Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. ICE refuses to pay for medical care in its concentration camps
For more than eleven months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has failed to pay third-party medical claims for people in its custody. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that ICE has not paid outside providers through the affected system since October 3, 2025, leaving hospitals and ambulance services owed millions of dollars and contributing to delayed or canceled medical appointments.
The payment breakdown began after the Department of Veterans Affairs ended its longstanding arrangement to process the claims. The VA acted under pressure from Republican lawmakers who alleged that the arrangement diverted resources from veterans. VA officials disputed that characterization because ICE reimbursed the department for the work.
ICE subsequently described the loss of its claims processor as an “absolute emergency” and hired Acentra Health to construct a replacement system. According to the Chronicle, Acentra had received $40 million under a contract worth as much as $67.5 million, but the replacement portal was still not operational as of August. Acentra’s website currently describes the portal as “coming soon” and says it has not begun processing claims. The Amica Center for Immigrant Rights has called the resulting restrictions a “death policy.”
The Republican complaint falsified the actual economics in order to manufacture a conflict between two sections of the working class: veterans and undocumented immigrants. It weaponized the legitimate grievances of veterans concerning VA underfunding, delayed appointments, rationed care, and increased privatization and redirected those grievances onto the most defenseless section of the working class rather than onto the economic system responsible for both.
This manufactured conflict served to cut services for both sections: ICE stopped paying medical providers entirely, leaving detainees to suffer and die, while the veterans—framed as the “winners” of this conflict—gained nothing. No additional resources were diverted to the VA. Instead, $40 million flowed to Acentra Health for a system that does not exist.
The results are a matter of record. At least 57 people had died in ICE custody since January 2025 as of early September. A Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights investigation of the first 52 deaths documented systemic failures in medical screening, staffing, mental-health services and access to outside care.
ICE’s own 2025 national detention standards require “medically necessary and appropriate medical, dental and mental health care and pharmaceutical services at no cost” to detainees. Investigations have repeatedly documented violations of this standard, and the payment breakdown has created an additional barrier to meeting it. Detainees have been directly charged thousands of dollars for medication and care they are legally entitled to receive free.
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The non-payment of medical providers is the same logic that governs the entire detention apparatus. The Texas Observer recently published an investigation of Camp East Montana, the largest immigrant detention facility in the country, on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso.
The original lead contractor at Camp East Montana, a small company called Acquisition Logistics, was contracted for $1.26 billion without a Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan, the mechanism that would have allowed financial penalties for violations, because of the “expedited time frames” for opening the facility. When that contract was terminated, ICE handed management to Amentum Services, a multibillion-dollar defense contractor, with no competitive bidding. In July, ICE extended Amentum’s no-bid contract for another year at more than $776 million, potentially through September 2027, on the claim that only Amentum could manage the facility. Amentum’s corporate lineage runs through DynCorp, a military contractor that was forced to pay $21 million to settle a False Claims Act suit over inflating the costs of training Iraqi police. A war profiteer now turned detention profiteer, the interconnection between imperialist aggression abroad and dictatorship domestically could not be more clear.
A Government Accountability Office audit found the Army and ICE paid as much as $19 million for unused services under the contract. That included as much as $11.5 million before detainees arrived, approximately $423,000 for unused meals during the initial period and approximately $7.1 million after ICE assumed the contract. Meanwhile, detainees reported drastic weight loss and being “fed cookies, candies and potato chips in lieu of meals.”
The pretense that the attacks on immigrants only target “illegal aliens” is also refuted by the record. US citizens, such as Brian Morales Garcia, have been deported. Deportation flights to Haiti have carried children born in the United States, citizens expelled from their own country alongside their parents. ICE has made approximately 150,000 arrests between June and August. The majority of these people had no criminal conviction or pending charge, underscoring that the ultimate target is not just “criminals” but the entire working class, regardless of immigration status.
The growing deportation apparatus under Trump is not new and is not solely the responsibility of the Republican Party. ICE was created under George W. Bush, expanded under Obama — whose administration set deportation records and built the family detention camps — and accelerated under both Trump and the Biden administrations.
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When Trump returned to the White House, 46 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act, which expanded mandatory immigration detention. In March 2025, 10 Senate Democrats provided the votes needed to advance a Republican continuing resolution funding the government while Trump and Elon Musk implemented the Department of Government Efficiency cuts and prepared the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Most recently, 176 House Democrats backed legislation funding federal agencies through December 11. These votes maintained the government and its immigration-enforcement agencies as ICE and Customs and Border Protection received tens of billions of dollars for further expansion.
This record also includes elected officials affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who previously called for abolishing ICE, reaffirmed on August 24 his support for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ bid to become speaker. Jeffries has proposed cosmetic changes to ICE kidnapping operations, such as wearing body cameras, but rejected calls to abolish the agency.
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The immigration detention system is an extension of the existing carceral state. The United States accounts for roughly 4 percent of the world’s population and holds roughly 20 percent of the world’s prisoners, and its prisons are aimed squarely at the poor and the working class.
After campaigning on “defunding the police,” Mamdani has embraced the New York Police Department. At a September 2 Bronx roll call, held two days after police fatally shot Pamela Cisneros, he declared that the NYPD had “worked around the clock to keep New York City safe” and said he was “grateful for their service today and every day.” Following the September 4 police killing of Chaun Bottom, Mamdani praised officers for attempting “to de-escalate” the encounter and deferred to an internal investigation.
The police, the immigration Gestapo, and the military are instruments of a single system of capitalist class rule, and its escalating violence is directed at one target: the working class, native-born and immigrant alike.
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These conditions cannot be ameliorated by petitioning the capitalist state for greater oversight, more humane detention, or compliance with its own standards. Nor can they be resolved by electing “progressive” or even self-proclaimed “socialist” Democrats.
The immediate and unconditional release of every detainee, the closure of the concentration camps, and the abolition of ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Homeland Security can be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the working class through the building of rank-and-file committees.
On September 3, Argentine President Javier Milei delivered two speeches. In the morning, in Santiago, Chile, he told the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Madrid Forum, an international assembly of fascistic forces, that the 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende had opened four decades of prosperity. That night, flanked by his entire cabinet on national television, he announced sanctions, decrees and a naval base in defense of Argentina’s claim to the Malvinas islands.
