1. This week in history: October 27-November 2
- 25 years ago:
Kosovo elections expose deepening nationalist divisions and discontent with KLA-NATO rule
50 years ago:
Ford declares federal support for the NYC austerity budget
75 years ago:
Puerto Rico uprising suppressed by United States
100 years ago:
Soviet military leader Mikhail Frunze poisoned at Stalin’s orders
2. Kenya’s President Ruto forms alliance with former dictator Moi’s KANU party
Kenyan President William Ruto is moving to integrate the Kenya African National Union (KANU) into his “broad-based” government aimed at stabilizing his crisis-ridden regime. Ruto’s government, already encompassing many rival factions of the bourgeoisie, is seeking to draw in the Moi dynasty and the remnants of the former ruling party that for four decades served as the main political instrument of Kenyan capitalism.
Barely a week after the burial of Raila Odinga—the political fixer who for decades diverted mass opposition behind the establishment—Ruto is pressing ahead with the absorption of KANU. Its current leader, Gideon Moi, son of former dictator Daniel arap Moi, is reportedly set to be appointed deputy prime minister. At least three new Cabinet slots could be allocated to KANU “as a reward for future loyalty,” according to the media.
Ruto is also reportedly exploring the possibility of merging his United Democratic Alliance (UDA) with Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), founded in 2005. Formerly the main opposition party, ODM joined Ruto’s government last year amid the eruption of the Gen Z protests, which shook the entire political establishment.
The entry of KANU would convert Kenya into a fully-fledged parliamentary dictatorship. Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza Alliance, ODM’s Azimio la Umoja One Kenya Coalition Party and KANU would sum up 342 MPs of a 349 seat-parliament. Beyond the parliamentary arithmetic, these developments are an attempt to forge unity at the top to suppress the opposition of workers and youth from below, intensify the imposition of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity, and deepen the assault on democratic rights.
KANU was the party that negotiated independence with British imperialism. Led by Jomo Kenyatta, it oversaw the transfer of power from the colonial administration to a national bourgeoisie that suppressed workers’ and peasants’ struggles. Under the banners of “Africanization” and “nation building,” it carried out mass land lootings to enrich itself and integrated Kenya ever more into the orbit of imperialism.
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President Ruto emerged as a product of the Moi regime’s machinery of tribal pogroms and repression. As a youth organizer in the KANU-linked YK’92 network, he played a direct role in attacks on opponents. The same tribalist incitement resurfaced in the 2007–2008 post-election crisis, when over 1,100 were killed and 600,000 displaced. Ruto played a key role, distributing machetes and money to Kalenjin youth to attack other communities across the agricultural-rich Rift Valley.
Ruto’s pilgrimage to Gideon Moi’s Kabarak home, where he discussed KANU’s entry into his government and laid a wreath at Moi’s mausoleum, symbolizes the coming together of the ruling elite.
Besides Ruto, all Kenya’s main political establishment figureheads have links to the old dictator. Former President Uhuru Kenyatta (2013-2022) was Moi’s handpicked successor in 2002, which launched his rise in national politics. The late Raila Odinga, who was detained and tortured multiple times by Moi’s regime, later briefly allied with him through a merger of his National Democratic Party and KANU in 2001 and became his minister of energy. Kalonzo Musyoka, today a nominal opposition figurehead to Ruto, served loyally under Moi for decades, including key ministerial roles and as KANU Secretary General.
Ruto’s call for “unity” from above is about enforcing austerity through an expanding police state. Nearly 40 percent of Kenya’s public debt is owed to the World Bank and IMF, and debt servicing now consumes more than 63 percent of government revenue, making austerity and tax increases a structural necessity for the ruling class.
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Nearly 20 million people already live below the national poverty line, and more than eight in ten workers are trapped in the informal economy without contracts, benefits, or job security. Inflation is cutting down real wages. According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 8.4 percent, while costs of housing, water, electricity, and gas continued to climb. The price of a two-kilogram packet of maize flour—a staple for Kenya households—has risen by between 33 and 65 percent since the start of the year.
The response of the Ruto regime to mounting hardship is repression and state violence. On the day of Odinga’s death, while the media celebrated the “national hero,” Ruto quietly signed eight draconian bills into law. The Privatization Act of 2025 paves the way for the wholesale sell-off of public assets, such as the Kenya Pipeline Company and 11 parastatals. The Cybercrimes Amendment expands digital surveillance and censorship.
