Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump and Xi to meet amid global eruption of imperialist war
In the six months since their meeting on the margins of the APEC summit in South Korea, the United States has kidnapped the president of Venezuela, launched a war against Iran and blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a global energy and food crisis. China is the largest destination for oil exports from both Iran and Venezuela, and the wars Trump has launched against these countries are the opening clashes of a global conflict targeting China itself.
Amid the worldwide conflagration launched by Trump, the New York Times led its Monday edition with an article titled, “As Trump Heads to Beijing, China Is ‘Locked and Loaded’ for a Fight.”
In fact, it is Trump’s White House that is “locked and loaded.” For months, the US military has been blowing boats out of the water in the Caribbean and Pacific, massacring civilians on the claim that they were smuggling drugs, and seizing tankers in international waters on the pretext that they were carrying “sanctioned” oil. American forces have killed more than 3,000 Iranians, and on April 7 Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
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In traveling to Beijing, Trump will bring with him a variety of carrots and sticks. On the carrot side, he has in tow a retinue of top CEOs and finance chiefs, including Tim Cook (Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla), Larry Fink (BlackRock), Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone), David Solomon (Goldman Sachs), Jane Fraser (Citi), and executives from Boeing, Cargill, Meta, Micron, Qualcomm, Visa and Mastercard. Various deals will be proffered, beneficial to both sides.
Underlying everything, however, is the constant threat of a major escalation of economic and military action against Beijing.
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The Trump–Xi summit takes place amid the basic strategic dilemma confronting the US ruling class: The protracted erosion of American economic supremacy, which Washington has sought to offset through ever more aggressive military force, has coincided with—and been intensified by—the continued growth of China.
The corporate media plays a central role in this turn, presenting China’s economic and technological development, carried out through trade, investment and industrial expansion, and within the formal framework of the “free trade” rules the United States itself promoted for decades, as a physical threat that allegedly “justifies” coercion, blockade and war.
Years of escalating tariffs and technology bans have not strangled Chinese industry. They have instead imposed vast costs on American workers through higher prices and economic dislocation, while failing to alter the underlying trajectory. China’s industrial position is demonstrated in the most concrete figures: The automaker BYD outsold Tesla globally in 2025 by more than 600,000 vehicles, shipping 2.26 million fully electric cars—kept out of the American market only through an extraordinary 247.5 percent tariff.
Chinese firms now ship roughly four out of every five humanoid robots produced worldwide, with Unitree alone aiming for 20,000 units this year after shipping 5,500 in 2025. The drone manufacturer DJI dominates the American consumer drone market and holds a commanding share of commercial drones internationally. In AI, open-source Chinese large language models have closed to within a benchmark point of America’s “flagship” systems at a fraction of the cost.
But the publications of American imperialism never ask the obvious question: Why is China so rapidly approaching, and in some areas overtaking, the US economy? After all, the United States had a massive head start. In 1980, it accounted for about 25 percent of world GDP, while China’s share was 2 percent.
For decades, American policy has been driven by one purpose: The engorgement of the ruling elite at any cost. American imperialism pursued a policy of financialization that enriched that class, presided over the destruction of US industry and waged wars across the world. The federal debt now approaches $40 trillion, fueled by American wars, militarism and the endless bailouts of the rich.
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The American oligarchy will not accept a diminished position in the world. Whatever the specific outcome of the summit, US imperialism is preparing for what Trump’s actions this year have pointed toward—a war against China itself, for which the conflicts in Iran, Lebanon, Ukraine, Venezuela and the Caribbean are the laboratory, the rehearsal and the opening clashes.
The Democratic Party has criticized the Trump administration for being insufficiently concentrated on the confrontation with Beijing. Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Fox News Sunday that “President Trump is going into this meeting terribly weakened,” adding: “There’s a stalemate now. The Iranians are holding 20 percent of the world’s oil at risk.”
The Democrats’ concern is not the criminality of the war, but that the debacle in the Middle East diverts resources and credibility from the central objective: escalating the conflict with China.
The Chinese bureaucracy offers no progressive way out. It is bound to the world capitalist market and to the defense of national state interests, and it has repeatedly sought an accommodation with imperialism—an accommodation that Washington is increasingly unwilling and unable to grant.
The crisis can be resolved only through the independent intervention of the international working class, uniting workers in the United States, China and throughout the world in a common struggle against war, dictatorship and the capitalist system that produces both.
2. Mamdani faces backlash after NYPD aids ICE at Brooklyn hospital
Community members in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, spontaneously protested the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center last week.
In response, the New York Police Department (NYPD), overseen by police commissioner and billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch, attacked and arrested protesters, clearing the path for ICE operations. This collaboration between NYPD and ICE directly violates New York City’s sanctuary laws and has led to a wave of denunciations of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
According to reports, federal immigration agents brought Nigerian immigrant Chidozie Wilson Okeke to Wyckoff hospital for medical assistance for injuries sustained during ICE’s violent arrest. In a video of the arrest that has circulated on social media, Okeke is tasered in his car and screams, “Somebody help me! They are killing me!”
Hundreds of residents gathered outside the hospital late Saturday night as word spread that ICE was preparing to remove Okeke. NYPD officers arrived in force, issued dispersal orders and moved against the crowd. Videos show a masked agent pepper-spraying protesters and police officers shoving demonstrators, throwing them to the ground, restraining them and clearing a path for federal agents to leave while dragging Okeke away in restraints. Nine protesters were arrested.
The hospital reportedly barred Alex Franco, an immigration and human rights lawyer contacted by Okeke’s family, from entering the emergency room and speaking with their client. Franco told the New York Times, “They basically said that they had to medically clear the person, the detainee, before I was allowed access. And I explained to them, ‘Look, I’ve done this before, show me where that policy is. Because as soon as he’s discharged, ICE is going to take him away. So, you are essentially denying them the right to counsel.’”
