Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. New York Times backs regime change war against Venezuela
The [New York] Times recruited [Bret] Stephens in 2017. Explaining its decision to hire the right-wing columnist from the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper claimed it s aim was to encourage “debate from a wide range of viewpoints.” This was a lie. Stephens was brought in because he opposed Trump from the same essential standpoint as that of the Times and the Democratic Party establishment: foreign policy. Like them, the columnist supported Washington maintaining its role as the “world’s policeman,” opposing Trump’s “America First” appeals and demanding a more bellicose policy toward Russia.
It is this same thread that runs through the present support for a war for regime change in Venezuela. In his column, Stephens wastes little time justifying the Trump administration’s absurd pretext for war: countering narcotics-trafficking. Instead, he writes, “the larger challenge posed by Maduro’s regime” lies in its “close economic and strategic ties to China, Russia and Iran,” giving these countries a “foothold in the Americas.”
He continues by warning that if Trump fails to go to war, it “will be read, especially in Moscow and Beijing, as a telling signal of weakness that can only embolden them, just as President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan did.” In other words, Venezuela is seen as a battlefield in an emerging third world war.
Demanding that Maduro surrender and flee the country, Stephens states, “Barring that, he deserves the Noriega treatment: capture and transfer to the U.S. to face charges, accompanied by the destruction of Venezuela’s air defenses and command-and-control capabilities, the seizure of its major military bases and arrest warrants for all senior officers…” That Venezuela is over ten times larger in both population and geographical area than Panama doesn’t seem to faze Stephens, anymore than the prospect for the US would be opening up yet another “forever war” whose costs in blood are incalculable.
He concludes his column with an apocryphal quote from Napoleon, apparently aimed at lending this hack piece for the US military-intelligence apparatus a bit of pseudo-intellectual gloss: “‘If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna,’ Napoleon is said to have told one of his generals. Same for Caracas, Mr. President.”
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The Times is not alone in its promotion of a war for regime change against Venezuela. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, published on Tuesday a statement by far-right US puppet Maria Corina Machado laying out her “vision” for Venezuela after its conquest by US imperialism.
The Post accompanied this wretched quisling document with an editorial titled “This could be the light at the end of Venezuela’s tunnel.” It was seemingly dictated by Bezos, who earlier this year addressed a missive to the Post staff instructing them that from now on they must be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
learly, it is the latter that takes precedence. The editorial praises Machado for putting “particular emphasis on the need to protect private property ownership as a fundamental right.” It continues: “To reawaken the economy, she proposes privatizing state-owned enterprises and ‘restoring the development of our oil and gas sectors to the ingenuity of free men and women,’” i.e., the CEOs of Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, etc. “Amen to all that,” states the editorial, no doubt echoing Bezos, who eyes Venezuela as a potential new market for Amazon.
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A US regime-change war against Venezuela, like Trump’s ongoing murder spree in the Caribbean, would be an entirely criminal enterprise. Those at the Times and the Post promoting such a war of aggression (or “crimes against peace,” as the international tribunal that tried the Nazis at Nuremberg put it) are complicit. They must be held accountable in the prisoners’ dock alongside Trump, Rubio, Hegseth, Miller and the other criminals in the White House and the Pentagon.
American workers must reject with contempt the lies of the war propagandists of the Times and the rest of the corporate media. They must expose the hypocritical pretensions of concern by both Democrats and Republicans for “democracy” and the wellbeing of the Venezuelan people, after decades of coup attempts and starving them by means of an economic blockade. It is the Venezuelan working class that will be the first victim of any US intervention.
Above all, the working class in the US must forge its unbreakable unity with the workers of Venezuela and the entire hemisphere in a common struggle against imperialist war based upon a socialist program to overthrow the capitalist profit system which is its source.
2. Congress, CEOs follow Trump in welcome to Saudi butcher
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met with top congressional leaders of both parties Wednesday morning, before an hours-long session with corporate CEOs and billionaires at the Kennedy Center in the afternoon.
The events confirm that President Trump spoke for the entire US ruling class, Democrats and Republicans alike, when he welcomed the bloodstained monarch to the White House and denounced any mention of bin Salman’s role in the gruesome murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
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The reception was intentionally low-key, with no notice to the press, no opportunity to take photographs and—likely the main consideration—no opportunity for those opposed to the Saudi regime and its collaboration with Zionism and American imperialism to stage protests against the appearance of the murderous ruler at the Capitol.
