Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: August 31-September 6
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Sri Lanka Freedom Party founded
100 years ago:
British gunboats open fire on Chinese city
US forces bombed Iranian territory early Sunday for the first time in a month, striking two rocket launchers on Iran’s Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Sunday the bombing left soldiers and civilians dead and injured, and its spokesman, Hossein Mohebi, called it a “strategic and fatal mistake” and vowed retaliation.
The war the United States and Israel launched against Iran on February 28, with opening strikes that assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, passed its six-month mark Friday. US President Donald Trump projected in March it would take “four to five weeks.”
Iran’s government is still standing, and most ships cannot traverse the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil was transported before the war. Iran’s Health Ministry last published the human toll on June 10: at least 3,468 dead and more than 26,500 wounded. It has issued nothing since.
The Trump administration went to war for control of that chokepoint and through it a grip on the fuel supply of China, buyer of more than 80 percent of Iran’s oil exports. During the month-long pause that Sunday’s strike ended, the administration pressed its naval blockade of Iran’s ports and widened the economic war whose chief target is Beijing.
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Defense Department records list 18 American troops dead and 758 wounded since February 28, the Intercept reported Tuesday; a fuller count the outlet published August 4 put the dead and wounded above 900.
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The campaign is a siege of a country of 90 million people: a naval blockade backed by the threat of economic ruin against any bank, company or government that trades with Tehran. Its logic leads to Beijing. To seal off Iran’s remaining trade, much of which runs to China, Washington would have to wage financial war on a nuclear-armed power.
The criticism Democrats do make of Trump comes largely from the right, faulting him for failing to end the war on Washington’s terms.
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The money for the ongoing war against Iran was appropriated by both parties. In December, 115 House Democrats, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries among them, voted for the National Defense Authorization Act, and Charles Schumer, Richard Durbin and 21 other Senate Democrats passed it through the Senate; in January, 149 House Democrats approved the $839 billion Pentagon spending bill, five weeks before the bombing of Iran began.
The most recent vote came in the first week of August, when the Senate approved by 86-11 a bill extending sanctions on Iran and imposing new ones on Russia, authorizing tariffs of up to 100 percent against the largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, China and India among them. Democrats backed it 37-10. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the bill’s chief Democratic sponsor, addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin directly: “Your economy, already on its heels, is going to be throttled, even decimated.” Schumer said the bill sends “an unmistakable message to Moscow that America will back Ukraine to the hilt.”
The economic siege of Iran is part of a widening campaign of imperialist war, including the escalation of the war against Russia. On Tuesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled in secret to Moscow—the first time a CIA director is known to have visited Russia since the Ukraine war began. CNN reported Thursday that Ratcliffe delivered a “warning to Russia not to stage an attack in NATO territory”—an indication that Washington itself considers open warfare between NATO and Russia a live danger.
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Israel’s assault on the Palestinians continued through the week. Israeli strikes on Gaza killed at least seven people on August 24, among them a 4-year-old boy in Bureij, and hit a mosque, a desalination plant and an aid warehouse, Al Jazeera reported that day. Gaza’s Health Ministry put the death toll at 73,422 through August 24, including 1,288 people killed since the cease-fire that took effect October 10. On Friday, an Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinians in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, and on Sunday dozens of settlers attacked the village of Qusra.
On Saturday, masked Israeli settlers ambushed an NBC News crew in Jalud, a West Bank village near Nablus, beating correspondent Matt Bradley, cameraman Khaldoon Eid and producer Lawahez Jabari with sticks and injuring Aida Ahmed Abdullah, the Palestinian woman they were interviewing, whom settlers had already driven from her home. “They jumped out, beat us, then jumped back in the car,” Bradley said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attributed the attack to “a handful of rioters.”
3. Canada’s opposition parties and trade unions join hands with Carney government in trade war with US
The leaders of Canada’s main opposition parties met with Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney last Tuesday to demonstrate their full-throated support for Canadian imperialism in the escalating trade war with the US.
The far-right Conservative Pierre Poilievre, social democrat Avi Lewis, and Yves-François Blanchet, the head of the pro-independence Bloc Québécois, all embraced Ottawa’s retaliatory tariffs and demanded sacrifices from the population in the face of Trump’s drive to crash the Canadian economy and annex the country.
Carney has responded with “dollar-for-dollar” retaliatory tariffs to Trump’s August 22 imposition of 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian imports and his subsequent announcement that auto tariffs will be doubled at the beginning of 2027.
The same day that Carney met with the opposition leaders, his Liberal government unveiled a list of tariffs on about $US20 billion of American goods scheduled to come into force September 8.
Trump’s attacks on Canada are part of his strategy to subordinate the Western hemisphere to unbridled US imperialist dominance as a stepping stone in the intensification of world war against Washington’s main rivals.
The fascist-minded US president escalated his aggressive “America First” over the course of last week. On Thursday, he signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade representative, declared in a provocative interview with the CBC that Canada risked becoming a back door for Chinese imports and demanded that Ottawa take seriously its claimed desire to be part of “Fortress North America,” i.e., by integrating its economy and military even more fully into Washington’s economic and military-strategic offensive against Beijing.
