Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Israeli tanks, bulldozers and ground troops have entered Gaza City
Israeli ground troops, supported by relentless artillery and air power, have succeeded in penetrating the heart of Gaza City. Eyewitnesses have described the latest round of terror unleashed, with hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles methodically advancing through dense residential neighborhoods.
Video and photographic evidence obtained by Reuters, the New York Times, Al Jazeera and the BBC, shows columns of tanks and bulldozers entering Sheikh Radwan, a district that was once home to tens of thousands, now reduced to rubble and dust.
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Amid this systematic devastation, Israel announced the opening of a new temporary evacuation route out of Gaza City, offering a “window” of 48 hours purportedly to permit civilians to flee before what Israeli politicians call the “final occupation” of the city.
Another measure of the savage mass murder of Palestinians by Israel, the so-called “clear routes” and humanitarian corridors, are the bombings and gunfire along all major highways south, which are forcing desperate Gazans to navigate a gauntlet of tanks, snipers and unmapped minefields.
“We tried to leave when the leaflets were dropped, but the bombs followed us down the coastal road,” said one survivor. “If we turn back, we die. If we go forward, we may still die.” The Israeli military claims 350,000 people have already fled Gaza City, yet up to half a million remain trapped amid siege and bombardment, unable or unwilling to abandon their homes and relatives.
In the words of a Gaza schoolteacher to Al Jazeera: “I prefer to die here in my neighborhood than become a refugee again.”
The ground offensive is unprecedented in scale and firepower, featuring at least three armored formations operating “in the heart of Gaza City,” according to direct reporting by ABC News and multiple international outlets. Plumes of smoke and fire rise above entire districts, while drone and artillery strikes hit areas designated by Israel as “terror sites.”
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The massive crime by Israel, which has been clear to the world’s population for 23 months now, was finally recognized by US Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday, who declared for the first time on the Senate floor that Israel “is committing genocide in Gaza.”
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The imperialist plans of Israel and the US is for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza, followed by privatization and reconstruction of the region for elite tourism and corporate development.
The proposal for a “Gaza Riviera,” detailed in leaked State Department documents and confirmed by media such as CNBC and CNN, envisages the relocation of over two million residents, digital “voluntary” resettlement exchanges, and the building of “AI-driven smart cities” to replace the ruins of Palestinian communities.
In a grotesque AI-generated promotional video, Donald Trump boasted of a beachfront resort to be built atop the devastation. The refusal to allow the return of refugees, the ongoing destruction of records, and the refusal to allow journalists or aid agencies into Gaza all point to a monstrous crime that points to the future that humanity faces in the twenty-first century under world capitalism.
In a September 2 response to a lawsuit brought by Mack Trucks worker and socialist Will Lehman, the Trump administration formally admitted that the Department of Labor has still not produced the legally required explanation for its rejection of his complaint over massive voter suppression in the 2022–23 United Auto Workers (UAW) national elections. A court hearing in the case is scheduled for later this month.
On August 1, the Department of Labor rejected Lehman’s complaint over UAW election fraud for a second time, writing in a perfunctory letter that such a statement would be provided “at a future date.”
The government’s ongoing efforts to maintain that the 2022-23 UAW elections were legitimate come amid an intensifying crisis facing the administration of UAW President Shawn Fain. While effectively coming to the rescue of Fain and the UAW apparatus, the Trump White House is simultaneously engaged in furious efforts to establish a dictatorship and overturn the Constitution, with its plans rapidly accelerating following the assassination of fascist Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
The government’s September filing is the first substantive response by the government to Lehman’s suit. Lehman had sued the Department of Labor and US Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in June of this year, after more than a year of stonewalling by the Department of Labor following a court ruling in his favor.
In what Bloomberg Law termed a “rare rebuke” of the Labor Department, federal district court judge David Lawson ruled in favor of Lehman in June 2024, finding that the department under the Biden administration had acted illegally and in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner when it dismissed Lehman’s complaint on narrow procedural grounds. Lawson had sent the complaint back to the Labor Department “for further proceedings,” stating they “at a minimum, must consist of the production of a supplemental statement of reasons.”
Instead, first the Biden and now the Trump administration have, in essence, defied that order. The Department’s latest filing openly acknowledges that no “statement of reasons” has been issued to Lehman more than a year after Lawson ordered it.
“The Department of Labor under both the Democrats and Republicans continues to demonstrate that it has nothing to do with defending workers’ rights and interests,” Lehman told the WSWS. “It is propping up the UAW apparatus precisely because the union bureaucracy serves to suppress opposition by workers to corporate exploitation. But in doing so, they’re only exposing the pro-corporate, anti-working class role of both the union apparatus and the state even more.”
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Since Trump’s election, Fain and the UAW leadership have openly aligned the UAW with the fascistic president’s trade war agenda. Fain has repeatedly hailed the wartime economy of the 1940s, when the UAW enforced a no-strike pledge and speed-up, and has called for auto plants to be retooled for military production. The UAW apparatus, along with the union bureaucracies more broadly, have worked ever more feverishly to subordinate workers to the needs of US imperialism, including the ongoing efforts to sabotage the strike by 640 GE Aerospace workers in Ohio and Kentucky.
With American capitalism hurtling toward dictatorship and global war, the UAW and other union bureaucracies, integrated into the highest levels of government policy, are playing a central role in preparing the “home front.” The AFL-CIO functions as a “domestic NATO,” as Biden revealingly put it.
