Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. United Airlines maintenance technicians vote to reject Teamsters-backed contract
Airline maintenance technicians at United Airlines voted to reject a tentative agreement negotiated by the Teamsters on September 18, the second time in two years that workers have rejected terms supported by the union bureaucracy.
Of 10,629 eligible voters, 9,072 cast ballots, an 85.4 percent turnout. The agreement was defeated by 53.5 percent to 46.5 percent. The No vote came nearly two months after the Teamsters declared “victory” in securing what it called an “industry-leading” contract for more than 11,000 mechanics and related workers.
United mechanics are joining a series of rejections by aviation workers of sellout contracts. In July 2025, 71 percent of 28,000 United flight attendants voted down their own tentative agreement. At Boeing in September 2024, 33,000 machinists rejected a union-backed agreement by 94.6 percent and shut down most commercial aircraft production for seven weeks. Another 3,200 Boeing defense workers in the St. Louis area struck for 101 days in 2025 after rejecting successive offers.
On September 24, 350 Teamsters at aircraft-seat manufacturer Safran Seats in Gainesville, Texas, also went on strike after rejecting a contract containing mandatory overtime.
These struggles are bringing workers into increasingly direct conflict with the union bureaucracies. At United, the Teamsters bureaucracy is seeking to impose a settlement containing concessions after nearly two years of negotiations. Under Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters also blocked a national strike at UPS in 2023 and pushed through a contract that did not prevent accelerated automation, facility consolidation and the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs.
Details of the United agreement show that it was anything but industry-leading. Proposed wages still lagged behind competing airlines, while United included major concessions in contract language that undermined the value of the pay increases offered.
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United is perfectly capable of meeting workers’ demands and more. The company posted profit of $3.4 billion in 2025 on revenues of $59.1 billion.
Despite United’s large profits, the company sought to offset wage increases with corresponding attacks on benefits and working conditions. A union memo shared by airline mechanics on social media outlining the pros and cons of the agreement listed just eight pros to 16 cons. The contract retained the tier system for worker retirement plans.
The contract also reportedly weakened language restricting the ability of the company to outsource work and opened the door to some work being performed by employees without Airframe and Powerplant licenses, the federal certification held by aircraft mechanics responsible for maintaining, inspecting and signing off on aircraft.
That such an indictment of the contract would be shared by the union itself is an indication that the Teamsters knew there would be substantial opposition. Even the bargaining committee voted only 19-12 to recommend it.
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The resistance is developing as the airline industry enters a new period of restructuring. War in the Middle East has sent oil and refined fuel prices sharply higher. IATA projects jet fuel will average $152 a barrel in 2026, nearly 70 percent above 2025, while global airline profits fall from $45 billion to $23 billion.
Airline managements are using the fuel shock to accelerate measures aimed at defending profits at the expense of workers and passengers. United, American and Southwest have begun cutting planned schedules, while higher costs are being passed on through increased fares. Spirit Airlines, weakened by debt and repeated bankruptcy proceedings, ceased operations in May, eliminating thousands of jobs and removing a major low-cost competitor.
The same profit requirements are driving the offensive on labor costs. Airline mechanics are in short supply and are an aging workforce in an industry desperate to minimize costs on aircraft maintenance. United’s demand for greater freedom to outsource maintenance comes as airlines are being forced to keep older aircraft in service because manufacturers cannot supply enough replacements.
IATA says the aircraft order backlog exceeds 18,000 and the average global fleet age has reached 15.2 years. Older planes require more work, and supply-chain failures added an estimated $3.1 billion to airline maintenance costs in 2025.
Many airline mechanics work extensive overtime and long shifts under high pressure to conduct maintenance and repairs quickly in order to maximize operational time per aircraft and therefore profit for the airlines. These conditions increase the airlines’ dependence on skilled mechanics even as management seeks to reduce the cost of their labor and expand outsourcing.
The consequences of subordinating safety and quality to production and profit targets have already been demonstrated at Boeing. Two 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people. Boeing admitted in a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement to conspiring to defraud the United States over information supplied to the Federal Aviation Administration about the MAX.
