Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Is the world on the brink of nuclear war?
Russia declared this week that it is ready to use nuclear weapons if
NATO moves to blockade Kaliningrad, the Russian territory on the Baltic between Poland and Lithuania. The warning was issued through Russian
embassies in Belgium, Britain and Ireland on September 28 and 29, and in
a diplomatic note to NATO.
Stating that NATO was preparing an
“air and naval blockade” of Kaliningrad, the Russian embassy in Ireland
stated, “There should be no mistake — Russia would be ready to use all
its arsenal, including nuclear weapons, to defend its territory if NATO
countries try to isolate Kaliningrad region from the rest of the
country.”
NATO spokesperson Allison Hart responded on Tuesday,
stating, “NATO is a defensive alliance and none of our activities or
exercises pose a risk to any part of Russia” and denounced “the threat
of force, including any irresponsible nuclear rhetoric.”
This
statement is flatly false, as the NATO alliance is arming and guiding
Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia. NBC News reported in October 2025
that the Trump administration would provide Kiev intelligence to help it
“strike at oil and gas facilities inside Russia.” On July 30 the
European Commission paid Kiev €3.47 billion, including funding for
“long-range jet-powered drones.” On the night of September 19–20,
Ukraine launched its largest drone attack of the war on Moscow and the
surrounding region. On August 28, Ukrainian forces struck a Tu-95
strategic bomber, part of Russia’s nuclear forces, at Engels air base.
Moreover,
NATO’s “activities and exercises” are directed at Kaliningrad itself.
In mid-August, according to a Western military source cited by Reuters,
dozens of NATO aircraft flew an unannounced operation around the
enclave. The operation showed they could cut off its radio and radar
links and its air defenses. Since January, 14 European states have
treated Russian-linked tankers that change flags or switch off their
transponders as “stateless vessels” open to boarding, and Sweden seized
one in March.
*****
The logic is one of relentless escalation. The European powers have
tied their policy to a Ukrainian victory. “Putin needs to feel that war
is coming to Russia itself,” EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius
declared Wednesday.
Ukraine’s military position, meanwhile, is
deteriorating. In July it intercepted just 29 of 195 Russian ballistic
missiles, and it enters the winter without the air defenses it needs to
protect its power grid. Each further setback will be met by further
escalation: the introduction of ground forces, or the opening of new
fronts, including Kaliningrad.
The stakes for Moscow could hardly be higher. Kaliningrad is to the
Baltic what Crimea is to the Black Sea. It is the headquarters of the
Baltic Fleet and the base of Russia’s nuclear-capable Iskander missiles.
Since Finland and Sweden joined NATO, it has been surrounded by the
alliance on land and sea.
In one respect the exclave is more sensitive than Crimea. Its status has
been internationally recognized since the Potsdam Conference of 1945
transferred it to the Soviet Union. Action against Kaliningrad would be
an attack on territory that no government disputes is Russian. Russia’s
nuclear doctrine permits a nuclear response to conventional aggression
that creates “a critical threat” to its territorial integrity.
*****
A blockade of Russia may be “just below the level of war in European
calculation,” but by international law it is an act of war. The
definition of aggression adopted by the United Nations General Assembly
in 1974 includes “the blockade of the ports or coasts of a State by the
armed forces of another State.”
Given the risks, it is staggering that there are no calls for
negotiations and no talk of a settlement. The only debate in the
European capitals is over how far and how fast to escalate.
This is the recklessness of imperialist powers beset by a deepening
social, economic and political crisis, pressing the war forward with no
regard for where it leads. The Putin regime, which speaks for the
capitalist oligarchy and is incapable of making any genuine appeal to
the international working class, answers with nuclear threats.
The contrast with 1962 is stark. When the United States and the Soviet
Union came to the brink over Soviet missiles in Cuba, the danger was
openly acknowledged. President John F. Kennedy announced the crisis on
national television on October 22, and for the following week the world
followed every development. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
exchanged letters, and the two governments, fearing the consequences,
negotiated through back channels until they found a way to step back.
Today there is neither acknowledgment nor negotiation.
There is a vast chasm between the scale of the danger and the public’s
awareness of it. Millions sense that something is deeply wrong but
cannot believe their governments would gamble with nuclear war. To the
extent the danger is presented at all in the media, it appears as the
inexplicable menace of the Russians, Putin’s “nuclear rhetoric” and
“hybrid warfare.” It is never presented as a response to what the NATO
powers are doing.
*****
The war in Ukraine, provoked by three decades of NATO expansion to
Russia’s borders, is part of a struggle for global dominance being waged
on every continent. More than four years into the war, a new and
catastrophic stage is being prepared behind the backs of the population.
The working class, which will pay the price, must be alerted. The
governments cutting jobs and social programs to finance rearmament are
the same ones leading toward a war that could turn nuclear.
The
fight against war must be connected to the class struggle that is
already developing. The same crisis that is driving the ruling class
toward war is driving workers into struggle against layoffs, against the
destruction of social programs and against attacks on democratic
rights.
The working class is the only social force capable of
stopping it, but it can do so only if it understands what is being
prepared and fights consciously against the war and the capitalist
system that produces it. The first task is to break the silence on the
danger. We urge our readers to circulate this statement as widely as
possible.
2. Nearly 1,000 private armed guards deployed in USPS plants, as Trump continues offensive against mail-in balloting
Nearly 1,000 armed private security guards are being deployed into
United States Postal Service facilities in the final weeks before the
November 3 midterm elections. Frank Albergo, president of the Postal
Police Officers Association, told Raw Story that the union had been
notified of about 39,000 work hours per week for 972 full-time armed
guards across 54 USPS facilities, including 18 that previously did not
have them.
Asked to explain the purpose of the operation, Brian
Benson, a Postal Inspection Service spokesman in Denver, was unusually
blunt. The guards, he said, are deployed “to provide security and act as
a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the
mailstream.”
