Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
One year ago, on July 27, 2025, approximately 100 workers, young people and family members gathered at the Marygrove Campus in Detroit for a public hearing of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), which presented its initial findings of its independent investigation into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr.
Adams, a 63-year-old skilled tradesman known to his coworkers as the “protector of the plant,” was crushed to death on April 7, 2025, when an overhead gantry crane suddenly activated while he performed maintenance at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex south of Detroit.
More than 15 months later, the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) has still not released the findings of its investigation. Contacted by the World Socialist Web Site last week, a MIOSHA spokesperson would say only that the “case remains open.” Stellantis and the United Auto Workers apparatus have also maintained a wall of silence.
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The IWA-RFC hearing stood in stark contrast to the cover-up by the company, the UAW bureaucracy and state authorities. Lawrence Porter, a leader of the Socialist Equality Party and former autoworker, chaired the meeting, denouncing a system that treats the annual deaths of 140,000 US workers from injuries and occupational disease as the “cost of doing business.” These deaths, he said, were “casualties in a class war.” “We are here to sound the call: Workers’ lives matter!”
The main report was delivered by Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania, an IWA-RFC leader and a candidate for UAW president in this year’s election. “No single worker, however committed or experienced, can guarantee safety under a system where profit is prioritized over human life,” Lehman said. Adams’ death “was not simply an accident. It was a crime—a preventable tragedy resulting directly from the capitalist system in which it took place.”
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Shamenia Stewart-Adams, the widow of Ronald Adams Sr., received a standing ovation as she spoke “not just as a grieving wife, but as a voice for every mother, every wife, every family who has watched their loved one walk out the door for work, trusting that they will return home safely.”
She implored Adams’ coworkers to come forward. “I know some of you have been threatened… But I am asking you with everything in me to find the courage to come forward,” she said. “Because what happened to my husband can happen again, to any one of you.”
The campaign of intimidation was waged jointly by management and the UAW apparatus to cover up their own responsibility for Adams’ death. Dundee workers attended the hearing in defiance of threats of retaliation.
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The investigation’s findings, drawn from dozens of interviews, exposed what the official agencies would not touch. It revealed that the retooling of the plant for new engine production was more than a year behind schedule, and management—with the acquiescence of the UAW—systematically bypassed safety protocols in the rush to accelerate the launch.
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The bureaucracy’s role was epitomized by Kevin Gotinsky, director of the UAW Stellantis Department and Shawn Fain’s hand-picked candidate for UAW vice president for Stellantis in this year’s election. On April 28, 2025—Workers Memorial Day, the very day hundreds gathered in Detroit to bury Adams—the UAW posted a video featuring Gotinsky alongside two Stellantis executives. It said nothing about Adams. Instead, it praised the “joint efforts” of the company and union to create a “safe workplace,” with Gotinsky declaring that safe decisions were ultimately the responsibility of “every UAW member” and Stellantis manufacturing chief Tim Fallon asserting that “unsafe acts are a leading cause of injury”—blaming workers’ shortcuts, not the prioritizing of profit over safety.
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This month, smoke from the Canadian wildfires gave Metro Detroit the worst air quality of any major city on the planet, yet tens of thousands of autoworkers were ordered into smoke-filled plants, where workers sickened and collapsed from the combined effects of heat and toxic air. Fain—under federal criminal investigation and facing reelection—waited more than 24 hours before merely “urging” employers to protect workers.
UAW Vice President Rich Boyer, also a candidate for the union presidency, sent Stellantis locals a letter on July 17—the day Detroit topped the global pollution rankings—claiming UAW Industrial Hygienists had verified that air quality “remains within acceptable limits.” His advice to workers with respiratory conditions was to “notify their supervisor.” Workers, not the apparatus, took the initiative, bringing fans into the plants and alerting local media, while the IWA-RFC demanded the shutdown of all non-essential workplaces with full pay.
