Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. A Turkish court unlawfully removes the CHP leadership from office
Under political pressure from the Erdoğan government, a court unlawfully removed the elected leadership of the Republican People's Party, triggering a major political crisis.
2. The Ebola epidemic, imperialism and the political economy of social murder
The Ebola epidemic ravaging central Africa is not a natural disaster but a social crime, the predictable product of the Trump administration's destruction of global disease surveillance and more than a century of imperialist plunder.
3. Management boasts deal to end Long Island Rail Road strike “within the MTA’s financial plan”
These statements are significant because they suggest that the overall value of the deal, which workers have not yet seen, is no better than the contracts workers previously rejected before the strike.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the media before the formal consultations began Friday morning that the Trump administration was “disappointed” with NATO members’ “response to our operations in the Middle East.”
5. Anger in Australia over brutal treatment of Gaza flotilla activists
Labor issued mealy-mouthed condemnations, while treating the relatives of the brutalized activists with utter contempt and hostility.
6. A $1 billion evening for the art world
Naively, one asks oneself: how is it that one individual can accumulate such an art collection and withhold it from the public? Wouldn’t it make sense, wouldn’t it be fairer, for all this work to be displayed in museums accessible to everyone? Does it seem likely that a Newhouse, a Paul Allen, a Pauline Karpidas has that much more affection and appreciation for art than the average person, or the average 10,000 persons? What type of society accepts the ability of the wealthy to appropriate art for themselves like this? What special, qualifying characteristics do they possess–aside from their riches, of course?An artist creates a work to communicate with others, to delight, to move, to educate, not to make money. That was true of Pollock and Brancusi, whatever one may conclude about their ultimate success or failure in that regard. (We have discussed Pollock’s evolution from a left-wing artist in the late 1930s to an abstractionist later on here.) Diderot suggested that “As soon as an artist thinks of money, he loses his sense of beauty,” while Marx insisted that although a writer “must earn money in order to be able to live and to write … he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.”
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Shakespeare (in Timon of Athens), Marx brilliantly points out, stresses two properties of money in particular.
Money, first, is “the visible divinity–the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things.” As a result, “impossibilities are soldered together by it” (ignorant, greedy billionaires and art work, for example). Second, money “is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations”!
On the other hand, Marx imagined a society,
assuming man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Dr. Arijit Chakravarty. Dr. Chakravarty is the chief executive officer of Fractal Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company that applies mathematical modeling to drug discovery and development, and has headed an interdisciplinary team of volunteers that has published more than 20 peer-reviewed papers on COVID-19.
New information that emerged Thursday night has raised further questions about the role of local police and the FBI in the lead-up to Monday’s neo-Nazi terrorist attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, in which three Muslim men were murdered and roughly 140 children narrowly escaped death.
More than a year before Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, carried out the massacre, Chula Vista police filed an emergency gun violence protective order and moved to confiscate weapons from the home of Vazquez’s father, Marco Vazquez. According to court records reviewed by major news outlets, the January 2025 order stated that Caleb Vazquez had been involved in “suspicious behavior idolizing Nazis and mass shooters.”
The order stated that Marco Vazquez and his wife, Lilliana, owned 26 firearms, including Glock pistols, rifles and shotguns. In response, Marco Vazquez told authorities that the weapons had been placed in a storage facility, that the family had increased supervision of their son and that he had been placed in therapy. Authorities have since said they recovered 30 firearms and a crossbow from residences connected to the shooters.
Court records also indicate that Caleb Vazquez had previously been placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold. Separately, Bloomberg reported Thursday that Vazquez had been the subject of a 2025 FBI eGuardian alert. The eGuardian system is used by federal, state and local police agencies to flag suspicious activity and potential threats, with reports reviewed through the FBI’s counter-terrorism apparatus and Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
In other words, police at every level were aware, well before the attack, that at least one of the eventual shooters was immersed in Nazi ideology, mass-shooter worship and violent threats. This makes the refusal of law enforcement officials to clearly characterize the attack politically all the more significant.
