On
Labor Day 2026, the American working class confronts an assault without
precedent in the post-World War II period. The economic crisis of
American capitalism has produced a single response from the ruling class
and both of its political parties: make the working class pay.
Under
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Medicaid, which insures 74.9
million people, including 35.7 million children, is being cut by more
than $900 billion over a decade through work requirements, eligibility
purges and monthly re-certification. The Congressional Budget Office
estimates that between 11 and 17 million people will lose coverage. The
same law triggers nearly $500 billion in automatic Medicare cuts.
Food
stamps have been slashed by $187 billion, the largest reduction in the
program’s history, stripping benefits from roughly 5 million people, at
least 1.2 million of them children. The Wall Street Journal, celebrating this as reform, demands that “mandatory spending”—that is, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—be cut further.
Brothers,
Herb and Ira Bibbero, attend a political rally to celebrate Labor Day
at Elysian Park in Los Angeles on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. [AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes]
This
money is to be funneled into war. The administration’s fiscal 2027
budget demands $1.5 trillion for the military, an increase of $445
billion and, adjusted for inflation, the largest single-year rise since
World War II. The Pentagon has sought more than $200 billion in
supplemental funding for the war against Iran.
The deficit is
itself a mechanism of enrichment. The national debt passed $40 trillion
on Aug. 18, double its level when Trump first entered the White House in
January 2017, and interest payments are approaching $1 trillion a
year.
This is a continuous tribute paid by the working class to
the financial oligarchy that owns the debt. Households in the top 1
percent hold 38 percent of all government and municipal securities owned
by American households, according to the Federal Reserve’s
Distributional Financial Accounts, while what flows to the bottom half
of the population is negligible. The growth of the debt and the growth
of the fortunes at the top are one process.
The overriding reality
of American life is the staggering levels of social inequality. Median
compensation for S&P 500 chief executives reached $17.3 million last
year and the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio climbed to 312-to-1,
according to the AFL-CIO’s 2026 Executive Paywatch report. That ratio
excludes Elon Musk, whose pay package is $158 billion and who became the
world’s first trillionaire in June. Labor’s share of national income
has fallen to its lowest level since World War II.
The ruling
class understands that a program of this scale cannot be imposed by
democratic means. Trump is manufacturing the pretexts for suppressing,
rigging or overturning the November midterm elections, demanding passage
of the SAVE America Act to disenfranchise millions of working class
voters, while his regime declares that it will not lose an election for
100 years. In January, federal agents murdered Renée Nicole Good and
Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis during the paramilitary
occupation of the city. The drive to dictatorship is the political form
of the assault on the working class.
The Trump administration is a
government of, by and for the oligarchy. The Democrats, however, are
not an opposition party. They are co-conspirators in the ruling class
assault on workers. The entire establishment, whatever its internal
squabbles, is united in placing the burden of the escalating capitalist
crisis on the working class.
And it is here that the role of the
trade union bureaucracy becomes decisive. If the media refers to Labor
Day at all, it is to equate the working class with the trade unions. But
the American labor movement, which once provided some defense against
the predations of the employers, died long ago.
The unions today
are labor enforcers, incorporated into the structure of corporate
management and the capitalist state. UAW President Shawn Fain boasts of
working with the Trump administration on tariffs, the same trade war
that has thrown tens of thousands of autoworkers out of their jobs, and
has told his members nothing about the threat of dictatorship. Any
struggle that escapes the control of this apparatus is intolerable,
because the entire strategy of making workers pay depends on suppressing
the class struggle.
The bureaucracy has performed this role for
nearly five decades. In the 1980s, the AFL-CIO colluded in
deindustrialization and the destruction of PATCO because it accepted
that American workers’ wages had to be driven down to compete with
Japan. In 2009, the UAW lent its full assistance to the Obama
administration’s restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler, ramming
through contracts that slashed wages and imposed the tier system on the
next generation of workers.
What this means in practice is written
in blood. More than 5,000 workers are killed on the job every year,
nearly 14 a day, and the AFL-CIO estimates that 120,000 to 135,000 more
die annually from occupational disease. On Aug. 1, James Brasher, 57, a
UAW member with more than 30 years’ seniority, fell 25 feet to his death
at Stellantis’ Mopar parts center in Center Line, Michigan, the third
Stellantis worker killed under the UAW’s “historic” 2023 contract.
