Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: September 8-14
- 25 years ago:
Mass protests over fuel prices rock Europe
50 years ago:
New York City teachers strike
75 years ago:
US warplanes use napalm against Korean civilians
100 years ago:
British unions make “left” gesture to stave off working-class militancy
2. Trump makes Chicago first target for his Department of Civil War
On Saturday morning, US President Donald Trump declared war on the third-largest city in the country, Chicago. His Truth Social media account posted an elaborate graphic image showing Trump directing a wave of attack helicopters against the city’s skyline, alongside the headline “Chipocalypse Now.”
Both the image, the title and the accompanying phrase, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” refer to the 1979 Vietnam War film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, “Apocalypse Now.” The graphic, apparently put together using AI at Trump’s direction, puts Trump in the role of the crazed officer and war criminal portrayed by Robert Duvall, who loved “the smell of napalm in the morning” as American imperialism murdered the Vietnamese population.
Below the image is written: “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” Trump was boasting about his executive order, signed Friday, to rename the Department of Defense, the largest military establishment on the planet, the Department of War.
A more appropriate name would be the Department of Civil War, as the Trump administration is targeting the violence of the military police apparatus on the American population. Trump and his aides have made clear that the deployments in DC and Chicago will be followed by dozens of other US cities.
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Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan announced Sunday that Chicago and other “sanctuary cities” should expect mass raids backed by National Guard troops. Meanwhile, troops are being mobilized in Louisiana for deployment in New Orleans.
Trump is acting on behalf of the billionaires and corporate bosses whose corruption, greed and hostility to democratic rights he personifies. The class character of this assault was underscored last week when Trump met in Washington with a group of tech billionaires and financiers, including Google’s Sergey Brin, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. The oligarchy is openly aligning themselves with Trump’s dictatorship, recognizing that their wealth and power depend on crushing democratic rights and suppressing the resistance of the working class.
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There is a staggering contradiction between the scale of Trump’s assault on democratic rights and the response of the media, the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus.
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But the issues now confronting workers cannot be ignored. The Socialist Equality Party insists that only the working class, organized independently of the union bureaucracy and the Democrats, can stop the establishment of dictatorship.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote on August 20:
In the absence of opposition from within the existing political structure, the center of resistance to Trump must move to the working class. The basic political questions that must be answered are: What must be done by the working class, with the support of students and all progressive forces within society, to stop the establishment of a dictatorship in the United States? What are the new forms of organized mass action, including a general strike, required to defend the democratic rights of the working class? What changes in the economic and social structure of the country are necessary to break the power of the financial-corporate oligarchy?
These questions must become the subject of discussion in every workplace, neighborhood and school. Workers must organize to demand and fight for an end to dictatorship and repression, uniting native-born and immigrant workers alike against ICE raids and mass roundups. They must oppose the squandering of billions of dollars on imperialist war while social needs go unmet, resist the attacks on science and public health, and insist on safe workplaces where lives are valued above profit.
Flight attendants at Air Canada have delivered a stunning rebuke to management, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) bureaucracy, and Mark Carney’s Liberal government by decisively voting down the tentative wage agreement that brought an end to their three-day strike last month. The result, announced Saturday, saw a 99.1 percent “No” vote on a turnout of 94.6 percent, with workers trashing an agreement CUPE had trumpeted as “transformational.”
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The vote’s outcome underlines the urgent necessity of flight attendants at Air Canada and across North America, as well as workers in every economic sector, establishing their organizational and political independence from the trade union bureaucracy. Rank-and-file committees, controlled by flight attendants, must be built at every workplace and unified into a network of rank-and-file committees to coordinate an industrial and political struggle by the working class to put an end to the prioritizing of corporate profits over workers’ rights in the airline industry.
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The CUPE bureaucracy felt compelled to sanction the workers’ decision to defy the government, but they did so the better to stab the workers in the back. During the third day of the strike, the CUPE leadership entered marathon talks with Air Canada management overseen by government-appointed mediator William Kaplan. In the early hours of Tuesday, August 19, CUPE announced an “agreement” with the company, claiming that it put an end to unpaid labour at Air Canada. However, in a powerful indication that the terms of the agreement were a sellout, the union barred the workers from voting on the majority of its provisions.
Moreover, to ensure that the vote of the rank and file was essentially meaningless, CUPE agreed that in the event flight attendants voted down the deal, all outstanding questions in the agreement would be subject to binding arbitration after a token three-day period of mediation.
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The main reason behind CUPE’s rush to sabotage the flight attendants’ defiance of the government’s strikebreaking order was that the bureaucracy was terrified that the workers’ struggle would serve as an example to other workers, triggering a broader mobilization against capitalist austerity that the bureaucracy would struggle to control. The issues over which Air Canada workers are fighting, including the right to strike, low wages and unpaid labour, are issues affecting all workers.
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The outcome of the contract vote is a damning indictment of the entire union bureaucracy and its cheerleaders in the pseudo-left organizations, who loudly proclaimed that last month’s flight attendants’ strike produced a resounding “victory” for the workers.
4. New Zealand protests continue against Gaza genocide
Thousands of people across New Zealand (NZ) took part in protests on September 6 against the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and the NZ government’s complicity in it.
According to Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, 30 towns and cities held demonstrations, which were part of a global day of action. As has often been the case, the corporate media ignored the events.
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The World Socialist Web Site spoke with several people at last Saturday’s rally of about 150 people in Porirua, north of the capital, Wellington.
As the new school year begins, educators across the country confront a political and social crisis of epic proportions. Districts everywhere are running significant budget deficits, schools are being slated for closure and shuttering doors, while mass layoffs, program cuts, surging class sizes, and gutted health and counseling services plague public education.
Above all, the Trump administration, acting on behalf of the most powerful corporate-financial oligarchs, has set out to destroy public education. The president and his fascist supporters in various states and school districts are whipping up a McCarthyite atmosphere targeting educators with loyalty tests, religious mandates, and censorship laws. This goes hand in hand with plans to destroy Social Security, Medicare, public health and other gains won by the working class to further enrich the oligarchy and wage world war.
