Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. US begins mass deportations to devastated Haiti
On Thursday, the Trump administration deported 161 people to Haiti aboard an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter flight, the first such flight since the administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitians living in the United States.
The forced return of workers and their families to Haiti amounts to a virtual death sentence. More than 3,100 people were killed and another 1,189 injured by gang violence between January and June, according to United Nations figures. A record 1.5 million people have been displaced within a country where more than half the population requires humanitarian assistance.
The ICE flight did not land at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, because the US government considers it too dangerous. Instead, the charter plane landed more than 80 miles to the north in Cap-Haïtien.
The deportees emerged from the plane dressed in white. Many covered their faces as journalists filmed them, fearing that they could be identified and targeted by armed groups. Gangs control an estimated 70 percent of Port-au-Prince and large areas beyond the capital. They control major roads, extort travelers, kidnap people for ransom and fire on passing vehicles.
Some of those deported were not even born in Haiti. Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti’s National Office of Migration, said that at least one man was born in the Dominican Republic and knew nothing of Haiti. His parents live in the Dominican Republic, but the United States deported him to Haiti because he is of Haitian descent.
Haitian immigration officials provided the deportees with no more than $65, along with something to eat and drink. Many were then expected to undertake dangerous journeys through gang-controlled territory to reach relatives or communities they may not have seen for decades.
*****
The deportation flight followed the Trump administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians on August 5. The program had allowed approximately 350,000 Haitians to live and work legally in the United States because conditions in Haiti made their safe return impossible.
In late June, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to end TPS protections affecting roughly 1 million immigrants from more than a dozen countries. On August 5, a federal judge lifted the remaining order temporarily preventing the deportation of Haitian TPS holders.
The rulings gave the White House judicial authorization for a decision it had already made. The objective is to transform hundreds of thousands of workers who entered the country legally, built families and became integral members of their communities into deportable “aliens” virtually overnight.
In Springfield, Ohio, more than 12,000 Haitian immigrants have settled and taken jobs in manufacturing, food processing and other industries. ICE thugs have fitted some of the workers with GPS ankle monitors of the type commonly imposed on people convicted of serious crimes and released on parole. The devices stigmatize Haitians as criminals and allow the immigration Gestapo to track and seize them more easily.
*****
The escalation of the mass deportation campaign comes as the Trump administration confronts an extraordinary political crisis. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency, with 64 percent disapproving of his performance.
The illegal US war against Iran has failed to achieve any of its aims while driving up energy costs and threatening a wider military conflagration. The national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. Gasoline prices were 24.6 percent higher in July than a year earlier. Trump is seeking to divert the immense social anger produced by war, inequality and declining living standards against immigrants.
Under these conditions, the mass deportation operation depends on the active collaboration of the Democratic Party and its so-called “socialist” representatives.
Since TPS was terminated on August 5, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has issued no public statement on the GPS shackling of Haitian workers, the ICE arrests in Springfield or Thursday’s deportation flight. During the same period, she devoted considerable social media attention to documenting her decision to freeze her eggs as she considers her political future, including a possible run for president.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has likewise issued no statement opposing the latest attacks on Haitian workers. On Thursday, as 161 people were deported to Haiti, Sanders found time to endorse Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon. His endorsement came two days after Nixon defeated the party establishment’s heavily funded candidate, Alexander Vindman, without Sanders’ support.
Democratic Socialists of America member and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has gone beyond silence. On August 7, two days after Haitian TPS was terminated, Mamdani announced that New York City would fire Haitian municipal workers who had lost their work authorization. He called no protest, mounted no legal challenge and appealed for no strike action. He instead urged the workers to seek relief from the same Trump administration that had stripped them of their status.
New York is home to one of the largest Haitian communities in the United States. Mamdani’s decision makes the Democratic city administration a direct enforcer of Trump’s attack. As one Haitian Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker told the World Socialist Web Site, “We have to get all of them out of office, both Trump and Mamdani.”
Social media comments by Tobias Lütke, the right-wing CEO of the Canadian online shopping site Shopify, in which the multi-billionaire attacks universal suffrage have been met with outrage in Canada and internationally.
Lütke declared that voting rights should be stripped from those whom he termed “dependents”—based on their payment of income tax. This would disenfranchise wide swathes of workers on low wages, elderly pensioners, the unemployed, students and the infirm. These proposals were met with support from within the Canadian capitalist oligarchy and international financial elite, including from the fascist Elon Musk.
The posts expose the internationally unified class character of the capitalist assault on basic democratic rights, which finds its most concentrated expression in the campaign of the fascist US President Donald Trump to establish a presidential dictatorship. The reaction to Lütke’s comments exposes the political complicity of Canada’s social democratic NDP and pseudo-left, who have falsely claim that Lütke’s hostility to democracy is merely “un-Canadian.” In fact, attacks on worker rights, including the right to strike, and the promotion of authoritarian forms of rule feature ever more prominently in Canadian political life.
Lütke’s remarks came in a series of replies to an X post by Jordan Grimes, a Democratic Party activist in San Francisco. The Democrat attacked elderly San Francisco residents mobilized at a town hall meeting to oppose a high-rise housing development. Grimes characterized the elderly voters as “the living dead,” complaining that they had outlived their democratic rights, and were a far greater obstacle than capitalism to solving the housing crisis.
To these complaints, Lütke responded with enthusiasm to strip people of their democratic rights. He cynically framed this as an inversion of the “New Deal” social reforms in the US in the 1930s:
“New deal: when you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.”
3. The US bond market crisis and the coming eruption of class struggle
The U.S. Treasury Department intervened this week to contain a selloff in long-term government debt, a sign of a mounting financial crisis that is driving an immense escalation of the class struggle. After the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond rose to 5.3 percent, its highest level since 2007, the department announced that it would at least double its purchases of long-dated bonds, to a minimum of $4 billion per operation, beginning September 9 and running through early November.
The move produced only a brief fall in yields before they resumed their rise. The failure points to the approaching limits of a financial order that has rested for decades on the unending expansion of US government debt.
Federal debt crossed $40 trillion this week, up from $5.7 trillion in 2000—and up from $38 trillion as recently as last October. Interest payments reached $963 billion during the first 10 months of the fiscal year, about $200 billion more than military spending and slightly more than Medicare. As yields rise, the government must pay more to refinance maturing debt. That increases the interest bill, requires still more borrowing and places still greater pressure on the bond market.
Successive Democratic and Republican administrations accumulated the debt through tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, decades of unending war and repeated rescues of the banks and financial markets. After the crashes of 2008 and 2020, the government and Federal Reserve supplied trillions of dollars to protect the fortunes of the oligarchy and fuel another surge in stock prices, corporate debt and speculation.
The privileged global position of the dollar allowed the United States to carry this process far beyond the capacity of any other capitalist power. Central banks and financial institutions throughout the world accumulated dollars and Treasury securities as reserves, collateral and a store of value. This demand allowed Washington to finance deficits and military operations on an immense scale.
But the growth of the debt now corrodes the privilege that made it possible. The dollar has weakened, while gold has reached new heights, expressing growing doubts about the currency as a store of value.
