Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Oppose the death threat against UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman!
On July 16, Raymond L. Jensen Jr., a high-ranking official of the United Auto Workers, posted a death threat against Will Lehman, the socialist Mack Trucks worker and candidate for UAW president. The threat was an AI-generated image posted on Lehman’s public Facebook campaign page depicting Lehman bound with rope and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked man aiming an automatic rifle at his back.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on workers and all defenders of democratic rights to denounce this incitement to violence against Will Lehman and demand its unequivocal public repudiation by the UAW.
Jensen’s threatening post cannot be brushed aside as the act of a deranged individual acting on his own. Jensen is an organizer on the staff of the UAW. Until recently he was the assistant director of UAW Region 9, the region to which Lehman belongs. He was paid approximately $202,000 in total compensation in 2025, according to the union’s LM-2 filings with the US Labor Department. He is a prominent supporter of UAW President Shawn Fain, and his Facebook profile displays an “I Support Shawn Fain” campaign badge.
Lehman is an officially certified candidate for UAW president, nominated on June 18 at the union’s 39th Constitutional Convention in Detroit. He is campaigning on a platform calling for the abolition of the union bureaucracy, the building of rank-and-file committees in every plant and the transfer of power to workers on the shop floor. In the last election, in 2022, Lehman received nearly 5,000 votes, despite the fact that turnout was systematically suppressed by the apparatus and barely 10 percent of the UAW membership voted.
On Friday, Lehman’s attorney Eric Lee sent a letter to the court-appointed UAW Monitor’s office demanding a full investigation. It states:
When a highly paid functionary of the incumbent administration, publicly identified with the president’s re-election campaign, posts an image of the opposition candidate gagged, bleeding, and under the gun, the message transmitted to the UAW membership is unmistakable: extreme violence against Will Lehman is encouraged and enjoys the sanction of the union leadership.
Under federal law, such a posting is a crime. Transmitting a threat to injure another person over the internet is a federal felony under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), punishable by up to five years in prison, and threats of violence are likewise criminal offenses under state law. In addition, 29 U.S.C. § 530 makes it a federal crime to use or threaten force or violence to restrain, coerce or intimidate a union member for the purpose of interfering with their rights.
On Sunday, Lehman responded with a statement warning that if a threat of this character can be made openly against a candidate for the union’s highest office, “then no worker who challenges the bureaucracy in their own local is safe.”
The threat is part of a pattern. Less than one month ago, the federal Monitor, Neil Barofsky, found that Fain “inappropriately used the powers of his office” in an “abuse of his authority,” documenting a “recurring pattern of retaliation,” including the removal of Vice President Rich Boyer on charges Fain “knew were false when he made them.” A federal grand jury is now investigating Fain.
The Monitor has also found that the leadership perpetrated a “toxic climate of retribution” and that Fain personally threatened to “slit” the “throats” of anyone who “messed” with his inner circle.
The long history of violence directed by union bureaucracies against rank-and-file opposition is well known. As for the UAW, the Monitor’s office itself exists only because of the apparatus’s record of criminality. It was installed under a consent decree with the federal government in 2021, following a corruption investigation that sent more than a dozen union officials to prison—including two former UAW international presidents—for embezzlement, kickbacks and the taking of bribes from the auto companies.
The IWA-RFC endorses the demands advanced in Lehman’s statement:
- A full investigation of the posting, encompassing not only Jensen’s conduct but the knowledge, encouragement or acquiescence of the UAW leadership.
- A public repudiation of the threat by the UAW in the strongest possible terms, a formal apology to Lehman, and an unequivocal public declaration—circulated to the entire membership—that the union recognizes and fully supports Lehman’s right to conduct his campaign.
- An immediate public statement by the Monitor’s office warning that such threats will not be tolerated and announcing that an investigation has been initiated.
- The immediate suspension of Jensen from his position without pay, pending completion of the investigation, with all appropriate legal and disciplinary sanctions to follow.
- Referral of the matter to the Department of Labor and, as warranted, to federal law enforcement.
- Affirmative measures to guarantee that the remainder of the 2026 election is conducted free of intimidation.
The IWA-RFC calls on UAW members and workers in every industry, in the US and internationally, to take up the defense of Lehman as their own cause. As Lehman stated: “This threat is not aimed at me alone. It is an act of intimidation directed against the entire rank-and-file opposition.”
The IWA-RFC also calls on all left-wing and progressive organizations to categorically denounce this threat.
Register your opposition to this incitement to violence! Email the UAW at feedback@uaw.org to demand that it publicly repudiate the threat against Lehman, with a copy to the Will Lehman campaign at info@willforuawpresident.org.
2. Former Trump envoy calls for ground invasion of Iran as US losses mount
The rapid escalation of the Iran war, and the mounting death toll for US troops, have triggered a crisis for the administration, which faces the failure of its goals of overthrowing the Iranian government, breaking the power of its military and securing American domination of the Strait of Hormuz.
In the face of this deepening crisis, the administration is moving more openly toward the deployment of ground troops, and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served as Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine until the end of last year, publicly called for a ground invasion.
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Only on Monday, after days of refusal, did the Pentagon acknowledge the scale of its losses: nearly 100 soldiers wounded since July 7. Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said the “vast majority” of the injuries were “mild concussions” and that 96 percent of the wounded have returned to duty. The New York Times reported Monday that in the week before the fatal attack, Iran struck US forces in Jordan three more times, wounding dozens of soldiers and damaging helicopters—strikes the Pentagon never disclosed.
The Pentagon’s public casualty database, static for days at 14 dead and 427 wounded, was quietly updated Monday evening to 18 dead and 447 wounded, the Washington Post reported. The Pentagon has not held a press briefing on the war since early May. “Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people,” Parnell said.
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A Journal investigation published in late June documented the damage at one base. Iranian missiles and drones, striking repeatedly between late February and June, devastated Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the base from which the U.S. Navy has run its Middle East operations for over 30 years.
The Fifth Fleet’s headquarters building, whose construction cost the Journal put at $200 million, can no longer be used, according to a US official. A dozen or more other buildings were struck, two satellite communications terminals were knocked out, and the Navy evacuated most of the base’s staff. The Pentagon has never publicly acknowledged the damage.
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At least 20 American military and diplomatic sites had been hit by late June, the Journal reported, in the course of the war that began February 28. Iranian attacks smashed structures at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, damaged Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates and destroyed E-3 Sentry radar planes at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
The Journal reported in June that US officials said the military was weighing a retreat from its exposed positions: pulling back from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, shifting bases and command functions westward out of missile range, burying command posts underground and stationing American forces in Israel.
The Pentagon has refused to tell Congress what the damage costs. Asked at a May hearing for an estimate, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth replied: “What is the cost of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon?” Jay Hurst, the Pentagon comptroller, said in congressional testimony in May that the department’s war-cost estimate—then $29 billion—left out the damage to American bases. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in a June report, put the war’s total cost at about $40 billion, including $2.2 billion to $5.1 billion in damage to bases.
