonotic spillover events, or of protecting the working
class from the consequences of either.
Public health must be
reorganized on a socialist basis—internationally coordinated,
democratically planned, oriented to human needs rather than the profits
of the financial oligarchy. This is the perspective of the International
Committee of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party.
The alternative is barbarism.
While the US war against Iran remains deadlocked in a fragile
ceasefire, a European war flotilla is en route to the Strait of Hormuz.
The
French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and its escort ships
transited the Suez Canal on May 6 to take up positions for operations in
the strategic strait. The United Kingdom, which is leading the mission
alongside France, has deployed the destroyer HMS Dragon, the landing
ship RFA Lyme Bay, and the Tomahawk-armed submarine HMS Anson.
Representing Germany are the minesweeper Fulda and the supply ship
Mosel, and Greece, Spain, and Italy have also sent warships.
The
mission was discussed on 17 April at a conference in Paris, to which
President Emmanuel Macron had invited around 40 countries from Europe,
Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose representatives participated in
person or via video link, including India and China. The warring
parties—the US, Israel and Iran—were not invited, however.
The
governments sending warships emphasize that they will not participate in
the US-Israeli war against Iran. The mission serves exclusively to
secure shipping in the Strait of Hormuz “as soon as circumstances
permit.”
President Macron announced on Wednesday that he had spoken by phone
with Iranian President Masoud Pezeschkian and encouraged him to consider
the British-French plans for a neutral mission in the strait. He also
said he intended to discuss the matter with US President Trump.
In
reality, the mission is neither peaceful nor neutral. The former
colonial powers France and Britain are pursuing their own imperialist
interests in the Middle East, which do not align with those of the US.
The same applies to Germany and the European Union.
*****
The Strait of Hormuz is just one flashpoint in the region where
American and European interests clash. With the imposition of new
punitive tariffs on European cars, the withdrawal of 5,000 US troops
from Germany, and Trump’s public attacks on German Chancellor Friedrich
Merz, transatlantic relations have recently become significantly
strained once again.
The summit of the European Political
Community (EPC) held on May 5 in the Armenian capital of Yerevan
demonstrated the far-reaching geopolitical interests at stake.
The
EPC was founded in 2022 on the initiative of French President Macron to
isolate Russia following its attack on Ukraine. In doing so, he
interpreted the term “European” very broadly. The EPC comprises 47
member states—nearly twice as many as the European Union—including the
United Kingdom, all Balkan states, Ukraine, Georgia, as well as Turkey,
Azerbaijan, and Armenia, all three of which border Iran. Canadian Prime
Minister Mark Carney also attended the Yerevan summit.
The summit
aimed to firmly anchor Armenia to the EU. The country, which had relied
on Russian military aid during its conflict with Azerbaijan over the
disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, had long been considered Moscow’s
stronghold in the Caucasus. But in 2023, Azerbaijan captured
Nagorno-Karabakh. Under pressure from the US, Armenia felt compelled to
sign an agreement and has since been orienting itself toward the West.
*****
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who attended the
summit, praised Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the highest terms. She
commended the “Velvet Revolution” of 2018 that had brought him to
power. The country thereby demonstrated its commitment to European
values, she said. President Macron, accompanied by a piano, even
performed a song by the Armenian-French singer-songwriter Charles
Aznavour to flatter the hosts.
A central component of the
partnership with the EU is the restoration and modernization of the
transport link between Azerbaijan and Turkey, which runs 43 kilometers through Armenian territory in the so-called Zangezur Corridor. It is
part of a new trade corridor, the so-called Global Gateway program,
which connects the EU with Central Asia and China while bypassing
Russia, Iran, and the Black Sea.
Via the approximately 4,000-kilometer-long Central Corridor, goods can
then be transported by rail or road through Kazakhstan to the Caspian
Sea, shipped to Azerbaijan, and from there brought overland through the
Zangezur Corridor to Turkey, which has numerous land and sea connections
to Europe. Instead of taking 42 days by sea, goods could be transported
from China to Europe in 12 days.
The only problem is that the Zangezur Corridor is in US hands. It was at
the center of the US-mediated peace negotiations between Armenia and
Azerbaijan in 2023 and is being developed exclusively by US companies.
To leave no doubt as to who controls this strategic chokepoint, it bears
the official name “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity”
(TRIPP).
*****
The imperialist powers are caught in the spiral of an escalating world
war. One conflict leads to the next. The war that NATO is waging against
Russia in Ukraine and the US war against Iran are, as the summit in
Yerevan shows, closely intertwined. Places whose names were previously
known to few—“Strait of Hormuz,” “Zangezur Corridor,” or “Suwałki Gap”
(the link between Poland and Lithuania)—are becoming strategic
flashpoints where a global conflagration could ignite.
The missing surveillance video of his cell, the failure of
prison guards to perform 30-minute checks of his cell along with the
determination by Dr. Michael Baden during an independent autopsy that
Epstein’s injuries, including fractures of the hyoid bone and thyroid
cartilage, were more consistent with “homicidal strangulation” than
“suicide by hanging,” all undermine the official suicide version of
Epstein’s death.
On April 29, six of nine members of Philadelphia’s appointed Board of
Education voted to approve Superintendent Tony Watlington’s
Orwellian-named “Accelerating Opportunity” facilities plan, setting in
motion the closure of 17 public schools beginning in the 2027–28 school
year.
