Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective: US resumes bombing and blockade of Iran: Mobilize the working class against the war!
The United States has resumed open warfare against Iran. Over the past week, American forces have bombed hundreds of targets across the country, reimposed a naval blockade on a nation of 90 million people, and declared the right to continue the onslaught indefinitely. What is unfolding is a new stage of a war of conquest—aimed at the destruction of Iran as an independent state, the seizure of the Strait of Hormuz and the transformation of the world’s most important energy corridor into an American toll road.
Under the June 17 agreement, the United States had lifted its blockade of Iranian ports in exchange for 60 days of safe passage for ships through the strait. The “ceasefire” lasted barely three weeks. Trump declared it finished on July 8, the final day of the NATO summit in Ankara, where the imperialist powers pledged to raise military spending toward 5 percent of GDP and celebrated Ukraine’s deep strikes into Russia.
On Friday, Trump threatened that “the U.S. Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.” Beginning Saturday night, US forces struck more than 300 targets across Iran in three consecutive nights. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded by declaring the strait, through which one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply normally passes, “closed until further notice.”
Then, on Monday morning, Trump announced the reimposition of the naval blockade of Iran and, in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, declared: “We’re going to hit them very hard tonight, and we’re going to hit them hard tomorrow. And there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.” The United States, he wrote on Truth Social, “will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped” through the strait.
These developments confirm the warning issued by the World Socialist Web Site on June 15 that any ceasefire with US imperialism would be the prelude to further war. “The end of this stage of the war does not mean the end of the war,” we wrote. “The 2026 ceasefire framework will pave the way for the war that follows.”
The renewed onslaught is the product of the failure of US imperialism to achieve its aims. Trump launched his attack on Iran in February to topple the government in Tehran, dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, break its armed forces and take the Strait of Hormuz. After 136 days, none of these goals has been achieved.
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A blockade is an act of war, and its logic leads toward invasion. How does the Trump administration intend to carry out the occupation of the Strait of Hormuz? Such an operation would require a massive deployment of ground troops and casualties far beyond those already imposed on American forces throughout the Middle East.
A further warning must be made. On June 10, the journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Trump had asked whether it “was doable” to use low-yield nuclear weapons against the underground factories where Iran builds its missiles. Given the desperate situation confronting US imperialism, the use of nuclear weapons cannot be excluded.
Nor is Iran the final target. The war on Iran is one front in a developing world war that threatens humanity with catastrophe. It proceeds alongside Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza, its violence in the West Bank and its bombardment of Lebanon, which has killed 4,322 people since March. NATO is escalating its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and all factions of the American ruling class are united on the need to confront China.
No faction of the political establishment opposes the predatory aims of the war. There is criticism only of its results. Both Democrats and Republicans condemned the deal in June as too favorable to Tehran. In a June 22 Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Vice President Mike Pence wrote that the agreement “smacks of the kind of appeasement” Trump had rejected in his first term, urging that “Mr. Trump should let the armed forces finish the job.”
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The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military. Its leaders have tactical conflicts with the administration over how the war has been fought, but they are united on its aims: US domination of the Middle East and stepped-up preparation for conflict with nuclear-armed China. They have worked systematically to exclude opposition to the war from their opposition to Trump and to suppress the antiwar sentiment of the population.
The complaint is not that Trump waged a criminal war of aggression, assassinated a head of state and his family members during diplomatic talks, and killed thousands of Iranians. It is that the war has not yet succeeded in achieving its ends.
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The war is equally lawless at home. Under the War Powers Act, a president who commits forces to hostilities has 60 days to obtain congressional authorization or withdraw them. Trump has converted this restraint into a perpetual-motion machine for illegal war. As the deadline approached, he signed the June 17 ceasefire and notified Congress that hostilities had “terminated,” supposedly rendering the 60-day clock, in the administration’s telling, a dead letter.
War abroad and dictatorship at home are not two policies, but one. A government that claims the right to destroy a country of 90 million cannot tolerate democratic rights among its own population—above all when that population is paying for the war through surging prices and a massive decline in living standards.
