Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. War-driven price surge fuels US political and social crisis

Inflation driven by the Iran war is cutting real wages, while higher interest rates make workers pay twice—on their own debts and on a trillion-dollar federal interest bill owed to the rich.

US consumer price inflation accelerated in September, rising 3.7 percent over the year, up from 3.4 percent in August. Real wages fell 0.5 percent in a single month and are down 0.7 percent over the year, the steepest decline since 2022.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which released the figures on Wednesday, pointed to the soaring prices of gasoline, diesel and fuel oil. Gasoline rose 9.1 percent in September alone, accounting for over half of the monthly increase in all consumer prices. Over 12 months, it is up 34.2 percent, and energy as a whole 20.4 percent. Fuel oil jumped 15.3 percent in the month and 74.2 percent over the year, a devastating blow to the millions of families in the Northeast who use it to heat their homes, just as cold weather begins.

These increases are the direct product of the US war of aggression against Iran, launched February 28, which closed the Strait of Hormuz, the outlet for roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. The shock is still working through the economy, through diesel in the price of everything delivered by truck and through fertilizer in the price of food. Moody’s Analytics estimates that the war has already cost the average American household $2,000, including $1,100 in fuel and goods, $540 in higher interest rates and $360 in military spending. “No wonder the war is so unpopular,” its chief economist remarked.

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate to 3.75–4 percent on September 16, and after Wednesday’s report markets put the odds of a further increase at its October 27–28 meeting, a week before the election, at roughly even. Higher rates mean higher payments on every form of household debt: the 30-year mortgage is at 7.4 percent, up from 6.3 a year ago; the average credit card charges 22 percent on balances; the average car payment is $680 a month, 40 percent above 2018.

The impact of these higher rates falls disproportionately on the working class. By the Federal Reserve’s own accounting, the poorer half of the population owes 52 percent of all consumer credit and the middle 40 percent nearly half of all home mortgages, while the richest 1 percent holds 3 percent of consumer credit. Household debt stands at $18.8 trillion, and the rate at which auto and credit card loans are falling into serious delinquency is, in the Fed’s word, “elevated.” Every quarter-point added in the name of “fighting inflation” is a levy on the half of the population with no cushion.

On the other side of the ledger is the federal debt. The government paid $1.14 trillion in interest in the fiscal year that ended September 30—more than it spent on the military or on Medicare, 15 percent of all federal spending—and the borrowing that finances the war, at the rates the war has produced, swells that sum every month. It is paid to the holders of the debt. Among American households, the richest 1 percent own 39 percent of government securities and the richest 10 percent nearly 80 percent; the poorer half own less than 1 percent. 

The workers thus pay for the war twice: at the pump and in the interest on their own debts, and again through the taxes and social cuts that fund a trillion-dollar tribute to the bondholders. The $200 billion war supplemental the Pentagon is demanding will be borrowed at today’s rates and added to the bill.

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The Democratic Party seeks to profit from inflation and the war through demagogic appeals on “affordability.” But its real differences with Trump run in another direction. When Trump, to show “concern” over prices before the election, struck a temporary deal with Putin last week to import Russian diesel and suspend sanctions on its sale, the Democratic leadership denounced it. Senators Shaheen, Schumer and Warren called the deal “a total betrayal of Ukraine, our European allies and American national security,” and declared that “Putin only responds to strength, which means cracking down on Russia.” The Democrats oppose any action that conflicts with the war against Russia that they want to escalate. Their objection to the war in Iran is that it is the wrong war. 

A Democratic victory would do nothing to raise living standards, defend democratic rights or halt the drive to imperialist war. It would shift control of Congress from one party of the financial aristocracy to the other, while the banks, corporate CEOs and billionaires remain the real masters.

At the same time, Trump is responding to the threat of electoral defeat with openly dictatorial measures: the shooting of immigrants in the streets in ICE raids; lawsuits and threats against states that refuse to hand over voter rolls to his “Justice” Department; the deployment of 1,000 federal prosecutors as election “monitors”; the confirmed policy that ICE may serve warrants at polling places; and the raid on the Washington home of Representative Ilhan Omar 22 days before the election, followed this week by grand jury subpoenas to her relatives. Trump himself has said he will accept the results only “if the elections are honest,” and that otherwise “something else has to happen.”!

The real concern of Trump and the oligarchs is not the Democratic Party, whose loyalty to American capitalism is unshakeable, but the working class in the months after the election. The inflation figures are the harbinger of an explosive growth of the class struggle in the United States, under conditions where tens of millions are one unexpected bill from disaster.

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The surge in prices is accelerating the processes that are driving the growth of the class struggle throughout the world. Bourgeois democracy is breaking down, above all in the United States, and the living standards of the working class are being driven down to pay for war and the enrichment of a financial oligarchy. The class struggle is intensifying and breaking out of the control of the trade unions.

It is to this movement that the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Parties are oriented, through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), which fights to unite workers across borders and arm their struggles with a socialist program.

Against the war and its costs mean wages that rise with prices, the repudiation of the war debt, and the redirection of society’s resources to healthcare, housing and education rather than to bondholders and the Pentagon—demands that can be won only by a working class that takes political power out of the hands of the financial aristocracy.

2.  IMF report details a financial system with rising risks and vulnerabilities

One of the most striking features of the International Monetary Fund’s Global Financial Stability Report presented to its annual meeting held in Bangkok, Thailand, this week is that the eruption of another financial crisis, following those of 2008 and March 2020, is taken as given.

The issue is not whether it will take place but how can it be prepared for, from where it will emerge, what will be its implications and what measures might be undertaken to try to mitigate its effects.

The authors of such reports all adhere to the foundational doctrine of the present order that the capitalist market and its financial system are the only possible, the only viable form of socio-economic organization.

But over the past 20 years they have been confronted with the reality that the system which they attempt to regulate is riven with irresolvable contradictions which continue to erupt and crash over their heads despite all their efforts to contain them.

In the period leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008, the dominant theme of IMF analysis was the success of what was called “the great moderation.” That notion has been blown away by the financial storms of the past 20 years and consequently the reports of recent times seek to identify what might trigger another one.

The present report maintains that financial markets have remained resilient but then immediately goes on to identify “three salient risks ahead.” These are: an AI driven market correction, a sharp rise in sovereign bond yields and what it calls “cyber threats.”

These risks do not necessarily threaten financial stability, it says, but could become systemic “if they are amplified by underlying vulnerabilities” and states that the aim of the analysis is to try to identify them. It turns out to be a long list.

3. In run-up to midterms, Trump steps up drive to rig the elections

These developments coincide with Trump’s campaign tour of Republican states, in which he is seeking to whip up his fascist base. That base could be thrown against voters in Democratic districts or prepared for an attack on the Capitol on January 3, when Congress votes to certify the election results, in a repeat of the January 6, 2021 coup attempt.

The administration is also preparing a presence at the polls. On October 2, the NAACP sued the Justice Department for records on its announced plan to deploy 1,000 personnel to polling places on Election Day. That is the largest such deployment in the department’s history. By comparison, the DOJ sent roughly 289 monitors in the 2022 midterms and 714 in the 2024 presidential election. The suit demands to know who these people are, where they are going, what they have been instructed to do and what legal authority they claim.

Assistant Attorney General Dhillon has been calling them “observers,” not monitors. The distinction matters. Federal observers authorized under the Voting Rights Act can receive special statutory authority to enter polling places, while ordinary DOJ monitors can be restricted by state law and local officials.

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In the face of this open plot to consolidate a dictatorship, the Democratic Party is doing nothing more than filing legal suits. It is making no appeal for the population to mobilize to stop the attack on the elections. It fears an independent movement of the working class far more than a presidential dictatorship. Its major disagreement with Trump is not authoritarian rule or the destruction of living standards, but his reluctance to pursue a more aggressive war against Russia.

The defense of democratic rights will come not from the capitalist parties, Congress or the courts but from the independent mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program.

4. Hundreds of thousands in Ireland’s largest public sector strike since 2009

More than 300,000 public sector workers struck across the Republic of Ireland on Wednesday in a 24-hour walkout over pay. It was the country’s largest strike since 2009, when mass protests and a one-day public sector stoppage erupted against the austerity imposed after the 2008-9 global financial crash.

