Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
In the week since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration has escalated its conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship.
The policy of the Trump regime was spelled out clearly by fascist strategist Stephen Bannon, one of Trump’s closest political allies. “If we are going to go to war,” he declared, “let’s go to war.” The Trump administration is waging a war—against the population, against democratic rights, against Constitutional government.
*****
The critical question now is: What must be done to stop this drive to dictatorship? In answering this question, it is necessary to identify the political context of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the Constitution, the class and economic interests that underlie the actions of the government, the social force that has the power to defend democratic rights, and the political strategy and program upon which the fight against Trump must be based.
First, it is necessary to put aside all self-deluding hopes that what is unfolding is anything less than a drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, based on the military, police, paramilitary forces and fascist gangs. The essential purpose of the glorification of Charlie Kirk has been to provide a martyr symbol to galvanize the most reactionary forces in the country.
*****
Second, Trump is not acting on his own. However grotesque his individual qualities, he represents the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy. Here again, the parallels to Nazi Germany are chilling. It is a historical fact that Hitler’s rise to power would not have been possible without the resources provided to the Nazi movement by leading German capitalists. Once in office, Hitler’s brutal regime served the interests of German banks and corporations, and they supported his dictatorship.
*****
Third, underlying the public reverence for Trump are cold-blooded economic and political calculations. The staggering concentration of wealth in an infinitesimal segment of the population is not compatible with democratic forms of rule. The rich are convinced that the defense of their wealth and their unrestricted exploitation of the working class is incompatible with democracy. Dictatorship is their preferred form of political rule.
However, the oligarchy’s reasons for supporting the overthrow of whatever remains of American democracy extend beyond their uncontainable lust for ever greater heaps of money and personal wealth. The American ruling class is acutely conscious of and terrified by the existential crisis of the capitalist system. It is aware that the national debt—now approaching $40 trillion—is unsustainable.
*****
Yet another factor in the political calculations of the capitalist elites is the geo-political crisis confronting American imperialism. The protracted deterioration in the global economic and strategic position of the United States has reached critical dimensions. The rise of China and the development of an alliance of states challenging American hegemony cannot be stopped except through war. The militarization of the United States demands ever greater expenditures, which, in turn, intensifies the pressure to slash social expenditures and wages. Moreover, the preparation and launching of wars requires the violent suppression of domestic political opposition.
These are the objective factors that underlie the collapse of American democracy. Trump’s policies are those of the ruling class. This is not to ignore the specific pathological features of his personality and that of his MAGA cabal that impart to this regime its particularly degenerate character. But even if the workings of actuarial statistics were to suddenly remove Trump from the scene, it would not halt the drive to dictatorship. The war on democracy and the working class would continue.
This objective cause of the breakdown of democracy is verified by the fact that parallel processes are being manifested in all major capitalist countries. Throughout Europe neo-fascist parties are gaining strength. The drive toward dictatorship is a global phenomenon.
*****
Fourth, the correct identification of the source of Trump’s war against the working class leads to critical political conclusions. The starting point of any serious struggle against dictatorship is a break with the Democratic Party. To rely on the Democratic Party to oppose Trump is to guarantee defeat.
The Democrats are, like the Republicans, a party of Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the corporate-financial oligarchy. What they fear above all is not the rise of fascism but the eruption of a mass movement from below that threatens the foundations of capitalist rule. This accounts for the Democratic Party’s cowardly capitulation to the fascist glorification of Kirk and its feckless response to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and all the previous dictatorial decrees issued by Trump.
The prostration of the Democratic Party was exposed when the US Senate unanimously approved a resolution marking October 14, Kirk’s birthday, as a “National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk.” Not one Democrat, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, had the courage to object. It would have been sufficient, and politically correct, to oppose the assassination on principled grounds, i.e., that the killing of one or another despicable figure serves absolutely no progressive interest, that it sows confusion among workers and youth and that it plays into the hands of the reactionaries.
But to sanction the elevation of Kirk—a man whose record of racism, antisemitism, opposition to civil rights, and promotion of authoritarian violence is well documented—as a national hero is obscene. Yet Sanders and the Democrats joined in this sanctification.
*****
Fifth, the development of the struggle to defeat Trump must be based on the mobilization of the multimillioned working class—the social force that has the power, if mobilized on the basis of a correct political strategy, to defeat Trump and drive him from office.
*****
The key elements of this strategy are:
1) The complete political and organizational independence of the working class from the Democratic Party and its collaborators and apologists, i.e., the DSA, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the myriad middle class organizations and individuals who believe that shouting obscenities on various social media platforms will stop Trump.
*****
2) The building of a new form of organization that can unify the working class and mobilize its vast industrial and economic power against the Trump regime. This new form of organization proposed by the Socialist Equality Party are rank-and-file committees.
*****
3) This movement, led by the working class, requires a program that accurately reflects socio-economic realities and corresponds to the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. The capitalist oligarchy has declared war on the working class. The necessary response is the declaration of war by the working class on capitalism, which must result in the socialist reorganization of society.
*****
4) The most important element of this strategy—upon which the implementation and realization of all previous elements depends—is internationalism. No effective struggle can be waged by workers in the United States unless their actions are coordinated and aligned with the struggles of the global working class.
*****
An inseparable corollary of the fight for the international unity of American workers with their class brothers and sisters beyond the borders of the United States is irreconcilable opposition to US imperialism, militarism and war. The Gaza genocide carried out by the Zionist regime, which has to a great extent been carried out with weapons provided by the United States, reveals the barbarism of which capitalism is capable.
*****It flows from this internationalist strategy that the rights of immigrants must be defended against the criminal and inhumane policy of deportation. The principle of birthright citizenship, inscribed in the Constitution, must be defended without compromise. Further, the class conscious worker rejects the insidious and cruel distinction between the “native” and “foreign born.”
*****
5) The strategy, organization and action that is necessary to defeat Trump, defend democratic rights, and prevent fascism and war will not emerge spontaneously. This program must be fought for. But the determination that is required to take up and wage this fight is incompatible with pessimism and demoralization.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party advances this program as the basis for the struggle against Trump and the degenerate oligarchy which he represents. Our program is not for the pessimists but for the fighters among workers, students, youth, professionals, artists and intellectuals. There is no time to lose.
We call on all workers and young people who agree with this perspective to join the Socialist Equality Party, mobilize the power of the working class, defeat the conspiracy of the oligarchs and fight for a socialist future without fascism, genocide and war.
2. The UK’s “Your Party” implodes—build the Socialist Equality Party
Factional warfare that has wracked the UK’s “Your Party” project since its inception erupted publicly on Thursday.
Since MP Zarah Sultana quit the Labour Party in July, the understanding was that the new left party would be co-led, at least initially, by her and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. That plan has now unraveled spectacularly.
*****
Thursday was stark confirmation that there will be nothing democratic, let alone socialist and revolutionary, about Your Party.
The pose of outrage and surprise of the pseudo-left is duplicitous. Firstly, all of them knew that Your Party was being run by rival and entirely unaccountable cliques.
Secondly, what has happened is not some dramatic reversal of the Corbynites’ otherwise principled record: it is an essential aspect of their opportunist, pro-capitalist politics.
Corbyn’s years’ long resistance to forming a new party opposed to Labour is legendary. The role played by his inner circle through Momentum in neutering left-wing sentiment in the party when he was Labour leader is also well known. As are the right-wing politics of his Independent MP allies.