But this points to the force that can stop it. The working class—in the United States, in Iran, throughout the Middle East and internationally—has no interest in this war and every interest in ending it. Workers all over the world must be mobilized against US imperialism’s offensive against Iran, as the spearhead of an international anti-war movement directed against the capitalist system that produces war.
2. Maine father murdered by immigration Gestapo, prompting protests
Less than one week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents murdered construction worker Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, the immigration Gestapo shot and killed another immigrant worker Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine.
The victim has been identified by neighbors as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old originally from Colombia, according to the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine. Nelson Elias, a neighbor of Guerrero, told the Portland Press Herald that the young man had a wife and daughter. After hearing the shooting, Elias stepped outside his house, located across the street from where it occurred, and saw Guerrero’s wife crying while holding her daughter’s hand.
Videos and eyewitness testimony indicate that immigration agents pursued Guerrero through downtown Biddeford in unmarked vehicles, rammed the passenger side of his white sedan and surrounded it with their weapons drawn. After agents fired at least six shots, footage shows them pulling his limp body from the driver’s seat, allowing his wounded head to strike the pavement and shackling his wrists behind his back as he lay dying.
The young father was not even the target of the warrant the agents were attempting to execute, according to Maine Senator Angus King, citing a phone call from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
Federal officials have already offered conflicting accounts of the killing. Shortly after the shooting, Senator King said the Department of Homeland Security had told his office that Guerrero had tried to hit immigration agents with his vehicle. Hours later, however, ICE issued a written statement that made no claim that Guerrero had attempted to strike or run over an agent. It stated only that he “attempted to flee the scene” and that an officer, purportedly “fearing for public safety,” opened fire.
The disappearance of the initial allegation is highly significant. ICE’s official statement does not identify any immediate threat to an agent or member of the public that could conceivably justify deadly force. By its own revised account, Guerrero was shot for attempting to drive away.
Witnesses said the father was still alive when agents pulled him from the vehicle. “He was bleeding profusely from the head,” Biddeford resident Daniel Boucher told the Portland Press Herald. “He was talking. He said, ‘I tried to stop.’”
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As in the other murders carried out by ICE agents, Guerrero’s killers have yet to be identified, much less arrested. Federal immigration agents have been given virtual immunity to kill workers, while their victims are posthumously smeared as criminals and threats. In capitalist America, armed agents of the state can gun down a worker in broad daylight and remain anonymous and free, protected by official lies, withheld evidence and investigations designed to produce no charges.
The killing of the 26-year-old Colombian father is the 11th fatal shooting by federal immigration agents since Trump returned to the White House. At least 54 more people have died while in ICE custody, while more than 63,000 immigrants are presently imprisoned throughout the administration’s expanding network of federal and for-profit concentration camps.
The killing provoked an immediate eruption of anger in Biddeford, a working-class city of roughly 23,000 people located 18 miles southwest of Portland. Hundreds of residents poured into the streets, marching through downtown Biddeford and denouncing ICE as murderers.
Built around the enormous textile mills powered by the Saco River, Biddeford drew generations of Irish, French Canadian and other immigrant workers. Although the mills have largely been converted into apartments and commercial space, health care, education, construction, retail and service industries now employ much of the city’s population.
3. Department of Justice investigating UAW President Shawn Fain: The crisis of bureaucracy deepens
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has convened a federal grand jury and subpoenaed the court-appointed monitor overseeing the United Auto Workers as part of a criminal investigation into the monitor’s findings that UAW President Shawn Fain “abused the authority of his office” to gain favors for his fiancée and her sister and retaliated against a UAW official for opposing it.
According to a Bloomberg story published Sunday, Fain was informed of the probe on June 18 by a Jenner & Block attorney representing the UAW Monitor’s office, nearly a month before workers learned of its existence. Reuters confirmed the investigation after a review of internal union documents.
The DOJ launched the probe into allegations that Fain pressured Vice President Rich Boyer to secure a cash bonus benefiting his fiancée, Keesha McConaghie, an employee at the UAW-Stellantis National Training Center, and to intervene in his fiancée’s sister’s workers’ compensation claim against Stellantis. He then allegedly retaliated against Boyer by stripping him of his duties as chief Stellantis negotiator on charges that Monitor Neil Barofsky found to be “unsupported, unfounded and exaggerated,” and that “Fain knew were false when he made them.”
