Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The reality of US-Israel relations—Part 3
The dissolution of the Soviet Union removed the last external constraint on American power in the Middle East. With Moscow gone, regimes such as Iraq, Syria, and South Yemen could no longer balance between rival great powers; Washington emerged as the region’s sole arbiter.
Far from inaugurating an era of peace, unipolarity freed the US to compensate for its long‑term economic decline through unrestrained military force. Over the next three decades, it launched a chain of interventions—Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq again, Libya, Yemen, and now Iran—that defined the new imperial order.
The Gulf War was the first expression of this shift. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990—undertaken under the illusion of tacit US tolerance—was seized upon by the Bush administration to reassert American dominance. Operation Desert Storm killed more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and shattered Iraq’s infrastructure, with Bush vowing to return the country “to the pre‑industrial age.”
To preserve the Arab coalition, Washington forced Israel to remain on the sidelines, even withholding Identification Friend or Foe codes to prevent retaliation against Iraqi Scud missiles. Yet the US stopped short of regime change, fearing that a Kurdish or Shia victory would destabilize Türkiye. Instead, it imposed a decade of sanctions and no‑fly zones that devastated Iraqi society while keeping Hussein weak.
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The Oslo Accords served US imperialism as a temporary mechanism for managing, not resolving, the Palestinian question that has historically been the single most powerful mobilizing force for anti-imperialist sentiment across the Arab world and, increasingly, globally. Every massacre, siege, settlement expansion, abuse and mistreatment generates mass outrage that threatens to destabilize Washington’s client regimes. The solution from Washington’s perspective was a containment operation, while advancing several other imperialist objectives.
Oslo’s fundamental achievement, from America’s standpoint, was converting the PLO from an armed national liberation movement into a subcontracted security apparatus. Arafat, in exchange for the fiction of eventual statehood, agreed to recognize Israel, renounce armed struggle, and—crucially—guarantee Israeli security. The Palestinian Authority that emerged was not an embryonic state but a police force suppressing Palestinian resistance on Israel’s behalf, while enriching a thin layer of the Palestinian bourgeoisie via “developmental aid”. Oslo served to tame the most radical of the Arab nationalist movements and put it to work for the occupation it had pledged to end.
Oslo was also driven by Israeli capital’s need to break out of national autarchy and integrate into the wider Middle East economy in the era of globalization. Labour leader Shimon Peres stated the objective with brutal candor in 1992: “We do not want a peace between nations. We want a peace between markets”.
A Palestinian mini-state—non-contiguous, economically dependent, providing cheap subcontracted labor—was the price of that integration into European Union and Arab markets. Palestinian workers would be excluded from Israel and replaced by even cheaper and more defenseless Asian migrants, while Palestinian consumers and territory would provide a captive market. This was colonial economics dressed in the language of peace.
For Washington, Oslo served another vital diplomatic purpose. It would provide the Arab bourgeois regimes with political cover for their collaboration with US imperialism. The Arab ruling classes in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia could point to the “peace process” as evidence that Washington was not simply an unconditional backer of Israeli expansionism, making it easier to justify their own normalization with Israel and their alignment with US strategic goals.
Likewise, the primary purpose of Oslo’s hollow successor, the 2003 Road Map, was to provide cover for the Iraq War and allow the Arab regimes to defend their acquiescence in the invasion to their populations.
This “peace” was structurally incapable of delivering either Palestinian self-determination or alleviating the Palestinians’ miserable living conditions. It was not designed to. Israel continued expanding the settlements throughout the 1990s, more so than in the preceding 26 years. It seized control of water and other resources, built bypass roads, and installed more than 600 checkpoints that crippled Palestinian movement and economic life.
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After 9/11, George W. Bush used the “war on terror” to normalize preemptive war and regime change, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq. This was the declaration that open‑ended military force would now be the routine instrument of US foreign policy. Israel naturally welcomed the shift.
Barely a month after invading Afghanistan, Bush unveiled the “axis of evil”: North Korea, Iran, and Iraq—the last two oil‑producing states that resisted US hegemony and supported the Palestinians. The list soon expanded to Cuba, Libya, and Syria. The US now claimed the right to attack any state that obstructed its global dominance.