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Several Senate Democrats who did not attend the reception for bin Salman criticized Trump’s embrace of the Saudi despot because he was rejecting the assessment made by the CIA that the crown prince had ordered Khashoggi’s murder. These included Jeanne Shaheen, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Tim Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election.
Kaine criticized Trump’s disregard for the CIA assessment of the Khashoggi murder, suggesting that it undermined the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East. He said in a statement, “Instead of rolling out the red carpet for MBS and leveraging the presidency for private hotel deals, Trump should be demanding accountability on behalf of Khashoggi’s Virginia-based family and pressing Saudi Arabia to advance U.S. security interests.”
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After his brief session schmoozing with the congressional leadership, bin Salman travelled across town to the Kennedy Center to resume the real business of his trip: wooing and being wooed by corporate CEOs and billionaires, with Trump presiding over the scene like the head pimp at a house of ill repute.
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There were no protests in this milieu over bin Salman’s bloody record. On the contrary, his corporate well-wishers no doubt envy his ability, not just to fire critics, as is the practice in giant corporations, but to put them, literally, to the sword.
On 9 November, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, American-Jewish philosopher and Holocaust researcher Jason Stanley was forced to cut short his speech at a memorial event organized by the Jewish community in Frankfurt. On Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, 1938, mobs spurred on by the Nazis attacked Jewish synagogues across Germany.In his speech, Stanley had referred to the important role that Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelsohn played in German cultural life and the struggle to promulgate the ideas of the Enlightenment. Stanly also addressed the experiences of his own family. From this liberal standpoint, he went on to criticize Zionism and Israel’s atrocities in the Gaza Strip. This was all too much for some members of the audience. Stanley was shouted down, and the rabbi present urged him to stop his speech.
The US professor was shocked. He had not expected such a break with the liberal traditions for which the Frankfurt community was once known, especially under conditions where many Jewish students and artists, not only in the US but also in Germany, defend the rights of Palestinians.
Stanley had prefaced his speech with the words of the liberal rabbi Leo Baeck: “A Jew does not ask what he should believe, but what he should do. What should we do today?”
The entire tenor of his speech was geared towards emphasising the merits of liberalism and the Enlightenment, which had been fought for in particular by German Jews and he also supported. He said he was closely connected to this understanding of religion.
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academic education in Germany and taught at several American universities. This autumn, alarmed by the increasingly reactionary climate in the US under President Donald Trump, he moved from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. He explained that he wanted to raise his children in a country “that is not heading towards a fascist dictatorship.”
Stanley has sharply criticized the Israeli military actions in Gaza from the outset and called for an end to the Israeli attacks. The Jewish community knew very well who they were inviting to their memorial service.
At one point in his speech in Frankfurt, Stanley contrasted his liberal view of the state with that of fascism:
According to Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, a nation is created by choosing an enemy. The choice of an enemy unites otherwise disparate elements of a society. The Nazis chose the Jews. At other times, in other places, other groups were chosen as scapegoats—Muslims, black people, transsexuals. The construction of a nation based on the choice of a racial, ethnic, religious or sexual enemy is at the core of fascism.
The ideals of liberal democracy, on the other hand, are freedom and equality. Equality means “that no group is placed above another.” German Jews who defended these ideals became the target of Nazi hatred.
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Stanley described “support for Hamas’s mass murder of our people on 7 October” as “unacceptable anti-Semitism.” However, he added that anti-Semitism also includes “holding individual Jews responsible for Israel’s actions.” “Criticism of Israel’s atrocities in the Gaza Strip” and “criticism of Israel’s long-standing unequal treatment of the Palestinian people” are not anti-Semitism, he said. He added: “A significant minority of American Jews are critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Among young American Jews, the number of critical voices is significantly higher.”
These remarks clearly went too far for many in the audience.
Stanley then criticized, without naming them directly, the practice now common in Germany of prosecuting any criticism of the Israeli government and its criminal actions in Gaza as anti-Semitism. Germany seems to have “decided that only those Jewish voices that unconditionally support Israel count.” The Germans had thus “assumed the power to determine who is Jewish and who is not.” That was intolerable.