The guards arrived at Colorado’s largest sorting
complex less than a week after the Supreme Court refused to allow the
Trump administration to enforce a new Postal Service rule imposing
restrictions on mail ballots before the midterm elections, and less than
two weeks before more than 4 million Colorado ballots were to be mailed
out.
The Inspection Service insists the deployment is part of a
“multi-year” security plan unrelated to any specific threat. But when
reporters asked to see that plan, Benson told them to file an
open-records request.
*****
While there is no indication that the contract guards have been
ordered to handle ballots or enforce election rules, their deployment
nevertheless puts a new layer of private armed security inside
facilities that will process millions of ballots. Meanwhile, the
administration is pursuing other measures to expand federal involvement
in election administration.
A postal worker and member of the USPS
Workers Rank-and-File Committee in Springfield, Massachusetts, told the
WSWS that empty rooms in the plant are under construction and are
rumored to be “offices for the security employees and/or rooms to pat
people down.”
They said that “the APWU has been extremely hesitant
to talk about it with us and claimed to not have any solid information
even though an article about it was published by Raw Story. …
Apparently, they have done next to nothing to demand answers about this
for the past two months.
“There is no clarification on the
training and credentials of these individuals, who they answer to, how
to report misconduct, or how they will interact with postal employees,”
the worker said. A 2022 Inspector General audit found that 30 percent of
sampled guards had worked without the required security clearances, and
auditors could not verify required training for selected guards.
The
worker continued: “In our location, management routinely violates
employees’ Weingarten Rights with no accountability or pushback from the
local branch of the APWU. It is very likely that postal management will
use security to walk people out of the building without union
representation as a form of discipline.”
*****
The expansion of private contract security comes after a long-term
reduction in the Postal Police workforce. By 2023, only about 370 Postal
Police Officers protected 33 postal properties nationwide.
In
2023, contract guards were generally unarmed. By July 2026, USPS was
sharply expanding the use of armed contract security, with Raw Story
reporting new armed coverage at 18 facilities. By September, the Postal
Service acknowledged that both armed and unarmed contract guards were
being deployed to “key facilities” around the country to augment Postal
Police Officers.
The trade union apparatus has long since ceased
to be an instrument of workers’ struggle and has become an instrument of
class collaboration—disciplining the workforce, channeling its
grievances into procedures that go nowhere and preventing any
independent organization of the workers. In the face of major attacks on
the right to vote, as well historic cuts to USPS being prepared early next year, the APWU and other unions have diverted workers into dead-end letter-writing campaigns to Congress.
The
Democrats’ answer to the attack on the franchise is to wring their
hands and file court lawsuits. They are more terrified of a mass
mobilization of the working class than they are of a Trump dictatorship.
At the same time, they fully agreed with the need for austerity at USPS
in House and Senate hearings earlier this year.
The
only force that can stop this is the working class itself, organized
independently of both corporate parties and their enforcers in the trade
unions. In its September 13 statement, “Postal Workers: Refuse to withhold ballots! Defend mail-in voting and the post office!”
the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee called on postal workers to
make clear in advance that they would not participate in any attempt to
interfere with the delivery of ballots:
“Our answer is
already given: We will not do it. We refuse to carry out any order to
withhold, delay or ‘verify’ mail-in ballots. We will not be the
instrument of the disenfranchisement of the American people.”
The statement concluded that this fight cannot remain confined to the Postal Service: “We
must link up with workers in every city and neighborhood where we make
deliveries—federal workers, teachers, industrial workers—to build a
unified class movement against dictatorship.”
3. Australia signs security pact with Ukraine, backs NATO war against Russia
While in New York last week for the United Nations (UN) General
Assembly, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a
far-reaching security pact with Ukraine and announced another military
contribution to the US-NATO war against Russia.
Beyond the
immediate significance of those commitments, Albanese was signalling his
support for the broader transformation of the UN meeting into a
festival of militarist reaction.
The leaders of the European
powers frothingly denounced Moscow and deepened their support for a war
that is aimed at inflicting a decisive defeat on Russia. US President
Donald Trump repeated his genocidal threat to “annihilate” Iran. Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bragged about his government’s
onslaught on the Palestinians and its rampage throughout the Middle
East.
Albanese responded by boasting of his “very good relationship” with
Trump. He posted a selfie with Trump, just hours after the latter had
again declared that the US military might drive Iran, a country of more
than 90 million people, “into hell with no chance of survival.” The
unprovoked US war that is already underway is completely illegal, and
such threats of mass destruction by a head of state are themselves a war
crime.
Trump and Albanese selfie
“Always good to catch up with @POTUS,” Albanese captioned the picture of himself and Trump grinning together.
Two
days later, during a press conference with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Albanese piously intoned: “This is an issue for the
world, because if a large, more powerful country in Russia is allowed
to profit from breaking the international rules of law with its illegal
and immoral invasion of Ukraine, then that sets a bad precedent for the
entire world.”
The Australian media reported those comments
uncritically, including with reference to Albanese’s “emotional” tone
while delivering them, without a hint of the staggering hypocrisy.
4. US government charges ICE victim Garces Perez, refuses medical care
Eight
days after shooting Wilber Garces Perez in the back, the US government
has charged him with one count of assaulting, resisting, interfering
with and impeding a federal officer. The government denied him bond
during a hearing on Wednesday.
*****
The prosecution of Garces Perez unfolds amid a broader offensive
against the ability of immigrants to challenge their imprisonment and
against judges who object to the government’s defiance of court orders.
On
Wednesday, the Trump Justice Department filed a judicial misconduct
complaint against Minnesota federal judges who spoke to the New York Times
about Operation Metro Surge. The complaint targets Patrick J. Schiltz,
John R. Tunheim and five judges who spoke anonymously. It demands an
investigation and their recusal from pending and future cases involving
the Department of Homeland Security.
At a Wednesday press
conference, Attorney General Todd Blanche denounced the judges’ comments
as “overtly political” and evidence of “obvious bias.”