Commenting on the first announcement of Your Party, the Socialist Equality Party, basing itself on a Marxist examination of this history explained:
The character of the party is shaped above all by its leadership. It has been developed over the last months under the direction not only of Corbyn, but many of the staff from his time as leader of the Labour Party, including Karie Murphy (his former chief of staff) and Pamela Fitzpatrick, who heads Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project.
To this old guard is added Sultana, representing the new generation of Corbynite MPs that entered parliament in 2017, and Corbyn’s Independent Alliance of four other MPs elected based solely on their opposition to the Gaza genocide and not on any record of struggle for leftist policies. One of these, Ayoub Khan MP, notoriously asked Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner whether the army could be used to clear Birmingham’s streets during the ongoing refuse collectors’ strike.
This apparatus will be charged with managing the inaugural party conference so that only a lowest-common-denominator program is adopted, largely based on the minimal social reforms included in Labour’s 2017 and 2019 general election manifestos under Corbyn.
The SWP, RCP and others have helped to cover these issues up to promote the bona fides of Your Party among workers and youth, while courting Corbyn and Sultana with the aim of securing a niche within the prospective party apparatus.
Corbyn and his allies are working to place the new organization—the massive support for which has alarmed them—firmly under their thumb. Their response to Sultana’s action—taking just a few hours to set her up for legal prosecution under data protection laws—is despicable.
But Sultana has acted throughout the months since Your Party’s launch to pull the wool over its supporters’ eyes about the people in charge, complaining only to the extent that her passage into a leadership role has been opposed.
*****
Although some entirely unprincipled reconciliation is not impossible, it is extremely unlikely. Moreover, the debacle has already blown a hole in the side of the Your Party project. Workers and young people will be appalled and many who saw the initiative as a way forward will be disappointed.
The socialist response is not to join in the pseudo-left’s chorus of despair, but to draw the essential political lessons and act accordingly.
It is not a question of taking sides in this unprincipled scrimmage. There are no innocent parties involved, somehow upholding the democratic rights of members. In a polemic with the RCP, the SEP has cited Leon Trotsky’s description of Labour lefts of an earlier period as “the expression of a shift but also its brake.”
Trotsky’s stress then, and ours now, is on the role of the Corbynite “left” as a political brake on the working class.
Under the leadership of the Corbynites—and no one has even suggested there will be any other leadership—this is not a party that can be pushed to adopt “basic socialist principles,” still less a “revolutionary program”, as the SWP and RCP claim. Both the Corbyn and the Sultana factions—despite her more militant rhetoric—are advocates of a Labour Party Mark Two, a party of a few mild reforms which only serves to politically disarm the working class.
The right-wing transformation and collapse of Labour and all the social democratic parties was not the result of bad leaders, but of shifts in world capitalism which rendered national reformism obsolete.
Globalization, declining rates of profit and the massive, cancerous growth of financial speculation mean that meaningful social reform can no longer be reconciled with a defense of the profit system. The order of the day for world capitalism is trade and military war for the control of essential resources and markets and class war at home to impose the brutal levels of exploitation and destruction of essential services to make this global conflict possible.
Fighting back demands the independent political mobilization of the working class, freed from the dead hand of the “left” representatives of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy, in a struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
3. Historic images of slavery removed by national parks after Trump directive
The Trump administration has compelled national parks—including Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, Manassas National Battlefield Park, Independence National Historical Park, and the President’s House Site in Philadelphia— to remove photographs, signs, and exhibit panels detailing the history of slavery and Native American displacement.
The removals, which have come to light in recent days, came in response to a March 27 Executive Order that called for censoring history deemed by the Trump administration to promote “corrosive ideology,” directing the National Park Service to eliminate materials considered to “unfairly disparage Americans.” Parks and museums nationwide were instructed to review and remove interpretive content on slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and related subjects that the administration judged presented the nation’s past “in a negative light.”
Staff at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park—where abolitionist John Brown led an unsuccessful attempt at starting a slave revolt in 1859—flagged over 30 pieces of material on display that were potentially in violation of Trump’s diktat.
At Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia—where the First and Second Battle of Bull Run took place in July 1861 and August 1862 respectively—staff were ordered by the Trump administration to remove a plaque which criticizes the pseudohistorical “lost-cause” myth propagated by ex-Confederate leaders.
At Sitka National Historical Park in Alaska and Florida’s Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, the Trump administration is investigating displays which mention the forced relocation and mistreatment of Native Americans.
But the most notable example of this sweeping removal effort is the famous photograph known as “The Scourged Back,” taken in 1863 during the Civil War, and showing Peter (sometimes called Gordon), who had escaped a Louisiana plantation and reached Union lines after a harrowing flight of about eighty miles. The image, taken at a Union military camp by photographers McPherson & Oliver, shows Peter’s back gruesomely scarred from years of whipping—a visual testament to the violence of slavery.
The “Scourged Back” photograph was first published as a wood engraving in Harper’s Weekly on July 4, 1863, Independence Day—the same day news broke of the Union’s victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, connecting the struggle for emancipation with national preservation. Abolitionists called for the photograph to be “multiplied by the hundred thousand and scattered over the states,” arguing it could do for public opinion what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had achieved in fiction. The photograph helped strengthen support for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued January 1 that year.
The action to pull this and other images dealing with slavery from display at places like Fort Pulaski and Independence National Historical Park has been met with outrage from historians and museum professionals.
*****
There can no longer be any doubt that the Trump administration is attempting to stamp out the history of slavery in the US and to rehabilitate the Confederate States of America, which seceded in 1861 in a bid to preserve chattel slavery in perpetuity.
Trump’s moves against the National Park Service slavery photography follow on the heels of an aggressive campaign launched against the Smithsonian Institution, where President Trump has accused the museum complex of promoting “anti-American ideology” for its honest exhibitions about slavery and American racism.
In an executive tweet and subsequent order posted on August 19, Trump condemned the Smithsonian for emphasizing “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” and directed his attorneys to audit the museum’s exhibitions and begin purging content he considered divisive or insufficiently patriotic. The White House has threatened to revoke vital federal funding unless the Smithsonian and other cultural organizations reshape their narratives to “showcase a more positive portrayal of the nation”—an ultimatum that risks layoffs, closures, and the privatization of priceless public collections.
In recent months, Trump has reversed the removal of Confederate symbols from US military bases, restoring the original names of installations such as Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and Fort Benning—returning honorifics to Confederate commanders who fought to preserve slavery. Paintings and monuments celebrating the Confederacy, including the reinstallation of Robert E. Lee’s portrait at West Point have been publicly justified as honoring “our history.”
Since 2021, dozens of states—such as Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee—have enacted laws that limit classroom discussion of slavery, racism, and other forms of exploitation.
*****
With the planned celebration of America’s semiquincentennial in 2026, the Trump administration has set its sights on “improving” the infrastructure and displays at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, setting July 4 as a deadline for purging materials deemed “disparaging.”
Trump’s crusade to whitewash American history mirrors his administration’s attacks on art and science. It is a regime that depends for its existence on the construction of a false reality in the past as much as the present.
