Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Mack Trucks worker and socialist Will Lehman nominated for UAW president
Rank-and-file socialist autoworker Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker from Macungie, Pennsylvania, was nominated for president of the United Auto Workers Wednesday at the union’s Constitutional Convention in Detroit. He was nominated by two delegates, the maximum allowed.
Nominating Lehman were Charles Coneeny, president of UAW Local 1821 in Ocala, Florida, which represents workers at the Lockheed Martin facility in the area, and Tamika Foster, chairperson for UAW Local 2145, representing Blue Cross Blue Shield workers in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Following his acceptance of the nomination, Lehman issued a statement, posted on his website, thanking the delegates who nominated him, the other delegates who had pledged to nominate him but were unable and the rank-and-file workers who attended the convention to campaign for him.
“This campaign is directed against that apparatus,” Lehman said. “It is about the fight to transfer power from the bureaucracy that has dominated this union to the rank and file, to the workers on the shop floor.”
*****
Lehman will face five other candidates: Shawn Fain, the sitting president who has presided over more than three years of sell-outs and betrayals; Rich Boyer, currently vice president in charge of Stellantis and independent parts suppliers, including Nexteer and American Axle; Stellantis worker Brian Keller; Greg Mooney, recording secretary of UAW Local 2147 at General Dynamics Land Systems in Lima, Ohio and a supporter of Autoworkers For Trump; Tricia Geiger, a UAW servicing representative from Flint.
Other nominations for top officers reflect factional conflicts within the apparatus, with incumbent UAW Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock and Vice President for General Motors Mike Booth seeking reelection against candidates of Fain’s “United UAW” slate.
Boyer, the main apparatus candidate opposing Fain, negotiated and signed the sellout 2023 national UAW contract with Stellantis that opened the door to the mass firing of temporary workers soon after it took effect and imposed below-inflation pay increases. As vice president in charge of auto part supplier plants, Boyer oversaw the bureaucracy’s attempt to ram through sellout contracts at American Axle, Nexteer, Dana and other parts plants in recent contract negotiations.
*****
The support for Will Lehman’s campaign is an expression of a growing insurgency within the working class. Workers are striving to break the grip of the pro-corporate trade union apparatus that blocks them every time they try to fight back.
Following the nomination of Lehman, Martaz Crutchfield, a worker at the Ford Dearborn Truck Assembly Plant outside Detroit, who ran for UAW delegate as part of Will’s Insurgent Slate wrote, “For all my life, like many others, I’ve toiled my life away to reach a promised ending. And just when we get to the end, the goal post is moved, lengthening our days and making the stresses of being a worker even harder. Even now as I stand here today, I can hardly keep myself upright because I hurt my back on the job.
“We must unite,” Crutchfield added, “against these forces that only see our lives as cattle, to make their ends and means grow even further than anyone could imagine. We do not work to have our lives taken away from us. We do not work to see our hard work go up in smoke. And we do not work to allow corrupt corporations to pass their failing companies off on an IPO, to drain away our collective dollar.
“This is where we start making a change. This is where we start fighting for the future, and today in Detroit, Michigan, we have made history, and Lehman is nominated. The call of change has been heard.”
On Tuesday, June 17, the Trump administration signed an agreement stripping the Department of Education of two of its largest remaining responsibilities: special education and civil rights enforcement.
The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which administers $15 billion annually for more than 7 million students with disabilities, is being transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. The Office for Civil Rights is being moved to the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
This move advances the administration’s use of “interagency agreements” to abolish the Department of Education through attrition, dismantling its workforce and authority piece by piece. Programs formally remain in existence, but they are being transferred to agencies that lack the capacity and expertise to administer them properly and are headed by officials who are outright hostile to their stated mission.
The latest agreements follow 10 others that shifted more than 100 K-12 and higher education programs to the Departments of the Interior, Labor, State, Treasury and Health and Human Services. These transfers have included school safety, academic supports, family engagement, Title I, career and technical education, higher education grant programs, the $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio and, eventually, FAFSA administration.
The measures follow, nearly to the letter, the fascist blueprint laid out in Project 2025. The Department of Education is being reduced to a legal shell that nominally retains responsibility for outsourced programs, including liability when they fail, while the machinery needed to run them is scattered across multiple agencies with neither the staffing nor the intention to do so.
Tuesday’s transfers mark a sharp escalation of the assault on public education. They create the conditions for a large-scale destruction of access to special education, and violate the law.
*****
The Arc, a disability rights organization, warned Tuesday that transferring oversight out of the ED would result in “a patchwork of rights” that families would be forced to enforce on their own through private lawsuits, a remedy beyond the means of most working-class families. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, appointed to oversee the dismantling of the department, canceled more than $30 million in IDEA grants for teacher training, research and assistive technology last year, dismissing them as “DEI programs.”
*****
The assault on special education is further compounded by Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” That 2025 law will slash more than $1 trillion from Medicaid by 2034, undermining reimbursement rates that fund IDEA-mandated therapies and nursing services and leaving districts legally obligated to provide services they may no longer be able to afford.