The revelations have deepened the crisis within the UAW bureaucracy, which is facing growing rank-and-file opposition, including massive rejections of UAW-backed contracts at Nexteer, Dana and other parts suppliers. It has raised the possibility that Fain will face formal corruption charges under conditions in which a real opposition to the bureaucracy has emerged.
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist, was nominated to run for union president during last month’s UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit on a program of abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to the rank-and-file workers on the shop floor.
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Fain’s central claim is that Monitor Barofsky “has a political grudge against me because the UAW took an anti-war stance about what was happening in Gaza.” This is a myth. The actual incident Fain is referring to was a confrontation in February 2024 in which Barofsky forwarded Fain a letter from the Anti-Defamation League critical of a symbolic and toothless ceasefire resolution adopted by the UAW.
This claim of persecution of Fain is being amplified by Labor Notes, Jacobin and the pseudo-left media as evidence that a two-year federal corruption investigation is driven by pro-Zionist animus against a fearless champion of Palestinian solidarity.
Fain’s real attitude was on display during the January 2024 UAW Community Action Program (CAP) conference, when the apparatus assembled to endorse Joe Biden for re-election. Three UAW delegates stood up and chanted “Ceasefire now!” calling for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They were dragged out of the hall by Capitol police as Fain stood by and watched.
During the University of California strike in the spring of 2024, tens of thousands of academic workers walked out to oppose the US-backed genocide in Gaza and police crackdowns on campus protests. The UAW bureaucracy repeatedly delayed calling the strike despite overwhelming votes for action, then limited it to just 2,000 workers at a single campus.
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Far from persecuting Fain, Barofsky has gone out of his way to prop him up. The court-appointed Monitor issued his charges against Fain in a status report filed with U.S. District Judge David Lawson on June 25, one week after the convention concluded. Fain, like the other candidates, was required to attest that he had not engaged in fraudulent or corrupt conduct—something the Monitor knew was untrue and could be the basis for disqualifying him from the election.
Barofsky also oversaw the 2022-23 UAW elections, the first direct membership vote in UAW history, and ignored the mountain of evidence presented by Lehman of the deliberate voter disenfranchisement, which led to Fain being elected with the votes of only 6 percent of the membership.
The federal oversight of the UAW—which began after the exposure that top UAW bureaucrats were taking corporate bribes and embezzling dues money—was never designed to produce genuine democratic accountability. Its aim was only to manage the apparatus’s public image and install a leadership acceptable to the corporations and the capitalist state.
The faction fight between Fain, Boyer and Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock does not reflect any principled differences. It is a struggle over positions and access to vast resources—the UAW’s $1.3 billion strike fund, its billion-dollar asset portfolio, its network of retiree healthcare funds and training centers, and the lavish careers they sustain for a bloated layer of overpaid officials. All parties are equally implicated in the betrayal of UAW members.
This bureaucratic infighting has been brought to a boil by something the Monitor’s reports deliberately never mention: a growing revolt of the rank and file against the apparatus as a whole. Fain has sought to use Boyer as a scapegoat for the sellout of Stellantis workers which the entire bureaucracy is responsible for. In a June 2024 letter, Boyer admitted that both he and Fain and his entire staff were aware that the claim that all temporary workers—known as “supplemental employees” (SEs) at Stellantis—would be converted to full-time under the 2023 agreement was a lie.
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The WSWS warned from the outset that Fain’s election would change nothing of substance. When he was sworn in as president in March 2023, the WSWS wrote, “Fain is not the expression of rank-and-file revolt against the UAW apparatus. Rather, he is the defensive reaction of the apparatus and the ruling class to a growing movement from below.”
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Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist, was nominated for UAW president for a second consecutive time at the 2026 Convention, on a program to abolish the bureaucracy and transfer power directly to workers on the shop floor. What the Fain scandal demonstrates is what Lehman told workers at the outset of his campaign: “This bureaucracy can’t be reformed. It must be abolished.”
