I asked Socialism AI two new questions and got the following answers:

1. Can you Point me to any reviews or criticism of the writer and director David Mamet at the World Socialist Web Site?  I only recently discovered some of his older films, which I found intriguing, but flawed. I find there is something disturbing and even simplistic about his themes, but he seems to have a strong style and interesting narratives.

Socialism AI:

The WSWS has covered Mamet's work and career in several substantial pieces, all of which engage directly with the qualities you're describing — the strong style and the disturbing, ultimately simplistic themes. The main ones are by the WSWS arts editor David Walsh, who has written about Mamet over many years.

The two essential pieces

As long as you don't look too closely (January 2001) — a review of State and Main that doubles as a general assessment. Walsh is blunt about his reservations: he calls Mamet's "mannered staccato dialogue" something that "merely irritates," and notes his "apparent contempt for those of his fellow beings not as clever as himself." But he also credits what Mamet does well — Wag the Dog and Glengarry Glen Ross are singled out as genuine public services, "when he turns his attention to institutions that deserve a thorough going-over." His conclusion is that Mamet's satire works when aimed at worthy targets, but that his "nastiness seeps through" and his "meditations on life and morals… usually fall flat, deflated by the author-director's smugness and cynicism."

Writer David Mamet: Man overboard (March 2008) — this is the most important piece, written in response to Mamet's notorious Village Voice article announcing his conversion to "conservatism" and his embrace of Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Walsh uses the occasion for a serious retrospective that speaks directly to your sense of "disturbing and even simplistic themes." He argues that Mamet's early work (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross) did contain a genuine element of social protest against Reaganite cut-throat commercialism — quoting critics who read the plays as attacks on the "distorted morality of American capitalism." But he identifies a contradiction present from the outset: Mamet lacked "a broad or deep understanding of society," so his anger was directed "not against [society's] foundations, but against some of its more repulsive… symptoms." Without social and historical context, the plays often left the impression "that the rottenness on vivid display was nothing more nor less than the rottenness of humanity itself." Walsh traces this misanthropy partly to Mamet's response to the Holocaust — a refusal of historical analysis in favor of a "gloomy and irrationalist" conception of humanity's innate "heart of darkness." His 2008 defection to the right, Walsh concludes, was a "moral collapse" made possible by the "generally wretched cultural-intellectual atmosphere" of the preceding decades.

Also relevant

David Mamet's Race in Toronto (April 2013) — a review by Jack Miller of Mamet's later play Race, about a wealthy white man accused of rape who hires a law firm with one white and one black partner. This is a useful gauge of where Mamet's "identity politics" themes lead in his later work.

The 2008 piece is really the one to read — it's the fullest articulation of the WSWS's judgment, and it grapples with the precise tension you've sensed between Mamet's undeniable craft and the corrosive cynicism underlying it.

2.  Yes. I just read the second 2008 piece by David Walsh. It is full of fascinating conjecture and descriptions. I like especially this passage: "It is possible to fight against the stream with all one’s might, but a truly powerful current has a way of wearing one down over time. Perhaps without even being conscious of it, one finds oneself floating in the opposite direction." This has me wondering, why have, not just self-professed reformed liberals as Mamet describes himself, but fervent leftists, often abandoned their beliefs, even becoming idols of the far right? Is the answer due mostly to the contemporary political and social tides affecting humanity? 

Socialism AI:

This is a question to which Marxism has given a precise and, I think, genuinely illuminating answer — and it is not "the tides affecting humanity" in the abstract, though that is part of the picture. The decisive factor is class position.

The class character of apostasy

Notice who actually makes this journey. It is not the working class that defects en masse to the far right; it is, overwhelmingly, the petty-bourgeois intellectual. The phenomenon you are describing — the "fervent leftist" who becomes an idol of reaction — is essentially a phenomenon of intellectuals, writers, academics, and the declassed middle strata who pass through the socialist movement.

Leon Trotsky analyzed this with extraordinary precision in 1939–40, in the struggle against James Burnham and Max Shachtman inside the American Trotskyist movement — the very faction whose members later became the seedbed of neoconservatism (Irving Kristol, and through Shachtman's acolytes, figures like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith). In his "Open Letter to Comrade Burnham", Trotsky wrote:

"Naturally, any man, any party and even any class can become bewildered. But with the petty bourgeoisie, bewilderment, especially in the face of great events, is an inescapable and, so to speak, congenital condition."

This is the crux. The worker's socialism is rooted in his position in production — in the daily, objective experience of exploitation, which no intellectual fashion can dissolve. The petty-bourgeois intellectual's socialism rests on something far more fragile: an idea, a moral impulse, a literary sensibility, a revulsion against the coarseness of capitalist society. That revulsion can be genuine — Mamet's early plays were genuinely angry at Reaganite philistinism. But because it is not anchored in the material interest and discipline of a class, it is susceptible to being dissolved by pressure, by defeat, by the passage of time, by the prospect of a comfortable career.

What the "tides" actually do

So the "contemporary political and social tides" you mention are real, but they operate selectively. They do not act on "humanity" in general; they act with devastating force on a particular social stratum, and almost not at all on another.

Trotsky's point about the petty-bourgeois intellectual is that he "vegetates in an artificial and shut-in environment," has "ample time to dabble in politics or its substitute," and is constitutionally prone to demoralization when the revolution does not arrive on schedule. The working class, by contrast, is schooled by the factory, the strike, the struggle itself. Trotsky's conclusion was organizational and programmatic: "The class composition of the party must correspond to its class program. The American section of the Fourth International will either become proletarian or it will cease to exist."

The subsequent history vindicated this completely. As Bill Vann documents in The historical roots of neoconservatism, the 1939–40 faction fight was not about minor programmatic details — it was about whether the party would hold to a revolutionary, internationalist perspective in the teeth of a catastrophic defeat (the Stalin-Hitler pact, the onset of world war). Burnham and Shachtman, disillusioned with the prospect of the working class extending the October Revolution, abandoned the defense of the Soviet Union and adopted "the grim perspective of a new totalitarianism." Trotsky warned that those who begin by rejecting dialectical materialism "end up not infrequently in the camp of reaction." Burnham was writing for Buckley's National Review within a decade; Shachtman ended as an advisor to the anti-communist AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the hawkish "Senator from Boeing," Scoop Jackson.

The pattern recurs in every period of reaction. The defeats of the 1970s and 1980s, the dissolution of the USSR, the collapse of the social protest movements — these produced a wave of apostasy among intellectuals who had never broken from their petty-bourgeois milieu, and who therefore had nothing to fall back on when the tide turned. This is the social origin of the Frankfurt School's pessimism, of postmodernism, of the whole "identity politics" apparatus: the intellectual expression of petty-bourgeois demoralization. The former radicals didn't become right-wing despite their old beliefs; in a deep sense their old beliefs had already been hollowed out, because they had never been grounded in the class.

The distinction that matters

So the answer to your question is: it is not primarily a matter of "tides acting on humanity," but of a specific class's relationship to those tides. The intellectual who is "fervent" for socialism as an idea, but who remains embedded in the petty bourgeoisie — in the universities, the journals, the professions — is precisely the figure most exposed to the current that Walsh describes, the current that "wears one down over time."

This is why the ICFI has always insisted on the distinction that Trotsky drew: the party needs "emigrants from the petty bourgeoisie who have broken completely with their social past and who have come over decisively to the standpoint of the proletariat" — and those who prove incapable of settling in the proletarian milieu must not be placed in positions of leadership. The apostasy of Mamet, of the neoconservatives, of the countless "ex-radicals" who populate the think tanks, is not a mystery of human nature. It is the predictable trajectory of a class position. The working class, by contrast, does not "become an idol of the far right" — it is betrayed, by leaderships drawn from precisely this unstable stratum, and then blamed for its own betrayal.

That is why the revolutionary party's task is not to recruit the cleverest intellectuals, but to build a party of the working class, whose socialism is not a mood but a class interest.

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. The record of the New York Times on the “war on terror”

A quarter century after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the events of that day have passed, for many, from memory to history. About one in three Americans alive today was born after the attacks.

With this, the task of the apologists of American imperialism has graduated from propaganda to historical revisionism. The New York Times’s editorial board, speaking for the Democratic Party, took up this dirty business in an editorial published Friday. “On this 25th anniversary … we ask that America face the mistakes that it made,” it wrote.

The “mistakes” it names are the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the torture of prisoners and the mass warrantless surveillance of Americans that “clearly went too far.” “The principal legacy of America’s response,” the New York Times wrote, is “two long, bloody wars—one of which, in Iraq, was started on false pretenses—that mostly weakened the United States, at home and abroad.”