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The Kenyan working class and youth must draw the lessons of past betrayals. The struggles against colonialism, dictatorship, and austerity have repeatedly been diverted by nationalist and tribalist politics. What is required is the building of an independent, socialist, and internationalist movement, linked to workers across Africa and the world. The fight against austerity, repression, and imperialist domination must be consciously organized as a struggle for a workers’ government that expropriates the capitalist elite, ends Kenya’s subjugation to imperialism, and reorganizes society on socialist foundations.
3. Northern Ireland: “Soldier F” found not guilty as Bloody Sunday whitewash maintained
A British soldier, publicly known only as Soldier F, has been found not guilty of the murder of two innocent men and the attempted murder of five more during the British Army’s Bloody Sunday massacre at a civil rights demonstration in Derry, Northern Ireland, on January 30, 1972.
13 people were shot dead, another died later. 15 more, at least, were wounded.
The shootings came three years after the British Labour government launched Operation Banner in 1969 to prop up the Northern Ireland statelet, part of the UK, in the face of mass opposition to anti-Catholic discrimination, Loyalist reaction, and intensifying class struggle across partitioned Ireland. The civil rights movement emerged as part of a worldwide wave of protests, strikes and revolutionary struggles. Ultimately, some 300,000 British troops served in the operation, which lasted officially until 2007.
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The January 30 protest had been billed as peaceful by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association organizers who laid “special emphasis on the necessity for a peaceful incident-free day”. This followed a demonstration the previous week when protestors were assaulted, shot with rubber bullets and attacked with CS gas.
The British government had, however, authorized an attack on the march, with its Belfast Joint Security Committee seeking to “prepare public opinion... for violent scenes on TV”, noting that their “operation might well develop into rioting and even a shooting war”.
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There have been two public inquiries—one, the Saville Inquiry, lasted 12 years—plus countless reviews of the events of the day and a protracted campaign by relatives and supporters of those shot and killed or wounded. 53 years later, Soldier F, now in his 70s, became the only member of the military involved in the massacre to actually face trial.
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Those killed by the army in Derry were, until 1992, routinely and falsely accused by the British government of being IRA members until Tory Party Prime Minister John Major was forced to concede that they were neither armed nor in the republican organization.
It was only after the publication of the Saville Inquiry’s extensive report in 2010 that another Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron, allowed an expression of official regret for the “unjustified and unjustifiable” murders on the day. Even then, in what remains the official line, Cameron insisted that the shootings took place because of soldiers “losing their self-control”.
Saville also noted of the evidence given by soldiers: “We have concluded that none of them fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks by nail or petrol bombers. No one threw or threatened to throw a nail or petrol bomb at the soldiers on Bloody Sunday.”
Saville attacked the credibility of the soldiers’ accounts as being “materially undermined” since all bar one responsible for casualties “insisted that they had shot at gunmen or bombers, which they had not.”
He continued, “Many of these soldiers have knowingly put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing.”
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Soldier F, a lance corporal in 1972, gave a prepared statement claiming he was sure he “properly discharged his duties as a soldier that day” and no longer had “any reliable recollections of those events”. He would therefore “not be answering any questions put to me.” He spent the entire trial protected from public view by a curtain.
In his verdict, Judge Patrick Lynch concluded that “a number of soldiers, members of the Parachute Regiment, entered Glenfada Park North and immediately, or almost immediately, opened fire with high velocity weapons at unarmed civilians at a distance of 50 meters or less.”
But Lynch described the key 1972 statements as originating from two witnesses who “are themselves, on the basis of the Crown case, guilty of murder as, in essence, accomplices with a motivation to name F as a participant in their murderous activities.”
Lynch rejected a joint enterprise accusation, stating baldly, after having cited many precedents that could, on the face of it, apply, “I hold that there is nothing to suggest that F and colleagues had any such wide-ranging [murder] plan.”
Of course, any serious investigation of joint enterprise would lead inevitably to 10 Downing Street, the then Ulster authorities and the heads of the British Army.
No one following the circumstances leading to the case against Soldier F and the trial itself would be surprised at him leaving the court a free man. But the lessons for today are clear.
Bloody Sunday took place in front of TV cameras and was directed against protestors who were Irish and British citizens. In ensuring that Soldier F got the required verdict, the British authorities and the imperialist bourgeoisie they represent—facing escalating class tensions and deepening opposition to savage austerity, the attack on democratic rights and genocidal militarism—are effectively stating, “We did this in 1972. We did it with impunity. And we will not hesitate to do it again”.