The transfer of the Office for Civil Rights places disability-discrimination complaints, including those brought by families seeking basic services for their children, in the hands of a Justice Department (DOJ) that has spent the past 18 months turning civil rights enforcement against the very groups it was supposedly created to protect.
Under Trump, investigations into disability and racial discrimination have ground to a halt as the office has been redirected toward right-wing political agendas, including attacks on transgender students and prosecutions of universities under the banner of combating “antisemitism.” The vast majority of cases brought to the OCR are families seeking services for disabilities. These are now being largely ignored, while the DOJ investigates 43 school districts regarding how they teach sexual orientation and gender identity.
The transfer of oversight from the ED to the DOJ has another component. Unlike the OCR, which was required to evaluate every student complaint, the Justice Department can choose which complaints to pursue. The result will be even less recourse for students and families in a system where enforcement had already been gutted. The OCR lost half its staff in March 2025 and, although those layoffs were rescinded by the end of 2025, the agency resolved a record-low number of cases—by design. These included no cases involving sexual harassment, sexual violence or racial harassment.
The transfer of desegregation and student privacy functions follows the same logic. These responsibilities are being handed to an agency that treats civil rights law as discrimination against white students and has been weaponized against anti-war and pro-Palestinian speech.
*****
There is unlimited funding for war, militarism and tax cuts for the oligarchy, but “no money” for speech therapists, classroom aides and the basic supports disabled students need. The high cost of special education—roughly 1.9 to 2.3 times as much as educating a general education student—is viewed as an intolerable deduction from profit-taking or military spending. The needs of disabled children are treated as an intolerable burden in a society organized around private wealth and imperialist violence.
The AFT, NEA and the union representing federal education workers, with more than 5.3 million members combined, have responded to the gutting of the Department of Education and now OSERS with press releases and lawsuits. They called for no strike and organized no serious mobilization against Trump’s sweeping attacks on public education.
This is not an oversight. The function of the pro-capitalist union apparatus is to contain the anger of rank-and-file educators and school workers and prevent them from breaking free of the Democratic Party.
Genuinely universal, high-quality public education for every child cannot be secured within a social order that subordinates all human needs to private profit and war. What is required is the independent mobilization of the working class through rank-and-file committees in every school and district, controlled by teachers, paraprofessionals and parents rather than by the union apparatus and its political backers.
The destruction of special education, the gutting of civil rights enforcement, the Medicaid cuts and the wave of school closures are not separate crises. They are components of a single assault carried out by a ruling class that has decided the most vulnerable children are expendable. The defense of public education is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism itself.
3. Shots fired in the Channel—Britain, Russia and the threat of World War III
Naturally there are conflicting accounts of the event. The Russian military claims the yacht was on a dangerous approach course and that multiple attempts were made to contact it and signal flares launched before five warning shots were fired into the air from the Admiral Grigorovich. The couple on the yacht claim no flares were sent up or radio calls made but have confirmed the shots were fired in warning. The British military, which was monitoring the event, also initially described the Russian actions as simply “an attempt to prevent a possible collision.”
Whatever the exact events, two facts are decisive and irrefutable. Shots would not have been fired if tensions between Russia and Britain had not been brought to a fever pitch. These tensions are the result of a de facto state of war between the European powers and Russia, which threatens to spread the catastrophe already underway in Ukraine across the continent.
Two days earlier, in the same waters, British forces seized the Cameroonian-flagged tanker the Smyrtos, part of Russia’s shadow fleet, carrying oil to India. This was the latest in a series of seizures and impoundments carried out by European governments—including Belgium, France, Sweden, Finland and Germany—enforcing economic sanctions against Moscow.
Britain signaling its readiness to intercept vessels in the Channel significantly raises the stakes. It is the main route used by tankers sailing from Russia’s major Baltic ports: Ust-Luga, Primorsk and St. Petersburg. According to a Sunday Times investigation, approximately £239 billion worth of Russian oil ($319 billion) has passed through the waterway since 2022.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer responded to the yacht incident by denouncing Russia’s “reckless” actions. The accusation should be turned back tenfold on Starmer and his Labour government. Claims from his Cabinet Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds that the incident of Russian warning shots “is not related to the seizing of the Russian oil tanker of the shadow fleet that happened last weekend” are absurd.
Britain and the European powers have been aggressively stoking the conflict with Russia for more than a decade, since supporting the far-right Maidan coup of 2014. Backed by the Biden administration, they saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022—a reactionary response to NATO’s eastward expansion—as a golden opportunity. They could bog down and bleed Russia, possibly even provoking regime change, while reducing Ukraine to a vassal state ripe for economic exploitation.
After more than four years of war, these objectives are being pursued with frenzied enthusiasm. This is now led by the European powers, the Trump administration having cooled on the war—preferring to pursue favorable trade relations with Russia on rare earths, oil, gas and other strategic assets, while securing its own economic control over Ukraine.
*****
At multiple points throughout the war, Russian officials have threatened to strike European targets outside of Ukraine in response to stepped-up involvement in the Ukrainian war effort.
In 2024, Putin indicated that any NATO airbases used as takeoff points for Ukrainian jets would be a “legitimate target.” The same year, when Paris floated the idea of sending troops to Ukraine and London authorized the use of its long-range missiles to strike Russian targets, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned of “a new round of escalation,” as Russia publicly announced drills involving strategic nuclear weapons.