Israel moved rapidly to insert its own conflict into this new framework. It insisted that the US and Israel were fighting the same war, recasting Palestinian resistance as part of the global jihadist threat. Netanyahu declared on 9/11 that the attacks would “generate immediate sympathy” for Israel, while Israeli officials folded Hamas, the bourgeois clerical group affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, all the Palestinian armed groups and Hezbollah in Lebanon into the same category as Al‑Qaeda. This ideological maneuver aligned US national‑security doctrine with Israel’s position during the Second Intifada.
Ariel Sharon, by this time prime minister of Israel, became one of the most vocal international supporters of the US drive to war in Iraq, despite Iraq’s shattered condition after a decade of sanctions and Israel’s 1981 destruction of the Osirak reactor. He helped manufacture a pro‑war consensus inside Israel that contrasted sharply with mass opposition across Europe and North America.
Israel did not formally join the 2003 invasion, but it supplied intelligence, logistics, and political support. US interrogation and torture methods used in Iraq—including at Abu Ghraib—drew directly on Israeli precedents. As in 1991, Washington excluded Israel from the “Coalition of the Willing” to avoid embarrassing its Arab allies, who publicly denounced the war while privately providing bases, overflight rights, and counter‑insurgency cooperation.
US–Israel integration deepened across every major security domain: counterterrorism, Homeland Security, urban warfare, cyber operations, intelligence coordination against Iran in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, regional missile‑defense integration, and joint exploitation of eastern Mediterranean gas. After 9/11, Israel became structurally embedded in the American security architecture—the forward base and strike arm for the coming confrontation with Iran.
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After 9/11, the Bush administration’s doctrine of reshaping the Middle East by force—and the Arab regimes’ acquiescence to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—allowed Israel to abandon the Oslo fiction of “negotiations” and replace it with open militarism: sieges, assassinations, curfews, and regime‑change operations aimed at crushing Palestinian resistance once and for all.
Bush signaled the shift immediately. In March 2001 he told Sharon he would not “try to force peace,” effectively giving Israel a free hand. Sharon responded with the first airstrikes on PA targets since 1967 and a wave of incursions across the West Bank. When Sharon formally repudiated Oslo in December 2001, the Arab regimes issued ritual protests but took no action.
In 2002 Washington installed Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian Prime Minister under the “Roadmap for Peace,” to sideline Arafat and create a Palestinian leadership willing to act as Washington’s enforcer. The Roadmap served as diplomatic cover for Arab support for the coming Iraq war.
In 2004 Bush issued written guarantees to Sharon that marked a historic shift in US policy: recognising that major settlement blocs would remain part of Israel, rejecting the right of return, and affirming Israel’s right to act “by itself” even in areas it withdrew from. Armed with these assurances, Sharon carried out the unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza—not a step toward peace, but a move to reduce the cost of occupation while freezing negotiations on refugees, borders, and Jerusalem.
When Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections, the US refused to accept the result. It organized a $1.27 billion plan to arm Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan to overthrow the elected government. When Hamas preempted the coup and took control of Gaza, Washington backed Israel’s blockade—cutting off food, medicine, electricity, and water—with Egypt’s active participation.
The US fully supported Israel’s 2008–09 assault on Gaza, viewing the destruction of Hamas as part of its broader project to build a “New Middle East” and weaken Iran and Syria. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the PA were direct accomplices, terrified that Hamas’ electoral victory had shown that a popular resistance movement could challenge their own rule.
Under Obama, US military aid rose to $3.8 billion annually, with expanded cooperation on missile defense and major funding for Iron Dome. Trump went further: cutting all funding to Palestinian institutions, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and orchestrating in 2020 the Abraham Accords—the normalization of Israel with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
This formalized what had long been an open secret: the extensive covert commercial, intelligence and military cooperation between the Gulf States and Israel, now legitimized in the service of Washington’s “maximum pressure” sanctions regime against Iran. It ended even the pretense that Arab regimes conditioned relations with Israel on Palestinian rights. It consolidated a US‑led anti‑Iran axis and aligned the Gulf States with Washington’s broader confrontation with China.
