Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
This five-part series examines the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, its defense of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism.
2. Justice Department begins retaliatory investigation against Trump victim E. Jean Carroll
The DOJ is considering whether to charge Carroll with perjury—not in her testimony about Trump’s sexual assault 30 years ago, but about a detail of how her long-running lawsuit was funded.
Carroll said in a sworn deposition in 2022 that no one else was paying her legal fees in her lawsuit against Trump for defamation. Her lawyers filed papers a year later declaring that Carroll “now recalls that at some point her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.”
The nonprofit organization which paid for some of Carroll’s legal expenses was set up by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a large donor to the Democratic Party and Trump critic. There is no suggestion that Hoffman’s assistance to the suit was improper, and a federal judge ruled that the issue was not relevant to the merits of the lawsuit.
A federal appeals court upheld that ruling, finding: “Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate otherwise. Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs.”
Carroll had publicly discussed her allegations that Trump raped her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s, when both were in their early forties.
After Trump denied her claims and accused her of lying to boost sales of a book, Carroll filed suit in 2019, while he was in his first term as president. The lawsuit was only possible, given the long period of time since the event, because of a recently passed New York state law, the Adult Survivors Act, which gave those subjected to sexual assault as adults a one-year window to file suits over offenses for which the statute of limitations has expired. The law did not permit criminal charges to be brought against alleged perpetrators, so Trump faced no criminal liability.
After Trump left office but continued to denounce Carroll on social media, she filed a second lawsuit in 2022, charging Trump with both sexual assault and defamation.
The second lawsuit went to trial in May 2023, and Trump’s attorneys did not put on a defense, confining themselves to cross-examining Carroll and challenging her credibility. The federal jury found in favor of Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages for sexual abuse. Contrary to Trump’s claim that the jury found him not guilty of rape, New York state law limits rape charges to cases of penetration, and Carroll had fought off her attacker and forced him to retreat.
The first lawsuit went to trial in January 2024, with the jury limited to assessing damages, since defamation had been proven in the earlier trial. The jury awarded Carroll $83 million. A court of appeals panel upheld both civil judgements and the total amount of the awards.
Trump has appealed both decisions to the Supreme Court, where they are now pending. As late as Wednesday, May 27, the court deferred any decision on whether to take up the appeal. As long as it delays, Trump can avoid paying the judgements.
The investigation of Carroll is yet another example of Trump using the Department of Justice to target his enemies, personal and political. There are multiple conflicts of interest, given that Trump’s attorney in the Carroll lawsuits, Alina Habba, was later appointed US Attorney for the northern district of New Jersey, although she was never confirmed by the Senate and is now relegated to the role of an “adviser” to the department.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did some legal work on the Carroll case and has recused himself, but Justice Department attorneys who work for him are overseeing the investigation, and both Blanche and Trump are undoubtedly kept up to date on the case.
The investigation is reportedly run by the US Attorney’s office in Chicago, headed by Trump appointee Andrew Boutros. Since last fall, Boutros’s office has been heavily involved in prosecuting immigrants’ rights protesters who have demonstrated outside the ICE detention center in the Chicago suburb of Broadview, as well as defending agents who engaged in violent attacks and then lied in court about their actions.
At the time of the jury verdicts against Trump, the WSWS explained that he was undoubtedly guilty of the civil charges brought against him, but that the case was being promoted by the Democratic Party and their media allies as a substitute for charging Trump with the crimes he committed as president. We wrote:
The Democrats have consistently refused to conduct a struggle against Trump for mass social and political crimes ranging from attacks on immigrants, as in the separation of children from their parents, to the attempted political coup of January 6, 2021, when he sought to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, mobilizing his fascistic supporters in a violent assault on Congress. More than two years after the attack on the Capitol, the chief instigators still walk free and face no criminal charges.
That said, there is no argument about the reality of Trump’s crude and brutal treatment of women. This is underscored by the speed with which the jury brought back a unanimous verdict, including one juror whom Carroll’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to disqualify because he regularly listens to ultra-right podcasts.
Even this limited accountability collapsed after Trump won the presidency a second time in November 2024. One month later, ABC paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump against the network and news anchor George Stephanopoulos, for comments Stephanopoulos made during an on-air discussion, in which he referred inaccurately to Trump being “convicted of rape” in the Carroll case, when it was in fact a civil judgement for sexual abuse.
Now the Trump Justice Department is investigating and seeking to harass or even prosecute the 82-year-old Carroll for having the temerity to tell the truth about his private conduct and his public smear campaign against her.
3. On the shutdown of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert by CBS
The shutdown of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show by CBS after 11 years raises important questions about the consolidation of the corporate media with the drive by the financial oligarchy and the Trump White House to silence opposition and control what the public has access to.
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The finale had a reported 6.74 million viewers, the largest ever audience for Colbert on CBS. The number of viewers highlighted the fact that the cancellation was a political rather than a business decision as originally claimed by the network.
Colbert treated the night as a significant ending, honoring the people who had worked on the program and the musicians who had helped define it. Rather than offering a sentimental closure, the finale focused on the show’s significance and became a protest against CBS management’s actions.
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In a typically stupid, vindictive manner, Trump celebrated the show’s cancellation and posted on social media that Colbert was “finally done at CBS.” The post also included a crude AI-generated video image of himself grabbing Colbert by the collar and throwing him into a trash dumpster. This sort of open interference by a US president in what people see on their television screens is without precedent.