3. United States: Kaiser Permanente implementing invasive AI surveillance of advice hotline nurses
An investigation published July 9 by CalMatters documented call monitoring, predictive productivity software and monthly performance scores used on Kaiser Permanente advice nurses in California. Interviews with seven current and former nurses found that staff are questioned about calls lasting more than 15 minutes and receive monthly scores tracking their speed and activity. Software also records active and inactive time and attempts to predict whether nurses are unproductive or answering too slowly.
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Nurses said the time allowed after calls has fallen from about 10 minutes to 30 seconds or less when lines are busy; extra time requires a manager’s permission. In 2024, Kaiser also piloted software that graded tone and apparent empathy in the voices of nurses and patients. One nurse said the program repeatedly scored calls incorrectly. Nurses petitioned against it, and Kaiser suspended the pilot in November, but they were told it could return. Kaiser declined to say whether patients knew their voices were being assessed. Charlotte Capulong, a 22-year call center veteran, told CalMatters: “You aren’t calling Comcast. We’re dealing with life here.”
Kaiser denied using average handling time to evaluate nurses or enforce call-time targets. It said its contact-center tools support quality assurance and are subject to human review. But the company did not explain why nurses are questioned about calls exceeding 15 minutes or why call time appears in the scores they described.
Management’s ability to impose these technologies depends on the trade union bureaucracy suppressing resistance and accepting contracts that preserve management’s authority. The nurses interviewed by CalMatters belong to the California Nurses Association (CNA), which represents 25,000 Kaiser nurses, including about 1,000 in call centers, and has historically remained outside Kaiser’s infamous Labor Management Partnership (LMP). But CNA begins contract talks this month, and its existing contract contains few limits on new technology outside of requiring notice, which even the union says Kaiser has not always provided.
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Workers’ control would require enforceable provisions: Call-time and activity metrics could not be used for discipline; nurses would determine adequate documentation and recovery time; workers would have access to system data and validation results; deployments would require approval by those affected; and clinical staff could override software recommendations without penalty. Staffing minimums would be based on patient need and could not be reduced on the promise of technological savings.
Technology can reduce repetitive documentation, but Kaiser has shown why this cannot substitute for staffing. It cut post-call time to as little as 30 seconds and filled the interval with another patient. Without control of workload, time saved in one task becomes the basis for imposing another. Automation cannot be presented as an alternative to hiring enough nurses.
Rank and file committees independent of the union bureaucracy are needed to investigate systems already in use and unite workers across Kaiser’s bargaining units around these demands. Decisions over staffing, budgets and technology ultimately require public ownership and democratic control of the healthcare system.
Hundreds of workers, young people and immigrant families rallied Sunday at Ervan Chew Park in Houston to demand justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old construction worker and father of three killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on July 7. Salgado’s sons addressed the crowd, which later marched onto the Hazard Street bridge.
On Monday, an attorney for Salgado’s brother, Victor, filed a habeas corpus petition seeking his release from ICE custody. Victor was inside the work van when his brother was shot. He and two other witnesses, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and José Trinidad Rojas, remain imprisoned at the Montgomery ICE Processing Center in Conroe and could be deported, the evident purpose being to prevent them from contradicting the government’s account of Salgado’s murder. The agent who killed Salgado has not been publicly identified, arrested or charged.
The witnesses say the agents did not identify themselves and none was standing in front of the van when the officer fired. DHS initially claimed Salgado used the van as a weapon and struck a government vehicle. That claim was absent from a statement Thursday by US Attorney Aaron Reitz. Reitz said the officer was beside or partly inside the van, no agent was injured and Salgado was not the target of the operation.
In a transparent attempt at smearing him after the fact, the FBI later filed an affidavit as part of a search warrant of Salgado’s van referring to a “white crystalline substance” in the vehicle, although there was no laboratory result or drug charge. The family’s attorney said it was granulated salt commonly used by construction workers to replace electrolytes.
Six days after Salgado’s death, ICE officer David Brouillette killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a young father and worker in Biddeford, Maine, although Guerrero was not the intended target. Subsequent reports revealed that Brouillette had a documented history of domestic abuse allegations, violent threats, erratic behavior and suicidal crises. ICE’s decision to arm him exposes the violent and authoritarian forces being recruited and empowered by the agency.
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In a nationally televised address on Thursday, July 16, Trump revived false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, demanded the punishment of officials who rejected them, and called for federal restrictions on voter registration, voting and mail ballots. The following day, Mullin threatened to withhold federal funding and impose fines, penalties and even prison terms on state officials who refuse to submit their voter rolls to Department of Homeland Security scrutiny. His threats made clear that the administration is preparing to seize control of the midterm elections and reject any result that does not go Trump’s way.
At a State Department summit that same day, attended by representatives of 66 governments, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that the counterterrorism apparatus would target socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-war and other left-wing opposition. He called such opposition “enemies of civilization” and vowed to dismantle its networks “brick by brick.” Stephen Miller denounced “leftists” as “deformed,” and said that their appeals to civil liberties to defend themselves against state prosecution must “fall on deaf ears.”
Miller did not name Salgado or Guerrero, but his statement answers demands for independent investigations into their deaths. The administration rejects constitutional rights and restraints on state violence whenever they obstruct its attack on domestic opposition.
Opposition to the ICE murders must therefore be taken up by the working class as part of a broader political movement against dictatorship, uniting immigrant and US-born workers, independently of the Democratic Party, against the raids, state violence and the attack on democratic rights.
5. Australia: Musicals cancelled as inflation and austerity impact ticket sales
A wave of cancellations and shortened tours across Australia’s commercial musical theater sector has exposed a deepening crisis as rising inflation is making large-scale touring productions increasingly unviable. The sector in Australia is not a niche industry: last year it generated $4 billion in economic activity and 30,000 associated jobs. Actors, dancers, musicians and technical crew—numbering in the hundreds across the industry—are now being thrown out of work with little notice and no recourse, and, in some cases, without being paid.*****
The immediate trigger of the musical theater cancellations is a drastic fall in ticket sales. Advance bookings, on which commercial producers depend to secure financing and commit to venue contracts, have fallen sharply, impacted by the surging cost of living and government austerity measures.
Industry groups have noted that a family of four attending a musical can easily spend between $500 and $1,000, including tickets and other associated costs. For middle-income earners and especially low-paid workers, hit by years of real wage cuts, rising interest rates, surging rents and escalating prices for electricity, groceries and fuel, these costs are prohibitive.
The present crisis, however, is more than just a fall in ticket sales. It exposes the fundamental instability of the for-profit commercial theatre model. Commercial producers are competing in an exceptionally crowded marketplace. Never before have there been so many large-scale musicals, international tours, concerts, festivals and immersive experiences, all vying for the same pool of ticket buyers.
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Even Broadway is struggling these days. According to a report in the New York Times, none of the 18 commercial musicals that opened last season have made a profit yet and only three of 46 new musicals have received the green light.
