On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom released a video claiming
that federal agents were investigating him and his family at the behest
of President Donald Trump. The investigation appears to be the latest
example of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the criminal
justice system against its political opponents.
In the video, posted on social media, Newsom declared:
In
recent days federal agents have knocked on the doors of family, friends
and former employees. Not because they found a crime, because they are
simply trying to find one. They are demanding records. They are abusing
the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random
documents.
The term-limited governor and likely 2028
Democratic presidential candidate claimed that Trump “isn’t coming after
me because of my mean tweets. He’s coming after me because I am
considering running for president. Because he hates that I have
consistently called him out, over and over again, for his lies and
deceit.”
*****
As of this writing, the Department of Justice and acting Attorney
General Todd Blanche have refused to comment on any investigations into
the Newsoms or release any charging documents. Newsom’s attorneys have
filed a Freedom of Information Act request for communications involving
top Justice Department officials, including Blanche, former Attorney
General Pam Bondi and former acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove.
In
his video address, Newsom noted that Trump personally called for him to
be investigated last year. Newsom’s office claims federal agents began
making inquiries to associates of the governor after Trump announced
that he planned to nominate Blanche as attorney general. Blanche
previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, Blanche has been carrying out
Trump’s personal and political vendettas at the Department of Justice.
He has overseen the ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files, refusing to
release millions of documents still held by the department. He
spearheaded the attempted creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund for the
fascists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and the agreement with the
Internal Revenue Service that granted Trump and his children immunity
from audits of past tax returns.
The New York Times reported, citing aides to Newsom, that
the federal investigation “appears to focus on his wife, Jennifer Siebel
Newsom.” The paper noted that those questioned by federal agents in
recent days include former employees of the governor and people
affiliated with his wife’s nonprofit groups. Newsom’s aides told the Times they believe banking records have been subpoenaed, although they said they had no written evidence of that.
The
newspaper quoted a person familiar with the matter who confirmed that
multiple federal investigations are active against Newsom, with at least
one focused on his wife. This unnamed source rejected Newsom’s claim
that the investigations were politically motivated and ordered by Trump,
asserting instead that the probes originated with federal officials in
California, not in Washington D.C.
Siebel Newsom is the mother of
the Newsoms’ four children. She is a filmmaker and owns a production
company, Girls Club Entertainment, which is listed as a contractor for
the Representation Project, a nonprofit founded by her. Tax records
reviewed by the Times indicate that the Representation Project paid Girls Club Entertainment $161,250 for film production services.
*****
Newsom’s denunciations of Trump underscore the hypocritical and
bankrupt character of the Democratic Party. He correctly accuses Trump
of using “the levers of government” to reward “cronies” and “try and
jail his opponents.” But Newsom himself has for years used the powers of
the state to defend the interests of the corporations, the wealthy and
the Democratic Party machine.
Most recently, Newsom and powerful
Democratic-aligned groups have moved to quash a proposed wealth tax on
California billionaires. Newsom’s team and allied organizations have
worked to isolate SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan, whose union has
championed the ballot measure. Construction unions, police unions,
teachers’ unions and major healthcare organizations have broken with
SEIU-UHW to oppose the initiative, while wealthy figures such as Google
co-founder Sergey Brin have reportedly moved assets or changed residency
arrangements in response to the proposal.
Faced with a modest proposal to impose a one-time tax on the state’s
billionaires, Newsom has mobilized the Democratic-aligned labor
bureaucracy, nonprofit groups and corporate interests to protect the
fortunes of the financial oligarchy.
Trump’s use of the Justice Department against Newsom marks a
dangerous escalation in the breakdown of American democracy. But the
Democrats have no progressive answer to it because they represent the
same financial oligarchy that controls the Republicans.
The
significance of this conflict lies not in the personal fate of Newsom
but in what it portends. The methods now being used in factional warfare
within the ruling class will be turned with far greater violence
against workers and youth who oppose the policies of the oligarchy: war,
austerity, deportations, police repression and the destruction of
democratic rights.
The G7 summit in Évian, France marks a further step in the collapse
of the postwar capitalist order and the slide now towards a Third World
War. Never before have tensions between the participants—the US, Japan,
Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada—been so acute. The heads of
state and government who traveled to the summit are sitting on an
explosive social powder keg in their own countries.
Trump’s
threats to seize Canada and Greenland, his trade tariffs against the
European Union and other so-called partners, his unilateral actions in
negotiations with Russia and in the recent war against Iran have
reinforced the view in European capitals that the US “can no longer be
relied upon” as an ally. The US is no longer seen as a partner but as a
threat.
The European powers are responding by pouring vast sums
into war and rearmament in order to pursue their imperialist interests
independently of—and, if necessary, against—the US. They are passing on
the costs to the population through cuts to social services, thereby
pushing social tensions, fueled by the war with Iran, inflation and the
economic slump, to the breaking point.
In the war in Ukraine,
Europe is pressing to have a seat at the table in the negotiations with
Russia, which have so far been led unilaterally by the US. Now that the
US has suspended its financial aid to Ukraine, the war is being financed
predominantly by Europe. Germany alone has spent more than €94 billion
on support for Ukraine since the start of the war, and the European
Union has recently released new loans totaling €90 billion to enable
Ukraine to continue the war.
The aim of the European powers and
Canada is to prevent any concessions to Russia. They insist on
escalating the war, thereby consciously accepting the risk of a nuclear
escalation. G7 host Emmanuel Macron invited Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky to the summit; Zelensky’s government has recently
been deliberately targeting energy facilities deep within Russia and
near the major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, provoking sharp
Russian reactions.
