Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. United Kingdom: Who is prospective Labour Party leader and prime minister, Andy Burnham?—Part One
Labour is presiding over a social catastrophe, including the deepest levels of poverty in 30 years, and trailing the far-right Reform, the Conservatives and the Greens in general election polls. If he successfully becomes an MP, Burnham is expected to challenge Starmer for the Labour leadership and to replace him in Downing Street.
The World Socialist Web Site condemns in the strongest terms the latest attempt by local authorities in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, to silence Luis Daniel Prieto Moreno, a labor rights activist and churro vendor known locally as 'Churros el Brayan.'
Municipal officials, acting through compliant courts and coordinated legal harassment, have obtained a court order barring Prieto Moreno from approaching the seat of local government where he has long exercised his constitutional right to protest in this city in central Mexico.
Seven separate criminal complaints have been filed against him, including by four councilwomen connected to the administration of municipal president Edgar González of the right-wing Movimiento Ciudadano party.
These measures represent a sharp escalation of a years-long campaign of state and corporate persecution against a worker who has committed no act of violence and whose only offense has been to speak the truth.
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Prieto Moreno has maintained a regular protest presence outside the Lagos de Moreno municipal presidency, using hand-lettered signs and chants to denounce corruption and abuse of power by local officials. His latest protests have focused on two issues: accusations that municipal police chief Miguel Ángel Pinzón was involved in the forced disappearance of Luis Fernando Cervantes Moya, a twenty-two-year-old mechanic who vanished in February 2024 following an alleged detention by municipal police on a local highway, with authorities subsequently refusing to provide his family any information about his whereabouts.
The second involves labor exploitation at EML (Estructuras y Montajes de Lagos), a multimillion-peso construction and infrastructure firm owned by municipal president Edgar González himself.
It takes considerable courage to speak publicly on either of these matters. Lagos de Moreno is one of the municipalities in Mexico with the highest number of disappeared persons—more than 600—and has a long history of repression.
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The response from the state and corporate interests has been relentless. A local labor official sent municipal police armed with machine guns to arrest him under a falsified rape accusation. In late 2017, his original organizing page was also shut down by Facebook. On January 31, 2018, two assailants beat him with a metal pipe outside his home, and months later his car was set on fire in an act of arson.
In February 2019, thugs attempted a nighttime home invasion days after he published a solidarity video for US autoworkers. In July 2020, police pointed guns at him to force him to move his churro cart. In early 2021, he was illegally arrested on orders from the then-mayor while peacefully protesting outside city hall; during the detention, which was carried out without a warrant, officers slashed his clothing with a knife and filmed him in an attempt at public humiliation before being compelled to release him.
The case of Luis Daniel Prieto Moreno illustrates with stark clarity the character of capitalist rule in Mexico and internationally. A worker who sells churros for a living, who protests with hand-written signs in front of a public building, who operates a Facebook page—this is what the municipal government of Lagos de Moreno, backed by the judicial apparatus of Jalisco, has mobilized its full legal and political resources to suppress. The reason is not difficult to understand: Prieto Moreno connects corporate exploitation to political power and refuses to be silenced.
To oppose the growing attacks on their democratic rights, workers internationally must recognize that the ruling classes operate like a mafia to suppress opposition, and must respond by organizing independent rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees entirely free from pro-capitalist trade unions and political parties, which have repeatedly failed to protect workers and have instead facilitated state repression.
As workers from the United States have expressed their solidarity with Luis Daniel Prieto Moreno, the international working class is the most powerful force in history when it stands as a unified body—animated by the conviction that an injury to one is an injury to all, and capable of transforming individual acts of courage into a coordinated global struggle against corporate and state violence.
3. Sri Lankan apparel company ELPHIS LANKA locks out workers for taking action demanding job security
Sri Lankan apparel company ELPHIS LANKA, located in Ekala, about eight miles from Colombo, closed its factory gates on May 25 to more than 500 employees who had begun a go-slow protest during the previous week, demanding job security.
The employees, most of them women, launched the action on May 19 after learning that the Korean-owned company was planning to sell the factory to an unknown company. The facility, which has been operating since October 1991, produces jackets, blouses, trousers and blazers for export markets.
They were informed by the company on Sunday, May 24 that the factory would be closed from the next day. When they arrived on Monday morning, they found a notice pasted on the gate—supposedly by the “new owner”—stating that “the institution will not reopen until you inform us in writing through the Deputy Labour Commissioner of the Ja-Ela Labour Office that you agree to cease your illegal strike actions and return to work.”
This allegation is spurious because it was, in fact, illegal for ELPHIS to transfer employees to another company without their knowledge and without clarifying what their job security and working conditions would be.