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Against this backdrop, Lehman’s struggle is of immense significance. In the 2022 UAW elections, he ran openly as a socialist, calling for the abolition of the union bureaucracy and the transfer of power and decision-making to rank-and-file workers. His campaign won broad support, winning nearly 5,000 votes, despite the efforts of the bureaucracy to keep workers in the dark.
“The implications of my lawsuit extend far beyond the UAW elections,” Lehman said, commenting on the latest developments in the case. “They expose the reality that the union, backed by both political parties and the state, is hostile to democratic rights and interests of rank-and-file workers and retirees.
“Throughout the 2022 elections and afterwards, my campaign stood for the interests of rank-and-file workers and retirees, and we challenged every violation of our rights. We followed all of the correct legal procedures, and in June of last year, we won a historic ruling against the Biden administration’s Secretary of Labor. But after three years, under Biden and under Trump, the government is still stubbornly refusing to follow the law and address the voter suppression that my campaign exposed. It is impossible for any fair-minded worker who has followed the progress of my complaints through the legal system not to conclude that the system is totally broken.”
“We need an entirely new framework to defend our interests, which is what the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is fighting for. Workers must take matters into their own hands and build rank-and-file committees in every factory and workplace, independent of the union apparatus, to fight for our rights and link struggles across industries and borders.
“Workers need both fighting organizations and a new political perspective. The massive levels of inequality and concentration of wealth in the US are totally incompatible with democracy, whether in the UAW, in the workplace, or anywhere else. We need a political program and movement based on the interests of the international working class to stop the descent into dictatorship and world war under capitalism.”
Daniel Berkley, a leading member of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee:
At a press conference last Friday, Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) National President Jan Simpson announced an ad flyer-delivery ban starting Monday, September 15. The prohibition on delivering commercial flyers, for which postal workers are not properly compensated, replaces a more than three-month overtime ban that CUPW initiated last May to block an all-out strike by the rank and file against Canada Post’s plan to radically restructure the postal service at workers’ expense.
The ad-flyer ban is popular among many postal workers, because it reduces the deliveries we perform for next to no pay and reduces the loads we have to carry. But from the standpoint of developing our struggle against Canada Post’s drive to destroy the postal service in its current form by eliminating the majority of fulltime workers and “Amazonifying” our working conditions, the ban must be understood as yet another desperate attempt by the CUPW bureaucracy to hold back our fight.
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CUPW is running our struggle into the ground. If its demobilizing strategy is not countermanded by the rank and file, it will inevitably result in a defeat that would set a precedent for the devastation of jobs in the public and private sectors, and for the destruction of public services as the government redirects all of society’s resources towards rearmament, handouts to the financial oligarchy, and war.
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The struggle that postal workers find ourselves in is of vital importance to all workers in Canada, public and private sector alike. The legal right to strike has been effectively abolished, while working conditions deteriorate across the board. Fundamental questions about the role of new automation and AI technologies are being posed point-blank for postal workers, but they are relevant to workers in virtually every workplace. Will AI and technological change more generally be used for the benefit of working people, reducing workloads and raising living standards? Or will they be employed for the benefit of the capitalist ruling class, intensifying worker-exploitation to squeeze out more profit, build more lethal weapons, and swell the fortunes of the billionaires?
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The union apparatus shudders at the prospect of a workers’ counteroffensive against corporate and government interests, which would inevitably develop as a rebellion against the bureaucracy and its corporatist perks. But conditions for the development of such a movement are rapidly developing. A strike by 10,000 Ontario community college workers began last week to fight against attacks on their job security and wages. Like postal workers, they too have a stake in defending the right to strike. But this right, along with working conditions and wages, cannot be defended under the discipline of the various union bureaucracies.
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To fight Canada Post, and the Liberal government and corporate Canada, which both back management to the hilt, it is imperative that postal workers take the struggle into our own hands by building rank-and-file committees in every workplace, joined together in a network under the leadership of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee. The tasks of these committees will be to advance demands based on what we need, not what the corporation claims is affordable, and to broaden our struggle to other sections of workers confronting the same threats to their jobs and living conditions.
Uniting with other sections of workers to defend the right to strike, public services, and working conditions for all is an urgent necessity. And the conditions to develop this movement are favorable. Workers everywhere are tired of worsening conditions, stagnant and declining wages, the growing gulf between rich and poor, the tens of billions stolen from public services to fund war, and the increasingly authoritarian methods used by the ruling class, its state, and union “partners” to impose attacks on us. This is why to secure our demands, we need to arm ourselves with a socialist and internationalist program that prioritizes the needs of workers, the vast majority of the population, over the accumulation of private profit by the oligarchs.
4. ABC/Disney joins fascist purge, suspends Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely over Kirk remarks
After facing pressure from the Trump administration on Monday, ABC—owned by Disney—announced it would be suspending the late-night television show Jimmy Kimmel Live! “indefinitely,” after the host came under attack from fascists and Trump administration officials over his commentary on the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
While TV viewership is down across the board, Jimmy Kimmel Live! remains fairly popular. In addition to competing with Stephen Colbert for top late-night ratings on network television, the show has 20.7 million subscribers on YouTube—more than double the 10.2 million for CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert but less than the 32.8 million for NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.During his monologue on Monday night, Kimmel correctly observed that in the wake of Kirk’s assassination “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Kimmel’s remarks were neither inflammatory nor inaccurate. In the wake of Kirk’s killing, right-wing politicians and media figures demanded retribution from the “left” even though no evidence had emerged revealing the shooter’s motivations or politics.