Well aware these efforts to eliminate the social achievements of the 20th century will provoke intense opposition, Trump has deployed the military to Los Angeles and Washington D.C. and has declared “war” on Chicago and other cities. Troops have been used to back the ICE gestapo, which has raided workplaces and kidnapped parents and even students. At least 10 documented cases of ICE raids at schools in Los Angeles and San Diego have taken place since classes resumed.
But the attack on immigrants is only a dry run for an assault on the entire working class. The deployment of troops to US cities is part of Trump’s plans to establish a military-police dictatorship and crush the resistance by workers and young people to social counterrevolution.
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The Democratic Party and union officials have done nothing to stop Trump’s dictatorial measures. Instead, they have prevented strikes by educators and city workers in Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities, and told workers to rely on the courts and election of Democrats in 2026 to defend themselves. Having taken the measure of this bogus “opposition,” Trump has only escalated attacks on the social and democratic rights of working people.
The capitulation of the Democrats and trade union officials to Trump cannot simply be chalked up to cowardice. The fact is they defend the same corporate-financial oligarchy as the Republicans and fear a movement of the working class from below far more than a fascist dictatorship.
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It is within this social and political context that teachers must examine the California Teachers Association’s (CTA) “We Can’t Wait” campaign. Launched in February, the CTA apparatus hailed the campaign as an act of “historic unity” of 32 union locals facing contract expirations. Union officials pledged to carry out a fight for “fully funded schools” and “higher wages” in order “to give students, educators and communities what they need and deserve to thrive long-term.”
This has been nothing but hot air. Far from mobilizing educators in common strike action, the CTA bureaucracy sent 80,000 teachers back into classrooms under expired contracts, including in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento.
The CTA apparatus—tied hand and foot to Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Party and the big business interests they defend—has blocked strike action, not because there is any lack of public support for such action, but precisely because a teacher walkout has the potential to become the catalyst for a far broader movement of the working class across the US.
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This is not an arbitrary assessment. The CTA is following the same playbook as the teacher unions in Chicago and Philadelphia, where the bureaucracy’s blocking of strikes opened up teachers and students to massive cuts and only emboldened Trump.
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In opposition to the CTA’s bankrupt strategy, rank-and-file educators must take the conduct of the struggle into their own hands. This requires building rank-and-file committees in every school and neighborhood, controlled by educators in the schools themselves. These committees will be fighting bodies, breaking through the wall of silence of the union bureaucracies and establishing lines of communication and coordination between schools and districts. They will be the democratic voice of educators to counterpose their will to the will of the corporate-political establishment and their stooges in the union bureaucracies.
These committees must outline their demands, including to oppose all cuts and win substantial improvements in wages and working conditions. But they must take up a struggle for demands that meet the urgency of the situation. A fight to save, defend and expand public education must be carried out now to prevent the Trump administration and his Democratic Party enablers from destroying it completely.
These demands should include:
- Immediate statewide strike of California educators to fight the bipartisan assault on public education, including the expansion of for-profit charters and other privatization measures.
- Rank-and-file control of the struggle: Committees, controlled by educators, not the bureaucrats, must oversee all negotiations and contracts. Full transparency.
- Prepare a general strike: Unite educators and workers nationally and internationally to defeat the attack on public education and all democratic rights.
- Defend immigrant students and families: An injury to one is an injury to all! No deportations! Oppose ICE raids and militarized police deployments. Not at schools, not anywhere!
- No censorship or repression: Defend free speech, oppose loyalty tests and right-wing religious mandates. Protect historical truth in classrooms.
- Full funding for public schools. The claim that there is no money for living wages, healthcare, pensions, smaller classes, more support staff and safe buildings is a lie. Expropriate the ill-gotten fortunes of the tech giants and other billionaires. Redirect trillions from war, policing and corporate handouts to education, healthcare and social needs.
The basic issue today for educators and workers more broadly is the development of a mass movement against the threat of dictatorship, combining the fight against the impossible cost of living, exploitation and inequality, with the fight against fascism and war, and in defense of democratic rights.
At Kaiser Permanente (KP) facilities in Northern California, over 600 certified nurse midwives (CNMs) and certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) are scheduled to hold a one-day strike on Monday, September 8. The walkout at 20 KP facilities is over “unsafe staffing, burnout, and the risk to patient care,” according to the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP), which is limiting the work stoppage to one day.
The San Francisco Chronicle has reported that over 1,300 workers will participate in the strike. This suggests that the number of “core strikers” of CNMs and CRNAs will be roughly equaled by physician assistants, acupuncturists and other sympathy strikers joining the picket lines. This points to a general mood of militancy among KP workers.
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The strike will take place under conditions of the sixth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed over 1.5 million lives in the United States and is currently in its 11th wave, declining life expectancy, and surging childhood mortality. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has launched an unprecedented war against science and public health, which most recently has involved steps toward the banning of vaccines.
These conditions compound the general crisis of healthcare in America, which is characterized by inadequate staff levels, acute shortages of nurses, excessive emergency room wait times, and various extreme manifestations of staff burnout. These conditions existed before the pandemic began and have only gotten much worse since.
Long before the strike will begin, affected workers have been divided organizationally by the union whose ostensible purpose is to unite them. While the involved workers are scattered across over 20 locations in Northern California, picketing is to take place between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. at only two locations: Oakland and Roseville.
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Thus, Monday’s strike will involve only about 1 percent of the workers who are subject to the same national contract, even though most of those are also in California, and, among those in California, most are members of the UNAC/UHCP.
In 2021, 96 percent of the more than 32,000 KP workers, most of whom are in the UNAC/UHCP, voted to launch an indefinite strike in relation to the previous version of the same contract. The unions called off the strike just before it was scheduled to begin, announcing an agreement which quickly proved to be a major sellout. At the time, workers reported being blindsided by the announcement of a tentative agreement.
UNAC/UHCP also has current, ongoing contract negotiations with Adventist Healthcare, AHMC Healthcare, Prime Healthcare, and Sharp HealthCare. While these workers are part of the same union, they are organizationally separated from workers at KP.