Marking the anniversary, Lehman issued the following statement:
One year ago, we gathered in Detroit because Ronald Adams’ family and coworkers refused to accept silence as an answer. Everything we said at that hearing has been confirmed. If workers had not carried out our own investigation, everything about Ronald’s death would already be buried.
We warned that unless workers took health and safety into our own hands, the deaths would continue. Gregory Knopf was crushed to death at Ford Sharonville when a press activated during maintenance—virtually the same way Ronald was killed. To those in charge, these deaths are a cost of doing business, and the fines are cheaper than the fixes.
The wildfire smoke showed millions of workers exactly where they stand. While the public was warned to stay indoors, we were ordered to keep the line running. Boyer certified that the air in smoke-filled plants was “within acceptable limits.” That letter tells you what the UAW’s joint safety machinery exists for. It does not protect workers from the company; it protects the company from workers, producing paperwork that declares poisoned air contractually acceptable so production never stops.
No one is coming to save us—not MIOSHA, not the courts, not Solidarity House. Workers have enormous power, because we produce everything of value in society, but only if we organize independently. The danger of our inaction remains greater than the danger of us acting in our own interests. Form rank-and-file safety committees with the authority to stop the line, and contact the IWA-RFC to join the fight we launched one year ago. That is how we ensure Ronald Adams Sr. did not die in vain.
To join the rank-and-file investigation or report unsafe conditions in your workplace, contact the IWA-RFC.
2. The war at home: Record 2026-27 school closures—the working class pays for US imperialism
More than 1,000 public schools shut their doors during the 2025–26 school year, up from 755 four years earlier—a 35 percent increase, according to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) figures reported this month. The wave is only accelerating. Board votes already on the record will close or consolidate more than 200 schools beginning in 2026–27.
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The closures are part of what Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab calls “the Big Shrink.” Its director, Marguerite Roza, does not merely describe the process—she advises districts on how to execute it. Because salaries consume most of a school budget, she tells administrators, the cuts must come out of staff; handled correctly, shrinking is a chance to build “smaller, stronger, and more effective” school systems. In practice it means shuttered buildings, laid-off teachers and aides, and more crowded classrooms for the children who remain.
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The claim that “there is no money” for public education is a lie whose dimensions can be measured. While school boards plead poverty, the Trump administration has submitted a Fiscal Year 2027 Pentagon request of $1.5 trillion—a 50 percent increase over the record $1 trillion FY2026 budget, and the largest single-year defense request in US history. Hegseth told Congress it would put the defense industrial base “back on a wartime footing.”
The entire budget of the near-dismantled Department of Education is roughly $80 billion—about 5 percent of the Pentagon request. The $56.4 million deficit Fort Bend cites to justify closing seven schools is 0.004 percent of it.
The administration is not only diverting money to the war machine; it is illegally blocking funds Congress already appropriated. The Office of Management and Budget, under Russell Vought, has frozen nearly $320 million in 2025 funds for the Institute of Education Sciences and is withholding $584 million more of its 2026 allocation. Of $235 million Congress appropriated for Education Innovation and Research grants, Vought has released $65,000. Of $50 million for Comprehensive Centers, $500,000. Blocked in court once, the Trump administration is now re-cancelling 223 school-based mental health grants by another route—a political project lawsuits will not stop.
Trump's anti-immigrant offensive is producing a further enrollment shock. Miami-Dade enrolled about 2,550 newly arrived immigrant students in 2025-26, against nearly 14,000 the year before—losses that erased roughly $70 million from its budget before the board approved nine closures on June 17. Houston closed a school for newly arrived immigrant children after enrollment fell from 111 to 21. This is the work of an ICE campaign that has killed 22 people in custody this year, four in the past eight days, among them Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, shot dead by agents in Houston on July 10. Raids drain districts of students and revenue, and officials cite the losses to justify the closures.