Colbert first became a major national figure through The Daily Show and then The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, where he built a comic persona modeled on conservative punditry. That persona was a sustained satire of right-wing politics and gave Colbert a platform to mock both the inanity of the far right and the way corporate news media content is manufactured.
During the period from 2005 to 2014, Colbert’s work on Comedy Central helped move late-night comedy more directly into political commentary, even if it remained limited within the framework of official American capitalist politics.
One of Colbert’s better moments was his appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in May 2006 at which, noted the WSWS, he delivered “a biting, ironic monologue directed at President George W. Bush and the media establishment.” Under Barack Obama, however, three years later, Colbert disgracefully solidarized himself with the US war effort in Iraq on a well-publicized trip to Baghdad.
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Colbert’s jokes during his monologues moved between criticism of government policy and cultural commentary, and he turned his desk into a place where political satire was front and center. He became a vocal critic of both the first and second Trump administrations and this made the show a target. Again, there were very distinct limits to this criticism. In February 2017, for example, Colbert, along with the rest of his talk show confreres, signed up for the anti-Russian (and anti-communist) hysteria, suggesting only half-jokingly that Trump was “being run by the Kremlin.”
Colbert’s CBS years coincided with a period of significant corporate media consolidation and the growing shift to the right within American bourgeois politics. As the television networks became increasingly controlled directly by the financial oligarchy and abandoned any pretense of independent news gathering or commentary, Colbert remained one of the few mainstream figures who openly ridiculed the president with consistency and bite.
Colbert’s response to Trump was direct and unambiguous. When Trump gloated over his show’s cancellation months earlier, Colbert answered on air in a way that made clear he viewed the decision as part of the larger political assault on free speech rights, not as a programming adjustment by CBS, as the latter claimed.
The significance of the show’s cancellation lies, above all, in the relationship between the corporate media and political power. The decision to cancel The Late Show was made as Paramount was seeking regulatory approval for its merger with Skydance, a company owned by David Ellison, son of Trump supporter and mega-billionaire Larry Ellison, who now serves as chairman and CEO of the combined company.
The Ellison family’s investment vehicles hold the controlling voting interests, and while Larry Ellison’s wealth helped finance the deal, David Ellison is the public face and operational controller of the new company and control of its properties sits with the Ellison family and their partners, including RedBird Capital.
The creation of Paramount Skydance is part of a broader consolidation of media power among ultra-wealthy owners closely aligned with Trump’s fascist politics. Media ownership is not politically neutral; it controls who gets airtime, what is said and the limits within which satire can operate.
Of the five existing media entities that control most US entertainment, News Corp (owned by the Murdoch family) and Paramount Skydance (owned by the Ellison family) are open supporters of Trump, while two dominant operators of local television markets are aligned with the Trump administration, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group.
While two other primary US media corporations—The Walt Disney Company (ABC) and Comcast (NBCUniversal)—are not owned by Trump supporters, media watchdog groups have noted a wave of corporate capitulation across almost all major networks. Billionaire owners like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (Los Angeles Times) have blocked political endorsements to protect their business interests and align with the White House editorially.
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One day after the end of The Late Show, Colbert resurfaced on Monroe County, Michigan’s, public-access TV show Only in Monroe, and delivered a low-budget satire about his own transition out of national television. The special was a one-hour episode featuring Jack White, Jeff Daniels and even a cameo from Eminem—all from Michigan—that spread quickly online.
As of this writing, the YouTube recording of the show has had a viewership of over one million and more than one thousand comments. CBS initially used copyright claims against third-party uploads, but viewer backlash forced the company to reverse course.
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The orchestrated attack on Colbert can only be understood as part of the broader attack on fundamental democratic rights by politically connected media empires to restrict what the public can watch, hear and read. The hysterical effort to silence Colbert and his lampooning of Trump is a warning about the implications of the concentration corporate and financial power as a critical element of the descent into an authoritarian dictatorship.
4. Democratic Socialist Chris Rabb wins Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District
Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, which encompasses significant working class areas in Philadelphia, is by some measures the most Democratic Party-leaning district in the country. Rabb faces no Republican opponent in November, so he is the certain successor to retiring Democrat Dwight Evans.
Rabb won his congressional seat posturing as a political outsider, declaring in an interview with the DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine, “Socialists need to expose the role of both parties in our crisis and point toward a future where the working class holds power.” Such rhetoric will not stop Rabb from following the dictates of the pro-capitalist Democratic Party leadership.
The Rabb victory demonstrates the deep-going radicalization of the working population, witnessed in the election last year of New York City mayor and fellow DSA member Zohran Mamdani and other nominally “left” politicians in the US and internationally, as well as the groundswell of mass opposition to war, genocide and fascism—all of which are byproducts of capitalism.
Like Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and several other DSA members now in Congress, Rabb operates with the bankrupt political perspective of reforming the Democratic Party and “pushing it to the left.” This platform was made explicit in the days following the win. On Wednesday, May 27, Rabb hosted an online mass call titled “How to Take Over the Democratic Party,” featuring other “progressive” Democratic Party congressional candidates.
The Democratic Party is not an empty vessel that can be filled with left-wing “content.” The Democratic and Republican parties are political instruments of the American ruling class, and the two-party system as a whole is the principal means for suppressing any independent political initiative from below. The task of socialists and the working class is not to reform the Democratic Party but to break with it and put an end to the capitalist system which it defends.