There is a vast chasm between rank-and-file healthcare workers and the union apparatus, which is allied with the Democratic Party and the for-profit medical system.
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KP, officially designated a nonprofit organization, earned $13 billion in profit last year. However, it will not take any meaningful steps to address issues related to the acute understaffing in response to a one-day strike of a group of workers. This is a necessary conclusion from the KP mental health workers’ strike—the longest mental health workers’ strike in United States history. The walkout ended in May this year with the defeat of the workers’ primary demand for better staffing after seven months of union-imposed isolation.
Systematic understaffing is a deliberate policy of the capitalist ruling class in every sector of the economy, not only healthcare. AHCU unions, including UNAC/UHCP, entrust the resolution of staffing issues to a Labor-Management Partnership (LMP), a corporatist structure based on a fundamental denial of any conflict of interests between workers and the company which exploits them. They have repeatedly expressed their intent to expand such labor-management collusion in any new contract.
To protect their jobs, ensure adequate staffing, and meet their own basic needs, as well as the basic needs of their patients, workers must break free from the union-imposed conditions of division and isolation, which sharply contrast with the basic meaning of the word “union.” This is particularly urgent under conditions of the general crisis of the for-profit “healthcare industry,” the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s implementation of a plan to dismantle the Constitution and transform the United States into a fascist dictatorship which will crush all workers’ struggles by means of criminal violence.
The way forward for workers in this struggle is to unite with other workers in a common struggle. This can be done through the development of rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions and the Democratic Party. KP workers have done so as recently as 2021.
California lawmakers are advancing legislation that not only fails to solve student homelessness, but enshrines it. Assembly Bill 90 (AB 90), authored by Democratic Assembly member Corey Jackson, Moreno Valley, requires the state’s 72 community college districts to develop plans enabling students to sleep in their cars overnight on campus, establishing “safe-parking” as an official institutional response to a catastrophic housing crisis.
Presented as a compassionate measure, AB 90 in reality represents a reactionary adaptation to poverty. Rather than confronting the causes of the crisis, the bill normalizes mass deprivation while protecting the profits of landlords, developers and financial institutions.
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California is home to 255 billionaires and the world’s fourth-largest economy. Yet this immense wealth is hoarded by a tiny elite while the state refuses to guarantee housing for students already burdened with skyrocketing tuition and historic debt levels.
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That many community colleges themselves oppose the bill underscores its true character: it adapts higher education to the reality of mass poverty and resigns students to a future defined by austerity and debt.
The Democrats, who control every lever of state government, have overseen decades of cuts to student housing programs and higher education budgets, including financial aid, while billions have been diverted into police militarization and tax subsidies for corporations. AB 90 is the logical product of this policy orientation: treating the right to housing as permanently unattainable and institutionalizing car-dwelling as the “new normal.”
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The state of California, with an annual GDP exceeding $5 trillion, now offers working-class students a parking space, a public bathroom and a security guard instead of a bed. This “solution” reduces students’ housing needs to a policing problem while depriving them of basic dignity.
By promoting such programs, the Democrats are shifting responsibility for social rights away from the state and onto students themselves, forcing them to navigate survival while burdened by debt and impossible tuition bills.
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The California Democratic Party has no intention of addressing the causes of homelessness. Its role is to institutionalize social misery and defend the system that produces it. It is the oldest political instrument of US imperialism and will continue to impose policies that deepen inequality while protecting private wealth.
The right to housing, education, healthcare and safety cannot be secured under capitalism. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class—students, immigrants and workers alike—against both capitalist parties and for a socialist transformation of society.
8. FAST Party wins Samoa’s crisis election
Official results from Samoa’s early general election held on August 29, indicate the Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST or “Samoa United in Faith”) Party has secured a decisive victory. FAST has a four-seat majority in the 56-seat parliament and will form government.
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The South Pacific country, with a population of just 217,000, operates an undemocratic electoral system in which only holders of the elite Matai title (a traditional family or clan leader) are able to stand for office.
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The Sunday after the poll FAST held a religious “thanksgiving service” with hundreds of supporters to celebrate its victory. Leuatea offered an “apology to Samoa” for the “uncertainty” caused by the political turmoil. He declared that “FAST has prevailed because we are blessed by God… This is God’s timing for FAST, the era of God-centered leadership has begun.”
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According to the 2023 Samoa Poverty and Hardship Report, 21.9 percent of the population lives below the basic-needs poverty line, 3 percentage points higher than in 2013‒14. Poverty is highest among private sector workers and those in subsistence agriculture. Unemployment is officially 9.4 percent.
Conditions in the health system are dire. The national hospital is falling apart and understaffed. A potentially deadly whooping cough outbreak was declared in November followed last month by a dengue fever outbreak which forced school closures. A deadly but preventable measles epidemic in 2019 killed 83 people, mostly young children.
The FAST Party’s victory will ensure neither stability nor resolve the desperate situation facing the working class and rural poor. The basic issue facing all factions of the ruling elite now is how to further impose the burden of the economic crisis on the population.
9. Floods devastate Pakistan as New Delhi scraps Indus Water Treaty
Pakistan has been severely affected in recent weeks by devastating monsoon floods, with over 800 lives lost and millions of people affected. While the floods have impacted all four of Pakistan’s provinces, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Punjab have been hit particularly hard, suffering high casualties. Punjab has experienced the most severe flooding, even as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has experienced the highest death toll.
The floods are the worst since 2022, when 8 million people were forced from their homes and 2 million dwellings were destroyed.
The current floods have also affected India, especially its Punjab state. More than 350,000 people across 1,400 Indian villages have been rendered homeless, with 46 deaths reported.
As in 2022, the flood waters have caused significant damage to crops, livestock, schools, health facilities and critical infrastructure such as bridges, roads and power grids.
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With monsoon rains expected to persist, the situation threatens to grow still worse. Floodwaters are projected to pour into the Indus River, threatening large areas in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province.
In Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, more than 3.3 million people across 33,000 villages have been directly affected by the flooding. Since the Ravi, Sutlej and Chenab rivers—tributaries of the Indus River—overflowed their banks two weeks ago, flooding has affected 3,900 villages in Muzaffargarh District, one of Punjab’s worst-hit areas.
Last Thursday, as the flood threat mounted in Pakistan’s Punjab province, officials claimed more than half a million people had been relocated in the previous 24 hours.
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With a population of about 128 million, Punjab is Pakistan’s agricultural hub and its principal wheat producer. Muhammad Amjad, 45, a rice and potato farmer in Chiniot told Reuters on September 1, “Thirteen of my 15 acres are gone, and our rice is completely destroyed. Women and children have evacuated. Men are left guarding what remains.” Some have lost their only source of income. Amish Sultan, 50, said: “I have 10 buffaloes. They’re so weak there’s no milk left for my children, let alone to sell. I used to earn 100,000 to 150,000 rupees a month. That stability is gone.”
Pakistani authorities have responded lethargically to the disaster, revealing yet again their indifference and disregard for the lives of workers and the rural poor. Although major floods are occurring ever more frequently, successive governments at the national and provincial level have done next to nothing to improve Indus Valley watershed control measures.
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Indian media has reported that in recent weeks, New Delhi has given Islamabad three flood warnings via diplomatic channels as a “humanitarian gesture,” despite it having suspended India’s participation in the Indus Water Treaty (IWT).
The 65-year-old treaty was suspended by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government as part of their bellicose response to an April 22 terrorist attack in Indian-held Kashmir, which killed 26 tourists. While Pakistan denied any involvement in the attack and called for an international investigation, India declared Islamabad responsible. On May 7, it launched missile strikes deep inside Pakistan, triggering a four-day cross-border war that brought the two nuclear-armed nations to the brink of all-out war.
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Although India and Pakistan came to a shaky truce on May 10, India has continued its suspension of the Indus Water Treaty, and both Modi and his chief henchman, Home Minister Amit Shah, have repeatedly vowed that New Delhi will not return to it, without—at the very least—a renegotiation to make it more favorable to India.
Threats against Pakistan and boasts of India’s military prowess were key themes of Modi’s August 15 Independence Day address. From Delhi’s Red Fort, he declared India had achieved a great victory in Operation Sindoor—its illegal, four-day aerial war in Pakistan; proclaimed that India will henceforth make no distinction between “those who nurture and harbor terrorism, and those who empower terrorists”; and vowed India will not be intimidated by “nuclear blackmail.” That is, it will aggressively pursue its interests, even at the risk of provoking all-out war.
This was combined with the declaration that the Indus Water Treaty is effectively dead. Modi called the treaty “unjust,” and proclaimed “India’s waters belong to India, and India’s farmers. Nobody can take away our waters.” Further underlining India’s bellicose intentions, Modi declared, “Blood and water cannot flow together.”
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Tensions between India and Pakistan remain on the boil as both countries extend bans on commercial flights in each other’s airspace until September 24, first imposed after the April 22 attack in Pahalgam. Meanwhile, the arms race is intensifying. On August 20, India successfully test-fired the Agni-V, an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying over 1,000 kg of nuclear or conventional payloads across 5,000 km at hypersonic speeds near 30,000 km/h. This development came exactly one week after Pakistan announced the formation of a new Army Rocket Force Command to address “strategic gaps,” in particular its ability to “strike the enemy from every direction,” before resorting to tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.
10. An interview with Flint whistle-blower Miguel Del Toral
Miguel Del Toral played the primary role in blowing the whistle on the violations of federal water regulations in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water.
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In response to the recent World Socialist Web Site article, A pseudo-left attack on science in Flint, Michigan, Del Toral suggested there be a follow-up to pay tribute to the selfless work of the many water experts who volunteered to work in Flint to help with the recovery.
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At the same time this discussion was taking place, a war was being waged by the Trump administration on public health and all science-based public service, particularly the EPA. The Office of Research and Development, which studies and adopts standards and protocols to monitor and remedy environmental issues, has been shut down. Thousands have been terminated from the agency’s workforce, severely crippling its ability to conduct its work.
11. Trump issues threats against Smithsonian exhibitions and art works
Under Trump’s directive, museums and cultural organizations must adhere to a ruling-class narrative of American greatness, patriotism and prestige or risk devastating funding cuts. In late March, Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” demanding sweeping changes within 120 days and threatening to revoke federal funds from museums that refuse to comply. The result, if the funding spigot is turned off, would be massive layoffs and potential closure for many museums. Priceless public collections could be lost to private buyers.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III responded to Trump’s attacks by proclaiming the institution’s independence and non-partisanship in a memo to staff, stating, “As always, our work will be shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship, to help the American public better understand our nation’s history, challenges and triumphs.” Bunch said that the Smithsonian’s mission is to “bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans,” vowing that the museums will “continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections and objects, rooted in expertise and accuracy,” despite growing political pressure from the White House to alter or censor content.
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The most jarring aspect of Trump’s social media broadside against the Smithsonian was its denunciation of the museum for emphasizing “how bad Slavery was.” The implication is that Trump sees slavery as having had its “good” or even benevolent sides, an argument pioneered by the old Southern slave oligarchy itself.
Slavery in the United States and the British North American colonies remains an indelible crime of the emerging global capitalist system, lasting from the early 1600s until its destruction in 1865 by the Civil War. During this period, millions of people of African descent endured unpaid forced labor, brutal violence and the enforced separation of families—husbands from wives, children from parents. They were bought and sold as the commodities they produced–cotton, tobacco, and sugar.
Furthermore, in obscuring that slavery was indeed horrific, Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian must also obscure the meaning of the titanic struggle to destroy it. The position that slavery was not, after all, so “bad” makes history incomprehensible. Why was there an abolitionist movement? How is the career and political evolution of Abraham Lincoln to be explained? Why did some 400,000 Union soldiers fight and die in the Civil War?
