Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: July 13-19
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Belgian King Leopold III abdicates the throne100 years ago:
Would-be assassins of Ataturk hanged in İzmir
2. Mobilize the working class to stop ICE murder and bring Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killers to justice!
The Socialist Equality Party and World Socialist Web Site demand that Salgado’s killers be brought to justice. This includes the officers who carried out the murder, the ICE administrators who organized and covered it up, and the Trump officials responsible for the nationwide campaign of terror, up to and including Trump himself. The apparatus of police and paramilitary terror that produced this crime must be dismantled.
This fight must be taken up by the working class, uniting immigrant and native-born workers in an independent movement against ICE and the drive to dictatorship. A mass movement must be built to defend the democratic rights of every worker. It must mobilize the immense economic and social power of the working class through independent workplace and neighborhood committees capable of monitoring and responding to state violence and preparing industrial action.
Salgado was only the latest in a series of state murders against workers of all races and nationalities. Two days earlier, National Guard soldiers participating in the military-police occupation of Memphis shot and killed 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson. Even the official account does not allege that Johnson fired at them.
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The same forces being mobilized against immigrants are being prepared against the entire working class. A government that claims the right to seize people without warrants, deport them without due process and kill those who resist is establishing methods that will be used against strikes, demonstrations and political opposition.
Salgado spent nearly 35 years building homes in Houston and was murdered while collecting a construction crew. Magnolia Park, the neighborhood in which he was murdered, is over 90 percent Hispanic and was built by generations of Mexican workers who laid railroad tracks, dredged Buffalo Bayou, loaded ships and constructed the Houston Ship Channel.
Today, more than 1.2 million foreign-born workers comprise nearly one-third of the Houston metropolitan workforce. They include 175,785 construction workers, 128,505 manufacturing workers and 93,348 workers in transportation, warehousing and utilities.
Houston’s working class occupies a strategic position in the national and world economy. The city is a center of American refining, petrochemical production and logistics. The Houston Ship Channel, with more than 200 private and eight public terminals, is the largest American port by waterborne tonnage and a critical center of world shipping, oil and petrochemical production.
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The critical question is how the immense and decisive power of the working class can be brought to bear. Workers must establish independent rank-and-file committees answerable to the rank and file itself.
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) advocate the development of independent workplace and neighborhood committees to prepare mass action against ICE violence and dictatorship. The IWA-RFC advances this strategy and assists workers seeking to establish committees and develop links across industries and borders. Its call must now be taken up throughout Houston and the country.
A working-class movement must fight for the following demands:
Identify, arrest and prosecute the ICE agent who murdered Salgado, the commanders and administrators responsible for the operation and cover-up, and the DHS and Trump administration officials directing these crimes.
Release all surveillance footage, operational orders, communications and other evidence.
Immediately release Salgado’s coworkers and protect them and their families against deportation, prosecution and retaliation.
Withdraw and dismantle ICE and Customs and Border Protection, end the raids and deportations, release all immigrant detainees and guarantee full legal and democratic rights for every immigrant.
Withdraw National Guard troops and federal paramilitary forces from American cities.
Drop the charges against the Minnesota 15 and all those prosecuted for opposing ICE, and release the Prairieland defendants.
To fight for this program, the working class must prepare now for a nationwide political general strike against ICE terror and dictatorship. A general strike means the organized shutdown of factories, ports, warehouses, transportation networks, schools and other critical workplaces by the working class acting as an independent political force.
Preparation begins with emergency meetings and rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood. They must include union and nonunion workers, documented and undocumented workers, and residents of every racial and ethnic composition. They should elect trusted and recallable representatives, establish multilingual communications, organize defense against arrest and workplace retaliation, build strike and legal-defense funds and send delegations to other workplaces and communities.
Through these efforts, workers can coordinate demonstrations, workplace actions and political strikes across industries and regions, developing the organization and confidence required for a nationwide general strike. Workers seeking assistance in establishing committees should contact the IWA-RFC.
Protesters spoke to the WSWS about the terror gripping immigrant communities, the complicity of the Democratic Party, and the power of workers to shut down construction and the ports.
4. Trump, Democrats, media mourn right-wing warmonger Lindsey Graham
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly Saturday at the age of 71, was a right-wing war hawk who was a vocal advocate of American imperialist aggression from Afghanistan and Iraq to Ukraine and Iran. His death came less than 24 hours after a long plane flight from the Ukrainian capital Kiev, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Graham’s strident advocacy of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine accounts in part for the adulatory tone of the media coverage of his death and the effusive remarks of Democratic senators and congressmen. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal urged the Senate to pass the bipartisan sanctions bill against Russia which he and Graham co-sponsored, as a tribute to the late four-term senator from South Carolina.
There was virtually no acknowledgement in the media coverage of Graham’s role as the successor in the Senate to Strom Thurmond, the Democrat turned Republican who built his political career on the defense of Jim Crow segregation. Graham did not come of age until after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s, but he worked closely with Thurmond after he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1994. When Thurmond announced his retirement in 2002, at the age of 99, Graham positioned himself in the Republican primary as Thurmond’s logical successor and won easily. He never criticized, let alone repudiated, Thurmond’s long history of race-baiting and support for the Ku Klux Klan.
While in the House, Graham’s best-known action was to serve as one of the House impeachment managers in the trial of President Bill Clinton before the US Senate. His denunciations of Clinton for lying about a private sexual affair contrast sharply with his later defense of the world-class liar and serial abuser of women who now occupies the White House.
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Graham fully supported Trump’s refusal to admit his loss of the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, and he directly assisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote. He called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, suggesting that he reject mail-in votes from certain counties with “questionable” signatures. He was recommended for indictment by the special grand jury, but District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, declined to charge him. The broader prosecution later collapsed when a state appeals court removed Willis and her Republican-appointed successor dropped all charges in November 2025.
After the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Graham pretended to break with Trump, declaring, “Count me out. Enough is enough.” But he voted against convicting Trump after he was impeached by the House for instigating the attack, and later said, “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.” When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Graham resumed his role as one of the most disgusting courtiers of the would-be dictator-president.
