Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel condemns Trump in return monologue watched by millions
Kimmel’s return, as the result of widespread outrage at ABC’s act of censorship and the huge audience it generated, represents a slap in the face for Donald Trump and his fascist cohorts.
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Kimmel is a comedian, not a political leader. However, in not bowing down before ABC, Disney, Carr or Trump, and in calling for public protests against Trump’s purge, Kimmel stands in stark contrast to the Democratic Party leadership, the New York Times and all those who adapted themselves quickly and unquestioningly to the pro-Kirk hysteria.
No prominent Democrats have called for the mobilization of opposition to Trump’s efforts to use the killing of the overtly racist and fascist podcaster as a pretext to criminalize political opposition. In fact, they enable Trump’s dictatorship. The Democrats, the official “opposition” but in fact also a party of the billionaires, fear nothing more than stirring up anger in the working class, which they sense is building and threatens to burst to the surface.
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Notwithstanding its sinister and very dangerous character, the attempt to make the antisemite and racist Charlie Kirk into a national hero has gone over with the majority of the American people like a lead balloon. A syllogism of an elementary kind, but with an infallible class logic, is passing through the minds of many: “Trump is for the rich, I hate Trump. He says we should celebrate Charlie Kirk—whoever he was. That’s good enough reason to distrust the whole Kirk hullabaloo.”
This failure to convince the public about Kirk only sends the far-right forces into greater hysteria. Trump fumed Tuesday night:
I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled. Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE.
A remarkable admission, that ABC assured the White House that Kimmel was “cancelled”!
Along with everything else, the Kimmel episode should help further dispel the myth that Trump is all-powerful, much less widely popular. A late-night comedian developed a mass following overnight because he stood up to Trump. This helps put things in proper perspective.
Trump and the oligarchy he represents—the Ellisons, Musks, Bezoses, Zuckerbergs—are held in contempt and despised by tens of millions. The crisis-ridden administration stays in power primarily because of the refusal of the Democrats, the trade unions, the official “left” to act. Their only role is to smother, strangle and suffocate each sign of protest and revolt. That will not continue “indefinitely” either.
2. The mass job cuts at TCS and the way forward for Indian IT workers
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT company, has initiated the biggest retrenchment in its history, eliminating around 12,000 jobs — roughly 2 percent of its global workforce. Trade union sources and media reports indicate the real number could be even higher.
These cuts come at a time when TCS is posting profits of over 120 billion rupees ($US 1.3 billion) every quarter, with profit margins near 20 percent.
On August 19, IT workers held protests outside TCS offices across India, including in Chennai, Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad. While limited and organised with the support of a union with the ties to the Stalinist-led Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the protests were significant, indicating that a section of IT workers is increasingly recognizing the need for collective action and identifying themselves as part of the working class. Long isolated behind corporate gates and branded “middle class” by the media and their employers, IT workers are entering on the path of class struggle.
Since the commencement of the Israeli war against the Palestinians nearly two years ago, the German-Jewish violinist Michael Barenboim—son of outstanding musician and conductor, Daniel Barenboim—has been one of the most active defenders of the rights of the people of Palestine. From the age of 14, Michael Barenboim has been a member of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, his father’s innovative project bringing together leading young Israeli and Arab musicians.
On Saturday, 21 September—World Children’s Day—Michael Barenboim was the main speaker at a gathering of musicians in Berlin’s historic Gendarmenmarkt, home to the city’s magnificent concert house.
Against a background of huge blowups of some of the small children murdered in Gaza by Israeli military bombardments, and following a thoroughly moving program of classical and Arabic music by the assembled mass choir and orchestra consisting of international singers and musicians, the distinguished violinist Barenboim listed the crimes carried out by the Israeli army under the direction of the fascist-dominated cabinet in Jerusalem.
To the repeated refrain “Today is World Children’s Day” Barenboim noted:
Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is also a cruel mass murder of children. In Gaza, at least one school class is murdered by Israel every day. This is the third school year in which Palestinian children have no access to education because Israel has already destroyed 90 per cent of the schools. There are more children with amputations in Gaza than anywhere else in the world. A new acronym had to be created to describe a bitter, cruel reality: “wounded child/no surviving family.”
4. Australia: As anger mounts, unions assist job destruction at Western Sydney University
A WSU meeting demonstrated how far union officials are going to trap university workers in sham “consultation” processes and oppose any unified fight against the estimated 4,000 job losses throughout Australia’s 39 public universities.
5. Framed-up Chinese scientist at University of Michigan pleads not guilty
At a hearing in Detroit on September 18, Yunqing Jian, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan (U-Mich), entered a plea of “not guilty” to politically motivated federal charges. Jian faces a vicious state campaign that has seen the 33-year-old plant biologist incarcerated without bail for over three months and branded an “agroterrorist” and spy for the Chinese Communist Party.
