Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Nearly half of California teachers may quit within a decade, survey finds
The annual “State of Teaching” survey, conducted between August and November 2025 among 5,802 educators nationwide, found that approximately 45 percent of California teachers expect to retire or quit within 10 years, significantly above the national estimate of roughly 35 percent. California teachers recorded a slightly higher morale score than the national average, but the so-called “Teacher Morale Index” remained abysmally low overall, with California at 16 on a scale ranging from -100 to +100, compared to the national average of 13.
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A January 2026 survey by the California Teachers Association found that 40 percent of educators were considering leaving the profession in the near future. Nearly half cited financial pressures as a central factor, while 54 percent said they personally knew coworkers who had already quit because they could no longer survive economically.
Teachers pointed to chronic overwork, expanding class sizes and deteriorating school conditions. They demanded more planning time, smaller classes, mental health days and stronger support in dealing with disruptive classrooms increasingly shaped by social misery, poverty and years of institutional neglect.
These conditions are not unique to California. The teacher shortage is an international phenomenon. Across the US, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands and numerous other countries, public education systems are hemorrhaging educators after decades of cuts, privatization and impossible workloads. During the pandemic alone, roughly 2.6 million US educators left K-12 and higher education jobs.
The global character of the crisis exposes the fraud of claims that the problem stems from local “mismanagement” or isolated policy failures. What is unfolding is the consequence of a worldwide capitalist system that treats education not as a social right, but as an expense to be minimized in favor of war and austerity.
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Overcrowded classrooms are not accidental. They are the direct product of systematic defunding stretching back decades. While billions flow to corporations, military spending and tax breaks for the wealthy, public schools are forced to operate with fewer teachers, crumbling infrastructure and increasingly inadequate support services.
California, home to some of the largest concentrations of wealth on Earth, exemplifies this contradiction. The state boasts hundreds of billionaires and massive technology fortunes while teachers struggle with unaffordable housing, stagnant wages and exhausting workloads. In many districts, educators work second jobs or commute hours because they cannot afford to live in the communities where they teach.
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Central responsibility for this catastrophe lies with the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus that functions as its industrial police force.
California is effectively a one-party Democratic state. The governor’s office, legislature and most major school districts are controlled by Democrats. The destruction of public education has occurred under their watch and with their active participation.
Governor Gavin Newsom has repeatedly imposed austerity budgets while presenting himself as a defender of progressive values. Democratic administrations across California have overseen school closures, budget cuts and the continued expansion of charter schools that siphon funds from public education into privately managed operations.
The teacher unions, affiliated with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, have played a critical role in suppressing opposition.
For years, these organizations have subordinated educators to the Democratic Party while isolating and sabotaging struggles by teachers seeking to defend public education. During the pandemic, the unions collaborated in the reopening of schools despite widespread opposition from teachers and parents concerned about unsafe conditions and mass infection.
Teacher strikes in Oakland, Los Angeles and Sacramento were systematically shut down before educators could mobilize broader support from other sections of the working class also entering struggle. Contracts were pushed through containing wage increases that failed to keep pace with inflation while fundamental issues such as class size, staffing shortages and deteriorating working conditions remained unresolved. What followed were layoffs.
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The survey’s findings are the accumulated result of these betrayals. The unions function as labor-management apparatuses tasked with containing social opposition. Their primary political role has become channeling educators into support for the Democratic Party, including early endorsements of administrations that have done nothing to reverse the collapse of public education.
The human cost will fall overwhelmingly on working class communities. Affluent districts, backed by private fundraising and concentrated wealth, are better positioned to absorb staffing shortages. Poorer communities across South Los Angeles, the Inland Empire and the Central Valley face escalating instability, overcrowding and the replacement of experienced educators with undertrained or temporary staff.
This deepening inequality is entirely consistent with the class logic of capitalist education policy. Public schools serving working class students are systematically starved of resources while privatization schemes funnel billions into charter school chains, testing companies and educational technology corporations seeking new profit streams.
