Adams’ death takes place amid a sweeping offensive by the ruling class to dismantle basic worker protections and funnel wealth to the capitalist oligarchy. The Trump administration has gutted OSHA and handed oversight to billionaire Elon Musk, while pushing $880 billion in social cuts to fund $4.5 trillion in tax breaks for the ultra-rich—slashing Medicare, Social Security and education under the banner of “the largest deregulation campaign in history.”
This assault is the culmination of decades of bipartisan class war. Both Democrats and Republicans have presided over a historic transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. Since 1975, $79 trillion has been siphoned from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent, who now earn 139 times more than the poorest 20 percent. Just last year, the 19 richest families increased their fortunes by more than $1 trillion.
The Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration has denied a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the World Socialist Web Site seeking details from the state agency’s investigation into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. The 63-year-old skilled tradesman was crushed to death on April 7 at the Dundee Engine Complex in southeast Michigan.
More than five weeks after the fatal accident, Adams’ family, co-workers and the public have yet to receive any information from MIOSHA, Stellantis management or the United Auto Worker about the causes and circumstances surrounding his death.
3. Israel escalates Gaza bombings, forcible displacement and famine as Trump tours Middle East
As US President Donald Trump continued his tour through the Middle East, Israel escalated its mass killings in Gaza, bombing two hospitals and killing at least 80 people in a single day.
As could be expected, a few “left” and not-so-left Labour MPs feigned outrage over the political pedigree of Starmer’s diatribe. How could they not, when every fascist on the planet knows the meaning of the words. Speaking to The Independent, Zoltan Kovacs, the state secretary of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orban, commented, “We see Sir Keir Starmer saying the exact sentences and words actually we’ve been talking about for the past 10 years.”
5. Save the US Postal Service! Build a rank-and-file movement against privatization!
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee urges postal workers to organize now to prepare emergency action, up to and including a national strike, to save the United States Postal Service and defeat Trump’s attacks on the working class. We must organize this from below—we can’t wait for “permission” from corrupt union bureaucrats and Democratic Party officials who are working against us.
The postal service is an arm of the federal government that has served each and every home in America since the Revolutionary War 250 years ago. We have to fight to ensure that mail continues to be delivered to every mailbox in America, on time, six days a week, by federal employees.
6. Ignoring overwhelming opposition, Atlanta Democratic mayor welcomes “Cop City”
The sprawling complex will be used to train the state’s numerous police forces in urban warfare. Firing ranges, mock buildings and city streets have been constructed, providing police the “training” they need to violently raid people’s residences and to crush protests or rebellions the state and city authorities target. According to American Friends Service Committee, “43% of the training at Cop City will be for officers outside of Atlanta, including military training with the infamous Israeli [sic] Defense Forces.”
7. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital announces plan to lay off 1,000 workers
The layoffs are a response to “current macroeconomic realities and anticipated challenges ahead,” [a] hospital spokesperson said. NewYork-Presbyterian reported $10.3 billion in revenue in its December 2023 filing with the Internal Revenue Service.
8. German auto industry crisis deepens as layoffs mount
While the major car manufacturers are still in the black— Mercedes posted a quarterly profit of €2.3 billion— they are moving further and further away from the targeted double-digit profit rates. That is why they are planning a jobs massacre. Autoworkers are being made to bleed so that profits can be restored. Where this has little chance of success, the survival of traditional brands such as Opel (Stellantis) and Ford is at stake.
9. India’s opposition parties rally behind far-right Modi regime’s provocative attack on Pakistan
Even under the threat of an all-out war that could spiral into a catastrophic nuclear conflict, all India’s opposition parties have rallied behind the Modi-led BJP government in the name of “defending the nation.” They are supporting its hawkish stance against Pakistan and joining with it in trumpeting the prowess of India’s military. They all promote New Delhi’s false narrative that the reactionary strategic conflict between India and Pakistan and the mass disaffection of the population of Indian-held Kashmir are due solely to the machinations and malevolence of Islamabad.