Following his phone calls with the other party leaders, Carney issued a statement declaring that they “discussed the ongoing response and underscored the importance of a united Team Canada approach as Canada works to protect jobs, build the economy, and stand up for Canadian interests.”
This nationalist propaganda aims to misdirect the genuine anger among workers and broad sections of the population over Trump’s bullying and threats behind a strategy for the protection of corporate Canada’s profits and the ruling class’s imperialist interests. Carney, who previously served as the governor of Canada’s central bank and a blue-chip executive, has exploited Trump’s threats to push official politics sharply to the right.
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At the same time, Carney continues to promote a possible “grand bargain” with Washington, in which Ottawa will give the US first dibs on critical minerals and other resources, if only Trump will recognize the Canadian ruling class’s “sovereign right” to the lion’s share of the profits extracted from Canada’s workers and abundant resources and gives it guaranteed access to the US market.
Coming out of Carney’s mouth, talk of “Canadian interests” means the predatory imperialist interests of the ruling class, not the interests of working people. Ottawa is itself an aggressive protagonist in the struggle among the great powers to redivide the world so as to secure control over natural resources, production networks, cheap labour, markets and strategic territories.
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The conflict between American and Canadian imperialism is a reactionary dispute between two rival bourgeoisies in which workers should not pick sides.
A recent Globe and Mail editorial, entitled, “A free Canada is worth the sacrifice” underlined the equally predatory ambitions of both countries’ ruling classes. Not for the first time, the mouthpiece of the Bay Street financial elite invoked Canadian imperialism’s involvement in the two world wars of the 20th century and countless conflicts since in an appeal for national “sacrifice.” “Mr. Trump should not mistake Canadian politeness for passivity,” declared the Globe. “A country that fought and died in the charnel houses of the world wars, in Korea and in Afghanistan knows the value of standing up for its ideals.”
To the extent that Carney and his Liberal government can pull off its two-faced pitch, it is thanks above all to the combined efforts of the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) and its sponsors in the trade unions. NDP leader Avi Lewis, who was touted during the party’s leadership campaign earlier this year as a “left,” could hardly restrain his enthusiasm for the torrent of nationalist, militaristic rhetoric unleashed by the trade war. Carney made a correct move by “walking away from a bad deal,” he declared, repeating word for word a statement from a few days earlier by Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) President Bea Bruske. Lewis added to CBC, “This trade war could and should hurt President Trump.”
In reality, the trade war hurts workers on both sides of the border through price rises, job cuts and plant shutdowns. Moreover, the trade war poisons political and social life by mobilizing the vast resources at the disposal of each bourgeois state—political parties, the media, big business, trade unions and universities—to pit workers against each other in a bid to make them believe that their interests lie with their “own” ruling class.
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Workers from across all industrial sectors know from bitter experience that “buy Canadian” and other similar nationalist programs have never defended a single job. On the contrary, such positions, championed by the trade union bureaucracies, have led to the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs and sweeping contract concessions over the past four decades. Among the most prominent examples of this is the auto industry. Since the Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor) split from the UAW in 1985, the union bureaucracies on both sides of the border have systematically pitted workers against each other, allowing the automakers to whip-saw jobs and conditions.
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No worker on layoff, laboring for a poverty wage, striking at National Steel Car for basic safety protections and an end to piecework, or risking their lives to make ends meet—as was so cruelly demonstrated by the death of a worker at Montreal Airport last week—should believe for a second that we are “in this together” with Canada’s more than 80 billionaires, banks, corporate executives or their political spokesmen. Canadian capitalism, no less than its US competitor, rests on ruthless class exploitation that gives rise to an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the working class and the capitalists.
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Meanwhile, alone among the premiers, Alberta’s Danielle Smith has refused to endorse Ottawa’s retaliatory tariffs. The head of the far-right United Conservative Party (UCP), Smith has publicly proclaimed her readiness to put Alberta’s massive oil and natural gas reserves at the service of the Trump administration’s predatory “global energy dominance” strategy.
Workers in Canada must oppose Trump and everything he represents—oligarchy, dictatorship and militarism—but they cannot do so on the basis of Canadian or Quebecois nationalism, or by aligning with any faction of Canada’s imperialist bourgeoisie.
Genuine opposition to Trump’s imperialist aggression and Canadian imperialism’s predatory designs demands that workers in Canada unify their struggles with workers in the United States so as to mount a joint counteroffensive against austerity, authoritarianism and imperialist war.
This struggle must be guided by a socialist and internationalist program. The unification of workers in Canada, the United States, Mexico and internationally will provide the basis to halt the trade war and imperialist war, defend workers’ democratic and social rights, and carry forward the fight for workers’ power and the United Socialist States of the Americas.
4. Newly established Communist League of Uganda leaders arrested by Museveni regime
Workers, youth and defenders of democratic rights internationally must oppose the persecution of political organizations by the Ugandan state and demand the immediate disclosure of the whereabouts and legal status of all those detained.
5. Socialist Equality Party (UK) calls on 50 British trade unions to defend Bogdan Syrotiuk
The SEP calls on workers to take this campaign into their own hands by popularizing the Bogdan’s case in their workplaces and passing resolutions in his defense in their branch and regional meetings.