Large-scale musical productions are financed on the expectation of high-ticket prices and extended runs but when ticket sales fall, producers respond not by lowering prices and reaching out to broader audiences but by cancelling altogether, throwing performers and crew members onto the street.
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The current downturn in live performance is not limited to the private commercial sector but extends into the state-funded sector. The Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC), Victoria’s state theater company for more than 70 years and a department of the University of Melbourne, recently announced a $3.9 million net deficit for 2025, following a drop in ticket revenue and donations, and a sharp rise in costs.
The reality is that state theaters and training institutions—which provide the commercial theater with the performance skills, technical expertise and, in many cases, venues needed to mount musicals and theatrical blockbusters—are being starved of funds.
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The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), which covers workers in the industry, has declared that the musical theater cancellations are “completely devastating for everyone involved,” but it has done nothing to defend jobs in the sector. It supports calls for tax reform, while advocating a “cultural pass” that would provide young people with government-funded vouchers to spend on theater tickets—a scheme that would funnel public money into the pockets of commercial producers while leaving the underlying fundamentals untouched.
As the WSWS has documented, the MEAA has functioned for decades as a corporatist instrument of employers and the state, not a defender of its members. Under legislation introduced in the 1990s, the union is directly involved in approving visas for foreign productions—which cannot proceed without MEAA sign-off and payment of consultancy fees—making it a de facto labor hire agency and one that guarantees industrial peace.
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While arts funding is being slashed, the Albanese government is funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into the military as part of the AUKUS pact and the US-led war drive against China. The same imperatives that drive producers to cancel tours and cut jobs compel governments to slash public arts funding: the subordination of every aspect of social life to the dictates of profit and the financial markets.
Musical theater performers and crews must fight to defend every job. This means reaching out to other creative artists and the entire working class through the development of rank-and-file workplace committees. Such organizations must be independent of the MEAA and other trade union bureaucracies and be based on a socialist perspective that rejects the domination of private ownership and profit over the needs of ordinary working people.
6. Refugees expelled from Australia face hunger and violence in Nauru
Two reports have shed further rare light on the inhuman conditions being suffered on the remote impoverished Pacific island of Nauru by asylum seekers and immigration deportees consigned there for indefinite detention by the Australian government.
Under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who once postured cynically as a defender of refugee rights to head off widespread disgust with offshore detention, the Labor government is enforcing one of the most barbaric regimes in the world.
The first report, published yesterday by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC), is based on interviews conducted with 78 refugees whose boats were intercepted militarily before they were forcibly transported to Nauru.
The results provide a glimpse of their plight, which has been largely hidden from public view because most journalists are banned from entering the tiny island state, a former British, Australian and New Zealand colony.
Among the interviewees, 99 percent could not buy enough food with their meager allowances and described routinely exhausting their fortnightly payments, leading to missed meals and periods of hunger. Two-thirds, or 68 percent, rarely or never had access to fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, and 82 percent had no easy access to free, clean drinking water.
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One asylum seeker commented: “I’m not even eating a quarter of what I ate before coming to Nauru. I cannot afford fruit or vegetables. I just eat pulses and rice. I skip meals frequently in the second week of my pay cycle. I’ve lost 15kg since arriving on Nauru. People tell me that I have lost weight. My clothes are much looser now than they were on arrival. I feel weak and tired from the lack of food.”
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In another report, based on whistleblower claims that were tabled in the Australian parliament in June, violent threats also come from community monitoring officers (CMOs), tasked with policing the people dumped in Nauru.
Under laws introduced by Nauru’s government in March, CMOs were given powers to restrain, search, and monitor Australian transferees, including the use of “reasonable force.” Failure to comply with instructions by the CMOs risks an imprisonment term of up to two years.
Last month, these laws were amended to extend those powers to be used against all residents of Nauru. That seems to be a bid, instigated by the Australian government, to stymie court challenges by ex-immigration detainees who face being deported to Nauru. Legal arguments have been mounted that the detainees’ selective exposure to CMO powers amounted to unconstitutional punishment.
In addition to consigning refugees to Nauru, the Labor government is trying to remove to Nauru about 350 people whom it had been forced to release from immigration detention facilities in November 2023 as the result of a High Court case known as NZYQ, which ruled indefinite detention to be unconstitutional punishment.
To help Labor evade the NZYQ ruling, Nauru’s government agreed to place them on 30-year visas in return for an upfront payment exceeding $400 million, plus $70 million a year. The exact terms of this Memorandum of Understanding remain secret.
Holders of these visas have no right to family reunification. More than a third of the NZYQ ex-detainees, 131 individuals, have Australian children, and 63 have an Australian spouse or partner, according to data obtained under freedom of information laws. They face being separated for life.
As of June 4, 12 people had been issued Nauruan visas and deported there, including an individual reliant on a wheelchair. A further 37 people reportedly have been re-detained for deportation to Nauru, with another nine issued visas but not yet detained.
Offshore detention is policed by private contractors such as Management and Training Corporation (MTC), a US prison operator. In 2025, the Albanese government expanded MTC’s Nauru detention contract to approximately $790 million.
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On every continent, the media and political establishments are seeking to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment and nationalism to divide the working class and divert discontent away from the staggering accumulation of wealth by the billionaires and the underlying capitalist profit system itself.
Amid an ongoing cost-of-living and housing crisis, and facing growing working-class disaffection, Labor is trying to scapegoat refugees, immigrants and international students for the deteriorating social conditions, echoing the far-right anti-immigrant One Nation.
To answer this toxic offensive, workers and young people must defend the basic democratic right of people to live and work anywhere, with full social and citizenship rights. This is part of the fight for a global movement of the working class to reorganize society on a socialist basis, for human and social need, not corporate profit.
7. Former Greek Prime Minister and Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras launches new party ELAS
Alexis Tsipras, notorious for his ruthless austerity policy in Greece, is back on the political stage. One year before the next parliamentary elections in 2027, the former Prime Minister and Syriza leader has founded a new party called ELAS (Greek Left Alliance).Following the announcement on 26 May, Tsipras’ party overtook the previously strongest opposition party, the social-democratic PASOK, in the polls and moved overnight into second place, directly behind the right-wing governing party Nea Dimokratia (ND).
Tsipras’ comeback inevitably calls to mind Karl Marx’s observation that all great world-historical facts and figures occur twice: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. That the man whose name is linked, like almost no other in Europe, with the deceit and betrayal of the working class is once again standing for election must be understood as a warning.
In his founding declaration, Tsipras calls for a “new patriotism” and “a sovereign, democratic, strong and secure Greece.” He combines this crude nationalist rhetoric with a handful of social phrases about justice and democracy, designed above all to pull the wool over the eyes of young people and workers who are searching for a political alternative to the ND government.
In 2015, more than ten years ago, Tsipras won the elections on a wave of mass protests by promising to end the austerity measures of his predecessors. It took only a few weeks for this pseudo-left standard-bearer to jettison all his social promises and turn them into their opposite. The attacks on social and democratic rights under Tsipras’ stewardship far eclipsed the austerity that had come before.