At no point in his monologue did Kimmel assert that the shooter was right-wing, a Trump supporter, or affiliated with any party or organization. No evidence has emerged linking the shooter to any left-wing group or the Democratic Party; the only known personal details are that he despised Kirk’s “hatred” and reportedly had a relationship with a man. These facts have been weaponized by the Trump administration and its media allies to mount a reactionary campaign blaming “the left,” “LGBT ideology,” and “transgender radicals” for Kirk’s death.
Kimmel’s ouster is part of a widening purge of journalists and commentators accused of insufficient loyalty following Trump’s return to the White House. This political retaliation against Kimmel is part of a coordinated campaign to silence critics of the Trump administration across the corporate media, before and after the killing of Kirk.
5. France: Build rank-and-file committees to wage the struggle against Macron and war!
Hundreds of thousands of workers will strike on today’s day of action in France, a week after the fall of the French government and mass “Block Everything” protests called on social media. As social anger mounts against President Emmanuel Macron and his new prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, France is not only in the throes of a parliamentary crisis. It is passing through a crisis of rule rooted in an international conflict between the working class and the capitalist oligarchy.
Workers reject the demands of the political establishment across Europe for deep social cuts to fund the sovereign debt and unpopular wars, while preserving the oligarchy’s obscene wealth. Replacing François Bayrou with Lecornu as French prime minister has not lessened this insoluble class conflict one iota. As Lecornu met with union leaders and the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS) to discuss new cuts and assemble another minority government, his poll ratings fell to 16 percent.
In the explosive class battles that lie ahead, the working class must take control of its own struggles. Militant organizations of the rank and file, built completely outside the framework of official politics, must take control of the class struggle out of the hands of the union bureaucracies and their “social dialog” with the capitalist state. This is the only way workers can organize resistance to and defeat the ruling oligarchy’s program of fascism, genocide and war.
Political lessons of the European strike wave of 2023, including the defeat of the struggle against Macron’s pension cuts, must be drawn. An overwhelming majority of French people opposed the cuts, millions of workers went on strike, and riots shook cities across France. Yet Macron was able to impose his cuts, because the union leaderships and parties in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) called off strikes and protests once Macron promulgated his illegitimate cuts as law.
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The policy of Mélenchon, for his part, is to lull the working class to sleep and keep subordinating it to the union bureaucracy. He has claimed “It is enough for us to let the situation ripen,” pointing to the fact that several union bureaucracies have called protests and claiming that “It is useless to tire oneself out trying to do more.” Peddling hopes that the union bureaucracies will call more protests and force Macron’s resignation, he says nothing to prepare workers and youth for a situation where the bourgeoisie would react to Macron’s fall by attacking workers even more aggressively.
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The PES calls for the transfer of power in all factories and workplaces from the union bureaucracies to the rank and file. To wage this struggle, workers need rank-and-file organizations to overcome the opposition of union bureaucracies whose “social dialog” ties workers to the diktat of the capitalist state. The Parti de l’égalité socialiste proposes the following demands, on which a political offensive can be waged in the working class to build support for the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC):
Expropriate the capitalist oligarchy!
Bring down Macron, abolish the Fifth Republic’s executive presidency!
No to imperialist war and NATO, build an anti-war movement in the working class!
Stop the Gaza genocide! No persecution of opponents of genocide!
Stop the persecution of immigrants! For the international unity of the working class!
For the United Socialist States of Europe!
6. Perspective: The social crisis fueling the collapse of democracy in America
What is happening in America outside of—and propelling—the frenzy within the political superstructure? Beneath the surface, the basic class contradictions of what Leon Trotsky called the “death agony of capitalism” are manifesting themselves.
Inflation is sharply eroding living standards, while workers and families are burdened with record levels of debt. The first waves of massive cuts to social programs are being felt, alongside the accelerated dismantling of public education. At the same time, unsafe working conditions continue to claim lives every day, with thousands of workers killed on the job each year in what amounts to an industrial slaughterhouse.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—entirely ignored by the media and political establishment—continues to exact a deadly toll, even as the remnants of public health infrastructure are dismantled and the most basic protections, including vaccines, are eliminated.
One of the leading mouthpieces of big business, the Wall Street Journal, gave a glimpse of this deepening crisis in an article posted Wednesday on its website with the headline, “The Two-Speed Economy Is Back as Low-Income Americans Give Up Gains.” The article is published in the newspaper’s Thursday print edition under the headline, “Divergent American Economy Gets More Divided.”
“There are two economies in the U.S. right now, and they are moving in different directions,” the commentary begins, noting that higher-income Americans “are still spending like gangbusters,” while for most workers, wage growth “has petered out. Those workers are curbing their spending and in some cases are struggling to find jobs.” Unemployment is hitting African Americans and young people particularly hard, while home prices and rents are soaring.
“The divided fortunes of rich and poor in the U.S. may sound like an old story,” the Journal acknowledges, but “the gulf is widening again.”
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Overshadowing even this colossal and growing inequality is the specter of a default in the financial markets, with personal, corporate and government debt all hitting stratospheric levels and runaway speculation in opaque or worthless investment vehicles like cryptocurrencies.