This marks the latest in an extended attack by both parties on essential
programs, meanwhile the Trump administration demands a record-setting
$1.5 trillion Pentagon war budget. Philadelphia’s children are now
directly paying for this war agenda and the demands of wealthy
developers in the region.
*****
The schools targeted serve predominantly working class and Black
communities across the city. Among them are Paul Robeson High School and
Lankenau Environmental Science Magnet High School—the only
environmental science magnet program in Philadelphia....
*****
The plan also carries an additional round of austerity: $225 million
in budget cuts for next school year, eliminating 220 building substitute
positions and reassigning 340 school-based roles.
The official
justification given is financial necessity. The district faces a $313
million deficit, and state lawmakers from both parties sat months
overdue on education funding as the situation deteriorated.
But
the district’s claims are exposed as fraudulent by the plan itself. The
“Accelerating Opportunity” master plan carries a $3 billion price tag.
The district claims it can cover only one-third—itself nearly $1
billion—with the remainder to come from “state, federal and
philanthropic sources.” The money, in other words, exists when the goal
aligns with the interests of developers, real estate capital and the
private philanthropic sector that will co-fund it.
The deficit
itself was manufactured at the state and federal levels. The Biden
administration, acting in concert with Congress, allowed federal
COVID-era ESSER relief funds to expire in 2024, including $1.8 billion
in Philadelphia. That move sent school districts across the country off a fiscal cliff.
The
Trump administration then proceeded to compounded the crisis, slashing
Title I, Title II and Title III federal aid and stripping approximately
$69 million from a district where 40 percent of students attend
low-income schools. Projected deficits—already $313 million for 2026—are
forecast to reach $466 million by 2027 and $774 million by 2030.
The “underutilization” crisis invoked to justify closures—declining
enrollment, deteriorating buildings, fragmented funding—is being used to
justify privately operated, publicly funded charter schools backed by
both parties. The district has shed 15,546 students, a 12 percent
enrollment decline, between 2014–15 and 2024–25.
Adding insult to
injury: A proposed $1 rideshare tax projected to raise $48 million
annually was killed after Uber launched a six-figure advertising
campaign to defeat it.
Speaking at the crowded hearing in late
April, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg
resorted to begging SDP leadership for a more transparent “process” in
determining cuts. “Shame on you for having this vote when there has not
been enough public engagement and transparency to answer all their
questions,” he declared. This amounts to nothing more than a plea to
involve the PFT more closely in managing the fallout—and determining the
final shape of the cuts themselves.
Steinberg’s idea of
“transparency” was on full display last year, during the betrayal of
14,000 city educators in their contract struggle. In June 2025,
Philadelphia’s teachers voted 94 percent to authorize a strike—the first
in 25 years—against chronic underpayment, deteriorating buildings,
punitive attendance policies, mass understaffing and decades of state
policy that had stripped them of the right to strike altogether.
Simultaneously, 9,000 AFSCME District Council 33 municipal workers voted
95 percent to strike alongside teachers, raising the prospect of a
citywide shutdown. DC 33’s leadership sold out the strike overnight in July, with Mayor Parker’s full cooperation.
On
August 26, five days before the teachers’ contract expired, Steinberg
stood alongside Mayor Parker and Superintendent Watlington to announce a
tentative agreement—with no details provided to members. A union that
had run “strike ready” events for months was, in fact, preparing a
surrender. The “historic“ contract was laden with concessions. Two weeks after ratification, the district announced closures and layoffs—which the PFT sellout had cleared the way for.
The betrayal follows a pattern repeated across the country. In spring
2025, the Chicago Teachers Union delivered a contract hailed as
“Trump-proof”—mass layoffs followed immediately. The Austin Independent
School District voted to close 13 schools in November 2025, citing the
same expiration of federal COVID relief funds.
In San Francisco, a
97.6 percent strike mandate was disarmed after just four days by the
United Educators of San Francisco and AFT President Randi Weingarten,
with layoffs and closures placed immediately back “on the table.” In Los
Angeles, the United Teachers of Los Angeles announced a sellout hours
before a strike deadline.
In each case, the common thread is the
trade union bureaucracy’s role in containing and derailing the working
class’s struggles. The Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee,
formed during the DC 33 municipal workers’ strike in July 2025, pointed
to the only correct alternative: independent organization of workers
outside and against the union bureaucracies, united across
sectors—teachers, transit workers, sanitation workers, healthcare
workers—against the common austerity offensive.
As the strike committee declared:
“It is a proven, iron law that as long as a struggle remains in the
hands of the bureaucracy, the only possible outcome is a betrayal. The
only path to victory is building independent rank-and-file strength and
solidarity.”
The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, who is also chair of
the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a global watchdog, is worried
about the stability of the global financial system because of the
explosive growth of private credit. And along with others, he has good
reason to be as a report by the FSB released this week makes clear.
It reveals that while private credit, particularly in the US, has come
to play an increasingly large role in the global financial system it is
shot through with risk factors that could set off a major financial
crisis under conditions where regulatory authorities exercise very
little control over and in many cases are in the dark about its
operations.
*****
According to the report, the private credit market has grown 10-fold
since 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis “with an aggregate
size estimated to be between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion” at the end
of 2024. The fact that the FSB makes an “estimate” of the size of this
market itself points to one of the risk factors, namely, that its
operations are very much out of sight.