In response to these events, Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), told a press conference that there was no prior coordination between the NYPD and ICE and framed the incident as merely a matter of public order. He said the NYPD was simply “responding to 911 calls regarding a protest outside the hospital” and that “our laws leave no room for interpretation about the fact that our NYPD will not participate in civil immigration enforcement.” Mamdani thus denied the facts: The NYPD had actively facilitated the removal of an ICE detainee. Following Mamdani’s logic, ICE only has to call 911 whenever they need the NYPD to secure an area to carry out ICE raids.
City Council member Sandy Nurse, who was at the protest, wrote on X that she witnessed “direct coordination between ICE and the NYPD, with officers cordoning off the ambulance bay to allow ICE to move the individual into their vehicles and leave.” Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso also accused the police department of supporting a deportation operation: “escorting and supporting ICE as they brought the detainee into the car, helping them close the door to the car.”
A group of “progressive” Democratic supporters of Mamdani, including Nurse, Reynoso, US Representative Nydia Velázquez, New York State Senator and DSA member Julia Salazar and City Council member Jennifer Gutiérrez issued a letter to the mayor stating that police “coordinated on the ground with ICE agents” and called for NYPD reforms. But rather than demanding that the mayor resist ICE raids in New York City, they wrote, “Officers arriving at a scene where federal agents are already operating cannot be left to improvise. They need a bright-line rule, communicated up and down the chain of command, that informs them when to disengage, when to step back, when to refuse a request for assistance and how to document what they observed.”
It is noteworthy that Politico wrote the following about the letter: “The fact that Mamdani’s elected supporters opted to call him out in such a direct way is a strong indication elements of his base are growing frustrated with his handling of public safety issues—and his perceived drift to the political center since entering City Hall.”
Contrary to the Democrats’ claims, however, the NYPD under Tisch is not improvising. The police officers’ actions in Bushwick were not mistakes but the state policy of the ruling class. In December 2025, the NYPD deployed the notorious Strategic Response Group (Mamdani campaigned on the promise to disband the Strategic Response Group but did not) against a similar anti-ICE confrontation in Lower Manhattan. Police used force to clear a path for agents, violently assaulted and pepper-sprayed demonstrators and arrested 12 protesters before ICE retreated due to the protesters’ effective human chains.
Following this episode, Mamdani released a video in which he feigned opposition to the ICE attack but told viewers not to “impede their [police] investigation, resist arrest or run.” As we wrote at the time:
The essential political content of the video is, however, that the NYPD will arrest anyone who interferes with ICE operations. The intended audience of the video is the NYPD brass and the Trump administration. The video seeks to reassure them that a Mamdani government will uphold ICE operations in the city. It is worth noting that since Mamdani met with Trump in November, he has not posted a single item on social media criticizing Trump.
The pact between Trump and Mamdani has a concrete—and chilling—meaning: Mamdani will allow the work of the repressive apparatus of the state in the city, in this case primarily the NYPD, to continue unimpeded.
This is the significance of his reappointment of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the pioneer of one of the most sinister mechanisms of repression aimed at the working class, the NYPD’s mass surveillance tools.
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Most recently, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan warned that if New York state advances measures limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities, the government will “flood” New York with “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen before.”
Mamdani campaigned on the promise to be “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare” but instead has courted him and openly crafted a cordial “partnership” with the fascist. Following Mamdani’s second White House meeting with Trump, the WSWS wrote that this was “an act of treachery aimed at forging an alliance with the far right.”
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Workers, immigrants and youth rightly see ICE as an armed instrument of state terror. Mamdani and the pseudo-left speak the language of sanctuary while preserving a police apparatus that collaborates with federal agents and suppresses popular opposition. The struggle against deportations, police violence and authoritarianism cannot be waged through appeals for cosmetic NYPD reform or pressure on the Democratic Party. What is required is the independent political mobilization of the working class—uniting workers, immigrants and youth in a common struggle against ICE, the capitalist state, war and dictatorship.
3. Major global bank takes a private credit hit
According to the Financial Stability Board (FSB), the share of assets under management sourced by retail investors has risen from virtually zero to 13 percent over the past decade. But there is a difference between institutions and retail investors. Institutions tend to invest longer term while individuals want quick access to their money if problem signs emerge. But the investments by private credit are in longer-term, relatively illiquid assets, not easily turned into cash at a profit, they can only provide for limited redemptions of investors’ funds.
The FSB said this situation “could increase potential vulnerabilities related to liquidity mismatches” because notwithstanding disclosures “retail investors may not fully understand the illiquidity of the asset class, which may amplify redemption requests during stress episodes.”
It is not quite a run on the banks, but mass redemptions could turn into the credit market equivalent. A recent article in the Murdoch-owned Australian said the decisions by some major funds, including Apollo and Blue Owl, “to invoke contractual withdrawal limits” marked the “most significant liquidity crisis in alternative credit since the global financial crisis.”
Inflation and the rise in interest rates, generally tightening credit conditions, have focused more attention on the private credit market after it grew at an exponential rate in the period of ultra-low interest rates which prevailed from 2009 to 2022.
One of the practices under scrutiny is the selling of assets by private equity investors. The modus operandi is to buy assets in the expectation they will be able to be sold at a later point realising a profit, after some “restructuring”—above all reductions in labour costs—has been carried out.
But the rise in interest rates has tended to lower the market value of such assets and made them harder to sell at a profit. Consequently, an increasing number of private equity firms are using what are known as continuation vehicles.
These are new funds set up by the original fund to which the assets are then sold, avoiding the necessity to bring them to the open market where they would register a loss. Another advantage is that this practice also generates valuable fees.
One might well wonder how such practices are even legal. But they are becoming increasingly used. The Institutional Limited Partners Association, which represents some of the world’s biggest pension and sovereign wealth funds, has estimated that last year transactions with continuation vehicles amounted to one fifth of all buyout exits.