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Under these conditions, the policies of the Trump administration have assumed an increasingly reckless and incendiary character. Its tariff barriers, adopted and modified seemingly at random, are devastating global trade, the driving force of world economic growth. Its foreign policy promotes military conflicts across the globe that threaten to coalesce into a Third World War fought with nuclear weapons.
This is only a partial portrait of the social crisis in America. The conditions fueling the present breakdown were not created by Trump, but his government, acting on behalf of the corporate and financial oligarchy, is vastly accelerating processes that have been developing for decades under both Democrats and Republicans. These same processes are expressed, in different forms, in every country around the world.
It is impossible to understand the violent turn toward dictatorship in American politics outside of this social reality. And it is impossible to seriously oppose dictatorship apart from the development of a mass movement of the working class, directed against the wealth of the oligarchy and the capitalist system on which it rests.
7. United States: Legionella outbreak at GM Tech Center in Detroit suburb
On September 10, 2025, two employees working at the Cole Engineering building at the General Motors technical center in Warren, Michigan, tested positive for Legionnaires’ disease, a severe and potentially fatal lung infection caused by Legionella bacteria. The Macomb County Health Department notified GM, and the Cole Engineering building was ordered closed “out of an abundance of caution” until at least September 22, when third-party test results become available. The company has not yet confirmed the engineering center as the source of exposure.
Legionnaires’ disease (legionellosis) is a severe type of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria. It is contracted through inhaling mist or aerosolized water contaminated with the bacteria. Common sources include cooling towers, HVAC systems, hot water plumbing, decorative fountains and other engineered water systems.
Symptoms typically appear 2–10 days after exposure and include fever, cough, shortness of breath, muscle aches, headaches, gastrointestinal symptoms or confusion in more severe cases. For high-risk populations, such as current or ex-smokers or people 50 or older, the disease can be fatal. One in 10 people who get infected with Legionnaires’ disease die from lung failure or other complications.
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Industrial workers are particularly at risk due to extensive, complex water systems at manufacturing plants. Cooling towers and industrial air conditioning systems are locations where Legionella bacteria are known to thrive and produce aerosolized contaminated water. With the constant drive to increase profit margins, companies are incentivized to reduce spending on maintenance and safety and cover up outbreaks to avoid loss of production.
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Even when corporations are caught engaging in criminal neglect of safety, they are fined at most a pittance compared to their operating profits. In 2023, a 61-year-old worker died from Legionnaires’ disease at Huron Inc., a Michigan auto supplier. Investigations showed that multiple workers were infected and hospitalized over several years, with internal tests detecting Legionella bacteria. The company was cited for failing to keep employees safe from a recognized hazard and fined just $10,300 for killing the worker.
Huron was acquired by Seven Mile Capital Partners in 2015, which then sold it to Adrian, an international private investment company with $62 billion in assets in 2017. For these giant investment firms, the penalty for killing a worker is a rounding error, the cost of doing business.
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Every day in the United States, an average of 385 workers die from hazardous working conditions. Legionnaires’ disease is only one expression of this ongoing social crime: workers forced into unsafe factories and offices, while companies and their financial backers profit. Without independent organization and struggle by workers themselves, outbreaks like those in Warren, Dearborn, and at Huron Inc. will continue—and more lives will be needlessly lost.
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Autoworkers must take lessons from the COVID 19 pandemic, when the ruling class declared that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease” and presided over tens of millions of preventable deaths. At the beginning of the pandemic, while the auto companies and the UAW were covering up illnesses and deaths to keep production moving, autoworkers took matters into their own hands and walked off the job, forcing a temporary shutdown of the industry.
8. Mandelson-Epstein scandal undermines Starmer before Trump, the royals and his party
Revelations of Lord Peter Mandelson’s intimate connections with Jeffrey Epstein have created yet another crisis for Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, putting him in the doghouse with US President Donald Trump, the British royal family and his own MPs.
Starmer was forced to sack Mandelson on September 11, less than a year after appointing him US ambassador last December. This was just five days before US President’s Donald Trump’s arrival this week for his second state visit to Britain.
Trump would have liked the trip to serve as a distraction from persistent questions over his own relationship with Epstein, which have prompted him to sue the New York Times for $15 billion. But the Mandelson saga meant the scandal has followed him over the Atlantic with renewed force, helped by protesters unfurling an enormous picture of Trump and Epstein together across the law on Windsor Castle, and projecting the image on its walls. And it did so under conditions where Mandelson has not made any attempt to deny the veracity of his appearance in Epstein’s “birthday book” when Trump insists that his own is a forgery.
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Trump’s hosts, the British royal family, have their own reasons for ruing the timing of events given Prince Andrew’s close connections with Epstein, the exposure of which dealt a huge blow to the monarchy. A diplomatic source told the Daily Mail: “The Palace has been grumbling about how unhelpful it all is.”
As for the Labour Party, MPs totally loyal to Starmer’s right-wing agenda are increasingly restive over whether he is the person to lead it, after a series of screw ups of which the Mandelson appointment is only the latest. It has become a focus for complaints in the party that Starmer is a political liability.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) announced Tuesday that union members will vote Friday on a non-existent contract. The move represents a brazen attempt by the IAM bureaucracy to shut down the six-week strike by 3,200 defense workers in the St. Louis area.
What workers are being made to vote on is a proposal by the union that Boeing has not agreed to accept. The union did not share specific details of the new settlement in its news release.