4. US measles cases near their worst level since 1991, met with official silence
In just half the time of last year, the United States has reproduced its worst measles outbreak in 35 years, a catastrophic milestone met with official silence. The nation recorded 2,231 confirmed measles cases as of the July 9 update by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 97.5 percent of the 2,289 infections reported for all of 2025, itself the highest full-year total since 1991. The country crossed the 1,000-case threshold in under two months, a mark it did not reach until nearly May of last year. With the CDC warning that summer travel and large events will drive further cases in the coming months, the 2025 record is certain to fall at the next weekly update.
Yet there are no congressional hearings, no emergency briefings, no presidential addresses....
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The geography of the disease maps onto the places where immunity has collapsed. South Carolina leads with 670 cases in 2026, the tail of an Upstate outbreak that began in October 2025 and grew into the largest outbreak in the US in more than three decades, reaching 997 cases concentrated in Spartanburg County before the state declared it over in April. Utah has climbed to 516 cases, with kindergarten MMR coverage at just 88.6 percent. Texas has confirmed 182, most inside federal detention facilities, including some 130 at a single U.S. Marshals Service site in Hudspeth County and the first publicly reported cases at the ICE family detention center in Dilley, tying the epidemic directly to immigration policy. Florida has reached 141 amid conspicuous under-reporting by its health department, and further clusters are active in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Washington.
This vulnerability is the structural result of declining rates of childhood immunity. National kindergarten coverage for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine fell from 95.2 percent in 2019–20 to 92.5 percent in 2024–25, a fifth consecutive year below the 95 percent herd-immunity threshold, leaving roughly 286,000 kindergartners unprotected as the exemption rate reached a record 3.6 percent. Only 10 states and the District of Columbia still meet the 95 percent target; Idaho has fallen to a national low of 78.5 percent.
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Measles is ancient, and its danger reaches beyond the acute illness. It induces immune amnesia, erasing up to 73 percent of a survivor’s immune memory and leaving them exposed to other infections for months or years, so falling coverage endangers far more than the primary infection. The disease is also, uniquely, tameable. The durable immunity first documented in the 19th century became the conceptual root of herd immunity, the very principle current policy is dismantling. Before the vaccine era began in 1963, the United States endured roughly 500,000 cases a year, driven to zero by elimination in 2000; worldwide, measles vaccination has since saved more lives than any other vaccine, an estimated 94 million since 1974.
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The virus spreading today is the same one conquered decades ago, and the remedy is the same cheap, highly effective vaccine that achieved elimination in 2000. The science has not changed; what has been withdrawn is the will to use it. An agency that would treat this as the emergency that it is would be holding hearings and mobilizing resources, not changing the subject to food dyes. The genuine defense of public health requires the independent political mobilization of the international working class, for whom these policies are a measure of life itself. The loss of elimination status in November 2026 measures how far the social right to collective protection has already been rolled back, and what it will take to reverse it.
5. Indian prime minister’s Pacific tour focuses on military issues
Over the past week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi carried out a three-nation visit to Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand to bolster strategic and economic ties in the Indo-Pacific. The heavy emphasis of Modi’s trip on military collaboration and developing supply chains for critical minerals are closely connected to the accelerating US-led war drive against China.
India’s strategic partnership with US imperialism and military ties are directed above all against Beijing, as is the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or “Quad”—a security pact involving the US, India, Australia and Japan. India remains a key element of the Pentagon’s planning for war with China, even though the US Indo-Pacific Command based in Hawaii was renamed last month to the US Pacific Command, suggesting a shift away from Indian Ocean and India.
While it remains an integral part of the US-led military build-up against China, the Modi government is also determined to project India on the world stage and to ruthlessly pursue its strategic and economic interests. India’s longstanding relations with Russia, including the purchase of arms, came into collision with the US, which imposed a 50 percent tariff last year on Indian imports for its continued purchases of oil and weapons.
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While small anti-Modi protests took place in Australia and New Zealand, the political and media establishments in all three countries made no mention of Modi’s own right-wing, anti-working class measures nor his long history of vicious, sectarian attacks on India’s minorities, particularly Muslims.