*****
The historic decline of American capitalism is approaching a new stage. As David North explained in his opening report to the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party, “the traditional remedies, fiscal expansion and monetary easing, are constrained by the mountain of debt and by the fragility of the dollar itself.”
Because the dollar and Treasury market occupy the center of world finance, the crisis assumes an inherently global character.
*****
The wealth of America’s 977 billionaires rose by $2.2 trillion in the year to June, reaching $9.24 trillion, according to an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness. But it goes without saying that any solution to the debt crisis which threatens the wealth of the oligarchy will not be considered.
The demands for austerity are determined not merely by subjective greed but by the deep crisis of American and world capitalism. The financial oligarchy can defend the immense mass of fictitious wealth only by continuously driving down the living standards of the working class at home and seizing foreign markets, resources and supply chains abroad.
Washington launched its war against Iran to seize control of the country’s oil wealth and eliminate a central barrier to US domination of the Middle East. Nearly six months later, American imperialism has achieved neither objective. The war has developed into a military and political debacle that has only deepened the political crisis of the US and accelerated the economic breakdown it sought to overcome.
The Democratic Party participated in every stage of the process that produced the present crisis: financial deregulation, the bailout of Wall Street, military expansion and attacks on the working class. It defends the same capitalist property relations and global interests as the Republicans.
The developing crisis demolishes the claim of the Democratic Socialists of America that workers can achieve social progress without a struggle against the capitalist oligarchy and the property relations on which its power rests. As Trotsky explained in Whither France?, “Governmental intervention on the foundations of a capitalist régime can be of assistance only in shifting the unprofitable expenditures of the decline from one class to another.” So long as the financial magnates control “all the basic levers of industry, credit and commerce,” they will use that power to impose the costs of the crisis on workers.
The trade union apparatus, as it has for decades, is taking an active part in this offensive. The bureaucracies base their privileges on their relations with corporate management and the state. They are suppressing strikes, helping impose plant closures and layoffs, cuts to wages and benefits and are invoking corporate “competitiveness” to justify every concession. As the ruling class expands the war economy, union officials such as United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain are already invoking “national interests” to discipline workers and subordinate them to American imperialism.
Every immediate struggle now develops within this broader context. A fight against a plant closure, mass layoffs, artificial intelligence-driven job destruction, healthcare cuts or pension reductions will collide with a ruling class declaring that there is “no money” for social needs while it directs almost $1 trillion a year to creditors and limitless resources to financial rescue and war.
*****
The alternative confronting humanity is socialism or barbarism. The fight to defend jobs, living standards and social rights leads directly to the question of which class controls society and whose interests govern economic life. The working class must take control of the banks and major corporations, expropriate the oligarchy and reorganize production to meet human need rather than private profit. That is the program of socialism.
4. Social crime in the Calumet region: Blackouts in Gary, Indiana, extend into second week
On August 11, a derecho swept across northern Illinois and northwest Indiana, producing hurricane-strength winds and eight confirmed tornadoes. A peak gust of 99 miles per hour was recorded at Gary/Chicago International Airport. Downed trees, utility poles and power lines caused widespread destruction across Chicago’s southern suburbs and northwest Indiana, including Gary, Hammond, Whiting and Merrillville.
Cities and towns have been forced into survival mode, cleaning debris, repairing or moving out of damaged homes and relying on neighbors for assistance with repairs and support.
Ten days later, tens of thousands of Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) customers remain without electricity. As of 9 p.m. Friday, 38,459 customers across northwest Indiana remained without power, including thousands in Gary, where complete restoration is not expected until the end of August.
Residents across the region have been forced to discard hundreds of dollars in spoiled groceries and refrigerated medicine, catastrophic losses for households living paycheck to paycheck. No systematic meal delivery or nutrition support is being organized by the state or federal government. Schools have been shuttered for weeks, and businesses remain dark, as primarily working class communities are left to navigate heat and darkness without climate control, refrigeration or medical devices.
*****
As a response to the major losses experienced by area businesses, a class-action lawsuit has been filed against the electric utility, NIPSCO, alleging inadequate vegetation management in and around power lines.
But this severely understates the case. The collapse in infrastructure in Gary and the Calumet area is the end result of decades of policy in which the financial elite funnels value out of productive assets and into speculation. The area’s mega-corporations continue to operate while the surrounding working class communities and small businesses have been plunged into “survival mode” for nearly two weeks due to the collapse of a dilapidated electrical grid.
The corridor stretching from Gary through Whiting and East Chicago is home to an extraordinary concentration of industrial capital, including the Midwest’s largest oil refinery, BP, producing 440,000 barrels of fuel daily; the US Steel and Cleveland Cliffs steel mills, some of the world’s largest integrated mills; two massive Ford automotive manufacturing facilities and a number of auto parts suppliers; and a large Cargill facility manufacturing food products, among other enterprises.
But there is no contradiction between the enormous concentration of industrial production in the Calumet area and its dilapidated capital infrastructure. The infrastructure is hollowed out due to the speculative profit-taking of a ruling class that demands relentless cost-cutting, ever lower taxes, total deregulation, and the most aggressive attacks on wages and safety standards.
5. Australia: ABC program exposes cruelty of Labor’s aged care schemes
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) flagship “Four Corners” television program on Monday provided a damning, if partial, view of the immense suffering of the elderly under the Labor government’s substantially privatized aged care schemes.
Hundreds of thousands of retired workers and their families are being denied adequate support packages or left waiting interminably for basic services. Titled “The Waiting Game,” the broadcast reported that more than a quarter of a million people are waiting for home care funding, and that 4,800 people died in 2024–25 while waiting.
*****
What “Four Corners” did not explain is that Labor’s Support at Home scheme is a more punitive version of the previous Gillard Labor government’s Home Care Packages program, announced in 2012. It shifted the sector from a mixture of government-funded services to a so-called Consumer Directed Care model.
This is a voucher-style system where participants, including the most frail, poor and vulnerable, must individually purchase services from private providers. By its very nature, this turns aged care services into profit-driven financial transactions.
Support at Home continues the voucher model, but with extensive co-payments. Retirees now contribute up to 80 percent of the charges for essential living services such as cleaning, home maintenance, gardening, meals and social support, whereas many aged pensioners previously paid very little or nothing beyond a basic daily fee.
Like the outsourcing of services to private operators under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which the Gillard government also pioneered, the Support at Home program is predicated on making the market profitable enough to win corporate investment.
The home care sector reported a $558.1 million net profit before tax for the year ending March 2025, with the largest corporate providers achieving the highest profit margins of around 8.3 percent–8.6 percent.
6. Australian government’s phony posturing over Israeli murder of aid worker
The Australian Labor government is once again engaging in a cynical exercise of handwringing over an atrocity by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), while continuing its full support for the Zionist regime and its murderous, ethnic-cleansing operation of Palestinians.
On Wednesday, the IDF exonerated itself over an April 1, 2024 drone strike that killed seven employees of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid group in Gaza, including Australian citizen Zomi Frankcom.