*****
Tensions between the US and Europe have become so acute that it was
already regarded as a success that Trump attended the summit at all and
did not leave early, as he did at the last G7 summit in Canada. From the
outset, a joint final communique was not planned.
However, the
European powers’ military and economic dependence on the US remains so
considerable that they are seeking to prevent a complete break before
they have strengthened their military capabilities. Host Macron
therefore spared no effort to create an artificial façade of harmony and
to suppress any external disruption.
He treated Trump like a
stubborn child, who had to be kept happy with gifts. He postponed the
summit by a day so that Trump could take part in the military parade in
front of the White House to mark his 80th birthday, and he invited the
US president to an exclusive dinner amid the historic splendor and pomp
of the Palace of Versailles at the close of the summit on Wednesday
evening.
The official occasion was the 250th anniversary of the United States’
independence. It was at Versailles in 1783 that the peace treaty was
signed, officially ending the American War of Independence and sealing
the US’s independence from Great Britain.
Macron, however,
preferred not to remind Trump of another date closely linked to
Versailles—October 5 and 6, 1789, the “March of the Market Women to
Versailles.” On that date, the people of Paris forced King Louis XVI,
who lived a life of unspeakable luxury with his entourage, to move to
Paris, where he was later beheaded.
The spectre of revolution hung
over the Évian summit as well. The gulf between the mass of the
population and the super-rich, who dictate policy in all G7 nations, is
now giving rise to massive resistance, protests and strikes. The G7
leaders are so unpopular that they are on the verge of being toppled in a
party leadership election (Starmer), no longer have a parliamentary
majority (Macron) or, according to polls, would not be re-elected
(Merz). They are responding by beefing up the state apparatus and
trampling on democratic rights. Trump is merely the forerunner in this
regard.
*****
The Évian summit serves as a microcosm of the state of the world
today: a ruling elite entrenched in a high-security compound, planning
new wars and attacks on social programmes; growing opposition coming up
against the concentrated might of the state.
No government and no
party that defends capitalism will halt this slide towards war and
dictatorship. Only an independent movement of the international working
class, fighting for a socialist program, can do so. The struggle
against war, dictatorship and fascism is inextricably linked to the
expropriation of the oligarchs and the reorganization of society on a
socialist basis.
On the second day of the UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit,
the administration of UAW President Shawn Fain stepped up its efforts to
bureaucratically stifle debate while ramming through a series of
amendments to the constitution aimed at strengthening the income and
salaries of the highly paid officials staffing the union apparatus.
In
between self-congratulatory and vacuous speeches by a series of
officials in Fain’s circle, the UAW apparatus used underhanded maneuvers
to force through amendments expanding the income and salaries of the
already lavishly compensated international officers and staff.
The
methods employed by the Fain apparatus to control the convention went
beyond even the strong-arm tactics used in the past, demonstrating the
fraud of the claim by Fain and corporate media that he heads a “reform”
administration.
In an attack on democratic rights and in
violation of normal parliamentary procedure, the UAW rammed through a
change in the rules to allow only one speaker in favor and one opposed
per region for resolutions. The apparatus appointed a resolution
committee to arbitrarily exclude all but five of the 74 resolutions
voted on and submitted by locals, but allowed all 35 resolutions
introduced by International officers.
After thus bureaucratically limiting debate, the UAW apparatus secured
passage of a constitutional amendment to raise the cap on the strike
fund that triggers an automatic dues reduction from the current $850
million to $1.3 billion. Under current language any time the strike fund
exceeds the cap, monthly dues must be decreased from 2½ hours pay to 2
hours.
This provocative move, aimed at keeping dues money flowing uninterrupted
to the apparatus, triggered significant opposition from the floor.
However, the UAW leadership quickly shut down debate and rammed through
passage. A counter-resolution calling for a lowering of the cap was
blocked from coming to the floor.
After this heist of members’ dues, the IEB secured passage of another
amendment raising the salaries of Shawn Fain and other top union
officers by around $30,000 each.
*****
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania and
socialist candidate for UAW president campaigning at the convention,
told the WSWS, “This is the most undemocratic gathering our union has
held in a generation. It is a convention of the bureaucracy, by the
bureaucracy, and for the bureaucracy.
“The defining action of the convention was the vote was for the
apparatus to reward itself a massive pay raise, while our brothers and
sisters cannot pay their bills. The character of the proceedings makes a
mockery of Fain’s claim about reforming the apparatus."
*****
Will Lehman said, “the conclusion the rank and file must draw from the
convention is the only conclusion these events permit. The decisions
that determine our lives have to be taken out of the hands of Solidarity
House and placed in the hands of the workers on the shop floor. That
requires the building of rank-and-file committees in every workplace,
independent of the bureaucracy and the political parties that defend it,
which is what the campaign is about.”
Autoworker, socialist, and candidate for UAW president: Will Lehman
As delegates prepared to nominate candidates for international office on the third day of the 2026 UAW Constitutional Convention
in Detroit, Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker from Macungie,
Pennsylvania and rank-and-file socialist candidate for UAW president,
issued a statement charging that the proceedings had laid bare the gulf
between the union bureaucracy and the membership it claims to represent.
“The
events of the first two days of the 2026 UAW Constitutional Convention
have made clear why my nomination is necessary,” Lehman wrote in the
statement, posted on social media. “This is a convention of the
bureaucracy, by the bureaucracy and for the bureaucracy.”
The statement followed two days in which the administration of UAW
President Shawn Fain pushed through a series of constitutional
amendments while sharply restricting debate from the floor. Of the
roughly 100 resolutions submitted by local unions, the convention’s
resolution committee advanced only a handful, while allowing all 35
resolutions introduced by the International Executive Board. New rules
limited debate to one speaker for and one against per region.