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The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper printed a slightly abridged version of the entire speech, which has since been placed behind a paywall.
The Jewish community in Frankfurt distanced itself from the speaker the next day. Benjamin Graumann, chairman of the community, rejected the American philosopher’s accusations and accused him of exploiting a memorial event on 9 November by giving a provocative lecture. Anyone who draws conclusions from the crimes of the Nazis other than from a strictly Zionist standpoint will apparently be denied speaking rights. So much for democracy and freedom of expression.
In late August, Variety reported that Emma Stone told a crowd at a question-and-answer session at the Telluride Film Festival that she found “terrifying” parallels between the storyline of Bugonia and the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024.
“What’s really crazy, after we had shot the film–I live in New York–we heard someone was shot up the street. It was a healthcare CEO. …
“It was wild, because we had all just been in a basement [filming] together talking about these issues and the bigger meaning of everything. It keeps hitting you that the world is so deeply fraught and terrifying in so many ways,” Stone concluded.
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Plemons’ intense and convincing performance does much to humanize Teddy. Stone is also compelling. Silverstone in a small role adds emotional and social weight.
Some of the film’s less grandiose moments ring especially true.
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At the time of the United Healthcare CEO shooting in 2024, the World Socialist Web Site noted the shocked response of the bourgeois media to popular sentiments. The Wall Street Journal, for example, headlined an article, “Manhunt for UnitedHealthcare CEO Killer Meets Unexpected Obstacle: Sympathy for the Gunman.” It commented, “From online forums and social media to the streets of Manhattan, people have been celebrating the suspect as a quasi-folk hero.”
Various mouthpieces for the oligarchy, the World Socialist Web Site observed, expressed genuine anxiety about the level of hostility toward the billionaires “who are perceived to own everything, run everything and steal everything.”
5. United States: Vote NO on UPTE’s sellout contract! For rank-and-file control of the struggle!
UPTE’s sellout deal exposes union betrayal, undermines the strike, and signals to workers nationwide the urgent need for independent rank-and-file action against austerity.
The Thatcherite policies enacted by Conservative governments in the 1980s greatly exacerbated the UK’s historic north-south inequality divide. But they also set in train what is today a vast housing crisis in London that fuels poverty and defies this easy characterization.
7. United States: Libbey Glass workers defeat USW bid to sell out 3-month strike in Toledo, Ohio
In a courageous act Wednesday, Libbey Glass workers decisively defeated the attempt by the United Steelworkers International Union to ram through a pro-company contract and shut down their powerful three-month strike.
8. Debt now moving to center of AI boom
There is now widespread recognition that the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, which has powered Wall Street to record highs, has taken a significant turn with major implications for financial markets and possibly the entire economy.
When the AI boom began at the end of 2022 with the release by OpenAI of ChatGPT, it was chiefly financed through the massive cash flows of the so-called “hyperscalers” such as Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, together with the chip-making firm Nvidia.
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Morgan Stanley estimates that between this year and 2028 the capital spending on AI infrastructure will be $2.9 trillion, of which $1.5 trillion will be financed externally, including $800 billion from private credit sources.
Apart from the money involved, the scale of AI data centers is indicated by their power consumption. The International Energy Agency has estimated that electricity demand from AI data centers worldwide will more than double by 2030 and reach a level higher than the electricity consumption of Japan, the world’s fourth-largest economy.
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There are an increasing number of concerns being raised about the potential triggers for the collapse of the AI boom and its consequences.
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The business consulting firm Bain has estimated that $2 trillion in revenue will be required by 2030 to sustain the investments that have been made, compared to $253 billion in 2024.
Another issue is the short life cycle of chips, which can be as little as three years. This means that the value of the asset backing of the massive loans used to finance the data center will be rapidly depreciated as they become redundant, requiring new expenditures to remain competitive.
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For companies that depend on massive computation capacity to run their AI models, [an] “algorithmic breakthrough or other event which challenges that paradigm could cause a significant re-evaluation of asset prices.”
As an example, it cited the introduction of a new model by the Chinese start-up firm DeepSeek in January at a lower cost and with a more efficient use of computing power, which triggered a fall in the stock price of AI companies in the US.