The Times names “America” as the subject of these “mistakes,” in order to absolve any responsibility of specific actors. With everything dissolved into the nation as a whole, no one can be assigned responsibility, let alone criminal liability.

The phrase “mistakes were made” was made notorious by President Ronald Reagan, who used it in his State of the Union address of January 27, 1987, to cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, the secret sale of weapons to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras: “serious mistakes were made in trying to do so.” The Contras, a force organized and armed by the CIA against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, killed, tortured and kidnapped civilians, as Americas Watch documented in 1984 and 1985, and the International Court of Justice ruled on June 27, 1986 that the United States had violated international law by arming and financing them.

As with Reagan’s statement on the Iran-Contra scandal, the Times speaks of “mistakes” in an effort to deflect attention from the fact that it justified and encouraged both the criminal wars of aggression and sweeping attacks on the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people. Its editorial pages justified these actions, and its news section published lies used to sell these “mistakes” to the public. 

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The Times’s central complaint is that the wars launched under the label of the “war on terror” did not succeed in the US goal of dominating the Middle East. “For much of the period after the disaster of the Vietnam War, America adhered to its lessons,” the Times editorial board writes. “Go to war only with defined and achievable goals. Prevent ‘mission creep.’ Most of all, win.”

In this the Times echoes the Democratic Party’s criticism of the Trump administration’s war on Iran. Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan put the same demand to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on July 21: “You don’t have a strategy. You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war.” Peters demanded that Hegseth “win this war.” These “mistakes” were, according to Peters, “an utter and complete failure to win this war to this point.”

The wars, the Times editorial board writes, “drained resources that could have been used to strengthen the country against emerging rivals,” that is, nuclear-armed China and Russia, which it does not name. Here the purpose of the exercise becomes clear. The “lessons” the Times draws from the “war on terror” are not lessons against war. They are lessons for even greater crimes.

This is why the editorial asks “America” to “face the mistakes that it made.” The American people did not decide to invade Iraq, to build the CIA’s secret prisons or to wiretap themselves. Those decisions were made by a ruling class, its two parties and its press, including the Times. Not one of the officials who ordered the torture, the editors who printed the lies or the politicians who voted for the wars has been held to account. The same people, and in many cases the same institutions, have supported the genocide in Gaza, agitated for decades for war against Iran, are demanding the escalation of the war against Russia, and preparing the war against China.

There is no reckoning with the “war on terror” that does not begin by naming those responsible for it, and no struggle against the coming wars that does not break with the imperialist Democratic and Republican parties and the entire corporate-financial military-intelligence establishment that the New York Times speaks for. That reckoning can be carried out only by the working class, mobilized independently and on the basis of its own interests, in the United States and internationally.

2. Bond market sell-off sinks Bessent plan

The attempt by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to bring down bond yields (interest rates) at the longer end of the market by organizing an increased Treasury buyback operation of up to $6 billion has hit the ground with a thud.

With the launch of the operation on Thursday, in which the Treasury bought $5.19 billion worth of 10-year and 20-year bonds, the sell-off continued unabated sending yields to the highest levels seen in two decades.

Besides widespread market skepticism about the Bessent plan, the sell-off was fueled by the jump in oil prices to $109 a barrel from around $100 the day before.

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The market’s thumbs down on the Bessent buyback did not come as a great surprise given the reaction the previous day to his announcement that the Treasury could spend as much as $6 billion, compared to the usual outlay of $2 billion per operation. 

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The national debt in the US has just passed $40 trillion. It is expected to reach $41 trillion by the end of the year, possibly even faster if US President Trump’s promise to pay every adult $5,000 if the Republicans retain control of the House and the Senate in the midterm elections at the start of November is met. The total cost of the Trump bribe is estimated to be more than $1 trillion.

The interest bill on past US debts is running at around $1 trillion a year and rising. But it is only the sharpest expression of a mounting crisis in the entire global financial system.

According to analysis published in the FT earlier this week, “the world’s governments have created a $2 trillion monster” in the form of the debt servicing burden that “gobbles up tax revenue.”

It reported that more money is spent on servicing the debt than on military spending in the US, the UK and France and the same was true for more than a dozen countries which comprise the 38 members of the OECD, the grouping of the richest countries. The total for the group is $2 trillion. The French government expects the cost of servicing its debt to rise by 25 percent this year.

With the OECD nations expected to borrow a further $18 trillion this year, an all-time high, investors are lowering the price they are prepared to pay for this increased supply, increasing the yield on bonds.

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The money used to finance bailouts after 2008 and again in the COVID pandemic and more recently to expand military spending pushed global public debt to 94 percent of world GDP last year—up more than 10 percentage points since 2019. According to the International Monetary Fund it will hit 100 percent by the end of the decade.

The mounting debt did not present a significant financial problem until interest rates began to rise in 2021–22, due to the surge in inflation triggered by the pandemic, and which has continued since then and is now being accelerated by the US war on Iran.

Twenty years ago, an interest rate of 5 percent did not present a major problem for debt financing. Now it does.

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There are now warnings that the increase in the interest rates on long-term US government debt, particularly on the 10-year bond which forms the base line for corporate borrowing, will impact on the broader economy, hitting the AI boom which is becoming increasingly dependent on borrowed money.

One of those making such warnings is Ruchir Sharma, the chair of Rockefeller International. In a recent column in the FT, he noted that “runaway debt” and the global government bond sell-off is “starting to matter,” noting that every major bubble going back 300 years ended when borrowing costs rose significantly for companies at its core.

Sharma has written in the past that the AI boom has many of the hallmarks of a bubble and would end when interest rates reached prohibitive levels.

He wrote that the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond had reached 4.8 percent (it has since hit 4.95 percent) and that “when it decisively breaches 5 percent, the upper end of its rate since the dotcom period, the AI bubble could pop.”

Writing in the FT, Benn Steil, the director of international relations at the Council on Foreign Relations, drew attention to a significant change in the structure of the Treasury bond market which is contributing to its volatility.

In 2007, on the eve of the global financial crisis, some 76 percent of US bonds were held by price-insensitive investors such as central banks who held them as part of their stable management policies. Today they hold only 43 percent, with the majority held by price-sensitive investors, including investment funds, which demand greater returns as government debt grows and inflation erodes their purchasing power.

The issuance of Treasuries needed to finance US debt was outpacing the demand of the once-reliable price-insensitive investors, he continued. “The new private buyers pay far more attention to yield and have to be offered higher and higher rates to absorb the growing Treasury supply.”

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The maneuvers of Bessent and other finance ministers and central bankers around the world can only provide at best a temporary “fix” and maybe not even that as the failure of this week’s Treasury buyback has revealed. The drumbeats in ruling circles are beating ever louder for a full-scale and devastating onslaught on the social conditions of the working class as increasing amounts of money are set aside for war.

The ruling class is making its preparations and likewise so must the working class in the US and internationally in the fight for a revolutionary socialist program—the only viable solution to the breakdown of global capitalism being manifested not least in its financial system.

3. Trump ends fascist convention by calling on attendees to pledge allegiance to him

 "So God made Trump"-- the unhinged commercial presented before Trump spoke

President Donald Trump capped off the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, an orgy of fascist reaction, by calling on those in attendance to pledge themselves to him and “cheat like hell” in the November 3 elections, less than two months away.

Ordering the crowd inside the less-than-capacity American Airlines Center to raise their right hands, Trump, pausing for the audience to repeat each phrase, spelled out the following pledge:

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.

He later told the crowd that anyone who did not vote would “go to hell.”

Trump’s pledge and attack on the elections are not just one-off comments. He and the Republicans are systematically trying to undermine and take control of elections in states across the country. The main line of attack is on mail-in voting. At the same time, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is targeting voter rolls in so-called “blue states,” seeking to disenfranchise immigrants and citizens who are legally entitled to vote on the basis of the lie that millions of “illegals” are voting.

Trump speaks for an increasingly besieged and unpopular ruling class. Ahead of the November elections, support for Trump and the Republican Party has cratered, with mass anger among millions of workers over the illegal war in Iran, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the war on immigrants, and skyrocketing inflation and inequality.

As workers and young people look for alternatives to the two big business parties and capitalism, the corporate oligarchy cultivates fascistic elements. At the Dallas event, nearly every speech featured attacks on immigrants, transgender persons, Muslims and socialists.

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Trump repeatedly claimed on both nights that the convention was packed and additional supporters were waiting outside. The images inside American Airlines Center told another story. Entire seating sections were covered with tarps, while large portions of the upper level remained empty. 

