1. Erdoğan to meet with Trump; Turkey and Egypt’s tensions with Israel intensify
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will be hosted by US President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, during his visit to the United States to attend the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
In a statement, Erdoğan said, “Our meeting with Trump concerns the region; every step taken in the Middle East is of vital importance to us.” Trump stated on the Truth Social platform, “We are working on many Trade and Military Deals with the President, including the large-scale purchase of Boeing aircraft, a major F-16 Deal, and a continuation of the F-35 talks, which we expect to conclude positively. President Erdoğan and I have always had a very good relationship. I look forward to seeing him on the 25th!”
Under intense government pressure through the judiciary, Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Özgür Özel claimed a few days ago that Erdoğan had held a secret meeting with Trump’s son at his office in Istanbul, that a promise to order Boeing aircraft had been made so that Erdoğan could meet with Trump, and that Palestinians in Gaza had been abandoned to their fate in order to get along with the US President. The meeting was later confirmed.
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Erdoğan government has been complicit in the Zionist regime’s genocide against Palestinians by continuing trade with Israel “through Palestine,” mediating for oil flows from Azerbaijan to Israel, permitting the use of US bases in Turkey for Israel’s benefit, and through other means. However, the struggle against this cannot be led by the CHP. Despite rhetorical criticisms, the CHP, in line with the reactionary interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie, supports the military-strategic alliance with US and NATO imperialism—the forces behind the genocide.
The Erdoğan-Trump meeting coincides with a period of escalating rivalry and dispute between Ankara and Tel Aviv. Tensions between Turkey and Israel increased after Israel’s attack on Hamas negotiators in the Qatari capital of Doha. This illegal attack by Israel fueled speculation that Hamas officials in Turkey, which does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization, could also be targeted.
The dispute and rivalry between these two allies of US imperialism in the region primarily concerns their shares in the carve up of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Ankara, like Tel Aviv, supports Washington’s drive for complete dominance in the Middle East, but it is concerned that Israel’s growing influence in the region, including in Cyprus and Syria, and the outbreak of a large-scale war with Iran, would harm the interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie.
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he struggle for influence in Syria continues to be the most significant flashpoint between Turkey and Israel. Last December, the rise to power of the US and Turkey-backed and Al-Qaeda-rooted Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) further heightened tensions between Ankara and Tel Aviv, which occupy northern and southern Syria, respectively.
Ankara has declared that the emergence of a US-Israel-backed Kurdish state on its southern border is a red line, while Tel Aviv is seeking to increase its influence by promoting the autonomy of minorities such as the Druze and Kurds in Syria’s new regime.
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Tensions peaked with the failed NATO-backed coup attempt to overthrow Erdoğan on July 15, 2016. At that time, Erdoğan first made agreements with China, and then, after the coup attempt, with Russia to purchase air defense systems. Although the agreement with China was cancelled before the [failed] coup, S-400 air defense systems were purchased from Russia and brought to Turkey. This led to Washington imposing a series of sanctions, including Turkey’s removal from the F-35 program.
Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which formed a close alliance with Erdoğan after the 2016 coup attempt, made an unprecedented statement last Thursday: “The most appropriate option for the world, in the face of the US-Israel evil coalition that challenges the world, is to build and revive the ‘TRC’ alliance, which is in line with reason, diplomacy, the spirit of politics, geographical conditions, and the strategic environment of the new century. It is our desire and recommendation that the TRC alliance be composed of Turkey, Russia, and China.”
In the US, when asked about Bahçeli’s statement, Erdoğan dismissed the issue by saying, “To be honest, I didn’t quite follow it.”
2. Treason trial of South Sudan’s Vice President threatens to reignite civil war
On Monday, the treason trial of First Vice President [of South Sudan] Riek Machar opened. It followed a bloody weekend in which at least 48 people were killed and more than 150 wounded in clashes between government forces and opposition fighters of Machar in the northeastern border town of Burebiey.
According to state officials, Machar’s forces from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO) attacked a government base but were repelled by the South Sudan People’s Defense Forces.
The SPLM-IO, formed after the December 2013 massacres of Nuer civilians in Juba, is the armed and political movement representing Machar’s core power base. Though formally folded into the 2018 “unity government,” the SPLM-IO continues to operate as a parallel military-political force.
Last week its leadership issued a statement calling for “regime change,” accusing President Salva Kiir of turning South Sudan into a dictatorship after Machar was dismissed and charged with treason over an alleged assault in Nasir in March that killed more than 250 soldiers. Soon after, Machar was suspended as vice president and placed under house arrest in Juba. The SPLM/IO denounced the charges as “fabricated.”
Nasir, on the Ethiopian border, is a strategic stronghold for Machar’s Nuer supporters. The Nuer, the second-largest ethnic group after the Dinka, form a significant portion of the population in Upper Nile and Jonglei. Traditionally pastoralist cattle herders, the Nuer have clashed with neighbors, particularly the Dinka, over grazing lands, conflicts deepened by colonial divide-and-rule and post-independence elites.
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President Salva Kiir has relied heavily on fighters from his Dinka base, the country’s largest ethnic group. These forces formed the backbone of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and, after independence, the national army. Kiir has consistently leaned on Dinka militias and commanders to secure his rule, reinforcing ethnic divisions.