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Last year there were more than $100 billion worth of sales into continuation vehicles, up from $70 billion the year before and just $7 billion or less a decade ago.
Insurance companies have been one of the major backers of private credit because they cannot obtain a sufficient rate of return from their traditional operations in the public market.
This has brought a warning from the former Apollo risk manager, Chak Raghunathan, who told the FT in an interview that some insurance companies would not be able to manage policy holder funds in a downturn.
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In 2011, the Senate report on the 2008 financial crisis found that it was the “result of high-risk, complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, credit rating agencies and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.”
Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the subcommittee, which carried out the investigation, said it had found “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
No one, however, was prosecuted for what was clearly criminal activity in many cases. Goldman Sachs, for example, sold financial products which it knew were going to fail. The Obama administration took the decision that, having bailed out the financial system on the basis that it was too big to fail, it also determined that those responsible were too big to jail.
The outcome of the Senate investigation was the Dodd-Frank Act which imposed some limited restrictions on the financial operations of the banks. But it is in the very nature of finance capital, rapacious in its never-ending search for profit and willing to use all means necessary to achieve this objective, that it found ways around these attempts at containment.
And one of the means developed was the growth of the private credit, which may be as large as $3.5 trillion, and which is starting to exhibit some of the features which characterized the financial system prior to 2008.
4. Governments downplay pandemic risk as MV Hondius hantavirus cases mount in US, Europe
The hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius is rapidly unfolding into an unmitigated disaster, exposing capitalist governments’ continued war on public health. In the 36 hours since passengers and crew began disembarking in Tenerife, Spain on Sunday, the number of confirmed and probable cases of the highly lethal Andes virus has jumped from eight to 11, with new infections detected in returning passengers in the United States, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain. Three passengers—a Dutch couple and a German woman—are dead, two of them confirmed by laboratory testing to have been caused by the virus and a third pending confirmation.
The numbers will almost certainly grow. The incubation period for Andes hantavirus may extend to 42 days, meaning every one of the 147 passengers and crew evacuated from the vessel—and every contact they encountered on the cascade of government-chartered flights now dispersing them across Europe, North America, Asia and the Pacific—must be regarded as potentially infected. They have arrived in communities that received little to no prior warning and in many cases have no contact tracing mechanisms in place. This amounts to the deliberate international seeding of a lethal pathogen that has demonstrated human-to-human transmission, with a fatality rate of roughly 40 percent among severely ill patients.
The Andes strain is the only hantavirus known to spread between humans, transmitted through close, prolonged contact with an infected person’s saliva, respiratory secretions or other body fluids. There is no vaccine and no specific treatment; survival depends on prompt hospitalization and supportive care—hydration, artificial respiration, dialysis.
Conditions aboard the Hondius made suppression all but impossible once the outbreak took hold. The Dutch-flagged vessel, owned by Oceanwide Expeditions, departed Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1 on a 33-day voyage to Antarctica and remote South Atlantic islands, carrying around 150 passengers and crew of 23 nationalities in 95 cabins. For weeks, the virus circulated in the closed, high-contact environment in which it spreads most readily.
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Returning passengers of the Hondius are falling ill in the United States and across Europe. Early Monday morning, 15 US citizens and one British national living in the United States landed at Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Nebraska, on a government medical flight and were immediately transported to the National Quarantine Unit. Two more were flown to Atlanta, where they are being monitored at Emory Hospital. Upon arrival, one American passenger tested positive for the hantavirus, and another began showing symptoms, with both traveling in the aircraft’s biocontainment units.
This came alongside an alarming development in France. A French woman who was among five French people evacuated from the Hondius and repatriated to Paris on Sunday also tested positive for the virus. French Health Minister Stéphanie Rist confirmed Monday that her condition is deteriorating.
Cases are spreading across Europe. A passenger of the Hondius who returned home to Switzerland via flights through South Africa and Qatar has now tested positive. The ship’s doctor, who tested positive for the virus, was evacuated to the Netherlands, where 12 staff of the Radboud Hospital in Nijmegen have been placed in quarantine after procedural errors in handling him. In Spain, a Spanish passenger has been placed in isolation at Gómez Ulla military hospital in Madrid after testing positive.
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While the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) classified its hantavirus response as Level 3, the lowest of three CDC emergency activation levels, the protocols it activated tell a different story. Hondius passengers were flown on a government medical flight to Omaha, Nebraska, to be assessed for early-stage hantavirus symptoms, including fever, muscle aches and diarrhea at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Anyone who falls ill could be transferred to the nearby Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
The National Quarantine Unit is described by Nebraska Medicine as the only federally funded quarantine unit in the United States designed to safely house and monitor people who may have been exposed to high-consequence infectious diseases. Its 20 single-person rooms are fitted with negative air pressure systems to contain airborne pathogens. It previously treated patients during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and among the first COVID-19 patients evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in 2020.
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The French government held an emergency meeting Monday afternoon, after identifying 22 French people exposed to the virus on flights taking Hondius passengers home. These individuals are to be held in a 42-day quarantine, while the cabinet insists the risk is low.
The Spanish Health Ministry insisted “all measures” had been taken “with the objective of breaking potential chains of transmission”—a statement aimed at defusing public anger after protests broke out in Tenerife against the arrival of the vessel. Photos have since emerged of a Hondius passenger on the bus to his repatriation flight with his FFP2 mask pushed down below his nose and mouth, provoking outrage on social media.
The Hondius outbreak is unfolding amid the ongoing dismantling of public health infrastructure in every major capitalist country. The same forces that allowed more than 27 million people worldwide to die in the COVID-19 pandemic are now actively dispersing carriers of a virus many times more lethal than SARS-CoV-2, while telling the public to remain calm. The crisis exposes the incompatibility of public health with the profit interests of the ruling class.