Public education cannot be defended through appeals to the same political and union forces responsible for dismantling it. Teachers must build independent rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by educators and linked with parents, students and the broader working class, to organize a genuine struggle against austerity and privatization. Recent experience has shown that the union apparatus, tied to the state and corporate interests, cannot be reformed.
The crisis facing educators is not simply about wages or retention, but about the priorities of society itself. Vast resources exist to provide high-quality education, smaller classes, fully staffed schools and decent living standards for teachers. The real obstacle is capitalism, which subordinates social needs to private profit. The growing teacher exodus exposes a social order incapable of guaranteeing quality public education as a democratic right.
2. Trump dismisses hantavirus threat as outbreak spreads
The deepening hantavirus outbreak and the Trump administration’s response to it expose the catastrophic dismantling of US public health and scientific infrastructure six years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Asked about what he saw of South Africa in Israel-Palestine, Coetzee resorted to acute and sustained irony. At first, he expressed concern about using the word “apartheid” in regard to “the present situation in Palestine,” because it “diverts one into the inflamed semantic wrangle.” However, he went on:
Apartheid [in South Africa] was a system of enforced segregation based on race or ethnicity, put in place by an exclusive, self-defined group in order to consolidate colonial conquest particularly to cement its hold on the land and natural resources.
In Jerusalem and in the West Bank—to speak only of Jerusalem and the West Bank—we’ve seen a system of enforced segregation based on religion and ethnicity, put in place by an exclusive, self-defined group to consolidate the colonial conquest, in particular to maintain and, indeed, extend its hold on the land and its natural resources.
Draw your own conclusions.
Coetzee joins a lengthening list of prominent writers who have denounced Israel’s brutal war against the Palestinian people, a list that includes Nobel prize winners Annie Ernaux and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Arundhati Roy, Sally Rooney, Rachel Kushner, Ian McEwan, Elif Shafak, Michelle de Kretser, Hanif Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, David Grossman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Irvine Welsh and many others.
4. US attacks two Iranian-flagged tankers as Trump escalates war ahead of China summit
US Navy aircraft attacked two Iranian-flagged oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman on Friday as part of the US naval blockade of Iran, in a major escalation of the war.
5. Brazil’s Lula comes to White House, whitewashing Trump’s imperialist crimes
The Brazilian president’s posturing as a “left-wing” opponent of war collapsed with a single phone call from Trump—who reportedly signed off with “I love you.”
6. Sri Lanka: Government May Day rallies promote lies, austerity and autocratic rule
President Dissanayake’s claims to head “a workers’ government” are absurd. The JVP/NPP presides over a capitalist government carrying out sweeping attacks on workers and the poor, including higher taxes, higher prices and wholesale privatization.
7. Mass opposition among Nexteer workers to second sellout tentative agreement
Nexteer workers in Saginaw, Michigan, are determined to vote down a second pro-company tentative agreement handed to them by the UAW Local 699 leadership just five weeks after they rejected an initial TA by 96.2 percent on April 2.
Britain’s Scottish and Welsh parliament and UK local council elections have marked a deepening in the collapse of the Labour Party.
Having long ago lost power in Scotland, historically a stronghold for Labour, it has now been wiped out in the devolved Welsh Senedd, where it has been the ruling party since the Senedd’s creation 27 years ago. Labour fell from 30 out of 60 seats to nine out of a newly expanded 98-seat parliament. This marks the end of a century in which Labour dominated Wales.
In local council elections across the UK, the party lost close to 1,000 seats out of roughly 2,550. At the time of writing, it was losing four out of every five seats where it previously held a 5-10 percent majority and one in every two where its majority had been higher than 30 percent.
Among the lost councils were multiple major cities with long Labour histories: Birmingham, Sunderland, Hartlepool and Leeds. Manchester and Wigan would have fallen too if all their seats had been up for election this year.
