Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. “Ceasefire” deal includes permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza
Israel and Hamas announced Thursday the formal adoption of a “ceasefire” agreement involving the release of all hostages held by Hamas and the permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza.
Hamas political chief Khalil al-Hayya announced, “An agreement has been reached to end the war and aggression against our people.”
In reality, the agreement is yet another step in the Israeli-imperialist plan to dominate Gaza and suppress the national rights of the Palestinian people. It turns Gaza into a colonial protectorate, supervised by a board led by the American president and involves the permanent Israeli occupation of a large portion of Gaza.
Al-Hayya declared that “We received guarantees from the mediators and from the US administration, and everyone confirmed that the war has completely ended.” The very people providing these “guarantees,” however, facilitated the Israeli bombing of Qatar last month that tried to kill Al-Hayya.
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A particularly foul role has been played by bourgeois nationalist governments in the Middle East and the broader region, including Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which endorsed the deal and agreed to implement it.
As a part of the agreement, Israeli forces will withdraw to a so-called “yellow line” amounting to 58 percent of Gaza. In the very last stage of the agreement, Israeli forces would retreat to a buffer zone in which they control all land crossings into Gaza, leaving the population subject to the threat of further deliberate starvation.
The deal inscribes a return to the open colonial domination of the Middle East that prevailed in the 19th century. Under the proposal, Gaza is to be governed by a “Board of Peace” that would be “headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump” and include “Former [UK] Prime Minister Tony Blair.”
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Condemning the “peace” agreement when it was first announced, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) wrote, “The plan’s inclusion of an international ‘Board of Peace’ ... ensures the exclusion of Palestinian voices from the decision-making of Palestinian futures.”
Órlaith Roe, a spokesperson for the ICJP, noted, “This plan offers Israel yet another opportunity to pause, rearm, and then return to violence with renewed impunity.” He added that it is “Steeped in colonial rhetoric.”
The Associated Press reported that the United States would send an additional 200 troops to Israel to monitor and oversee the agreement.
2. Perspective: Fascist gathering in the White House signals mass repression and violence
All the events of the past month since the killing of Charlie Kirk—the transformation of a fascist provocateur into a martyr of the MAGA movement, the mobilization of the National Guard against the so-called “enemy within,” and the open preparations to invoke the Insurrection Act—have demonstrated beyond any doubt that what is underway is a systematic conspiracy by the Trump administration to establish a dictatorship. Blinders are falling from people’s eyes. More and more Americans are saying, “I don’t recognize this country anymore.” The Land of Lincoln is being transformed by Trump and his arrogant satraps into the land of a would-be Führer.
This conspiracy entered a new and chilling stage on Wednesday, when President Trump convened a meeting in the White House that was presented as a “roundtable on antifa.” It was, in fact, a gathering of extreme right-wing political maniacs: neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, racists, and Hitler lovers. They were assembled by Trump in what was clearly intended as a signal for all-out war against political opposition. An atmosphere of menace and imminent violence prevailed throughout the entire “discussion.”
Nothing like this has ever occurred in the history of the United States. The White House has been transformed into the headquarters of a conspiracy to legitimize fascism, brand anti-fascism as “terrorism,” and mobilize the repressive machinery of the state against the population.
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The October 18 protest demonstrations should mark the beginning of a counter-offensive against Trump’s dictatorial and fascistic rampage.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) urges that in every workplace, factory, neighborhoods and schools, workers and student youth must begin to discuss and organize resistance to the assault on democratic rights. The savage assault on immigrant workers and their families must be stopped. Moreover, all political organizations and individuals targeted by the Trump regime must be defended. For its part, the Socialist Equality Party will defend all victims of government attacks, regardless of differences over program and strategy.
Rank-and-file committees must be formed to coordinate this struggle across industries and borders. The SEP has taken the initiative to develop the fight through the formation of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The fight for this strategy and program among the youth is being conducted by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE).
The fight against dictatorship is inseparable from the fight against capitalism and for socialism. To defend democracy, the working class must take power into its own hands, expropriate the financial oligarchy, and reorganize economic life on the basis of human need, not private profit. Only in this way can the descent into fascism and dictatorship be stopped.
3. Immigration thugs assault, kidnap US citizens in Chicago, Portland
Trump’s ongoing mass deportation operation continues to target citizens and residents alike, provoking mass anger across the United States.
In a video taken last month that has gone viral, Reverend David Black, a Presbyterian minister, is seen offering to pray for ICE agents outside the Broadview, Illinois facility. ICE thugs responded to this call to prayer by repeatedly shooting Black in the head with “less lethal” pepper ball rounds.
As Black fell to the ground under the barrage of pepper ball fire he recalled to Religion News “We could hear them laughing.”
In just the last week, US citizens in Oregon and Illinois have alleged that immigration Gestapo have assaulted and detained them, despite not having a warrant or legal justification. These cases demonstrate that the attacks on immigrants are an attack on the entire working class, regardless of citizenship status. Furthermore, the fight to defend democratic rights cannot be waged with appeals to the Gestapo, but must be fought on a class basis against not only the Republican Party, but also their Democratic Party co-conspirators, who have allowed Trump to return to the White House and have provided him with the votes and funding to carry out these attacks.
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On Tuesday, two US citizens and cemetery workers, Daniel Greer and David Eichler, were viciously assaulted by immigration police while laboring at the Concordia Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois. Forest Park, a suburb of Chicago, has been flooded with immigration agents as part of the Nazi-inspired “Operation Midway Blitz.”
Speaking to WGN9, Greer and Eichler said they were working when they noticed someone struggling in the Des Plaines River near the cemetery. Witnesses told WGN that the immigration Gestapo were trying to persuade the man in the river to give himself up to them.
Greer said he and Eichler thought the man, “was in harm’s way because he was in the river and we’re trying to see what’s going on.”
Eichler began filming the armed ICE agents who became agitated once they saw the workers.
ICE agents demanded that the workers “Just open the gate, buddy,” onto the private property so they could access the river from both sides of the bank.
The workers refused to unlock the gate, stating it was private property. ICE agents refused to provide a warrant or heed the workers’ advice. Instead, agents used a bolt cutter to break open the gate, after which they proceeded to assault, shackle and detain both workers. On the video, the agents are heard yelling, “Get on the ground now!” before repeatedly shooting the workers with stinging pepper ball rounds.
“Once they breached the gate they pepper sprayed us, their guns were drawn and then proceeded to tackle us onto the ground,” Darren Eichler told WGN9 Chicago. Eichler revealed that after several hours he was eventually hospitalized due to the pepper spray.
A still shaken Eichler told WGN, “I’m concerned for my neighbors, my families, my friends. If this happened to me, a US citizen [for] no real reason, who is to say what they will do to somebody else?”
Both Greer and Eichler said they were never read their Miranda rights and, despite being detained for hours, they have yet to be charged with a crime.
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On October 2, Frank Miranda, 46, of Milwaukie, Oregon, was abducted by masked immigration agents dressed in plain clothes while he was on his way to work in Portland. Miranda was born in Glendale, California and is a US citizen.
In an interview with Willamette Week, Miranda said that the morning he was kidnapped he drove to work and parked his car outside the metal shop at about 6 a.m. when he noticed lights behind him. Shortly thereafter he saw two men come out of the SUV and call him by name, asking for his ID. Miranda said the men claimed they were from the Department of Homeland Security.
“They looked like day laborers,” Miranda told Willamette Week. “They were not looking or acting professional at all.”
Miranda said he took out his Oregon driver’s license at which point the agents snatched it from his hand. At this point, Miranda took out his phone and began filming the incident. “I pulled it out to show it to him. I knew something was wrong right there.”
