Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective: Medicaid work requirements take effect: No money for healthcare, $1.5 trillion for war
The Trump administration’s rule imposing work requirements on recipients of Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled, took legal effect on Friday, July 31, setting into motion the deepest restructuring of the program since its founding in 1965.
The instrument is the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), which President Donald Trump signed on July 4, 2025. It slashes federal Medicaid spending by an estimated $911 billion over a decade. The Congressional Budget Office expects the cuts to leave 7.5 million more Americans uninsured by 2034.
By the government’s own estimate, the work requirement will strip 2.3 million people from the Medicaid rolls in its first year. Enrollees aged 19 to 64 must document 80 hours of work, community service or schooling every month, or earnings of at least $580. States must begin enforcement by January 1, 2027. Nebraska starts next month.
A medical exemption requires proof that a condition “significantly impairs” the ability to work. Having cancer is not, by itself, enough. When Arkansas imposed the same policy in 2018, more than 18,000 people lost coverage in six months, overwhelmingly through paperwork failures. Twenty-six states sued over the narrow “medically frail” definition. A Massachusetts federal judge declined Thursday to block the rule.
Beyond Medicaid, the law cuts roughly $270 billion from student loans and $187 billion from SNAP, the food stamp program—cuts driven above all by expanded work requirements, which will force 2.4 million people a month off food assistance.
The administration is also ending the subsidy that has stabilized premiums for Medicare Part D prescription drug plans. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Tuesday that the subsidy will lapse at the end of this year, raising costs for the 25 million seniors enrolled.
The White House has also drafted a rule, ProPublica reported in April, to reverse a 2024 Biden era Social Security rule that expanded Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the disabled, threatening nearly 400,000 recipients with cuts of roughly $331 a month or the loss of benefits. First Medicaid, then Medicare, then Social Security—Whatever remains of the social safety net is to be dismantled.
None of the money cut is being “saved.” It is being reallocated—upward to the rich through the OBBBA’s tax handouts and outward into the machinery of war. The administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request demands $1.5 trillion for the military, an increase of $445 billion over current levels and, adjusted for inflation, the largest single-year rise since World War II.
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This is not austerity imposed by a scarcity of resources—The American financial oligarchy has never been wealthier. The gutting of social programs is a deliberate reallocation of the wealth produced by the working class to pay for the crisis of American capitalism and the wars through which the ruling class seeks a way out.
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The assault on Medicaid and Medicare is accompanied by a war on public health and medical science. Two days before the Medicaid rule took effect, Senate Republicans staged a McCarthyite inquisition against Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38 years. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. The committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky—having first published the scientist’s private diaries—sought to set Fauci up for a perjury charge and closed the hearing by scheduling a contempt vote.
Not a single Democrat on the Senate committee protested the witch-hunting of Fauci or reacted when Rand Paul had Fauci’s lawyer removed from the hearing room.
Under Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., some 20,000 Health and Human Services employees have been driven out, all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee have been fired and replaced with anti-vaccine ideologues, $500 million in mRNA research has been canceled, and the universal hepatitis B birth dose has been abandoned.
The results are tabulated in disease and death: 2,318 confirmed measles cases this year, the most since 1991, and Long COVID debilitating millions. US life expectancy remains below that of every comparable country.
The Trump administration’s new Medicaid work rules have been met largely with silence from the Democrats and the US media. The word “Medicaid” did not appear on the front page of the July 31 print edition of the New York Times or on its website Friday evening, even though that page carried a report on hospitals flooded with the newly uninsured. The Washington Post’s home page likewise had no mention Friday evening.
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The assault on social programs and democratic rights is provoking an upsurge of the working class. In July, 4,000 nurses at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital led the largest healthcare strike in Massachusetts history, and autoworkers at parts plants across Michigan have repeatedly rejected contracts pushed by the UAW apparatus.
The defense of these rights requires the independent mobilization of the working class, free of the shackles of the Democrats, the Republicans and the trade union bureaucracy, through rank-and-file committees on shop floors, in hospitals, in neighborhoods, in schools and on campuses. These committees—linked internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC)—must fight for the unconditional restoration and expansion of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and SNAP as inviolable social rights, preliminary to guaranteed, free healthcare for all. This must be paid for through the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the utilization of the trillions now devoted to war for the satisfaction of human needs.