The
convention raised the salaries of top officers, with increases Lehman
put at between $10,000 and $30,000 a year for each official. “While our
brothers and sisters cannot pay their bills, the bureaucracy voted
itself raises,” he wrote. “It is rewarding itself for the betrayals it
has carried out.”
*****
Lehman argued that the convention’s tightly managed character was
designed to head off opposition. “The whole event has been aimed at
suppressing opposition to the bureaucracy that controls the UAW,” he
wrote, contending that “there was not, in any meaningful sense, an
actual agenda apart from what Solidarity House wished to ratify.”
He pointed in particular to the presence of former UAW President Ray
Curry, whom Fain invited to the podium as a guest of honor. Curry was
the incumbent Fain defeated in 2022, when Fain denounced him as part of
an “old guard” that had “sold out members with tiers, concessions, and
plant closures.” Lehman noted that Curry “has been welcomed back with
open arms” and that “Curry’s people now sit on the slate alongside
Fain’s.” This reconciliation, he argued, amounted to “the unity of the
apparatus against the rank and file.”
*****
His campaign, Lehman said, “is about transferring power from the
bureaucracy to the rank and file” through “a network of rank-and-file
committees in every workplace.” He directed an appeal to delegates as
they prepared to vote on nominations: “When you go home, your members
will ask you what you did in Detroit. Will you say that you voted to
maintain full dues for workers making $15 an hour while authorizing pay
increases for the apparatus? Or will you say that you stood for building
a popular rank-and-file movement to take back this union?”
Lehman
said he had spoken with delegates “who are outraged by what has
transpired here,” and urged them to “nominate me, and nominate any
candidate who is willing to take a stand for the rank and file against
the apparatus.”
Nominations for international office are scheduled to proceed as the convention continues.
Most recently, on Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made a
provocative visit to Guantánamo Bay—the US naval base held indefinitely
on Cuban territory— where he made entirely unfounded claims that Havana
was looking “to procure or get access to the types of weapons that
could reach this base or the American homeland.”
Axios reported
last month, citing classified intelligence documents, that Cuba had been
acquiring hundreds of attack drones from Russia and Iran. Cuban
authorities have denied all such claims.
Military experts note
that the Cuban military is in a state of disrepair following years of
sanctions and the fuel blockade, making the claims of a threat to the
United States absurd on their face.
The Trump administration has also moved to construct a pseudo-legal
pretext for military action. Last month it indicted 94-year-old former
President Raúl Castro on four counts of murder in connection with the
1996 downing of two planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a
CIA-linked exile organization that conducted repeated hostile
overflights of Cuban territory. As the WSWS has explained, the
indictment directly mirrors the strategy used against Venezuelan
President Nicolás Maduro: fabricate criminal charges, then use them as
cover for abduction or military intervention.
The Pentagon has been preparing for military action. Politico
reported in late May that it “has spent months positioning the troops
and weapons needed for the U.S. to launch a military attack on Cuba—all
it needs is a final go-ahead from Donald Trump.” This includes the USS
Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group, which is operating in the
Caribbean near Cuba as a standing show of force.
*****
These military threats are unfolding against the backdrop of a
humanitarian catastrophe imposed deliberately by Washington. The energy
blockade established in January—when Trump issued an executive decree
threatening any oil suppliers with sanctions—remains in full force and
is tightening. After the Florida-based company Vanguard Energy announced
plans to ship approximately 250,000 barrels of fuel to Cuba, the State
Department denied any authorization had been granted, and Miami-Dade
County revoked the company’s right to operate.
Daily blackouts now exceed 20 hours and affect over 60 percent of the island. There is no relief in sight.
The
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, issued a stark
warning this week: “The fuel restrictions imposed since early 2026 and
recent tightening of extraterritorial sanctions, taken together, are
directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable. Children are
dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and
medicines. This is unacceptable. These sanctions must be lifted
immediately.”
*****
The Cuban government’s response to this siege has not been to appeal
to the international working class against this naked imperialist
aggression.
It has been to offer the Trump administration economic
concessions, seeking to demonstrate that the Castroite leadership can
oversee the island as a profitable source of cheap labor and natural
resources for US corporations.
Last Friday, President Miguel
Díaz-Canel announced a sweeping package of 20 liberalization measures
spanning tourism, foreign trade, foreign investment and the private
sector. He opened Cuba’s hotel sector to “new actors” and “new
modalities” to fill the vacuum.
State import intermediaries,
which had previously been required to participate in all foreign
commerce, are to be eliminated in favor of a more “dynamic” trading
environment. Agricultural producers are to be granted direct access to
inputs, the right to hold accounts with real cash backing and access to
foreign exchange markets. The government announced it will “incentivize”
foreign direct investment and extend the same conditions to Cubans
living abroad—including the exile community in Miami, long associated
with coup and terrorist operations against Cuba—as to residents on the
island.
More sectors of the economy are to be opened to non-state actors, and
the number of ministries is to be reduced from 27 to 20. Díaz-Canel
also returned to the long-standing government objective of “gradually
eliminating subsidies to products.” While claiming this is to direct
social support to “vulnerable groups.” This austerity measure will allow
for open-ended inflation and even deeper economic desperation.
These
changes are, in substance, a program of shock therapy and structural
adjustment—the same type of measures being implemented by Trump-aligned
far-right governments across the region, including Argentina’s Javier
Milei and Rodrigo Paz’s government in Bolivia.
Despite these massive concessions, the Trump administration has stated
openly that its objective is directly what has been imposed on
Venezuela, where income from oil sales and government finances are being
managed directly by the US Treasury Department, where US troops operate
freely, and where a puppet regime was installed through military force.
