Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective: The ICE murders in Maine and Texas and the lessons of Minneapolis
On Monday morning, at the corner of Pool and Hill streets in the small city of Biddeford, Maine, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old worker from Colombia with a valid work permit, Social Security number and active asylum claim, was murdered by federal immigration agents. Neighbors heard as many as seven gunshots ring out around 7:15 a.m. Eyewitness video shows agents pulling Guerrero out of his bullet-riddled vehicle, dropping him on the concrete and handcuffing him as he bled from his head.
His last words, according to witness Daniel Boucher, were, “I tried to stop.” Guerrero’s partner and his 3-year-old daughter, “wearing Bluey pajamas,” with a “pink rolling backpack,” according to the Portland Press Herald’s account, watched from the sidewalk as he bled out and died. His body remained handcuffed on the pavement for five hours.
The lie that has now become standard issue for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that the victim had “weaponized his vehicle,” fell apart within hours. That was the story the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first gave Senator Angus King, the same story told about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, murdered in Houston six days earlier as he drove his co-workers to a construction site. When witnesses and video demolished that pretext, ICE retreated to the claim that Guerrero had “attempted to flee the scene” and that the officer fired “fearing for public safety.”
This second lie is, if anything, more sinister than the first. It abandons even the pretense of a threat. It is a public declaration that federal agents may gun down anyone, anywhere, for supposedly trying to drive away—an assertion of the right to murder.
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These murders raise critical political issues. It is now over six months since ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good in her car in south Minneapolis and just under six months since Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents gunned down Alex Pretti as he sought to protect a woman being assaulted by the agents. These murders came amidst a violent federal occupation of the Twin Cities that provoked weeks of protests, culminating in demonstrations in January involving tens of thousands in downtown Minneapolis. The call for a general strike against ICE became the central demand.
Confronted with a movement of the working class demanding the expulsion of ICE and the prosecution of the killers, the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus worked systematically to shut it down. Governor Tim Walz mobilized the National Guard and state police against protesters. The trade union bureaucrats ordered workers to obey no-strike clauses in their contracts, converting the demand for a general strike into a “day of action.”
When the visible federal presence in Minneapolis was reduced through a deal between Walz and the Trump administration, the Democrats and their pseudo-left apologists proclaimed victory. The World Socialist Web Site warned against these complacent pronouncements. The paramilitary forces were being redeployed and the drive to dictatorship was being stepped up. That warning has been completely vindicated.
The agents withdrawn from Minneapolis street corners were dispersed as part of a nationwide occupation. ICE has been deployed to the nation’s airports and more than 40 states, reaching towns that previously had not suffered a federal enforcement presence. Meanwhile, a $45 billion detention buildout proceeds. The military occupation of American cities continues, with more than 2,600 National Guard troops in Washington D.C., 1,500 in Memphis—where a Guard soldier shot and killed 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson this month—and more in New Orleans.
The Posse Comitatus Act, which for nearly 150 years barred the military from domestic law enforcement, is a dead letter. On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the Pentagon’s request for an additional $350 billion, on top of a record $1.1 trillion budget, by declaring: “We’re fighting communism on our very own shores.”
Meanwhile, the killers remain under Department of Justice protection. Good’s killer and Pretti’s killers are free and uncharged. Only this week did Minnesota prosecutors finally obtain evidence federal authorities had withheld for half a year, prompting Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, a Democrat, to thank her “federal partners” for helping “promote public trust.”
The Democrats’ toothless “reforms” of immigration enforcement were advanced to contain the popular movement and rehabilitate the deportation apparatus, not dismantle it. Before the killings, the Democrats had funded Trump’s mass deportation operation without meaningful conditions. Once the protests receded, they dropped even their token reform proposals.
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Now, confronted with two more corpses, the Democrats are playing off of the identical script. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared Tuesday that “the killings won’t stop until we stop the impunity that Trump and Republicans want to preserve.” He knows that impunity is bipartisan. It was Schumer and the Democratic leadership who engineered the cynical maneuver that cleared the way for nearly $70 billion in additional money for ICE and the Border Patrol through 2029. This is the money that hired, armed and dispatched Guerrero’s killers.
Maine’s congressional delegation issued a joint letter appealing to the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general for a “comprehensive, transparent, and expedited investigation.” The letter does not demand the identification or arrest of the killer, does not call for a halt to ICE operations, does not even condemn the killing, which it describes euphemistically as a “fatal shooting involving” ICE personnel. Its stated concern is that “timely and factual answers” provide “closure” and ensure that future operations are conducted “safely” and “lawfully.”
