Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective:
20 years since Hurricane Katrina
Friday marked the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. On the morning of August 29, 2005, the massive Category 3 storm made landfall in New Orleans, Louisiana. The surge breached the city’s levees, flooding 80 percent of the low-lying metropolis, with water reaching depths of more than 15 feet in some areas.
What followed was a catastrophe that claimed nearly 1,400 lives and caused $125 billion in damage. The world watched in shock as tens of thousands of residents, unable to escape, clung to rooftops or remained trapped in flooded homes without food or water. For days they pleaded for help, but none arrived.
More than 10,000 people were forced to huddle for days in the New Orleans Superdome, amid scenes of hunger, disease and desperation. Survivors recalled corpses floating in the floodwaters, left to rot in the sweltering August heat. In total, more than 1 million people were displaced, scattered to cities across the region.
All of this devastation could have been avoided. Scientists had long warned that New Orleans’ levee system was inadequate and would be overtopped by a major storm, causing extensive flooding. Nothing was done, nor was there an evacuation plan in place.
Four days after the hurricane struck, the World Socialist Web Site wrote:
Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the awful truths of contemporary America—a country torn by the most intense class divisions, ruled by a corrupt plutocracy that possesses no sense either of social reality or public responsibility, in which millions of its citizens are deemed expendable and cannot depend on any social safety net or public assistance if disaster, in whatever form, strikes.
Washington’s response to this human tragedy has been one of gross incompetence and criminal indifference. People have been left to literally die in the streets of a major American city without any assistance for four days. Images of suffering and degradation that resemble the conditions in the most impoverished Third World countries are broadcast daily with virtually no visible response from the government of a country that concentrates the greatest share of wealth in the world.
The official response to the disaster focused on repression rather than saving lives. Fueled by trumped-up media claims of looting and lawlessness, some 65,000 National Guard troops, joined by Blackwater mercenaries, were dispatched to enforce “law and order.” For the ruling class and its political representatives, from Republican President George W. Bush to Democratic state and local officials, the overriding concern was not rescuing the population but preventing the human catastrophe from morphing into a social uprising.
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President Bush’s conduct epitomized the ruling class response to the catastrophe. He stayed on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and did not return to Washington D.C. until Wednesday, three days into the disaster. As Air Force One flew over New Orleans, Bush was photographed peering out on the scene of mass suffering through a window on the plane.
For a quarter-century before Katrina, administrations of both parties diverted resources away from social infrastructure and programs and funneled them into the coffers of the corporate oligarchy. Bush and Congress had unlimited funds to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and to build up, in the name of “homeland security,” the framework of a police state, but offered no federal aid to the victims of Katrina. Instead, the White House urged the population to donate to private charities.
And what are the conditions 20 years later? The “rebuilding” program after Katrina accelerated the nationwide social counterrevolution already underway. The city was held up as a model for the country: Nearly the entire public school system was privatized and turned into for-profit charter schools, housing projects were demolished, and Charity Hospital, founded in 1736 to serve the poor, was permanently closed. The poorest neighborhoods were emptied of large sections of their working class residents, while other areas were gentrified.
Today, the population remains 23 percent smaller than before the storm, the poverty rate is 22.6 percent—more than double the national average of 11.1 percent—and economic inequality is greater than ever. Public transportation has shrunk to just 35 percent of its pre-Katrina capacity.
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These conditions are a concentrated expression of broader developments across the United States. Since 2005, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and super-rich has only accelerated: The share of national wealth held by the top 1 percent has risen from 22 percent to more than 30 percent today.
Over the same period, there have been two multitrillion-dollar bailouts of Wall Street, in 2008 and 2020, carried out with bipartisan support, alongside further tax cuts for the wealthy, record military budgets and deep cuts to social programs.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, fueled by the refusal of both parties to adopt public health measures that impinge on corporate profit, has demonstrated that for the American state, “millions of its citizens are deemed expendable.” The pandemic has claimed nearly 1.2 million lives and left 48 million suffering from Long COVID. Meanwhile, global warming, with ocean temperatures at record highs, ensures that further weather-related disasters on the scale of Katrina are inevitable.
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2. 100 years of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great GatsbyIn 2005, the WSWS wrote:
The political establishment and the corporate elite have been exposed as bankrupt, together with their ceaseless insistence that the unfettered development of capitalism is the solution to all of society’s problems.
In the figure of the fascist dictator-in-the-making Donald Trump, and his complicit Democratic Party “opposition,” this assessment is being brutally confirmed. The central lesson of Katrina—that the basic requirements of modern society are incompatible with a system that subordinates everything to the enrichment of a financial oligarchy—must now serve as the starting point for the working class to build its own independent revolutionary and socialist movement against capitalism.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, c. 1920
After a century, Fitzgerald’s characters may seem far away, formal and even highly mannered. His people belong to a distinct period and place in history, the booming American 1920s, often called the Jazz Age. A barrier exists between us and this period, produced by ten decades that have been filled with momentous events, social triumphs and horrors, vast technological changes and other earthshaking developments.