Miranda was able to film for roughly 30 seconds before the immigration Gestapo took his phone. In the video, one of the agents is heard accusing Miranda of an “overstay.” When Miranda rejected this lie, another agent is heard off camera threatening to “get the dog.”
An agent then asked Miranda where he was born, “And don’t lie to me.” Miranda responded, “California,” and asked the agents where they got their information.
“Wherever we got it from doesn’t matter,” came the reply.
The masked thugs proceeded to handcuff and shove Miranda into a separate van. Once inside the van, Miranda said an agent that didn’t speak English kicked his legs out from underneath him and told him he would be sitting on the floor.
Miranda recalls the agents celebrating their capture, “They were high-fiving.” The immigration thugs proceeded to take Miranda to an ICE facility where he was fingerprinted and held for several hours. Miranda did not speak to any agents without a lawyer present, and none of the agents provided their names or badge numbers.
After several hours, Miranda was eventually driven back to his place of employment and dropped off without an explanation as to why he was abducted and assaulted.
The signing of California Assembly Bill 715 (AB 715) by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 7 marks a milestone in the bipartisan campaign to criminalize political dissent and rewrite history in the service of imperialist policy. The timing of the bill’s signing, two years since the events of October 7 and the beginning of Gaza’s genocide, was no accident.
Passed under the fraudulent banner of “antisemitism prevention,” AB 715 embodies a reactionary fusion of state power, corporate censorship and Zionist ideology. It is part of a nationwide effort to equate opposition to the Israeli state with hatred of Jewish people, silencing criticism of the Gaza genocide and US imperialism in the Middle East.
The unanimous passage of AB 715 exposes the class character of American politics. In May, the Assembly approved it 68–0; the Senate followed 35–0; and the Assembly concurred 71–0. Not a single Democrat or Republican voiced objection. The “progressive” state that boasts of diversity and inclusion has united the entire establishment behind a law attacking freedom of speech, placing in grave danger academic freedom and democratic principles.
Unanimity among the ruling class is not progress but a warning. The American capitalist class achieves consensus when preparing war, abroad or at home. AB 715 is a declaration of war on democratic rights and public education, part of the ideological groundwork for dictatorship in the United States which will only facilitate the Trump administration’s war on the working class.
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AB 715 amends the state’s Education Code to prohibit “advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partisanship” in instruction and declares that discriminatory bias requires no “direct harm” or even a “protected group member.” This vague and sweeping language effectively criminalizes any viewpoint opposing official ideology. Teachers who discuss Israel’s origins, the Nakba, or the US-backed genocide in Gaza could be accused of “antisemitic bias” and face investigation or dismissal.
The law aligns California’s policy with the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which endorses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Although AB 715 avoids naming IHRA directly, it adopts its logic wholesale—using the guise of anti-hate enforcement to suppress anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide and socialist expression.
In an attempt to conceal the law’s true purpose, Democrats broadened the bill’s scope by advancing the companion Senate Bill 48, signed by Newsom the same day, to include protections against discrimination based on religious beliefs, race and ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, an example of identity politics weaponized to erode democratic rights under a false egalitarian banner.
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AB 715 was spearheaded by Democratic Assemblymember Rick Zbur, a self-proclaimed liberal champion of civil rights, and signed with great fanfare by Governor Newsom, who declared it would make California “a national model in the fight against hate.” In reality, it makes the state a national model for government censorship allied with the political right.
The Democrats’ sponsorship of this law exposes the bipartisan nature of the assault on democratic rights. Despite their posturing against Trump and the far right, both parties share a common class goal: defending capitalism through repression. They are united in silencing criticism of US imperialism and its Israeli ally.
AB 715’s authoritarian character is unmistakable. By erecting an apparatus of surveillance and punishment over teachers and students, the Democrats are actively collaborating with the Trump administration in wielding direct ideological control over education. The pretense of “inclusivity” masks the construction of mechanisms that can (and will) be turned against any expression of opposition to militarism, inequality, repression or dictatorship.
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Significantly, the role of the California Teachers Association (CTA) in this process exposes the complicity of the union bureaucracy with the Democratic Party. During a hearing before the Assembly Education Committee on May 14, 2025, CTA President David Goldberg issued only a tepid objection, stating that “AB 715 raises serious free speech concerns, leaving teachers uncertain about what they can lawfully say in the classroom on a wide range of issues. At a time when too many are seeking to attack academic freedom and weaponize public education, AB 715 would unfortunately arm ill-intentioned people with the ability to do so.”
Yet after this mild comment, the CTA fell silent. No organized campaign, no call to mobilize teachers or students, no public opposition followed. By refusing to mount a genuine struggle against the bill, the union leadership effectively abandoned hundreds of thousands of educators and students to state repression, confirming its role as an appendage of the Democratic Party and an enforcer of its political agenda.
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The significance of AB 715 is not confined to questions of free speech. It is a frontal assault on public education itself. The law transforms schools into instruments of state ideology, where historical analysis must conform to the political needs of the ruling class.
At stake is not merely the right to discuss the crimes of Zionism or the genocide in Gaza, but the right to teach (and learn) history truthfully: the right to name imperialism, capitalism and class exploitation as the root causes of war and oppression. Under the new law, lessons on colonialism, racism or the origins of fascism may be censored as “biased” or “partisan.” Discussions of Marxism, anti-imperialist movements, or the revolutionary struggles of the working class could be deemed inappropriate or even unlawful.
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Genuine opposition to antisemitism cannot be entrusted to the capitalist state. It is inseparable from opposition to the Gaza genocide, nationalism, racism and imperialist war. Teachers, students and workers in California must recognize that no faction of the political establishment defends democratic rights. The trade unions, Democratic Party—and pseudo-left groups aligned with them—have all accepted censorship and imperialist propaganda.
The defense of free speech, academic freedom, public education and historical truth demands independent working class mobilization. Rank-and-file committees of educators and students must organize in every district to oppose AB 715, defend persecuted teachers and link the fight for socialism to the struggle for democratic rights and against war, austerity and inequality.
5. Country music’s Zach Bryan: “ICE is gonna come bust down your door”
In a partial release of his new song “Bad News,” country music star Zach Bryan refers directly to the brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on immigrants being carried out by the Trump administration.
“Bad News,” unusual in the country music genre for its open criticism of the government, has elicited a series of attacks from the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and far-right media mouthpieces.
This hysterical response—which includes an aggressive effort to blacklist and silence Bryan—reflects the extreme nervousness of the fascists in the White House, who cannot tolerate any public criticism of their authoritarian measures. Aware of the widespread opposition among tens of millions against the ICE raids, the clique around Trump is fearful that voices such as Bryan’s will encourage others to speak out and take political action.
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Facing a barrage of right-wing denunciations, Bryan backtracked somewhat, insisting the song was not a political statement, but a reflection of widespread fear and a plea for unity amid division: “This song embodies my love for this nation and everyone within it above all else. Once you hear the entire song, you will grasp the broader context that resonates with both political sides. Those who are weaponizing this now only highlight how profoundly divided we truly are. We need to navigate our way back.”
He stated further, “I wasn’t speaking as a politician or some greater-than-thou a–hole, just a 29-year-old man who is just as confused as everyone else. … To see how much s— it stirred up makes me not only embarrassed but kind of scared.”
Meanwhile, the fascistic Noem denounced Bryan’s lyrics as “completely disrespectful … not just to law enforcement but to the country and every single person who has stood up and fought for our freedoms.” In a video interview with extreme right pundit Benny Johnson, Noem stated, “He compromised it by putting a product that attacks those who are trying to keep our streets safe. I hope he understands how completely disrespectful that is.” The primary threat to “safe” American streets at present comes from the ICE-Gestapo forces unleashed by Noem and company.