The IDF declared that it had concluded its investigation and that there was no “reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct” by any of its forces involved in the attack. To add salt to the wound, the statement was issued on World Humanitarian Day.
That provocation was followed by another on Friday, with Israel’s foreign ministry extending its condolences to the family members of the aid workers “who tragically lost their lives under deeply regrettable circumstances.”
The IDF’s suggestion that it had been targeting supposed Palestinian militants and that the strike on the WCK staff was an unfortunate error had always been a transparent fraud. The IDF carried out a bombardment of a clearly-marked WCK convoy. The aid organization had provided its coordinates to the military in advance.
The strike was carried out under conditions where Israel was openly using starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinians of Gaza, including by blockading most aid from entering the Strip. In that context, the strike, targeting a US-based charity with close ties to Western governments, would have been ordered at the top levels of the military command and by the government itself.
Workers and students in Sri Lanka have added their voices to the international campaign for the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk. The 27-year-old Ukrainian Trotskyist and leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists was arrested in April 2024 and sentenced on August 10, 2026, to 15 years in prison for “high treason under martial law.”
No evidence of espionage, sabotage or collaboration with the Russian military was produced against him. He was convicted for writing political articles, published by the World Socialist Web Site, which opposed both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US-NATO war against Russia, exposed the Zelensky regime’s rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators, and called for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against war.
The campaign to free Bogdan is attracting widespread support. The petition for his release now has 6,300 signatures from people in 47 countries. The WSWS has published statements denouncing the frame-up verdict from historians, academics, artists, journalists, workers and youth internationally.
Meanwhile, pro-imperialist media outlets, such as the New York Times, have refused to report this anti-democratic conviction and sentence.
*****
Sajith Bandara, a cartoonist, said: “As an artist, I strongly oppose the sentencing of Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk to 15 years in prison.
“Imprisoning a person for 15 years for opposing a war, criticizing a government, or presenting alternative political views about society raises serious questions about democratic rights and freedom of expression.
“War not only destroys human lives; it also leads to severe restrictions on democratic rights in society. In such circumstances, suppressing voices opposing the war only serves to deepen the destruction caused by the war.
“Bogdan is a young man who stood for the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian working classes and against the war.
“A society in which an artist, writer, or political activist can be imprisoned for expressing their views raises serious questions about genuine freedom and democracy. Although the voice being silenced today may be that of a single socialist activist, tomorrow it could be an attack on the right of any artist, writer, or ordinary citizen to express their views.
“Art and free thought must not remain silent in the face of war and state repression. Opposing war is not a crime. Holding a political opinion is not a crime. Criticizing a government is not a crime, but silence is.
“Therefore, I call for the immediate annulment of the 15-year prison sentence imposed on Bogdan Syrotiuk and his immediate release.”
8. H5N1 avian flu spreads among Australian bird population
Australia confronts a rapidly evolving outbreak of H5N1 Avian Influenza (bird flu). The outbreak began in late June, when two infected migratory seabirds were found on a remote beach in Western Australia.
Now, 290 “positive events”—confirmed infections of one or more birds—have been recorded across the country, with cases recorded in all six states. South Australia is worst affected, with 177 events, followed by Victoria, with 84. These numbers are almost certainly undercounts, as the widespread extent of confirmed bird flu cases indicate that a mass wave of infections is underway.
Three mass mortality events, involving a total of more than 1,000 greater crested terns, were detected in South Australia on Wednesday, with H5N1 the presumed cause, pending further testing. The dead birds were found on Troubridge Island, off Yorke Peninsula, and on North Page and South Page, small islands near Kangaroo Island. A little penguin from Kangaroo Island is also thought to have died from the virus.
The strain of H5N1 responsible for the outbreak, clade 2.3.4.4b, is classified as a “high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI)” due to its lethality to birds and other wildlife. Spread by migratory birds, it killed an estimated 500 million birds worldwide between 2021–2024, including millions of farm poultry that were culled to prevent disease transmission in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Australia was the last continent to report the virus, but its spread has been anticipated for years.
H5N1 is not restricted to birds alone. It has demonstrated the ability to infect an estimated 600 species of animals, including dairy cows, pigs, and other domesticated and farm animals. This puts humans at risk of infection by contact with contaminated farm animals, and 100 people, mainly agricultural workers, were infected during the 2021–2024 outbreak, with 10 deaths.
Australia’s unique and geographically isolated wildlife have limited immunity to new diseases and are particularly at risk from H5N1. National assessments from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) and conservation scientists warn that the virus could drive already fragile species to extinction.
This includes the already endangered orange-bellied parrot and swift parrot, and the Australian fairy tern, brolga crane, black swan, and Australian pelican, which are exceptionally vulnerable to rapid flock-wide transmission.
The endangered Australian sea lion also faces acute threats as do scavengers, such as the Tasmanian devil, from feeding on infected carcasses.
*****
The most concerning possibility is that a mass outbreak near population centers will give the virus opportunities to evolve mechanisms to better to infect humans. This process, known as “zoonotic spillover,” is the method by which devastating diseases like COVID-19 and Ebola were able to spread from animal to human hosts, and eventually develop human-to-human transmission.
Although the true severity in humans from clade 2.3.4.4b is yet to be clarified, previous strains of bird flu have had mortality rates of nearly 50 percent. Even a fraction of this death rate would have disastrous consequences.
*****
H5N1 is often indistinguishable from other influenzas in its early stages, with symptoms often resembling the common cold, making rigorous and readily accessible testing a necessity to identify early cases in humans. No initiative to provide this testing equipment and training to doctors and other health workers has been announced.
Moreover, H5N1 emerges in Australia at a time when public hospital services, which would bear the brunt of a new mass disease event, are under immense strain, plagued with shortages of staff, available hospital beds and resources, including personal protective equipment. This is the result of decades of funding and staffing cuts, imposed by successive state and federal governments, Labor and Liberal-National, with the assistance of the trade unions.
The response of the ruling class to COVID-19 established a grim precedent. In Australia, some 29,000 people died as governments “let it rip,” rejecting a coordinated, scientific response to infectious disease in favor of big business profits and state austerity. This poses the need for a political struggle by the working class, based on a socialist perspective for the prioritization of basic social needs, including for high-quality public hospitals and infectious disease control infrastructure, not the profit demands of the financial and corporate elite.
9. Ukrainian parliament approves new SBU-linked defense minister
In a repudiation of widespread protests that followed the dismissal of former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian parliament unanimously approved Yevhen Khmara to replace the former Western-backed Fedorov as defense minister on Wednesday.
The dismissal of Fedorov, who is widely associated with a dramatic escalation of Ukrainian-NATO drone attacks on Russia, had provoked protests from aggressively pro-war layers, drawing tens of thousands of people. At the protests in Kiev in support of Fedorov, one of many reactionary placards read, “Fedorov = more Russian deaths, Syrsky [the former Army chief] = more Ukrainian deaths.” Fedorov’s removal had also been criticized by leading Ukrainian politicians and EU officials who, according to The Guardian, had been “startled” by the move.