At a press conference following the shooting, FBI Special Agent Mark Remily claimed the manifesto expressed “various ideologies” and that the “subjects did not discriminate on who they hate.” This formulation was calculated to blur what was obvious from the facts already available: the attack was carried out by neo-Nazis animated by the same “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that has become a central element of Republican and far-right politics.
The manifesto, social media material and symbols associated with the attack were not politically incoherent. They were saturated with fascist, racist and anti-Muslim hatred. The attackers’ worldview reduced all the problems of capitalist society to anti-immigrant and neo-Nazi filth about immigrants supposedly coming to the United States to take jobs, replace whites and “outbreed” them.
The deliberate vagueness of the police and FBI is aimed at covering up the social and political forces that cultivated this ideology. The anti-immigrant politics they espoused were nourished in a political climate dominated by the Trump administration, the Republican Party and a layer of billionaires, with Elon Musk foremost among them, who have promoted the same anti-immigrant and white supremacist conceptions in order to divide the working class along racial and national lines.
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The new information demonstrates that the police were deliberately concealing the political motivation behind the mass shooting in order to cover for, and advance, the lies promulgated by the Trump administration: that the greatest “domestic terrorist” threat comes not from fascists and neo-Nazis, but from left-wing, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist opposition.
This was codified in National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, issued by Trump in September 2025. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, NSPM-7 is “a fascist blueprint for mobilizing the entire repressive apparatus of the American state—the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), State Department, Treasury, and the military—against all political opposition on the left.” The memorandum “brands anti-fascism and opposition to capitalism as ‘domestic terrorism,’” while remaining “silent on right-wing political violence.”
9. Audit report documents Australian government's betrayal of 2022 flood victims
Of the 4,382 homes or housing lots promised through the northern NSW flood recovery programs, zero had been delivered as of March 31 this year, four years after the disasters.
10. Sri Lankan president uses war commemoration to declare “economic war” on working people
The working class must understand that the Dissanayake government is preparing a frontal assault on its living and social conditions and democratic rights and is turning towards autocratic rule.
11. New Zealand woman held for weeks in ICE detention
Nobody is exempt from the sweeping attacks on basic democratic rights by the Trump administration, no matter what their national origin or immigration status.
12. Having canceled Los Angeles schools strike, SEIU circulates petition to ask that layoffs stop
The same bureaucracy that blocked a unified walkout of all 77,000 LAUSD employees now presents a letter-writing campaign as a substitute for the mass action it deliberately strangled.
UPS carried out the long-threatened closure of the midnight shift at its 43rd Street hub in Manhattan. The closure, repeatedly delayed after a WARN Act notice was first issued in 2025, is the latest chapter in the company’s “Network of the Future” restructuring drive which has cost tens of thousands of jobs. In April, UPS announced it would close 27 more facilities nationwide.
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CEO Carol Tomé has called this “the most significant strategic shift in our company’s history.” In practice, that shift means UPS’s profitability no longer depends on expanding package volume or preserving jobs. It depends on extracting greater profit from a shrinking workforce through layoffs, automation and the intensification of labor exploitation. The back half of 2026—which Tomé refers to as “the inflection point”—is when Wall Street expects the full benefits of facility closures, job cuts and network consolidation to be realized in higher profit margins.
UPS is not an exception. In January 2026 alone, US firms announced more than 108,000 layoffs—the highest figure for the start of any year since the Great Recession. In 2025, US companies announced more than 1.2 million layoffs. Across logistics, healthcare, auto and technology, corporations are using automation and artificial intelligence to slash labor costs and funnel the savings to shareholders.
The conditions for this bloodbath were established by the 2023 national UPS contract, which the Teamsters promoted as “historic.” It contained no meaningful protections against automation-driven job cuts. When UPS launched its Driver Choice Program—a buyout scheme offering drivers up to $150,000 to leave the company—it initially bypassed the union entirely, offering it directly to workers. Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien objected, not to the elimination of jobs, but to being cut out of the process. The Teamsters bureaucracy derives its institutional power from being the recognized intermediary between workers and management—the mechanism through which workforce compliance is delivered to the company. When UPS went around it, that arrangement was threatened.