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Rabb’s family is deeply involved in Democratic Party politics. His mother, Madeline Murphy Rabb, served in the administration of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black Democratic mayor, who held office from 1983 until his death in office in 1987. Rabb began his political career in the 1990s as an aide to US Senator Carol Moseley Braun (Democrat-Illinois) and briefly worked in the Clinton administration.
In 2010, while a visiting researcher at Princeton University, Rabb published the book Invisible Capital. In it, he argued that entrepreneurship generates inequality, but that the solution is to make capitalism more equitable so that the working class can themselves become entrepreneurs.
His foray into trade union organizing led him to become a leading organizer at Temple University, helping to establish the Temple University Adjuncts Organization (TUAO). Today, a TUAO member teaching a typical load of four courses per year earns roughly $27,000—a wage that falls below the federal poverty line for a single-person household in Philadelphia.
That union was one of two American Federation of Teachers (AFT)-affiliated unions which stood idly by as Temple University graduate workers—themselves AFT members—went on strike in 2023. Both had signed “no strike” clauses forbidding their members from engaging in solidarity action as the underpaid student workers fought for a living wage.
Rabb’s invocation of socialism does not mean the overthrow of the capitalist system, but rather minor reforms that leave the fundamentals unchanged. In his interview with Jacobin, Rabb states he aims at “fixing a system that’s been rigged to benefit billionaires and instead making the real investments needed in workers.” In other words, Rabb believes gross inequality is not the inevitable outcome of capitalism, but the product of a few corrupt individual capitalists.
If Invisible Capital is any guide, his aim is not to fight for revolutionary change but to seek a more humane capitalism that can be bent in favor of workers—so that they, too, can become “entrepreneurs”—i.e., capitalists. A truly “classless” society!
Rabb is also backed by “Patriotic Millionaires,” an organization chaired by former BlackRock Managing Director Morris Pearl, which describes itself as “a collection of wealthy Americans fighting against the destabilizing concentration of wealth and power in the United States.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is another Democrat to receive donations from the group’s Political Action Committee.
On foreign policy, Rabb bases his opposition to the war in Iran not on international law or anti-militarism, but on budgetary grounds. In the same Jacobin interview, Rabb correctly called the conflict “an illegal war,” but added that “war in Iran is costing US taxpayers over $1 billion a day. … [instead] we should be investing those funds in our communities.” This statement implies it would be acceptable waging war abroad so long as it did not impose too great a burden on the population at home.
Rabb’s position resembles a variant of the “guns and butter” policy of the Cold War era. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, social programs and the economy expanded alongside a massive military buildup as the US consolidated its post-World War II dominance while simultaneously staging coups and waging wars to maintain it. The killing fields of Korea and Vietnam, alongside CIA-backed coups in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and Brazil in 1964—to name only a few—were defining features of this period.
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Rabb’s cynical “anti-war” posturing is further exposed by the political endorsements he has received from a host of nominally “left” Democratic Party figures who have themselves voted continually to fund the US war machine and that of its criminal partner, the Israeli state. These include House members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal, and others.
Rabb’s endorsement from Ocasio-Cortez—who campaigned alongside him in the final days of the primary—is particularly revealing, given that she has consistently upheld Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Her most recent foreign policy venture was an appearance at the Munich Security Conference in February, where the self-described “democratic socialist” peddled Trump administration lies used to justify the criminal war against Iran, as well as the ongoing NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
Fellow DSA member Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June 2025 on a platform strikingly similar in tone and rhetoric to Rabb’s, then immediately set about reassuring the Democratic establishment he was a safe pair of hands. Within weeks of his November general election victory, he traveled to the White House to shake hands with Trump himself—whom he had denounced as a fascist on the campaign trail—declaring the two shared a common interest in making New York City affordable for working people. Since taking office, Mamdani has buried the promises that got him elected. Such an evolution should be expected from Rabb, once he takes office.
Workers and youth must break with the Democratic Party—an imperialist party of war and Wall Street that cannot be reformed. This includes its satellites, such as the DSA, the main force backing Rabb, which has aided criminal sell-outs of working class struggles in Philadelphia in recent times. A different model exists: the Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee, formed during last July’s municipal workers strike, which united workers struggles against exploitation, war, deportations and dictatorship.
In its founding statement, the committee declared, “There is a division of labor between Trump and his enablers in the Democratic Party. The Democrats are doing nothing to oppose him because they too represent the corporate oligarchy. Both parties are in full agreement on bleeding the working class dry to fund Wall Street and war.”
5. The politics of Hasan Piker: Radical rhetoric in service of the Democratic Party
Through his online media activity, Piker has accumulated several million dollars in personal wealth and a $2.7 million home in West Hollywood.
With his record of support for the Democrats, Piker can hardly be described as a “dangerous radical.” He has never failed to support the Democratic Party’s candidate in any election, declaring in one broadcast that he “never urged people not to vote. I have never told people to vote for the Green Party. Ever. Ever. Ever.” He quickly walked back even a passing suggestion that he would vote third party in 2028.
In an interview with Pod Save America, Piker explained his aims plainly: “I understand that politics is in some ways the art of the possible. My expectation is never going to be someone coming out and advocating seizing the means of production. I’m a reformist.” He even acknowledged his critics’ characterization: “Many to my left will say ‘you’re feeding revolutionary potential back into the Democratic Party, you’re a shepherd for the Democrats.’” Indeed.