Perhaps the biggest adjustment for the modern reader is that Fitzgerald shows us, we who live in the age of the decline and putrefaction of American imperialism, scenes from the period of its rise and self-confidence.
Nevertheless, the dilemmas and feelings of Fitzgerald’s characters are contemporary, beset by the social divisions that Fitzgerald depicts so precisely. The novel inescapably points to the corruption and disease at the heart of bourgeois American life, aspiration and self-delusion.
Considering what it is that accounts for Gatsby’s continuing popularity and resonance is perhaps another way of asking: which aspects of Fitzgerald’s view of American society a century ago have proven objectively true, enduring and indelible? Did he not grasp, in fact, at a time when US dominance was becoming a fact of life, that American capitalism was rotten and criminal, that the “party was [already] over,” to borrow a phrase from the novel’s final pages?
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At a time when American capitalism, as it were, was only coming into its own as an international power, the best American writers like [Theodore] Dreiser and Fitzgerald recognized that the system was already morally dead, stillborn. They grasped or intuited that American capitalism had no glorious, honest, legitimate future. In the final pages of Gatsby, Fitzgerald makes clear that the promise of America, such as it was, lies in the past. What he writes about Gatsby is clearly meant to have wider application:
He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Truly, as Fitzgerald also writes, about a visitor who arrives for one of Gatsby’s events long after their host was dead, “it was some final guest who … didn’t know that the party was over.”
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Students in college and high school, workers and youth—we all need The Great Gatsby. Artists themselves, stuck in the morass of identity politics in an age of official historical falsification, need it as well. It is not a work subject to a single interpretation, but it does show the rich for what they are, for what they necessarily are under the system that has created and elevated them, and the consequences of relying or playing up to them.
3. Carney’s European tour deepens Canada’s war drive and sets the stage for austerity at home
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s whirlwind tour over the last week with stops in Kiev, Warsaw, Berlin and Riga, Latvia, confirms that the new Liberal government intends to deepen Canadian imperialism’s economic and military ties with the European powers amid a developing third imperialist world war.
In Ukraine, Carney detailed the allocation of an additional C$2 billion in weapons and war materiel; in Germany, he pushed natural gas exports and signed a critical-minerals pact; in Latvia, he renewed Canada’s command of NATO’s multinational brigade; and on multiple European stops he touted the procurement of a new submarine fleet as part of his rearmament plan to position Canada as a significant player in the redivision of the world among the major powers.
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The Liberal government boasts it has delivered nearly C$22 billion to Ukraine since 2022—the largest per capita financial contribution in the G7.
“Ukraine is … at the frontline of the struggle for democracy and freedom,” Carney proclaimed in Kiev, insisting “allies must step up and lead.” He amplified the message on X with the declaration: “Ukraine’s fight is our fight.” These are the slogans of a government preparing Canadian workers to pay for escalating imperialist war.
From Poland, Carney sharpened the implications: Canada, he said, would not rule out participating in a post-war “security guarantee” in Ukraine—up to and including putting Canadian troops on the ground as a tripwire for a wider war against Russia. He also hailed the “essential” role that Canadian military personnel are currently playing in training Ukrainian troops under Operation UNIFIER.
The proposal to send Canadian, i.e. NATO troops to Ukraine is totally unacceptable to Russia, which launched its reactionary invasion of Ukraine due to the provocations of NATO’s eastward expansion. The aim of this proposal, which is also being advanced by the European powers, is to escalate the war with Russia and sabotage Trump’s attempt to reach an agreement with Moscow, over the heads the other NATO powers. Through a “peace deal,” Trump seeks to both gain US access to the resources of Russia and the Ukraine, at the expense of the European powers and Canada, and focus American imperialism’s might on preparing for war with China and securing unbridled control over the Americas.
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Carney and the Canadian bourgeoisie’s attempt to balance between privileged access to the US market, and the European powers’ rearmament drive and determination to escalate the war with Russia at all costs is increasingly untenable. The rift in trans-Atlantic relations that has burst to the surface since Trump began his second term in the White House has turned the erstwhile NATO allies into competitors and, under certain conditions, belligerent rivals for control over raw materials, markets, production networks, and geostrategic territories and influence.
Canada’s Tory-aligned gutter press, in particular the Toronto Sun, tried to score points by painting Carney’s Kiev stop as a face-saving reaction to Canada’s absence from the extraordinary White House meeting on Ukraine with European leaders earlier this month. Carney was apparently not invited to participate as the heads of government of Europe’s four largest countries and the chief of the EU Commission rushed to Washington at a day’s notice to try to block Trump’s effort at an accommodation with Russian President Vladimir Putin after their summit in Alaska.