6. Australia: Oppose the sellout union agreements at WSU! Build rank-and-file committees!
The WSU management is trying to push through new 2026–30 enterprise agreements that will facilitate more job destruction, further real pay cuts and increased workloads.
7. Australia Post CEO escalates “Post 30” restructuring drive
Paul Graham threatened workers that the next four years will be a “battle for our lives,” in which the business must be radically restructured or “die on the vine.”
8. US Steel electrician Mitcheal Nelson electrocuted at Granite City Works
Mitcheal N. Nelson, a 62-year-old electrician, was electrocuted early Saturday morning at US Steel’s Granite City Works in southwestern Illinois.
Nelson, a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1899 from Bridgeton, Missouri, had reportedly worked at the plant for 14 years. According to the Madison County coroner’s office, Nelson and two other employees were working on a transformer that malfunctioned during a storm. Nelson was attempting to shut it off when he was electrocuted.
Emergency responders were called at 4:53 a.m. on July 11. Nelson was pronounced dead at 6:20 a.m. after lifesaving efforts. An autopsy found the preliminary cause of death was electrocution, with toxicology results pending. No other injuries were reported.
*****US Steel issued a perfunctory statement claiming that “safety is our top priority” and promising to cooperate with investigations. The USW said its safety coordinator, local representatives, Health and Safety Department, Emergency Response Team and union leadership had mobilized to support the family and Local 1899. It added, “There will be a comprehensive investigation.”
Workers can place no confidence in an investigation controlled by the company, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or the USW apparatus. US Steel has a financial interest in limiting the investigation to the immediate circumstances of Nelson’s death while concealing any role played by deferred maintenance, inadequate staffing or management decisions. OSHA penalties are generally a negligible cost of doing business, while the USW operates joint labor-management safety committees with US Steel and subordinates safety to the continued profitable operation of the mills.
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Nelson’s death follows other documented fatalities at the mill, which is more than 130 years old.
9. New Zealand government restricts access to emergency housing for homeless people
Internal documents obtained by TVNZ under the Official Information Act and publicly reported last month, revealed that New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development (MSD) is systematically denying emergency housing to people in the dire and desperate circumstances.
A letter sent to regional managers within MSD explained that their job performance would be graded based on whether they met the government’s “reduction targets” for the number of people receiving unemployment benefits and the number receiving emergency housing support.
When it took office at the end of 2023, the National Party-led government set a target to reduce the number of people in temporary emergency housing by 75 percent. The number of households in state-funded emergency housing, typically motels, dropped from 3,141 in December 2023 to 471 two years later.
Reducing access to emergency housing is one component of a sweeping austerity program designed to make the working class pay for the increasingly severe economic downturn, exacerbated by the ongoing, illegal US war against Iran.
The government does not keep records of where people go once they leave emergency housing, or when they are denied access to it, but numerous organizations have highlighted an increasing number of people living on the street.
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In a further indication of the worsening crisis, RNZ reported on July 9: “Data from Health New Zealand shows the number of homeless people being hospitalized has doubled in six years… from just under a thousand in 2018/19 to close to 2000 in 2024/25.”
The denial of emergency housing goes hand-in-hand with the government’s plan to give police sweeping new powers to criminalize the very homelessness it is creating. It intends to pass legislation that will empower police to issue “move on” orders against people as young as 14 who are begging, rough sleeping, or attempting to “inhabit a public place.” Those who breach an order face fines of $2,000 or three months’ imprisonment.
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Whoever wins the November election, the crisis will continue to deepen. Whatever tweaks a Labour government makes around the edges of the emergency housing policy will not fundamentally alter the ruling class’s program of austerity and war. The working class can only defend its interests by building its own party, independent of all the capitalist parties, based on a socialist and internationalist program that fights to put an end to the capitalist system that produces poverty, homelessness and war.
Germany’s leading conservative daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.), published an article in May headlined “Russia’s role in the First World War reassessed” by historian René Schlott.