The court, while accepting her not guilty plea, simultaneously scheduled her next appearance on November 13 for both a plea hearing and a sentencing hearing. This seemingly contradictory scheduling is a procedural indication of the immense pressure being brought to bear on Jian to capitulate. The court is evidently proceeding on the assumption that the ordeal of indefinite pre-trial detention will force her to accept a plea deal.
Jian was re-arraigned on a new criminal information after prosecutors dropped a visa fraud charge while proceeding with charges of conspiracy, smuggling, and making false statements, which carry a potential 25-year prison term. Her alleged crime is conspiring to transport samples of a common plant fungus for scientific research.
The scheduling of a plea hearing and sentencing on the same day is a feature of the American plea-bargaining system, which resolves over 90 percent of federal criminal cases without a trial. A defendant’s formal plea is “not guilty” until they change it in open court. The court’s calendar, however, is a weapon in the state’s psychological campaign to secure the change of plea.
Typically, in a felony case, a significant gap of a month or more separates a guilty plea from sentencing. This allows for a Presentence Investigation Report (PSR) to be prepared by probation officers. The defense must be given this report at least 35 days before sentencing, a right that can only be relinquished if the defendant waives it. By scheduling both events for November 13, the court signals its expectation that Jian will not only plead guilty or no contest but will also waive her right to the standard pre-sentencing review, expediting her own conviction.
The choice presented to Jian is capitulating to a pre-arranged deal versus the prospect of remaining in jail to fight a trial where she faces decades in prison. Whatever her choice, the essential objectives of this witch-hunt have already been accomplished: the destruction of a young scientist’s career, the terrorizing of Chinese students and researchers across the country, and the reinforcement of the anti-China war drive.
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The frame-up of Jian is not an isolated incident but follows a well-established playbook for the political persecution of scientists of Chinese descent. The immediate precursor was the case of Chengxuan Han, a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate arrested just days after Jian for transporting common, non-hazardous biological materials for her research.
Han was subjected to the same template: held without bail for three months at the same jail as Jian and vilified with racist smears, with the DOJ referring to her as an “alien from Wuhan” to associate her with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Wuhan Lab Lie. She pleaded “no contest” on August 19. When her case came to sentencing on September 10, however, the government’s fear-mongering narrative collapsed. US District Judge Matthew Leitman stated from the bench, “This is not a case of smuggling in some sort of virus or a crop-destroying something or other… From what I can tell, this material was not a threat at all.”
Judge Leitman sentenced Han to time served and released her, whereupon the government immediately deported her back to China.
The government is fully aware that its case against Jian is just as baseless as its case against Han. The state’s strategy is to use the immense punitive power of the pre-trial process—the denial of bail and months of incarceration—to secure a conviction on lesser charges.
The historical archetype for these frame-ups is the 1999 persecution of Dr. Wen Ho Lee. A nuclear physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lee was targeted through racial profiling and became the subject of a state-led witch-hunt accusing him of giving China the secrets to the W-88 nuclear warhead. The central tactic was coercive pre-trial punishment. He was held for nine months in solitary confinement without bail, deemed a “clear and present danger.”
Ultimately, Lee was released after pleading guilty to a single felony count of mishandling data, with 58 other counts dropped. The case concluded with an extraordinary apology from the presiding federal judge, James A. Parker, who told Lee: “I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner in which you were held in custody by the executive branch.”
Jacobin magazine, the most prominent publication linked to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), held a conference in New York City under the banner “Socialism in Our Time” on September 13 to mark its 15th anniversary. The event, which drew around 200 participants, epitomized the moods of pessimism, demoralization, and political paralysis promoted by the DSA to serve a specific political function: to channel opposition to inequality and war back behind the Democratic Party, of which the DSA is a faction.
Throughout the course of the 10-hour gathering, Jacobin offered scarcely any appraisal of the political situation in the United States. Instead of clarifying the scale of the crisis or outlining a perspective for struggle, the conference sought to cultivate resignation and lower expectations.
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No panelists addressed the significance of the Trump administration—its deployment of the military in US cities, fascistic campaign against immigrants and open rejection of constitutional limits—or the deeper processes driving the collapse of democratic rule: unprecedented inequality, America’s declining global position, massive debt, the breakdown of postwar alliances and the acceleration of war, including genocide in Gaza and conflict between nuclear-armed powers.
On its pages, Jacobin carries out a continuous cover-up of the Trump administration’s actions. It has published nothing on the fascist rally held over the weekend as a memorial for Kirk. The reality of dictatorship must be denied because Jacobin is irreconcilably opposed to what flows from this reality: the necessity for a revolutionary response.