Commentary on the Sunday morning television talk shows treated Graham as a political giant and an intransigent defender of freedom and democracy. After Trump phoned in to several of the talk shows to pay tribute to Graham, Democrats like Senator Adam Schiff and former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile chimed in with their own praise.
Both former president Biden and former vice president Kamala Harris issued their own tributes.
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The adulation in official Washington stands in stark contrast to the response among the broader public, where the news of Graham’s death has been met with a mixture of indifference and open hostility. On social media, most of the commentary centered on the wars Graham championed and the millions of lives they destroyed. Among some, there may be a sentiment that Saturday’s sudden events will improve the state of American politics, if only slightly.
This, however, would be to vastly overstate Graham’s individual significance. The oligarchy that elevated him can easily replace him with another reactionary nonentity. What his career demonstrates is not the power of one man but the character of the political system that produced him, one in which decades of service to militarism and reaction are the qualification for the tributes now being showered upon him by both capitalist parties.
5. Guggenheim museum workers, public defenders in New York City vote to authorize strike action
In two separate votes, staff at the Guggenheim Museum and hundreds of public defense attorneys in New York City, all members of the UAW, overwhelmingly authorized strike action, demanding higher wages, improved healthcare and a reversal of declining living and working conditions.
6. Chilean court moves to overturn acquittal of Carabineros officer who blinded Gustavo Gatica
The June 25 ruling opens the door to a new trial for Claudio Crespo, whose 2019 shooting of a student protester became an international symbol of police state violence, and whose January acquittal under the Naín-Retamal Law epitomized the institutionalization of impunity.
7. Against austerity, rearmament and fascism
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) is standing in the Berlin House of Representatives elections to oppose the warmongering, which is being pursued by all the parties in the Bundestag, and to build a socialist movement.
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Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht committed the worst crimes in human history. The ruling elite is today reviving this criminal tradition once again, thereby risking a nuclear war that would reduce not only Germany and Europe but the whole world to rubble and ashes.
The issues at stake here are not “peace,” “defense” or “international law,” but—just as 85 years ago—pure profit and power. This is evident from the fact that the German government is simultaneously supporting the US criminal attack on Iran and the genocide in Gaza, which Israel is extending to Lebanon. US President Trump does not even make an effort to conceal the brutality of these wars. He has openly threatened to “bomb Iran,” with its 93 million inhabitants, “back to the Stone Age” and to commit other war crimes of historic proportions. He is even laying claim to territory belonging to former allies.
Ruling circles in Germany and Europe are no more “democratic” or “peaceful” than those in the US; rather, they are following the same path. Their response to “Make America Great Again” is “Deutschland über alles.” Germany, according to Chancellor Merz, must learn once again to speak “the language of power politics.” To this end, more than €1 trillion is being poured into rearmament and the expansion of military infrastructure, conscription is being reintroduced, and the war in Ukraine is escalating on a massive scale.
8. California Congressman Ro Khanna detained by Zionist settlers and Israeli soldiers in the West Bank
California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna has reported that he and his delegation were detained in the occupied West Bank by armed Zionist settlers and then by soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on Wednesday.
Khanna was visiting the ruins of Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian Bedouin village in the southern West Bank whose residents were driven out by repeated settler assaults following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, when his group’s van was surrounded and blocked.
He has explained that he went to the West Bank explicitly “to seek an unfiltered view” of life under occupation, including meeting Palestinian families, because he believes politicians who refuse to speak up for Palestinian human rights are “morally compromised.”
According to Khanna’s own account, settlers armed with American‑made M4 rifles blocked the road, encircled the vehicle and refused to let the delegation pass, effectively detaining a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives and several American citizens for more than an hour.
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Khanna and his staff contacted the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem from the van while they were held, and only after intervention by what he described as police officers, following embassy involvement and calls to senior Israeli officials, was the group allowed to leave.
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On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning, Khanna directly contradicted the official IDF narrative and accused the Israeli military of lying about what had happened. The IDF statement claims that troops merely responded to reports that settlers “were unlawfully blocking the vehicles of foreign nationals and members of the media,” dispatched forces that “quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians, and reopened the blocked road,” and insists that “the IDF soldiers operating in the area did not take part in blocking the road.”
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Ro Khanna represents California’s 17th District, centered in Silicon Valley, and has served in Congress since 2017, where he has been a critic of Israel’s mass killing in Gaza and West Bank repression. Khanna did not use the word “genocide” to describe the situation in Gaza until September 2025, nearly two years after the Israeli war crimes began. International and US news media are describing Khanna as a potential Democratic Party presidential contender in the 2028 elections.
Despite an armed, foreign‑backed settler gang and soldiers detaining a sitting US congressman and other Americans in occupied territory, there has been no public statement from the White House. Reports note that while Khanna has been in contact with the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, he “has not spoken with the White House or the State Department” and is still planning “to get a comment about what the Israeli government plans to do with these four IDF soldiers.”
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to present settler violence as the work of isolated “vigilantes,” who will supposedly be punished under the law, even as his government arms, finances and politically champions the very forces terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank. While commenting on recent incidents, Netanyahu promised that “the law will be applied to them,” a formulation echoed in other official Israeli rhetoric after settler attacks.
There have been no reported arrests of the armed settlers who detained Khanna’s delegation, and IDF sources have not only denied his account but derided it, claiming that no senior officers were sent and that the matter was quickly resolved. The fact that settlers acted with impunity against foreign nationals underlines that Netanyahu’s talk about restraining “vigilantes” is a cynical cover for ongoing state‑directed violence in the West Bank.
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The settlers’ “thuggish” behavior towards Khanna—laughing young men with US‑made assault rifles, surrounding a vehicle, blocking a road, calling in the army and boasting of their power—mirrors the routine harassment, beatings, shootings, arson attacks and destruction of homes, schools and agricultural land inflicted on Palestinian communities.
Khirbet Zanuta, the village Khanna visited, was itself abandoned after relentless settler raids in which homes and a school were destroyed, an example of the systematic campaign to empty areas of Palestinian residents and expand the network of illegal settlements and outposts.