On August 19, the US Department of Education (DOE) announced it was placing five school divisions in Northern Virginia on “high-risk status,” with the condition that all federal funding be delivered by reimbursement only.
The change in policy, which subjects schools to increased scrutiny whenever seeking federal funds, follows a late-July investigation by the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which determined that the school districts had violated Title IX in their policies regarding bathroom and locker room usage as it pertains to LGBTQ+ students.
The policy targets districts in Alexandria City, Arlington, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, and Prince William County. Together, the five school divisions enroll well over 400,000 students, with Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) serving over 183,000, making it the largest district in Virginia and the ninth largest in the country. In all, the Trump administration has launched 575 investigations into Virginia schools alone.
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As schools resume around the country, the nationwide campaign to undermine education must be understood as part of a deepening crisis of American capitalism. The broad assault on students’ democratic rights and the attack on public education are inseparable from the other crises inherent in the capitalist system. Its burden will fall heaviest on the working class, which must be mobilized independently in defense of public education and the democratic rights of all students.
5. Israel moves into the ground phase of the forced removal of Palestinians from Gaza City
Since the official declaration by the UN of a famine in Gaza City one week ago, Palestinians have endured among the deadliest attacks since the onset of Israel’s campaign of genocide began in October 2023.
Lethal strikes targeting medical facilities are part of the accelerated moves by the Zionist government for the complete occupation of Gaza City. These measures are being carried out in advance of mass expulsions and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, all of which are backed by the US and supported by the other imperialist powers.
On August 25, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) targeted Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the largest remaining partially functioning hospital in southern Gaza. At around 10:00 a.m., the first strike hit the hospital’s upper floors as journalists and medical staff tended to over 1,000 patients, triggering chaos and panic.
Over the next several minutes, a second and then a nearly simultaneous third strike—now documented in footage by CNN—struck the gathering of rescuers, health workers and additional reporters. In total, at least 22 people were killed: five journalists, four healthcare staff, members of the civil defense, patients and civilians. More than 50 others were wounded, many critically.
Deliberately striking emergency responders and journalists with “double-tap” and “triple-tap” attacks, as described by the BBC and CNN, is a war crime under international law. Journalists killed included Reuters contractor Hussam al-Masri, Al Jazeera’s Mohammad Salama, AP’s Mariam Abu Dagga, freelancers Moaz Abu Taha and Ahmad Abu Aziz.
Despite Israel’s claim of a “tragic mishap,” the IDF justified the strikes as usual by stating that “six terrorists” were targeted and that a “comprehensive investigation” was ongoing that will never produce any findings.
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After more than 10 months of total siege and the systematic destruction of critical infrastructure, the United Nations officially declared famine in the Gaza Governorate, including Gaza City, on August 22, 2025. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) confirmed “widespread starvation, destitution, and preventable deaths.”
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An orchestrated plan is now in motion to remove the entire Palestinian population from Gaza City and, ultimately, the whole Gaza Strip. Israel and the US are working on the forced relocation of over a million Palestinians to “humanitarian cities” in the south—essentially concentration camps—with the intent to remove them to third countries in Africa or the Arab world, including South Sudan.
The US has mobilized logistical and diplomatic resources in preparation for the expulsion, securing the complicity of neighboring Arab states and international agencies for the Israeli campaign of ethnic cleansing. The role played by the Trump White House shows that the destruction of Gaza is not only Israel’s crime but a crime authorized and strategically planned by US imperialism.
6. Republicans, fascists, Musk exploit Minneapolis school massacre to escalate anti-trans campaign
In the aftermath of the horrific mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, in which two children were killed and 18 others wounded, the fascist right, Elon Musk and the Trump administration are seizing on the shooter’s identity to launch a pogrom-style campaign of demonization against transgender people.
The comments and proposals now being advanced by the White House and its allies in the media, including openly neo-Nazi and Christian nationalist propagandists, are the political antecedents of imprisonment, forced “deprogramming,” electroshock, and other forms of abuse historically visited on LGBTQ people.
While the fascists are fixated on the shooters identity, at a press conference Thursday police officials stated that the shooter “hated everyone” besides other mass murders. The latter include several neo-Nazis whose names the shooter had written on the weapons used in the killings.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed that among the 18 wounded in Tuesday’s attack, 15 were children between the ages of 6 and 15, with three elderly adults in their eighties were also injured. While some children suffered graze wounds, several remain hospitalized in critical condition.
Chief O’Hara said the shooter was a former student at the school whose mother once worked there. The shooter, O’Hara said, “had some deranged fascination with previous mass shootings and very disturbing writings that demonstrate hatred towards many different individuals and groups of people,” and “fantasized” about previous mass killers.