Some worker activists rushed to the nearby Ja-Ela Labour Office and then to the Gampaha District Labour Office to discuss their problems. However, officials turned them away, telling them to lodge a complaint with the Labour Department.
The workers entered into struggle spontaneously; the Ceylon Mercantile, Industrial and General Workers Union (CMU) did not intervene on their behalf.
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All sections of the working class face the same assault on living conditions and democratic rights, as the government seeks to impose the burden of the global fuel crisis on the working class, on top of austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund.
Apparel workers must build their own action committees in every factory, excluding trade union bureaucrats and all capitalist parties from these committees. This will enable them to unite with workers in other sectors in a common struggle to defend jobs, wages and working conditions.
Sri Lankan workers must unite with their class brothers and sisters across Asia and in every country, who are being driven into struggles against the same attacks, often imposed by multinational corporations. To coordinate their struggles internationally, workers must join and fight to build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
This struggle must be guided by a socialist political perspective, aimed at abolishing the capitalist system, and establishing workers’ ownership and control over the means of production.
4. Florida executes Andrew Lukehart, eighth victim of DeSantis death machine in 2026
Lukehart was convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse in Duval County for the February 25, 1996, death of Gabrielle Hanshaw, the five-month-old daughter of his girlfriend, Misty Rhue. On the afternoon of the killing, Rhue took her two-year-old, who had been ill, to a bedroom for a nap. Lukehart was left to care for Gabrielle in another room.
At approximately 5 p.m., Rhue heard her car start in the driveway and looked out to see Lukehart driving away. She could not find the baby. About 30 minutes later, Lukehart called from a convenience store and told Rhue to call 911, claiming the baby had been kidnapped. That evening, Lukehart was found without shirt or shoes in rural Clay County, his car abandoned nearby with the engine running.
During questioning the following day, Lukehart told a Clay County Sheriff’s lieutenant that he had dropped Gabrielle on her head and then shaken her and that the baby had died at Rhue’s residence. He said he had panicked, left the house and thrown the baby’s body into a pond, where law enforcement recovered the infant’s body.
At trial in February 1997, Lukehart chose to testify in his own defense. He described how, while changing Gabrielle’s diaper on the floor, the baby repeatedly pushed up on her elbows. He testified that he forcefully and repeatedly pushed her head and neck onto the floor, using what he described as “quite a bit” of force, “until the last time I did it she just stopped moving.” He said he tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and, when the baby did not revive, panicked and drove to a rural area, also accidentally hitting her head on the car door as he got out. He acknowledged at trial that he did not intend to kill Gabrielle but was responsible for her death.
The jury recommended death by a vote of 9 to 3, a fact that would take on constitutional significance as his appeals extended across nearly three decades.
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The crime for which Lukehart was executed cannot be separated from the life that produced him. The evidence presented at the penalty phase, and developed through years of subsequent litigation, describes an individual who had been systematically destroyed long before he ever came before a judge.
Lukehart’s father was an alcoholic who physically and emotionally abused him and his sister, until Lukehart was at least four or five years old. When he was approximately 10, an uncle who had been his primary supporter and confidant died. Around the same time, another uncle began sexually abusing him. When he was 17 or 18, his sister Jennifer was killed in a car accident, a loss that left him nearly suicidal.
Lukehart showed signs of psychological disturbance from childhood. His parents, unaware of the sexual abuse and unable to grasp the full extent of his problems, sent him sporadically to counseling. By the time he was 16, counseling records described him as “clearly a disturbed individual” and noted that family dynamics had contributed significantly to his emotional deterioration. In ninth grade, a teacher reported fearing he would harm himself. His father gave him his first drink of alcohol at age 4; by 13, he was drinking heavily. He began using marijuana at age 8.
A forensic psychologist, Dr. Harry Krop, evaluated Lukehart after the crime and testified at the penalty phase that he remained a “seriously disturbed individual.” Dr. Krop diagnosed him with intermittent explosive disorder, substance abuse—especially alcohol—post-traumatic stress disorder arising from childhood sexual abuse, and a personality disorder with antisocial, immature and borderline features. He further testified that Lukehart’s IQ of 79 placed him in the borderline range of intellectual disability.
In Dr. Krop’s assessment, Lukehart acted violently that day because he could not cope with trying and failing to care for a crying infant, and whatever he did to stop her crying seemed only to escalate the situation.
Three of the 12 jurors who voted on Lukehart’s sentence agreed that this history was sufficient to spare his life. Under Florida law as it existed at the time of his trial, that was not enough.