These Zionist thugs are integrated into Israel’s political system through coalition partners drawn from religious extremist and Jewish Power parties, whose leaders have praised settler rampages and pushed for the annexation of large parts of the West Bank.
Their ideology combines religious messianism, ethnic chauvinism and explicit admiration for historically fascist movements, and they have created armed gangs that operate with the backing or active participation of the police, the IDF and the Civil Administration.
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In the case of Khanna himself, Israeli authorities have announced only that “the identity of the armed individual connected with the incident is under review,” while the IDF insists its soldiers did not participate in blocking the road.
As in countless attacks on Palestinians, the authorities talk of “investigations” while allowing settler outposts to grow, continuing to arm and deploy soldiers alongside settlers and preserving the legal architecture that denies Palestinians their fundamental rights.
9. 1199SEIU seeks to impose sellout contract on 86,000 New York healthcare workers
The union leadership has produced a tentative agreement that cuts real wages and provides no genuine protection against AI-driven layoffs.
The United Auto Workers continues to isolate the strike by 140 workers at the Lorain County Department of Job and Family Services (JFS) in northeast Ohio. The strike entered its 146th day Monday, making it one of the longest public-sector strikes in the state’s history.
The workers walked out February 18 after months of fruitless negotiations with the county, located 25 miles west of Cleveland. The original bargaining unit included approximately 140 caseworkers, investigators, eligibility specialists and other employees in UAW Local 2192. More than 100 workers reportedly remain on strike, while several have been forced by financial hardship to find other employment.
Despite the determination of the workers, there is no new bargaining session scheduled. Lorain County commissioners continue to insist that their offer of wage increases totaling 12 percent over three years, far below the rise in the cost of living, is their “best and final” proposal.
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The strike is developing as the federal government imposes the largest attack on Medicaid and food assistance in the programs’ history.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law July 4, 2025, combines trillions of dollars in tax reductions overwhelmingly benefiting corporations and the wealthy with approximately $911 billion in reduced federal Medicaid spending over a decade. The law also cuts federal SNAP spending by roughly $186 billion.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that millions of people will lose health coverage and that an average of 2.4 million people will be removed from SNAP. Ohio is expected to lose approximately $33 billion in federal Medicaid funding between 2025 and 2034, depending upon how the state responds to the law.
Some attacks have already begun. Effective February 1, Ohio expanded SNAP work requirements to adults through age 64, stripping exemptions from veterans, homeless people and young adults who aged out of foster care, and extending the requirements to parents of children 14 or older. Since March 1, recipients must document at least 80 hours of work, training or other approved activity each month. These rules are deliberately designed to purge eligible people through paperwork, missed notices and reporting failures. Every new restriction creates additional work for JFS employees, who must review documents, send notices, answer appeals and explain to desperate families why their food assistance has been cut off—even as Washington slashes the funding needed to do this work. On October 1, the federal share of SNAP administrative costs falls from 50 to 25 percent, forcing Ohio and its counties to absorb the difference or impose further cuts.
Medicaid recipients face similar attacks. The law imposes work documentation on adults covered through the Medicaid expansion, shortens eligibility periods, increases reviews, restricts retroactive coverage and limits coverage for lawfully present immigrants. Ohio has some 1.4 million SNAP recipients and hundreds of thousands on expanded Medicaid, and the funding cuts threaten rural hospitals, clinics and nursing homes which are already under severe financial pressure.
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The prolonged strike demonstrates both the courage of the workers and the dead end of a strategy based upon appeals to county commissioners, mediators and Democratic politicians.
JFS workers must organize a rank-and-file strike committee, independent of the UAW apparatus, to place control of the struggle in the hands of the workers themselves. Such a committee should appeal directly to county employees, teachers, healthcare workers, autoworkers and JFS workers throughout Ohio for coordinated action.
The demands must include substantial wage increases that compensate for years of inflation, fully paid high-quality healthcare, the restoration of adequate staffing, the rehiring of workers who left because of low pay and workloads, and the defense and expansion of SNAP, Medicaid and all essential social programs.
The resources exist to guarantee decent wages, universal healthcare and high-quality public services. They are monopolized by a financial aristocracy and squandered on war, corporate tax reductions and the enrichment of billionaires.
The struggle of the Lorain County JFS workers is therefore a struggle for the entire working class. Workers throughout Ohio and across the country must come to their defense.
11. Democrats in crisis after collapse of fake “working class” candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine
55. Trump threatens to “decimate and destroy” Iran as US continues onslaughtOn Friday, Graham Platner officially ended his campaign to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, submitting his withdrawal letter to the secretary of state. Platner is a Marine and Army veteran and former Blackwater/Constellis mercenary with multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was recruited by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and promoted by the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), to run as a supposed populist tribune of the working class.
In this attempt to reverse the collapse of working class support for the Democrats and give the party a “progressive” veneer, promoters such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna downplayed the Nazi SS Totenkopf (death’s head) tattoo Platner had emblazoned on his chest while in the Marines. They also dismissed complaints of sexual mistreatment from multiple women Platner had dated. The same forces just a few years ago, it should be noted, were promoting the #MeToo movement’s witch-hunt of alleged sexual predators based on the slogan “Believe the woman.”
Platner handily won the Democratic senatorial primary last month by appealing to the anger of voters over economic inequality, the soaring cost of living, the assault on immigrants, war and Trump’s dictatorship in the making. At the same time he rejects socialism, calls himself a small businessman and former Marine, and proclaims his loyalty to the Democratic Party.
The much vaunted Platner juggernaut began to collapse on Monday, July 6, when Politico and CNN published interviews with Jenny Racicot, a former girlfriend, who accused Platner of raping her in 2021. Platner has denied the accusation and attributed it to an “establishment” conspiracy to sabotage his supposedly pro-worker campaign.
The top party leadership withdrew its support within hours of the media reports, followed shortly by Khanna and other “progressive” Democrats. Sanders waited until the following day to urge Platner to step down. On Wednesday, Platner announced he was suspending his campaign. On Friday, he submitted his official letter withdrawing his candidacy.