This year, the Russian defense ministry listed the addresses of European companies helping Ukraine produce drones, commenting that their involvement represented the “creeping transformation of these countries into a strategic rear for Ukraine” that would lead to “a sharp escalation.”
*****
As the events in the Channel unfolded, Trump was boasting to the world’s imperialist powers at the G7 summit in Evian that peace with Iran was just days away, pending only the signing of a “memorandum of understanding.” Instead, the world has moved a step closer to open war with Russia.
None of the combatants can provide a way out of this rising inferno. They represent factions of a capitalist oligarchy increasingly dependent on the methods of war and dictatorship to defend their interests: whether that be through the carving out of new zones of influence, as in the case of the imperialist powers, or the attempt to establish a strong regional position from which to resist these efforts, as with Russia.
The working class in Europe is already paying for this through ever more savage austerity and the destruction of fundamental democratic rights. Like their Ukrainian and Russian brothers and sisters, workers will also pay with their lives.
The burning necessity now is to construct a mass socialist anti-war movement. It is only the working class that can halt the escalating global war, using its own method of international socialist revolution.
4. Minneapolis anti-ICE protesters face federal felony charges in Trump administration frame-up
The federal felony indictment of 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis is a naked act of political repression. Brought by the Trump Justice Department under the framework of its fascistic National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the charges announced Tuesday by federal officials are aimed not at punishing any genuine crime but at criminalizing opposition to the administration’s mass deportation regime and intimidating workers and youth who have mobilized against it.
The case exposes once again the class character of the American “justice” system. It does not function as an impartial arbiter of law but as an instrument of the capitalist state, deployed to defend the interests of the financial oligarchy against the working class. While the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents who murdered Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in January remain uncharged, those who protested the federal occupation of the Twin Cities and sought to defend immigrant workers from kidnapping and deportation now face sweeping conspiracy charges and the threat of years in prison.
The 94-page indictment names 15 people: Isaac Auman Sant, Emmett James Doyle, Cameron Kennedy, Callum Robinet, Erik Davis, Brian Stillwell Apland, Kyle Wagner, Hannah Margaret Van De Water Davis, Treasure Cay Thoreson, Nathan Junho Kim, Alec Stewart, Douglas Misterek, Dustin Scott Beisell, William Morgan and Natasha Rakotz.
*****
The indictment does not allege that the 15 defendants, as a group, carried out any coordinated armed attack. Nor does it allege that they amassed firearms or organized any plan to kill or seriously injure immigration agents. Instead, the document seeks to transform protest activity, surveillance of federal agents, Signal messages, social media posts, “hard” and “soft” blockades and the use of homemade shields into a sweeping criminal conspiracy.
The alleged conspiracy centers on protests and community defense efforts around the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, the operational hub of the federal kidnapping campaign in the Twin Cities during Operation Metro Surge. The indictment describes efforts to track ICE vehicles, alert residents to raids, mobilize protesters and obstruct federal agents carrying out deportation operations. In one section, the government quotes Direct Action Minnesota’s own description of itself as “a decentralized coalition of working-class people engaged in various forms of community defense against the current Federal Occupation happening within the wider metro area, and against state and far-right violence more broadly.”
In other words, the federal government is criminalizing opposition to its own campaign of state violence. The political character of the prosecution was made explicit in the White House statement issued after the charges were announced. Headlined “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network,” the statement declared that Trump had “designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization” and “directed the full power of the federal government to hunt down, disrupt, and dismantle the violent anarchist network.” It falsely claimed the 15 defendants had been charged with “coordinating violent attacks on ICE agents and facilities during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.”
*****
The Minneapolis indictments are part of a broader wave of politically motivated prosecutions against opponents of Trump’s mass deportation regime. On Tuesday, a federal judge refused to overturn the obstruction conviction of former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, who was prosecuted after allegedly helping Eduardo Flores-Ruiz leave her courtroom when ICE agents arrived to detain him. According to the AP, Dugan challenged the agents’ use of an administrative warrant, directed them to the chief judge’s office, and later led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney through a private jury door. ICE agents arrested him outside, and one week later FBI agents arrested Dugan at the courthouse and led her away in handcuffs.
The White House itself grouped the Minnesota case with prosecutions in Oregon, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, California and Indiana, presenting them as components of a single national campaign to “neutralize” so-called “Antifa terrorists.”
*****
More than 24 hours after the charges were filed, leading Minnesota Democrats remained silent on their fraudulent character and on what the prosecution portends for future attacks on democratic rights. On June 15, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tweeted in defense of California Governor Gavin Newsom after Trump’s Justice Department announced an investigation into Newsom and his wife. “The Justice Department is not a tool for the President to investigate his political opponents,” Walz wrote. “Welcome to the BS investigations club, Governor Newsom. You’re in good company.”