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Lukehart’s execution is the eighth carried out in Florida this year and is inseparable from the systematic acceleration of capital punishment that DeSantis has made a centerpiece of his political tenure. In 2025, DeSantis oversaw 19 executions—the most in a single year in Florida’s modern history, more than double the previous record of eight set in 1984 and matched in 2014. After carrying out no executions in 2020, 2021 or 2022, Florida executed six people in 2023, one in 2024 and then surged to 19 in 2025. The state currently has more than 250 inmates on death row.
The pace of Florida executions has been matched by legislative changes designed to lower the legal barriers to carrying out death sentences. In 2023, DeSantis signed legislation reducing the jury threshold for a death sentence recommendation from unanimous to 8 of 12 jurors—one of the lowest standards in the country. Under the previous system, a single holdout juror could block a death sentence. Under the new law, prosecutors need the agreement of only two-thirds of the panel to send a defendant to death row.
Florida’s death penalty surge does not operate in isolation. It functions as both a model for and an expression of the Trump administration’s national death penalty program. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” directing the attorney general to pursue capital punishment “for all crimes of a severity demanding its use” and specifically targeting the murders of law enforcement officers and capital crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has documented across months and years of coverage of the American death penalty’s relentless advance, the common thread in case after case is the same: defendants shaped by poverty, abuse, neglect and untreated illness; legal proceedings their attorneys say failed to adequately present that history to the juries that decided whether they would live or die; and a political establishment that has made the demonstration of the state’s capacity to kill a tool of social intimidation directed at the working class.
5. Trump taps personal fixers to lead Justice Department and intelligence apparatus
This week President Donald Trump moved to elevate Todd Blanche to attorney general and install Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, a further stage in the transformation of the state apparatus into a personal instrument of presidential dictatorship.
Neither appointment is based on competence, independence or adherence to the Constitution. Both men have been selected because they have demonstrated unconditional loyalty to Trump and a willingness to use state power against his political opponents.
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The response of the Democrats has been to frame their opposition almost entirely in terms of “national security” and the smooth functioning of the intelligence apparatus. Their central concern is not that Trump is erecting a dictatorship, but that his appointments could complicate the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the warrantless spying authority used by the US government to surveil foreign targets while sweeping up the communications of Americans.
Representative Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, complained that installing Pulte days before the expiration of Section 702 was “a stupider thing to do” than almost anything he could imagine. Representative Adam Schiff likewise warned that Pulte’s appointment would make it more difficult to secure votes for the surveillance program.
These statements expose the Democrats’ real priorities. They do not oppose the intelligence agencies, mass surveillance or the apparatus of repression. They fear that Trump’s blatant personalist use of these institutions will undermine bipartisan support for the very police-state powers they have long defended.
The appointments of Blanche and Pulte demonstrate that Trump’s second administration is not merely staffed by loyalists. It is being organized as a personal dictatorship, in which the Justice Department, financial regulators and intelligence agencies are subordinated to the president’s vendettas and the interests of the fascist movement around him.
On the second day of the Minnesota Republican Party convention in Duluth, Minnesota, delegates approved a motion to hold a minute of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted in the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
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The moment of silence at the Duluth convention drew the mildest of objections from Democratic Party officials who called it “inappropriate and offensive.” For Republicans, the call for Chauvin’s exoneration was not objected to but, according to the Associated Press, there were expressions of concern that the action was politically damaging.
The reactionary moment of silence at the convention in Duluth takes place while there is an ongoing campaign in far right and fascist circles challenging Chauvin’s conviction. Arguments that Floyd’s death was primarily caused by drug abuse or underlying health conditions have been circulating since his death and were presented as evidence during Chauvin’s court proceedings.
These claims were rejected by the jury after extensive expert testimony. Legal analysts and medical experts cited by the Washington Post and NPR have noted that the jury’s verdict reflected the weight of video evidence and medical findings presented at trial.
Additionally, in exchange for a capped federal sentence, Chauvin admitted that he willfully deprived George Floyd of his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable force. He acknowledged that he kept his knee on Floyd’s neck and back even after Floyd lost consciousness and stopped breathing.
Chauvin also admitted to willfully violating Floyd’s rights by failing to provide him with medical aid when he was in distress and had stopped breathing.
Meanwhile, the renewed campaign to exonerate Chauvin is taking place following the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January 2026 by federal immigration officials and ICE agents. While these murders were also captured on smartphone video from multiple angles along with police body cameras and have been seen by tens of millions of people, no charges have been brought against the killers of Good and Pretti.
7. American Axle workers defy strikebreaking as workers press for broader walkout across auto industry
One thousand American Axle workers continue their walkout which began on Monday against the key auto supplier and are reporting efforts by the company to move product across their picket lines while provocations against pickets have been reportedly instigated by company security guards.