Notably, the letter, which he posted on X, included the parting line, “F___ ICE.” The use of an expletive typified his campaign, reflecting the views of the upper-middle class and bourgeois social layers he represents. They do everything they can to promote backwardness, which they identify with the working class.
Within hours of Platner’s formal withdrawal, the Maine Democratic Party announced it would hold a nominating convention on July 25 in Bangor to select his replacement to run for the US Senate against Collins. The long-time incumbent Collins is considered to be vulnerable and the Maine contest is seen as critical to Democratic hopes to retake the upper legislative chamber in November’s midterm elections.
By choosing Platner’s replacement by means of a snap convention rather than a new primary election, the party leadership is seeking to tightly control the process and its results. The Democrats face a July 27 deadline to name a new nominee.
The US military bombed Iran throughout the weekend, striking about 140 targets Saturday night—the largest single barrage of the week—and launching at least two more rounds on Sunday. The Sunday New York Times reported that, in all, US forces have struck some 310 targets in Iran over the past week.
Late Friday, US President Donald Trump once again threatened to destroy the entire country in a post on Truth Social. “1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, declaring that the US military stood ready “for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran—PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
The weekend attacks completed the abrogation of the “ceasefire” Washington and Tehran signed on June 17. “The United States has stated to them, in no uncertain terms, that the Cease Fire is OVER!” Trump wrote Friday.
The “ceasefire” itself marked the failure of the American campaign to overthrow the Iranian government and dominate the Strait of Hormuz. The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote Wednesday that of the four objectives Trump named in March—destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, destroying its navy, denying it a nuclear weapon and cutting off its proxies—“None of these objectives is fully complete.”
Even as Trump sought a temporary negotiated settlement, both factions of the US political establishment condemned it for conceding too much to Iran.
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US warplanes hit some 80 sites on July 7 and roughly 90 the next day, and the US Treasury canceled the waiver that had let Iran sell its oil. On July 9, US strikes severed the rail line to Mashhad during the burial of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader the United States and Israel assassinated, along with members of his family, in the war’s opening attack.
On Sunday, six ships transited the strait, against more than 130 a day before the war. CNN reported Sunday that the United States has expended half its THAAD interceptors, nearly half of its Patriot interceptors and about 30 percent of its Tomahawk cruise missiles—stocks earmarked for a future war with China. Gasoline, at $3.88 a gallon, costs 30 percent more than before the war, and the White House has asked Congress for another $87.6 billion in emergency war spending.
Launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, the war is now in its 135th day. Iranian authorities counted more than 3,400 dead by mid-June, before the past weeks of bombing, and Amnesty International has documented at least 39 political executions and more than 6,000 arrests inside Iran since the war began. The World Bank called the choking of the Strait of Hormuz “the largest oil supply shock on record,” and the International Monetary Fund cited the war’s energy shock this month in cutting its forecast for world growth this year to 3 percent.
The assault on Iran unfolds alongside Israel’s continuing onslaught against Gaza and Lebanon. Gaza’s Health Ministry put the death toll there at more than 73,000 as of July 6. In Lebanon, where a truce nominally took effect June 21, an Israeli drone strike on July 6 murdered a school principal, her mother and two others, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared on July 9 that Israeli troops would remain in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
12. Australian Rich List: Record high wealth at the top during historic cost-of-living crisis
The Australian Financial Review (AFR) annual Rich List has again underscored the enormous concentration of wealth at the top of society. This year’s listing is all the more striking, given the immense cost-of-living and social crisis facing ordinary people, amid resurging inflation.
The total wealth of the 200 on the list, which was released in May, is $707.25 billion, the highest level ever. That is a nearly 6 percent increase over last year’s $667.8 billion and compares with $197.3 billion ten years ago. At this rate, the total will surpass $1 trillion in 6 years.
Almost everyone on the list is a billionaire, with the count now at 178 versus 161 last year. The threshold to be on the list is $853 million, $106 million higher than in 2025. 145 rich listers saw an increase in wealth, while 33 who remained on the list saw a decline.
The top 10 hold 31 percent of the wealth of the 200, underscoring a concentration even within the top echelons. As reported by the charity Oxfam in January, the wealthiest 48 billionaires hold more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the population, some 11 million people.
Those on the list have primarily found their fortunes in parasitic and speculative activities. The list remains chiefly split between mineral and fossil fuel extraction, property, and tech which generally receives investment far greater than its real value or takes the form of gambling enterprises.
Iron ore magnate Gina Rinehart retains the top spot for the seventh year in a row, with $39 billion, a $900 million increase over last year, enough to take a place on the list. In mining, she is joined in the top 10 by former Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg (No. 4) who saw a 68 percent increase, Clive Palmer (No. 5) and Nicola and Andrew Forrest (Nos. 7&8).
This is the first year that AI has had a significant impact on the list. Of the 15 debutants to the list, 4 have made their fortune in AI, while multiple of the existing rich listers also profited from it. The valuations of these individuals are largely the result of an AI bubble in the market and totally disconnected from their real value.
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As usual, the AFR celebrates the excesses of those on the list and presents the fantasy that fortunes can merely be built “on the back of a good idea.” They cite the example of Tim Gurner (No. 159) who has made his fortune in property but “never gave up on his wellness idea,” that being the highly exclusive Saint Haven wellness clubs. This is the same Tim Gurner who infamously called for unemployment “to jump 40 to 50 percent” and for “pain in the economy” in 2023.
This is a perspective of wellness for the rich, while workers face a public hospital system in a cycle of crisis, being underfunded by $10 billion in the budget according to the Australian Medical Association. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is receiving an unprecedented cut of $38 billion over four years, which will remove or block over 300,000 from the scheme. These cuts will result in increased emergency department visits and deaths.
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In stark contrast to the billions hoarded by the top of the capitalist class, large sections of the population are facing significant hardship. The Australian Bureau of Statistics General Social Survey published in May found that 21.7 percent were unable to raise $2000 within a week for something important, up from 18.7 percent in 2020 and 13.4 percent in 2014.