Maine’s Democratic Attorney General Aaron Frey knows the name of Guerrero’s killer but is withholding it from the public, announcing only that the officer has been placed on leave.
A particularly foul role is played by Bernie Sanders, who has said nothing about either murder. His silence follows from his embrace of Trump’s anti-immigrant framework. Sanders has repeated the nationalist claim that without borders “you don’t have a nation” and praised Trump for having “done a better job” than Biden in securing the border. His role, like that of the Democratic Party’s entire nominal left, is to legitimize the deportation apparatus and block an independent movement of the working class against it.
The determination to fight exists in Biddeford, in Houston, in Minneapolis and throughout the country. What is required is an independent organization and program. Every official channel is a mechanism for strangling the movement while the machinery of terror is expanded and perfected for use against the entire working class.
The erection of a police state goes hand in hand with the waging of wars of conquest, as in Iran, to steal oil and other resources, including new sources of cheap labor. The cost is imposed on the working class, in the form of skyrocketing prices and the destruction of healthcare, education and jobs. State repression is the inevitable response to the mounting resistance of workers.
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The defense of democratic rights falls to the working class. It requires the fight for socialism and the reorganization of economic life to serve social needs, not the wealth of the oligarchs and their wars.
Nearly six months after his arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, former Chilean intelligence officer Armando Fernández Larios is living comfortably at home in a South Florida gated community, awaiting an August 5 appearance before an immigration judge on his deportation proceedings.
Fernández Larios was quietly released on parole in March, despite the Department of Homeland Security having posted his name and mug shot on its website entitled “Arrested: The worst of the worst.” The site is designed to cherry pick individual cases to cast all of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants being arrested and deported as violent criminals, even though only one out of 20 has been convicted of a violent crime, and three-quarters of them have no criminal record whatsoever.
“Worst of the worst,” however, is an epithet that is decidedly appropriate as a description of the former Chilean secret police agent. He is one of the principal architects of the first act of state-sponsored terrorism in the history of the US capital, murdering two people with a car bomb.
He is wanted in connection with multiple homicides both in his own country, Chile, and in neighboring Argentina. He is still remembered and reviled as one of the most murderous and sadistic members of Pinochet’s repressive apparatus, which tortured and slaughtered tens of thousands of workers, students and other perceived opponents of the dictatorship. And relatives of his victims continue to clamor for him to be brought to justice, even half a century after his terrible crimes.
How is it that the doors to the Krome Detention Center swung open for the convicted murderer and terrorist, while tens of thousands of working mothers, fathers and their children, whose sole “crime” is to be immigrants, remain locked up under abysmal conditions in for-profit concentration camps like Krome?
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The fate of Fernández Larios remains to be seen, but his release from ICE detention is in line with the decades of protection offered by the US government, leaving intact the the extraordinary impunity enjoyed by one of the surviving participants in some of the most notorious crimes of the Pinochet era.
What was behind his arrest, brief detention and speedy “humanitarian” release? The most likely explanation is that he was “collateral damage” in a frenzied anti-immigrant crackdown by an agency that increasingly resembles an American Gestapo. With the Trump administration reportedly demanding 2,000 arrests daily, ICE agents are grabbing anyone and everyone they can, including many immigrants with the legal right to be in the country.
It is highly improbable that his arrest reflected any change in policy in relation to his crimes and those of the Pinochet dictatorship. Washington is pursuing a policy of promoting and installing regimes across Latin America that defend and even celebrate the repression and mass murder carried out by the continent’s most savage dictatorships. This includes Milei in Argentina, Kast in Chile, Fujimori in Peru and De la Espriella in Colombia.
3. Workers swelter at worksites and in factories, as new heat wave moves across the United States
Some US locations have already seen the highest temperatures ever recorded, as a heat dome moves east, creating unhealthy and dangerous conditions at workplaces and factories that lack adequate cooling.
4. At least 30 people dead in Thailand bar fire
The violation of fire safety measures was not an isolated case, but indicative of widespread practices in Thailand where public welfare is subordinated to private profit.
Unifor President Lana Payne announced late Saturday evening that the union had reached a tentative agreement for a new three-year contract with Ford Canada more than two months before the union’s current contracts expire with Ford and with the two other Detroit Three automakers—GM and Stellantis.