Not only do the vast majority of workers see no reason to cast a ballot for Labour, most actively despise it. They were promised “change” from the Tories and have received more of the same.
The faces are new but they speak the same lines: austerity in the interests of the “bond markets,” “fiscal discipline,” and “financial headroom”; more military spending for the war in Ukraine, to carve out a niche amid the ongoing US-led war on Iran, and to reinforce Britain’s support for Israel.
Among young people and Britain’s Muslim population in particular, Labour will never be forgiven for its complicity in the Gaza genocide—reflected in gains for the Green Party, especially in the capital London.
But by far the biggest beneficiary of Labour’s collapse is Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK. The party took 34 seats in the Welsh Senedd and gained over 1,000 councillors across the UK.
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That a party characterized above all by its attacks on welfare recipients and migrants—led by a multi-millionaire former stockbroker and advocate of privatizing the NHS—is leading the polls in Britain, with its support concentrated in more working-class constituencies, is a devastating indictment of what has passed for the “left”.
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Only the Socialist Equality Party told the truth of what Corbyn was doing and its consequences. When what most workers were hearing was that his insipid semi-reformism and anti-socialist scheming was what constituted left-wing politics, many turned away. As long as this political fraud is allowed to continue, the inevitable result will be an ongoing march to the right.
Thursday’s results also expose the bankrupt character of the Together Alliance and all organizations which seek to subordinate politics to the slogan “Stop Reform” and the strategy of tactical voting and parliamentary alliances between the other capitalist parties. Workers know what these parties are and they will not be persuaded to vote for them.
The only way forward is the fight for a genuinely socialist party opposed to all the others, for which great opportunities are now opening up.
The Socialist Equality Party treats the rise of Reform deadly seriously. But we have nothing in common with the middle-class despair over the rise of the right.
Starmer’s refusal to “plunge the country into chaos” by resigning as prime minister and Labour leader, is about more than personal arrogance. He knows the significance of shattering the de facto two-party system which has been a straitjacket on British politics. He knows the radicalizing effect that the consequences of the war on Iran will have.
The working class is asking new political questions, which only the socialist movement can ultimately answer. It will increasingly be pitched into struggles, international in scope, which reveal the real class interests served by each political tendency. Through those experiences, workers can be won to socialist politics by a policy of intransigent opposition to all forms of capitalist inequality and oppression.
The same issues are posed across Europe and internationally. The old social democratic and liberal parties are in freefall. Their nominal “left” alternatives, from Polanski to France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the German Left Party, oppose a struggle by the working class for socialism, advocating meager reformist measures.
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The decisive political lesson to be drawn is the urgent need to build the Socialist Equality Party (UK), the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (France), the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Germany) and new sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
9. Australia: Earthquake near Newmont’s Cadia Valley mine trapped workers underground for 10 hours
Residents of nearby Orange have raised concerns mining activity contributed to the most powerful seismic event ever recorded in the region.
10. Australia: Coal mine company handed small fine for “alarming” death of worker
A judge fined the company just $7 million for industrial manslaughter over the preventable death of an underground coal worker in Queensland.
11. United flight attendants vote on second contract, as Spirit collapse signals industry-wide crisis
Voting closes Tuesday for a second tentative agreement (TA) covering 30,000 flight attendants at United Airlines. The vote by members of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) is taking place under conditions of acute crisis in the airline industry, marked above all by the sudden collapse of Spirit Airlines on May 2 and the layoff of its 17,000 workers without notice or severance.
United flight attendants have not received a pay raise since 2020, though their previous contract became amendable in August 2021. They have been kept on the job through the joint operation of the airline and the union apparatus under the federal Railway Labor Act of 1926, which imposes heavy limits on the right to strike for railroad and airline workers. The law has been wielded for a century by the American bourgeoisie, and loyally enforced by the trade union bureaucracy, to suppress the class struggle.