Machar’s trial has shattered the fragile 2018 peace agreement that ended five years of civil war in which 400,000 people were killed, rape was wielded as a weapon of war, famine deliberately inflicted, and more than four million displaced. It recalls the eruption of conflict in December 2013, when President Kiir dismissed Machar as vice president and sacked his entire cabinet, consolidating near-dictatorial powers under the presidency. By purging Machar and other Nuer representatives from government, Kiir transformed a political power struggle into an ethnic confrontation, unleashing massacres in Juba and driving the country into a full-scale civil war.
South Sudan emerged from the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese government of Omar al-Bashir and the SPLM. Under US pressure, Khartoum conceded to a referendum on independence in 2011, in which 99 percent of Southerners voted to secede. Western media hailed the “birth of freedom,” with US President Obama declaring “an inspiring step forward in Africa’s long journey toward democracy and justice.”
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The referendum was the product of decades of intrigue in which Washington and its allies nurtured the SPLM as a proxy force against Khartoum. As the World Socialist Web Site warned in 2011, “the referendum has nothing to do with self-determination, peace or democracy. It is dictated by the efforts of the United States to gain strategic advantage in relation to China, which dominates the Sudanese oil industry.” Its aim was “the creation of a puppet state… the separation of the south will only perpetuate religious and ethnic conflict, with the most likely outcome being a resumption of warfare.”
Two years later, as the SPLM fractured and the country descended into war, the World Socialist Web Site concluded, “partition has produced yet another unviable state, ruled over by warring factions beholden to one or other major power, bringing nothing but hardship to all but a tiny layer in Juba.”
Since independence, South Sudan’s elite has plundered billions. A UN investigation, Plundering a Nation, exposed how oil revenues—$25.2 billion since 2011, including $8 billion since 2018—were siphoned into patronage networks tied to Kiir and Machar. Health spending in 2024 was just $7.9 million for 12 million people, less than was allocated to the men’s national basketball team, while the Presidential Medical Unit, serving only Kiir and his circle, received more than the entire national health system. GDP has collapsed to a quarter of pre-independence levels.
The consequences have been catastrophic. South Sudan ranks second-to-last in global health coverage. One in ten children dies before the age of five, three-quarters from preventable illnesses. Maternal mortality is the world’s highest. Life expectancy has stagnated at 55 years. Two-thirds of the population face acute food insecurity, including 2.3 million acutely malnourished children and 1.2 million women. Entire regions teeter on famine.
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South Sudan’s descent into civil war is part of a wider regional breakdown. To the north, Sudan’s civil war, raging for two years, has killed tens of thousands, displaced 12 million internally, and driven 4 million abroad.
In Ethiopia, the two-year war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front ended in 2022 after hundreds of thousands of deaths and mass displacement. Armed clashes persist in Oromia and Amhara, while Egypt is whipping up tensions against Ethiopia over its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
In Somalia, Al Shabab continues its insurgency, while Somaliland negotiates with Ethiopia for sea access and with Washington to host Palestinians expelled from Gaza in exchange for state recognition.
To the south, Kenya has been convulsed by protests against austerity and collapsing living standards, met with murderous repression.
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As Beijing emerged as Sudan’s main economic partner in the 1990s and 2000s, controlling 75 percent of oil production, Washington accelerated its drive to split the country. Secession in 2011 stripped Khartoum of three-quarters of its oil reserves, leaving the new state dependent and unviable.
Stalinism facilitated these betrayals. The Sudanese Communist Party, once one of the strongest in Africa, subordinated workers and peasants to alliances with bourgeois nationalists, joining Nimeiry’s regime in 1969 only to be destroyed the following year. Across Africa, Stalinist and Maoist-backed parties tied themselves to the manoeuvres of the Soviet bureaucracy and Beijing, blocking socialist revolution in the name of a “national democratic revolution” and clearing the path for imperialist domination through corrupt local elites.
The history of Sudan and South Sudan confirms the central tenet of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution: in countries of belated capitalist development, the bourgeoisie is incapable of fulfilling the democratic or national tasks of liberation. Bound to imperialism, it rules through repression, ethnic manipulation and plunder. Only the working class, leading the oppressed masses, can carry through these tasks as part of the international fight for socialism. The creation of new nation states under capitalism only paves the way to warlordism, kleptocracy and imperialist dependency. The bloody fate of South Sudan tragically demonstrates this truth.
3. Mass protests in Brazil against amnesty for Bolsonaro’s fascist coup attempt
Brazil witnessed massive nationwide demonstrations on Sunday, September 21, opposing the efforts of the political establishment to politically rehabilitate and overturn the conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his military and civilian co-conspirators in the January 8, 2023 fascist coup attempt.
The protests were prompted by last week’s approval of two measures in the Brazilian House of Representatives demanded by the fascist political opposition associated with Bolsonaro as part of what they call a “National Pacification Package.”
On Wednesday, by a vote of 311 to 163, the House approved the expedited voting procedure for a bill to amnesty those who are convicted and who are under investigation for the January 8 coup attempt. On the same day, it approved a constitutional amendment bill dubbed the “PEC da Blindagem” (“Shielding Amendment”), which prohibits the criminal prosecution of members of parliament and party presidents without congressional authorization.