The sudden announcement included no information about the contents of the agreement apart from its three-year duration, and none has been divulged in the three days since. The Unifor bureaucracy even abandoned its standard practice of holding a post-agreement press conference.
Ratification meetings are now being convened for the July 17-19 weekend. The union apparatus intends to corral Ford workers into the ballot booths to vote “Yes” to the tentative agreement literally minutes after giving them an entirely self-serving and deceptive “Highlights” summary of its terms.
Workers should be under no illusion. If the union apparatus feels compelled to use such flagrantly anti-democratic methods, it is because it is attempting to ram through a massive sellout.
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The global auto industry is being reorganized at autoworkers’ expense and with the support and complicity of the nationalist and pro-capitalist trade unions. Unifor in Canada, the UAW in the US and the auto unions in Europe are all complicit in job cuts, production speed-up, plant shutdowns, and attacks on worker rights. During the same week that Unifor announced its tentative agreement with Ford, Germany’s Volkswagen, where the IG Metall union controls a majority on the automaker’s supervisory board, revealed plans to slash up to 100,000 jobs across its global operations and close four sites in Germany.
Corporations are deploying AI, automation and restructuring as instruments of a class war strategy: slashing labor costs and extracting ever greater profits from workers to sustain a crisis-ridden financial system, while governments divert social wealth to rearmament and war.
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Over the past four decades, Unifor has trampled on all the militant traditions of earlier generations of autoworkers and evolved into little more than a cheap-labor contractor for the Detroit Three. Ever since the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), Unifor’s predecessor, split from the UAW on a thoroughly nationalist basis in 1985, the unions on both sides of the Canada-US border have systematically pitted workers against each other, whip-sawing jobs and conditions back and forth across the border, in the name of defending “Canadian” and American jobs.” As the globally mobile automakers have launched a sustained onslaught on the working class, transforming what was once one of the best-paying and secure industrial jobs into a precarious, multi-tier low-wage industry, Unifor and the UAW have offered their services as corporatist “partners” to the relevant executives and national governments, while whipping up poisonous Canada and American nationalism.
Thus the UAW is a champion of Trump’s “America First” trade war, while Unifor cheers for a “Team Canada” based on the supposed common interests of workers and the corporate executives and capitalist oligarchs who profit from their exploitation.
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Already, the struggle to build rank-and-file committees among autoworkers has taken root in auto plants in the United States, with committees rallying workers at Nexteer and other auto parts companies to defeat UAW sellout agreements.
This movement is exemplified in the campaign of Will Lehman for the presidency of the United Auto Workers in the membership vote to be held later this year. A rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker from Pennsylvania, Lehman is running in the UAW on a socialist program to abolish the union bureaucracy and place power back in the hands of workers on the shop floor.
Lehman opposes the nationalist-protectionist policies of both the UAW and Unifor, which divide workers, for the benefit of the auto bosses, and corral them behind their “own” governments in trade war and the developing global war.
Lehman is a leading representative of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, which exists to coordinate workers’ struggles around the world in opposition to the globally organized auto corporations. The IWA-RFC fights to unify autoworkers in Canada with their fellow workers in the US, Mexico and internationally, alongside all workers entering into struggle amid the skyrocketing cost of living due to the criminal US/Israeli war on Iran. This organizational form expresses the reality of the class struggle today, which unfolds across national borders and cannot develop outside of a frontal assault on the dictatorial power exercised over society by the financial oligarchy, opposition to imperialist war, and the fight for the reorganization of social and economic life to meet the needs of the vast majority, not provide greater profits for the few.
The series suffers from this sponsorship from birth. The rot is not in this sketch or that one; it lies in the central conception and the assumptions that go along with that. A history of America underwritten by the man who presided over the world’s most predatory imperialist power for eight years was never going to be permitted to discover or uncover anything of significance.
It is revealing and rather pathetic that individuals like David, who has some brains and a sense of humor, seem to genuinely believe that Obama—the initiator of “Terror Tuesday” and “kill lists,” the president, frankly, of the intelligence agencies—is the apotheosis of civilized behavior and political sagacity. This WSWS perspective from 2017 effectively sums up Obama’s period in office: “Obama's legacy of war, repression and inequality.”
7. Wildfires signal Europe’s third heatwave in 6 weeks as 14,000 excess deaths reported
Six of Europe’s leading oil companies made $21.7 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2026, 43 percent higher than last year.
On the day Burnham secured the party leadership, he assisted outgoing Labour Prime Minister Starmer in pushing through vicious anti-immigration policies. Burnham will take over from Starmer on Friday and oversee their enforcing.