Piker summarized his prescription for political action: “We have to consistently show our discontent over and over again by way of protest, but also by pressuring the Democratic Party. By trying to unseat bad Democrats and replacing them with Democrats that will do the right thing.” The “left flank candidates” he promotes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Shawn Fain, Chris Van Hollen, are on record as supporters of American imperialism, having voted for war budgets or voiced support for NATO’s interventions. The record of every figure Piker supports is ultimately a record of war and austerity.
Most revealing is Piker’s treatment of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he repeatedly cited as proof that a “left flank” politician could win office and exert genuine pressure from within the system. The record of Mamdani’s first months in office demolishes this claim entirely. Mamdani made repeated visits to the White House to forge a political “partnership” with Trump, a president who had called for the execution of Democratic legislators just one day before Mamdani’s first visit. Piker’s response was to call it “Awesome,” framing the collaboration in terms of pop-psychology and claiming Mamdani had skillfully “wooed” Trump. At no point did Piker raise the obvious question: What does it mean for a supposed socialist mayor to be building a political partnership with a fascist president waging an illegal war of aggression at the very moment that war is beginning?
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Contrary to his claims of “raising consciousness,” Piker actively discourages his audience from fighting to introduce socialist politics in the working class, by portraying workers as backward and reactionary. He declares there is “no class consciousness in this country” and characterizes American workers’ views as “f***ing distorted and out of whack.” Even after calls for a general strike emerged from below in Minneapolis in response to ICE terror, Piker insisted the US is “a country with no class consciousness whatsoever.”
Socialists, following Lenin and Trotsky, take the opposite approach: “Our tasks don’t depend on the mentality of the workers. The task is to develop the mentality of the workers.” The Bolsheviks did not abandon independent organization because Russian workers were backward. They built the party precisely to overcome that backwardness. Piker has inverted the method entirely, using the limitations of working class consciousness as an argument against building the very instrument necessary to overcome it.
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In response to growing interest in Trotsky’s ideas among his audience, Piker has engaged in slanders of Trotskyism drawn from the neo-Stalinist milieu cultivated by the DSA. In a May 6 livestream, he remarked: “There was another guy … that decided that the peasant class would never play a formative role in any sort of revolution and would unironically be counterrevolutionary. He spent the rest of his f***ing days in Mexico.”
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The theory of Permanent Revolution explains that in the epoch of imperialism, the national bourgeoisie in backward countries is tied to imperialist capital and landed property, rendering it incapable of carrying out the tasks of the democratic revolution. The proletariat must therefore assume the leading role. And crucially, once the proletariat takes power, it cannot stop at the democratic tasks: the logic of its class position drives it toward socialist measures . It was this perspective, vindicated by Lenin’s own shift in the April Theses of 1917, that guided October itself.
Piker has also repeated the slander that Trotskyism “leads to neo-conservatism,” citing figures such as Irving Kristol and David Horowitz. This is a fabrication. Kristol was an early Shachtmanite who was never a Trotskyist; Horowitz was long associated with the Pabloite IMG. The true political lineage of the neoconservatives runs through Max Shachtman, who broke with Trotsky in 1940 over the defense of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state. Shachtman’s “third camp” theory refused to defend the USSR against imperialism. Trotsky fought bitterly against this capitulation in the final months of his life, documented in In Defense of Marxism.
Ironically or not, it is the political heirs of Shachtman who are the founding figures of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization whose candidates Piker consistently promotes. Shachtmanism is not a form of Trotskyism but a petty-bourgeois tendency that rejected Trotskyism’s most essential political positions. It is not Trotskyism which leads left-radicals to neo-conservatism but their abandonment of Trotskyism.
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Because Piker writes off the working class as a revolutionary force, he has no choice but to look to capitalist states as the vehicle of anti-imperialism. Trotsky responded to such arguments, writing, “A ‘socialist’ who preaches national defence is a petty-bourgeois reactionary at the service of decaying capitalism. Not to bind itself to the national state in time of war, to follow not the war map but the map of the class struggle …”
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Piker is a media personality whose social function is to capture the leftward energy of a generation and redirect it into the thoroughly safe channels of the Democratic Party and its satellite organizations. The fact that this role is performed with profanity, a veneer of anti-capitalist rhetoric, and even with quotes from Lenin and Marx, does not change its fundamental character.
The WSWS has been unequivocal in its opposition to the attacks on Piker, including the recent moves by the Trump administration to target him and Medea Benjamin for traveling to Cuba, as well as Piker’s earlier detention and interrogation at Chicago O’Hare Airport in May 2025. That is part of the broader fascist offensive against free speech.
But at every decisive juncture when the question of what to do arises, Piker’s answer is: Support the left Democrat, back the DSA candidate, vote for the Democratic Party.
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The International Youth and Students for Social Equality calls on young people to break completely with both capitalist parties and their agencies, and to turn to the working class as the only social force capable of stopping genocide, imperialist war and the rise of fascism. We call on all workers, youth and students to join the IYSSE and the Socialist Equality Party, and take up a serious study of what Marx, Engels, Lenin and, above all, Trotsky actually argued—assimilating the theory, method and history of the Trotskyist movement.