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According to calculations by former International Monetary Fund leading economist Gita Gopinath, a collapse in the AI market equivalent to the bursting of the dot-com bubble would cause US investors to lose $20 trillion, an amount equivalent to 70 percent of American GDP, and deliver a $15 trillion hit to the rest of the world, equivalent to 20 percent of its GDP.
Given the growing involvement of the banks and finance capital more broadly in the AI boom, and the ever-increasing role of debt in funding historically unprecedented levels of capital spending as each of the tech giants seeks to dominate AI, such a development would signify not just the bursting of a bubble but potentially a collapse of the entire financial system.
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There is no doubt that the rationally planned, conscious and democratically controlled development of AI would provide for an advance of humanity in the economy and so many other areas of social life.
However, AI is not being advanced in such a manner but within the social relations of capitalism, based on the private ownership of the means of production and finance subject to the anarchy of the market and the striving of corporate giants for profit.
The process now unfolding recalls the central thesis of the founder of scientific socialism, Karl Marx, when he explained that the objective possibility, indeed necessity, for the socialist transformation of society arose when “the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.”
That contradiction is now assuming an acute form. AI, which could provide enormous economic advances for the mass of humanity, is already being used as a battering ram against the working class in the form of mass layoffs and the intensification of exploitation.
At the same time, under capitalism the mechanisms for its development are creating the conditions for a devastating economic and financial crisis.
There is only one way forward. That is the conscious political struggle by the working class—the producers of all wealth, including AI—for the overthrow of the capitalist oligarchy and the socialist transformation of society, so that the enormous potential contained within AI for social advancement can be realized.
9. Australia: Cobar mine workers should defy the company gag order
In the early hours of October 28, an explosion at Cobar’s Endeavor silver, zinc and lead mine claimed the lives of mine workers Patrick Ambrose McMullen, 59, and Holly Clarke, 24, and left Mackenzie Stirling, also 24, with serious injuries. The immediate reaction of the company, Polymetals Resources Ltd, was to impose a pall of silence upon workers at the mine.
Cobar residents have told the World Socialist Web Site that Endeavor workers have not only been instructed not to speak to the media, but even to their own families about the tragic death of their colleagues and the conditions in the mine.
This is an extraordinary attack on democracy that workers and their families should not accept. Serious questions must be asked: Why are workers being muzzled? What is the company trying to cover up? Above all, how is it possible that members of a trained and qualified team, led by a man known to all as a highly safety-conscious, meticulous, expert worker, were killed at work?
Extraordinary as it is, the silencing of workers in the aftermath of a workplace death is not unique to Cobar. Just days ago, 24-year-old rigger Jack McGrath was killed at BlueScope’s Port Kembla Steelworks, and his coworkers have been subjected to a similar order not to speak.
The claim that workers must be gagged to facilitate an investigation into the incident by the same organizations that allowed it to happen is a fraud. In fact, the suppression order is aimed at preventing the truth from seeing the light of day, and at blocking the development of organized opposition to the rapid reopening of the mine.
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In a small, remote town like Cobar, which has a population of around 3,500, almost every aspect of life is dominated by the mining industry. The other major companies in town—Harmony, which owns the CSA copper mine, and Aurelia, which owns the Peak gold mine—are just as motivated as Polymetals to limit any discussion of safety and other working conditions in the mining industry.
The overwhelming majority of workers are either directly or indirectly employed in the mines. The local retail and hospitality businesses are heavily dependent on their custom and that of fly-in-fly-out workers engaged by the mines. Schools, sporting clubs, parks, community groups and the local newspaper all rely on sponsorships or advertising from the mining corporations.
As such, there is a considerable weight on the whole population not to speak out against the company line. This is amplified by the mining unions, which have silently endorsed the reopening and promoted illusions in the official investigation.
[The World Socialist Web Site and Socialist Equality Party calls] on workers to break this silence. Ambrose McMullen, Holly Clarke and Mackenzie Stirling, as well as their families, friends and coworkers, deserve the truth, as do all workers, as more lives could be at stake at Endeavor and throughout the mining industry.
10. Australia: Young worker killed in Port Kembla steel plant
Aged just 24, Jack McGrath was killed this week at the BlueScope Steel complex at Port Kembla in the industrial city of Wollongong, south of Sydney. Emergency services reportedly rushed to the site at about 10:30am on Monday, but the young worker died at the scene.
