Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Ankara plane incident shows panic and disorientation of Trump White House
Nothing disclosed by the White House and Pentagon, as well as “leaked” to corporate media outlets like the Post and the Times, can be taken at face value, above all, the claim that Iran was seeking to shoot down Air Force One.
It is more than likely that this claim originates in the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which has been raising claims of Iranian assassination plots against Trump as a reason for resuming full-scale bombing of Iran. The Trump administration could use this allegation as the pretext for all-out invasion.
But the sequence of events involving Trump’s own movements reveals, first and foremost, the panic and hysteria now gripping the administration.
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Except for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who joined Trump on the military jet, all other top officials who attended the NATO summit flew out of Ankara on Air Force One. These included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, as well as top White House aides like Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff and counter-terrorism chief, and Steven Cheung, the communications director.
As for the traveling press pool, consisting of dozens of reporters, producers and technicians, their lives were treated with complete contempt. Those aboard Air Force One were not simply left in danger through negligence. In effect, they were assigned a military function: to serve as unwitting decoys, to draw enemy fire, to be the target in the president’s place.
What if the plane had been hit by a missile and destroyed, taking more than a hundred people with it, while Trump made a cowardly escape? The political repercussions for the president, the man who has, in the media parlance, “his finger on the nuclear button,” would have been catastrophic. Even the belly-crawling Democratic Party leaders would not have been able to save him.
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As for the faux outrage over Iran’s alleged threats to assassinate Trump, it should never be forgotten that the first action of the joint US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran was to use bomb and missile strikes to exterminate the top leadership of the Islamic Republic, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and most of his family, children and grandchildren among them. This was followed by the deliberate bombing of a school near the Strait of Hormuz, in which more than 160 schoolgirls and their teachers were killed.
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As for the faux outrage over Iran’s alleged threats to assassinate Trump, it should never be forgotten that the first action of the joint US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran was to use bomb and missile strikes to exterminate the top leadership of the Islamic Republic, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and most of his family, children and grandchildren among them. This was followed by the deliberate bombing of a school near the Strait of Hormuz, in which more than 160 schoolgirls and their teachers were killed.
The rise of the far-right One Nation party is the result above all of the pro-business policies of Labor and the union bureaucracy and can only be fought by building a socialist movement of the working class.
Reform leader Nigel Farage in June published a 6,800-word essay, “Britain is a two-tier state—against white people”, asserting that “anti-white racism was embedded into the state” and that equality legislation constitutes “social cleansing”.
4. Left Party leader offers a prop for Germany’s Christian Democrats
The ZDF interview with Left Party leader Luigi Pantisano shows that even under its new chairman, the party is offering itself as a reliable prop for the bourgeois state and the Christian Democrats.
5. Canada: National Steel Car workers in Hamilton, Ontario launch strike for second time in three years
More than 1,200 workers at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario went on strike at 12:01am Wednesday, August 12. The walkout followed a decisive vote to reject the company’s “last, best, and final offer,” which was handed out to workers over the heads of the United Steelworkers Local 7135 Friday afternoon.
The court-appointed monitor overseeing the United Auto Workers has suspended Raymond Jensen Jr. from union membership for posting a death threat against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president—but may leave it to the union apparatus to decide whether Jensen continues to collect his $202,000 annual salary from the UAW International.
According to Lehman, when his legal team asked the Monitor’s office to verify that Jensen had been removed from his position as a UAW International organizer, “we were told that while Jensen is suspended from the UAW, it would be up to the union apparatus to determine whether or not he will still be paid by the UAW.” Lehman’s attorneys immediately challenged this position, and the Monitor’s office said it would look into the matter. That was last week. It has yet to provide an answer.
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“From the beginning, I said this thuggish behavior was not aimed at me alone,” Lehman stated. “It was aimed at every UAW member who speaks out against the backroom deals and treachery of the apparatus. The image was meant as a warning: this is what happens to you if you vote down a contract, if you speak up at a meeting, if you challenge the bureaucracy in your own local.”
The image was the product of a bureaucracy that has, for decades, employed intimidation, retaliation and physical threats to suppress opposition from the workers it claims to represent. The UAW apparatus sits atop $1.25 billion in net assets and spent $118 million on its own officers and staff last year—14 times what it paid out in strike benefits. It functions as an arm of management, and it responds to any challenge from below with the methods of management’s enforcers.
Jensen, a former assistant director of UAW Region 9, Lehman’s home region, is listed as an “organizer” in the UAW’s Department of Organizing and Bargaining Strategies. The department, which works under Fain’s direction, has played a central role in trying to beat back the rising rebellion of autoworkers, particularly parts workers who have rejected a series of UAW-backed contracts at Nexteer, Dana, Bridgewater and other suppliers.