Kamara Bond, a production worker at the Dana Incorporated auto parts plant in Warren, Michigan, was fired twice for reporting dangerous working conditions on the shop floor. Chemical exposures, high temperatures and poor ventilation at the Detroit area factory could have very well contributed to the death of her co-worker Anthony King in October 2025 and an unidentified janitorial contract worker in 2024.
The Fortune 500 corporation, which employs 28,000 people in 33 countries, reported $610 million in 2025 profits on $7.5 billion in sales revenue. In an investor call last month Dana executives boasted they achieved $35 million in cost reductions during the first quarter and were on schedule to slash $325 million as part of its Dana 2030 plan.
Dana workers in Warren produce axle, driveshaft, suspension and steering components for some of the most profitable vehicles sold by General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. Far from being protected by United Auto Workers Local 155, workers say union officials have allowed management to sacrifice their health and safety for profit.
Kamara reached out to the World Socialist Web Site to share her story and encourage her coworkers to come forward with information on Anthony King’s death. She said workers had to prepare for a fight when the current UAW agreement expires on May 22.
6. US rural healthcare collapse accelerates under Medicaid cuts and privatization
Rural hospitals are in a continued and escalating state of crisis, impacting the health outcomes for an estimated 60 million Americans. One-third of all rural healthcare facilities nationwide are at risk of closing, according to an analysis from Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. This represents a staggering 734 rural hospitals.
This crisis is the product of decades of subordinating healthcare to the profit motive. But it is now being dramatically accelerated by the Trump administration’s open offensive against every social program won by the working class in the 20th century. Driven by a frenzy for profit and the demands of imperialist war preparation, the ruling class is demolishing what remains of the public health infrastructure.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law by Trump on July 4, 2025, is the legislative centerpiece of this assault. It authorizes one of the largest redistributions of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest in American history, making permanent $3.8 trillion in tax cuts overwhelmingly benefiting corporations and the rich, while gutting the social programs working people depend on.
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The crisis extends far beyond hospitals. According to a report released last year by Good RX, approximately 81 percent of counties in the United States are considered healthcare deserts in at least one category, meaning large portions of the population have limited access to critical services like pharmacies, primary care, hospitals, hospital beds, trauma centers or community health centers. Estimates suggest that over 120 million Americans, roughly one in three, reside in counties identified as healthcare deserts.
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The Trump administration is attempting to cover up their demolition of the rural healthcare system. At a House Ways and Means Committee hearing last month, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked about the crisis of rural healthcare by Adrian Smith, a Republican representative from Nebraska. Kennedy responded saying, “Last week I went to Arizona to announce an unprecedented $125 million investment in community health centers which are serving 39 million Americans mainly in rural areas around the country.”
Kennedy is trying to claim credit for a $125 million investment in community health centers while simultaneously supporting and defending the gutting of Medicaid, which is the primary source of funding for those very same community health centers. He went on to say, “President Trump made the biggest investment in rural health care in American history, a $50 billion rural health transformation fund.”
The Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) is not a panacea for rural healthcare. It is an accounting offset designed to facilitate large-scale austerity and the marketization of rural care, while providing political cover for the destruction of permanent public health entitlements. Passed as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the $50 billion is distributed over a five-year period and is conditional upon an agreed investment plan between the state and federal government, including restricting access to certain funds for states that are not adopting “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) policies.
Additionally, the $40 billion in cuts to the HHS last year directly impacted rural healthcare funding through the elimination of grants. The World Socialist Web Site described these cuts as “a deliberate, fascistic effort to destroy the infrastructure of scientific research and public health that underpins modern society. The aim is to return the working class to conditions of social misery and industrial exploitation not seen since the 19th century.”
The Trump administration has made unmistakably clear that the subordination of society to war is their explicit program. At a closed Easter lunch at the White House last month, Trump stated it in plain terms: “Don’t send any money for daycare—we’re fighting wars. ... It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare. ... We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” He dismissed Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as “little scams.”
On the evening of May 7, agents operating under the direction of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), together with university police, barred researchers from entering six rooms in a biology laboratory at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington, halting ongoing experiments and establishing a de facto police occupation of the facility.
The primary target was the laboratory of Distinguished Professor of Biology Roger Innes. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Innes has pioneered research on plant immune systems that holds the potential of increasing global crop yields and mitigating the need for toxic agricultural chemicals. The sudden closure of his workspace is the latest escalation in a campaign of terror against scientists of Chinese descent. The police state operation is no longer limited to international researchers. It is now directed as well at senior American-born faculty.
This campaign is aimed at whipping up anti-Chinese sentiment in preparation for war against US imperialism’s greatest economic rival, a nuclear power, intensifying the war against immigrants and imposing a fascistic, America-first ideology on university campuses.
The IU administration has not defended Innes. A memorandum issued by IU Vice President for Research Russell J. Mumper stated the university was “notified by the US Department of Agriculture that they will be engaging in activity in a laboratory” and that “the actions taking place are being directed by federal authorities, and the university is cooperating as required.”
The government has targeted this laboratory because Professor Innes has taken a principled and courageous stand against the persecution of Chinese scientists. When the FBI and the Department of Justice began manufacturing “agroterrorism” cases against Chinese researchers, Innes intervened to expose the scientific fraud underpinning the prosecutions.
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Indiana University is deeply integrated into the military-industrial complex through agreements with Naval Support Activity (NSA) Crane and the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane Division, the third largest naval installation globally. IU President Pamela Whitten recently renewed an Educational Partnership Agreement with NSA Crane, establishing shared technology spaces on campus. IU has committed $53.5 million to expand research partnerships with defense applications, focusing on artificial intelligence and microelectronics funded by the Department of Defense.
The militarization of campus life is an institutional expression of Washington’s preparations for a catastrophic war. American imperialism must purge scientists with ties to China in order to convert universities into secure nodes of the military-industrial complex.