Mass opposition is being driven by the perception among broad sections of the Brazilian population that the corrupt bourgeois political system is striking a criminal compromise behind their backs to preserve the power of the forces exposed for conspiring to overthrow democracy and reimpose a military dictatorship. These sentiments were widely displayed in Sunday’s protests.
n the demonstrations, which took place in virtually every major city in the country, demonstrators held signs calling the president of the House of Representatives, Hugo Motta, an “enemy of the people” and chanted: “No amnesty and no forgiveness, I want to see Bolsonaro in prison.”
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The protest in Rio had the participation of legendary figures of Brazilian popular music, such as Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, all of them imprisoned and exiled under the dictatorship and now in their eighties. As demonstrators shouted, “No Amnesty!” and “Long live democracy!” they sang the song “Cálice” (chalice, in Portuguese, which is pronounced the same as “shut up”), composed by Gil and Chico, an anthem of the struggle against the military dictatorship.
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More importantly, the protests expressed widespread social, economic and political dissatisfaction, which has also fueled mass protests around the world. Recent years have also seen an increasing number of strikes, particularly by federal public workers against the Lula government’s austerity policies.
Faced with this social powder keg and unable to offer any real solutions to the problems faced by the Brazilian working class, the entire Brazilian ruling class viewed Sunday’s protests with concern. It fears that these protests will become the spark for a massive movement from below, outside the control of the nominal left and the unions it controls, that threatens the fragile bourgeois regime in Brazil, of which the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) is a fundamental pillar.
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The PT’s promotion of reactionary nationalist illusions leads only to defeat. Throughout the world, the profound corruption of the capitalist political order, the deepening of austerity policies and the drive by the ruling class toward dictatorship and war are fundamental characteristics of a global capitalist system marked by growing crises.
4. Top Democrats plead for meeting with fascist Trump as government shutdown looms
Schumer made clear the supine posture of the Democrats. He criticized Trump for “running away from the negotiating table before he even gets there,” and added, “Democrats are ready to work to avoid a shutdown…”
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... The Democratic Party does not call for impeachment and opposes a struggle to bring down the Trump regime. It fears the emergence of a revolutionary movement of workers against capitalism, not fascism and dictatorship.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for expropriation of the corporate oligarchy to pay for the deepest funding crisis in the history of the Chicago Transit Authority. We call on workers to build a mass movement, independent of the two corporate parties and their lackeys in the union bureaucracy, for a massive redistribution of wealth and against corporate dictatorship.
In contrast to the Democrats and Republicans, who say workers must accept massive cuts, we insist that workers have the inalienable social right to transportation, as well as education, healthcare and other public services needed to live decently in a modern society.
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In every city across America, basic public health and job safety protections are being clawed back. Long-term joblessness and hunger are increasing, driven in part by rising prices. School funding is being slashed to the bone, vital programs like Medicaid and food assistance are being dismantled and entire federal departments are being gutted or shut completely while greater sums than ever before flow to the military and to the superrich via tax cuts.
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San Francisco and the Bay Area: Deep service cuts are being discussed or phased in. BART may close stations and limit train service to once an hour. Muni faces 50 percent reduction in frequency on many lines.
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There is bipartisan consensus that the working class must pay for the crisis of American capitalism. This is why the Democratic Party, the other party of American big business, refuses to lift a finger against Trump. In US cities, it is Democrats who are organizing the slashing of schools, transit and other public services.
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The right to public transit is a class question. It requires a new, independent strategy to mobilize the working class independent of the Democratic Party, as well as the pro-corporate union bureaucracy, to challenge the unquestioned power of the American oligarchy. It must be connected with the broader fight against the Trump government and end the threat of fascism in America.
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To prepare a fight, workers must have organizations which they genuinely, democratically control. This means building rank-and-file committees, excluding union officials. Power must be transferred from the well-appointed offices of the union tops to the workers on the floor and on job sites, who can make decisions on strategy, policy and actions.
A similar change must take place in the whole society. Only through a fight by the working class to break the power of the rich is it possible to defend democratic and social rights. Workers taking this critical step will inspire and unify all the different forces of protest in a single massive social movement against the oligarchic government.
6. American actor Robert Redford (1936-2025)
Intentions are one thing, of course, results are another. The social and cultural circumstances in postwar America in which Redford grew up and matured created limitations and threw up barriers that were difficult to overcome. What does genuine “independence” in or from the Hollywood film industry entail?
7. Révolution Permanente tries to block independent political struggle by French workers against Macron
Nationwide protests on September 10 and 18 confirmed the depth of working class opposition to the Macron regime and its program of austerity and war. France is plunged into a historic budget crisis, with the fall of the Bayrou government, exploding military spending, and a rapid deterioration in living conditions. Hundreds of thousands of workers, youth and activists have expressed their anger through strikes and blockades of infrastructure.