Shortly after dismissing Fedorov, Zelensky appointed Khmara, then head of the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) as acting defense minister. Only in January 2026, Khmara had been appointed acting director of the SBU, the agency principally in charge of overseeing a domestic campaign of terror against opponents of the war and the Zelensky regime.
Infamous for its infestation with neo-Nazis, the SBU initiated and oversaw the persecution of Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, who was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison for his internationalist opposition to the war and exposure of Ukrainian fascism. Khmara’s appointment as head of the SBU was endorsed by white supremacist Andriy Biletsky, founder and former commander of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and current commander of Ukraine’s fascist 3rd Assault Brigade.
Just prior to the parliamentary vote on his appointment as defense minister, Khmara participated in the reinterment ceremony of Yevhen Konovalets, founder of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Zelensky and Khmara were photographed happily shaking hands at the fascist celebration, demonstrating Khmara’s and the entire Ukrainian state’s full commitment to both the escalation of the war and the promotion of fascist forces.
Khmara’s appointment is aimed at further consolidating the role of the SBU in Ukraine amidst ever wider opposition to the war and the brutal campaign to forcibly mobilize men for the slaughter. In recent weeks, public discontent over the war has significantly escalated. On an almost daily basis, videos showing people being kidnapped off the streets, people attacking recruitment officers and others pleading with them to spare their spouses are going viral in Ukraine and internationally.
*****
A recent report by the German weekly Die Zeit admitted that hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers, who are sent to Germany for military training, seize upon the earliest opportunity to flee the army. And even the pro-war Nation magazine recently ran a lengthy story on the growing number of draft dodgers who chose to effectively go underground to avoid being sent to the front and killed. Last week, the famous Ukrainian pop star Olya Polyakova, who was reportedly friends with Zelensky, described the country as a “concentration camp” in a widely publicized interview. A blogger who criticized the violent mobilization drive, Marian Chava, was sentenced recently to five and a half years in prison for “endangering national security.”
Under these conditions, the appointment of Khmara is both a threat and a provocation against a population that, increasingly, demonstrates its refusal to be used as cannon fodder in the war against Russia.
*****
For workers and youth in Ukraine and beyond, the path forward lies not in siding with one faction of the oligarchy or another. Rather, the turn must be toward the political program for which socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk was imprisoned and sentenced to 15 years: the mobilization and unification of the working class in Russia, Ukraine and internationally, to put an end to this war and the capitalist system as a whole.
10. United States: ABC/Disney goes to court to stop FCC early review of broadcast licenses
ABC and its parent company Disney filed a suit Tuesday, August 18 in a US District Court asking for a temporary restraining order to halt the Federal Communications Commission’s unprecedented early review of its television licenses. The FCC action, effectively ordered by President Donald Trump and implemented by his fascistic operative FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, is a frontal attack on the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and the press.
The FCC ordered the early review in April of all eight licenses owned by ABC years before they were set to expire. Licenses are issued for eight-year terms.
ABC’s lawsuit notes that the license review was announced days after ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel satirized the White House Correspondents Association dinner in an April 23 skit. The comic said First Lady Melania Trump was “glowing like an expectant widow.”
A gunman attempted to enter the dinner at the Washington Hilton before he was stopped by Secret Service agents. Trump linked the incident to Kimmel’s sketch and called for his firing.
Trump has repeatedly attacked news and talk show broadcasts by ABC, CBS and NBC for their allegedly unfavorable coverage of his administration and threatened to pull their licenses and force them off the air. He recently called for ABC’s TV licenses to be revoked after the network did not carry his July 16 prime time Oval Office speech on election fraud. Carr said the network’s decision would be taken under consideration in the license review process.
*****
Besides investigating ABC, Carr has opened separate investigations into CBS News and NBC News.
The FCC fraudulently claims that its early review of ABC’s licenses has nothing to do with the content of the network’s broadcasts, but rather what the FCC calls discrimination linked to ABC’s diversity and inclusion standards. On Tuesday, responding to the ABC lawsuit, an FCC spokesperson said: “All broadcasters have a legal obligation to operate in the public interest—even Disney. The FCC has been examining claims that Disney engaged in illegal DEI discrimination for over a year.”
*****
ABC and the other broadcast networks, owned by billionaire oligarchs, have by no means waged a consistent fight against the Trumpian version of what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung—the official subordination of the media and academia to Nazi ideology. Besides initially acceding to the demand to take the Jimmy Kimmel program off the air, ABC/Disney in December 2024 agreed to pay Trump $15 million to settle a lawsuit over statements ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos made about E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault civil suit, which the president lost in court.
CBS similarly capitulated to Trump when it paid $16 million to settle his complaint over a “60 Minutes” interview with his 2024 opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris. Parent company Paramount agreed to the settlement in order to clear the regulatory path for its merger with Skydance Media.
A major motivation behind ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC is the prospect of a protracted legal battle over licensing that will place a cloud of uncertainty over the network’s operations, encouraging investors to abandon the company.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Mike Proulx, vice president and research director for the advisory firm Forrester, who said, “Media companies must weigh the political and regulatory uncertainty attached to licensed broadcast properties and whether that, along with continued losses in viewers and ad revenue, is worth it.”
A federal judge has set a hearing for the week October 5, 2026, for ABC’s temporary restraining order request.
11. How Chile’s “progressive” government and union bureaucracy covered up the El Teniente disaster
In May 2026 Sernageomin, Chile’s mining regulator established that the six contract workers killed at the El Teniente mine on 31 July 2025 were not victims of an unforeseeable natural event. They were killed by a chain of command that, over a period of years, systematically ignored seismic warnings, concealed unsafe mining conditions from the regulator, falsified safety reports and kept workers in areas known to be dangerously unstable.
This happened through the mechanisms of a state-owned corporation operating under the relentless pressure of the world capitalist market. It also happened on the watch of Gabriel Boric’s “progressive” government, with Communist Party member Jeannette Jara serving as Minister of Labor, and with the active complicity of the copper miners union apparatus.
The chain of events that led to the deaths of Paulo Marín Tapia (48), Gonzalo Núñez Caroca (33), Alex Araya Acevedo (29), Carlos Arancibia Valenzuela (34), Jean Miranda Ibaceta (31) and Moisés Pavez Armijo (33) can be traced with precision.
*****
Every element of this catastrophe unfolded under the government of Gabriel Boric and his “Approve Dignity” coalition, which included the Broad Front, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and other forces of the Chilean “left.” Boric had been elected in 2021 on a wave of social opposition following the 2019 anti-capitalist social uprising, promising to “bury neoliberalism.” He appointed Máximo Pacheco Matte as chairman of Codelco’s board and Jeannette Jara of the Communist Party as Minister of Labor.
Jara’s tenure as Labor Minister was not a departure from the anti-working class policies that characterized every past government but continued and deepened its impact. Her signature “reform” was a pension law that, in the words of José Piñera, the architect of Pinochet’s privatized pension system, expanded the private savings model by 60 percent and consolidated its validity “indefinitely.” The subcontracting regime that made the El Teniente disaster possible, under which 78 percent of Codelco’s workforce is employed through contractor firms with inferior wages, no job security and no effective safety representation, was administered by Jara’s ministry.