Teachers, nurses, doctors, civil servants and council workers walked out. The Journal reported unions suggesting numbers participating could reach around 400,000. 

In the face of this overwhelming mandate, union leaders called just one day of strike action.... 

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The Irish strike is part of a growing movement of workers across Europe. In France, a public sector strike on September 29 coincided with mass high school occupations. In Portugal, around 350,000 public administration workers struck on October 2, the same day as a general strike in Italy.

Irish workers must take this dispute into their own hands by building rank-and-file committees, independent of the union apparatus and linked through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. 

5. Sweden’s Social Democrats try to form government after worst election result in modern era

Sweden faces a government crisis more than a month after September’s parliamentary election. The Social Democrats won the September 13 poll with their lowest share of the popular vote since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1921. They are struggling to cobble together a coalition to secure a parliamentary majority for leader Magdalena Andersson as prime minister.

The election demonstrated the deep alienation of workers from the entire political establishment. After four years of a right-wing minority government that depended on the fascistic Sweden Democrats for its parliamentary majority, Andersson’s Social Democrat-led bloc of parties secured a razor-thin majority, winning 176 seats against the right-wing bloc’s 173.

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The Social Democrats have done more than any other party over the past four decades to destroy the “Swedish model,” the comparatively generous wages, social programs and welfare provisions secured by the working class in the post-war period through bitter class battles. Supported by the Greens and Left Party in parliament, Social Democrat-led governments laid the basis for sweeping privatizations of public services in the late 1990s and early 2000s, embraced the right wing’s vicious anti-immigrant witch-hunting following the 2015 refugee crisis, adopted the demands for financial restraint and initiated military spending increases and the reintroduction of conscription.

This class war agenda was the response of Sweden’s ruling class to the escalating global capitalist crisis and the breakdown of the post-war economic order, which once provided the basis for it to pursue policies of class compromise. The Swedish economy and industry have over recent decades been exposed to ruthless competition due to the globalization of production, eliminating many of the protections workers previously enjoyed and that served to ensure support for national-reformist organizations like the Social Democrats and their allied trade unions.

The fate over the past two decades of such iconic Swedish names as automakers Saab and Volvo, and more recently the battery-maker Northvolt, either sold off to foreign owners or bankrupted, is part of a restructuring of Swedish capitalism that has benefited investors and better-off layers of the middle class. Meanwhile, workers confront increasing job insecurity and growing social inequality.

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The questions of political perspective fought out in this struggle are essential for workers in Sweden and internationally today. Opposing war, austerity and the rise of the far right is possible only if the working class establishes its unconditional political independence from the official “left” led by the Social Democrats and Left Party.

The urgent task is to build organizations of class struggle, rank-and-file committees that can unite the struggles of workers in Sweden with their colleagues throughout Europe opposing public spending cuts, attacks on wages and conditions, and the subordinating of society’s resources to militarism and war. The socialist and internationalist political leadership such a movement requires must be provided by building a Swedish section of the ICFI.

6. United Kingdom: Burnham hosts Zelensky as Europe rebuffs Trump’s Russia-Ukraine policy

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday “to underline the UK’s rock-solid support for Ukraine for as long as it takes,” in the words of a government statement.

The Saturday before, US President Donald Trump had announced a deal to buy diesel from the Russian government, undermining US and European sanctions. He claimed an “energy ceasefire” would now be in operation in the Ukraine war, making clear its primary purpose for him was to protect the Russian refineries supplying the fuel.

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Zelensky’s public criticisms of the diesel deal earned a threat from Trump that he “he’d better damn well stop” and a suggestion that “It’s time for Ukraine to get a new president… who can make a deal.” Zelensky, he told reporters, “wants to make problems for the world.”

The European powers, which are overwhelmingly responsible for funding Ukraine’s war effort after the withdrawal of American funds, rallied around the Ukrainian president. Italy’s Georgia Meloni said of Trump’s diesel agreement: “It provides Moscow with legitimacy as its bombs continue to fall on Ukrainian cities, generates new revenue to finance the war, and implicitly weakens the effectiveness of sanctions.”

Burnham’s invitation to Zelensky aligned the UK with these efforts. It came just a few days after the Labour Prime Minister visited German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to talk up closer military and economic ties. He followed that with an announcement that Russia had sought to influence the outcome of the Brexit vote, urging MPs to help him pursue a “better deal with the EU”.

The specifics of Burnham’s promises to the Ukrainian president underscore why this move closer to the European powers is necessary for the British ruling class. Though Burnham offered to “go further and faster in our support to back your courageous fight,” there was little new he could actually deliver.

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Ukraine is heavily outmatched by Russian drone and missile attacks, which have escalated rapidly since progress on the frontline slowed to a crawl. Russian forces have placed a particular focus on disabling Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, with 2.4 times as many strikes on these targets so far in 2026 compared to the same period last year, intended to demoralize Ukrainian society through the harsh winter.

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The division between the White House and the European capitals is over two strategies for Ukraine’s domination. The policy of the majority of the European and American ruling class is to force a Russian withdrawal and secure their complete political and financial control over Ukraine, ideally including Crimea and with the hope of shattering the Putin government in the process. Trump veers between aiding this strategy and making moves to secure Ukraine’s resources and access to Russia’s also in partnership with the Putin government, excluding the Europeans.

For the Ukrainian working class, these are different versions of the same exploitation and oppression. They have no allies in the White House, Brussels, or any of the halls of power of Europe and America. Ending the slaughter and destruction means linking arms with a Russian working class ultimately facing the same fate, in a joint socialist struggle against war and its authors.

Their allies are the workers of Europe and America, who have every interest in bringing a stop to a conflict which increasingly threatens war between nuclear-armed powers.

7. Brazil’s presidential runoff: as Lula moves to the right, Flávio Bolsonaro prepares for dictatorship

After fascist candidate Flávio Bolsonaro won the first round of Brazil’s October 4 presidential election against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party—PT) by 47.0 percent to 45.2 percent of the valid votes, the internal crisis of the party and its “broad front” deepened, opening a debate over the causes of the disaster that is already provoking a new turn to the right by the PT.

The numbers expose the nature of the result. Lula lost nearly 3.4 million votes compared to the first round of 2022 against former President Jair Bolsonaro, sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading the 2022-23 coup conspiracy. Lula’s vote fell from 57.3 million to 53.9 million, Flávio received 56.1 million votes, more than 5 million above his father’s 51.1 million four years earlier. Even so, Flávio received fewer votes than Lula did in 2022.

The election represented not a rightward shift of the masses, but rather the disintegration of the PT’s electoral base—a protest vote against a party that, in Lula’s own words, “became the system” and proved incapable of solving the increasingly severe problems of workers and the poor in Brazil.

Lula lost votes even among his historic constituencies. He won by a wide margin among the poorest, but lost votes across nearly all income brackets, registering growth only among the wealthiest 4 percent. Even in the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region and the PT’s stronghold in recent elections, Flávio received 1.6 million more votes than his father in 2022, in all nine states.

For the runoff, Flávio’s advantage tends to grow....

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The first-round defeat opened an internal crisis in the PT and its “broad front,” with a debate over the causes of the disaster. But this debate is, in essence, a fraud. Contrary to those who claim the PT is a party “in dispute,” the course is already decided—and it is the deepening of the reactionary course that produced the defeat.

The decisive confession came from Lula himself. According to Estado de S. Paulo, the president “admitted that the PT erred in not drawing closer to the broad front that supported it in the 2022 elections against Jair Bolsonaro.” Thus, the response now in the runoff is to broaden the “broad front.”

The class character of this response is condensed in the slogan that, according to press reports last week, is guiding the runoff campaign: “more Alckmin and less Janja.” Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, a representative of the São Paulo bourgeoisie, and former ministers Simone Tebet and Carlos Fávaro have been tasked with drawing closer to the corporate world and agribusiness. Alckmin is being considered for the Finance Ministry, as the guarantor of the promise of “fiscal responsibility”—that is, of continued austerity. First Lady Rosângela “Janja” da Silva, whose activity was oriented toward the party’s base and the social movements, is being pushed aside.