But facts, as the old saying goes, are stubborn things—in the past as well as the present. The brutality of human bondage was a truth so powerful as to have once moved a whole generation into Civil War—a social revolution that ended chattel slavery and destroyed the southern oligarchy built on it. This remains a memory etched deeply in the democratic, egalitarian consciousness of the American working class. And it is a memory that Trump and the billionaire oligarchy he represents dreads.
4. Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t!: A private detective sets to work in “non-glamorous” California
With people as “knowing” as [director Ethan] Coen and [co-screenwriter Tricia] Cooke, the deliberate eschewing of “big questions” is not innocent. As objective events take a more and more menacing or explosive turn, studiedly directing one’s attention to secondary or tertiary matters must be harmful to one’s art. In any case, Honey Don’t!, on the whole, is flat as a pancake.
5. Invoking “war,” Trump threatens to send troops to more American cities
In a press conference from the Oval Office on Friday, President Donald Trump pledged to deploy US combat soldiers to major American cities with or without the consent of local officials or the population.
After repeating comments made to him earlier this month by Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena, in which Vena told Trump he had to “save Chicago,” Trump named Chicago, Memphis, St. Louis and New Orleans as the next targets in his war on the “enemy within.” Trump said:
Now we are going to go for the big one. We set ourselves up very well in Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans…going in early, just to see what was happening.
Declaring war on the some of the largest cities in America, Trump said:
We are studying, we are studying the site. It’s sort of like war. I hate to tell you, it’s like war, some of these people are really bad. They are really really sick people, they are dangerous people, they are killers, they are murderers, drug dealers and we can’t have it.
As with the occupation of Los Angeles and Washington D.C., Trump is making clear that he and the ruling class he represents see entire sections of the urban working class as an enemy population that must be subdued by force.
Trump’s comments are a concrete confirmation of the Marxist analysis of the capitalist state. Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in 1848:
“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
As Lenin explained in State and Revolution (1917), citing Engels, the modern state relies on “special bodies of armed men,” comprised of cops, guards, soldiers, the courts, prisons, to repress the working class and maintain the rule of the capitalist class.
Lenin wrote:
“The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”
He continued:
Engels elucidates the concept of the “power” which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.
The special armed body of which Lenin wrote—the FBI, National Guard, and potentially active-duty soldiers—is being mobilized not to safeguard the lives and conditions of workers, but to terrorize and discipline them.
*****
Far from opposing Trump, the Democrats have gone along with his attacks on immigrants, workers and democratic rights. Trump noted in his press conference that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, previously endorsed and supported by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America, had already agreed to a Republican continuing resolution to keep the government funded after October 1.
This did not prevent Trump from lashing out at House Democrats for not fully backing a resolution honoring the “life and legacy” of the racist and fascist Charlie Kirk. “Just today the House Democrats voted against condemning the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. Who could vote against that?” Trump said.
In fact, the resolution received significant Democratic party support, with 95 “yea” votes, nearly 45 percent of the caucus, including the entire Democratic House leadership.
*****
In response to a question from ABC’s Jonathan Karl whether he was committed to free speech, “including of people critical of you,” Trump snapped:
That’s why your network paid me $16 million… You are guilty Jon... ABC is a terrible network. You should be ashamed of yourself. NBC is equally bad. For you to stand there and act so innocent and ask me a question like that... frankly you are a terrible reporter. You know it, and so do I.
6. Gaza death toll tops 65,000 as hundreds of thousands flee south
The death toll in the nearly two-year-long genocide in Gaza has reached 65,000, Gaza’s health ministry said Friday. This latest horrific milestone comes as Israeli forces continue their assault on Gaza City, the last remaining part of Gaza outside direct military occupation, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee south over the choked coastal road.
Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee said Friday that the Israeli military would use “unprecedented force” in its assault on Gaza City, urging the remaining residents to “join the hundreds of thousands” of people fleeing south.
*****
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has called the onslaught on Gaza City part of the “concluding moves” in the war on Gaza launched in October 2023. Israeli officials have made it clear that they are planning the total displacement of the Palestinian population to the country’s south, from whence large numbers of them will be expelled to other countries.
In May, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained that “Within a year... Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to... the south to a humanitarian zone... and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”
The Trump administration is actively discussing plans to jointly occupy Gaza alongside Israel. The devastated enclave will be transformed, in Trump’s words, into the “Gaza Riviera,” where major corporations and investors will profit from the mass killing and forcible displacement of the population.
*****
In August, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) officially declared a famine in Gaza City, stating that “this famine is entirely man-made.” The report added that “after 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution, and death.”
*****
On Wednesday, the conflict tracking group Acled published figures indicating that fifteen out of every sixteen people killed in Gaza were civilians. The group said that since March 18, 1,110 members of Hamas had been killed out of a total death toll of 16,000.
Another set of internal figures from the Israeli military, reported by The Guardian, estimates that civilians accounted for 83 percent of deaths in Gaza since the start of the genocide.
Last week, Herzi Halevi, the former chief of Israel’s military, admitted that over 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, or over 10 percent of the population, have been killed or injured during the Israeli onslaught on Gaza.
The vast majority of Gaza has been destroyed by the Israeli military, with 90 percent of homes either damaged or destroyed. The enclave’s medical, sanitation, and food distribution infrastructure has been largely destroyed.
On Thursday, the US vetoed a resolution in the United Nations Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Israel’s restrictions on the entry of food into the enclave.
*****
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is moving ahead with a plan to sell nearly $6 billion in weapons to Israel, to be paid for with US tax dollars.
The planned sale includes $3.8 billion for 30 Apache attack helicopters, which would double Israel’s current stock of the aircraft, as well as another 3,200 infantry assault vehicles, at a cost of $1.9 billion.
7. Mandatory vaccination and democratic rights: An interview with law professor Dorit Reiss
[Professor of Law at UC Law San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings), a member of the Parent Advisory Board of Voices for Vaccines, and a member of the Vaccines Working Group on Ethics and Policy, Dorit] Reiss accepted the invitation for this interview that places her analysis in today’s public-health context and what is at stake for families if those legal and institutional guard rails fail.
*****
Dorit Reiss: ...when my older son was two, I did what academics do: I learned about parenting by reading books, science blogs. I stumbled on an anti-vaccine comment and was surprised. So, I read more and concluded pro-vaccine parents needed to speak up online. I started there—responding to anti-vaccine claims—then began writing professionally. Now all my research and teaching are about vaccines: school immunization and the law, tort liability, administrative law, and I’ve written more sociologically about the anti-vaccine movement.
*****
Benjamim Mateus [of the World Socialist Web Site]: Given the surge in vaccine skepticism, building now for decades but supercharged during COVID, plus the growing “medical freedom” rhetoric, what are the hardest challenges in balancing individual rights with the community’s right not to be exposed to disease? And how have appeals to American individualism and libertarianism, including RFK Jr.’s role in COVID-era misinformation, shaped this debate?
Dorit Reiss: That’s a great question, and I’d answer it in three parts.
First, none of this started with COVID. Opposition to vaccination is as old as vaccination and appeals to “liberty” have been there from the beginning. We’ve gone through cycles like this since the late eighteenth century....
Second, there’s the “freedom” frame. Historically, anti-vaccine activism in the United States wasn’t neatly partisan. You saw it at the ends of the spectrum on both left and right. On the right, distrust of government; on parts of the left, distrust of corporations and a romantic idea of “natural” health. Those impulses are understandable in moderation. The problem is when they’re taken to extremes....