When the disaster occurred, Boric rushed to Rancagua to lead the rescue operation, promising that “all responsibility must be assigned” and cynically adding that “There must be justice… when justice is delayed and not timely, it is not justice.” The families of the six are still waiting.
*****
No analysis of the Codelco disaster is complete without an examination of the role played by the union apparatus. The Federation of Copper Workers (FTC), the Confederation of Copper Workers (CTC), and the Unified Workers’ Central (CUT) are not representatives of the working class in any sense of the word, but rather, are instruments through which the Stalinist Communist Party, the nationalist Socialist Party and the pseudo left Broad Front exercise control over the working class on behalf of the capitalist state.
The FTC, which represents Codelco’s direct employees across 26 unions, has been dominated for decades by leaders formed in or aligned with the Chilean “left.” Its current president, Héctor Roco, is an unregistered socialist who has spent 19 years in the federation’s leadership. His predecessor, Raimundo Espinoza, also socialist, held the presidency from 1993 to 2018, a quarter-century during which the subcontracting regime was deepened, direct employment was cut and the conditions that led to the El Teniente disaster were consolidated. Amador Pantoja, president of the Sewell and El Teniente unified union and a former FTC president, was a Communist Party member for three decades. The FTC’s national board includes leaders who publicly endorsed the fascistic Pinochetista and anti-working class Kast in the 2021 presidential election, which is itself such an indictment of the “left.”
The FTC’s response to the El Teniente disaster was instructive. On 6 August 2025, six days after the collapse, the federation issued a public statement. It expressed condolences. It called for “a thorough review of the company’s safety model.” It demanded that “Occupational Safety and Health be elevated to the level of a Vice Presidency.” It declared “a state of alert.” What it did not do was call a strike. What it did not do was demand the arrest of the executives responsible. What it did not do was mobilize its 12,000 members to shut down production until safety was guaranteed. Instead, the FTC participated in the “Strategic Pact” with Codelco management, a mechanism of class collaboration that the federation’s own general secretary, Aldo Binimelliz, admitted had “yielded zero results.”
The federation’s posturing throughout the subsequent crisis has been consistent: it appeals to the state to defend Codelco as a state-owned enterprise while refusing to wage any struggle against the conditions inside it. When the Republican Party proposed privatizing the mining giant, the FTC responded with its usual issuing of statements, holding press conferences, threatening to “take to the streets.” On the question of the safety of workers, the wages of contractors, or the prosecution of criminal executives, the federation falls silent. The reason is not difficult to discern. The FTC represents 15,694 direct employees. Both the direct workforce and contract workers are unified in production and share a common class enemy. However, the FTC has exacerbated the system brought in by the Pinochet regime to drive a wedge through the most powerful section of the Chilean working class and keep them divided.
The CTC, which nominally represents the 61,000 contract workers, is even more directly an instrument of the Communist Party. Its long-time president, Christian Cuevas, was a PC member who served as labor attaché in Spain before returning to Chile to lead the confederation. The current president, Ana Lamas, operates within the same political framework. The CTC’s principal achievement, known as the Acuerdo Marco (Framework Agreement), is presented as a victory for contract workers.
In reality, the Framework Agreement is a mechanism for regulating and containing the struggles of the most exploited section of the mining workforce. The agreement does not set a base salary. It establishes benefit floors and CPI adjustments while leaving the fundamental wage relation and the subcontracting system itself intact. When the CTC calls mobilizations, as it did in January and March 2026 over the renewal of the Framework Agreement, it does so within carefully controlled parameters: brief blockades at mine entrances, a few hours of disruption, then back to the negotiating table. The objective is not to end subcontracting but to secure marginal improvements that reinforce the legitimacy of the subcontracting regime and justify their own existence.
The CUT, Chile’s national trade union center, is headed by figures from the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. After the El Teniente disaster, CUT president José Manuel Díaz (PS) met with Boric not to demand justice but to urge the government to “act quickly because there are families waiting,” meaning families waiting for the mine to reopen so that workers would not be laid off. This is the language not of class struggle but of industrial policing.
*****
The social relations of copper production in Chile are defined by a chasm between those who extract the wealth and those who appropriate it, a chasm that runs not only between workers and owners but within the workforce itself.
At the summit sit the mining dynasties. In the single year to January 2026, the fortune of Iris Fontbona, matriarch of the Luksic family which controls Antofagasta Plc, rose by 91 percent to US$55.6 billion. The Luksic family’s Antofagasta Minerals pays its CEO, Iván Arriagada, approximately US$3–4 million annually; BHP’s global CEO, Mike Henry, received US$8.5 million in total compensation for the year to June 2025.
At Codelco, the CEO, Rubén Alvarado until his departure in July 2026, received a gross annual salary of approximately CLP 525 million (roughly US$553,000). The top vice presidents and division general managers earned between CLP 500 million and CLP 700 million (US$530,000–$740,000). Board members received annual fees of CLP 70–88 million (US$74,000–$93,000) for part-time governance roles.
According to Codelco’s own reporting 15,694 direct employees earned an average gross monthly salary of approximately CLP 5.99 million (US$6,300) in 2025–26 while at BHP’s Escondida, the claim is that 2,376 workers of Sindicato N°1 earn an average of CLP 5.5–6.5 million monthly.
These averages conceal the real internal differentiation. At the upper end of the direct employee category sit the professionals and middle managers—mining engineers, geologists, production planners and area heads earning CLP 8 to 14 million gross monthly.
In the middle band are the specialized technicians and tradespeople, electricians, electromechanical workers, process controllers, who earn between CLP 2.3 million and CLP 3.9 million gross monthly, while experienced tradespeople and shift supervisors can reach CLP 4–6 million.
At the base of the entry-level direct employees at Codelco are operators, service workers, who earn approximately CLP 1.8–2.2 million gross monthly, with additional bonuses for night shifts, rotation, zone and production that can lift effective take-home pay above that floor.
Then there are the contractor workers. Codelco’s own figures show 61,000 contractor workers, a ratio of nearly 4:1. These workers earn between CLP 1.1 million and CLP 1.7 million monthly gross (US$1,160–$1,790). At the private transnationals, like Luksic’s Antofagasta Minerals, where contractors account for close to 80 percent of the workforce, the “ethical wage” floor was CLP 630,000 gross monthly in 2024, a figure so low that, as one contractor noted, it barely covers rent in Calama or Antofagasta.
The six men who died at El Teniente on 31 July 2025 were all contract workers. They were the disposable tier of the workforce, the ones sent into the most dangerous sectors, the ones whose deaths would not trigger bonuses for direct employees, the ones whose unions do not shut down production for. This is the class structure of the Chilean copper industry and society more broadly.