*****
The current prostration of the Castroite leadership—its receiving the CIA director in Havana, its appeals to Miami gusano
capitalists, its dismantling of social rights and nationalizations—is
not an accident. It is the logical conclusion of a nationalist and
capitalist program that was always hostile to the independent power of
the working class and was therefore always incapable of sustaining the
gains of the 1959 revolution against the pressure of imperialism.
As a recent WSWS statement on the balance sheet of Castroism stated, pointing to Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution:
The
Cuban revolution provides a strategic confirmation of the theory of
permanent revolution in the negative. Even the most radical
nationalizations carried out by a petty-bourgeois nationalist
government, under conditions of mass mobilization, could not resolve the
democratic task of emancipation from imperialism. Defenders of
Castroism could argue that it is precisely the isolation imposed by US
imperialism that led to their failure, but that argument only
underscores the point that the struggle for workers’ power as an
integral component of world socialist revolution is necessary.
The defense of Cuba against military attack and the genocidal blockade
requires the mobilization of the working class internationally—above all
in the United States. Its defense cannot be built on illusions in the
Cuban government’s ability to negotiate its way out of Washington’s
crosshairs, or in the regional bourgeois governments that have fallen
silent as the blockade tightens and the carrier strike group takes up
position in the Caribbean. It can only be built on the program of
socialist internationalism that unites workers across the Americas in a
common struggle to put an end to imperialist militarism and the
capitalist system that is its source.
On June 10, an Indonesian military court sentenced four personnel from
the armed forces’ Strategic Intelligence Agency (BAIS) to prison terms
for their roles in attacking a prominent human rights activist with acid
in March.
The
attack took place on March 12 in Jakarta against Andrie Yunus, a deputy
coordinator for the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of
Violence (KontraS). Andrie, who was known for his criticisms of the
military’s growing role in civilian life, was riding a motorbike shortly
before midnight. He had been recording an interview for a podcast with
the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute on the issue of remilitarization in
Indonesia since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998.
Two
men on another motorbike coming from the opposite direction pulled up
next to him and doused him with acid. As a result of his injuries,
Andrie lost his sight in one eye and received acid burns on more than 20
percent of his body. The attack took place in full view of more than a
dozen CCTV cameras, clearly meant to be seen in order to intimidate
other government critics.
*****
The four soldiers were undoubtedly not acting on their own, but involved
authorization at higher levels of the military. The BAIS is the
intelligence body of the Indonesian military (TNI) and like other
intelligence and special forces organizations, played a key role in
suppressing opposition to the Suharto regime, which was in power from
1966 to 1998.
Andrie was one of a number of activists who protested a closed-door
meeting by members of the House of Representatives discussing revisions
to the TNI law in March 2025. Those changes expanded the number of
civilian positions that active-duty military personnel are legally
allowed to hold, including in the Attorney General’s office and the
Supreme Court.
These changes are part of a broader expansion of
the military in Indonesia. President Prabowo Subianto is reviving the
Suharto-era political policy of “dual-function” or dwifungsi in
which the military plays major roles in the government and public
sectors. In this way, the military was able to enmesh itself into
civilian life in order to suppress resistance to Suharto’s government.
Following the end of Suharto’s regime in 1998, the Indonesian bourgeoise claimed it was carrying out a period of reformasi,
supposedly ending the “dual-function” system among other democratic
reforms. In reality, the military continued to exert a great deal of
control and influence while figures like Prabowo, who were intimately
connected to the Suharto regime, were brought back into positions of
power. Under Prabowo, the repressive measures of the Suharto era are
returning in order to suppress working-class discontent amid a global
crisis of capitalism.
*****
The trial of Andrie’s attackers simply made them the scapegoats while
covering up any involvement of the military top brass. Andrie had
requested that the trial take place in a civilian court, rather than a
military court. He refused to appear in person during the trial, citing
his health and fears for his safety.
Mokhamad Zainal Abidin, one
of the judges in the trial, downplayed the seriousness of the attack,
stating, that the four men “only intended to teach (Andrie) a lesson”
for criticizing and “demeaning” the military. In other words, Andrie had
brought the attack on himself implying the same could happen to anyone
who criticizes the armed forces.
*****
Significant protests have taken place during Prabowo’s term,
including those that erupted last August over an allowance that greatly
increased legislatures’ pay amid rising inflation costs and layoffs. In
response, the Prabowo government deployed the police and military and
carried out hundreds of arrests.
Only a few weeks after that, in September 2025, the military took out a full-page advertisement in Kompas,
Indonesia’s largest circulation newspaper, extolling the expansion of
the armed forces into people’s lives. It claimed that the military had
been turned into “people’s defense based on prosperity and cross-sector
collaboration.”
As part of these efforts, the Prabowo government
is undertaking the largest expansion of the military this century. Since
late 2024, approximately 30 “territorial development brigades” and 155
“territorial development battalions” have been established. The
government intends to create another 150 battalions this year with the
goal of establishing one for each of Indonesia’s 514 regencies and
cities.
While supposedly to assist in disaster relief, community
projects, and to combat crime, these battalions are being deployed to
monitor and suppress social unrest while conditioning the public to the
presence of security forces in their daily lives.
Last year China recorded a trade surplus of more than $1 trillion,
the largest ever for any country and the data for the first half of this
year show the export surge is continuing.
Exports in May jumped
by 19.4 percent from a year earlier compared to a forecast of a 15
percent growth and a 14.1 percent increase for April. The growth was
concentrated in high-tech areas—long gone are the days when Chinese
exports largely comprised cheaper consumer goods, though these still
play a part.
*****
The situation in the domestic economy, however, stands in marked contrast to the tech-fuelled export boom.
Figures
released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) yesterday show that
retail sales declined by 0.6 percent in May. This was greater than
expectations and the worst result since the ending of COVID restrictions
as the disease swept through the country.