Third, COVID turbocharged all of this. In a fast-moving pandemic, public-health agencies will make some mistakes, and those were amplified in an information ecosystem where certain outlets, with Fox News preeminent among them, regularly downplayed the pandemic and vaccines. People trust their trusted sources; if those sources turn skeptical, audiences follow.
*****
Benjamim Mateus: [H]ow do “coercion” and “informed consent” work in law and medical ethics? How do they apply to school or workplace vaccine mandates?
Dorit Reiss: Since the early 20th century, U.S. law and medical ethics have increasingly centered on patient autonomy, the right to control what happens to one’s body....
In clinical care, informed consent belongs to adults with decision-making capacity: the clinician discloses risks, benefits, and alternatives; the patient understands and voluntarily decides. There are special rules for people who don’t fit that category. For children, consent comes from a parent or legal guardian, and we often seek the child’s assent when developmentally appropriate. For adults who lack capacity—because of illness or disability—we use a surrogate decision-maker (or an advanced directive if one exists). And for incarcerated people, the law is especially alert to coercion and undue influence. Their dependency on the institution means extra safeguards and limits, particularly around research participation....
Public health is different because it addresses shared risks. We routinely limit individual autonomy to protect others: drive on one side of the road, don’t smoke on airplanes, etc. There are medical analogs, too.... The principle is balance....
That balance is why school and workplace vaccination policies are lawful. Schools are shared spaces, and unvaccinated attendance raises risks for classmates, infants too young to vaccinate, immunocompromised students, and staff. Parents have broad authority over their children, but not to expose other people’s children or their own to communicable disease. Courts have upheld school-entry rules on that basis for a century.
Finally, coercion in law means an improper threat that leaves no reasonable alternative.... A neutral, evidence-based condition of participation such as school entry or certain jobs paired with accommodation and, at most, exclusion or modest penalties, is not coercion. It’s the standard way we balance private choice with public risk, while keeping oversight in place....
*****
Benjamim Mateus: Libertarians and “medical freedoms” advocates claim school vaccine mandates are coercive. But how does the law view that?
Dorit Reiss: Fair to ask, but it’s worth noting that not all libertarians advocate for “medical freedoms.” Some accept school mandates on a classic harm-to-others theory: your liberty ends where you endanger someone else’s child.
Legally, the view runs the other way from “coercion,” for two main reasons.
First, children’s welfare (parens patriae). School mandates regulate parents’ choices about children. Kids aren’t refusing on their own; adults are declining on their behalf. We protect parental rights, but they’re not absolute. The state already sets limits to prevent harm; child-labor laws, compulsory education, and medical-neglect rules are basic examples....
Second, public health in shared spaces. Schools have shared air. Unvaccinated attendance increases risk to classmates, infants too young to vaccinate, immunocompromised students, and staff. It’s not just your child; it’s everyone they breathe with....
Because school mandates sit at the intersection of children’s rights and community protection, courts have upheld them for a century....
One complication today, however, is that the courts have become more aggressive about protecting religious exercise. Some states that had tightened exemptions are being pushed to restore or expand religious exemptions. Those exemptions are difficult to police and can undermine herd protection. But the core rule remains: school-entry vaccination requirements themselves rest on very strong legal ground, precisely because they protect children and the broader school community.
*****
Benjamim Mateus: Does “coercion” in law imply causing harm or removing real choice? Given that vaccines confer benefits to the recipient and others, how should we understand that term here?
Dorit Reiss: Legally, coercion means an improper threat that leaves no real alternative. A neutral, evidence-based condition of school attendance—with medical exemptions and, at most, exclusion or modest penalties—doesn’t meet that standard. But I’d qualify the discussion in two ways.
First, nothing effective is risk-free....
Second, many parents who decline vaccines overestimate those risks because they’ve been exposed to disinformation. They’re not seeing the same evidence you and I are, so they interpret “mandate” through a fear lens. Clear communication about real, but very small, vaccine risks, and the much larger disease risks, helps put the term “coercion” in proper legal and ethical context.
*****
[Benjamim Mateus and Dorit Reiss discuss historical court rulings and their influence today.]
*****
Benjamim Mateus: I think the long-term consequences are stark. By my count, there are roughly 250 vaccine manufacturers globally, and more than half are in the United States. If liability protections are stripped, it could chill production, never mind the knock-on effects on school requirements and mandates.
Dorit Reiss: When litigation risk spikes, the rational move for many companies is to step away from low-margin, high-scrutiny products and make something more profitable. If enough manufacturers exit, you get shortages and fragile supply, and then even willing families can’t get vaccinated. At that point, school and workplace requirements become unenforceable in practice because access isn’t reliable.
*****
Benjamim Mateus: ... What should the public expect from [a planned meeting of the ACIP next week?]
Dorit Reiss:
Substantively, I’m concerned they will try to withdraw or narrow recommendations on COVID-19. To be clear, ACIP recommendations do not “pull” a vaccine from the market—that’s FDA’s job, and FDA licensure remains. But ACIP drives access in three critical places:
1. Medicaid generally covers ACIP-recommended vaccines. Remove a recommendation and Medicaid coverage can vanish.
2. Vaccine for Children (VFC), which covers roughly half of U.S. children, depends on ACIP recommendations; lose the recommendation and many children lose no-cost access.
3. Under the ACA, private plans are required to cover ACIP-recommended vaccines with no cost-sharing. If ACIP backs away, some insurers may still cover them on their own because prevention is cheaper than hospitalization, but others won’t. The result shows up at the pharmacy counter.
We’re already seeing the dynamic when leadership discouraged COVID vaccination in pregnancy outside the ACIP process: pregnant people report being turned away at pharmacies. If ACIP now formally narrows or withdraws recommendations, then we can expect more denials or out-of-pocket charges. These products are not cheap—on the order of $140 per dose.
*****
Benjamim Mateus: Given their track record, the antivaccine movement and distortion of scientific data, do you expect an effort to revive claims linking vaccines to autism? And could they succeed in mainstreaming that?
Dorit Reiss: That’s a real concern. One effect of this ACIP meeting—and of the broader shift under Kennedy—is to hand false anti-vaccine claims a much bigger microphone. Even parents who sense something is off may still think, “If officials are saying this, maybe there’s something there—should I risk it?” Fear like that can push families away from protecting their children....
...I also expect misuse of VAERS. VAERS accepts unverified reports from anyone; it cannot establish causation for an injury or death. Saying “a death was reported to VAERS after a vaccine” is not evidence the vaccine caused it. Using VAERS as causal proof misleads parents and drives a dangerous wedge between public health and the population: skipping vaccination is the real danger, because of anecdote-driven fear based on falsified and erroneous evidence.
*****
Benjamim Mateus: Given everything happening inside the United States—leadership changes at HHS/CDC/ACIP, politicized guidance, and widening skepticism—what are the international consequences? I’m thinking specifically about the World Health Organization and global emergency readiness.
Dorit Reiss: CDC has been a leader in global pandemic response and front-line technical partner for global health—training field epidemiologists, standing up labs, running surveillance, and deploying teams during crises. When the U.S. steps back from these global responsibilities, two things happen: there’s less money and less expertise available to respond to emerging threats.