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The fierce debate over American historical memory has been shaped in recent years by the New York Times’ high-profile 1619 Project, launched in 2019. This wide-ranging multimedia effort, with educational materials disseminated to schools, argues that the United States’ true founding was marked not by the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but by the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619. The Project contends that both the American Revolution and Civil War must be primarily understood as struggles rooted in the defense of slavery and “anti-black racism.” The 1619 Project was itself a racialist myth.
As the World Socialist Web Site warned, the fascistic right-wing would seize on the opportunity presented to it. Trump quickly launched his own far-right counterattack with the 1776 Report, released in January 2021. This shallow tract of patriotic myths and moral tales glorifies family, “law and order,” God, guns and unrestrained nationalism. Trump has since sought to bring institutions like the Smithsonian to heel, along the lines of Nazi efforts at cultural “synchronization,” threatening financial punishment or harsher measures if they do not conform to his reactionary rewriting of the past.
In preparation for the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Trump is orchestrating a counterrevolution against history. His assault on the Smithsonian is only the opening skirmish. Mirroring his interventions against the Kennedy Arts Center and Ivy League and other major universities, as well as his administration’s attacks on science, Trump is determined to control speech and thought, including artistic expression and public history.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s unveiling of a ruthless austerity drive that will animate the coming budget has laid bare the reactionary character of his big-business Liberal government. Standing before reporters last Wednesday, Carney boasted that Canada would have “a budget of austerity and investment at the same time,” insisting this could be achieved “if we’re disciplined.”
Behind this technocratic formulation from a lifelong servant of the financial oligarchy lies a ruthless plan: deep austerity for the working class while Ottawa shovels tens of billions into building up the military, expanding resource extraction, and shoring up corporate profits. The framework laid out by Carney is not a balancing act, as he portrays it, but sets the basis for a frontal assault on public services, social supports and workers’ living standards.
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In a July letter to cabinet ministers, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne confirmed the initial details of the social spending cuts, outlining staged cuts of 7.5 percent of discretionary program spending beginning in fiscal year 2026-27, deepening to 10 percent the next year and then going up to 15 percent in the third year. This will affect department budgets—resulting in direct layoffs of civil service workers and contractors—as well as grants provided by the government to universities, cultural institutions and non-profits.
Scientists and researchers have already sounded the alarm that the proposed 15 percent cuts to discretionary spending will devastate university research and basic science, undermining the capacity of society to meet the challenges of climate change, health crises, and technological development.
The Liberals have previously stressed that transfers to the provinces and individuals would be shielded, but this is a sleight of hand. As many commentators have observed, the lion’s share of federal expenditures is tied up in these transfers which fund the country’s healthcare system, old age pension plan, employment insurance and other social programs; to carve out the savings demanded by Carney and the financial elite, far deeper cuts will have to be inflicted on social programs, public sector employment, and the very infrastructure of public life.
While the population is told to tighten its belt, Carney has doubled down on Canada’s commitments to NATO’s rearmament drive. The government will not only reach the alliance’s 2 percent of GDP military spending target this fiscal year thanks to the 17 percent leap in defence spending the prime minster announced in June. Carney has signaled that his government is committed to NATO’s new 5 percent target, declaring it plans to reach it by no later than 2035, although this will require quadrupling the military budget from the government’s last spending estimates issued in 2024. This means hundreds of billions of dollars will be poured into fighter jets, warships, submarines, drones, and dual-use infrastructure in the far north Arctic, all justified in the name of confronting Russia and China.
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The ideological inspiration for Carney’s austerity program was underlined by the extraordinary spectacle that surrounded the second day of the Liberals’ Fall Cabinet Planning Forum, held in Toronto last Wednesday and Thursday.
The government had invited Kevin Roberts, president of the far-right Heritage Foundation and the chief architect of the notorious Project 2025, which has served as a blueprint for US President Donald Trump’s fascistic second term, to address ministers. Roberts was forced to withdraw at the last moment after news of the invitation provoked widespread outrage, but the Prime Minister’s Office quickly reassured reporters that “further engagement and discussions” with Roberts and other leading US policy figures will continue.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has consistently explained, Carney’s government expresses the interests of Canadian imperialism, which is determined to preserve its decades-long military-security partnership with American imperialism to secure its position in the rapidly developing third world war for a redivision of the world’s raw materials, markets, and pools of labour.
In May we explained that Carney’s campaign promises to rein in spending while cutting taxes and boosting military budgets were always incompatible, and that the inevitable outcome would be austerity for the working class alongside enrichment of the ruling elite. We warned that his invocation of threats from Trump and American protectionism were being seized on as an opportunity for the Canadian bourgeoisie to accelerate its shift to the right. That perspective has been vindicated in the first months of his premiership.
Carney’s budget strategy exposes the fraud of his carefully cultivated image as a sober technocrat, a “serious” politician for “serious times.” His discipline is demanded not of the billionaires and corporations who plunder Canadian resources and dodge taxes, but of workers, students, and the poor. His investments are not in healthcare, education, or scientific research, but in tanks, missiles, and liquefied natural gas terminals. His vision of the future is one in which the population is told there is no money for hospitals or housing while hundreds of billions are made available for war and corporate subsidies.
13. Almost 900 protesters arrested in London as Palestine Action repression deepens (videos included)
A man is arrested and dragged away
The Labour government’s clampdown on opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza escalated on Saturday with the Metropolitan Police arresting nearly 900 people in London in an unprecedented 12-hour operation involving over 2,500 police—including from other forces around Britain.
The vast majority (857) were arrested for their opposition to the proscription under the Terrorism Act of the Palestine Action campaign group. They were singled out for displaying a placard containing seven words: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They were apprehended under the Terrorism Act 2000, Section 13 (1), which carries a maximum sentence of six months in prison.
At another demonstration Saturday in Edinburgh, to demand an end to UK arms sales to Israel, police arrested two men under the Terrorism Act.
The protest in Parliament Square was organized by Defend Our Juries (DOJ), as the latest mass rally against the Gaza genocide—attended by around 200,000 people—marched through central London. DOJ went ahead with the protest once 1,000 people committed to holding the sign. The organization said around 1,500 joined on Saturday, meaning that near two thirds (57 percent) of them were arrested by police.