*****
The El Teniente disaster was caused by the relentless pressure to cut costs, outsource labor and maximize production that is inherent to the capitalist mode of production, a pressure that operates whether the owner is a state corporation or a private shareholder. The subcontracting regime that put six contract workers in harm’s way is the same regime that prevails at BHP’s Escondida, at Anglo American’s Los Bronces, at Antofagasta Minerals’ Los Pelambres, at every other mine in Chile and around the world. The falsification of safety reports and the inflation of production figures are not pathologies unique to Codelco; they are the logical expression of a system in which the drive for profit overrides every other consideration, including human life.
Family, friends and coworkers will gather Saturday at the Kaul Funeral Home in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, to memorialize James Brasher, the 57-year-old Stellantis worker killed on the job August 1 at the company’s Mopar Parts Distribution Center in Center Line.
Brasher, a member of United Auto Workers Local 1248 with more than 30 years seniority, was discarding decommissioned office furniture and equipment through a roll-up door on the second floor of the building when he fell 25 feet into a trash dumpster below. Center Line Public Safety Director Paul Myszenski said it appeared Brasher was killed instantly from head injuries.
Neither the company, the UAW nor the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) have released any further information of the workplace fatality.
James leaves behind a wife, Karyn, a daughter, Sabrina, his mother, Tina-Marie and his brother, Erik, according to an obituary on the funeral home’s website. It also noted that “Jim devoted 33 years of his life to his job at Stellantis, formerly Chrysler/FCA, where he worked until the day of his passing. He was a member of UAW Local 1248 and was an incredibly hard worker who was well-respected by the coworkers and friends he came to know over more than three decades. Many of those relationships grew far beyond the workplace into lasting friendships.”
A GoFundMe page organized by a family friend describes Brasher as “the kind of person who made this world better simply by being in it. If someone needed help, he was there. He would give you the shirt off his back without a second thought.” The fundraiser was established to support Brasher’s wife Karyn, who the site notes is facing “an incredibly serious medical battle” and “a long and difficult road ahead that will require extensive treatment, recovery, and ongoing care.” Donations are being raised for funeral expenses, lost income, medical bills, gaps in insurance coverage: the realities that confront the families of the more than 5,000 workers killed on the job in the United States every year.
Brasher was the third Stellantis worker and fourth Detroit Three autoworker killed since the UAW bureaucracy, headed by President Shawn Fain and Vice President Richard Boyer, rammed through the sellout 2023 contract that they hailed as “historic.”
The tragedy is the direct outcome of the deal, which sanctioned the closure of 19 US facilities, including half of all Stellantis parts distribution centers. The Center Line building—once the national headquarters of Mopar—was sold in January 2025 and is being leased back until the opening of a $388 million automated Detroit Mega Hub in 2027. The new Amazon-style facility near the Detroit Metropolitan Airport will eliminate hundreds of jobs through automation. Brasher was dumping discarded furniture and equipment from one of the 10 PDC facilities already condemned to close. In other words, he was cleaning out the remains of a parts depot the UAW had signed away.
*****
On August 21, 2024—two years ago to the day before Saturday’s memorial service—Antonio Gaston, a 53-year-old father of four, was crushed to death at the Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex when he was caught under a vehicle moving on the assembly line. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Stellantis $16,000 for “serious violations,” including the failure to ensure that pinch points on the chassis delivery conveyor were properly guarded. Stellantis challenged the fine and it was reduced to $11,000.
On April 7, 2025, Ronald Adams Sr., a 63-year-old machine repairman known to his coworkers as “the protector of the plant,” was crushed to death at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex when an overhead gantry crane suddenly activated during maintenance. Sixteen months later, neither the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA), nor Stellantis, nor the UAW has released a single finding. In more than a year since her husband’s death, Adams’s widow, Shamenia Stewart-Adams, has received not one letter, not one call, not one explanation.
*****
At the July 30 UAW presidential candidate debate, Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist running against Fain, alone raised the toll of dead workers. “Every year in this country, more than 5,000 workers die on the job because safety is subordinated to profit,” Lehman said. “In our plants, Antonio Gaston, Ronald Adams Sr., Gregory Knopf were crushed to death under the 2023 contract that this leadership called ‘historic.’” Two days later, James Brasher was dead.
In a statement following Brasher’s death, Lehman declared that workers must “take health and safety into our own hands” by forming rank-and-file committees with the power to shut down production until conditions are safe.
Brasher’s family and co-workers deserve the truth. That will not come from Stellantis, from MIOSHA, or from a UAW bureaucracy that has made itself the personnel department of the auto companies. It will come only when rank-and-file workers, organized in committees under their own democratic control, take the fight for safety into their own hands—and wage a political struggle against the capitalist system that sacrifices human life to corporate profit every single day.
13. After canceling strike vote, union officials ram through Michigan Medicine nurses’ contract
Nurses at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor, Michigan were rushed into a ratification vote on a new three-year contract amid a UMPNC and corporate media campaign hailing the “historic gains” of the agreement and concealing the provisions that protect the interests of hospital management.
14. Second deadliest Ebola outbreak on record spreads across the eastern Congo
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), in an August 17 statement, warned that the outbreak risks becoming the deadliest ever recorded globally. The agency reported that the epidemic grew from eight confirmed cases in three health zones of a single province on May 15 to more than 5,000 cases across six provinces in three months, that it is taking approximately one life every 30 minutes, and that each day of avoidable delay costs around 50 lives.
*****
The permanent machinery to detect and suppress Ebola and other infectious diseases has been systematically dismantled over the past 18 months by the fascistic Trump administration. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was abolished in 2025, and Washington has withdrawn from the WHO. On September 30, support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), whose laboratories and epidemiologists diagnose Ebola across the continent, converts to a fee schedule, and any government receiving more than $125 million in US aid, the DRC and Uganda among them, must purchase a minimum package.
This is the DRC’s 17th Ebola outbreak. The 16th was declared over on December 1, 2025, five and a half months before this one began, and was held to 53 confirmed cases because a licensed vaccine existed for the Zaire strain and doses were already in the country. Nothing comparable existed for Bundibugyo, 19 years after the species was identified, because there was no market in developing it. The gold, cobalt and coltan of the eastern Congo find buyers on every continent; the disease that circulates among the workers who dig them found none.
The intervals between these epidemics are shortening, and each one meets a surveillance system with less capacity than the last. What was once a rare event in a few villages is becoming a permanent danger across the eastern Congo and the region beyond it. The means to change that are not missing. They are being withheld, priced out and dismantled by governments that have weighed their cost against Congolese lives and made their choice. This is social murder, and it is the lesson the ruling elites took from COVID-19, and took quickly: that mass death, when it falls on the poor and the distant, carries no political price.
That calculation must be answered. The resources to end this epidemic exist in abundance, and prying them out of the hands of the governments and corporations rationing them requires a struggle against the profit system itself. The only social force capable of carrying that out is the international working class, which faces the same enemy in Ituri, in Kinshasa, in Europe and in the United States.