*****
Figures on loans and credit also point to a slowing of the domestic
economy. While aggregate financing increased by 2.03 trillion yuan
(around $300 billion) in May it was 11 percent lower than the previous
year. According to a Bloomberg report last week, the “weak underlying
credit showed little sign of rebounding despite efforts by the central
bank” to stimulate its flow.
China was able to insulate itself to
some extent from the impact of the war in Iran by using its large oil
reserves to cut oil imports. But it has not been able to completely
escape the effects of the war nor the impact of the Trump tariffs.
In April, the New York Times
reported on protests in southern China by thousands of workers who took
to the streets over the sudden close of several toy factories.
These
factories operate on very thin profit margins, and the closures were
the result of increases in the price of plastics, the production of
which is dependent on oil and natural gas.
The factories were based in Yulin City, a toy manufacturing hub. According to the Times:
“Workers draped banners across factory gates with slogans like, ‘Give
me back my blood and sweat money.’” It said “numerous short videos” of
the protests circulated online in China, apparently tolerated by
authorities who mostly censor such actions.
If the internal
economy continues to slow, amid declining consumer spending, sluggish
investment and the rising costs of production for many firms, then the
Xi regime could well be confronted with its worst nightmare—an upsurge
of working-class struggles.
It used to be said by leaders of the ruling Chinese Communist Party,
which functions as the chief mechanism of rule for China’s capitalist
oligarchy, that a growth rate of at least 8 percent was needed to
maintain “social stability.”
The official growth target for this year is between 4.5–5 percent and there are doubts that even this level will be reached.
*****
Not only is the domestic economy weakening but there are growing
tensions arising from the export boom. China is not only confronted by
the US but increasingly by Europe which takes 20 percent of its exports
and comprises 31 percent of its record trade surplus.
Earlier this
month Beijing cancelled diplomatic meetings with the European Union
without a reason being given. But the move was interpreted as expressing
dissatisfaction with the EU’s threats to impose protectionist measures.
Last month, as it threatened tariffs and restrictions on Chinese goods,
the European Commission said the rising trade deficit with China, now at
€1 billion a day, was “unsustainable”.
*****
The Global Times, which strikes a more nationalist tone, said: “The EU should not and cannot afford to fight a ‘trade war with China’.”
There
will be a summit meeting of the European Council later this week which
will discuss “competitiveness and global economic challenges.” China is
not mentioned by name, but it is clearly the target.
The doctrine
of the CCP, so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is that
it can somehow peacefully integrate itself into a “rules-based” global
capitalist order. But that order has been shattered, above all through
the actions of the Trump regime in the US, and global capitalism is
rapidly moving, not into a multipolar word, but one riven by a series of
conflicts which increasingly resemble those of the disastrous 1930s.
At the Teamsters’ 31st International Convention, held this week at
Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) helped
return Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman to power unopposed.
The
O’Brien-Zuckerman Teamsters United slate was reelected by white ballot
Tuesday after no opposition candidate received enough delegate votes to
reach the membership ballot. TDU, which endorsed O’Brien for a second
term, has thus helped secure another five years for an ultra-right union
president whose record includes mass layoffs, blocked strikes and open
collaboration with Donald Trump and fascistic forces.
The election
decision was settled by convention delegates in Las Vegas, at a luxury
casino resort, while 1.3 million Teamsters were denied the right to vote
on the top offices.
Only five years ago, TDU and its pseudo-left
allies promoted O’Brien-Zuckerman as the beginning of a new era of
militancy, democracy and “rank-and-file” power. TDU said the campaign
offered “new leadership and a new direction.” Jacobin and Labor Notes hailed the coalition between TDU and O’Brien as proof that the “reform” wing of the bureaucracy had opened a new road forward.
None
of these promises came true for workers. The only “reform” that
materialized was the elevation of TDU members into higher positions
inside the apparatus.
O’Brien’s central pledge in 2021 was that he would lead a showdown
with UPS. Instead, the Teamsters apparatus, with TDU’s full support,
used the 2023 “strike ready” campaign as a bait-and-switch operation to
prevent a strike and push through a sellout contract.
The result
has been one of the largest corporate job-cutting campaigns in the
United States. UPS announced 12,000 layoffs in 2024. In 2025, the
company eliminated 48,000 jobs, launched driver buyouts and closed 93
facilities. It plans to eliminate up to 30,000 more positions in 2026.
These cuts have followed directly on the heels of the contract that
O’Brien and TDU sold to workers as a breakthrough.
O’Brien’s other
major “achievement” has been to steer the Teamsters into active support
for Trump and the far right. He became the first Teamsters general
president to speak at the Republican National Convention, where he
praised Trump and presented the union bureaucracy as a partner in the
nationalist politics of the Republican Party. He has cultivated
relations with figures such as Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson, promoted
“America First” trade-war policies and echoed the rhetoric of the Trump
administration against immigrant workers.
O’Brien’s politics express the orientation of the union bureaucracy as a
whole. The apparatus rests on nationalism, anti-communism and
corporatism. Under conditions of capitalist crisis, war and
dictatorship, it seeks a place for itself inside the state as a labor
police force, suppressing workers’ struggles in the name of “national
competitiveness” and “American jobs.”
*****
While the Teamsters convention is taking place in Las Vegas, the UAW
is holding its constitutional convention in Detroit, where the Fain
apparatus is seeking to prevent socialist autoworker Will Lehman from
being nominated as a candidate. Over the previous weekend, Labor Notes
held its conference in the Chicago area. These events form a balance
sheet for the entire milieu. Its “success stories” are now in office,
and their record consists of layoffs, betrayals, corruption allegations,
nationalist politics and suppression of rank-and-file opposition.
