Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective: Trump preparing forces for “massive attack” on Iran
The Trump administration is concentrating US military forces in the Middle East and Europe for a vast expansion of US imperialism’s war against Iran.
According to an article published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, “In the past week, special-operations forces have deployed to the region from their U.S. bases, according to flight-tracking data and U.S. officials. Squadrons of jet fighters have been staged across the Middle East, and bomber aircraft at bases in the U.S. and U.K. are on high alert to ramp up operations, according to one of the officials.”
According to the article, more than 150 medics have arrived in recent days at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest American military hospital abroad and the first stop for troops wounded in the Middle East. This is a clear indication that the Trump administration is preparing for a major increase in American casualties.
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A US effort to reopen the strait by force would be a massive undertaking. Mark Montgomery, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, told the Financial Times in an article published Thursday that degrading Iran’s ability to launch drones and missiles could take weeks of as many as 150 to 200 American strikes a night. The FT also quoted a maritime adviser: “Iran only needs to hit one tanker to put everyone off.”
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The Trump administration is driven to escalation by the logic of the war, which is now in its fifth month. American imperialism has failed to achieve any of its stated objectives, including the overthrow of the Iranian government and the seizure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large percentage of the world’s oil and natural gas passes.
Every failure by the Trump administration has led to an even greater and more reckless escalation. In January, the administration encouraged and tried to arm protests inside Iran that it had hoped would overthrow the government. That operation’s failure led Trump to seek regime change by killing Iran’s leaders on February 28. These murders, too, failed to break the resistance of the Iranian population, and the administration escalated to a months-long bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,600 people and to the ongoing blockade.
Now the administration sees a massive and desperate escalation as the only way to rescue the prestige of US imperialism. In March 1965, as the Johnson administration prepared its escalation in Vietnam, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton wrote in a memorandum later published in the Pentagon Papers that 70 percent of the American purpose was “to avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).” That same month, the first 3,500 Marines landed at Da Nang; by the end of 1968, 536,000 American troops were in Vietnam.
A similar logic is involved in the war against Iran, under even more dangerous conditions. Washington calculates that a withdrawal after nearly five months of losses would shatter the world position of American imperialism in the eyes of its rivals, above all, China, and would represent a devastating blow to US domination.
American imperialism, staggering under massive debts, also confronts a deepening crisis of the dollar’s dominance in the world financial system. Federal debt held by the public has passed 100 percent of gross domestic product, the dollar’s share of world reserve assets has sunk to its lowest levels in three decades, and a survey of central banks published at the end of June found, for the first time, more of them planning to cut their dollar holdings over the coming decade than to increase them.
The war has the support of the entire political establishment. On Wednesday, the House passed a $1.15 trillion military authorization bill, 216-212, with six Democrats supplying the margin. After the Democrats ensured sufficient votes to pass the bill, the remainder were allowed to vote against. In January, 149 House Democrats approved the $839 billion military appropriations bill that paid for the assault on Iran launched five weeks later.
Beyond conflicts over geopolitical strategy, the main concern of the Democratic Party is to prevent the emergence of popular opposition from below. The escalation of the war is being made without any explanation or warning, from any section of the political establishment, to the American people, who have opposed the war in every major poll since it began. No section of the ruling class is telling the population of the massive escalation of the war being prepared.
The escalation now underway will have catastrophic consequences for the population of Iran, the region and the entire world. Imperialism is in the initial stages of a global war that is continually expanding in scope. With each new stage, the danger of nuclear war grows.
The war has created the framework for a massive assault on the social position of the working class. Everything is to be subordinated to the unprecedented expenditures for war. Trump has declared the intention of the oligarchy to attack Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Food aid has already been cut off for 1.5 million children, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The renewed bombing is having a devastating effect on US households. Gasoline passed $4 a gallon this week, up from $3.14 a month ago, and the war has cost the average household some $450 in higher energy bills, by CNBC’s estimate—more than wiping out the tax rebate Trump promised. For the first time in three years, inflation is erasing all wage gains.
The war is necessarily fueling the growth of the class struggle, in the United States and throughout the world. Already, in the first half of 2026, this movement has begun to emerge explosively. The international working class, armed with a socialist program, is the social force upon which the struggle against imperialist war must be based.
2. Japanese defense minister calls for end of “taboo” on nuclear weapons
Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi publicly declared on July 17 that Tokyo should discuss the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan. The comments were rare coming from a sitting member of government and demonstrate Tokyo’s escalating program of remilitarization as part of the US-led war drive against China.
Speaking in an interview with the online program Genron TV, Koizumi stated, “While this is a difficult issue for Japan to discuss, one topic we cannot avoid is nuclear weapons.” These comments came shortly before the far-right defense minister headed to Europe. He cited both France and Finland as examples to emulate as Paris plans to boost its nuclear arsenal while Helsinki recently lifted a ban on the deployment of NATO nuclear weapons to the country.
Koizumi presented the issue of hosting or acquiring nuclear weapons in Japan—the only country to suffer from atomic bomb attacks—as a necessary one in case of an “emergency.” He added: “Considering this, I believe we must make even greater efforts to explain that the security environment in which Japan finds itself requires us to approach every policy with a strong sense of crisis, discussing and advancing them without any taboos.”
Since the eruption of the US/NATO-stoked war in Ukraine against Russia, Tokyo has regularly declared that “Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow,” accusing China of planning an attack on Taiwan as a pretext for Japan’s rapid remilitarization.