*****
The FSB report identifies a series of potential flashpoints. One of
these is that borrowers predominantly obtaining finance from private
credit “typically lack public ratings.” It also noted that some private
credit borrowers “also appear to be relying more on payment-in-kind
loans, which can also signal deteriorating credit conditions.”
Payment
in kind refers to a situation where borrowers increase the loan
principal or provide the lender with equity in the firm rather than pay
the interest bill in cash and is estimated to involve around 12 percent
of loans.
Valuation of the assets which private credit finances
also poses “challenges.” This is because valuations are “often conducted
less frequently and may involve significant discretion, which can
amplify uncertainty during times of stress.”
The phrase
“significant discretion” is a euphemistic way of saying that in many
cases there is no objective basis for valuations and these are recorded
as what the borrowers say they are, according to their own calculations,
which are then exposed when they undergo the test of the market.
*****
One of the major sources of contagion is the relationship between the
private credit providers and the banks which finance them. These
connections often only emerge when there is a crisis or a bankruptcy.
This
was the case in the failure last October of two auto-connected private
credit-backed firms First Brands and Tricolor. The market reaction to
the defaults was short-lived and was “digested by markets without major
strains,” the FSB report said.
But these events exposed a range of
“potential vulnerabilities in corporate credit.” In the first instance
the use of off-balance sheet financing by the companies involved
rendered assessment of overall financial health difficult for lenders.
Workers at the United States Postal Service’ Network Distribution
Center Springfield, Massachusetts are speaking out against injuries,
contract violations, safety issues and inaction in the face of this by
union officials.
Conditions at USPS have deteriorated for many
years, but the issue has reached a breaking point since the start of the
“Delivering for America” restructuring program begun in 2021. This
bipartisan program aims to restructure the post office along Amazon
lines, setting the stage for potential privatization. The current
financial crisis at USPS—which may run out of money by next year—is
being used to further squeeze the workforce. Management has already suspended payments into postal workers’ pension plan.
Last
month, a group of workers founded a rank-and-file committee at the
facility to expose these conditions and to “unite postal workers
worldwide to build collective power,” according to its founding
statement. The committee is “independent of union apparatus, political
parties and management,” it continues. “It is democratic, transparent
and accountable to the shop floor.”
In the founding statement, the workers who founded the Springfield NDC
rank-and-file explained, “we will continue to lose ground unless we form
independent rank-and-file committees to advocate for our rights,
investigate violations and wrongdoings, address safety concerns and
educate our coworkers.”
Following the University of Michigan’s commencement ceremony on May 2,
U-M President Domenico Grasso publicly attacked outgoing Faculty Senate
Chair Derek Peterson for remarks opposing the US-Israeli genocide in
Gaza. “Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists,” Peterson told
the graduates, “who have over these past two years opened our hearts to
the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
Within hours, the university removed the entire video of the
commencement ceremony from its website, and Grasso issued a statement
reprimanding Peterson. Grasso wrote:
At today’s U-M
spring commencement ceremony, our outgoing Faculty Senate Chair made
remarks regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict that were hurtful and
insensitive to many members of our community. We regret the pain this
has caused on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment. For this,
the university apologizes.
The Faculty Senate Chair deviated from
the remarks he had shared before the ceremony. The Chair’s comments
were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position. Nor
do they represent the diversity of views across our entire faculty.
This
is an act of censorship and a blatant attack on freedom of speech. In
seeking to muzzle Peterson, Grasso is defending the US-backed Israeli
genocide in Gaza.
The immediate backlash to Grasso’s authoritarian
decree indicates broad support for Professor Peterson. Over 1,500
students, faculty and staff have signed an open letter denouncing Grasso
and defending Peterson. A separate alumni letter with over 750
signatures is also circulating. The main letter declares:
Nothing
in Professor Peterson’s statement warrants any apology. To the
contrary, it is President Grasso’s statement for which the University
should apologize. … Many members of our community have family members
who have been killed, whose houses have been destroyed, and whose lives
have been transformed by Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. President
Grasso has now told these members of our community that their
perspective on this issue is so out of bounds that the University should
apologize for its even having been expressed. We can think of little
the University could do that is more “hurtful and insensitive” to the
deep moral commitments and expressions of these community members.
According
to the official figures of the Palestinian authorities, 72,615
Palestinians in Gaza have been killed and 172,400 injured, the vast
majority of casualties being civilians, largely women and children. U.N.
Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has cited estimates suggesting
the real death toll could be as high as 680,000. Of that estimate, some
researchers suggest 380,000 could be children under five.
*****
Grasso’s cynical excuse that he is protecting the sensibilities of
members of the U-M community who are offended by Peterson’s remarks has
become the standard justification for shutting down anti-genocide
opposition and defending the Israeli state and Zionists on and off
campus. The underlying slander in such statements is the lie that
opposition to Israeli mass murder and Zionist ethno-nationalism equals
antisemitism.
*****
Grasso’s defense of the Gaza genocide is inseparable from his
collaboration with the Trump administration and the Democratic Party in
the witch-hunting of Chinese scientists. This xenophobic campaign is
part of Washington’s war preparations against China and Trump’s drive to
establish a presidential dictatorship. Five U-M researchers—Yunqing Jian, Chengxuan Han, Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang and Zhiyong Zhangù—as well as Youhuang Xiang
at Indiana University, were arrested on trumped-up federal charges of
conspiracy and smuggling. They were accused of terrorism by top
administration officials, such as FBI Director Kash Patel and
then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, held without bail for months and
ultimately deported.