The UAW presidential candidate forum held online the evening of July 30 laid bare the gulf between rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman, a socialist, and the five other candidates, who are contending for control of an apparatus sitting atop $1.25 billion in net assets.
Every candidate apart from Lehman is a product of the apparatus or a contender to run it. Incumbent Shawn Fain is under federal criminal investigation, as the Justice Department has convened a grand jury and subpoenaed the Monitor over findings that Fain abused his office to obtain benefits for his fiancée and her sister, then retaliated against Vice President Rich Boyer for refusing them. Boyer, now running against Fain, negotiated the 2023 Stellantis contract that opened the door to the mass firing of temporary workers and the layoff of thousands more.
The other three candidates are Brian Keller, a Stellantis Mopar worker who ran in 2022 and won support at several assembly plants before endorsing Fain in the runoff; Tricia Geiger, a highly-paid UAW International servicing representative; and Greg Mooney, recording secretary of Local 2147 at General Dynamics Land Systems in Lima, Ohio, a supporter of Autoworkers for Trump.
In his opening statement, Lehman placed the election in its real context:
We as workers confront historic attacks on our conditions and our lives. Workers’ share of the national income is the lowest since records have been kept. Escalating global war is driving up prices. Paychecks don’t cover basic necessities in a country that just minted its first trillionaire. More than 21,000 autoworker jobs have been wiped out since the start of 2024. The corporations aim to use AI and automation to carry out a global jobs massacre. Democratic rights are being torn down, and our immigrant brothers are hunted by ICE agents.
Every year in this country, more than 5,000 workers die on the job because safety is subordinated to profit. In our plants, Antonio Gaston, Ronald Adams Sr., Gregory Knopf were crushed to death under the 2023 contract that this leadership called “historic.” This month, workers were carried out on stretchers as smoke filled the plants and the lines kept running.
Lehman then told members where their dues go: 560 International staffers were paid more than $100,000 a year; Fain was paid $276,000 last year, 6.6 times what the average member earns; $118 million was spent on the apparatus’s own officers and staff, 14 times what it paid out in strike benefits. “This was never about a few corrupt officials,” Lehman said. “The bureaucracy as a whole is an arm of management.”
He ended his opening remarks by calling for the independent mobilization of autoworkers and the working class, stating:
There is a growing mood of anger and rebellion among autoworkers, healthcare workers, educators, legal aid workers and workers in the UAW. What we need is a strategy and an organization, class struggle instead of class collaboration, internationalism instead of nationalism, rank-and-file committees in every plant and workplace, controlled by workers, linked across industries, to abolish the bureaucracy and transfer power to the shop floor. This campaign is not about what I will do for you. It is about what you are going to do.
The moderator, retired New York Times labor reporter Steve Greenhouse, opened the debate by calling the UAW one of the nation’s greatest unions and pledging to be “scrupulously neutral.” His first question exposed this pretense, as he asked what had “enabled the UAW to come away with a victory in the stand-up strike” against GM, Ford and Stellantis in 2023 and whether it had made mistakes.
That the strike was a victory was not offered for debate, and five of the six candidates accepted the premise. Fain called the union’s contract campaign “brilliant,” declaring, “I’m proud of what we’ve done,” and touted the general strike he claims to be preparing for May Day 2028.
Lehman alone rejected these claims, stating bluntly, “It was not a real strike. It was a disaster. It was a Hollywood strike.” Workers had voted overwhelmingly to strike, but at most 30 percent were called out while the rest worked overtime. Those who did walk out were starved on inadequate strike pay. Lehman stressed: “That’s not solidarity. That’s isolation.”
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A critical aspect of the debate was the recent death threat made against Lehman by Raymond L. Jensen Jr., a UAW organizer who was until recently assistant director of UAW Region 9, Lehman’s own region, and paid roughly $202,000 in 2025. On July 16, Jensen posted an AI-generated image on Lehman’s public campaign Facebook page showing him bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked man aiming an automatic rifle at his back. Jensen, whose Facebook profile carries an “I Support Shawn Fain” badge, posted it beneath Lehman’s statement on the federal investigation into Fain.