6. The vindictive prosecution of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy
A jury is deliberating in the high-profile trial of Lindsay Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, accused by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of criminal responsibility for the deaths of her three children in January 2023.She faces three counts of first-degree murder and lesser offenses, for the strangulation of her daughter Cora, 5, and sons Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. After killing her children, she attempted to take her own life by cutting her wrists and neck and throwing herself from a second-story window. Clancy survived but suffered a severe spinal-cord injury resulting in leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
Clancy admits that her actions caused her children’s deaths. However, her defense argued that severe insomnia following the birth of her third child and the side effects of prescribed psychiatric medications associated with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, brought on her postpartum psychosis and that she therefore lacks criminal responsibility.
The prosecution argued that Clancy was not psychotic and did not have postpartum psychosis at the time. They claimed that she maliciously planned the murders and set up an opportunity to do so by asking her husband to pick up dinner and a prescription for one of their children.
The Commonwealth has the burden to prove to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was criminally responsible at the time of the offenses. That means proving either that she did not have a mental disease or defect, or that any such condition did not deprive her of the capacity to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct and that she could conform her conduct to the law. This is Massachusetts’ equivalent of what is commonly called an insanity defense.
The five-week trial included 21 days of testimony from 85 witnesses; 75 for the prosecution and 10 for the defense.
None of the psychiatric experts on either side denied that she experienced significant psychiatric symptoms leading up to the killings. The arguments focused on whether she experienced psychosis.
The elephant in the room has been the question of motive. If not for psychosis and the auditory hallucinations that commanded her to kill her children and herself—what could have led this dedicated mother to commit such an act?
What is perhaps the most tragic element of all was the weight of testimony from family, friends and coworkers who described the type of person Lindsay Clancy was, how much she loved being a mother and cared for children, including the babies she delivered and cared for as a nurse.
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It should be noted that the Commonwealth’s District Attorney’s office did not need to prosecute this poor woman and could have had her civilly committed to a mental health institution.
Instead, it has sought her vindictive punishment. Aware of its burden, it has sought to exploit all the terrible facts, subjecting the jury to every horrific detail of the act as well as the state of the deceased via autopsy photos and testimony from numerous medical examiners, forensic pathologists, firefighter-paramedics and EMTs, responding police and even forensic laboratory scientists. The aim is to secure a conviction by appealing to pure emotion and the basest sentiments.
The degree of detail is highly prejudicial when Clancy does not dispute the killings. Clancy was inconsolable throughout much of the above testimony which lasted weeks and had the air of public torture.
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Roughly one in eight mothers (12–13 percent) report postpartum depression, nearly a quarter-million a year in the US. Postpartum psychosis is rarer, affecting 1 to 2 per 1,000 births. While certain risk factors increase the likelihood, tens of thousands with no prior mental health issues are affected. While certain risk factors can increase a mother’s likelihood of experiencing symptoms, tens of thousands with no prior mental health issues are affected.
Over the course of the trial many women have taken to social media to speak about their experiences with postpartum depression and psychosis. “I could have been Lindsay Clancy” has become a common phrase. Renee Kimball, a Clancy supporter, told NPR, “I think we just know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair, and it should not take for it to get to tragedy.”
Interest in Clancy’s case, and significant advocacy for her, is due in large part to public empathy for Clancy, frustration over what were arguably insufficient responses and poor care by her mental health providers, and anger over the cruel and vindictive case brought against her.
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Over the past few decades, capitalist politicians of both parties, at the behest of the financial oligarchy, have eviscerated mental health services as a deliberate class policy, part of a broader assault on every social gain won by the working class over the last century.
Under capitalism healthcare is organized around profit, not human need. Not only is access to adequate mental healthcare unattainable for many, much of the infrastructure was destroyed along with massive funding cuts.
“Deinstitutionalization” began in the 1960s under the banner of “patient rights,” though it was driven by state officials shifting costs to Washington. President Kennedy’s 1963 promise of 2,000 community mental health centers yielded only 750 by 1980, and Reagan slashed federal mental health spending by 30 percent.
The past two decades have accelerated this destruction. As the WSWS reported, the 2008 financial crisis was utilized as a pretext for unprecedented cuts: between 2009 and 2012, states cut mental health expenditures by a total of $5 billion, eliminating roughly 10 percent of the remaining public psychiatric beds—about 4,500 beds—in just three years.
The number of state psychiatric beds from 2005 to 2010 plummeted by 14 percent, driving per capita bed availability down to the level of 1850, before the Civil War and before hospital-based psychiatric treatment even existed.
There are now 10 times more people with severe and persistent mental disorders—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression—in state and county prisons than in state psychiatric hospitals. As of 2012, in 44 states a single prison or jail held more seriously mentally ill people than that state’s largest remaining psychiatric hospital.
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At a time when the Trump administration is promoting Christian nationalist curricula and Texas is requiring the Ten Commandments in every classroom, the moral-religious framing that surfaced in the Clancy courtroom was not incidental. Those following the trial with compassion for Clancy and her children saw a case that turned on medical evidence being argued instead in the language of sin and choice.