The
same social layer plays a similar role in electoral politics. The DSA,
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani channel anger back into the
Democratic Party and the capitalist state, combining left phrases with
adaptation to the right, austerity and imperialism. Mamdani’s meetings
with Trump and his “Commission on Government Efficiency” in New York
City are only the latest expression of this politics.
Workers must
draw the necessary conclusions. The issue is not that TDU chose the
wrong bureaucrat or that workers need a better reform caucus. The entire
strategy of pressuring, capturing or reshuffling the apparatus has
failed.
*****
TDU’s “one member, one vote” campaign has ended with the membership
denied a vote. This fact sums up the whole reform perspective. The task
facing workers is not to refurbish the apparatus, but to abolish its
control and transfer power to the rank and file.
On June 10, the Hollywood Reporter posted an article
headlined “Why Hollywood’s Unions Didn’t Put Up a Fight With Studios
This Year.” It’s a superficial piece, which accepts as good coin the
explanations provided by the various parties involved.
In our
view, the most accurate and direct response to the article’s headline
would be: The Hollywood unions abjectly surrendered as they did in 2026
because they fully accept the existing economic conditions, including
the stranglehold of the conglomerates, and act as extensions of
management. They are incapable of developing a strategy independent of
the corporate oligarchy, and this has disastrous consequences for
industry workers.
*****
The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the 2026 contract cycle,
which notes the Directors Guild of America (DGA) as “the last union to
seal a deal,” paints a picture of a year remarkable mainly for its absence of
drama. “What a difference three years makes,” the article begins. 2023
was “spicy.” 2026 was “sleepy.” The Writers Guild (WGA) talks were “very
chill.” SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations were “pretty uneventful.” The DGA,
true to form, behaved like the responsible eldest child.
The HR
then proceeds to offer explanations for this supposed placidity: the
ongoing contraction of Hollywood employment, the unions’ need for health
plan funding, the “personalities at play” (a new AMPTP president, new
union presidents) and the general sense that in a “precarious industry
environment, unionized entertainment workers were in no position to risk
another strike.”
The logic here deserves thinking about. Times
are harsh, the employers are taking advantage by cutting jobs and
increasing pressure on workers. Therefore ... the unions argue, we must
run up the white flag!
What is to be said of organizations that capitulate without a fight in
the face of ruthless enemies and bitter conditions? Workers might be
able “tolerate” such unions in periods of relative peace and quiet, but
now that everything is being turned upside down, the well-heeled union
bureaucracies’ utter worthlessness from the point of view of struggle
has been revealed. The rank and file will need to take matters into
their own hands, or there will be nothing left.
*****
To the tens of thousands of writers, actors and crew members who have
watched their livelihoods collapse over the past four years, the HR
account will read as something between evasion and insult. As noted, it
describes the surface of events—who said what, which leader replaced
which, what percentage voted yes—while systematically obscuring the
forces that determined the outcome. The purpose of this reply is not to
polemicize against a trade publication but to speak directly to the
workers who have been betrayed and to explain what actually happened,
why it happened and what must be done.
*****
The HR’s article treats the union leadership as the natural and
permanent representative of entertainment workers. Sean Astin “struck a
diplomatic tone.” Danielle Sanchez-Witzel praised the AMPTP for coming
“ready to talk.” Greg Hessinger “helped reset the relationship.” The
entire narrative assumes that workers’ interests are advanced through
the personalities and negotiating styles of officials.
This is a
falsehood. The interests of entertainment workers cannot be advanced
through an apparatus that is structurally integrated into the industry
it claims to fight. This apparatus is not the workers’ representative,
but their enemy. The answer is to build independent rank-and-file
committees, democratically controlled organizations that operate outside
and against the union bureaucracy, capable of coordinating across
crafts, across unions and across industries.
The Hollywood writer facing AI replacement, the SAG-AFTRA performer
losing healthcare eligibility, the WGAW staffer stripped of coverage for
going on strike, the Detroit autoworker facing plant closure, the
University of California healthcare worker whose strike was canceled in
the middle of the night by AFSCME—They all face the same financial
oligarchy and the same apparatus of betrayal. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) has been built precisely to make this unity a reality.
After three consecutive interest rate hikes in February, March and
May, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) kept its cash rate on hold at
4.35 percent at yesterday’s Monetary Policy Board meeting.
But
the RBA board warned of possible further rate hikes, primarily to
suppress household spending, amid the ongoing global impact of the
US-Israeli war on Iran and a worsening cost-of-living crisis for
working-class families.
Statements issued by the RBA and its governor Michele Bullock
reiterated the central bank’s determination, acting on behalf of the
corporate ruling class, to keep increasing unemployment to achieve its
sub-3 percent inflation target—well below the current official rate of
4.2 percent—backed by the Albanese Labor government.
At her media
conference in Sydney, Bullock dismissed a reporter’s question about the
rising official jobless figure—now 4.5 percent—and how many more workers
had to lose their jobs before the bank’s inflation requirements would
be satisfied. She flatly stated that unemployment necessarily had to
“drift” up in order to slow demand.
Bullock was vehement that this offensive would continue even if the
Middle East war ended, and fuel and other price rises began to ease. “I
want to be very clear that inflation remains too high,” she stated. “We
already had an inflation problem before the Strait of Hormuz closure
supercharged things.”
In other words, the working class must
continue to bear the burden of job losses, as well as real wage cuts,
regardless of whether the Trump administration’s supposed ceasefire deal
survives.
Two more University of Michigan anti-war activists entered pleas of not
guilty on June 15 before the US District Court for the Eastern District
of Michigan. The federal conspiracy prosecution of the U-Mich Eight is a
Trump administration assault on First Amendment protections and a
pseudo-legal attempt to criminalize routine activities of political
organization.