The two speeches were deeply connected. A government whose austerity program is feeding economic crisis and mass discontent is reaching simultaneously for the rehabilitation of the military dictatorships and for nationalist chauvinism. Both are directed against the working class, and both deepen Argentina’s subordination to American imperialism.
Another speech two years ago provides the key to understanding Milei’s politics in class terms. In January 2024, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he delivered a fascist diatribe that was greeted with thunderous applause by the oligarchs. Elon Musk praised him. The Wall Street Journal ran his speech under the headline that he had given the Davos crowd “a Spine Transplant.”
Now, with the rise of the AfD in Germany and the far-right globally, as well as Trump’s ongoing efforts to undermine the constitutional order in the US, the normalization of such politics is well advanced. What Milei says today, he says as the voice of a financial oligarchy that has concluded it can no longer rule through democratic forms.
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His most significant remarks, however, were his tribute to 1973. Milei told the Madrid Forum:
Chile is an emblematic place because with its recent history it reminds us of the immense value of waging the cultural battle. After the overthrow of the communist Allende, Chile entered a period of stability and growth that extended for more than 40 years and, thanks to that, Chile was without any doubt the envy, in economic terms, of the entire region.
What Milei describes as “stability and growth” was a reign of fascist terror. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, with the direct assistance of the CIA, US military intelligence and the Nixon administration, bombed the presidential palace and installed the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Some 3,000 workers, students and socialists were murdered or disappeared. Tens of thousands were tortured in the National Stadium and in clandestine centers across the country. Congress was dissolved, parties banned, unions smashed.
This apparatus of terror existed for a definite purpose: to impose, at gunpoint, the free-market program drawn up by the “Chicago Boys” trained under Milton Friedman. Privatization, deregulation and the destruction of wages could be carried out only after the working class had been physically decapitated. That is the real content of the “Chilean model” Milei celebrated in Santiago, a week before the coup’s anniversary, standing beside President José Antonio Kast, a lifelong defender of the dictatorship.
Milei then turned to the 2019 mass uprising in Chile:
The whole country was plunged into an unprecedented wave of left-wing violence, which left dozens dead between 2019 and 2020, because the leftists, at a certain point, believed they were right to use violence to carry out their policies.
This is a brazen falsification. It was the Chilean state that killed dozens of protesters and shot more than 400 of them in the eyes, on top of the thousands detained and tortured.
It is fitting that Milei combines the 2019 repression with his tribute to the coup. At the time, President Sebastián Piñera launched a state of emergency that put soldiers on the streets against demonstrators for the first time since Pinochet.
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Hours later, Milei went on national television to claim his government would pursue control over the Malvinas. He claimed that “winds of change” favored Argentina’s claim, citing Trump’s remark that Washington might reconsider its position recognizing Britain’s control of the islands, which it calls the Falklands.
In fact, Trump’s comment was rather noncommittal: “I always review every position. That’s just one of many.” Asked by GB News whether he would aid Britain in a dispute, Trump was dismissive, complaining that the UK “weren’t there to help me” over Iran.
The absurdity of Milei now wrapping himself in the flag is underscored by his long-standing self-description as an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, who ordered the sinking of the General Belgrano, killing 323 Argentine sailors. He adopted the sovereignty posture only months ago amid rapidly falling approval ratings and coming elections.
The historical precedent is unmistakable. In April 1982, the fascist-military junta, economically bankrupt, facing a working class returning to struggle after brutal repression, invaded the islands. The Peronist and Stalinist leaderships that had just been clubbed into submission marched to the Plaza de Mayo behind Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri. And the revisionist Nahuel Moreno, who had broken with the International Committee of the Fourth International and was living in exile, called on his supporters to join the “military camp” of the junta, refusing to raise a single independent class demand. Hundreds of conscripts died for a regime that had disappeared 30,000 people, as a national cause became the instrument through which workers were bound to their own executioners.
Once again, the entire Argentine political establishment is closing ranks behind the “cause of the Malvinas.” The Peronists, who denounce Milei’s austerity by day, echo his territorial claims without qualification. So do the Morenoite organizations.
The Trotskyist position is the opposite. Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution establishes that in countries of belated capitalist development oppressed by imperialism, the democratic tasks—the expulsion of foreign domination among them—cannot be entrusted to the national bourgeoisie. Only the working class, fighting for its own class power, can carry them through as part of the world socialist revolution.
The British seizure of the islands in 1833 and the Royal Navy's war of 1982 were colonial crimes. But the struggle against imperialism can only be waged by a working class that maintains irreconcilable political independence from its own bourgeoisie.
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Under Milei, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population controls fully a quarter of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent, suffering the full impact of his government’s “chainsaw” austerity, is unable to afford basic necessities of life.
It is within this fundamental social context that the Argentine president’s celebration of the torture regimes of Pinochet and Argentine dictator Videla must be understood. They are no political aberration or personal eccentricity, but a revealing expression of the drive by the bourgeoisie, in Argentina as throughout the capitalist world, to bring political forms of rule in line with underlying social relations.
With the vast concentration of wealth at the top, even as wages, pensions and public services are decimated, democratic forms of rule become increasingly unviable. The result is a turn to fascist methods everywhere: Trump’s drive to consolidate a presidential dictatorship in the US; the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the political heir of Nazism; and the coming to power of far-right governments from Argentina to Colombia.
The same social contradictions driving the ruling class to resurrect the murderous methods of Pinochet are moving workers and youth into struggle across the Americas and internationally. What is required to defend basic democratic rights and defeat the drive to dictatorship is the independent industrial and political mobilization of the working class, armed with a socialist and internationalist program directed against dictatorship, war and the capitalist system that gives rise to them both.
3. Chasm between workers and union apparatus on full display at Detroit Labor Day parade
Detroit’s 2026 Labor Day parade put on full display the immense chasm between rank-and-file workers and the trade union apparatus. Under conditions of the Trump administration’s fascistic assault on democratic rights, the ongoing war against Iran, rampaging inflation, expanding ICE terror against immigrants and threats to rig or even cancel upcoming Congressional elections, the unions were incapable of rallying more than a few thousand workers in a metropolitan area with more than 300,000 union members.