Schiltz, a
George W. Bush appointee who keeps signed photographs of conservative
Supreme Court justices John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in
his chambers, said the government’s conduct “created a grave threat to
the rule of law.” He described the events in his court from January
through March of this year as virtually unprecedented since the Civil
War.
The Justice Department’s complaint claims that any violations
of court orders by DHS were the judges’ fault. Its complaint blames
their legal rulings for a flood of habeas petitions and the resulting
strain on government resources, and asserts that the administration’s
noncompliance was a consequence of judicial error.
Schiltz’s
defense of the courts expresses the concerns of a section of the ruling
establishment over the erosion of its own institutions. The appearance
of equality before the law is essential to sustaining the fiction that
the capitalist state and its institutions, including the courts and the
police, stand above classes. Open executive defiance of judicial orders
threatens to upend this charade.
The Trump administration is
asserting that even these institutional restraints are intolerable.
Judges who insist that the government obey court orders are themselves
targeted for investigation. The aim is to subordinate the judiciary to
the executive as part of the establishment of a presidential
dictatorship.
5. Part 1: Democratic Party runs more than 60 military-intelligence candidates for Congress
Eight
years ago, the WSWS first exposed and analyzed the remarkable and
unprecedented influx of military-intelligence operatives into the
Democratic Party, with dozens of former military officers, intelligence
agents and State Department and National Security Council officials
seeking Democratic congressional nominations.
Eleven of these
candidates won seats in the House of Representatives, and in the three
elections that have followed, in 2020, 2022 and 2024, that number has
held roughly constant, as new candidates from a military-intelligence
background have replaced those who have moved on, either to higher
office, reelection defeat or retirement.
In the 2026 elections,
the role of former military, intelligence and civilian national security
officials within the House Democratic caucus is likely to vastly
increase. A staggering 67 Democratic congressional candidates with a
national security background, more than double the number who ran in any
of the last four elections, are on the November ballot.
These 67
range from former flag officers (so-called because they rank high enough
to have their own personal flags), who oversaw tens of thousands of
troops, to commanders of combat units in the war zones of Afghanistan
and Iraq, to military intelligence agents, involved in the most
sensitive secret operations, to former State Department and White House
aides. A smaller number were rank-and-file soldiers, many of these are
career soldiers with multiple combat deployments, and there are a few
whose role in the military was medical only.
*****
If, as appears likely based on pre-election polling, the Democratic
Party makes significant gains in November, the military-intelligence
“caucus” inside the Democratic delegation could double or triple in
size. They will vastly outnumber the relative handful of self-proclaimed
“democratic socialists” to whom the corporate media has given so much
attention, and whom pseudo-left groups cite as evidence that the
Democratic Party can be pushed to the left.
Regardless of the
outcome, the sheer number of military-intelligence candidates is
staggering. There are 184 Democratic House members seeking reelection,
including 10 from the military-intelligence apparatus. That means that
251 seats are open for Democratic challengers. Of these, 57 are being
contested by candidates whose major credential is their national
security experience, nearly one quarter. Of the seats that are genuinely
competitive, the proportion is even higher.
6. Pacific defense ministers prepare to suppress civil unrest
The 11th South Pacific Defense Ministers’ Meeting (SPDMM) was held in
Fiji from September 22 to 24. It included representatives of the
regional imperialist powers Australia, New Zealand and France, alongside
Chile, Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Tonga. They were joined by
observers from Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Desna
Solofa, Acting Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) also
attended.
The SPDMM describes itself as “the premier defense ministerial dialogue
in the South Pacific, enhancing cooperation and driving Pacific-led
responses to shared regional security challenges.” Behind token
statements about the need for “joint responses” to climate disasters,
humanitarian emergencies and transnational crime, the organization’s
real agenda is strengthening the web of imperialist alliances preparing
for a US-led war against China.
*****
A key decision at the 2025 SPDMM was to transform the Pacific
Response Group (PRG), a regional military disaster response group formed
in 2004 ostensibly to develop a more coordinated response to natural
crises, into a taskforce that could conduct “stabilization operations”
for Pacific nations to deal with civil unrest.
The imperialist
powers anticipate that soaring social inequality and economic
breakdown—intensified by the US-Israeli war against Iran—will produce
social explosions across the Pacific. In 2024, riots erupted in PNG over poverty, and France deployed troops to suppress an uprising by Kanak youth in New Caledonia.
The aim is to create a mobile military force, alongside the Australian-led Pacific Policing Initiative,
that can intervene rapidly anywhere in the region. Expanding the remit
of the PRG to deal with civil unrest topped the agenda at this year’s
SPDMM.
*****
Many Pacific countries, including Naoero (formally Nauru), the Solomon
Islands and Kiribati, do not want to alienate Beijing as it provides
significant development aid and loans. Increasingly, however, they face
demands from Washington, backed by Australia and New Zealand, for
complete and unwavering alignment with their war plans.
*****
“Pacific-led” security is fraudulently deployed by Canberra and
Wellington to embed their own neocolonial domination over the region,
which they regard as their own “backyard,” and counter any Chinese
influence. The 2000 Australian Defense White Paper enunciated
an explicit interventionist doctrine laying the basis for military
interventions to “foster the stability, integrity and cohesion of our
immediate neighborhood.”
One thorny issue concerns the legal
immunity necessary for military personnel deployed to other countries in
the region. According to JHOPS, Pacific sovereignty would purportedly
be safeguarded by the principle that deployments “would only be
triggered by a formal request for assistance by a member.”
Such
“requests” are however easily manufactured in the heat of a crisis,
particularly given the level of political and military interference
across the Pacific from Washington, Canberra and Wellington.
There
is no shortage of precedents for military interventions to enforce
colonial domination, including the French military-police crackdown used
to suppress the New Caledonia uprising. Australia and New Zealand have
repeatedly dispatched troops to Pacific nations under the banners of
“peacekeeping” and “restoring order”—including deployments to East
Timor, Tonga and the Solomon Islands. The latter country was effectively
occupied by Australia and NZ from 2003 to 2017.