*****
Benjamin Mateus: Who are the key organizations and networks working to roll back vaccine rules? How have they embedded themselves in today’s political structures and social media?
Dorit Reiss: The group of activists is small but has a significant impact relative to its size. In the U.S., many anti-vaccination organizers have more resources and social capital—well-educated, media-savvy, and connected to donors, lawyers, and political networks—so they can shape narratives, file lawsuits, and lobby effectively despite their numbers....
...In recent years they’ve rebranded. Instead of leading with “vaccines are dangerous,” they front-load “medical freedom,” constitutional language, and parental rights—while still working to reduce vaccination in practice. If it were truly about freedom, they wouldn’t try to remove other people’s access to vaccines.
They also aligned with right-wing media and political networks, which vastly expanded their reach....
...And these don’t respect borders either. Internationally, these networks are well connected. U.S. narratives show up in the U.K., Germany, and France; Australian or European claims flow back here. They share tactics, legal briefs, funding leads, and media assets, building an international community.
[Final thoughts:]
Dorit Reiss: I always start from the basic premise that no one deserves to be hurt or killed by a preventable disease. I also think many people who are anti-vaccine are sincere, but they are working off disinformation and a completely different reality. But sincerity doesn’t undo the harm to others. And I do think some movement leaders are willing to bend or ignore facts to push their cause.
[On Florida's vaccination coverage among two-year-olds in Florida which is down to about 75 percent:]
Dorit Reiss: That’s far too low. Florida’s leaders are essentially running a natural experiment on what will happen if we let measles, Hib [Haemophilus influenzae type b], and polio come back in children. The people making these decisions won’t pay the price—children and their families will.
[The interview ends with a summary of Major legal cases and rulings in the United States on public health and vaccinations.]
8. The conclusion of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ACIP meeting: The death knell of scientific inquiry
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s handpicked Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) concluded its two-day meeting in Atlanta on Friday by voting to further restrict COVID-19 vaccine access and delay critical childhood immunizations.
The proceedings represent the next stage in the Trump administration’s war on science and public health. What was once a globally respected, science-driven advisory body has now become a stage for the promotion of ideology and demagoguery, rather than scientific inquiry and consensus. Expert voices were dismissed, replaced by individuals with little relevant expertise and a record of anti-vaccine disinformation, upending decades of vaccine policy built on careful data review and diverse professional input.
The panel’s most devastating decision involved COVID-19 vaccines, with members voting to abandon universal recommendations in favor of “shared clinical decision-making,” a euphemistic term that places further barriers between Americans and lifesaving vaccines.
*****
These restrictions come as devastating new data confirms the deadly consequences of limiting vaccine access. A study published Thursday in JAMA Network Open projected that COVID-19 will cause 814,000 hospitalizations and 54,000 deaths nationally over the next 12 months. Universal COVID-19 vaccination recommendations, compared to restricting vaccination only to high-risk groups, would prevent thousands of additional hospitalizations and deaths. Specifically, expanding recommendations to all ages would prevent an additional 28,000 hospitalizations and 2,000 deaths beyond what restricting to high-risk groups would achieve.
The committee’s assault on childhood immunizations proved equally destructive. On Thursday, the panel voted to no longer recommend the MMRV combination vaccine for children under four, replacing it with separate MMR and varicella shots. Public health experts warn this change will result in reduced vaccine uptake, greater inconvenience for families, and dangerous gaps in immunization that will allow previously controlled pathogens to reemerge among vulnerable children.
*****
Perhaps more critical than these votes were the gross misrepresentation of the scientific process that has gone into making these vaccines available to the public over more than a century. In particular, Retsef Levi’s assertion that childhood and other vaccines have not undergone long-term placebo-controlled trials grossly distorts the realities of vaccine research and public health oversight.
Decades of rigorous trials and extensive real-world monitoring support the safety and efficacy of routine vaccines, including multiple large-scale randomized placebo-controlled studies for vaccines against polio, measles, mumps, rubella and others. Ignoring this evidence, Levi has repeatedly advanced unfounded claims, particularly against mRNA vaccines, despite the scientific consensus that vaccination dramatically reduces hospitalization and death from preventable diseases.
*****
The proceedings exposed a committee guided not by evidence but by the personal ideologies of Kennedy’s handpicked appointees. By blocking external critique, limiting scientific input, and replacing transparent deliberation with anti-vaccine propaganda, Kennedy’s ACIP represents a fascistic departure from evidence-based public health.
These policy shifts will disproportionately harm working families who depend on public health programs and insurance coverage for vaccine access. In making vaccines harder to obtain and more expensive, Kennedy’s agenda constitutes a class attack that will leave the most vulnerable Americans exposed to preventable disease and death.
9. Privatized phone system failure causes deaths in Australia
People throughout Australia were shocked to learn overnight that at least three people, including an eight-week-old baby, died on Thursday because of a breakdown in the Triple 0 emergency phone system. The disaster was caused by a failure by Optus, one of the country’s privatized telecommunications providers.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue held a short snap press conference at 5.30 p.m. on Friday to belatedly announce the breakdown. He provided no details or explanations, other than that an Optus network outage had caused the failure of 600 Triple 0 calls across South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
South Australian police confirmed that two deaths involved a baby boy from Gawler West, 43 kilometers north of Adelaide, the state capital, and a woman from Queenstown, in Adelaide’s northwest. A third death occurred in Western Australia, but that person was yet to be identified.
*****
There has been no explanation as to why emergency backups did not kick in, as they were meant to, to divert 000 calls to an alternative service provider.
The disaster threw new doubt over the reliability of the Triple 0 emergency system, which is a life-and-death issue, and underscored the human cost of successive governments, both Labor and Liberal-National Coalition, handing over all the essential telecommunications services to corporate operators driven by profit.
*****
Labor government ministers, federal and state, tried to go into damage control. The Albanese government’s Communications Minister Anika Wells said: “This is incredibly serious and completely unacceptable.” South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas declared: “I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communications worse than this.” He said it was “reprehensible.”
But this is not the first time an Optus service failure has shut down Triple 0 calls. An even worse breakdown occurred in November 2023. At least 2,145 customers could not access Triple 0, and Optus also failed to conduct more than 2,000 welfare checks on people who had attempted to access emergency services.
That 12-hour outage in 2023 collapsed phone and internet services for approximately 10 million customers nationwide, disrupting hospitals, banks, EFTPOS payment systems and train services. Businesses across the country were brought to a halt, unable to receive cashless payments, by what Optus called a “routine software upgrade.”
An investigation by the official government regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority said the 2023 Triple 0 outage was not only “preventable” but had the potential for “devastating” consequences.
Yet Optus, a subsidiary of Singtel, the Singaporean-listed communications giant, was only penalised $12 million. That is a drop in the bucket for Optus, which has been valued at around $16 billion, and Singtel, which is valued at more than $50 billion. A formal review commissioned by the Albanese government then made 18 limited recommendations in March 2024 to supposedly prevent further incidents.
Minister Wells admitted last night that six of these recommendations were yet to be fully implemented.
*****
Optus is not alone. Telstra, the country’s largest telco, was fined $3 million last December after a reported technical issue at one of its call centers meant that 127 calls to Triple 0 were not transferred to emergency services in March 2024. Another 346 calls were transferred to emergency service using a work-around which did not include the callers’ digital location.
