Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump’s “America First” Counterterrorism Strategy: A blueprint for dictatorship
The Trump White House released a new US Counterterrorism Strategy on Wednesday that openly lays out the framework for a fascist police state. The 16-page document, unveiled under the direction of White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka and signed by Trump on Tuesday, identifies three central targets of the Trump administration’s counterterrorism apparatus: “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” The document then declares, “We can defeat every single one of these groups, but the threat is significant and pervasive.”
This is the language of political proscription. The document’s promise that “counterterrorism operations will be executed apolitically” is immediately contradicted by its own content, which defines “violent left-wing extremists” as one of the three principal threats facing the United States.
The political character of the document is underscored by the role of Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant and senior director for counterterrorism. Gorka, born in Britain to Hungarian parents, served in the British Territorial Army from 1990 to 1993 and later moved to Hungary, where he became involved in right-wing nationalist politics. In 2007, he helped found the New Democratic Coalition, a Hungarian nationalist party formed with former members of Jobbik, an openly antisemitic and neo-fascist organization.
Gorka is a member of the Historical Vitézi Rend, a reconstitution of the World War II-era Vitézi Rend, or Order of Heroes, established under Admiral Miklós Horthy, the antisemitic dictator of Hungary and ally of Hitler. Under Horthy, the Hungarian Communist Party was banned, political opponents were repressed and hundreds of thousands of Jews were delivered to the Nazis.
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The counterterrorism document produced under such auspices is saturated with the language of far-right conspiracy and fascist repression. It declares: “Americans should be safe to live their lives without the fear of terror attacks, the threat of Jihadists, the flooding of our communities with deadly drugs at the hands of foreign narcoterrorists, or violent left-wing extremists who have adopted radical ideologies antithetical to the principles upon which our Republic was founded.”
It then goes further, pledging the use of the national security apparatus against political tendencies before any crime has been committed. “Our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” the document states. It promises to “map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
This is a blueprint for preemptive political repression. It authorizes the state to “map” domestic political organizations, identify their members and “cripple” them on the basis of ideology. Its explicit references to “radically pro-transgender” politics repeat the framework of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, announced last September, which used the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk to justify a sweeping campaign of police repression against the left.
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The purpose of the document is not to assess political violence objectively, but to designate the left, which is virtually anyone who opposes the Trump administration and its fascist agenda, as the “enemy within.”
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The historical parallels are unmistakable. When Hitler came to power in Germany, the first inmates of Dachau were not foreign terrorists, but communists, socialists, trade union militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime. The category of “left-wing extremism” was the ideological preparation for dictatorship.
The Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy must be understood in this historical and political context. It follows the infusion of vast sums into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security, including the roughly $170 billion allocated last year for immigration enforcement and detention infrastructure and the additional tens of billions now being prepared for the immigration police. The US government is not building this apparatus merely to deport immigrants. It is preparing a police-state infrastructure for use against the working class as a whole, regardless of citizenship status.
The same government claims there is no money for Medicaid, food stamps, public education, health care or social services, while funneling hundreds of billions into immigration police, military operations and war. The counterterrorism document’s fusion of domestic repression, anti-immigrant hysteria and global military violence points to the real trajectory of American capitalism: dictatorship at home and war abroad.
The response of the corporate media and the Democratic Party has been near-total silence. The major cable networks have not treated the document as a warning of dictatorship. Figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have said nothing of substance about its implications. This silence is not an oversight. The Democrats and the corporate press do not want to alert the working class to the danger, because they support and defend the same national security apparatus now being turned ever more openly against political opposition and the population as a whole.
The fight against fascism cannot be waged through appeals to the Democratic Party, the courts or any agency of the capitalist state. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class against both parties and the military-intelligence apparatus they defend. The greatest source of terror in the world is not immigrant workers, anti-fascists, socialists or opponents of genocide. It is the US government itself, which has waged illegal wars, backed the genocide in Gaza, killed hundreds of fishermen in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and now seeks to use the same violent and illegal methods against workers and their families in the US.
2. Conviction of Palestine Action activists escalates Labour’s historic assault on democratic rights
The conviction of five Palestine Action activists at Woolwich Crown Court on May 5 marks a major escalation in the Labour government’s criminalization of opposition to the genocide in Gaza, and the right to protest.
Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio, Fatima Rajwani and Samuel Corner were convicted of criminal damage. Jordan Devlin was convicted of violent disorder. Zoe Rogers was acquitted of all charges. Corner was also convicted of grievous bodily harm, but was cleared of grievous bodily harm with intent.
The verdicts follow a retrial and relate to a break-in at Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems UK’s Filton site near Bristol in August 2024.
Immediately following the verdicts, Mr Justice Johnson ordered that Corner, Head, Kamio and Rajwani be remanded in custody pending sentencing, provisionally scheduled for June 12. They face the prospect of heavy sentences, as their case has been flagged by the Crown Prosecution Service and the police as terrorism related.
The convictions are a continuation of the activists’ punishment at the hands of the British state, with their imprisonment now stretching back nearly two years since their arrest in August 2024, barely four weeks after the election of the Starmer Labour government.
The case has been central to the efforts of the Labour government, courts, police and media to construct the narrative that Palestine Action is a “terrorist” organization and that opposition to Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza be equated with “antisemitism” and hatred of Jews.
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On February 18, a jury in that trial acquitted all six defendants of aggravated burglary, the most serious charge against them and one carrying the possibility of life imprisonment. The acquittals shattered attempts by the prosecution to portray the defendants as violent extremists and terrorists.
However, the jury failed to reach verdicts on charges of criminal damage and violent disorder. Under British law, prosecutors may seek a retrial where jurors cannot agree on a verdict.
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In July 2025, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper formally proscribed Palestine Action under terrorism legislation, claiming the organization met the statutory definition of terrorism. Cooper cited Elbit as an example of why PA’s proscription was necessary, telling MPs in June 2025, “In several attacks, Palestine Action has committed acts of serious damage to property with the aim of progressing its political cause and influencing the Government.”
The ongoing Filton prosecution was repeatedly invoked by the media to justify the ban.
Since the proscription, more than 3,300 people have been arrested under terrorism legislation for expressing support for Palestine Action.
The acquittals at the first Filton trial represented a second major setback for the government’s efforts to criminalize opposition to the Gaza genocide. On February 13, the High Court ruled that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful and that it represented a disproportionate attack on democratic rights, including freedom of speech and assembly. Yet mass arrests have continued with the Starmer government doubling down on the banning order in the face of mounting public opposition.
Against this backdrop, convictions in the retrial became essential to the state’s efforts to legitimize the branding of PA activists as “terrorists” and to intensify the wider crackdown on the right to protest and free speech.
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At the conclusion of the retrial, Charlotte Head and four co-defendants felt compelled to dismiss their barristers shortly before closing speeches and addressed the jury themselves. Head explained, “after some decisions made by the court, I no longer feel like they are permitted to represent me in a way that does us all justice.”
She continued, evoking powerfully the history of democratic legal procedures being trampled by the British courts: “I was unsurprised to learn that, in 1898, when the first person was allowed to answer the charges they faced from the witness box and testify to their own defence, many people, including prosecutors and judges, were worried about what would happen. Not because they feared that the defendants would lie but because they feared the jury sympathizing more with normal people than the elites of the legal profession.”
Addressing her actions in the Elbit factory, Head asked of evidence not heard by the jury: “Why is there no precise inventory of what was damaged or destroyed? You might feel it’s because they don’t want to highlight the weapons they’re making on British soil or that the narrative spun by the prosecution is incorrect. You might consider the contrast between Elbit Systems on one hand and me and my co-defendants on the other and wonder which one has been more open, honest and human with you.”
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The left-wing Jewish Voice for Liberation has compiled a transcript of the speeches given before the court by the defendants.
Yet further outrages followed. After the guilty verdicts, Rajiv Menon KC was re-engaged to represent Head and another defendant in an unsuccessful application for bail.
Only after final verdicts, as reporting restrictions were lifted, could it be revealed that Menon himself was the target of extraordinary judicial measures. Menon is one of the most prominent human rights barristers, having worked on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, the Hillsborough inquests, the Grenfell Tower inquiry and the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
Following the end of the February trial, Menon was threatened with contempt proceedings by Judge Johnson over his closing speech to the jury.