The fresh
military preparations take place against a backdrop of escalating social
crises in every Pacific nation, involving deepening poverty, inequality
and health disasters directly connected to the global capitalist
crisis. The US-Israeli war
of aggression against Iran, combined with the Trump administration’s
shutdown of the USAID program and withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), have severely impacted dependent Pacific nations.
According to the WHO, PNG now has the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the Asia-Pacific region, followed by Fiji.
The Fiji government this month formally declared a national HIV
emergency. Health Minister Dr. Atonio Lalabalavu confirmed that
estimates indicated that one in every 60 adults in Fiji is living with
HIV, connected with an epidemic of widespread drug use. Transmission
between mothers and babies is on the rise, with 18 babies dying in the
past year.
Major struggles will inevitably erupt as the
imperialist powers and the local ruling elites turn to increasingly
authoritarian measures to impose the full burden of the economic and
social crisis. Working people in Australia, New Zealand and the wider
Pacific must oppose the escalating neocolonial militarist operations and
fight for the international unity of the working class across the
Asia-Pacific.
7. Mamdani’s counterterrorism chief denounces “far-left terrorism”
At a September 9 press conference on security preparations for the 25th
anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, New York City
Police Department (NYPD) Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and
Counterterrorism Rebecca Weiner declared “far-left terrorism” a serious
threat. Standing beside her as she spoke was New York City Mayor Zohran
Mamdani, the most prominent elected member of the Democratic Socialists
of America (DSA). The “socialist” mayor raised no objection.
Weiner claimed that the terrorist threat had geographically
decentralized and diversified ideologically since 2001. She cited “a
proliferation of threats coming from conspiracy theories, grievances,
nihilistic violence, far-left, far-right, antigovernment, all of those
things.” The designation of the “far left” as an object of surveillance
was a political statement by the most powerful intelligence officer in
the NYPD.
Weiner, an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia
University’s School of International and Public Affairs, was personally
responsible for coordinating police intelligence activities during the
brutal police assault on Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment protest
in April 2024. Following the line of Democratic Mayor Eric Adams and the
Biden administration, she justified the crackdown by claiming that the
protests were the work of “outside agitators”—the same McCarthyite
slander deployed against every anti-war student movement since the
1960s.
Weiner is right at home in Mamdani’s NYPD, run by
billionaire heiress and arch-Zionist Jessica Tisch. The mayor’s silence
on Weiner’s comments leaves no doubt as to his endorsement of the
program she laid out. The ruling class is alarmed by the growth of
left-wing and anti-war sentiment among workers and youth, and the
Mamdani administration is taking up the task of policing the growth of
this left-wing radicalization to defend the capitalist state.
The DSA mayor was elected last year by over a million people driven by
anger over soaring rents, record Wall Street bonuses, the threat of
fascist dictatorship, war and genocide. Mamdani’s first acts as mayor
were directed not against the corporate-financial oligarchy but at
reassuring the capitalist elite of his loyalty to the profit system.
*****
Over the past two and a half years, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza has
intensified, spread to the West Bank, and metastasized into a broader
imperialist war across the Middle East, including a criminal war of
aggression against Iran. Trump has declared that the United States and
Israel will “clean out” the Palestinian population. The protest
movement’s existing leadership, rooted in the middle class, has offered
no way forward. Its strategy of appeals to the conscience of the ruling
class and its political representatives was, and remains, a dead end.
Genocide, fascism and imperialist war cannot be opposed by pressuring
the ruling class and its representatives in university administrations,
the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy. That perspective
leads, with iron logic, to Mamdani: a mayor who falsely claims to be a
socialist, but who designates left-wing protesters as a threat. Students
and young people looking for a way to fight must instead turn to the
developing struggles of the working class.
8. A girl dies of measles in the Peruvian Amazon
The 16-year-old girl who died belonged to the evangelical Christian
community of Alto Monte, in Ramón Castilla Province, which has become a
focal point of transmission. Religious opposition to vaccination within
the community has been identified as one obstacle to immunization. But
Loreto regional health director Percy Vargas has stated that religious
practices alone do not explain the outbreak, emphasizing a broader
social responsibility for disease prevention and the importance of
vaccination as measles spreads through the region.
Peru’s
immunization programs suffer from longstanding structural problems,
compounded by deficient decentralization and previous health crises.
Infectious-disease specialist Dr. Juan Celis told Expreso that the Amazon contains pockets of native communities with low vaccination rates.
Another
major obstacle is the region’s inadequate transportation and
communications network. MINSA apparently does not maintain its own fleet
of seaplanes or a radio network capable of reaching many isolated
settlements. In the Amazon, rivers are the principal transportation
routes, and tracking the geographical spread of measles therefore
requires close attention to the river networks along which people
travel.
Malnutrition represents a further risk. Measles can be
substantially more dangerous among people suffering from chronic
malnutrition and anemia, and Loreto has high rates of both.
*****
The outbreak has also reached healthcare facilities in Lima. In
August, the Ministry of Health reported an outbreak among workers at
Casimiro Ulloa Hospital, prompting strengthened isolation, surveillance
and infection-control measures in public and private hospitals. Crowded
urban environments provide favorable conditions for transmission of a
disease that spreads directly from person to person.
The
distribution of infections is not uniform. Cases are concentrated in
specific pockets, particularly extremely poor communities located far
from healthcare facilities. Peru has approximately 1.125 million
unvaccinated children.
*****
The resurgence of measles is not confined to Peru. In the Americas,
Peru has the fourth-highest reported number of cases, behind Mexico with
12,495, Guatemala with 6,655 and the United States with 3,659. Peru had
recorded approximately 2,400 as of September 27.
With a
population roughly one-tenth that of the United States, Peru’s caseload
is equivalent, on a population-adjusted basis, to some 24,000 cases in
the US—more than six times the number reported there.