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Seeking to whip up a pogrom-like atmosphere ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Texas Senator Ted Cruz denounced the Democratic Party, claiming it had been overtaken by a “new and dangerous red-green alliance: communists and Islamists.”

Cruz named New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Senate nominees in Michigan and Texas. As he spoke, a man in the audience repeatedly called for their assassination.

“When Mamdani says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it,” Cruz said.

“He should be shot!” the man yelled.

“When Abdul El-Sayed says he has a, quote, ‘obligation to comply with Sharia law,’ he means it,” Cruz continued.

“He should be shot!” the man shouted again.

“And when James Talarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism, he means it,” Cruz said.

“He should be shot!” the man yelled a third time.

Cruz did not acknowledge or condemn the death threats. His social media account later posted a video of the speech in which the threats were clearly audible.

Cruz, a supporter of Trump’s failed January 6 coup, said communists and Islamists were united because “they hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution, and they hate America.”

Trump’s pledge, including his call for supporters to “cheat like hell,” and the death threats shouted against three Democratic politicians came nearly 15 months after the assassination of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman. Despite this context, neither incident received prominent treatment on the homepages of several major news organizations Friday afternoon.

The New York Times homepage contained two articles about the Republican convention, but neither headline mentioned Trump’s pledge or the death threats. ABC News’ live coverage of the convention, last updated several hours after Cruz spoke, did not mention his speech or the audience member who called for Mamdani, El-Sayed and Talarico to be shot.

This is not a mistake by the major capitalist press but a deliberate decision to downplay the danger of dictatorship and the threat of fascism. The turn towards fascism in the United States is part of a global process. From the recent election victory of the AfD in Germany to the promotion of fascist Giorgia Meloni in the pages of the New York Times, the ruling class in every country is turning toward far-right reaction. The defense of democratic rights depends on the development of an independent socialist movement of the working class against the financial oligarchy.

4. Australian businessman jailed for “reckless” foreign interference

Alexander Csergo’s imprisonment underscores how someone can be ensnared into being accused of supplying information to a foreign entity under draconian foreign interference laws.

5. Australia: Private school teachers in Melbourne vote to strike for first time

The strike vote at Overnewton College is a further indication, following strikes in government schools across Australia, of a developing revolt by educators against wage cuts and intolerable workloads.

6. The US National Archives to close facilities in San Francisco and Chicago

The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will close its branches in San Francisco and Chicago, creating new and significant burdens for historical research and historic preservation.

While news of the closures only reached a major national news outlet last month, with an August 12 article published by NBC news, the pending shutdowns have been under way since at least late June. It was then that NARA Chief Operating Officer Jay Trainer announced the closures in an email to NARA staff. In the email, Trainer told staff that the closures would “support the long-term financial health and viability of the Federal Records Centers Program’s revolving fund, reduce expenses for the Operating Expense (OE) fund, and reduce our real estate portfolio in alignment with the administration’s priorities.”

The Trump administration has made its attitude toward history and the institutions responsible for communicating historical knowledge to the public abundantly clear. Since returning to office, the Trump administration has waged an all-out assault on history educators and institutions in the name of replacing current curricula with “patriotic education,” a euphemism for the right-wing nationalist distortion of American history.

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The stated purpose of the National Archives is to “preserve, protect, and share the historical records of the United States to promote public inquiry and strengthen democratic participation.”  Shutting down the NARA facilities in San Francisco and Chicago betrays that mission.

The San Francisco branch of the National Archives, actually located in San Bruno, California, holds the records of federal agencies and courts from a vast geographic territory including California, Nevada, Hawaii, American Samoa, and Guam. Documents held in San Francisco are essential for researching the anti-immigrant regime of the United States during the Chinese Exclusion era, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the expansion of U.S. imperialism into the Pacific, including the annexation of Hawaii in 1898.

Perhaps the most famous of the archive’s many holdings, having special political releavance today, are the records of the United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court case that affirmed the principle of birthright citizenship in the United States. With the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to overturn this fundamental democratic principle, closing the home facility of these records and forcing their relocation amounts to tampering with historical evidence.

It also removes the evidence from the scene of the crime. A visit to the archives in San Bruno places researchers within reach of many of the locations referenced in archive documents. There is San Francisco’s historic immigration station at Angel Island, where US authorities detained many thousands of Chinese immigrants during the first half of the twentieth century. There is also San Francisco’s Chinatown, where a mural dedicated to Wong Kim Ark is prominently displayed on Grant Avenue, a vivid reminder that Wong’s story and birthright citizenship is history with living importance worth defending today.

The National Archives at Chicago holds federal records from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. Among these are records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the federal agency founded in 1824 to oversee relations between the United States and Indigenous Americans. The BIA records reveal a history of dispossession, forced removals and forced assimilation.

Many of the well-known records held at the Chicago NARA facility concern the US government’s suppression of dissent. This includes the records of the United States v. Eugene V. Debs, the case which saw socialist leader Eugene Debs convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 after making his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio. Documents of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the trial of the Chicago 7, as well as documents relating to the Kent State shooting of 1970 are all held in Chicago.

The accessibility of these records following the closure of facilities in San Francisco and Chicago remains unclear. An email sent by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society to its membership in July warned that the records would be sent “to a site in Missouri with no research facilities.” The Organization of American Historians has also warned that the records will be consolidated at “a storage-only site with no research room.” A post buried on the National Archives web site in August suggests the records will be scattered among facilities in California, Colorado, Maryland, Texas, Georgia, Missouri and Massachusetts.

In addition to the obstacle these closures and relocations create for scholarship by professional historians, they present a significant burden to the public currently served by the San Francisco and Chicago locations. Should the records even be accessible to the public, those whose family histories are intimately bound up with the historic crimes of Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment or the Indian Removal Act, and who lack the financial support of universities and academic associations available to professional researchers, would now be forced to travel across the country at great expense or forgo their research entirely.

The NARA closures have been protested by scholars whose work has relied heavily on research materials held at the targeted facilities. In a statement published in the journal California History, historian Erika Lee, who has written extensively on immigration and Asian American history, called the NARA closures part of a “politically motivated war on American history and the historical profession,” which poses “an enormous threat to historical research and to the teaching and learning of history.”

W. Caleb McDaniel, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his book Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, has stressed the importance of archive staff who will likely lose their jobs if the closures go through. McDaniel wrote on his website that his experience working with staff at NARA’s Chicago location showed what it actually takes to uncover the many, many stories about the nation’s past that are not yet known. It requires researchers to go in person to archives whose managers are not always aware of all the treasures they hold. And it requires expert, professional staff who understand those archives better than anyone and can troubleshoot problems when a researcher requests a file.

Historian David A. Chang, who specializes in Native American and Native Hawaiian history, told Hawaii Public Radio in August that most of the materials held at NARA San Francisco are “not available online. They've not been printed. There's millions and millions of pages, and you can't get to them unless you go there.” Chang added, the archive “should be close. It should be free. It should be publicly available. These are our records. They belong to the citizens of the United States. They must be available to them. And they’re making it harder to get to them or, for all we know, impossible. And we object to that.”

Thus far the campaign to defend the National Archives and public access to these important documents has been confined to letter-writing initiatives launched by academic associations or alliances of non-profit and community organizations like Save Our National Archives (SONA). These campaigns have encouraged opponents of the closures to appeal to their Congressional representatives for support. Democratic Congressman Kevin Mullin recently responded by introducing a bill, the “National Archives Protection Act,” that would prevent NARA from closing facilities without first acquiring Congressional approval.

However well-intentioned these letter-writing campaigns may be, no confidence should be placed in the US Congress to halt the closure of National Archives facilities. The ultimate guardians of these institutions must be the working class, and it is to the working class and not Congress that appeals must be directed.

7. Florida executes Daniel Conahan as DeSantis killing spree reaches 15 in 2026

Florida killed 72-year-old Navy veteran Daniel Conahan while DNA evidence that he said could exclude him went untested. He was the 15th death row inmate executed in the state in 2026.

8. Sheinbaum vows Mexico “will never be a colony” while offering military collaboration, cheap labor and minerals to Trump

As Trump posts a map of North America draped in the US flag and threatens military action against the cartels, the Sheinbaum government answers with patriotic declarations while offering to serve Washington as a war base.

9. Fifty-three years after the coup: US imperialism and the coming confrontation in Chile

What was covert in 1973 is now proclaimed from the stage of a fascist summit in Santiago. The Trump administration does not hide its operations in Latin America, but on the contrary advertises them.