The decisive question is: how can this anger be transformed into a conscious, organized force capable of breaking the power of the capitalist oligarchy? In a September 10 article “On the brink of collapse: the Fifth Republic in terminal crisis?”, the Morenoite group Révolution Permanente (RP) tries to answer this question. But far from offering a revolutionary orientation, RP tries to disorient the working class, hiding the real political tasks it faces behind the calls for a “general strike” without content or international perspective.
Preparing a general strike requires building rank-and-file committees in the working class, entirely outside the framework of the current political system, to wage the class struggle. Only such organizations can break the debilitating diktat of the union bureaucracies over the class struggle, link workers' struggles in France with those occurring internationally, and open a path for revolutionary struggle for workers' power and socialism.
In contrast, RP member Juan Chingo asserts: 'To turn the situation around and build a movement capable of confronting the regime, we will therefore have to build the strike from below by seeking to develop self-organization, to extend general assemblies beyond a narrow circle of militants, and to think of them as a place for democratic debate over the direction of the movement. So, while we must demand that our trade unions develop a serious battle plan, we cannot leave the struggle in the hands of union bureaucrats.”
This passage sums up RP's politics: verbally criticizing the union bureaucracy while refusing to call for a break with it. Behind rhetoric about “self-organization,” RP in reality tries to limit workers’ struggles to put pressure on the existing union bureaucracies. The “general strike” it proposes is confined to the national framework and conceived only as a lever for negotiating with the capitalist state, not for fighting for socialist revolution.
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RP intensified the confusion by claiming that workers should conclude from the Commune, the world's first workers’ state, that they must appreciate “bourgeois representative democracy.” This is the opposite of what the working class should conclude from the experience of the Paris Commune. It was massacred by the army of the “bourgeois representative” Third Republic in the Bloody Week of May, 21-28, 1871.
A relentless political offensive for workers’ power is the only way to avoid disaster in historical crises like those of 1871, and today. This is the key lesson that Marxists drew from the massacre of the Commune, helping prepare the Bolsheviks politically for the October Revolution in Russia. But Révolution Permanente, despite its name, is diametrically opposed to a Bolshevik political strategy.
RP maintains today the same petty-bourgeois orientation it had in 2023. Its talk of “self-organization” and “strikes from below” masks its refusal to confront the central issues: the nature of the capitalist state, the need to organize workers independently of union bureaucracies that are pillars of this system, and the necessity of an international revolutionary strategy.
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RP’s line, behind its “combative” phrases, remains nationalist, limited to calls to reform the moribund capitalist system. It aims to channel social anger into union bureaucracies or allied petty-bourgeois organizations, while carefully avoiding any call for the expropriation of capital or the taking of power by the workers.
The current crisis confronts the working class with two perspectives: either the bourgeoisie imposes a dictatorship to crush social opposition, or the workers build a revolutionary organization capable of overthrowing capitalism.
This means breaking with the union leaderships and their political allies, including RP. These leaderships are not “neutral” instruments that can be pressured to fight. They are integrated into the state, which finances them in order to maintain social order and stifle any real protest. Workers cannot ask them for a “battle plan.” They must take the organization of their struggles into their own hands.
8. Journalism award withdrawn from young German media activist opposing genocide
Early September saw yet another blatant case of censorship linked to unjustified accusations of antisemitism. The young activist Judith Scheytt, who in January had received a prize for her posts and videos on Instagram and TikTok criticizing media coverage of the genocide in Gaza by the Israeli armed forces, was forced—after the intervention of the pro-Zionist Cologne Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation—to hand back the award and prize statue.
Just before her graduation, the then high school student had been awarded the non-endowed “special commendation” of the Donnepp Award for Critical Media for her work on social media, especially her Instagram reels. Since November 2023, Scheytt had focused on the one-sided reporting of the German media on the Middle East conflict, and the human rights crimes of the Israeli army (IDF) in the Gaza Strip.
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The jury praised Scheytt’s “wealth of knowledge” and “analytical brilliance,” with which she exposed false information about the Gaza war in detail. Her “pointed and challenging analyses” had “created open spaces for discussion,” it said in January. Scheytt was producing “a new and truly contemporary form of journalism with her critical media on Instagram,” according to the validation published by the Grimme Institute.
Scheytt’s Instagram channel supports her criticism with studies and sources, as noted in the commendation. She openly speaks of genocide, apartheid and war crimes, and accuses German media of marginalizing Palestinian voices. For example, she drew on a study by Fabian Goldmann, which showed that of headlines analysed (Bild, Zeit, Spiegel, Tagesschau), 43.3 percent drew on Israeli sources, but only 5 percent on Palestinian ones.
The jury praised her “pointed and, in the best sense, challenging video analyses.” She had engagingly and incisively exposed the grossest breaches of journalistic professionalism and integrity, dissecting “double standards, framings, clichés and false information down to the smallest detail.” Her focus was particularly on “German reporting on the Middle East.”
In an Instagram video posted after graduating high school, Scheytt revealed that she had been stripped of the award as early as April. Jörg Schieb of the Friends of Grimme board had phoned her mother to say so. When she herself asked for the reasons, she was told her media criticism was “structurally antisemitic.”