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When the October 2023 genocide began, the Biden administration’s immediate deployment of warships to the eastern Mediterranean made clear that this was a joint US–Israel offensive. Washington provided intelligence, logistics, and a $14.3 billion emergency weapons package, while using its veto at the UN Security Council to block ceasefire resolutions. Gaza became a tactical laboratory for US–Israel military doctrine: urban warfare, surveillance, drone operations, and missile‑defence systems tested in real time.
Every Israeli assault—in Gaza or the West Bank—served US strategic interests. Israel was given a free hand because each operation advanced the broader project of remaking the Middle East under US hegemony. The 2023 genocidal war signalled to Iran, China, and Russia that the US had no “red lines” and would tolerate mass killing to assert dominance.
But this was always a relationship of mutual dependence. Israel required US financing and protection to survive; the US required Israel as its indispensable enforcer, subcontractor, and regional attack dog. What united them was the shared class interest between US imperialism and its regional proxy in crushing any challenge—Palestinian, Arab nationalist, Iranian, or working‑class—to their domination of the most strategically vital, oil‑rich region on earth.
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In 2006, Israel launched a 34-day assault on Lebanon that was explicitly aimed at eliminating Hezbollah, an Iranian ally, as a military and political force. It was a carefully planned component of the US strategy for regional restructuring, which the WSWS described as “a continuation and escalation of the imperialist geo-political restructuring of the Middle East and Central Asia that began with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.” The immediate military goal — crushing Hezbollah—was the prelude to confronting Syria and ultimately Iran. The US actively blocked ceasefire efforts, with Condoleezza Rice’s visit deliberately delayed, giving Israel maximum destruction time.
The war devastated Lebanon and displaced more than a million people, but it failed to achieve its strategic aims. Hezbollah survived, mobilised mass popular support, and forced a ceasefire. The war did, however, accelerate the development of missile‑defence systems that became central to US–Israel military cooperation.
Israel persisted in its efforts to eliminate Hezbollah. Throughout the 2010s, it conducted thousands of airstrikes in Syria targeting Iranian-backed forces and Hezbollah supply lines, acting as Washington’s air force against the Iranian axis of resistance. In 2024, Israel returned to the task with far greater ferocity: a systematic campaign of assassination of Hezbollah’s entire senior command structure, culminating in the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah on September 28, 2024.
Some 85 bombs—the majority US-supplied 2,000-pound bunker-busters — were dropped on central Beirut. Netanyahu ordered the strike from New York City, the day after delivering a speech at the UN General Assembly explicitly framing Israel’s campaign as the construction of a “new Middle East” aligned with US strategic interests against Iran, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. The WSWS wrote that this was not Israeli unilateralism but an operation of US imperialism, “Netanyahu’s government, funded and armed by the United States, is not an independent actor but functions as America’s proxy.”
In March this year, Israel again attacked Lebanon as part of the wider US confrontation with Iran, deploying the same tactics used in Gaza—mass displacement and aerial bombardment—while seeking to push Hezbollah north of the Litani River. The broader US objective remains the same: reshaping the regional balance of power. Israel’s leadership, meanwhile, is using the conflict to pursue its territorial ambitions and consolidate a Greater Israel.
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Israel has not only carried out operations directly against Iran; it has functioned as Washington’s forward strike force against the entire “axis of resistance” the US seeks to destroy. During the US–Gulf–Türkiye campaign to topple the Syrian government, Israel launched hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian military sites, airfields, weapons depots, and the bases and convoys of Iran and Hezbollah—the decisive external force in Syria since 2013.
It effectively acted as air support for US‑backed opposition militias, while providing medical and logistical aid to armed Islamist groups in the Golan Heights. These operations were coordinated with US forces in eastern and northern Syria, which shared intelligence with Israel.