Thursday night, Moet McCullum, 41, a mother of three with 11 months on
the job, was struck and killed by a D train in the Bronx while setting
up flagging lights, as the Transport Workers Union blocks strike action
by New York City transit workers.
This is an international
process. In Germany, IG Metall has agreed to the elimination of tens of
thousands of Volkswagen jobs and joined the works councils in
celebrating the “cost discipline” that is destroying the livelihoods of
the workers who produce all value, even as the plants are converted to
armaments production.
The reality of social life is fueling an
immense growth of social opposition, which increasingly takes the form
of a rebellion against the bureaucracy itself. Contract after contract
has been voted down. The year began in Minnesota, where more than
100,000 workers and young people demonstrated on Jan. 23 against the ICE
occupation of the state. The union apparatus, working with the
Democrats, conspired to block the development of a general strike
movement.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees exists to give this movement organized form. It encourages
and spearheads the development of committees elected and controlled by
workers themselves in every workplace, linked across industries and
across national borders. In the 1930s, workers who could not advance
through the craft-based American Federation of Labor built new
industrial organizations, which became the CIO.
Such committees
do more than defend workers against the employers. They are the
anticipatory forms of genuine workers’ democracy and workers’ power,
through which the working class begins to constitute itself as the
future ruling class. The campaign of Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker
running for UAW president on a program of abolishing the apparatus and
transferring power to the shop floor, has given this revolt conscious
political expression.
The crisis of American capitalism cannot be
resolved within the framework of the profit system. The ruling class has
no answer but war abroad, austerity at home and dictatorship to enforce
both. The working class must answer with its own independent
mobilization: the building of rank-and-file committees in every
workplace, their unification internationally through the IWA-RFC, and
the fight for a workers’ government and the socialist reorganization of
economic life.
The Socialist Equality Party fights to arm the
developing movement of the working class with a revolutionary and
internationalist perspective. We urge every worker and young person who
agrees with this perspective to join the SEP today.
The desperate attempt by tens of thousands of migrants to reach the
Spanish north African enclave of Ceuta is being seized on by the
right-wing Popular Party (PP) and neo-fascist Vox to topple the
Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government.
In July, around 70,000
people crossed or attempted to cross into Ceuta, in the hope of escaping
poverty. At least 140 are reported to have drowned in the deadliest
mass attempt to reach European territory in recent history.
What followed exposed the brutal machinery of the European Union’s
Fortress Europe enforced by the PSOE-Sumar government. Madrid deployed
the army alongside police units, sealed off any possibility of reaching
mainland Spain, and worked with the Moroccan authorities to carry out
mass expulsions. Tens of thousands were trapped without accommodation
and with restricted access to food and water. Soldiers and police swept
through the city, pushing migrants over the Moroccan border.
The
Sánchez government later boasted that around 90 percent of migrants had
been expelled. Around 5,000 people remained in Ceuta, including roughly
1,500 minors. They have faced a pogrom-like atmosphere, with far-right
vigilante groups and armed men pursuing migrants through the streets and
mobs attempting to descend on the makeshift camps.
The entire Spanish political establishment has responded by declaring in
unison an “invasion”. Sánchez, on arriving in Ceuta on July 31,
denounced the crossings as an “attack” and a “violation of the
territorial integrity of Spain,” declaring that the government would use
“all the resources of the State” to defend Ceuta.
*****
Millions of workers are understandably alarmed by the possibility
that the far-right could bring down the government and come to power.
The Vox and PP seek to channel mounting social anger against migrants,
in order to ultimately target the entire working class, demanding a vast
expansion of military expenditure and subordinating every aspect of
social policy to rearmament and the interests of Spanish and European
capitalism. But the record of the PSOE, Sumar and Podemos demonstrates
that the far-right cannot be defeated by subordinating the working class
to parties that implement the same agenda.
PSOE-led governments
and their pseudo-left allies have enforced the EU’s fascistic
anti-migrant border regime, presided over falling living standards and
increased military expenditure to record levels. This is what
strengthens the far-right—creating the political framework on which it
feeds.