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Also on Friday, the United Auto Workers is holding a vote on a new tentative agreement to shut down a strike at GE Aerospace. UAW President Shawn Fain is an advocate of a war economy, calling for the retooling of closed auto plants to make military vehicles and citing World War II as a model for today.
The World Socialist Web Site urges workers in both strikes to reject their contracts by the widest possible margin. The bargaining committees, which produced these deals, must be thrown out and replaced with new ones elected solely from the rank and file, not bureaucrats with intimate ties to management. They must make plans for an expansion of the struggle and to break out of the isolation being imposed by the union officials.
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Boeing has already begun hiring permanent scab workers in an attempt to break the morale of the rank and file. The company’s confidence in this provocative measure rests on the services of the IAM bureaucracy, which has worked from the beginning to isolate the strike and wear workers down.
Despite the union’s $300 million in net assets and $200 million in annual expenditures, the IAM has left strikers to survive on just $200 per week in strike pay. The national leadership has issued only perfunctory statements and has done nothing to mobilize the union’s estimated 600,000 members in support of the St. Louis workers.
The IAM bureaucrats are acting as enforcers for the government, not just Boeing. The Pentagon needs its fighter jets and missiles for Gaza, Ukraine and a future war against China.
Many of the same weapons being deployed halfway around the world are also being prepared against the American population. Trump has deployed the National Guard and other federal armed forces in Los Angeles and Washington D.C., threatening to do so in many other major cities, in an attempt to suppress opposition to the administration’s full-scale assault on immigrants and democratic rights.
The IAM officials have publicly asked for Trump to intervene which amounts to a request for the would-be dictator to crush the strike. Trump admitted over the weekend that he is working with corporate executives to work out where to send troops, with St. Louis singled out by Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena.
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The rail unions have also sought and obtained an intervention from Trump to prevent a strike on the Long Island Rail Road, New York City’s largest commuter rail system. New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s response was to attack Trump for not intervening against workers fast enough. The Democrats have refused to lift a finger against Trump because they are a party of the same ruling class that Trump represents. They are far more afraid of a mass movement in the working class than they are of a dictatorship.
It is urgent that Boeing workers take matters into their own hands. Without a new leadership and a new strategy, the strike will be betrayed. Rank-and-file committees must be formed, excluding union officials, to appeal throughout St. Louis and across Boeing for support.
10. Former Thai prime minister Thaksin jailed for a year
Thailand’s former prime minister and de facto leader of the Pheu Thai Party, Thaksin Shinawatra, was sentenced by the country’s Supreme Court last week to serve a one-year prison term. Ostensibly related to longstanding corruption charges, the ruling is a move by right-wing factions aligned with the military and monarchy to sideline Thaksin and his party.
The trumped-up charges against Thaksin stem from his five years as prime minister which the military used as part of its pretext to oust him in the 2006 coup. He fled into a self-imposed exile for 15 years, during which time he was sentenced to eight years in prison in absentia.
Following the general election in 2023, Thaksin returned to Thailand as part of a sordid bargain between Pheu Thai on one hand and the military and monarchy on the other to prevent the Move Forward Party (MFP) from coming to power. The MFP, which had won the most seats, was later dissolved on bogus grounds and is now the People’s Party.
Pheu Thai, which once claimed to be the party of “democracy,” entered into a coalition with the military-backed parties to form a government while Thaksin received a royal pardon, reducing his prison sentence to one year. He ultimately served only six months, staying in a suite at the Police General Hospital in Bangkok on the basis of “life-threatening” health issues before being paroled.
The traditional ruling elites centered on the military and monarchy have always been intensely hostile to Thaksin, himself a billionaire, and Pheu Thai, and have effectively reneged on the deal.
The court ruled on September 9 that Thaksin’s health concerns were in fact “non-urgent” and insufficient to override standard incarceration rules under the Corrections Act. This meant he still had to serve his one-year sentence in prison. Thaksin was immediately transferred to the elderly wing of the high security Khlong Prem Central Prison in Bangkok.
The jailing of Thaksin took place shortly after the Constitutional Court removed his daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra as prime minister in a judicial coup based on phoney ethics charges. Her Pheu Thai-led ruling coalition collapsed afterwards, allowing the pro-military and pro-monarchy Bhumjaithai Party (BJT) to take power with its leader Anutin Charnvirakul becoming prime minister. Paetongtarn was the second Pheu Thai prime minister removed in a year on spurious grounds.
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Thaksin and his party have accepted his imprisonment and the party’s removal from power. Whatever their economic and political disputes, the entire Thai ruling class is aware that it sits on a social powder keg. Its fears have no doubt been heightened by the recent mass protests in Indonesia and Nepal.
Thailand’s cost of living has grown rapidly. Food prices have surged by 106.5 percent over the past 13 years while the minimum wage has risen by only 33 percent in the same period, according to Thailand’s Agency for Real Estate Affairs. Household debt stands at approximately 87.4 percent of GDP.
The economic situation has been exacerbated by geopolitical tensions driven by accelerating US-led preparations for war against China. Trump tariffs are negatively impacting Thailand’s export-driven economy. For 2025, the World Bank has forecast only 1.8 percent economic growth, down from 2.5 percent in 2024.
Significantly, while Thaksin has been jailed, no moves, at present, have been made in the courts against Pheu Thai. As it faces the prospect of further political upheaval and opposition, the ruling class may yet require its services to prop up increasingly unstable bourgeois rule.