8. ECB reports shift away from US Treasury bonds towards gold
The annual report on the international role of the euro published by the European Central Bank (ECB) this week points to the growing fragmentation of the global financial system amid attempts to shift away from dependence on the US dollar.
The most striking figure to emerge from the report was the decline in the proportion of US Treasury bonds in the reserves held by central banks and the increase in the use of gold as a reserve asset.
Gold bullion accounted for 27 percent of all global central bank reserves at the end of 2025, a marked jump from the level of 20 percent at the end of 2024.
Some of this was a result of the rapid increase in the price of gold in 2025 when it rose by 60 percent, which boosted the value of central bank holdings, despite a small slowdown in purchases from more than 1,000 tonnes over the previous three years to 850 tonnes.
However, the trend is unmistakable. Correspondingly, the share of the US Treasury bonds fell from 25 percent to 22 percent over the last year. Dollar-denominated assets remained the highest proportion of reserves, coming in at 42 percent.
Stocks of gold are now the second highest component of reserves, having eclipsed the euro last year.
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Apart from dollar weaponization, there is another significant reason for the marked shift out of US Treasury bonds. It centers on the growing concern that the US financial position, expressed in the exponential growth of government debt—now at more than $39 trillion and an annual interest bill of around $1 trillion—is unsustainable.
The position of the US financial establishment is that the present level of record debt can be sustained, but its rate of increase cannot. All three major global credit rating agencies have downgraded the US credit rating from their top level.
US Treasuries have long been regarded as the safest asset in the world, but that is now being increasingly called into question under conditions where the US financial system has undergone a series of major crises, including the 2008 crash and the freezing of the Treasury market in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
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The report issued a reassurance that while gold had achieved a significant milestone as a reserve asset, this was not sustainable.
“Going forward, gold faces limitation as an official reserve asset compared with the major fiat currencies” and does not adjust seamlessly to “shifts in international demand for liquidity.”
That may well be true as far as it goes. But this analysis omits one of the central functions of gold as a store of value. Unlike fiat currencies, of which the dollar and the euro are the two most prominent and which can be created by central banks at the press of a computer button, gold is real value in that it embodies human labor. This property becomes crucial if confidence in fiat currencies is undermined.
And that trend is developing. At present, central banks hold almost as much gold as they did in the days when the international financial system functioned under the Bretton Woods system established in 1944 when the dollar was backed by gold at the rate of $35 per ounce. Today the price of gold is around $4,500 per ounce, signifying the precipitous decline in the real value of the dollar since the Bretton Woods system was abrogated with the removal of the gold backing in 1971.
The international monetary system was reconstituted on the basis of the dollar now operating purely as a fiat currency and with Treasury bonds issued by the US forming the central pillar of its operations.
The fact that US debt is being steadily replaced by gold as a store of value, as set out in the ECB report, is a sure sign that the international monetary system is coming under increasing stress. That does not mean it is headed for an immediate crisis, but it does indicate the fundamental trend of developments.
9. Opposition mounts to 4th UAW-backed contract at Nexteer: “They haven't changed anything”
Like previous TAs, the latest proposal does not include any protection against layoffs, under conditions in which as many as 300 to 400 workers face job elimination over the next years through automation and consolidation.
10. A reply to Edward Luce of the Financial Times on youth radicalization
"... Mr. Luce correctly detects a process of radicalization among the world’s youth. The question is, at what point will this radicalization break beyond the bounds of the media-vetted pseudo-leftism of people like Sanders and Mamdani and reestablish contact with the genuine Marxian-socialist political perspective and culture that was exemplified in the October Revolution and figures like Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg. This break must and will occur, and the rediscovery of Trotsky’s extraordinary political legacy and writings will be a critical element of the reemergence of Marxism as a mass socialist movement based on the working class."
11. NATO and Ukraine escalate war against Russia
The NATO war against Russia has reached a new stage. On Wednesday, Ukraine launched drone attacks in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city. Black clouds of smoke rose over the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal as the International Economic Forum opened in the city. According to reports, the Kronstadt naval base and other military targets were also attacked.
The attack is part of a series of increasing and ever more far-reaching Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on Russian energy facilities, airfields, arms factories, command centers, and military infrastructure—some of them hundreds of kilometers behind the front.
Ukraine is not carrying out these attacks alone. They are politically covered, militarily enabled, technologically supported, and strategically coordinated by the NATO powers, particularly Germany.
The latest attacks implement what Berlin and Kiev have publicly agreed to in recent weeks. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was received with military honors in Berlin in mid-April, the two governments signed a “strategic partnership” that codifies a deepening of war cooperation.