None of the major speakers, including United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and Metro Detroit AFL-CIO President Daryl Newman, even so much as mentioned Trump or the fascist danger. Nor were any slogans advanced pointing to a way to fight back against the growing existential threats workers face on multiplying fronts, including AI and automation job cuts and the mounting toll of workplace deaths.
Placards promoting US-Canadian worker solidarity, and by implication opposition to the US-Canada trade war, were prominent on the march. However, Trump’s ongoing tariff war against Canada and the threat to annex Canada as the 51st US state were not mentioned by Fain or other major speakers, nor was any appeal made for international working class unity. This is no surprise given the fact that Fain is one of the biggest supporters of Trump’s trade war measures, claiming that the layoff of workers in Canada and other countries benefits workers in the US.
As it has in previous years the parade served as a campaign event for the Democratic Party. UAW-endorsed US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed marched alongside Fain at the front of the UAW contingent at the parade. Also attending were other prominent Democratic politicians, including gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, and US Representatives Debbie Dingell and Rashida Tlaib, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
There is a broad radicalization taking place in the United States, reflected in the continuing contract rejection votes, the mass opposition to the attacks on immigrant workers and massive No Kings protests. However, the discredited UAW apparatus, which oversees 110,000 active members in the Detroit area, was incapable of organizing delegations of more than a few hundred workers, even from the largest plants in the area, such as the Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant and Ford Rouge complex. The turnout mobilized by other unions was equally dismal.
The Detroit Labor Day was a further expression of the fact that the American trade unions are unions in name only. Under the grip of the pro-corporate trade union bureaucracy, they have degenerated into appendages of corporate management and the capitalist state. Over the last 50 years they have presided over the deindustrialization of Detroit and other Rust Belt cities. The long ago demise of what was once the American labor movement has coincided with ever smaller turnouts at Labor Day parades, which once involved hundreds of thousands of workers and their families.
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By the time Fain spoke, the crowd at Roosevelt Park had dwindled to perhaps 50 or 60 people. Fain, who is running for re-election this year along with other top UAW officers, postured as a champion of workers with his usual demagogy lambasting billionaires despite being a tool of the auto companies himself. Like other speakers he focused on trying to boost turnout for Democratic candidates in the upcoming November elections, where a US Senate seat and the governor’s office will be decided along with Michigan’s 13 House seats. Michigan is considered a key battleground in the Democrats’ efforts to capture control of Congress.
With an eye to his re-election where he faces a challenge from rank-and-file autoworker and socialist Will Lehman, Fain praised the sellout contracts at parts suppliers American Axle, Three Rivers, Michigan and Bridgewater Interiors in the Detroit suburbs as victories. “Those victories prove something. When workers stay together, the impossible starts to look possible,” citing the supposed $35 an hour top wage won at Bridgewater. He did not mention that the UAW rushed through both deals without providing workers time to review the full contracts. Nor did he point out that the Bridgewater deal included a starvation-level starting wage of only $20 an hour.
According to the UAW’s contract “highlights,” Bridgewater workers would not make the touted $35 an hour until 2033—three years after the contract expires! At American Axle the $30 top rate will not be reached until 2030 and will fall far short of workers' demands to restore all concessions and abolish the hated tier system imposed after the UAW sellout of the 2008 strike.
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As the parade assembled, many younger workers stopped by a literature table set up by campaigners for the Socialist Equality Party and its youth movement, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality. Campaigners distributed hundreds of copies of the WSWS perspective, “Labor Day 2026: The oligarchy demands that workers pay for the crisis of American capitalism,“ which explained that the $40 trillion government debt has “produced a single response from the ruling class and both of its political parties: make the working class pay.”
Many workers commented on the savage cuts the Trump administration was carrying out on Medicaid and food stamps and the impact of inflation, and expressed their anger over the ongoing war against Iran and the danger of a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
Many workers who stopped by the table signed the petition to demand freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk, the young Ukrainian socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison on bogus charges of treason for calling for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against the war.
A number of young people expressed disillusionment with the Democratic Socialists of America and expressed interest in genuine socialism. A tech worker, who had attended No Kings demonstrations, said he was frustrated with those organizations that claim the Democrats can be changed into a party that defends the working class. “How many times have we heard that? That’s what Bernie said. Biden supported the genocide, and the Democrats are a party that is for the rich. That’s not going to change.” After a discussion, the young worker purchased a copy of Oligarchy: Trump and the breakdown of American democracy from Mehring Books.
Stephanie, a special ed teacher from Detroit, carried a sign expressing solidarity with Canadian workers. She opposed the ongoing war against Iran and the corporate oligarchy. She also expressed support for Will Lehman, the socialist candidate for UAW president who is running on a program of abolishing the union apparatus and transferring power to workers on the shop floor. Lehman supporters also had a literature table at the parade and handed out hundreds of flyers.
4. Black lung cases surge to highest levels since 1978 among US coalminers
Black lung has returned to 1970s levels among veteran underground miners in Central Appalachia as a long-delayed federal silica standard remains stalled and the UMWA bureaucracy has spent decades suppressing the industrial power of the miners.
5. WSWS readers in Asia demand the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk
“Bogdan has not done anything wrong; he is making a great contribution to world peace and democracy. He is uniting Ukrainian and Russian workers against a war that does not belong to them.” — A young worker in China
Letters demanding the release of the Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk continue to arrive at the Pervomaisk City District Court and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal from historians, workers and opponents of war on four continents.
7. Australian state Labor government announces more police-state laws
Under the guise of combating gang-related violence, the state Labor government in New South Wales (NSW) is planning another barrage of legislation that can be used far more widely, including to crack down on anti-war and other forms of political dissent.
In a ministerial media release on Monday, Premier Chris Minns pledged to “hit criminal networks at every point.” He announced far-reaching police surveillance and “crime prevention” powers, together with laws to allow more teenagers to be prosecuted and imprisoned as adults.
Assisted by laws introduced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s federal Labor government, the Minns administration is spearheading a repressive reaction to worsening social conditions and growing political discontent, clearly seeking to outdo the far-right One Nation and the Liberal-National Coalition.
Minns claimed that the legislation—his government’s third such package in recent months—is a response to “increasingly sophisticated” gang activity taking place across Sydney, which has produced numbers of shootings.
But the police powers and new offenses apply far more broadly than gang violence. They extend to all activities designated by the government as Serious Criminal Offenses. These can include any prescribed indictable offenses, ranging from treason and terrorism to assault and property damage offenses.