The broader aviation system is also being strained by chronic understaffing and cost-cutting. The FAA has roughly 11,000 certified air traffic controllers, who averaged 167 hours of overtime in 2024. On August 24, 39-year-old ramp worker Oscar Robayo, employed by ground-handling contractor Samsic Assistance Canada, was crushed by the nose gear of a French Bee Airbus A350 during a routine pushback at Montréal-Trudeau International Airport. Co-workers told the World Socialist Web Site that he had been forced to conduct the operation without an extension cable that would have allowed him to remain a safe distance from the aircraft.
After rejecting the contract, United mechanics must now go through the arduous process imposed by the Railway Labor Act, which governs labor relations in both the railroad and airline industries. The RLA requires workers to go through bargaining and federal mediation before they can legally strike. Further procedures and presidential intervention can delay strike action again.
Railroad workers saw how this machinery could be used in 2022. After years of negotiations and federal mediation, workers were poised to launch a national strike when the rail unions blocked strike action and set the stage for the Biden administration and Congress to intervene. Congress passed legislation making the unratified agreement binding, and Biden signed it on December 2, 2022.
The Teamsters bureaucracy does nothing to break workers free from the constraints of the RLA. The United mechanics’ rejection now threatens to be channeled into another prolonged round of bargaining and potentially federal mediation while pressure builds for a revised settlement.
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The interests of airline mechanics and all airline workers can only be advanced through the independent struggle of rank-and-file workers to unite workers, regardless of company or craft, in a common fight for better pay, working conditions and benefits.
The next stage of the struggle is for workers to form rank-and-file committees independent of the bureaucracy. These committees would allow workers themselves to discuss demands, prevent the rejected concessions from being repackaged and establish direct links with flight attendants, Boeing workers and other sections of the aviation workforce.
Rank-and-file committees at United should oppose further erosion of licensed and in-house maintenance work, demand substantial wage increases and full compensation for the two years spent without a new agreement, and prepare common action across crafts and companies.
2. Australia: The Victorian educators’ struggle—lessons of a sellout
After twice rejecting union-Labor government agreements and taking statewide strike action, a majority of Victorian public school educators voted to accept a fundamentally unchanged deal that entrenches four more years of untenable workloads, low wages and a worsening staffing crisis.
3. Bond markets in a “meltdown”
Global bond markets, led by the US, continued to fall yesterday in what has been described as a “meltdown,” sending yields (interest rates) to their highest levels since before the 2008 financial crisis.
The bond sell-off has been developing for several weeks. It accelerated on Wednesday when the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond recorded its biggest jump since Trump announced his sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs in April 2025.
It rose by 0.15 percentage points and then followed this with a further increase of 0.11 percentage points yesterday, taking the yield to 5.23 percent, with no indication as to when the sell-off might stop.
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A number of incidents came together to create what it called a “perfect storm.” First, there was a survey on business activity which indicated stronger than expected US growth, strengthening the prospect of another rate hike by the Fed.
Then came a defiant speech by Iran’s representative at the UN that the Strait of Hormuz would not be reopened as long as US sanctions remained in place, as well as comments from a Fed governor that were regarded as “hawkish” and a weak auction of US government bonds.
But these events were only a catalyst for the sell-off which went around the world as yields in Germany, Japan, and the UK all rose due to concerns about the level of government debt.
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Commenting on what it called the “wild ride” back to 5 percent, the WSJ noted: “Many on Wall Street started to believe that low rates had become a permanent fixture and borrowing would always be cheap. Tech startups with easy access to capital pursued loss-leading strategies to acquire customers, and private equity firms went in an acquisition being powered by cheap debt.”
The enormous expansion of debt which has resulted—government, household and corporate—was highlighted by a report from the Institute of International Finance (IIF) issued this week. In the first half of this year, total global debt rose to $365 trillion, up from $347 trillion a year earlier, with total government debt coming in at $110 trillion.
The IIF drew attention to the sharp rise in interest rate costs. Over the past year, advanced economies had paid more than $3.5 trillion in interest on internationally traded bonds compared to $2.6 trillion on AI, $3.1 trillion on the military and $3.4 trillion on energy.