During his closing address, Menon stated on six occasions that the trial judge could not direct the jury to convict the defendants. Menon referred to Bushell’s Case of 1670, the historic ruling establishing the independence of juries from state coercion. He read the inscription displayed at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales) in London commemorating the case, which “established the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions.”
In response, Johnson accused Menon of defying court orders which had prohibited any reference to the jury’s historic right to acquit according to conscience. He declared, “The effect of Mr Menon’s speech was to invite the jury to disregard my directions that they should put views of the Middle East and the war in Gaza, and emotion, to one side.”
The contempt proceedings against a senior KC for remarks defending the jury’s independence are unprecedented in British legal history.
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The evisceration of centuries old legal and democratic rights signified by Menon’s targeting was underscored outside the court during the retrial when police arrested nine people under the Public Order Act for holding signs reading: “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit according to their conscience” and “Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth.”
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The retrial unfolded amid a renewed campaign by the government, police and media demanding intensified measures against what they falsely portray as an epidemic of antisemitism and indifference to the fate of British Jews.
This hysteria was cynically inflamed following the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, north London, by Essa Suleiman, a British national, whom police later revealed had severe mental health problems.
Ignored in the mass media coverage was the fact that Suleiman had allegedly attacked another man earlier the same day—Ishmail Hussein, a Muslim man, who suffered knife injuries following an altercation with Suleiman.
The methods employed in the Filton case are establishing sinister precedents for the suppression of all political opposition by equating civil disobedience and protest with terrorism. That the courts have collaborated so openly in restricting political defenses, curbing jury independence, and criminalizing appeals to conscience demonstrates the advanced decay of democratic rights in Britain.
3. Jörg Baberowski’s Bypassing the People: Fascism as a revitalization of democracy
It is hardly surprising that a book on democracy and its history written by a far-right professor is steeped in anti-democratic ideas, trivializes Nazi terror and hails the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a revitalization of democracy. What is remarkable, however, is that Jörg Baberowski’s latest treatise, Am Volk vorbei—Zur Krise der liberalen Demokratie (Bypassing the People—On the Crisis of Liberal Democracy), is being hailed and praised in countless media outlets. This can only be understood as a deliberate political campaign to secure the AfD a place in government.
The historian of Eastern Europe at Humboldt University previously played a key role in ideologically justifying the return of German militarism and dictatorial tendencies. In February 2014, he argued in Der Spiegel for a re-evaluation of the Nazis and claimed that Hitler had not been “vicious.” He trivialized the Holocaust by comparing it to the executions during the Russian Civil War: “Essentially, it was the same thing: industrial killing.”
This trivialization of the past crimes of German militarism went hand in hand with a call for brutal military force. During a discussion at the German Historical Museum that same year, Baberowski spoke out in favor of military operations against terrorists and declared: “And if one is not willing to take hostages, burn villages, hang people and spread fear and terror, as the terrorists do, if one is not prepared to do such things, then one can never win such a conflict and it is better to keep out altogether.”
The IYSSE protested vehemently against this falsification of history and war propaganda at the German university. Meetings attended by hundreds of participants and numerous student councils across Germany criticized Baberowski and drew public attention to the matter. Various lawsuits brought by Baberowski, claiming he should not be called a “right-wing extremist,” “racist” or a “falsifier of history,” were dismissed by the respective courts. Yet the vast majority of the media and representatives of all parties in the Bundestag (German parliament) rallied behind the far-right professor and defended his right-wing agenda.
Nevertheless, following the storm of student resistance, Baberowski largely withdrew from day-to-day political issues and left the field to others for almost 10 years. The fact that he is now making a comeback with an open plea for the integration of the AfD and is being celebrated by countless media outlets is an expression of a fundamental shift to the right across the entire political establishment. No fewer than six major media outlets—Der Spiegel, Die Welt, the Frankfurter Rundschau, Austria’s Der Standard and public broadcasters ARD and Deutschlandfunk—have published detailed and favourable interviews with Baberowski about his book. Cicero and the NZZ also published positive reviews, while only the Süddeutsche Zeitung published a mildly critical review and Die Zeit a somewhat stronger one.
While Trump terrorises immigrant workers with his ICE Gestapo, murders political opponents in broad daylight and openly calls for war crimes in his brutal war of aggression against Iran, the ruling elite in Germany is also falling into line with this course. With his pseudo-academic treatise, Baberowski is the man of the hour. From the ruling class’s perspective, the horrendous military build-up and the associated fierce social attacks require authoritarian methods of rule to suppress resistance.
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Baberowski’s central political thesis is as simple as it is pernicious: The so-called “populists”—by which, despite every effort to maintain academic detachment, he primarily means the far right—are not a threat to democracy but rather its corrective. “Populism,” writes Baberowski, “is also a corrective, an antidote to the self-empowerment of the privileged, a wedge that breaks through the prescribed consensus, and in this way it contributes to the revitalization of politics” (p.150).
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Stylistically, Baberowski goes to great lengths to maintain a distance from the “populists,” but time and again his own views emerge, which essentially overlap with those of the AfD.
This begins with his conception of globalization, which he does not understand as a stage in the development of capitalism but as the work of a “cosmopolitan elite”: “They declared globalization to be a democratic interplay of free forces in order to conceal the fact that it was about nothing other than instrumentalizing the governments of nation states for self-serving interests.” (p.88) These elites then profited from globalization because they “find their way easily in a world without borders, because they are mobile and possess cultural capital” (p.88).
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Baberowski’s juxtaposition of unbridled global capitalism with the supposedly familiar nation-state is also at the heart of every right-wing and far-right ideology.
Historically, the emergence of the nation-state and democracy are closely intertwined. They shaped the era of the bourgeois revolutions, which shattered the rule of the nobility, overcame feudal fragmentation and, with the nation-state, created a broader framework for the development of the productive forces.
Yet by the end of the 19th century at the latest, the division of labor and world trade had burst the boundaries of the nation-state. It had become an obstacle to the modern forces of production. The First and Second World Wars were an expression of this fact. The imperialist powers attempted to resolve the contradiction between the world economy and the nation by forcibly redividing the world at the expense of their rivals. Nationalism became the weapon of the most extreme reaction. It was directed against the working class, which is closely linked to the modern forces of production and fought under the banner of socialist internationalism.
Hitler idolized the nation, which he traced back to race and blood. Yet he did not strive for national self-sufficiency. His nationalism served to rally all the forces of society to conquer first Europe and then the world; it was the ideological shell of a supranational imperialist programme that tolerated no social or political opposition and could only be implemented through the means of a fascist dictatorship.
Today’s far-right extremists—from Trump’s MAGA movement to Germany’s AfD—stand in this tradition. They preach nationalism and wage imperialist wars. They are smashing the democratic rights of the working class, which is today more international than at any time in history. Almost every product passes through hundreds of hands and dozens of countries before it reaches the consumer. Revolutionary technologies in IT, communications, medicine and countless other fields would be unthinkable without the international division of labor.
Contrary to what Baberowski claims, drawing on Carl Schmitt, democracy is not based on “nation” and “people.” Its defense is inextricably linked to the overcoming of the nation-state and the capitalist private property it defends.
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It is not without a certain irony that Baberowski, of all people, should write a book on democracy. The professor, who sought to establish a research center entitled “Dictatorships as Alternative Orders” and physically assaulted a student critic, has hitherto openly placed himself in the tradition of the reactionary and anti-democratic right.
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From this reactionary standpoint, Baberowski writes a highly selective history of democracy. Ultimately, his main aim is to justify the banal notion that representation and popular sovereignty are contradictions that have been weighted differently. On this basis, he then argues in the later chapters that fascists must be integrated in order to do justice to popular sovereignty.
But along the way, Baberowski repeatedly reveals his essentially authoritarian ideas. One is reminded of Dr. Strangelove, who, in his description of nuclear war, cannot bring his right arm under control.