*****
None of these developments can be separated from the fact that both Optus and Telstra have carried out waves of retrenchments and cheap labor outsourcing since being privatized in the 1990s, an assault that began with the trade union-backed Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996.
*****
Optus began in 1981 as Aussat, a government-owned satellite communications company. In 1991, the Hawke-Keating Labor government sold Aussat to a consortium known as Optus. The sale was coupled with the granting of a telecommunications carrier license to Optus, which enabled it to establish the country’s first corporate-owned telecommunications network and start cut-throat competition with the government-owned Telecom.
This was part of a sweeping privatization agenda in Australia and internationally. Under Hawke and Keating, Labor also sold off the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas and other major public utilities, while transforming Telecom into Telstra, a profit-making corporation. That laid the basis for the following Howard Liberal-National government to complete the Telstra privatization over three stages, between 1997 and 2006.
At the time, these selloffs were falsely presented as opportunities for “mum and dad” investors to buy shares in iconic national enterprises. Today, both Optus and Telstra are controlled by huge corporate investment funds that ruthlessly scour the world looking for ever-higher rates of profit.
*****
Thursday’s terrible deaths demonstrate the fundamental incompatibility between the basic needs of the population—even for essential telecommunications and emergency services—and the control of society’s infrastructure and productive capacity by the capitalist oligarchy.
To reverse the catastrophic subordination of human life to the profit interests of corporate giants, the fight must be undertaken for the socialist alternative, which includes placing public utilities, such as communications, and the major banks and corporations under public ownership and democratic workers’ control.
10. Worker crushed to death at Palermo’s Pizza in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Robert Cherone, a 45-year-old worker of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, was crushed to death by a robotic machine during his early morning shift at Palermo’s Pizza’s West Milwaukee manufacturing facility. First responders found him trapped in the machinery and pronounced him dead at the scene. The incident is being investigated by the West Milwaukee Police Department, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Palermo Villa Inc., the plant’s corporate owner, issued the standard corporate script, offering perfunctory condolences along with vague promises of “support” for the family and “counseling” for employees.
This is the latest in an endless wave of workplace deaths. The statistics are staggering. In Wisconsin alone, 112 workers were killed on the job in 2023, according to the AFL-CIO. About one-fifth of those deaths resulted from “contact with objects and equipment”—the category in which Cherone’s death falls. Nationally, more than 5,000 workers die on the job each year, and millions more suffer injury or illness.
Each case is treated as an isolated mishap, but together they reveal a systemic crisis. Workplaces are organized not for human well-being but for the maximization of profit, which inevitably means cutting corners.
Palermo’s Pizza has a long history of unsafe conditions. In May 2013, a 21-year-old Burmese immigrant lost three fingers in an industrial dough mixer that unexpectedly started while he was cleaning it. OSHA found that Palermo’s had failed to implement even the most basic lockout/tagout procedures—Machines were not de-energized during maintenance. For this gruesome, life-changing injury, Palermo’s faced just $13,500 in fines, the equivalent of pocket change for the company.
Around the same time, OSHA also investigated Palermo’s industrial refrigeration system, which used a large quantity of anhydrous ammonia as a coolant. The plant stores approximately 30,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia on site in a densely populated Milwaukee neighborhood. OSHA found serious deficiencies in Palermo’s Process Safety Management of this system. In a news release, OSHA cited Palermo’s for eight violations, seven categorized as “serious” and one as “other than serious,” all related to the ammonia system. These included inadequate employee training on emergency procedures, poor maintenance and operating practices and insufficient emergency planning for a leak or explosion.
*****
Earlier this year, Ronald Adams, a 63-year-old machine repairman, was crushed to death on April 7, 2025, at Stellantis’ Dundee Engine Complex in southeast Michigan. Adams died in a unionized facility under the watch of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Yet the UAW colluded with management to cover up the circumstances of his death.
Today’s unions are controlled by bureaucrats who operate as appendages of management, functioning to contain and defuse opposition rather than to defend lives. Whether in a nonunion shop like Palermo’s or a unionized auto plant, workers confront the same underlying danger.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) launched an investigation into the death of Adams to uncover what happened and to hold those responsible accountable. The IWA-RFC did more to fight for Adams’ justice than the entire UAW apparatus, despite its vast sums of money and resources.
*****
Cherone’s death and Adams’ death are not accidents but crimes of a social order that values profit above life. Appeals to OSHA, to corporate consciences, or to union bureaucracies will not prevent future tragedies. The defense of life, dignity and safety requires the independent organization of workers and the building of rank-and-file committees to uncover the cause of Cherone’s death and fight to ensure it never happens again.
11. New Zealand economy in sharp decline
New Zealand’s gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 0.9 percent in the second quarter of 2025, according to statistics released on Thursday. The decline was more than twice as big as most economists had predicted.
On an annual basis, economic activity was down 1.1 percent. GDP per capita fell 2.1 percent in the past year and 3.9 percent since June 2023.
The National Party-led government’s finance minister Nicola Willis blamed business nervousness, stoked by the Trump administration’s plan to impose 15 percent tariffs on New Zealand goods. The economy, however, shrank in three of the last five quarters, which cannot be explained by Trump’s tariff announcement in April.
The economic war being waged by US imperialism, as it prepares for all-out war against China, is exacerbating the already severe global economic crisis, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. New Zealand, which relies heavily on exports of agricultural products and timber to China, is particularly exposed to the downturn in China.
The value of New Zealand’s exports dropped 1.2 percent in the three months to June and 0.4 percent in the previous quarter.
*****
While tens of thousands are being thrown out of work, the cost of living continues to soar. Food prices have risen 5 percent in the past year. Milk is up 15 percent, cheese 14.3 percent, bread 9.5 percent, meat 9.4 percent, fruit and vegetables 8.9 percent. The cost of electricity increased 11.4 percent.
Meanwhile, the government has effectively slashed the minimum wage, raising it by only 1.5 percent.
*****
The accelerating social counter-revolution is driving workers to the left and into struggles. Tens of thousands of nurses, doctors and teachers recently held nationwide strikes against low wages and extreme understaffing. These actions, however, have been limited and isolated by the union bureaucracy, which is working with the government to prepare sellout deals.
12. Australian airport almost shut down by air traffic controller shortage
Sydney Airport came close to completely shutting down take-offs on the afternoon of Friday September 12, when staff illness, on top of longstanding shortages left only a skeleton crew of air traffic controllers (ATCs) on duty.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Airservices Australia (ASA), the government-owned entity managing air traffic control, was forced to implement a departure limit between 10 a.m. and 11 p.m., allowing just 15 takeoffs per hour instead of the typical 60.
Even with these restrictions in place, the shortage of staff was so acute that ASA anticipated it would need to halt departures entirely from 3:30–4 p.m., to allow ATCs to take a mandatory break. This was narrowly averted with just an hour to spare, when an off-duty controller was eventually found to cover the gap.
The episode underscored that air traffic control operations covering Australia’s busiest airspace run perilously close to collapse as a matter of routine. The implications are not just costly and inconvenient delays for passengers and airlines, but the potential for a serious accident. Each ATC is responsible for coordinating multiple aircraft, most carrying hundreds of passengers, at once.
*****
Peter McGuane, secretary of Civil Air, the union that represents controllers, said there was a worldwide shortage of controllers that was disrupting airports in cases where staff were unavailable due to illness.