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The notion that socialism lies centuries in the future, if it comes at all, did not prevent Jacobin from convening a panel titled, “The Blueprint: Socialism after Capitalism.” Panelist Ben Burgis defended the drawing up of such utopian schemes, even if never realized, as a way to persuade people of socialism’s desirability. Yet even in this exercise, the panelists could not imagine socialism beyond the framework of minor reforms, relying on the “tools that Keynesianism gave us.”
The combination of these two seemingly contradictory ideas—that socialism is off the table for the foreseeable future and that it is nonetheless necessary to draw up a plan for socialism—is not unique to Jacobin and follows a definite logic. WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North, in a polemic written two years before Jacobin’s founding, explained:
The task of the Marxist movement was not to spur the workers on with the mirage of an illusory utopia, but, rather to develop, within the advanced sections of the working class, a scientific understanding of history as a law-governed process, a knowledge of the capitalist mode of production and the social relations to which it gives rise, and an insight into the real nature of the present crisis and its world-historical implications... This conception is opposed by those ‘who see no basis for socialism in the objective conditions created by capitalism itself, who have been demoralized by the experience of defeats and setbacks, and who neither understand the nature of the capitalist crisis nor perceive the revolutionary potential of the working class...’
Jacobin, which advertised its conference with a poster of Karl Marx, is in fact bitterly hostile to Marxism, particularly to its founder’s insistence that the working class organize itself independently of all factions of the bourgeoisie. For Jacobin and the DSA, there is no crisis of capitalism and therefore no objective basis for socialism, and certainly no need to mobilize the working class in opposition to the Democratic Party and the ruling class.
This role of channeling leftward-moving sentiment into the dead end of the Democratic Party was most clearly expressed in the panel titled, “Municipal Socialism and Its Limits: The Mamdani Moment in New York City.”
With Zohran Mamdani poised to become mayor of New York in November, the DSA will likely have one of its own leading the largest city in the country and the center of global finance capital. Mamdani won support on pledges to confront the affordability crisis and on the popular rejection of the pro-corporate Democratic establishment and its capitulation to Trump. But since securing the Democratic nomination in June, he has gone out of his way to reassure the party leadership and the corporate and financial elite that he can be trusted to serve their interests—a clear indication of what is to come in January and beyond.
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As the Socialist Equality Party statement on Saturday stressed, “The Democrats, the unions and the media cultivate the myth of an all-powerful government while insisting that nothing can be done. This is a lie. What is lacking is not mass opposition but, rather, a political strategy to guide and organize the struggle against Trump’s assault on democratic rights… Our program is not for the pessimists, the skeptics and the demoralized, but for the fighters among workers, students, youth, professionals, artists and intellectuals. There is no time to lose.”
7. Manual dexterity and the human brain evolved together
A century and a half ago, Frederick Engels, in an unpublished 1876 essay titled, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man (International Publishers 1950), identified the evolution of the hand as a key component of human evolution. He proposed that the development of bipedality, walking upright using the hind limbs only, freed the hands to perform labor: “the hand had become free [emphasis in the original] and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity and skill… Thus the hand is not only the organ of labor, it is also the product of labor” [emphasis in the original].
Engels went on to say that the evolution of the hand did not occur alone but was part of the coordinated development of other associated body parts.
A newly published study (“Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand,” Joanna Baker, Robert A. Barton and Chris Venditti, Nature communications biology, 26 August 2025) provides new insights into the coevolution of the hand and the brain.
8. Halt the police-state searches at Ford factories! Reinstate every victimized worker!
Over the past few days, there have been multiple suspensions and terminations of workers who refused to permit searches, including the two-week suspension of a worker with 25 to 30 years with no previous disciplinary issues.
9. Supreme Court uses shadow docket to uphold Trump’s termination of Federal Trade commissioner
The extreme right-wing Supreme Court majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s summary termination of a member of the Federal Trade Commission, setting the stage for using her case to strip Congress of legislative power to establish federal agencies independent of the executive, a major step in the erection of a dictatorship.
Early Wednesday morning, a sniper from a rooftop fired multiple rounds at immigrants being transferred at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Dallas, Texas. As of this writing at least one detained immigrant has been killed, and two others are seriously injured.
So far, the names of the immigrants killed/injured have not been released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Mexican Consulate General in Dallas confirmed one of those critically injured is from Mexico.
The killing of at least one immigrant on Wednesday marks at least the 16th killing of a person while in the custody of the immigration gestapo this year.