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The United States is home to the most billionaires and school mass shootings. The phenomena of mass school shootings in the US has exploded over the last three decades under conditions of unending war abroad, deepening inequality and the evisceration of democratic rights and what remains of the social safety.
While the ruling class and politicians ignore these factors in the rise of school shootings, the fascist attempt to pin the blame on transgender persons is transparently false.
As the Republicans drive the anti-trans crusade, the Democrats are rushing to keep pace with their fascist “colleagues.” During his 2024 campaign Trump routinely spread fascist lies about transgender people. In response to similar attacks from Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, his opponent in the race, Democrat Colin Allred ran an ad declaring he opposed trans participation in women’s sports.
Speaking with the aforementioned fascist Charlie Kirk on his podcast earlier this year, California Governor Gavin Newsom backed Kirk’s anti-trans campaign, which is laundered under the false flag of “defending women’s sports.” Newsom, adapting to his fascist guest, said, “I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.”
The Democratic Party, which elevates issues of identity above class to obscure its own alignment with corporate and military interests, has no principled opposition to the fascist assault.
7. Philadelphia teachers union rams through contract in sham vote
After weeks of posturing that it was preparing to call a strike by August 31, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) abruptly rammed through a sellout contract Thursday night in order to prevent a walkout by 14,000 educators in the nation’s eighth-largest school district.
The contract was presented during a tightly choreographed virtual town hall meeting. Voting was restricted to the course of the online event, where union officials pre-screened questions and blocked critical comments. According to the union’s own figures, less than half of the membership participated. Only 4,000 ballots were cast in favor—barely one quarter of the total membership—yet the PFT declared the agreement ratified.
8. Three Texas workers killed by toxic gas at sewer plant
Three workers were killed Wednesday after being exposed to toxic hydrogen sulfide gas at the Westwood Shores sewer plant near Trinity, Texas. Hydrogen sulfide, produced by the decay of organic matter, is a well-known hazard in sewers, sewage treatment facilities, food processing plants, ranches and landfills, as well as in certain industrial processes.
Two of the victims—John Nelson Sr., 52, of Cleveland, and Bradley Wrightsman, 46, of Katy—were employed by H2O Innovation, a Canada-based multinational specializing in wastewater utility maintenance and management. The third, Brad Hutton, 47, worked for Hydroclear Services, which operates sewage vacuum trucks. All three men, residents of the Houston area, were in the prime of their working lives.
Both companies were working under contract for the plant, which is operated by the Westwood Shores Municipal Utility District.
According to the Trinity County sheriff, the men were initially working above ground, fixing a motor at a lift station in the sewage facility. Lift stations are used to pump sewage or wastewater from lower to higher elevations.
When sewage began backing up in the area, one of the men descended into a nearby manhole to try to fix the problem but did not return. The other two attempted a heroic rescue, and all three were apparently overcome by the lethal hydrogen sulfide gas. Their bodies were later recovered by Montgomery County Emergency Service District (ESD) 1 and sent for autopsy. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been notified of the incident.
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More than 5,200 workers are killed on the job each year in the United States, according to official figures. The real toll, including deaths from occupational diseases, is over 140,000 annually. At Clairton Coke Works, for example, two workers were killed and 10 seriously injured in what workers have said was a foreseeable disaster, the result of deliberate neglect by both management and the union of urgently needed repairs at the plant.
The rank-and-file investigation into the death of Ronald Adams Sr., an autoworker crushed by a gantry crane at Stellantis’ Dundee Engine Plant in southeast Michigan, provides an important lesson for stopping such deaths. Whatever has been exposed about Adams’ entirely preventable death—or about the disaster at Clairton Coke Works—was uncovered through the initiative of rank-and-file workers, not the companies, unions or government agencies.
9. Global Sumud Flotilla to set sail from European and Tunisian ports against Israel’s genocide in Gaza
On Sunday, over 50 ships carrying humanitarian aid and activists from 44 countries are set to depart from Barcelona, Genoa, Sicily, Greece, and other Mediterranean ports, joined on September 4 by vessels from Tunis, under the name Global Sumud Flotilla. Sumud is Arabic for “perseverance.”
The Flotilla is the largest organized civilian maritime mission yet against the land and sea blockade of Gaza organized by Israel with the assistance of the Egyptian army to the south. It brings together four initiatives: Freedom Flotilla Coalition, Global Movement for Gaza, the Maghreb Sumud Convoy and the Southeast Asian Nusantara Sumud Initiative. Thousands of doctors, lawyers, journalists, and cultural figures have registered to join or support the flotilla, with some 30,000 reportedly on waiting lists.