4. Trump escalates Canada-US trade war, as Ottawa prepares class-war budget
US President Donald Trump has canceled all trade negotiations with Canada and said he is slapping a further 10 percent tariff or tax on Canadian exports to the US.
Trump, as is his wont, imperially announced his escalation of the US-Canada trade war via social media posts, the first tweeted last Thursday evening.
Trump failed to provide the barest of details about the new 10 percent tariff that he announced Saturday, including when it will come into force and what goods will be subjected to it.
As part of his drive to restructure the world economy in American imperialism’s favor and rebuild its military-industrial base in preparation for world war, the would-be dictator US president has hit America’s second largest trade partner with a barrage of tariffs, impacting huge swathes of Canada’s economy.
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Trump has also revived his threats to annex Canada, beginning at the extraordinary meeting of all US generals that War Secretary Pete Hegseth convened September 30 as part of the administration’s preparations to deploy the military against the American people.
As justification for canceling the trade talks and hitting Canada with an additional 10 percent tariff, Trump has cited an Ontario government ad broadcast on Fox and other far-right US networks that includes clips of Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs as counterproductive. Trump has absurdly claimed the clips of Reagan, which come from a 1987 speech, may have been generated using AI.
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Lost in all the capitalist media reports about Trump’s pique over the ad is the fact that on Thursday, shortly before he began his series of posts railing against it, Ottawa rolled back the exemptions given US-based automakers General Motors and Stellantis under the retaliatory tariffs Canada imposed in response to Trump’s auto tariffs.
Trump has repeatedly vowed he will shut down Canada’s auto industry, which has been fully integrated with America’s since the 1960s. His Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, more generously told a conference on Canada-US relations earlier this month that Canada would be allowed to be “second” after the US in auto production, indicating that it should be restricted to supplying materials and auto parts for US-assembled vehicles. Whatever the case may be, the drive to destroy Canada’s industrial base is a key component of American imperialism’s push to make Canada the 51st state.
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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sought to downplay Trump’s scuttling of the Canada-US trade talks. Speaking shortly before departing on an East Asia trip where he will cross paths with Trump at both the ASEAN and APEC summits, Carney said Canada is prepared to return to the negotiations whenever Washington is ready.
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Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Carney during his initial months in office insisted that Canada would accept nothing less than the repeal of all of Trump’s tariffs. But Ottawa has now reconciled itself to simply reducing their impact, so as to focus on preserving Canada’s broader privileged access to the US market. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly threatened to scuttle USMCA altogether, including when Carney visited the White House earlier this month. During that visit, Carney genuflected before the fascist autocrat, hailing him as a “transformational” president and “peacemaker.”
The reality is the close economic and military-security partnership with Washington and Wall Street central to Canadian imperialism’s global strategy since the eruption of the Second World War has irreversibly broken down.
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In response, Carney, his Liberal government, and the Canadian ruling class are desperately seeking to reach an accommodation with Trump, while working to strengthen ties with the European and Asian-Pacific imperialist powers.
Carney has offered Washington a new “economic and security” pact, with the aim of ensuring that Canada’s strategic interests and prerogatives as a junior imperialist partner of the United States are duly recognized within a Trump-led Fortress North America. In return, Canada would tie itself still more fully to the US drive to secure control over critical minerals, energy resources, production chains and strategic territories through trade wars, protectionist blocs, aggression and war.
At the same time, Carney has strongly backed Britain, France and Germany’s efforts to escalate the NATO-instigated war with Russia over Ukraine, assisting their efforts to sabotage any potential rapprochement between Moscow and the Trump-led US; and he has secured Canada’s participation in the European imperialist powers’ drive to massively expand armaments production under ReArm Europe.
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The axis of the government and Canadian ruling class’s drive to strengthen Canada’s “sovereignty” and economic “resilience” is a dramatic escalation of the assault on the social and democratic rights of the working class. Trump’s latest tariff increase and threats to junk USMCA will only accelerate this process.
The military spending increases—as Carney and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne have indicated with their vow to deliver a “transformational,” “austerity and investment” budget —will be paid for by the working class through massive social spending cuts.
On Wednesday evening, Carney delivered a speech that the Prime Minister’s Office billed as a “primetime, pre-budget preview,” and which was nationally televised at the government’s request.
Carney began his speech with taglines cribbed from the far-right Conservative opposition, affirming “there is no prosperity without security,” and touting the government’s actions to provide “strong borders,” i.e., gut the rights of refugees and immigrants, fight crime, and massively boost military spending.