Threatening a union member to interfere with his rights in a union election is a federal crime. Until Thursday night, neither Fain nor any member of the union’s executive board had said a word about it. At the debate, Lehman explained that the threat was not just about him but about the response of the apparatus to all rank-and-file opposition, referring to Antwiane Sanders, a Nexteer worker fired for speaking out against UAW officials at a contract meeting inside the plant.
Fain first tried to ignore the issue and only responded when Lehman confronted him directly. “I don’t condone that stuff,” he said, before adding: “If you’re running for president, get ready, brother, because you’ll be getting them every day.” This statement effectively endorsed and doubled down on the threat. Fain gave no indication whatsoever that Jensen would face any consequences.
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Asked what the union’s stance toward the Trump administration should be, Lehman warned that Trump is “trying to enact a fascist dictatorship” and that workers should back neither capitalist party. Tariffs serve the ruling class, he explained: They raise prices, save no jobs and set workers in one country against those in another. He denounced both the Trump and Biden administrations as war criminals.
The other candidates avoided any sharp criticism of Trump and signaled a willingness to bargain with the fascist in the White House, above all, over tariffs, which every other candidate supported. Fain boasted of the collaboration with Trump, saying the UAW had been in US-Mexico-Canada Agreement talks in Mexico City and had “worked very close” with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
A question on organizing in the academic sector exposed what unites the five against Lehman: a preoccupation with the dues base on which the salaries of the apparatus rest. Boyer complained that higher education did not deliver “the best bang for our buck” and asked how long it would take to recoup the $100 million allotted for organizing. Geiger, Mooney and Keller said the same.
Lehman answered that the money belonged in the strike fund, and that gains won on the shop floor, not paid staff, draw workers to the UAW. What the union should not be funding, he said, are “cushy seats for organizers who do nothing and contribute nothing to the union, just going around and earning a paycheck for nothing.” Academic workers who turned to the UAW in the hopes that they would be united with autoworkers in their struggles found an organization that sells them out and bars its own members from striking over political demands, including opposition to the Gaza genocide.
In his closing statement, Lehman elaborated on his program, stating:
Let’s be honest about the situation we face. The ruling class is waging an all-out war on the working class. ... We cannot pretend that the interests of workers in the UAW have nothing to do with what is happening in this country and the world. The reality is the interests of workers and the interests of the capitalists are antagonistic. They cannot be reconciled. We can win what we need only through struggle.
Every other candidate is telling you, “Elect me, put a better person at the top of the apparatus, and things will change.” Workers have been through that four years ago. Shawn Fain made the same promise, and every worker knows how that ended. Put a new individual at the top of the same apparatus, and you get the same policies because the apparatus answers to the companies and to itself. It defends the social and economic system based on the exploitation of the workers.
The alternative was a new power built from the shop floor and linked across industries and borders and the fight for a fundamental reorganization of economic life. “Socialism means equality,” he said. “It means workers’ control of production. It means the international unity of the working class based on our interests. That fight has already begun.” He pointed to the contract battles at Bridgewater Interiors and American Axle, and to the millions marching against dictatorship: “The working class, the sleeping giant of American politics, is beginning to awake.”
Lehman ended by paraphrasing Thomas Paine, stating, “‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ The complacent bureaucrat and the lying reformer will, in this crisis, betray the fight. But the worker who stands up now deserves the love and thanks of all humanity.”
The debate made clear that the only social force capable of halting the jobs massacre, the killings in the plants and the drive to world war is the working class itself, organized through its own rank-and-file committees. Lehman ended with an appeal to act on that, stating: “Vote for me, but do more than vote. Build. Build the committees, build this movement. That is where our power is.”
The Communication Workers Union bureaucracy has co-authored this wrecking operation because it accepts EP Group’s drive to make Royal Mail "competitive" and "sustainable" for the company’s billionaire investors.
4. United Kingdom: Burnham pledges nuclear weapons submarines to be paid for by welfare cuts
The £8.4 billion pledged for the next phase of Britain's Dreadnought nuclear armed submarine program was the first truly significant funding announcement of Burnham’s premiership, committing him to austerity and war.
5. United Kingdom: Mass arrests of Palestine Action defenders outside Westminster Magistrates Court
Since the Labour government’s proscription of Palestine Action one year ago, 3,500 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act (2000) for holding cardboard signs reading, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
6 US looting of Venezuela continues amid earthquake disaster
More than a month after the June 24 earthquakes devastated northern Venezuela, the confirmed death toll has risen to 5,546, with 16,740 injured. The United Nations fears that as many as 51,000 people may still be missing.