Workers rejected the first tentative agreement last July by 71 percent on a 92 percent turnout. The current TA emerged after eight months of further mediated talks and was announced March 26 following a four-day session in Washington D.C. It runs from May 31, 2026 to May 31, 2031.
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Spirit’s collapse is only the first casualty in a wave of bankruptcies and consolidations likely to break out across the industry. The immediate trigger is the oil price shock due to the US attack on Iran. Jet fuel was roughly $80 per barrel in March; by the week ending April 24, the International Air Transport Association recorded an average of $179 per barrel. Industry analysts now predict JetBlue is highly likely to go bankrupt in the next year. Frontier is already returning aircraft and deferring deliveries.
But the oil shocks are being seized upon to carry out a further series of consolidations and job cuts. The Trump administration refused to bail out the airline, absurdly declaring the government did not have “half a billion dollars lying around.” Since the US airline industry was first deregulated in 1978, workers have been continuously under attack, especially through the mechanism of bankuptcies and mergers.
Only three “legacy” carriers—United, American and Delta—survive of the 10 major carriers from 1978. The legacy carriers are themselves preparing for further consolidation. United approached American Airlines about a merger earlier this year.
The situation demands that airline workers begin organizing now in defense of their jobs and the flying public against the next round of corporate attacks. The billions of dollars being squandered every week in criminal wars and the trillions of dollars controlled by Wall Street must be used instead to ensure a high quality, fully-staffed industry at affordable prices for the public.
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Whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s vote, mass layoffs are coming, the struggle is not over but entering its next phase. The defense of jobs across the industry requires the formation of rank-and-file committees, independent of the AFA bureaucracy and the two capitalist parties. New organs of power, accountable to workers and with no ties to management and Wall Street, must coordinate joint action across the industry.
In particular, airline workers must raise the demand that Spirit’s 17,000 workers must be made whole, financed by the expropriation of the war profits of the oil majors and the major banks. The Railway Labor Act must be abolished and the unconditional right to strike recognized. Such measures would be the first step towards bringing the airline industry under public ownership, under the control of workers, and operated as a public utility, not private profit.
12. US construction of a second southern border wall disturbs important archaeological sites
Ignoring protests from archaeologists and local Native Americans, a border wall construction crew knowingly cut a wide swath through a pre-Columbian geoglyph site. This is just one of many such impacts to archaeological sites by this project.
Canada’s Liberal government is pouring hundreds of billions of additional dollars into the military as part of the ruling class’s drive to rearm and violently lay claim to “its share” of the spoils in the imperialist redivision of the globe.
Ottawa pledged to ramp up defense spending to 5 percent of GDP at a NATO summit last summer in what observers have noted is the largest peacetime military buildup in the nation’s history. The eye-watering sums involved—projected to reach nearly $160 billion annually by 2035—will exceed the size of all federal transfers to the provinces for healthcare, social welfare, post-secondary education and equalization.
The fact that this agenda entails the creation of a war economy was outlined earlier this year in the government’s Defense Industrial Strategy. This comprehensive document not only presents Prime Minister Mark Carney’s roadmap to massively expand military procurement and production to reach the 5 percent spending target. It also proposes policies to strengthen Canadian “sovereignty” in recognition of the fundamental breakdown in the Canada-US military-strategic partnership, which for over eight decades served as the basis for Canadian imperialism to aggressively pursue its worldwide interests. In this, Ottawa is heading in the same direction as all the imperialist powers in Europe, the Asia-Pacific and North America, first and foremost the United States, which is planning a record budget of $1.5 trillion under the fascist dictator Trump.
Amid Trump’s threats to annex Canada as the 51st state and crash its economy, the strategy document sets as a target sourcing at least 70 percent of all military procurements domestically. It also announced the creation of a new Defence Industrial Agency, staffed by unelected civil servants, to ensure that decisions on military procurement and investment are even more insulated from any democratic control.