The eight people being prosecuted are students, former students, or
student employees of the university who were involved in protests
demanding that U-Mich divest from Israel.
Ahmet Kerem Korkaya, 28,
and Alexander Matthew Sepulveda, 23, were arraigned on June 15 and
released on bail. Korkaya was a student at the Medical College of
Wisconsin and conducted research at U-Mich in 2023-24. Sepulveda was the
co-founder of the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter at U-Mich.
Their appearance follows the arraignment of four co-defendants on June 12:
Paige Feyock, 26; Zainab Hakim, 23; Colin Weger, 24; and Jonathan Zou,
22, all of whom also pleaded not guilty and were released on bond.
Miriam Odeh, 24, former president of Students Allied for Freedom and
Equality (SAFE), is scheduled for arraignment on July 1. The seven were arrested June 10 in coordinated FBI raids
across southeast Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin. An eighth defendant,
Amatullah Hakim, 21, the sister of Zainab Hakim, is currently in India
on a work-study program.
These prosecutions escalate the drive by
the Trump administration to construct a pseudo-legal framework for the
criminalization of left-wing political opposition. On September 22,
2025, Trump issued an executive order designating Antifa as a “domestic
terrorist organization.” Three days later, he issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7
(NSPM-7), a fascistic blueprint that names “anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity” as “common threads animating”
domestic terrorism. In March of this year, nine North Texas activists
were convicted of “material support for terrorism” for their alleged
role in a July 4, 2025 protest at an ICE detention center, the first
large-scale application of that charge against left-wing protesters.
*****
Among the phrases the government presents as criminal are: “if you
aren’t losing sleep after funding mass murder and genocide, then WE WILL
WAKE YOU UP”; “we must escalate, mobilize, and organize to demand
divestment by any means necessary”; “our duty to Palestine is to damage,
disrupt, and destroy the colonizers’ operations by any means
necessary”; and “Do not forget … You sleep only because we let you.”
The
phrase “by any means necessary” has been used by the labor movement,
anti-war coalitions and civil rights campaigners for generations. The
government is effectively stripping the working class and students of
the right to employ urgent, aggressive or confrontational rhetoric
against the ruling elite. As Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR)-Michigan staff attorney Amy Doukoure noted: “None of that seems
like a threat when you’re talking about First Amendment law.”
*****
The same modus operandi of inflating minor infractions into federal
felonies applies to the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Chinese
researchers at U-Mich. Five Chinese researchers affiliated with the
university were charged with conspiracy and smuggling over routine
customs paperwork violations. They were arrested, jailed and either
deported or forced to return to China. The witch-hunt led to the suicide
in March of post-doctoral research scientist Danhao Wang.
Neither Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer nor Attorney General
Dana Nessel has made a public statement addressing the federal
indictments against the U-Mich Eight, but the FBI credited Nessel’s
office for providing logistical assistance in the investigation. Unable
to secure convictions in state court, Nessel colluded with the Trump
administration to finish the job.
The government attack on U-Mich
anti-genocide protesters has from the start been a bipartisan operation.
The Biden administration joined with Republicans to smear
pro-Palestinian protesters as antisemites and supported crackdowns on
peaceful demonstrators by campus and local police.
*****
These illegal and unconstitutional methods are being refined and
tested on students today so they can be deployed against striking
autoworkers, teachers and logistics workers tomorrow. The defense of the
targeted students cannot be left to the courts, nor can it rely on
appeals to the Democrats and Republicans carrying out the persecution.
The
Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for
Social Equality demand the immediate dropping of all charges against the
University of Michigan Eight and an end to the persecution of anti-war
protesters nationwide. The defense of democratic rights and the defeat
of the imperialist war machine require the independent political
mobilization of the international working class against the source of
war and dictatorship—the capitalist profit system.
Communists raise their fists as Nazi soldiers lead them to their execution
For
the first time, newly discovered photos of the Nazi massacre at
Kaisariani give a face to the 200 Greek resistance fighters, including
twelve Trotskyists, and reveal their courageous defiance.
*****
After the recent discovery of the photos, descendants of Krokos
published an open letter in which they “reverently, moved and proudly” honored the 200 executed men who “faced death with dignity, true to
their convictions to the end.” They demanded that the photos be handed
over to the Kaisariani Museum and that a National Resistance Museum be
established in Athens.
*****
Today’s Communist Party of Greece, which currently has 21 seats in
parliament, places itself in the tradition of the partisan movement and
attempts to politically co-opt the memory of the Kaisariani massacre. In
articles, at events and at a large concert at the memorial site, it has honored the executed KKE members as its heroes and communist patriots.
In 2016, it also opened a museum about the history of the EAM
resistance movement in Kaisariani.
But to this day, the leadership of the KKE pursues an openly Stalinist
programme, justifies the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, which claimed
the lives of countless loyal Bolsheviks, and covers up the
counterrevolutionary role that it itself played at decisive moments of
Greek history. In fact, it bears a substantial share of political
responsibility for the tragic fate of the heroic fighters and its own
members who were murdered by the Nazis in 1944.
*****
The pictures do not tell a story from afar but speak to a generation
that is once again facing the horrors of war and fascism and is
searching for paths of resistance. They show the upright posture of the
victims of Kaisariani. These people knew what was coming to them, and
yet they did not bow. It is precisely for this reason that the photos
raise questions that go beyond the massacre itself: Why were these
courageous people not saved, although an escape would have been
possible? Why was the powerful movement that they had helped to build
disarmed and betrayed after the war?