The same logic guides the hardening of the discourse on public security. Lula adopted a new campaign slogan: “For the working people, protection. For the criminal, prison,” while again defending his Public Security bill which strengthens the repressive apparatus in Brazil. It is the PT’s adoption of the far right’s own police-state program—the very issue Flávio Bolsonaro exploits. 

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But the question is not one of advertising techniques. The rejection of Lula has a real class content: a government that imposed austerity, left 80.9 percent of families in debt and set interest rates at 13.75 percent has nothing better to “communicate” about its attitude towards the cost-of-living crisis facing millions of workers. And there was no lack of money for the PT’s campaign. The party that received the largest share of the electoral fund after Flávio’s Liberal Party (PL)—R$ 615 million, of which R$ 127 million was earmarked for Lula’s campaign—suffers not from a shortage of resources, but from political bankruptcy. 

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Flávio Bolsonaro’s response to the first-round result has been a combination of social demagogy and coup preparations. The candidate reacted with “strong indignation” to the Lula campaign’s accusations that he would cut funds and eliminate benefits, dismissing the allegation as a “lie.” 

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Flávio’s intention is explicit: to implement the Milei-Bukele model in Brazil. The Argentine president took part in the launch of his candidacy. In place of the chainsaw, Flávio promised a “scissors”—a sweeping cut in public spending—to balance the public accounts. His campaign coordinator, Senator Rogério Marinho, declared that the current economic model is “bursting” and that the pension (2019) and labor (2017) reforms would be “revisited”—that is, deepened.

But the “scissors” is only the economic half of the project. The other half is the continuation of his father Jair Bolsonaro’s coup conspiracy. Flávio has promised that, if elected, he will grant his father a pardon—and that Bolsonaro will climb the ramp of the Planalto Palace alongside him at the inauguration. The declaration that “Brazil belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ,” made in a live broadcast in August, is not a folkloric detail: it is the ideological expression of a theocratic project, fusing religious fundamentalism with state authoritarianism.

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The threat represented by Flávio Bolsonaro provoked a real and spontaneous reaction. On the night of Monday, October 5, the first university mobilizations began at the Fluminense Federal University in Niterói, and over the course of the week spread to more than 40 universities in 14 states and the Federal District, with assemblies, plenaries and marches bringing together tens of thousands of young people. The concern is legitimate: a Flávio Bolsonaro government would mean a brutal attack on education, science and democratic rights.

But it is necessary to say clearly what these protests are—and what they are not. The class character of the demonstrations, such as that of October 11 in São Paulo, is petty bourgeois: university students and self-employed professionals, not the organized working class. And their political direction is already defined: the UNE (National Union of Students) is openly calling for mobilization in the universities to elect Lula—“Brazilian youth will occupy the universities across the country to build Lula’s victory in the runoff!”

The students’ concern over education is real—and it is precisely for this reason that the PT’s response is so cynical. The party that now presents itself as the defender of education against Flávio is the same one that, under Lula’s “new fiscal framework,” promoted the dismantling of the federal universities, driving professors and staff into countless strikes. 

The youth mobilizing against Flávio has a history: it protested against the Bolsonaro government—and was diverted by the PT into the elections, where its energy was dissipated in support of a government that continued its predecessor’s policies. To repeat this cycle is to repeat the disaster.

The essential question is not whether Flávio Bolsonaro represents a threat. The question is how to fight it. And the lesson of the PT’s four decades is unequivocal: the policy of the “lesser evil”—voting for the PT to contain the far right—does not contain the far right; it strengthens it. The PT does not represent a genuine struggle against fascism; it opened the path to it by destroying every alternative to the left and handing the far right the ability to posture as an opponent of the system. 

8. As forest fires spread across Peru, convergence of El Niño and war threatens survival of millions

The October 1 front page of La República, one of Peru’s leading newspapers, carried two reports revealing the convergence of environmental catastrophe and economic crisis. Gasoline prices had risen 40.6 percent over the preceding year, while forest fires were spreading across Cusco, Áncash and Ucayali, threatening rural communities and exposing the government’s inadequate preparations for increasingly destructive climatic conditions.

From Guatemala to Peru’s southern Andes, torrential rains and devastating droughts threaten agriculture, livestock and the survival of millions of impoverished families as a Super El Niño builds in the Pacific. Yet the right-wing governments of the region prioritize tens of billions of dollars in weapons purchases for repression and war over protecting their populations from the approaching disaster.

Forest fires spreading across the Peruvian Andes and Amazon have revealed the vulnerability of communities already exposed to extreme weather. La República reported that fires were becoming increasingly frequent in highland and Amazonian regions, warning that climate change and prolonged dry periods could aggravate their severity.

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Many fires originate in agricultural burning intended to prepare land for cultivation. However, exceptionally dry vegetation and strong winds can transform localized fires stemming from agricultural practices into uncontrollable disasters. This makes prevention, firefighting resources and rapid emergency intervention indispensable.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Peru’s wildfire emergency is that affected communities have been largely abandoned to fight the flames themselves. In Cusco, residents and veterinary students from the National University of San Antonio Abad joined firefighting efforts. According to La República, some communities received little government assistance, while employers refused to release volunteer firefighters from work. Even small business owners, subjected to the imperatives of capitalist profit, placed business above human lives. They had the example of government ministers who refused to postpone trips abroad as the Andes and Amazon burned.

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The social impact of the fires is compounded by a surge in fuel prices driven by the unprovoked US-Israeli war against Iran, which has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea and raised freight, insurance, fuel, electricity and fertilizer prices. Peru’s dependence on trucking makes rising fuel costs particularly devastating, driving up food prices, reducing consumption and threatening recession.

Bolivia provides a glimpse of what is to come: dollar shortages and exorbitant fuel prices paralyzed economic activity in 2025, provoking a 50-day national strike and mass protests by miners, workers, students and small businesspeople.

At the same time, governments across the region are arming themselves. Donald Trump, the would-be Führer, launched the Shield of the Americas in March 2026, enlisting 14 lackey Latin American governments in Washington’s campaign to contain Chinese economic influence and secure the region’s natural resources. Peru received US approval for a proposed $3.42 billion package of 12 F-16 fighters in September 2025, and its Finance Ministry announced an initial $462 million payment to Lockheed Martin in April 2026, nearly double the 800 million soles the government has announced for El Niño prevention.

Argentina purchased 24 secondhand F-16 fighter aircraft from Denmark for $301.2 million. Colombia signed a $3.62 billion agreement for 17 Swedish Gripen fighters in November 2025 and contracted to acquire two Brazilian KC-390 military transport aircraft in August 2026. Ecuador received US approval for a proposed $64 million military rifle package.

These developments have a common source. While multinational corporations and their supply chains demonstrate humanity’s capacity to plan production and allocate resources on a global scale, this potential is subordinated to the competition among rival capitals for a greater share of surplus value, rooted in the private ownership of the means of production, and to the division of the world into rival nation-states. The environmental consequences of their activities, meanwhile, are disregarded.

The consequences are now provoking and converging with the 2026-27 Super El Niño. According to the October 8 report of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Pacific sea surface temperatures reached 2.1°C above average in the Niño 3.4 region and 3.9°C above average off Ecuador and Peru (Niño 1+2). The report estimated a probability exceeding 83 percent that strong-to-very-strong El Niño conditions would persist through January-March 2027, potentially extending into June 2027.

Relatively small and local disturbances can unleash catastrophic consequences, akin to the so-called “butterfly effect” or a chaotic and nonlinear evolution of the weather system. Changes in equatorial Pacific temperatures can contribute to extreme weather threatening millions: floods and agricultural losses in South America; droughts and cyclones in Central America; water shortages in the Pacific; hurricanes in the eastern Pacific; hunger and floods in Africa; disrupted Indian monsoons; droughts in Asia; and wildfires in Europe. Combined with the shocks produced by war, crop failures drive food inflation, shortages and economic instability, particularly in poorer, oil-importing countries.

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Peru’s catastrophic 1982-83 El Niño illustrates the approaching danger. Extraordinary ocean warming unleashed devastating floods along the northern coast and drought across the southern Andes, destroying roads, bridges, irrigation systems, homes and farmland while disrupting fisheries.

Economic losses reached $3.28 billion, approximately 11.6 percent of GDP. Applied to Peru’s 2025 GDP of $334.85 billion, that percentage represents $38.8 billion, nearly half the government’s 2026 budget of 257.562 billion soles ($78.9 billion). With education and healthcare accounting for approximately 35 percent of public spending, such losses would exceed their combined annual budgets.