10. In answer to Trump’s trade war, Carney advances Canada’s own imperialist agenda

The trade war between the US and Canada intensified Tuesday after President Donald Trump announced a series of new charges and outright bans on approximately US$1 billion worth of Canadian goods imports. Earlier in the day, Ottawa’s “dollar for dollar” retaliatory tariffs of 15, 25, and 50 percent on some US$20 billion of US imports—a response to Trump’s imposition of imposts following the collapse of trade talks in August—came into force.

Trump’s aggressive strategy is based on the drive to annex Canada as the 51st state or at least reduce it to vassal status, with its trade, energy and foreign policies largely dictated by Washington. The so-called “Donroe doctrine” is premised on US control over the entire Americas, stretching from Greenland and Canada in the north, through Mexico and the Panama Canal, to all Latin America. With a stranglehold over the Western hemisphere’s economic supply chains and governments, Trump and the American oligarchy for which he speaks believe they can wage a world war against their rivals, above all China, to reassert American imperialist global hegemony.

The fascist-minded president demonstrated his commitment to this agenda once again over the weekend with a social media post showing American control over Greenland and Iceland in the North Atlantic, Canada, Mexico and the Panama Canal.

Trump’s executive orders signed Tuesday banned motorcycles, and some alcohol and dairy products outright, while imposing higher tariffs on other goods. He set September 29 as the deadline for this late barrage of trade restrictions to come into force.

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Canada’s establishment does not oppose Trump’s far-right social and foreign policies—notwithstanding the sharp criticisms Carney, his ministers and political allies, including almost all provincial premiers, the NDP social-democrats, and the trade unions, have made of the US president. Rather, Canada’s political establishment has used Trump as a foil to shift politics sharply right. Their “opposition” to Trump is solely from the standpoint that his “America First” program fails to recognize Canada’s prerogatives as a junior partner of American imperialism and grant its ruling class “first rights” to the proceeds from exploiting the country’s working class and natural resources. 

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Their chief complaint with Trump is that he is using the close economic and military-security ties Canadian imperialism has forged with its larger southern neighbor as, to use Carney’s words, “vulnerabilities,” to push Ottawa and the Canadian economy into an explicitly subordinate relationship.

Since the outbreak of the second imperialist world war, the Canadian ruling class has pursued its imperialist interest through the US-Canada military-security alliance and US-led “liberal” world order, whose dismantling Trump is completing because it is deemed insufficiently tilted in favor of Washington and Wall Street. Ottawa was a staunch US ally through the Cold War, and over the past 35 years has backed US-led wars of aggression and “regime change” operations across the globe.

While staggered by Trump’s effective termination of the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement (USMCA) and cognizant that Trump could repudiate any deal within days of his signing it, Ottawa continues to plead for a reconfigured “partnership” with US imperialism, based on confronting their historic rivals, principally China and Russia.  

In a video speech released Tuesday shortly after Canada’s retaliatory tariffs came into force, Carney explained his strategy as a “pivot” away from Canada’s reliance on its bilateral relationship with its southern neighbor, and accused Trump of trying to “break us to own us” and make Canada “dependent” on Washington.

At the centre of this pivot is an intensification of worker-exploitation to increase the global “competitiveness,” i.e., the profitability, of Canadian capitalism and the forging of closer ties with the European imperialist powers, as they rapidly rearm to pursue war on Russia and otherwise seek to aggressively assert their interests around the globe.

Carney and several leading ministers will host a two-day Canada Investment Conference in Toronto next Monday and Tuesday to this end. The event aims to initiate the process of attracting C$1 trillion in investments from the vultures of international finance capital. Prominent participants include top executives of BlackRock and Blackstone, Barclays Bank, Canada’s Big Five banks, and various pension and state “sovereign wealth funds.” One day later, Carney will attend European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s “State of the Union” address in Brussels before receiving the honor of giving an official address to the European Parliament.

*****

A major component of Ottawa’s pivot or “diversification” strategy is a turn towards European imperialism, where Carney is searching for allies for his massive rearmament drive. Earlier this summer, he unveiled a C$100 billion package for the purchase and maintenance of a new submarine fleet from Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems. The agreement was no less a geopolitical move than a military procurement decision, integrating a key sphere of Canada’s military capacities with a resurgent and aggressive German imperialism. The government is also considering abandoning plans to purchase new F-35 fighter jets from the US-based Lockheed Martin in favor of Swedish Saab’s Gripen fighter jet. In his Tuesday speech, Carney lauded Montreal-based Marconi Technologies for becoming the first non-European company to secure a contract for military equipment under the EU’s multi-billion-dollar rearmament program, SAFE.

Ottawa, unlike Trump, has lined up with the European powers in their reckless escalation of the war against Russia in Ukraine. With billions of dollars in financial and military aid, its ideological fostering of far-right Ukrainian nationalism, and backing for Ukraine’s drone and missile attacks on Russia, Ottawa has made a major contribution to escalating the war, which poses the real danger of exploding into a nuclear conflagration.

On Thursday, Carney hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose government has outlawed opposition to the war, as shown by the 15-year sentence handed down to the Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk because he has called for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers to stop the war in articles posted on the World Socialist Web Site.

The eruption of inter-imperialist antagonisms and initial stages of the third world war have exacerbated the regional divisions that have always been a feature of Canada’s ruling class.

*****

There is widespread and entirely legitimate hostility to Trump across Canada, but this can find no progressive outlet by lining up with the Canadian ruling class or any of its regional factions. Workers across Canada must instead unify their struggles with workers in the US and internationally, who all suffer the consequences of trade war, economic breakdown and imperialist war. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in a perspective this week,

The urgent task is to revive the long traditions of joint struggle between American and Canadian workers, stretching back to the eight-hour-day movement in the 19th century and the building of the industrial unions in the 1930s, and infuse them with a new and higher socialist content. The only alternative to intensifying inter-imperialist antagonisms and world war is the fight for the socialist transformation of society.

11. UK Labour government’s token sanctions against settlers conceal continued collusion with Israeli genocide

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced government plans Tuesday to ban trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Britain has long deemed to be in breach of international law, and sanction individuals and companies facilitating settlement expansion. He also announced plans for a ban on arms licenses and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”, as well as on the advertising of illegal settlement properties in Britain.

Britain’s plans were announced in coordination with Canada and France, with other countries pledging to follow suit. It comes decades after these governments denounced the settlements while continuing to trade with the businesses that sustain them.

It was widely seen as a belated—and face-saving—attempt by incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham to shore up support for Labour in the wake of its slavish support for Israel’s three year-long genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza under Keir Starmer. Labour faces a by-election in Starmer’s former Holborn and St Pancras seat that Green party leader Zack Polanski will contest. Polanski has won popular support in large measure due to his opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Giving the lie to any notion that the sanctions would have a significant impact, British diplomats reportedly told their US counterparts that the move was “largely symbolic” and would have “no material impact on the UK’s wider relationship with Israel on trade or security”.

This distinction is even clearer in Britain’s military relationship with Israel. While Miliband said the government would impose further restrictions on the export of arms to Israel, over and above those announced in September 2024, UK firms will continue supplying parts for the F-35 fighter jet, of which the UK builds 15 percent by value, under a “carve-out”. Israel has used its US-supplied F-35 jets in its illegal wars on Gaza and Iran, as well as its attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Miliband, in a handwringing speech, told the House of Commons that Britain could no longer stand back and watch the suffering in the West Bank and Israel’s destruction of the two-state solution. Nearly 60 years after Israel seized the West Bank in the 1967 Arab Israeli war, he declared that the British government officially regards the occupation as unlawful and stated that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is taking place in the West Bank.

It comes more than two years after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion in July 2024, at the request of the UN General assembly, confirming yet again the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem under international law. The ICJ called for settlement building to stop and Israeli settlers to leave occupied Palestinian territory and for governments to stop helping sustain Israel’s unlawful presence.

*****

Britain is now acknowledging that ethnic cleansing is taking place in the West Bank while insisting that its sanctions target settlements and settlers, not Israel. But the Israeli government promotes settlement expansion, protects settler violence and advances the displacement of Palestinians. 

*****

The economic significance of the trade ban is extremely limited. Total UK-Israel trade in goods and services was £5.9 billion ($7.86 billion) in the four quarters to March 2026. Goods originating in Israeli settlements are not separately identified in British trade statistics, but settlement goods are only a tiny proportion of Israel’s overall exports. The latest available figures put total UK trade with the Occupied Palestinian Territories at only about £40 million. 

*****

The government has provided little detail on how it will distinguish settlement goods from other Israeli products as they pass through companies, distributors, packing centres and complex supply chains, or how it will prevent goods being routed through other channels.