However, neither Washington’s nuclear arsenal nor Japan’s nuclear ambitions has anything to do with defense. US President Trump has reportedly asked if using low-yield nuclear weapons against Iran “was doable.” In the event of war with China, the US would no doubt resort to these weapons, making Japan a potential staging ground for such attacks.
The deployment of nuclear weapons to Japan would further destabilize the Indo-Pacific region, no doubt leading to a broader arms race and the even greater danger of a nuclear war.
Responding to Koizumi’s remarks, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian stated on Monday, “If the Japanese authorities stick to their miscalculation on the nuclear issue, push to revise the three non-nuclear principles, and deploy allies’ nuclear weapons in Japan, they not only gravely challenge the postwar international order and the international nuclear non-proliferation regime, but also breach the commitment to peace, defy what the Japanese people want, and will eventually pay a heavy price for it."
Both Washington and Tokyo have goaded Beijing for years over Taiwan, regularly challenging the One China policy, whether by dispatching high-level diplomatic missions, sending naval warships through the Taiwan Strait, or backing pro-independence sentiment on the island. Beijing is extremely sensitive to the issue, fully conscious that if Taiwan were to declare independence, it would set a precedent for the future carve-up of Chinese territory while providing the imperialist powers with a military base against the mainland.
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Last November, far-right Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi provocatively declared that an “emergency” on Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan—the legal justification needed for war against China in the name of supposed “self-defense.”
In the short term, the most likely scenario would be for Tokyo to host US nuclear weapons on Japanese soil. However, Tokyo has no intention of simply being Washington’s junior partner. Rather, allowing the US to openly base nuclear weapons in Japan would set a precedent for Tokyo to go further, establishing its own nuclear arsenal. Tokyo has a stockpile of at least 8,000 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, enough to make 1,600 nuclear weapons. Other estimates of Japan’s stockpiles are considerably higher.
With its own nuclear weapons, Japanese imperialism would be more capable of asserting its own economic and strategic interests, including at the expense of the US, as it seeks to re-establish itself as the primary power in the region.
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Having been eclipsed by China as the world’s second largest economy, Japan is seeking to reverse its decline by all means including military. This requires not only dispensing with the ruling class’s phony adherence to “pacifism,” but also running roughshod over the democratic rights and interests of the working class as a whole.
3. Swelling student protests rattle India’s far-right government
The protest movement took on heightened significance this week, when tens of thousands defied a government ban on their marching on the parliament buildings. True to its violent and authoritarian instincts, the Modi regime responded with ferocious police repression—tear gas, baton charges, mass detentions and the deployment of thousands of paramilitary forces.
The youth agitation follows an uprising in April of thousands of brutally exploited workers in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi, and in the town of Manesar in the neighboring state of Haryana. Workers in both industrial townships have been criminalized and thrown into prison just for demanding a livable wage.
India’s student youth face bleak prospects on every front: Either they are denied access to higher education through a college-entrance system rotten with corruption thereby limiting them from the outset to poverty wages; or upon graduation they confront a labor market that offers most degree-holders gig work, unemployment or underemployment.
The Indian government’s own Labor Force Survey has found that the country’s unemployment rate is the highest it has been in 45 years, a figure so politically explosive that the Modi government initially suppressed it. Of the more than 10 million young people entering the labor market each year, only a tiny fraction secure formal sector employment. This is not an accident or a temporary dysfunction—It is the structural outcome of a capitalist order that generates spectacular wealth for 229 billionaires, whose combined net worth exceeds $1 trillion, while condemning a generation to permanent precarity.
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The immediate roots of the current agitation can be traced to June 6, when thousands of demonstrators gathered in Delhi, India’s capital, for the first major public event of a new movement calling itself the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP)—founded as the result of the mass response to an anti-establishment social media meme. After holding protest marches in several other major cities, the CJP launched a continuous sit-in protest at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi on June 20. Eight days later, environmental and education reform activist Sonam Wangchuk began an indefinite hunger strike at the protest site in solidarity with the students.
The initial spark was the revelation that examination questions for the NEET medical college entrance exam on May 3 had been leaked by politically well-connected, student-coaching businesses. NEET is a mandatory, brutally competitive examination through which over 2.3 million students compete annually for a mere 136,000 medical college seats. The examination was subsequently cancelled and rescheduled for June 21. The consequences were devastating: At least 12 young people, their hopes crushed and their years of preparation rendered worthless, took their own lives.
The name “Cockroach Janata Party” is a spoof of the name of the ruling Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party and a product of the growing social rage. On May 15, India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant made remarks from the Supreme Court bench denouncing the tens of millions of unemployed Indian youth as “parasites” and “cockroaches.” The contempt was not incidental—It was a naked expression of the utter disdain with which the ruling class views the masses of young people it has failed and discarded. Moreover, it was popularly recognized as such. India’s youth have transformed the slur into a symbol of defiance—even if the CJP itself does not go beyond the bounds of establishment politics and has sought to confine the protest movement to the most limited demands.
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On Monday, July 20, tens of thousands of demonstrators attempted a “Sansad Chalo”—March to Parliament—timed to coincide with the opening day of the parliament’s “Monsoon Session” in a show of defiance of the Modi government.
Rattled by the scale and determination of the CJP-led movement, the government had preemptively criminalized the march and widely broadcast its ban in the hopes of intimidating the protesters.