The human consequences were devastating. Impoverished families lost crops, livelihoods and resources for future planting. Destroyed roads isolated communities from markets, schools and hospitals, while contaminated water increased disease risks.

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The question confronting humanity is whether its scientific and economic capabilities will be mobilized to prevent destruction or increasingly employed to produce it. The problem is not merely a shortage of resources, but a conflict over their allocation by the capitalist class.

Workers and the rural poor in Peru, Ecuador and countries worldwide require immediate protection against extreme weather, unreliable infrastructure and unprepared healthcare systems, together with sustained scientific preparedness. Yet under capitalism, these crises reinforce one another: climate disasters destroy agricultural production and infrastructure; energy shocks intensify inflation and poverty; and wars destroy productive capacity, divert public resources and obstruct international cooperation.

The climate, affecting oceans and the atmosphere, the world economy and the consequences of war are interconnected. The problems arising from them cannot be resolved through isolated national measures. The challenge is not simply to forecast the next El Niño or extinguish the next forest fire, but to organize society’s immense scientific and productive resources around protecting human life.

The only solution is for the working class to take control of the means of production and use existing economic planning tools to pursue a long-term program: first, to meet every person’s needs; and second, to prepare society to protect the planet from disasters, both foreseeable ones like El Niño and those that cannot be foreseen. This requires uniting workers in Peru and across Latin America with workers in the United States, Europe, China and internationally in a common struggle against imperialist war and the capitalist system, and building the International Committee of the Fourth International as the revolutionary leadership of that struggle. 

9. Canada: Alberta’s far-right “independence” referendum: the issues for the working class

Alberta’s far-right United Conservative Party (UCP) government has called an Alberta independence referendum for Monday, October 19.

Due to an adverse court ruling, independence per say will not be on the ballot. Rather, Albertans will be asked if they want the UCP government to hold a “binding provincial referendum” on Alberta’s secession from the federal state.

The UCP’s Alberta independence referendum is part of its broader assault on the social rights of the working class and its efforts to enhance the power and wealth of Alberta’s energy barons and financial elite within the Canadian federal state.

The question on Alberta independence is the tenth of ten government-authored questions on the referendum ballot.  All are cut from the same reactionary cloth.

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Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her government are formally committed to Alberta remaining within a “reformed” or radically reconfigured Canadian federal state, in which Alberta’s capitalist elite would have both greater autonomy from Ottawa and a greater say over national policy. This would include dismantling both the legal-constitutional and fiscal framework for the federal government’s guarantee that all provinces and territories adhere to minimum national standards in the provision of public health care and other essential services and social supports.

Smith’s strategy rests on leveraging Trump’s barrage of threats against Canada, including to transform it into the 51st state.

Not only has she conspicuously stood apart from the federal government-led, tri-partite Team Canada trade-war alliance and vehemently condemned any and all suggestions that Ottawa make use of Alberta’s massive oil and natural gas exports to the US to place pressure on Washington. She has traveled to the US to court Trump’s favor. As part of her efforts to strike a separate deal with Washington, Smith has publicly pledged to put Alberta’s vast energy wealth at the disposal of Trump in using “energy dominance” to assert American imperialist global hegemony.

Similarly, Smith has actively encouraged the Alberta separatists, who since their emergence in the 1980s have always been of and for the far right and bitterly hostile to the working class. “Alberta First” tub-thumping and the mobilization of the far-right elements from which the Alberta separatists draw their core support (“Freedom” Convoy activists, anti-vaxxers, Christian fundamentalists, and Elon Musk-style “libertarians”) were critical to Smith’s successful 2022 campaign to wrest the UCP leadership and premiership from the former Harper Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney.

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Workers in Alberta and across North America have every reason to oppose Smith, her far-right UCP government and the would-be minions of Trump in the Alberta separatist movement. The UCP government’s reactionary referendum proposals should be rejected en bloc.

But if workers are to defend their social and democratic rights they must do so from their own class standpoint—as part of the struggle to develop a working-class counteroffensive across North America against the program of austerity, rearmament, war, and intensified worker-exploitation being pursued by the UCP in Alberta, the federal Liberal government in Ottawa, Trump and all the political representatives of the ruling class, whether nominally left, liberal or right.

Conditions to build such a movement are favorable. Contrary to the reactionary regionalist and outright Alberta separatist positions stoked by the UCP government and its far-right allies, the experiences of workers in Alberta are the same as those across the continent: vicious austerity to pay for militarism and war, crumbling public services, declining real wages, and dangerous workplaces. The upsurge of rejected contracts by workers throughout the American auto parts industry over the summer, the ongoing strike by over 1,200 workers at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario, and the thousands of workers facing the threat of layoff due to the reactionary trade war conflict between American and Canadian imperialism underscore that the objective conditions for unifying and mobilizing workers across all artificial divisions to oppose war, austerity, and the growth of dictatorial forms of rule have matured.

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Workers across Canada must implacably oppose all the rival ruling class camps and the rival banners behind which they seek to subordinate workers to their profit interests, from the defense of Canada and Team Canada to Quebec indépendantiste nationalism and Alberta First regionalism and separatism.

The only answer to war, austerity, ever-deepening social inequality and authoritarianism is the mobilization of the working class as an independent political force. Workers in Canada must turn to the growing upsurge of workers in the US against Trump and the capitalist oligarchy that stands behind him and fight for the development of a unified working-class counteroffensive to establish workers’ political power and a socialist North America.

10. Colombia’s president orders crackdown on national protests as US Reaper drones arrive and IMF cuts loom

Hours before the first national protests against his government, Colombia’s far-right president loosened restraints on the police, as US attack drones arrive and IMF-backed cuts are prepared.

Hours before teachers, students, Indigenous organizations and trade unionists marched Wednesday in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla and other cities in the first national protest against his government, Colombia’s President Abelardo de la Espriella signed a decree freeing the police to unleash repression against demonstrations without first exhausting dialogue and mediation.

The decree rewrites the protest protocol adopted in 2021 under a Supreme Court order. Dialogue becomes only “a rule of preference” and “not a prerequisite that conditions, suspends or postpones” police action against individuals accused of violence. In such cases, officers may skip the first three steps of the escalation ladder.

In a video address, De la Espriella said the decree gives the state “the teeth it needs” against “urban terrorism disguised as protest.” On Monday he called the protest organizers “instigators of evil” and warned: “If they intend to set Colombia on fire, they will run into the determination of the Tiger and his government.”

The Bogotá march was called as a “preparatory day” for a national strike by the Unitary Workers Central (CUT), the Colombian Federation of Educators (Fecode) and former president Gustavo Petro’s Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact) coalition. The presidency warned public employees of “consequences” if they missed work. In Cali, 600 soldiers joined 1,200 police at the city’s entrances.

“There is a lot of accumulated indignation, a hopelessness among people toward this reactionary government,” Gabriela Delgado of the National Association of Youth and Students told El País. “We cannot limit ourselves to the agenda in Congress.”

By the early afternoon, marches in Bogotá, Tunja, Cali, Bucaramanga, Prerira, and Santa Marta involved tens of thousands and were reported as calm. The decree is not a response to violence but an act https://crtweb.org/of intimidation. 

In just ten weeks, the government has opened Colombia to US military operations and sought IMF backing by accepting massive social cuts. The government’s “Rescue Law” would cut spending by 45 trillion pesos a year, 2.2 percent of GDP, toward the president’s pledge to shrink the state by 40 percent.

The government estimated the cost of rebuilding after the magnitude 7.4 earthquake of August 10 at 30 trillion pesos. The planned annual cut is one and a half times that figure.

The quake killed 331 people, left 240 missing and affected 361,353. Families whose homes were destroyed receive 875,452 pesos a month for three months, exactly half the minimum wage. Under “assisted reconstruction,” survivors supply the labor. Fecode is demanding repairs to quake-damaged schools.

The last IMF rescue package, $2.7 billion in exchange for austerity, was signed in 1999 by the same Pastrana government that signed Plan Colombia with Washington that year.

The Colombian ruling elite knows these measures will provoke mass resistance. The union federations and the Pacto Histórico are working to keep this movement within the bounds of “dialogue” with the government preparing to crush it.