Police claim the shooter, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, took his own life with the rifle used in the attack as police were closing in on him. Reports indicate that Jahn did not have a violent history but was previously arrested in Collin County, Texas, in 2015 for a marijuana possession charge.
Police claim to have also recovered Jahn’s car, a blue Toyota Corolla. On the rear passenger panel of the vehicle, a paper map of the continental United States was affixed. The map featured large black blots across much of the country and was captioned: “Radioactive fallout from nuclear detonations have passed over these areas more than 2x since 1951.”
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While there is still much not known about the shooter or his motives, this has not prevented the Trump administration and Republicans from seizing on the killing of immigrants to attack their political opponents and advance their fascist political agenda. Similar to the shooting of fascist political operative Charlie Kirk, the Dallas attack is being used by the ruling class to attack the democratic rights of everyone.
Less than two hours after the attack began, FBI Director Kash Patel claimed there was an “idealogical [sic] motive behind this attack.” Patel posted a picture of five cartridges on the wet pavement. On one the cartridges the phrase “ANTI-ICE” was written in a blue marker.
It is unclear if Jahn wrote this message. “ANTI-ICE” is a not a popular slogan used by opponents of ICE or Trump’s mass deportation operation.
In an interview with Reuters, Jason Jahn, Joshua’s brother, said Joshua was not interested in politics and did not express either anti-ICE or anti-immigration views. Jason said he had “never once heard him talk about ICE” and was shocked by the alleged inscription on the bullets.
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While no clear motive has emerged, this has not prevented Republicans, including President Donald Trump, from designating the killer as a politically motivated left-wing extremist....*****
Speaking in front of a black police urban assault vehicle in Concord, North Carolina, Vice President JD Vance claimed the shooter was a “violent left-wing extremist” and that “there is some evidence that we have that’s not yet public but we know this person was politically motivated, they were politically motivated to go after law enforcement. They were politically motivated to go after people who were enforcing our border. And I think that is the most disgusting thing.”
Hours after this speech was given, neither Vance nor law enforcement have produced any corroborating evidence that the shooter was part of a left-wing group or had a particular disdain for police.
This did not prevent Vance from blaming left-wing opponents of the Trump-Vance administration: “If you want to stop political violence, stop attacking our law enforcement as the gestapo. If you want to stop political violence stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi.”
In 2016, before he excised what little was left of his ability to speak a truth (and before he became a political figure in the Republican Party), Vance publicly and privately characterized Trump as “America’s Hitler.”
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ICE agents are widely hated not because of Democratic Party rhetoric, which is non-existent or effusive in praise of ICE and the police, but because broad sections of the population, who still support democratic rights, including the right to asylum, are outraged over the daily attacks on workers and their families.
Millions of people in the US, including workers and students, are hostile to the heavily armed, masked thugs kidnapping their co-workers, friends and family members. And they suspect that these forces will soon be turned against them the moment they resist the increasingly fascist Trump regime and the criminal financial oligarchy he represents. The police, including immigration agents, do not exist to protect the working class but to wage war on working class families and workers.
Far from trying to “tone down the rhetoric,” Trump administration officials, and the official DHS social media accounts, regularly post fascistic content glorifying their criminal operations while dehumanizing immigrants. A video posted on X by DHS on September 22 compares immigrants to Pokemon cards, using the song, “Catch ‘em all,” set to violent imagery of federal agents blowing open doors and placing people in chains. Following the post, DHS began posting Pokemon-style cards featuring immigrants taken by the agency along with their alleged crimes.
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As of September 7, over 58,000 people were being held in ICE concentration camps across the country. Over 70 percent of those held have no criminal record.
11. Perspective: Trump’s anti-science crusade against autism and the modern revival of eugenics
Monday’s White House press conference on autism, led by Donald Trump, was the most extreme assault on medical science by any president or other elected official in American history. Flanked by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other HHS officials, Trump made demonstrably false and dangerous claims connecting vaccines and acetaminophen use during pregnancy to autism, in blatant contradiction to decades of rigorous scientific research.
In the course of his unhinged remarks, Trump repeated variations of “don’t take Tylenol” dozens of times within less than one hour. Multiple studies have found no connection between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism, including a 2024 Swedish study involving nearly 2.5 million children. Trump and Kennedy portrayed autism as an “epidemic,” wildly inflating the increased prevalence of the condition in recent decades and dismissing the expert consensus that the primary driver of this increase is broadened awareness and diagnostic criteria.
Trump spouted long-debunked myths of the anti-vaccine movement, including that no Amish people are autistic because they do not vaccinate. He falsely claimed that children “get these massive vaccines like you’d give to a horse,” asserting they contain “sometimes 80 different vaccines in them.” In reality, the childhood vaccine schedule involves 12 vaccines from birth through age six.