On March 19, Danhao Wang,
a 30-year-old Chinese postdoctoral research scientist at U-M, jumped to
his death from an upper floor within the G.G. Brown Laboratory building
the day after he was interrogated by federal agents. It has been seven
weeks since Wang’s death, and Grasso and U-M have said nothing to the
broader U-M community. Under conditions of government persecution and
institutional betrayal, the suicide of Danhao Wang takes on the
character of a social murder.
United Flight 169 from Venice, Italy to Newark, New Jersey struck
both a light pole and an 18-wheeler semi truck on the New Jersey
Turnpike on May 3, during the aircraft’s landing approach. The flight
was traveling at approximately 160 miles per hour at the time of
collision—well below its cruising speed of over 500 miles per
hour—having slowed through the descent and landing sequence.
The
Boeing 767 was landing on Runway 29 at Newark Liberty International
Airport, which had become the active runway due to a shift in wind
direction. Runway 29 is among the shorter runways at Newark, which means
aircraft must hold their approach profile with greater precision, with
landing gear extended as they cross the runway threshold at low altitude
over the New Jersey Turnpike.
New Jersey State Police reported
that the bottom of the aircraft’s fuselage, as well as a landing gear
tire, struck a light pole and a semi truck traveling on the turnpike
before the plane completed its landing at Newark. CBS News reported that
the truck driver was released from the hospital and was recovering at
home from minor injuries as of May 4.
*****
But the turnpike corridor beneath Runway 29’s approach path has alarmed
motorists for many years. Aircraft on low approach appear startlingly
close to highway traffic—though under normal conditions, they cross at
altitudes sufficient to clear any vehicle on the road. Sunday’s
collision was not normal conditions.
The gusty westerly winds that
prompted the switch to Runway 29 on May 3 created conditions capable of
producing wind shear at low altitude—a sudden, dramatic reduction in
the lift generated by the aircraft’s wings that can cause the plane to
drop rapidly below the established glide path. Pilots and controllers
both have access to meteorological forecasts updated hourly, as well as
real-time field conditions including wind direction, speed and peak gust
readings. Onboard flight management systems and approach monitoring
displays give both cockpit crew and controllers continuous glide path
data. Audible warnings would have sounded seconds before the aircraft
descended to an altitude that could bring it into contact with vehicles
on the highway.
These warning systems existed. The question the NTSB will answer is why the approach was not aborted.
*****
Air traffic controllers are working under conditions of historic
under-staffing that has built up for decades. This is being compounded
by a massive erosion of real wages due to inflation and skyrocketing
costs of living in the urban areas, where FAA facilities are
concentrated. As the World Socialist Web Site has documented
extensively, over 90 percent of US airport towers are short on air
traffic personnel, and only about 70 percent of staffing targets are met
by fully certified controllers at terminal approach facilities. The
Philadelphia TRACON, which is responsible for Newark’s airspace, has
been, in the words of United Airlines’ own CEO, “chronically
understaffed for years.”
The FAA’s ground-based navigation
infrastructure—radar arrays, VHF radio antennae, instrument landing
systems—has languished in a semi-broken state for years. Budget
appropriations have been consumed by competing contractors offering
replacement systems that do not fully replicate the functions of the
equipment they are meant to replace. The equipment failures at Newark in
April 2025, when a burned-out copper wire caused controllers to lose
radar and communications contact with arriving and departing flights for
90 seconds, were a direct expression of this rot. That crisis has not
been resolved.
*****
Spirit Airlines, which ceased all operations on May 2, the day before
this accident, is the first major casualty of this fuel crisis. Seventeen thousand Spirit workers
lost their jobs and paychecks; their executives simultaneously sought
$10.7 million in “retention” bonuses. After years of mounting financial
losses, two Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings and a failed merger with
JetBlue, the war-driven fuel price surge was the final blow that made
Spirit’s business model nonviable.
But in reality, Spirit was
deliberately allowed to collapse by the government, in line with the
decades-long consolidation in the industry under both parties. It is
also an attempt to impose the costs of the war onto the backs of
workers, both as producers and consumers—The immediate impact of the
ultra-low cost carrier’s demise was a sharp increase in ticket prices.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy claimed the government did not “have
half a billion dollars laying around,” while it is spending $1 billion a
day on the war.
The collapse of Spirit Airlines is the beginning of a wave of
cost-cutting across the industry. One of the most direct mechanisms
through which this pressure reaches the cockpit is the go-around—the
standard safety procedure in which a pilot aborts a landing that does
not meet approach parameters, climbs away and re-enters the landing
queue for another attempt.
But a go-around on a Boeing 767 burns
over 4,400 pounds of jet fuel and costs the airline $2,000 to $3,000 in
additional fuel and maintenance charges. Airlines are now training crews
to minimize unnecessary go-arounds, and management reviews every
decision that results in extra fuel burn.
Under normal safety conditions, the pilots of United 169, confronted
with an approach that had dropped below safe parameters, whether from
wind shear, a late wind gust or any other factor, would have executed a
go-around as a matter of routine. The existence of systemic pressure,
economic and institutional, to avoid that $3,000 cost cannot be
separated from the question of why the approach continued to the point
of collision.
This is the logic of capitalist cost-cutting applied to public safety
infrastructure. The same logic led to the January 2025 collision between
a passenger jet and military helicopter over Washington D.C. At Reagan
National Airport’s tower, one controller was left doing the work of two
people. The same cost-cutting left Newark’s approach systems running on
burned-out copper wire.