By presenting the problem as one of “settler terrorists”, Miliband turned a system of state-supported territorial expansion into a problem of a few extremist individuals. Yet settler attacks take place under the protection of the Israel Defence Forces, while the Israeli state provides the land, infrastructure, military protection and legal framework through which settlement expansion takes place. The foreign secretary insisted, “The sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel.”

Britain’s token sanctions are not only an attempt to distance London from Israel’s past crimes, but from worse crimes to come.

*****

In August, Israel issued a tender for the construction of more than 1,000 housing units in the E1 area east of Jerusalem. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had earlier praised the plan that “practically erases the two-state delusion” by splitting up the territory designated for a future Palestinian state.

There was predictably a furious response from Israel to Miliband, with Foreign Minister Gideon Saar calling the announcement “morally distorted” and accusing the UK of “blatant interference in the affairs of a sovereign state and its electoral process.”

Israel said it would close the British consulate in East Jerusalem and exclude British representatives from the International Gaza Support Center in Kiryat Gat. It announced that Britain would no longer be permitted to train Palestinian security forces in the West Bank and that 12 British lawmakers and other nationals, including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, would be barred from entering the country.

Britain’s Orthodox chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, who functions as a cheerleader for the Netanyahu government, claimed that action against Israel’s illegal settlements would unleash a new wave of antisemitism, endangering the safety of Britain’s Jewish population.

His comments came a few days after US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee accused the British government of “Jew hate”. However, an Axios report said that US President Donald Trump did not oppose British plans to sanction Israeli settlements in a briefing on the plan during a conversation with Burnham ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.

This is a true measure of their limited character, as a means of posturing over some of Israel’s crimes while leaving untouched British imperialism’s fundamental relationship with the Zionist state, even as it plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza and to annex the West Bank.

12. Right-wing consensus over militarism and austerity in Sweden’s election campaign

All the main parties agree on readying Sweden for war, scapegoating immigrants for the social crisis, and curbing public spending to fund rearmament and subsidies to wealthy investors.

13. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific 

Australia:

Transport workers at 5 major trucking companies hold 24-hour nationwide strike
 

Victorian Arts Centre workers hold 24-hour strike

 

Sydney Ferries workers continue industrial action

 

Bridgestone tyre fitters begin six-day strike

India:  

Thousands of Gujarat autorickshaw and taxi drivers stage four-day strike

Haryana sanitation workers continue state-wide strike
 

Telangana power-loom workers strike for higher piece rates

 

Andhra Pradesh drinking-water workers strike over unpaid wages

 

Kerala migrant highway workers strike over wage arrears

 

Tamil Nadu liquor shop workers protest suspensions and working conditions

 

Punjab health workers begin 11-day strike

 

Punjab ministerial employees suspend pen-down strike after assurances

 

Maharashtra sanitation workers continue indefinite strike in Manwat

 

Jammu and Kashmir health mission workers begin 72-hour walkout 

New Zealand:  

Emergency department nurses strike in Gisborne

Pakistan:  

Larkana primary teachers escalate campaign for service structure

Sri Lanka:  

University lecturers stage nationwide one-day strike

14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

Bogdan Syrotiuk in 2015

"Peace for the world! Down with war!"

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today: 

1. Twenty-five years since the September 11 terrorist attacks

The World Socialist Web Site stated on September 12, 2001, in an analysis published while the fires at ground zero were still burning, “It is the policies pursued by the United States, driven by the strategic and financial interests of the ruling elite, which laid the foundations for the nightmare that unfolded on Tuesday.” The statement noted that “the United States has been bombing one or another Middle Eastern country almost continuously since 1983.”

And the WSWS warned, in a sentence that has defined the two and a half decades since, that “the escalation of US militarism abroad will inevitably be accompanied by intensified attacks on democratic rights at home.” This statement, along with many others, is included in a special exhibit on the record of the WSWS on 9/11, its origins and consequences.

The attack was immediately described as the greatest “failure” of the US intelligence apparatus in the history of the country. Yet despite saturation media coverage, the investigation by the 9/11 Commission and countless congressional hearings, the American people know little more about the organization of this crime today than they did the day after it happened. 

Moreover, not a single person was fired, demoted or held in any way responsible or accountable for this disaster. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, several Navy admirals and lower-ranking officers lost their jobs. Nothing of the kind followed in the wake of September 11. 

*****

The Al Qaeda organization was well known to US intelligence agencies. Its founder, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi construction multimillionaire, had been financed by the American CIA as part of its effort to build an anti-Soviet paramilitary force in Afghanistan to provoke the 1979 Soviet invasion. The goal, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Democratic President Jimmy Carter, was “giving the USSR its Vietnam.” It was only after the US mobilization of 700,000 troops in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, most of them based in Saudi Arabia, that bin Laden turned against his American backers.

Whatever the specific elements of the still unexplained conspiracy, the real political significance of the attacks is how they became a turning point in both the foreign and domestic policy of the American government. The “war on terror” became the all-purpose pretext for an unprecedented campaign of international aggression and domestic repression. These measures had long been prepared, and awaited only a suitable pretext, supplied by 9/11.

Within weeks, Congress passed, with the near-unanimous support of Democrats and Republicans, an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It was first invoked by the Bush administration as the basis for invading Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his main base. However, the AUMF was repeatedly invoked as the basis for further military operations in at least 22 countries, including drone strikes and Special Forces attacks from Pakistan to Syria to Libya and across North Africa, by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. It remains in force today, 15 years after the killing of bin Laden. Meanwhile, when it suits the policy of Washington, a Syrian regime clearly linked to Al Qaeda is welcomed as an ally when it agrees to serve US foreign policy goals. 

While a separate AUMF was the legal basis for the war in Iraq, the Bush administration cited a nonexistent connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda (in reality bitter enemies) as one basis for obtaining the second war resolution. The other lie was the claim that Iraq was in possession of “weapons of mass destruction” and might supply a nuclear bomb to Al Qaeda for use against the United States. As Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice declared in 2002, dismissing the need for proof that Iraq was a threat to the US: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Domestically, the impact of 9/11 was perhaps even greater. The country was placed on a war footing, with internal military-police measures on a massive scale. Congress passed the Patriot Act by 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to one in the Senate. 

A new federal department was created, the Department of Homeland Security, merging 22 agencies and housing the newly established Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has become the spearhead of Trump’s police-state operations. Torture became a standard practice at secret CIA prisons around the world, as well as at the main detention center at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Justice Department memos justified waterboarding prisoners in the name of preventing “another 9/11.”

The Democratic Party was a full participant in the “war on terror,” repeatedly voting to fund Bush’s wars, then continuing and expanding them under Obama, who launched the US-NATO bombing of Libya and US-backed wars in Syria and Yemen. It was Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, who concocted the legal basis for drone missile assassinations, including of US citizens without due process, and spearheaded the persecution of courageous whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who exposed US war crimes and illegal mass surveillance.

The corporate media were enthusiastic cheerleaders for the attacks on international law and the Constitution. Every shred of media independence was discarded, with the New York Times, the principal mouthpiece of Democratic Party liberalism, leading the way.

The role of the World Socialist Web Site stood in the sharpest contrast to the subservience of the corporate media. From the day of the attacks, the WSWS denounced them as reactionary acts of mass murder, while warning that they would be seized on by US imperialism as a means of carrying out long-planned military attacks and the destruction of democratic rights at home.

*****

The 25 years which have elapsed since 9/11 have discredited the propaganda lies and demonstrated the deepening crisis of American imperialism. The Afghanistan war resulted in a debacle, with more than 100,000 Afghan dead, as well as 6,000 Americans, in a 20-year conflict that ended with the return of the Taliban to power. The war in Iraq was an even greater bloodbath, with an estimated 1 million Iraqi dead, along with 7,000 Americans. The US is now at war with Iran, while Saudi Arabia, which supplied most of the attackers and actually supported some of them financially, enjoys even closer ties with Washington. 

Its response to 9/11 revealed the absence of any support for democracy within the American ruling class. Since then, the intensification of internal police powers—surveillance, police killings, mass detentions—has proceeded by leaps and bounds. Were another such attack to take place—or be staged, on the model of Hitler’s Reichstag fire—the response of the capitalist state would be even more unrestrained. There would be troops on the streets, mass arrests, and full-scale police-state methods.

But the working class has learned bitter lessons as well. There is no support for the “forever wars” conducted by Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again. Few take seriously the pro-war propaganda of the military-intelligence apparatus and its media mouthpieces. The police murder of George Floyd produced massive public protests in 2020. The restored Trump administration has faced the largest opposition demonstrations in US history, in the “No Kings” protests. Workers are increasingly turning to methods of class struggle, where they immediately encounter the opposition of the trade union apparatus.