The bond market sell-off in the US has had immediate consequences, with the interest rate on a 30-year home mortgage rising to more than 7 percent.
A major concern is that the rises will impact on the AI investment surge, which has become the chief factor sustaining the US economy.
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The immediate outcome of the bond sell-off is yet to be established. But one thing is clear: US financial authorities have no economic or financial solution to the developing crisis.
The announcements by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for increased buyback purchases at the longer end of the market to try to keep rates down have failed. And the moves by the Treasury to issue increasing amounts of debt at the shorter end are no solution either, since yields are rising there and the debt must be rolled over more frequently.
The objective logic of the crisis dictates two courses. On the one hand, increased attacks by the US on its rivals and competitors in the form of economic and military measures and, on the other, the slashing of spending on vital services at home—a stepped war against the working class.
4. White House bars CNN, MS NOW, Politico reporters from state dinner
The action appeared to be in direct defiance of a restraining order issued by a federal judge, requiring the Trump administration to restore access to the White House for the three media outlets.
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The media pushback against Trump is less a defense of democratic rights than an indication that sections of the financial aristocracy are increasingly dissatisfied with his failure to win the war against Iran, his turn away from the war against Russia in Ukraine, and his inability to carry out sweeping cuts in Medicare and Social Security.
Even more concerning to the oligarchs is the mounting movement from below which has been fueled by economic discontent and popular outrage at Trump’s brazen attacks on democratic rights, particularly in the police-state treatment of immigrants. Trump has faced the largest opposition protests in American history, and there is growing support among workers and youth for a socialist alternative to the capitalist system, diverted for now into votes for the DSA wing of the Democratic Party, but threatening a broader social eruption.
5. Joseph Kishore discusses fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk on the Punch Up Pod
On Wednesday, September 23, Socialist Equality Party (US) National Secretary Joseph Kishore appeared on the Punch Up Pod to discuss the 15-year sentence imposed by the Ukrainian government on Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk and the fight to secure his freedom.
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The Punch Up Pod is hosted by Leila Charles Leigh and Patrick Cote and streams multiple times a week on YouTube, Rumble and X.
In the wide-ranging interview, Kishore raised the political issues involved in Syrotiuk’s prosecution and the growing support for his release, expressed in thousands of signatures and letters posted at freebogdan.wsws.org.
In addition to Syrotiuk’s case, Kishore and the hosts discussed US politics, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s latest meeting with Trump at Gracie Mansion and Bernie Sanders’ appearance with fascist Steve Bannon at an AI conference. They also discussed the rise of the far-right AfD in Germany and the necessity of building an independent socialist movement in the working class.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, delivered a genocidal tirade at the United Nations General Assembly Thursday, calling the victims of Israel’s rampage throughout the Middle East “barbarians,” “monsters,” “butchers” and “the worst mass murderers on earth.”
Netanyahu praised the murder of civilians and political leaders in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Reading a roll call of the dead, “Khamenei, Deif, Sinwar, Haniyeh, Nasrallah and thousands of other terrorists,” he declared: “They’re all gone too.”
He praised the series of Israeli terrorist attacks on Lebanon in September 2024, in which Israel detonated pagers and walkie-talkies, killing at least 37 and wounding more than 2,931 in Lebanon and Syria, Amnesty International reported on September 20, 2024. “You remember the beepers?” he asked, holding up a pager. “Hezbollah certainly remembers them.”
The tirade by Netanyahu followed the warmongering rant by US President Donald Trump on Tuesday, in which the US president threatened to “annihilate” Iran, and the speech Wednesday by the US-NATO proxy Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who defended NATO-funded Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. “Russia’s revenues must remain a target,” Zelensky declared.
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He dismissed the attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as the work of “a handful of young juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number,” who, he said, had killed “maybe two or three” people.
Netanyahu pledged to overthrow the Iranian government, declaring: “This evil regime will fall, and we will all celebrate that day.”