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Trump spearheads an assault prepared over decades by both big-business parties, but across many states it is the Democrats who implement it. On June 29, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a $352 billion budget deferring $3.9 billion in constitutionally guaranteed K-12 funding. A trailer bill strips the elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction of authority and hands it to a governor-appointed commissioner—executive power consolidated to streamline closures and suppress labor unrest. Los Angeles Unified alone faces an $877 million deficit, 3,200 layoff notices and a projected shortfall of up to $1.6 billion in 2027-28.
The Democrats, who posture as defenders of public education, have voted for every one of Trump’s war budgets. Educators, parents and students cannot stop this through appeals to school boards, that party, or union bureaucracies that accept the framework of unavoidable deficits.
Philadelphia demonstrates this. In June 2025, 14,000 members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers voted 94 percent to authorize the first strike in 25 years—over class sizes, understaffing, punitive attendance rules and crumbling buildings. Days before schools opened, PFT President Arthur Steinberg appeared beside Superintendent Tony Watlington and Democratic Mayor Cherelle Parker to announce a tentative agreement no member had read, declaring himself “thrilled” at three years of “labor peace.” It was rammed through a scripted online town hall: fewer than half the membership took part, and roughly 4,000 votes—a quarter of the members—were declared a ratification.
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The fight must be organized independently, through rank-and-file committees linking workers across districts and states, on the demand for the resources to keep schools open, cut class sizes, restore programs and guarantee free, high-quality public education for every child.
3. Chicago Public Schools announces 1,723 layoffs, exposing conspiracy between union and mayor
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The role of Mayor Brandon Johnson deserves note. He is a former CTU official on leave from the union who was elected mayor in 2023 with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the rest of the CTU bureaucracy. Although Johnson pretended to run as a “public school champion” and a fighter for working people, he made clear in a candidate forum that as a long-time CTU staffer, he would be in the best position to impose cuts on teachers.
As he put it, “There will be some tough decisions to be made when I am mayor of the city of Chicago. And there might be a point within negotiations that the Chicago Teachers Union quest and fight for more resources—we might not be able to do it. Who is better able to deliver bad news to a friend than a friend?”.
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In an April 2, 2025 article, the WSWS warned that “CTU officials, Mayor Johnson and the news media are conspiring to conceal the full impact of Trump’s historic cuts on Chicago schools” and called on educators to reject the sellout deal and build rank-and-file committees to take control of the struggle against cuts and attacks on public education.
On April 15, 2025, the WSWS wrote that the agreement “was pushed through on entirely false pretenses,” that “there is only funding for the first of the four years of the contract,” and that “it will soon be followed by demands for layoffs, school closures and program cuts.” The article exposed Gates’s complacent declaration that she was “not worried” about Trump’s cuts because Johnson was in the mayor’s office and DSA-backed figures sat on the school board and in the City Council.
Barely two weeks after ratification, on April 28, 2025, the WSWS reported that Chalkbeat had obtained an internal CPS presentation outlining plans for between 1,600 and 1,700 school-based layoffs. The article noted that the projected deficit did not even include Trump’s cuts to Title 1 funding and that “the leaked plans for massive budget cuts completely vindicate the position taken by the World Socialist Web Site.”
The current layoffs are the realization of precisely those plans. The CTU bureaucracy, the Johnson administration, and the Democratic Party knew these cuts were coming. They concealed them to prevent a strike. Now they are implementing them.
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The attack on educators extends beyond layoffs. On July 17, Josue Pire Hidalgo, a CPS custodian at Farnsworth Elementary School in Jefferson Park and father of two, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at what he and his family believed would be a routine immigration check-in appointment in downtown Chicago. He is now being held at a jail in Clay County, Indiana, with his next hearing scheduled for July 28.
SEIU Local 73, which represents some CPS custodians, issued a statement saying it “stands behind” Pire Hidalgo and is “organizing its members and communities to demand his immediate release.” The CTU has said nothing publicly. Neither union has called for a single day of job action, a walkout, or any mobilization to demand his release.