But as of this writing, Walz has issued no public statement denouncing the charges against citizens of his own state. The same is true for Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
The only major Minnesota Democrat to comment on the case was Rep. Ilhan Omar, herself a frequent target of the Trump administration. Omar wrote on X on June 16, “While the killers of Renée Good and Alex Pretti walk free, the DOJ is busy bringing bogus charges against protesters. The Administration thinks intimidation will make us back down. They keep learning the same lesson: Minnesotans don’t scare easily. We organize for our rights.”
The Minnesota population did organize in defense of democratic rights, but it did so without the help of, and in direct confrontation with, the Democratic Party. The Democrats have provided Trump and the Republicans the votes and political space needed to fund ICE and CBP through the end of Trump’s term, ensuring the continued expansion of the unaccountable immigration Gestapo and its network of for-profit concentration camps.
Working with the trade union bureaucracies, the Democrats have buried calls for a general strike and instead insist that workers and youth fight fascism by voting for the same party that has facilitated Trump’s escalating dictatorship.
5. US central bank on course to tighten interest rates
In what was characterized as a “hawkish” decision, the FOMC yesterday removed the bias towards lowering rates in its statement on monetary policy with nine of its 19 members indicating, via their so-called “dot plots” where they pencil in projections, that they expect interest rates to rise by the end of the year. It decided to keep the present rate on hold.
This assessment, which did not include one from Warsh who is opposed to the practice, is a marked change from the start of the year when the forecast was for at least two rate cuts by the end of the year.
It was a significant shift from the last dot plot projections in March when no one forecast an interest rate rise this year.
The inflation set off by the war on Iran has changed the interest-rate settings by central banks around the world including the Fed. The Bank of Japan lifted its rate this week following a decision last week by the European Central Bank to up its rate by 0.25 percentage points, citing uncertainty created by the Iran war.
In its statement, the Fed did not specifically mention the war, saying only that inflation remained elevated above the goal of 2 percent, “in part reflecting supply shocks that have driven price increases in certain sectors, including energy,” and that the committee “will deliver price stability.”
Across the Atlantic, at a meeting of the G7 leaders in France, Trump more directly pointed to the forces at work when he outlined his reasons for deciding on an extension of the ceasefire deal with Iran, rather than continuing military action.
Trump told reporters that he had been influenced by the stock market and did not want to be compared to Herbert Hoover, the president at the time of the stock market crash of 1929 which ushered in the Great Depression.
*****
The reaction in the markets to the Fed decision was significant and swift. The S&P 500 closed 1.2 percent lower for the day and the NASDAQ was down 1.3 percent. The Dow fell by 1 percent to close 507 points lower.
There was a marked fall in consumer stocks—the Wall Street Journal described them as having “tumbled.”
This reflects the decline in real wages for the broad mass of the working population which means that consumption spending increasingly comes from the upper end of the income distribution. Figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) earlier this month showed that a year and a half of wage increases for the average American worker had been wiped out by inflation caused by the rise in energy prices.
*****
Asked for his assessment of the Fed decision, which flew so directly in the face of his continued calls for cuts, Trump was relatively muted, saying he was prepared to be “guided” by Warsh on monetary policy.
And on the possibility of the Fed raising rates later in the year, he said: “It could happen. I mean it is hard to believe. It just keeps the country down. It is so unusual.”
*****
The decision by the Fed was unanimous—the first time there has been no dissent in a year. But there could well be differences below the surface, with Warsh referring to the two days of discussions as a “good family fight.”
Differences may well emerge on the plans being set in motion by Warsh to change the operations of the Fed.
He announced the setting up of a task force “in each of five areas central to the broad conduct of monetary policy.” These are: Fed communications; balance sheet policy; the use and reliance on existing data sources; productivity; and the Fed’s inflation framework.
*****
One of the major changes he wants to see, in what he has called a “new chapter” for the Fed, is a reduction in its balance sheet to levels more akin to those that prevailed before the financial crisis of 2008.
This has been a long-standing aim, but it has already been opposed by other members of the Fed’s governing body. Fed governor Christopher Waller has described the return to this position as “inefficient” and “stupid.”
He also indicated that press conferences after every Fed meeting may also be scrapped because “you want to make sure you have something important to say.”
And he wants to move away from agencies such as the BLS because the current sources only provided “echoes of history” rather than real-time information used by corporations on which to base decisions.
This was coupled with a significant statement, one which would never have been made by Powell or any of his predecessors, who always sought to create the image that Fed operations were based on developments in the real economy and the interests of the American people, and that while it took note of the markets, it was not directed by them.
Setting out his new orientation, Warsh said: “Financial market prices are probably the most important source of information to guide central bankers.”
6. Washington’s Pax Silica and the return of extraterritoriality in the Philippines
On April 16, 2026, the Philippines formally joined Pax Silica, a US-led coalition to secure supply chains for semiconductors, artificial intelligence and critical minerals, and signed on to host the coalition’s first physical project: a 4,000-acre industrial hub at the former Clark Air Base in Pampanga.
Within weeks, the Wall Street Journal reported what Washington actually demanded: that the hub operate under US common law with diplomatic immunity, extending protections equivalent to those of an American embassy. The economic zone effectively would be US soil. Joshua Bingcang, president of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), the state corporation overseeing the site, confirmed “that was their [Washington’s] request.”