The aim was explicit: prevent Iran from consolidating its position in Syria as a counterweight to US regional dominance. Israel also destroyed Syria’s alleged nuclear reactor at al‑Kibar in 2007—an operation the Bush administration was unwilling to carry out itself but sanctioned Israel to perform, preserving the US–Israeli nuclear monopoly. The strike was immediately used by Washington as a warning to Tehran: this is what awaits your nuclear facilities.
The 2023–24 Israel–Hezbollah war reshaped the Syrian battlefield. Hezbollah was forced to divert fighters, commanders, and logistics back to Lebanon’s southern front. Its reduced presence created a temporary vacuum in northwest Syria just as Hay’at Tahrir al‑Sham (HTS), the Sunni Islamist militant group and al-Nusra offshoot, was consolidating control over Idlib.
With Hezbollah tied down and regional actors focused on preventing a wider Israel–Iran confrontation, HTS faced fewer constraints. This indirect but decisive shift helped HTS tighten its grip and contributed to the collapse of the Syrian regime in December 2024.
After HTS seized Damascus, Israel continued its long‑standing objective of weakening and fragmenting Syria. It backed minority groups against a centralized state—the Druze in the southwest and the Kurds in the northeast—until Washington forced it to withdraw support for Kurdish forces during the Syrian army’s offensive to reintegrate the autonomous region.
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The US‑led invasion of Iraq—whose unintended consequence was to expand Iran’s regional influence—made Iran the focus of US strategy. This shift accelerated Israel’s integration into the American military‑security system and pushed Iran towards deeper ties with China, now Washington’s principal global rival.
Once Iran was placed in the “axis of evil,” Washington drove a series of UN sanctions against its nuclear program, despite no evidence that it had violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Obama escalated this pressure in 2012 by targeting Iran’s energy sector and central bank, threatening any state that bought Iranian oil with exclusion from the US‑dominated financial system.
Trump intensified the confrontation: tearing up the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposing sweeping sanctions, designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) a terrorist organization, and ordering the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
Alongside these overt measures, the US and Israel waged a long “shadow war” to cripple Iran’s nuclear and military capacity: the Stuxnet cyberattack on Natanz; assassinations of scientists and IRGC officials; sabotage of military and energy infrastructure; and attacks on Iranian shipping. This was a joint campaign of military, technological, and economic containment—cementing Israel’s role as Washington’s frontline enforcer.
The alignment became explicit in 2024, when Israel’s strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus triggered direct Iranian retaliation. The US mobilized immediately: CENTCOM assembled a multinational air‑defense coalition, with the UK, France, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE providing intelligence, airspace, and logistical support. Israel’s defense now operated inside a US‑centered regional security system.
The point was driven home in June 2025, when Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities during US–Iran talks. The US defended Israel, intercepted Iranian missiles, provided intelligence and logistics, and ultimately carried out direct strikes on Iran’s underground nuclear sites—targets beyond Israel’s capabilities. Iran responded by striking a US base in Qatar, after which Washington imposed a ceasefire. The Gulf states again supplied bases, intelligence, and airspace; NATO powers offered political and logistical backing. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz captured the essence of the operation: Israel was doing the West’s “dirty work.”
The present conflict, launched jointly by the US and Israel on 28 February, is the fullest expression of this integration. All the Gulf states except Oman have opened their bases, intelligence networks, and airspace to Washington; NATO states have provided political and indirect military support.
Taken together, these developments show how Israel functions as Washington’s forward agent within a US‑directed regional security architecture. The US determines the scale, duration, coalition, and political framework of operations—and orders ceasefires. Israel is not even a party to the US–Iran negotiations that will determine the terms of any settlement.
This makes clear that the US–Israel war on Iran is not the product of Israeli scheming or lobbying networks, but of the crisis of the global imperial order. To reduce a world‑spanning confrontation to the maneuvers of a state of ten million people is to mistake the shadow for the substance. The driving force is the strategic logic of US imperialism, desperately seeking to reassert control over energy, raw materials, investment routes, trade corridors, and geopolitical chokepoints as its dominance erodes on every front except the military.