Among those joining are former Barcelona mayor Ada Colau, Mariana Mortágua of Portugal’s Left Bloc, Emma Fourreau, an MP for La France Insoumise, and Bruno Gilga of the Movimento Revolucionário de Trabalhadores in Brazil. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg will also board one of the boats. Acclaimed Irish novelist Naoise Dolan has announced her participation, alongside actors such as Susan Sarandon and Gustaf Skarsgård. Others, including Mark Ruffalo, Liam Cunningham, Alessandro Gassman, and Zerocalcare, have publicly endorsed the initiative.
The Global Sumud Flotilla marks the largest civilian-led maritime effort in solidarity with Gaza since the 2010 Mavi Marmara. Israeli commandos stormed the aid ship in international waters, murdering nine people—eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish American—and seriously wounding many others.
Announced by Thunberg two weeks ago, its declared aim is to open a corridor to deliver aid to the besieged population of Gaza and to raise global awareness of the need to break Israel’s blockade. Israel, backed to the hilt by Washington and the European powers, has made clear it will not permit such a corridor to be forced open.
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The World Socialist Web Site unconditionally defends the democratic right of this flotilla to sail, and opposes all attempts to suppress it, whether by US and European imperialist powers or by the Israeli state.
Nevertheless, it must be bluntly stated that initiatives such as the Global Sumud Flotilla cannot halt the genocide. The strategy of appealing to imperialist powers or to the Israeli regime itself is utterly bankrupt. This is underscored by the organizers’ appeals for government officials across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East to join the mission, in the hope that their presence might shield activists from repression.
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The genocide will not be halted by moral appeals or protests aimed at pressuring imperialist governments. The only social force capable of stopping it is the international working class. Workers, bound together across borders by a common interest and common struggle, have the power to halt arms shipments, shut down production, and break the financial and logistical lifelines of the genocidal machine.
There is immense potential for such a movement. Across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, workers and youth have repeatedly demonstrated their opposition to war and genocide, joining mass protests. Last week in Italy, dockworkers in Genoa blocked weapons shipments aboard the Bahri Yanbu, a Saudi-owned vessel bound for Israel. In June, dockworkers at the port of Marseille-Fos refused to load a container of spare parts for machine guns and cannon tubes onto a ship headed for Israel.
Port workers in Barcelona, airport ground crew in Belgium, and staff at Athens International Airport have all taken similar steps since the genocide began. Last year, workers at 11 major Indian ports declared they would not handle weapons bound for Israel, while Greek dockworkers stopped a shipment of 21 tonnes of ammunition. Moroccan dockworkers have also refused to load Maersk container ships carrying parts for F-35 fighter jets used by Israel in its genocide in Gaza.
Workers and youth across every country must take up this struggle as their own, raising definite demands: an immediate halt to all shipments of weapons and military aid to Israel; a boycott of trade and economic activity with Israel to sever the financial lifeline of genocide; the indictment and prosecution of corporations supplying Israel with the means of mass murder; and the arrest and prosecution of Israeli leaders and their accomplices for war crimes.
10. Prepare a general strike, bring down Macron, halt the war escalation in Europe!
By calling a vote of confidence on his austerity budget, French Prime Minister François Bayrou has blown the lid off the political crisis in France and across Europe. With his minority government set to fall, and no clear winner expected if new legislative elections are called, France is in deadlock.
An irreconcilable conflict is emerging between the working class and the capitalist oligarchy’s funding of its war course through deep austerity. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz prepares a €1 trillion war fund and declares, “The welfare state can no longer be financed,” Bayrou is calling to cut vacation days and €44 billion in social spending to prepare to triple French military spending. These policies of austerity and militarization, pursued across Europe, face overwhelming popular opposition.
Polls show 84 percent of France’s population oppose Bayrou’s budget. Over two-thirds want the removal of both Bayrou and French President Emmanuel Macron, the president of the rich. Work stoppages are being prepared by energy and rail workers, supermarket workers, taxi drivers, and pharmacists, and there are growing calls to block the economy with a one-day nationwide protest strike on September 10.
The political situation is pregnant with the possibility of a general strike like that of May 1968 in France. But such an eruption of the class struggle, for which a one-day national protest strike in France would only be a rehearsal, must be fought for. The working class must be politically armed with an understanding of its tasks in the emerging international struggle, and overcome the obstacle posed by bureaucracies that seek to delay and disorganize the class struggle.
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Workers and youth in France have powerful allies in the millions of workers across Europe and internationally opposed to war, fascism, genocide and austerity. Bureaucrats and parliamentarians will stand in the way. Workers must build their own rank-and-file organizations of struggle and a political movement to transfer power to the working class in France, across Europe and internationally, replacing the capitalist European Union with the United Socialist States of Europe.
11. UK Court of Appeal overturns High Court Epping hotel asylum seeker ban
The Court of Appeal overturned on Friday an interim injunction imposed by the High Court last week, which had banned the Bell Hotel in Epping, England from housing asylum seekers.
Since July far-right forces—including openly neo-Nazi groups and individuals—have led weekly protests outside the Bell Hotel demanding the 138 asylum seekers it houses be kicked out.