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The attack on St. Petersburg underscores that the NATO powers are crossing every red line. Russia has repeatedly warned that attacks with Western weapons on Russian territory could lead to countermeasures, including beyond Ukraine. As early as April, the Russian Defense Ministry published the addresses of German arms companies after Berlin announced that it would develop long-range weapons and drones together with Ukraine for attacks on Russia.
The imperialist powers respond to every Russian warning with absolute recklessness, risking nuclear war. They are not only consciously accepting that the conflict could turn into a direct war between NATO and Russia, they are working toward it. Through ever more far-reaching attacks on Russian territory, maneuvers on Russia’s borders, additional NATO troops in Eastern Europe, and the expansion of Europe’s war potential, Moscow is to be provoked into a response that could then serve as a pretext for NATO’s official entry into the war.
None of this has anything to do with the defense of “democracy,” “freedom,” or “human rights.” The war in Ukraine is the result of decades of NATO’s eastward expansion, the systematic transformation of Ukraine into a military outpost against Russia, and the right-wing coup in Kiev in 2014 supported by Washington and Berlin. Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, the NATO powers have continuously expanded the war.
It is about imperialist interests: the control of Ukraine, rich in raw materials and geostrategically positioned; the weakening and ultimately the dismemberment of Russia; access to the raw materials and markets of the Eurasian landmass; and the redivision of the world among the major imperialist powers.
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The European powers treat the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder for their own imperialist interests. At the same time, the massive military expenditures, including a German military budget that will explode to more than €200 billion per year in the coming years, will be paid for through brutal attacks on the working class: social cuts, pension cuts, wage reductions, job cuts, the destruction of public services and the militarization of schools, universities and workplaces.
The fight against the madness of war also requires the rejection of the reactionary policies of the Putin regime. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not a progressive or anti-imperialist response to the decades-long encirclement of Russia by NATO. It was the desperate and reactionary response of a capitalist oligarchic regime that emerged out of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism. Putin’s policy has suffered a complete shipwreck. His entire strategy has been an attempt to win the Russian oligarchy a recognized place within the world capitalist order through an accommodation with imperialism.
The International Committee of the Fourth International has sought to unify the workers of Ukraine and Russia in opposition to war from the beginning. In its first statement immediately after the start of the war, the ICFI explicitly denounced “the Russian military intervention in Ukraine” and stated, “Despite the provocations and threats by the US and NATO powers, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine must be opposed by socialists and class-conscious workers.” The statement declared:
The catastrophe that was set in motion by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 cannot be averted on the basis of Russian nationalism, a thoroughly reactionary ideology that serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class represented by Vladimir Putin… The invasion of Ukraine, whatever the justifications given by the Putin regime, will serve only to divide the Russian and Ukrainian working class and, moreover, serve the interests of US and European imperialism.
This analysis has been fully confirmed. Putin initiated the war with a furious attack on the October Revolution and on Lenin. In his speech before the invasion, he attacked the Bolsheviks for recognizing Ukraine’s national self-determination and the founding of the Soviet Union as a voluntary union of equal republics. In this way, he made clear that his regime completely rejects the revolutionary and internationalist traditions of 1917 and adopts the Great Russian chauvinism of Tsarism.
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Workers in Ukraine and Russia have no interest in slaughtering one another for the interests of rival oligarchs and imperialist powers. Workers in Germany, France, Britain, the United States and throughout Europe have no interest in sacrificing their wages, pensions, schools, hospitals and ultimately their lives for the great power plans of their ruling classes.
The slogan that must be counterposed to the war is not the defense of one or another nation-state, but socialist internationalism: For the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers! Against NATO imperialism and against the Putin regime! For the building of an international socialist anti-war movement of the working class!
12. 2026 World Cup overshadowed by war, repression and sky-high ticket prices
With the first match just days away, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is shaping up to be the most expensive and politically charged sporting events in history. Unfolding across the United States, Mexico and Canada from June 11 to July 19, it is the largest tournament ever staged—48 teams, 104 matches, 16 host cities. Corporate sponsors have poured hundreds of millions into it. FIFA expects to generate over $11 billion in revenue across the four-year cycle. Promotional videos speak of “unity,” “passion” and the universal language of football. The message is relentless: for one glorious month, the world comes together.
But one need not look too far beneath the surface to uncover the grotesque reality behind the spectacle. The 2026 World Cup opens as the United States wages an active war of aggression against Iran, prepares for war against Cuba and continues both its material support for the genocide in Gaza and its missile murder spree against fishermen off the waters of South America. At home, it is conducting mass arrests and deportations of immigrant workers at a pace unprecedented in US history as part of a drive to consolidate a dictatorial regime against the working class.