UPS’s response to O’Brien’s objection confirmed what was already well underway: “Over the course of 2026, we expect to be overstaffed in all classifications. This could impact substantially all centers. We anticipate managing this overstaffing through attrition and layoffs.” Once UPS agreed to route the program through the bureaucracy, O’Brien declared it a “win.” The jobs were still gone.
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The 43rd Street workers are not isolated. There is growing opposition to the contract that the LIRR unions agreed to to end the powerful three-day strike. Transit workers in the TWU are being forced to stay on the job despite an expired contract. In every industry workers face overwork, declining real wages, deteriorating healthcare and unions that co-manage austerity on behalf of the corporations.
The Teamsters apparatus will not defend UPS workers. The 2023 contract, the Article 38 procedure and the DCP settlement all demonstrate that its function is to administer the company’s agenda, not to fight it. The answer is the construction of independent rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves and free from the authority of the union apparatus. The central demand must be that not a single job be lost to automation—that the gains of new technology be used to shorten the working day and raise living standards.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is building the organizational framework to unite workers across industries and across borders against the global jobs massacre and the imperialist war that accompanies it.
Workers at the 43rd Street hub—and at UPS facilities across the country—should contact the UPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee and join the IWA-RFC at iwa-rfc.org.
As Bolivia's workers defy repression and maintain their indefinite strike into its fourth week, the international response exposes a single coordinated apparatus—from Washington's threats to Milei's alleged arms shipments to Lula's complicit silence.
15. Pro-independence Parti Québécois strengthens its ties with the far right
Parti Québecois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon gave a one-hour interview last month to Rebel News, a far-right media outlet with close connections to Trump’s MAGA movement and fascist forces in Europe.
David North to a dissatisfied reader of A letter from afar by A. Lincoln:
To treat Lincoln as a figure alien to the democratic ideals of the socialist movement is to repudiate the method of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in favor of a sectarian schema in which the working class is sealed off from the entire prior history of revolutionary struggle against feudalism, slavery and absolutism. That schema is a caricature of Marxism. It has appeared on the political stage many times before, always to the detriment of the movement that adopted it.
The WSWS waged a sustained campaign against the New York Times’ 1619 Project—a campaign conducted in defense of the revolutionary heritage of the United States against an effort to falsify the American Revolution and the Civil War as expressions of an immutable racial pathology, to expel Lincoln from the pantheon of progressive historical figures, and to substitute racial mythology for the class analysis of American history. The interventions of the WSWS, supported by the work of leading historians of the period, including James McPherson, Gordon Wood, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum and others, were directed precisely at defending the democratic and revolutionary content of these events against an academic and journalistic offensive that sought to liquidate them. The letter from Lincoln’s grave belongs not only to that political and historiographical fight, but the present struggle against Trump and the fascistic conspiracy of the oligarchy.
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The letter from Lincoln’s grave is an attempt to mobilize what is best in the United States’ democratic heritage against what is worst in its contemporary capitalist-imperialist reality. It is an appeal to the American working class to reassert the traditions of the struggle for democratic rights, and to understand that the defense of these rights is now possible only through the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program against the capitalist oligarchy.
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We welcome, on the WSWS, poetry, literary experiment and sustained engagement with the resources of artistic form, directed toward the building of the international socialist movement of the working class and the Fourth International. This is an essential element of the political tasks of the movement. The October Revolution unleashed a flowering of artistic experiment, which the Stalinist reaction strangled. The recovery of that tradition, and its further development, is among the responsibilities the movement must shoulder.
In this connection, the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site will be marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with an online webinar to which we have invited leading scholars of the Revolution. Among the issues to be taken up will be Lincoln’s place in American and world history—the place, that is, of the man who carried through the unfinished business of 1776, and whose work it now falls to the working class to complete on an international socialist foundation.
Fraternally,
David North
17. UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman issues letter to Nexteer workers: Prepare for strike action
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and rank-and-file socialist candidate for UAW president, issued a statement this week calling on Nexteer workers in Saginaw, Michigan to immediately prepare and launch a strike following their overwhelming strike authorization vote.