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Now Tsipras is returning to the scene of his crimes, once again offering himself as capitalism’s savior in a period of deep political and economic crisis. As across Europe, social conditions in Greece are stretched to breaking point. The ND government is engaged in a massive military build-up, while workers, families, pensioners and students can barely make ends meet. Public discontent is above all fueled by the high cost of living, which has risen sharply again with the Iran war.
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The choice of name is no coincidence. ELAS is not only a nationalist allusion to Greece (“Hellas”), but above all a reference to the Greek resistance army ELAS, which, under the leadership of the Stalinist Communist Party, fought Hitler’s Wehrmacht (military) during the Second World War.
Under this new banner, Tsipras is attempting to politically reorganize the same social layers that already formed the base of Syriza—the affluent urban petty bourgeoisie, academics, cultural workers and the self-employed.
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Tsipras’ new party is a calculated maneuver to bring the social discontent that has erupted over recent years in large strike and protest movements under control and channel it into nationalist directions. Its program, moreover, does not differ fundamentally from Syriza’s.
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As he did ten years ago, Tsipras presents himself to the world as a shrewder statesman and foreign policy operator. He promises to restore Greece’s “international standing,” weakened by “corruption and lack of credibility,” and to pursue national interests more effectively: “In a period of intense geopolitical upheaval, the country urgently needs a new national compass and an active, multi-layered foreign policy.”
What stands out particularly is the gushing nationalism of ELAS, only perfunctorily disguised by a pro forma critique of right-wing tendencies. The declaration claims that “oligarchies” manipulate social discontent, pit workers and peoples against one another, and foment racism and nationalism. “Neoliberalism,” it adds, embraces “neo-fascism.”
But what is Tsipras’ answer to this fascist danger? Not the mobilization of the working class to overthrow capitalism, which gives rise to war and fascism, but... “the dedication of all to the fatherland”!
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The list of Syriza’s crimes could be extended at length. The experience with Syriza is a strategic lesson for the working class of world-historical significance. It has proved what the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) tirelessly explained from the beginning of Syriza’s rise in 2012: it is impossible to resolve the deep social and political problems confronting society by voting for pseudo-left parties that promise reforms within capitalism.
The WSWS warned even before Syriza took office: “Despite its left-wing façade, Syriza is a bourgeois party that rests on affluent layers of the middle class.” This analysis was completely confirmed and applies equally to Tsipras’ new party ELAS. It stands ready to impose capitalist interests in the coming confrontation with the working class with the same brutality as Syriza.
8. Pentagon draws up plans to attack Cuba amid anti-communist propaganda campaign
The Pentagon is drawing up a range of detailed plans for a potential military assault on Cuba. The continued threats against Cuba, even as the White House actively discusses sending ground troops into Iran, points to the increasing desperation of the Trump administration as it expands its campaign of imperialist plunder abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home.
The report on the Pentagon’s preparations, which first aired July 16 on CBS News, highlighted a plan involving an assault by thousands of US Army troops from the 101st Airborne Division. The 101st Airborne Division is capable of landing thousands of soldiers into a territory within a matter of hours through the use of helicopters. While the operation undertaken by US special forces to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, killed over 100 people just to accomplish that objective, an operation to invade Cuba as a first step to take over the country would involve bloodshed and destruction on a much larger scale.
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In recent weeks, the Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to construct a casus belli by claiming the presence of Iranian drones in Cuba. During a visit to the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay on June 10, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth suggested that Cuba had acquired drones that could pose a threat to the base or even the US mainland. The US government under Trump and Biden has previously alleged that Cuba hosts Chinese and Russian intelligence facilities. Countering Chinese influence in Latin America has been a top strategic priority for the White House.
The drone claim was renewed on Monday, when President Donald Trump said the US was “looking into” the possibility that Cuba was stockpiling Iranian drones, saying, “If they do have that, and they might very well have that … we’ll take care of it in short order. We’re not going to allow that to happen. So, it could be that they’re storing some. We’re looking into it now. It could be so, and it maybe isn’t.”
A report in Foreign Policy on July 17 interviewed several experts, all of whom denied Cuba posed any threat to the United States, even if it did possess some small number of drones. Fulton Armstrong, a former American intelligence officer and subject matter expert for Latin America, stated “there has never been, in 63 years since the Cuban missile crisis, any evidence of Cuba [having] offensive intentions against the United States or southern Florida or Guantanamo.”
At the same time that the Pentagon draws up invasion plans, the Trump administration has continued its fuel blockade. Cuba’s latest reported major shipment came in April, when the Russian tanker Anatoly delivered crude oil, but the energy crunch has since deepened. Residents in Santiago de Cuba said they have endured 26 straight days without electricity, while other areas have faced repeated blackouts lasting many hours and, in some municipalities, more than 87 consecutive hours. Growing anger over the crisis has spilled into the streets, with cacerolazos (pot-beating) and fire-lit protests in downtown Havana and other cities.
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US aggression and threats have already resulted in deep concessions as the Cuban government uses the crossroads to carry out pro-market policies to attract investors and appease Trump. On June 18, Cuba’s National Assembly unanimously approved a package of more than 170 measures that amount to a form of shock therapy and would dismantle most of what little remains of the radical reforms the government put in place following the 1959 Revolution.
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The official Cuban newspaper Granma noted that during the National Assembly session, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz “recalled the premises of Army General Raúl Castro Ruz in leading the update of the economic and social model: not to be dogmatic or immobile, to banish the mechanical association between socialism and egalitarianism, and to recognize that socialist planning does not exclude, but must incorporate and regulate the rules of the market.” One can hardly imagine a clearer statement of the Cuban government’s distance from Marxism and genuine socialism and its social constituency in a capitalist ruling elite intent on intensifying the exploitation of Cuban workers.
This layer is exemplified by figures such as Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, also known as El Cangrejo, or The Crab. Rodríguez Castro is Raúl Castro’s grandson, as well as the son of Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, a general who worked closely with the elder Raúl to create the GAESA business conglomerate which is operated by the Cuban military, and which comprises a large part of the Cuban economy, including much of its tourist sector. According to reports, the 42-year-old Rodríguez Castro has enjoyed a life of luxury, including trips on yachts, private jets and designer clothes.
Nominally a colonel in the Interior Ministry without much of a public profile, Rodríguez Castro has emerged from the shadows in recent months as an interlocutor with the US government during talks which have been going on since the beginning of the year. In this role he has effectively served as an indirect line of communication to the 95-year-old Raúl Castro, who maintains substantial control and influence over the government despite his official retirement.
The Castros and their close supporters are no doubt prepared to throw open the gates to American capitalism in exchange for a continued political role and a guarantee of their privileges along the lines enjoyed by the Venezuelan Chavistas. A New York Times article recently revealed that American Secretary of State Marco Rubio is effectively “running Venezuela,” controlling its finances and government, approving all major decision of the country’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez.
Whether or not the Trump administration deploys the American military to Cuba in the near term, its goal is the complete overturn of the Cuban Revolution and the extirpation of any even verbal or symbolic link to the Russian Revolution, which it hopes to use as a cudgel to bring Latin America into line as it prepares for war against China.
Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK)—the Pakistan-held portion of disputed Kashmir—has been convulsed by mass protests since early June, including sit-ins, demonstrations, and “wheel-jam” and “shutter-down” strikes of public transport, shops and other businesses.
The protests have continued despite mounting state violence. More than 30 people, among them a small number of security forces, have died in clashes between protesters and police and paramilitaries. On Tuesday, July 14, at least nine people were killed, including half a dozen anti-government protesters who were shot down when they tried to block a security convoy in Tararkhal, in AJK’s Sudhnoti District.
The immediate trigger for the current mass agitation was the state’s banning of the AJK Joint Awami (Common People’s) Action Committee or JAAC under a draconian anti-terrorism law, and the arrest of more than a hundred of its leaders and activists.
Although it was the government of the ostensibly self-administered AJK that formally criminalized the JAAC on June 5, it was clearly done at the behest of the central government. From the outset, Pakistan Rangers and Frontier Constabulary police were deployed en masse to make arrests and quell opposition. All of the territory was also immediately subject to a cell phone and internet service blackout that lasted well beyond its initially announced duration of a week. Since then, the authorities have continued to suspend telecommunications intermittently, especially in Rawalakot and the Poonch District of which it is the capital.
In an attempt to break the protest movement, which is centered in Rawalakot, security forces have effectively besieged Azad Pakistan’s third-largest city. The government has prevented food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching Rawalakot, where tens of thousands have joined an ongoing sit-in launched in defiance of the authorities on June 7.
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A mountainous region, Pakistan-administered Kashmir is home to some 4 million people. Like Indian-held Kashmir, which lies to its south and east, it is highly strategic given its centrality to the reactionary conflict between India and Pakistan and its proximity to China.
Relations between South Asia’s nuclear-armed rivals have remained on a knife-edge since they fought a four-day border war in May 2025, with New Delhi and Islamabad regularly exchanging bellicose threats.
Objectively, the protest movement in Azad Kashmir undercuts the official narrative of the Pakistani state, which counterposes a supposedly “free” (in Urdu and Kashmiri “Azad”) Pakistan-held Kashmir to the larger part of the former princely state Jammu and Kashmir now controlled by India. In reality, both India and Pakistan have systematically run roughshod over the democratic rights of the Kashmiri people, while seeking to manipulate them to serve their rival predatory agendas.
The Kashmir region and people were partitioned as part of the broader 1947-48 communal carve-up of South Asia. Implemented by the subcontinent’s departing British colonial overlords and the rival representatives of the colonial bourgeoisie in the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, it divided the subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India.
*****
Given the myriad of intersecting crises, the situation in AJK could spiral out of control, potentially leading to a major military operation aimed at brutally upholding the authority of the Pakistani state over Azad Kashmir and/or a rapid spike in tensions with India.
New Delhi, it need be noted, has hypocritically denounced the Pakistani state repression in Azad Kashmir. This under conditions where it maintains a half-million-strong security force in Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir, and routinely suppresses protests and imposes internet and cell-phone blackouts. In 2019, the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi-led BJP government illegally stripped the region of its status as a “semi-autonomous” state within the Indian Union and reduced it to a Union-administered territory so as to place it more directly under central government control.
*****
The agitation in Azad Kashmir raises fundamental strategic questions for the working class across all South Asia, above all the necessity of it making the strategy of permanent revolution the axis of its struggle. First formulated by Leon Trotsky, it served as the strategic compass for the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the subsequent struggle against its Stalinist degeneration, under conditions where the revolution remained isolated in a war-ravaged, predominantly backward country.
What Trotsky established—and this was subsequently demonstrated in the positive in the October Revolution and in the negative in the independence and partition of South Asia—is that in the imperialist epoch the tasks historically associated with the democratic revolution, such as the eradication of landlordism and caste-ism, separation of Church (mosque/temple) and state and real freedom from imperialism, can only be realized through a working-class led socialist revolution.
Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK)—the Pakistan-held portion of disputed Kashmir—has been convulsed by mass protests since early June, including sit-ins, demonstrations, and “wheel-jam” and “shutter-down” strikes of public transport, shops and other businesses.
The protests have continued despite mounting state violence. More than 30 people, among them a small number of security forces, have died in clashes between protesters and police and paramilitaries. On Tuesday, July 14, at least nine people were killed, including half a dozen anti-government protesters who were shot down when they tried to block a security convoy in Tararkhal, in AJK’s Sudhnoti District.
The immediate trigger for the current mass agitation was the state’s banning of the AJK Joint Awami (Common People’s) Action Committee or JAAC under a draconian anti-terrorism law, and the arrest of more than a hundred of its leaders and activists.
Although it was the government of the ostensibly self-administered AJK that formally criminalized the JAAC on June 5, it was clearly done at the behest of the central government. From the outset, Pakistan Rangers and Frontier Constabulary police were deployed en masse to make arrests and quell opposition. All of the territory was also immediately subject to a cell phone and internet service blackout that lasted well beyond its initially announced duration of a week. Since then, the authorities have continued to suspend telecommunications intermittently, especially in Rawalakot and the Poonch District of which it is the capital.
In an attempt to break the protest movement, which is centered in Rawalakot, security forces have effectively besieged Azad Pakistan’s third-largest city. The government has prevented food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching Rawalakot, where tens of thousands have joined an ongoing sit-in launched in defiance of the authorities on June 7.
*****
A mountainous region, Pakistan-administered Kashmir is home to some 4 million people. Like Indian-held Kashmir, which lies to its south and east, it is highly strategic given its centrality to the reactionary conflict between India and Pakistan and its proximity to China.
Relations between South Asia’s nuclear-armed rivals have remained on a knife-edge since they fought a four-day border war in May 2025, with New Delhi and Islamabad regularly exchanging bellicose threats.
Objectively, the protest movement in Azad Kashmir undercuts the official narrative of the Pakistani state, which counterposes a supposedly “free” (in Urdu and Kashmiri “Azad”) Pakistan-held Kashmir to the larger part of the former princely state Jammu and Kashmir now controlled by India. In reality, both India and Pakistan have systematically run roughshod over the democratic rights of the Kashmiri people, while seeking to manipulate them to serve their rival predatory agendas.
The Kashmir region and people were partitioned as part of the broader 1947-48 communal carve-up of South Asia. Implemented by the subcontinent’s departing British colonial overlords and the rival representatives of the colonial bourgeoisie in the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, it divided the subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India.
*****
Given the myriad of intersecting crises, the situation in AJK could spiral out of control, potentially leading to a major military operation aimed at brutally upholding the authority of the Pakistani state over Azad Kashmir and/or a rapid spike in tensions with India.
New Delhi, it need be noted, has hypocritically denounced the Pakistani state repression in Azad Kashmir. This under conditions where it maintains a half-million-strong security force in Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir, and routinely suppresses protests and imposes internet and cell-phone blackouts. In 2019, the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi-led BJP government illegally stripped the region of its status as a “semi-autonomous” state within the Indian Union and reduced it to a Union-administered territory so as to place it more directly under central government control.
