Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: June 8-14
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
“Trenton Six” frame-up trial concludes; four defendants acquitted, two convicted
100 years ago:
Students protest in Korea against Japanese colonialism
2. One Hundred days of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran
The “negotiations” currently being carried out by the Trump administration at gunpoint are a fraud. In an interview this weekend, Trump declared that if Iran does not accept his demands, “I’m going to blow the hell out of them.” Even if the Trump administration agrees to a “ceasefire,” any agreement with the gangsters in the White House will just be as meaningful as the “peace” deal in 2025 that set the stage for this year’s war.
On Sunday night, Israel attacked Tehran. In Lebanon, the Israeli bombardment, escalating even amid the supposed negotiations, has killed at least 3,593 people and driven over a million from their homes—a toll that exceeds the 3,468 Iranians killed, among them seven infants and 376 children, with more than 26,500 wounded.
In the course of the war, imperialism plumbed new depths of barbarism. Trump’s threats to extinguish “a whole civilization” and Hegseth’s vow to wage war with “no quarter, no mercy” will go down in history as expressions of an oligarchy that has abandoned all pretense to legality. The imperialist powers now wage wars of oppression and subjugation in the open, with methods pioneered by the Nazis.
Despite the brutal and murderous character of the US-Israeli onslaught, however, imperialism has failed to achieve a single one of its aims. It has not overthrown the Iranian government, broken Iran’s military or seized control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The war has had two major effects: a deepening of the global crisis of the capitalist system and an enormous escalation of the global class struggle, not least within the United States.
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The fight against war cannot be waged through appeals to the governments and parties that are waging it. In the US, the Democratic Party greeted the murder of Iran’s leaders with cheers and financed Trump’s military budget. The European imperialist powers have backed the war and politically justified it, while pouring €800 billion into rearmament as they escalate the proxy war against Russia, which they arm and direct.
Opposition to imperialism requires developing struggles of workers in the United States, Europe and across the world—against war, austerity and dictatorship—into a conscious political movement armed with a socialist program. To put an end to war and barbarism, the capitalist system must be abolished.
3. United Kingdom: Gary Stevenson and the dead end of wealth-tax reformism
Stevenson’s broad appeal is not difficult to understand. For millions of workers and young people, official economics has become an open fraud. They are told that the economy is improving while rents soar, house prices remain out of reach, public services decay and secure work disappears.
Stevenson captures this experience sharply. In a 2024 Financial Times (FT) interview, he mocked the complacency of the political and media establishment, saying rich people sit together, their lives improve, while “ordinary people’s lives are collapsing.” He has insisted that without addressing inequality, society faces only a deepening fall in living standards and mounting political instability.
“Insider” status has helped boost his authority, with his 2024 memoir The Trading Game turning him into a major media personality. In the book, he explains how he made millions by recognizing that rising inequality would suppress demand, hold down interest rates and inflate asset prices.
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After more than a decade of austerity, wage suppression and asset-price inflation, millions confront conditions once associated with the poorest countries. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), some 6.8 million people in Britain now live in “very deep poverty,” while 4.5 million children are officially in poverty. Workers in Britain have experienced the longest era of wage suppression since the Napoleonic Wars.
Housing has become a mechanism of mass dispossession. The average UK private rent reached £1,381 a month in April 2026, rising to £2,290 in London. Rents have increased 40 percent since 2020, and mortgage repayments by 40-60 percent. Housing stress affects 67 percent of the population—45 million people.
Homelessness has reached staggering levels: the charity Shelter estimates more than 354,000 people are homeless in England on any given night, including 161,500 children.
At the same time, the UK, along with every other capitalist government, faced with economic stagnation, explosive social tensions and the sharpening struggle for markets, raw materials and spheres of influence, is rearming. Young people today can only look forward to war and social devastation under capitalism.
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Stevenson correctly points out that mainstream economics systematically obscures inequality. He is likewise right that hoarding wealth at the top has driven asset-price booms, social decay and political reaction.