Baberowski discusses the relationship between representation and popular sovereignty without any reference to concrete social conditions, class struggles or uprisings. For Baberowski, democracy is always something granted to the people, not something that has been fought for. The great social upheavals that made democratization possible in the first place are systematically ignored or marginalized.
The French Revolution is virtually absent from his book, even though it was the first major democratic mass revolution of the modern era, which overthrew absolutism and established the principle of popular sovereignty. The American Revolution is mentioned but only in terms of its conservative elements: Baberowski emphasizes the Federalist compromise, the restriction of the will of the majority through constitutional law, and the institutional safeguards against direct democracy. Not a word, however, about the Declaration of Independence of 1776, which stated that “all men are created equal” and have the right to overthrow a tyrannical government—a revolutionary impulse that had a global impact.
When he describes the development of democracy in Germany, he cannot avoid mentioning socialism as a driving force. But he assigns it a completely subordinate role. Instead, Baberowski emphasizes the First World War as a factor in democratization: not because workers and soldiers fought and revolted, not because of the Russian Revolution and the November Revolution, which cost the German nobility the throne—but because the war mobilized everyone and thus created a collective experience. In fact, it was the masses who wrested democratic rights through strikes and uprisings, not the war as such.
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This dictatorial and reactionary line of reasoning runs like a thread through Baberowski’s work. All the polite language Baberowski now uses to justify engaging in democratic discourse with fascists thus turns out to be the well-known strategy of the far right: They insist on freedom of speech when they are criticized but attack the most fundamental democratic rights when they are in power. It is precisely for this purpose that they are deployed by the ruling class.
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The central political lesson in this context is, of course, the Nazi dictatorship. In the last free elections in November 1932, Hitler received only 33.1 percent of the vote—significantly less than the two workers’ parties, the Social Democrats and the Communist Party, combined. Yet he was brought to power through a conspiracy involving the military, business leaders and the media, with the aim of crushing the workers’ organizations and preparing for a new war. In March, all the “democratic” bourgeois parties then voted in favor of the Enabling Act.
As Peter Longerich has demonstrated, based on a systematic analysis of a large number of intelligence and police reports, that opposition to the Nazi regime was widespread throughout its entire reign. It simply could not find open political expression. [5] That is why the Nazis ruled with unprecedented terror. Immediately after seizing power, they created a network of at least 70 concentration camps, in which tens of thousands of communists, social democrats and trade unionists were imprisoned and stripped of their rights. The terror continued to escalate, culminating in the mass murder of World War II and the industrial extermination of German and European Jews.
Not a single sentence about this can be found in Baberowski’s book on the history of democracy in Germany! On the contrary, he describes the brutal Nazi dictatorship as a kind of national awakening. For instance, when he paraphrases the recollection of a girl from the Nazi era: “By freeing itself from its representatives, popular sovereignty found expression in the ‘Führer’ in the first place. This is undoubtedly how many Germans understood it when they resolved to surrender to the seducer.” He then sums it up himself: “The idea of an all-encompassing community of destiny is evidently capable of captivating the masses as long as dictatorships deliver on their promises and give people what they most desire in their everyday lives” (p.74).
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In addition to whitewashing Nazi terror and denigrating anti-fascists, Baberowski’s extremely brief digression on the Third Reich essentially serves to downplay the threat posed by today’s fascists. Because Nazis (and communists!) openly declared that they wanted to establish a dictatorship, but today’s “populists” do not, it cannot be assumed that they want to abolish democracy (p.133f). The idiocy of this claim has already been demonstrated above with regard to Trump, who, incidentally, has also openly declared that he does not want to relinquish power.
In reality, the parallels to the 1930s are obvious. Trump’s open declaration of war crimes, his threat to wipe out Iran and starve millions of people, are, in their ruthlessness, comparable only to the Nazis. His comprehensive attacks on the democratic and social rights of workers serve to prepare for a full-scale war against China that threatens the very survival of human civilization.
In Germany, too, the government is rearming on a scale not seen since Hitler, and democratic rights are under attack. Anyone who opposes the horrific genocide in Gaza or the brutal war against Iran must expect massive repression. Under these conditions, even the ruling elites in Germany are taking a liking to dictatorship. That is why Baberowski’s treatise is being celebrated and the AfD courted.
Yet there are also significant differences from the 1930s. The far-right groups are not mass organizations with strong militant wings. War and militarism are rejected by the overwhelming majority, and workers around the world are only just beginning to free themselves from the straitjacket of the trade unions and mount genuine resistance against the spree of cuts and mass layoffs.
This opposition must be linked to the struggle against war and the fascist threat and directed against the root of the problem: capitalism. Rejecting the rampant ideological justification of fascism and war is an important part of this struggle.
4. The MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak and the threat of another pandemic
Six years after masses of people became aware of the COVID-19 pandemic following the horrific Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak, a deadly outbreak of a far more lethal pathogen is unfolding aboard another cruise ship. And once again, the response of every relevant authority is to insist that the public has nothing to fear.
Eight cases of Andes virus hantavirus and three deaths have been confirmed aboard the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius, the first ship-borne cluster of the virus ever recorded. Thirty passengers had already disembarked across four continents—undoubtedly maskless on commercial flights—before authorities knew an outbreak was underway. On Thursday, news broke that a KLM flight attendant who had brief contact with one of the dying passengers has been hospitalized in Amsterdam with mild symptoms, the first potential secondary case outside the ship.
This strain of hantavirus carries a 38–40 percent case fatality rate, roughly 40 times that of COVID-19. There is no FDA-approved vaccine, no specific antiviral treatment, and an incubation period that can extend up to eight weeks before symptoms emerge. No one knows how many infections this cluster has already produced.
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The sense of déjà vu is palpable. As with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, every official statement is a soporific, and nothing is being done to warn the public of the potential dangers.
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What must be done now? In every workplace, school, hospital, port and ship, the working class must act independently and raise the following demands:
Immediate PCR and serology testing of every passenger, crew member, Saint Helena disembarkee and flight contact, with full public release of genomic sequencing.
Educators, healthcare workers and transit workers must demand the safe deployment of HEPA filtration and Far-UVC (222 nm) air disinfection in every indoor public space.
Every layoff at the CDC, NIH and HHS must be reversed; cruise inspection, zoonotic surveillance and pandemic preparedness must be restored on an emergency basis.
The criminal “let it rip” policy must be ended, and the elimination of COVID-19, influenza and other airborne pathogens taken up as the demand of the working class against the ruling class that has refused it.
Emergency action on climate change must be imposed against the financial oligarchy whose investments are driving accelerating zoonotic spillover.
This is not a call for panic. It is a call for the public to know what is happening, and for the working class to act on what its governments will not. Whether the Hondius cluster becomes the next pandemic cannot yet be known. What is certain is that the ruling class has demonstrated, over six years and counting, that it is structurally incapable of preventing pandemics, of arresting climate change which is increasing the threat of zoonotic spillover events, or of protecting the working class from the consequences of either.
Public health must be reorganized on a socialist basis—internationally coordinated, democratically planned, oriented to human needs rather than the profits of the financial oligarchy. This is the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party. The alternative is barbarism.
5. European war flotilla en route to the Strait of Hormuz
While the US war against Iran remains deadlocked in a fragile ceasefire, a European war flotilla is en route to the Strait of Hormuz.
The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and its escort ships transited the Suez Canal on May 6 to take up positions for operations in the strategic strait. The United Kingdom, which is leading the mission alongside France, has deployed the destroyer HMS Dragon, the landing ship RFA Lyme Bay, and the Tomahawk-armed submarine HMS Anson. Representing Germany are the minesweeper Fulda and the supply ship Mosel, and Greece, Spain, and Italy have also sent warships.
The mission was discussed on 17 April at a conference in Paris, to which President Emmanuel Macron had invited around 40 countries from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose representatives participated in person or via video link, including India and China. The warring parties—the US, Israel and Iran—were not invited, however.
The governments sending warships emphasize that they will not participate in the US-Israeli war against Iran. The mission serves exclusively to secure shipping in the Strait of Hormuz “as soon as circumstances permit.”