But when this manifestly failed, the Delhi police, acting on the government’s orders, met them with a brutal show of force. Massive contingents of security personnel had been deployed to block the march before it could reach the Parliament. Police fired tear gas into crowds of demonstrators and launched repeated baton charges, indiscriminately beating young men and women who had gathered peacefully. Numerous protesters were detained, and over 200 persons were so severely beaten that they suffered from broken bones, deep skull lacerations and toxic levels of exposure to tear gas. A 21-year-old girl was so badly injured she has had to receive treatment in an ICU.
Several Delhi Metro stations were temporarily closed in a deliberate attempt to choke off the flow of demonstrators into the city center, while sweeping restrictions were imposed across parts of the capital, turning New Delhi into something resembling a city under siege.
Conspicuous among those who joined the Sansad Chalo were a number of courageous youth who had to wear bandages wrapped around their heads to cover the wounds police had inflicted on them the night before, when police violently cleared the Jantar Mantar protest site.
In the wake of Monday’s events, the protest movement has continued to grow, with the sit-in re-established at the Jantar Mantar protest site and sympathy protests held in a number of cities, including Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Patna. In the latter city, the capital of Bihar, India’s second most populous state, police savagely attacked a demonstration of tens of thousands on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Modi broke his silence on the youth agitation. In a short social media post he feigned concern for India’s youth and promised to set up a so-called “fast-track” court to punish those responsible for national examination leaks, of which there have been scores over the past decade.
The government is also dangling an offer of resuming the talks it held with CJP representatives on Monday.
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India’s bourgeois opposition parties—led, above all, by the Congress Party and its grandly named but politically hollow “INDIA” alliance—have rushed to position themselves as champions of the protesting students and youth. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, that hereditary symbol of India’s dynastic bourgeois “opposition party,” made a show of attempting to join the July 20 “Sansad Chalo” march as it headed toward Parliament. He was briefly detained by Delhi police.
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The organizations historically identified as the “left”—the CPM and CPI, and the trade unions, including the Stalinist-led Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and All-India Trades Union Congress (AITUC)—are rightly widely discredited. In the name of opposing the Hindu supremacist BJP, they have for decades systematically suppressed the class struggle, supporting right-wing governments at the Center, imposing what they themselves describe as pro-investor policies in the states where they hold office and isolating militant workers’ struggles.
Both the Noida workers’ agitation and the current student protest movement erupted outside the traditional establishment structures, the unions and the ostensible opposition parties. This is a reflection of the depth of the social crisis and the popular alienation with the entire establishment, “left” and right, and carries within it the seeds of something genuinely threatening to the BJP government and the capitalist ruling class as a whole.
But it also poses the central danger—as already evidenced in the politics of the CJP leadership—with which every such movement is confronted. Unless aimed at mobilizing the working class on a socialist and internationalist program, mass protests, however militant and defiant, remain vulnerable to being brought under the control, diverted and ultimately dissipated by bourgeois and pseudo-left political forces. That is what happened to the mass uprising in Sri Lanka in 2022.
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Socialist-minded youth must fight to turn the protest movement to the working class, beginning with the workers in Noida and the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt. It is the working class that has the social power to defeat the Modi government and to transform society to make social equality its guiding principle. But if this power is to be mobilized, the working class must forge its political independence from all the pro-capitalist parties, including the Stalinists, and rally the oppressed toilers behind it in the fight for a workers’ government and the socialist reorganization of society. This requires building new organizations of class struggle, independent rank-and-file committees, and above all a revolutionary working class, that is, Trotskyist, party.
4. Trump administration witch-hunts People’s Forum and BreakThrough News
Socialism AI summary:
The House Ways and Means Committee has issued subpoenas to three non-profit groups — People's Forum, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and BreakThrough News — alleging they received nearly $40 million in funding from Neville Roy Singham, a multi-millionaire former tech executive now living in Shanghai. Committee chair Jason Smith and right-wing media outlets like Fox News are pushing the claim that the Chinese Communist Party is the real source of the funds, framing the investigation as an effort to close "loopholes" in tax-exempt law. The subpoenas, which the groups' attorneys have challenged on First Amendment grounds, are part of a broader anticommunist witch-hunt that also targets the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), with suggestions that PSL-led campaigns against AI data center development are a Beijing-directed effort to sabotage US technological dominance.
The article identifies this as a classic "big lie" — attributing social conflict in America to "outside agitators" rather than to the objective class divisions of capitalism. It also notes that right-wing conspiracy theorists are absurdly claiming that the massive "No Kings" protests were orchestrated by Singham and George Soros. While the WSWS emphasizes its long-standing and unbridgeable political differences with the PSL and the targeted groups, it unequivocally condemns the Trump administration's witch-hunt as an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, warning that such precedents could be used against any left-wing, socialist, or working-class organization.
5. Conclusion of a four-part series: Chile’s “left” enablers of Kast’s counterrevolution
The most politically significant aspect of the current situation in Chile is the role being played by the parties of the former ruling coalition—the Broad Front (FA), the Communist Party (PC), the Socialist Party (PS), and the Party for Democracy (PPD). Under former President Gabriel Boric, these parties implemented the same law-and-order agenda, the same anti-immigrant policies, the same fiscal discipline, and the same defense of capitalist property relations that the current administration of ultra-right President José Antonio Kast is now radically intensifying.
The Kast government did not emerge from a vacuum. The millions of workers who voted for Kast in December 2025 did not do so out of enthusiasm for fascism. They voted out of desperation after having been betrayed by the pseudo-left government that promised change and delivered more of the same. Kast won 310 of Chile’s 346 communes. Jeannette Jara of the Communist Party, the candidate of the ruling coalition, captured only 36 communes and did not win a single commune in the southern regions. This was not a turn to the right; it was a rejection of a political establishment that had exhausted its credibility.