*****
Aviation workers—controllers, pilots, ground crews and maintenance
staff—face a common enemy in a system that treats their safety, their
working conditions and their wages as variables to be optimized against
the bottom line.
The answer is not to appeal to regulators, who
have for decades refused to act, or to union bureaucracies like National
Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) that have extended
punishing contracts without member consent and collaborated with
management against the interests of workers. The answer is the
independent organization of aviation workers in rank-and-file
committees, united with workers across transportation and all other
sectors, to fight for the public ownership and democratic control of
aviation infrastructure as part of the broader struggle against
capitalism and its wars.
US forces struck Iranian military targets on Thursday after sending
three US Navy destroyers through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has
effectively closed since February. Iranian forces fired missiles, drones
and small boats at the warships as they transited; the destroyers
evaded the attacks. U.S. Central Command then ordered strikes on Iranian
military sites.
US President Donald Trump issued what was widely
read as a nuclear threat against Iran later Thursday, telling reporters
at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool: 'You're just going to have to
look at one big glow coming out of Iran, and they better sign their
agreement fast.'
The strikes were the first the United States has carried out on Iran
since the April 8 truce. The renewed military action is a measure of the
depth of the strategic crisis the Trump administration faces. The war,
launched on February 28 by the United States and Israel, has entered its
69th day. The United States has failed to carry out its stated
objectives of militarily crippling Iran and overthrowing its government.
*****
A Reuters investigation by Gram Slattery, Jonathan Landay and Erin
Banco published May 4 reported that US intelligence assessments find
Iran’s nuclear timeline unchanged: Tehran would still need approximately
one year to build a weapon, the same estimate produced after the June
2025 strikes on Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan. The current war has produced
“limited new damage,” three sources told Reuters. Iran’s stockpile of
approximately 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium—enough for an
estimated 10 weapons—remains intact in deeply buried sites that US
munitions cannot penetrate.
The same intelligence assessments
place Iran’s surviving conventional missile force at roughly half its
prewar inventory, with about 60 percent of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps Navy intact. Damage to US bases in the region runs into the
billions: Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar lost a $1.1 billion radar system;
Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was struck on March 27, leaving
15 US soldiers wounded and an AWACS aircraft destroyed; the Fifth Fleet
headquarters in Bahrain was hit on the war’s first day; 16 US bases in
the region took fire.
Pentagon figures put US military deaths at
13, with more than 400 wounded. The Intercept has reported the actual
toll is at least 15. Nearly half of US Patriot interceptor stocks have
been expended, and more than half of THAAD interceptor stocks have been
expended, with replacement timelines of three to four years.
The Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) documented 3,636
Iranian deaths through April 7, including 1,701 civilians. Iran has
reported 81,000 civilian structures damaged, including 275 medical
facilities. Israel has reported 24 killed and 7,791 wounded by Iranian
missile attacks; at least nine Gulf state nationals have been killed in
Iranian strikes.
*****
The economic cost of the war is being borne by the working class.
Gasoline crossed $4.50 a gallon last week, the first time since July
2022. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has called the disruption
the largest in the history of the oil market.
Spirit Airlines
liquidated on May 2, throwing 17,000 workers out of jobs. Frontier,
Avelo, Sun Country and Allegiant have jointly requested $2.5 billion in
emergency federal fuel assistance, which Transportation Secretary Sean
Duffy publicly rejected. JetBlue has shown signs of acute financial
strain.
The March consumer price index rose 0.9 percent in a
single month, the largest jump in four years, with gasoline up 21.2
percent. Real hourly earnings fell roughly 0.6 percent that month. The
personal consumption expenditures index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred
inflation measure, is running at 4.5 percent annualized—more than
double the central bank’s target. The personal savings rate has fallen
to 3.6 percent. US credit card debt has reached a record $1.28 trillion
at an average annual percentage rate above 21 percent.
The
political crisis at home is deepening. Trump’s approval has fallen to 34
percent in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, the lowest of his presidency.
Sixty-one percent of Americans, including 25 percent of Republicans, say
the war has done more harm than good. The Senate has voted down War
Powers resolutions to halt the war five times. On May 1, Trump declared
hostilities formally “terminated” to evade the 60-day War Powers
Resolution clock, a position rejected by senior Democrats and
constitutional scholars across the political spectrum.
Whatever
temporary accommodation the Trump administration may extract from
Tehran, it is only the prelude to new and ever more violent eruptions as
US imperialism attempts to extricate itself from its crisis through
military force.
The new tentative agreement (TA) presented by UAW Local 699 is a
rotten sellout. Every worker should vote it down with the contempt it
deserves. The very fact that the union leadership has presented this new
company-dictated deal after we voted down the first one by more than 96
percent shows that we have to oust the bureaucrats and their bargaining
committee, establish shop floor control and organize an all-out strike.
The
rot extends to the very top of the UAW, beginning with President Shawn
Fain and his cronies—and their six-figure salaries and expense accounts.
To win a decent contract that provides a living wage, ends the speedup,
and gives us job security and a safe workplace, we need to reach out to
our fellow autoworkers across the US and in Mexico, Canada and around
the world. We need to coordinate our fight with theirs and combine the
struggle against the auto bosses with a rebellion against the traitors
in Solidarity House and the local union halls. That’s the agenda of the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
The Labor government’s 2026–27 Victorian state budget, handed down on
May 5, is a pre-election document designed above all to satisfy the
financial markets and corporate boardrooms by cutting spending to
produce a budget surplus, while trying to contain working-class
discontent over the intensifying cost-of-living crisis.