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The effort to muzzle Zach Bryan is part of the campaign by the Trump administration to silence and punish any criticism of its fascist policies. The most visible recent example of this was the attempt to force late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air after he publicly exposed the political exploitation of the shooting death of Charlie Kirk, a leader of the right-wing Turning Point USA, by the Trump forces.
Trump’s vindictive response was at first successful, as ABC indefinitely suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” by using pressure from regulators and criminal threats from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, who said, gangster-like, “We can handle this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to modify their behavior and take action regarding Kimmel, or the FCC will have more work to do.”
However, in the end, public opposition to the intervention of the Trump administration was so enormous that ABC and its affiliates were forced to put Kimmel back on the air within a week. Some 32 million people watched his return opening monologue live or on social media.
Similarly, there has been an eruption of support for Bryan on social media over his “Bad News” release and this reflects the mass opposition to the brutalization of immigrant communities, particularly the terrorizing of children by ICE.
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Street murals, spoken word performances and mass protests led by immigrant youth have become regular occurrences, using art to express what mainstream politicians and media kissing up to the Trump government refuse to report on.
Zach Bryan’s “Bad News” is the latest example of dissent within popular culture in the US against the Trump administration. While his lyrics have brought vilification and censorship efforts engineered by Noem and her agents in the media, Bryan’s defiance has also tapped into something much deeper and stronger: the feelings of millions in America who are demanding an end to the cruelty and militarization of everyday life.
6. Hypocrisy and lies: Sri Lankan President Dissanayake at the UN General Assembly
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 25, Sri Lankan President Dissanayake ludicrously postured as a fighter against poverty and a campaigner for world peace.
Notwithstanding his false claims, the substance of Dissanayake’s speech was a reaffirmation of his government’s subservience to the imperialist powers, particularly the US and its support for the criminal Israeli regime.
Dissanayake’s appearance at the UN General Assembly was his first visit to the US since assuming office a year ago as head of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power administration. Clearly anxious to have his photo taken with the US president, he did so even as Trump was illegally mobilising federal troops in Washington and intensifying his government’s assault on basic democratic rights.
The Sri Lankan president told the General Assembly that poverty was “a tragedy as old as human civilization [and], has accompanied humankind on its journey through time.” He cynically called on the assembled diplomats to “pay special attention to eradicating extreme poverty.”
Dissanayake’s proclamations were a pathetic attempt to cover up the reality that poverty in Sri Lankan has drastically worsened under the International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity measures initiated by the Wickremesinghe government and now being expanded by his own JVP/NPP administration.
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Dissanayake told the General Assembly that Sri Lankan voters had endorsed his party’s “Thriving Nation, a Beautiful Life” election manifesto. But the JVP/NPP campaign, which included a series of empty pledges to improve living standards, was a pack of lies.
Having come to office, Dissanayake ditched his party’s vacuous promises and began ruthlessly implementing IMF austerity measures.
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Having promised during its election campaign to abolish the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), the Dissanayake government has used this repressive law against Ceylon Electricity Board workers fighting to defend jobs and conditions and against activists opposing the Israeli genocide. It also used the military to break national strike action by postal workers.
A leading representative of the JVP and its Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist agenda since the late 1980s, Dissanayake backed Colombo’s almost three-decade communal war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to the hilt. Dissanayake cynically told the General Assembly, however, “I believe that we must awaken our conscience to oppose racism and religious extremism in protection of human rights and freedoms.”
During his election campaign, Dissanayake made overtures to the Tamil community in the North and East, demagogically vowing to promote racial harmony and promising the return of land—seized during the civil war and occupied by the military—to their original owners. Those promises were ditched after the JVP/NPP took power and the military occupation of the Tamil-dominated North and East continues.
The JVP/NPP insists that the Sri Lankan military did not commit any war crimes during the almost three-decade war. Its foreign minister recently told the United Nations Human Rights Council that the JVP/NPP government opposed any international investigation into the actions of the military during the war.
Dissanayake went on to bemoan the death of tens of millions of people from inadequate healthcare when “hundreds of millions are spent on futile wars” and “hundreds of thousands of children are denied the right to an education, as millions are spent on invading another’s land.”
Dissanayake did not mention a single government or political leader during his anodyne lament but called on the assembled diplomats to commit themselves “not to lead the world to another disaster” but to make the world a better place for the next generation.
This posturing is a fraud. In fact, the Sri Lankan government is integrating itself with US imperialism’s preparation for war against China. Dissanayake has welcomed numerous senior US and Indian officials to Colombo, including Admiral Steve Koehler, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, and Donald Lu, US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia. In April, during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Colombo, the JVP/NPP government signed the first-ever formal defense agreement with India.
Referring to Israel’s murderous ethnic cleansing war against the Palestinians in Gaza, Dissanayake was consistent with his regime’s pro-Israeli and pro-US political line. He refused to utter the words “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” during his speech, instead calling for equal acknowledgment of the “legal, security, and humanitarian concerns of Israel and the Palestinian people” and the bankrupt and reactionary two-state solution.
When scores of diplomats walked out in protest during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascistic speech to the General Assembly, a member of the Sri Lankan delegation remained seated along with the US, in a clear nod to Washington and its militarist agenda in the Middle East.
7. Impact of Trump tariffs roils global auto production as workers bear the brunt
Supply chain disruptions from the Trump administration’s tariffs are continuing to roil the US and global auto and auto parts industry due to the globally integrated character of auto production. This includes frequent production halts caused by parts shortages.
The impact of Trump’s tariffs is being borne by autoworkers through speed-up, job cuts and the undermining of working conditions enforced by the United Auto Workers bureaucracy. A tragic consequence was the death of Ronald Adams Sr., a skilled trades worker at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Plant in southeast Michigan six months ago under conditions where safety takes a back seat to profit concerns.
This past week workers at the Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly plant learned that they were being put on a mandatory 10-hour, 7-day overtime schedule starting the weekend of October 4. On Friday, however, Warren Truck workers were sent home after only nine hours, with management saying a parts shortage was disrupting production.
According to a management memo sent to Warren Truck workers, the UAW allowed the imposition of a 10-hour 7-day schedule citing Memorandum of Understanding 2 of the 2023 UAW-Stellantis national agreement in advance of the “buildout date” or model changeover. With hundreds of workers still on indefinite layoff at Warren Truck following the elimination of the second shift last year, the company is behind in production of the highly profitable Jeep Wagoneer assembled at Warren Truck. Sales of Jeep brand vehicles were up 10 percent in the third quarter of 2025 year over year, and sales of the three-row Wagoneer SUV built at Warren Truck were up 122 percent in the quarter.
As part of the sellout 2023 contract, the UAW secretly removed restrictions on the ability of Stellantis to make up production due to parts shortages through imposing mandatory overtime. The deal came despite the claim by Shawn Fain that the UAW had fought for “work-life balance.”
The imposition of mandatory overtime at Warren Truck and other plants, such as the Stellantis Jeep complex in Toledo, is seen by workers as particularly provocative given that thousands remain on indefinite layoff.
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Highlighting the globally integrated nature of auto production, the Center for Automotive Research and US Department of Commerce data reveal that the average auto part crosses the US–Canada border about 6 to 8 times before final vehicle assembly. When Mexico is added a part can cross the border up to 12 times before a final product is completed. About 50 percent of auto parts used in US assembled vehicles come from Canada or Mexico.