A March survey of food relief charities by the charity OzHarvest found that 36 percent of those seeking support are new faces, and 45 percent are families, outstripping single parents, the homeless and unemployed, underscoring that it is the working class being hit by the crisis.
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks assembly worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania and rank-and-file candidate for president of the United Auto Workers, issued a statement Saturday calling on the 10,000 John Deere workers in Iowa, Illinois and Kansas to reject the company’s proposal for a two-year contract extension and to rebuild the Deere Workers Rank-and-File Committee, which played a decisive role in the five-week strike of 2021.
Agricultural equipment giant John Deere announced the proposal earlier this month, citing the need for “stability” under conditions of falling demand and “economic volatility.” The current six-year agreement, imposed after the UAW apparatus shut down the 2021 strike, does not expire until October 2027. The company’s offer would extend it to October 2029 in exchange for 4 percent wage increases in 2026 and 2027 and a one-time $3,000 bonus payable in November. All other terms of the 2021 contract would remain locked in place. Deere has set a deadline of midnight, August 31, and no full contract language has been released. Far from rejecting the proposal, UAW officials have announced they will bring it to a membership vote.
“This is a preemptive strike against the membership,” Lehman wrote. “Deere and the UAW apparatus have watched Nexteer workers vote down three contracts. They’ve watched American Axle workers walk out. They’ve watched Dana workers reject UAW-backed deals by 90 percent margins. They are terrified that Deere workers might lead the fight again—and they’re trying to lock you in before you can organize.”
Lehman, who traveled to the Quad Cities (the region of five cities in Iowa and Illinois) in 2022 to speak with striking Deere workers during his first campaign for UAW president, was nominated for the union’s top office at the UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit last month. His campaign calls for the abolition of the UAW bureaucracy and the transfer of decision-making power to workers on the shop floor through a network of rank-and-file committees.
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Lehman drew a direct connection between the Deere proposal and the rebellion now spreading throughout the auto parts sector, above all, at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan, where workers rejected three successive contracts—by 96 percent, 73 percent and 55 percent—and voted by 86 percent to authorize a strike. The UAW ignored the strike mandate, brought back essentially the same deal a fourth time, held the ratification vote on company property, where every “no” voter could be identified and declared the contract ratified. Veteran worker Antwiane Sanders was fired after criticizing a UAW representative.
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The statement also pointed to the UAW Constitutional Convention as proof that the UAW “is a union in name only.” While Deere was preparing its offer, delegates in Detroit voted raises of $10,000 to $30,000 for top officers, on top of the $276,000 salary already drawn by UAW President Shawn Fain. The apparatus consumes $90 to $100 million in payroll annually, with nearly 470 employees taking home over $100,000 a year, while sitting on $1.1 billion in assets, $800 million of it invested on Wall Street. The convention blocked a dues reduction members had been promised, raised strike pay by only $50 a week and said nothing about the struggles at Nexteer, American Axle or Dana. Former UAW President Ray Curry, who presided over the 2021 Deere sellout, was welcomed back as a guest of honor.
“This bureaucracy can’t be reformed. It must be abolished,” Lehman wrote. “The union’s $1.1 billion, built from our dues, must be placed under the democratic control of the rank and file.”
Lehman called on Deere workers to reject the extension outright, arguing there is “nothing to vote on” since workers already have a contract that runs to October 2027, and to revive the Deere Workers Rank-and-File Committee, independent of the UAW bureaucracy and both corporate parties, to prepare for the coming contract fight. He urged workers to link up with workers at the Big Three, Nexteer, American Axle, Dana, Magna, Bridgewater Interiors and CNH through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and to build ties with Deere workers in Germany, France, Brazil, India and Mexico.
“Mexican and German workers are not your enemies,” Lehman wrote. “The enemy is in the boardrooms in Moline and at Solidarity House in Detroit.”
14. Australia, Fiji sign “Ocean of Peace Alliance” to escalate anti-China offensive
Albanese declared the treaties are among the most significant Australia has undertaken with any country. “This level of ambition is possible because Australia and Fiji are Vuvale—family—with a relationship grounded in trust, loyalty, understanding and respect,” he declared.
Australia’s posturing as a benevolent partner in the so-called “Pacific family” is a lie. For over a century, Australian and New Zealand imperialism have been responsible for appalling poverty and under-development throughout the region, while using Pacific Island workers as a source of cheap labor. The two regional powers are seeking to maintain their neocolonial dominance in their own “backyard.”
The Ocean of Peace commits Australia and Fiji to mutual obligations in the event of war. It asserts that an armed attack on either country “would be dangerous to each other’s peace and security” and that each “would act to meet the common danger, in accordance with its domestic processes.”
While it is framed as “defensive,” the treaty creates the mechanism for pulling Fiji and the region into an aggressive war against China, which is being actively prepared by the US.
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China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning issued a frosty response to the Australia-Fiji treaty. “We do not engage in geopolitical rivalry or seek selfish political games,” she said. She called on Australia to “truly respect the independence of Pacific island nations, focus on their sustainability, such as economic development, and avoid targeting any third party or harming the interest of any third party.”
The US and its allies are pulling the Pacific region, which experienced some of the bloodiest battles of World War II, into their plans for an even more catastrophic war. The only way to stop this agenda is for workers and young people across the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand, to join the fight to build an international anti-war movement based on socialist principles.
15. Dengue epidemic infects tens of thousands, exposing collapse of Sri Lanka’s public health system
Sri Lanka’s rapidly spreading dengue fever outbreak has infected tens of thousands of people and had reached epidemic proportions by the end of last month. Hospitals struggling to cope with the massive influx of patients have laid bare the collapse of the South Asian country’s public health system—the result of decades of deliberate austerity imposed by successive governments under the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
As of July 11, the total number of dengue cases reported in Sri Lanka in 2026 had exceeded 67,200. According to the National Dengue Control Unit (NDCU), the dengue death toll had risen to 47 by July 11.