Trump’s statements, which according to inside sources were “off script,” generated precisely the confusion he intended. Immediately, healthcare providers across the US became inundated with calls from concerned parents.
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While Trump gave the appearance of a semi-senile idiot, underlying his deranged ravings and those of Kennedy are much darker forces and motives.
By terrorizing pregnant women with false claims about acetaminophen safety and promoting dangerous delays in childhood vaccination, the Trump administration is shifting responsibility from the government and healthcare providers to individual parents and families. Trump’s intended message is that if parents cause their children’s autism through their own choices, why should the government bear the cost of support services?
Furthermore, Trump is seeking to undermine people’s trust in science and scientific institutions, portraying them as essentially lying and concealing the real cause of autism.
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Perhaps the most alarming element of the Trump administration’s promotion of disinformation about autism is the central role being played by David Geier. In the 2000s, Geier, alongside his father Mark, promoted fraudulent theories connecting autism to mercury and testosterone. As a supposed “miracle cure,” they administered Lupron injections to hundreds of autistic children despite knowing that this could cause chemical castration. As a result, Mark Geier had his medical licenses revoked in all 12 states where he practiced, while David Geier, who holds only a bachelor’s degree and is not a physician, was fined $10,000 for practicing medicine without a license.
In late March, Kennedy appointed David Geier as a “senior data analyst” at HHS to run clinical trials looking to tie vaccines to autism, while giving him broad access to CDC databases. While HHS abandoned explicit “autism registry” plans after public outcry, Geier now oversees a $50 million autism data collection initiative that privacy advocates warn could enable harmful research targeting autistic individuals, effectively continuing his eugenicist agenda under government authority.
Kennedy, Geier, Trump and the ghouls now running the various HHS agencies are reviving the same eugenicist ideology that animated large sections of the American right in the early 20th century and provided the intellectual foundation for Nazi racial hygiene policies.
The Nazi T4 program, which began with the systematic murder of disabled people, serves as the historical precedent for what is now unfolding. The program targeted people with conditions, including epilepsy, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and schizophrenia, as well as communication and developmental disorders that today would fall under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The Nazis established medical panels to approve the “euthanasia” of disabled children and adults as “mercy killings,” using physicians to oversee gassings in chambers disguised as showers. The murder of disabled people became the testing ground for the Holocaust’s gas chambers and mass deportations.
The modern eugenics revival was also expressed by Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade’s recent statement that homeless people with mental illness should receive “lethal injections,” while the parallels between the Nazis’ concentration camp system and Trump’s mass deportation program are unmistakable. Masked ICE agents now prowl American streets, spiriting away immigrants to concentration camps dotted across the US, to Guantanamo Bay, or to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison, all with conditions which amount to torture.
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Significantly, eugenicist conceptions were also advanced under the Biden administration. In January 2022, amid the devastating first Omicron wave, then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared that the fact that COVID-19 predominantly kills people who are “unwell to begin with” was “encouraging news.” Amid the August 2023 COVID wave, Anthony Fauci blithely declared that older people, the ill and disabled “will fall by the wayside.” Both Walensky and Fauci implied that the lives of elderly, chronically ill and disabled people were less valuable than healthy ones.
Over the past eight months, the Trump administration has carried out a systematic assault on all scientific institutions, cutting the positions of over 20,000 federal public health workers and scientists, canceling more than 800 research grants, and imposing crippling budget cuts on all HHS agencies.
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The response of the Democratic Party reveals their fundamental allegiance to the same corporate interests that Trump serves. The attacks on vaccines are part of the bipartisan ruling class policy of lowering workers’ life expectancy, reducing pension obligations, and gutting all public health and social services. Trump expresses this most crudely, but the fundamental drive to reduce social expenditures through the deliberate shortening of working class lifespans enjoys complete bipartisan support, which explains why no Democrats have sought to mobilize opposition against these attacks on science.
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The defense of science and public health requires the independent mobilization of the working class based on a socialist program. The oligarchy’s embrace of eugenics reflects its understanding that genuine public health measures conflict fundamentally with its class interests. Only through the overthrow of the capitalist system that has elevated such figures to power can humanity defend itself against the barbarism that Trump and his backers represent.
12. CUPE imposes arbitration after Air Canada flight attendants’ 99% rejection of sellout wage deal
Last week’s agreement by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) to scrap three days of mediation over wages and rush Air Canada flight attendants into binding arbitration is the latest stage in the union bureaucracy’s betrayal of a militant struggle that defied the state and threatened to galvanize workers across Canada.