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To meet “a more competitive and hostile world,” Ottawa, he declared, must make “tough choices” and Canadians sacrifices.
Specifically, he pointed to the government’s announcement that Canada Post must end daily and home delivery, i.e., massively cut postal services and eliminate tens of thousands of full-time jobs, as an example of its readiness to make “difficult” and “responsible choices.”
“Even with such efficiencies and better management,” Carney continued, “we will have to do less of some of the things we want to do, so we can do more of what we must do to build a bigger, better Canada.”
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The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party (Canada) have warned from the very outset of the Canada-US trade war that the Canadian ruling class, with the assistance of the union bureaucracy and the union-sponsored New Democrats, would use Canadian nationalist flag-waving and tub-thumping as the political-ideological spearhead for a massive intensification of the assault on the working class.
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Over the past fourteen months, the Liberal government has arrogated the power to illegalize strikes at will. The first substantive piece of legislation it proposed following the April 28 election would massively restrict the right of those fleeing repression and war to seek refugee status and massively expand the powers of the police and national-security apparatus.
The Globe and Mail, the traditional mouthpiece of Canada’s Bay Street banks, has declared the coming budget a “test” for Carney’s minority Liberal government, signalling that if it doesn’t move with sufficient speed and intensity against the working class, the Globe will renew its push for a Pierre Poilievre-led, far-right Conservative government.
Meanwhile, the unions and NDP remain the biggest promoters of Team Canada, the Carney and Ontario Tory government-led corporatist trade-war alliance. Their only criticism is that Ottawa should be more aggressive in employing counter-tariffs and other protectionist measures whose principal victim will be American workers and Canadian consumers. The two NDP premiers, Manitoba’s Wab Kinew and British Columbia’s David Eby, are leading advocates of Canada’s massive military spending increases, with Eby recently announcing the BC NDP will soon unveil the province’s first-ever military-industrial policy.
The role of Canada’s labour bureaucrats mirrors that of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the other US-based trade unions, who are fully on board with Trump’s tariffs and American imperialism’s global war to redivide the world.
Workers in Canada have every reason to oppose Trump and everything he represents—oligarchy, dictatorship and war. But they can do so only by opposing all factions of the Canadian ruling class, intensifying the class struggle, and forging unity with workers in the US, who, as the October 18 “No Kings” protests demonstrated, are increasingly being propelled into action against Trump.
It is Trump’s so-called “enemy within”—the working class—that are the true allies of workers in Canada. In both countries, to oppose austerity, dictatorship and war, workers must build new organizations of genuine class struggle, rank-and-file committees, in opposition to the corporatist trade union apparatuses, and fuse their struggles into a political-industrial counter-offensive for workers’ power and a socialist North America.
5. Orwell: 2+2=5–Raoul Peck’s film about George Orwell and contemporary events
David Walsh explains why Raoul Peck’s new film Orwell: 2+2=5 is "irritating and extraordinarily tedious." How did the author George Orwell evolve over his lifetime?6. More interviews with workers in New Zealand’s mass strike
Healthcare workers and teachers, who were among 100,000 people on strike last Thursday, spoke about the impact of poverty and homelessness on schools and hospitals, and denounced the National Party-led government’s support for war and genocide.
7. VW halts production due to chip shortage resulting from Trump’s trade war measures
The global economic war waged by the US against the world, and particularly against China, is once again hitting Europe’s car industry hard. VW has announced production stoppages and is already negotiating with the Federal Employment Agency over short-time work starting in November.
8. Australia: Meeting on demolition of Melbourne public housing towers blocks SEP speaker
The meeting organizers—above all, the Greens and pseudo-left organizations—promoted the illusion that the demolition of the housing towers was simply a policy mistake that protests and pressure would compel the state Labor government to reverse.
9. Munition factory explosion in Russia kills at least 13
The disaster is the second major explosion at a munitions factory in Russia in less than a week.
The Wayne State University Law School in Detroit sponsored a meeting on Friday, October 24, on “Executive Orders and Constraints on Free Speech,” which dealt with the legal and political issues arising from the Trump administration’s persecution of Cornell University graduate student Momodou Taal.
The panel including Taal, who participated remotely, and two fellow litigants from Cornell University who were co-plaintiffs in the case of Momodou Taal v. Donald Trump, and the two lawyers who filed the lawsuit, Eric Lee and Chris Godshall-Bennett.