The strategy outlined five main pillars designed to help the ruling class prepare for world war. These include engaging more effectively with industry, securing supply chains, procuring strategically and working with Indigenous groups and other domestic actors, particularly in the North. One of the pillars, “Investing purposefully to strengthen an innovative Canadian defense sector,” is largely devoted to integrating the country’s colleges and universities into Canadian imperialism’s war machine, and recruiting students and professors to serve as the brains behind new killing machines for future wars of plunder.
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Ottawa will deepen its links with colleges and universities as incubators of talent by “establishing mechanisms to better connect universities and colleges to defense priorities,” the document announced. The new budget earmarks $1.6 billion to “attract and equip world-class researchers.”
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The government is also planning to dramatically increase the size of the armed forces. Chief of the Defense Staff Jennie Carignan told CBC recently that she will soon present a detailed proposal to government on how to increase the military to 85,000 regular troops, 100,000 reserves, and an additional 300,000 reserves with light training who can be called upon in an emergency.
Noting the difficulties of marshaling such immense resources, one think tank, the Institute for Research on Public Policy, wrote of how universities could be utilized to facilitate Ottawa’s plans (while claiming not to seek the militarization of campuses). It argued that schools could support logistics, personnel management and administration to help deal with an influx of new troops.
There is no popular groundswell of support for Canadian imperialism and its predatory foreign policy, with polls indicating that less than one-fifth of Canadians would volunteer to serve unconditionally in the armed forces. Despite the loosening of requirements including permitting permanent residents to join the military, the Canadian Armed Forces has consistently fallen short of its recruitment targets.
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The arguments advanced by sections of the so-called “left” to justify support for Canada’s massive rearmament program are particularly pernicious. They assert that the tens of billions being invested in war and destruction can serve as a “job creator” and provide “skilled, good-paying jobs” for workers. The New Democrat-aligned Mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, has called for the new Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) to be headquartered in the city claiming it would “create thousands of jobs.”
Spearheaded by the trade union bureaucracy, which has been spewing out “Team Canada” nationalist propaganda on behalf of the corporate elite in response to the trade war with the US, supposedly “left” forces are waving the Maple Leaf while providing ready-made justifications for expanding Canada’s military. The Tyee, for example, published an opinion piece last year that demanded, in response to Trump’s tariffs and threats, “we should be prepared to defend our sovereignty—not just with military spending, but with a population that is engaged, trained and ready.” Former NDP MP Charlie Angus has, for his part, welcomed the CAF’s proposal to massively expand the military reserves as a blueprint for a “people’s army.”
Leading union bureaucrats in Unifor, the United Steelworkers, and other unions have trumpeted their support for Canadian imperialist rearmament, while emphasizing the need to ensure the weapon-systems are “Canadian-made” and joining in the anti-China hysteria that the Canadian and American ruling class are whipping up as they intensify their preparations for war with Beijing.
Workers and young people have no interest in being dragooned into serving the interests of Canadian imperialism in the rapidly developing third world war. Rather they must join the fight against militarism and war, for their futures and lives depend upon it. This struggle requires the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program to put an end to capitalism, the crisis-ridden social order that is at the root of imperialist war. Students opposed to the militarization of the campuses and the transformation of their apprenticeships and training programs into “pipelines” for the war machine must link their opposition to war and rearmament with the growing working class resistance to the gutting of public services, mass layoffs, and the ruling class’s evisceration of democratic and social rights. All those who agree with this program should join and build the Socialist Equality Party and its youth organization, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.
14. “Hondurasgate” exposes living legacy of Operation Condor across the Americas
A leak of audio recordings from Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram—published by Diario Red and the investigative platform Hondurasgate—has exposed what amounts to a modern-day Operation Condor: a US-backed transnational conspiracy involving Washington, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires and the Honduran state to destabilize governments across Latin America, erect police-state regimes, and prepare the violent suppression of social opposition throughout the hemisphere.