While Manila formally rejected the demand, the supplemental agreement governing the hub’s operating terms has not been signed, and the question of jurisdiction remains unresolved. Washington is actively preparing a war against China and is reaching for the oldest instruments of colonial domination to do it.
Pax Silica was launched in December 2025 with seven founding signatories—the United States, Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the United Kingdom—and has since expanded to 13 members. Its architect, US Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg, told Congress in February 2026 that controlling “the industrial foundation of artificial intelligence” was essential to American “national survival.” A $250 million seed fund aims to leverage $1 trillion in investment from state-linked sovereign wealth funds. The explicit target is China.
*****
The US demand for legal immunity in an enclave on Philippine soil has deep historical roots. Britain went to war against China in 1839 in the First Opium War to assert the right of its merchants to sell narcotics to the Chinese people against the explicit prohibitions of the Chinese state. Having inflicted a military defeat on a country it had poisoned, Britain extracted extraterritorial rights from the wreckage: its citizens in China would answer not to Chinese courts but to British consuls, their persons and property beyond the reach of the sovereign whose territory they occupied. A second criminal war in 1856 extracted further concessions.
The United States secured the same privileges, without firing a shot, through the Treaty of Wangxia in 1844. Within decades, more than 80 treaty ports had been carved out across China—legal enclaves where Western and Japanese citizens stood above Chinese law, where the labor and resources of Chinese workers fed foreign profits under the protection of foreign arms.
The Shanghai International Settlement was governed by a foreign municipal council on Chinese territory, with its own police, courts and prison: a colonial state planted inside a sovereign nation. Extraterritoriality was the legal architecture of plunder—the means by which imperial powers asserted that their right to exploit another people’s land was beyond the jurisdiction of the people being exploited.
In the Philippines, extraterritoriality was not a postwar imposition—it was the continuation of American colonial rule, established through years of savage military conquest that killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century and never fully relinquished its character. Clark and Subic were not merely bases. They were sovereign American territory planted in the heart of the Philippine archipelago, housing tens of thousands of servicemen beyond the reach of Philippine law.
The United States used its bases to stage the air war over Vietnam, launching hundreds of thousands of sorties from Philippine soil against a people Filipinos had no quarrel with and no voice in attacking. Around the bases, the military presence generated vast economies of exploitation—Olongapo outside Subic, Angeles City outside Clark—built on the systematic impoverishment of the surrounding population.
Filipino workers and their families, living in the shadow of American extraterritorial immunity, were subjected to harassment, assault, rape and murder. Servicemen who killed Filipinos faced American military tribunals, not Philippine courts. Cases were transferred, quietly closed and forgotten. Children were shot dead by sentries who claimed they had mistaken them for pigs.
The 1976 film Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo, set in Pampanga at Clark, depicted one such killing and argued for what the Philippine Senate finally delivered in September 1991: a 12-11 vote rejecting renewal of the Military Bases Agreement and expelling the US military from Philippine soil.
The Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), ratified by the Philippine Senate in 1999, restored the principle if not the permanent garrisons. American servicemen accused of crimes on Philippine soil would remain in US custody, tried if at all by American military tribunals—the same arrangement under which killings at Clark and Subic had been buried for decades. The cases that followed confirmed nothing had changed.
US Marine Daniel Smith, convicted of rape by a Philippine court, was transferred to the US Embassy rather than a Philippine prison—the Embassy itself being sovereign American territory under international law. US Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton, convicted of the killing of Jennifer Laude, was held at a Philippine military camp under American supervision rather than in Philippine custody. The demand for a US-law enclave at Clark is not an innovation. It is an extension of a legal doctrine that has never, in over a century of American presence in the Philippines, been relinquished.
The EDCA arrangement is not a restoration of the Cold War bases. It is their transformation from a coercive regional deployment to a platform for a war that is being actively prepared. The United States now operates from nine EDCA sites across the archipelago, positioned with deliberate strategic precision: in Cagayan, facing Taiwan across the Luzon Strait; in Palawan, commanding the South China Sea; and at the former Clark complex in Central Luzon.
*****
Historically, the United States and Japan are the two states most directly responsible for the destruction of the Philippine economy and the mass killing of its people. The Japanese occupation killed over one million Filipinos during World War II. The Battle of Manila in February 1945—fought street by street through the capital as American forces drove out the Japanese—killed an estimated 100,000 civilians and left Manila the second most destroyed Allied city after Warsaw.
As compensation, Japan paid $550 million in goods over 20 years: ten cents on the dollar of the Philippines’ own assessed war damage, disbursed in a form that simultaneously reopened Philippine markets to Japanese capital. American colonial destruction was never compensated at all. Both powers describe their relationship to the Philippines as one of investment. What they are investing in is a new war, to be fought on the same ground, at the expense of the same people.
The economic premises of Pax Silica do not survive examination. China controls over 91 percent of global rare earth refining capacity and dominates the processing of 19 of 20 strategic minerals essential to AI and semiconductor production. Industry analysts assess the coalition as “a declaration without large-scale domestic separation capacity, magnet manufacturing, or permitting reform needed for execution.” Even optimistic US projections place China’s processing share at 75 percent by 2040—a monopoly position.