President Macron announced on Wednesday that he had spoken by phone with Iranian President Masoud Pezeschkian and encouraged him to consider the British-French plans for a neutral mission in the strait. He also said he intended to discuss the matter with US President Trump.
In reality, the mission is neither peaceful nor neutral. The former colonial powers France and Britain are pursuing their own imperialist interests in the Middle East, which do not align with those of the US. The same applies to Germany and the European Union.
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The Strait of Hormuz is just one flashpoint in the region where American and European interests clash. With the imposition of new punitive tariffs on European cars, the withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from Germany, and Trump’s public attacks on German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, transatlantic relations have recently become significantly strained once again.
The summit of the European Political Community (EPC) held on May 5 in the Armenian capital of Yerevan demonstrated the far-reaching geopolitical interests at stake.
The EPC was founded in 2022 on the initiative of French President Macron to isolate Russia following its attack on Ukraine. In doing so, he interpreted the term “European” very broadly. The EPC comprises 47 member states—nearly twice as many as the European Union—including the United Kingdom, all Balkan states, Ukraine, Georgia, as well as Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, all three of which border Iran. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney also attended the Yerevan summit.
The summit aimed to firmly anchor Armenia to the EU. The country, which had relied on Russian military aid during its conflict with Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, had long been considered Moscow’s stronghold in the Caucasus. But in 2023, Azerbaijan captured Nagorno-Karabakh. Under pressure from the US, Armenia felt compelled to sign an agreement and has since been orienting itself toward the West.
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EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who attended the summit, praised Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the highest terms. She commended the “Velvet Revolution” of 2018 that had brought him to power. The country thereby demonstrated its commitment to European values, she said. President Macron, accompanied by a piano, even performed a song by the Armenian-French singer-songwriter Charles Aznavour to flatter the hosts.
A central component of the partnership with the EU is the restoration and modernization of the transport link between Azerbaijan and Turkey, which runs 43 kilometers through Armenian territory in the so-called Zangezur Corridor. It is part of a new trade corridor, the so-called Global Gateway program, which connects the EU with Central Asia and China while bypassing Russia, Iran, and the Black Sea.
Via the approximately 4,000-kilometer-long Central Corridor, goods can then be transported by rail or road through Kazakhstan to the Caspian Sea, shipped to Azerbaijan, and from there brought overland through the Zangezur Corridor to Turkey, which has numerous land and sea connections to Europe. Instead of taking 42 days by sea, goods could be transported from China to Europe in 12 days.
The only problem is that the Zangezur Corridor is in US hands. It was at the center of the US-mediated peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2023 and is being developed exclusively by US companies. To leave no doubt as to who controls this strategic chokepoint, it bears the official name “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP).
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The imperialist powers are caught in the spiral of an escalating world war. One conflict leads to the next. The war that NATO is waging against Russia in Ukraine and the US war against Iran are, as the summit in Yerevan shows, closely intertwined. Places whose names were previously known to few—“Strait of Hormuz,” “Zangezur Corridor,” or “Suwałki Gap” (the link between Poland and Lithuania)—are becoming strategic flashpoints where a global conflagration could ignite.
6. Judge forces unsealing of alleged Epstein “suicide note”
The missing surveillance video of his cell, the failure of prison guards to perform 30-minute checks of his cell along with the determination by Dr. Michael Baden during an independent autopsy that Epstein’s injuries, including fractures of the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage, were more consistent with “homicidal strangulation” than “suicide by hanging,” all undermine the official suicide version of Epstein’s death.
On April 29, six of nine members of Philadelphia’s appointed Board of Education voted to approve Superintendent Tony Watlington’s Orwellian-named “Accelerating Opportunity” facilities plan, setting in motion the closure of 17 public schools beginning in the 2027–28 school year.
This marks the latest in an extended attack by both parties on essential programs, meanwhile the Trump administration demands a record-setting $1.5 trillion Pentagon war budget. Philadelphia’s children are now directly paying for this war agenda and the demands of wealthy developers in the region.
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The schools targeted serve predominantly working class and Black communities across the city. Among them are Paul Robeson High School and Lankenau Environmental Science Magnet High School—the only environmental science magnet program in Philadelphia....
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The plan also carries an additional round of austerity: $225 million in budget cuts for next school year, eliminating 220 building substitute positions and reassigning 340 school-based roles.
The official justification given is financial necessity. The district faces a $313 million deficit, and state lawmakers from both parties sat months overdue on education funding as the situation deteriorated.
But the district’s claims are exposed as fraudulent by the plan itself. The “Accelerating Opportunity” master plan carries a $3 billion price tag. The district claims it can cover only one-third—itself nearly $1 billion—with the remainder to come from “state, federal and philanthropic sources.” The money, in other words, exists when the goal aligns with the interests of developers, real estate capital and the private philanthropic sector that will co-fund it.
The deficit itself was manufactured at the state and federal levels. The Biden administration, acting in concert with Congress, allowed federal COVID-era ESSER relief funds to expire in 2024, including $1.8 billion in Philadelphia. That move sent school districts across the country off a fiscal cliff.
The Trump administration then proceeded to compounded the crisis, slashing Title I, Title II and Title III federal aid and stripping approximately $69 million from a district where 40 percent of students attend low-income schools. Projected deficits—already $313 million for 2026—are forecast to reach $466 million by 2027 and $774 million by 2030.
The “underutilization” crisis invoked to justify closures—declining enrollment, deteriorating buildings, fragmented funding—is being used to justify privately operated, publicly funded charter schools backed by both parties. The district has shed 15,546 students, a 12 percent enrollment decline, between 2014–15 and 2024–25.
Adding insult to injury: A proposed $1 rideshare tax projected to raise $48 million annually was killed after Uber launched a six-figure advertising campaign to defeat it.
Speaking at the crowded hearing in late April, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg resorted to begging SDP leadership for a more transparent “process” in determining cuts. “Shame on you for having this vote when there has not been enough public engagement and transparency to answer all their questions,” he declared. This amounts to nothing more than a plea to involve the PFT more closely in managing the fallout—and determining the final shape of the cuts themselves.
Steinberg’s idea of “transparency” was on full display last year, during the betrayal of 14,000 city educators in their contract struggle. In June 2025, Philadelphia’s teachers voted 94 percent to authorize a strike—the first in 25 years—against chronic underpayment, deteriorating buildings, punitive attendance policies, mass understaffing and decades of state policy that had stripped them of the right to strike altogether. Simultaneously, 9,000 AFSCME District Council 33 municipal workers voted 95 percent to strike alongside teachers, raising the prospect of a citywide shutdown. DC 33’s leadership sold out the strike overnight in July, with Mayor Parker’s full cooperation.
On August 26, five days before the teachers’ contract expired, Steinberg stood alongside Mayor Parker and Superintendent Watlington to announce a tentative agreement—with no details provided to members. A union that had run “strike ready” events for months was, in fact, preparing a surrender. The “historic“ contract was laden with concessions. Two weeks after ratification, the district announced closures and layoffs—which the PFT sellout had cleared the way for.
The betrayal follows a pattern repeated across the country. In spring 2025, the Chicago Teachers Union delivered a contract hailed as “Trump-proof”—mass layoffs followed immediately. The Austin Independent School District voted to close 13 schools in November 2025, citing the same expiration of federal COVID relief funds.
In San Francisco, a 97.6 percent strike mandate was disarmed after just four days by the United Educators of San Francisco and AFT President Randi Weingarten, with layoffs and closures placed immediately back “on the table.” In Los Angeles, the United Teachers of Los Angeles announced a sellout hours before a strike deadline.
In each case, the common thread is the trade union bureaucracy’s role in containing and derailing the working class’s struggles. The Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee, formed during the DC 33 municipal workers’ strike in July 2025, pointed to the only correct alternative: independent organization of workers outside and against the union bureaucracies, united across sectors—teachers, transit workers, sanitation workers, healthcare workers—against the common austerity offensive.
As the strike committee declared: “It is a proven, iron law that as long as a struggle remains in the hands of the bureaucracy, the only possible outcome is a betrayal. The only path to victory is building independent rank-and-file strength and solidarity.”