In July 2025, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a sweeping “National Agriculture Security Action Plan,” framing American agriculture as a theater of war against China. When asked about the prosecuted U-M researchers, Rollins said, “We’re tracking and very well aware of the Michigan case, but there are others as well.”
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What is unfolding at IU and U-M is a concentrated expression of the terminal crisis of American capitalism. The ruling class can no longer tolerate free scientific inquiry and international collaboration and is herding the population toward a catastrophic war against China. This operation can be stopped only through the independent political mobilization of the working class and the building of an international anti-war movement rooted in the working class and based on a socialist program.
8. German imperialism’s third campaign for world domination
This speech was delivered by Christoph Vandreier, National Secretary of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Germany), at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
9. Youth, conscription and the war on socialist opposition
This speech was delivered by Tamino Dreisam, Leader of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (Germany), at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
One day before the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale, the massive global art exhibition, thousands of marchers took to the city’s narrow streets to protest Israeli genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon. Marchers included many of the festival’s artists and workers who took strike action and closed for a day an estimated twenty-seven of the Biennale’s 100 national pavilions. Signs on a number of the pavilions read “We Stand with Palestine.”
The strikers and demonstrators were responding to a call from the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), supported by a number of other activist groups. ANGA announced that the action was the largest of its kind in the history of the Biennale, which runs from May 9 to November 22.
In a press release ANGA declared
Israel has killed over 73,000 people in Gaza, with a further 10,000 missing. It has systematically destroyed hospitals, schools, refugee camps, cultural institutions, and civilian infrastructure. Its leadership faces ICC arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Biennale knows this and it chooses to accommodate Israel anyway.
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While angry resistance to Israeli participation has come from grass-roots organizations such as ANGA, leading European institutions have exerted strong pressure on the Biennale through a combination of political condemnation, funding threats and diplomatic pressure in an attempt to block Russia’s participation at the art festival.
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All of this reeks of intense and obscene hypocrisy. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a reactionary action taken by the Putin regime, but it was a war deliberately and transparently provoked by NATO to weaken Russia and create conditions for its eventual carve-up. As for “democracy,” Zelensky rules in Ukraine as a dictator, who has banned political opposition and locked up opponents. All the NATO powers that instigated the war against Russia and now piously denounce its presence in Venice have enthusiastically supported the mass slaughter in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon.
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The latest demonstrations and protests in Venice confirm that a significant layer of artists and cultural workers are determined to oppose the genocidal policy of Israel supported by Western governments, including the far-right Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni.
11. Amid dozens of spy flights over Cuba, US sanctions drive out foreign companies
Even as the administration of Donald Trump continues its war against Iran—provoking the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical commercial waterways—the Pentagon is escalating preparations for a devastating regime-change war against Cuba.
A report by CNN based on publicly available aviation data reveals a dramatic surge in US military intelligence flights around the island. “Since February 4,” CNN reported, “the US Navy and Air Force have conducted at least 25 such flights using manned aircraft and drones, most of them near the country’s two biggest cities, Havana and Santiago de Cuba, and some coming within 40 miles of the coast, according to FlightRadar24.”
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The aggressive posture was underscored on May 6 when Secretary of State Marco Rubio was photographed at the headquarters of US Southern Command in Doral, Florida, standing before a map of Cuba.
These flights are not routine patrols, but intelligence-gathering missions designed to map strategic targets that go hand-in-hand with the escalating measures to shut down the Cuban economy and any ability to fend off an attack.
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On May 1, after threatening to “take Cuba immediately,” Trump issued the most aggressive sanctions yet imposed on the island. The executive order threatens to cut off from the US-dominated financial system any company conducting business with Cuba.
Under the order, Rubio announced sanctions last week against the military-commercial conglomerate GAESA, its executive Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera, and the mining company Moa Nickel. GAESA, closely linked to the Castro family, is estimated to hold stakes in roughly 40 percent of Cuban enterprises.
These latest sanctions continue the tactical shift away from earlier licensing arrangements that had permitted US capital to penetrate Cuba through the private sector and through contacts with figures connected to the Castro family and GAESA itself. Washington is now waging all-out economic warfare while preparing broader intervention.
Washington has set June 5 as the deadline for foreign firms to terminate any operations involving GAESA, and Rubio warned that additional sanctions are imminent.
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Washington’s claims that Cuba—a small island nation of fewer than 10 million people—constitutes a national security threat to the United States are transparently absurd. Allegations that Havana harbors Russian or Chinese spy bases, moreover, are propaganda devices aimed at manufacturing public support for aggression.
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As in the cases of Venezuela and Iran, the Trump administration is waging a global counterrevolutionary campaign against any government that challenges, however partially or inconsistently, Washington’s domination over world resources, markets and strategic territories. The target is not merely the Cuban government but the remaining historical legacy of the anti-colonial and social struggles of the twentieth century.
The Chinese Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution—all of them shaped, albeit in various distorted manners, by the immense influence of the Russian Revolution—represented blows against imperialist domination. Today, US imperialism seeks to erase every remaining social and political consequence of those upheavals.
Rubio himself has repeatedly framed US foreign policy as a crusade against what he calls “godless communist revolutions” and anti-colonial uprisings dating back to 1945. Behind the language of “democracy” and “security” lies an attempt to reimpose direct imperialist domination over the entire world.
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The Trump administration’s blockade and threats of military action against Havana, its bombing of fishermen in the Caribbean and Pacific, and overall onslaught against the region is part of the same strategy that places migrants in concentration camps and orders federal forces to kill protesters in US streets.
US imperialism is responding to its unprecedented crisis by seeking to transform the entire continent and world into a vast killing field, a captive market of cheap labor, plundered resources and surveilled populations administered by puppet regimes answerable not to their own people but to Wall Street.