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Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism remains the indispensable framework for understanding the present world crisis. Imperialism is not simply colonial aggression or great‑power bullying; it is a specific stage of capitalist development defined by monopoly, finance capital, the export of capital, international cartels, and the division of the world among the major powers—a division that can be altered only through violent redivision. It is not a policy choice but the structural logic of capitalism once it outgrows the limits of the nation‑state.
Lenin wrote that the changing economic, financial, military strength of competing capitalist states constantly destabilizes any imperialist “balance.” The rise of Germany shattered the equilibrium of the early twentieth century; the rise of China after the collapse of the Soviet Union has played the same role in the twenty‑first. The drive toward war flows from this objective contradiction, not from the decisions of individual leaders.
Lenin also insisted that imperialism produces “reaction all down the line” at home. Monopoly capitalism requires repression, censorship, and the curtailment of democratic rights. The vast sums funneled to Israel—$158 billion since 1948, $3.8 billion annually today, plus emergency supplements—represent a direct transfer from social needs to militarism and the arms industry.
The repression of pro‑Palestinian protests on US campuses, the criminalization of dissent, the banning of student groups, and the threats of deportation in Germany are part of the same process: using the Israel–Palestine conflict to justify the expansion of the repressive apparatus against a working class entering into struggle over wages and conditions.
Lenin’s analysis was rooted in the recognition that capitalism had entered an epoch of systemic crisis and decay, in which the socialist transformation of society had become an objective necessity. From this analysis flows the strategic conclusion. No appeal to the capitalist state, no invocation of the “rules‑based international order,” and no campaign to reform US foreign policy by reducing Israeli influence can halt the descent toward world war. The mass demonstrations of 2003 did not stop the invasion of Iraq; the global outcry against the Gaza genocide did not stop it; nor did appeals to the International Court of Justice or International Criminal Court. Imperialism cannot be pressured into peace.
What is required is the construction of an international movement of the working class, armed with a socialist and internationalist program, directed against the capitalist system that is the root cause of imperialist war, and led by the revolutionary party of the Fourth International. Only the independent mobilization of the working class on a world scale can put an end to the barbarism now unfolding and open the road to a socialist reorganization of society.
2. Anthropic IPO to intensify Wall Street frenzy
The announcement by AI company Anthropic, the maker of AI assistant Claude, that it is moving to an initial public offering (IPO) will add fuel to the frenzy on Wall Street which has sent the S&P 500 index to 11 record highs in May.
Anthropic’s announcement came in the wake of that by Elon Musk’s SpaceX late last month that it was going public and is expected to be followed shortly by one from its rival, OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT.
Few details are available about the Anthropic launch at this point, such as the number of shares, their initial price, the structure of the company and its revenue and profit prospects, because its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was on a confidential basis. But the estimates are that Anthropic will enter the market by being listed on the NASDAQ exchange with a market value of around $1 trillion.
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Anthropic was set up in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders and has since had a meteoric rise. It has enjoyed a 15-fold increase in its estimated market value in the past 15 months. In March 2025 it was valued at around $65 billion and is now valued at $900 billion.
But so far Anthropic has not made a profit—it says it expects to do so in the June quarter of this year—but has recorded losses. So have SpaceX and OpenAI.
This means that investment in the three AI companies launching IPOs is entirely of a speculative character, based on what they claim they will be able to make in the future. SpaceX has asserted that its target market is almost $29 trillion, equivalent to around 90 percent of US GDP. The issue is whether their various claims will be able to be met. As comments in the financial press have noted, the market is about to be “tested.”
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The market boosters claim that AI, because of its capacity to raise productivity, is the means by which American capitalism will power itself into a glorious future and solve its ever-growing problems, such as the mounting government debt now at $39 trillion, rising by billions of dollars every day, with the interest bill, running at around $1 trillion a year, consuming a larger and larger portion of government revenue.
Closer examination of the stock market boom—of which AI is the latest component—and its historical development reveals a different picture from that presented by AI promoters.