Under the latest wave of new laws, police will be able to forcibly seize and access mobile phones to download all their data and open encrypted messages, even previously deleted material going back for years.
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Police will be allowed to impose these orders even if charges have not been laid against a person, or a person has been tried and acquitted. The orders can be based on mere “reasonable suspicion” of involvement or potential involvement in designated serious criminal offences.
Moreover, this suspicion can be based on hearsay evidence, that is, assertions by other people, rather than actual conduct. Police can utilise confidential intelligence, intercepted communications and reports from undercover provocateurs, agents or informants that would not normally be permissible in a criminal trial.
This is another serious overturn of essential legal and democratic rights, such as freedom of association, movement and assembly, and the centuries-old principle of being treated as innocent until proven guilty in a trial beyond a reasonable doubt.
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The laws will also double penalties for non-compliance with the compulsory questioning by the NSW Crime Commission. Giving false or misleading evidence will carry a maximum of ten years imprisonment, and refusing to answer questions or obstructing an investigation will carry up to four years.
Under the Minns government, since March 2023, police already have been given vast powers. As a result, more people are being arrested and incarcerated than ever before and the number of young people in prison has increased at record rates.
None of this has stopped gang-related violence.
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Last week, Minns doubled down on his defence of unconstitutional anti-protest laws that his government imposed to ban demonstrations against the genocide and the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in February. Minns again falsely depicted the protests as antisemitic and violent, as Albanese has previously done.
Minns also justified the police rampage during the Herzog visit, which saw police viciously bash demonstrators to enforce the laws that a court later ruled an unconstitutional breach of an implied freedom of political communication.
The Minns government’s latest measures are being drafted under conditions in which the Albanese government is expanding the already vast US access to bases across Australia and further integrating the US and Australian armed forces in preparation for what would be a widely-opposed and catastrophic war against China.
Australian Education Union President Mullaly’s video betrayed a nervousness that union members who voted Yes last time, or did not vote at all, may switch to No, as the nature of the betrayal becomes clearer.
9. Japanese yen turbulence continues to threaten global financial markets
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his counterparts in the Japanese government are walking a tightrope as they seek to raise the value of the yen against the US dollar and stabilise it.
If they slip and fall off, it could have significant consequences for the US and global markets, such is the fragility of the international financial system, shot through as it is with speculative trades and contracts.
The issue of the yen’s value started to come into greater international prominence earlier this year as it continued to fall against the dollar. This was despite threats from the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama that they would intervene against short sellers—those who seek to profit from a further decline—and boost its value.
The threats had no effect and Bessent became concerned that Japan would start to sell dollars to halt the yen’s fall, which adds to the government’s economic problems by boosting inflation via higher prices for imports.
Fearing such an action, Bessent organised a joint intervention with the MoF under which Japan would obtain money from the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilisation Fund to back the value of the yen without having to sell US dollars. The US support would be provided by the sale of US holdings of euros to purchase yen.
This unusual set of arrangements—the European Central Bank was not even informed of the action the US was to take with its currency—had one aim: to prop up the yen without selling dollars.
In a letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee who had asked what legal and financial analysis was behind the use of the stabilisation fund, Bessent outlined some of his fears in abusive tones.
He wrote that Warren’s letter of August 13, two weeks after the intervention, “reveals that you know even less about foreign exchange markets than you do about banking” and went on to recommend “an entry level course in international finance for you and your staff, or I can give you a tutorial on Foreign Exchange for Dummies.”
The tone of the Bessent letter revealed the intense hostility of the Trump administration to any kind of Congressional oversight, while its content displayed the nervousness over the state of the US financial system.
Noting that Japan is a major holder of US Treasuries, as Warren had done—Japan, with more than $1 trillion, is now the largest foreign government holder of US bonds—he wrote that “disorderly yen markets can trigger forced unwinds, which would destabilise global markets and ultimately raise borrowing costs for American families and businesses.”
He was referring to a situation where if Japan sold Treasury bonds to obtain dollars with which to support the yen, this would lead to a fall in their value and a rise in the yields (interest rates) at the longer end of the bond market leading to a general rise in corporate and government borrowing costs.
He likened the yen intervention to that carried out earlier in the year to support the Milei regime in Argentina, where the ESF was used to “stabilise Argentina in its moment of acute, short-term illiquidity and to prevent the problem from becoming a broader regional crisis.” Such crises in the past have impacted on the US, such is the closely integrated nature of the international financial system.
Bessent subsequently revealed his concerns over the issue of longer-term debt by announcing that, henceforth, Treasury bond buybacks would be lifted from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation and allowed Treasury officials to indicate that money from the Treasury General Account of around $1 trillion, through which the government finances its day-to-day activities, could also be tapped if necessary.
The joint US-Japan intervention at the end of July did lift the value of the yen, but only marginally, and it soon began to fall back again. Consequently, the US has been insisting that the Bank of Japan (BoJ) begin lifting interest rates at its meeting on September 17–18 in order to provide a more long-term prop for the yen.
This was main issue discussed between Bessent and Japanese Finance Minister Katayama and the governor of the BoJ, Kazuo Ueda, at the recent meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bankers.
After saying that he was “not going to tell them what to do,” when asked if the central bank should consider successive interest rate increases to combat the weak yen, Bessent made it clear he was doing precisely that.
10. Australia: Major home building company Bathla collapses
Tens of thousands of building workers, contractors and home buyers will be impacted by the collapse, which may be a harbinger of a deepening insolvency crisis in the construction sector.
11. La France Insoumise calls for the freeing of Bogdan Syrotiuk
Support has continued to grow internationally for Bogdan Syrotiuk, the young Ukrainian socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison for opposing the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine. On Monday, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) party issued a communiqué condemning the fabricated charges and the “unacceptable brutality” of the sentence against Syrotiuk and calling for his immediate release.
On August 10, a court in Pervomaisk sentenced Syrotiuk, a leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists (YGBL), on charges of “high treason … under martial law.” Since then, the campaign waged by the sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to defend Bogdan has won increasing prominence and support. Over 7,700 people from 90 countries have signed the petition for Syrotiuk on FreeBogdan.org, and letters of protest have flowed to the Pervomaisk court from over 30 countries.