In marked contrast to other economic commentators, Stevenson has also pointed to the danger of world war as a consequence of extreme wealth inequality, pointing out that, as assets become more expensive, it is more “cost-effective” for the super-rich to use the militaries of their respective states to seize the assets of their rivals.
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But what does Stevenson propose the working class do about this global crisis?
His concrete proposal is a 2 percent annual wealth tax on assets above £10 million, designed to be “watertight” with no exemptions, enforced across borders through international cooperation, and used to fund public investment in housing, healthcare, and other social services. He views this as a form of “defense” to stop the rapid transfer of assets from ordinary people to the super-rich.
This places Stevenson within a broader political phenomenon: figures who speak in a language of anger against the oligarchy, attract a mass audience because capitalism is visibly breaking down, but redirect this energy into political dead ends.
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The question of ownership is central. Stevenson presents the concentration of wealth primarily as a problem of distribution: the tax code has been systematically rigged to allow the rich to accumulate without limit, and the solution is to un-rig it by adopting progressive tax measures.
But this raises a deeper question: why has the tax code been systematically rigged in the first place, across every major capitalist country, under governments of every nominal political stripe? Stevenson attempts to explain this by pointing to economists’ faulty models, their dogmatic thinking and the corruption of individual politicians. These phenomena exist, but they do not, by themselves, explain anything.
The Marxist analysis goes deeper. The capitalist state is not a neutral instrument that can be picked up and aimed at the wealthy by a sufficiently determined government. It is an organ of class rule. The billionaires do not merely influence governments; in any meaningful sense, they are the government. The Trump administration reflects this basic tendency to the nth degree, but it is the basic dynamic of contemporary imperialism.
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Global competition between states has become so fierce that it is now outgrowing the confines of pure economics and spilling into the political and military spheres. The only area in which contemporary capitalist governments are eager to spend tax money is the military, at the expense of social programs.
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A renewed imperialist redivision of the world is already underway, evident in Ukraine, the Middle East and Latin America. Global military expenditure reached a record $2.72 trillion in 2024, with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) warning that governments were increasingly prioritizing military security over other budgetary choices.
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Even the most minor reforms will therefore be fiercely resisted by the oligarchy. History confirms this at every turn. Thomas Piketty, whose data on inequality Stevenson draws upon, proposed a global wealth tax over a decade ago. As Nick Beams has noted in the WSWS, not a single government anywhere in the world has implemented it.
Where popular movements have developed against inequality, they have been cruelly betrayed by those who promised reformist solutions through parliament and other institutions of the capitalist state.
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All in all, Stevenson’s call for a “relentless and aggressive pursuit of common ground” between the various “left” bourgeois parties sums up his role: to corral popular anger over inequality back into the channels of pursuing parliamentary reform, where they can be safely suffocated.
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Social inequality is baked into the structure of capitalism. Its noxious consequences can only be ended along with the rule of the capitalist class. No solution can come from lobbying the capitalist state, pleading with ministers or waiting for enlightened technocrats in the Treasury and civil service.
The major banks, finance houses, energy corporations, transport systems, logistics chains, housing monopolies, real estate empires and war industries must be taken into public ownership without compensation to the oligarchs and placed under the democratic control of the working class.
The wealth created by the international working class can then be redeployed according to social need, not profit. The enormous social surplus currently wasted in speculation, self-aggrandizement, rent extraction and militarism can be turned towards guaranteed employment, a massive housing program, free high-quality healthcare and education, full access to culture, the cancellation of oppressive debts, and the reduction of working time without loss of pay.
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Stevenson correctly senses that global inequality, militarism and far-right reaction are inseparable. But one cannot fight them through a tax accord among capitalist governments. The same ruling classes presiding over austerity are rearming at breakneck speed. The struggle against war and social collapse demands the global unification of workers against every national bourgeoisie and its state.