The piece is based on an essay published in 2025 by Viennese philosopher of law Joachim Dolezik in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (Journal of Historical Science), titled “Historiographical Debates on the July Crisis and the Question of Responsibility for the Outbreak of War in 1914.” As the subheading to Schlott’s article notes, Dolezik “goes beyond Christopher Clark and seeks the primary guilt with Russia.” Instead of the German Reich (Empire), it is the Tsarist Empire and France that are declared the truly responsible parties for the “seminal catastrophe of the 20th century.” Germany is presented as a power that was merely defending itself.
This reinterpretation is no accident. It comes at a time when the German government is rearming for a war against Russia on a scale not seen since the Nazis. The history of German imperialism is being rewritten because it is preparing a new war in the present.
11. Budget cuts at Berlin’s universities—Archaeology Department at Humboldt University set to close
“What gets cut with money saved? Research, education, the present day!”—with this chant, more than 200 students, faculty members, and museum staff gathered on June 4 in front of the main building of Berlin’s Humboldt University (HU). They were demonstrating against the planned closure of the Institute of Archaeology, which offers not only Classical Archaeology but also the Archaeology and Cultural History of Northeast Africa program—a program that is unique in Germany.
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On June 17, the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Cultural, Social, and Educational Sciences at HU decided to close the institute as part of its budget cuts. On Instagram, the student council and the institute explain what this means:
With today’s decision to close the Institute of Archaeology, the faculty has chosen to bury a tradition spanning more than 200 years at the Humboldt University of Berlin and is sending a clear message: against academic diversity, against expertise in cultural studies, and against solidarity with the so-called “minor disciplines.” Today, archaeology at HU is being laid to rest. Who will be next?
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The IYSSE, which in June once again won three seats in the HU Student Parliament, is the only campus group to declare that resistance to the austerity measures can only succeed if it is linked to the struggle against war and the militarization of universities.
Appeals to university administrations, the Senate, or the federal government are doomed to failure. Instead, students and faculty must turn to the working class and build independent rank-and-file committees that coordinate militant actions nationwide and internationally with workers in other sectors. Only a socialist program that calls for the expropriation of large corporations and banks and the redirection of their profits toward education and social infrastructure can stop and reverse the cuts.
12. Romania’s political crisis clears the road for the fascist AUR
Romania’s ruling establishment is engulfed in an escalating political crisis. As democratic forms of rule are breaking down internationally and fascist forces are being elevated from the United States to Italy, the oligarchic regime constructed in Romania by the former Stalinist bureaucracy is struggling to maintain its democratic façade.
The grand coalition government headed by Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan fell on May 5 after a no-confidence motion supported by the post-Stalinist Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the fascist Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). President Nicușor Dan has since failed to assemble a majority for what he calls a “pro-Western” government. His latest nominee, former National Liberal Party politician Adrian Veștea, failed to win confirmation in parliament on June 22.
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Dan wants to avoid early elections, which could produce an electoral collapse of the former coalition partners. Calls for his impeachment, first advanced by AUR, have now been taken up by sections of the PNL.
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The roots of the present crisis lie in the presidential election of late 2024. Călin Georgescu, a figure previously little known outside the state bureaucracy and far-right circles, unexpectedly won the first round.
His elevation resulted from deepening inequality, the cost-of-living crisis and job destruction, which placed mounting pressure on millions of Romanian workers abroad who support relatives at home. Politically disenfranchised, many registered a protest vote for Georgescu or AUR.
These were also the only major political forces permitted a wide platform from which to express anything construed as opposition to the war in Ukraine. Any questioning of the demand for the “military defeat of Russia” is denounced by the media as “Russian propaganda.” AUR and Georgescu exploited this suppression of antiwar sentiment to channel social anger into reactionary nationalism, religious obscurantism and support for Trump.
Although Georgescu was immediately presented as a product of Russian “hybrid warfare,” his campaign was openly embraced by the MAGA movement. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon promoted his cause, while US Vice President JD Vance used the Munich Security Conference to denounce the annulment of the election. Both Georgescu and AUR maintain extensive connections with MAGA politicians and businessmen.
Georgescu and AUR are part of an international phenomenon: the elevation by the ruling class of fascist forces in preparation for confrontation with the rising struggles of the working class.