The reasons must be sought in
the devastating role of Stalinism in Greece. What these victims of
fascism did not have was a political leadership that fought for a
revolutionary conquest of power by the working class. When today’s KKE
claims the memory of the “Kaisariani 200” for itself, it conceals the
fact that it is continuing the same Stalinist policy that led tens of
thousands of courageous resistance fighters to defeat 80 years ago.
Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled Monday that the Labour government’s
proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization under the
Terrorism Act 2000 was “justified and proportionate”, marking a
dangerous escalation in the suppression of democratic rights.
Five
of the most senior judges in England and Wales—led by Lady Chief
Justice Baroness Sue Carr and including Master of the Rolls Sir Geoffrey
Vos, Lord Justice Edis, Lord Justice Lewis, and Lady Justice
Whipple—overturned a February High Court ruling that found the ban
unlawful and disproportionate.
The judgment has immediate consequences for more than 700 people
already charged under the Terrorism Act and for the around 3,400
arrested since the ban took effect in July 2025. The majority were
detained for holding placards reading “I oppose genocide. I support
Palestine Action”—an act that, under section 13 of the Terrorism Act,
carries a potential sentence of six months in prison.
Within hours
of the Court of Appeal ruling, the Metropolitan Police announced it had
arrested a further 117 people outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice
for “supporting a proscribed organization”. Many simply held up a
placard reading “Saving lives is not terrorism. I support Palestine
Action.”
Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, who brought the original
judicial review challenge, described the latest ruling as “one of the
most extreme attacks on free speech and the right to protest in modern
British history.” She added, “We will seek permission to appeal to the
Supreme Court and, if need be, take this to the European Court of Human
Rights”.
*****
The real criminal is the Labour government, complicit in the genocide of
the Palestinians through arms supplies to Israel and hundreds of RAF
surveillance operations over Gaza on behalf of the fascistic Tel Aviv
regime. It has banned a group whose principal target was Elbit Systems, a
key supplier to the Israeli Defense Forces.
*****
The ruling came just three days after four Palestine Action activists
were sentenced as terrorists for a 2024 break-in at an Elbit Systems
factory in Filton, South Gloucestershire. With more than 700 individuals
already facing charges under the Terrorism Act—their cases suspended
pending the appeal—the floodgates have now opened for a wave of
prosecutions against people whose only offense was to peacefully
identify with opposition to genocide.
This is the spearhead for
worse. The fact that the ruling made specific reference to the war in
Ukraine, NATO and the Five Eyes surveillance alliance makes clear the
motivations behind the crackdown. As military tensions mount across the
globe, the British ruling class is preparing its state for war—against
its enemies abroad and the working class at home.
The language that is used to describe peaceful direct action protest
against a genocide is chilling. The Court of Appeal endorses the Home
Secretary’s power to weigh the “operational benefits” of proscribing an organization against the action’s infringements of democratic rights.
The “key benefit” being “to prevent it from funding terrorism and to
degrade its covert infrastructure characterized by secret cells.”
Defending
democratic rights means organizing the working class to win the
ferocious confrontation which the ruling class is preparing. It was
popular struggles which won every social and democratic right now
threatened with destruction. The fight against the war, genocide and
dictatorship requires the building of a mass socialist movement in
Britain and internationally.
Musk, an ideological fascist and the biggest donor of the 2024 election,
who spent $277 million to elect Trump, headed the Department of
Government Efficiency early in Trump’s second term, using it to gut
federal agencies and close the US Agency for International Development.
According to a 2025 study in the Lancet, the closure of USAID could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, 4.5 million of them children under five.
The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, and New Zealand’s
Christopher Luxon, met in Australia on June 6 for their annual leaders’
meeting.
The countries are crucial allies of Washington in the Indo-Pacific
and are deeply involved in US-led imperialist wars in every part of the
globe—from the Middle East to the US-NATO proxy war against Russia over
Ukraine, and war preparations against China. These are all fronts in a
developing third world war, which threatens a catastrophe far greater
than the two world wars of the last century.
Both ruling elites
face intractable economic and political crises at home. Australia’s
Labor government and NZ’s National Party-led coalition are profoundly
unpopular as the working classes confront attacks on living standards,
exacerbated by the Iran quagmire and the Trump administration’s tariffs.
Both governments are massively increasing military spending.
*****
The anti-China thrust of the meeting was highlighted by statements
condemning so-called “intensification of destabilizing activities” in
both the South China and East China Seas, including “the militarization of disputed features and instances of unsafe and unprofessional behavior.” Albanese and Luxon opposed “any unilateral action to change
the status quo” at the Taiwan Strait, purportedly “encouraging dialogue
rather than coercion or the use of force.”
The statements,
implicitly blaming China, turn reality on its head. They repeat the
propaganda deployed by Washington to demonize Beijing and reinforce US
imperialist positioning in the region. It is not China, but the Trump
administration that is engaged in a vast buildup and expansion of its
military activities in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
recently demanded that local allies increase their military budgets to
at least 3.5 percent of GDP, as part of US-led war preparations.
*****
Attempts by the ruling classes to whip up anti-China sentiment are,
however, beginning to fall flat. A survey released this month shows
that, for the first time in a decade, New Zealanders are more likely to
see China as a “friend” than the United States.
The “Perceptions
of Asia and Asian Peoples” survey, by the Asia New Zealand Foundation,
found that 43 percent of people viewed China as a friend, up from 38
percent last year. The percentage who regarded the US as a friend
dropped dramatically from 61 to 39 percent.
While this is
indicative of overwhelming public opposition to war, experience has
demonstrated that imperialist governments are impervious to protests
urging them to change course. The urgent task is to build a socialist,
anti-war movement to unite workers and young people across Australia,
NZ, Asia, the Pacific and internationally to put an end to capitalism,
which is the root cause of war, social inequality and dictatorship.
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.