That the
comparison is unfavorable to Peru does not mean the United States is
well protected. Under the phony banner of “Make America Healthy Again,”
Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has
ordered investigations into reported post-vaccination adverse events and
a review of the childhood vaccination schedule. He has overseen the
reduction of staffing at the CDC by nearly a third and publicly promoted
false claims critical of vaccines. The result is the worst US outbreak
since 1991, with Pennsylvania the hardest hit.
The crisis extends
far beyond the Americas. Bangladesh has reported more than 210,000
suspected cases and over 1,100 deaths since March, overwhelmingly among
children, while India has reported 26,607 cases. Infections have also
been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and across Europe.
The United Kingdom lost its measles-elimination status in February
2026.
The World Health Organization reported that 14.3 million
infants received no measles vaccine at all in 2024, and that global
first-dose coverage stood at only 84 percent, leaving every region short
of the levels required for elimination.
*****
The measles epidemic exposes a fundamental truth: under capitalism, the
lives of the working class and poorest and most geographically isolated
populations are expendable. Defending the right to healthcare requires
the independent political mobilization of the working class in Peru and
internationally, on a socialist program that subordinates production and
the allocation of social resources to human need rather than to private
profit and military expenditure.
9. Canada’s Prime Minister considered US military attack scenario amid trade war, Trump annexation threats
Carney chose his words carefully. He stressed that an American attack
was not his government’s expected scenario. But the fact that a Canadian
prime minister considers it necessary to prepare for the possibility
that the United States—Canada’s closest military ally for over eight
decades and overwhelmingly its most important economic partner—could
resort to force speaks to the historic breakdown of relations between
North America’s two imperialist powers.
10. Congo Ebola epidemic passes 8,000 cases and nears 4,000 deaths as attacks on health workers mount
The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s National Institute of Public
Health, established by ordinance in March 2023, recorded 8,116 confirmed
cases of Ebola and 3,924 confirmed deaths as of September 27, the 135th
day of the epidemic, across 63 of 167 health zones in seven provinces.
The
bulletin for September 26 reported 78 new confirmed cases against 43
the day before, and 49 deaths against 19. Thirty-four of the dead had
never reached a treatment center.
*****
“The outbreak is not shrinking; it is moving,” observed Anthony
Kergosien, emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), on
September 18.
*****
The World Health Organization gave its own assessment of the Ebola
crisis on Tuesday. Dr. Janet Diaz of its Health Emergencies Programme
told reporters in Geneva that many people are still dying at home or in
their communities because they cannot reach a health facility in time,
and put this down to delays in seeking care and to difficulties of
access and referral. Placing a positive spin on the grave issues, she
noted that treatment capacity has grown from a handful of beds at the
start of the outbreak to more than 1,600 across 50 centers, she said,
and nearly 400 health workers have been trained. However, oxygen, which
she called decisive for the survival of the severely ill, remains
unavailable or unreliable in many facilities.
None of this was unknown to the governments that gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly last week.
On
September 23, the United States convened the foreign ministers of the
world’s largest economies in New York to discuss stopping Ebola in the
Congo. The Japanese foreign ministry records that the meeting opened at
3:10 p.m. and lasted about an hour. It produced roughly $700 million in
fresh commitments, bringing the total pledged since the outbreak was
declared to about $2.9 billion, of which the American share is $886
million.
Two days later, in the same building, those same
governments refused to adopt a political declaration on pandemic
preparedness. The document was not binding. It obliged nobody to spend
anything. It was blocked all the same.
Erica Schwartz, director of
the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the session the
text contained “divisive ideologies lacking definitional consensus” and
did not say which. An early draft seen by the New York Times shows
that Washington had asked to strike out the words “equity” and
“solidarity,” and the commitment to “universal access to sexual and
reproductive health care.” The European Union blocked it over
intellectual property, objecting to a paragraph reaffirming the 2001
Doha Declaration, which holds that patent rights should be read in a
manner that supports the right of states to protect public health.
The
declaration they would not sign reports a $15 billion annual gap in
preparedness financing, praises a WHO emergency fund that has received
$5.4 million this year and is nearly empty, and commits governments to
delivering vaccines within 100 days of a threat. The Congo is at day
135.
An hour of speeches about defeating Ebola were followed, 48
hours later, by a refusal to sign a statement that would have cost
nothing, because it used the word equity and because it touched on
patents and royalties.
That sequence is obscene, and it is also
entirely consistent with capitalist medicine for profit. What was
refused in New York was not money, which had already been found. It was
the principle that a Congolese life has the same claim on the world’s
medicine as any other. “Equity” was struck out because it implies an
entitlement. The Doha language was struck out because it implies that a
patent might one day be overridden to save a dying population.
*****
The capacity to end this epidemic and prevent the next exists now. But
the current effort is organized around what can be taken out of the
ground of eastern Congo rather than around the people who live above it.
Until the pharmaceutical industry and the laboratories are taken out of
private hands, and the resources now committed to extraction and to war
turned toward the medical and sanitary infrastructure the Congolese
population has been denied, every epidemic of this kind will end as this
one is being conducted: not contained and not counted.
11. Judge denies bail, continues detention of anti-Zionist Hasidic father in bid to deport him to Israel
An immigration judge in New York City on Wednesday denied bond to
Yehonatan Ovadia, a 35-year-old father of five from Rockland County who
has been held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since August
28. Ovadia, an Israeli citizen, was taken into custody when he appeared
for an immigration court proceeding in Manhattan and remains detained in
Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, while the Trump
administration is seeking his deportation to Israel.
Ovadia’s
detention is a retaliatory political attack on an anti-Zionist Jewish
religious teacher whose opposition to the Israeli state and its
genocidal war against Palestinians arises from his deeply held religious
convictions. His case exposes the fraudulent charge of “antisemitism”
against outspoken opponents of Zionism and the Gaza genocide.
*****
At Wednesday’s hearing, the government identified Israel as the country
to which it intends to remove Ovadia, according to Chris
Godshall-Bennet, one of his attorneys. This prospect is especially
vindictive given the administration seeks to expel a Jewish opponent of
Zionism to the very state whose political foundations and military
crimes he has publicly condemned.