These facts illustrate the absurdity of the claim by UAW President Shawn Fain that the jobs of American workers can be defended by ignoring— or even at the expense of— the interests of workers in other countries.
In opposition to the nationalism of the UAW bureaucracy, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is fighting to unify workers across national borders and launch a coordinated struggle against the attack on jobs and conditions by the global automakers and capitalist governments that defend them.
This requires building new forms of working-class organization in every factory and workplace, rank-and-file committees that will transfer power from the high-paid functionaries in the union apparatus to the workers on the shop floor. Collective action must be prepared to defend all jobs, demand the rehiring of laid off workers, and a reduction in the workweek with no loss in pay. This fight is inseparable from the defense of the democratic rights of workers inside and outside the factories, and a struggle against Trump’s plans to invoke the Insurrection Act, establish military rule and use state violence against all opposition, including workers fighting to defend their livelihoods.
A global shakeout is taking place in the auto industry under the impact of Trump’s tariff wars and the costs of EV transition. All across Europe automakers face declining profits and are slashing jobs. Volkswagen, Mercedes, Bosch, ZF, Porsche, Ford, Audi as well as Stellantis have announced job cuts at their European operations.
While Stellantis, Ford and General Motors all saw higher sales in the third quarter of 2025, this was in part due to higher EV sales as buyers took advantage of the $7,500 tax credit before it expired September 30. Profit figures have yet to be released.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned Thursday that the Trump administration would fire air traffic controllers who failed to show up to work even though they are not being paid during the government shutdown. Duffy’s provocative comments came just days after the release of a draft White House memo stating that furloughed federal workers are not guaranteed compensation for their forced time off during the shutdown.
Friday is Day 10 of the government shutdown, which the Trump administration has used to accelerate its plans to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers, eliminate entire agencies, gut entitlement programs and consolidate even more power in the hands of the presidency as part of Trump’s plans to establish a police-military dictatorship.
Trump has relied on the cowardice and complicity of Democratic congressional leaders who have treated the crisis as routine haggling over programs, begging Republicans for a bipartisan deal that would provide funds for Trump to continue his fascist conspiracy.
An estimated 13,000 air traffic controllers and about 50,000 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers have been forced to work without pay. Because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is at least 3,500 controllers short of its staffing targets, many controllers have been forced to work mandatory overtime and six-day weeks well before the shutdown.
Duffy denounced controllers who did not come to work, saying they were responsible for the estimated 15,000 flight delays since Monday. “If we have a continual small subset of controllers that don’t show up to work, and they’re the problem children,” Duffy said on Fox Business. “... if we have some on our staff that aren’t dedicated like we need, we’re going to let them go. I can’t have people not showing up for work.”
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Far from denouncing these threats, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) officials issued a statement warning its members that “participating in a job action could result in removal from federal service” and is “illegal.” In the eyes of the labor bureaucracy, it is completely “legal” to compel their members to work for nothing like slaves.
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Trump and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought—a key architect of the right-wing Project 2025 playbook—are operating like gangsters, gloating over the firing of thousands of federal workers and threatening to deny back pay to as many as 750,000 federal workers after the shutdown.
On Friday, Trump posted an AI-generated video with Vought as the Grim Reaper, with scenes of him carrying a scythe through Washington D.C. buildings as federal workers stand on unemployment lines.
Denying backpay to federal workers would be a blatant violation of the “Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019” (GEFTA), signed by Trump himself during the last government shutdown, which lasted a record 35 days. The law, known as GEFTA, “has been widely interpreted as ensuring that furloughed workers automatically would be compensated after future shutdowns,” an Axios report noted.
It continued: “But the new White House memo from the Office of Management and Budget argues that GEFTA has been misconstrued or, in the words of one source, is ‘deficient’ because it was amended nine days later, on Jan. 25, 2019. … [The amendment] added a phrase saying furloughed workers shall be compensated ‘subject to the enactment of an appropriations Acts ending the lapse.’ … To the White House that means money for those workers needs to be specifically appropriated by Congress.”
Asked Tuesday by a White House reporter whether it was the position of the administration that furloughed workers would get backpay, Trump responded like a Mafia boss: “I would say it depends on who we’re talking about. I can tell you this, the Democrats have put a lot of people in great risk and jeopardy, but it really depends on who you’re talking about. But for the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
In the face of this unprecedented attack, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has filed a handful of lawsuits and is urging its members to write to their congresspeople. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten’s message is: Nothing to worry about, stay at your classrooms. Other union officials are openly jumping into the Trump camp.
This bottleneck must be broken through the formation of rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by federal workers themselves, to organize collective resistance to mass firings and wage theft. These committees, affiliated with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) must link up with the broadest sections of workers to prepare mass action, including a general strike, to drive Trump and his fascist cabal from power. Such a movement must be politically independent of the Democratic Party, which defends the same corporate-financial oligarchy as the Republicans.
The development of rank-and-file committees is the only way the massive opposition to Trump, which is being expressed in the growing support for the October 18 “No Kings” protests, can take a politically conscious form.
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In a Reddit comment one federal worker spoke of Trump’s Grim Reaper social media post, “More like oligarch death cult. Do these guys think a surveillance state and militarized police will protect them from another French Revolution-style event?”
9. Transport strike in Peru joins growing “Gen Z” protests
Mass protests against the government of Peru’s President Dina Boluarte intensified markedly throughout September in Lima and across the country and have continued to escalate into October.
On October 2, the 12th transport strike in Lima and the neighboring port of Callao brought much of economic activity to a halt.
In the cities, youth have led so-called “Gen Z protests,” taking to the streets since late September with banners and signs brandishing “Z” and images from the popular Manga series One Piece.
Joined by many poor rural communities and the unemployed, the protests were sparked by a reactionary bill reshuffling the pension system in favor of AFPs, or private pension funds, but they have been characterized by general opposition to Boluarte and the far-right regime she leads.
The situation in Peru is part of a growing wave of working class struggles internationally, with youth leading the protests saying they were inspired by “Gen Z protests” in Nepal that brought down the prime minister.
Mass protests in Peru, Ecuador and other countries express growing opposition against the escalating turn by the ruling elites everywhere toward dictatorship and social attacks on workers in response to the crisis of global capitalism.
The “Gen Z” slogan has been exploited by the corporate media in Peru and other countries to present the protests as a generational issue extraneous to the sentiments and demands of the rest of the working class. However, the youth-led protests herald the escalation of workers’ struggles, as demonstrated by the transport strike and an increase in the class struggle across Peru.
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The October 2 transport strike, organized by the National Association of Transport Integration (ANITRA) and the National Transport Alliance, exposed the contradictory nature of the sector’s demands. While leaders pushed for greater state intervention—through police and military—to fight the extortion and murder terrorizing transport workers, many rank-and-file drivers, fare collectors and controllers expressed opposition to the leadership’s calls.
The strikers’ fight for survival amid urban chaos collides with a government apparatus deeply tied to criminal gangs and incapable of providing genuine protection, revealing the social decomposition under bourgeois rule.
The night before the strike, gangs shot at a bus full of passengers in San Juan de Miraflores, exacerbating drivers’ fears, with estimates that 30 percent have ceased working to avoid extortion threats and assassination attempts. While the Boluarte government claimed normal bus circulation, this was fiercely contested by strikers and reporters alike, fueling a greater mobilization with vehicles withdrawn, bus windows smashed and tires cut to immobilize services.
A police presence of 3,000 officers and hundreds of vehicles was concentrated in working class neighborhoods of northern Lima to contain the protests. Still, the strike led to widespread clashes with police and blockades of key roads like the Panamericana Norte and avenues in the heart of Lima, with arrests and police violence targeting demonstrators.