“The union spent nine months bargaining in good faith with the company on wages and saw no evidence that an additional three days of mediation will yield an acceptable result. The union is therefore seeking an expedited process that will put money in our members’ pockets and conclude this process as quickly as possible,” CUPE’s Air Canada component said in a statement, justifying its latest capitulation.
Less than two weeks earlier, over 10,500 flight attendants delivered a resounding rebuke to Air Canada management, the Carney Liberal government, and the union apparatus itself by voting 99.1 percent against a wage deal CUPE had proclaimed as “transformational.” With a turnout of nearly 95 percent, the result expressed the overwhelming hostility of the rank and file to an agreement that offered nothing but real-terms pay cuts, the continuation of unpaid labour, and a surrender of basic democratic rights.
The vote exposed in stark relief the fraudulent character of the “collective bargaining” framework and the unions’ role as its chief enforcers. Under the terms of CUPE’s hastily cut deal with management and the government—worked out behind workers’ backs in late-night talks to shut down their defiance of a back-to-work order last month—the only section of the contract that workers were even permitted to vote on was wages.
John, who provided testimony to the public hearing on the death of fellow skilled tradesman Ronald Adams Sr., spoke recently with the World Socialist Web Site about the hearing and about how to build a working class movement against dictatorship.
14. After Tricolor collapse another indebted US auto-connected firm goes under
The US auto company, First Brands, involved in the sale of parts and highly dependent on debt, is facing bankruptcy, with its creditors involved to the tune of billions of dollars.
On June 3, 2025, Eric Smith, a 59-year-old electronic technician with nearly thirty years of service with the United States Postal Service (USPS), collapsed while on duty at the Palmetto, Georgia Regional Processing and Distribution Center (RPDC). Smith was rushed to Piedmont Newnan Hospital but could not be saved.
Co-workers remembered Smith as friendly, kind and hard-working, a man who took pride in his decades of service as a USPS electronic technician. Outside of work, he loved motorcycle riding and was an active member of a local riding club. Beyond one local news item and a brief USPS condolence statement, there has been no follow-up reporting on the circumstances of his death, no medical examiner’s determination made public, and no comment from the postal unions beyond general expressions of sympathy.
The silence surrounding his passing, like that which followed the death of Shannon Barnes at the same facility less than a year earlier, highlights the indifference of USPS management, the federal government and the union bureaucracy to the lives of postal workers.
Barnes, 48, collapsed during her night shift on August 18, 2024. Doctors later told her family she had suffered a brain aneurysm. Co-workers said there was no cell service inside the building, forcing someone to run outside to call 911. By the time paramedics arrived, Barnes could not be saved. Her death should have been a wake-up call: a modern facility with no reliable way to summon emergency help is a disaster waiting to happen. Yet nearly a year later, the same vulnerabilities remained.
At roughly one million square feet, more than 17 football fields, the Palmetto RPDC is so vast that walking from one end to the other can take several minutes. The floor is filled with conveyor belts, forklifts, and rolling containers. Workers report aisles blocked with mail containers and clutter, forcing detours that add precious minutes in an emergency.
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The Palmetto RPDC opened in February 2024 as part of Delivering for America (DFA), the USPS’s ten-year plan to “modernize” mail operations. DFA aims to consolidate hundreds of local processing centers into about sixty massive hubs. This program is a major step towards the decades-long goal of corporate America to convert the post office into a private entity.
Palmetto has become a choke point for all classes of mail collected in the area. Tractor-trailers have been documented waiting hours to unload, and the OIG warned that even one “adverse event” could gridlock the entire facility and ripple through the network. For workers, this means starting each shift facing piles of unprocessed mail, clearing jammed conveyors, and hauling heavy containers under relentless pressure to meet dispatch times.
A medical emergency like Smith’s then becomes a test of a system already at its limits. Was there a delay in summoning medical help? Was emergency equipment up to date? Were enough trained staff on duty to respond? These questions remain unanswered by USPS management, the OIG, or OSHA. Until they are, workers remain at risk.
The Postal Regulatory Commission’s January 2025 Advisory Opinion on DFA called the USPS’s cost-savings projections “defective” and warned the plan could result in “months of degraded service performance” if implemented before facilities are ready. Postmaster General David Steiner, like his predecessor Louis DeJoy, has brushed these findings aside and continued the consolidation drive.
Eric Smith’s death, and that of Shannon Barnes’s before him, show the human price of this policy. These were not inevitable tragedies but predictable results of a system where safety, staffing and communication are subordinated to cost-cutting.
In a March statement, the USPS Rank-and-File Committee (RFC) warned that the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU) have done nothing to stop the unsafe rollout of DFA.