8. A revealing report on the rise and rise of private credit
The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, who is also chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a global watchdog, is worried about the stability of the global financial system because of the explosive growth of private credit. And along with others, he has good reason to be as a report by the FSB released this week makes clear.
It reveals that while private credit, particularly in the US, has come to play an increasingly large role in the global financial system it is shot through with risk factors that could set off a major financial crisis under conditions where regulatory authorities exercise very little control over and in many cases are in the dark about its operations.
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According to the report, the private credit market has grown 10-fold since 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis “with an aggregate size estimated to be between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion” at the end of 2024. The fact that the FSB makes an “estimate” of the size of this market itself points to one of the risk factors, namely, that its operations are very much out of sight.
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The FSB report identifies a series of potential flashpoints. One of these is that borrowers predominantly obtaining finance from private credit “typically lack public ratings.” It also noted that some private credit borrowers “also appear to be relying more on payment-in-kind loans, which can also signal deteriorating credit conditions.”
Payment in kind refers to a situation where borrowers increase the loan principal or provide the lender with equity in the firm rather than pay the interest bill in cash and is estimated to involve around 12 percent of loans.
Valuation of the assets which private credit finances also poses “challenges.” This is because valuations are “often conducted less frequently and may involve significant discretion, which can amplify uncertainty during times of stress.”
The phrase “significant discretion” is a euphemistic way of saying that in many cases there is no objective basis for valuations and these are recorded as what the borrowers say they are, according to their own calculations, which are then exposed when they undergo the test of the market.
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One of the major sources of contagion is the relationship between the private credit providers and the banks which finance them. These connections often only emerge when there is a crisis or a bankruptcy.
This was the case in the failure last October of two auto-connected private credit-backed firms First Brands and Tricolor. The market reaction to the defaults was short-lived and was “digested by markets without major strains,” the FSB report said.
But these events exposed a range of “potential vulnerabilities in corporate credit.” In the first instance the use of off-balance sheet financing by the companies involved rendered assessment of overall financial health difficult for lenders.
Workers at the United States Postal Service’ Network Distribution Center Springfield, Massachusetts are speaking out against injuries, contract violations, safety issues and inaction in the face of this by union officials.
Conditions at USPS have deteriorated for many years, but the issue has reached a breaking point since the start of the “Delivering for America” restructuring program begun in 2021. This bipartisan program aims to restructure the post office along Amazon lines, setting the stage for potential privatization. The current financial crisis at USPS—which may run out of money by next year—is being used to further squeeze the workforce. Management has already suspended payments into postal workers’ pension plan.
Last month, a group of workers founded a rank-and-file committee at the facility to expose these conditions and to “unite postal workers worldwide to build collective power,” according to its founding statement. The committee is “independent of union apparatus, political parties and management,” it continues. “It is democratic, transparent and accountable to the shop floor.”
The committee is affiliated with the national USPS Worker Rank-and-File Committee, which is conducting an independent investigation into workplace safety. That inquiry was launched last November, after the deaths of postal workers Nick Acker in Michigan and Russell Scruggs, Jr in Georgia.
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In the founding statement, the workers who founded the Springfield NDC rank-and-file explained, “we will continue to lose ground unless we form independent rank-and-file committees to advocate for our rights, investigate violations and wrongdoings, address safety concerns and educate our coworkers.”
10. University of Michigan president attacks Faculty Senate chair for opposing Israel’s war on Gaza
Following the University of Michigan’s commencement ceremony on May 2, U-M President Domenico Grasso publicly attacked outgoing Faculty Senate Chair Derek Peterson for remarks opposing the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. “Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists,” Peterson told the graduates, “who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
Within hours, the university removed the entire video of the commencement ceremony from its website, and Grasso issued a statement reprimanding Peterson. Grasso wrote:
At today’s U-M spring commencement ceremony, our outgoing Faculty Senate Chair made remarks regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict that were hurtful and insensitive to many members of our community. We regret the pain this has caused on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment. For this, the university apologizes.
The Faculty Senate Chair deviated from the remarks he had shared before the ceremony. The Chair’s comments were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position. Nor do they represent the diversity of views across our entire faculty.
This is an act of censorship and a blatant attack on freedom of speech. In seeking to muzzle Peterson, Grasso is defending the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The immediate backlash to Grasso’s authoritarian decree indicates broad support for Professor Peterson. Over 1,500 students, faculty and staff have signed an open letter denouncing Grasso and defending Peterson. A separate alumni letter with over 750 signatures is also circulating. The main letter declares:
Nothing in Professor Peterson’s statement warrants any apology. To the contrary, it is President Grasso’s statement for which the University should apologize. … Many members of our community have family members who have been killed, whose houses have been destroyed, and whose lives have been transformed by Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. President Grasso has now told these members of our community that their perspective on this issue is so out of bounds that the University should apologize for its even having been expressed. We can think of little the University could do that is more “hurtful and insensitive” to the deep moral commitments and expressions of these community members.
According to the official figures of the Palestinian authorities, 72,615 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed and 172,400 injured, the vast majority of casualties being civilians, largely women and children. U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has cited estimates suggesting the real death toll could be as high as 680,000. Of that estimate, some researchers suggest 380,000 could be children under five.
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Grasso’s cynical excuse that he is protecting the sensibilities of members of the U-M community who are offended by Peterson’s remarks has become the standard justification for shutting down anti-genocide opposition and defending the Israeli state and Zionists on and off campus. The underlying slander in such statements is the lie that opposition to Israeli mass murder and Zionist ethno-nationalism equals antisemitism.
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Grasso’s defense of the Gaza genocide is inseparable from his collaboration with the Trump administration and the Democratic Party in the witch-hunting of Chinese scientists. This xenophobic campaign is part of Washington’s war preparations against China and Trump’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship. Five U-M researchers—Yunqing Jian, Chengxuan Han, Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang and Zhiyong Zhangù—as well as Youhuang Xiang at Indiana University, were arrested on trumped-up federal charges of conspiracy and smuggling. They were accused of terrorism by top administration officials, such as FBI Director Kash Patel and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, held without bail for months and ultimately deported.
On March 19, Danhao Wang, a 30-year-old Chinese postdoctoral research scientist at U-M, jumped to his death from an upper floor within the G.G. Brown Laboratory building the day after he was interrogated by federal agents. It has been seven weeks since Wang’s death, and Grasso and U-M have said nothing to the broader U-M community. Under conditions of government persecution and institutional betrayal, the suicide of Danhao Wang takes on the character of a social murder.
United Flight 169 from Venice, Italy to Newark, New Jersey struck both a light pole and an 18-wheeler semi truck on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 3, during the aircraft’s landing approach. The flight was traveling at approximately 160 miles per hour at the time of collision—well below its cruising speed of over 500 miles per hour—having slowed through the descent and landing sequence.
The Boeing 767 was landing on Runway 29 at Newark Liberty International Airport, which had become the active runway due to a shift in wind direction. Runway 29 is among the shorter runways at Newark, which means aircraft must hold their approach profile with greater precision, with landing gear extended as they cross the runway threshold at low altitude over the New Jersey Turnpike.
New Jersey State Police reported that the bottom of the aircraft’s fuselage, as well as a landing gear tire, struck a light pole and a semi truck traveling on the turnpike before the plane completed its landing at Newark. CBS News reported that the truck driver was released from the hospital and was recovering at home from minor injuries as of May 4.
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But the turnpike corridor beneath Runway 29’s approach path has alarmed motorists for many years. Aircraft on low approach appear startlingly close to highway traffic—though under normal conditions, they cross at altitudes sufficient to clear any vehicle on the road. Sunday’s collision was not normal conditions.
The gusty westerly winds that prompted the switch to Runway 29 on May 3 created conditions capable of producing wind shear at low altitude—a sudden, dramatic reduction in the lift generated by the aircraft’s wings that can cause the plane to drop rapidly below the established glide path. Pilots and controllers both have access to meteorological forecasts updated hourly, as well as real-time field conditions including wind direction, speed and peak gust readings. Onboard flight management systems and approach monitoring displays give both cockpit crew and controllers continuous glide path data. Audible warnings would have sounded seconds before the aircraft descended to an altitude that could bring it into contact with vehicles on the highway.