Outside, more than 1,000 people protested the Gaza genocide. Shortly after noon, several hundred people organized by Jewish Voice for Peace sat down on First Avenue at 39th Street, just south of UN headquarters. After the speech, more than 1,000 people marched behind the Palestinian Youth Movement from Bryant Park toward the UN, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported Thursday.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who just three days earlier held a photo op with Trump at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, oversaw mass arrests.
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Mamdani had said he did not “have any plans to attend any protest.” He told reporters on September 16: “To New Yorkers, I have never encouraged them to protest ... What I have always told them is that they have the right to do so in this city.”
In a December 2024 interview with the journalist Mehdi Hasan of the news site Zeteo, Mamdani, then a candidate, said: “As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.”
In a video posted on July 21, he declared: “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government however does and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.” The day before, Trump had written that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.” On August 18, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on the ICC’s president, Judge Tomoko Akane.
The arrests of protesters drew angry responses online. Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of the Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime, wrote on X Thursday afternoon, in a post viewed more than 850,000 times, that Mamdani had campaigned on arresting Netanyahu, but that when Netanyahu came to New York he was given heavy police protection while the NYPD arrested the people protesting against him. Other users accused the mayor of betraying his campaign promise and the anti-genocide movement.
In his speech, Netanyahu denounced Mamdani. Of those who accuse Israel of genocide, he said: “Whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the anti-Semitic mayor of New York, I say this: Shame on you.”
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After the speech, Mamdani issued a written statement: “As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians. Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The statement did not mention the more than 100 people his police department had arrested that afternoon.
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Israel has killed 73,928 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 175,030 since October 2023, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported Thursday. Israeli forces killed 1,408 of these after the ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025.
On September 16, 2025, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. It named Netanyahu, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as having incited that crime.
7. Trump administration moves to gut Head Start, including mandating English-only classrooms
The Trump administration is moving to gut Head Start, the nation’s largest federally funded early childhood program. A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) published by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on August 7 would rescind more than 1,400 provisions of the Head Start Program Performance Standards. Buried in it is a mandate that all instruction be conducted in English, in a flagrant attack on immigrants.
Head Start was created in 1965 under the Lyndon Johnson administration’s so-called War on Poverty. For six decades it has paired preschool with health screenings, dental care coordination, nutrition assistance, disability services and family support. Its rationale was that poverty, through hunger, illness and untreated disability, holds children back before they reach a classroom. Those services are what the rule strips out.
The program was a concession meant to contain the urban uprisings and civil rights struggles of the mid-1960s, starved almost at once by the cost of the Vietnam War. Today it reaches fewer than a third of eligible preschoolers.
The proposal does not abolish Head Start outright. That was attempted in 2025, when a leaked White House budget draft listed it for elimination and HHS closed half of its regional Head Start offices. Having failed to kill it from outside, the administration is now hollowing it out from within.
The workforce is a prime target, and it has been squeezed for decades. In 2022 the average Head Start teacher earned about $35,000, against $60,000 for a public kindergarten teacher. In Mississippi the average was under $27,000. A 2024 rule requiring programs to move toward public school pay by 2031 came with no new money. A separate NPRM, issued May 12 and not yet finalized, would rescind it.
The new proposal would delete the regulatory staff qualification standards and bar programs from requiring or even incentivizing college credentials, unless a position demonstrably demands them.
The administration claims it wants to “give authority to the States to govern group size and ratios, background checks, and transportation practices.” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented the rule on August 6 as “trusting parents and local communities.”
In fact, authority passes to state licensing agencies and grantee management. Parent committees, where parents at each center have a voice in running the program, would become optional and lose their role in hiring staff. Janell, a Policy Council parent in Peebles, Ohio, urged HHS in a public comment to keep parents involved. “This is how we as parents get involved, stay involved, and advocate for our children,” she wrote.
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Head Start is among the most popular programs in the country. In December 2025 polling for the advocacy group First Five Years Fund, 87 percent of voters, including 84 percent of Republicans, supported it. That support is visible in the response to the rule itself. Since August 7, more than 16,000 comments have been filed on the federal rulemaking docket.