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The four-month evolution of the Broad Front, Communist Party, Socialist Party, and Party for Democracy in relation to the Kast government’s mega-reform cannot be understood through the lens with which these parties seek to portray themselves—as a principled “opposition” defending social rights against a far-right assault. A Marxist analysis must penetrate beneath the surface drama of negotiations, betrayals, and internal fractures to identify the class character of these organizations, the political function they perform, and the real content of their “opposition.”
Before analyzing their tactical maneuvers, we must be clear about what these organizations are.
The Broad Front is a pseudo-left formation rooted in the affluent upper-middle class. As the World Socialist Web Site has documented, it is “explicitly anti-Marxist, substituting the fight to establish the political independence of the working class with the selfish concerns of the upper-middle layers for equality in corporate boardrooms and the capitalist state.” Its historical function—identical to that of Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the Democratic Socialists of America in the United States—is to ensnare radicalized youth and workers with left-sounding phraseology and dissipate their struggles into the dead end of parliamentary reformism.
Gabriel Boric's presidency (2022–2026) was a definitive expression of this global political phenomenon. He appointed austerity-committed Mario Marcel as finance minister, slashed spending, showered the Carabineros militarized police with funds, and rammed through 15 pieces of repressive security legislation. The Broad Front is not a bulwark against the right. Rather it provides “progressive” cover for policies the right could never legitimize on its own.
The Communist Party is a Stalinist organization that severed any connection to revolutionary socialism within just a few years of its founding in 1922. By the 1930’s it had adopted Stalin’s “two-stage” theory of revolution, which subordinated the working class to the so-called “progressive national bourgeoisie,” when no such section of the ruling class existed. During the 1970–1973 Popular Unity government, the Communist Party feared the independent mobilization of the working class far more than the threat of a military coup, the results of its policy written in blood by Pinochet's forces and 17 years of dictatorship.
During the restoration of civilian rule, the Stalinist party completed its transformation into an outright bourgeois organization, serving as junior coalition partner to President Michelle Bachelet and providing critical support to Boric’s government. The new generation leading the party is, like the Broad Front, rooted in the affluent upper-middle class. Key cadre—Jeannette Jara as Labor Minister, ex-student radical Camila Vallejo as government spokesperson—administered austerity and police-state policies. In 2025, Jara ran for president on a platform that competed with the right on immigration and security. The Communist Party is not the “historic party of the Chilean working class;” it is a party of the bourgeoisie that uses the memory of workers’ past struggles to betray them.
The Socialist Party and Party for Democracy are bourgeois reformist organizations of the old center-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy (Concertación) and New Majority. For 30 years after the dictatorship, they preserved and strengthened every pillar of Pinochet’s neoliberal agenda—privatized pensions, two-tier health care, labor repression, constitutional protections for capital—while presenting themselves as the “democratic” alternative to the right.
The Socialist Party (PS) was founded in 1933 as an explicitly anti-Marxist and anti-Internationalist organization. It was from the beginning an instrument of capitalist rule, albeit with a mass working class base. Following the US-backed coup that toppled the reformist government of Socialist Party President Salvador Allende the PS was transformed into one of the instruments for the US-backed restoration of civilian rule. PS President Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) led a neoliberal government: his corporate tax rate at 17 percent was lower than what Kast now proposes. The PPD was created as the “instrumental party to bypass the PS’s nominal socialist identity while pursuing identical policies. Neither party has any connection to the working class. Their social base is the professional-managerial strata and sectors of the bourgeoisie that prefer a more “stable” form of class rule than the far right offers.
The Christian Democratic Party, which forms part of this “opposition” bloc, is a right-wing bourgeois party. It was the party of the 1973 coup’s enablers, of the civilian restoration’s architects, and of every major neoliberal reform since 1990. Its inclusion in the “opposition” coalition is not an anomaly—it reveals the coalition’s true character.
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What, then, has been the political function performed by this bloc of parties over the past four months?
The answer is that they are managing the political fallout from a reform that the Chilean ruling class needs but that threatens to provoke social opposition. Their “opposition” is not directed against the capitalist system the mega-reform serves, but at mitigating the political and electoral consequences of being seen to support it. This is a division of labor.
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The opposition is now threatening to appeal to the Constitutional Court over tax stability, the ultimate expression of commitment to bourgeois legality. The Constitutional Court is an institution of the capitalist state. Its function is to adjudicate disputes within the ruling class and to ensure that legislation conforms to the constitutional framework that protects private property.
What is absent from the opposition’s arguments is as significant as what is present. Nowhere does the opposition call for the working class to organize independently against the reform. Nowhere does it call for strikes, demonstrations, or mass mobilization. Nowhere does it argue that the reform should be defeated by extra-parliamentary means. Nowhere does it connect the mega-reform to the broader crisis of capitalism or call for the socialist transformation of society. That would be asking too much.
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Kast’s mega-reform is a declaration of class war. The working class must prepare its response—not in the corridors of Congress, where the pseudo-left begs for amendments, but in the streets, the workplaces, and the communities, through the mobilization of its collective power. The crisis of Chilean capitalism is deepening. The task is to ensure that the working class emerges from this crisis not as the victim, but as the gravedigger of the system that has produced it.