What has gone entirely unremarked in the coverage of the case is the response it has provoked among ordinary people due to the deep democratic sentiments in the working class which are both present and strengthening.
The prosecution’s conduct—its attempt to appeal to religious doctrine, the effort to turn psychosis into criminality—has been met with widespread revulsion, not the demand for vengeance the state anticipated.
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The trial has unfolded as the illegal war on Iran enters its 27th week, and as the Gaza genocide—with over 20,000 children killed—continues with full bipartisan support. On August 17, court filings revealed that a one-year-old girl sat before an immigration judge in Arizona with no parent or guardian and was told to file an asylum application or face deportation.
The same state that cries “justice for the children” in a Massachusetts courtroom is the one that runs the ICE Gestapo—51,000 kidnapped in July alone, infants held in detention, an immigrant dying in custody roughly every 10 days since Trump took office.
If “justice for children” meant anything, it would begin with an indictment of the warmongering criminal oligarchy itself—not with the prosecution of a extremely ill woman mother caught up in a nightmarish tragedy.
7. Contract deadline looms this week for 23,000 steelworkers in the US
The USW bureaucracy is blocking preparations for a unified struggle with Canadian USW members on strike at National steel Car, instead subordinating steelworkers to nationalism, protectionism and trade war.
More than 1,200 workers at the National Steel Car plant in Hamilton, Ontario, members of United Steelworkers Local 7135, have been on strike since August 12 at North America’s largest railroad freight car manufacturing facility. Workers voted down the company’s final contract ultimatum by 78 percent and are determined to get rid of the company’s oppressive piecework system, which endangers their lives and robs their wages. This is their second strike in three years.
World Socialist Web Site reporters from Canada visited the picket line Saturday to speak to striking workers. Supporters of Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for president of the United Auto Workers, also traveled from Detroit. They distributed a statement from Lehman calling on workers in Canada and the US to back the striking workers and oppose the trade war measures being used by the governments and trade union bureaucracies in both countries to divide the workers along national lines.
Lehman’s statement highlighted the call of the National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee for railroad and other workers in the US to ban the use of any railroad cars National Steel Car had leased to the railroad companies to keep revenue flowing during the strike.
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The fact that Lehman supporters had come from the United States to express their solidarity, and appeal for joint action across the Canada-US border elicited a powerful and defiant response.
“We should all unite together. I mean, our governments want to pit us against each other. I have nothing against Americans. I know Trump is a problem with our government. But for me, our own government is our problem…at the end of the day, we need to come together,” said the veteran worker with more than a half century of work at the plant.
The Lehman supporter replied that “the American workers have a problem with Trump too.” The Canadian worker responded, “So we all agree.”
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When asked about the call by the National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee for striking workers to take the struggle out of the hands of the USW apparatus, one worker with long experience at the plant said the bureaucracy would do everything it could to prevent workers from asserting their control. “They treat the union as a business. It’s their business, and they will do what they have to do to protect that business. Like any other insurance company, they collect money, and they don’t want to pay out.”
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“What would you say to the proposition that the workers should be the boss?” the reporter asked. He responded, “Oh, absolutely. Who better to run a company than the workers? Who else knows how to run this place?”
9. Gary, Indiana residents still without power weeks after storm
Over 300,000 people lost power after hurricane-strength winds and multiple tornadoes downed power lines, trees and utility poles across the Calumet region.
10. New Zealand to deepen involvement in Ukraine war
About 100 New Zealand troops are likely to remain in Britain, where they were deployed in 2022 by the then Labour-Greens government to assist in training Ukrainian conscripts for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia.According to the Post, NZ’s current National Party Prime Minister Christopher Luxon joined a phone call with other world leaders in the “Coalition of the Willing” on August 24. He told Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky that “we’ll look to continue to support [Ukraine in] as many ways as we possibly can.”
Luxon told the Post he made an “emotional” visit to the UK training ground in early 2025 where Ukrainians, including “bakers, electricians and accountants,” were about to be sent into the “trenches in Ukraine, fighting for democracy, fighting for values that we just take sometimes for granted.”
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The conflict in Ukraine is one front in an expanding world war which includes the US attack on Venezuela, the US-Israeli war against Iran and the ongoing Gaza genocide. The imperialist powers are seeking to redivide the world and establish colonial control over markets and resources. New Zealand’s government has supported all these criminal wars of aggression.
Luxon’s claim that the war is being waged for “democracy” is a lie. Zelensky has been ruling as a dictator since his presidential term expired more than two years ago. He recently delivered a tirade in which he said holding elections would “destroy the country.”
Dozens of opposition parties have been banned and socialist publications including the World Socialist Web Site are suppressed. The socialist activist Bogdan Syrotiuk, a leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for writing articles that called on Ukrainian and Russian workers to unite to end the war.
While the Zelensky regime has outlawed socialism, it is glorifying fascism by promoting Nazi collaborators in World War II as national heroes, including Stepan Bandera, Andrey Melyk and Yehven Konovalets.