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The suppression of the living standards of the working class has played a major role in the accumulation of the Wall Street oligarchs. As the Economic Policy Institute has calculated, since 1979 productivity has grown 90 percent while the pay of workers has grown by 33 percent, meaning that if workers’ wages had tracked productivity growth, they would receive an average of $16.40 more an hour today.
The suppression of the struggles of the working class by the trade union bureaucracies which has created this situation has not only boosted the profits of the corporations.
It has been a major factor in the rise of the stock market and the growth of parasitism and speculation which has siphoned ever increasing wealth into the hands of the corporate and financial oligarchy, creating a level of social inequality which exceeds all historical precedent.
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The history of the stock market demonstrates this relationship. In the early 1970s, the period of the last great wages upsurge of the working class in the US and internationally, stock markets plunged.
In the period of 1973–74, at the height of the international wages offensive—in the UK the miners’ strike brought down the Heath Tory government—Wall Street’s Dow Jones index fell by 45 percent. In the UK, the fall was even greater at some 73 percent.
This history throws a revealing light on the present-day role of the trade union bureaucracy. As the market frenzy continues, so their efforts intensify to sabotage, betray and suppress, by all means possible, the independent struggle of the working class to combat the daily cuts to their living standards.
A collapse in the share market of anything even approaching what took place in the face of the movement of the working class in response to the inflation of the 1970s would devastate the global financial system.
Its operations as a wealth creation machine for the financial oligarchy rests on confidence—confidence that the working class is suppressed and that its activity will not call into question capitalist ownership of the means of production and finance.
The role of the trade union apparatuses is not a product of the characteristics of the individuals who head them, but of their social and class function within the profit system. They are tied by a thousand strings to the capitalist class.
These ties are: material (as they pull in salaries, financed to a considerable degree by union financial investments, far above those of the workers they supposedly represent); ideological (in their undying support for capitalism and its system of exploitation), and political (as they openly align themselves with the nationalist “America First” agenda of the fascist Trump or back his props the Democrats).
They are more than aware that any significant movement of the working class in defense of jobs, wages and living standards threatens the financial system on which they depend and for which they are the gendarmes.
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To meet this developing crisis and the offensive of the ruling class, the working class must make its own preparations at both a political and organizational level. It must initiate a struggle to reorient itself based on an internationalist socialist program and develop the means for carrying through the fight against the policemen of the capitalist oligarchy, the trade union bureaucracies, through the building of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and communities.
3. Zohran Mamdani promised free buses; New Yorkers are getting a bus fare enforcement crackdown instead
The outcome of the promise of free bus fare has lessons for the 40,000 subway and bus workers who have been working on an expired contract for more than two weeks. In contract talks, MTA management is demanding 2 percent annual wage increases (less than half the rate of local inflation), along with a doubling of out of pocket healthcare payments and sharp restrictions on overtime and sick leave. It claims that anything else is “unaffordable” and must be offset through fare hikes.
In reality, what is “unaffordable” is the 15 percent of its operating budget that goes to MTA’s Wall Street creditors. The MTA is among the most indebted transit agencies in North America, carrying tens of billions of dollars in long-term debt accumulated through decades of borrowing to finance capital projects.
Workers should form rank-and-file committees to prepare a fight, appealing for support from the city’s riders and the broader working class and fighting for oversight and control over the talks. A struggle must be organized from below. The Transport Workers Union bureaucracy is compromised by its deep relations with the Democratic Party, including both Mamdani and New York governor Kathy Hochul, whom the union endorsed in 2022.
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During his campaign, Mamdani argued that working-class New Yorkers should not be forced to choose between transportation and other necessities. That message resonated especially in neighborhoods where a $3 fare is not a minor inconvenience, but a recurring expense borne by people already struggling with the city’s soaring cost of living. Implicit in the support for the demand was also the broader question: Why should access to public transportation depend on a rider’s ability to pay, rather than a basic social right?
While the free bus demand found broad support in the working class, Mamdani quickly abandoned it once he took office in January. After securing state funding for a modest expansion of childcare, the mayor endorsed New York’s openly pro-business state governor Kathy Hochul for reelection and accepted her refusal to fund fare-less bus service, which would have taken place via small income tax increases for the wealthy.