The working class across the hemisphere, and above all inside the United States itself, must intervene as an independent political force to halt any military aggression against Cuba, to free every migrant held in American detention and to break the stranglehold of imperialism over the continent.
12. BioNTech: Profit takes precedence over health—and 1,860 employees lose their jobs in Germany
The Mainz-based biopharmaceutical company BioNTech is halting COVID-19 vaccine production in Germany, closing almost all its German production sites and cutting 1,860 jobs. The sites in Marburg, Idar-Oberstein and Singapore, as well as the recently acquired CureVac plants in Tübingen and Wiesbaden, are to be wound up. The group, which has earned billions from COVID-19 vaccines, aims to save €500 million a year with these drastic cutbacks.
This is a severe blow to the affected workers, who have done an admirable job in helping to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the pandemic is far from over. Last year, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) recorded almost 150,000 infections and 2,551 reported deaths linked to COVID-19 in Germany. That is seven deaths per day, although the actual figure is likely to be significantly higher, as testing for coronavirus has virtually ceased.
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For almost two years now, since late 2024, the BioNTech board has been hinting that the cutting of around a thousand jobs was planned, including 300 IT positions. Many workers who had the opportunity subsequently moved to other companies. But now that management is moving towards mass redundancies and site closures, the chances of those made redundant finding new work are significantly worse.
The redundancies come at a time when other chemical giants (BASF, Bayer, Evonik and many others) are also responding to the energy and sales crisis resulting from the war in Iran with mass redundancies. In total, between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs are currently at risk in the sector, and redundancies are also being made in industry, the banking sector and the IT sector.
Hypocritically, BioNTech has offered the redundant staff the chance to reapply for positions within the company’s cancer research division. The group intends to focus entirely on the development of cancer drugs, a move that applies both to the current co-CEOs, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, and to the remaining BioNTech management in Mainz. Şahin and Türeci plan to set up their own new company for this purpose and will step down from their leadership roles by the end of the year at the latest.
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BioNTech has profited enormously from the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically from scientific research findings that were publicly accessible and deliberately not geared towards profit. The start-up joined forces with the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to market its COVID-19 vaccine—the first to receive approval—worldwide. As the WSWS wrote: “The mRNA technology on which the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine is based was developed at publicly funded universities. Private firms only showed interest once huge profits beckoned. And even then, they were generally supported and backed by public funds.”
The entire vaccine development process was only possible because outstanding researchers and scientists such as Professor Zhang Yongzhen in Shanghai sequenced the virus’s genome and made it available free of charge on open-source platforms. It was only such actions that enabled BioNTech/Pfizer, Moderna and other pharmaceutical companies to develop their vaccines so rapidly.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020, the governments of the EU, the UK and the US provided generous funding for research: In the case of BioNTech/Pfizer, this included a €100 million development loan from the European Investment Bank and a €365 million grant from the German government, alongside advance payments from the US government, which were effectively interest-free loans.
BioNTech’s share price skyrocketed, from €13 in October 2019 to €150 in 2021. On this basis, the pharmaceutical group generated billions in profits. According to the Handelsblatt, sales of the COVID-19 vaccine brought BioNTech just under €19 billion at its peak, of which the company still holds assets worth over €15 billion to €16 billion today.
German politicians, particularly the then-Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democrats), kept a protective hand over the private company. When in 2021 more than 100 WTO member states, led by India and South Africa, called for a suspension of patent protection to enable poor countries to develop vaccines rapidly, the Merkel government opposed the patent suspension with all its might. Angela Merkel is said to have personally phoned Uğur Şahin to reassure him on this matter.
One consequence of the rigid patent protection was, among other things, that barely 2 percent of the population in Africa could be vaccinated, with fatal consequences that have, however, received little public attention. The catastrophically poor reporting systems simply ignored the coronavirus death tolls in large parts of Africa. In Zambia, for example, only ten percent of COVID-19 deaths with a positive PCR test were actually recorded as coronavirus deaths. At the same time, new variants such as Omicron were able to emerge in these regions and spread rapidly across the globe.
At every turn and on every issue, the capitalist logic of profit has been and continues to be prioritized over public health and the public good. Fierce patent disputes between competing pharmaceutical companies mean that scientific discoveries and research findings with immense potential become a bone of contention between competing capital interests. Publicly researched knowledge, which belongs to everyone, is being privatized; the risks are socialised and borne by the taxpayer, while the profits are appropriated entirely for private gain.
Manroland Sheetfed GmbH, once the world’s third-largest manufacturer of printing presses and Offenbach’s biggest employer, will cease operations there on June 1, 2026. The final 744 employees are losing their jobs, 660 on June 1 and the remaining 84 at the end of the year, when the factory is wound down. On March 6, Langley Holdings initiated provisional self-administration proceedings and appointed an insolvency administrator. At a works meeting on April 20, workers were informed of the definitive closure. The works council and IG Metall union are demanding a “transfer company” be established for those dismissed.
It is impossible to speak about the end of Manroland in Offenbach without looking back at the breakup of the corporation 14 years ago. And anyone speaking about the insolvency at the turn of 2011-2012 must also address the role played by IG Metall.
It is thanks to the union that a workforce of more than 6,600 highly trained and militant workers at three sites—Offenbach, Augsburg and Plauen—could be misled, divided, deceived and massively attacked for two months without resistance. The course was set back then for today’s disgraceful ending in Offenbach.
When Langley Holdings, a privately owned British engineering and industrial manufacturing group, took over Manroland Offenbach in February 2012, the company had already been broken into pieces with the Augsburg and Plauen sites separated off and sold. More than 2,000 jobs were destroyed, and the remaining workforce stripped of pension rights and entitlements won through decades of struggle.