6. German political satire show Die Anstalt bows to censorship in its 100th edition
A Socialism AI summary:
The German political satire show Die Anstalt marked its 100th edition with a broadcast marked by censorship and self-censorship. Shortly before recording, ZDF management cancelled a planned performance by musician Danger Dan and pianist Igor Levit of their anti-fascist song "Keine Angst" ("No Fear"), with ZDF director Norbert Himmler branding it "a set of instructions for left-wing, violence-prone resistance." This was an outrageous assault on artistic freedom — made all the more striking because neither Levit nor Danger Dan is a left-winger; both support the government's positions on the Gaza and Ukraine wars, and Danger Dan's group Antilopen Gang even released a song attacking Palestinian solidarity and defending Israel's war.
The presenters protested the cancellation but failed to mount a principled defense of the artists, instead distancing themselves from any "calls to vigilante justice." Their entire program was oriented toward demanding a state ban on the AfD, a party now polling near 30 percent nationally. Such a ban, Peter Schwarz argues, would mean erecting a police state in the name of fighting the right — strengthening the very police and intelligence services riddled with AfD supporters, who would inevitably deploy their power against opponents of capitalism.
The article traces how the show has degenerated over twelve years. Once a genuine satirical voice willing to take on the powerful, Die Anstalt now glorifies figures like Robert Lehr, the Adenauer-era interior minister who banned the Socialist Reich Party as a prelude to outlawing the Communist Party, and celebrates the theory of "militant democracy," which extends democratic rights only to those who do not call the existing social order into question. The show even features a sketch urging Chancellor Friedrich Merz to collaborate with the Left Party — in reality a combination that has only accelerated the AfD's growth by channeling discontent back into right-wing politics.
The ruling class turns to fascism when class antagonisms can no longer be contained by democratic means, which is why far-right parties are rising across the imperialist centers. The defeat of fascism therefore requires the international mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program that unites resistance to war, fascism, and social inequality with the struggle against their common cause — capitalism. Die Anstalt's reliance on a strong state to suppress the far right represents the opposite of such a perspective.
7. New Zealand First campaigns on anti-immigrant chauvinism and militarism
Ahead of the New Zealand election, the right-wing NZ First party has called for recent migrants to be disenfranchised and for unemployed youth to be drafted into the military.
8. Third Dallas-area postal worker dies in three years amid extreme heat
Umeshkumar Thakkar, a 58-year-old rural letter carrier, is the third Dallas-Fort Worth postal carrier in just over three years to die on his route amid dangerous heat.
Cleveland library and hospital workers are moving toward strike action as more than 100 Lorain County social service workers continue one of the longest public-sector strikes in Ohio history.
Opposition continues to mount among autoworkers and other sections of the working class to the death threat made against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for president of the United Auto Workers. Workers at Stellantis and auto parts plants in the Detroit area, along with other workers in the US and Canada, have condemned the threat and voiced support for Lehman’s campaign to abolish the UAW bureaucracy and transfer power to workers on the shop floor.
The threat—an AI-generated image depicting Lehman bound, gagged and bleeding, with a masked assailant pointing an automatic rifle at this back—was made by Raymond Jensen Jr., a UAW Region 9 organizer. To date, the Fain administration has not taken any disciplinary action against Jensen, who was paid $202,000 last year, according to UAW financial records.
The threat is the response of a bureaucratic apparatus in deep crisis. UAW President Shawn Fain is the subject of a federal criminal investigation for abuse of power and retaliation against his internal rivals. At the same time, the apparatus confronts a growing rebellion from below: workers at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan rejected three sellout agreements by overwhelming margins, and opposition is spreading throughout parts plants where the UAW apparatus has enforced poverty wages for decades. Lehman’s campaign has given this opposition conscious political expression, and it is precisely this that the bureaucracy fears.
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The WSWS also spoke with Camille, a former auto parts worker from Detroit, who joined Lehman as he campaigned earlier this week at Bridgewater Interiors and the Warren Truck Assembly Plant.
“The threat against Will was honestly egregious,” she said. “While I was handing out flyers to workers, I told them Will is an advocate for the working class or else they wouldn’t be threatening him. Although it is horrible, it’s proof that he truly is fighting for a good cause.
“For these union officials, their air conditioned offices and high paid positions in the UAW are at risk because somebody is finally coming along who is going to fight for the workers. They are intimidated because they are being called out.
“There’s no way a UAW official should be able to get away with making a death threat towards somebody without any consequences. If a worker made such a threat against someone at work or online, they would be terminated. During my time at Flex-N-Gate, I saw people get fired for less, including using profanity on the line.”
The threat, Camille said, followed “a classic playbook of the higher-ups using intimidation against anybody who speaks out for workers,” a pattern that has run throughout the auto industry and every other industry for generations. “It just makes me support Will Lehman more in his mission to actually put workers’ issues on the board in the UAW and take back power against these corrupt union leaders.”
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She concluded with an appeal to other workers: “Capitalism and worker exploitation, these systems were made by people, and they can be dismantled by people. As difficult as it may seem, it is not impossible to dismantle these systems. It can be done. And we can have a better life for ourselves. It is worth fighting for.”
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This week, Lehman visited the Stellantis assembly and stamping plants in Sterling Heights, Warren and Detroit, the Bridgewater Interiors and Dana plants in Warren and the Nexteer plant in Saginaw. On Thursday, his campaign posted interviews with Stellantis workers at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant and Detroit Assembly Complex-Jefferson plants.