9. Australian government threats to defund universities that fail to suppress anti-genocide dissent
Labor is stepping up a witch-hunting atmosphere against opponents of the mounting Israeli assault on the people of Gaza.
10. Facing debacle in Iran, Trump threatens to attack Iranian power plants and bridges
US President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges, as the United States reimposed its naval blockade of Iranian ports and bombed the country for a fourth day.
“We’re going to hit them very hard tomorrow night. We’re going to hit them very hard the night after, and then next week it gets really bad for them, because next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges,” Trump told Fox News. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
The deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure is a war crime under international law. In April, Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” In June he posted that the United States might be “forced to militarily complete the job,” and that if that happened, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”
Trump’s genocidal threats to destroy Iranian civilization, and his renewed attacks, are a testament to the deepening crisis of the war. Trump has achieved none of the war’s objectives, from overthrowing the Iranian government to controlling the Strait of Hormuz.
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The Trump administration claims that it can wage war again because it had a pause. The White House maintains that the June “ceasefire” ended the earlier hostilities and that its July 10 letter to Congress restarted the 60-day clock of the War Powers Resolution.
The response in major pro-war publications demonstrates the degree of the crisis gripping the Trump administration.
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Establishing US control over the Strait of Hormuz would require a massive escalation. Holding the strait would take a ground war, military analysts told the Associated Press Tuesday. “It’s very difficult to envision any scenario where you could satisfactorily secure the Strait of Hormuz absent ground forces,” said Jason Campbell of the Middle East Institute, a former Pentagon official—an operation, he said, that would require tens of thousands of troops, months of preparation and “very high costs.”
The forces such an operation would draw on are in place. The Abraham Lincoln and George H.W. Bush carrier groups, the assault ships Tripoli and Boxer with thousands of Marines aboard, and more than 20 warships in all are on station, with more than 50,000 US troops in the Middle East—by the military’s own account its largest force in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
11. A revealing comment from former IMF chief economist
Reports from global institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, generally try to present the state of the world capitalist economy in the most favorable light, albeit with increasing difficulty.
But every so often an insight is gained into the discussion which goes on behind closed doors that presents a truer picture of the state of affairs.
Such is a recent op-ed piece published in the New York Times last week by the former IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, who stepped down in June. The article was published in the wake of the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook update.
It described the global economy as being caught in the “crosscurrents of war and technology.” It said there was a “modest slowdown” in global growth—to 3.0 percent in 2026 and 3.4 percent in 2027, compared to the average of 3.5 percent in 2024-25. The slowdown reflected the effect of the war in the Middle east which had been partially offset by investment in AI technology.
“Global economic activity and the outlook are being shaped by two major forces, pushing in opposite directions … First is the negative supply shock induced by the war in the Middle East. Second is the ongoing positive technology shock manifesting in accelerated momentum of the global technology cycle, in no small part driven by advances in and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools.”
This characterization, based on the assertion that war and the development of AI technology are pushing in opposite directions is, to say the least, extremely short-sighted. While AI has the potential to bring enormous advances in the productivity of labor, its development within the framework of the profit system and deepening global conflicts is intensifying all the contradictions of global capitalism.
In the first place, the “success” of AI, which depends on its capacity to generate a sufficient rate of return on the trillions of dollars being invested, requires the slashing of costs and the elimination of potentially millions of jobs—a process that has already started with the mass layoffs in the US high-tech sector.
Secondly, the development of AI, far from acting as a counterweight to the effects of war, is at the very center of the struggle being waged by the US to maintain its dominance of the global economy against its rivals, above all China.
The projections of the IMF update for only a “modest” decline in global growth became outdated almost as soon as they were issued because these calculations “assume that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz begins in mid-July, with conditions broadly returning to the prewar state of affairs by March 2027.”
These assumptions have been effectively blown out of the water with the escalation by the Trump regime of the military attacks on Iran amid the clamor from all sections of the US political establishment that he “finish the job.”
Even on the assumption of a return to “normal,” the IMF forecast growth in the advanced economies is just 1.7 percent in 2026 and 1.8 percent in 2027, with world trade volume growth slowing from 5.0 percent in 2025 to 3.5 percent in 2026.
And it warned that “AI hype and exuberant financial markets could … sow the seeds of macro-financial instability.”