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The Monitor acted only because rank-and-file workers forced his hand. Lehman’s campaign rallied support from UAW members in Detroit and around the country, from workers in other industries, and from workers and young people in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Türkiye, Australia and New Zealand. Autoworkers gave video interviews at Stellantis Warren Truck and Sterling Stamping and at Bridgewater Interiors. A young worker at Bridgewater told Lehman’s campaign team, “They’re trying to shut you up. And they usually only do that when somebody’s telling the truth.”
The Monitor has every authority to take action preventing Jensen from continuing receive a paycheck from the UAW. In December 2025, the Monitor forced out Fain’s top administrative assistant, Chris Brooks, after finding that Fain, Brooks and UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman concocted fabricated charges to strip UAW Secretary Margaret Mock of her oversight of eleven Union departments in “retaliation for, among other things, Mock’s refusal or reluctance to authorize improper expenditures of funds at the request of and/or for the benefit of those in the President’s Office.” Barofsky also found that Brooks and Fain made false or misleading statements to the Monitor to conceal this conspiracy.
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The oversight by the court-appointed monitor has not prevented further corruption, it has not stopped the victimization of workers who speak out. Antwiane Sanders, a Nexteer worker with more than 10 years on the job, was fired last month for speaking out against UAW officials at a contract roll-out meeting inside the plant. Workers are victimized, isolated and driven out of their jobs for opposing this apparatus in plants across the country, week after week, and almost none of it is ever investigated or penalized.
“I call on workers to demand that the Monitor remove Jensen from his post and cut off his salary,” Lehman stated. “Otherwise, the UAW bureaucracy will see this as a green light to attack not only opposing candidates but the rank and file. But workers cannot rely on the Monitor to protect our rights. We must achieve this ourselves.”
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The July 30 presidential debate made it clear that Lehman is the only candidate who speaks for the rank and file. Every other candidate represents a section of the apparatus. Fain is under federal criminal investigation. Boyer negotiated the 2023 Stellantis contract that opened the door to mass firings. Brian Keller endorsed Fain in the 2022 runoff. Greg Mooney is a supporter of Autoworkers for Trump. And Tricia Geiger, a highly paid UAW International servicing representative, has just received the endorsement of Ray Curry, Rory Gamble and Ron Gettelfinger—three former UAW presidents who presided over decades of concessions, plant closures and the systematic betrayal of the membership.
In his remarks, Lehman said the rank-and-file committees he is fighting for will be based on “class struggle, not class collaboration. Internationalism not nationalism.”
In an earlier statement, Lehman put his campaign in a broader context, saying, “There is a rebellion already underway in this union, in the contract rejections and the strikes and the anger on every shift. Deepen it. Organize it. Make it something the apparatus cannot threaten its way out of.”
7. Trump administration moves to arm ICE agents with electric-shock torture gloves
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million on electric-shock gloves designed to inflict intense pain through direct physical contact, including during kidnapping operations, detention and forced deportations.
A Department of Homeland Security contracting notice published Monday and first reported on by AP lists a planned purchase of the CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E., or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. The notice estimates the contract at between $10 million and $20 million and indicates that there will be no competition.
The gloves are slated to be issued to agents with Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE divisions responsible for raids, arrests, imprisonment and deportations. The department expects the contract to be completed by March 31, 2027.
The acronym-laden description of the glove as a “Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device” is a bureaucratic euphemism. The weapon is designed to deliver electric shocks through an agent’s hand, causing immediate and overwhelming pain until the targeted person submits.
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The company insists that the gloves are intended to “gain compliance,” not for “verbal defiance,” “punishment,” “torture” or “horse play.” These disclaimers are worthless.
Police agencies have always treated alleged “non-compliance” as a license to beat, tase, choke and kill. The threshold is even lower than the familiar claim that an officer “feared for his life.” An ICE agent need only assert that a worker, immigrant or protester did not submit quickly or completely enough.
On Monday, masked ICE agents in Falls Church, Virginia boxed in the vehicle of Carolina Molina, a US citizen and licensed counselor, after she cursed at agents she saw arresting two people. One agent immediately approached Molina’s window with a pistol pointed inches from her head.
The agent accused her of attempting to run the officers over. Molina’s dashcam footage does not show such an attempt. Nevertheless, DHS subsequently accused her of “weaponizing her vehicle,” recycling the same lie used to justify the killings of Renee Nicole Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.
Molina’s alleged “non-compliance” consisted of condemning ICE and refusing to accept the agent’s lies. Had he been wearing an electric-shock glove, the same agent could have reached through her window and tortured her while claiming that he was merely trying to “gain compliance.”