The anti-democratic repression is aimed above all against Ukraine’s working class, which is turning against the war. Many of the conscripts New Zealand has trained in Britain are now likely among the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have been killed. The Ukrainian military is desperately short of cannon fodder and is facing hundreds of thousands of desertions. Conscription teams are roving the streets and snatching men to send to the front, provoking protests by ordinary Ukrainians.
New Zealand is integrated into the war despite being on the other side of the world. Like Australia, the country has been an ally of US imperialism since World War II and its ruling class relies on US support to maintain New Zealand’s own neo-colonial domination over much of the South Pacific.
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The corporate media, meanwhile, is actively encouraging young people to go and fight against Russia. In July, the New Zealand Herald published an article glorifying Sam Haines, a 22-year-old Auckland man who died while fighting for the Azov Battalion, a fascist unit that plays a major role in the Ukrainian military.
It is not known how many New Zealanders are fighting in Ukraine, but reports indicate that at least seven have died since Russia invaded in 2022. By comparison, 10 NZ soldiers died during the two decades of war in Afghanistan, in which more than 3,500 New Zealanders served.
11. Mamdani reaffirms support for Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries
One day after the New York Times reported a private meeting between House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, New York City Mayor and DSA member Zohran Mamdani reaffirmed his support for Jeffries’ bid to become the next speaker of the House.
12. ICE Gestapo expands deportation flights to third countries in Africa
The Trump administration has dramatically expanded the forced deportation of immigrants to so-called “third countries,” shipping men and women in chains to impoverished and war-torn African nations where they have never lived and have no family or social connections.Over a 10-day period in August, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported more than 100 people aboard three flights to eight African countries, according to internal government documents obtained by CBS News.
The deportees included men and women from Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Nepal, Nicaragua, Turkey and Venezuela. Others came from African countries different from those to which they were expelled. They were deposited in Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
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The flights are part of a rapidly expanding network of secret agreements through which the Trump administration pays foreign governments millions of dollars to receive people the United States wants to expel.
On Sunday, the New York Times published interviews with 10 people recently deported to Liberia. All had spent months imprisoned in ICE detention centers before being placed aboard the 14-hour flight.
The deportees described being shackled at the wrists, ankles and waist throughout the journey. ICE agents refused requests to use the bathroom, forcing detainees to urinate on themselves. When they protested being sent to a country where they had no connections, agents beat them, slammed them to the floor and dragged them by their chains, leaving scratches on their wrists and bruises on their necks.
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The administration is accelerating these deportations following a record wave of ICE arrests. Nearly 50,000 people were arrested in July, the highest monthly total of Trump’s second term. More than half had no prior criminal record.
Among those recently expelled was a young Afghan man whose relatives served alongside the US military during Washington’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. An immigration judge had granted him protection from deportation because of the danger that the Taliban would persecute him. The Trump administration shipped him to the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the world.
The US State Department warns American citizens not to travel to the Central African Republic because of armed conflict, crime, kidnapping and unrest. Rwanda, another recipient of third-country deportees, is under a Level 3 “Reconsider travel” advisory because of crime, unrest and health risks. The State Department warns Americans not to travel within 10 kilometers (6 miles) of Rwanda’s border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo under any circumstances.
The same government that tells American citizens these countries are too dangerous to visit is forcibly transporting immigrants there in chains.
The crime has a direct historical parallel to the grievances against King George III enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.
During the recent WSWS webinar, “The American Revolution and Its Place in History,” historian Adam Hochschild recalled that the Declaration charged the British king with “transporting people beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”
“I think of the deportations,” Hochschild said.
There can be no mass deportation operation without the construction of a police state.
With the collaboration of the Democratic Party, the Trump administration has received billions of dollars to hire more agents, expand its network of concentration camps and purchase the latest torture and surveillance technology.
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While millions are spent equipping the immigration Gestapo with electric-shock weapons and robotic surveillance dogs, the Trump administration has eliminated federally funded legal representation for an estimated 26,000 unaccompanied immigrant children.
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The spectacle of a judge ordering an infant to prepare a legal application while the government spends millions on electric torture devices expresses the class character of the emerging dictatorship.
It is directed not only against immigrants. The immigration Gestapo is the spearhead of a police state apparatus being prepared for use against the entire working class. The same agents, databases, detention centers, drones, robotic surveillance systems and torture devices deployed against immigrants will be turned against workers, students and all opponents of war, inequality and capitalism.
The Democratic Party is not opposing this apparatus. It has provided Trump with the funds and political cover required to build it.
Democratic leaders are now making clear that even if they regain control of the House in the November midterm elections, they will do nothing to remove the fascist president responsible for these crimes.
Speaking to CNN last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries refused to commit to impeaching Trump.
“We haven’t ruled anything in and we haven’t ruled anything out,” Jeffries said, adding that Democrats would respond only to unspecified “moments of accountability.”
On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, South Carolina Representative James Clyburn was equally explicit.
“I don’t rule it out, but I don’t rule it in,” Clyburn said when asked about impeaching Trump.
“I don’t think that should be our priority if we get into office,” he added. “Our priority ought to be making housing, education, energy, healthcare affordable and accessible for all of our citizens. Impeaching the president will not do that.”