*****
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has explicitly made
Ovadia’s political views central to its case. In a statement to the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a DHS spokesperson declared, “In violation of
our nation’s laws, he overstayed his welcome and refused to depart. He
will receive due process and remain in ICE custody pending the outcome
of his immigration proceedings.”
The department added that
residence in the US is “a privilege to be granted a visa or green card”
and asserted that the administration had acted within its authority
against “any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports
terrorists, harasses Jews, and steals property.” These allegations are
completely made up by Trump’s DHS, since Ovadia has not done any of
these things.
On Wednesday evening, attorney Eric Lee rejected the
effort to depict anti-Zionist Judaism as antisemitism, saying, “The
detention of Yehonatan proves the absurdity of conflating anti-Zionism
with antisemitism. Democrats and Republicans alike have attempted to
denounce opponents of Israel as anti-Jewish, but here Trump has detained
a rabbi through the High Holidays for his attendance at an anti-Israel
protest three years ago. It is necessary to mobilize the working class
against the escalating attack on free speech.”
The federal lawsuit
brought by Lee and Ovadia’s other lawyers argues that the
administration has taken an official position favoring one religious
tendency within Judaism while punishing a follower of another. The
government’s action, the lawyers wrote, amounts to preferring “one
religious position within Judaism and [penalizing] an adherent of
another.”
That formulation identifies the central constitutional
issue. The state is not merely enforcing an immigration technicality. It
is using discretionary immigration powers to punish a religious teacher
for professing anti-Zionist Jewish beliefs and publicly opposing a mass
atrocity.
*****
The facts of this case expose the slander by the White House, Democrats
and Republicans and corporate news media, who have all mounted a
three-year, non-stop campaign to conflate the mass protests around the
world in defense of Palestinian rights and against the Gaza genocide as
“antisemitism.”
12. United States: Smithfield workers speak out against deadly conditions after death of Patou Mpinda in Illinois meatpacking plant
Workers at the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Monmouth,
Illinois are speaking out over deadly conditions inside the facility
following the September 14 death of 44-year-old Congolese immigrant
Patou Mpinda. Smithfield, the world’s largest pork processor, is owned
by the Hong Kong-based WH Group. Its Monmouth plant employs
approximately 1,600 workers and slaughters an estimated 10,000 hogs per
day.
Mpinda was killed while performing maintenance on machinery at approximately 2:30 a.m. Coworkers told the World Socialist Web Site
that he had been assigned to work alone on a machine that required at
least a two-person maintenance team or safety observer. According to
workers at the plant, Mpinda was strangled after his sweater became
caught in the machine and was pulled around his neck.
Around 100
workers walked out shortly afterward. Day-shift workers received a text
message at about 5:30 a.m. announcing only a “late start.” When they
arrived at approximately 7:30 a.m., hundreds of workers were gathered in
the lunchroom, many learning only then that Mpinda had been killed.
Workers described coworkers crying and confronting plant management,
demanding, “Listen to your people! Why are we here? We shouldn’t be
working!” After workers were told that production would resume,
approximately 100 left the plant. The action was documented by workers
on social media.
The walkout at Smithfield is part of a broader
re-emergence of the class struggle in the United States and
internationally, as workers are driven into conflict with the giant
corporations by increasingly intolerable conditions of work and life.
In March, approximately 3,800 workers at the JBS beef plant in
Greeley, Colorado struck for nearly a month over wages, safety
conditions and company retaliation, in the first strike at a US beef
slaughterhouse in four decades.
In August, Tyson Foods abruptly
closed its beef slaughterhouse in Joslin, Illinois, eliminating
approximately 2,500 jobs with virtually no advance notice. Workers
responded with protests demanding that the plant remain open and that
Tyson provide full compensation and benefits to those thrown out of
work.
Immigrant workers are playing a prominent role in these
struggles, exposing attempts to scapegoat immigrants and pointing to the
international dimensions of the struggles of the working class. A
substantial portion of the Smithfield workforce consists of
French-speaking immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo;
African immigrant workers were among those who led the walkout. Across
the US animal slaughtering and processing industry, 42 percent of
workers are foreign-born, more than twice the national average.
The
logic of these struggles requires independent rank-and-file committees,
uniting workers across national and racial boundaries across the
country and the world, to coordinate action over safety, jobs and the
defense of immigrant workers.
*****
While Smithfield is being left off the hook for injuries and deaths
at the facility, the immigrant workforce of the region is being
viciously targeted by ICE.
In April, ICE agents arrested eight
workers at two Davenport restaurants without advance notice to local
police. Federal detention records also show 45 ICE detention stays at
the Scott County Jail in Davenport between August 2024 and August 2026,
with nearly all ending in removal.
ICE maintains a “hold room” at
its nearby Rock Island office, with federal records associating at least
322 detentions with the site. Nearby Muscatine County Jail is under
contract to house ICE detainees, an arrangement that has already
generated at least five federal lawsuits.
Records from East Moline
show that outside law-enforcement agencies searched the city’s network
of license-plate cameras 146 times for immigration-related purposes in
May 2025 alone, including searches explicitly labeled “ICE,” “ICE
warrant” and “Immigration Enforcement.”
The impact on the region’s
food-sector workforce has become serious enough that in 2025 the
Chicago Region Food System Fund awarded the Quad Cities
immigrant-support nonprofit Akwaaba QC $25,000 in emergency funding for
workers affected by heightened ICE policing, detention and deportation.
The fund said the sudden removal of workers was disrupting the food
system and leaving workers and their families afraid even to leave their
homes.
Under such conditions, the action by the immigrant workers
in Smithfield not only showed tremendous courage. They raise the
emergence of an independent movement of the working class defending
democratic and social rights.
Organizing rank-and-file committees at Monmouth and throughout the
meatpacking industry would give workers a means to act collectively over
safety and jobs, defend immigrant coworkers against persecution, and
link their struggles with workers confronting the same corporations and
conditions elsewhere in the United States and internationally.