The first attack against the award was an article in the staunchly pro-Israel Die Welt, written by Mirna Funk. Great granddaughter of the East German writer Stephan Hermlin, Funk found her way into journalism in 2018 with a Vogue column and now writes an erotic column for Cosmopolitan. Since converting to Judaism, she has become a vehement defender of the Israeli government and contributes to right-wing outlets like Die Welt and Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
But what proved decisive was an email from the Cologne Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, which apparently threatened to launch a media campaign against the association and the Grimme Institute unless the award was rescinded.
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When she asked why she had to return the prize, Scheytt received a nearly 40-page document with absurd reasoning from chairman Jörg Schieb. Among other things, her videos were accused of omitting essential historical-political context and many “security aspects” of Israel. Her content was deemed “purely activist”—supposedly violating the award’s statutes. In convoluted jargon, the document further accused her of “selective contextualization,” “terminological trivialization” and “media de-realization.”
Grimme Institute director Çiğdem Uzunoğlu also suddenly backed rescinding the award, allegedly to avoid antisemitism allegations against the organization. Since 80 percent of its budget comes from the NRW state government, the institute has adapted itself to official policy and its weaponization of antisemitism smears. The jury was not involved in the decision to rescind; several members, including chair Nadia Zaboura, expressly disagreed with it.
Even Annika Schneider, the main prize-winner, returned her award—including the €5,000 prize money—in protest. She said that while she did not agree with Scheytt on every point, the association had failed to provide proof of antisemitism: “I cannot accept a prize for ‘good journalism’ from an association that does not itself uphold its principles.” She added, “The withdrawal of the award was carried out in secret. The association issued no statement, it did not inform the other winners. It simply bypassed several jury members, not even telling them the award had been revoked. For that reason, I return my award.”
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The revocation of Judith Scheytt’s award contains important lessons. The one-sided pro-Israel reporting on the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli army’s horrendous war crimes, which she highlighted in her online work, is not merely unprofessional journalism but official state policy.
The Israeli government could not sustain its terror against Palestinians without the active backing and military aid of Washington, Berlin and other NATO-member governments. Criticism of this support is not to be tolerated.
The slanderous charge of antisemitism serves to intimidate. Under the Nazis, antisemitic agitation was used to direct the anger of ruined petty bourgeois layers against Jews. Socialists resolutely fought this poison. Now the false “antisemitism campaign” is being used to criminalize anyone who speaks out against oppression and militarism.
9. US health insurance costs to surge as Trump administration declares war on workers’ medical care
Healthcare insurance costs are expected to rise sharply throughout the United States at year’s end, intensifying a crisis of healthcare in the United States. Rising costs, paired with the expiration of Affordable Care Act marketplace subsidies and the $930 billion cut to Medicaid funding by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law on July 4, are undermining the health coverage of tens of millions of people.
The Democrats are posturing as defenders of healthcare for Americans, pledging to block passage of a spending resolution if Republicans do not make concessions on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enhanced subsidies, set to expire at the end of 2025, or restore $1 trillion in Medicaid funds cut by the OBBBA. The continuing resolution must be passed by September 30 to avoid a federal shutdown.
Paycheck deductions for employer-held plans, which cover around 154 million people, are expected to rise an average of 7 percent, even after expected cost-cutting measures by employers, with 59 percent of companies expected to cut aspects of their health insurance offerings or switch to cheaper insurance at workers’ expense. A large component of this projected increase are back-of-the-envelope calculations being made by insurers in response to the potential inflationary impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs, the costs of which the healthcare industry intends to pass down to workers. For example, the Trump administration is considering tariffs as high as 250 percent on imported medicines.
Those on Medicare Part B (covering doctor visits and outpatient services) are expected to see 11.6 percent increases, with stand-alone premiums for Medicare Part D (outpatient prescription drugs) expected to go up by up to $50 a month, impacting retirees and others on fixed incomes.
However, plans purchased directly by workers on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace, covering 24 million people, are set to rise far more sharply, an average of 20 percent nationwide. These increases, the highest since 2018, still do not reflect the actual scale of the challenge facing workers with these plans. The impending loss of ACA subsidies put in place under the Biden administration would raise the cost of health insurance for those with ACA plans by a staggering 75 percent on average. Many would simply be unable to afford insurance through the ACA marketplaces.
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Despite Democrats’ hailing of the passage of the ACA 15 years ago as the greatest reform since the New Deal, the whole history of the ACA has demonstrated in practice that it represents direct collusion between the government and the healthcare industry, at workers’ expense. Funneling workers’ money to the insurance industry by requiring workers’ and their families to purchase private insurance, the ACA has shifted costs onto working people and made care less accessible.
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The World Socialist Web Site noted in 2009:
Obama’s health care counterrevolution is of a piece with his entire domestic agenda. It parallels the multitrillion-dollar bailout of the banks, the imposition of mass layoffs and wage and benefits cuts in the auto industry, and a stepped-up attack on public education and on teachers. … All that remains of the social reforms from the 1930s and 1960s, and the gains won by previous generations of workers in bitter struggle, is to be wiped out.