Clyburn’s attempt to counterpose living standards to the defense of democratic rights is a fraud. The same capitalist oligarchy that is destroying healthcare, education, wages and housing is building the police state to suppress the social opposition its policies will inevitably produce.
13. NASA launches Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to survey dark energy, dark matter
The central focus of the science to be done with the data collected will be a study of dark energy, the unexplained pressure accelerating the expansion of the universe and accounting for roughly 68 percent of all known mass/energy. Data collected by Hubble in the 1990s was some of the earliest direct evidence of this accelerating expansion.
Recent results from ground-based surveys have produced evidence that dark energy may not be constant at all but changing over cosmic time, a finding that, if confirmed, overturns the standard model of cosmology. Roman will test this with three independent methods that cross-check one another, including light detected from Type Ia supernovae, the distortion of distant galaxies caused by the gravity of intervening matter, known as gravitational lensing, and the remnant signals of vibrations in the plasma of the early universe, so-called baryon acoustic oscillations.
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Roman launched six years behind that schedule at a total cost of roughly $4.3 billion, nearly three times the original estimate. And it likely would not have been made at all without two 2.4-meter mirrors donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office in 2012, each worth about $250 million, though they forced many expensive changes to the mission, which was originally designed for a 1.5-meter mirror.
The telescope is also being launched amid the sixth month of the American assault on Iran, the fourth year of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the ongoing war preparation against China. The Trump administration has requested $1.5 trillion for next year’s military budget, nearly 350 times the total cost of Roman.
That a machine of Roman’s caliber has been launched and will soon be in operation is certainly cause for celebration. It will answer numerous scientific questions that have been outstanding for years or even decades.
The telescope, however, also poses a social question of utmost importance: Why are such achievements rationed and fought over line by line made to justify themselves against war budgets and the enrichment of a financial oligarchy whose share of wealth is the highest ever recorded? The same international coordination and scientific understanding used to develop, build and launch Roman must be directed politically toward placing society itself on a higher, rationally planned social order, one that abolishes poverty, disease, dictatorship and war.
14. Humanitarian catastrophe unfolds in Nepal after floods
A humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding. Survivors are searching frantically for missing relatives amid shortages of food, clean water, medicine, clothing and shelter. Hospitals and government offices in Kathmandu and Nuwakot are overwhelmed as families check survivor lists; many witnessed relatives swept away by mud and ice flows. Communication blackouts and damaged roads have hampered aid.
Tens of thousands have been displaced and entire villages destroyed, while temporary shelters are overcrowded and unsanitary, raising the risk of disease. The floods struck during the harvest season, wiping out crops and destroying irrigation systems, prompting warnings of a food security crisis as emergency rations struggle to reach affected areas.
At the displacement camp in Kolani, Kopila Pariyar told the Kathmandu Post that basic necessities are unobtainable. “There is no drinking water in the camp, and we cannot even buy bottled water,” she said. “We have no money, no clothes and there is almost nothing to buy in the Kolani market.” Her 43-year-old sister-in-law, Shanti, and her 16-year-old brother, Abinash, have been missing since the flood.
Hospitals near the disaster zone cannot supply essential medicines, especially for chronic illnesses. The floods cut off their main water sources, compromising hygiene and patient care. While the government has ordered free medical treatment for the injured, many remote areas remain inaccessible and medical staff are overwhelmed.
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Sanitary facilities and clean water are lacking, and inadequate toilet drainage is making matters worse. Physicians fear a second catastrophe: disease epidemics in the overcrowded camps. Rajendra Lama, medical superintendent of Trishuli Hospital, said, “With so many people living together in one place, there is a risk of disease spreading,” adding that “the lack of safe drinking water and proper toilets raises the possibility of an epidemic.”
The poor quality and inadequate food in the camps is a particular danger for pregnant women, new mothers and the sick. There are major shortages of medication, cooking gas, and diesel for ambulances.
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The United Nations estimates that some 10,000 households require immediate assistance, indicating widespread loss of housing.
At least 18 schools have been completely destroyed and another 20 damaged, affecting an estimated 10,000 to 17,000 school-age children. Dozens more schools on riverbanks remain at high risk.
Health facilities were also badly hit: Three clinics were destroyed, one hospital was partially damaged and access to two others was cut off.
Infrastructure was likewise devastated. The Department of Roads reported that 35 motorable bridges and 45 suspension bridges were damaged or swept away, according to Rediff News. The entire 42-kilometer stretch of road between Betrawati and Rasuwagadhi was damaged at multiple points, cutting off numerous communities.
Eleven hydropower units and one solar facility ceased operating, taking 431.1 MW—about 10 percent of Nepal’s installed capacity—off the national grid. A further 15 power plants under construction, with a combined projected capacity of 470 MW, were also damaged.
Nepal may require $4 billion to $5 billion to rebuild, Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle told Reuters on Saturday, a sum equivalent to roughly a tenth of the economy. This will sharply worsen the country’s economic crisis.