11. Fed cuts interest rate as US economy weakens
The US Federal Reserve cut its interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point yesterday and indicated more cuts could come later this year, after a tense buildup to the meeting arising from efforts by US President Trump to change the composition of its governing body in support of his drive for a much lower rate.
On Monday, on the eve of the meeting, one of Trump’s leading economic advisers, Stephen Moore, took his place as Fed governor after his confirmation for the post had been rushed through the Senate and carried in a 48–47 vote.
But his efforts to remove Fed governor Lisa Cook failed—at least for the present—when an appeals court, also on Monday, upheld a lower court ruling against Trump’s efforts to sack her for “cause” over claims she had falsified a mortgage application for properties she bought before her appointment in 2022.
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But deliberations at the Fed’s next two meetings for the year—in October and December—could be more contentious, as indicated by the so-called dot plots in which all members of the FOMC indicate what they think the trajectory for rates will be.
A slim majority indicated two additional rate cuts this year while seven expected no further reductions and two projected one further cut.
In support of its decision, the FOMC said that unemployment had “edged up” and inflation had moved up and remained somewhat elevated, and that “in light of the shift in the balance of risks,” it had decided to make a rate cut—the first since December last year.
In his prepared remarks at the press conference following the meeting, Powell noted that job gains had slowed and downside risks to employment had risen, while at the same time inflation had risen and remained “somewhat elevated.”
“In the near term,” he said, “risks to inflation are tilted to the upside and risks to employment to the downside—a challenging situation.”
Both these phenomena are the result to a significant degree of the tariff hikes of the Trump administration.
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In a comment on the eve of the meeting, Financial Times (FT) columnist Robert Armstrong cited analysis that “tariff pass-through to prices appears to be picking up rather than subsiding.”
Coming down on the side of the “hawks,” he underscored the potential for major turbulence in financial markets as Wall Street continues to hit record highs.
“Resurgent inflation is the scariest risk right now,” he wrote, warning that “another bout of inflation could cause a market crash. Risk asset valuations are bubbly and the US fiscal position is precarious. Unmoored inflation expectations could lead to a spiral in long-term interest rates that would make the US debt burden unmanageable and crush risk markets.”
With US government debt at $37 trillion and rising, such fears are not misplaced.
While he referred to the effect of tariffs on inflation, Powell made no reference to their impact on jobs, which has been no less significant. Since the July meeting of the Fed, new data has shown that the number of jobs created in the US economy in the year to last March was more than 900,000 fewer than previously estimated.
Since then, job growth has slowed markedly, with Powell acknowledging that “labor demand has softened and the recent pace of job creation appears to be running below the ‘breakeven’ rate needed to hold the unemployment rate constant.”
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The Fed meeting was held under what the Wall Street Journal characterized as “unprecedented political pressure” as part of Trump’s drive to take control of its governing body and secure major interest rate cuts, repeatedly citing the need to cut the interest bill on the rising US government debt.
That pressure will intensify because yesterday’s reduction and even the indication that more cuts may be coming are nowhere near the reduction of three percentage points Trump has been demanding.
12. Algal bloom devastates marine life in South Australia
A significant and harmful algal bloom, centered near Adelaide, the state capital of South Australia (SA), is devastating marine life, impacting local communities, and causing financial losses in aquaculture and tourism. Since being detected in March, the bloom has grown to an estimated size of nearly 5,000 square kilometers, covering around 30 percent of the state’s coastline. Photographs show dead sea life and toxic yellow foam washing ashore.
The Biodiversity Council, an independent group of scientists from 11 Australian universities, published a statement in July suggesting a combination of factors caused the bloom. It pointed to a marine heatwave beginning in September 2024 reaching temperatures 2.5 degrees Celsius above average. This has combined with two other factors: the flushing of excess nutrients from the heavily farmed Murray-Darling basin during 2022-2023 floods; and nutrient upwelling—a natural process by which nutrient dense sea water is brought from the sea floor to the surface.
A citizen-led database on iNaturalist has so far documented over 500 affected marine species and the deaths of over 40,000 sea creatures, indicating a far broader impact. Local communities have led the clean-up with reports that heavily affected beaches are virtually unvisitable due to the stench of rotting marine life washing ashore and a variety of aerosolised algal toxins that can cause eye, skin and respiratory irritation.
The bloom is dominated by Karenia mikimotoi, a species of photosynthetic microalgae documented by scientists for nearly a century, which has reportedly persisted in low numbers for years until this latest bloom. A previous bloom of the algae was recorded in South Australia in Coffin Bay in 2014. K. mikimotoi has caused increasing blooms worldwide in recent decades. A 2012 bloom in China's Fujian Province, for instance, inflicted significant financial losses on marine aquaculture.
Unlike typical algal blooms that kill through oxygen depletion during mass die-offs, K. mikimotoi is toxic to marine life making it particularly devastating. This outbreak is especially concerning as it has persisted through winter. Scientists are unable to estimate when the bloom will subside and have warned of its potential growth as warmer conditions return.
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The algal bloom in South Australian waters highlights the growing impact of climate change that is taking many and varied forms. In this case, higher sea temperatures are interacting with the leaching of excessive agricultural fertilizers into the river systems.