Few details are yet known about the incident or the conditions under which McGrath was working. According to BlueScope, its “preliminary understanding” was that McGrath was hit by a steel beam that dropped while being lifted by a crane.
It is believed that McGrath died while working on a $1.15 billion reline of BlueScope’s no.6 blast furnace. The incident happened opposite the no.5 stockhouse, located near the no.5 blast furnace.
McGrath was employed by the contractor Ventia, which has been providing maintenance and engineering services to BlueScope for some 20 years. Ventia is involved in manufacturing, defence, transport, health, education and other sectors across Australia and New Zealand.
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Friends, family and former colleagues paid tribute to the young worker on social media as the “life of the room” with “his cheeky smile and sharp wit.”
Such is the level of public concern over the death and increasingly unsafe working conditions that local federal and state Labor MPs and trade union officials issued hypocritical statements of condolence. None, however, proposed any action, instead leaving any investigation in the hands of government authorities.
Similarly, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), of which McGrath was a member, put out a perfunctory statement extending its condolences to his friends and family and saying that CFMEU officials were on site conducting inquiries with “the relevant authorities.” Likewise, Australian Workers Union (AWU) NSW secretary Tony Callinan said workers needed to “allow the relevant authorities to do their appropriate investigations.”
But investigations by SafeWork NSW and its equivalents around Australia, New Zealand and internationally are inevitably protracted exercises that hold no one responsible. The average number of workplace deaths annually in Australia over the past five years was 191, which is more than one every two days in a workforce of about 15 million.
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Workers need to take matters into their own hands. In order to defend their lives, safety, jobs and conditions, they need to break out of the pro-employer straitjacket of the Labor government and the union apparatuses and establish democratically-elected rank-and-file committees, completely independent of the unions. These committees would reach out through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) for support from other workers everywhere for a unified struggle against the capitalist profit system.
11. Rank-and-file committees and the fight against layoffs, hunger and the industrial slaughterhouse
On the topic of the necessity of building the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees for workers to defend their rights, Tom Hall, a specialist on labor history and frequent contributor of articles to the World Socialist Web Site, delivered this speech to an international gathering of workers this past Sunday. Please visit the World Socialist Web Site to read it in full.acts as mayor-elect: Seek Trump meeting, keep NYPD commissioner Tisch and protect Hakeem Jeffries
Less than three weeks after Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election, garnering over 1 million votes, the mayor-elect is quickly revealing himself to be nothing more than a standard capitalist politician. In the last 72 hours, it has been revealed that Mamdani reached out to Trump for a meeting; publicly pleaded for and accepted as his police commissioner current police chief Jessica Tisch; and lobbied against a “socialist” challenge to New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries.
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Mamdani’s defense of Jeffries, the New York Police Department and entreaties to Trump confirm the class character of his administration and the futility of all attempts at “reforming” the Democratic Party, the oldest capitalist party in the world.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained following his election:
Mamdani will bow to the demands of the financial and political establishment. Whatever he claims, the ultimate purpose of his campaign is to preempt and contain the growing movement of the working class.
The way forward for workers in New York and throughout the country lies not in pressuring the Democratic Party or placing hopes in Mamdani’s administration but in the independent mobilization of the working class in struggle.
A strike by cleaning chemical workers at Brulin Holding Company in Indianapolis has entered its seventh week in a fight by the workers for wage increases, improved working conditions and fair contract bargaining.
13. For a rank-and-file inquiry into the deaths of USPS workers Nick Acker and Russell Scruggs, Jr.!
An inquiry, organized by workers and not corrupt union bureaucrats, is needed to arm workers with the knowledge they need to defend themselves and go on the offensive against the regime of corporate dictatorship in the workplaces which makes these deaths inevitable.
14. Nick Acker’s coworkers speak out against unsafe conditions, APWU complicity in his death
Nick’s coworkers are speaking out about unsafe conditions inside the facility as well as the fact that grievances were filed less than 90 days before Nick’s death.
15. David North to speak in London November 22: “The American Volcano: Towards Fascism or Socialism”
David North, national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States and chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, is the featured speaker.
16. 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.