13. Australia: ACT Labor government slashes school budgets across Canberra
Public schools across the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) face
budget reductions for 2027, as the territory’s Labor government presses
ahead with a “needs-based” funding overhaul that is, in reality, a
zero-sum redistribution of grossly inadequate resources.
Data obtained by the Canberra Times
reveals that 58 of the territory’s 94 public schools will see their
funding fall, with 37 facing cuts greater than 5 percent. The figures
expose a far more sweeping assault than the Education Directorate
initially admitted. Last month, the directorate claimed just one college
and 18 schools would face significant cuts.
The cuts are being
imposed through a new Student Resource Allocation (SRA) model—a centralized funding system the directorate has labelled a “generational
shift” away from school autonomy. In practice, it is a mechanism for
rationing scarcity and pitting schools against one another.
*****
The specialist schools, which enroll students with the highest levels
of disability, appear to be losing the most funding. An Education
Directorate spokesperson claimed an additional $7 million would be
allocated across specialist schools above their SRA funding, insisting
that “no specialist school will have less funding than in 2026.” But
this is an admission that the model itself is so destructive it cannot
even be applied to the most vulnerable students without emergency
top-ups, while mainstream schools with high-needs students receive no
equivalent aid.
*****
Educators, parents and students must take matters into their own
hands. They must build their own organizations—rank-and-file committees
in schools, independent of the trade union apparatus. These committees
would fight for an end to all cuts, the full restoration of learning
support assistant positions, a massive increase in public education
spending, and an end to the billions poured into corporate subsidies,
war preparations and handouts to private and religious schools.
Through
the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the rank-and-file educators
network, and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees (IWA-RFC), educators can link their struggle with those of
their counterparts across Australia and around the world. The fight for
public education is inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist
system itself—a system that subordinates all human needs, including the
education of children, to the profit demands of big business and the
plunge into war.
14. Two years of JVP/NPP rule in Sri Lanka
It is now two years since the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s
Liberation Front)/National People's Power (JVP/NPP) came to power in Sri
Lanka. On September 21, 2024, JVP/NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake
won the presidential election with roughly 42 percent of the vote—a more
than 12-fold increase from the 3.1 percent he had polled in the
previous presidential contest in 2019. In the subsequent parliamentary
election, held two months later in mid-November, the JVP/NPP, which had
held just three seats in the outgoing parliament, captured a more than
two-thirds majority.
Two days before the presidential election, the World Socialist Web Site denounced the JVP/NPP presidential campaign as “a trap for the Sri Lankan working class.”
The JVP, it warned, was “a capitalist party, steeped in Sinhala
chauvinism, and bitterly hostile to the working class” that had “long
ago abandoned its socialist pretensions and over the past three decades
... completely integrated itself into the political establishment.”
Just two days after the election, on September 23, 2024, the WSWS warned:
“Trading on its image as an ‘outsider,’ the JVP made limited promises
of increased social spending, while railing against the manifest
corruption of the traditional political elite…
“All of this was
utterly disingenuous. The JVP is publicly committed to working within
‘the parameters’ of the IMF bailout negotiated by [former president]
Wickremesinghe.”
The political analysis and warnings made by the
WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) have been starkly vindicated
during the past two years. Jettisoning its election promises, the
JVP/NPP government has ruthlessly escalated International Monetary
Fund-dictated austerity, aligned itself with US imperialism and its
allies, and unleashed state repression against workers and students who
have increasingly come into struggle against the government’s attacks on
their living conditions and cuts to education and other public
services.
The JVP/NPP got elected by exploiting mass popular anger
against the island’s traditional parties—the United National Party
(UNP), Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), their now larger offshoots,
respectively the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and the Sri Lanka Podujana
Peramuna (SLPP), and the Tamil and Muslim bourgeois parties. All these
parties, either by heading successive governments or supporting them,
have attacked the social and democratic rights of the island’s workers
and toilers for decades.
Amid an unprecedented crisis of Sri Lanka
capitalism and the collapse of popular support for its traditional
governing parties, substantial sections of the ruling class turned to
the JVP/NPP, which had never before held office, calculating that it
could best enforce the socially incendiary austerity dictates of the
IMF.
Two years earlier in 2022, bourgeois rule in Sri Lanka had
been roiled by a mass uprising of workers, youth and rural poor, fueled
by the unbearable economic and social conditions triggered by the Covid
pandemic, the NATO-instigated war on Russia and the government’s default
on the national debt. After more than three months of mass protests and
strikes, President Gotabaya Rajapakse was forced to resign and flee the
country.
The JVP/NPP proved—from the standpoint of the Sri Lankan
bourgeoisie and world imperialism—its fitness for higher office by the
role it played in derailing and suppressing the 2022 uprising. Working
in concert with the main big business opposition party, the SJB, and
with the assistance of the fake-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) and
union bureaucracies, it politically harnessed the mass movement to the
existing social and political order, calling for an interim capitalist
government based on the cabal of right-wing parties in parliament.
When
the ruling class moved to impose the inveterate right-winger and pro-US
imperialist stooge Ranil Wickremesinghe as interim president by a vote
of the very MPs whose sacking the masses had been demanding, the JVP/NPP
helped legitimize this anti-democratic maneuver by standing Dissanayake
as a candidate.
Taking advantage of the confusion among working
people over the speed and ease with which their “victory” over the hated
Rajapakse had been stolen from them, Wickremesinghe moved quickly to
use repression to clear the streets and to negotiate, as the opposition
had been demanding, an IMF “bailout.”
But the lull proved very
temporary. With Wickremesinghe and his government facing mounting
popular opposition and still facing the challenge of imposing the bulk
of the spending cuts, tax increases, and privatization measures demanded
by the IMF, powerful sections of the ruling class came to view the
bringing to power of the JVP/NPP as their least-worst option in ramming
through savage austerity and further integrating Colombo with the
predatory agenda of US imperialism and its principal South Asian ally,
India.