Under DeJoy’s plan, USPS signed an agreement with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate 10,000 jobs through early retirement, even as facilities like Palmetto were already dangerously short-staffed. “In the face of the deepest attacks in the 250-year history of the post office,” the RFC wrote, “the union officials … have not proposed, much less organized, a serious struggle.” Rather than mobilizing resistance, the unions have partnered with management, leaving workers isolated as fatalities mount.
16. No Trump-Albanese meeting amid demands for increased Australian military spending
It is increasingly clear that the US is demanding an even greater military build-up by Australia, as the quid pro quo for a meeting between Albanese and Trump.
17. Sri Lankan president invokes essential services act against power workers
Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake imposed essential service orders on state-owned Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) effective from Sunday midnight to suppress the weeks-long struggle of CEB workers against restructuring and in defense of their jobs and conditions.
n Tuesday, his Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government cancelled leave for all CEB workers until further notice—a move aimed at blocking any sick-note stoppage.
According to Sunday’s gazette notification issued by Dissanayake, all electricity supply services are declared essential. This anti-democratic measure allows the government to ban industrial action by electricity workers.
Non-compliance can lead to a summary magistrate’s trial, with guilty individuals facing two to five years of rigorous imprisonment, a fine between 2,000 rupees and 5,000 rupees, or both. Campaigning for such industrial action is also an offense, punishable by the same penalties.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) calls on all sections of the working class to condemn the JVP/NPP government’s repressive measures against CEB workers, and urges everyone to stand in their defense.
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Dissanayake’s new moves to suppress the CEB workers’ struggle has the support of the entire political establishment. Yesterday, the parliament approved the president’s essential service order without debate as the leaders of all parliamentary parties had given their approval the previous day.
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Just one year after coming to power, Dissanayake has declared war on electricity workers. This is a warning to all workers, who are being pushed into struggle by the government’s implementation of the IMF diktats. The president’s invocation of the essential services act is a declaration of war against the working class as a whole.
The JVP/NPP government came to power last year under conditions of deep economic and political crisis by exploiting the immense popular opposition to the traditional parties of bourgeois rule. It put forward a raft of election promises claiming it would renegotiate the terms of the country’s IMF bailout loan, protect democracy and improve the living conditions of the masses. Once in office, Dissanayake quickly tore up his pledges including to renegotiate the IMF’s terms.
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There are two main reasons why the Dissanayake government is attacking CEB workers. Firstly, the government is strictly bound by IMF directives and faces being denied the next installment of the IMF loan if it fails to fully carry them out.
Secondly, Dissanayake fears that if the CEB struggle continues it will encourage other sections of workers to oppose the IMF austerity measures that are devastating living standards.
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Workers and the poor cannot defend their basic rights within the framework of the capitalist system. The declaration of war by the Dissanayake government against the CEB workers highlights the need for the unified political movement of the working class—Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim—based on a socialist perspective.
This must include the nationalization of the major corporations, banks and plantations under workers’ democratic control, and the bringing to power of a workers’ and peasants’ government to implement such measures. We call on workers and youth who want to fight for this perspective to join the Socialist Equality Party (SEP).
18. The fascists are needed: Leader of Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn released from prison early
A little under two weeks ago, on September 12 , the Greek fascist Nikos Michaloliakos was released early from prison into home detention. The Court of Appeal in Lamia granted his application for release on “health grounds”. The notorious leader of the Greek neo-Nazi party Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) had been sentenced in 2020 to 13 years and six months in prison after his party was classified as a “criminal organization”.
The Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler bears responsibility for numerous acts of violence against left-wingers and migrants. Having served not even half his sentence, he may now serve the remainder under house arrest in his hometown of Pefki, north-east of Athens. Refugees, by contrast, are monitored with electronic ankle tags since the latest tightening of the asylum law and are thrown into prison if they are denied asylum. One can be certain the neo-Nazis will eagerly assist the police in tracking down and violently arresting these desperate people.
As early as May 2024, Michaloliakos had been conditionally released for the first time but had to return to prison after a month because he continued to spread his fascist agitation in online articles. Since there was a suspicion he might commit further offences, his continued imprisonment was ordered.
The renewed release of Michaloliakos sends an unmistakable message: neo-Nazis who terrorize workers and refugees need not fear spending years behind bars. On the contrary, the fascists are needed. The faster the social crisis in Greece intensifies, and strikes and protests challenge the government under the right-wing New Democracy (ND), the more strongly the ruling class will rely on far-right forces and goon squads to divide and suppress the working class. This dangerous logic can be observed across the world, especially in the United States under the fascist Donald Trump and in Britain under the Starmer government.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has shown, there are close links between Golden Dawn and the Greek state, particularly among police and military circles. It is no coincidence that the party gained influence during the Greek financial and debt crisis from 2009/2010. It was systematically promoted politically, received large donations from business, and was given media attention.