“The ball is in your court now. Do not give it back,” Lehman wrote in the statement, posted on his campaign website. He praised workers for rejecting two UAW-backed tentative agreements—first by 96 percent and then by 73 percent—and for forcing a strike authorization vote that the apparatus was determined to prevent, culminating in an 86 percent strike mandate, including 89 percent among production workers.
Lehman warned workers to reject any attempt by UAW Local 699 and the UAW International to use the strike vote as a pressure valve while continuing production. He pointed to the Local 699 Facebook message telling workers to keep reporting to work and stressing that a strike authorization vote “does NOT automatically” mean a strike—a statement Lehman described as “management’s voice wearing a union jacket.”
In his statement, Lehman argued that the bureaucracy’s call for “14 more days” to reach a deal is aimed at weakening workers’ leverage by giving Nexteer time to build inventory and the Big Three to cushion production disruptions. “The UAW is not using your strike authorization as a weapon against management,” he wrote. “It is delaying action and buying time for management while pretending to fight.”
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Lehman’s statement places the Nexteer contract fight in the broader historical trajectory of concessions imposed throughout the auto parts industry. He noted that parts workers once earned wages closer to Big Three assembly workers, but that the wage gap widened as the UAW apparatus isolated and defeated parts struggles during the 1980s and later paved the way for the spinoff of Delphi and the destruction of jobs, wages and pensions. He cited the tier system forcing workers to start at $19.50 and take four years to reach $27—essentially the same as what workers earned more than two decades ago under Delphi—and noted that if wages had kept pace with inflation, workers would be making “more than $45 an hour today.”
Central to Lehman’s appeal is the call to take control of the struggle out of the hands of officials. He urged workers to form an elected rank-and-file strike committee “composed of trusted workers from the shop floor and accountable only to the membership,” empowered to set a concrete strike deadline, oversee all information related to negotiations, and prevent any further closed-door agreements presented as a fait accompli.
Lehman also raised an immediate financial demand: $1,000 per week in strike pay from the UAW’s strike fund. “At current living costs, $500 a week is not meaningful strike support,” he wrote, calling it “a mechanism for weakening workers’ ability to sustain a struggle.”
Addressing the company’s threats to shift production to Mexico or Poland, Lehman emphasized international solidarity, rejecting nationalist competition. “Mexican workers are not your enemies. Polish workers are not your enemies,” he wrote, calling for workers to link up across borders through rank-and-file committees and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Lehman appealed directly to autoworkers at GM, Ford and Stellantis to honor Nexteer picket lines and refuse to handle scab parts, and urged parts workers at American Axle, Dana, Magna and Bridgewater—whose contracts are approaching expiration—to build rank-and-file committees.
Lehman concluded by tying the fight at Nexteer to the broader struggle over who controls production and society. “This struggle is about more than one contract,” he wrote. “It is about who controls the workplace, the union and ultimately society itself—an apparatus tied to management and the political establishment, or the workers who create all wealth.”
18. Israel faces a general election with all parties committed to war, repression and social devastation
Israel is preparing for a general election in which every Zionist party—Netanyahu’s ruling bloc, the ultra‑Orthodox factions, and the nominal opposition—enters the race on a single, unifying platform: the continuation and expansion of war.
The debate in the ruling elite is over how best to manage it, how to distribute the spoils, and how to suppress the growing internal contradictions produced by a society reorganized around permanent militarism.
The Knesset’s overwhelming vote to begin dissolving itself was triggered by the ultra‑Orthodox parties’ demand for a law exempting yeshiva students from compulsory military service—an exemption they have enjoyed for decades and which has become intolerable to a society now mobilised for total war. When the bill failed, they withdrew support from the governing coalition, forcing the move toward elections.
Netanyahu’s government, nearing the end of its four‑year term, follows one of the most politically unstable periods in Israel’s history: five elections in three and a half years, repeated failures to form viable coalitions, and the brief interlude of the Naftali Bennett/Yair Lapid “government of change—an incoherent alliance that collapsed within a year. Netanyahu returned to power in November 2022 at the head of the most extreme government Israel has ever seen, dominated by racist demagogues, settler leaders, and advocates of annexation and ethnic cleansing.