Events at the Bell have been used as a launchpad for a national campaign of far-right mobilizations against asylum seekers, demanding forced mass deportations. They have utilized the arrest—made public on July 8—of a 41-year-old refugee from Ethiopia accused of sexually propositioning a schoolgirl. The asylum seeker, who was staying at the Bell Hotel, denied the charges and attended a two-day trial from August 26. A verdict is expected on September 4.
The root and branch overturning by the Court of Appeal’s three judges of the High Court ruling was necessitated because it was so overtly sympathetic with the aims of the far-right mob. The High Court judge, Sir Stephen Eyre, was previously a Conservative Party parliamentary candidate four times.
12. United Kingdom: CWU rams through pro-company agreements at Royal Mail off historic low voter turnout
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) announced Wednesday that its members had “overwhelmingly endorsed” two agreements, on pay and “rebuilding Royal Mail”, with billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group.
CWU officials reported a 79.5 percent Yes vote, and a 20.5 percent No vote, with Dave Ward and his Deputy Martin Walsh declaring the ballot “an emphatic endorsement of the union’s position and the agreements we have reached.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Just 40.3 percent of members submitted a ballot return—a vote of no-confidence in the entire CWU bureaucracy. It means just 31.8 percent of CWU members have voted to back the CWU-EP Group agreements.
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The ballot results make clear there is mounting anger toward the CWU bureaucracy over its collusion with the company that has resulted in back-breaking workloads and unprecedented stress, sickness, injury, early retirement and even premature death among postal workers who have given decades of loyal service to Royal Mail.
But anger is not enough. The company’s advantage is that the CWU executive and divisional reps function as an arm of management. The CWU executive’s advantage is that it does not yet face an organised rank-and-file opposition. This must be changed. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee has called a Zoom meeting on Sunday September 7 at 7pm to discuss the aftermath of the ballot and the way forward for postal workers. We urge postal workers to register and make plans to attend.
13. A week of protests in Indonesia fueled by glaring social inequality
Protests continued yesterday in many cities across Indonesia after a 21-year-old man, Affan Kurniawan, died from being hit by an armored police vehicle as police aggressively tried to break up a rally in Jakarta on Thursday. Kurniawan was one of the many motorcycle ride-sharing drivers in Indonesia who eke out a living ferrying passengers.
The demonstrations initially erupted on Monday, after it was announced that parliamentarians would be given an exorbitant monthly accommodation allowance of 50 million rupiah ($US3,045), highlighting the country’s worsening social inequality. The figure is up to 20 times the monthly minimum wage of workers in poor areas of the country.
There has been a heavy police presence throughout the days of protest. More than 1,200 security personnel were deployed on Monday to secure the parliament building and fired tear gas as protesters attempted to approach. The police blocked off streets leading to the parliamentary compound, including several toll roads.
Angry ride-sharing drivers, students and many others gathered outside the parliament building and police headquarters in Jakarta on Friday chanting, “Killer! Killer!” amid desperate attempts by President Prabowo Subianto to appeal for calm. Seven police involved in the incident have been detained. At the same time, the government deployed troops from the navy marine corps to contain the protests.
According to the limited press reports, thousands have been involved in the protests in Jakarta and at least 600 have been arrested. Other protests were held in major cities, including Surabaya, Bandung, Yogyakarta and Solo in Java, Medan in northern Sumatra and Gorontalo in Sulawesi.
The protests have been fueled by a groundswell of resentment and anger, particularly among young people, over deteriorating living conditions, glaring social inequality and anti-democratic methods. But the immediate spark for this week’s protests was the accommodation allowance for parliamentarians.
14. 1,400 school workers strike Evergreen Public Schools in Washington state
On Tuesday, August 26, more than 1,400 classified staff in the Evergreen Public Schools in Vancouver, Washington, walked out, launching the first strike in the district’s history. The strike by members of the Public School Employees of Washington (PSE SEIU Local 1948) forced the district to postpone the start of the 2025–26 school year until September 2.
The workers—paraeducators, bus drivers, custodians, mechanics and food service staff—among the lowest-paid in the school workforce—voted by 92 percent to strike after five months of negotiations produced no agreement.
Evergreen paraeducators describe working second and third jobs, while custodians and drivers work unpaid hours, and many of the classified staff rely on food banks to feed their families. “Most of the paraeducators I’ve worked with over the years have second jobs during the school year and also during the summer, just so they can afford to pay rent and keep food on their tables,” said classroom specialist Brooke Lessley to the local media.