When Greek governments—under ND, the social-democratic PASOK and the pseudo-left Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left)—enforced the European Union’s and International Monetary Fund’s austerity diktats with merciless severity, democratic rights were simultaneously curtailed and authoritarian structures strengthened to suppress ongoing resistance by workers to wage and pension cuts. In this situation, Golden Dawn proved highly useful to the ruling elite, terrorising workers and refugees with its incitement and paramilitary units.
Golden Dawn’s breakthrough came when the far-right party Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) was included in the technocratic government in 2011 at the suggestion of EU representatives. This step—unprecedented since the end of the military junta—made far-right positions respectable again.
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The early release of Michaloliakos exposes the role of Syriza and other pseudo-left organisations, which five years ago hailed the verdict against Golden Dawn as a “milestone” and a “turning point for the struggles of the working class”.
Now Syriza laments that the early release contravenes “the democratic convictions of the Greek population and the fundamental principles of the rule of law”. It is time, it says, for “democratic parties, social movements, collectives and all democratic citizens to intensify their struggle against fascism in all its forms and against fascist practices”.
From the mouth of the party that itself formed a governing coalition in 2015 with the ultra-right ANEL (Independent Greeks) and, with its policy of social butchery, strengthened the far-right, this statement represents nothing but scorn and hypocrisy. At the same time, Syriza fuels the dangerous illusion—by appealing to “the rule of law” and “democratic parties”—that one can rely on the judiciary and the capitalist parties in the fight against the fascists.
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Indeed, the ruling ND party, in office since Syriza’s defeat in 2019, has implemented the far-right’s program ever more openly and aggressively. It has hollowed out the welfare state, attacked fundamental workers’ rights such as the right to strike, criminalized refugees and driven them to their deaths, spread nationalist incitement, and massively intensified military rearmament.
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Anyone who truly wants to combat the influence of fascists like Nikos Michaloliakos and his neo-Nazi gangs must not look to the state, nor to pseudo-left parties like Syriza, nor to the Antifa actions of anarchists. The far-right can only be halted if the cause of fascism is abolished: the capitalist system. This political struggle requires the international unification of the working class in its own revolutionary party—the International Committee of the Fourth International.
19. Israel attacks third humanitarian Freedom/Sumud Flotilla bound for Gaza
Over 50 vessels from various organisations—the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, Global March to Gaza, and Thousand Madleens to Gaza—carrying 500 volunteers from 44 countries are currently off the coast of Crete. The main contingent launched from Barcelona on August 31, with more ships joining later from Bizerte in Tunisia and August in Sicily.
Their purpose is to draw attention to the illegal blockade of Gaza and the famine that is being perpetrated against the Palestinians by the Israeli government.
Two attacks in two days earlier this month saw incendiary devices dropped on two different boats—the Family Boat and the flagship Alma—while they were moored in Tunisia.
This week, the Flotilla reported, “Multiple drones, unidentified objects dropped, communications jammed and explosions heard from a number of boats. We are witnessing these psychological operations first-hand, right now, but we will not be intimidated.”
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The Israeli government has refused to comment on the attacks while continuing to threaten the flotilla. On Tuesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed the boats were “pursuing a violent course of action” and that their mission was “organized by Hamas” and “intended to serve Hamas”.
Two previous attempts to deliver aid by sea this year have been blocked by Israeli armed forces. In June, the Madleen was raided and its crew arrested and deported. In May, the Conscience was hit by drones off the coast of Malta and had to be rescued.
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The drone attacks Tuesday and Wednesday came just hours after tens of thousands of Italian workers and young people held protests Monday in up to 80 towns and cities against Israel’s onslaught.
Ten days ago, over 100,000 protesters took to the streets in Madrid, blocking the final stage of Spanish Vuelta cycling race due to of the participation of the Israel–Premier Tech cycling team. Further anti-genocide protests were held across Spain on September 18.
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The general silence in Europe over the drone attacks on the Sumud Flotilla is in marked contrast to the flurry of condemnations over drones sighted near Copenhagen and Oslo airports, causing their closure, on Monday. NATO powers lost no time in pointing to Russia as the culprit and condemning its alleged effort to “disrupt and create unrest” in the strongest possible terms.
More drone sightings on Wednesday and Thursday closed Aalborg airport, and affected others in Esbjerg, Sønderborg and Skrydstrup. Danish defense minister Troels Lund Poulsen said the country was considering invoking NATO’s Article 4 for the first time in its history. Poulsen added that “In addition to Article 4, there are other things that can be done through NATO.”
20. 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.