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The planned purchase is one component of the immense bipartisan buildup of the American police state. Trump’s 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill” supplied approximately $170 billion for immigration enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE and $45 billion to construct new detention camps.
The nearly $70 billion appropriated in June through the Secure America Act will fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through 2029. Although Republicans supplied the votes for final passage, the allocation was made possible by a maneuver engineered by Democratic Senate leadership.
Following the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti and the eruption of mass opposition in Minneapolis, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrats separated DHS funding from the broader government spending bill. They then voted to fund the rest of DHS while excluding ICE and Border Patrol, without securing a single restriction on the immigration Gestapo.
This allowed the Democrats to posture as opponents of ICE while they demobilized protests and suppressed growing calls for a general strike. As Democratic leaders knew would happen, Republicans then used the budget reconciliation process to pass the ICE and Border Patrol funding with a simple Senate majority.
The electric-shock gloves are being purchased from this ocean of money. They are the product of a police-state buildup carried out by the Republicans with the indispensable political collaboration of the Democratic Party.
8. United States: Democratic primary elections show volatility amid shift to the left
US primary elections were held Tuesday in six states: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alabama, South Carolina, Vermont and Connecticut. The two most watched and hotly contested contests were in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
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The virulently hostile response of the Democratic establishment to DSA-backed “socialists” and “progressives,” who claim that the Democratic Party can become a workers’ party and who seek to bind mass opposition from below to the Democrats, exposes the bankruptcy of the political perspective of the DSA and the rest of the pseudo-left.
The Australian Education Union is once again trying to bulldoze Victorian teachers and staff into accepting a wage and condition cutting sellout that they have twice rejected.
10. Chile’s courts seal impunity for Carabinero officer who blinded Gustavo Gatica
The legal architecture of impunity for the forces of state repression has been built through the combined efforts of the entire political establishment—right, center and pseudo-left alike.
11. Homeless people die in New Zealand winter
At least two homeless people died in recent weeks in New Zealand amid plummeting winter temperatures.
According to a report in the Press on August 7, a woman was found on the beach in New Brighton, Christchurch, by local resident Justine Balcar just before 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 25. That evening, Balcar and her husband brought the woman, Hayley, some food and then phoned emergency services, concerned that “she was possibly hypothermic.”
Balcar said “Police turned up five minutes later and told us an ambulance was on its way.” The woman died in hospital the following morning. The recorded temperature on the morning of July 26 was -4.3 degrees Celsius (24.26 F).
About a week later, at around 4.00 a.m. on August 3, a man in his early 40s was found dead on Cuba Street in Wellington. The Post reported: “He could not be revived and the cause of his death has been referred to the Coroner. He was understood to have been an occasional rough sleeper.”
Snow fell in Wellington on August 4, a very rare occurrence for the capital city, which currently has no emergency night shelter for homeless people.
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These appalling deaths are the foreseeable and preventable outcome of the ruthless dismantling of social welfare, public healthcare and housing programs carried out by successive governments.
Dr Bruce Arroll, a general practitioner who treats homeless people at Auckland City Mission’s Calder Centre, told Radio NZ on July 9 that the average age at which his patients die is 55 for men and 54 for women—about one-third below the country’s overall life expectancy.
12. Australian union calls off strike by Victorian doctors
In what would have been their first strike in 20 years, thousands of doctors at seven Melbourne hospitals had planned to stop work for 3.5 hours, as part of a year-long enterprise bargaining dispute with the state Labor government over wages and conditions.
13. Historian Mario Kessler denounces sentencing of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk
The following statement denouncing the sentencing of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk was submitted to the World Socialist Web Site by German Professor Mario Kessler:
I, Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian in Berlin, hereby strongly protest the Pervomaisk court’s conviction of Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk.
Mr. Syrotiuk is accused of acting on behalf of the Putin regime in Russia. In court, Mr. Syrotiuk pleaded not guilty. He stated that, as a Ukrainian socialist, he condemns the Russian invasion from its beginning. The World Socialist Web Site, which is actively campaigning for his release and for which I was also interviewed, is a website registered in the United States.
The website is affiliated with a Trotskyist organization. Must I remind you that Leon Trotsky, as People’s Commissar for Defense, ensured the formation of the Red Army, which was able to curb the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews during the civil war? Must I also remind you that in 1939, Trotsky vehemently condemned the partition of Western Ukraine between Germany and the Soviet Union and advocated for a Ukraine independent of the Soviet Union—including Stalin’s Soviet Union?
How does this fit with the accusation that Mr. Syrotiuk, a self-proclaimed socialist and Trotskyist, is playing along with Putin’s game?
Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian
14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