Behind the claims by Premier Jacinta Allan’s government of delivering
its first surplus in seven years, the budget deepens cuts to public
education, health and disability services, while rejecting the demands
of workers across the public sector—from local council workers and
teachers to health workers—for decent wages and conditions.
The
budget continues the drive to make the working class bear the burden of
the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran, which the federal Labor government
has backed from the outset. The war has sent the prices of fuel, food
and other essentials soaring, along with home mortgage interest rates
and rents.
*****
Under a state Labor government since 2014, working-class households
in Victoria were already under severe pressure before the war.
According
to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in the year to March 2026,
people in Victorian capital Melbourne saw costs rise 23.8 percent for
electricity, 5.9 percent for housing and 3.2 percent for food and
non-alcoholic beverages. Similar trends are seen across the country.
Real wages have fallen. Every state and territory Labor government is
enforcing the austerity demanded by global capital, as are their
counterparts internationally.
*****
Health workers, teachers, council workers and more are coming into
conflict with a system in which corporate profits dictate government
spending. And in each case, the union bureaucracy works to contain the
struggle and negotiate outcomes acceptable to the government. The AEU
suspension of strikes on the eve of the budget is the latest example.
Primarily
because of its pro-business record, the Allan government is one of the
most unpopular in Victoria’s recent history. A Roy Morgan poll last
month put Labor’s primary vote at just 25.5 percent—down from 37 percent
at the 2022 election.
Many workers and young people oppose the
government’s systematic attacks on the social and democratic rights of
the working class. It has deployed police and counter-terrorism units to
raid the homes of and arrest anti-genocide protesters.
The
government is proceeding, despite the objections of residents, with the
demolition of all 44 public housing towers in the state capital
Melbourne—displacing approximately 10,000 working-class and vulnerable
people amid the worst housing crisis in the country’s history.
On
every front, Labor is carrying out the program demanded by the
Australian capitalist class: austerity at home and a war economy, with
the Albanese government pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into
military spending, all at the inevitable expense of social spending.
The
working class cannot address this through appeals to whichever party
holds office, or to trade union bureaucrats, but through an independent
political movement, fighting for a socialist alternative to a capitalist
order that places the demands of financial elites above human need.
Bolivia’s right-wing President Rodrigo Paz Pereira is marking six
months in office amid an escalating national strike, mass protests, and
roadblocks demanding his resignation unless his government approves a 20
percent wage increase and halts its austerity measures.
The
deepening social upheaval is being intensified by the global economic
shock triggered by the US-Israeli war against Iran. The conflict and the
blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted roughly 20 percent of
global oil supplies, driving Brent crude prices above $100 per barrel
and provoking fuel shortages internationally.
Bolivia, which has
become heavily dependent on imported diesel and gasoline due to
declining domestic gas production and chronic dollar shortages, has been
hit especially hard. Long lines at gas stations, fuel rationing and
soaring prices have sharpened social tensions throughout the country.
An
indefinite strike called by the Bolivian Workers Confederation (COB)
last Saturday has been accompanied by highway blockades, protest marches
and threats of further actions involving ever broader sections of the
working class, youth and peasantry.
Urban transport workers
announced an indefinite nationwide shutdown beginning Tuesday,
denouncing fuel shortages and the circulation of what they called
“garbage gasoline.”
At the same time, peasant and indigenous
organizations from all 16 provinces of Cochabamba are mobilizing, while
the Rural Worker Federation Túpac Katari of La Paz confirmed that
beginning at midnight Wednesday it would launch an indefinite general
blockade across all 20 provinces of the department of La Paz, which
includes the capital.
The organizations are being driven by a
social powder keg from below. Industrial workers affiliated with the COB
occupied Bolivia’s Ministry of Labor Wednesday. Riot police violently
intervened to clear the building and arrested 13 protesters.
Attempting
to maintain control over the radicalized workers and peasants, the COB
announced a “pact of no betrayal” with the mobilized peasant and
indigenous organizations directly raising demands for Paz to resign. The
COB leadership cynically claimed that it will not betray like in the
past.
*****
Bolivia’s economic breakdown has deep historical roots. The country
has transitioned from a net energy exporter to importing roughly 86
percent of its diesel and 54 percent of its gasoline due to decades of
mismanagement, declining investment in exploration and dependence on
commodity exports.
*****
The US war against Iran has now dramatically intensified Bolivia’s
fuel crisis. The government lacks sufficient dollar reserves to finance
imports, while the estimated $56 million weekly cost of purchasing fuel
abroad is overwhelming public finances.
Bolivia is once again
approaching a social explosion, reflecting a broader process unfolding
across Latin America and internationally, including within the United
States itself.
*****
The struggle against imperialism, austerity and capitalist exploitation
cannot be waged through nationalist or bourgeois parties tied to the
existing state. It requires the independent political mobilization of
the working class throughout Bolivia and Latin America, uniting workers
with oppressed peasants and indigenous masses in a common struggle
against capitalism and imperialism.
Netflix recently added to its global catalogue the Peruvian film Chavín de Huántar: The Rescue of the Century, which premiered in Peru last October.