The reality is that in Australia, as in many parts of the world, this shortage is the product of government and aviation authority cost cutting, which was accelerated in the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, ASA slashed its workforce by 14 percent by implementing a retirement incentive scheme, which was taken up by 140 controllers aged between 56 and 65.
While a small number of new controllers have since been recruited, many are only qualified to control a particular sector of air space or work one position in a tower, unlike the majority of the controllers pushed to retire, who were trained and licensed to cover numerous roles, according to Civil Air.
Becoming a controller can take between 18 months and two years of training, combining classroom lessons with practice using flight simulators. After this, trainees work three to six months under supervision before they can apply for an ATC license.
*****
In the wake of the near shut down at Sydney, some in the corporate press have pointed the finger at ATCs’ supposed right to “unlimited” sick leave. In fact, while technically entitled to take sick leave “as required”—in recognition of the serious potential consequences of controllers working while impaired by illness or medication—controllers who take 15 days or more of sick leave in a 12-month period can be subjected to punitive management reviews.
The September 12 episode shows how close routine operations are to breaking point. With staff so heavily cut, even minor absences put huge strain on those left at work and can throw the system into crisis.
13. Brazilian right exploits death of Charlie Kirk to mount assault on democratic rights
The death of American fascist Charlie Kirk is being utilized by the Trump administration to abolish political freedoms and escalate the drive toward dictatorship in the USA. This campaign has been quickly extended throughout Brazil.
Inspired by and on the direct advice of the US government, the ruling class is utilizing the frenzy surrounding Kirk’s assassination to launch a mass persecution against democratic and leftist thought in Brazilian society.
Although initiated by the fascist allies of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison last week for attempting a coup d’état, the campaign was embraced by the entire political and corporate establishment.
*****
As is occurring in the United States, the witch-hunt conducted by the fascists in Brazil also reached communicators and public figures.
The most prominent case was the cancellation of historian and journalist Eduardo Bueno. Bueno is the author of a series of popular books on Brazilian history and owner of the Buenas Ideias channel, with 1.5 million followers on YouTube. He had contracts and events canceled and was effectively banned from public life after posting an ironic message about Kirk’s death on Instagram.
With characteristic sarcasm, Bueno stated that it is “terrible for an activist to be killed for ideas, except when it’s Charlie Kirk”. The video was deleted by Instagram, which the historian characterized as censorship.
*****
It is also notable that Kirk and Bolsonaro established direct relations. The first public event in which the former Brazilian president participated after the January 8, 2023 coup attempt was organized by Kirk’s Turning Point USA in Florida, where Bolsonaro remained for three months after leaving power. He was also interviewed on The Charlie Kirk Show.
The political terror campaign launched in Brazil on the pretext of Kirk’s death is an integral part of a counteroffensive by fascist forces following Bolsonaro’s coup conspiracy conviction and that of the military chiefs.
*****
Bueno, the historian targeted for his accurate characterization of Kirk, drew attention to this monstrous hypocrisy: “But where is the freedom of expression so defended by the extreme right? I am being censored! I hope the US invades Brazil soon to defend me!”
The coordination between the fascist offensive in Brazil and the Trump government is also blatant in the campaign around Kirk.
US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau directly participated in the persecution of Brazilians on the internet. A Brazilian neurosurgeon, who mocked Kirk’s death, was fired in Recife after Landau publicly reported his comment, demanded retractions from Brazilian medical societies and announced that he “personally ordered” the revocation of his American visa, “in case he had one”.
The determined strike by more than 700 nurses and case workers at Henry Ford Health Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan is about to enter its third week. The healthcare workers, who walked out on September 1, are fighting for safe staffing levels, decent pay and the protection of previously secured benefits against the brutal offensive of a multibillion-dollar corporate healthcare giant.
Having voted down a concessions contract by 93 percent in August, the strikers have demonstrated their resolve to win their demands. However, the courageous stand of the strikers is in grave danger.
Workers are confronting a battle on two fronts: on one side, a ruthless strikebreaking operation by Henry Ford Health, and on the other, the systematic effort by the Teamsters bureaucracy to isolate and sabotage the strike, setting the stage for a sellout contract that gives the hospital everything it wants.
The Teamsters apparatus, which has a long and sordid record of betraying workers’ struggles, is actively blocking any independent initiative by the nurses while promoting illusions in the Democratic Party, which is part of the very capitalist political establishment that enforces the subordination of healthcare to corporate profits.
*****
Henry Ford Health has responded to the strike with an all-out strikebreaking operation, keeping the hospital open with contract nurses, or scabs, and staff who have crossed the picket line. The hospital is paying these scabs up to $8,500 per week, plus stipends and hotel costs. As nurses correctly point out, this proves the company has the money to meet their demands for safe staffing and better pay.
The use of unqualified scabs places patients in extreme danger. Strikers report that the replacement workers are unfamiliar with the hospital’s charting system and equipment, and that many are “underqualified” for their assignments.
One nurse stated bluntly that scabs are scabs because they “make too many errors in care to hold down permanent jobs,” and it is difficult to track their mistakes as they move from hospital to hospital. Strikers have heard rumors from inside the hospital of dangerously poor care, including one horrific account of a breached baby who was transferred out too late to be saved.
While management wages war on the striking nurses—terminating their insurance coverage and threatening other unionized workers against showing support—the Teamsters bureaucracy has done nothing to stop the scabbing.
*****
Negotiations are not taking place. A session scheduled for September 10 was cancelled when Henry Ford representatives failed to show up. Another recent meeting, overseen by a federal mediator, was deemed “unproductive” by Teamsters Local 332 President Dan Glass. Negotiations resumed on Thursday without progress, according to local news reports, and there are currently no plans for another meeting.
However, there is every indication that management has no reason to bargain when the Teamsters bureaucracy keeps the strike isolated and toothless. Henry Ford is relying on the union apparatus to help it exhaust the strike and force the workers back to work under the terms of a sellout agreement which will be presented as “the best we can do.”
*****
he hypocrisy of the Teamsters’ embrace of Democratic politicians was on full display when union officials harassed reporters from the World Socialist Web Site on the picket line on September 16. They accused the WSWS of “sowing division” and bringing “politics into the strike.”
However, when asked how it was that the Teamsters had no problem bringing the politics of Democratic Party candidate for Michigan governor Swanson to the picket line, the mouthpieces for the union bureaucracy and isolation of the strike had no response.
*****
Despite these efforts by the union bureaucracy, nurses on the picket line spoke powerfully about their struggle. An OR ( operating room ) nurse declared, “I don’t think healthcare should be a business. We are talking about people’s lives.” Another said, “We just want safe care. Safe staffing saves lives. They should set nationwide standards across the board.”
Showing WSWS reporters an ad for scab pay of between $7,168 and $8,536 per week plus a stipend being offered by Henry Ford Health, one nurse remarked, “This is not being reported on the news. And they try to say we are asking for too much.”
Another nurse connected the immediate crisis to broader social issues: “With the retirement of the baby boomers conditions are going to get worse. The CEO of Ford complains about the nursing shortage, but there is no investment in education in the United States.”
*****
The strike at Henry Ford Health Genesys Hospital is coming to a denouement. The policy of the Teamsters bureaucracy of isolating the strike, allowing scabbing to continue, and promoting Democratic Party politicians is a recipe for defeat. It is the same strategy that led to the betrayal of the 2024 contract struggle at this very hospital and countless other struggles, including the recent sellout of 340,000 UPS workers.