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The last strike in Mead took place half a century ago, in 1974. That action was swiftly strangled in the courts, with a judge issuing an injunction against the teachers. The case reached the Washington Supreme Court, which overturned the injunction only on the technical grounds that the school board had authorized legal action in violation of the state’s Open Public Meetings Act. But the strike itself was shut down within days. In the 50 years since, Mead teachers have not struck again, despite decades of deteriorating conditions. This silence is not the product of satisfaction but of the deliberate inaction of the unions, which have preserved “labor peace” while schools and classrooms fell into crisis.
The experiences in Evergreen and Mead must be seen alongside the recent betrayal of teachers in Philadelphia. Earlier this month, 94 percent of Philadelphia educators voted to strike against intolerable conditions. Anger among teachers was explosive.
Yet the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) intervened at the last moment with a sellout contract. The agreement included only a token 3 percent annual wage increase—below inflation—while offering harsher attendance discipline, higher healthcare costs and cosmetic parental leave provisions. It was celebrated by the district and the media because it guaranteed “three years of labor peace” and ensured that schools would open on time.
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Nothing these educators face is local. It is part of the plan to end public education. Their demands for living wages, manageable class sizes and safe classrooms clash directly with the priorities of the American ruling class, which showers billions on corporations, the military and war while imposing austerity and privatization at home.
15. Kennedy’s COVID vaccine restrictions and CDC purge endanger millions amid new pandemic wave
On the same day that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved significant new restrictions on COVID vaccines.
Specifically, only those 65 and older, or younger people with at least one medical comorbidity that puts them at increased risk of severe disease, are now eligible to receive them. These restrictions await approval from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), with approval all but certain given that Kennedy has previously fired all 17 ACIP members and replaced them with a majority of anti-vaccine allies.
The effects of these restrictions are immediate and severe. Facing the threat of legal retribution, many pharmacies across the country are already requiring prescriptions from doctors for anyone seeking vaccination. In some states, pharmacies have ceased offering doses altogether, further narrowing access. Insurance uncertainty means that for those able to obtain a prescription, the out-of-pocket cost for a COVID booster can reach $150 per dose. Even for individuals seeking off-label use, “doctor shopping” is becoming the norm, with physicians themselves facing the threat of sanction from their boards or state medical authorities for issuing scripts.
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With yesterday’s White House announcement that Jim O’Neill, Kennedy’s current deputy and a former Silicon Valley tech investor, would replace Monarez, Kennedy has consolidated control over the public health system, transforming these institutions into bastions of anti-scientific thought and presenting an existential threat to public health and safety.
Dr. Robert Steinbrook, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, summed up the sentiment among public health experts:
Ousting the first Senate-confirmed CDC director weeks into the start of her tenure makes absolutely no sense and underscores the destructive chaos at RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services. To make matters even worse, there are reports of additional resignations of critical high-ranking CDC staff. The CDC is being decapitated. This is an absolute disaster for public health.
In solidarity with Monarez, four other long-serving public health leaders have resigned: Dr. Debra Houry, CDC chief medical officer; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Jennifer Layden, head of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology.
16. Australian government moves to axe legal rights for mass deportations to Nauru
Yesterday, for the second time this week, the Australian Labor government launched previously unannounced measures to overturn basic legal and democratic rights. Its immediate aim is to consign up to 400 former immigration detainees to the impoverished tiny Pacific island of Nauru, a former British, Australian and New Zealand colony.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government is setting far-reaching precedents, initially directed against refugees and immigrants, that parallel or go beyond those being pursued by other capitalist governments internationally, spearheaded by the Trump administration in the US and the Starmer government in the UK.
Without any prior notice, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke made a snap visit to Nauru on Friday to sign a $408 million-plus deal to allow the Albanese government to start deporting to the remote island hundreds of people, including asylum seekers, who had been released from indefinite detention in November 2023 as the result of a High Court case known as NZYQ.
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The High Court’s NZYQ ruling involved a stateless Rohingya man, identified only as NZYQ. The judges partially overturned a shocking near-20 year precedent set by the High Court of permitting indefinite detention of non-citizens. In NZYQ, the judges said detention amounted to punishment, which only courts can inflict under the Australian Constitution, but said it would still be constitutional to lock up people where there was a real prospect of removal to another country.
The Albanese government’s more than $400 million pledge to Nauru is on top of a $100 million deal it earlier signed with Nauru’s government, despite opposition from Nauru’s population, to reopen a notorious Australian-funded refugee detention facility.
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According to Amnesty International, there were about 100 people in the Nauru detention center at the start of this year. On August 1, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre reported an outbreak of painful and debilitating mosquito-borne dengue fever among the refugees, on top of other physical and mental health problems. The center voiced fears for their safety because of Nauru’s fragile health system, reporting: “The people seeking asylum are surviving on a stipend of $230 a fortnight, and are unable to afford or access mosquito nets and repellent to protect themselves.”
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Why Nauru?
Nauru was ravaged by decades of colonial phosphate mining, leaving many of its people destitute and now facing the danger of being swamped by the rising ocean levels produced by global climate change.