A WSWS review of the roughly 8,600 submitted as text found that more than 95 percent oppose the rule, many of them from parents and Head Start staff. One family service worker reported earning $15.30 an hour, or $25,704 a year. Yvonette, whose child is in Early Head Start, described a biweekly paycheck that leaves “about $200-300 to figure out food and things kids need” after rent and utilities.
Naomi, a single working mother, called the program “the difference between life and death, housing and homelessness for my family.” A grandmother wrote that Head Start let her return to school and work and leave welfare, and that her daughter and granddaughter attended too: “All three of us are a product of Head Start.”
Patty, a Head Start teacher for nearly 20 years, wrote that for some of her children, the classroom is the most stable place in their lives, where they are “safe, loved, and given healthy meals to eat.” But advocacy groups such as NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) and the National Head Start Association are funneling this opposition into template letters appealing to the program’s “bipartisan” record, petitioning the very administration carrying out the attack.
The same administration says it cannot afford standards for poor children while requesting a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027, enough to fund Head Start at its current standards more than 120 times over.
The program has been under bipartisan attack for many years. The Obama administration presided over the largest cut in Head Start’s history in dollar terms, in 2013: more than $400 million through the sequester he negotiated with congressional Republicans. The Biden administration let the expanded child tax credit, the most significant anti-poverty measure in a generation, expire.
The party’s response to the NPRM has been press conferences and appeals to vote Democratic in November. On September 14, the AFT, AFSCME, SEIU and the National Education Association jointly asked the administration to withdraw the rule. But AFT President Randi Weingarten pledged to fight “in Congress, in the courts and the court of public opinion.” Their statements propose no action by the workers themselves.
The defense of Head Start requires the independent action of the families the program serves and employs: rank-and-file committees of teachers, aides, family service workers and parents, linked with K-12 educators and the workers hit by the SNAP and Medicaid cuts, organized outside the unions and the Democratic Party.
Their demands should not be merely to preserve inadequate existing standards but to guarantee every child a place regardless of immigration status or home language, to expand funding for early childhood education massively, paid for by cutting the Pentagon budget and expropriating the ill-gotten gains of the oligarchy.
8. US government continues to torture gunshot victim Wilber Garces Perez
Four days after an ICE thug shot him in the back, Garces Perez remains imprisoned with a bleeding wound and a bullet near his spine, despite a specialist’s recommendation that it be surgically removed.
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It is no hyperbole to describe the treatment ICE and the US government are meting out to Garces Perez as torture. Since being shot, he has been moved between hospitals and the ICE facility, denied adequate medical care and cut off from confidential communication with his attorney. According to Lincoln-Goldfinch, guards at the GEO Group-run facility handcuffed him, shackled his ankles, placed a chain around his waist and handled him roughly during a transfer to the hospital.
The horrid conditions inside Pearsall were described in a recent WSWS interview with a former detainee. He reported overcrowded dormitories, inedible food and days spent in solitary confinement without water. When he sought treatment for severe eye pain, he said he waited four days to see someone: “All they did was give me some ibuprofen.” Pearsall is owned and operated by the GEO Group. A previous government inspection found that ICE paid the company approximately $18 million for guaranteed beds that went unused over one year, even as detainees were crowded together.
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Workers cannot entrust the defense of immigrants or democratic rights to the agencies carrying out the repression, or to Democratic Party politicians and their union adjuncts who appeal to the police for an “independent” inquiry. That defense, and the abolition of the entire state apparatus of repression, requires that workers organize independently of both capitalist parties and the union bureaucracies.
9. Delcy Rodríguez thanks Trump at the UN: Chavismo and American fascism embrace
On Tuesday evening, at the Lotte New York Palace luxury hotel, Donald Trump received Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez, flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
According to Axios, Trump did most of the talking and entertained his guest with an account of the “precision” military operation that seized her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, on January 3. Hours earlier, she sat with a blank stare when Trump boasted, from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly, that US troops “arrested the outlaw dictator, real criminal Nicolás Maduro,” and concluded: “To the victor belong the spoils.”
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, sat in a cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, about 10 miles away. Rodríguez later posted a photo of herself smiling beside Trump, calling the meeting “historic.”