***** 

US imperialism and its client elites in the region are turning rapidly toward fascistic forms of rule. Fascism will not be stopped by lawsuits before the Council of State or by appeals to the loyalty of the army.

It can be defeated only by the independent political mobilization of the working class to take power and end the capitalist profit system, under a new leadership armed with an internationalist and socialist program.

11. Morenoite CRT seeks to subordinate housing protests to Spain’s union bureaucracies

The eruption of mass protests across Spain against the housing crisis, following the eviction and subsequent death of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, has brought millions of workers and young people into confrontation with the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government. As demonstrators call for a general strike, the fundamental opposition between their demands and the existing order is evident. They oppose the relentless escalation of militarism and war, of fascist parties and the police state, and of austerity and social inequality that have dominated Europe for decades.

The critical tasks are to broaden the movement among workers and youth, to prepare for a general strike, and politically arm the working class for the revolutionary tasks that would emerge if the working class developed into a total blockade and shutdown of the capitalist economy. This requires the independent organization of the working class in rank-and-file committees independent of organizations tied to the government. 

The Corriente Revolucionaria de Trabajadores (CRT), the Spanish affiliate of the Morenoite tendency led by Argentina’s Socialist Workers Party (PTS), and sister party of Révolution Permanente (RP) in France, is intervening to block such a struggle. Behind its calls to build a strike “from below”, the CRT advances a perspective of pressuring the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO), politically aligned with Sumar and Podemos, and the General Union of Workers (UGT), historically aligned with the PSOE, to lead the movement.

They work ceaselessly to sow illusions that the one-day nationwide protest strike called for November 11 by these pro-government union bureaucracies is a step forward for the working class. While the protest is clearly aimed against the PSOE-Sumar government and its reactionary housing policies, the CRT constantly seeks to hand the initiative back to bureaucracies tied to the government.

*****

The CRT’s appeal to unity... becomes a mechanism to avoid clarifying the program and leadership required to defeat the government's offensive.

No less revealing is what the CRT leaves out. As mass protests erupt across Europe, its perspective for the Spanish general strike remains confined within Spain’s national borders. It makes no attempt to link the movement with the youth protests shaking France, the demonstrations against austerity in Belgium, or the thousands who took to the streets of neighbouring Portugal against soaring rents and the cost-of-living crisis. These are not isolated national struggles, but expressions of an international resurgence of the class struggle, driven by the same capitalist crisis, attacks on living standards and diversion of vast resources towards imperialist war.

*****

The urgent task is to build independent, democratically elected rank-and-file committees in workplaces, schools, universities and working-class neighborhoods, wrest control of the struggle from the union apparatus, and prepare a genuine general strike against the PSOE–Sumar government.

Such a movement must unite workers across Spain with their class brothers and sisters throughout Europe and internationally, linking the fight against evictions, austerity and falling living standards to the struggle against imperialist war and capitalist rule. This requires the building of a revolutionary socialist leadership fighting for the political independence and international unity of the working class, not another round of bankrupt appeals to the trade union bureaucracies.

12. Trump threatens direct US strikes on Yemen, as the US-backed Saudi war escalates

The Trump administration is threatening direct US airstrikes on Yemen in a major new escalation of the war that US imperialism has been waging alongside its ally Saudi Arabia for more than a decade.

Asked Saturday outside the White House whether he was going to join the Saudi strikes on the Houthis, the movement that controls Sanaa and Yemen’s Red Sea coast, US President Donald Trump said: “We may. ... We move very quickly.” Asked Tuesday whether the United States would join the Saudi campaign, he said: “I can’t tell you that.”

The statements followed a declaration by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on October 5: “The United States has a defense and security agreement with Saudi Arabia, and we intend to live by it.”

The active US discussions of a direct intervention against Yemen accompany ongoing plans to attack Iran. NBC News reported October 7 that the military had prepared options “for a possible resumption of major combat operations in Iran ... including the option of launching strikes before the midterm elections next month.” The Associated Press (AP) reported October 2 that three aircraft carriers could be in the region “as early as the end of October.”

Saudi Arabia bombed Sanaa and the provinces of Dhamar and Saada on Tuesday. Spokesman Turki al-Maliki said the strikes were on facilities used to “supply the war effort.” The Sanaa health ministry said a strike killed two people at an oil facility near the port of Ras Isa, the AP reported Wednesday.

UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg told the Security Council Friday that Yemen had returned to “full-scale war.” UNICEF said September 25 that nearly 130,000 people had been displaced in three weeks.

The pretext for direct US intervention is the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia. On Saturday, a Houthi missile strike on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300, NBC News reported Sunday, citing Saudi civil aviation authorities. Rubio wrote on X after the attack that the dead included “an American citizen.” Overnight Tuesday, the Houthis attacked Dhahran, where the state oil company Aramco has its headquarters. The Saudi energy ministry reported Tuesday a “limited fire” in an administrative building.

Houthi forces took the port of Mocha and Perim Island on September 10 and 11, giving them “effective control of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline,” Reuters reported September 15. On October 5, Rashad al-Alimi, head of the Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council, announced a ground offensive. Yemeni Foreign Minister Afrah al-Zouba told reporters Wednesday that her government was “not calling for starting any negotiations.”

The Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the United States into the war on March 25, 2015, announcing “logistical and intelligence support” for the Saudi-led bombing. The bomb the coalition dropped on a school bus in Dahyan on August 9, 2018, killing 40 children, was a 500-pound MK 82 made by Lockheed Martin, CNN reported August 17, 2018. Trump vetoed a congressional resolution to end US participation on April 16, 2019, and that in September a UN group of experts reported that the warring parties “may have used starvation as a method of warfare.”

President Joe Biden announced February 4, 2021 that “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen.” That November, a UN Development Program report projected that the war would have killed 377,000 people by the end of the year, 60 percent of them through hunger and preventable disease. On January 11, 2024, Biden ordered US strikes on Yemen “in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.”

The United States bombed Yemen again from March 15 to May 6, 2025, killing at least 250 people, Al Jazeera reported June 10, 2025. In May 2025, Trump signed an arms package with the kingdom worth nearly $142 billion and in November 2025 a Strategic Defense Agreement.

*****

The US-Israeli war on Iran, begun February 28, is drawing in the whole world. French President Emmanuel Macron said on French television September 24 of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia’s oil terminal on the Red Sea: “We are going to send military resources, that is to say, soldiers, radar systems and defense systems, to protect this site.” British Prime Minister Andy Burnham agreed to send a Royal Air Force tanker to refuel Saudi warplanes, the Defense Post reported September 22.

Al-Monitor reported October 5 that Türkiye and Pakistan had pledged troops and other military support for quick dispatch to Saudi Arabia under the defense pact the three countries signed August 7. Pakistan’s military spokesman, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, told CNN, the Pakistani daily Dawn reported October 7: “I can confirm that the forces of Pakistan are already there.”

13. Florida executes James Robertson as executions press ahead after Christa Pike horror

Florida executed James Robertson, 63, by lethal injection Tuesday at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was pronounced dead at 12:32 p.m., about 10 minutes after the drugs began to flow. Robertson, who told authorities he killed his cellmate in order to be sent to death row, declined to make a final statement. His execution was Florida’s 17th this year, more than any other state. 

Robertson was to be the first of two men put to death in Starke on Tuesday. William Lee Thompson, 74, was scheduled to die that evening for the 1976 murder of Sally Ivester in Miami. But on October 8, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis withdrew Thompson’s death warrant without explanation—the first time he has done so. DeSantis had stayed the execution in September and appointed three psychiatrists to evaluate Thompson’s competency after his lawyers said recent assessments found him “confused” and “disoriented” and under the impression that Bush was still president. The findings of that evaluation have not been released.

“Mr. Thompson suffers from dementia and his health is failing,” said his attorney Bri Lacy. “Now that Mr. Thompson is no longer under a death warrant, we hope FDOC will relocate him to an adequate medical facility and provide the care he needs.” Thompson remains on death row, and a new warrant could be signed at any time.

Robertson’s was Florida’s first execution since Tennessee’s failed attempt to kill Christa Pike on September 30. Asked how Florida would avoid a repetition of that horrific event, Department of Corrections spokesman Jordan Kirkland said the state had “a sound lethal injection process and protocol.”