*****
The imperialist powers, for their part, have pledged a pittance. The United States is offering just $3.6 million and the deployment of one disaster-response advisor. Britain’s response is only marginally better: emergency responders and $6.79 million in aid. The European Union has set aside $2.32 million in humanitarian aid. Australia is giving just $3.58 million. Set against the scale of the devastation, these sums are derisory, and it remains to be seen how much will actually reach Nepal.
The record of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 people and caused an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion in damage, is instructive. The US pledged a total of more than $61 million. Britain pledged £33 million (about $51 million) in humanitarian aid and eventually committed to a five-year £83 million reconstruction program. The European Commission provided €16.4 million in immediate humanitarian funding, later raising its total to €22.6 million.
Delivery, however, fell far short of the pledges. At the June 2015 donor conference, international donors promised about $4 billion for reconstruction, but two years later Nepal had received only $2.73 billion. Much of the pledged aid was delayed, redirected or never disbursed, leaving a vast gap between what was announced and what arrived.
The floods devastating Nepal are the direct product of a climate crisis for which the major industrial powers are directly responsible, yet their response is a study in criminal indifference. A few million dollars are pledged for a catastrophe demanding billions. The poorest people, who bear no responsibility for global warming, pay the greatest price, including their lives and livelihoods.
*****
The catastrophe in Nepal is a stark demonstration of the incapacity of the ruling classes—in Nepal and throughout the world—to address even the most basic requirements of the masses. The way forward lies in the international unification of the working class in a socialist struggle to reorganize society on the basis of human need and scientific planning. The fight to stop the destruction of the environment is inseparable from the fight against the capitalist system that is destroying it.
15. FAA moves to fire 2 LaGuardia controllers before fatal runway-collision investigation is complete
The threatened firings are a naked effort to scapegoat workers for chronic understaffing and unsafe conditions throughout the National Airspace System.
The Pentagon has taken ownership stake in one-fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves, in a deal that exposes both the gangsterism of the US ruling class and the terminal bankruptcy of Chavismo and bourgeois nationalism.
17. German auto industry moves into arms production—just as under the Nazis
Since 2018, when the industry employed 834,000 people, the German auto industry has shed 142,500 jobs. In the first half of 2026 alone, 42,300 jobs were cut. Now parts of the auto industry and its suppliers are to be converted into lucrative arms plants.
The arms industry needs new capacity to rapidly ramp up booming arms production and make Germany “fit for war,” in the words of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) defense minister. Rheinmetall alone plans to increase its workforce from 30,000 to 40,000 over the next three years, with revenues expected to increase as much as fivefold by 2030. To this end, the German Security and Defense Industry Association (BDSV) is seeking available labor, factories and technical expertise from the crisis-hit auto industry under the slogan “Auto2Defence.”
The German government is making enormous financial resources available for rearmament. The 2026 federal budget allocates €108 billion for military spending, rising to €152 billion by 2029, whetting the appetite of the corporations. According to recent surveys, one in three industrial companies expects new business opportunities from entering the defense industry.
The transformation under way in the auto industry and other sectors—massively accelerated by AI—is being ruthlessly exploited to reorient production towards armaments. Workers are being given the choice of either losing their jobs or producing weapons of war.
*****
The current expansion of the arms industry closely echoes the rearmament carried out under the Nazis—even the corporations and controlling families involved are, in many cases, the same.
In the 1930s, the establishment of a fascist regime was the fundamental precondition for setting the gigantic rearmament and war machine for the Second World War in motion. The German working class, which was predominantly socialist in outlook and organized in two mass parties, the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party (KPD), had to be politically smashed and atomized. This is why leading industrialists such as Thyssen and Krupp financed Hitler and his fascist gangs. Large sections of the German bourgeoisie regarded him as the last way out of an impending socialist revolution.
Once in power, the Nazis set a gigantic war economy in motion. On the one hand, it served to prepare for the conquest of Europe and the war against the Soviet Union, on the other, it guaranteed German major corporations—Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben, Siemens and others—high profits at state expense once again, after the Great Depression. The working class was disciplined through the destruction of its organizations, wage freezes, forced labor and, ultimately, mobilization to the front.
In 1934, German military spending stood at 3.4 percent of gross national product (GNP); by 1936 it had already reached 7.6 percent, and by 1938, a year before the outbreak of war, 18.1 percent. In the first year of the war, 1939/40, it rose further to 26.4 percent, and in the second year of the war, 1940/41, to 42.3 percent.
These figures, together with more recent research into the militarization of the Nazi economy, demonstrate how systematically and extensively the Nazi regime was planning its war of annihilation as much as five years before the invasion of Poland. It is now also well documented that major industrial corporations such as Krupp, IG Farben, Siemens, Rheinmetall and others were actively involved in war planning. The Nazi state relied on a system that drew industrial managers directly into military planning.
More recent research describes this as a system of cooperative interlocking between state and industry, rather than a purely command economy. The state created financial incentives—including Mefo bills (secret bills of exchange used to finance rearmament off the official budget), price guarantees and special subsidies—and organizational structures such as the Four Year Plan, “War Economy Führers” and armaments inspectorates. Corporations, in turn, took an active part in planning, built up their own war economy departments and, from 1939/40 onwards, increasingly deployed forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners to boost production. According to economic historians Adam Tooze and Jonas Scherner, this interplay entangled German industry deeply in war preparations well before 1939.