The German General Major Christian Freuding, who is in charge of the German Bundeswehr’s “Situation Command Ukraine” was photographed on May 9 shaking hands with the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi commander Oleg Romanov. May 9 marks “victory day” in the former Soviet Union: it was the day (May 8 in Western European time) that Hitler’s Wehrmacht, which had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, with the largest combat forces in world history, signed a definitive surrender and ended all military operations.
In the four preceding years, the German Wehrmacht, with the assistance of collaborationist forces such as the Ukrainian fascists of the Ukrainian Nationalist Organization, had murdered 27 million Soviet citizens. Among them were between 1.5 million and 2 million Jews, many of them from Ukraine, and some 3 million non-Jewish Ukrainian civilians.
The picture could only be understood as a political provocation and an insult to the memory of the victims of fascism.
11. New Zealand government seeks to ban social media for under-16s
The calls to restrict teenagers’ access to social media are driven by fear in ruling circles that young people are becoming politicized and are moving to the left in response to the breakdown of capitalism. Above all, governments are determined to prevent youth from accessing a socialist analysis of the crisis they confront, especially the articles published on the World Socialist Web Site, which is suppressed by the corporate media.
12. Massive 7-alarm warehouse fire engulfs West Baltimore, disrupts rail and displaces residents
13. Rapper Kanye West releases pro-Nazi song “Heil Hitler”
West’s actions are not simply those of a diseased individual. He is foul, but he is not a fool. He has his political and ideological antennas up. His longstanding and relentless selfishness, narcissism and backwardness have now combined with toxic features of American political life, emerging from the vast social inequality, state bankruptcy and imperialist violence.
His latest song coincides more or less with the fascist “commander-in-chief” Donald Trump’s ascendancy once again to the presidency. While Trump’s “salutes” to the Nazis have been slightly more disguised, he has continued to send weapons to Netanyahu’s government as it plans to implement Israel’s “final solution” for the Palestinian people in Gaza. Trump has fought to assert his version of the “Führer principle” in government, sending masses of people without conviction to a high security concentration camp in El Salvador. He also plans to deport United States citizens while revoking the right of habeas corpus.
Amazon is notorious for its high-tech exploitation, in which robots and surveillance systems are used to force workers past the point of injury. It also has a sordid history of trying to cover up injuries, even by essentially throwing injured workers out on the street in order to deny them workers’ compensation. This is why the whole “safety is our top priority” messaging cannot be trusted.
15. Kennedy escalates war on health in congressional testimony
At the hearings, Kennedy was questioned on multiple issues, including the planned Medicaid cuts, vaccines, the ongoing Texas measles outbreak, fluoridation of drinking water, and cuts to research at the National Institutes of Health. In response, Kennedy doubled down on nearly every major anti-scientific, anti-health position he has taken both prior to and since becoming Health Secretary, while attempting to falsely portray the Medicaid cuts as eliminating “fraud and abuse.”
He also promulgated a major new fraud, that the US national debt constitutes a “social determinant of health.” This position attempts to portray the debt as directly responsible for harming Americans’ health, as opposed to the ruling class and its criminal policies that have caused grotesque increases in social inequality and eviscerated workplace safety protections.
16. NHS FightBack campaigns at Royal Bournemouth Hospital protest: “We shouldn’t be afraid to speak up”
Nurses and other clinical staff at Royal Bournemouth Hospital in the United Kingdom joined a lunch time protest on Tuesday in support of their colleagues who are affected by plans to mass transfer them onto new contracts under a private subsidiary, known as a “SubCo”.
But the pause, truce, détente, or however it may be designated, has not resolved, or even come close to resolving, the existential conflict between the world’s number one and number two economies.
Rather, it signifies that the war waged by the US will, sooner rather than later, enter a new and even more dangerous phase in which it will increasingly resort to military means.
In essence, what took place was that the attempt by the US to batter China into submission by imposing an embargo on it failed because it threatened to blow up the US financial system, and it had to back down. For all Trump’s bluster about a victory, this is widely recognized.
18. Smith’s snack food workers strike in South Australia
More than 150 workers have started industrial action at a snack food factory in South Australia, owned by PepsiCo. The workers, covered by the United Workers Union and several other unions, carried out rolling 4-hour stoppages across five shifts from May 8 to May 10, demanding pay parity with their counterparts in Queensland.
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