Of particular note was a convoy of buses without passengers traveling from various districts to the Congress, where over 1,000 workers, students and union delegates protested. Slogans denounced Boluarte as a “murderer,” and several unions, including construction federations and university students, joined the mobilization demanding improved working conditions.
The governing coalition, in both the executive and Congress, have agreed in the wake of the latest protests to advance a bill against “urban terrorism” to harshly repress the protests. This measure is hardly exclusive to Peru. In the United States, fascist President Trump speaks a similar language, railing against an “internal enemy” and intervening militarily in several cities (Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, Memphis, Portland and others) with the aim of imposing a dictatorship. Capitalist governments the world over have declared war on the working class, knowing there is widespread repudiation of their authoritarian, anti-democratic and outright fascist measures.
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The current crossroads faced by Peruvian youth and workers urgently raises the need to take stock of their experiences with the different variants of bourgeois nationalism and petty-bourgeois radicalism.
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Pedro Castillo survived his first year as president from July 2021 to December 2022 because his promotion as a left populist and rural teachers union leader. The alignment of all pseudo-left forces behind him was useful to the ruling class for diverting an emerging movement of the working class behind empty promises of social reforms. This political disarmament facilitated the murderous repression that followed Castillo’s overthrow.
The Maoist ideology promoted by Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán was hostile to the movement of the working class. It rejected the Marxist perspective of the independent political mobilization of the working class and the struggle to educate a revolutionary workers’ leadership. Instead, it advanced the pernicious theory of a “people’s war” based on the protracted warfare of a peasant army surrounding the cities. In practice, this amounted to terrorist attacks in which the masses were relegated to the role of passive bystanders.
Shining Path carried out assassinations of leftists, union leaders, leaders of peasant organizations and workers who did not comply with the strikes it decreed. It attacked factories, destroyed machinery and dynamited transmission towers and roads, cutting off the supply of electricity and food to the cities.
The Peruvian working class must reject with contempt the anticommunist propaganda of the bourgeoisie, while learning the bitter lessons of the experience with Maoism, a tendency that combines bourgeois nationalism, peasant radicalism and Stalinism, whose purpose is to block the construction of proletarian revolutionary parties.
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If the political agents of the current capitalist regime in Peru, together with the media, are so determined to revive the refrain of “terrorism” and exalt the security forces, it is because they know that revolutionary struggles are on the horizon in a country where the working masses are condemned to poverty and misery.
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The betrayals of the union bureaucracy and the tendencies that proclaim themselves left have helped to create a devastating social crisis that underlies today’s social ferment.
According to data from the INEI (National Institute of Statistics and Informatics), monetary poverty in 2024 affected 27.6 percent of the country’s population, which is equivalent to more than 9 million Peruvians. In other words, one in three Peruvians is poor. Monetary poverty, measured through spending on goods and services, means that incomes are insufficient to cover the cost of the Basic Consumption Basket (food and essential goods). But there are regions of the country with a monetary poverty index of more than 43 percent, such as Loreto (43 percent) and Cajamarca (45 percent). Extreme monetary poverty affected 5.5 percent of the population, that is, nearly 1.9 million people who do not have enough money to feed themselves.
Unemployment is very high, and labor informality abounds, exceeding 90 percent of the Economically Active Population (EAP). In these households, poverty reaches 31.9 percent.
Homelessness is another unresolved problem and worsens with population growth. Almost 1.7 million families are homeless.
The healthcare system is fragmented with multiple socially segmented public subsystems, with equitable access and quality of care in sharp decline. To this must be added the huge increase in the price of medications.
Parallel to this crisis, and feeding it, has been the devastation caused by COVID-19, two years of drought and ups and downs in the economy due to the international capitalist crisis and the war in Ukraine. These have triggered high unemployment rates and a drastic increase in the cost of living, especially food prices.
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Technological advances associated with the invention and advancement of the integrated circuit and, above all, the development of AI have produced revolutionary changes, accelerating a process of global economic integration that is directly at odds with nationalist ideologies. But these economic and technological advances, far from opening up new historical prospects for capitalism, have raised the fundamental contradiction between the world economy and the current capitalist nation-state system, and between social production and private property, to an unprecedented intensity. This is what fuels the present struggles in Peru which are part of a wave of international struggles (Morocco, Indonesia, Ecuador, Nepal, Madagascar, Kenya and Angola).
All these struggles can and must be unified, but without a conscious political leadership in the working class there is no way out of the profound crisis facing Peru and the entire planet. This is the Achilles heel of the workers’ and popular struggles in Peru and internationally—a weakness exploited by the pseudo-left representatives of sectors of the affluent middle class that not only discard the potential power of mobilizing the proletariat but have become consciously hostile to it.
10. Australia: Kindergarten teachers take industrial action, but union seeks a deal
Kindergarten teachers in the Australian state of Victoria took strike action for the first time in 11 years on September 16 over pay and conditions. More than 1,000 educators from community kindergartens marched on parliament house, demanding a 35 percent wage rise over three years and protesting against the refusal of the state Labor government to even make a pay offer.
Since then, however, the trade union covering the educators, the Australian Education Union (AEU), has held back any further action. This week it announced limited bans on overtime and the preparation of transition to school statements for students commencing primary school next year.
AEU state branch president Justin Mullaly said the union would only consider further stopwork action if the government’s “failures” continued. This is another warning of preparations by the union bureaucrats to do a sellout deal with the government, as it did to Victoria’s public school teachers in 2022.
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Early childhood educators are amongst the lowest paid sections of the working class in Australia, have crushing workloads and, as a result, the sector is experiencing significant staff shortages.
Despite having university degrees that are equivalent to teaching degrees, early childhood teachers are paid even worse than their primary and secondary school colleagues in Victoria. Entry-level educators earn at least $10,000 per annum less than public primary school teachers.
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A recent AEU survey of 1,182 Victorian kindergarten educators showed that 48 percent of teachers were always or often thinking about leaving the early childhood profession. Teachers reported that they were working almost 6.6 hours unpaid overtime each week.
A teacher who took strike action and attended the September 16 rally told the World Socialist Web Site her main concern was the conditions. “We are always short of staff, especially trained staff, and there is so much paperwork,” she said.
She explained that she only had two staff to look after 21 children and only one of them was trained as an early childhood teacher—the other had a diploma qualification. She had recently moved to Melbourne from New Zealand, where she said the pay was better and she felt more supported by the employer and parents.
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Rank-and-file committees are needed throughout the public sector, and the rest of the working class, to halt this assault and fight for first-class public education at all levels, with decent pay and conditions.
This means a political struggle against Labor, the Liberal-Nationals, the union apparatuses and the capitalist profit system that they all defend.
11. Unprecedented “circular deals” inflate AI bubble
Warnings that a major AI bubble has formed, or is rapidly in the process of formation, as OpenAI announces a series of deals with chip suppliers to build its computing power, are coming thick and fast.
The alarms are being sounded because the deals involve a high degree of circularity whereby, in one form or another, the supplier of the chips and technology provides financial assistance to OpenAI to enable it to purchase its products.
According to calculations by the Financial Times (FT), the results of which have been widely circulated, deals done by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, with AMD, Nvidia, Oracle CoreWeave, and other smaller companies amount to about $1 trillion in cost. The company will need more than 20 gigawatts of computing power over the next decade, with the electricity needed to power it equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors.
As the FT reported: “OpenAI is burning through cash on infrastructure, chips, and talent, with nowhere near the capital required to fund these grand plans.”