6. Australian High Court to hear limited challenge to Melbourne public housing tower demolitions
Even if the case succeeds, it will not stop the state Labor government’s criminal wrecking operation; just require Homes Victoria to hold a consultation process.6.
The Financial Stability Review (FSR) issued by the European Central Bank (ECB) this week says the Iran war, combined with the other disruptions to the global economy resulting from the Trump administration, could set off a major financial crisis as it points to a series of potential triggers.
According to the report, at the start of the year the global financial system had been “remarkably resilient” despite a series of “uncertainty shocks” all of which had been set off by the Trump administration. These included the issue of Greenland’s sovereignty, the US military intervention in Venezuela, the threat to US central bank independence and uncertainty over US tariff policy.
But this resilience was “now being tested by a major geoeconomic shock triggered by the war in the Middle East” which posed upside risks to inflation, downside risks to global growth which could also “increase market volatility and challenge debt servicing capacities as financing costs rise.”
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The immediate impact of the Iran war has been the rise of inflation and in the view of the ECB this is going to worsen.
In an interview with Reuters last week Isabel Schnabel, a member of the executive board of the central bank, said that inflation was set to rise further, reaching 4 percent by the end of the year as a result of the war.
“Our hope that this conflict would be resolved quickly has not materialized. The shock,” she said, “is much more persistent and we have actually moved beyond the adverse scenario, which assumed a rapid normalization of prices with the futures curve of oil prices suggesting they are expected to remain elevated over a significant period of time.”
Foreshadowing a rise in the ECB interest rate, she said that “given the size and persistence of the current shock, looking through [in which central banks treat inflation as a one-off occurrence and not a persistent trend] is no longer an option.”
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With inflation on the rise, global bonds are being sold off, lifting their yields or interest rate in contrast to the elevation of stock markets. The FSR characterized bond markets as a “central transmission mechanism through which adverse shocks spill over globally, including to the euro area bond markets.”
The growing presence of price-sensitive hedge funds in the euro area bond market could “amplify” an abrupt repricing of sovereign risk and raise the risk of spillovers to the funding costs of corporations and banks.
“The potential for these highly interconnected risks to materialize simultaneously, possibly amplifying each other further, increases the risk to financial stability.”
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So far nonbank financial institutions had been able to weather the storm of war “but face risks from broad-based market downturns” but in an uncertain environment “sudden and correlated price drops in financial markets and spikes in volatility—potentially leading to margin calls [where banks demand more collateral from hedge funds and others to which they have lent money to finance their operations]—could quickly trigger liquidity stress.”
The growth of nonbank financial institutions and the valuation of their assets which are increasingly not market tested and the “opaque” nature of their operations, of which there is precious little knowledge let alone supervision, is of concern for the ECB as it has been for other major central banks.
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In a globally interconnected financial system, there is no national or regional solution to the mounting threat of a major crisis. The FSR noted that while private credit markets in the euro area remained relatively small, despite their recent rapid growth, “the risks stemming from spillover from the United States are significant,” and it could be said the same applies to every other “national” financial system.
The FSR report of the ECB is along the same lines as other analysis in the recent period. It reveals a financial system in which the potential for a crash, even more significant than that of 2008, not least because of the growth of debt and complex financial mechanisms since then, hangs over the global financial structure. And moreover, that financial authorities have very incomplete information on what is taking place and certainly no measures to deal with it.
7. Bolivian government authorizes deployment of military against working class uprising
That MAS voted to hand repressive tools to a government already shooting its own citizens requires an explanation beyond factional rivalry.
8. Syrian refugees fear deportation from Germany
The German government's friendly reception of Syrian Islamist leader Ahmed al-Sharaa and its plans to deport up to 80 percent of Syrian refugees have sparked massive fear among those who have sought asylum in Germany.
US indictments of and attempts to extradite 10 high-level Mexican political figures for allegedly protecting, if not consorting with, narcotics cartels continue to shake Mexico’s political establishment.
Those figures include Rubén Rocha Moya, the governor of Mexico’s central Pacific Sinaloa State and its sole senator; Enrique Inzunza Cázares; Gen. Gerardo Mérida Sánchez, Sinaloa’s security minister under Rocha from September 2023 to December 2024; and Enrique Díaz Vega, its administrator and finance minister under Rocha from November 2021 to September 2024.
Díaz Vega turned himself in to US authorities in Arizona, and Mérida Sánchez in New York. Inzunza Cázares told the newspaper La Jornada that there was “no chance” he would turn himself in to US authorities.
Mérida Sánchez, a former commander in the Mexican Army, is accused by the US of conspiracy to import narcotics, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices. His indictment alleges he “received bribes from the Chapitos” and, in exchange, provided them with, among other things, “advance notice of law enforcement raids on drug labs, so that the Chapitos could move their drugs and lab equipment before the raids.” The charges against the others are along the same lines.
All four Sinaloa politicos, as well as the mayor of Sinaloa’s capital city Culiacán, Juan de Dios Gámez, undoubtedly have been fingered by the “Chapitos,” the sons of Sinaloa Cartel capo Chapo Guzman jailed in New York City. Like the Chapitos, Mérida Sánchez and Díaz Vega likely likewise figured that turning state’s evidence is their best bet.
On May 12, Terrance Cole, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, warned that the accusation against Rocha is “just the beginning of what is to come in Mexico,” alluding to other officials and politicians allegedly linked to drug trafficking.