*****
The critical minerals memorandum of understanding Washington signed with Manila in February 2026 promises a pivot to domestic processing but provides no means to achieve it. Washington offers pledges; Beijing offers contracts. Pax Silica is not economic competition with China. It is the industrial and logistical mobilization for a war against it, and the Philippines, its sovereignty bartered away for a 99-year lease, is one of the grounds on which that war will be fought.
7. Railroad workers at CPKC reject nine-year contract by 2-to-1 margin across 11 states
The tentative agreements were announced April 24. They would have consolidated 11 existing contracts covering former Kansas City Southern Railway, Mid-South Rail Corporation, Tex-Mex Railway, CPKC [Canadian Pacific Kansas City] consolidated territory and Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern locations into two long-term hourly agreements running from 2025 to 2034. This sweeping restructuring was presented by management and the union officials as a modernization of pay and work rules. In reality, it was an attempt to impose a new framework for labor discipline across CPKC’s US operations.
*****
The rejection is the latest in a series of rank-and-file revolts against concessionary contracts across the railroads—a sign that the long-sleeping giant of the working class, in the United States and around the world, has not only awakened but is now on the move.
In October 2024, Norfolk Southern conductors initially voted down their deal by 81 percent. The following month, BNSF workers rejected a contract that would have paved the way for one-man crews. Maintenance of way workers at CSX rejected their contract and were forced to vote a second time under threats from union officials. CSX engineers only narrowly ratified their deal with 53.6 percent.
Those contracts were rammed through only after workers were forced to vote again on virtually identical deals. The bureaucracy was determined to prevent a repeat of 2022, when railroaders staggered them by voting down a deal backed by the Biden White House and pushed for a national strike. The near-revolt by the rank and file was only settled for the moment by an act of Congress, signed by Biden, to block a strike and impose a contract.
The union bureaucracy’s strategy in the subsequent round of national negotiations was to break up workers by craft, by carrier and by territory into dozens of separate agreements, in order to prevent the kind of unified national fight that nearly broke out in 2022.
The CPKC rejection is a sharp blow to that strategy. The fact that both engineers and train-service workers rejected parallel agreements is especially significant. It shows the objective basis for a common struggle across crafts, precisely what the carriers and the union officials are seeking to prevent.
*****
The leading role in organizing widespread opposition was played by the Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee, which was founded in the course of that fight to organize independently of the union bureaucracy and build a movement controlled by workers themselves.
The conditions that produced the near-national strike of 2022 have not gone away. They have only worsened. Precision Scheduled Railroading remains in place as the dominant operating model, with relentless cost-cutting, skeleton crews, longer trains, unpredictable schedules, constant on-call status and attacks on rest and family life.
The railroads continue to shower shareholders with money while squeezing the workers who move the freight. CSX alone recently announced a new $5 billion stock buyback authorization. Meanwhile, derailments remain a constant feature of railroad operations. Class I railroads continue to report hundreds of derailments every year—while disasters such as the 2023 toxic chemical wreck in East Palestine, Ohio show the catastrophic consequences of cost-cutting and deregulation.
The Trump administration is accelerating the assault. The Federal Railroad Administration is now headed by David Fink, a former president of Pan Am Railways. The industry is pushing to repeal the federal two-person crew rule, expand automated track inspection and eliminate jobs. At the same time, the Surface Transportation Board and other federal agencies are being aligned ever more directly with the demands of the rail carriers.
This deregulation agenda has bipartisan support. The Democrats imposed the 2022 contract and banned a strike. Both parties, whatever their tactical differences, serve the same financial oligarchy whose thirst for profit knows no end.
*****
The lesson of the past three years is that the union apparatus cannot be reformed or pressured into a genuine fight. It is an instrument of class collaboration, structurally integrated into the corporate and state machinery that enforces these contracts.
Workers need their own organizations. Rank-and-file committees, controlled by the membership, must be built with the power to coordinate across crafts, carriers and borders. The Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee, founded in 2022 on precisely this basis, must be built in every CPKC yard.
The fight of CPKC engineers and train-service workers must be linked with conductors, maintenance of way workers, signal workers, mechanical workers and all other crafts—and with the broader working class facing the same corporate assault.
8. Germany deploys soldiers to classrooms as militarization of schools accelerates
Schools and universities are increasingly being turned into tools for preparing society for war. The federal and state governments are attempting to prime an entire generation ideologically for rearmament, conscription and war. Germany’s ruling class is preparing for war—and for that it needs the youth. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of Bundeswehr visits to schools more than doubled—from 2,558 to 6,137. In 2025, too, it remained at a high level, with 5,529 appearances.*****
The Bundeswehr maintains a corps of so-called “youth officers,” who visit schools on behalf of the Defense Ministry. Formally, they are not considered recruiters; open recruitment is the responsibility of career advisers. The actual content of their work, however, refutes this distinction.
They turn up in Politics/Social Studies, History and Ethics lessons—precisely the classes where pupils are supposed to engage critically with politics. Their discussion topics are “the mission and tasks of the Bundeswehr,” “national and alliance defense,” “collective security” and, since 2022, above all the Ukraine war and the alleged threat from Russia.