The company has yet to make a profit, and its founder and CEO Sam Altman has said that profit-making is not really on his horizon at present. Speaking earlier this week, he said becoming profitable was “not in my top-10 concerns.”
“Obviously,” he continued, “someday we have to be very profitable,” and the company would get there, but “right now” it was in a “phase of investment.” In other words, it is taking a trillion-dollar gamble that the massive investments will eventually pay off.
But others say a different dynamic is at work. As Gil Luria, an analyst at the investment bank and financial services firm DA Davidson told the FT: “OpenAI is in no position to make any of these commitments.” It was expected to make a loss of around $10 billion this year.
“Part of Silicon Valley’s ‘fake it until you make it’ ethos is to get people to have skin in the game. Now a lot of big companies have a lot of skin in the game on OpenAI.”
Their connection has been established through the circular deals through which OpenAI is being financed.
Under the $100 billion deal with Nvidia, the leading maker of the graphic processing units (GPUs) which form the basis for the development of AI, the money it supplies to OpenAI will be used to buy more Nvidia chips.
While Altman has said the deal with Nvidia is a “new financing model,” it is very much a repeat of the kind of circular deals which were made in the dot-com bubble at the start of the century before it collapsed with billions of dollars in losses.
And the deal with the chipmaker AMD has added a new twist to the circularity. Under the agreement, AMD will provide OpenAI with warrants to buy up 10 percent of the company’s shares for just one cent a share provided certain targets are met. As the price of AMD shares rises, OpenAI will be able to cash in and use the money to buy AMD chips.
AMD chief executive Lisa Su described the deal as a “pretty innovative structure, which didn’t come lightly.”
In essence, the agreement means that the whole operation is being financed on the expectation that the surge in high-tech and AI stocks will continue indefinitely.
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here is a clear recognition that an AI bubble—a situation characterized by the complete divorce of market valuations from underlying real economy—is fast developing. As well-known financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin noted in the New York Times this week, he was asked about this issue multiple times a day at a meeting in San Francisco.
His answer was that “we are—we just don’t know when it will end. When the dot-com bubble popped, it wasn’t the end of the Internet. It just meant that the weakest companies didn’t survive. And that’s probably what will happen again.”
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Commenting on the AI surge in the FT, Ruchir Sharma, the chair of Rockefeller International said that “America has become one big bet on AI” and the US and its markets could “lose the one leg they are standing on.”
The Bank of England has added its voice to the growing warnings. In its latest quarterly financial stability update, it said “stretched valuations” for equities and, in particular, AI companies, together with the loss of independence by the Federal Reserve and increased corporate failures, had fueled the risk of a “sharp market correction.”
12. Behind plans for social-democratic government under Macron, French ruling elite plots dictatorship
Maneuvers to install a government under French President Emmanuel Macron, of ministers from the New Popular Front (NFP) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon are at an advanced stage. After the fall of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS), a leading party in the NFP, is working frantically to form a government.
They are laying a political trap for the working class. A PS-led government under Macron would not be socialist or left-wing, but a capitalist government abetting Macron’s rule against the people. Amid France’s historic debt crisis and the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, its agenda of imperialist war, austerity and police-state rule would inevitably disappoint those workers who placed their trust in the NFP.
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Today, the formation of a PS-led government under Macron would allow the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) to pose as the sole genuine opposition to Macron. It would vastly strengthen conspiracies in the French bourgeoisie to bring the RN to power and impose a far-right dictatorship.
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...[T]alk of “social justice” is a fraud. The PS is a discredited capitalist party with a 45-year record of austerity, war, police-state repression, and deals with far-right forces. The first president to formally invite neo-fascist party leaders to the Elysée presidential palace, François Hollande, was a PS member, whose austerity policies Macron helped devise as economy minister. While the PS is now pledging to consider taxing the rich and repealing Macron’s pension cuts, it would rapidly abandon this if financial markets began speculating against French sovereign debt.
Yesterday, outgoing French Economy Minister Roland Lescure, a former PS official, pledged the incoming government would respect EU austerity criteria. “A majority of parliamentarians in France want stability,” he said, adding: “[W]e need a budget for 2026, and this is very important: a budget that respects our promises to our European friends. So that is what will happen.”
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RN party leader Marine Le Pen has responded to talk of a PS-led Macron government by pledging to vote censure motions against the government until it falls. On X, she mocked plans for a PS-led government with the Greens, the right-wing The Republicans (LR), and the PCF: “If I understand correctly, Emmanuel Macron is preparing to entrust the prime ministership to a party that won 1.75 percent of the vote in the presidential elections. It would build a government with representatives of those who got 4.63 percent, 4.78 percent, reinforced maybe by those who got 2.28 percent.”
The RN is accelerating plans to form a government in alliance with factions of LR and Macron’s supporters. Last year, Lecornu and another former prime minister of Macron, Edouard Philippe, discussed forming an RN-led government. Now, bolstered by poll results showing Le Pen coming in first in future presidential elections with 34 percent of the vote, the RN is bidding for support in the ruling class on an ultra-right program.
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There is no mechanism for the working class to resolve this crisis within the existing political system. Mélenchon’s policy of alliance with the PS and the PCF and union bureaucracies, it is ever clearer, has not worked to represent the French people in the National Assembly but to let the capitalist oligarchy keep using the Assembly as an arena for conspiracies against democracy.
The decisive issue, as the Parti de l’égalité socialiste has stressed, is mobilizing opposition among rank-and-file workers to capitalist dictatorship and preparing a general strike to bring down Macron, independently of the NFP and allied bureaucracies. This is the only way to prepare the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchy and stop its anti-democratic conspiracies, as the PES explained in its statement, “Build rank-and-file committees to wage the struggle against Macron and war!”:
The defense of the fundamental social and democratic rights of the working class requires a mass mobilization of the rank and file, fighting for the self-organization of the working class and the preparation of a general strike to bring down Macron. This is inseparable from the construction of a political movement in the working class, in France and across Europe, for workers’ power and a socialist revolution.
The PES calls for the transfer of power in all factories and workplaces from the union bureaucracies to the rank and file. To wage this struggle, workers need rank-and-file organizations to overcome the opposition of union bureaucracies whose “social dialog” ties workers to the diktat of the capitalist state.
13. Public Meeting in London: “The American Volcano: Towards Fascism or Socialism”
President Donald Trump is preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act against the American working class. He has already sent troops to major US cities and demanded unswerving loyalty from US generals in a war against “antifa” and the “radical left”.
Four-and-a-half years after Trump made clear his intention to overthrow Constitutional law by instigating the January 6 coup attempt, he is moving rapidly to establish a presidential dictatorship.
Trump’s actions are not the product of individual evil, but the response of America’s capitalist class to an existential crisis of US imperialism. His administration represents the realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States.
The President is acting on behalf of an ultra-rich oligarchy: the richest 1 percent hold a staggering $49 trillion dollars, one third of all US wealth. These grotesque fortunes represent the apex of explosive levels of social inequality which cannot be reconciled with even the most rudimentary elements of democratic rights.
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What is taking place in America is of the greatest political concern to workers and young people internationally. Not only because the consequences will be felt around the world, but because the US situation only reflects in the most extreme form the same global crisis gripping every other country.
Everywhere, governments preside over societies laid to waste by inequality, overseeing worsening living standards for workers, sweeping cuts to social spending and rapid remilitarisation. They attack democratic rights, demonize migrant workers, promote divisive nationalism and empower far-right and fascist parties.
In Britain, this takes place under a Labour government, led by Trump’s close ally Keir Starmer, which is carrying out an unprecedented crackdown on political opposition. Following the arrest of over 2,000 people for opposing the proscription of Palestine Action, Starmer has now announced sweeping restrictions on all peaceful protests.