With the mass arrests of 55 people in Parliament Square on July 19, more than 70 around Britain the week before, and 532 in the Square on August 9, Saturday’s total took the number arrested for opposition to the proscription enacted on July 5 to at least 1,444.
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People attempted to stop the arrests, chanting “shame on you” to police. The Met denounced this as “a coordinated effort to prevent officers from carrying out their duties which escalated to violence where officers were punched, kicked, spat on and had objects thrown at them.” In fact, just 17 people were arrested after being accused of “assaults on police officers.”
Video footage shows the brutal way many arrests were carried out, police drawing their batons, a police officer shoving an elderly man to the ground and another officer punching his way through the crowd to make an exit route for an underway arrest.
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It would be a grave mistake to believe, as is claimed by Defend Our Juries, that the forces of the capitalist state will be “overwhelmed” by protests like Saturday’s, rendering them unable to uphold repressive laws.
Mass arrests have in fact escalated both in numbers and in brutality, driven by the political imperative of silencing opposition to the Gaza genocide and demonstrating the readiness of the Starmer Labour government to do what is demanded of it in imposing the dictates of the ruling elite. The arrests are being followed up with charges that in some cases can lead to 14 years’ imprisonment upon conviction.
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The Socialist Equality Party has repeatedly insisted that the assault on democratic rights spearheaded by the proscription of Palestine Action can only be countered by the systematic mobilization of the working class against the Starmer government.
The offensive against democratic rights is necessitated by British imperialism’s efforts to claim a share of the imperialist carve-up of the world’s resources and markets—a contest that drives the proxy war waged by NATO against Russia in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza and the broader struggle to dominate the Middle East, and the escalation of hostilities towards China.
Waging trade and military war abroad demands class war at home to crush political and social opposition and militarize economic life through the destruction of essential social provisions and the imposition of savage levels of exploitation.
This cannot be opposed by individual acts of conscience, however bravely expressed. It means the mobilization of the millions of workers, particularly the younger generation, who want to put an end to Starmer’s hated government of austerity, genocide and war.
14. VIDEO: interviews with protesters from 200,000 strong London demonstration against genocide in Gaza
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to some of those attending Saturday’s mass protest in London against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The protest was the 30th national rally against the ongoing destruction, which proceeds with the backing of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
The demonstration assembled in Russell Square in the north of the capital, marched through central London, ending with a rally in Whitehall, adjacent to the prime ministers’ Downing Street residence.
15. ArcelorMittal South Africa announces 4,000 job cuts
ArcelorMittal South Africa (AMSA), one of the continent’s largest steel producers and a subsidiary of the global steel giant, ArcelorMittal, the world’s second-largest steel producer, has announced over 4,000 job cuts, surpassing the prior announcement of 3,500 layoffs earlier this year.
The company plans to close its long steel plants in Newcastle and Vereeniging and restructure operations at Vanderbijlpark, wiping out tens of thousands of indirect jobs in mining, transport, logistics, and countless small businesses that rely on the wages of steelworkers, unleashing a social disaster across entire communities.
AMSA’s origins lie in the state-owned Iron and Steel Corporation of South Africa (Iscor), founded in 1928. For decades, Iscor was the backbone of South African industrialization, producing the bulk of the steel used in construction, mining, rail, and manufacturing. Its growth rested on the brutal exploitation of black labour under the Apartheid regime. In 1989, amid mass working-class struggles that were shaking the Western-backed Apartheid regime, Iscor was privatized in a fire sale by the white Afrikaner ruling class, eager to strip state assets before handing political power to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.
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Claims that privatization would revitalize the steel industry proved a fraud. Through the 2010s, AMSA repeatedly posted losses even as it sacked thousands of workers and shut down capacity, only earning a profit in 2019. Between 2014 and 2020 alone, the workforce was slashed from 15,000 to just 7,000. Each round of cuts was justified with the mantra of “efficiency” and “restructuring”.
AMSA’s plant closures, first announced in November 2023, were postponed three times before the company made its final announcement in September 2025. The company blamed spiraling electricity costs, worsened by rolling blackouts imposed by Eskom, the state-owned electricity company that generates 90 percent of South Africa’s power, and the breakdown of rail transport under Transnet, the state-owned ports and rail monopoly.
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These crises are the product of decades of ANC capitalist rule, in which state-owned enterprises like Eskom and Transnet have been systematically looted by a corrupt elite that cloaks its plunder in the language of “black empowerment”, a cynical cover for anti-working-class politics aimed at creating a thin layer of black capitalists, of whom President Cyril Ramaphosa, one of South Africa‘s richest men, has been a prime beneficiary.
These problems, however, cannot be simply reduced to corruption. They are inseparable from the global capitalist crisis. Across the world, steel capacity has vastly outstripped demand, with 113,000 jobs destroyed between 2013 and 2021 in OECD economies alone. In Europe, entire regions have been devastated by steel closures, such as the Redcar plant in Teesside, UK, where 1,700 jobs were wiped out.
Governments have only intervened where steel is deemed essential for war production, as in Britain, where loss-making steel plants are being taken over on the grounds of maintaining capacity for the military economy.
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The collapse is not confined to steel. Workers across South Africa are facing a jobs bloodbath. In 2025 alone, Daybreak Foods, one of the country’s largest poultry producers, cut 2,200 jobs. Goodyear, the US tyre manufacturer, shut down operations and destroyed 900 jobs. Ford slashed nearly 500 jobs, adding to the 4,000 jobs already wiped out in the past two years. Glencore, the Swiss-based commodities conglomerate, is threatening thousands more job cuts. The South African Post Office has axed 4,000 workers.
Manufacturing employment has already plunged from 1.4 million in 2005 to just over a million in 2021, a loss of more than 300,000 jobs in a decade and a half. This crisis is set to deepen, with the Reserve Bank warning that US tariffs could wipe out a further 100,000 jobs in the auto and agriculture sectors.