The recordings, reportedly authenticated using the forensic software Phonexia Voice Inspector, reveal discussions involving former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), current Honduran President Nasry Asfura, Vice President María Antonieta Mejía and other right-wing operatives about building “information cells,” financing disinformation campaigns, imprisoning or assassinating opponents, and coordinating a continental offensive against the “cancer of the left.”
The significance of the leaks extends far beyond Honduras. They emerge amid the Trump administration’s open embrace of what it calls the “Shield of the Americas,” the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, and the broader “Greater North America” strategy aimed at reasserting direct US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere through military force, economic coercion and political subversion.
These plans are not only directed outward. They are inseparable from the rapid development of authoritarian forms of rule inside the United States itself.
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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded publicly to the leaks this week. While denouncing the existence of an international right-wing network, she focused on the role of Argentina—not Washington—and dismissed any threat that these conspiracies will affect her own administration.
For his part, Colombian President Gustavo Petro merely denounced Netanyahu for freeing JOH “to destroy the Colombian and Mexican governments,” exempting Trump or the US government from any wrongdoing. Significantly, presidential elections will be held in Colombia on May 31. Petro-backed candidate Iván Cepeda leads the polls, but is expected to face a second round against the fascistic Abelardo de la Espriella.
Amid the scandal, on Thursday Brazilian President Lula da Silva followed Petro’s footsteps earlier this year in kissing Trump’s ring in Washington. The consistent accommodation to Trump by the three nominally “left” governments in the most powerful countries in the region is the clearest demonstration that bourgeois nationalism offers no way to oppose imperialist oppression or fascism.
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The exposure of the “Hondurasgate” conspiracy comes half a century after the launching of Operation Condor. Like today, the savage terror of Operation Condor did not emerge in a political vacuum.
The reformist governments that preceded the military dictatorships — Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition in Chile, João Goulart’s nationalist administration in Brazil, and the Peronism in Argentina —defended the capitalist state and its repressive apparatus against pre-revolutionary movements of the working class, and systematically subordinated their governments to Wall Street and US imperialism. Meanwhile, their Stalinist and Pabloite allies insisted that workers must first support “progressive” nationalists and promoted popular front coalitions with them. Acting as a political brake on the independent mobilization of workers, these forces left the field open to US-backed military coups and dictatorships, with tens of thousands paying with their lives for these political betrayals.
With the full backing and encouragement of the US government, and with the CIA playing the leading role, right-wing military regimes were established in Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. These dictatorships joined forces with regimes in Paraguay and elsewhere to launch Operation Condor, a joint enterprise between Latin American secret police agencies and the CIA to hunt down and murder leftists and revolutionary exiles across national borders.
Operation Condor was formally launched in October 1975, when Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras convened representatives from Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil in Santiago to establish a joint “information bank” and multinational “task forces.” Political exiles could be kidnapped, tortured, disappeared and murdered anywhere on the continent without judicial authorization, turning Latin America into what the World Socialist Web Site has aptly described as a “labyrinth of horror.”
Secret police death squads crossed borders freely while exiles were hunted down and returned to torture centers and execution chambers. Contreras himself later testified that assassinations carried out by Chile’s DINA secret police had been jointly organized with CIA approval.
The Israeli government played a critical auxiliary role in sustaining these terror networks, as a conduit for US arms and covert operations where Washington sought plausible deniability. Israeli advisers trained the Guatemalan military under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt. When Congress restricted arms sales to Chile after the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, Israel stepped in to arm the Pinochet dictatorship.
The “Hondurasgate” scandal demonstrates that this machinery of imperialist repression was never dismantled.
One crucial difference, however, is that the original Condor network operated largely in secret. Today, US imperialism no longer even attempts to maintain the façade of defending “democracy” or the “free world.”
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“Hondurasgate” exposes the far-advanced implementation of the methods of Operation Condor—the CIA’s continental machinery of terror—under conditions of deepening global crisis and class conflict.