*****
The agitation in Azad Kashmir raises fundamental strategic questions for the working class across all South Asia, above all the necessity of it making the strategy of permanent revolution the axis of its struggle. First formulated by Leon Trotsky, it served as the strategic compass for the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the subsequent struggle against its Stalinist degeneration, under conditions where the revolution remained isolated in a war-ravaged, predominantly backward country.
What Trotsky established—and this was subsequently demonstrated in the positive in the October Revolution and in the negative in the independence and partition of South Asia—is that in the imperialist epoch the tasks historically associated with the democratic revolution, such as the eradication of landlordism and caste-ism, separation of Church (mosque/temple) and state and real freedom from imperialism, can only be realized through a working-class led socialist revolution.
*****
The class struggle is intensifying in South Asia as around the world. The crucial question is the fight to establish the political independence and hegemony of the working class, so it can lead all the oppressed in struggle against the national bourgeoisie and imperialism. This will only be realized through the development of a class-conscious vanguard that has assimilated the lessons of the great revolutionary struggles of the last 150 years—that is through the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Pakistan and across the subcontinent.
10. Questions raised over continuation of AI boom
Amid the frenzy on Wall Street, the big questions being raised in financial circles are whether the AI-based bubble is about to burst, what factors may trigger its collapse and what will be the consequences if that happens.
The past weeks have been marked by increasing volatility: a surge one day followed by a significant fall, and then another surge.
*****
The memory chip industry is notoriously volatile, going through boom-bust cycles. But the rollout of the AI data centers is a new factor. Samsung shares have fallen by a third since their June high, SK Hynix has dropped 40 percent and shares of the US-based chipmaking firm Micron have dropped more than 30 percent.
Reporting on the fall in semiconductor stocks yesterday, the FT cited remarks by Kwon Seok-joon, a professor at a Seoul university who warned of a significant oversupply problem if AI demand faltered.
“Chipmakers are making these plans on the assumption that demand from AI centers will remain strong for the next two to three years. But memory demand will fall if returns on AI investments fail to meet expectations.”
It is not just chipmakers that are dependent on the continuation of the AI boom, but Wall Street and major global equity markets.
It is estimated that about 60 percent of the gains in the S&P 500 index have been driven by a handful of AI-related tech giants, including companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Broadcom. The 10 top companies in the index account for 41 percent of the S&P’s market capitalization.
This high degree of concentration and its role in driving the market higher is the cause of increasing concern in sections of the financial press.
*****
It is by no means guaranteed that the US firms presently leading the development of AI, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, will emerge as the winners in the ruthless fight for markets and profit. Their business model assumes that they will be able to stay at the head of AI development and thereby accrue the lion’s share of the profits.
However, this assumption is already under challenge with the development of AI firms in China which can produce results comparable with their powerful US rivals at a much lower cost. AI users may turn to Chinese models as being adequate for their purposes, even though they are not top of the range, because they are cheaper to run.
*****
Drawing out the wider implications of this development, the New York Times noted: “The release of a free, open-source Chinese AI model that could rival the performance of costly computing-intensive systems from Silicon Valley’s best-funded companies has reignited concerns over whether the industry’s enormous spending spree on data centres is justified.”
11. Protests shake Zelensky government after dismissal of Ukrainian defense minister
The Ukrainian ruling class and military are in an immense crisis following the firing of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and the reshuffling of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s cabinet last week.
On Saturday, around 10,000 protesters gathered in Kiev near the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre demanding the dismissal of current Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and the reinstatement of Fedorov. Smaller protests were also held in Odessa, Lviv, Lutsk, Dnipro, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Chernivtsi, Rivne, and Ivano-Frankivsk, and elsewhere.
The protests have shaken the Zelensky government, which has been embroiled in a number of corruption scandals, involving several of Zelensky’s closest allies. However, these protests cannot be characterized as “anti-war.” Rather, they have been dominated by frustrated pro-war veterans and upper middle class elements from Ukraine’s so-called “civil society,” who support the war in principle but are critical of Zelensky’s conduct of it. Protesters in Kiev were photographed carrying placards with Fedorov’s name, explicitly backing the continuation of the disastrous war with Russia that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and youth, both Ukrainian and Russian.
*****
In the days following Fedorov’s dismissal, Ukrainian forces have dramatically ramped up long-range drone and maritime attacks, successfully hitting Russian oil depots, shadow fleet tankers in the Black Sea, and major logistics centers deep inside Russian territory, including facilities near Moscow. Such strikes are part of a strategy specifically championed by Fedorov.
The expanding drone strikes of the past weeks and months have created a serious fuel crisis in Russia, one of the largest oil producers in the world. They are also claiming a growing death toll. On Sunday, a Ukrainian strike on a warehouse of the Russian online retailer Wildberries in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, killed at least seven workers, injuring 25 more. The town is located approximately 360 kilometers (220 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
*****
While Western media have celebrated these strikes as a sign that Ukraine could “win” the war, the increased reliance on drones is not least of all a response to the massive desertion crisis facing the Ukrainian army. According to an April report from public broadcasting (PBS) in the US, an estimated 150,000 service members were missing from their units as the war entered its fifth year.
12. Second in a Four-Part Series: Kast's fiscal austerity: ruling Chile by Executive Decrees
Almost from the moment that Chile’s ultra-right President José Antonio Kast assumed power he began issuing executive decrees. Finance Minister Jorge Quiroz’s Circular 12, Decree 333, Decree 330, Decree 337, and Circular 16 are not an emergency response to a temporary fiscal imbalance. They are the logical culmination of a social architecture erected over half a century. To understand what Kast is cutting, one must first understand what was created.
The Chilean state that emerged from the Pinochet dictatorship was organized around a single principle: the state does not provide. The 1980 Constitution enshrined the “subsidiary state,” under which public functions like health, education, pensions, were transferred to private operators or devolved downward to municipalities, while the central state retreated to a regulatory and financing role. This was a reorganization of class rule.
In health, the dictatorship created a two-tier system. The National Health Fund (FONASA), the public insurer, was left with the poor, the chronically ill, and the elderly, which the market refused to cover. The Private Health Insurance Institutions (ISAPREs) skimmed the young, healthy, and wealthy and were permitted to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Public hospitals were starved of resources while private clinics proliferated. By the time the dictatorship ended, Chile had one of the most privatized health systems in the world.
In education, the dictatorship municipalized the school system in the 1980s, transferring administration to communes with wildly unequal tax bases while introducing a per-pupil voucher subsidy. The result was that a school in the leafy Vitacura commune and a school in working class La Pintana commune received the same voucher, but the Vitacura school had parents who could supplement it, better infrastructure, and a municipality with resources. The Constitutional Organic Law on Education, imposed in 1990 as Pinochet’s parting gift, constitutionalized this arrangement. In higher education, the 1981 reforms dismantled public universities and opened the sector to for-profit operators. The State-Guaranteed Loan System (CAE), introduced under Socialist Party President Ricardo Lagos in 2005, completed the architecture: private banks issued loans, the state guaranteed repayment, and students shouldered decades of debt.