The next day she addressed the General Assembly. She thanked Trump for his “willingness to resume the path of diplomatic relations and cooperation,” and hailed the August 28 deal handing the invading armed forces majority control over one-fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves—the largest in the world—as “one of the largest ever signed.” She then promised elections at a “right moment.”
What she left out said more. There was not a word about Maduro and Flores, nor about the more than 100 people killed in the invasion. Nor did she mention Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, the 28-year-old Venezuelan DoorDash driver shot by an ICE agent in Austin on Sunday and jailed with the bullet still lodged near his spine, or the Venezuelan immigrants who have died in ICE custody.
The choreography was unprecedentedly humiliating from beginning to end. Rodríguez arrived on Monday on a private jet with US registration and was greeted by Washington’s chargé d’affaires in Caracas, John Barrett, with a kiss on the cheek.
The Wall Street Journal ran the headline “From ‘Dictator’ Deputy to Trump Ally,” recalling that in 2019 she had told the same Assembly that Venezuela “does not kneel before any imperial power.” Al Jazeera’s Belén Fernández wrote that she “returned to thank the man who delivered” the regime change and resource grab she had once warned against. The Financial Times observed that she “has had to show deference to Washington in a way most leaders would find humiliating.”
In September 2019, as Maduro’s vice president, Rodríguez led the “No More Trump” campaign, which the government said gathered 13 million signatures against US sanctions. She promised to deliver the petitions to the UN. “No more Trump, neither for Venezuela nor for humanity, because we know he is an international threat,” she declared. Seven years later, the international threat has occupied her country, jailed her president and taken its oil. She has thanked him for it.
What, then, is “historic?” Never before has a government claiming the banner of socialism and anti-imperialism carried out so naked a surrender of national sovereignty, and then flown to New York to celebrate it before the world. This has major implications for workers everywhere.
In Venezuela, the state apparatus built by Chavismo, its army, police and intelligence services, now directly guards the interests of US oil companies and Wall Street creditors. In the United States, the same administration that Rodríguez praises is building a police state against immigrants and the working class, and it presents Venezuela as a model for the “Donroe Doctrine” in the hemisphere.
For workers internationally, the Chavistas are demonstrating what the bourgeois nationalists and their pseudo-left admirers will do when imperialism puts a gun to their heads.
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In the 1970s, Washington installed or backed fascist-military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru to impose the dictates of US capital on a rebellious working class, murdering and disappearing tens of thousands. The Rodríguez regime, backed by the same military high command that served Maduro and is now reporting to Rubio, is being groomed for that role.
The explosion is already building. Blackouts of up to 16 hours a day in Aragua, Carabobo and parts of Caracas have provoked nightly protests, with residents blocking avenues in Maracay and banging pots in Guacara. For Thursday, teachers, university professors, industrial workers and retirees called a national protest in all 24 states demanding living wages. University professors report a base salary of less than one dollar a month.
Venezuelan history is full of such eruptions against subservience to imperialism. The general strike of January 1958 brought down the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. In February 1989, when President Carlos Andrés Pérez imposed an IMF package that doubled fuel prices overnight, workers rose in the Caracazo in Caracas and a dozen other cities, and the army massacred hundreds, possibly thousands. Lacking its own revolutionary leadership, the working class saw its anger captured by a faction of the officer corps led by Hugo Chávez.
Chavismo used the oil windfall of the 2000s to buy social peace with limited welfare programs while the private sector’s share of the economy grew and Venezuela’s banks became the most profitable in the world. It never broke the country’s dependence on oil or on finance capital. When prices collapsed and sanctions tightened, the ruling elite and the new layer of Chavista capitalists, the boliburguesía, placed the full burden of the crisis onto the backs of the working class.
Under US guns, they have now traded the nation’s oil and their ties to Beijing and Moscow for Washington’s guarantee of their own positions and fortunes. This is where the defense of capitalism inevitably led.
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The same process has unfolded across the “Pink Tide.” The Workers Party in Brazil, Peronism in Argentina, the MAS in Bolivia and Correismo in Ecuador all administered capitalism, disarmed the working class politically and opened the door to the right.