The layoffs and the ICE kidnapping are not separate issues. They are components of the same class war being waged by the Trump administration and the Democratic Party against the working class. The CTU and SEIU bureaucracies, tied to the Democrats, are incapable of fighting either. Their role is to manage anger, channel it into electoral dead ends, and ensure that the organized power of workers is never deployed.
What is required is the building of rank-and-file committees in every CPS school — committees that unite teachers, teacher aides, paraprofessionals, custodians, lunchroom workers, crossing guards, and all school staff on an independent and democratic basis. The defense of public education and the defense of immigrant workers are inseparable.
4. Burnham hosts Zelensky, promises deeper UK involvement in war with Russia
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit Monday to the UK was the first by a foreign leader since Prime Minister Andy Burnham took office just a week ago.
They met Monday on board the Queen Elizabeth, one of the two UK aircraft carriers, at the Portsmouth Royal Navy base. More than 200 Ukrainian sailors and soldiers have spent the past three weeks training there as part of Exercise Sea Breeze 26-2.
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Burnham said “it was a very warm meeting… We got on very well indeed, and this is going to be a close partnership.”
Central to their talks were “anti-ballistic missiles and the supply of them to Ukraine” that they would “follow up with our partners.” Burnham would visit Zelensky in Ukraine “soon”.
The talks came less than two weeks after Keir Starmer traveled to Kyiv for the final foreign visit of his premiership, underscoring the seamless continuity between the two Labour leaders’ commitment to the war. Burnham does so as the fifth UK prime minister, Conservative and Labour, to enter Downing Street since Russia’s invasion in February 2022—all of whom backed the slaughter taking place in the middle of Europe, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost.
5. Israel’s violence engulfs occupied West Bank
Israel has intensified its assault on the occupied West Bank. According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 1,111 Palestinians, at least 243 of them children, have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the start of the war in Gaza, at least 65 of them since the beginning of 2026.
Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property has surged to record levels. OCHA documented more than 1,800 attacks in 2025 that resulted in casualties or property damage across about 280 communities in the West Bank—an average of five incidents a day, the highest daily rate since records began in 2006. Attacks are up more than 50 percent in the first six months of this year.
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All this has been done with financial, military and political backing from Washington, for whom Israel serves as the well-paid custodian of US interests in the resource-rich Middle East.
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Netanyahu is set to meet US President Donald Trump in the White House on Tuesday, his seventh meeting in Trump’s second term, far outpacing any other world leader and underscoring the Zionist state’s continued usefulness to US imperialism. It comes amid renewed escalation of US aggression against Iran following Washington’s abandonment earlier this month of a ceasefire reached as part of a Memorandum of Understanding.
The meeting, coinciding with Netanyahu’s visit to the US for the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham—one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Washington—signals their continued coordination on the broader regional war against Iran and its allies. Israeli media report that the IDF have prepared for a significant escalation.
The only progressive way out of this permanent state of war is for the working class, both Israeli and Palestinian, to unify across national lines against their common enemy, the Zionist bourgeoisie and its imperialist backers.
6. Australian government plans harsher foreign interference laws
The existing legislation itself amounts to a far-reaching attack on basic democratic rights, particularly against anti-war and anti-genocide activity, or any anti-government dissent.
Against [a backdrop of turmoil within the UAW bureaucracy], the secretary-treasurer forum revealed that despite the intense and bitter factional struggle inside the apparatus, there are no essential political differences among the contending factions.
In her opening statement, [incumbent Margaret] Mock avoided any criticism of either the Fain administration or the UAW apparatus. Instead, she emphasized her personal commitment to “integrity, transparency and accountability” in managing members’ “sacred dues dollars.” She stated that she had enforced federal compliance rules and had “questioned spending when necessary.”
Significantly, Mock made no reference to the UAW Monitor’s findings that she had been unjustly stripped of her duties, nor did she criticize Fain for the retaliation documented in the Monitor’s reports.