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The official figures drastically underestimate the true scale of the disaster. Because 75 to 80 percent of infected individuals are asymptomatic but still capable of transmitting the disease, Public Health Inspector Sandun Rathnayake of the Mannar Municipal Council told the media that the real number of infections may be close to 200,000.
The gap between official statistics and reality is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate policy of concealment, like that employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when governments reduced testing and manipulated official death figures while pursuing the criminal strategy of “herd immunity,” placing corporate profits above human lives. Since then, every government has continued dismantling the public health system.
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The JVP/NPP government, despite promising to “renegotiate” the terms of the country’s IMF bailout, has become the most ruthless enforcer of austerity. The 2026 budget cut health spending to 554 billion rupees, down from 604 billion in 2025, while committing to a primary budget surplus and annual debt repayments of 5 billion dollars.
Local government institutions responsible for sanitation, drainage and garbage collection have been systematically starved of funds, leaving blocked drains, garbage dumps and stagnant water to serve as breeding grounds for dengue mosquitoes.
Recent inspections by public health officials identified schools as major breeding sites for dengue mosquitoes. An employee at a leading Colombo school told the WSWS that this is the direct result of staffing shortages caused by funding cuts: “Our school has four vacancies for development officers and four for management assistants. Library and sanitation workers are being assigned to those duties. As a result, the library has been partly closed, school cleaning has broken down, and parents are doing those tasks. A considerable number of teachers and students have also contracted dengue.”
The capitalist ruling class is placing the profit interests of big business above human lives. While billions of rupees are handed to major corporations, funding for health care and other essential services continues to be cut. The trade unions that claim to represent health workers support the IMF program, suppress workers’ struggles and oppose any independent mobilization against the JVP/NPP government.
The Socialist Equality Party calls on workers to establish independent action committees to fight for the resources needed to rebuild public health. This means a political struggle to place the major banks, corporations and private hospitals under democratic workers’ control, reject foreign debt repayments, and establish a workers’ and peasants’ government based on socialist policies.
16. Moxie Lieberman: 1970-2026
Moxie Lieberman, a fiber artist and former member of the Socialist Equality Party, died very prematurely at 55 after years of chronic illness and the ongoing assault on public health.
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Born Melysa Ann Lieberman in New York City in 1970, Moxie grew up in Corte Madera, California. Her mother, Kerin, was first the office manager and the then associate director of the San Francisco Bureau of Jewish Education, while her father held numerous jobs, including various office jobs and managing a shopping center. Moxie lived with chronic illness and disability since the age of 19, when a severe illness permanently reduced her lung capacity. The illness left her massively immunocompromised.
She met her future husband, Paul, in a journalism class at the College of Marin, where despite her disability she became editor of the student newspaper. She and Paul moved to Seattle in 1998 where she worked as a graphic designer and rose to become director of a Boys and Girls Club. She was also a needle felting artist whose sculptures were exhibited across the country, including a piece on permanent display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Moxie and Paul belonged to a generation that grew up in 1980s and early 1990s, when the Reagan administration marked a significant shift to the right in US politics, with the collapse of the labor movement and the transformation of the trade union bureaucracies into open agents of management. A critical turning point in this transformation was the betrayal of 1981 PATCO strike by the AFL-CIO, which defied demands for a general strike and allowed Reagan to fire 11,000 air traffic controllers and destroy their union.
The most significant change in world politics was the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 by the Stalinist bureaucracy as its final repudiation of the October 1917 socialist revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In response, the capitalist media flooded public discourse with concepts such as “the end of history” and the beginning of a new “American century,” in an effort to suppress all forms of socialist consciousness.
The old radical organizations fell in line, including virtually every organization that called itself Trotskyist. The only political tendency that carried forward the fight for socialist revolution and the struggle for workers’ power was the International Committee of the Fourth International. Beginning in 1995, the sections of the ICFI, such as the Workers League in the United States, transformed themselves into the Socialist Equality Parties. In 1998, the ICFI established the World Socialist Web Site, which has become the most widely read socialist publication worldwide.
Neither Moxie nor Paul were immune to the capitalist triumphalism; Paul commented that, “for many people of our generation, knowledge of Trotsky extended no further than recognizing Snowball in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.” But the relative decline in the class struggle was short-lived. Soon after the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, which Paul attended, he and Moxie discovered the WSWS and recognized that there was an alternative to the Stalinist or anarchist politics presented by the left radicals at the time: Trotskyism, the genuine socialism of the 21st century.
Both carried out a careful reading of the WSWS throughout the Bush administration, and the experience of Obama—bank bailouts, expanded wars, NSA surveillance, drone assassinations, and the rolling out of the red carpet to Trump—shattered any remaining illusions in the Democratic Party and capitalism as a whole. Moxie’s transformation accelerated with Trump’s election in 2016, which forced her to examine the class character of American politics. She rejected the notion that the Democrats and identity politics could fight fascism, including a conscious rejection of Bernie Sanders and the pseudo-left organizations that supported him.
These experiences led her to encourage Paul to join the Socialist Equality Party in 2018; at the time, Moxie’s illness prevented her from doing the same. In that period, both deepened their understanding of the objective nature of the contradictions of capitalism and how those gave rise to a figure like Trump. The study of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, one of the central laws in Marxist political economy, played a critical role in their understanding of the ongoing political, moral, economic and social decay of capitalism.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was the decisive factor in Moxie’s decision to herself join the SEP, which she did in 2021. As an immunocompromised person, she experienced the full criminality of the bipartisan policy of mass infection. She and Paul were effectively quarantined for the last six years of her life, leaving their home in Tacoma almost exclusively for medical appointments.
The pandemic laid bare the class character of public health under capitalism. The postwar expansion of institutions like the CDC and WHO had rested on economic growth, state capacity and the geopolitical counterweight of the Soviet Union, which compelled limited concessions to social welfare. With the collapse of the USSR and the acceleration of capitalist globalization, the ruling class shed any obligation to maintain the infrastructure that protected populations from preventable disease. The normalization of mass death from COVID-19, remains not a policy failure but an expression of a system in terminal decline.