*****
Immediately after coming to power, the Dissanayake government
jettisoned its election promise to renegotiate the IMF bailout agreement
and instead pledged to global capital that it would implement it in
full.
The budgets of the past two years, presented by President
Dissanayake in his capacity as Finance Minister, have marked a dramatic
intensification of the war on working people's living conditions.
*****
However, opposition to IMF austerity and its JVP/NPP state enforcers
continues to grow. In the recent period, thousands of farmers have held
protests demanding a higher guaranteed paddy price, subsidies and other
facilities for cultivation. Early in September, around 5,000 university
teachers engaged in a two-day strike, and there have been strikes and
protests by railway and Sevanagala Sugar factory workers and by students
opposing the government’s education cuts.
As a result of its
record of ruthless assault on social and democratic rights of the
working people, youth and rural poor, the JVP/NPP government is facing
growing popular anger. According to the latest Verité Research “Mood of
the Nation” poll, the government’s approval rating has sharply dropped
to roughly 50 percent in July, down from a post-election high of 65
percent last February.
In an attempt to reverse the erosion of
its support among workers and the rural poor the JVP/NPP has started a
series of public meetings to mark the second anniversary of its coming
to power. By the end of October, Dissanayake is to have addressed
meetings under the slogan, “Two years of our government—Prosperous
nation” in every one of the country’s 25 districts.
Unable to
point to any improvement in the living conditions of the masses,
Dissanayake is doubling-down on the JVP/NPP’s attempts to blame the
crisis of Sri Lankan and world capitalism on the “corruption” of the
handful of elite families who since independence have led the now deeply
discredited traditional governing parties. Prior to the coming to power
of the JVP/NPP, Dissanayake thunders, “Sri Lanka operated as a ‘Black
State’ ,” but now this is supposedly changing because of the
government’s “war on corruption” and enforcement of the “rule of law.”
According
to World Bank estimates, close to 22 percent of the population is mired
in poverty, while 10 percent of the population lives just above the
poverty line. About 39 percent of households have inadequate diets,
while nearly one-third of children under five suffer from malnutrition.
Public sector wages have declined by 33 percent since 2022. A recent
research report, based on International Labour Organization data, placed
Sri Lanka 120th among 130 countries with lowest minimum wages, below
Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
The bourgeoisie, for its
part, can celebrate Sri Lanka as a “prosperous nation” under JVP/NPP
rule. Top companies are continuously recording higher profits. John
Keells Holdings, the country’s largest listed conglomerate, closed the
financial year in March 2026 with a 143 percent increase in pre-tax
profit. Commercial Bank, Sri Lanka’s largest private bank, reported a
June-quarter 2026 profit of 17.49 billion rupees, up nearly 8 percent
year-on-year.
The opposition parties all support the IMF austerity
program. Their calls “not to put burdens on the masses” are a
transparent fraud.
*****
The 2022 uprising revealed the enormous social power of the working
class, which increasingly came to the fore and dominated the mass
movement that toppled Rajapakse. But its fundamental lesson is the
urgency of building a revolutionary leadership in the working class
based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution to spearhead the
fight to establish the working class’ political independence and
hegemony, so it can rally all the oppressed against Sri Lankan
capitalism and, in conjunction with workers around the globe, world
imperialism.
Only through the development of such a vanguard
party, can the working class impose its own socialist solution to the
capitalist crisis—one that rejects its subordination to the profit
imperatives of domestic and global capital.
The program and
perspective on which to build such a party and mobilize the working
class and oppressed toilers was elaborated in the main resolution, “The
strategy and program of the SEP in the fight against the JVP government
and capitalism,” unanimously adopted at the party’s 4th national congress last month.
*****
The
SEP proposes the formation of action committees, democratically
elected by workers in every workplace, plantation, and major economic
center, as the basis for mobilizing workers' social power, opposing IMF
austerity and building workers’ independent political strength.
The
SEP emphasizes that there is no progressive solution for the working
people within the framework of the capitalist system or the
nation-state. We call for the establishment of a Democratic and
Socialist Congress of Workers and Rural Masses based on independent
action committees of workers and rural poor to formulate a program of
socialist policies and develop the fight for a workers’ and
peasants’ government.
The SEP stresses the international character
of the struggle, noting that Sri Lankan workers must unite with the
international working class by coordinating their action committees with
the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees
(IWA-RFC) and build it as the coordinating centre of a global fightback
by workers.
15. First of three parts: The strategy and program of the SEP in the fight against capitalism and Sri Lanka's JVP government
The
Congress was held amid a deepening political and economic crisis of
global capitalism, marked by unfolding world war pushed by the
imperialist powers and moves by the ruling class to impose austerity and
dictatorial forms of rule, as well as the resurgence of class struggle
globally.
16. Online meeting in Sri Lanka: Free Bogdan Syrotiuk! Build an international movement against imperialist war!
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in
Sri Lanka, the youth and student organization of the Socialist Equality
Party, will hold a Zoom meeting on Tuesday, October 13, at 7:00 p.m., as
part of the international campaign to secure the freedom of Bogdan
Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Trotskyist socialist imprisoned in Ukraine.
The meeting will be conducted in Sinhala and translated live into Tamil. Register for the meeting here.
Bogdan
Syrotiuk is a founding member and leading figure of the Young Guard of
Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), a Trotskyist organization operating in
Ukraine. On April 25, 2024, the fascistic Zelensky government had him
arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on fabricated charges
of “high treason under martial law.” The state claimed he was an agent
of the Russian government—a libel for which, in more than two years of
detention, not a shred of evidence was ever produced.
17. Stand up for the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The World Socialist Web Site publishes the the text of an open letter to the leadership of the Left Party. It
was sent on September 30 to Ines Schwerdtner and Luigi Pantisano,
co-chairs of the Left Party, as well as to Heidi Reichinnek and Sören
Pellmann, co-chairs of the Left Party parliamentary group in the
Bundestag.
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