Freed from the constraints imposed by his official position as the IMF’s chief economic spokesman, Gourinchas set out a more accurate assessment of the situation in his op-ed piece. He said his term, starting with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, followed by Trump’s “volley of tariffs” and then the war in the Middle East, had posed the challenge of managing the economic fallout of wars.
“Too often,” he wrote, “these shocks are viewed as isolated disruptions. They are not. They are interconnected symptoms of a deeper fragmentation reshaping the global economy. This fragmentation, both geopolitical and geoeconomic, risks ushering in what could become a new age of war. One defined not necessarily by constant military confrontation but by a persistent undercurrent of strategic economic rivalry and coercion and rising economic insecurity. And yes, also increased risks of actual wars.”
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The analysis of this “paradox” was provided more than 100 years ago by the leader of the Russian revolution, Lenin, in his work Imperialism, published amid World War One. There he detailed that the very dynamic of capitalism meant that any equilibrium, which provided the basis for peace at one point, must inevitability give rise to war at another because of the changes in relations between the major powers which disrupt the previous equilibrium.
The realities of the capitalist system, he wrote, meant that “general alliance of all the imperialist powers” was nothing more than a “truce” in periods between wars. “Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditioning the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one of the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economic and world politics.”
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Gourinchas called for a “course correction” based on a “more cooperative system built on shared rules and continued integration.”
But in the next sentence he noted that developments are proceeding in the opposite direction.
“Increasingly, the world’s superpowers are searching for strategic advantages, identifying choke points, adopting inward-looking policies and increasing military expenditures, all in the name of resilience and sovereignty.”
Gourinchas could offer no solution to the deepening crisis, save for a vacuous appeal to return to the supposed “ideals” of the IMF for cooperation contributing to growth and shared prosperity, because there is none within the framework of the of capitalist profit and nation-state system.
There is no realistic and viable solution to the deepening crisis of global capitalism as it plunges towards a new world war outside of the perspective of socialist revolution—the taking of power by the working class to open the way for the reconstruction of the world economy on socialist foundations.
12. German government expands surveillance and police state measures
The German government is swiftly pressing ahead with the construction of a police and surveillance state. At the center of this stands the so-called “Security Package 2.0” and the amendment of the Federal Police Act. Both greatly expand the powers of the security authorities and are directed against the vast majority of the population.
The new Section 98e of the Code of Criminal Procedure (StPO) allows investigative authorities to network existing police databases and search them automatically for connections. The Federal Bar Association criticized that this would allow far-reaching movement and personality profiles to be created.
The new section also permits biometric data, such as photographs from criminal proceedings, to be automatically compared with publicly available images from the internet, allowing a person’s whereabouts to be determined within a short space of time. The analysis software in question could include the controversial Gotham system from the US company Palantir, which state police forces in Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are already using.
Palantir was co-founded by the American right-wing extremist and JD Vance supporter Peter Thiel. The company has never made a secret of its hostility to democracy and is therefore subject to massive public criticism. Critics assume that under the draft law, the data used for biometric matching could also be transmitted to private providers and abroad. This is the basis for mass surveillance of the entire population.
In several cities, AI-supported video surveillance is already underway. In Frankfurt am Main, a pilot project for biometric real-time facial recognition has been launched; in Mannheim and Heidelberg, the police are using intelligent video analysis; in Hamburg, it is being trained; and in Berlin, the General Security and Order Act was correspondingly tightened at the end of 2025.
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These massive attacks on fundamental democratic rights coincide with Germany’s vast rearmament program and the escalation of the war against Russia. To finance both, draconian cuts are being made to health, care, pensions and education. At the same time, jobs are being destroyed on a massive scale in the factories, forcing hundreds of thousands into unemployment. Popular opposition to this is growing. The government and the establishment parties’ only response to this is the curtailment of fundamental democratic rights and the criminalization of any opposition.
13. Cyclosporiasis outbreak sickens thousands in Michigan and across the US
Nearly 7,000 people have been sickened and 141 hospitalized, while the federal apparatus that would trace the outbreak to its source has been dismantled by the Trump administration and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
14. Brigham and Women’s Hospital nurses return to work in Boston without a contract
The largest strike of healthcare workers in Massachusetts history has ended for now, on management’s terms.
15. WSWS begins posting highlight clips from webinar on the American Revolution
On June 25, the World Socialist Web Site hosted an extraordinary panel of eminent historians at a webinar to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
The full webinar, “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings,’” can be accessed at wsws.org/1776.
Here is another clip:
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