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AUR has deliberately cultivated an image as an heir to the interwar fascists of the Iron Guard, one of the most criminal organizations in European history. At the same time, it functions as a parliamentary front groomed for public respectability. Behind it, from smaller far-right organizations to paramilitary networks, stands more than a century of the Romanian bourgeoisie’s fear and hatred of the working class.
The prospect of an AUR government is now routinely presented as inevitable. The unstated reality is that ever less separates the outright fascists from the mainstream establishment.
Dan exemplifies this process. He built his image as a respectable politician of the “center” and won the 2025 election largely because of mass opposition to Simion. But as a self-described conservative, he has increasingly sent signals to the far right.
In December, he decorated Second World War veteran Ion Vasile Banu and praised him for having fought “with dedication for the liberation of Bessarabia.” This referred to Banu’s participation in Nazi Germany and Marshal Ion Antonescu’s war of extermination against the Soviet Union. Banu served in the 13th Infantry Division, which participated in atrocities against the civilian population, including the Odessa massacre.
Dan’s alliance with Moldovan President Maia Sandu has also normalised discussion of a “union” between Romania and Moldova. Such a move would mean the absorption of a sovereign country by a NATO member despite broad opposition among Moldovan workers. It would have explosive implications for Russian-speaking regions and Transnistria and could become a direct pretext for war with Russia.
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The danger posed by AUR cannot be fought through support for Dan, the PSD, the PNL or the USR. These forces created the social devastation on which the fascists feed, suppressed opposition to war and nationalism and are now adopting ever more openly the program and historical symbols of the far right.
The struggle against fascism is inseparable from the struggle against austerity, militarism and war. It requires the independent political mobilization of the Romanian working class, united with workers throughout Europe and internationally, on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
13. United States: The New School lays off 90 faculty and staff
The Democratic Party, which runs New York City, is a political party of Wall Street and war. It represents the same class interests that lie behind the austerity program at The New School. Rejecting this reactionary organization includes a break with the pseudo-left politicians in and around the Democratic Party. New York Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is presently implementing a policy of austerity in the city and has remained silent on the ongoing university layoffs and restructuring.
14. From impunity to amnesty: The fascist right’s war on accountability in Chile
In late June 2026, Johannes Maximilian Kaiser Barents von Hohenhagen, president of the National Libertarian Party (PNL), former deputy, and YouTube personality turned political operator, announced the introduction of legislation that would grant a blanket pardon to all military and police personnel convicted of crimes committed during the 2019 social uprising.
Flanked by convicted Carabineros captain Pablo Carvajal as he turned himself in to serve a seven-year sentence for blinding a protester, Kaiser declared that the uniformed personnel “did not go out of their own free will to repress” but were following orders, and that it was “unacceptable” for police to be imprisoned while “criminals received lenient sentences or pardons from the previous government.”
The bill has already secured the backing of José Antonio Kast's Republican Party, whose deputies, including Sebastián Zamora, the former Carabinero acquitted of throwing a 16-year-old off the Pío Nono Bridge and now a Republican congressman, have lined up to support it. The Pinochetist Independent Democratic Union (UDI) has offered only procedural objections, insisting pardons be granted “case-by-case”, while affirming that most of the convicted should be freed.
The push for amnesty is the culmination of a process decades in the making: the systematic shielding of Chile's repressive apparatus from any form of legal accountability. To understand what is being proposed, one must examine the forces behind it, the pattern of acquittals that has already gutted the prosecution of state violence, and the deep institutional corruption that the amnesty seeks to permanently bury and, critically, to license for the future.
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Johannes Kaiser, born in 1976 into a landowning family expropriated during the Popular Unity government, represents a political type increasingly familiar across Latin America: the social media demagogue who fuses economic libertarianism with open nostalgia for military dictatorship. His trajectory mirrors that of Argentine President Javier Milei, with whom his brother Axel Kaiser maintains close personal and ideological ties. Where Milei rants against the “political caste,” Kaiser rants against the “lumpen” and the “troglodytes” who supposedly threaten Chilean civilization.