15. Portland, Maine, nurse released from ICE detention
Debora Kapisha, a medical-surgical nurse at Maine Medical Center in Portland, has been released after spending a week in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Kapisha, an asylum seeker originally from Zambia, was kidnapped by ICE agents on July 30 while passing through a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint at Portland International Jetport. Her attorney, Kerry Doyle, told the Portland Press Herald that an agent claimed Kapisha’s luggage needed to be inspected in another room. ICE agents were waiting inside to seize her in what Doyle described as an apparently targeted operation.
Kapisha had a pending asylum application and valid authorization to work in the United States. MaineHealth, the owner of Maine Medical Center, reportedly understood that her employment authorization was valid until 2030.
ICE nevertheless accused Kapisha of overstaying a visa that expired on November 13, 2024. “Any pending application does not confer legal status,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson declared.
The statement expresses the deliberately coercive character of the asylum system. A pending application does not by itself provide lawful immigration status, even when an asylum seeker has government authorization to work while the claim is reviewed. The government can allow a worker to staff a hospital for years while simultaneously asserting the power to arrest her, imprison her and place her in deportation proceedings before deciding whether she is entitled to asylum.
Kapisha was detained in Massachusetts and faced transfer to Louisiana, far from her family, attorney, coworkers and support network. Such transfers are a standard ICE tactic. Moving detainees hundreds or thousands of miles makes it more difficult to obtain counsel, communicate with relatives and challenge detention.
Kapisha filed a challenge in federal court. A judge initially barred ICE from transferring her outside New England before a scheduled hearing. She was released on August 6 as her immigration case continued.
Her release followed an outpouring of support from nurses and the surrounding community. The Maine State Nurses Association, an affiliate of National Nurses United (NNU), said more than 200 nurses, community supporters and elected officials rallied outside Maine Medical Center on August 5 to demand her freedom and block the threatened transfer.
*****
After her release, Kapisha issued a brief statement through her coworkers: “Thank you for all your love and support. I am so thankful to be home and can’t wait to return to my co-workers and patients.”
NNU called Kapisha’s release a demonstration of the power of organized nurses. “Nurses in Maine found out one of their own was locked up and sprung into action to get her out,” the union said. It called for the release of everyone in ICE detention and the abolition of what it described as a “fascist agency of secret police.”
Kapisha’s kidnapping was part of an expanding immigration dragnet at US airports. Maine immigrant advocates reported that at least five people were detained at the Portland jetport during a two-week period.
*****
Kapisha is seeking asylum from Zambia, a copper-rich southern African country of approximately 20 million people where enormous mineral wealth exists alongside mass poverty.
Zambia, which has poverty rates among the highest in the world, is in debt distress. With a gross domestic product of roughly $30 billion, it has at least $12 billion in outstanding external debt—and unofficial estimates place the real figure at double that amount, including off-balance-sheet Chinese loans for infrastructure deals. The government spends nearly half of its tax revenues on debt servicing, leaving virtually nothing for social spending after paying public sector wages.
Zambia defaulted on its Eurobonds in November 2020 and has also accumulated arrears with other creditors. After four and a half years of negotiations, Zambia has yet to reach a deal with some private creditors, including UK-based Standard Chartered.
The country’s food and energy costs are high, its poverty and inequality substantial. Unemployment—particularly among young people—is a major concern. A just-concluded presidential election, which kept the ruling oligarchy in power, was characterized by procedural irregularities and violence against the opposition figures, including the arrest of 11 oppositionists.
Immigrant workers such as Kapisha form a vital layer of the US health care workforce. They are heavily represented among nurses, nursing assistants, home health aides, custodial workers and food service employees. Hospitals and nursing homes depend on their labor while the immigration system keeps them under the constant threat of detention and deportation.
As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reported in April 2026 on ICE activity at Michigan healthcare facilities, an estimated 29 percent of the state’s custodial and maintenance workers and 9 percent of its hospital workers overall are immigrants. These workers do not fill marginal positions—they keep hospitals functioning by cleaning operating rooms, transporting patients, preparing meals and providing direct patient care as nurses, nursing assistants and home health aides.
*****
The detention and possible deportation of Kapisha, a hardworking and well-respected nurse employed at a major hospital in a profession that is in desperate need of skilled workers, serves to highlight both the absurdity and the criminality of the frankly xenophobic campaign against immigrants by all segments of the ruling oligarchy in the US. It yet again exposes the bald-faced lie that the anti-immigrant campaign solely targets the “worst of the worst.”
The enthusiastic support demonstrated by Kapisha’s coworkers at Maine Medical Center is a clear illustration of class solidarity. While her own status has not yet been determined, the savage assault on the immigrant working class, and ultimately the entire working class, is made clear.
It will take a lot more than a few demonstrations to counter the attack that is rapidly expanding. As recent nurse strikes in New York, California, Michigan and elsewhere demonstrate, the established unions will not undertake more than token efforts to defend these vital healthcare workers from exploitation. Only the establishment of independent rank-and-file committees, run by workers themselves, can mount the necessary revolt against a capitalist system headed toward disaster.
16. Trump begins deporting Venezuelans, Colombians, Cubans and other migrants to Liberia
A US deportation flight carrying 20 people landed shortly before 1 p.m. local time Thursday at Roberts International Airport outside Monrovia, Liberia. The reported nationalities of those aboard included Venezuelans, Cubans and Colombians, according to Reuters.
Five men refused to leave the plane. The New York Times reported that American federal agents forced them off, and that all five were eventually returned to the aircraft. A video verified by the Times shows deportees sitting on the tarmac beside the plane, surrounded by roughly 20 agents. The Liberian government has not clarified their status.
This is the first flight under an agreement permitting Washington to transfer up to 1,200 people to Liberia over the next year. Liberia is the 26th country to receive them. Some 23,000 people have already been sent abroad under at least 35 bilateral arrangements, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.
The three nationalities named in Thursday’s flight are not incidental. Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba today face three of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in the Western Hemisphere that have been greatly worsened by the recolonization drive by US imperialism.
*****
Liberia is not a random destination. It was founded in 1822 by freed American slaves and became a de facto US colony within decades—rich in minerals and heavily exploited by American capital after the Second World War and throughout the Cold War. When Cold War support ended, the country collapsed into civil war; the 1989–2003 conflicts alone killed some 300,000 people.
Its health system never recovered from the 2014–15 Ebola epidemic, and the US State Department currently maintains a Level 2 travel advisory for Liberia, citing crime, civil unrest and health infrastructure concerns.
The arrangement is completely venal. Following Liberia’s October 2025 agreement to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who continues to fight his deportation in the US, Washington extended Liberian business and tourism visas from 12 to 36 months and signed a $124 million health sector memorandum. Reuters reports $5 million allocated for Liberian “immigration management.”
*****
Third-country deportation flights are the end point of a machinery being built across the United States. Politico reports that in the past year, judges have ruled against ICE’s detention tactics more than 16,000 times, roughly two-thirds of those cases stemming from a single two-page memo reinterpreting a 1996 statute to permit the detention of people who had lived in the country for years.
Third-country deportation exists precisely to circumvent the courts. When a judge rules a person cannot be returned home because they face persecution or torture, they are stationed 7,000 kilometers away instead, where no US court has jurisdiction and no one is watching.