These warning systems existed. The question the NTSB will answer is why the approach was not aborted.
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Air traffic controllers are working under conditions of historic under-staffing that has built up for decades. This is being compounded by a massive erosion of real wages due to inflation and skyrocketing costs of living in the urban areas, where FAA facilities are concentrated. As the World Socialist Web Site has documented extensively, over 90 percent of US airport towers are short on air traffic personnel, and only about 70 percent of staffing targets are met by fully certified controllers at terminal approach facilities. The Philadelphia TRACON, which is responsible for Newark’s airspace, has been, in the words of United Airlines’ own CEO, “chronically understaffed for years.”
The FAA’s ground-based navigation infrastructure—radar arrays, VHF radio antennae, instrument landing systems—has languished in a semi-broken state for years. Budget appropriations have been consumed by competing contractors offering replacement systems that do not fully replicate the functions of the equipment they are meant to replace. The equipment failures at Newark in April 2025, when a burned-out copper wire caused controllers to lose radar and communications contact with arriving and departing flights for 90 seconds, were a direct expression of this rot. That crisis has not been resolved.
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Spirit Airlines, which ceased all operations on May 2, the day before this accident, is the first major casualty of this fuel crisis. Seventeen thousand Spirit workers lost their jobs and paychecks; their executives simultaneously sought $10.7 million in “retention” bonuses. After years of mounting financial losses, two Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings and a failed merger with JetBlue, the war-driven fuel price surge was the final blow that made Spirit’s business model nonviable.
But in reality, Spirit was deliberately allowed to collapse by the government, in line with the decades-long consolidation in the industry under both parties. It is also an attempt to impose the costs of the war onto the backs of workers, both as producers and consumers—The immediate impact of the ultra-low cost carrier’s demise was a sharp increase in ticket prices. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy claimed the government did not “have half a billion dollars laying around,” while it is spending $1 billion a day on the war.
The collapse of Spirit Airlines is the beginning of a wave of cost-cutting across the industry. One of the most direct mechanisms through which this pressure reaches the cockpit is the go-around—the standard safety procedure in which a pilot aborts a landing that does not meet approach parameters, climbs away and re-enters the landing queue for another attempt.
But a go-around on a Boeing 767 burns over 4,400 pounds of jet fuel and costs the airline $2,000 to $3,000 in additional fuel and maintenance charges. Airlines are now training crews to minimize unnecessary go-arounds, and management reviews every decision that results in extra fuel burn.
Under normal safety conditions, the pilots of United 169, confronted with an approach that had dropped below safe parameters, whether from wind shear, a late wind gust or any other factor, would have executed a go-around as a matter of routine. The existence of systemic pressure, economic and institutional, to avoid that $3,000 cost cannot be separated from the question of why the approach continued to the point of collision.
This is the logic of capitalist cost-cutting applied to public safety infrastructure. The same logic led to the January 2025 collision between a passenger jet and military helicopter over Washington D.C. At Reagan National Airport’s tower, one controller was left doing the work of two people. The same cost-cutting left Newark’s approach systems running on burned-out copper wire.
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Aviation workers—controllers, pilots, ground crews and maintenance staff—face a common enemy in a system that treats their safety, their working conditions and their wages as variables to be optimized against the bottom line.
The answer is not to appeal to regulators, who have for decades refused to act, or to union bureaucracies like National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) that have extended punishing contracts without member consent and collaborated with management against the interests of workers. The answer is the independent organization of aviation workers in rank-and-file committees, united with workers across transportation and all other sectors, to fight for the public ownership and democratic control of aviation infrastructure as part of the broader struggle against capitalism and its wars.
12. US resumes strikes on Iran, as Trump threatens further escalation
US forces struck Iranian military targets on Thursday after sending three US Navy destroyers through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed since February. Iranian forces fired missiles, drones and small boats at the warships as they transited; the destroyers evaded the attacks. U.S. Central Command then ordered strikes on Iranian military sites.
US President Donald Trump issued what was widely read as a nuclear threat against Iran later Thursday, telling reporters at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool: 'You're just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran, and they better sign their agreement fast.'
The strikes were the first the United States has carried out on Iran since the April 8 truce. The renewed military action is a measure of the depth of the strategic crisis the Trump administration faces. The war, launched on February 28 by the United States and Israel, has entered its 69th day. The United States has failed to carry out its stated objectives of militarily crippling Iran and overthrowing its government.
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A Reuters investigation by Gram Slattery, Jonathan Landay and Erin Banco published May 4 reported that US intelligence assessments find Iran’s nuclear timeline unchanged: Tehran would still need approximately one year to build a weapon, the same estimate produced after the June 2025 strikes on Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan. The current war has produced “limited new damage,” three sources told Reuters. Iran’s stockpile of approximately 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium—enough for an estimated 10 weapons—remains intact in deeply buried sites that US munitions cannot penetrate.
The same intelligence assessments place Iran’s surviving conventional missile force at roughly half its prewar inventory, with about 60 percent of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy intact. Damage to US bases in the region runs into the billions: Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar lost a $1.1 billion radar system; Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was struck on March 27, leaving 15 US soldiers wounded and an AWACS aircraft destroyed; the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain was hit on the war’s first day; 16 US bases in the region took fire.
Pentagon figures put US military deaths at 13, with more than 400 wounded. The Intercept has reported the actual toll is at least 15. Nearly half of US Patriot interceptor stocks have been expended, and more than half of THAAD interceptor stocks have been expended, with replacement timelines of three to four years.
The Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) documented 3,636 Iranian deaths through April 7, including 1,701 civilians. Iran has reported 81,000 civilian structures damaged, including 275 medical facilities. Israel has reported 24 killed and 7,791 wounded by Iranian missile attacks; at least nine Gulf state nationals have been killed in Iranian strikes.
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The economic cost of the war is being borne by the working class. Gasoline crossed $4.50 a gallon last week, the first time since July 2022. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has called the disruption the largest in the history of the oil market.
Spirit Airlines liquidated on May 2, throwing 17,000 workers out of jobs. Frontier, Avelo, Sun Country and Allegiant have jointly requested $2.5 billion in emergency federal fuel assistance, which Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy publicly rejected. JetBlue has shown signs of acute financial strain.
The March consumer price index rose 0.9 percent in a single month, the largest jump in four years, with gasoline up 21.2 percent. Real hourly earnings fell roughly 0.6 percent that month. The personal consumption expenditures index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, is running at 4.5 percent annualized—more than double the central bank’s target. The personal savings rate has fallen to 3.6 percent. US credit card debt has reached a record $1.28 trillion at an average annual percentage rate above 21 percent.
The political crisis at home is deepening. Trump’s approval has fallen to 34 percent in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, the lowest of his presidency. Sixty-one percent of Americans, including 25 percent of Republicans, say the war has done more harm than good. The Senate has voted down War Powers resolutions to halt the war five times. On May 1, Trump declared hostilities formally “terminated” to evade the 60-day War Powers Resolution clock, a position rejected by senior Democrats and constitutional scholars across the political spectrum.
Whatever temporary accommodation the Trump administration may extract from Tehran, it is only the prelude to new and ever more violent eruptions as US imperialism attempts to extricate itself from its crisis through military force.
The new tentative agreement (TA) presented by UAW Local 699 is a rotten sellout. Every worker should vote it down with the contempt it deserves. The very fact that the union leadership has presented this new company-dictated deal after we voted down the first one by more than 96 percent shows that we have to oust the bureaucrats and their bargaining committee, establish shop floor control and organize an all-out strike.
The rot extends to the very top of the UAW, beginning with President Shawn Fain and his cronies—and their six-figure salaries and expense accounts. To win a decent contract that provides a living wage, ends the speedup, and gives us job security and a safe workplace, we need to reach out to our fellow autoworkers across the US and in Mexico, Canada and around the world. We need to coordinate our fight with theirs and combine the struggle against the auto bosses with a rebellion against the traitors in Solidarity House and the local union halls. That’s the agenda of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
14. Australia: Victorian budget cuts services amid war and cost-of-living crisis
The Labor government’s 2026–27 Victorian state budget, handed down on May 5, is a pre-election document designed above all to satisfy the financial markets and corporate boardrooms by cutting spending to produce a budget surplus, while trying to contain working-class discontent over the intensifying cost-of-living crisis.