*****

Texas carried out the first execution after the Pike debacle, putting Jamaal Howard, 46, to death on October 7 with pentobarbital—the drug that failed to kill Pike. Howard’s lawyers had presented evidence that he was intellectually disabled, and he had been diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia for 25 years. Texas and Tennessee use a single-drug pentobarbital protocol. Florida uses three drugs: the sedative etomidate, the paralytic rocuronium bromide, and potassium acetate, which stops the heart.

The day after Howard was killed, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would livestream the firing squad execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. Trump had approved the execution on October 5. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said, adding, “I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II.” Trump promised at a rally to “deliver final justice to an evil killer.” The execution, the first by the US military since 1961, is set for December 3.

Robertson, who was executed Tuesday in Florida, entered prison in 1980 at 17 and spent his entire adult life incarcerated. He accumulated convictions for burglary and assault in four Florida counties; for escape, battery and weapons offenses committed in prison; and for the attempted murder of a cellmate in 1997. He told the Netflix series I Am a Killer that he killed to escape solitary-like conditions for the better conditions of death row.

*****

Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP) said the case “raises deeply troubling questions about isolation, despair, and the use of execution as a means of escaping incarceration.” Such “homicide as suicide” has been documented repeatedly since 1976. A 1999 Journal of Criminal Justice article, “The Psychology of Suicide-Murder and the Death Penalty,” identified at least 22 suspected cases and warned, “there is a danger in even just having the death penalty on the statute book in a state.” FADP’s Maria DeLiberato said the existence of the death penalty “may have caused the very violence it purportedly prevents.”

The killings of Howard and Robertson passed without protest from Congress, the Democratic Party or the corporate media. Even official criticism of Pike’s failed execution concerned its outcome, not the killing itself. Tennessee Governor Lee insisted executions must be “effective.” Trump said lethal injection “shouldn’t be very difficult.” Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee for Tennessee governor, declared, “We have to find a way to do this—and do it successfully.”

The bipartisan objections to the Hasan execution are directed not at the killing but at the livestream, which the UN human rights office says would violate the prohibition on torture. Their concern is that a televised firing squad would tarnish the military and damage the interests of American imperialism abroad. Nearly all of these critics support the death penalty.

Thirty-one people have been executed in the US in 2026. Florida accounts for 17, more than all other states combined, followed by Texas with seven, Oklahoma with three, Alabama with two, and Arizona and Tennessee with one each. DeSantis, who leaves office in January, has signed 20 death warrants this year, after a record 19 executions in 2025.

14. Norfolk Southern train derails in suburb of St. Louis, Missouri

On the evening of September 20, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in Ferguson, Missouri, triggering widespread power outages and prompting an immediate emergency response from authorities. Norfolk Southern reported that about 20 train cars derailed in the 600 block of Ferguson Avenue near Paul Avenue.

The train was composed of three locomotives and 98 cars, including boxcars, auto carriers and gondola cars, with one car carrying hazardous materials which was not involved in the derailment. Approximately 240 customers remained without electricity shortly after midnight on September 21 in an area stretching from West Florissant and Ferguson avenues to South Florissant Road.

No injuries were reported. Authorities did not order an evacuation, but asked residents to avoid the area while emergency crews assessed the damage.

Jacqueline Nelson, who lives three houses away from Elizabeth and Ferguson where the train fell off the bridge, told local television station FOX 2, “What’s going on in this area. Why us?”

While the immediate cause of the derailment was still under investigation in the initial reports, corporate strategies aimed at boosting profits—such as running longer trains, reducing crew sizes, and cutting maintenance costs—have contributed to an environment in which derailments are a regular fact of life in America. Federal Railroad Administration data list 1,113 derailments in 2024 and 976 in 2025, roughly three per day.

*****

Among the US derailments reported in the first two weeks of October:

• October 13: Five Norfolk Southern cars and a locomotive derailed in Morganton, North Carolina, injuring an engineer.

• October 8: Eleven Canadian National cars carrying sand derailed south of Pittsville, Wisconsin, temporarily blocking a highway crossing.

• October 5: An RJ Corman coal train derailed in Thurmond, West Virginia, damaging tracks and cutting off vehicle access.

• October 2: Five Conrail cars derailed in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, forcing road closures.

• October 1: Thirty-four Norfolk Southern cars derailed in Springville, Alabama, after a crossing collision, prompting a temporary evacuation.

• October 1: About 25 BNSF cars derailed north of Pleasantville, Iowa, closing a local road.

Norfolk Southern was also responsible for the East Palestine, Ohio derailment in February 2023. Three days later, a company contractor deliberately vented and burned vinyl chloride from five tank cars, an operation the National Transportation Safety Board later concluded was unnecessary. The derailment, chemical spills and fires contaminated the town and nearby waterways, killing thousands of fish and other aquatic animals.

While government agencies concluded that the environment was safe, local residents have reported health issues including rashes, neurological problems and respiratory difficulties.

The six Class I railroads (Norfolk Southern, CSX Transportation, Union Pacific, BNSF Railway, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City) which dominate the industry, operate primarily to serve their shareholders’ interests rather than prioritizing safety or human needs. The financialization of railroads, where hedge funds and asset managers prioritize buybacks and dividends, diverts capital from operations that could otherwise be used to enhance worker safety and prevent train derailments.

Policies such as “Precision Scheduled Railroading” and BNSF’s punitive “Hi Viz” attendance system are designed to exploit railroad crews to the limit, operating longer and heavier trains with fewer workers and reducing maintenance and inspection time.

The rail industry has been pushing to eliminate two-person crew requirements in favor of operating trains as long as two miles with only a single engineer, a move that would result in thousands of job losses and increase the risk of accidents.

Railroaders founded the Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee in September 2022 to organize a national strike against the concessions proposed by then-President Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board, which the union apparatus was working to impose. Workers were fighting years of stagnant wages, exhausting schedules and punitive attendance policies that made it difficult to take time off even for illness. The committee sought to unite workers across the divisions maintained by the 12 rail unions and put the struggle under rank-and-file control. 

The unions delayed strike action even after workers in four unions rejected the White House-backed agreement. In December 2022, Biden and Congress imposed the contract and banned a strike, with support from both capitalist parties. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voted for the anti-strike bill. Bernie Sanders voted against final passage but consented to the expedited procedure that allowed it to pass before the strike deadline, while promoting a sick-leave amendment that was defeated. The union officials enforced the strike ban.

Beginning in August 2024, the union bureaucracies negotiated separate agreements at individual carriers, dividing workers by company and craft before national bargaining even opened. The deals set a pattern of 17.5 percent wage increases over five years, below the 24 percent in the contract imposed in 2022, while preventing workers from mounting a united fight.

*****

Rail workers need to expand the Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee to unite across carriers and crafts against job cuts and unsafe operations, independently of the union bureaucracy. This struggle requires a political break with both big-business parties and a socialist movement of the working class to place the railroads under public ownership and democratic workers’ control. 

15. Texas prosecutor accuses ICE of intentionally running over worker, obstructing investigation

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told NBC News on Tuesday, October 13 that it was “pretty obvious” an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer intentionally ran over 48-year-old construction worker Miguel Parra Hernandez in Texas last Saturday. Teare said federal authorities were refusing to cooperate with local investigators and may have allowed critical evidence to be erased.

“My viewing of it, and many other investigators that have viewed it as well, it’s pretty obvious that this was an intentional striking and running over of the person by the vehicle, and in that case, that is an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Texas,” Teare told NBC.

Teare said investigators had obtained additional video beyond the footage already circulating publicly. The vehicular assault left Parra Hernandez with multiple breaks and fractures, according to his attorneys. He remains hospitalized in ICE custody.

*****

The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, bear responsibility for ongoing wanton ICE violence. They provided key votes for passage of the anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act as well as procedural votes to ensure ICE and Customs and Border Protection received billions in funding through the end of the Trump administration.

In a CNN Town Hall Wednesday, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico reiterated his support for the immigration Gestapo. Asked by CNN if he supported abolishing ICE, Talarico quickly replied, “No, and I never have.” The Democrat added, “We need immigration and customs enforcement in this country.”