To hold the world’s premier football tournament in this environment—co-hosted by the very state machinery driving these catastrophes—invites an obvious comparison: Argentina’s blood-soaked military dictatorship hosting the 1978 World Cup, where political prisoners in the infamous Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) could hear the roar of the stadium crowds from the dungeons where they were being tortured.
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US officials have warned that ICE immigration enforcement agents will be deployed at every stadium and every match. While acting-Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin claimed that this anti-immigrant gestapo would not be conducting mass roundups, he insisted: “ICE always does immigration enforcement—but we’re not there solely for that purpose. We’re in there to do our job.” ICE will operate in coordination with the FBI and the Secret Service.
Meanwhile, Trump’s travel bans, which by mid-2025 covered 19 countries affecting over 400 million people, have created an obstacle course for fans from Muslim-majority nations, from African nations with high rates of visa denial and from Latin America. The “world coming together” in 2026 will be a carefully screened world.
Workers at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles have threatened to strike if ICE agents are deployed there during World Cup matches. “ICE should have no role in these games,” declared stadium cook Isaac Martinez at a protest outside the venue. His concern is well-founded: FIFA’s requirement that stadium employees submit personal data before the tournament creates a direct pipeline to an agency with a documented record of detaining anyone deemed a potential “alien,” with legal status a secondary concern.
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Concerns over the threat of abuse at the hands of US immigration authorities is a driving factor in what has already a massive fall-off in overall international tourism to the US. April 2026 visitor numbers were down 14.1 percent year over year, and four million fewer foreign visitors arrived in 2025 compared to 2024.
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Iran qualified for the tournament and has announced its intention to participate. As of this writing, however, its delegation has not been granted visas to enter the United States, where its three initial matches are scheduled, and has been forced to relocate its training camp across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Trump warned on social media that “the Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to the World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety”—a statement widely read as a veiled death threat directed at a delegation attempting to compete in an international sporting event.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has been targeted through a different mechanism. Congo qualified for its second World Cup after 52 years—a historic achievement. US authorities demanded a 21-day quarantine for the Congolese delegation, citing an Ebola outbreak, even though every member of Congo’s squad plays professionally in Europe and none have visited the country since the outbreak began. Congolese fans are barred under a US entry ban imposed against the DRC over Ebola. The United States—which recorded over 103 million COVID-19 cases and 1.2 million deaths, the worst pandemic record of any nation on earth—invoked public health as pretext for an exercise in humiliation rooted in what can only be described as imperial contempt for the African continent.
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Beyond the police-state apparatus and geopolitical provocations, the economic structure of the 2026 World Cup makes its class character unmistakable. For the first time in the tournament’s 23-edition history, ticket prices are governed not by fixed tiers but by “dynamic pricing”—the market mechanism previously confined to American domestic sports and stadium concerts, where prices fluctuate to whatever wealthy bidders are prepared to pay.
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Total tournament revenue is projected at $665 million—a 34 percent increase over the previous edition. FIFA’s stated goal is to “support positive social change,” but as University of Notre Dame economist Professor Richard Sheehan, author of Keeping Score: The Economics of Big Time Sports, notes, that claim is “belied by a track record of corruption and lack of transparency.”
The clubs themselves are owned by the global oligarchs. Chelsea FC belongs to Todd Boehly ($9.3 billion). Paris Saint-Germain belongs to the Qatari royal family. According to Forbes, 3,428 billionaires exist worldwide alongside nearly 30,000 individuals with fortunes exceeding $100 million. To this social layer, listing a World Cup final ticket at $2.3 million is not an outrage—it is a rational business decision.
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The commercialization of the sport has extracted other costs less visible than ticket prices. Elite footballers once played around 50 matches per year; today it has climbed to 70, driven by FIFA’s tournament expansion and relentless commercial pressure. Scientific assessments show this increase fundamentally disrupts cellular recovery, triples the probability of serious joint injury, and may reduce elite careers by three to five years. Meanwhile, the athletes’ extraordinary gifts—Messi’s uncanny ability to navigate defenders, Mbappé’s explosive acceleration—have been meticulously cultivated by sports corporations and transformed into brand assets generating hundreds of millions annually from merchandise, endorsements and broadcast rights. The players bear the cost in shortened careers and broken bodies. The owners collect the revenues.
FIFA boss Gianni Infantino set the tone for the tournament last December, awarding Trump the “inaugural FIFA Peace Prize”—an attempt to appeal to Trump’s bitter resentment at being passed over for the better known prize awarded by the Nobel Committee. Aside from providing another gold-plated ornament for the Oval Office, the prize symbolized the subordination of the Cup to the would-be American fuhrer and the fusion of the corrupt aims of FIFA and the Trump administration. It speaks volumes about the moral bankruptcy of football’s governing body.