A growing range of political parties across Europe have condemned the sentence and demanded Bogdan’s freedom. These include the Stop the War Coalition in Britain, Revolutionary Left and the Spanish Communist Workers Party in Spain, Socialist Alternative in the Netherlands, and the Spartacist Workers Party and Klasse Gegen Klasse in Germany. In France, Lutte ouvrière (LO, Workers Struggle) and Révolution permanente (RP) have issued statements calling to free Syrotiuk.
LFI’s decision to issue their own call for Syrotiuk’s freedom reflects the growing prominence of the campaign to free Syrotiuk, and the political significance of Syrotiuk’s struggle to unite the working class against far-right forces and a bloody war that threatens to engulf all of Europe.
Mélenchon is a front-runner in next year’s French presidential elections, which currently are expected to produce a runoff between Mélenchon and a neo-fascist candidate. In the 2022 elections, Mélenchon won nearly 8 million votes. Many LFI officials—including LFI National Assembly group leader Mathilde Panot, and LFI European Parliament members Rima Hassan and Emma Fourreau—have faced police interrogation or legal charges on trumped-up accusations of terrorism for statements of opposition to the Gaza genocide.
12. The number of fatalities in the Congo Ebola outbreak reaches 3,226
The Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) had killed 3,226 people as of September 5. According to DRC national reporting carried by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), 6,604 confirmed cases had been recorded across 61 of the country's 151 health zones in six provinces, a case fatality ratio (CFR) of 48.1 percent. The Ministry of Public Health, Hygiene and Social Welfare declared the outbreak on May 15, meaning these figures were reached on the 113th day.
Only the West African epidemic of 2014 to 2016, which produced 28,616 cases across all categories and 11,325 deaths, has been larger or more lethal. That outbreak did not reach the Congo's present case total until roughly its 185th day, nor its present death toll until the 187th.
Speaking at a media briefing in Geneva on September 2, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus confirmed that this is now the fastest-moving outbreak of the disease ever recorded, and the second largest in its history.
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Meanwhile the geography of the epidemic is shifting. Cases in Ituri fell by 12 percent over the three weeks to September 3, while in North Kivu cases more than doubled and deaths rose by 98 percent. That province now records a CFR of 67.7 percent, the highest of any affected province.
The province at the center of the epidemic is also a goldfield, and the industry working it has continued without interruption. Congolese gold generated $2.28 billion in export revenue in 2025, more than 90 percent of it from a single mine. Kibali, 140 kilometers north of the epicenter, is owned in equal 45 percent shares by Barrick and AngloGold Ashanti, the remaining 10 percent held by the state company Societe Miniere de Kilo-Moto (SOKIMO). Barrick’s attributable profit from its share alone came to $172 million in the second quarter of 2026, while royalties to the Congolese state amount to roughly 5.3 percent of sales.
Extending that single quarter across both foreign partners and across four quarters, a back-of-the-envelope calculation places their combined annual take from Kibali somewhere in the region of $1.4 billion. The six-month response plan for an epidemic that has killed 3,226 people cannot raise the $1.3 billion it would cost.
The wage bill is instructive for a different reason. Kibali has paid $621 million over thirteen years, roughly $48 million annually, which across 7,600 employees and contractors comes to some $525 a month per worker. Set beside $172 million of profit booked by one partner in a single quarter, labor is a minor charge on the operation. What that wage secures, in a country where 73.5 percent of the population subsists on less than $2.15 a day, is a workforce held apart from the population surrounding it.
Within five days of the declaration of the epidemic, the mine had instituted daily screening of all 7,600 workers and required each to declare where they had traveled from. It has recorded no infections, and its health zone no cases at all. This was not solicitude for the workforce. An outbreak inside the perimeter would halt production, and the measures protect the ore body, and the miners incidentally, in the manner of equipment. Kibali possesses a clinic, an airstrip, logistics, laboratory access and 7,600 people under daily observation, which is the apparatus the national response conspicuously lacks. None of it has been extended beyond the fence line, and no contribution from the mining industry to the national response has been recorded.
No such arrangements exist to the south. In Mongbwalu, the gold town of 130,000 where the outbreak was first identified and which has since recorded 632 confirmed cases, National Public Radio found in June that the pits were operating without protective equipment, sanitation controls or medical oversight, and Oxfam reports only 20 percent of residents have safe water. At Iga-Barriere in August, the Associated Press documented an 11-year-old boy earning two dollars a day. SOKIMO takes 30 percent of what the artisanal miners bring up.
What Kibali demonstrates is that the containment of this epidemic is entirely feasible in Ituri today. It is being carried out, competently and at scale, 140 kilometers from a town where 632 people have been confirmed infected. The capability exists, and it is deployed where it protects profit accumulation and nowhere else. Nothing has been shut. On September 4, two days after the death toll passed 3,000, the Congolese mines minister received a SOKIMO delegation to review progress on a new industrial gold project at Mongbwalu, targeted for production in mid-2027.
The same logic governed the reopening of the schools. Classes resumed across the DRC on September 1, with nearly 31 million pupils expected. Education Minister Raissa Malu had announced a three-tier system under which schools in red zones would switch to printed worksheets and community radio, and a ministry document seen by Reuters placed more than 1,000 schools in Ituri alone in that category. The plan was abandoned and schools opened as normal, provincial authorities having objected that red-zone pupils would fall behind the curriculum.
None of this is an aberration, and none of it is peculiar to the Congo. The negligence is the policy, and nowhere is it written more plainly than in the United States, where measles has reached 3,134 confirmed cases as of September 3, against 2,289 in all of last year. Two unvaccinated residents of Pennsylvania died in August, yet the CDC's 2026 deaths table records none, and the agency is now drafting a standardized definition of what will count as a measles death. Kindergarten vaccination coverage has meanwhile fallen to 92.4 percent, leaving some 280,000 children unprotected.
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The productive capacity that exists today is more than sufficient to end this epidemic and prevent the next one. It is organized instead around what can be extracted, and under that arrangement the working class of the Congo, of Europe and of the Americas figures as an expendable input. Bringing epidemics of this kind to an end requires that the pharmaceutical industry and the research laboratories be taken out of private hands, and the resources now committed to extraction and to war redirected toward the medical and sanitary infrastructure the Congolese population has been systematically denied. That task falls to the international working class.