Advised
and logistically supported by the Peruvian Army, the film is a
dramatization of the April 1997 rescue by 195 commandos of 72 hostages
held at the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. Fourteen members of the
guerrilla movement MRTA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) had seized
the embassy and the hostages nearly five months earlier.
The
operation was touted by the Peruvian military as one of the most
successful in its history, as only one hostage and two soldiers lost
their lives. However, all of the insurgents — who had no military
training, let alone political preparation—were killed, summarily
executed after being captured unarmed.
Certainly the embassy
takeover, and above all its political roots, is an event that deserves
artistic treatment. It revealed, above all else, the dead end that
small-bourgeois nationalist armed movements had reached. These were
promoted for decades by the Stalinists, their pseudo-left allies,
and—most reprehensibly—Pabloite revisionists such as Ernest Mandel and
Nahuel Moreno. The latter presented these movements, which neither
possessed nor aspired to gain the support of the working class, as
alternatives to Marxist workers' parties.
But in the hands of the
Peruvian Army and director Diego de León, the film inevitably becomes a
piece of reactionary militarist propaganda designed not only to glorify
the Peruvian Army (as Hollywood films like 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
do analogously for US security forces), but also, within the current
context, an attempt to prop up the institution of the Army amid a
long-running crisis of bourgeois rule and an unprecedented loss of
credibility by all the institutions of the Peruvian state.
*****
The MRTA emerged from the fusion of Castroite armed movements with
petty-bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist tendencies. The leader of the
hostage taking, Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, began his political activity as
the 25-year-old secretary of a union that carried out an occupation of a
textile factory. The action ended in violent repression ordered by the
military government, leaving several workers dead and sending Cerpa
himself to jail for a year.
The methods of guerrillaism served to
separate such militant younger workers from the working class as a
whole, strengthening the grip of Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist
bureaucracies dedicated to subordinating workers’ struggles to the
capitalist order.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained:
What
all these factions shared was the conviction that some force other than
the working class would be the vehicle of social struggle in Peru. Their
methods and policies had nothing in common with Marxism in any genuine
sense. They operated through kidnappings, bombings, bank robberies, and
armed actions aimed primarily at pressuring the Peruvian state and
extracting political concessions — not at mobilizing or politically
educating the working class. The organization made no systematic appeals
for working-class popular support and remained organizationally
isolated from the broad masses.
The film makes no
reference either to what the Fujimori government had become by that
point. Having been unexpectedly elected in 1990 as a populist outsider
opposed to the neoliberal reforms demanded by Washington, Fujimori
rapidly jettisoned his electoral promises and launched a wave of
privatizations and economic 'shock therapy' measures. To impose these
sweeping attacks, he carried out a “self-coup” (autogolpe) in 1992,
disbanding parliament and the judiciary in order to concentrate
dictatorial power in his hands and creating a new constitution that, to
this day, favors large foreign capital, among other anti-worker laws.
*****
Today, the country's democracy is once again under assault by the
so-called “congressional mafia pact”—an alliance of right-wing and
far-right parties led by Fujimori's own daughter, Keiko.
This alliance has followed Fujimori's playbook and used congress as a
platform to concentrate political power in its hands through
constitutional amendments, threats against judges and prosecutors, the
passage of laws that weaken the fight against crime and corruption, and
the removal of democratically elected presidents.
Millions of
Peruvians despise this miserable and shameless clique that has seized
control of the state—as in the Fujimori era—and turned it into an
instrument to sustain their privileges and favor foreign capital and the
native oligarchy. Since 2023, following the parliamentary coup that
ousted democratically elected pseudo-left president Pedro Castillo,
congress has maintained an approval rating of between 4 percent and 6
percent, one of the lowest in the world.
It is within this
political context that the emergence and promotion of the film must be
understood. Faced with a population that despises them and with all
their political institutions utterly discredited, Peru's ruling class is
attempting to cling to a “glorious” episode of the Army's history in
order to gain some measure of approval—enough to remain in power, or to
lull the population as much as possible.
This is reflected, in a distorted way, in the fact that the film has
been one of the biggest box-office successes in Peruvian cinema history.
Certainly, the rescue of the Japanese embassy hostages is an episode
that enjoys approval among the majority of Peruvians.
*****
Whatever the attempts of Peru’s ruling class to rewrite its bloody
history and glorify its armed forces, the insoluble crisis of capitalism
and Washington's imperialist offensive against Latin America are
engulfing Peru and driving the masses of working people once again into
struggle in defense of their economic, social and democratic rights. The
Peruvian Army will once again be called upon to demonstrate its
usefulness as a tool of state repression.
The victory of the
working class requires a break with all bourgeois parties, including
those posturing as “left” populists, and the construction of a
revolutionary leadership based on the program of the International
Committee of the Fourth International, to lead the working class in Peru
and internationally in a socialist offensive against war, dictatorship
and capitalism. This program includes the abolition of the standing army
along with the capitalist system that it defends.
A small group of four vulnerable women and nine children, who arrived in
Australia yesterday after years of arbitrary detention in Syria, have
been subjected to a venomous reception by the country’s Labor government
and the entire political and media establishment.
There were hysterical media packs at Sydney and Melbourne airports,
intent on creating a scene. And scarcely after they had landed, three of
the four women were arrested before being charged with offences that
could see them imprisoned for decades, or even for life.