The widening humanitarian crisis has not stopped the Trump administration from withholding billions of dollars from Venezuelan oil sales—with estimates as high as 96.5 percent of the revenue.
While US and Venezuelan troops patrol the streets to intimidate workers going without basic necessities, imperialist looting is taking place on a historic scale.
*****The scale of the disaster is unfathomable. The Venezuelan government reports 190 buildings collapsed and 856 severely damaged, but NASA’s assessment puts the figure at 58,000 buildings destroyed or damaged.
The World Bank estimates $19.6 billion in direct damages but says the full cost of physical recovery—including debris clearance and rebuilding to modern standards—could reach $50 billion, close to half of Venezuela’s entire GDP.
According to official figures, some 18,000 people have lost their homes completely, and more than 23,000 remain in shelters. The UN humanitarian relief agency projects that 1.3 million people will require assistance over the next six months.
Conditions on the ground are deteriorating toward a secondary catastrophe. Dust from pulverized concrete hangs in the humid air on top of the smell of corpses. Garbage accumulates in the streets, as families camp outside buildings declared too dangerous to enter.
An estimated 1.2 million tons of debris must be managed, much of it contaminated with fuels, motor oil, paints, solvents and plastics released when the buildings came down.
Diego Díaz Martín of the environmental organization Vitalis warned the AP that seasonal rains could trigger landslides across earthquake-weakened hillsides, while many affected areas have not been assessed.
Safe drinking water is scarce. There are no guarantees the water in tanker trucks has been properly treated, the AP reports. Unsafe water and inadequate sanitation are already triggering disease outbreaks.
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Against this mounting catastrophe, Washington has committed $386 million in assistance, and Venezuela secured a further $346 million in emergency financing from the IMF. Set against $50 billion in recovery costs, these sums are derisory.
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Meanwhile, sanctions remain in force and $22 billion in Venezuelan state assets remain frozen and billions more are being taken by US imperialism.
The financial mechanism at the center of this arrangement deserves the closest scrutiny.
Since the January 3 invasion that abducted President Nicolas Maduro, the United States has directly controlled the sale of Venezuelan crude. The Financial Times calculates that the Trump administration has collected more than $13 billion in revenue from Venezuelan oil sales so far.
Washington has said almost nothing about where that money has gone, with an executive order describing the US role as “custodial.” Trump, for his part, boasted in June that the US had recovered the cost of the military operation in Venezuela “28 times” through oil, adding that the United States is “making a lot of money, too.”
*****The paper trail is deliberately opaque. A first tranche in January 2026 was valued at roughly $500 million, but only $300 million was actually confirmed transferred by both Venezuelan and US officials; the remaining $200 million was reportedly held in an account in Qatar, with no confirmation from either side that it was ever released.
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There is no independent audit, no public ledger and no mechanism by which the Venezuelan population can determine what has become of its key natural resource. There is likewise no way of knowing what portion has found its way into the accounts of the Trump family and its business associates.
In order to safeguard this sacking operation, the US military occupation continues to deepen. Former Vice President Elías Jaua told Truthdig: “The United States has not only taken over the country’s main airport and seaport but also deployed 900 Marines in La Guaira and 2,000 across the entire operation.”
He added that US forces have conducted drone and helicopter mapping of the entire Venezuelan coastline, imposing de facto control over Venezuelan airspace and coastal waters from US bases in Puerto Rico, Panama and Trinidad and Tobago. American troops now patrol La Guaira accompanied by an Israeli military delegation.
The government of interim President Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice president, functions entirely according to Trump’s demands. Caracas has announced its withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, now a key target of US provocations. It lodged a diplomatic protest against Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi for observing that “Iran is not Venezuela, where you take one person and everyone else gets scared and backs down.”
Caracas has removed Russia’s Rosneft from oil projects and halted oil shipments to China that had serviced Venezuelan debt. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reported to be directly managing Venezuelan export allocations, sidelining European companies as well. Rodríguez has hosted an Israeli delegation and a US congressional delegation led by the fascistic Florida Republican Brian Mast, while moving to restore relations with the far-right governments in Chile and Peru.