Workers throughout the Americas must draw the necessary conclusions. The defense of democratic rights and opposition to dictatorship cannot be entrusted to any faction of the ruling class, whether in Washington or among the bourgeois nationalist governments of Latin America.
15. Record low western US snowpack threatens water supplies for millions
Significantly, precipitation in many places did not decline for the western US. However, much of it fell as rain instead of snow during the winter, leaving much of it to runoff instead of staying in reserve as snow. Washington saw 104 percent of median precipitation but similar snowpack figures to Oregon and California.
Snowpack is an essential part of western water supplies, holding water in reserve to melt during the dry summer months. If snowpack melts too soon those reserves are disrupted and a significant portion of that melt water is lost as evaporation. Recent research has also shown that drier conditions in late spring and early summer are causing natural vegetation to consume more ground water and snow melt as they attempt to compensate for reduced spring rains caused by climate change.
While conditions in the Pacific Ocean are developing for a “Super El Niño,” which will bring greater moisture to the western US but also hotter temperatures later this year. A warmer winter may convert snow into rain and weaken what should be a year of respite from reduced snowpack.
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Across the entire Colorado Basin the sudden implosion of snowpack exacerbates threats to the water supply for 40 million people and 5 million acres of farmland in seven US states and Mexico.
Arizona, California and Nevada have issued a proposal to conserve nearly 3 million acre-feet over the next two years to stabilize the reservoirs but it is only a temporary effort to contend with a more than 25-year problem.
This major snow drought will also be felt on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. Snow melt from mountains in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico feeds major rivers like the Rio Grande, Arkansas, Missouri and Platte rivers, many of which are tributaries to the Mississippi.
This is significant because the southern US, from Texas to Virginia, is experiencing severe to exceptional drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. Reduced headwater flows from the Rockies will only amplify these conditions.
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As is the case with much of the western US, the issue is a fundamental divide between supply and demand. In the Colorado River Basin and California the largest water users are large agricultural interests that consume upwards of 90 percent of all water used. For Corpus Christi the crisis is fed by declining supplies from climate change and increasing demand from the local petrochemical industry.
This is a recurring theme around the world in which the imbalance between supply and demand cannot be rectified without a complete restructuring of how water is used. A recent report from the United Nations defined this condition as “water bankruptcy,” in which much of the world’s water systems are so overburdened that only a complete rebalancing of demand to match supplies could prevent a system collapse.
While climate change intensifies these conditions, global capitalist governments have proven wholly incapable of effectively responding. This is not for a lack of knowledge or solutions but because of the incompatibility of capitalist interests with the necessary measures needed to restructure global economies.
16. No cannon fodder for war plans of the German ruling class!
Eighty-one years after the end of World War II in Europe, the specters of war and fascism are back. The IYSSE calls for building an international, socialist anti-war movement against conscription and militarism.
17. Turkish independent union leader Mehmet Türkmen placed in solitary confinement
Mehmet Türkmen, an independent union leader who has been in prison since mid-March, was placed in solitary confinement for drawing attention to the dire conditions of a fellow inmate.
18. Iran war wreaks havoc in Africa
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven fuel prices in Africa up by as much as 80 percent. Inflation is rising, and food production is in jeopardy, with governments scrambling to avert agricultural collapse.
19. United Kingdom: Royal Mail workers at Mount Pleasant speak on CWU-Royal Mail “negotiators agreement”
Pointing to the company headquarters where CWU officials are in constant discussion with management, a worker from Mt Pleasant said: “Them lot upstairs are not interested in us, it's how much profit they can make.”
20. Ukraine’s Defense Minister implicated in corruption scandal
As Ukrainian soldiers continue to perish in the NATO-backed proxy war, new revelations make clear that the Ukrainian ruling class is enriching itself to obscene levels in Europe’s poorest country.
21. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
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.