This was coupled with a city budget balanced on the backs of city workers, with Mamdani and Hochul reaching a deal to achieving billions in savings by delaying the implementation of new class-size mandates in public schools and by delaying repayment to city pension funds. Hochul and Mamdani agreed on a plan for a modest pied-à-terre tax, a minor source of additional revenue as a fig leaf so the mayor could claim he delivered on his promise to tax the rich.
Mamdani’s pretensions and that of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which he is a member, are being rapidly exposed. His function is to corral the radicalizing sentiment and direct it towards alliances with the Democratic Party establishment and even President Trump, whom he visited twice at the White House.
The MTA’s bus evasion crackdown, while not directed by the mayor himself, mirrors the broader policing strategy of the Mamdani administration. On Monday, Mamdani’s police commissioner, the billionaire Jessica Tisch, announced the administration’s plan to hire an additional 580 uniformed officers by the end of the year.
The new recruits will bring the NYPD headcount to a staggering 35,555 cops, larger than the standing armies of 97 countries, according to World Population Review. This is also an increase compared to the law-and-order administration of ex-cop Eric Adams.
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As a candidate and state legislator, Mamdani frequently denounced over-policing and the use of law enforcement to manage social problems rooted in poverty and inequality. Yet in office, he supports the very institutions he once criticized.
4. UK Labour government bars Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from entering the country
The bans stemmed from demands from right-wing Labourites and Zionists, who deployed the now standard lie conflating opposition to the fascistic Israeli government with antisemitism and terrorism.
The Trump administration's designation of Brazil's PCC and CV as Foreign Terrorist Organizations marks an ominous escalation of imperialist intervention in Brazilian politics.
6. Train derailment in Houston TX further expose the brutality of corporate railways
While the cause of the accident still remains unknown, officials said 11 rail cars carrying finished vehicles derailed along a major rail corridor that cuts through a busy industrial and commuter section of northwest Houston.
7. UAW apparatus shuts down grad student strike at Harvard University: The political issues
The strike was shut down this week by the United Auto Workers because it raised deeper political and class questions which the bureaucracy works to suppress.
With a career spanning 47 years, Mary Jo Marinelli offers a candid look at the steady decline of the American healthcare system.
New Jersey state and local police have continued their crackdown on protesters outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, where hundreds of immigrants are nearing the end of a second week of hunger and labor strikes against filthy conditions, medical neglect, rotten food, lack of access to counsel and pressure to sign deportation documents.
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The Delaney Hall arrests are part of a broader effort to criminalize opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Last week, three anti-ICE protesters in Spokane, Washington—Bajun Mavalwalla II, Justice Forral and Jac Archer—were convicted on federal conspiracy charges stemming from a June 2025 protest aimed at blocking the transport of immigrants from Spokane to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, on the other side of the state.
Spokane police arrested 30 people that day, but no officers or protesters were injured. Richard Barker, then the acting-US attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, resigned before the indictments were filed and has since said he did not believe the charges were warranted. There was no “conspiracy,” only a call to action answered by dozens of people. The three now face up to six years in prison if their appeal is denied.
The message is clear: Those who oppose ICE raids, deportations and detention centers are to be treated as criminals and potential federal felons.
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The return of Congress to Washington this week will bring the resumption of work on the reconciliation package that would fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including the Border Patrol, through the end of Trump’s term. Senate Republicans have proposed roughly $72 billion for the two agencies, including more than $38 billion for ICE and more than $26 billion for CBP. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has made clear that the purpose is to provide “border security and immigration enforcement for the next three years,” bypassing the normal appropriations process and insulating the agencies from even token oversight votes.
This outcome was prepared in advance by the Democrats. As the World Socialist Web Site explained last month, Democratic leaders helped separate ICE and CBP funding from the broader DHS funding bill, allowing them to posture as opponents of Trump’s immigration Gestapo while ensuring that the money would be delivered through reconciliation. Having helped split DHS funding from ICE and CBP funding, they could then claim innocence as Republicans moved to funnel tens of billions of dollars to the very agencies carrying out masked raids, warrantless home invasions, illegal detentions and killings.