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This is not abstract nostalgia. Kaiser directed and financed a 2019 documentary calling for the “urgent and prompt” release of Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, an agent of the infamous National Intelligence Directorate serving over 1,000 years for kidnapping, torture, and murder. During his 2025 presidential campaign, he pledged to pardon dictatorship-era convicts over 80 years old. He has also raised the prospect of proscribing the Communist Party.
Kaiser's economic program—crafted by advisers trained in the Austrian School under Jesús Huerta de Soto in Madrid—promises what he euphemistically calls a “cure” for the country: privatizing Codelco, slashing public spending by 4.5 to 5 percent of GDP, reducing the number of ministries to nine, and eliminating 200,000 public sector jobs. His brother Axel, who runs the Fundación para el Progreso and has served as an adviser to Argentina’ President Milei, anchors this project within the Atlas Network, the US-based libertarian infrastructure that has coordinated the spread of far-right economic programs across Latin America. The two brothers jointly inaugurated the Fundación Faro with Milei in November 2024; a think tank designed explicitly to train candidates and propagate the “cultural battle” of the libertarian right.
The Kaiser phenomenon is thus not a fringe aberration but a coordinated political project with international backing, fusing economic shock therapy with the rehabilitation of military dictatorship and the systematic dismantling of legal accountability for state violence.
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The Kaiser amnesty bill must be understood in this full context: not as an isolated proposal but as the logical endpoint of a process that spans the acquittals of police violence, the military's espionage against those who expose its crimes, and the institutionalized corruption that has drained billions from the public treasury over two decades.
The forces driving this agenda are not merely seeking to close the books on past crimes. They are constructing a legal and political architecture in which the repressive apparatus can operate with guaranteed impunity going forward. The Kast government has already moved to militarize the borders, deploy troops against immigrant communities, criminalize protest through the State Security Law, and slash social spending while cutting corporate taxes. These measures will generate resistance, and the amnesty signals to the Carabineros and military that when that resistance is met with violence, there will be no legal consequences.
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The working class cannot place any faith in this process. The pseudo-left parties that governed under Boric—the Broad Front and the Communist Party—helped build the police state infrastructure that Kast is now extending. They passed the Ley Naín-Retamal that courts now use to acquit police shooters. They normalized relations with the fascist right in the name of “republicanism” and “dialogue.” Their calls for “case-by-case” review of pardons are a fig leaf for the same capitulation.
What is required is not the reform of the repressive apparatus but its dismantling. The Carabineros, the military intelligence services, and the secrecy laws that shield them are instruments of class rule. They cannot be democratized; they must be replaced by organs of workers' power. The struggle against impunity is inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist state itself—and the Kast-Kaiser project is a sharp warning that the ruling class will not hesitate to deploy the most reactionary forces at its disposal to defend its crumbling order.
15. Britain’s healthcare workers must demand Israel release Gaza’s Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya
NHS FightBack supports the stand taken by healthcare workers across Britain mobilizing in support for Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, medical director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital. We echo the demand that he is released immediately from Israel’s Rakefet interrogation center, where he is being tortured and faces death.
Speaking last week, Nasser Odeh, Abu Safiya’s lawyer, visited him on July 2 at the Rakefet interrogation facility in Nitzan Prison, northern Israel. He said Abu Safiya was brought to the meeting shackled by his hands and feet and accompanied by masked prison guards. He bore fresh, severe injuries to his head, around his eyes, and on his ears and neck—to the extent that Odeh initially struggled to recognize him. He was struggling to breathe and speak and was in a state of distress.
Extremely weak, Abu Safiya told Odeh, “This is the last time you’ll see me… they brought me here to kill me”. He added, “I’m living in hell. The mind can’t imagine what I go through every day. I think someone has decided to kill me.”
16. 6.5 million young people in Türkiye not in employment, education or training
Türkiye’s official statistics cannot hide the fact that the country is experiencing one of the sharpest and most devastating forms of the global youth unemployment crisis.
17. WSWS begins posting highlight clips from webinar on the American Revolution
On June 25, the World Socialist Web Site hosted an extraordinary panel of eminent historians at a webinar to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
The full webinar, “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings,’” can be accessed at wsws.org/1776.
Here is another clip:
18. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Chile:
Canada:
Dominican Republic:
United States:
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.