Instead of being treated as a social right, healthcare under capitalism is subject to the profit priorities of the healthcare industry and exists to transfer wealth from the working class to the capitalist oligarchy. Health spending comprises 18 percent of GDP in the United States, a percentage that is growing faster than the rate of growth of the GDP itself. The cuts to Medicaid funds by the OBBBA will cause tens of millions to lose their insurance in the next 10 years. With the addition of 4 million people losing their insurance from the discontinuation of ACA subsidies, the projected total of those who will lose their insurance is 16-17 million people nationwide. This is itself a source of rising costs for the entire healthcare system, as healthcare providers shift costs incurred by those who are uninsured and forced to seek emergency care onto those with insurance.
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Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” had only a 32 percent approval rating in recent polling. Democrats are worried that they might be even more deeply discredited if they rubberstamp the Trump administration again, as they did in March, when nine Senate Democrats and an independent caucusing with the Democrats voted for a continuing resolution on government funding in the midst of Trump’s authoritarian policies and DOGE attacks on social programs. In this round of negotiations, House Democrat Jared Golden of Maine voted for the continuing resolution and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted for continued funding in the Senate. Republicans voted down a competing Democratic resolution that had no chance of passing.
The Republicans have called the Democrats’ bluff, suspending Congress for the Rosh Hashanah holiday for a week, planning not to return until October 1, when a shutdown would already be in effect. For his part, Trump has denounced a letter written by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—begging to meet with the president to have him bring the Republicans back to Congress for further negotiations—calling it an act of “desperation.” Trump and other Republicans have dismissed the Democrats’ posturing as protectors of healthcare as “unserious” pandering to their “leftist base,” with Senate Majority Leader John Thune expecting the Democrats to fall into line when Congress returns next week.
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The working class must fight to end for-profit healthcare as part of a social counter-offensive against the fascistic drive of the Trump administration, which is an expression of the crisis of capitalism itself. The capitalist oligarchy wants to rob workers of every social program to counteract the constant expansion of the mountain of debt upon which their parasitic wealth is based.
10. Trump declares war on the world at UN General Assembly speech
US President Donald Trump delivered a fascist rant Tuesday to the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly in which he proclaimed “America First” should be the world’s organizing principle, threatened war and aggression the world over, and lionized the criminal actions of his administration at home and abroad.
He attacked both America’s ostensible allies and states long in Washington’s military-strategic crosshairs in a meandering speech that lasted almost triple his allotted time.
Trump reveled in displaying his disdain and contempt for international law, making clear that Washington will accept no restraints on the ruthless assertion of its imperialist interests, whether through trade war, assassinations, regime-change operations or global war.
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Media reports in the run-up to the UN General Assembly largely focused on the supposedly landmark recognition of a Palestinian state by a number of Western countries, including France, Britain, Canada and Australia.
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Trump’s fascist rant before the UN stunned the assembled government leaders and senior diplomats. “Six years ago Trump’s UN audience laughed, this year they were silent,” announced a BBC headline.
This is not because Trump is all-powerful. On the contrary, he personifies the decline and depravity of US imperialism, world capitalism’s bulwark since World War II and still the center of world finance and the cockpit of global counterrevolution.
The reality is the United Nations is collapsing as the League of Nations did in the run-up to World War II and for the same fundamental reasons. Faced with a systemic crisis, the rival imperialist powers are seeking to violently repartition the world so as to secure control over critical resources, markets, production networks and strategic territories.
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As Leon Trotsky incisively explained, to oppose imperialist wars and capitalist barbarism, the working class must look not to the war map but to the map of the class struggle. The same processes that are driving the capitalist powers to war are fueling social revolution. The critical task is to infuse the growing struggles against war, austerity, dictatorship and fascism with a socialist perspective and arm them with a revolutionary leadership. That is the task to which the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties are dedicated.
11. Trump signs executive order criminalizing opposition to fascism
Since antifa as a formal organization does not exist, Trump’s executive order amounts to a blanket authorization to brand political dissent and opposition to his fascist regime as “terrorism.”
On Tuesday, September 9, at least 75 shipping containers fell off the cargo ship, the Mississippi, when unloading its cargo at the Port of Long Beach at around 8:48 am (PDT). The Mississippi, a Portuguese‑flagged container ship operated by ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd., had recently arrived from Yantian, China, delivering 2,412 containers full of clothes, furniture, shoes and electronics.
A “Unified Command” consisting of federal, state and local agencies are currently assisting with the ongoing recovery efforts and investigation.
No major injuries were reported. However, one worker on the STAX 2, a clean-air barge designed to capture exhaust emissions from ships, sprained an ankle while fleeing from containers that fell onto the barge he was working on.
The falling containers damaged the smaller STAX 2, as it was attached to the Mississippi at the time of the incident, leading to a small oil spill from the vessel’s 2,000 gallons of renewable diesel.
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“It was a miracle that no one suffered any major injuries,” US Coast Guard Captain Stacey Crecy stated to the press, “especially those individuals who were on the emissions collection barge at the time when the containers fell on top of it.”
Crew sizes vary on clean-air barges, but there are typically two crew members on board at all times—a systems operator and a deckhand—with up to three mariners nearby assisting with port operations.
It is still unclear what caused the containers to topple, but there are a number of factors which could have contributed to this dangerous incident.
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The Port of Long Beach handles more than 9 million 20-foot containers per year from over 2,000 vessels, moving nearly one-fourth of all containers on the West Coast.