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The metamorphosis of the Chavistas from proponents of “Socialism of the 21st Century” into the managers of US imperialist interests is the most damning refutation possible of the entire perspective of bourgeois nationalism and left reformism. It demonstrates that no nominally left or nationalist force operating within the framework of capitalism can secure national sovereignty or lasting social improvement.
This capitulation is being demanded with special ferocity precisely because US imperialism itself is in crisis—burdened by record debt and trade deficits, a weakening dollar and a losing economic contest with China. Its response is to squeeze Latin America dry through methods of direct colonial rule not seen in a century.
Just as workers and young people in the United States increasingly reject the myth of American capitalism as a land of opportunity and turn toward socialism, workers across Latin America can see that capitalism offers them neither social improvement nor physical safety. The radicalization now developing throughout the region requires a genuinely socialist political program and a revolutionary party.
7. Lula and Morenoite-led union promote arms industry amid US offensive against Brazil
On Friday, July 24, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party–PT) attended the official reactivation of Avibras, for decades Brazil’s largest defense industry company. The ceremony brought together the three chiefs of the Armed Forces, government ministers, businessmen and officials of the Metalworkers Union of São José dos Campos and Region (SindMetalSJC), affiliated to the CSP-Conlutas trade union federation led by the Morenoite Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU). The event represented the convergence, on the same platform, of the bourgeois state, the military high command, big private capital and the pseudo-left trade union bureaucracy.
The reactivation is the centerpiece of a drive Lula has pressed forward over the past month to expand Brazil’s defense industry. The US invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026 set off alarm bells through the Lula government. The threat of direct US military aggression against Brazil was recently acknowledged officially by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which warned that the Trump administration’s designation of the criminal factions Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” in late May “could be invoked as justification for extraterritorial actions.”
That designation comes on top of the punitive tariffs imposed against Brazil since July of last year—part of a broader US offensive against Brazil and Latin America aimed at rolling back Chinese influence and installing governments aligned with Washington’s interests across the region. A new round of US tariffs was imposed on July 15, designed to help Trump’s fascist ally Flávio Bolsonaro win the October presidential election against Lula. The Lula government answers this offensive with rearmament: a nationalist and militarist response to the crisis of global capitalism.
Founded in 1961, Avibras produced missiles, rockets, armored vehicles and space launchers for the Brazilian Armed Forces and dozens of international clients. In March 2022, the company entered bankruptcy proceedings. More than 400 workers were laid off, though the courts suspended the dismissals.
Without receiving their wages, the workers carried out a strike lasting three and a half years—from September 2022 until March of this year, when a fund led by billionaire businessman Joesley Batista of the JBS group announced an investment of R$300 million (US$59 million) to resume production. The largest meat processing enterprise in the world, JBS is also one of the largest beneficiaries of state credit programs under the first PT government. The Lula government announced a further R$300 million, not yet invested in Avibras, whose primary stated purpose is to cover workers’ back wages.
*****In his speech, Lula declared it “a special day,” explaining that since the beginning of his government in 2023 he had held meetings with military chiefs and ministers with the aim of reactivating the company. For Lula, keeping Avibras idle was unacceptable: “There was no political, economic, or social explanation, and there is no explanation either as a sovereign nation, for us to preside over a country that had a company which had accumulated the technological knowledge of Avibras—producing something so important for the country’s security—shut down and being destroyed.”
The most revealing passage of the speech, however, was Lula’s comparison of the Armed Forces to God–an institution one turns to in every crisis. “I want the Armed Forces well prepared, well trained, with enough soldiers to take care of this country,” he declared. The president enumerated the resources that would make the country a coveted target: critical minerals, rare earths, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, 12 percent of the planet’s fresh water.
The “sovereignty” Lula invokes is entirely that of the bourgeois state and its Armed Forces—the same forces that harbored and protected the conspirators behind the January 8, 2023 coup attempt, whose apparatus remains intact and closely intertwined with the US military. In a country that has not fought a war involving its national sovereignty in more than a century and a half, and which was ruled by a blood-soaked military dictatorship for some two decades beginning with a Washington-backed coup in 1964, there is an infinitely greater likelihood that a revamped military will turn its guns against the Brazilian working class than fight a war of national defense.