It was not only arms firms such as Thyssen, Krupp and Rheinmetall that made handsome profits. Almost all the major auto and engineering companies entered the lucrative production of military goods. Some of them had already supplied the Kaiser’s imperial army with military vehicles, aircraft, weapons and ammunition during the First World War. A similar development is emerging again today—and many of the same car companies are once again involved.
18. Australia: Teachers speak out against union sellout in Victoria
“Agreement after agreement has seen our working conditions deteriorate while outcomes that fall well short of what staff originally fought for are presented as victories.”
19. Pro-government Turkish journalist calls for extermination of Syria’s Arab Alawites
A Turkish journalist with deep ties to the Erdoğan government made remarks on a major national television channel that sought to normalize the massacre of Arab Alawites in Syria.20.
Military-intelligence chiefs and the Murdoch media have complained that the witch-hunting Royal Commission into Antisemitism did not go far enough in persecuting the pro-Palestinian movement.
20. Millions mourn singer Dolly Parton
Dolly was intensely musical from her earliest days. Music “was in our blood. … Even as a little kid I loved the excitement of getting to sing in front of somebody.” Dolly would not be overlooked. At the age of 10, she performed on local radio and television. At the youthful age of 13 she made her first record, “Puppy Love,” and performed on stage at the Grand Ole Opry, America’s most celebrated country music venue, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Parton’s biography typifies the “rags to riches” theme—the staple of the so-called American Dream. From her impoverished rural upbringing, by age 80 she had accumulated an estate estimated at a half billion dollars. Despite her financial success, Parton said of her hoped-for legacy, “I’d like to be thought of as a good human being.” Accordingly, she set up numerous charities, perhaps the most far-reaching of which is her “Imagination Library,” a global book-gifting program which mails free books monthly to children from birth until age five. Her father’s illiteracy was the inspiration for the project.
From the earliest days, her most important talent, Parton maintained, was as a writer. She had enormous empathy for the conditions endured by people around her, which became the source of countless poignant songs.
The day after she graduated from high school, Dolly caught the bus for Nashville, 200 miles from home, “to be a star.” She told her parents that she wasn’t coming home until she had “something to show for it.”
*****
Her first album, “Hello, I’m Dolly” was released in 1967. It included her own version of “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” the song that introduced her to a mass audience. But more memorably, it included a song that she didn’t write, “Dumb Blonde,” which became a kind of anthem for her—“This dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.”
*****
In September of that year, Parton’s noticeable talents induced Porter Wagoner to offer her the co-starring spot on his nationally syndicated television show, which vastly broadened her audience. She agreed to do the show for five years, but it turned into seven and Wagoner still resisted letting her go due to her popular appeal.
She penned a heartfelt farewell and thank you to Wagoner that would become her most widely known (and profitable) song. Upon singing it for him, he tearfully agreed to let her go if he could produce the recording. As audiences around the world know, “I Will Always Love You” became a massive hit, especially after it was recorded by popular R&B artist Whitney Houston.
Notably, the intense relationship between Parton and Wagoner was strictly a musical one. By that time, Dolly had been married for eight years to Carl Dean, who she had met just after moving to Nashville. He was her lifetime companion until his death in 2025.
Remarkably, the same night that she composed “I Will Always Love You,” she wrote “Jolene,” released as a single in October, 1973 and the following year on Parton’s 13th studio album, titled Jolene. The song met with wide acclaim and was recorded by numerous well-known artists, including Olivia Newton-John, Reba McIntyre, and younger artists Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, Brandi Carlile, Allison Krauss, Mindy Smith, Fiona Apple, The White Stripes and Beyonce.
*****
In 1979, when actress Jane Fonda was developing a concept for a film to depict the conditions of women being exploited as office workers, she heard Parton’s “Two Doors Down” on the radio and decided to appeal to her to join the cast.
Parton’s involvement in the production would change the character of the film. The singer always steered clear of politics, despite her lifelong empathy for the downtrodden. “It’s just a funny, funny show,” she told Rolling Stone magazine. “I’m just saying I don’t want to get involved in a political thing.”
*****
Released in November, 2023, Rockstar was Parton’s 49th and final studio album. It was a collaboration with prominent rock musicians Elton John, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Pat Benatar, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Michael McDonald, Sheryl Crow, Linda Perry, Melissa Etheridge, Debbie Harry, Pink, Brandi Carlile, Miley Cyrus, Joan Jett, Peter Frampton, Stevie Nicks, Steven Tyler, John Fogerty, Ann Wilson, Steve Perry, Sting and others. Her performance of “World on Fire” on the 58th American Country Music Awards was a bombastic appeal for human decency. “Whatcha gonna do when it all burns down?”
*****
Parton performed to her last days. In spite of her prodigious success, she will be remembered for her genuine love of people and generous sharing of herself through her performances. She told an interviewer in 2024, “There’s a lot of people with more talent, but I don’t think there’s anybody out there that loves doing it any more than me.”
21. 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.