The fight against the far-right requires the political
independence of the working class from the PSOE-Sumar government and
from Podemos. It requires the construction of a new political party
based on socialism, internationalism and the unity of workers across
national, ethnic and religious divisions. Spanish, Moroccan, African and
immigrant workers have common social interests that are fundamentally
opposed to attempts to divide them along national or racial lines.
The Socialist Equality Party (UK) devoted its monthly readers meeting
on September 2 to a call to join the campaign to free our comrade,
Bogdan Syrotiuk.
Bogdan is facing 15 years in a Ukrainian prison.
He has been targeted by the right-wing Zelensky regime and convicted of
high treason after a political show trial. The verdict makes explicit
that his fundamental “crime” is to have opposed the fratricidal
slaughter in the Ukraine, waged as a proxy war against Russia by the
NATO powers. He has opposed the reactionary invasion of Ukraine by the
Putin regime and called for a unified offensive by workers in Ukraine
and Russia to bring the war to an end.
The meeting was addressed by German language editor of the World Socialist Web Site
and leading member of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, Johannes
Stern, who has played a leading role in the campaign for Bogdan’s
freedom and has been interviewed on multiple media platforms.
Stern directed his contribution to “two questions that are
inseparably connected, the escalating war in Ukraine and the fight to
free our comrade Bogdan Syrotiuk.”
He noted that the German government has now “formally accused Russia of responsibility for the explosive drone found at the Leipzig/Halle airport
on August 4,” using this to announce punitive measures, including a
more aggressive response against what they call the Russian shadow
fleet.
“It’s coming very close to an open state of war,” said Stern, “But if you ask the question, cui bono, who benefits, it’s more the interests of the imperialist powers in Ukraine and not Russia.”
*****
“Today, the German ruling class is once again declaring that it must
dominate Europe, also militarily, and pursue its interests as a global
power.”
This assessment, said Stern, leads directly to the case of
our comrade Bogdan. He explained how the 27-year-old Bogdan had begun
turning to socialism quite early on. “His life, his family background is
very much connected to the history of the 20th century. His grandfather
fought in the Red Army and opposed the Nazi invasion, also living
through the years of famine under Stalin.”
Bogdan had eventually turned to the World Socialist Web Site
and the International Committee of the Fourth International, together
with his group, the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, which is active
in Ukraine and Russia. They had adopted a conscious Trotskyist socialist
internationalist perspective, “And that was basically his crime.”
*****
Stern asked why Bogdan was considered so dangerous that he had to be
locked up for 15 years: “I think the answer is clear. Bogdan fought for
the only viable perspective which can actually stop this catastrophe. He
opposed the NATO war offensive. He opposed Putin’s invasion. He
actively rejected the poison of Ukrainian and Russian nationalism with
his comrades. He insisted on this basis that Russian Ukrainian workers
who are now being sent to kill one another have common class interests
and have to unite and have to organize and conduct a joint struggle
against the ruling cliques on both sides of the battlefield.”
*****
Chris Marsden, National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party
(UK) said that the Zelensky regime wanted Bogdan dead, “And they want to
throw him into a hole until he is.”
He drew a parallel with Julian Assange,
“who came as close as anyone would ever did to dying here in the UK.
Julian Assange went into prison with a compromised condition. Bogdan,
who has significant illnesses, has been locked away now for two years
and is facing 15 more. And we’re not going to let that happen.”
Marsden
noted that in Andy Burnham’s first House of Commons speech as prime
minister. “The first real thing he talked about was waging war in
Ukraine….
“His Labour government will escalate the offensive
against Russia at the direct expense of the working class. The dangers
of this cannot be stressed enough.” If capitalism continued, “the drive
to redivide the world and its resources and markets between the major
imperialist powers threatens catastrophe on a global scale. And the only
way out of this nightmare is through capitalism’s overthrow by the
working class.
On September 1, Peru’s recently elected far-right president, Keiko
Fujimori, broke diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This action constitutes the most open expression to date of her
government’s subordination to the rapacious foreign policy of US
imperialism.
The shameful act against a country subjected to incessant bombardment
by the most powerful military power on the planet came just one day
after the United States announced the robbery of the century: Washington
had secured “majority US control of more than 65 billion barrels of
proven oil reserves in Venezuela.”