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Neither Mock nor the other candidates addressed the broader significance of the strike fund or the bureaucracy’s financial interest in limiting strikes. Under the UAW Constitution, money may be transferred from the strike fund to the union’s general treasury, which finances officer salaries and the day-to-day operations of the apparatus, provided the strike fund remains above a specified threshold. Over the years, the percentage of investment income eligible for transfer has quietly been increased until it now stands at 100 percent, giving the International Executive Board broad discretion over those funds.
Conserving and growing the strike fund therefore provides the bureaucracy with a direct financial incentive to avoid strikes or shut them down quickly when they do occur.
Likewise, none of the candidates acknowledged that outdated membership lists, a key duty of the secretary-treasurer, contributed to the turnout of only 9 percent in the 2022 direct election of top UAW officers, nor did they explain what concrete measures, if any, are being taken to prevent a repetition in the 2026 election.
The sharpest exchange of the forum came after moderator and former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse asked Campbell and Ciers to respond to the UAW Monitor’s findings that Fain’s administration had engaged in misconduct in its treatment of Mock.
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Under relentless attack throughout the debate, Mock finally responded.
“Those are lies. Scratch a liar, find a thief,” she declared. Referring to her disputes with Fain over financial oversight, she asked, “What should I do when the president of the international union says, ‘Sign the fucking checks’? That’s my only job?”
In one of the debate’s most revealing moments, Mock sought to describe the real relation of power inside the UAW leadership, which functions more like a feudal monarchy than a genuine workers’ organization.
“Shawn Fain, the president of the International Union, has tanks, grenades, AK-47s. He has all the arsenal. He has all the tools. What do I have? Rocks and dust.”
The exchange underscored the intensity of the factional conflict within the apparatus. Yet despite the bitter personal and organizational struggle, the debate revealed no substantive political differences over the union’s fundamental orientation or its relationship to management, the Democratic Party or the capitalist state.
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Taken as a whole, the forum demonstrated that the struggle within the upper levels of the UAW bureaucracy is not a conflict over the interests of rank-and-file workers but over the control of a vast financial and institutional apparatus. While the candidates exchanged accusations over administration, accounting and internal governance, none advanced a program challenging the corporatist framework that has dominated the union for decades or addressed the growing demands of workers confronting layoffs, plant closures, concessions and war.
It underscores the importance of the call by rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman, who is running for UAW president against Fain and Boyer, for the abolition of the UAW bureaucracy and the transfer of power to workers on the shop floor through the development of rank-and-file committees in every factory and workplace. These committees, democratically controlled by workers, would utilize the financial resources of the UAW to sustain workers in strikes and other battles, as part of a fighting program to unite workers across plants, industries and globally in a counteroffensive against the relentless corporate assault on jobs, living standards and democratic rights.
8. Perspective: Europe’s “firewave” and global capitalism’s climate crisis
French authorities are actively considering the evacuation of Bordeaux, with a population of over 250,000 and a metropolitan area inhabited by 850,000 people. Home to some of the most prestigious vineyards in the world, it has stood for more than 2,000 years and over a third of the city is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site.
All of which is now covered in thick smoke, produced by a wildfire which has already burned through a record area of land and forced the evacuation of 200,000 people in its path—bringing the total number of people displaced by fires across Europe to 400,000. The heat and haze are now generating their own thunderstorms, bringing lightning strikes which can worsen the blaze.
That this can be happening in one of the 10 richest countries in the world, in the continent with the highest levels of per capita social spending, is an unanswerable indictment of capitalism.
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Economic and social life is so mismanaged, so dominated by the profit interests of an obscenely rich few, that a damaged climate is endangering millions even in the most technologically developed parts of the globe. More fires are burning in Spain, Italy, Greece and the UK, as well as other areas of France, threatening areas close to Madrid, Valencia and Paris. Only weeks ago, North America was blanketed in toxic wildfire smoke.
Scientists at Imperial College London have been moved to coin the term “firewave,” described by Professor of Fire Science Guillermo Rein as “the wildfire equivalent of a heatwave: a period of exceptionally high wildfire activity that overwhelms the emergency response of a city, region or nation.”