The civilian center-left coalition of Christian Democrats, and the Socialist and Communist parties that governed for 24 of the 28 years after 1990, did not dismantle this structure but deepened it. Ports, electricity, oil refineries and banks were privatized. The education voucher was expanded. The health split was maintained. The pension system, built around the private Pension Fund Administrators (AFPs), was left untouched. The “Chilean miracle” celebrated by the IMF and the World Bank was, really, a mechanism for transferring public wealth into private hands while condemning the working class to chronic underfunding, interminable waiting lists and debt servitude.
The municipalization of social services proved particularly destructive. Municipalities, constitutionally prohibited from borrowing except by special congressional authorization, were made responsible for primary healthcare and public education but given revenues (property taxes, vehicle permits, commercial licenses, and their share of the Common Municipal Fund) that were structurally inadequate and acutely sensitive to economic downturns. The poorest communes, with the weakest tax bases, were left to fund the most vulnerable populations.
The consequences of this architecture are now visible in every social indicator.
*****
The Kast government’s cuts were prepared by four years of pseudo-left austerity under Gabriel Boric. By the time Boric handed power to Kast in an “orderly and exemplary transfer,” the structural deficit stood at 3.6 percent of GDP, the per capita public spending was frozen, the hospital network was in debt, the municipalities were insolvent, and the police state was operational. The pseudo-left had done the preparatory work for the fascistic right.
*****
The fiscal adjustment operates on two simultaneous tracks: executive decrees that modify current-year appropriations with immediate legal effect, and instructional circulars that set the framework for future budget formulation.
*****
The financing mechanism for this austerity is a US$6.2 billion increase in public debt, approved by the Chamber of Deputies with 94 votes in favor and sent to the Senate. The government is borrowing to finance tax cuts for large corporations (the corporate rate drops from 27 to 23 percent under Kast’s National Reconstruction Plan) while cutting the programs that sustain working class life.
13. Trump loudly booed at World Cup final in New Jersey
There were two noteworthy events at Sunday’s World Cup final match in New Jersey. Spain defeated Argentina 1-0, on the strength of a defense so suffocating that Argentina did not record a shot on goal until the 116th minute of the contest. And US President Donald Trump was heavily booed by the crowd as he walked onto the field to award the trophy to Spain’s captain Rodri.
*****
The response to Trump Sunday was significant because there were so many football fans from around the world in attendance, particularly from Spain and Argentina, obviously, but from many other countries, including the United States. Trump is even less popular around the world than he is at home.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, whose countries co-hosted the World Cup along with the United States, also congratulated the victorious Spanish team and shook hands with the players. Neither, however, tried to hog the stage, as Trump did, and neither was treated with any hostility by the crowd.
While the booing of Trump was quite audible on the television broadcast, according to on-the-spot press accounts the boos and whistles were far louder within the stadium itself, drowning out the music piped in as part of the award ceremony.
Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino jointly carried the trophy to present it to the Spanish team, but Trump resisted Infantino’s effort to usher him out of the picture-taking session which followed, and he stayed on the podium during the initial celebration, in a transparent and pathetic effort to claim the spotlight.
*****
Trump’s own conduct during the World Cup added insult to injury. He blatantly interfered with disciplinary process, calling up Infantino to demand that FIFA suspend the red card issued to US striker Folarin Balogun for a foul, which would have prevented him from playing in the knockout second round match against Belgium.
Infantino did as he was told, and Balogun, who had accepted the consequences of his foul with grace, was allowed to play. The Belgian team was outraged, and they outplayed the US team by a wide margin, beating them 4-1.
One group of protesters outside the World Cup final distributed specially made red cards to fans going into the stadium, asking them to raise the cards against Trump and Infantino as they presented the trophy after the match.
More ominous was the Trump administration’s use of its powers as host country to exclude the Iranian team, which was not allowed to stay overnight on US soil. After each match, the Iranians were forced to go back across the border into Mexico, where they were welcomed with appropriate hospitality.
US immigration officials also expelled a FIFA-certified referee, Omer Artan, for the “crime” of bearing a Somali passport. Fans from several African and Asian countries were subjected to racial harassment and exclusion when they attempted to enter the US to cheer on their countries’ teams.
An article in Foreign Policy magazine Friday gave details of a little-reported aspect of the Trump “welcome” to the World Cup. It was headlined: “The Soccer Surveillance State: How the United States used the World Cup as a testing ground for policing technologies.”
The article described how security cameras and sophisticated software were used to spy on fans attending a June 13 match between Qatar and Switzerland at Levi’s Stadium in the San Francisco Bay Area:
Long before fans watched Qatar and Switzerland take the field that day, the stadium watched the fans: tracking faces at the gates, flagging suspicious sounds in the crowd, and feeding a constant stream of data to an on-site control center, where it then became accessible to a network of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies coordinating security for the event.
The article noted that this surveillance regime was not limited to San Francisco or to the World Cup: “This system will not shut down when the World Cup ends: DHS budget documents reveal that the tournament is a testing ground for new surveillance technologies.”
14. New UK prime minister Andy Burnham will step up Labour’s agenda of austerity and war
Andy Burnham became Britain’s seventh prime minister in just 10 years as his predecessor Keir Starmer scuttled off stage after his final meeting with King Charles. Starmer was followed later that day by his two closest allies, former chancellor Rachel Reeves and deputy prime minister David Lammy, along with numerous other loyalists who will be missed by no one.
Burnham did make sure to retain arch-Blairite Jonathan Powell as national security adviser to underscore the continuity of British imperialism’s foreign policy. But this was dwarfed in significance by Burnham’s most important appointment to his new cabinet, John Healey as chancellor.
Healey’s resignation as defense secretary precipitated Starmer’s downfall and paved the way for Burnham’s rise. He denounced Starmer and Reeves for being “unable and unwilling” to commit the resources required to wage war effectively, identifying a £28 billion “black hole” in existing defense spending and insisting that the real shortfall was closer to £78 billion.
Healey is an advocate of military aggression against Russia and China, up to and including nuclear weapons. He has now been placed in a position to determine the savage cuts required to bring about his dream of “full spectrum society resilience”—a blueprint for the militarization of all aspects of social life.
*****
The world situation is characterized by an escalating global conflict to carve up essential territories, resources and markets between the imperialist powers. This eruption of militarism and its devastating impact demand ever deeper austerity, not a reversal.
Social spending must be slashed to free up resources for war and push more young people into the armed forces. Aggression against Russia and China, two of the world’s largest military powers, will drive the greatest offensive on the working class, its social and democratic rights, since the 1930s.
The claim that Burnham can change the course of the government is a pale imitation of the claims made earlier about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
Corbyn entered the 2015 leadership contest with an explicit, stated objective: to prevent the type of implosion that had almost destroyed other social-democratic parties across Europe. His aim was to channel anti-austerity, anti-war sentiment that had welled up after the 2008 financial crash back into the Labour Party, where it could be managed, contained and defused.