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Trump responded by appointing himself chair of the World Cup organizing taskforce, conveniently headquartered in Trump Tower in Manhattan, signaling the intent to turn the tournament into one more crooked money stream for the Trump family. The tournament’s structure reflects the same hierarchy of power: the opening match is scheduled for the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, but the quarterfinals, semifinals and the final are all assigned to US venues, along with seven of the eight round-of-sixteen matches. The geography of the tournament tracks precisely with the geography of imperial power.
The attempt to use the World Cup as an instrument of wealth extraction does not go unanswered. The threatened strike by SoFi Stadium workers is one expression of a broader pattern of resistance. In Mexico, teachers organized in the CNTE union have vowed to bring their protests and strikes over wages and pensions to the gates of the Azteca Stadium. Teachers demonstrated in Mexico City on Tuesday, blocking main roads through the capital and setting soccer balls alight as they faced repression from security forces using tear gas, rubber bullets and batons.
And the tournament’s own audience tells a more complicated story than its organizers intend: 75 percent of Americans know the US is hosting the World Cup, and roughly half plan to watch—but nearly a third are rooting for another country alongside or instead of the US, a testament to immigrant roots that no amount of nationalist demagogy can erase.
Socialists do not share the ruling class’s contempt for sport. Football, at its most elemental level, is a magnificent expression of collective human creativity—skill, movement, cooperation, drama. The working class invented the game in its modern form; it is the working class that fills the lower tiers of stadiums and has driven the culture of the sport for more than a century.
What the 2026 World Cup represents, hosted under conditions of accelerating war and repression, is the attempt by a ruling class in crisis to paper over the class antagonisms tearing its society apart with 104 matches of carefully branded nationalism. Workers in the United States are told to cheer for “their” team—an affinity that supposedly unites them with a ruling class and its government that are filling detention camps with their neighbors, raising their food and fuel costs to pay for wars, and deploying armed thugs against citizens demanding democratic rights. The antidote to that nationalist appeal is not indifference to the sport, but political class consciousness: the recognition that a Mexican worker, an American worker and an Iranian worker share common class interests that no flag-waving can dissolve.
The game will be played. The well-healed crowds will roar. The television rights holders will profit magnificently. But the social contradictions this spectacle is designed to suppress—the inequality, the repression, the wars—will be resolved not on a football pitch, but in the intensifying global class struggle.
13. US House approves fraudulent resolution on Iran war
Wednesday’s vote in the House of Representatives directing President Trump to end military operations against Iran is a political fraud engineered by the Democratic Party, with the support of a handful of Republicans. It is unlikely to pass the Senate and would be vetoed by Trump if it did. He vetoed two such resolutions in his first term, in relation to US military operations in Yemen and Iran, and Congress did not override either veto.
The actual import of the resolution adopted by a 215-208 vote is to require Trump to get authorization for the war from Congress—meaning that there would be a further vote, and many if not most of those who voted “against” the Iran war on Wednesday would likely vote to authorize the war if given the chance.
In other words, the resolution is not an “anti-war” measure at all, but rather an appeal to Trump to make Congress a full partner in the war-making process, as required by the Constitution and further spelled out in the War Powers Act.
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Representative Gregory Meeks (D-New York), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee and the author of the resolution, said in a statement: “The passage of my War Powers Resolution is a significant bipartisan rebuke of President Trump’s illegal and costly war in Iran, and the first step toward ending it once and for all.”
The resolution is nothing of the sort. Its purpose is to allow the Democrats to posture as opponents of the war in the course of the midterm election campaign, while they reliably vote to fund the war and enable Trump and his fanatical Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth to order bombing and mass murder as they please.*****
There is no doubt that the majority of Americans are not merely tired of the war, but oppose it vehemently, not only for its economic impact in terms of gas prices and overall inflation, but as a continuation of the endless wars in the Middle East that every American president since George W. Bush, Democrat and Republican, has promised to end—promises that were never kept.
The New York Times gushed in its news coverage of the House action: “Adoption of the resolution was a remarkable rebuke to Mr. Trump and his handling of the conflict, after he has repeatedly dismissed any effort by Congress to curb his power and as the G.O.P. has largely ceded its prerogatives to do so, deferring to him time and again.”
It must be repeated: the resolution does nothing to stop the war or impede Trump. The Democrats are not seeking to end the war, only to gain a “seat at the table” so that they will have input into how the war is to be waged.