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has said on repeated occasions that her government will not shield anyone who has committed a crime. Rocha, who is now “on leave,” and Inzunza, both members of Sheinbaum’s ruling Morena Party, continue to deny the accusations against them.
Sheinbaum and her government say that the evidence provided to them is thus far “insufficient” to turn those accused over to Washington. However, Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit has “temporarily frozen” their bank accounts, along with the accounts of their children and several senior members of the Rocha administration.
On Thursday, May 21, Sheinbaum met with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin at the Mexican presidential palace. After the meeting, Sheinbaum shared a brief post on X saying that both nations “will maintain cooperation based on mutual respect.” She claimed to “rule out” discussing the cases of the 10 indicted officials.
In a statement issued after the meeting, the Mexican Foreign Ministry emphasized “respect for sovereignty” and “coordination without subordination” as some of the key principles agreed upon for cooperation. It also emphasized the importance of cooperation on migration. It cited the successful reduction of Mexican citizens crossing the border, which has reached a 50-year low.
Undoubtedly there are calculations by Sheinbaum that some cooperation with the US could prevent indicting bigger fish in the Mexican government. The biggest fish would be Morena’s founder and “populist” president before Sheinbaum, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO.
AMLO has not been accused in the past of outright bribes from narcos but rather of receiving campaign contributions from them in return for looking the other way from cartel activity.
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After his election López Obrador pursued a “hugs, not bullets” campaign, nominally concentrating on social programs to attack the sources of criminality, rather than confrontation with the cartels. During his presidency in a visit to Sinaloa’s capital city Culiacán, AMLO hugged Chapo Guzman’s mother in public.
AMLO, however, combined this rhetoric with a massive buildup of the military and a perpetuation of its domestic deployment. The lethality of these operations also far exceeded that of his predecessors and points to widespread extrajudicial executions, with five suspects and civilians killed for every one injured. Now, responding to US pressure, Sheinbaum boasts of even greater militarism.
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US-Mexico bilateral relations were shaken after a report of the deaths of two CIA agents on April 19, along with two officials from the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office, when the vehicle they were traveling in plunged into a ravine in the mountains between Chihuahua, which borders Texas, and Sinaloa, where a clandestine synthetic drug lab had been dismantled. On April 22 the Los Angeles Times reported that the raid involved a total of four CIA agents and marked at least the third time CIA operatives have joined Chihuahua state officials on operations this year.
The incident prompted a formal protest from the Sheinbaum administration to Washington that it had not been informed of the presence of the CIA agents in Mexico or of their activities in the opposition-governed state of Chihuahua. What seemed most to irk Sheinbaum was that the opposition right-wing National Action Party (PAN) governor of Chihuahua, Maria Eugenia Campos, was in on the operation, while Sheinbaum was not. Sheinbaum blamed the latter for the unauthorized involvement. But she emphasized that she wants to “avoid conflict” with the Trump administration over the incident.
CNN reported on May 13 that the CIA facilitated a targeted assassination of Francisco Beltrán, known as “El Payín,” a member of the Sinaloa cartel, on a highway on the outskirts of the State of Mexico’s Felipe Ángeles International Airport, using plastic explosives. This fueled a firestorm in Mexico. According to CNN, the Beltrán operation was part of an expanded, and previously unreported, CIA campaign inside Mexico—spearheaded by the agency’s elite and secretive Ground Branch—to dismantle the entrenched cartel networks.
Absent the express authorization of the Mexican federal government, the direct participation of foreign agents in security operations is prohibited by Mexico’s Constitution.
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Two weeks ago, Trump himself threatened to launch ground offensives against the cartels in Mexico, after praising attacks targeting vessels that Washington accuses—without evidence—are involved in drug trafficking. “If they’re not going to do the job, we will,” the president said. During a hearing in the House of Representatives, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called on Mexico to take action against the cartels so that his country “doesn’t have to do it.”
CNN reports that the CIA’s “deadly attacks” in Mexico have been occurring for at least a year, mostly targeting mid-level cartel members, such as El Payín. The network cites unnamed Mexican officials who claim that “the lethality of their operations has been seriously ramped up.”
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The increasing US military involvement in Mexico has major political and historical implications. In the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA and Pentagon were deeply involved in Mexico’s “dirty war” against left-wing student and guerrilla groups, much as it was in Operation Condor in South America. During the war, government forces carried out systematic torture, extrajudicial executions and an estimated 1,200 disappearances. For US imperialism those unfettered days are returning.
As to AMLO, for all the US complaints about his populist rhetoric, he did little to interfere with US economic, immigration or security policies. Taking him down, however, would deflate the populist impulses of the Mexican masses. So Morena is a target, no doubt.
The US focus on battling drug trafficking is a front for its larger and more fundamental goal—control of Latin America and its immense mineral resources, in an increasingly failing attempt to contain China.
The US has looked the other way as to cocaine trafficking in exchange for arming the Contras against the Nicaraguan revolution.
In December, Trump exercised his executive clemency to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was serving a 45-year sentence in a US federal penitentiary for drug trafficking and weapons offenses, because he was viewed as useful.
The aim of the Trump administration is to operate freely in a neocolonial Mexico, as shown by the treatment of Venezuela and the Honduras-gate conspiracy against any government resisting that level of subservience.
For all her rhetoric, the Sheinbaum administration is substantially permitting pursuit of that US goal.