Workers must not accept this destruction of jobs and livelihoods. Steelworkers, auto workers, miners, postal employees and the broader working class face a common assault and must draw political lessons from their experiences. Three stand out.
The first is the role of the trade unions.
The second lesson is the role of the rival nationalist movements, above all the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
The third lesson emerging from the first two is the need to build independent organizations of struggle and a new political leadership.
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Above all, what is required is the building of a Trotskyist party in South Africa, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Such a party would arm workers with an internationalist and socialist program: the expropriation of the corporations, the placing of industry under workers’ control, and the reorganization of the economy to meet human needs, not private profit.
Only through this struggle, linked with workers across the world, can the South African working class put an end to the devastation wrought by post-apartheid capitalism and open the road to genuine equality and socialism.
16. Indonesian protests—a sign of social crisis and deep-seated opposition
In the wake of a huge police crackdown and thousands of arrests, the protest movement that erupted in Indonesia late last month has largely subsided, but none of the basic issues that fuelled the widespread demonstrations have been resolved.
The immediate trigger for the protests was the decision to pay a huge monthly accommodation allowance of 50 million rupiah ($US3,045) to the 580 parliamentarians of the House of Representatives (DPR)—10 to 20 times the minimum wage paid to millions of workers struggling to survive.
The lavish allowance was emblematic of far deeper concerns and opposition stemming from the immense social gulf between the country’s wealthy few and their political representatives and the vast majority of working people. Moreover, the social crisis facing broad layers of the population, particularly young people, is only worsening as economic growth slows and unemployment rises. The jobless rate for youth has hit 16 percent, forcing many into poorly paid, casual work.
The protests dramatically escalated after the callous killing of a young ride-share motorbike rider Affan Kurniawan on August 28. He was run over by an armoured police vehicle amid a mass mobilisation of police, including the notorious, heavily-armed BRIMOB. In the following days, angry protesters clashed with police, attacked government buildings and stormed the homes of prominent political figures including Finance Minister Sri Mulyani, the architect of the budget cuts that set off protests earlier in the year.
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The protests involving thousands were not limited to the capital Jakarta but had spread to major cities throughout the country, including Surabaya, Surakarta, Bandung, Semarang and Yogakarta in Java; Banda Aceh, Padang and Medan in Sumatra; as well as Makassar and Kendari in Sulawesi, Palangka Raya in Kalimantan, and Manokwari in West Papua.
At least 11 people died in the clashes with the police and military, hundreds were injured, and another 20 protesters are missing, according to the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence. More than 3,000 people have been arrested.
Confronting a police crackdown, the protests subsided last week but the anger has not. Smaller protests continued. Last Wednesday, hundreds of women from the Indonesian Women’s Alliance (IWA) marched to the parliament building in Jakarta wielding brooms to “sweep away the dirt of the state, militarism and police repression.”
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In a bid to quell widespread anger, the parliament did announce the axing of the housing allowance that initially sparked the protests. The announcement was left to the parliamentary speaker Puan Maharani. She is the daughter of former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, chairperson of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P)—the only parliamentary party that is not part of the Prabowo government.
On the same day, Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto suggested that the government would carry out various stimulus measures to boost jobs and incomes—including wage subsidies for those earning less than 10 million rupiah a month, a program of public works, tax exemptions and steps to prevent mass lay-offs. But under conditions of a slowing economy that will be further hit by Trump’s tariffs, these proposals have the character of empty promises.
No steps have been taken to rein in the police and military. The only action taken against the police has been against low-level officers involved in the widely publicized killing of ride-share worker Affan Kurniawan. The officer in charge of the vehicle that struck Kurniawan has been dishonorably dismissed, and another received a seven-year demotion.
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Significantly, the protests in Indonesia reverberated more broadly throughout South East Asia as workers and young people confront very similar economic and social problems, exacerbated by slowing economies. Protests took place last week in support of those in Indonesia, including in Malaysia and Thailand.
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In Thailand, a social media poster called Yammi shared instructions on how to order meals for Jakarta-based ride-share and food delivery motorbike riders. Revealing sympathy not just with the protesters but the difficult and dangerous conditions facing poorly paid riders, the post went viral in the region and internationally. Donations came in from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, as well as Japan, Sweden and the United States.
The protests have provided a glimpse of the explosive social tensions that have built up in Indonesia as well as the broader region and will only intensify amid growing global economic turmoil.
17. Australia: Anti-protest policy used to block IYSSE club event at University of Newcastle
Last month, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Newcastle (UoN), was prevented from holding an anti-war and anti-genocide speakout at the Callaghan campus by security, in collaboration with management and the University of Newcastle Students’ Association (UNSA).
This was a blatant attack on the democratic right of students to conduct political activity on campus, particularly targeting widespread opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the Australian Labor government’s complicity in it.
The speeches that IYSSE members were going to deliver would have explained a socialist perspective to stop university job cuts, the Gaza genocide, unfolding global war and attacks on democratic rights.
The justification used to block the planned speakout was that the event would constitute “harassment” of passing-by students, according to the Campus Access Policy (CAP). As such, security had to seek approval from “higher up,” i.e., management, and were reportedly told that the speakout could not proceed.
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All of these attacks on students are part of the Labor government’s broader offensive against the opposition to genocide and militarism more generally. Official statements and media coverage have endlessly slandered protestors as antisemitic. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese labelled the peaceful encampments as “divisive” displays of “hatred.”
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This is in line with events globally. The same blatantly false accusation of antisemitism has been leveled against protestors and students internationally. The increasing militarization of universities and consequent attacks on democratic rights are a product of a global turn by imperialist governments, including Australia, toward a more open pursuit of their predatory interests.
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The deepening assault on democratic rights is another refutation of the fraudulent line peddled by various pseudo-left groups that endless protests appealing to the powers-that-be will halt the genocide and the associated crackdown on civil liberties.
To fight against the deepening authoritarianism and imperialist war, students must turn to the working class, the revolutionary force in society. The aim must be to build an international anti-war movement, based on a socialist perspective directed against the source of the deepening barbarism, the capitalist system itself.