Researchers estimate 80 percent of Nauru has become uninhabitable due to mining, and local authorities believe that rising tides will force 90 percent of its residents to relocate to higher ground. Its government has become so desperate that it is selling $160,000 “golden passports” to wealthy foreigners to raise cash.
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Since the 1990s, both Labor and Coalition governments have set leads for other governments to shut their doors, block refugee boats, detain asylum seekers and either return them or transport them to grim isolated locations.
Today, the Labor government is also slashing the numbers of immigrants and international students, blaming them for the deteriorating social conditions produced by capitalism’s economic and cost-of-living crisis, and the channeling of billions of dollars into military spending amid the US-backed Gaza genocide and the preparations for war against China.
17. South Korean president holds first summit with Trump
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung held a summit with US President Donald Trump in Washington on August 25. During the first in-person meeting between the two since Lee took office in June, the South Korean leader pledged to back Trump’s war drive against China.
During the public portion of the meeting, Lee and Trump focused on issues like North Korea, which is regularly used to justify the rapidly expanding militarization of the region led by US imperialism. Trump expressed his supposed interest in a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the future.
In response, Lee lavished praise on the fascistic Trump, calling him a “peacemaker.” Lee told Trump, “It is not easy for inter-Korean relations to improve through my involvement alone. In fact, the only person who can truly resolve this issue is President Trump.”
The real purpose of the meeting, however, was not North Korea, but to provide Lee an opportunity to assure the Trump regime that his three-month-old administration would continue to fully back Washington’s war plans against China. Lee came to power claiming he would improve relations with Beijing and Pyongyang, exploiting widespread anti-war sentiment in the South Korean working class.
18. Alleged ambush of police by “sovereign citizen” highlights danger of Australian far right
While executing an arrest warrant at a property in the regional Victorian town of Porepunkah on Tuesday morning, two police officers were shot dead and another was seriously wounded. The alleged perpetrator, Dezi Freeman, has not been seen since and is suspected to have escaped into the massive and dense bushland neighboring the town.
Victorian Police have stated that the warrant was over historical child sexual assault allegations, not political matters. The incident nevertheless has a political significance, given that Freeman was a highly active member of the far-right “sovereign citizen” movement, which has grown over recent years, particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Freeman obviously has not been brought before a court and is entitled to a presumption of innocence and to due process.
According to the police account, ten officers were dispatched to execute the warrant. When they approached a bus that Freeman was living in on a larger property, they claim he opened fire with a homemade shotgun, in an ambush-style attack, before escaping with his own weapons and those of t
Freeman appears to have been active in the loosely-connected “‘sovereign citizen” milieu since at least 2019. Adherents of the movement, though they increasingly eschew the term, tend to deploy a bizarre and nonsensical pseudo-legal jargon to claim that they are not subject to laws or authority and to thus assert their “sovereignty.”
In a capitalist society, where the law and the police in the final analysis serve to defend the interests of a corporate and financial elite, there is no shortage of abuses to which the “sovereign citizens” can point.
In essence, though, the movement is a form of extreme right-wing libertarianism. Its assertion of the unfettered rights of the individual to do whatever they please, regardless of the social consequences, is a caricatured expression of the exploitative and anti-social logic of the profit system itself. “Sovereign citizens” often also subscribe to right-wing conspiracy theories regarding global “cabals,” with an open or implicit antisemitism to them.
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There have been several other far-right terroristic incidents. Last year, a young man walked into the office of Newcastle Labor MP Tim Crakanthorp, dressed in fatigues and carrying weapons. He was inspired by Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist who massacred dozens of Muslims in New Zealand mosques. Disaster was seemingly only averted in Newcastle because the young man lost his nerve.
That and other far-right actions involving violence have been downplayed by the media and the political establishment.
They have received far less attention than the peaceful mass movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has been continuously slandered as antisemitic and subjected to police-state attacks.
South Australian public sector health workers strike again over low pay
NBN subcontractors in Victoria protest 30 percent pay cut
Cleanaway waste management workers still on strike at Chevron in Western Australia
Crown Sydney casino workers hold third strike over low pay
ReGroup waste recycling workers in Queensland strike for improved pay offer
Tasmanian public health and community sector workers protest over wages
Early childhood teachers and educators in Victoria fight for pay rise
Fonterra dairy processing workers in Victoria strike for pay rise and job security
Bangladesh:
Momo Fashion garment workers protest factory closure
India:
Sanitation workers in Madurai, Tamil Nadu end five-day strike without resolution
Telugu film industry workers return to work after 18 days
Punjab anganwadi workers protest faulty tracking app and budget cuts
Patna Municipal Corporation daily wage workers demand wage rise and permanency
New Zealand:
Media workers strike
Sri Lanka:
Public transport workers reject government’s joint transport initiative
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