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Workers from other countries have also voiced their support. Yacine, a Montreal-area postal worker, said, “As a union worker, I wish to condemn in the strongest possible terms the death threats made against Mr. Will Lehman. This type of behavior is intolerable, illegal and can under no circumstances be normalized. The physical and psychological safety of everyone is a fundamental right. I offer my full support during this ordeal and strongly encourage reporting these acts to the competent authorities to ensure the protection of workers and uphold our rights.”
The breadth of this response testifies to the fact that workers see in the attack on Lehman an attack on themselves. What distinguishes Lehman’s campaign from those of Fain, Boyer and others is not a difference over who should administer the apparatus but a fundamentally opposed program. Lehman calls for the abolition of the bureaucracy itself and the transfer of power and decision-making to workers on the shop floor, organized in a network of rank-and-file committees and linked internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Against the economic nationalism of Fain, who has tied workers to trade war and the war aims of the American ruling class, Lehman insists that autoworkers in the US can defend their jobs and living standards only by uniting with their class brothers and sisters in Mexico, Canada, China and around the world. The threat against him has only underscored what is at stake: The bureaucracy will stop at nothing to defend its privileges, and workers can defend themselves only by building an independent movement from below.
11. UAW claims ratification of Dana master wage agreement in yet another betrayal of auto parts workers
The United Auto Workers announced the ratification of the master wage agreement covering Dana auto parts workers who are members of the UAW and United Steelworkers (USW). The four-year contract covers some 4,000 workers at 14 Dana plants in the US Midwest and South. The UAW did not present an exact breakdown of the vote only claiming it was “massive.” However, the few figures obtained by the WSWS indicated substantial opposition, including the outright rejection of the deal by workers at the Dana Driveline plant in Toledo, Ohio.
A letter posted by the UAW Competitive Shop/IPS UAW Vice President Rich Boyer, who is running for UAW president against incumbent Shawn Fain [and the insurgent socialist candidate Will Lehman], stated:
Major gains were achieved through tough collective bargaining. The UAW Dana Council & USW committees and their members stood in solidarity to achieve their expectations and more for the following gains:
$3 increase at ratification with $700 retro
$30 in 2029
$8 increase for skilled trades over life of agreement
Pension maintained for all members with a $0.10 increase over life of agreement
$3000 signing bonus
40 hr bank to use for short work week
Boyer does not note that the contract would also extend the wage progression for new hires to five years, while freezing starting pay for new hires at a poverty $21 an hour over the life of the contract. Those hired after ratification will not see the $30 an hour wage under the life of the contract. Thus the deal effectively expands the divisive tier system that undermines solidarity and encourages management to victimize workers in order to maintain a supply of super-exploited workers at the bottom of the pay progression.
The contract specifically excluded workers from the Crossville, Tennessee Dana distribution center, whose top pay will be capped at $26 an hour. To secure passage, the UAW-USW included a larger ratification bonus and $700 retroactive pay to active workers. The bureaucracy also organized a snap vote, handing workers only cherry picked “highlights” and forcing them to cast ballots the very next day in many cases.
There is no protection in the contract against the layoffs that are sweeping the auto and auto parts industry, as employers use AI and automation to eliminate jobs and shift the costs of the loss of EV subsidies, tariffs and intensified global competition onto the backs of workers. Following the 2021 sellout, Dana closed plants in Auburn Hills, Michigan and Lima, Ohio.
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The vote at Dana follows a series of contract sellouts in the auto parts supplier industry where the UAW has colluded with management to impose sellout deals over massive rank-and-file opposition. The contracts imposed varied but uniformly substandard contract terms, with pay rates vastly inferior to even the inadequate pay levels at the Big Three assembly plants. The contracts maintain separate contract expiration dates to undermine solidarity between workers at different companies. Needless to say none of the contracts fall due on May 1, 2028, the date the Big Three contracts expire and when UAW President Shawn Fain has proclaimed his bogus general strike threat.
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The suppression of opposition, the systematic overriding or ignoring of strike votes, the deliberate isolation of strikes when they occur and the refusal to organize a coordinated fight among all auto parts workers is part of a deliberate pattern by the UAW apparatus aimed at defending the interests of management.
The UAW bureaucracy is deeply integrated into the structure of the corporations and the state on which the inflated salaries of the apparatus depend. Fain has consistently voiced his support for the US war machine, often wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a World War II bomber, and has lined up behind Trump’s trade war measures against the overseas rivals of US capitalism. The necessary corollary of this program, which is not just that of Fain, but the entire UAW bureaucracy, is the crushing of working class militancy in order to secure the “home front” in the war with Iran and the looming war with China.
This program is meeting determine opposition on the part of workers. At Nexteer, workers formed a rank-and-file committee which led the rank-and-file opposition that caused the rejection of three contracts in a row. It has also been shown in the growing support for Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president. Lehman is fighting for the abolition of the union apparatus and the transfer of power to workers on the shop floor through the expansion of a network of rank-and-file committees.
12. Protests erupt in Madison, Wisconsin following police execution of Corey Ruiz
Protests and mass anger erupted in Madison, Wisconsin, Wednesday afternoon following the police execution of Corey Ruiz, a 38-year-old father and longtime resident of the city. An as-yet-unidentified Madison police officer shot Ruiz multiple times in the head in broad daylight and in front of dozens of people, many of whom recorded the incident. The footage quickly went viral because of the brutal character of the latest murder by US police and immigration agents.
In an initial press conference Wednesday following the killing, Madison Police Department (MPD) Chief John Patterson said police received a report shortly before 1 p.m. that a person was “allegedly checking parked vehicles.” Patterson said police located the man, “but he fled on a bicycle and then traveled through some nearby backyards, we think in an attempt to get away.”