Their collapse confirms Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution: in countries oppressed by imperialism, the national bourgeoisie cannot win genuine independence or carry out the fundamental tasks of the democratic revolution, because it fears its own workers far more than it fears imperialism. Rather, as Trotsky established and the October 1917 Russian Revolution verified, these tasks can be carried out only under the leadership of the working class, which is compelled to take power and go over to socialist measures while seeking the extension of its revolution internationally.
Of all of the “Pink Tide” movements, Chavismo in Venezuela was held up, particularly by Pabloite revisionist tendencies that had broken with Trotskyism, as the exemplar of some new road to liberation from imperialist oppression and even to socialism. Among these pseudo-left elements, some went so far as to cast the Chavez government as the keystone for building a “Fifth International.” Of this prognosis, not one stone rests upon another.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) alone prepared the working class for these developments. Going back 65 years, the ICFI waged an implacable struggle against the Pabloite attempt to portray Castroism as a new road to socialism that rendered the independent political mobilization of the working class and the building of a Marxist leadership in its vanguard superfluous. Workers in Latin America are still paying the price for the defeats and betrayals inflicted under their banner of substituting petty-bourgeois guerrillaism for proletarian revolution.
The only way forward for Venezuelan workers is a political break with every faction of the bourgeoisie, including Chavismo and the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left forces that served as its cheerleaders. The decisive task is that of assimilating the lessons of the long history of struggle of Trotskyism against revisionism and its intersection with the tumultuous struggles of the whole past period. This is the irreplaceable foundation for building sections of the ICFI across Latin America and uniting the working class throughout the hemisphere and internationally in the fight for world socialist revolution.
10. IG Metall union ties pay to company profits, preparing new cuts for autoworkers in Germany
By linking wage rises to individual firms' profit margins, IG Metall is setting up deeper cuts in real wages for workers in the crisis-hit auto and machine-building sectors, while dangling bonuses for arms firms.
In the space of one week this month, two of the most prominent figures of American “democratic socialism” have appeared alongside prominent fascists in the United States.
On September 15, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, an event on AI organized by the Future of Life Institute, which has relations with the far-right. Sanders spoke just prior to Steve Bannon, the fascist advisor to Donald Trump, who used the occasion to launch into a vicious anti-Chinese rant.
Six days after the assembly, on September 21, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the DSA, invited Donald Trump to Gracie Mansion, their third meeting since November. The two held a joint press conference on the lawn of the mayor’s residence, where Trump patted Mamdani, and the mayor presented Trump as a political ally in improving the conditions of New Yorkers.
Both events were reported prominently in the corporate media, which treated them as expressions of a supposedly “unlikely” coming together of political opposites. The various publications associated with the DSA and the organizations in and around it, however, have said nothing.
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For a decade the DSA and the publications around it have justified their work inside the Democratic Party as the building of an opposition to the right. What this month has shown is that the Sanders wing of the party has entered a bloc with Bannon, while the DSA’s most celebrated official is in a political partnership with Donald Trump.
The alignment with the far right is not a deviation from the DSA’s politics but their result, and the pseudo-left cannot report it because it cannot explain it without exposing itself.
Qui tacet consentire videtur: Silence implies consent.
12. Texas executes Ker’Sean Ramey a week after killing his codefendant
Ramey was condemned by a jury from which prosecutors had removed every prospective black juror, after a trial in which he was represented by a part-time lawyer who worked days as a dentist and had never tried a capital case.
13. New York City experiences the second outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease this year
New York City is experiencing yet another outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease—the second this year alone. Previous multiple clusters of infection have been recorded in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. This time it is hitting the South Bronx, while the previous one, centered in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, took place in July, only two months ago.
That outbreak, one of the city’s worst, killed a total of 11 people, with 90 officially recorded infections. So far, this new occurrence has caused two deaths with 22 reported infections, with three people currently hospitalized. Those figures are expected to rise as testing proceeds. As of Monday, September 22, the search for infections continues to expand to additional neighborhoods beyond the initial cluster.