The widespread illusions that Corbyn would lead a left renaissance were dashed as he worked to betray opposition to the Blairite right and preserve the grip over the working class of the bureaucracy—of which he is a loyal representative.
The pseudo-left groups—such as the Socialist Workers Party—who gave their fulsome backing to Corbyn at that time now claim that pressure exerted “from below” on Burnham will force an albeit more limited shift to the left. In this way they continue to oppose the necessary political break with the Labour Party, and with the trade union bureaucracy on which it depends to police and suppress the class struggle.
It must be recalled that Starmer replaced Corbyn while promising to implement a 10-point plan more left-sounding than Burnham’s miserable offering. It included higher taxes on the top earners; additional welfare measures; the scraping of university fees; a Prevention of Military Intervention Act to stop illegal wars; ending outsourcing in the National Health Service and local government; defending migrant rights and freedom of movement; strengthening workers’ rights; and bringing rail, mail, energy and water into public ownership.
They all evaporated like mist.
Whatever temporary and tactical shifts workers’ social and political opposition may produce, the fundamental direction of capitalist politics today is shaped by pressure “from above”, exerted by the oligarchy. This financial and corporate elite is set on a common global agenda, destroying democratic rights and eliminating social gains to prepare for trade war and military violence.
America is the prime example, where Donald Trump’s presidency is the direct instrument of multi-billionaires. But the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of this world exert the same influence everywhere. The financial oligarchy buys control of political parties by pushing millions into their coffers, and not just the far-right. Moreover, the demands of the oligarchy are passed on through the bond and stock markets that can threaten national economies with collapse, and by the media and business groups—none of which Burnham has either the ability or the desire to oppose.
All talk of alleviating the social distress faced by millions of workers without challenging the power of the oligarchy, without mobilizing the working class on an anti-capitalist and anti-war program, is a dangerous political fraud.
Burnham has been installed to do what Starmer failed to do. He will continue and intensify Britain’s participation in the US-led NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, as well as the broader global preparations for direct military conflict with Russia and China, at whatever cost to the working class.
It is time to break with the illusion that Labour can be reformed or “saved”. The bitter price the working class paid for this lie began with the Starmer government and its agenda of austerity and war. It must not be allowed to continue under Burnham, to more devastating impact.
15. Legal services workers strike in New York City
On Thursday morning, roughly 500 lawyers, paralegals, social workers and administrative workers walked out at Brooklyn Defender Services, launching a strike over pay and working conditions.
The organization provides free legal representation to people in Brooklyn and Queens facing criminal, family, immigration and other civil legal matters. Its workers are members of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA)-UAW Local 2325. The strike pits legal-service workers against an employer whose operations depend heavily on public funding overseen by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, injecting a directly political character into the strike.
The walkout is part of an eruption of struggles across New York City’s fragmented legal-services sector. Fellow Local 2325 members are currently on strike at Justice in Motion, while workers at the Bronx Defenders and the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem have authorized walkouts. Bronx Defenders struck last year, as did workers at the Goddard Riverside Law Project, CAMBA Legal Services, and the Urban Justice Center.
At the Legal Aid Society, historically the dominant provider of public defense services in New York City, UAW officials prevented a strike last year by pushing through a grossly inadequate contract while formally leaving the door open for revisiting wage provisions this year.
The strike at Brooklyn Defender Services is a concentrated expression of something objectively significant unfolding across the American working class. The attorneys and support staff who walk picket lines are not the high-earning professionals popularly portrayed; they are workers who have been squeezed by stagnating wages, crushing caseloads and institutional indifference into conditions that differ in degree, not in kind, from those of any other section of the workforce.
What gives the legal services sector strikes added political and social significance is the terrain on which these workers labor. Every day, public defenders confront the wreckage of a social order that criminalizes poverty. Their clients are the same workers and families hammered by evictions, wage theft, police violence, deportations and mass incarceration. When public defenders are compelled to strike over wages that leave them unable to cope with the rising cost of living, it reveals the broad character of exploitation. The eruption of class struggle in the legal sector, alongside strikes by nurses and Long Island Rail Road workers in New York City alone just this year, is an indication of a far broader social radicalization taking place well beyond the city limits.
*****
Meanwhile, the political orientation of the union apparatus is to appeal to Mayor Zohran Mamdani “to personally visit our picket lines and use the city’s funding of these organizations as leverage to directly pressure management to concede to our reasonable demands,” according to a statement adopted by the ALAA-UAW Local 2325 Joint Council. The statement also acknowledges the draconian sweeps of homeless encampments, the overcrowded and inhumane conditions in arraignment courts and the brutal police methods continuing under Mamdani. The statement appeals to the mayor to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and to “fully re-commit to his values as a democratic socialist and supporter of labor.”
The insistence by the UAW on directing workers’ energies toward pressuring the Mamdani administration is a dangerous diversion. Mamdani governs a city whose fiscal framework is dictated by Wall Street and whose housing stock is controlled by big landlords and real-estate developers. He is presiding over explosive tensions under conditions of growing social inequality, expanding war, and the dismantling of democratic rights. When workers’ demands come into direct conflict with the interests that dominate New York City and the country as a whole—as they inevitably must—a mayor operating within these constraints does not choose the side of workers. He seeks to contain and neutralize their opposition.
Will Lehman, the socialist candidate for UAW president and Mack Trucks worker who has campaigned to transfer power from the union bureaucracy to the rank and file, issued the following statement in support of the striking pubic defenders:
As a UAW member and Mack Trucks worker, I stand in full solidarity with the striking workers at Brooklyn Defender Services and every legal service worker fighting for a contract across New York City. I am calling on UAW members everywhere to mobilize active, concrete support for this strike. The issues these workers are fighting for are our issues. Wages that cannot keep pace with soaring costs, workloads designed to grind workers down, employers who track your movements and treat you as a resource to be managed rather than a human being. This is the common experience of the working class. And the clients these workers defend, people facing deportation, criminalized for being poor, trapped in a system of mass incarceration that functions as a weapon against the entire working class, these are our brothers and sisters too. The deportation machine and the prison system exist to divide, intimidate, and exploit workers. They must be dismantled.
The power to win this fight lies with the workers themselves, not with union officials negotiating behind closed doors or with politicians. I urge legal service workers to fight to expand the strike to every Local 2325 shop and beyond, including appealing to the tens of thousands of transit workers, healthcare workers, and municipal employees who are now or will soon be staring down expired contracts. A unified walkout across the entire sector is the only way to break the isolation that management and the UAW apparatus depend on to wear workers down. To seize the initiative, what is required is to build rank-and-file committees—democratically elected, accountable only to the membership, with full transparency over negotiations and the power to reject any deal that doesn’t meet workers’ needs. That is how we win.
16. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Canada:
Strike mandate by WestJet cabin crews
Cuba:
Mexico:
Puerto Rico:
United States:
800 pharmacists in Southern California vote to strike
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