4. Attendees speak on Socialist Equality Party public meetings marking 1926 British General Strike
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to some of those attending the lecture series held by the Socialist Equality Party (UK) last month marking the centenary of the 1926 general strike.
The university is to be brought into line, critical voices are to be silenced, while the campus is being transformed into a military research facility and recruitment ground for war.
4. United States: Ann Arbor public school teachers enter sixth month without a new contract
Ann Arbor Public Schools teachers have now gone nearly six months without a contract following their near-unanimous rejection of a tentative agreement.
6. The Philippines engulfed in acute political and constitutional crisis
Three weeks after gunfire rang out in the Philippine Senate, the political standoff it expressed has deepened into a constitutional crisis. The legislature sits under two competing leaderships, each denying the other’s legitimacy. A senator wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) remains a fugitive; a second senator has been jailed for plunder. The executive is steadily accumulating the powers being vacated by the paralyzed upper chamber. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator, governs by emergency decree, directs the Senate’s reorganization, and is preparing to convene Congress in special session to pass legislation of his choosing.The crisis emerges out of the conflict between the Marcos and Duterte factions of the Philippine ruling class that has been expanding and sharpening for years. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president whose six-year rule was defined by a drug war that killed tens of thousands, opposed deepening the Philippine military integration with Washington’s war preparations against China—an alignment that Marcos, firmly in the US camp, has pursued without restraint. Sara Duterte, his daughter and current Vice President, became the focal point of that conflict after her political alliance with the Marcos family publicly collapsed. Rodrigo Duterte himself is currently in ICC custody in The Hague, where the court confirmed charges of crimes against humanity against him in April, sending his case to trial.
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The 1987 Constitution contains explicit provisions restricting foreign military basing and requiring Senate ratification of treaties—provisions written against the US military presence that sustained the previous Marcos dictatorship of the president’s father. These provisions are the primary constitutional obstacle to the full formalization of Washington’s forward base architecture in the Philippines, which now includes nine EDCA sites with further expansion announced, and which was on full display at Balikatan 2026 in May: 17,000 troops, the first live Tomahawk firing on Philippine soil, the first Japanese combat deployment since the Second World War. Marcos has made it clear he wants these constitutional restraints loosened, but every move toward Charter Change has so far been blocked in the Senate by the Duterte camp—a resistance that has included his own sister, Senator Imee Marcos. With that bloc now stripped of its Senate positions, the path to a constitutional convention has opened for the first time.
7. Australia: Poor communities hit by largest diphtheria outbreak on record
Most cases have occurred in the Northern Territory, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, among the poorest and most oppressed layers of the Australian population, the hardest hit.
The expulsion of leading researchers from the American Diabetes Association conference by armed police exposes the capitulation of medical institutions to the Trump administration’s fascistic anti-science agenda.
9. Australia: Gold mining company handed meager fine for worker’s amputation
A 23-year-old laborer's arm was ripped off by a drilling machine at the Cadia East mine near Orange, New South Wales. Almost three years later, the company was fined just $750,000.
10. Medicaid work requirements threaten coverage for millions as Trump escalates class war on the poor
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the work requirement provisions in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $326 billion over 10 years—the single largest source of savings in the legislation—and strip coverage from an estimated 5.2 million adults by 2034.
11. Court rules that Trump’s name must be removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
A Washington DC federal district judge ruled that the president’s stacking of the board with his loyalists and placing the Trump name on the Kennedy Center was a “procedurally defective and substantively unlawful action.”
12. Stellantis in Germany: 650 engineering jobs at Opel in Rüsselsheim on the line
In April 2026, Stellantis announced elimination of 650 of the remaining 1,650 jobs at the Rüsselsheim, Germany development center, without hiring replacements, in open violation of an ongoing “Future Collective Bargaining Agreement.”