Legionella is caused by bacteria typically found in infected water droplets dispersed in air. The main source is thought to be rooftop cooling towers on large buildings with central air conditioning. The towers provide heat dissipation via transfer to water which is volatilized and dispersed into the surrounding air.
The water to be used for this process is kept in rooftop tanks. If the tanks are not drained and disinfected at frequent intervals, bacteria may accumulate and contaminate the water which then is spewed into the surrounding neighborhood’s air, to be inhaled by passersby, resulting in infection. Legionella bacteria thrive in warm water (77–113°F / 25–45°C) and stagnant or low-flow water systems.
Direct, person-to-person transmission is not thought to occur, or perhaps to be very infrequent, so some other method of dispersal must spread the bacteria from place to place in neighborhoods that experience outbreaks, such as transfer of contaminated water.
Legionnaires’ disease is a severe form of pneumonia characterized by fever, cough and difficulty breathing. Most cases can be treated with antibiotics, if caught soon enough. The people at highest risk include adults over 50, smokers and those with chronic lung disease or weakened immune systems. The incubation period is 2-14 days following inhalation. The disease occurs nationwide, with about 5,000 to 8,500 cases of Legionnaires’ disease diagnosed in the US each year.
This past May, the new Mamdani administration mandated a 31-day cycle of testing rooftop water tanks for Legionella bacteria. During the latest outbreak, two of the buildings with positive tests were out of compliance with reporting requirements, indicating an insufficient level of enforcement. Health experts have proposed both stricter supervision of compliance with the revised testing protocol and more rapid response to identified contamination.
The disease, first identified in 1976 during an outbreak at a Pennsylvania American Legion convention in Philadelphia, is an ongoing problem in New York City, which has an unusually high, chronic case rate. Approximately 200 to 700 people are diagnosed with the disease annually in the city, most of whom require hospitalization, with roughly a dozen cases resulting in death.
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The latest outbreak has a novel feature. In addition to cooling towers on residential buildings that have been found to be infected, positive results have also been found in cooling towers at Yankee Stadium, Lincoln Hospital and the Boricua College Bronx Campus.
It is also alarming that New York City’s regulations in regard to Legionnaires’ disease are by far the strongest in the US. The dangers in other large cities could well be greater, and, given that the symptoms of Legionnaires could well be misdiagnosed as pneumonia, the current figure of 5,000 to 8,500 cases annually could be a sizeable underestimate.
The danger is also increased by the acceleration of global warming, which will, among other effects, increase the use of air conditioning. The capitalist crisis which is responsible for global warming is creating conditions for the increase in the spread, not only of Legionella but many other diseases as well, such as Ebola. Meanwhile, at the same time, healthcare is under attack around the world.
14. A further exchange with Brazilian historian Mário Maestri on Trotskyism and the American Revolution
Mário Maestri has sent a reply to our article “Once again in defense of the American Revolution: A reply to a Brazilian historian,” developing his position on the character of the American Revolution and Brazilian independence, to which the WSWS has in turn responded.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his anti-Russia address to the UN General Assembly to announce a National Centre for Information Defence that will be used to suppress political dissent at home.
16. Oppose Unite’s collaboration with Labour government over the jobs cull at Jaguar Land Rover
Britain’s largest carmaker has announced plans to eliminate around 4,000 jobs globally over the next two years, the cuts falling in the UK.
17. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Côte d’Ivoire:
Nigeria:
Sierra Leone:
South Africa:
Estonia:
Thousands of teachers in national strike over pay and conditions
Italy:
Hundreds of workers at Apple retail stores hold one-day strike for better working conditions
Norway:
Train drivers at Vy rail walk out over pay and conditions differential after merger
United Kingdom:
Academic staff at Dundee University, Scotland begin five-week stoppage over job cuts
Journalists at the Lancet, walk out over pay
Teachers walkout at two schools in northwest England over academy transfer plans
Furniture manufacturer workers in Melksham strike over pay
Indefinite stoppage by bread delivery drivers in Bristol over pay
Middle East
Lebanon:
Strike by civil servants in response to soaring inflation and high cost of living
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