At no point during the pursuit did Patterson claim that police witnessed Ruiz committing a crime. Nor did he state that police saw him brandish a weapon or attempt to assault officers or anyone else.
Patterson said that roughly half an hour after initially spotting Ruiz, police “reconnected” with him at the intersection of Baldwin and Williamson streets. Patterson said Ruiz “either fell off or was taken off of the bicycle by officers. We’re not sure which. That’s still being determined.”
Videos circulating on social media appear to show police knocking Ruiz off the bicycle. Within seconds of Ruiz falling to the ground, four police officers, three men and one woman, have him surrounded. The male cops are seen wrestling with Ruiz, at which point one yells, “He’s got a knife.”
The female cop runs toward Ruiz, who is in the middle of the intersection trying to stand up, and yells, “Taser, Taser, Taser,” before shooting him with the electronic shock device. After being shocked, Ruiz is seen falling to the ground and curling into the fetal position.
Despite video clearly showing Ruiz subdued by the Taser, Patterson claimed in his press conference that its deployment was “unsuccessful.”
Patterson claimed that the cop who proceeded to shoot Ruiz in the head was injured at some point during the brief struggle by a “fixed-blade” knife wielded by Ruiz. It is not apparent in any of the circulating videos when this alleged injury occurred.
One of the male cops is seen placing his knee and most of his body weight on Ruiz’s left hip as he lies curled up on the pavement. Another cop raises his right leg and appears to stomp on Ruiz’s left thigh. At this point, the third male cop, who is facing Ruiz, pulls out his pistol, leans forward and shoots Ruiz approximately three times in the head.
Patterson said the cop who shot and killed Ruiz is a “veteran officer.” Video recorded after the shooting shows the officer being led away from the scene and speaking with other cops. Despite allegedly being injured by a knife, the cop is not seen seeking medical attention or applying bandages. No blood is visible on him.
After shooting Ruiz, the cops did not immediately render aid. Instead, they restrained his wrists and began going through his pockets. One cop is seen tossing what appears to be a large kitchen knife to the side. Police pulled out Ruiz’s wallet as blood from his skull poured onto the pavement, staining the street red.
Witnesses immediately reacted with horror and anger. “No, you didn’t have to kill him!” a woman yelled, adding, “I saw everything!”
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Jazzman Brown, a friend of Ruiz since they attended middle school and La Follette High School together in Madison, told Channel 3000 that Ruiz struggled with homelessness and mental health issues but was “more than his rap sheet.”
Beginning in 2007, Ruiz was convicted of several misdemeanors, including charges related to drug possession, as well as felonies that included battery or threats against a judge and resisting police.
Brown added, “He was a human. He had children, a family, people that loved him. And he did not deserve to be gunned down in front of the world.”
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A review by the Homelessness Policy Research Institute found that police encounters with homeless people are more likely to involve force than encounters with housed people, particularly when the victim has a mental illness. In Los Angeles, homeless people were arrested at 17 times the rate of the general population.
This persecution is bipartisan. Democrats have joined Republicans in transforming homelessness, itself the product of soaring rents, poverty wages and the destruction of social services, into a crime.
Following the Supreme Court’s 2024 Grants Pass ruling, Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to dismantle homeless encampments and later demanded that cities adopt ordinances forcing homeless people to relocate every 72 hours. Nationwide, more than 350 cities and 14 states have enacted measures criminalizing homelessness since the ruling. These policies place thousands of defenseless people in the direct line of fire of the police.
Pleading for calm Thursday, Madison’s Democratic mayor, Satya Rhodes-Conway, said “Good investigations take time,” and that she supported “peaceful” protests.
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There is no centralized government database tracking police killings in the United States. Journalists and researchers are forced to piece together news reports to provide insight into the near-daily police killings that occur across the country.
The billions of dollars poured into police budgets in states and cities, led by both Democrats and Republicans, have not reduced the number of people killed by police. Over the last decade, police have killed more than 1,000 people every year. In 2026, Mapping Police Violence had tracked at least 689 police killings as of early July.
The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, which previously tracked 10,429 people killed by police between 2015 and 2024, stopped maintaining its database following Trump’s return to the White House.
13. Volodymyr Zelensky appoints new Commander-in-Chief amid intensifying drone warfare
A brief outline assisted by Socialism AI:
a. The Leadership Shake-UpZelensky fired Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and replaced him with Mykhailo Drapatyi. This followed days of protests against Zelensky's earlier dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov — a move that "startled" NATO officials and drew criticism from figures like Vitaly Klitschko. The protesters, dominated by pro-war veterans and middle-class layers, demanded Syrskyi's removal. Drapatyi is a Fedorov ally.
b. The Real Conflict: Drone Warfare vs. Conventional WarfareThe Fedorov–Syrskyi clash was not personal but strategic. Syrskyi represented the "old guard" with Soviet-era methods. Fedorov, 35, has been hailed by the New York Times as "Ukraine's Drone Warfare Mastermind." He blocked artillery ammunition purchases in favor of drones. Drapatyi's appointment signals a decisive shift toward Fedorov's approach: massive, AI-assisted long-range drone strikes deep inside Russia — now averaging 300–350 per day.
c. The US Role and the Drone TechnologyThe drone campaign is enabled by Hornet attack drones — AI-assisted, $5,000 each, carrying 5 kg of explosives up to 200 km. They are developed and sold by Swift Beat, owned by Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO deeply tied to US intelligence, the Democratic Party, and the military-industrial complex. A DC think-tank fellow publicly endorsed Drapatyi before his appointment, indicating US backing.