One of
the women has been hit with terror offences related to allegedly
entering a “declared area,” a portion of Syria that was then under the
control of Islamic State (IS). Unbelievably, two of the other women have
been charged with crimes against humanity, in what will be the first
such prosecution in Australia since trials of alleged Japanese war
criminals in the aftermath of World War II.
The treatment of the
women and children is grotesque and amounts to political persecution.
The Labor government is effectively seeking to destroy the vulnerable
people, who have already suffered enormous hardships. The vilification
of the group, amounting to incitement to violence against them, is
transparently Islamaphobic.
*****
Labor’s decision to allow the families to enter Australia, as is
their fundamental right as citizens, had nothing to do with legal
niceties but was bound up with the alliance with the fascistic
administration of US President Donald Trump.
The leveling of the
charges against three of the women, however, can only serve as a massive
disincentive for the women who remain in Syria to return. The
extraordinary prosecution for crimes against humanity is thus aimed at
perpetuating the ban on the other families returning, only in a
different form.
Those charges relate to the alleged practice by IS
of enslaving women of the Yazidi ethno-religious minority. That IS was
an utterly reactionary entity that committed heinous crimes is not in
doubt.
The suggestion, though, that two random Australian women
were in anyway central to those crimes is simply absurd. One of the
women charged is a 54-year-old grandmother. The other is currently only
31, meaning that she would have been still in her teens or very early
20s during the period that the charges relate to.
The substance of
the accusation appears to be the claim that the two women were in the
same household as an alleged Yazidi slave. As is well known, IS,
however, not only enslaved and persecuted minorities, but was an
ultra-patriarchal organization, with women, including wives and mothers
in a subordinate position that in some instances may also have resembled
slavery. Under those conditions, the charges have a punitive character,
punishing potential victims themselves.
In any event, only the willfully naive would believe that the Australian government and its
imperialist allies has the slightest interest in the welfare of the
Yazidis or in the prevention of “crimes against humanity.”
*****
In all of the media hysteria over the “ISIS brides,” there is no
analysis of the character or the roots of that war. In fact IS emerged
directly out of a US war for regime-change in Syria, that was one of the
preparations for the current assault on Iran and the broader global
war, targeting Russia and China, of which that criminal assault is a
part.
Beginning in 2011, Washington instigated a civil war in
Syria, in a bid to oust the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, because
of its close ties to Iran and Russia. In what has since been
acknowledged as one of its largest operations in history, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and cash to Islamist
opposition groups that were also supported by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
States.
It was from such Islamist groups that IS emerged. The US
only targeted it after IS declared a caliphate and crossed into Iraq,
threatening American dominance over oil fields. The broader
regime-change operation continued, however, culminating in the fall of
Assad in December 2024 and the establishment of a US-aligned government
run by the former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda.
*****
The persecution of the Syrian families all these years later, including
of children who were not even alive during the IS caliphate, should be
opposed by the working class. It is inseparable from an assault on
democratic rights that is completely connected to the new stage of
imperialist militarism, expressed in the criminal assault on Iran.
The criminal US war against Iran is rapidly worsening the already
dire living conditions of Sri Lankan workers and the rural and urban
poor. Rising global energy prices and supply disruptions are feeding
directly into domestic inflation, driving up the cost of essential goods
and services.
At the same time, the government is intensifying
its assault on the population by imposing new tax measures in line with
International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands to boost state revenue. An
amendment to the Value Added Tax (VAT) Bill is to be presented to
parliament in the coming weeks and will be effective from July 1,
further shifting the burden of the economic crisis onto working people.
According
to official figures, headline inflation, measured by the year-on-year
change in the Colombo Consumer Price Index, surged to 5.4 percent in
April, up from 2.2 percent in March and 1.6 percent in February. This
marks a significant break from the relatively low and stable inflation
recorded in late 2025.
*****
Sri Lanka’s Central Bank (CB) has admitted that these developments
are bound up with the “fluid nature” of the “Middle East war” and its
global repercussions. While claiming that inflation will remain around
its 5 percent target over the medium term, the CB has acknowledged that
the outlook is subject to “elevated uncertainty.”
A UN World Food Program (WFP) report on April 22 warned of growing
risks facing Sri Lanka. It said the country imports 63 percent of its
energy needs while depending on oil for nearly 40 percent of the
country’s energy supply. With global oil prices reaching a four-year
high, Sri Lanka’s transport and electricity charges are being pushed up.
*****
The Colombo government is dependent on migrant workers’ remittances,
largely from the Middle East. While remittances have not been
drastically impacted thus far, the Institute of Policy Studies, a
government-related think tank has issued warnings about employment cuts
and major disruptions if the Iran war escalates.
The WFP has also
noted that Sri Lanka imports over 90 percent of its fertilizer requirements. With the Strait of Hormuz handling about 30 percent of
globally traded fertilizer, this poses a significant challenge.
Shortages and higher fertilizer prices could lead to reduced usage and
lower crop yields.
The report noted: “Global food prices have
risen sharply, particularly for staples such as wheat, corn, rice and
vegetable oil. Sri Lanka, which imported around USD 2.5 billion worth of
food in 2025, remains highly sensitive to such increases.”
*****
The working class can only effectively develop its fight against the
JVP/NPP government’s IMF austerity measures and the increasing war
burden by building action committees in every workplace and institution,
independent of the trade union bureaucracies, and based on a socialist
program. These are the only organizations capable of defending jobs,
wages, working conditions and the rights of rural masses. Such a
struggle must be developed in unity with the international working class
and the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees.
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.