Moxie understood this and aggressively fought for the eradication of COVID-19, for masking, and for a public health response guided by science rather than profit. She recognized that this was not an individual question but a class question—the subordination of human life to capitalist accumulation. The trajectory from the triumph of mass vaccination in the 1950s and 1960s to the present-day declaration by a senior CDC official that disease is merely the “cost of doing business” traced the arc of a system that had exhausted its capacity to protect human life. Moxie lived inside that arc.
And though Moxie’s health forced her to step back from formal membership, she maintained her political perspective and continued to follow the WSWS. She supported Paul throughout this period and understood Trump’s re-election as a realignment of the political superstructure to match the reality of a decaying economic system. She opposed ICE deportation operations and rejected the illusion that the 2026 midterm elections would resolve the crisis.
Moxie was also a devoted reader of the cultural criticism of David Walsh. And before her hospitalization, she expressed interest in the development of Socialism AI, recognizing the potential of the technology within the constraints capitalism imposed on it.
Moxie’s death at 55 is an indictment of a social order that treats the chronically ill as expendable. A society committed to scientific progress could have offered her medical care free of cost barriers, ended the pandemic, and provided a social existence free of enforced isolation. Instead, the bipartisan normalization of COVID-19 condemned millions of immunocompromised people to years of deprivation—a policy now extended through the dismantling of vaccination programs and the withdrawal of the United States from the WHO.
The mass protests erupting against the Trump administration’s deportation operations are an expression of the social movement to which Moxie dedicated herself. She did not live to see these struggles develop, but she understood and supported the socialist program and perspective that must guide them.
17. Volkswagen's rigged game: Union officials and company executives unite to destroy jobs
The eagerly awaited meeting of the Volkswagen Group’s supervisory board on Thursday was a rigged game organized by the executive board, the works council and IG Metall union. Fearing an explosive reaction from the workforce, the supervisory board–a 20-member body consisting of an equal number of shareholder and employee/union representatives–reached no concrete decisions on plant closures or the number of jobs to be cut, but it did set the course for them.
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The works council was clearly extremely nervous, fearing that the anger in the workforce would erupt in spontaneous walkouts and protests. To calm the waters, it called for token protests at all sites on the day of the supervisory board meeting, but these were deliberately kept small. Our reporter from Neckarsulm, where the entire Audi plant along with 15,000 jobs is on the hit list, reported:
As stated in the announcement, it was an “action by works council reps, union stewards and youth representatives in front of factory gate 6–ordinary workers were excluded from the protest. About 500 predominantly younger people, equipped with IG Metall accessories, dominated the gathering and created the impression that they had assembled to intimidate ordinary employees.
IG Metall organized this with the intention of preventing rank-and-file workers from taking part–a lesson learned from the events at Mercedes in Sindelfingen, where more than 20,000 workers had unexpectedly gathered on July 3.
About 20 to 25 non-uniformed workers left the event in the middle of the half-hour spectacle; one said: “This is nonsense, I’m going back to work.”
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The rank-and-file Volkswagen Action Committee distributed a statement headlined “We demand strikes and industrial action at all sites! Break the control of the IG Metall apparatus! Defend every job!” in front of several plants on the day of the supervisory board meeting. “The first step in the fight against the jobs massacre is to continue building and strengthening the action committee,” it states. “We need this new organizational structure in order to break the dictatorial control of the IG Metall officials and the works council, with their constant intimidation and threats.” The statement advocates industrial action to defend every job, opposes the conversion to arms production and calls for international cooperation among all sites.
The Action Committee invites you to an online discussion meeting on Wednesday, 15 July at 6 pm (CET), for which you can register anonymously.
18. Trump seeks to impose fascistic version of US history on Smithsonian museum
The Trump administration released a 162-page diatribe, “Saving America’s Story,” on July 4, excoriating the leadership of the National Museum of American History (NMAH) in Washington, D.C., one of the flagship components of the Smithsonian Institution, the network of federally sponsored museums. The document was written as a critique of the NMAH’s exhibitions and materials, and upholds an ultra-nationalist and anti-scientific version of American history.
Compiled by the Domestic Policy Council under the direction of former Trump speechwriter Vince Haley and fascist policy adviser Stephen Miller, the document represents another salvo in the administration’s campaign to reshape the curation of national history at the Smithsonian Institution.
The document was published during a week in which the fascist president “celebrated” the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia by overseeing the roundup of 10,000 immigrant workers, as well as several ICE killings, including that of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on Tuesday. Such “commemorations” of the document that stated “all men are created equal” were foreshadowed by the draconian sentences imposed on the left-wing Prairieland protesters in Texas, as a warning to all opponents of the administration.
Trump’s official speech on the holiday at Mount Rushmore, reaching new depths of hysteria and anticommunism, amounted, as the WSWS noted, “to an official proclamation that the principles embodied” in the Declaration of Independence “are, for the ruling class, a dead letter.”
The goal of this document is the same: to suppress anything that resembles left-wing thought and dissent in cultural institutions and to replace it with a conformist set of far-right myths about American history. It is much the same process that the Trump has sought to implement at the universities, including threats to cut off funding for those that do not crack down on student protesters, and eliminate whole departments that they find objectionable.
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In “Saving America's Story,” the Trump administration has targeted everything from exhibitions to signage to learning materials prepared for teachers. It seeks to conduct a witch-hunt against the Director of the NMAH, Anthea M. Hartig.
While Dr. Hartig has not responded publicly to the report, her immediate superior, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie G. Bunch III, wrote a letter this week to staff that was reported widely in the media. He characterized the document as “not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History,” and that “our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy, and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story.”
The Organization of American Historians also came to the defense of the museum. In a statement published on its website on Monday it noted:
The question this report forces us to confront is simple: who has the authority to determine how American history is told? The President, or the historians, archivists, educators, curators, and museum professionals whose training and evidence-based methods have always governed that work? The answer, as a matter of law and professional practice, has never been the former.