The loss of 75 containers out of a pool of over 9 million is negligible when it comes to the profitability of these multi-billion dollar shipping corporations.
According to the class logic of the financial oligarchy, any effort to prevent dangerous accidents such as the one that occurred on the Mississippi at the Port of Long Beach would be more costly than allowing these periodic incidents to occur indefinitely.
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Other catastrophic events, such as the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse and the Clairton Coke Works plant explosion, followed similar pro-corporate, cost-saving measures which resulted in the preventable deaths and injuries of numerous workers.
According to the class logic of the financial elite, workplace safety and protections are just another overhead expense which must be avoided at all costs, and a worker’s death or injury is considered just another cost of doing business.
What dictates the response of the corporate elite is the fact that the ruling class as a whole is gripped by unprecedented economic and political crises—spearheaded by $40 trillion of unsustainable debt and worsening trade imbalances—which will compel them to initiate further attacks against the working class in order to offset their decline.
The re-imposition of the most brutal working conditions of an earlier period is a necessary prerequisite to this process.
13. American workers speak out against dictatorship and fascism
Workers across America are furious about Trump’s ongoing bid to establish a dictatorship. Reporting teams from the World Socialist Web Site distributed copies of the Socialist Equality Party’s statement, “Trump’s fascist conspiracy and how to fight it: A socialist strategy,” which was received with great interest.
Among the responses:
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A Dana Driveline worker in Toledo declared, “I can’t stand Trump.” Asked what she thought of the working class launching a general strike to drive him out of office, she said, “I agree with that. We should do something because he needs to be gone.” Asked who Trump spoke for, she said, “the rich,” as he headed to work.
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A Michigan school bus driver: “I am livid about people being cancelled by so-called ‘free speech absolutists!’ It’s absolutely unconstitutional! We feel like they’re pushing us to our absolute breaking point—and that’s the purpose of it. To punish us all.”
14. New Zealand teachers, nurses, doctors and all workers must unite against austerity and war
In recent weeks more than 60,000 teachers, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers have joined nationwide strikes in New Zealand against the attempts by the National Party-led government to drive down their wages and eviscerate public health and education services.
Some 20,000 high school teachers held a one-day strike on August 20. This was followed by two one-day strikes by 36,000 nurses this month. In addition, 5,500 senior doctors struck on September 23-24, and about 40,000 primary teachers and school staff will strike on October 23. In each case, the government has offered pay rises of between 1 and 2 percent per year—a significant pay cut relative to the soaring cost of living, with inflation currently 2.7 percent and food prices up 5 percent in the last year.
These disputes stand at a crossroads. The roughly 100,000 workers involved—more than 3 percent of the country’s workforce—confront an intransigent ruling class, which is determined to use health workers and educators to set a benchmark for drastic wage reductions across the entire public sector and private industries.
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New Zealand’s economy has staggered from one crisis to the next. It shrank 1.1 percent in the year to June and will deteriorate further as it is hit by 15 percent tariffs from the United States and the global slowdown. The Luxon government is determined that workers will pay the price through historic attacks on public services, jobs and wages.
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Already, there is a profound social crisis: unemployment stands at 5.2 percent, with new job losses announced every week; one in five children are living in poverty and one tenth of the population is reliant on foodbanks to survive.
The situation in hospitals and schools is extremely dire. More than a third of hospital shifts have been short-staffed over the past three years. Tens of thousands of patients are being forced to wait for months or even years for vital operations. Similarly, more than a third of schools have teachers working in areas for which they are not trained, because of a lack of staff.
While starving public health and education, the government has allocated $12 billion over four years to the armed forces. Military spending is being doubled in order to integrate New Zealand into the unfolding world war of which the US-Israeli war in Gaza and the wider Middle East is one front. The imperialist powers, led by the US, seek to “solve” the crisis of capitalism by violently redividing the world’s markets and resources.
As a minor imperialist power, NZ is already involved: NZ soldiers are in Britain training Ukrainian conscripts for the US-NATO war against Russia, and in the Middle East to assist in the US bombing of Yemen. Now the government, supported by Labour and the unions, is preparing to join the accelerating US-led drive to war against China.
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The Socialist Equality Group calls on healthcare workers and school staff to take control of their struggles by building rank-and-file workplace committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves.
Such committees should be established in every workplace. They must fight to overcome the divisions imposed by the unions and to coordinate the struggles of healthcare and school staff with workers in transportation, meat processing, forestry, manufacturing and across the public sector.
The International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), an initiative of the Trotskyist movement, provides the means for workers to organize across borders against the capitalist oligarchy. Teachers and healthcare workers in New Zealand should work with the Australian Committee for Public Education and the Health Workers’ Rank-and-File Committee, which were established by the Socialist Equality Party.
15. Ex-Australian Labor leader calls for corporate and militarist “re-imagining” of universities
Bill Shorten, a former longtime trade union bureaucrat and Australian Labor Party leader, last week laid out a totally pro-business and militarist blueprint for universities.
His speech made more explicit and blunt the content of the Albanese Labor government’s assault on tertiary education, which is currently driving the destruction of nearly 4,000 jobs throughout the country’s 39 public universities.