At the delivery of a frigate to the Navy at the TKMS Estaleiro Brasil Sul shipyard in Santa Catarina on June 26, Lula portrayed that apparatus as the foundation of “the beginning of a country that will assume, in fact and in law, the right to be sovereign,” emphasizing that his governments—the 2003-2010 period and the current one alike—have always been marked by a “good relationship with the military.”
The program Lula announced is that of a government preparing to become an arms exporter on a growing scale. Pledging that “the Armed Forces, together with the Defense Ministry, will prepare to place whatever orders need to be placed,” he went further still: “We are going to have to travel, Zé Múcio [Defense Minister], selling things.”
To obfuscate what amounts to the transformation of Brazil into a major international arms dealer, Lula reached for a cynical formulation typical of bourgeois militarism: “When I sell a weapon abroad, I say: it was made by Brazilian workers—men and women—and they don’t want to kill anyone. This weapon is for peace. It’s just so you can say you have it, so nobody messes with you.”
Lula has invoked Washington’s expansionism to justify this program: “Right now the American president wants to take Greenland, Canada is going to become his state, he wants to take the Panama Canal,” he declared in June. His “weapons of peace,” however, have a precise destination in the real world. In the 1980s and 1990s, Avibras supplied equipment for the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. Today, four of Brazil’s five largest defense export customers are NATO members, including Germany and the United States, and Brazilian equipment is being used in the wars in Ukraine and Iran.
At the same Santa Catarina ceremony, Lula spelled out the place this program now occupies in his government: “Beyond education, beyond healthcare, beyond the energy transition, beyond artificial intelligence, defense is part of my priorities to transform this country into the true country it needs to be.” He added: “For the first time, I will include the question of defense in my government program.”
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In his speech at the ceremony, Lula was effusive in his praise for the Metalworkers Union of São José dos Campos and Region (SindMetalSJC). “The union is a source of pride for the maturity of its understanding of the importance of the company and the political moment we are living through.” The phrase captures the role played by the Morenoite leadership of SindMetalSJC: that of a bureaucracy which, over three and a half years, “matured” in the direction of the negotiating table and in accordance with the interests of the bourgeois state, militarism and national private capital.
Present at the ceremony, Weller Gonçalves, the union’s president and a PSTU member, addressed Lula directly, advancing essentially the same nationalist and militarist program as the PT government. He recounted the “many meetings held with Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, with Defense Minister Múcio and with other ministers.” What was conspicuously absent from Weller’s remarks, however, was his own intensive campaign of engagement with the Brazilian military, whose principal interlocutor was the reactionary military commander Robinson Farinazzo. This partnership culminated most recently in a public campaign for SindMetalSJC to receive the Order of Military Merit, the Brazilian Army’s highest decoration.
At the ceremony, Weller handed Lula a document that encapsulates the program the Morenoite bureaucracy has pursued throughout this entire period. “The return of Avibras is a great victory for our country,” the document declared, crediting the union’s struggle with having prevented “Brazil’s main defense industry from being handed over to foreign capital.” Addressing Lula directly, Weller was still more emphatic: “We did not waver in defending Avibras as a national company.”
The document also put forward what it called a “strategic proposal for national development”: the re-nationalization of aviation giant Embraer—which also produces military aircraft—the nationalization of Avibras and all strategic companies in the defense sector, and their merger into a large state-owned industry integrated with universities and research centers.
Just as Lula had done moments earlier, the document justified this proposal in terms of the “profound transformations in world geopolitics,” the “ongoing wars” and the “rivalry between major imperialist powers,” concluding: “no country that intends to preserve its sovereignty can do without a national defense industry.”
The interview Weller gave to Brasil247 on July 24 is still more revealing about the real political role the union has played. He disclosed that at the outset, government representatives argued: “Look, you talk about nationalizing the company, you talk about government investment. Brazil is not at war. If we invest in Avibras, people will question why we’re not investing in healthcare, in education, in infrastructure.”
That argument—whose substance was subsequently repeated by Alckmin and Lula—reveals that the systematic lobbying by the Morenoite-led union helped create the political conditions for the PT government to present rearmament as a national priority on a par with social policies. “The defense industry needs government funding. It’s the money from our taxes that the government must invest in Avibras,” Weller concluded. He also argued that the company “will need to improve itself” and “pivot to producing drones.”