The Mexican government’s continuing capitulation on migrants, extraditions, Cuban oil, operations by US troops and spies and its approval of a US intelligence complex on the border in Ciudad Juarez has only emboldened the Trump administration. This amounts in substance to aligning politically with US imperialism.
10. New Zealand government introduces anti-transgender legislation
The far-right coalition government is seeking to narrowly define the words “woman” and “man” in order to demonize and discriminate against transgender people.
11. Under cover of US-Iran negotiations, Israel steps up effort to annex Gaza
While the US and international press are focused on the terms of negotiations between the Trump administration and Iran, Israel is massively expanding its rampage across the Middle East—moving to permanently occupy Gaza and escalating its bombardment of Lebanon.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Thursday that he had ordered the Israeli army to seize control of 70 percent of the Gaza Strip—well beyond the 53 percent Israel was allowed to hold under the cease-fire that took effect in October.
“We now control 60% of the territory in the strip. You know, we were at 50, we moved to 60. My directive is to move to … 70%,” Netanyahu told a conference in an occupied West Bank settlement. The directive would confine the strip’s 2.1 million Palestinians to less than a third of the territory.
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In Lebanon, an Israeli air strike on the Southern Beirut suburb of Choueifat killed a woman, her infant daughter and a Syrian child on Thursday—the first Israeli attack near Beirut in three weeks. The Lebanese Health Ministry put Thursday’s countrywide death toll at 14 killed, including a strike on a vehicle near Sidon that killed six people, among them a mother and her two children.
The Israeli army Wednesday ordered the entire city of Tyre to evacuate, declaring all areas south of the Zahrani River—about 15 percent of Lebanese territory—to be a combat zone.
Israel is systematically breaking the ceasefires it agreed to. A Gaza “ceasefire” took effect October 10, 2025. The Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli attacks have killed more than 900 Palestinians since the ceasefire took effect.
In Lebanon, a US-brokered ceasefire that took effect November 27, 2024, required Israel to withdraw from the south within 60 days; Israel never withdrew and continued bombing throughout. A further ceasefire that took effect April 16 is being broken by Israeli air strikes on a near-daily basis.
What Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon, with full support of the Trump administration, demonstrates the actual content of any US agreement made with Iran. It will not mean peace but only serve as the prelude for further attacks by the imperialist powers and Israel, aimed at expanding their domination of the Middle East.
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Despite the massive violence unleashed against Iran, the United States has failed in its central war aims. It has not overthrown the Iranian government, broken the resistance of the Iranian population or gained control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The war has triggered a deepening political crisis in Washington. Democrats and Republicans alike have attacked Trump from the right for what they cast as his insufficient defense of the interests of US imperialism.
On the ground in Gaza, Israeli forces have steadily advanced past the so-called “yellow line” marking the supposed ceasefire boundary. Israeli-aligned militias have evicted Palestinian families on threat of death.
The deaths of 11 workers in Longview are not an aberration, but part of the return of mass industrial slaughter under capitalism.
13. As economic crisis worsens, Sri Lanka’s opposition leader urges talks for another IMF program
Sri Lanka’s opposition parties, including the SJB, are signaling that they are ready to join hands with the JVP government to suppress workers’ struggles.
14. ISIS-linked families return to Australia, but mother and child blocked
One mother was barred from re-entry by an arbitrary Labor government exclusion order, violating the fundamental democratic rights of citizenship.
15. United States: Nexteer workers denounce third UAW sellout contract: “Enough is enough”
The workers at the plant have already rejected two deals and voted to strike. But rather than honor that mandate, the UAW extended the contract, lied to workers that a strike would be “illegal,” and has now brought back a third agreement.
16. OSHA fines USPS only $26,481 over death of Allen Park, Michigan, postal worker Nick Acker
The fine is a reduction from the initial figure of $66,200, equivalent to 10 seconds worth of USPS revenue and likely not even half of what Acker’s yearly salary was at the post office.
17. Greece deepens role as Washington's Eastern Mediterranean bulwark
Over the second week of May, Greece’s armed forces took part in NATO’s Trojan Footprint 2026, which the military alliance described as the “premier and largest Special Operations Forces exercise in the European theater”.
The United States-led event took place across 10 countries spanning the Mediterranean, Baltic Sea, and Black Sea, with Greece serving as the exercise’s key operational hub in the Eastern Mediterranean. Involved were approximately 1,000 US special operations forces personnel, along with 2,000 from NATO allies and partner forces.
The exercise took place within the context of US imperialism’s war against Iran and NATO’s war in Ukraine against Russia and was presented as a dress rehearsal for escalation of these conflicts. Sky News reported the exercise was “designed to test responses to attempts by an unnamed enemy—most likely Russia—to infiltrate NATO territory and launch sabotage, cyber and other attacks under the threshold of all-out war.”
The exercise was overshadowed by the unraveling of transatlantic relations, as US imperialism’s aggressive pursuit of its geopolitical interests cuts across those of the European imperialist powers. This was reflected in Trump’s withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from Germany and his halting of the planned deployment of US intermediate-range weapons there.
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The extent to which Greece is aligned with US geostrategic aims in the region was evident following Washington’s illegal assault on Iran. Just days after US and Israeli forces began their bombardment of Iran, Greece was the first to respond to the drone strike on Britain’s Akrotiri sovereign base on March 2—attributed without proof to Tehran or its allies—deploying frigates equipped with anti-drone systems and F-16 fighter jets to Cyprus before Britain had announced the deployment of its own warship to the region. A Greek anti-aircraft battery stationed in Saudi Arabia shot down two Iranian ballistic missiles on March 19.