The task now is to draw the political lessons of the past quarter century—and more—and build a powerful mass movement of the working class against capitalism, based on a political break from the corporate parties, Democratic and Republican alike, and advancing a revolutionary socialist program.

2. The Socialism 2026 conference and the pro-war politics of the Democratic Socialists of America

The Socialism 2026 conference was held September 4-7 in Chicago organized by Haymarket Books and prominently endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Its panels promised to discuss the fight for “revolutionary socialism,” “anti-imperialism” and anti-colonialism.

Most of the roughly 190 sessions dealt with the concerns of the middle-class pseudo-left: racial identity politics, gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality. But the central political axis of the conference was expressed in its panels on foreign policy, which presented support for the US-NATO war with Russia and the US conflict with China as “anti-imperialism.” Behind the invocations of “anti-imperialism” and “socialism” stood the pro-war foreign policy of the Democratic Party.

At these panels, speakers denounced Russian and Chinese “imperialism,” whitewashed the Ukrainian government’s granting of state honors to perpetrators of the Holocaust, attacked China’s zero-COVID policy and echoed the Trump administration’s talking points about China’s “concentration camps” for the Uyghur minority.

*****

The context of the conference was a shift to the left among broad sections of workers and young people, triggered by the eruption of imperialist war and the imposition of dictatorship all over the world. This change has led to an increase in the membership of the DSA, which announced in July that it had passed 120,000 members.

These layers were overwhelmingly directed to the larger panels, where [Hasan] Piker and [Amy] Goodman drew audiences in the hundreds. Jokes, banter and pop-culture references gave these sessions the feeling of a stand-up comedy night, while the political discussion was devoted to electoral maneuvers.

*****

Never addressed in these sessions was the fact that the DSA backs and endorses the rapidly escalating US war with Russia. Its two members of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, voted for the $40 billion Ukraine war package in May 2022 and the $61 billion package in April 2024.

This is the politics of the Democratic Party. The DSA is a faction of that party, and the line laid down in Chicago’s breakout rooms is the line of the party that funded the war.

The DSA is the political descendant of Max Shachtman, who broke with Trotskyism in order to make his peace with American imperialism. In 1940, with Europe at war, Shachtman and James Burnham led a minority out of the Socialist Workers Party, the American Trotskyist party, refusing to defend the Soviet Union against imperialist attack.

Leon Trotsky answered them in In Defense of Marxism, writing that the minority “is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency” that had capitulated to bourgeois public opinion. He insisted the theoretical capitulation would be followed by a political one.

Shachtman dissolved his Independent Socialist League into the Socialist Party in 1958, backed the CIA’s invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and championed the war in Vietnam. He steered his followers into the Democratic Party under the strategy of “realignment,” and his acolytes ended up in the neoconservative movement.

His protégé Michael Harrington founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1973 and merged it with the New American Movement in 1982 to form the DSA. Two other Shachtman disciples ran Washington’s instruments of regime change: Carl Gershman as president of the National Endowment for Democracy and Tom Kahn as director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department.

In his Letters from Afar of 1917, Lenin called the world war a great stage manager that put every political tendency in its place. The four days in Chicago were a demonstration of it. Workers and young people entering into struggle must be warned about the warmongers and reactionaries who staff the upper echelons of the Democratic Socialists of America and determine its politics.

3. Trump promises $5,000 checks if Republicans win midterm elections, claims Congress may not be needed

President Donald Trump opened the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, Texas Wednesday night with a nearly two-hour speech centered on himself, attacks on his Democratic opponents and repeated warnings of an alleged communist takeover of the United States. He concluded with an extraordinary promise: if Republicans retain control of both the House of Representatives and Senate in the November elections, he would give every adult American citizen a $5,000 payment.

*****

Trump’s cash bribe raises a basic constitutional question. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution provides that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Trump has therefore proposed a payment potentially costing more than $1 trillion while simultaneously asserting that the executive branch could distribute the money without congressional authorization.

A bribe of $5,000 closely recalls the economic promises made by Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, the fictional presidential candidate at the center of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. The story depicts a fictionalized version of the US in which the fascist Windrip wins the 1936 presidential election in part by promising a $5,000 yearly stipend to American citizens.

Both demagogues, Windrip and Trump, are promising a large direct payment to Americans while at the same time presenting themselves, and their loyalists, as the only people who can restore the country’s “greatness.”

*****

The Republican convention continued Thursday in Dallas, with Trump scheduled to deliver another address on the second and final night of the event. One of the most striking moments of the first night, however, came not from a Republican but from a Democratic senator.

Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman appeared in a prerecorded video to introduce Republican Senator Dave McCormick, standing in front of a steel mill. Fetterman described McCormick as “a great American” and said he would work with Trump to “fight and defend the steel way of life.” He presented himself as a “common-sense Democrat” and said, “I’m always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life.”

McCormick thanked Fetterman for his “friendship” and “courage” following the video. The White House subsequently promoted the appearance on social media, describing Fetterman, in Internet slang popular among the extreme right, as “Based John Fetterman.” Fetterman later reiterated that he remains a Democrat and said he would continue to support the Democratic caucus if it wins a Senate majority.

Fetterman’s appearance is particularly notable given the support he received from the pseudo-left four years ago in his campaign. Fetterman had previously endorsed Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and during the 2022 Senate campaign Sanders returned the favor by actively soliciting contributions for Fetterman. Jacobin, the unofficial mouthpiece of the Democratic Socialists of America, published multiple favorable articles portraying him as a left-populist candidate and, in one headline, “the kind of political communicator the Left needs.”

Four years later, Fetterman was appearing at Trump’s Republican convention to introduce a Republican senator and denounce socialism. His message from the Republican convention was not a call for opposition to the administration, but a declaration that Democrats and Republicans could work together around Trump’s trade war agenda.

4. Germany’s 2027 budget wages war on 2 fronts: Abroad and at home

The budget pairs the largest military spending increase since Hitler with the deepest cuts to pensions, healthcare and social services ever seen.

5. In interview, German Foreign Minister Wadephul takes the war course against Russia to the extreme

An interview that Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul (CDU) gave to the Bild newspaper on September 8 underscores the aggressiveness with which the German government is pushing forward its war course against Russia.

6. Turkish government escalates its offensive of wage suppression and austerity

While minimum wage and public-sector pay increases in Türkiye remain tied to artificially low inflation targets, interest payments and military spending are soaring.

7. Ex-president Zuma’s son, Duduzane, auditions in front of South African big business

Duduzane Zuma’s boast that his father repeatedly “held back” revolt amounted to a personal political pledge. He was assuring his audience that, should the MKP enter government, he could perform the same function.

8. Two British ports turn away lifeboats with rescued migrants, amid far-right blockades

The obscene pushback of the lifeboats took place as Britain’s main far-right party, Reform UK, was holding its conference. The occasion saw party leader Nigel Farage and National Rally President Jordan Bardella to end small-boat arrivals from France "forever."

9. APWU bureaucracy enables Trump’s attack on mail voting

The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) bureaucracy is enabling the Trump administration’s anti-democratic attack on mail-in voting by refusing to mobilize the workers whose compliance the operation requires. Postal workers should organize independently of the bureaucracy, refuse to carry out the new ballot verification and rejection procedures, and defend any worker victimized for doing so.

For the second time in six years, Trump is attempting to steal a national election. After his defeat in 2020, he tried to stop the certification of Biden’s victory, culminating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol by far-right militias and other Trump supporters. He is now targeting mail-in voting, which accounted for about 30 percent of ballots cast in 2024, calling mail-in ballots “inherently corrupt” and saying, “Hopefully there will be no mail-in ballots.”

Trump’s March 31 executive order directed USPS to impose new conditions on federal ballot mail. USPS published a proposed rule on June 2 and a final rule on August 26. State and local election officials must submit voter and barcode data to a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal, then present outgoing federal ballot mail for verification before USPS will accept it. Mailings that fail the new requirements can be rejected and returned. The rule gives that campaign a federal choke point over ballots state officials have already decided to send.

In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the APWU warned that the final USPS rule could produce “catastrophic wholesale non-delivery” of mail ballots to hundreds of thousands of voters.

The courts have repeatedly ruled against the legality of the order. On September 4, US District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction against the order’s mandatory provisions for the midterms, and on Thursday the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction.