In 2022, the youth officers’ annual report recorded 4,308 lectures reaching 123,928 school pupils and students, compared with 83,320 in 2019.
The most revealing format is the multi-day simulation game POL&IS (Politics and International Security). The world is divided into 13 regions; pupils take on the roles of heads of government, business representatives and media, while youth officers run the event. The target group is the upper secondary level, precisely those groups approaching conscription age. For the first quarter of 2026, the Bundestag documents numerous POL&IS events in Berlin, Göttingen, Soest, Aachen, Teterow and many other cities.
That the dividing line between “education” and “recruitment” does not exist in practice is demonstrated by a study commissioned by the Ministry of Defense itself. According to this study, 24 percent of young men interested in working for the Bundeswehr previously had contact with a youth officer.
At the same time, the budget for recruitment of young people was increased from €35.3 million in 2023 to €58 million in 2024.
*****
The “Law for the Promotion of the Bundeswehr” passed in Bavaria in July 2024 makes higher education institutions a central component of military rearmament. It promotes cooperation with the Bundeswehr, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and cyber warfare, while at the same time prohibiting “civilian clauses” that commit research exclusively to peaceful purposes. It creates the legal preconditions for research results to be increasingly used for military ends and made available within the framework of NATO cooperation.
Civilian clauses—voluntary commitments to exclusively peaceful research—are explicitly prohibited. The law is a massive attack on academic freedom and serves as a blueprint for other federal states. Nationwide, around 70 higher education institutions have civilian clauses; in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia they have already been abolished.
The Center for Digitalization and Technology Research of the Bundeswehr, founded in 2020, pools armaments research at the Bundeswehr universities in Munich and Hamburg. Its stated goal is to anchor “the national security concept in broader society.”
*****
Leading trade union functionaries spread the same propaganda as the federal government and the military brass—that massive rearmament and war preparation supposedly serve peace. The GEW [education union] merely criticizes the most visible manifestations of militarization in schools, while its umbrella organization supports its political foundation.
*****
In December 2025, tens of thousands of school pupils in over 90 cities took to the streets to protest against conscription, rearmament and war. On May 8, 2026, the anniversary of the liberation of Germany from the Nazis, around 45,000 young people again participated in nationwide anti-militarist protests.
The ruling class knows that its pro-war policies meet with broad rejection within the population, and particularly among young people. The mass school strikes against conscription, in particular, have shown that an entire generation is being radicalized against rearmament, militarism and war.
For precisely this reason, the ruling class is seeking to systematically turn schools and higher education institutions into instruments of military and ideological preparation. Sending youth officers into schools, the cooperation agreements with the Bundeswehr, the militarization of higher education research and the reintroduction of conscription are components of a comprehensive political war strategy.
The decisive task is to link the growing opposition among young people with the struggles of the working class. The attacks on education, social rights and democratic freedoms are inseparably linked to a policy of war. While hundreds of billions of euros are made available for rearmament, schools, universities and social institutions are being devastated by massive cuts.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) fights to orient the opposition to conscription, militarism and war towards the working class, and to arm it with a socialist perspective. The struggle against the militarization of education can succeed only as part of an international movement of the working class—against war, rearmament and capitalism itself.
Antwiane Sanders:
"I was fired for speaking up at a union meeting about back pay. My plant manager walked right past me in the break area and said nothing. Weeks before, he told me to sit there and wait. My supervisor confirmed that’s where they wanted me. And I was still fired.
I just want to know where the integrity is. I love my job. I come to work, do my job, help fix the machines when they go down, cover for anybody, go wherever the supervisor needs me, no complaints. I just had a senior graduate from high school and I’m in the middle of planning an open house, and you fire me? It’s amazing. I can’t believe it, and then for it to be my union that sold me out…."
10. One Nation leader delivers racist, pro-business rant at Australian press club
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s speech at the National Press Club (NPC) yesterday was a marker of the degraded character of the political and media establishment as a whole.
For close to an hour, Hanson ranted and raved against immigrants, Muslims and transgender people at one of the country’s supposedly preeminent forums of public discussion, whose events are televised by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Hanson boasted that she has not changed over the past thirty years. That is true. She remains an unreconstructed racist, trading on the demonisation of minority groups and a low-grade populist rhetoric.
What has changed is that amid a crisis of the two-party set-up, sections of the ruling elite and their mouthpieces in the press are boosting One Nation as they ponder whether it may be the political vehicle through which the program of austerity and war can best be advanced.
*****
In the days leading up to the address, the entire media treated it as a major event. Breathless articles across the press noted that it was the first time Hanson had spoken at the NPC in thirty years and wondered with excited anticipation what she would say, as though there were any great mystery.
As everyone knew she would, Hanson blamed immigrants for all social ills. The housing crisis, she asserted, was due to too many foreign nationals being permitted to enter the country. The reality that the housing affordability crisis is the result of rampant speculation and the dominance of the sector by wealthy property developers, Hanson did not mention.
Hanson rattled off figures showing growing social distress, including poverty and food insecurity. Again, the issue was reduced to immigration.