Workers and young people are being posed point blank with the need for a socialist party to replace this right-wing monstrosity in power.
In Britain, as in America and every country, the decisive question is the building of a revolutionary leadership, rejecting left-talking opponents of the class struggle like Jeremy Corbyn. “The American Volcano: Towards Fascism or Socialism” will be an opportunity for a serious discussion of this central political task.
Strike action by around 2,000 bus drivers at Metroline and Stagecoach in Greater Manchester due to take place today, Saturday and Monday has been suspended at the last minute through the intervention of Labour mayor Andy Burnham, in collaboration with Unite the union’s leadership.
The most notable feature of this intervention is the secrecy involved over the revised offers to be balloted on by bus drivers. Only last week, Metroline and Stagecoach workers rejected derisory new proposals from the private operators: among the largest and most profitable bus companies in the UK.
The suspension was announced yesterday evening, reported by the Manchester Evening News. A press release was only put out by Unite today, lacking any information on the proposed deals.
As a matter of principle, strikes should not be called off until workers have discussed and agreed a deal. This is an attempt to foist on members an agreement worked out between the companies and the union in secret.
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An initial wave of strikes, from September 19–22, had paralyzed two-thirds of bus services operated by the three companies under Burnham’s flagship Bee Network, exposing the reality of his so-called “integrated” transport system: a franchising model run for private profit.
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Unite’s refusal to issue a unified pay demand is deliberate, allowing Stagecoach and Metroline to return with piecemeal offers that chip away at the dispute depot by depot. This is part of its standard playbook used nationally to shut down a potential strike movement. The union has claimed similar “wins” elsewhere after calling off action for slightly improved offers that fall well short of what could be achieved through determined collective struggle.
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The unified strike vote by Unite members across Greater Manchester’s three bus companies showed that workers were looking to wage a determined fight to reverse decades of declining pay and fragmented conditions since privatization. But Burnham and Unite have worked together to sell the illusion that the new franchising powers handed to the Greater Manchester authority in 2023 marked a return to “public control.”
The new framework is merely a more managed form of privatization. While the Labour-controlled authority sets fares, timetables and routes, operations remain in private hands, with companies driving down wages and conditions to maximize profit.
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Burnham’s latest intervention, in collusion with Unite, to suppress resistance to the private operators underscores the need for workers to take the dispute into their own hands. The Labour mayor’s constant references to working with “trade union colleagues” are made to justify a corporatist stitch-up: closed-door meetings with the union bureaucracy to override the membership and sabotage a genuine fight.
Stagecoach and Metroline drivers should form a joint strike committee—independent of Unite’s bureaucracy—to unify their struggle across depots and companies. This should be the first step towards a broader mobilization of all transport workers under the Bee Network.
A direct challenge must be made to the claim that workers’ demands are “unaffordable”, with Burnham adding that “the region and country are not awash with money.” Millions are being siphoned off by private operators—funds that should go toward decent wages, improved services and affordable fares.
15. 10th anniversary of Ankara bombings by ISIS which killed over 100 people
Today marks the tenth anniversary of the bloodiest terrorist attack in modern Turkish history, the Ankara Train Station massacre on October 10, 2015.
A “Peace Rally” was to take place in Ankara on that day. Trade union confederations and professional organizations organized the event, and the Kurdish nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and numerous left-wing organizations were set to participate.
At least 104 people were killed and nearly 400 injured when two Islamic State (ISIS)-affiliated suicide bombers blew themselves up among the crowd gathered at the Ankara Train Station intersection before the rally. Following the massacre, angry protests erupted across the country, with demonstrators holding the government responsible.
Hande Arpat, an executive of the Turkish Medical Association (TTB), and numerous other witnesses, stated that immediately following the bombings riot police attacked those in the area with tear gas and water cannons. Then, Arpat wrote, “They [the police] not only entered the area but also attacked healthcare workers treating critically injured people in life-threatening conditions, as well as the injured and the deceased, with pepper spray, endangering people’s lives.”
Last year, ten ISIS members were sentenced to life in prison for the bombings. However, no official whose negligence allowed the attack to occur was prosecuted or resigned.
The massacre was part of the spread to Turkey of the war for regime change in Syria launched in 2011 by Washington and its regional allies, including Ankara. In the proxy war against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the United States, the Gulf regimes and Turkey armed, financed, and directed Islamist jihadist forces.
The spread of ISIS, which emerged from these proxy forces, to Iraq and the Kurdish regions of Syria in 2014 risked a deviation from US aims. The imperialist powers then militarily intervened directly in Iraq and Syria in the name of an “anti-ISIS coalition,” while the People’s Defense Units (YPG)-led Kurdish nationalist militias developed into the main proxy force in the regime-change war in Syria.
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Turkey had become a hub where jihadists could easily cross the border and organize throughout Syria as part of the war to overthrow the Assad regime, which was supported by Russia and Iran, to secure the full dominance of US imperialism in the Middle East. It was confirmed by their own families that ISIS members who carried out these massacres had been operating freely in Turkey for years, under the watch of intelligence agencies, crossing into Syria and returning.
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Meanwhile, escalating tensions between Ankara and Washington over Syria and the Kurdish issue, as well as Erdoğan’s policy of maneuvering between the US-NATO and Russia and China, led to a failed coup attempt backed by NATO on July 15, 2016. After surviving the coup, Erdoğan expanded his offensive against the Kurdish movement into Syria.
Starting in August 2016, the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) conducted numerous military operations against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—whose backbone is the YPG— and occupied an area of northern Syria encompassing cities such as Jarablus, Afrin, Ras al-Ayn, and Tell Abyad to prevent the formation of a unified region under the control of Kurdish militias.
Today, Ankara and the PKK are once again negotiating. As was the case ten years ago, these negotiations are consistent with and subordinate to the imperialist redivision of the Middle East led by US imperialism. Furthermore, the tensions that ended the negotiation process in 2015 and led to the resurgence of civil war have intensified. This is accompanied by escalating imperialist and Zionist aggression in the Middle East, including the genocide in Gaza, military attacks on Iran and its allies, and the change of regime in Syria.
The Ankara-PKK agreement, formed with the approval of the United States as part of the anti-Iran alliance, is also a move against Israel’s growing influence in Syria and the region.
The entire process, masked by claims of “peace and democracy”, is a preparation for more extensive wars and is just as likely to collapse from within.
The aggression of the Zionist state—the spearhead of the US’s “new Middle East” plans—and the takeover of power by the al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in December 2024, which overthrew the Assad regime, have deepened the conflict and intensified the struggle for influence over Syria.
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The only way to prevent atrocities like the Ankara massacre, which occurred as part of the imperialist re-division of the Middle East, end the genocide in Gaza, and ensure lasting peace throughout the region is to build an anti-war, socialist movement within the working class in the Middle East and internationally for the establishment of a Middle East Socialist Federation, in place of reactionary nation states serving imperialist-capitalist interests.
16. Large majority of Lufthansa pilots vote for strike action
Lufthansa pilots have voted by a large majority in favor of strike action. But while nine out of 10 pilots support the strike, their union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) is doing everything it can to prevent one.
Pilots at Germany’s largest passenger airline voted 88 percent in favor, and their colleagues at the freight division Lufthansa Cargo voted 96 percent in favor of strike action. More than 90 percent of eligible pilots took part in the ballot.