Behind the claims by Premier Jacinta Allan’s government of delivering its first surplus in seven years, the budget deepens cuts to public education, health and disability services, while rejecting the demands of workers across the public sector—from local council workers and teachers to health workers—for decent wages and conditions.
The budget continues the drive to make the working class bear the burden of the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran, which the federal Labor government has backed from the outset. The war has sent the prices of fuel, food and other essentials soaring, along with home mortgage interest rates and rents.
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Under a state Labor government since 2014, working-class households in Victoria were already under severe pressure before the war.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in the year to March 2026, people in Victorian capital Melbourne saw costs rise 23.8 percent for electricity, 5.9 percent for housing and 3.2 percent for food and non-alcoholic beverages. Similar trends are seen across the country. Real wages have fallen. Every state and territory Labor government is enforcing the austerity demanded by global capital, as are their counterparts internationally.
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Health workers, teachers, council workers and more are coming into conflict with a system in which corporate profits dictate government spending. And in each case, the union bureaucracy works to contain the struggle and negotiate outcomes acceptable to the government. The AEU suspension of strikes on the eve of the budget is the latest example.
Primarily because of its pro-business record, the Allan government is one of the most unpopular in Victoria’s recent history. A Roy Morgan poll last month put Labor’s primary vote at just 25.5 percent—down from 37 percent at the 2022 election.
Many workers and young people oppose the government’s systematic attacks on the social and democratic rights of the working class. It has deployed police and counter-terrorism units to raid the homes of and arrest anti-genocide protesters.
The government is proceeding, despite the objections of residents, with the demolition of all 44 public housing towers in the state capital Melbourne—displacing approximately 10,000 working-class and vulnerable people amid the worst housing crisis in the country’s history.
On every front, Labor is carrying out the program demanded by the Australian capitalist class: austerity at home and a war economy, with the Albanese government pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into military spending, all at the inevitable expense of social spending.
The working class cannot address this through appeals to whichever party holds office, or to trade union bureaucrats, but through an independent political movement, fighting for a socialist alternative to a capitalist order that places the demands of financial elites above human need.
15. National strike in Bolivia fueled by gas costs sees growing calls for president to resign
Bolivia’s right-wing President Rodrigo Paz Pereira is marking six months in office amid an escalating national strike, mass protests, and roadblocks demanding his resignation unless his government approves a 20 percent wage increase and halts its austerity measures.
The deepening social upheaval is being intensified by the global economic shock triggered by the US-Israeli war against Iran. The conflict and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted roughly 20 percent of global oil supplies, driving Brent crude prices above $100 per barrel and provoking fuel shortages internationally.
Bolivia, which has become heavily dependent on imported diesel and gasoline due to declining domestic gas production and chronic dollar shortages, has been hit especially hard. Long lines at gas stations, fuel rationing and soaring prices have sharpened social tensions throughout the country.
An indefinite strike called by the Bolivian Workers Confederation (COB) last Saturday has been accompanied by highway blockades, protest marches and threats of further actions involving ever broader sections of the working class, youth and peasantry.
Urban transport workers announced an indefinite nationwide shutdown beginning Tuesday, denouncing fuel shortages and the circulation of what they called “garbage gasoline.”
At the same time, peasant and indigenous organizations from all 16 provinces of Cochabamba are mobilizing, while the Rural Worker Federation Túpac Katari of La Paz confirmed that beginning at midnight Wednesday it would launch an indefinite general blockade across all 20 provinces of the department of La Paz, which includes the capital.
The organizations are being driven by a social powder keg from below. Industrial workers affiliated with the COB occupied Bolivia’s Ministry of Labor Wednesday. Riot police violently intervened to clear the building and arrested 13 protesters.
Attempting to maintain control over the radicalized workers and peasants, the COB announced a “pact of no betrayal” with the mobilized peasant and indigenous organizations directly raising demands for Paz to resign. The COB leadership cynically claimed that it will not betray like in the past.
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Bolivia’s economic breakdown has deep historical roots. The country has transitioned from a net energy exporter to importing roughly 86 percent of its diesel and 54 percent of its gasoline due to decades of mismanagement, declining investment in exploration and dependence on commodity exports.
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The US war against Iran has now dramatically intensified Bolivia’s fuel crisis. The government lacks sufficient dollar reserves to finance imports, while the estimated $56 million weekly cost of purchasing fuel abroad is overwhelming public finances.
Bolivia is once again approaching a social explosion, reflecting a broader process unfolding across Latin America and internationally, including within the United States itself.
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The struggle against imperialism, austerity and capitalist exploitation cannot be waged through nationalist or bourgeois parties tied to the existing state. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class throughout Bolivia and Latin America, uniting workers with oppressed peasants and indigenous masses in a common struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
16. Chavín de Huántar: The Rescue of the Century: A film of reactionary propaganda for Peru’s military
Netflix recently added to its global catalogue the Peruvian film Chavín de Huántar: The Rescue of the Century, which premiered in Peru last October.
Advised and logistically supported by the Peruvian Army, the film is a dramatization of the April 1997 rescue by 195 commandos of 72 hostages held at the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. Fourteen members of the guerrilla movement MRTA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) had seized the embassy and the hostages nearly five months earlier.
The operation was touted by the Peruvian military as one of the most successful in its history, as only one hostage and two soldiers lost their lives. However, all of the insurgents — who had no military training, let alone political preparation—were killed, summarily executed after being captured unarmed.
Certainly the embassy takeover, and above all its political roots, is an event that deserves artistic treatment. It revealed, above all else, the dead end that small-bourgeois nationalist armed movements had reached. These were promoted for decades by the Stalinists, their pseudo-left allies, and—most reprehensibly—Pabloite revisionists such as Ernest Mandel and Nahuel Moreno. The latter presented these movements, which neither possessed nor aspired to gain the support of the working class, as alternatives to Marxist workers' parties.
But in the hands of the Peruvian Army and director Diego de León, the film inevitably becomes a piece of reactionary militarist propaganda designed not only to glorify the Peruvian Army (as Hollywood films like 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi do analogously for US security forces), but also, within the current context, an attempt to prop up the institution of the Army amid a long-running crisis of bourgeois rule and an unprecedented loss of credibility by all the institutions of the Peruvian state.
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The MRTA emerged from the fusion of Castroite armed movements with petty-bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist tendencies. The leader of the hostage taking, Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, began his political activity as the 25-year-old secretary of a union that carried out an occupation of a textile factory. The action ended in violent repression ordered by the military government, leaving several workers dead and sending Cerpa himself to jail for a year.
The methods of guerrillaism served to separate such militant younger workers from the working class as a whole, strengthening the grip of Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist bureaucracies dedicated to subordinating workers’ struggles to the capitalist order.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained:
What all these factions shared was the conviction that some force other than the working class would be the vehicle of social struggle in Peru. Their methods and policies had nothing in common with Marxism in any genuine sense. They operated through kidnappings, bombings, bank robberies, and armed actions aimed primarily at pressuring the Peruvian state and extracting political concessions — not at mobilizing or politically educating the working class. The organization made no systematic appeals for working-class popular support and remained organizationally isolated from the broad masses.
The film makes no reference either to what the Fujimori government had become by that point. Having been unexpectedly elected in 1990 as a populist outsider opposed to the neoliberal reforms demanded by Washington, Fujimori rapidly jettisoned his electoral promises and launched a wave of privatizations and economic 'shock therapy' measures. To impose these sweeping attacks, he carried out a “self-coup” (autogolpe) in 1992, disbanding parliament and the judiciary in order to concentrate dictatorial power in his hands and creating a new constitution that, to this day, favors large foreign capital, among other anti-worker laws.
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Today, the country's democracy is once again under assault by the so-called “congressional mafia pact”—an alliance of right-wing and far-right parties led by Fujimori's own daughter, Keiko.