Weller did not ignore the fact that his alliance between a “communist trade unionist” and a military figure like Farinazzo had drawn criticism. In what appears to be a direct reference to the WSWS—which has published an extensive record of articles exposing the SindMetalSJC’s militarist program amid broad silence from the pseudo-left—he declared: “There are even some websites out there, aren’t there, Commander, that stir up controversy saying: ‘wow, a communist trade unionist alongside a military man—what’s that about?’” He answered his own question: “Each to their own ideas. But when it comes to the struggle for the return of Avibras, it is a united front.” Such a nationalist, multi-class front between a union leadership and the military represents a grotesque and reactionary parody of the “united front” policy advanced by Trotsky.
The political content of this fraudulent “anti-imperialism” is further exposed by the positions on the main international conflicts adopted by the PSTU and CSP-Conlutas, the trade union federation to which SindMetalSJC is affiliated. While crying for Brazilian “national sovereignty,” they have championed the US-NATO arming of Ukraine in its proxy-war against Russia, the war in Syria and other initiatives by the same imperialist powers.
In the Brasil247 interview, Weller went still further in his nationalism. He claimed that the Bolsonaroist far-right had hijacked “national symbols,” adding: “The real patriot is the worker on the shop floor … The real patriot is the metalworkers’ union that stood on the front lines fighting for Avibras and wants to defend our country. This far-right crowd has nothing to do with patriotism.”
Weller’s argument is, at its core, a declaration against the international character of the working class. By proclaiming that “the real patriot is the worker” and contesting the “national symbols” with the far right, the SindMetalSJC president advances no independent class perspective. The “patriotism of the worker” Weller invokes is, in practice, the patriotism that leads workers to subordinate themselves to bourgeois nationalism—to accept the sacrifices demanded by the state and capital in the name of the nation, and to identify their interests with those of their own ruling class.
But the working class has no homeland. By its very position in the productive process, it is an international class. A metalworker in São José dos Campos has more in common with a Boeing worker in Seattle, a defense factory worker in Germany or a worker in Iran than with Lula, the Brazilian generals or the businessmen who now control Avibras. What unites them is not the flag, but exploitation—and what divides them is not national origin, but class.
The Avibras ceremony takes place as the imperialist wars enter a new stage. The war between Russia and NATO-backed Ukraine and the war waged by the United States against Iran are intensifying, while the genocide in Gaza continues unabated. Last week, Ukraine struck an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea, claiming it was carrying drones and missiles bound for Russia. Iran denounced the attack as aggression against a commercial vessel. As the WSWS analyzed, the attack exposed the global character of imperialist war, with the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran increasingly converging into a single conflagration.
The answer to the escalation of imperialist war and the growing threat of a third world war cannot come from bourgeois nationalism—not from the PT government, not from the military, and not from the trade union bureaucracy that marched alongside them. It requires the independent political mobilization of the Brazilian working class in unity with its class brothers and sisters in the United States, Ukraine, Iran and across the world—in a common struggle against capitalism and the imperialist war system it generates.
8. German government in crisis
Never before has a German chancellor been as unpopular as Friedrich Merz. After just under 15 months in office, only 18 percent of the population are satisfied with his performance, while 78 percent are dissatisfied. This is the lowest approval rating recorded for a sitting chancellor since polling began in 1998. At the same point in his term, Merz’s predecessor Olaf Scholz still had an approval rating of 41 percent, while Angela Merkel’s stood at 66 percent.*****
Merz has responded to the collapse in the government’s poll ratings by reshuffling his cabinet and reorganizing the leadership of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. Following the resignation of parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn, Merz installed his close confidant Thorsten Frei, previously head of the Federal Chancellery, as Spahn’s successor. Spahn was forced to step down after he and his husband had a child through a surrogate mother in the United States, despite surrogacy being prohibited in Germany and publicly opposed by both the CDU and Spahn himself.
The Federal Chancellery is now headed by former Health Minister Nina Warken, who, according to Merz, demonstrated through her health reforms “that she can lead a ministry and push through reforms even in the face of opposition.” Warken has been replaced as health minister by Carsten Linnemann, the former secretary-general of the CDU. Although he holds a doctorate in economics, Linnemann has no expertise in health policy and is regarded as a staunch representative of business interests. His task will be to impose the austerity measures initiated by Warken against widespread opposition.