Taal is a British-Gambian citizen who was studying at Cornell University. He participated in student protests in 2024 against the Gaza genocide, as well as speaking at a protest against arms manufacturers who were part of a recruitment event on the campus.
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For the latter “crime,” Taal was targeted by the university administration for deportation from the United States. Cornell’s provost suspended Taal, and told him he had 48 hours to leave the country because his student visa was no longer valid.
After a vigorous response by Taal and his legal team, the university backed down and restored his status as an enrolled student. But the effort to remove him was revived after Donald Trump entered the White House and ordered full-scale persecution of all foreign students who had engaged in protests against the foreign policy of American imperialism.
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Eric Lee, an attorney defending the rights of Taal, explained that freedom of speech is guaranteed under the Bill of Rights not just to American citizens, but to everyone living in this country. The word “citizen” does not appear in the text of the First Amendment, which refers to the rights of the people, he said.
Taal was forced to leave the US in March to escape detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, after his lawyers filed suit challenging Trump’s executive orders attacking campus protests against the Gaza genocide.
One of the executive orders allows the removal of foreign students for criticizing Israel, or makes them inadmissible if they’re a student or individual attempting to apply for a visa from outside the United States. The second executive order renders individuals potentially deportable or excludable if they so much as criticize the US government, its institutions, or American culture.
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Eric Lee, an attorney defending the rights of Taal, explained that freedom of speech is guaranteed under the Bill of Rights not just to American citizens, but to everyone living in this country. The word “citizen” does not appear in the text of the First Amendment, which refers to the rights of the people, he said.
“The First Amendment is a switch, not a dial. It’s either on or off,” Lee said. “Because Momodou is not here, that violates all our rights here at this meeting, because we can’t have face-to-face contact, which is vital. American citizens will face this too.”
About going to the courts, Lee said, “We do everything we can through them. But also, we can expose the framework of whatever remains of this supposed democracy. People in this country, despite the Trump vote, understand the power of the Bill of Rights and Constitution. This gives us the support politically to win working people here, and all over the world.”
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Godshall-Bennett addressed law students at WSU [Wayne State University directly], saying, “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. Law students have to think about what their next few years are going to be like.” He attacked the fake charges of antisemitism against those protesting against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, “which is the reaction of the Zionists to the loss of popular opinion on the issue of Palestine, particularly among young people. There has to be one crime that shakes us.”
A lively discussion followed the initial presentations, with law students raising questions about the language of the First Amendment and the various legal hurdles Momodou Taal and his lawyers had to encounter, as well as the chilling effect of the Trump administration repression on the campuses.
In the course of this discussion, Lee placed the attack on Momodou Taal within the framework of the bipartisan attack on democratic rights, which has reached the point that Trump is seeking to establish a presidential dictatorship. The Democrats act as his collaborators and facilitators, opposing any mass mobilization of working people against this growing danger.
11. Fascist conspirator Steve Bannon tells The Economist “We have a plan” for a 3rd Trump term
Neo-Nazi Trump ally Steve Bannon told The Economist magazine in an interview Thursday that President Trump will have “at least” one more term in office and that the leaders of his MAGA movement “have a plan” to defy the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, which says presidents can be elected to only two terms.
In the 40-minute interview posted on The Economist’s website, both Bannon and his interlocutors, Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and Deputy Editor Edward Carr, ignored the massive “No Kings” protests that brought over 7 million people onto the streets across the US on October 18. Bannon claimed it was the “will of the American people” for the widely hated would-be-dictator to remain for a third term in 2028 and possibly beyond.
Bannon’s statements amount to an admission that he and his co-conspirators in and around the Trump White House are engaged in treason. They are plotting to overthrow the Constitution and impose a presidential dictatorship. Yet his interview has elicited no serious response from the Democratic Party or the establishment media, including the unofficial organ of the Democrats, the New York Times.
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Taking a page from the playbook of his hero, Adolf Hitler, Bannon said the strategy was to “seize the institutions and then purge them.” After the failure of his 1923 Munich “Beer Hall Putsch,” Hitler determined that he would come to power through the institutions of the Weimar Republic, with the support of decisive sections of the German capitalist class. That is what occurred in January 1933, when the crisis-ridden ruling class concluded that it could no longer rule by democratic means and turned to the Nazis to smash the working class.