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Scientists are warning that toxic algal blooms are a growing international threat due to climate change and environmental degradation. Yet despite the mounting dangers associated with climate change, governments have proven incapable of taking the necessary measures to halt, let alone reverse, global warming. In the case of the United States, one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the Trump administration is actively dismantling climate legislation, boosting the fossil fuel industry and doing everything possible to undermine the science of climate change.
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The failure over decades to take action to stem climate change is rooted in the capitalist system itself, in which corporate profit takes priority over all else, including mounting environmental disasters. The outmoded division of the world into rival capitalist states driven by narrow national economic and strategic interests has cut across any genuine international agreement to arrest greenhouse gas emission.
What is necessary is a unified struggle by the international working class based on a socialist program to refashion society to meet the pressing needs of the majority of the world’s population, not the profits of the ultra-wealthy few.
13. Far-right Alternative for Germany wins in former SPD strongholds
In municipal elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was able to exploit the anger and frustration over the decades-long policies of the establishment parties and nearly triple its vote share. In parts of the former industrial heartlands of the Ruhr, it is now the strongest force.
Sunday’s vote was the first major ballot since the federal elections in February and was therefore seen as a test of the political mood. Of the roughly 13.7 million eligible voters, 56.8 percent cast ballots. This is the highest turnout for North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) municipal elections since 1994, and at that time the federal election was held simultaneously.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) managed to remain the strongest party statewide with 33.3 percent, but only narrowly, slipping by 1 percent compared to the last municipal elections in 2020. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) lost another 2.2 percent from its already poor result five years ago. In its traditional heartland—often referred to as the SPD’s former “beating heart”—won only 22.1 percent. The AfD nearly tripled its share of the vote, winning 14.5 percent (plus 9.4 percent).
The two parties of the current federal government (CDU and SPD) saw their worst-ever municipal election results in NRW since the state was founded in 1946. The Greens also suffered heavy losses, winning just 13.5 percent (minus 6.5 percent), while the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP) sank into irrelevance with 3.7 percent (minus 1.9 percent).
This is the direct outcome of the social devastation wrought over the last three to four decades by these parties, especially in the Ruhr region, and which has been accelerated most recently. At the federal level, the previous government of the SPD–Greens–FDP under Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) had declared a “new era” in 2021, funneled €100 billion into rearmament and war, and made working people pay for it with welfare cuts, reductions in social infrastructure, layoffs and wage cuts. The current government under Friedrich Merz (CDU) and Lars Klingbeil (SPD) has resolved to respond to the deepening capitalist crisis and Donald Trump’s election as US president by escalating this redistribution of wealth upwards.
One trillion euros are to flow into war and rearmament. The corresponding social attacks will be immense, falling on terrain already laid waste in the Ruhr: closed swimming pools and libraries, lack of childcare places, hollowed-out healthcare, gutted cultural institutions, and reduced municipal services. The neglect of numerous cities, especially in the major conurbations along the Rhine and Ruhr, will intensify further.
The AfD exploits this policy and the frustration it has generated within parts of the working class. For decades, the dominance of the mining and steel industries in the Ruhr was synonymous with the dominance of the SPD. With the decline of coal and steel, the cities grew impoverished, and the SPD imposed massive cuts at the local level. Unemployment and poverty rates are the highest in the state.
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The growth of the AfD has two main causes. First, it is being consciously fostered by the ruling class. The historic attacks on jobs, wages and welfare, preparing for trade war and military war, cannot be implemented by democratic means. Just as in the US, where the Trump administration is building a fascist dictatorship, in every country the foundations are being laid for authoritarian forms of rule.
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The second main cause of the AfD’s rise is the SPD, which long ago severed all ties to the working class. The SPD is full of careerists, opportunists and apparatchiks who organise attacks on the population. They can do this only because they are closely bound to the trade unions. While the SPD ruthlessly enforces social cuts in Ruhr cities, every plant closure and every agreement cutting thousands of jobs in industry bears the signature of a union official—usually from IG Metall or the IG BCE (Mining, Chemicals, Energy). Over the last 50 years, since 1975, the remaining 200,000 coal jobs and 400,000 steel jobs have been wiped out in the Ruhr alone. Now nearly 10,000 more jobs at Thyssenkrupp and HKM (Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann) are to go—already signed off by IG Metall.
By enforcing every assault on workers’ livelihoods and suppressing the class struggle, the unions create conditions in which the AfD can thrive.
14. United Kingdom: Bus drivers at three Greater Manchester companies to take four days of strike action
More than 2,000 Greater Manchester bus drivers at three different private operators have voted to take co-ordinated strike action between September 19–22. They rejected insulting pay offers. Further strike action has been confirmed from September 30 to October 2.
The members of the Unite union work for bus companies who rank among the largest and most profitable in the UK—Stagecoach, Metroline and First Bus. The planned walkout will shut down two-thirds of the Greater Manchester network. This itself shows the operational grip of the private operators functioning collectively under the “Bee Network”, the franchised public transport system including the Metrolink tram/light rail service overseen by Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM). This is controlled by the 10 councils in the combined authority and led by Labour Mayor Andy Burnham.
At Stagecoach, 1,000 drivers across Oldham, Stockport and Middleton depots rejected a 3.5 percent offer. Another 1,000 drivers at Metroline Manchester threw out the same deal at Sharston, Hyde Road, Ashton and Wythenshawe depots. At First Bus in Rochdale, 110 turned down a 6 percent offer, as they are the lowest paid bus drivers in the region on £15 an hour.