The precedent was set much earlier. Beginning February 4, 2025, the administration flew Venezuelan detainees to Guantánamo Bay—the site built expressly to hold prisoners where US constitutional protections were said not to apply. In March 2025, 238 Venezuelans were flown to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, 137 of them under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, in open defiance of a federal court order to turn the planes around. They were imprisoned without charge, trial or sentence on allegations of Tren de Aragua membership that rested in many cases on nothing more than tattoos. Held incommunicado for four months, they were released only in a July 2025 prisoner exchange.
Asked in April 2025 about sending US citizens to the same prison, Trump told El Salvador’s Bukele that “homegrowns are next,” adding that he would need “five more places.” In other words, what is being tested on migrants—detention without charges, imprisonment abroad, defiance of the courts—is being prepared for citizens and political opponents.
*****
Whether a deportee is flown to Caracas, Bogotá, Havana or Monrovia, the underlying principle is the same and it is indefensible: workers are being forcibly removed from places where they had built lives and sent to places where their safety cannot be guaranteed. This reality is summed up by the 20 agents surrounding five men who refused to get off the plane, on a tarmac in a country none of them had chosen or to which they had the slightest connection.
The right of workers to live and work where they choose, without fear of persecution or deportation, is not a concession to be granted by any government. It requires the independent political mobilization of the international working class on a socialist program that abolishes the outmoded capitalist nation-state system.
17. The questions left hanging by Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
Over 100 million people have watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in cinemas around the world. The film has generated an enormous amount of discussion. So too has the highly critical commentary of Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer’s text was cited by Nolan as an inspiration.
Such debate is all to the good, and a sign of a growing and healthy concern in society for the challenging ideas addressed in the original epic, the reams of scholarship since, and the many artistic works it has inspired. This article explores the attractions and limitations of Nolan’s film in part through a dialogue with Wilson’s critique.
There is a one-sidedness to these criticisms that leaves it hard to understand why The Odyssey has produced such an enormous popular response: not only ticket sales, but purchases and loans of the book itself, in different formats. The more Wilson moves from relationships within the text to its overall relation to today, the less convincing her article becomes.
However, she is right that “the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas”. This is the heart of the phenomenon around The Odyssey: its viewership and the many, varied responses. The film is a flawed but important attempt to address questions which are decisive today, and increasingly recognized as such.
*****
Whatever its artistic success, it is to Nolan’s credit that he has attempted to respond to this moment in history with a popular recreation of a well-suited classical masterpiece. The scale of the response is fueled by years and decades in which audiences have been largely deprived of serious political and artistic questions about contemporary society, let alone answers.
*****
If the ending fails to resonate with social life today, however, elements of the story of human struggle that brought us to it plainly have. Contemporary struggles—against war at home and abroad, the climate crisis and much besides—will bring the subjects only hinted at in Nolan’s film fully into view in the work of a new generation of artists.
18. Voices from the UK in support of international campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk
“A young man writes what he believes. He says war is wrong. He says working people on both sides should stand together. For that—15 years in prison.”
19. London bus drivers speak after Unite union cancels heatwave strike
Unite said there will be a ballot before the next strike scheduled for the 25th, although several bus drivers told the World Socialist Web Site they had received no details of the deal.
20. Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan forge a military alliance amid Iran war
Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed the “Mecca Joint Defence Agreement” at the Al-Safa Palace in Mecca on August 7.
Signed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the Mecca Agreement takes NATO’s Article 5 as its model. It declares that an armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against all three, and grounds this in Article 51 of the UN Charter, which sets out the right of self-defense.
The agreement extends to Türkiye the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed by Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan at the Al-Yamamah Palace in Riyadh on September 17, 2025. Alongside the collective defense clause, it provides for intelligence sharing, joint exercises, training, cooperation in defense technology and long-term strategic coordination. Strategic political and military mechanisms composed of the foreign and defense ministers are being established.
According to figures compiled by Al Jazeera, the three militaries taken together amount to some 1.4 million active personnel, 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks and more than 340 naval vessels. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stated that the agreement would not remain confined to these countries and that Egypt could also join the bloc.
With this agreement, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is in effect extended as an umbrella over its two Middle Eastern allies. Following the Saudi-Pakistani agreement of 2025, Pakistani officials had intimated that the country’s nuclear capability fell within the scope of the alliance.
The agreement was signed under conditions in which the war of aggression launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28 is continuing and has spread across the region, including to Iraq and Yemen. Saudi Arabia is among the countries that Iran has struck in retaliation, exercising its right of self-defense by hitting US bases. Türkiye and Pakistan share land borders with Iran, while Saudi Arabia is its maritime neighbor.
The bourgeois press presented the pact largely as a defensive reflex in the face of the chaos created by the Iran war. Reuters wrote that the agreement brought together “Sunni Muslim US allies alarmed at a regional conflagration” that has rained missile fire onto Gulf oil exporters. The Associated Press characterized it as a consolidation of cooperation between three regional powers at a time of mounting security concerns. The Financial Times claimed that the three countries were deepening security cooperation to cope with wars and instability, while the Wall Street Journal observed that the agreement had been signed at a moment when new uncertainties had emerged over the US security umbrella.
This agreement, however, is not the product of any move by Ankara, Riyadh and Islamabad to free themselves from the Washington axis, nor of a search for an alternative to it. On the contrary, it is an expression of the efforts of these states—pursuing the reactionary interests of their own ruling classes under conditions of escalating war and intensifying regional rivalry—to align themselves with US-led imperialist calculations and to prepare for still greater wars.
*****
All three governments that signed the Mecca Agreement are mired in a deep social and political crisis. In Türkiye, rising military expenditure is financed through falling wages, higher taxes, the liquidation of public services and social cuts, while the home front is fortified by judicial operations that progressively abolish democratic rights and by the mass detention of opponents of NATO and of workers engaged in struggle.
In Pakistan, a government under the tutelage of the military is implementing the austerity program dictated by the IMF while suppressing the opposition. In Saudi Arabia, the regime rests upon the labor of more than 10 million migrant workers who are denied the right to organize. Preparation for war abroad and class war at home are two sides of the same process.
Bringing together three regional powers acting in concert with US imperialism, the Mecca Agreement is a product of the deepening of global war. This pact, which extends the umbrella of a nuclear-armed state over two allies, offers the working classes of the signatory countries no protection whatsoever. It binds them to a chain of conflicts stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to South Asia, and drives them into war.
Stopping the war will not come from these governments or from their blocs, but from the working class—the only social force capable of confronting imperialism and its regional allies. Across the Middle East, South Asia and the world, workers must be united on an international scale, based on a socialist program, against the war preparations of their own ruling classes. The building of the International Committee of the Fourth International and of its sections is the central task of this struggle.
21. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
Sri Lanka:
22. Global outpouring of support for imprisoned Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk
More than 1,000 people in 58 countries and territories have signed the petition for Bogdan Syrotiuk’s release since August 10, when a Ukrainian court imposed a 15-year prison term on the 27-year-old for seeking to unite the workers of Russia and Ukraine against the war.
23. 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.