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In the interview, Bannon made the absurd claim that Trump rules in the interests of workers and the “little man” by ending “corporatism” and restoring capitalism. This was said of a multi-billionaire gangster who is the open representative of the financial oligarchy in the United States. The interview was posted one day after Trump pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of crypto exchange Binance. Zhao, who has extensive business relations with Trump’s sons, pleaded guilty to money laundering during the Biden administration.
The interview also coincided with Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House—the physical expression of his dismantling of the legacy of America’s democratic revolutions—to build a massive ballroom. This Mar-a-Lago-style monstrosity is being paid for by corporate donors, including Meta, Amazon, Apple, Caterpillar, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir, Union Pacific, the Lutnick family, Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone), and the Winklevoss brothers.
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In his interview, Bannon spoke of his “populist, nationalist” (i.e., fascist) movement as part of an international wave, citing Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the UK, Le Pen’s RN in France, the Alternative for Germany, Vox in Spain and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
Bannon, who fancies himself a great strategist of fascist counter-revolution, bases his plan on one critical assumption, which is that the Democratic Party will do nothing—beyond filing impotent legal appeals to the Supreme Court and muttering verbal disapproval—to uphold the Constitution. When push comes to shove, the Democrats will shamelessly bend down before Trump.
And this assumption is entirely correct. On Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries whimpered that Bannon’s remarks were “dangerous authoritarian talk” and represented a continuation of Trump’s pattern of “defying the rule of law” and “testing the limits of our Constitution.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Bannon’s statements “chilling” and proof that the MAGA movement is “eroding constitutional safeguards.”
Neither so much as called for Bannon’s prosecution and arrest or demanded that he reveal the identities of his co-conspirators. As always, they made no call for mass action to halt the drive to dictatorship.
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No faction of the Democrats, including its so-called “progressive” wing, will lift a finger to stop Trump’s drive for dictatorship. Last week, Bernie Sanders, whose cynical opportunism knows no bounds, appeared on the podcast of Trump supporter Tim Dillon and backed Trump’s war on immigrants, saying “Trump did a better job” than Biden in securing the border.
The Democrats’ indifference to democratic rights was already demonstrated in 2000, when Al Gore accepted the theft of the election by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which halted the counting of votes in Florida to award the White House to George W. Bush, the loser of the popular vote. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, this showed that there was no serious constituency for the defense of democratic rights within the US ruling class.
Bannon’s declaration that Trump will be kept in power through unconstitutional, i.e., illegal, methods signifies a break with democracy and its traditional political processes. But from this fact flows the critical political conclusion: If Trump is determined to retain power in violation of the law, this means that his removal from office becomes possible only through mass action, outside the bounds of the electoral process. Perhaps Mr. Bannon has not thought through to the end the implications of his criminal strategy, but there is no escaping the fact that he is legitimizing the resort to revolution by the working class.
The conspiracy of Bannon and his accomplices in the White House has created the political premises for precisely the situation envisioned in 1776 by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness] it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
In contemporary terms, the struggle against dictatorship depends upon the mobilization of the working class as an independent social force. It must take power out of the hands of the capitalist class, whose interests are incompatible with democracy. The “Safety and Happiness” of the working class, which comprises the overwhelming majority of the population, requires the formation of a workers’ government, based on socialist principles.
The strike by approximately 700 nurses and case workers at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan, has now entered its eighth week.
This struggle, centered on reversing debilitating staffing shortages and defending previous gains, finds itself at a critical juncture. Management is operating the hospital by hiring scab nurses for than $100 per hour, and Henry Ford Health management has expressed gratitude towards nurses who have chosen to resign from the union and return to work as part of its strikebreaking campaign.
Meanwhile, management is claiming that the hospital “cannot and will not” meet the nurses’ demands regarding premium pay, attendance and staffing levels.
Management’s ruthlessness can only be answered through the expansion and escalation of the struggle by workers. Nurses must organize and appeal for support among workers across western Michigan, the Henry Ford Health system and US healthcare workers as a whole. This month’s strike by 45,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente on the West Coast shows that the conditions are emerging for a powerful national movement in defense of high quality healthcare.
Instead, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has been systematically isolating the strike. This underscores the need for workers to take matters into their own hands through a rank-and-file strike committee, providing them with the means to take the initiative and carry out strategic decisions made democratically by the workers as a whole.
The conflict between the strikers and the bureaucracy was revealed by the picket line visit last Thursday by Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien and General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman.