In the last days, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security caused international outrage over his treatment of the 450 abducted Gaza flotilla activists who the Israeli armed forces had seized in international waters and deported to Israel. He published a video on social media in which he was seen taunting the activists as they knelt on the floor with their hands tied.
Before October 7, Israel was already in a profound political crisis. Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul—an attempt to strip the courts of even their limited ability to restrain executive power—provoked seven months of mass protests, police violence, and refusals to serve by more than 10,000 reservists. The opposition leaders, many of whom had served in Netanyahu governments, postured as defenders of “democracy,” but they all shared Netanyahu’s strategic aims: the repression of Palestinians and the maintenance of Israel’s regional military dominance. Their fear was that Netanyahu’s open authoritarianism threatened the interests of Israel’s corporate and financial elite.
The October 7 attack ended even this shallow dissent. The Netanyahu government had spent months provoking a confrontation, ignoring warnings from Egypt and Israeli soldiers, and leaving the border effectively unguarded. At least 360 of the 1,200 Israeli deaths resulted from the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) own massive military operation, including the use of the secretive Hannibal Directive.
Within hours, the opposition declared full unity with the government and the IDF. Five opposition leaders—including former generals Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot—joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet on October 11. Their later resignations changed nothing. They remain fully committed to the war’s aims.
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The decisive issues confronting Israeli workers—the genocidal war on Gaza, the deepening occupation of the West Bank, settlement expansion, the US‑led war on Iran and confrontation with Hezbollah, and the erosion of democratic rights—are excluded from the electoral agenda as givens. So too is the economic crisis produced by the war and the government’s authoritarian restructuring.
Instead, the opposition focuses on a state inquiry into October 7, Netanyahu’s corruption trial, ultra‑Orthodox draft exemptions, and the growing influence of religious parties. These are secondary disputes within the Zionist state’s political leadership that is united on the essentials: war abroad, repression at home and the exclusion of Palestinians from political life.
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Israel has been transformed into a permanent war economy. Debt‑to‑GDP has risen to 69 percent. Defense spending reached 8 percent of GDP in 2024 and is set to climb further as the Iran war continues. The 2026 defense budget of nearly $50 billion guarantees worsening living costs, a deepening housing crisis—the issue that precipitated mass protests in 2011—and chronic underinvestment in transport, healthcare, education, and welfare. The VAT hike to 18 percent and the end of tax exemptions are already squeezing the middle class.
The workforce has been hollowed out by mass reserve call‑ups, especially in the tech and service sectors. Small businesses, particularly in the Galilee and periphery, are collapsing. Construction and agriculture remain crippled by the exclusion of Palestinian labor. Attempts to recruit Asian workers have failed to substantially increase house starts and prevent soaring housing costs.
Israel’s global “reputation risk” has surged. Foreign investors increasingly demand that companies base their operations abroad, threatening Israeli jobs and tax revenues. The Trump administration’s 15 percent tariff on Israel’s key chip and pharmaceutical exports further threatens employment and state revenues.
These pressures are tearing apart Israeli society. The middle class and high‑tech workforce—long the backbone of Israel’s economy—face falling incomes, rising taxes, and the burden of reserve duty, while watching the ultra‑Orthodox secure exemptions and expanded state funding. The result is a society in which every class fraction feels betrayed, overburdened, and increasingly hostile to others.
Israel is a garrison state whose ruling class sees perpetual war as the only means of maintaining its power. The coming election will only determine which faction of the Zionist political establishment presides over a deepening war, an expanding authoritarian state, and a worsening social crisis. The essential program—militarism, occupation, repression, and the exclusion of Palestinians—will remain untouched.
19. London Underground Train Operators speak on TfL’s compressed "four-day week"
“A young driver told the World Socialist Web Site, “I’m against this deal. Nothing management comes up with is done to benefit us. It is an attack on all our hard-won terms and conditions, going back 50 years when they were won.”
16. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
India:
South Korea:
17. Defend Bogdan Syrotiuk! Please add your name to our petition!
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.