The Democrats, who postured as opponents of ICE and CBP following the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, have in fact dropped any attempt to impose even token restraints on the police-state operations of the immigration agencies. Meanwhile, Trump has indefinitely deployed hundreds of armed ICE officers at major airports to harass and detain immigrants and, ultimately, political opponents of his dictatorial regime, without the slightest protest from the Democrats, including figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
10. The right-wing politics of New Zealand’s Opportunity Party
The Opportunity Party’s claim to be neither left- nor right-wing is a fraud; backed by sections of the capitalist class, it aims to protect the wealth of the super-rich while maintaining New Zealand’s imperialist alliance with the US.
In a naked attempt to intimidate the 1,700 Nexteer workers who have defiantly rejected three UAW-backed deals, the union apparatus could hold the next vote in the plant under the supervision of management.
12. The balance sheet of Castroism as Trump prepares war on Cuba
Workers in Cuba, the US and across the Americas must urgently mobilize in opposition to Trump’s blockade and war plans, but effective opposition to imperialism requires a historical balance sheet of Castroism and the Cuban Revolution.
13. Australian Labor government trying to appease big business over limited budget tax changes
A furious campaign by business leaders and the corporate media against the minor tax adjustments has demonstrated the refusal by Australia’s billionaires and their global partners to accept even the slightest inroads into their profits and fortunes.
Kast’s speech was built around the conceit: that Chile is in a “state of emergency” requiring extraordinary measures, ruling through presidential decrees and demanding that the working class pay for a crisis it did not create.
15. Raphael, the “Prince of Painters,” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
A major exhibition of the Renaissance artist’s work sheds light on the social and aesthetic factors that enabled his artistic development and on the character of his achievement.
16. Nexteer Workers: We have rejected three contracts. Now we must become the authority.
The Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee calls for the development of a movement of the rank-and-file to take control of their struggle and connect it with American Axle and other auto workers.
17. Successful meeting at Berlin’s Humboldt University calls for the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk
On May 28 around 30 students and workers gathered at Humboldt University in Berlin for a meeting organized by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) titled “Freedom for the socialist anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk! Stop the war in Ukraine!”
Syrotiuk, now 27 years old, was arrested on April 25, 2024, by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) for advocating the unity of the Ukrainian and Russian working classes against the war. The government accuses him of “high treason under martial law”—an offense for which he could face life imprisonment.
The meeting took place at a time when Bogdan’s trial is at a critical turning point. Two expert reports have now exposed the core of the charge—that Bogdan spreads Russian propaganda—as baseless.
The international campaign for Bogdan’s release is gaining increasing traction in Germany. As the WSWS reported, his case has garnered growing attention in recent weeks at universities and in working-class neighborhoods.
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At the end of the meeting, those present adopted a resolution calling for the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk and all other political prisoners in Ukraine, and demanding that the European Court of Human Rights expedite the review of his case. The resolution makes clear: Bogdan is not in prison for a criminal offence, but because he advocates for the international unity of the working class against the war.
In August, Mehring Verlag will publish the book The War in Ukraine and the Struggle for Socialism: The Case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, which is already available for pre-order. It will feature, for the first time, Bogdan’s own writings, statements by the International Committee of the Fourth International on Bogdan’s case, and analyses of the war in Ukraine and the role of German imperialism.
The campaign for Bogdan’s release must be expanded in the coming weeks and months. We call on everyone who wants to support Bogdan’s freedom and the building of an anti-war movement to sign the petition at wsws.org/freebogdan and to join the IYSSE’s struggle!
We also invite all interested individuals to attend the IYSSE’s next meeting: “Science Instead of War Propaganda: How Can We Fight Conscription, War, and Cuts at our University?” Thursday, June 11, 2026, 6:30 p.m., Humboldt University of Berlin, Main Building, Unter den Linden 6, Room 1072.
18. Help 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.