13. AI and the fight for socialism
“AI and the fight for socialism,” was the fifth of six resolutions adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2 to 7, 2026.
Following is the entire resolution, presented by Evan Blake:
1. The Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) places the development of artificial intelligence (AI) at the center of its analysis of the world capitalist crisis. In no other technology are the contradictions of the capitalist system so sharply concentrated. Produced by the collective labor and accumulated knowledge of humanity, AI possesses an immense liberating potential; owned and controlled by a financial-corporate oligarchy, it is being turned into an instrument of exploitation, surveillance and war. The development of AI raises the decisive questions the working class confronts with every great advance in the productive forces: Who owns it? In whose interest is it developed? To what end is it deployed? On these questions hangs whether the immense powers now assembled become the means of humanity’s liberation or of a new barbarism.
2. Under capitalism, AI is being introduced not to lighten the burden of labor but to cut it as a cost—the realization, for the corporations, of a long-cherished dream of drastically reducing the workforce. In the first five months of 2026, US employers announced nearly 400,000 job cuts, with AI cited as the leading reason. Studies project the displacement of hundreds of millions of workers worldwide by 2030. For the first time, automation is striking directly at intellectual and professional labor—higher-paid layers of the working class whose jobs were long thought secure. In the same period, the technology oligarchs have enriched themselves as never before, with the fascist Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
3. At the same time, AI has been forged into an instrument of repression. Governments and corporations deploy it for mass surveillance, censorship and the monitoring of political opposition. In the United States, Trump’s ICE Gestapo uses AI to track, hunt and deport immigrants. Access to the technology itself is being made an instrument of control. Governments are imposing digital ID and age-verification regimes that condition the use of these tools on the surrender of personal identity to the state, while the Trump administration moves to restrict open-source AI models. Above all, AI has become central to the new imperialist redivision of the world. In the US-Israeli war on Iran, Palantir’s Maven Smart System— incorporating the Claude model built by Anthropic—generated some 1,000 bombing targets in the first 24 hours of the assault, part of a campaign of many thousands of strikes that killed thousands of civilians, including children. The same class of systems directs the genocide in Gaza, where the Israeli military employs AI-driven targeting and mass facial recognition. US imperialism is waging an economic and military offensive to dominate the technology, directed above all against China.
4. None of these reactionary uses flow from the technology itself, but from the social relations within which it is developed—private ownership, the profit system and the division of the world into rival nation-states. This distinction—between a technology and the social order that wields it—is the foundation of the Marxist attitude, stated by Leon Trotsky in his 1927 essay “Culture and Socialism”:
Technology is a basic conquest of mankind; although it has indeed served until now as an instrument of exploitation, it is at the same time the basic requirement for the liberation of the exploited. The machine strangles the wage-slave. But the wage-slave can only be freed through the machine.
5. In the absence of a mass socialist movement fighting to clarify these issues, hostility to AI is widespread and growing. The socialist movement is by no means indifferent to the devastation now underway, and this anger is understandable. But to conclude that the technology itself is the enemy is a profound error—a modern form of Luddism. The World Socialist Web Site has warned that this “anti-AI phobia appears as the political first cousin of the anti-vax hysteria.” Both respond to the crimes of capitalism — the profiteering of the pharmaceutical giants, the devastation wrought by the AI oligarchs — by turning against the scientific advance itself rather than the social order that abuses it. Nor is this hostility merely spontaneous; it is consciously prompted by virtually every pseudo-left tendency and by broad sections of the political establishment. The revolutionary position is the opposite. It approaches technology objectively and materialistically, and insists that the working class cannot turn its back on the most powerful productive forces ever created. It must take hold of AI technologies, as it must take hold of the factories, the mines, the data centers and the banks, and wrest them from the class that has monopolized them.
6. What is called “artificial intelligence” is better understood as augmented intelligence, a term the party has advanced to cut through the mystification surrounding the technology. The intelligence in these systems is not artificial, but rather the automation and amplification of human intellectual labor, produced by training vast statistical models on the digitized inheritance of human writing, science, art and code. To present AI as an alien mind arisen independently of humanity is a mystification that serves its owners. The party rejects both the uncritical awe promoted by the industry’s apologists and the irrational fear of the technophobes, grasping the genuinely revolutionary and contradictory character of the technology.
7. On December 12, 2025, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) launched Socialism AI, placing augmented intelligence at the service of the political education and organization of the international working class. Conceived, built and maintained by the cadre of the ICFI, Socialism AI makes the heritage of Marxism—the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Plekhanov and Trotsky, and the vast archives of nearly three decades of the World Socialist Web Site—available at once, in any language, to workers and young people entering into struggle all over the world. It is an instrument of, not a substitute for, revolutionary leadership. As the ICFI’s statement coinciding with the release of Socialism AI explained:
The decisive significance of Socialism AI lies in its ability to bridge the gap between the objective movement of the working class and the subjective level of socialist consciousness.
8. Just as the Enlightenment prepared the ground for the French Revolution by placing the knowledge of the age in the hands of the rising revolutionary class, so Socialism AI places the accumulated theoretical and historical experience of the Marxist movement at the disposal of the working class of the 21st century. The same advance that threatens workers under the profit system becomes, in their hands, a weapon for the development of revolutionary consciousness. The party must fight to make Socialism AI known as widely as possible and to bring it into the daily political activity of workers and youth.
9. AI is the latest and most powerful product of the scientific and technological revolution that has transformed the productive forces over the past century. This process was enormously accelerated by the modern globalization of production, which integrated the world economy and knit together humanity's scientific and intellectual labor as never before. Having arisen out of this revolution, AI now accelerates it in turn. Marx established that every fundamental transformation of society has its roots in the development of the productive forces, which at a certain stage come into conflict with the existing relations of production. AI brings that conflict to an extreme pitch—a colossally socialized productive force straining against the private property relations and national boundaries that confine it.
10. More than any technology before it, AI is the materialization of what Marx, in the Grundrisse, called the “general intellect.” He grasped the principle now unfolding before us:
The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.
AI systems are built from the general social knowledge of humanity—its science, language, and accumulated culture—congealed into a machine. That common inheritance, the product of countless generations, has been seized as the private property of a handful of the largest corporations on earth.