The widespread discontent expressed in the vote is directed particularly against the company’s handling of employees’ occupational pensions. Since Lufthansa restructured the pension scheme in 2017, pilots have faced significant setbacks. The airline no longer guarantees the amount of pension benefits to be paid upon retirement but only guarantees to contribute to a company-managed fund at a fixed rate. Experience in recent years has shown that this change has substantially reduced pension levels. For this reason, the pilots’ union Vereinigung Cockpit is demanding a tripling of the employer’s pension contribution.
n addition, the market-based pension system is subject to all the fluctuations of the financial markets. Given the ongoing capitalist crisis, even a complete loss of pension funds is not an unrealistic scenario.
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When Lufthansa Airlines CEO Jens Ritter claims that an increase in company pension contributions is “simply unaffordable,” what he really means is that shareholders and executives intend to boost their own incomes at the expense of pilots’ jobs, wages and pensions. At the same time, Ritter threatened all pilots considering resistance: if they insisted on defending their pensions, there would be “no alternative but to relocate further aircraft to more profitable operations.”
This threat refers to a long-established practice by the company that has angered employees. By founding subsidiaries such as Discover Airlines and Lufthansa City Airlines (formerly CityLine), Lufthansa bypasses the collective agreements covering its core brand. Staff at CityLine, for example, are being told either to work under significantly worse conditions at Lufthansa City Airlines—or to leave.
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On the fundamental issue, VC is now fully aligned with the company. “We are sticking with the capital-market-oriented system,” Karstens declared in an interview with aero.de. “The level of the pension will not be guaranteed; what remains are guaranteed contributions.” He complained that it is Verdi, not VC, that enjoys management’s “favor,” even though pilots have caused “the least strike costs” since 2017.
The sectional union, founded by pilots over 50 years ago, supposedly as a less corrupt representative body, has shown itself today to be as bankrupt as Lufthansa’s “house union” Verdi and the other main unions. While nine out of 10 pilots have voted to strike, VC is doing everything possible to prevent it.
It is treating the result as nothing more than bargaining leverage in talks with management. The company must now “finally present a negotiable offer on occupational pensions,” says Karstens. “The result is a strong signal of our members’ unity,” declared VC President Andreas Pinheiro. “The pilots stand firmly behind their demands and their bargaining committee.”
This is false. The result is a strong signal to organize strike action. But VC is not doing so. The union has already held seven rounds of talks with Lufthansa management and, despite the strike vote, is now calling for an eighth.
Worldwide, workers are having the same experience. Union leaderships act as management’s company police, isolating workers’ struggles instead of coordinating them. They defend the capitalist system and thus prevent genuine mobilization and solidarity among workers.
In August, Air Canada flight attendants demonstrated their determination to fight by defying a government strike ban—but their union, CUPE, sabotaged the action and shamefully capitulated to the government and company shortly afterwards. Only days ago, a Greek court banned air-traffic controllers and other aviation workers from participating in the general strike, and the unions accepted the decision.
The lessons for Lufthansa pilots and workers everywhere are clear. The fight for living wages and pensions and the defense of jobs cannot be left in the hands of VC, UFO, Verdi or any other nationalist and pro-capitalist union. Independent rank-and-file action committees must be formed, directly controlled by the workers themselves and coordinated across industries and national borders. These committees must base themselves on a political program that rejects the subordination of human needs to corporate profit.
The first evidence presented in the only ever trial of a British soldier for their role in the January 30, 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland described scenes of indiscriminate shootings and execution.
Thirteen civil rights protestors were killed and another 13 wounded, one of them later dying of their injuries. Other demonstrators were hit by shrapnel and rubber bullets, more were beaten, and two were run over by British Army vehicles.
A former lance corporal of the 1st Battalion of the British Army’s notorious Parachute Regiment, known legally only as Soldier F—although his identity is well known—is accused of the murder of James Wray and William McKinney. He is also accused of the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon, Patrick O’Donnell, and another, unnamed, person.
The case is being held in Belfast Crown Court in a non-jury trial in front of Judge Patrick Lynch, KC. Late September, Lynch ruled that statements made in 1972 by Soldiers G and H can be presented as evidence. Soldier G is now deceased, while H is reportedly unwilling to give evidence.
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Bloody Sunday is one of British imperialism’s most infamous colonial crimes. It took place three years into Operation Banner under which the Labour government of Harold Wilson deployed the British Army to prevent the collapse of the hated Ulster Unionist administration, in the face of a mass civil rights movement demanding equal rights for Catholics.
The movement in Northern Ireland was part of a worldwide eruption of class struggle between 1968 and ‘75. In 1971, Wilson’s Conservative successor, Edward Heath, introduced mass arrests and internment without trial of suspected Irish republicans. Hundreds were seized and tortured, their homes smashed up.
By the time of the January 30, 1972 march, 22,000 troops, including the Parachute Regiment, were active in Northern Ireland. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people intended to protest against interment. The day, billed as a family event, was due to conclude with speeches. Rather than accept a peaceful protest, the Heath government authorized an attack on the march. The meeting of the Joint Security Committee in Belfast proves the government sought to “prepare public opinion... for violent scenes on TV” and concluded “the operation might well develop into rioting and even a shooting war”.
When the scale of British Army violence resulted in even the Irish government of Jack Lynch protesting, Heath blamed the marchers themselves, organized in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Heath also blamed the Provisional Irish Republican Army who played no role on the day at all.
Ever since, the British government has sought to cover up, lie, obfuscate and delay any meaningful investigation into what took place, obstructing the push for prosecutions. The Widgery Inquiry, set up in 1973, became almost a synonym for whitewash.
A more thorough inquiry under Lord Saville—set up by the Blair Labour government as part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement—sustained the whitewash in a more complex form. Saville took 10 years to conclude in 2010, despite a vast amount of evidence pointing to the responsibility of the Heath government and leading army officers, that the massacre was somehow the result of soldiers on the ground “losing their self-control.” Saville identified Soldier F as having shot three people, and possibly another two.
Finally in 2019, Northern Ireland’s prosecution service concluded there was enough evidence to charge Soldier F, one of 21 members of the Parachute Regiment who fired their weapons on the day. Relatives and supporters of those killed and wounded had been expecting another four soldiers to be charged.
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Soldier F’s long delayed trial, which opened on September 15 and is expected to last several weeks, is only one of a stream of contested cases emerging from the decades long “dirty war”.
18. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Lecturers continue stoppage for a third week to demand salary arrears
Morocco:
Anti-government protests in Morocco met with live fire by police
Nigeria:
Oil union calls off strike over mass sackings
South Africa:Protest march in Cape Town demands fair wages and job security
Protest march in Cape Town demands fair wages and job security
Uganda:
Union local tells workers to defy national civil servants’ strike
Europe
Belgium:
Hundreds of overworked IKEA staff strike for improved pay and conditions
Hundreds of overworked IKEA staff strike for improved pay and conditions
Bosnia and Herzegovina:
Workers in Bosnian coking plant walk out to protest non-payment of wages and benefits
Workers in Bosnian coking plant walk out to protest non-payment of wages and benefits
Portugal:
Museums and Monuments workers hold another national one-day strike in ongoing pay dispute
Museums and Monuments workers hold another national one-day strike in ongoing pay dispute
Spain:
Thousands of school teachers in Extremadura strike for pay parity
Thousands of school teachers in Extremadura strike for pay parity
United Kingdom:
Construction workers at Sellafield walk out over hazard pay
Construction workers at Sellafield walk out over hazard pay
Iran:
Nationwide protests continue across Iran at wages, pensions and conditions
Taftan gold miners protest conditions
Nationwide protests continue across Iran at wages, pensions and conditions
Taftan gold miners protest conditions
19. 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.