She connected this to a xenophobic denunciation of multiculturalism, declaring that Australia is a “monocultural nation,” based upon “Judeo-Christian values.” Hanson frothed at figures showing the number of households that speak languages other than English at home. As though the concept that people could speak more than one language was beyond her limited intellect, Hanson suggested that this entire cohort was incapable of conversing in English.
Muslims were particularly targeted, with Hanson warning that “radical Islam” was among the chief threats to “the West.”
When she entered politics in 1996 as a Liberal candidate, Hanson traded on widespread fear-mongering over Asian immigration by the political and media establishment. Her vicious attacks on Muslims now are of the same caliber, with the old demagogue trying to capitalize on the consequences of more than twenty years of the bogus “war on terror” and the official normalization of Islamophobia.
She denounced nominal and wholly inadequate attempts to address climate change as one of the primary causes of the cost-of-living crisis, without providing any evidence. One Nation, whose most prominent supporter is mining baron and multibillionaire Gina Rinehart, would build new coal-fired power stations, Hanson declared.
The latter section of her speech was a rant about the “transgender insurgency,” which had supposedly taken over all arms of the state and the public service. The demonization of transgender people, a kind of repackaged homophobia, is a central staple of far-right movements internationally. And in Trumpian fashion, Hanson declared that she would abolish the publicly subsidized Special Broadcasting Service, which features multilingual broadcasting and would severely curtail the ABC.
Hanson was permitted to speak far beyond the time normally allotted at the NPC, in a transparent attempt to limit the number of questions she would have to field. The assembled journalists, when they eventually got their chance, were respectful towards Hanson, as though they had just listened to a reasoned speech, rather than the unhinged rant that she actually delivered.
*****
While the political establishment “respectfully” discusses One Nation’s fascistic program for an even greater onslaught on social and democratic rights than is already occurring, the critical task for the working class is to build its own independent movement in opposition to the ruling elite and all its representatives, from Labor to the Coalition and the far right.
11. Australia: BHP hires strikebreakers as mining workers vote for industrial action
Hundreds of workers at BHP’s Port Hedland iron ore export hub have voted to strike, in what would be the first protected industrial action at the mining giant’s port operations in Western Australia’s (WA) Pilbara region in more than three decades. The company has responded by preparing a strikebreaking operation.
The Electrical Trades Union (ETU) announced last week that 100 percent of its approximately 100 members at the port had backed a protected action ballot authorizing work stoppages of between 30 minutes and 24 hours. The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) reported that 89 percent of its more than 100 members had voted in favor.
The strike votes are part of bargaining for a new enterprise agreement covering about 450 BHP employees at the port, with the Australian Workers Union (AWU) yet to file a ballot application to allow the workers it covers to take industrial action.
The workers, who are currently employed under individual contracts, are seeking a common enterprise agreement to introduce pay parity for workers with similar skills and experience, a clear classification and progression structure and improved working conditions.
Despite the overwhelming vote in favor of industrial action, the ETU and AMWU bureaucracies have not yet called a strike, which requires giving BHP at least five days’ notice, but BHP is already making plans to undermine it.
The company claims that strike action shutting down the world’s largest iron ore loading port would potentially mean $126 million a day in lost revenue. But BHP Australia president Geraldine Slattery said the company had “contingencies in place should disruption arise that would get to that scale.”
Within hours of the ballot results, it emerged that labor hire firms have been actively recruiting strikebreakers. A text message reportedly seen by Australian Associated Press offered positions for electricians at Port Hedland paying up to $93 an hour.
*****
For decades, BHP and other mining corporations in the region have employed workers on individual agreements, meaning wages and conditions could be wildly disparate between workers doing similar jobs. Under Australia’s draconian industrial relations laws, this arrangement has meant workers had no right to strike.
This situation was created through the collaboration of the union apparatus. When BHP moved to introduce individual contracts at its Pilbara iron ore sites in 1999–2000, in order to introduce around-the-clock product and the greater use of contract labor, the ACTU shut down nationwide strikes at BHP facilities, despite massive opposition from workers, and under conditions where picketing workers in Port Hedland were being attacked by police.
Instead, the union bureaucrats unsuccessfully sought to maintain their own privileged position at the bargaining table by convincing the company that working with the unions was the best way to achieve its aims, vowing that they were committed “to bring about world’s best practice that would substantially lower costs in the Pilbara operations.”
*****
The overwhelming strike vote at Port Hedland expresses the determination of workers to fight for improved wages and conditions. But such a struggle cannot be left under the control of the union bureaucracy, which will seek to contain and isolate this dispute, using the threat of strike action as leverage to extract a deal that re-establishes the unions’ negotiating position, while leaving the fundamental power of BHP over its workforce intact.
Workers at Port Hedland and across BHP’s Pilbara operations must take the conduct of this dispute into their own hands. They must establish independent rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers, not bureaucrats. These committees must reach out to workers across BHP’s operations, the mining industry and the broader working class, who all confront similar attacks on their wages and conditions.
What is required is not just an industrial struggle against BHP and the other mining corporations, but a political fight against the Labor government and the capitalist profit system itself.
12. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Canada:
Chile:
Ecuador:
Panama:
United States:
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.