Since Trump’s return to the White House, the immigration Gestapo has shot at least 25 people. More than 55 have died in ICE custody, and hundreds, if not thousands, have been brutalized by federal agents and for-profit prison guards.

The only social force capable of securing justice for victims of the immigration Gestapo is the working class, united on a socialist basis and politically independent of both capitalist parties. Their border regime divides workers by nationality and immigration status, pitting them against one another in a race to the bottom for the benefit of the capitalist class. 

16. The crisis of capitalist rule in Australia and the political fight for socialism

The second of five resolutions adopted unanimously by the Eighth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), held September 26–29, 2026, summarized here with the assistance of Socialism AI: 

1. Australia's two-party system (Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition) is disintegrating under the pressures of world war, inequality, attacks on democratic rights, and working-class radicalization.

2. This mirrors an international decay of the traditional capitalist parties, with ruling-class sections cultivating far-right formations (Trump, AfD, Le Pen, Meloni, Reform, One Nation) to suppress the coming revolutionary upsurge.

3. The Liberal Party's collapse is the sharpest expression of the crisis, but the social bases of both Labor and the Coalition are breaking up as professionals are proletarianized and small business is squeezed.

4. The 2025 election was a historic debacle for the Coalition: Dutton's Trump-style turn was rejected, the Coalition was reduced to a rump, and Dutton lost his own seat; the Coalition then ruptured in January 2026 and remains fragile.

5. With the Liberals no longer viable, Labor is left alone to impose war, austerity and authoritarianism without a stable parliamentary safety valve and with historically low support.

6. The establishment is lurching right (elevating One Nation and imposing a reactionary Labor program), while workers and youth shift left.

7. Workers are being driven into struggle against Labor and the union bureaucracies, and the outcome depends decisively on the SEP's fight to organize and politically free the working class.

8. Polls are distorted but unprecedented: One Nation has eclipsed the Coalition and sometimes outpolled Labor—the first time a "third party" has done so.

9. Sections of the ruling elite, led by billionaire Gina Rinehart, are turning to One Nation because neither old party can impose the required agenda fast or ruthlessly enough.

10. The establishment once saw Hanson as merely pushing politics right; now it is seriously considering her far-right party as an instrument of rule, as shown by Barnaby Joyce's defection.

11. One Nation draws mainly on disgruntled Liberal/National voters, but some workers are turning to it under the mistaken belief it is "anti-establishment."

12. One Nation is not anti-establishment: it is a far-right formation being integrated into official politics as an instrument of the corporate-financial oligarchy, whose program (war, 5% military spending, attacks on rights, gutting social programs, anti-immigrant scapegoating) serves capital.

13. One Nation's growth is a distorted expression of hostility to the establishment, and Labor bears political responsibility for it, since Labor and the unions created the social crisis the far right exploits.

14. The crisis of bourgeois rule is fundamentally a crisis of the Labor Party, on which the ruling class has relied in every crisis for over a century.

15. Labor's 2025 "triumph" rested on a primary vote of just 34 percent, and its decline calls into question its ability to suppress the working class while serving the oligopoly amid world war.

16. Labor was founded in 1891 as a bourgeois party resting on working-class support, not a socialist one; Lenin in 1920 called it "a thoroughly bourgeois party" that exists "systematically to dupe the workers."

17. Lacking its own democratic tradition, the Australian ruling class has relied on Labor and the unions to contain a militant working class, using the racist "White Australia" policy and the arbitration system as pillars of rule.

18. Labor has been the preeminent party of war and class suppression since Federation—from Hughes's conscription campaign, through Scullin's Depression austerity, to Curtin and Chifley's wartime strike suppression.

19. Post-war Labor backed every US war (Korea, Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq), integrated Australia into US war preparations against China, and its opposition to the Vietnam War was purely tactical, aimed at preventing a revolutionary turn.

20. In 1975 the ruling class dismissed Whitlam and put the army on alert, relying on Labor, the unions and the Stalinists to divert mass opposition into a dead-end election; today's crisis is far greater and those old mechanisms are corroded.

21. The Hawke-Keating years (1983–96) marked a reactionary turn, part of an international wave of renunciationism by labor organizations amid capitalist globalisation and the Stalinist restoration.

22. Labor abandoned social reform and the unions abandoned workers' rights in the name of "competitiveness," implementing deregulation, privatization, tax cuts and the wage-suppressing Accord.

23. The result was the greatest redistribution of income to the wealthy in history: labour's share of income fell from 62.4% (1975) to 53% (2008), and 170 billionaires now hold wealth equal to the bottom 60% of the population.

24. Opposition has grown as the combined Labor-Coalition vote fell from 93.1% (1983) to 66.4% (2025), while union membership collapsed from 57% to 13.1% of the workforce.

25. The Greens, a safety valve based in the affluent upper-middle class, failed to gain in 2025; it funnels votes to Labor, props up its budgets, and its "anti-AUKUS" stance is a variant of Labor's militarism, not an alternative to it.

26. The Albanese government's defining feature is turning Australia into a forward base for US war against China (AUKUS, nuclear submarines, military integration), carried out by a prime minister from Labor's so-called "socialist left."

27. Since May 2022 real wages have fallen to 15-year-old levels, and the real jobless rate (Roy Morgan) is 11.7% with 8.8% underemployment—over 3.35 million workers without enough work.

28. The RBA, backed by Labor, has imposed 16 rate rises, mortgage costs are up 155%, new loans consume 45% of income, and property prices have surged 47.3% since 2020, locking millions out of home ownership.

29. The centerpiece of austerity is a $38 billion cut to the NDIS—the largest single program cut in history—forcing at least 300,000 disabled people off the scheme while tens of billions go to the military.

30. The assault on the defenseless continues decades of attacks on Aboriginal communities, and the "Closing the Gap" program has been a bipartisan fraud that met none of its targets.

31. The Albanese government has effectively adopted One Nation's anti-immigrant program, with Tony Burke spearheading visa cancellations, fee hikes, deportations of 80,000 people, and the stripping of rights from asylum seekers.

32. Blaming immigrants for the housing crisis is a fabrication; the real cause is the profit drive of banks and developers, aided by government legislation.

33. Attacks on Aboriginal people and immigrants set precedents for attacks on the whole working class, and the SEP insists all workers must be able to travel, live and work in any country with full rights.

34. The ruling class fears that Labor and the unions cannot contain the radicalization its war-and-austerity agenda is fueling.

35. The two-year mass protests against the Gaza genocide were the most significant anti-war movement since 2003, signalling a rupture between broad layers of the population and the establishment.

36. Workers and youth are drawing broader conclusions—"money for war but never for working people"—recognizing that war and austerity are one program.

37. Governments have responded with police-state methods, and when vilifying the Gaza protests as antisemitic failed, the December 2025 Bondi attack was seized on as a pretext for anti-protest laws.

38. The circumstances of the Bondi attack (15 dead) remain unexplained, but it was immediately used, like 9/11, to justify unprecedented authoritarianism and war.

39. Albanese and NSW Premier Minns enacted far-reaching anti-democratic laws (including the Combating Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act) criminalizing political opinion, banning organizations, and expanding surveillance, with police violence used against a Herzog protest in February 2026.

40. The class struggle has accelerated, with educators, health workers, public servants and miners voting to strike after years of sub-inflation wages.

41. The union bureaucracy has suppressed the class struggle and blocked any link to the anti-war movement—no union has struck against war supplies, and a Trades Hall secretary called police on anti-genocide protesters.

42. Union bureaucrats have long suppressed action by citing anti-strike laws they themselves consented to, so workers must fight the very leaders who claim to represent them.

43. The sudden joint resignation of the two top ACTU bureaucrats after the 2026 Labor conference signals an explosive rebellion is brewing.

44. None of these problems can be resolved within the profit system and its warring nation states; nuclear war and climate catastrophe require a globally coordinated plan that capitalism cannot provide.

45. The pseudo-left (Socialist Alternative, Socialist Alliance, Solidarity) is a last line of defense, combining socialist phrase-mongering with the insistence that workers can only pressure capitalist governments and corporatized unions.

46. The pseudo-left are neither socialist nor working class; they descend from tendencies that broke from Trotskyism and now serve an affluent upper-middle-class layer by channeling workers' opposition back into Labor and the unions.