This alliance has followed Fujimori's playbook and used congress as a platform to concentrate political power in its hands through constitutional amendments, threats against judges and prosecutors, the passage of laws that weaken the fight against crime and corruption, and the removal of democratically elected presidents.
Millions of Peruvians despise this miserable and shameless clique that has seized control of the state—as in the Fujimori era—and turned it into an instrument to sustain their privileges and favor foreign capital and the native oligarchy. Since 2023, following the parliamentary coup that ousted democratically elected pseudo-left president Pedro Castillo, congress has maintained an approval rating of between 4 percent and 6 percent, one of the lowest in the world.
It is within this political context that the emergence and promotion of the film must be understood. Faced with a population that despises them and with all their political institutions utterly discredited, Peru's ruling class is attempting to cling to a “glorious” episode of the Army's history in order to gain some measure of approval—enough to remain in power, or to lull the population as much as possible.
This is reflected, in a distorted way, in the fact that the film has been one of the biggest box-office successes in Peruvian cinema history. Certainly, the rescue of the Japanese embassy hostages is an episode that enjoys approval among the majority of Peruvians.
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Whatever the attempts of Peru’s ruling class to rewrite its bloody history and glorify its armed forces, the insoluble crisis of capitalism and Washington's imperialist offensive against Latin America are engulfing Peru and driving the masses of working people once again into struggle in defense of their economic, social and democratic rights. The Peruvian Army will once again be called upon to demonstrate its usefulness as a tool of state repression.
The victory of the working class requires a break with all bourgeois parties, including those posturing as “left” populists, and the construction of a revolutionary leadership based on the program of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to lead the working class in Peru and internationally in a socialist offensive against war, dictatorship and capitalism. This program includes the abolition of the standing army along with the capitalist system that it defends.
17. Australian Labor government persecutes women and children returning from Syria
A small group of four vulnerable women and nine children, who arrived in Australia yesterday after years of arbitrary detention in Syria, have been subjected to a venomous reception by the country’s Labor government and the entire political and media establishment.
There were hysterical media packs at Sydney and Melbourne airports, intent on creating a scene. And scarcely after they had landed, three of the four women were arrested before being charged with offences that could see them imprisoned for decades, or even for life.
One of the women has been hit with terror offences related to allegedly entering a “declared area,” a portion of Syria that was then under the control of Islamic State (IS). Unbelievably, two of the other women have been charged with crimes against humanity, in what will be the first such prosecution in Australia since trials of alleged Japanese war criminals in the aftermath of World War II.
The treatment of the women and children is grotesque and amounts to political persecution. The Labor government is effectively seeking to destroy the vulnerable people, who have already suffered enormous hardships. The vilification of the group, amounting to incitement to violence against them, is transparently Islamaphobic.
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Labor’s decision to allow the families to enter Australia, as is their fundamental right as citizens, had nothing to do with legal niceties but was bound up with the alliance with the fascistic administration of US President Donald Trump.
The leveling of the charges against three of the women, however, can only serve as a massive disincentive for the women who remain in Syria to return. The extraordinary prosecution for crimes against humanity is thus aimed at perpetuating the ban on the other families returning, only in a different form.
Those charges relate to the alleged practice by IS of enslaving women of the Yazidi ethno-religious minority. That IS was an utterly reactionary entity that committed heinous crimes is not in doubt.
The suggestion, though, that two random Australian women were in anyway central to those crimes is simply absurd. One of the women charged is a 54-year-old grandmother. The other is currently only 31, meaning that she would have been still in her teens or very early 20s during the period that the charges relate to.
The substance of the accusation appears to be the claim that the two women were in the same household as an alleged Yazidi slave. As is well known, IS, however, not only enslaved and persecuted minorities, but was an ultra-patriarchal organization, with women, including wives and mothers in a subordinate position that in some instances may also have resembled slavery. Under those conditions, the charges have a punitive character, punishing potential victims themselves.
In any event, only the willfully naive would believe that the Australian government and its imperialist allies has the slightest interest in the welfare of the Yazidis or in the prevention of “crimes against humanity.”
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In all of the media hysteria over the “ISIS brides,” there is no analysis of the character or the roots of that war. In fact IS emerged directly out of a US war for regime-change in Syria, that was one of the preparations for the current assault on Iran and the broader global war, targeting Russia and China, of which that criminal assault is a part.
Beginning in 2011, Washington instigated a civil war in Syria, in a bid to oust the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, because of its close ties to Iran and Russia. In what has since been acknowledged as one of its largest operations in history, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and cash to Islamist opposition groups that were also supported by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
It was from such Islamist groups that IS emerged. The US only targeted it after IS declared a caliphate and crossed into Iraq, threatening American dominance over oil fields. The broader regime-change operation continued, however, culminating in the fall of Assad in December 2024 and the establishment of a US-aligned government run by the former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda.
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The persecution of the Syrian families all these years later, including of children who were not even alive during the IS caliphate, should be opposed by the working class. It is inseparable from an assault on democratic rights that is completely connected to the new stage of imperialist militarism, expressed in the criminal assault on Iran.
18. US war on Iran drives up cost of living in Sri Lanka as government prepares new taxes
The criminal US war against Iran is rapidly worsening the already dire living conditions of Sri Lankan workers and the rural and urban poor. Rising global energy prices and supply disruptions are feeding directly into domestic inflation, driving up the cost of essential goods and services.
At the same time, the government is intensifying its assault on the population by imposing new tax measures in line with International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands to boost state revenue. An amendment to the Value Added Tax (VAT) Bill is to be presented to parliament in the coming weeks and will be effective from July 1, further shifting the burden of the economic crisis onto working people.
According to official figures, headline inflation, measured by the year-on-year change in the Colombo Consumer Price Index, surged to 5.4 percent in April, up from 2.2 percent in March and 1.6 percent in February. This marks a significant break from the relatively low and stable inflation recorded in late 2025.
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Sri Lanka’s Central Bank (CB) has admitted that these developments are bound up with the “fluid nature” of the “Middle East war” and its global repercussions. While claiming that inflation will remain around its 5 percent target over the medium term, the CB has acknowledged that the outlook is subject to “elevated uncertainty.”
A UN World Food Program (WFP) report on April 22 warned of growing risks facing Sri Lanka. It said the country imports 63 percent of its energy needs while depending on oil for nearly 40 percent of the country’s energy supply. With global oil prices reaching a four-year high, Sri Lanka’s transport and electricity charges are being pushed up.
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The Colombo government is dependent on migrant workers’ remittances, largely from the Middle East. While remittances have not been drastically impacted thus far, the Institute of Policy Studies, a government-related think tank has issued warnings about employment cuts and major disruptions if the Iran war escalates.
The WFP has also noted that Sri Lanka imports over 90 percent of its fertilizer requirements. With the Strait of Hormuz handling about 30 percent of globally traded fertilizer, this poses a significant challenge. Shortages and higher fertilizer prices could lead to reduced usage and lower crop yields.
The report noted: “Global food prices have risen sharply, particularly for staples such as wheat, corn, rice and vegetable oil. Sri Lanka, which imported around USD 2.5 billion worth of food in 2025, remains highly sensitive to such increases.”
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The working class can only effectively develop its fight against the JVP/NPP government’s IMF austerity measures and the increasing war burden by building action committees in every workplace and institution, independent of the trade union bureaucracies, and based on a socialist program. These are the only organizations capable of defending jobs, wages, working conditions and the rights of rural masses. Such a struggle must be developed in unity with the international working class and the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
19. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Liberia:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Across Europe:
Notable May Day strikes and Demonstrations take place in Germany, Greece, Netherlands, France, and Turkey
Italy:
May Day sees first of three general strikes against declining living standards
Portugal:
Healthcare workers join two-day national strike , protesting collapsing public health system
Spain:
Early childcare staff in Madrid continue strike over pay, conditions and funding
Industrial workers at Tubos Reunidos march to defend jobs
United Kingdom:
Unison ends strike at the National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield, England on eve of council elections
Planned strikes and walkouts at several schools highlight increasing workload and threat to jobs
Critical care workers at hospital trust in England walk out over cuts to overtime pay and staff shortages
Middle East
Iraq:
Israel:
20. 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.