13. Trump denounces California election, defends January 6 attackers
Trump’s unrestrained hatred of anyone who either opposes him or questions him—even in the mild tones of a Kristen Welker—is not merely the characteristic of an increasingly unhinged authoritarian personality. The sweeping claims of vote fraud are an ominous warning of what is to come as the midterm elections unfold amid growing popular opposition and mounting global crises involving war, financial chaos and environmental disaster.
Trump’s popularity continues to plunge, with polls suggesting he has reached the lowest point for any president since the depths touched by George W. Bush during the Iraq War. The White House has no intention of submitting placidly to a popular repudiation at the polls. On the contrary, with its wild claims of vote fraud and its embrace of fascist claims that millions of “illegal aliens” will go to the polls in November, the Trump administration is preparing either to challenge the results of the election or suspend elections altogether.
14. Who stands to lose: Future faces of the Medicaid work requirement cuts
The Trump administration and its ideological allies have constructed an elaborate fiction around the Medicaid work requirements embedded in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” signed into law July 4, 2025—that the policy targets lazy, able-bodied adults who prefer leisure to labor, and that only those who fail to “prove that they matter”—in the words of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz—will lose their coverage.
The reality documented by researchers, advocates and the experience of earlier state-level implementations is categorically different. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that work requirements will strip coverage from 5.2 million adults by 2034. More expansive analyses from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warn the number at risk could reach nearly 15 million. In every prior implementation—most comprehensively in Arkansas in 2018 and 2019—the majority of those who lost coverage were already working, were legally exempt, or were victims of administrative failure rather than genuine noncompliance.
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... the people who will lose Medicaid under the new work requirements are not people who refuse to work. They are people for whom the work requirement’s documentation regime is incompatible with the actual conditions of their lives—the unpredictability of gig work, the seasonality of agricultural and construction labor, the invisibility of caregiving, the bureaucratic inaccessibility of rural and under-resourced communities, the complexity of exemption processes that assume a level of institutional support most low-income workers do not have.
This is not an accident. It is, as the experience of Arkansas and Georgia has already demonstrated, precisely how work requirements function. They do not encourage work; they terminate coverage. The administrative maze is not a bug in the design; it is the mechanism by which the savings are generated and the rolls are reduced.
The CBO projects that the work requirements will account for the largest share of the $793 billion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade. That money does not disappear. It flows upward—through the tax provisions of the same legislation, to corporations and the wealthy—while the people whose labor makes American society function are left to manage illness, disability and economic precarity without the most basic guarantee of medical care.
Their stories are not exceptional. Instead, they will become the reality in 21st century America.
Nexteer workers who have voted down three UAW-backed contracts are fighting to join American Axle workers in a common strike.
16. Four workers dead at Palmetto—the consequence of decades of cuts and the drive to privatize USPS
Four workers have died at the Palmetto Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Georgia in the past two years. The most recent, Demarcus Little, told a supervisor he felt unwell last week, collapsed, and died.
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Postal workers have been dying across the country. Management is being let off the hook. USPS was recently fined only $26,481 for the death of Nick Acker, who was crushed to death in a mail sort machine in Allen Park, Michigan.
The deaths are part of a broader assault on the postal workforce. Utilizing a manufactured deficit, USPS Postmaster General David Steiner has proposed ending six-day mail delivery, closing “unprofitable” local post offices and ending the Universal Service Obligation. They have already suspended payments into workers’ pension system. The proposals would mean the effective abolition of USPS as a public service and placing it under control of private corporations.
The union bureaucracy has told workers there is nothing to worry about. They have already endorsed the pre-existing “Delivering for America” restructuring, signed below-inflation contracts and backed binding arbitration to strips workers of the right to vote on their own agreements. It will not fight the coming attacks on jobs and services. That must be organized from below.
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee has been conducting an independent investigation into conditions across the postal network. This meeting will report on what we have found, discuss the threat to USPS as a public institution, and take up how workers can build the organization needed to fight back.
Join us this Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern. Register here, send in your testimony and join the committee.
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