O’Brien, delivering his typical profanity-laced remarks, referred to himself several times as a “tough guy” from Boston and denounced Henry Ford Health as a “white collar crime syndicate” and the hospital as a “schoolyard bully.” He vowed that the Teamsters would “make certain that these white collar crime syndicates are held accountable and give you the contract that you deserve.” He added that the union will continue to “fight this week and next week.”
But O’Brien offered no concrete strategy of proposals for how the strike could be won. This is because, behind his hot air, the real purpose of his visit is to help shut the strike down. It recalls a similar visit to the picket line of 8,000 Philadelphia municipal workers by AFSCME President Lee Saunders, which was followed within days by the cancellation of the strike and the announcement of a sellout agreement.
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The strike is at a critical juncture. Either nurses and case workers take control of the struggle through the formation of a rank-and-file strike committee, or the strike will be betrayed.
A central aim of the committee would be to break through the isolation of the strike and mobilize other hospital employees and the working class in the area to stop the scabbing.
The committee would also be tasked with reaching out to and mobilizing other hospital employees, unionized and non-unionized alike, at Henry Ford Genesys and across the entire Henry Ford Health system and to hospital workers at the other healthcare systems in the area, such Corewell Health.
The rank-and-file committee must begin not with what Henry Ford claims it can afford, which is where the bureaucracy begins, but by what nurses and patients urgently need.
13. Pentagon moving massive naval force towards Venezuela
The Trump administration is mobilizing the largest naval force in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, in open preparation for a massive and illegal war against Venezuela.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced Friday that at Trump’s order, he was redeploying the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, the largest such vessel in the world, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean. This follows Thursday’s operation, when two US B-1 bombers flew along the coast of Venezuela in a brazen show of force.
This in turn followed the series of attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, in which US military forces have destroyed 10 small fishing boats, killing at least 43 people. Bodies with missing limbs and horrific burns have begun to wash up on the shores of Trinidad and Tobago, the island nation which is only six miles off the coast of Venezuela at its closest point.
It will take about a week for the aircraft carrier and its associated ships, called a carrier group, to transit the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean and take up a station off the coast of Venezuela. But air strikes and other attacks on targets within Venezuela could begin at any time, as Trump gloated that nearly all boat traffic in the region has stopped, and that the US would shift its focus to attacks on land.
By the beginning of November, then, the US flotilla off of Venezuela will include an aircraft carrier with 70 fighter jets and attack helicopters, a helicopter carrier with another 30 tilt-rotor aircraft and attack helicopters and nearly 2,000 Marines, the spearhead of an assault landing force, a guided-missile cruiser, six or more destroyers and other support ships.
Needless to say, this is not a force aimed at interdicting drug smugglers. Its sole purpose is to invade Venezuela, a country of more than 30 million people, twice the size, geographically, of Iraq, and one and a half times the size, geographically, of Afghanistan. Roughly half the country, the southern half, is tropical jungle, part of the Amazon basin, mainly bordering on Brazil.
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In the event of a full-scale war against Venezuela, the legal position of Venezuelan migrants inside the United States would change abruptly. Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act, although this has been limited in certain ways by the courts. It is quite likely that Venezuelan nationality would result in immediate arrest and detention, regardless of any other legal considerations, such as Temporary Protected Status. Given the number of Venezuelan migrants, likely several million, now in the US, a huge number of immigration agents, police and troops would be required to detain them, and only massive concentration camps could house them.
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The Wall Street Journal quoted Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser in the final two years of his first term: “Moving a carrier into theater is the clearest statement the United States can make that the crisis is serious … the combat power that the Ford task force can generate is sufficient to defeat the [Nicolás] Maduro regime’s military, which would be the key step to installing the country’s legitimately, elected president, Maria Machado in office.”
The last description is remarkable, since Machado was disqualified from running in 2024 and therefore never received a single vote. She has never appeared on the ballot in any presidential election. But her Nobel Peace Prize made her the likely front-woman for a new US-backed regime in Venezuela.
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In a remarkable interview on “Meet the Press” Sunday, Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona was asked if the Trump administration attacks on alleged drug boats are consistent with international law. He replied, “No, it’s murder … If this president feels that they’re doing something illegally, then he should be using the Coast Guard. If there’s an act of war, then you use our military, and then you come and talk to us first. But this is murder.”
His “Meet the Press” interviewer, Kristen Welker, did not raise an eyebrow over this characterization, but simply passed on without comment. Gallego then went on to discuss the Democratic Party’s posture in the government shutdown, demanding that Trump agree to negotiate. Neither Gallego nor Welker indicated that there was any contradiction between calling Trump a murderer and seeking to sit down with him at a conference table.