The embrace of Trump by the national Teamsters leadership further exposes the bureaucracy as a pro-corporate agency of the billionaires that is hostile to the struggle of the working class for its interests.
The only way forward is for the striking nurses and case workers to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the union functionaries. This means forming a rank-and-file strike committee, democratically controlled by the workers themselves, to fight for what is necessary, not what Henry Ford Health and its stooges in the Teamsters claim is “affordable.”
Such a committee would immediately make a direct appeal to the AFSCME-represented hospital staff to defy their own sellout leadership and join the strike to shut down the hospital completely. The committee would also organize mass picketing to stop the scabs from entering the facility by turning to the broader working class—autoworkers in Flint, teachers, logistics workers, and others—for active support.
Striking Birmingham bin workers and all those seeking genuine solidarity with their struggle must consider how to take forward the fight to defeat the Starmer government’s brutal austerity agenda, enforced through its flagship local authority.
Calls for “Victory to the Birmingham bin workers” at the national demonstration organized by Unite in the city on Saturday mean nothing outside of formulating a strategy to make this a reality.
*****
The determination of the 400 bin loaders and drivers at the city’s three depots is beyond doubt. They have stood firm against plans to cut pay by up to £8,000, the elimination of the safety-critical Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role, and a quarter reduction in crew sizes. In April they rejected a lump-sum bribe to sell their jobs, and earlier this month voted for a second time to extend the strike until March 2026 with a 99.5 percent majority. As strikers have stated, “It is us today, you tomorrow,” in a direct appeal to the working class.
Yet after more than six months of all-out action, their defiant stand remains isolated: one section of militant workers has faced an unprecedented strike-breaking operation by the Starmer government that goes beyond anything attempted by its Tory predecessors.
On March 31 the Labour authority, backed by Starmer, declared a “major incident.” Police used Section 14 of the Public Order Act to disperse pickets, while military planners were brought in to coordinate a strike busting operation involving the hiring of agency staff as a replacement workforce and support services drafting in from neighboring councils. The restrictions on pickets which are limited to designated zones remains in force through the indefinite High Court injunction granted in May.
The reality must be faced. The mobilization against this attack on tens of thousands of other council workers and of workers more generally has been prevented by Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham, who presides over a union with one million members. And this has been reinforced by the collusion of the entire trade union bureaucracy.
*****
Birmingham’s bin workers are not responsible for the financial crisis of the Labour run authority. And neither are council workers up and down the country for the cash strapped councils where they face similar “job evaluations” to impose pay cuts and deskilling, as frontline services which millions depend on are bled dry.
After a decade of austerity, central government funding has been slashed by up to 60 percent with nearly half of councils in England facing bankruptcy, according to a report by the National Audit Office. The attack on Birmingham bin workers is to spearhead an austerity drive by the Starmer government that begins where the Tories left off.
The defense of Birmingham bin workers is the essential preparation for a counteroffensive against the savage cuts and the authoritarian methods used to slash jobs and pay and dismantle essential services throughout Britain.
The need for a strike committee to be established by Birmingham bin workers has never been more urgent to prevent their defiant stand from being worn down by the Unite apparatus, as the fire and rehire policy is implemented under direction of the Labour government.
16. Medium-Term Program: The war against the Turkish working class is escalating
The Medium-Term Program (MTP), which outlines the government’s economic goals and policies for the next three years (2026-2028), was approved by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and entered into force on September 7.
The MTP, presented by Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz, shows that Turkey’s economic strategy will be based on “sustainable growth,” reducing inflation, and maintaining fiscal discipline to close the budget deficit. As in the program announced last year, frontal attacks on the social conditions of the working class are being stepped up.
The MTP is consistent with policies implemented since June 2023, when Mehmet Şimşek was appointed to head economic policy. The program, designed to meet the needs of the Turkish bourgeoisie and international capital, means that austerity measures targeting the living and working conditions of the working class—reducing real wages and purchasing power, and increasing taxes—will continue to intensify.
In recent years, the government’s main policy for reducing high inflation and closing the budget deficit has been to suppress workers’ wages and raise interest rates. This policy, which aimed to curb demand and increase savings, not only failed to significantly reduce inflation but also led to the further impoverishment of the working class, including pensioners, and the further enrichment of the wealthy minority at the top through high interest income. The government’s increased interest expenditures were imposed on the working class under the guise of “spreading taxes across the base.”
The official inflation rate, which was 38 percent in June 2023, increased to 75 percent in May 2024. In August 2025, the official rate was 33 percent. Despite more than two years of harsh austerity policies, official inflation fell by only 5 percent. This alone debunks the idea that workers’ wages and pay rises are the main source of inflation.
In reality, the main source of inflation stems from the exorbitant profits of banks and large companies. This fact was even acknowledged last year by Erhan Çetinkaya, President of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat): “Corporate profits are rising faster than inflation. The exorbitant corporate profits in Turkey have an upward effect on inflation, this has been scientifically proven”.
The government is transferring public resources to banks and large corporations in the form of tax breaks, incentives and interest payments. It is also spending vast sums on armaments to defend the interests of the same capitalist oligarchs.
*****
The government’s attack on workers’ social rights and living conditions, in order to transfer public resources to corporations, banks, and militarism in the service of the ruling class, is an international phenomenon. Against this capitalist attack with the collaboration of union bureaucracies in Turkey and around the world, workers’ resistance and social struggles are developing everywhere, seeking an independent path forward.
These struggles confirm the observation made in the World Socialist Web Site’s 2025 New Year Statement: “The past five years have been dominated by the response of the ruling class to the capitalist crisis. The next five years will be dominated by an explosive eruption of the class struggle, which is already under way.”
*****
In Turkey, mass protests which erupted in March following the arrest of Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor and Republican People’s Party presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu—and strikes and protests by public sector workers and public employees during the summer months, wildcat strikes in municipalities, and ongoing struggles in many other sectors—are signs of growing determination to fight among workers and youth.
17. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:Schindler Lifts technicians in New South Wales on strike for pay parity
Newcastle bus drivers to stop work for four hours
Woodside oil and gas production workers in Western Australia step up industrial action
South Australian public sector health and disability support workers protest low pay offer
South Australian firefighters continue industrial action
CDC bus drivers in the Northern Territory begin industrial action for pay increase
Northern Territory public sector health professionals begin industrial action
Forensicare mental health workers in Victoria strike for improved pay offer
Public hospital patient assistant workers in Eastern Health, Victoria protest outsourcing
Alcoa aluminium smelter workers in Victoria strike for improved pay offer
Fonterra dairy processing workers in Victoria begin indefinite strike
Early childhood educators in Victoria strike
Royal Hobart Hospital environmental services workers walk out
Public school facility attendants in Tasmania strike over workload and resources
Bangladesh:
Workers from Eurozone Fashion Garments resume protest
India:
Telangana government contract health workers demand unpaid wages and bonuses
Ludhiana Municipal Corporation workers protest outsourcing of garbage collection
Coal India workers and pensioners in West Bengal demand pay and pension increase
Pallorbond tea estate workers in Assam protest low pay and reduced bonus
Sri Lanka:
Public school teachers protest
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