In an address to the Australian Institute of International Affairs last Thursday, Shorten declared that universities had to help build a “pillar of national security” by serving the needs of industry and the military, particularly through the AUKUS pact, which is a preparation for war against China.
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In effect, Shorten spelt out the essential content of the Labor government’s Universities Accord, which demands the wholesale restructuring of universities to satisfy the employment and research demands of the corporate elite and preparations for war.
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Shorten placed Labor’s transformation of universities squarely in the context of war. “For the better part of three decades, Australia has enjoyed a holiday from history,” he said, but “that holiday is now over. We find ourselves in a world of escalating strategic competition.”
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He also insisted that universities had to “overcome the gaping chasm” between their research and “our ability to apply and commercialize it.” In other words, research, as well as teaching, had to be subordinated to the profit and strategic requirements of Australian capitalism.
16. Australia: Worker killed in Perth factory earmarked to build AUKUS submarine parts
On Monday September 8, a worker was killed on the job in Bassendean, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia (WA). The 45-year-old man, who was married and had a 10-year-old daughter, died at the Hofmann Engineering factory after being crushed by a falling steel object.
Paramedics rushed to the scene, but were unable to save the man, who is the second worker killed at the plant in a little over six years.
Despite his age, the man was working as an apprentice mechanical fitter, having reportedly changed careers to spend more time with his wife and child. Previously, he worked as a chef. Originally from South Korea, the man relocated to Australia a decade ago and became a permanent resident in 2023.
Steve McCartney, state secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), told the West Australian, “it’s clear this tragedy was preventable.”
McCartney said, “This guy is a first year apprentice, it doesn’t matter if you’re 15 or 50. … He should’ve had someone observing him and working with him.
“He was wrapping a six-meter forging ring … on a sloping floor.” McCartney explained that this “big heavy piece of kit,” weighing around 3 tonnes, “swept off the trestles and crushed him.”
A spokesman for Hofmann Engineering denied McCartney’s claim that the inexperienced worker was not under proper oversight. He said, “all employees, including apprentices, are appropriately supervised.”
Earlier, the company had released a statement, declaring “The safety and wellbeing of our employees is our highest priority.”
Hofmann Engineering’s safety record, however, is not without blemish....
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Hofmann Engineering, founded in 1969, designs and produces components for the defence sector, as well as the mining, transport, energy, manufacturing and agriculture industries. While headquartered in Bassendean, the company also has facilities across Australia, in Melbourne, Bendigo, Newcastle and Rockhampton, as well as locations in Canada, Chile, Peru, India and China.
On August 20, less than three weeks before the latest fatal incident, the WA and federal Labor governments jointly announced that Hofmann Engineering had been short-listed as a possible parts supplier for aircraft carriers being built for the US Navy.
State and federal ministers emphasized the significance of this as a first step towards Australian involvement in the construction of nuclear-powered submarines. The $368 billion submarine deal is part of the AUKUS agreement, the central purpose of which is to more thoroughly integrate Australia into US preparations for war against China.
17. United States: Wayne State University president resigns
Wayne State University President Kimberly Andrews Espy resigned September 17 as it was becoming clear the Board of Governors was planning to remove her. Located in the center of Detroit, Wayne State is Michigan's third-largest university, with nearly 24,000 graduate and undergraduate students, including a large number of Arab and Middle Eastern descent.
While Espy cited “personal reasons” for her resignation, there is little doubt that her ouster is related to a series of political convulsions on the campus involving students, faculty and administration, connected to the widespread protests over Israeli genocide in Gaza. Both Espy and the board were involved in repression of these protests.
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In reaction to Espy’s resignation, Jennifer Sheridan Moss, president of the Wayne Academic Union, told WXYZ television, “I don’t think it came out of nowhere. I think there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the previous president. We thought she was turning the campus into a police state essentially after the Palestinian encampment, after that was broken up.”
WSU senior Nuzmeya Abdrabboh told the station, “I think that it was a culmination of events that led up to this point: the ongoing lawsuit that Wayne State is experiencing against their students for violating their rights to free speech, taking down the encampment and arresting 12 students.”
The Wayne State Board of Governors presently has a 5-3 Democratic majority, and was 6-2 for Democrats during the period of the police attacks on anti-genocide protesters. It is chaired by Democrat Shirley Stancato, a longtime banking executive at Chase Bank who also has a seat on the board of Fifth Third Bank. Ford Motor executive Bryan C. Barnhill, another Democrat, is vice-chair. He previously worked for the real estate company controlled by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
Espy’s resignation was accepted at a 10-minute board meeting, without any explanation of why she was leaving. Whatever its differences with Espy, the Board of Governors is not sending her away empty-handed. She receives $730,000 severance, more than her annual base salary of $690,000, although that rose to nearly $1 million with benefits, expenses and other perks.
The board named Richard Bierschbach, dean of the Wayne State law school, as interim president, pending a search for a permanent replacement.
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Espy’s ouster may well be connected to a murky conflict within the Wayne State School of Medicine, one of the most prestigious facilities associated with the university. Last month, Espy placed the longtime dean of the School of Medicine, Dr. Wael Sakr, on paid leave pending an investigation into unspecified allegations against him.
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.