18. German government coalition partners agree on massive social cutbacks
Ten days after Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that Germany could no longer afford the welfare state, the leaderships of the ruling Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) have agreed to a massive reduction in social benefits.
Following a meeting of the coalition committee on Wednesday, Merz said, “We have really reached a good understanding here, also on the objective of reforming the welfare state.” The coalition would agree on the key points for such a reform later this year. Citizen’s Income (welfare payments) would be replaced by a new basic benefit that would “promote” responsibility and “challenge” potential abuse.
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The cuts to Citizen’s Income mark the beginning of a frontal attack on social gains fought for over decades. Pensions and healthcare are next, involving much higher sums. In the coalition pact to form the federal government, the CDU/CSU and SPD had already agreed to set up expert commissions for this purpose. These are now to draw up proposals without delay.
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Behind this frontal assault on the welfare state lies more than the usual clamor of business representatives and neoliberal economists. Capitalist society is at an impasse, from which the imperialist powers see no way out other than social cutbacks, dictatorship and war.
In the 1930s, a spiral of recession, trade war, financial crisis, fascism and rearmament led to the Second World War. Today, a similar catastrophe is again unfolding.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House has definitively destroyed the illusion that there could be such a thing as peaceful global capitalism. In 1940, after the outbreak of the Second World War, the Fourth International recalled Lenin’s statement that imperialist wars were inevitable as long as capitalism remained. It declared:
The second imperialist war is no accident; it does not arise from the free will of this or that dictator. It was long foreseen. It followed inexorably from the contradictions of international capitalist interests.
This warning is once again being confirmed today. Trump is not the cause but a symptom. He is responding to the decline of American capitalism by declaring war on the rest of the world, imposing punitive tariffs on rivals and allies, raising US military spending to the staggering level of $1 trillion, and erecting a dictatorship in the United States. This is the essential content of his “Make America Great Again” policy.
The European powers are pursuing the same course. Under the supposedly democratic Obama and Biden administrations, they enthusiastically joined the NATO offensive against Russia in the hope of rich spoils. Now they have been caught wrong-footed by Trump. He imposes tariffs on European nations, threatens to reach an agreement with Russia at their expense, and forces them to shoulder the full burden of the costly war in Ukraine. Washington now supplies weapons to Kiev only if Europe foots the bill.
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After two lost world wars, German militarism is again grasping for world power and is prepared to take any risk. Its military expansion plans are once more directed eastwards, consciously accepting the danger of a Russian counterattack. Yet just a fraction of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, comprising 4,000 to 6,000 warheads, would suffice to completely destroy all urban centers, military sites and industrial infrastructure in Germany.
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In other European countries, the crisis is even more explosive, particularly in France, which, with public debt at 114 percent, has virtually no room for further borrowing without risking a financial crisis.
After President Emmanuel Macron brought forward the increase of the military budget to €64 billion from 2030 to 2027, Prime Minister François Bayrou is planning budget cuts of €44 billion for next year, primarily at the expense of social spending. This is provoking massive resistance. Nationwide blockades and strikes are planned in the coming days.
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[German members of the Socialist Equality Party] welcome the resistance of French workers and youth against Bayrou and Macron and call on workers in Germany to demonstrate their solidarity with them and follow their example. But this resistance can only be successful if it breaks free from the influence of the New Popular Front and the trade unions, bases itself on independent rank-and-file action committees, and fights for a workers’ government and the United Socialist States of Europe.
On Friday, September 5, the school board of Evergreen Public Schools in Vancouver, Washington voted unanimously to authorize legal action against more than 1,400 striking classified staff. The workers—paraeducators, bus drivers, custodians, food service staff and mechanics—are members of the Public School Employees of Washington, an affiliate of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1948. The workers have been on strike since August 26, delaying the start of the 2025–26 school year. The board branded the strike “unlawful” and is prepared to seek injunctions and financial penalties, threatening to criminalize the struggle by its lowest-paid but most indispensable employees.
The state of Washington does not guarantee public employees the right to strike. At the same time, the state has set no specific penalties for striking. Courts have in the past, however, intervened with strikebreaking injunctions.
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The cost-of-living crisis in Clark County is acute. Median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver now exceeds $1,700 a month, while the starting wage for Evergreen paraeducators is little more than $22,000 annually. Even the district’s “generous” 12.5 percent offer would still leave many below $15 per hour—an income that qualifies a family of four for food assistance.
District officials insist that “fiscal realities” tie their hands, pointing to a $26 million projected shortfall over three years and warning that the reserve fund will fall to roughly 2.5 percent, below the board’s 5 percent policy. Yet workers rightly note that these are district accounting choices, while billions continue to flow to Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft in the form of tax breaks and subsidies. Washington’s regressive tax system compounds the injustice. With no state income tax, the burden falls on sales and excise taxes that hit working families hardest. A paraeducator buying groceries pays proportionally far more than a Boeing shareholder or an Amazon executive.
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The experience of Philadelphia teachers earlier this month provides an even sharper warning. There, 94 percent of educators voted to strike against intolerable conditions, only for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers to impose a sellout contract at the last possible moment. Hailed by the district and the media for guaranteeing “three years of labor peace,” the agreement handed teachers below-inflation raises, harsher discipline, and rising health costs. The union’s goal was clear: to smother a struggle by tens of thousands of educators that threatened to encourage struggles across the country.
The implications are clear. In Washington, the same political establishment that subsidized Boeing to the tune of $8.7 billion in 2013 and shields the fortunes of Amazon and Microsoft now insists there is “no money” to pay paraeducators a living wage or to maintain safe classrooms. Nationally, both Democrats and Republicans have gutted education programs while funneling hundreds of billions into the military. The unions, boasting of their “seat at the table,” enforce these attacks by blocking independent action and tethering workers to a political system hostile to their needs.
20. Trump tariffs bring job destruction
The bogus claims by US President Trump that his economic agenda, based on a tariff war against the rest of the world, would bring a new “golden age” for American capitalism are being ripped apart by jobs data for the economy as a whole and the emergence of mounting sackings across US industry.
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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.