These events have been made far more likely and severe by the raising of the Earth’s average temperature through fossil fuel emissions. They are the product of prolonged and record heat waves—Britain is now entering its fourth this year—and worsening drought.
Besides contributing to the wildfires, these conditions have already killed well over 10,000 people across the continent—as many as 25,000 according to an estimate from Indiana University—and injured an estimated 277,000 workers. They have caused billions of euros of economic damage, especially to agriculture.
Scientists have warned for decades about Europe’s exposure to these dangers. But a ruling class which already proved its indifference to human suffering during the Covid pandemic did nothing to prevent them.
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For the world working class, this is a grave warning and must be a spur to action. Today’s environmental disasters are taking place with the Earth only on the threshold of breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius global heating above the pre-industrial average. Most authoritative forecasts warn of the world’s capitalist governments taking the planet to close to double this (2.8C) by 2100.
The consequences—not only extreme heat and drought but flooding and storms—worsen exponentially with each tenth of a degree.
As the authors of these studies warn, the impact will fall hardest on exposed poorer countries in Africa and South Asia. Imperialism denied these countries any opportunity to lay the foundations of a modern, sustainable economy and now lumbers them with the worst outcomes of fossil fuels’ rampant overuse by the super-rich.
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Like war, the climate crisis is one of the defining issues of our time, which the international working class must either suffer or solve. It is not, as right-wing politicians and their many media sounding chambers claim, a “lifestyle” question of interest only to the affluent middle class, but a life-or-death question for every worker. It is not, as the green movement claims, a question of personal responsibility, but of collective class struggle.
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The social wealth monopolized by the super-rich, and with it the power to direct the fate of humanity, must be expropriated through the struggle of the working class. Only through democratic, scientifically informed planning can a situation in which society has enough productive power to drastically alter the climate of the planet, but apparently not to feed and protect all its citizens, be ended.
This is the perspective of world socialist revolution which must be taken up by the workers of Europe now being burned out of their homes and of the whole world threatened with the results of capitalism’s climate crisis.
9. Trump Michigan speech: Trade war and anti-communism
This incoherent rant is another demonstration of the fear now wracking the American ruling class. The cause is not the handful of electoral victories for candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, which is a faction of the Democratic Party completely committed to defense of the interests of American imperialism, whatever their radical phrases.
What Trump and his fellow billionaires fear is the mass radicalization that is developing among working people and youth, a turn to the left by millions which finds only partial and distorted reflection in the votes cast in Democratic Party primaries. In Michigan too, where the August 4 primary is the occasion for Trump’s visit, a candidate backed by the DSA, Abdul El-Sayed, is closely contesting the Senate nomination against Representative Haley Stevens, the choice of the party establishment.
Contrary to Trump’s fantasy of the Democratic leadership embracing communism, the party establishment has funneled $50 million into a media barrage against El-Sayed, a left-liberal who has explicitly declared that he is not a socialist. This media attack has been largely financed by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and other pro-Zionist groups, because El-Sayed has criticized the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
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Trump hinted at the measures his government would take to retain power, saying, “A lot of the Republicans are nice. We’re a very nice party. We shouldn’t be so nice, to be honest with you… We’re having the single greatest year we’ve ever had as a country. We’re not going to let these people destroy it.”
This under conditions where more than two-thirds of the American people say the country is on the wrong track, and even greater numbers oppose Trump’s economic policies and the war against Iran. It is this threat from below, not the toothless opposition of the Democratic Party, that gives Trump and his fascist colleagues nightmares.
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As the WSWS warned after Trump’s Mt. Rushmore speech, “Beyond the hysterical denunciations, Trump’s speech is a declaration of political intent, a conspiracy to overturn the results of the midterm elections and consolidate a presidential dictatorship.” The working class must prepare accordingly.