Merz sacked Transport Minister Patrick Schnieder in a humiliating manner, which sparked a storm of indignation within the Rhineland-Palatinate regional association, where his brother is Minister-President. Schnieder’s successor is Steffen Bilger from Baden-Württemberg, a lobbyist for the automotive industry who has made a name for himself as an opponent of environmental regulations. From 2004 to 2007, Bilger was chairman of the youth organization of the Weikersheim Study Centre, the right-leaning think tank founded by the former Nazi judge Hans Filbinger.
Merz also replaced several state secretaries or transferred them to other ministries.
The reshuffle, which Merz had apparently barely discussed with anyone, exacerbated the crisis. For the first time, the Chancellor is being publicly attacked and called into question from within his own ranks. Tensions within the party are reaching a boiling point. The high-handed manner in which Merz went about his business also offended regional associations in the east and facilitated the eruption of pent-up panic within the party. With state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania just a few weeks away, CDU office-holders fear for their influence and their positions.
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The criticism of Merz is not directed at his policies, but at the arrogant manner in which he implements them. Merz’s critics fear that he is thereby provoking an uprising that threatens not only the government but capitalist rule as a whole. They support his agenda of rearmament and social spending cuts, which has catastrophic consequences for large sections of the population, but, like the Chancellor himself, are seeking the most effective method possible to implement it—even in collaboration with the AfD if necessary.
The government’s disastrous poll ratings are a measure of the growing opposition to policies that have no support whatsoever amongst the population. The systematic escalation of the war in Ukraine against the nuclear-armed power Russia, the enormous sums spent on rearming the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces), the drastic cuts to healthcare, care services, pensions and welfare benefits, as well as the job cuts in the car industry, are meeting with growing resistance.
Only the super-rich are better off under Merz. The number of centimillionaires—those with more than $100 million—rose from 3,900 to 5,000 in his first year in office. In the same year, poverty reached a historic high, with a rate of 16.1 percent, or 13.3 million people.
The crisis facing the Merz government must be viewed in this context. Merz’s critics within the CDU and in the media almost unanimously accuse him of “technical errors,” “poor communication” and “bungling.” Their aim is to make his reactionary policies more effective. In contrast, public opposition is directed against the substance of Merz’s policies—against cuts to social services, poverty, unemployment, militarism and war.
This opposition finds no political expression in official politics. The SPD is part of the Merz government and heads two key ministries: Defense and Finance. The Greens support both the war and rearmament policies and are not in government solely because they are not needed to secure a majority. The trade unions are working closely with the government and business associations to push through mass redundancies and cuts to social services and to stifle resistance to them.
This enables the right-wing demagogues of the AfD to exploit to some extent the anger and frustration of the middle classes—and indeed of workers—for their own ends. However, the AfD is not an opposition party; rather, it takes the reactionary policies of the ruling class to extremes. It is no coincidence that it is supported by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance.
It is only a matter of time before the AfD is brought into government. The other parties are systematically paving the way for it by adopting its inhumane refugee policies and its “law and order” agenda. What is currently still preventing them from forming a coalition government is the fear of massive protests, as well as differences of opinion on foreign policy.
It is telling that even the Left Party, which was on the brink of collapse just a few years ago, is gaining support once again. It is attracting voters and members, particularly among the younger generation, because it speaks out publicly against cuts to social services, militarism and the rise of the AfD.
However, the Left Party is not a political alternative, but rather a lightning rod and a safety valve. It spouts left-wing rhetoric to absorb the growing radicalization. In fact, it protects the hated federal government, helped Merz to a swift rise to the chancellorship and even voted in the Bundesrat, Germany’s second chamber of parliament, in favor of the government’s war credits. Wherever it assumes government responsibility, it defends capitalism and supports austerity programs. In this way, it strengthens the AfD. In Thuringia, where the Left Party held the position of Minister-President for ten years, the far right now enjoys over 40 percent support in the polls.
The vicious circle of militarism, war, social spending cuts and dictatorship can only be broken by an independent working-class movement fighting for the overthrow of capitalism. The Socialist Equality Party (Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, SGP) is fighting for this perspective in its campaign for the Berlin House of Representatives election on 20 September. The SGP’s election statement declares:
We do not make hollow appeals to the warmongers, nor do we beg for handouts. We organize resistance against redundancies, wage cuts and social cuts, and, together with our sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International, we are building a worldwide movement against war and its root cause, capitalism.
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