11. The scale of the speculative frenzy surrounding AI is without precedent. A small group of interlinked corporations—among them OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, Meta and Google—have bound themselves together in a web of 'circular deals' that inflate the appearance of demand. Such commitments now approach $1 trillion, even as OpenAI, valued at over $850 billion, loses money on a colossal scale with no prospect of being profitable. This is a vast expansion of fictitious capital and financial speculation— paper claims on wealth not yet produced—swollen far beyond any commensurate base in real production, and it must eventually collapse.
12. This mountain of speculation rests on the promise that AI will restore the profitability of a stagnating economy. It will do the opposite. Value, as Marx demonstrated, is created by living human labor, and profit is derived from the surplus value extracted from the worker over and above the wage paid for his labor power. As capitalism develops, the mass of constant capital—machinery, plant and raw materials, and now the vast infrastructure of chips and data centers—grows relative to the variable capital laid out in wages, and the rate of profit tends to fall. By displacing living labor, the sole source of surplus value, on a vast scale, AI accelerates this decline. Far from rescuing the profit system, it drives to a new extreme its fundamental law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
13. The AI boom exposes the parasitic and superfluous character of the capitalist class. The owners contribute nothing to production. These systems are conceived, built, trained and maintained by workers—the engineers and researchers of Silicon Valley and its counterparts across the world; the low-paid data workers who label their outputs in Kenya, the Philippines, India and Venezuela; the miners of cobalt, lithium and rare earths in the Congo and other oppressed countries; the chip fabricators of Taiwan; the workers who build and run the data centers. The oligarchs merely own the result, and use that ownership to throw millions out of work while enriching themselves without limit. Society has no need for the oligarchs: their grip on economic life has become incompatible with social progress and the survival of civilization.
14. The struggle over AI poses point-blank the question of who is to control the productive forces, and demolishes the oldest argument against socialism—that a modern economy is too complex to be consciously planned, that without the market and the guiding hand of owners and managers production would collapse into chaos. This was always a self-serving lie; with AI and modern communications it has become an absurdity. Workers organized in rank-and-file committees can now obtain in moments the answer to any question about their industry, their supply chains and the world economy, and coordinate instantly with their class brothers and sisters across every border. The material premises for the socialist planning of the world economy are fully in hand.
15. Directed by scientists in their fields, AI has become a powerful instrument for augmenting research. Freed from private profit and placed under social ownership, AI could vastly accelerate the science and the rational organization of production required to halt climate change. The party takes seriously the concern over the enormous energy consumed by the present AI buildout—but this waste is a product of capitalism, not of the technology. Under a democratically planned world economy, AI would itself become a powerful instrument for solving the climate crisis it is now made to deepen.
16. The working class must reject the false solutions of the pseudo-left. The most instructive is the recent call by Senator Bernie Sanders for an “AI sovereign wealth fund,” under which the government would take an equity stake in AI corporations and pay the population a dividend. This converges with the policy of the Trump administration, which has already moved by executive order to establish a US sovereign wealth fund, and with the schemes of the AI executives themselves—OpenAI’s Sam Altman foremost among them—who have offered the government a stake in their firms, with the aim of securing a future bailout when the AI bubble bursts. Under every such scheme the corporations remain private and profit-driven, while the working class owns nothing, controls nothing and decides nothing. The control of AI cannot be entrusted to the capitalist state, whose function is to defend the wealth and power of the ruling class. It will be won only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, on the basis of the following demands:
Expropriate the technology monopolies! The great AI, cloud-computing, semiconductor and digital-platform corporations must be expropriated and transformed into public utilities under the democratic control of the working class.
Not a single job lost to AI! For a shorter working week and workers’ control over technology! The immense gains in productivity must be used to shorten the working week with no loss of pay and to raise the living standards and free time of the whole population. The introduction of new technology in every workplace must be placed under the control of the working class, governed by the needs of the workers and of society, not the drive for profit.
Turn AI to human need and the planning of the world economy! Placed under social ownership and integrated into a democratically planned world economy, AI must be directed toward the needs of humanity—the advancement of science, medicine and education, the abolition of poverty and drudgery, the solution of the ecological crisis and the raising of world culture.
17. The ideologists of the technology industry present the outcome as already settled: an all-powerful machine intelligence will be created, before which humanity will be rendered obsolete and effectively reduced to the status of pets. This is a fatalistic myth that abstracts AI technology from the class struggle. Between the present order and any reorganization of society stands the working class, whose labor sustains the entire system and which will not accept in silence the destruction of the livelihoods of hundreds of millions. The struggle over AI—over who owns it and whom it serves—will become an epicenter of the class struggle. To reconcile workers to permanent joblessness, the ruling class and its apologists offer a universal basic income. This is a fraud, a means of administering mass unemployment and dependence on the capitalist state while the wealth and the machines remain in the hands of the oligarchy. The alternative to barbarism is not a subsidized passivity but the conquest of power by the working class.
18. The material foundations of socialism have never been so fully assembled. The productive forces developed under capitalism—of which AI is the highest expression— make it possible to abolish scarcity, poverty and toil and to place the accumulated knowledge and creative power of humanity at the disposal of all. But nothing is automatic. The deeper the crisis, the more ferociously the ruling class will fight to defend its wealth and power, even at the cost of civilization itself. Whether the immense powers now within humanity’s reach are used to build a new world or to destroy the existing one will be decided by the conscious struggle of the working class and the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The working class must take hold of AI, as it must take hold of all the productive forces its labor has created, expropriate the oligarchy that has usurped them, and reorganize the world economy on socialist foundations. This is the perspective for which the Socialist Equality Party fights.
14. Brazilian judiciary scandal exposes crisis of rule one month before elections
A month before Brazil’s elections, feuding factions of the Federal Supreme Court have exposed the terminal crisis of the political regime built on the 1988 Constitution.
15. UCLA doctoral student sues over punishment for anti-genocide protests
On August 26, Dylan Kupsh, a 27-year-old doctoral candidate in computer science, filed suit against the Regents of the University of California, two student-conduct administrators and UCLA Police Captain Jeffrey Chobanian, alleging a two-year campaign in retaliation for his open and constitutionally protected participation in five pro-Palestinian protests.