10. As imperialist wars converge, Ukraine strikes Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea
On Saturday, Ukraine struck an Iranian cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea with a long-range drone, indicating a further convergence of the US-NATO war against Russia and the US-Israeli war against Iran. The incident, confirmed by Iranian and international reporting over the weekend, left one sailor dead and another injured.
The strike prompted exchanges between Tehran and Kiev over who was responsible and what the ship was carrying. Ukraine said the target was not civilian commerce but a vessel transporting drones and missiles from Iran to Russia, while Iran denounced the attack as aggression against one of its commercial ships.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Saturday that Ukrainian forces had achieved “very good results” in long-range strikes in the Caspian Sea, including against vessels used to transport military cargo linked to Iran.
The BBC identified the vessel as the Ana, an Iran-owned dry cargo ship. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said it had departed from the Russian port of Astrakhan and was carrying civilian cargo.
The route is strategically important because Astrakhan sits on the northern Caspian and serves as a key logistics hub for trade moving between Russia and Iran. Any disruption to that lane touches the maritime corridor that has become more valuable for both countries as sanctions, war and supply chain pressures have pushed them to rely on the Caspian as a workaround route.
Reuters reported that Tehran responded with condemnation and vows of retaliation. Iran’s Foreign Ministry described the incident as an act of aggression and said Iran would defend its national interests and security. Iranian officials also accused Ukraine of trying to widen the Russia-Ukraine war by striking a ship tied to Iran.
The Trump administration has not issued an official statement on the Caspian strike.
The incident also shows how the Caspian—which borders Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, but not Ukraine—can no longer be viewed as insulated from the Ukraine war. Reporting said Iran was furious over the vessel strike and summoned Ukraine’s diplomatic chief of mission.
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In the Persian Gulf, Iran has shut the Strait of Hormuz and Houthi allies have threatened or closed the Bab el-Mandeb gateway as well, shutting the vital Red Sea route for oil tankers. Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are two of the world’s most important chokepoints for oil, LNG and commercial shipping.
If both are disrupted at once, 30 percent of the world’s oil capacity is impacted, and tankers will be forced into longer routes through the Suez Canal and around Africa. Transit times will rise sharply, insurance costs will jump and prices will rise dramatically.
The immediate result of these combined shocks is a classic supply squeeze: less refined products from Russia, greater transport risk in the Middle East, and upward pressure on benchmark prices. The broader economic effect is not limited to energy companies. Higher fuel costs feed into freight, food, manufacturing and airline prices, while import-dependent countries face inflation pressures and balance-of-payments stress.
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Ukraine’s strike in the Caspian Sea adds another dimension to the widening imperialist wars of conquest led by the US and involving an expanding number of countries, in wars that are overlapping and heading toward a new world war. Reports late Monday that Russia plans to enlist 30,000 North Korean soldiers for a fall offensive in Ukraine further intensify this trend.
11. Deadly flooding strikes West Virginia and Texas as global climate catastrophe intensifies
Floods, droughts, heatwaves and wildfires mark a further intensification of the global climate catastrophe, driven by decades of fossil-fuel emissions and the refusal of capitalist governments to undertake the internationally coordinated measures required to protect human life.
12. Australia: Labor’s $10 billion housing scheme delivers under 1,500 homes in 2 years
The Housing Australia Future Fund, a central part of Labor’s election platform in 2022, was supposed to make available an additional 40,000 dwellings by 2029.
13. United States: Bronx public defenders walk out
The WSWS spoke to Bronx Defenders attorneys, social workers and support staff, who launched a strike Monday over wages and working conditions.
14. Maritime Union of Australia helps quash debate of Gaza genocide at Labor conference
The union bureaucrats that have postured as opponents of the genocide played the linchpin role in suppressing any discussion of the Israeli regime’s crimes at Labor’s national conference.
15. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Canada:
Nova Scotia Power workers issue strike notice
Guatemala:
Honduras:
Paraguay:
United States:
Picket line clash between striking workers and sheriff's deputies at C&H sugar in California
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