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Soon after the passage of the Iran war resolution, Democrats won another victory in the Republican-controlled House, pushing through a procedural motion by a 218-204 margin, forcing the House to take up for consideration a bill to provide $9 billion more in aid and loans to the Ukraine government for the US-NATO war against Russia. Again, a unanimous Democratic caucus was joined by a handful of Republicans—six, in this case—to override the opposition of the House Republican leadership. Those voting to advance the Ukraine war funding included the entire “Squad” of representatives affiliated with or supported by the Democratic Socialists of America, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Greg Casar and Ilhan Omar.
The Democrats thus demonstrated they are not “anti-war,” but only have different military priorities than Trump, wanting to focus far more on the Ukraine war and regarding Iran as something of a diversion.
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In its final action Thursday, the House approved the Ukraine aid package on which the Democrats had forced a vote. This time 18 Republicans broke with the White House and House Speaker Mike Johnson and sided with the Democrats. Every “left” Democrat voted for Ukraine war aid—Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Casar, Summer Lee—with the exception of Ilhan Omar.
Workers at Bridgewaters Interiors in Warren, Michigan, have voted to reject a tentative agreement while thousands of Dana auto parts workers are being kept in the dark ahead of imminent contract ratification votes.
15. Australia: Queensland teachers in arbitration straitjacket, facing long pay freeze
After reluctantly calling a second statewide stoppage in November to head off teachers’ discontent, the QTU leadership shut down further industrial action and effectively joined hands with the state government to refer the dispute to compulsory arbitration.
The GKN near-disaster is not an isolated incident. The EPA’s Office of Inspector General identified 25 high-priority facilities nationwide releasing ethylene oxide, a carcinogenic gas, at levels associated with elevated lifetime cancer risks. In 16 of those communities, residents had not even been informed of the danger.
California provides multiple examples. In the first five months of 2026 alone, the chemical incident tracker “Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters” reported nine accidents, including GKN Aerospace.
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Internationally, the same pattern has produced some of the worst industrial catastrophes in modern history: Minamata, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Fukushima and Rana Plaza, each exposing the deadly consequences of subordinating human life to profit.
The danger of hazardous facilities operating in close proximity to densely populated communities is increasing due to the policies of the state.
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In the US, the political responsibility for this situation lies entirely on both parties of American capitalism. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s “Common Sense Approach to Chemical Accident Prevention” rule, formally proposed in February 2026, systematically destroyed existing safety standards. It eliminated independent third-party audits after chemical releases and deleted mandatory evaluation of climate and power-loss risks. It even rescinded worker rights to anonymously report safety hazards.
The Trump administration has gone further still, moving to shut down the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board entirely, the independent agency responsible for investigating exactly the kinds of accidents that nearly destroyed Garden Grove last month.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom, who positioned himself as a national Democratic leader and potential presidential candidate, has a record of suspending environmental protections when corporate interests demand it, vetoing California Senate Bill 674 in August 2024.
SB 674 would have established uniform statewide fenceline air monitoring, mandated real-time public alerts during toxic releases and required third-party audits within 14 days of any incident. These were not radical demands. They were minimal protections. Newsom vetoed them anyway, leaving communities in West Long Beach, Carson and Wilmington without basic access to real-time safety data.
Underlying all of this is the growing physical instability introduced by climate change, what industrial safety researchers call “Natech” events: natural hazards triggering technological disasters. The GKN crisis was a Natech event in embryo. Methyl methacrylate must be kept at or below 50°F to remain stable.
As Southern California summers shatter heat records, the thermal loads on industrial cooling systems increase dramatically and compound the probability of exactly the kind of valve failure that occurred on May 21. Capitalism has created the climate crisis while simultaneously destroying the regulatory infrastructure that might partially buffer its industrial consequences.
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The international working class, including the workers who produce the chemicals, operate the refineries, live in the fenceline communities and breathe the contaminated air, is the only social force with both the interest and the capacity to impose rational, democratic control over industrial production. The working class cannot afford to wait for another near-miss.
17. Workers Struggles: Africa & Europe
Africa
Ethiopia:
Guinea:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Portugal:
Workers in nationwide general strike against government labour reforms, low pay and poor working conditions
Civil servants at migrant processing centres in Portugal strike over staff shortages and poor working conditions
Spain:
Thousands of teachers in Valencia continue indefinite strike against low pay, staff shortages and deteriorating conditions
United Kingdom:
Academic staff at Nottingham University, England begin two-month strike over job cuts
Support staff at London secondary school resume stoppages over threat to cut hours
Strike by cancer research staff at London facilities over pay
Stoppage by UK school examination board staff over pay
Stoppage by UK school examination board staff over pay
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.