FirstGroup’s operating profit for last year was £204 million and share dividends were increased by 45 percent on the previous year. Stagecoach’s reported pre-operating profits of £51 million for last year, up from £33 million the year before. Metroline’s parent company, Singapore-based ComfortDelGro, recorded a £60 million operating profit from its UK and European bus operations in the first half of 2025—boosted by new Greater Manchester contracts worth £422 million over five years.
This profit gauging exposes the companies’ claims that even a cost-of-living pay rise for bus drivers is unaffordable.
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The fight for a genuine pay rise and parity is not only a fight against the profiteers of Stagecoach, Metroline and First Bus, but also against the Labour authority and its entrenched relations with the private operators
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In 2023, Greater Manchester became the first English region outside London to introduce bus franchising since Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation in 1986. This has been promoted as bringing bus services back under “public control”, but franchising is a managed form of privatization: fares, timetables and routes are set by the local authority, while the buses remain in private hands. Operators continue to undercut one another in the bidding process, driving down pay and conditions to guarantee shareholder returns.
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While Unite is boasting of “co-ordinated action” in Greater Manchester it continues its isolation tactics nationally to stymie and block a unified struggle of bus workers. From September 29 to October 5 and again October 13 to 19, 500 Stagecoach drivers in Birkenhead, Chorley and Preston are set to strike over pay disparities. Over 800 Arriva drivers, engineers and cleaners across five depots in Luton, Milton Keynes, Stevenage, Ware and Hemel Hempstead are striking for 16 days on September 23–26, and three staggered stoppages in October, rejecting a 65p per hour pay offer. 600 First West of England bus drivers in Bristol began strike action from this Tuesday to Friday after Unite suspended earlier action between September 4-8 to put a “full and final” offer from the company, which was rejected. An earlier two-year derisory deal based on an extra £1 an hour from now to March 26 and an hourly increase of 30 pence from April 2026 had already been voted down.
At Greater Manchester Metrolink tram and light rail service Unite is also using delaying tactics over a ballot for industrial action by its 200 members. Workers employed in ticketing, passenger assistance and information services already rejected a 3.2 percent offer from the private consortium Keolis/Amey which operates the system, but the ballot does not close until October 1.
Greater Manchester bus drivers at Stagecoach, Metroline and First Bus must establish a joint strike committee to take control of the dispute. They should demand complete oversight over further pay negotiations and not allow Unite officials to suspend the action prior to proper scrutiny of any revised offer at mass meetings before a vote is taken.
15. Australian PM fails to finalize neo-colonial defense treaty with Papua New Guinea
A push by the Australian Labor government to strengthen its neo-colonial dominance in the South West Pacific received a setback this week, when the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) failed to endorse a wide-ranging defense treaty.
Labor, acting in concert with Washington, is seeking to integrate the Pacific states into the aggressive US-led preparations for war with China. At the same time, it is attempting to shore up its control over a geopolitically vital and resource-rich region that has always been central to the strategy of Australian imperialism.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese traveled to PNG at the beginning of the week, to finalize the treaty. As late as yesterday morning, sections of the Australian press were reporting that the treaty would be signed later in the day and were crowing that it would help to “China-proof” PNG and the broader Pacific.
But, as it transpired, PNG Prime Minister James Marape was only prepared to sign a “communique” with Albanese, which, while it commits to the signing of the treaty in the future, provides no timeline. Albanese has nevertheless insisted that the treaty will be ratified sometime “in the coming weeks.”
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Australia formally took control of the British colony of Papua in 1906, shortly after the establishment of the Australian federation in 1901. After it seized the German colony of New Guinea at the outset of World War I, Australian imperialism looted the resources of PNG, particularly its minerals, repressed opposition and left a legacy of economic and social backwardness. Since 1975, Australia has repeatedly intervened in PNG to defend its economic and strategic interests.
The details of the defense treaty, as outlined by the communique, make clear that the Labor government was attempting to “celebrate” 50 years of PNG’s independence by effectively abolishing it and returning the largest Pacific Island country to the status of a neo-colony.
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PNG has always been a central focus of Australian imperialism, because it is far and away the largest of the Pacific states, by landmass, population and resources. Its military facilities and strategic position could play a major role in any war in the Indo-Pacific.
The country has also been a focus of the US-led military build-up for war against China. As the Obama administration was preparing its “pivot to Asia,” then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited PNG in 2010, signalling its importance to the war drive.
In 2023, after years of diplomatic campaigning by Washington, Marape signed a far-reaching defense pact with the US, giving American forces “uninhibited access” to PNG’s military and related civilian facilities. The US and Australia are involved in an expansion of the Lombrum Naval Base on Manus island, which was first established as a facility for the US military during World War II.
While Marape acceded to the US treaty in 2023, his government, like many throughout the Pacific, has continued to attempt to balance between Washington and Beijing. China is now PNG’s second-largest trading partner and has provided substantial investments in infrastructure, mining and a major development in the capital Port Moresby.
16. Political Genocide in the USSR (1936-1940): The Moscow Trials and the Dewey Commission
This is the first part of the lecture “Political Genocide in the USSR (1936-1940)” delivered by Fred Williams, Katja Rippert, and Alejandro Lopez to the 2025 Summer School of the Socialist Equality Party (US) on the history of the Security and the Fourth International investigation.
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
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.