Educators and students joined the meeting to oppose the assault on university education and its transformation to meet the needs of the corporate elite and the war machine.
University educators, students and teachers participated in a strong public meeting on Sunday to discuss the Australian Labor government’s restructuring of universities, accompanied by the destruction of some 4,000 jobs, and its connection to the dictatorial and militarist agenda that the Trump regime is spearheading internationally.
Held in Sydney and online, the meeting was entitled “Oppose Labor’s ‘national priorities’ university restructuring and job cuts.” More than 100 people joined the meeting, called by the rank-and-file committees at Western Sydney and Macquarie universities, the Committee for Public Education (CFPE)—the educators’ rank-and-file network—and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth movement of the Socialist Equality Party.
15. United States: Libbey Glass strike in Toledo at crossroads
The nearly 10-week strike by 675 Libbey Glass workers in Toledo, Ohio, is rapidly approaching the longest in the company’s history—the 2.5-month walkout in 1974.
The month-long government shutdown is rapidly turning into a social catastrophe, as funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, is set to expire on November 1. The program provides essential food aid to around 42 million Americans living near or below the official poverty line. Its cutoff would mark, in the words of the CEO of Hunger Free America quoted in The Guardian, “the greatest hunger catastrophe in America since the Great Depression, and I don’t say that as hyperbole.”
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A large notice on the USDA website now declares: “Bottom line, the well has run dry … We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”
The claim that Democrats are demanding funding for healthcare for undocumented immigrants and for gender affirming care is false, and it is illegal under the Hatch Act to post such transparently partisan messages on an official government website. This language is part of the White House’s fascist rhetoric as part of its plans for dictatorship.
In reality, the hunger crisis is being deliberately manufactured by the Trump administration. It is going to allow tens of millions to go hungry as a form of political blackmail over the shutdown, through which Trump is seeking to seize control of the federal budget process from Congress and consolidate executive power.
This is part of a broader policy of class war. Trump has already enacted more than $180 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next decade under his “Big Beautiful Bill” passed this summer. Even without the shutdown, new eligibility restrictions set to take effect next month would have reduced or eliminated payments for roughly half of all recipients.
At the same time, Trump is threatening to dismantle unnamed “Democrat” and “semi-communist” programs. This clearly refers to food stamps, Medicaid and other social programs enacted decades ago under Democratic administrations, when that party was still associated with limited social reforms. Medicaid alone was also slashed by more than $800 billion over the summer.
The administration is also preparing for massive repression. It has reallocated $8 billion, roughly the same amount required to fund SNAP for an entire month, to pay soldiers during the shutdown. This is designed to ensure their loyalty as the government illegally deploys troops into American cities and moves toward invoking the Insurrection Act. The cost of maintaining food stamp funding is also less than half the $17.5 billion construction and research and development costs of the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which has been dispatched to the Caribbean as part of the US military buildup against Venezuela.
The boundaries separating government from the financial oligarchy are being openly dismantled. Soldiers’ pay is also being supplemented by a $130 million “anonymous” donation, later revealed to be from Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and one of the heirs to the Mellon family fortune originally built by the 19th- and early 20th-century banker, industrialist and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.
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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CBS News on Sunday, “There is an urgent need to reopen the government, which is why we continue to demand that Republicans sit at the negotiating table so we can enact a spending agreement that’s bipartisan in nature [emphasis added].”
The call for a “bipartisan agreement” is code for a deal that includes sweeping social spending cuts, possibly offset by a token or cosmetic concession on Medicaid to provide Democrats with political cover. This is the same political theater that has characterized every budget crisis for decades.
But Trump is not playing by the ordinary rules, as the Democrats are well aware. In a recent interview, Trump loyalist Steve Bannon openly admitted the existence of a secret plan to allow Trump to remain in office beyond constitutional term limits, effectively establishing a dictatorship. Yet the Democrats refuse to oppose him because they fear the mass, working class movement required to defeat Trump far more than they fear the prospect of dictatorship itself.
The situation underscores the necessity for such a movement—an independent mobilization of the working class, opposed to both capitalist parties and to the capitalist system as a whole. This is what the Socialist Equality Party fights for.
17. Two workers killed in Everett, Massachusetts crane collapse
Two workers were killed when a crane mounted on a barge toppled over while they were cutting pipe for a redevelopment project site on the Mystic River.
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