At the time, the Frankfurter Rundschau, the Offenbach Post and IG Metall praised the takeover and re-establishment of the firm as Manroland Sheetfed GmbH under the direction of Langley Holdings as “the best solution for Offenbach”. The new owner Anthony Langley was hailed as a “white knight” and “Robin Hood.” The World Socialist Web Site, by contrast, warned on February 7, 2012:
In reality, the new owners are not interested in the production of printing machines, and certainly not in the future of workers and their families. … Realistically, one must assume that the new owners seized the favorable opportunity to acquire the best “crown jewels” for little money. They are primarily interested in conducting financial transactions worth millions.
This assessment has been fully confirmed. At no point did Anthony Langley, chairman and CEO of Langley Holdings, provide any guarantee for jobs at Manroland. Remarking that “The situation is not sustainable,” he has now decided the ultra-modern Manroland production facility, which can look back on more than 155 years of experience in printing press technology, will close on June 1.
Manroland workers, many of whom have been employed there for 30 years or longer, and who built up the Offenbach factory as skilled professional workers, are now losing everything. Langley’s wealth, by contrast, which stood at $368 million in 2011, is today estimated at around $3.6 billion—a tenfold increase in his fortune. He owns two large yachts, a seven-seat helicopter and a private jet, as well as a sailing club.
His fortune had “really taken off steeply from 2005 onwards,” Langley boasted to Forbes. He was referring to the start of his activity as a so-called “locust,” buying up troubled companies, carving them up, selling profitable sections at a gain and bleeding the rest dry.
This development was foreseeable: billions for the capitalists, unemployment and hopelessness for the workers who built everything. It is the result of IG Metall’s refusal at the time to fight for jobs. That is why a look back at the history of Manroland is of the greatest significance today for all metalworkers and engineers—whether at VW, Thyssen, Bosch or other plants threatened with job cuts and closure. It contains vital lessons.
The most important lesson is this: IG Metall will abandon anyone who relies on it. What is necessary is the building of rank-and-file action committees independent of IG Metall and all the unions, capable of acting on the basis of a socialist and international program.
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The WSWS exposed the betrayal and sell-out by IG Metall relentlessly and almost in real time. Its statements circulated from hand to hand in the factory and caused great unrest because workers knew that what the WSWS wrote was true. The sell-out by IG Metall was so obvious that even the Offenbach Post took up the issue.
On January 21, 2012, its then editor-in-chief Frank Pröse wrote under the headline “Uneasy feelings” about the WSWS article “Manroland is being broken up with the help of the union,” which had appeared the previous day: “Yes, we are moving onto thin ice when we quote Ulrich Rippert of the World Socialist Web Site, who sees the breakup of ‘Manroland’ as a rigged game. But there are good reasons for this assessment.”
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The union functionaries of the works council leadership, the shop stewards and the IG Metall headquarters reacted to the intervention of the Trotskyists with anger and hostility. When a WSWS team attempted to attend a meeting on December 7, 2011 concerning the future of the plant, they were denounced as “splitters” and thrown out of the hall.
One union official complained: “You are driving a wedge between the workers and IG Metall,” while a shop steward lamented that he had come directly from a Manroland workshop where the WSWS leaflet had caused great commotion, making it difficult for him to convince workers of IG Metall’s standpoint.
At a meeting of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party), Ulrich Rippert stressed that the right to work and a decent wage as an elementary democratic right stood higher than the profit interests of management and shareholders, and that it was necessary to build action committees and prepare a factory occupation.
Rippert said: “I am not speaking of a symbolic action, a few red flags at the main gate and limited protest actions with radical speeches, but of a serious occupation strike aimed at drawing the other sites and other factories threatened with redundancies into a broad resistance.” The insolvency had to be understood for what it really was: part of a social counterrevolution.
Today this social counterrevolution is far advanced. Many of the Manroland workers now being dismissed are being driven into unemployment and poverty in old age, and, if they are young, perhaps into the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and the looming war against Russia. The current Manroland closure is part of a wave of deindustrialisation that has been developing for several years and has accelerated dramatically above all with the escalation of war against Russia.
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Manroland alone still maintains sales and service branches in more than 40 countries.
IG Metall has not considered it necessary to unite workers across different plants—on the contrary. In order to enforce its role as the capitalists’ junior partner, it deliberately and systematically divides workforces by site and by country.
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The World Socialist Web Site and the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei invite all Manroland employees, all metalworkers and all their supporters to contact us and become active themselves.
14. United Kingdom: Starmer’s “survival speech” only postpones his downfall amid Labour’s collapse
On Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave what was billed as a “survival speech” following Labour’s disastrous loss in last week’s local elections and elections to the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales.
Labour lost almost 1,500 councillors in local elections across England. The party lost power in Wales, after politically dominating it for a century, and its worst-ever result at a Holyrood election returned just 17 of the 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament.
The main beneficiaries from the mass turn-away from Labour by millions of workers and youth were the Greens, who presented themselves as a left alternative, and the far-right Reform UK.
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Starmer tried to don a more populist guise, stressing in his London speech his only policy choice that has had significant support: “If we’d listened to the advice of other parties [a reference to Reform and the Conservatives], right now we’d be stuck in a stand-off with Iran, having been dragged into a war that is not in our interest, and I will never do that.”
Trying to channel popular discontent, he declared, “The British people are tired of a status quo that has failed them. Change cannot come quickly enough. They turn on the TV. They see bombs falling. They go to the petrol station, see prices rising. And they think, how is this happening to us again?”
The response “this time, must be different,” he claimed, convincing no one after almost two years of upholding “the status quo” in office, including by handing over £13–14 billion to Ukraine in military support and loans to fight Russia, and adding around £6 billion a year to the overall UK military budget—to be taken from social spending.
Starmer then gaslit the British population, claiming he had already delivered major gains, which workers had simply failed to notice. The tin-eared prime minister said he had spent too much time “talking about what I am doing for working people, and not enough time talking about why or who I stand for”!