Souda Bay in Crete has provided crucial logistical support to US forces throughout their deployment in the Middle East. The US maintains a permanent troop presence in Greece of around 400 mainly naval personnel, largely at Souda Bay.
Greece’s integration into US imperialism’s war drive is the culmination of the country’s decades-long status as a client state for Washington. Historically, the country has been one of NATO’s top defense spenders, consistently and comfortably exceeding the 2 percent of GDP benchmark set by the alliance. This included the years of last decade’s financial crisis, when health, pensions and other social provisions were gutted at the behest of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
During the first half of this decade, Greece’s defense spending amounted to an average of 3.33 percent of GDP—including just under 4 percent in 2021 and 2022. Over the next decade, Greece is embarking on the largest modernization drive of its military in history, planning to spend €25 billion. This includes new submarines, air, sea and underwater drones, and a communications satellite. At the center of the plans is the “Achilles Shield”, an anti-aircraft and anti-drone dome developed in partnership with Israel.
While this does not yet reach the new NATO target of 3.5 percent of GDP for Core Defense and 1.5 percent for Security-Related Spending, it is a staggering squandering of resources, equating to €2,500 per head of population of around 10 million people. Were the UK to commit to such military spending, this would require the Labour government to hand over approximately about €174.8 billion (£149 billion) to the armed forces.
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An integral part of drawing Greece even closer to Washington has been the forging of close military ties with Israel over the past decade, centred on control of the enormous natural gas reserves discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean by a US Geological Survey in 2010.
At the start of 2016, the pseudo-left Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) government—which had previously campaigned on ending military ties with Israel—signed a tripartite agreement with Israel and Cyprus on energy cooperation, counterterrorism, and military coordination. At a summit hosted by Israel in Jerusalem last December, the leaders of the three countries agreed to deepen cooperation on “security, defense and military matters” to protect “critical regional infrastructure” in the Mediterranean.
The militarization of the Eastern Mediterranean has served to inflame Greece’s historic tensions with Türkiye, also a US ally and NATO member and, notwithstanding President Erdoğan’s frequent anti-imperialist posturing, no less integrated in Washington’s drive to war in the region.
At the center are rivalries over control in the Aegean as well as the frozen conflict in Cyprus, which have sharpened since the discovery of gas reserves in the region. Greece’s deepening alliance with Israel has added fuel to the fire, given Türkiye’s escalating rivalry with Israel. In the summer of 2020, Greece and Türkiye came dangerously close to war after Türkiye dispatched a gas survey vessel into an economic zone claimed by Greece and Cyprus, resulting in a stand-off between Greek and Turkish warships.
Since then, Greece has become increasingly assertive in the region. In 2021, its parliament extended territorial waters in the Ionian Sea from six to 12 nautical miles, the first such expansion since 1947. This move is widely seen as a precedent for a future extension in the Aegean, which would effectively restrict Turkish naval movement.
In 2024, Greece announced plans for a maritime park in the Aegean. Türkiye rejected the move, stating it would not accept “fait accompli” actions in disputed areas. Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis reaffirmed that extending territorial waters to 12 nautical miles is a sovereign right that Greece will exercise when it chooses.
In response, Turkey has advanced its “Blue Homeland” doctrine into legislation, asserting maritime claims in the Black Sea and Mediterranean. Turkish officials describe this as defending national rights against external pressure.
Behind these rivalries lie deep internal crises. In Türkiye, inflation is officially 32 percent (55 percent according to independent organization ENAG), with growing working-class unrest a major threat to the Erdoğan government. In Greece, long-term austerity—fueled by the mass movement for justice for the Tempi rail crash victims—has produced repeated waves of strikes over wages and living conditions. Protests and strikes have brought to the fore anti-war sentiment, with demands that funding be allocated to social spending on health, education and housing; not to the military . This opposition will only mount as Greece’s treasury is emptied and handed over for the planned surge in military spending.
Espousal of nationalism and militarism serve to redirect these social tensions outward while advancing the predatory interests of the Greek bourgeoisie in the Eastern Mediterranean. As the WSWS noted in 2022, Erdoğan and Mitsotakis are “united in the attempt to use militarism and nationalism to divide the working class and suppress the growing struggles on both shores of the Aegean Sea.” The answer is the independent political mobilization of Greek and Turkish workers, united internationally against capitalism and the drive to war.
18. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Ethiopia:
Guinea:
Kenya:
South Africa:
Across Europe:
Notable May Day strikes and Demonstrations take place in Germany, Greece, Netherlands, France, and Turkey
Iceland:
Sailors on three vessels on indefinite strike against low wages and vulnerable employment
Italy:
Hundreds of doctors in Abruzzo, demonstrate against cuts in health budget
Spain:
Tens of thousands in Madrid demonstrate against housing shortages, high rents and property speculation
Türkiye:
Hundreds of miners at Özşen Mining in Edirne strike and march over unpaid wages and sackings
United Kingdom:
Further stoppages by drivers at London bus company over rota changes and fatigue
UK ancillary workers at hospital and university in Cambridge demand high cost-of-living pay supplement
Scottish airport workers set to walk out over pay
Middle East
Iran:
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.