The method of the report is to override historical scholarship and intellectual freedom, but its content is to reshape US history along far-right, xenophobic, nationalist and Christian fundamentalist lines. It is a thoroughly dishonest and sinister document.
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The document makes much of the fact that the museum’s materials “support the New York Times’ 1619 Project” which, “in the words of the Times, set out to ‘reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.’”
While the 1619 Project and racial and identity politics in general has some influence in the museum’s materials and exhibitions, the goal of the “Saving America’s Story” is to expunge any mention of the struggles for equality throughout American history, not to provide an legitimate critique of the shortcomings of the 1619 Project.
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American history must be defended, and to do so, the freedom of scholarship must be upheld as a critical component of democratic rights. The decision of the Trump administration to publish this document on July 4 is not accidental. It is meant not only to tarnish but suppress the understanding of the American Revolution to millions of people.
The stakes for incorporating an understanding of the American Revolution in the struggles of the working class against war, fascism and economic disaster are high.
On June 25, the World Socialist Web Site held a critical online seminar on the American Revolution with several leading historians. The purpose of this event was to highlight the needs of millions for historical knowledge, particularly about the great revolutionary struggles in the United States. In that sense, it was a response before the fact to the reactionary mythmaking of “Saving America’s Story.”
Among workers and youth visiting the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) Supporters Campaign stall, there was widespread distrust of Burnham and disillusionment with Corbyn's Your Party for failing to provide a socialist alternative.
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This year’s Durham Miners’ Gala was the occasion for the Labour and trade union bureaucracy to declare its backing for Andy Burnham, who is about to replace Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader and prime minister.
The gala, held annually in the former mining stronghold, was the main traditional gathering of the trade union movement with attendances that spanned upwards of 200-300,000 people. With the decline and collapse of the mining industry following the defeat of the 1984-85 national strike, the gala has been reduced in size and diluted politically. There was a certain boost in its political character when there were swelling attendances during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader on a nominally left platform from 2015-20. But Corbyn’s political cowardice ensured that this bubble burst.
This year, speaking on behalf of the union bureaucracy were Andrea Egan, general secretary of the largest trade union, Unison, and Joanne Thomas of the shop and retail workers union USDAW, alongside gala president, former mineworker Alan Mardghum.
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The platform tried to convince everyone that Keir Starmer’s right-wing leadership of the Labour Party could possibly be only an unfortunate and thankfully brief interruption to now be remedied by Burnham.
20. Farage forces by-election as financial scandals engulf Reform UK
Nigel Farage, leader of far-right Reform UK, stood down as an MP this week in his seat in Clacton, announcing he will stand in the resulting by-election. He is seeking to face down a mounting series of financial scandals surrounding his leadership of Reform UK, by claiming to subject himself to the “verdict” of the electorate.
Farage calculates that having won the seat with a majority of 8,405 in 2024, he will strengthen his hand against his political opponents. But there are already clear indications that his maneuver could backfire badly.
Farage and Reform UK face a concerted attack, ranging from pro-Brexit sections of the ruling class and their media outlets that were previously supportive of his role in shifting politics to the right, to nominally liberal media outlets such as the Guardian, the traditional opponents of Reform UK.
Farage is under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, over his alleged failure to declare a £5 million gift from cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne. Farage said he didn’t because it was a personal gift received before his election and was used in part to fund private security. Separate investigations concern whether financial support connected to his longtime associate George Cottrell—a convicted fraudster—should also have been declared.
It was revealed this week that the Metropolitan Police are separately investigating possible offenses relating to the alleged “evasion of restrictions on donations” to the party by Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell’s mother. Police are investigating whether false information was provided regarding donation of at least £500,000, including the amount or the donor’s identity.
Multi-millionaire Farage declared that he is under assault by the political elite, announcing, “This will be a people versus the establishment by-election,” that would offer the chance to “stick two fingers up to the entire establishment.” He claims he has done nothing wrong and that Britain needs “successful people from all walks of life” in business and government.
But within hours, Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and competitor far-right group Restore Britain said they would not contest the seat.
The only candidate, apart from a few unknown independents—to announce they are challenging is Count Binface, the alter ego of comedy scriptwriter Jon Harvey, who wears a cape and a plastic bin on his head in the guise of an “intergalactic space warrior”. The satirical protest candidate has previously gathered a small number of votes standing against Tory leaders Boris Johnson (2019), Rishi Sunak (2024) and against Labourite Andy Burnham in the recent Makerfield by-election. But amid growing anger toward Farage’s financial arrangements, there is speculation that tactical voting by supporters of the parties who are boycotting could result in Farage’s defeat.
While Farage remains favorite in Reform’s safest seat, a poll Friday found that in a run-off between the two, 33 percent of British adults would prefer Count Binface to win, while only 21 percent back Farage.
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Behind the present campaign against Farage lie concerns that Reform UK—a fragile coalition of politically untested, right-wing forces—is not yet ready to govern. Dominant sections of the ruling class have concluded that Labour under Andy Burnham is better able to impose their interests while placating and policing social and political opposition in the working class.
Outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer was the favoured candidate in ruling circles going into the 2024 general elections, pledging that Labour would govern as the “party of NATO” and impose deep welfare cuts to pay for NATO’s war against Russia. But amid a collapse of his own and Labour’s polling—Reform had a 10-point lead for most of the last year–Starmer was unable to deliver on his unpopular pledges. Burnham is being installed to lead a government that will carry out this agenda, under conditions of deepening economic and geopolitical crisis.
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As Burnham prepares to enter Downing Street by July 20, Farage’s move means he can “own the news agenda in July and August” in a bid to restore his standing. However, the Financial Times captured the establishment’s cold assessment. Farage’s “stunt has already fallen flat,” it wrote. Should he be re-elected, the investigation “can resume and might yet be expanded to include other undeclared assistance.”
It nevertheless concluded with the warning that “unless the Labour government can renew itself, it is still far too early to write off Farage.” The ruling class is putting its contenders through their paces. This is a contest over which party can best intensify the assault on jobs, wages, welfare and democratic rights, as Britain is dragged ever more openly to war.
21. 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:
22. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