His reset would begin with Wednesday’s King’s Speech setting out the government’s agenda for the coming year. But the “examples” he gave only confirmed how emphatically his government is a creature of the ruling class, and how incapable it is of making an even half-serious pitch to the working class.
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For now, Starmer will remain in place. Not thanks to his speech, which confirmed him as one of the politically walking dead and was greeted by several dozen more MPs calling for him to step down, plus the resignation of four junior ministers. He staggers only thanks to the fact that the preferred replacement of his Labour opponents is not in parliament.
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Starmer’s time is up. But the danger is that Labour’s meltdown has been exploited, as in every other country where social democracy has played a similar role, by the far-right. Reform UK has captured the despair of impoverished, mainly ageing workers.
Other, more progressive and generally younger sections of the working and middle class have turned to the Greens as a left-wing opposition.
But neither of these capitalist parties represents a genuine political alternative, which can only be provided by a socialist internationalist program. There is no time to lose. Workers and youth must turn to the building of their own party, the Socialist Equality Party, as the only means of fighting the ruling oligarchy, its wars, austerity and attacks on democratic rights.
15. After Greeley betrayal, UFCW blocks new strike action by Denver, Colorado meatpacking workers
Less than three weeks after United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 called off the powerful strike of meatpacking workers at the JBS meat processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, meatpacking workers at the JBS beef and pork plant in nearby Denver voted April 27 to authorize strike action.
16. Rallies oppose Australian Labor government’s massive cut to disability funding
Protests were held in several Australian cities on Saturday, against the Labor government’s onslaught on disability funding. Around 500 people participated in Melbourne and several hundred in Sydney, with a smaller rally in Brisbane.
Labor is slashing funding to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) by more than $35 billion over the next four years, in the largest single cut to a government program in history. Up to 300,000 disabled people are to be kicked off the NDIS, under conditions where there is no alternative to it.
At the rallies, people with disabilities spoke about the dire consequences. They noted that the targeting of tens of thousands of autistic children would have dire consequences. Families would simply be unable to cope, raising the prospect of tragic circumstances, including death. Other speakers noted the degrading character of a new “functional assessments” regime, under which government bureaucrats will scrutinize the disabled with a view to limiting the assistance they receive or kicking them off the NDIS altogether.
The cut to the NDIS is the centerpiece of a broader austerity budget that Labor is bringing down tonight that will also target other essential services such as health, education and public sector jobs. Labor is forcing the working class to pay for a deepening crisis of capitalism and for record military spending, as it supports US-led wars globally, including the criminal assault on Iran and prepares for new catastrophes, above all plans for an offensive against China.
17. Meetings in Australia and New Zealand to oppose the imperialist war on Iran and government austerity
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality are holding a series of public meetings in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Newcastle and in Wellington, New Zealand, to discuss the socialist and internationalist strategy that must be adopted to stop the war against Iran.
The world stands at one of the most dangerous crossroads in modern history. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a massive, unprovoked military assault against Iran—a historically oppressed nation that posed no military threat. Iran’s Supreme Leader and dozens of senior officials were killed. A girls’ elementary school was bombed, with scores of children among the dead. Thousands of people have since been murdered by US and Israeli bombs.
The Trump administration is waging this criminal war despite mass opposition from the American working class and the vast majority of the world’s population. Hundreds of millions of people are being plunged into poverty and hunger due to the blocking of the critical Strait of Hormuz supply route.
Meanwhile, Israel wages a brutal war of extermination in Lebanon and is extending its genocide of Palestinians from Gaza into the West Bank. These wars, along with the attack on Venezuela and the ongoing war against Russia over Ukraine, are not isolated conflicts.
The war in Iran is the culmination of a 35 year period which began with the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Trump’s threats to “end their civilisation” is the most grotesque expression of the policy of military war to resolve US imperialism’s declining economic situation. This is part of a developing Third World War, in which US imperialism is seeking to seize markets and resources and redivide the globe at the expense of Russia and China.
The capitalist class in Australia and New Zealand are not bystanders: these junior imperialist powers want a seat at the table for the violent redivision of the world. Both governments—Anthony Albanese’s Labor government in Australia and the conservative coalition led by Christopher Luxon in NZ—have lined up squarely behind the criminal US-Israeli onslaught.
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The critical question is: How can the working class stop the global descent into barbarism and war?
These meetings will expose the politically criminal role played by pseudo-left organizations, such as Socialist Alternative in Australia and Socialist Aotearoa in NZ. As they have done throughout the Gaza genocide, these middle class groups are seeking to channel anti-war sentiment behind the pro-imperialist Labor and Green parties and the trade union bureaucracy.
Speakers from the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), the Socialist Equality Group (NZ) and the IYSSE will discuss the origins and driving forces of the US-Israeli war. They will explain the socialist political program that must be adopted to unite the working class internationally to put an end to war and fascist dictatorship by abolishing the capitalist system which is their root cause.
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NEW ZEALAND
When: 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 19
Where: AM101 in the Alan MacDiarmid Building at Victoria University of Wellington (Kelburn campus).
Register hereMELBOURNE
When: 2:30 p.m. Sunday, May 24
Where: Community Hall A, Djerring Flemington Hub, 25 Mt Alexander Road, Flemington
Register hereSYDNEY
When: 2:30 p.m. Sunday, May 31
Where: Community Room 1, Bryan Brown Theatre, 80 Rickard Rd, Bankstown
Register hereBRISBANE
When: 2:30 p.m. Sunday, May 31
Where: Richlands Community Centre, 75 Old Progress Rd, Richlands
Register hereNEWCASTLE
When: 1 p.m. Saturday, June 5
Where: VG07 University of Newcastle (Callaghan campus)
Register here
18. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Bolivia:
Canada:
Haiti:
United States:
Uruguay:
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.