d. Drapatyi's RecordDrapatiyi's career is entirely bound up with the NATO proxy war: he helped suppress Donbass separatists after the 2014 coup, was awarded the "Transitional Sword of the Queen of Great Britain," and later commanded the disastrous Ukrainian invasion of Russia's Kursk region — a debacle conveniently omitted in Western coverage.
e. The Escalating Toll on CiviliansThe drone campaign increasingly targets civilian and economic infrastructure:
The article's central point: this is not a routine military reshuffle. It marks the consolidation of a US-backed drone-warfare strategy that is escalating the war's civilian bloodshed on both sides, all while the Western media celebrates Fedorov as a "mastermind" and the human cost is systematically downplayed.
- Oil refineries have been hit so heavily that Russia, one of the world's largest oil producers, has begun importing oil, with thousands waiting in fuel lines for hours or days.
- Wildberries warehouses (Russia's Amazon equivalent, delivering to millions of households and to soldiers) were struck twice — killing at least seven workers trapped in a burning warehouse, with 10% of the company's warehouse space now destroyed.
- The Kremlin spokesperson admitted the situation is "difficult."
- Hundreds of civilians have likely been killed this year. In a single night (July 22–23), 18 Russian regions were hit, with deaths including a 3-year-old child.
- On the Ukrainian side, the UN recorded 1,396 civilian deaths in the first half of 2026 — a 37% increase over the same period in 2025.
14. Australia: Second strike by Victorian teachers deepens crisis for Labor government and unions
As it has done from the outset, the Australian Education Union will do everything possible to prevent any further industrial action by wearing down opposition to its sell-out deal with the government.
Rail, Maritime and Transport union members working at EMR, including staff responsible for onboard train operations and passenger safety, have voted for strike action over safety concerns surrounding the Hitachi-built Class 810 fleet.
The killing of Abderrahim Fakir is the product of escalating police-state repression as Meloni’s government intensifies authoritarian rule against growing working-class resistance.
17. Lebanon agrees to align with US against Iran, disarm Hezbollah and accept Israeli occupation
US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun at the White House forms part of a broader US–Saudi strategy to isolate Iran by eliminating its influence in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
Aoun’s visit—brokered by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman—was aimed at securing assurances that Washington would pressure Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, increase funding for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), support reconstruction in the devastated south, and approve loans and aid to avert economic collapse.
It came just one week after newly installed Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al‑Zaidi agreed with Trump on steps to disarm pro‑Iranian militias by the end of September, the deadline for the withdrawal of all US forces.
Aoun’s meeting followed his signing of the US‑brokered “agreement” with Israel on June 26, signalling Lebanon’s intention to end the state of war that has defined Lebanese–Israeli relations since 1948 and establish peaceful and diplomatic ties. Aoun aligned his government with Washington and Tel Aviv’s campaign to disarm Hezbollah—which, with its Shi’ite allies, forms one of Lebanon’s largest political blocs, the March 8 Alliance—and dismantle it as a political force.
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Hezbollah (Party of God) emerged in the 1980s during Israel’s brutal occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000, an extension of Lebanon’s 15‑year civil war—a proxy conflict shaped by competing regional and imperialist powers and Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians. Backed by Iran and the Assad regime in Syria, the bourgeois religio‑nationalist movement drew support from impoverished Shi’ite and Palestinian communities devastated by decades of state corruption and the looting of Lebanon’s wealth by a handful of billionaires who have dominated the country since 1990.
The party promotes corporatism, paternalism—providing vital welfare services—and religious obscurantism as a counterweight to class struggle. Together with its Shi’ite and Palestinian allies, Hezbollah forms the largest bloc in Lebanon’s sectarian and fragmented political system and remains the principal obstacle to domination by the US‑ and Gulf‑aligned financial elite. As part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”—which includes Hamas, Shia militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen—it supports Palestinian factions in southern Lebanon and hosts a Hamas bureau in Dahiyeh, its stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
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The June 26 agreement to disarm Hezbollah with Israel’s help marks a decisive break with Lebanon’s decades‑long policy of recognizing Hezbollah as the semi‑official “resistance” to Israeli occupation and repression of the Palestinians, symbolized in the slogan “the people, the army and the resistance”. It confirms the announcement made last August by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s cabinet committing to Hezbollah’s disarmament—without which no financial aid or loans from the US, France, or the Gulf would be released to rescue Lebanon’s bankrupt economy. The agreement repudiates any notion that the state retains political independence or sovereignty.
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[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz have insisted that Israeli troops will maintain an indefinite presence in southern Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. Netanyahu boasted, “We dominate southern Lebanon, from the summit of the Beaufort, and we will remain as long as required in the security zone. We do not intend to withdraw from it.” He claimed the agreement was a “major blow” to Iran, saying that Israel, Lebanon, and the United States were telling Tehran, “This is none of your business”.
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Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem denounced the agreement as “null and void”, calling it humiliating and a surrender of sovereignty. He vowed to continue armed resistance against Israel’s occupation of Lebanese soil and rejected provisions linking Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah’s disarmament, warning that the agreement could ultimately lead to annexation of Lebanese territory. Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah warned that the government could not enforce the agreement “unless they go, with American support, to civil war”.
A spokesperson for the Lebanese Armed Forces stated that it was not bound by an arrangement it had neither participated in nor approved.
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