The administration has also asked the Supreme Court to lift it. That emergency application remains pending, with the government filing its reply Thursday as ballots are already being mailed in several states.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that the Supreme Court, stacked with a 6-3 right-wing majority, will rule in favor of Trump. It already lifted a lower court’s injunction in late August. But even if the Supreme Court rules against the administration, Trump is not playing by a normal constitutional framework. It is possible the fascistic president will attempt to enforce the executive order anyway.

The issue will be decided in struggle. Trump’s ability to sabotage the election and restrict the right to vote can be countered only through a mass movement, led and centered in the working class, against dictatorship.

*****

The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee, formed in 2023 to oppose corporate-style restructuring, is fighting to build a network of committees uniting workers across the postal system.

The very fact that Trump is back in the White House after the January 6 coup attempt shows that the existing political institutions, including both the courts and the Democratic Party, are incapable and unwilling to defend democratic rights. It falls to the working class, the vast majority to which both parties are hostile and which is the ultimate target of Trump’s plans, to play the leading role in the fight against dictatorship.

The US Post Office, first established in 1775 under Benjamin Franklin, was a major democratic achievement of the American Revolution, guaranteeing everyone access to information and the ability to take part in political life.

The use of the USPS to sabotage the midterm elections, by contrast, comes as Postmaster General David Steiner and Congress are preparing to carry out the deepest cuts in the agency’s history. Steiner has established January, the period following the midterms and the holiday peak season, to begin measures such as slashing working hours, consolidating routes, expanding subcontracting and other cuts. More extreme measures, such as cutting back from six-day-a-week delivery, abolishing the Universal Service Obligation and closing post offices, are also being considered.

The fight to defend the post office and democratic rights requires workers to prepare themselves to act independently of the union apparatus. The union officials cannot be counted upon to lead this struggle because they themselves run the unions as bureaucratic dictatorships integrated with management, routinely flouting or ignoring the democratic will of the membership.

The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU), for example, are moving contract talks to binding arbitration, denying workers the right to vote on their contract and freeing management’s hands to begin cuts.

*****

As the political establishment has shifted toward Trump, sections of the union apparatus have shifted with it, backing his economic nationalism or cultivating direct relations with his administration while turning to lawsuits when their own institutional interests are threatened.

The United Auto Workers leadership has embraced Trump’s tariff policy, declaring in August that it will “always support strategic tariffs,” including Section 232 tariffs on automobiles and heavy trucks. Teamsters officials have thanked Trump for particular tariffs and pledged to continue working with his administration on trade policy. International Longshoremen’s Association President Harold Daggett has called Trump a “hero” to the union and credited him with helping secure its contract settlement.

Postal workers should build rank-and-file committees and appeal to letter carriers, mail handlers, rural carriers, other federal workers and workers throughout private industry to defend anyone punished for refusing to participate in the destruction of voting rights. Management retaliation should be answered with demonstrations, workplace action and preparations for broader industrial and political mobilization. The defense of postal workers who refuse to help obstruct lawful ballot mail can become the starting point for a wider working-class defense of the right to vote against authoritarian rule.

10. University speakouts in Australia and New Zealand demand freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk

“I think that Bogdan has definitely been wronged. He has just written his own truth, and the truth is not being accepted by Zelensky. After the Russian invasion, democracy has basically collapsed in Ukraine.”

11. Rubio advances continental Plan Colombia 2.0 in Latin America tour

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio carried out a whirlwind tour of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru from September 8 to 10, signing agreements that convert Washington’s year-old campaign of extrajudicial killings at sea into a permanent structure of military, economic and police integration across South America’s Pacific coast.

Rubio stated the purpose of the tour in an essay published as the tour began, titled “A Hemisphere that Delivers.” Extra-hemispheric actors, “specifically from China,” enter the region with promises masking predatory practices, opaque contracts and unsustainable debt; when critical national assets fall under another nation’s control, countries lose the right to determine their own destiny. 

This was written weeks after the Pentagon took an equity stake in Venezuela’s oilfields, following the January abduction of that country’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Washington’s objection is not to foreign control of national assets. It is to anyone else’s.

The same essay makes the transaction explicit: after the August 10 earthquake that killed at least 331 people in Colombia, the administration provided over $27 million in emergency assistance, and “in turn” Colombia adopted a new stance on border security and immigration. Disaster relief is stated openly as leverage.

In Barranquilla on Tuesday, President Abelardo de la Espriella asked Rubio to fund what he calls the “21st Century Patriot Plan.” The name is a deliberate reference. It is Plan Colombia 2.0, and it is being extended to the entire continent.

Plan Colombia was signed in 1999 by Bill Clinton and Andrés Pastrana as a counter-narcotics program. Washington poured in $2.8 billion worth of military aid between 2000 and 2005, later raised to $4.5 billion by the Pentagon, alongside aerial spraying of glyphosate over peasant crops and a vast expansion of the Colombian armed forces.

Cocaine production was never suppressed. What was built was a counterinsurgency machine aimed at the rural and urban poor. Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace found in April that at least 7,837 civilians were murdered by the armed forces between 1990 and 2016 and dressed up as guerrillas killed in combat—the “false positives”—to inflate body counts in exchange for promotions and leave. A total of between 450,000 and 800,000 people have died in the conflict and 8 million have been displaced.

De la Espriella’s proposal revives and revamps this operation with investments in drones, radar, aircraft, helicopters, air defense, cyberdefense, special forces and troop deployments and the reactivation of aerial fumigation. Rubio received it favorably.

Two memoranda were signed outright in Colombia, and neither concerns drugs. One covers critical minerals and rare earths, aimed at positioning Colombia inside US battery and high tech supply chains. The other covers civil nuclear cooperation. The two governments also opened talks on a joint military base, and De la Espriella confirmed Colombia has joined the Shield of the Americas alliance established by the Trump administration, whose regional headquarters will sit in Medellín.

Rubio then traveled to Quito, Ecuador on Wednesday. There he announced the modernization of the bilateral extradition treaty, while a “safe third country” agreement is near completion under which Washington would deport asylum seekers to Ecuador, replicating the arrangement with El Salvador. He designated the gang Los Tiguerones a foreign terrorist organization, pledged a 110-foot Coast Guard cutter and five interceptor vessels, and promoted investment by Google, Palantir and SpaceX—all contractors deeply embedded in the US military-intelligence apparatus.

Washington also sanctioned seven Ecuadorians for taking bribes from gangs: a former prisons director, several judges and a former assembly member. Every one is a former official. 

The sanctions were an attempt at covering up the pervasive corruption and drug ties of the people Rubio was meeting, which expose any pretense that US military operations and flagrant electoral interference to help install these governments are aimed at combating narco-trafficking.

*****

Rubio’s tour coincided with the sixth US operation against Ecuadorian vessels in under two weeks. The method has changed: rather than incinerating boats with drones, troops now board them, detain the crews and sink the vessels. This is not humanitarian restraint, however. Boarding requires soldiers, and soldiers require basing and immunity. 

Fishing families in Manta have contradicted every official account, insisting the “floating refueling stations” were their own boats, dedicated to fishing, not moving drugs. What is being rehearsed at sea is openly being planned for land operations, including the permanent US deployment along the Pacific coast, with local forces as auxiliaries.

This apparatus is not aimed at cartels. It is aimed at the working class of the entire hemisphere.

*****

Rubio travelled to set up the necessary political apparatus to defend bourgeois rule against opposition from below and advance the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts US dominance over the hemisphere as a theater of great-power confrontation with China. Latin America is being integrated as a front in an emerging third world war.

Rubio’s final stop was Lima, where he met President Keiko Fujimori—the daughter of the dictator in the 1990s who fused emergency powers, death squads and mass privatization. 

The character of these partners disposes of the claim that any of this protects Americans or anyone from drugs. A lawyer for paramilitaries tied to organized crime, a banana dynasty whose containers carry cocaine and the corrupt daughter of a former dictator are being armed by Washington to bomb workers, peasants and fishermen. 

*****

There is no way out of this within capitalist politics. Only the unification of workers across the hemisphere in an independent political struggle against imperialism and the profit system can stop the emerging third world war and the turn to fascism.

12. 10,000 New Zealand public servants hold nationwide strike

About 10,000 public servants in New Zealand took part in a half-day strike on September 9 against the National Party-led government’s moves to drive down wages. The government also intends to cut about 8,700 jobs across government departments—14 percent of the core public sector workforce.

Demonstrations were held in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and many other towns and cities. It was the biggest strike since last October’s “mega strike” by over 100,000 teachers and healthcare workers.

The strike involved workers from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the Ministry for Ethnic Communities (MEC).

The combined action was a significant expression of rising anger over the government’s austerity measures. The ruling elite is starving essential public services in order to funnel more money to the rich and to boost the military budget in preparation for war.