16. Amazon Air crash in Miami kills 5 contract workers: The cost of profit
On September 6, 21 Air Flight 7598, operating for Amazon Air, overran Runway 30 while landing at Miami International Airport in Florida. The aircraft struck navigational equipment and then a Ford Econoline van carrying seven aircraft-cleaning contractors inside the airport. It passed through the airport fence, struck a Toyota Corolla Cross on Northwest 67th Avenue and continued through a grassy area before striking another fence near a fleet of Tesla robotaxis. The 32-year-old Boeing 767-300 freighter caught fire before coming to a halt roughly 1,300 feet beyond the paved runway.
Five people were killed and five others were injured. The pilot and co-pilot were admitted to the hospital and have since been released. Two people remained in critical condition Tuesday, while another was in stable condition.
All five of those killed were workers for Professional Ocean Service Corporation, which provides aircraft-cleaning services. They were Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53; Julio C. Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47. They were subcontracted, low-wage workers at the bottom of the aviation labor hierarchy, killed while performing some of the most precarious work on the airfield.
21 Air is a small North Carolina-based cargo carrier operating the flight on Amazon’s behalf under the Amazon Air brand. Amazon uses contracted airlines to supply pilots, maintenance and flight operations, separating the corporation legally from much of the workforce that moves its cargo.
Amazon has owned some aircraft since purchasing 11 used Boeing 767s in 2021, but it continues to employ outside carriers to operate them. The pilots are legally employees of contractors such as Atlas Air, Air Transport International and 21 Air, rather than Amazon. At the time of the previous fatal Amazon Air crash in 2019, senior pilots at Amazon contractors were earning approximately one-third less than UPS and FedEx pilots with comparable experience flying the same aircraft.
On February 23, 2019, Atlas Air Flight 3591, operating for Amazon Air, crashed into Trinity Bay near Houston, Texas, killing all three people aboard. Just weeks before the crash, pilots at Atlas Air and Air Transport Services Group warned that an accident was “inevitable” because of low pay, inadequate training, chronic fatigue and difficulty retaining experienced pilots.
Safety authorities like the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) classify the Miami accident as a runway excursion. A runway excursion occurs when an aircraft overruns the end of a runway or veers laterally from its paved surface.
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Runway excursions are among the most frequent forms of aviation accident. According to the Flight Safety Foundation, runway excursions accounted for 23 percent of the 283 accidents recorded in the International Air Transport Association database between 2005 and mid-2019. The foundation recorded 20 runway-excursion accidents in 2024, including two fatal crashes, while excursions averaged more than 15 annually between 2019 and 2023.
- A Citation II jet that veered sharply to port (left) at the end of its rollout during a post-maintenance avionics test flight on March 4 at Opa-locka, Florida.
- IAI 1124A Westwind that veered left during the takeoff roll at 146 knots in Las Vegas, Nevada in August, collapsing parts of its landing gear.
- On September 1, a Citation 560 XL that overran the end of the runway in Porterville, California by 1,000 feet at 111 knots. The aircraft sustained substantial damage but zero fatalities.
- A Flexjet Embraer Praetor 500 veered off the side of the Miami-Opa-Locka Executive Airport runway at 101 knots during landing with zero fatalities on September 4.
These incidents are so routine, and so concentrated in the corporate/charter and cargo sector where cost pressure is sharpest, that they barely register as news until bodies are in the way.
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The fatal Amazon cargo crash in Miami has renewed national focus on a system called the Engineered Materials Arresting System (EMAS), which is a lightweight, crushable concrete block system installed at runway ends to prevent this kind of runway overrun accident. The concept is similar to runaway truck ramps installed on mountain highways or the water-filled impact attenuators (crash cushions) found on many highway medians.
As of August 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported that EMAS had been installed at 122 runway ends at 70 airports. The FAA now reports that the technology has safely stopped 26 overrunning aircraft carrying 497 people.
The system demonstrated its effectiveness on September 24, 2025, when a CommuteAir flight operating as United Express landed long during heavy rain at Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport in Virginia. The Embraer ERJ-145, carrying 50 passengers and three crew members, was safely stopped by the airport’s EMAS bed. No one was injured.
Unfortunately, Miami International Airport relies only on the old standard 1,000-foot grass safety buffer which might have been adequate 70 years ago when commercial aircraft were smaller and slower but is woefully deficient for modern passenger and cargo jets.
Why, then, is EMAS not installed as a matter of course at every airport with commercial operations? The reason is cost. It is cheaper for the airline and airport operators to accept a certain number of dead workers compared to the cost of install arresting systems. Safety improvements are adopted only when the cost of liability exceeds the cost of the fix: a calculation made by owners, not the people who die.
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This crash is not an anomaly but the normal operation of an industry run for profit. The Boeing 737 MAX disasters killed 346 people through a corporation that, with FAA complicity, subordinated safety to market share.
The November 2025 UPS crash in Louisville ultimately killed 15 people, including three crew members and 12 people on the ground. Workers at the company’s Worldport hub reported that proper maintenance was not being done on the planes.
The March 2026 collision between an Air Canada Express jet and a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport killed both pilots. Only two controllers were on duty, with controllers assigned multiple responsibilities. The investigation also found that the airport’s ground-surveillance system issued no warning and that the fire truck lacked a transponder that would have allowed controllers to track its position.
The NTSB investigation will almost certainly attribute the crash to “pilot error” and absolve Amazon, 21 Air, and the airport operators. This is what state regulatory agencies do: they are instruments for managing the liability of capital, not neutral arbiters of safety. The NTSB will not ask why Amazon structures its cargo operation through subcontractors; why subcontracted cleaning workers, the lowest-paid, least-protected people on the airfield, were placed directly in the path of the hazards of the airfield. Those questions are inadmissible in a capitalist investigation.
Pilots, mechanics, ground crews, and the subcontracted cleaners who died share a common interest in airline safety that is directly opposed to the profit interests of Amazon and its contractors. The unions have collaborated in imposing the very conditions that produce these crashes.
The answer is the formation of independent rank-and-file committees of aviation workers, organized across company and union lines, fighting for safety as a class question and for the expropriation of the airlines from the capitalists who operate them for profit. Safety in the air is incompatible with the private ownership of the airline industry.
During a 31-minute program, "The Ukraine-Russia conflict planting the seeds for a world war", the presenter Anas posed questions regarding the Ukraine war and the arrest and sentencing of Bogdan.
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.