47. The pseudo-left's response to One Nation—denouncing its voters as "racist scum" while backing "anyone but Hanson"—exposes its class character, and its new Australian Socialist Party is a fraud modelled on the DSA and Syriza.

48. One Nation can only be defeated by a socialist program for the overthrow of capitalism, and it is against this revolutionary perspective that the pseudo-left directs its fire.

49. Objective conditions drive workers into struggle but do not spontaneously produce socialist consciousness; the party must comprehend and give political direction to the subterranean radicalisation before it is captured by bourgeois agencies.

50. The SEP is committed to building independent rank-and-file committees rooted in the workplaces, going deeper into the working class and developing worker-socialists through the WSWS and patient political education.

51. The SEP must expand its youth movement, the IYSSE, building clubs at universities, TAFEs, high schools and among working-class youth against militarism and for socialism.

52. The task is to transform radicalization into a conscious revolutionary movement by arming workers and youth with the lessons of Marxist history, above all the history of the Fourth International and its International Committee.

53. Socialist consciousness is not the spontaneous product of events but of the persistent, systematic intervention of the revolutionary party, which alone can transform radicalization into a conscious struggle for a workers' government.

17. Australian PM glorifies Afghan occupation at event attended by accused war criminal

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese glorified Australia’s role in the US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan at a ceremony in Canberra on Sunday attended by former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith, who is awaiting trial on five charges of war crime murder.

*****

Albanese’s celebration of the neo-colonial occupation was a declaration of the Labor government’s unwavering commitment to US-led imperialist wars, past, present and future, including the ongoing criminal assault on Iran and preparations for a catastrophic conflict with China.

The decision to hold an event marking the 25th anniversary of the invasion was itself strange and provocative.

The longest imperialist occupation in modern history against one of the poorest countries in Central Asia and the Middle East, after all, ended in a complete debacle. When the US withdrew in 2021, to focus on its confrontations with Russia and China, its puppet forces were immediately routed by the Taliban. That proved in practice that the occupation was opposed by the vast majority of the Afghan population.

The year before, an official report commissioned by the Australian military, underscored why the occupiers were so hated. The Brereton Report, though covering up the responsibility of governments and military command, acknowledged “credible evidence” that Australian troops had murdered at least 39 Afghan civilians and prisoners among a slew of atrocities.

Albanese did not reference either the outcome of the war or that horrific record. Instead, his speech was substantially a repeat of the utterly discredited justifications given for the invasion in 2001. The remarks closely paralleled those delivered by conservative Prime Minister John Howard when he announced Australia’s participation and favorably cited them.

Albanese presented the invasion as a legitimate response to September 11 declaring it as “an attack on a way of life that belonged just as much to us” as to Americans.

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The invasions were themselves acts of state terrorism on a vast scale. The many questions over 9/11, including the role of Saudi Arabia and the failure of the American intelligence agencies to prevent it, have only grown louder. And in the interim, the US has openly allied with Al Qaeda linked forces, including in the regime-change operations in Libya and Syria beginning in the early 2010s.

Labor, in opposition at the time, supported Australia joining the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while briefly posturing over the need for a United Nations mandate for the latter. But even by that standard, Albanese’s remarks were striking as a direct repetition of the line of the most hawkish and criminal sections of the US military-intelligence apparatus.

*****

Roberts-Smith, who was heavily promoted by the political and media establishment for years, including being awarded the Victoria Cross in 2011, was earlier this year charged with five war crimes. The allegations include that Roberts-Smith machine-gunned a disabled Afghan prisoner to death; kicked a civilian off a cliff before instructing a subordinate to murder him, and other instances of “aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring the war crime of murder.”

Nor was Roberts-Smith’s presence, despite the fact that he is essentially charged with being a serial killer, a low-key one. He was seated in the front row, permitted to place a wreath and then to give interviews to the media.

18. SEP (Sri Lanka) public meeting: Two years of JVP/NPP rule—a regime of IMF austerity and big business

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka will hold a public meeting entitled “Two Years of JVP/NPP Rule: A regime of Big Business and IMF Austerity” on Tuesday, November 10 at 4 p.m. in the Colombo Public Library Auditorium.

The SEP and IYSSE invite workers, youth and other oppressed layers of society to attend the meeting, which will assess two years of JVP/NPP rule and discuss the way forward for the working class.

Two years ago, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) came to power by exploiting mass opposition to the discredited traditional establishment parties. It conducted a two-faced election campaign, making false promises to workers and the poor to improve their living conditions and uphold democratic rights, while assuring big business and foreign capital that their interests would be protected.

The pseudo-left, led by the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), hailed the election victory and presented the NPP as the “realization of the people’s anticipations.” Today, as workers enter into struggle, these same forces preach that the class struggle must be diverted into pressuring the government to “take the correct path.”

Only the SEP and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) warned that the JVP, re-branded as the National People’s Power (NPP), was another capitalist party, steeped in Sinhala chauvinism, and that it would prove to be a trap for workers who had been fighting attacks on social and democratic rights under the government of Ranil Wickremesinghe. 

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The working class must organize independently of the capitalist parties, their servile pseudo-left apologists and the trade union bureaucracies. It must rally the rural poor and other oppressed layers of society to fight the government’s austerity program and attacks on democratic rights.

We warmly invite workers, intellectuals, youth and those opposed to austerity and the suppression of democratic rights to attend the meeting and participate in the discussion on the way forward for the working class and the masses.

Venue: Colombo Public Library Auditorium
Date and time: Tuesday, November 10, at 4 p.m.

19. New Zealand university and polytechnic staff vote to strike

About 9,500 New Zealand university and polytechnic staff, including lecturers, tutors, professors and librarians voted in ballots last month to strike during October.

Tertiary Education Union (TEU) national secretary Amy Ross said university staff were being offered pay rises well below inflation, which is currently 4.1 percent. Radio NZ reported in August that the TEU was “seeking a six percent pay rise for its members at six universities,” but an October 2 press release announcing the strike vote did not mention this figure. Workers also want more secure employment, with fully half of all tertiary staff not permanent.

It is the first time both university and polytechnic staff have voted together to strike, but the TEU has not announced any strike dates. Its statement said actions “may include half day or full day strikes, withholding of students grades or new enrollments.”

Polytechnic employers are resisting attempts to retain a single collective employment agreement covering the country’s trades training sector. The TEU has asked the state’s Employment Relations Authority (ERA) to provide facilitated bargaining for a multi-employer collective agreement (MECA) for 11 institutions.

The union has been trying to engage in collective bargaining with polytechnics since February, with most employers dragging out the process, refusing to be a part of a MECA and refusing to discuss pay.

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The vote is an expression of rising anger over worsening austerity hitting all layers of the working class. It follows a half-day strike by 10,000 public servants on September 9 against the National Party-led government’s moves to drive down wages and cut jobs. About 8,700 jobs across government departments, 14 percent of the core public sector workforce, are to be axed.

The public service strike was the biggest since last October’s “mega strike” by some 100,000 teachers and healthcare workers.

The ruling elite is starving essential public services, including health and education, to funnel more money to the rich and to boost the military budget in preparation for war. With an election due on November 7, opinion polls have the National Party and main opposition Labour Party both registering below 30 percent support, the first time since the 1930s that the two main bourgeois parties have been so unpopular.

The broad assault on living standards has been facilitated directly by the trade unions. Following the mega-strike the unions isolated each section of workers involved, shut down intermittent strike activity, and imposed below-inflation pay deals of around 2.5 percent for teachers, allied health workers, doctors and nurses.

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The Socialist Equality Group (SEG) in New Zealand warns that the current struggles will, if left in the hands of the TEU, result in a sellout. The union apparatus long ago ceased representing the interests of workers, even in the struggle to defend basic conditions. It is a privileged bureaucracy whose priority is the defense of capitalism. Its role, with the assistance of middle class, pseudo-left groups, is to enforce redundancies, wage cuts and pro-corporate restructuring.

The unions, instruments of big business and the state, are not reformable. The SEG calls on education sector workers to build rank-and-file committees that they control democratically, independent of the unions. These committees must break the isolation imposed by Labour and the bureaucracy and fight to unite all public and private sector workers against historic attacks on their jobs, wages and living standards.

20.  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.