*****

The union leadership is preparing to sell these workers out. Its position is two-faced. PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons told a strike rally in Wellington: “We need bargaining-table offers that keep pace with the cost of living increases facing public servants.”

Later in the day she contradicted herself, telling Radio NZ (RNZ) that if the government made “the same offer that health and education workers got of 2.5 percent [in the first year] and 2 percent [in the second year] and lump sum payments and clear commitments to work constructively with the union, I think that would cut it.”

In other words, the PSA will pressure public servants to accept the real wage cuts that the unions imposed following last October’s strike. The PSA pushed through a below-inflation deal for 12,300 allied health workers in February.

13. Scientific study sheds new light on human evolution

A new study shows that modern humans (Homo sapiens) inherited DNA from two previously unidentified extinct populations for which there is currently no known fossil evidence. The remarkable discovery was made possible by the ability of scientists to identify complete human genomes and examine them in exquisite detail using advanced computational tools.

The results deepen our scientific understanding of how interconnected and complex human evolution was.

The research, led by Priya Moorjani’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley in the US, with graduate student Yulin Zhang and Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher Arjun Biddanda as co-first authors, was published in the journal Science on July 30, 2026.

It builds on more than a decade of prior genomic research establishing that the modern human genome contains DNA inherited from Neanderthals and Denisovans, our closest known extinct relatives, following landmark 2010 studies that first sequenced their genomes and proved ancient interbreeding had occurred.

Neanderthal are well known as the stockier cousin of modern humans. They lived in Europe and went extinct about 40,000 years ago.

Once thought to have disappeared due to lack of intelligence compared to Homo sapiens which outcompeted and even killed them, Neanderthal are now understood to have been highly complex socially and culturally. They were as technologically advanced as Homo sapiens of a similar age, and there is evidence that Neanderthal practiced burial rights and decorative crafts.

It is now believed that, rather than simply being wiped out by Homo sapiens, Neanderthal were outcompeted but also assimilated into the modern human population through interbreeding.

Denisovans, our closest relatives who lived in Asia, died out about 30,000 years ago. They too did not vanish completely, leaving traces of their DNA in modern humans, particularly those living in the Pacific Islands today.

The new study extends these established findings by showing this pattern of ancient mixing was even more extensive than previously known.

Analyzing genomes from 503 people worldwide, the researchers identified two previously unknown archaic hominin lineages that had interbred with the ancestors of modern humans.

The first, which the team calls a “ghost” lineage, split from the human line about 800,000 years ago and interbred with human ancestors in Africa at some point more than 50,000 years ago—before the major migration of Homo sapiens out of the continent. This ghost DNA is present in every population studied, comprising roughly 0.5 to 1 percent of the genome of every living person, comparable in scale to Neanderthal ancestry.

Yulin Zhang emphasized in a UC Berkeley news release that the ghost lineage “is in all modern humans, not only in Africans.”

The second, so-called “super-archaic” lineage that diverged some 1.8 million years ago, never interbred with humans directly. Instead, it mixed with Denisovans in Eurasia, who later passed a trace of that ancient DNA on to modern humans through further interbreeding, primarily detectable today in the genomes of modern Pacific Islander populations. Altogether, roughly 2 percent of the modern human genome now appears to derive from archaic hominins previously unknown to science.

The finding has been received with considerable interest, alongside calls for careful, ongoing verification.

*****

The human genome is a tangle of many family trees carrying within it a complex history of ancient mixing. The researchers built the computer program TRACE to comb through this genetic tangle and pick out the pieces that signal ancient lineages.

The method was first tested against the known Neanderthal genome and Denisovan-linked regions, successfully rediscovering both, before being applied to search for entirely new, unknown lineages.

The study exemplifies how advances in computing power and genomic sequencing have transformed evolutionary science over the past two decades. Where earlier researchers were confined to whatever bones happened to survive and be discovered, geneticists can now look at hundreds of human genomes at the same time.

Through this remarkable capability scientists have inferred the existence, approximate age, and population history of two extinct human relatives despite possessing not a single fragment of their physical remains.

*****

The findings also add a new layer to the “Out of Africa” model of human dispersal.

From the 1980s until the 2010s, this model competed with a rival “multiregional” theory, which held that modern humans evolved simultaneously across Africa, Europe and Asia from earlier populations, rather than solely in Africa. Genetic evidence, beginning with the 1987 “Mitochondrial Eve” study, gradually settled this debate in favour of Out of Africa, which is now the accepted model.

The standard theory holds that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and later migrated into Eurasia around 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, encountering Neanderthals and Denisovans there.

The new study shows that even before that migration occurred, the population that would eventually leave Africa had already absorbed DNA from an unrelated, unknown hominin group within the continent itself.

*****

Taken together with two decades of fossil discoveries—the diminutive Homo floresiensis found in Indonesia in 2003, the genetically defined Denisovans identified in Siberia in 2010, and Homo naledi and Homo luzonensis unearthed in South Africa and the Philippines respectively—this research reinforces a fundamental shift in how scientists understand human evolution.

The old image of a single evolutionary ladder, with modern humans as its final, inevitable rung, has been replaced by something far more complex: a landscape in which multiple related human populations lived side by side for hundreds of thousands of years, repeatedly meeting, mixing and exchanging genes across vast stretches of time and geography.

14. Workers react to death of Montreal Airport ramp worker Oscar Robayo

Thirty-nine-year-old ramp worker Oscar Robayo was killed while performing a routine pushback of a passenger jet at Montreal Trudeau Airport (YUL) on August 24. Testimonies from several workers to the World Socialist Web Site show that Oscar was crushed by the landing gear of the plane because his employer, Samsic Assistance Canada, failed to provide him with an extension cable that would have allowed him to stand a safe distance from the aircraft.

The competition between subcontractors providing ground handling and other services at Canada’s airports is ruthless. Highly exploited workers face gruelling schedules to ensure flights leave on time, and dangerous conditions due to broken equipment and the systematic violation of safety procedures.

This system of profit maximization for operators like the multinational Samsic, which employs well over 100,000 people in 27 countries, is overseen by the federal Liberal government. In 2021, the Liberals entrenched the decades-old system of contract flipping, which allows airport operators to sever contracts at will and award a new contract to the lowest bidder, with a cosmetic reform of section 47.3 of the Canada Labour Code.

A Samsic worker in Montreal told the WSWS:

I would like to say a good 90 percent of our equipment is broken in some way (missing windows, doors, seatbelts), the brakes don’t work, the steering wheels are either rough or too loose and all of our equipment constantly needs charging.

Asked whether he had witnessed accidents on the job like the one that killed Oscar, he responded, “No other accidents during pushbacks, just close calls of the same manner that Oscar passed.” He added,

Third-party contracting is terrible, we are constantly overworked and in a rush to push planes out. Safety is often ignored and the company tries to cut corners whenever they can. We have been complaining for months and used to joke that it would take someone to die for things to change …  working at the airport is only dangerous when SOPs (standard operating procedures) are not followed and they rarely are at YUL with the third-party companies.

15.  Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East

Africa

Kenya:  

Nurses continue national strike over pay and conditions

 

Aviation workers on go-slow over poor working conditions 

Morocco:  

Lawyers continue nationwide strike to defend independence of judiciary

 

Nigeria:  

Students protest over lack of education

 

Non-academic workers continue indefinite strike

South Africa:  

Union suspends strike over pay parity and permanent jobs at BAIC auto plant

 

Planned strike by drivers at Cape Town bus company

 

Retirees protest demanding higher pension 

Tunisia:  

Chemical workers strike after death of colleague

Zimbabwe:  

Teachers refuse to work more than three days a week

 

Europe

Belgium:

Prison warders strike over staff shortages and overcrowding

France:

Firefighters strike for increases in staffing and resources

Greece:

Thousands demonstrate in Thessaloniki against New Democracy government

Italy:

Rail workers’ stoppage in protest over poor pay and conditions

Domestic appliance workers strike against factory closures and job losses

Netherlands:

Transport strike and demonstration against government attacks on benefits and pensions

United Kingdom:

Aerospace workers at firm in Leicester begin indefinite walkout

Academic and administrative staff at Caledonian University Glasgow, Scotland, hold stoppage over job cuts

Further stoppages by holiday camp safety officers in Bognor Regis over pay and conditions

Middle East

Iran:

Ongoing protests by workers impacted by the country’s dire economic crisis

Iraq:

Protest and strike threat by oil production workers over terms and conditions 

16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

Bogdan Syrotiuk in 2015

"Peace for the world! Down with war!"