This figure amounts to
one-fifth of Venezuela’s reserves, the largest in the world. However,
Washington is in fact asserting control over the country’s oil industry
as a whole. The agreement was negotiated directly at the point of a gun
by Marco Rubio, Trump’s principal operative in Latin America, with
Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez, without even consulting
the executives of the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela
(PDVSA), much less the legislature or the Venezuelan people.
The
subjugation of Venezuela and its transformation into a semi-colony of US
imperialism, whose resources can be used to support US global
militarism, followed immediately by Peru’s breaking of diplomatic
relations with Tehran, are clear indications of the globalization of the
conflict.
The war in the Middle East is increasingly intertwined with the
imperialist struggle for markets, resources and strategic dominance
worldwide, drawing South America ever more directly into an expanding
global confrontation.
*****
Fujimori’s decision to align Peru more closely with Washington comes
immediately after the US takeover of a major share of Venezuela’s vast
oil reserves. By demonstrating her usefulness to Washington at precisely
this moment, Fujimori is also positioning her government to seek
preferential access to Venezuelan oil or other economic concessions that
could help contain the domestic impact of soaring energy prices.
But
the breaking of relations with Iran goes far beyond oil prices.
Fujimori is using the crisis to ingratiate herself with Donald Trump and
demonstrate that her government can serve as a reliable ally of
Washington in South America.
In this arena, she is competing with Argentine President Javier
Milei, Trump’s most strident ally on the continent and the only South
American president to have offered direct assistance to the United
States for its war against Iran. Fervently pro-US, pro-Israel and
anti-Iran, Milei recently emphasized that Argentina had designated
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force as terrorist organizations
and had “expelled the chargé d’affaires of the Iranian regime.”
Close
behind is Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, who has
carried out an explicit strategic shift toward Washington and Israel,
including Colombia’s incorporation into the US-led security architecture
and the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
Chilean
President José Antonio Kast also backed the US-Israeli attack on Iran.
“Chile must always be an ally of the nations that promote freedom and
democracy,” he declared.
Ecuador and Bolivia have called for a
diplomatic solution to the conflict, but neither government has openly
challenged the US offensive against Iran.
In Brazil, Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva, who heads one of the few surviving “Pink Tide”
governments in Latin America, is favored to finish first in the first
round of the October 4 presidential election. He has made limited calls
for a diplomatic solution in the Middle East. However, the election
could lead to a runoff between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former
President Jair Bolsonaro and the candidate favored by Trump.
During
the presidential campaign, Flávio Bolsonaro has attacked Lula’s
position on Iran as unacceptable and advocated unconditional alignment
with Washington and Israel.
*****
This year makes particularly clear that NATO’s war against Russia in
Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran are
not isolated conflicts. They are part of the breakdown of the world
order established after World War II and of an increasingly open
struggle over markets, raw materials, trade routes and geostrategic
positions.
At the center of this process is the growing
confrontation between the United States and China. The enormous and
increasingly unsustainable US public debt, which exceeds $40 trillion,
together with growing threats to the dollar’s position as the principal
international currency, are driving Washington’s efforts to contain
China, an emerging economic power that already rivals the United States
in important fields of technology, industry and science.
It is
precisely this confrontation that places Peru at the center of
conflicting global strategic interests. The Chancay megaport, built with
decisive Chinese capital participation, is conceived as a major
commercial connection point between South America and Asia. Potentially
linked to transcontinental land corridors, it could considerably reduce
transportation times and costs between South America’s principal
productive centers and China.
For this reason, Chancay has become one of the principal points of friction between Washington and Beijing in South America.
Representatives of US imperialism, including Marco Rubio, Pete
Hegseth and J.D. Vance, have repeatedly warned Latin American
governments against the growing Chinese presence, accusing Beijing of
unfair trade practices, corruption, espionage and the use of strategic
infrastructure for political and potentially military purposes. In the
case of Chancay, sections of the US political and military establishment
have even raised the danger that the port could acquire a dual-use
character and eventually serve the Chinese navy.
Washington’s
accusations about the Chinese threat to international supply chains are
particularly hypocritical. It is Trump’s tariff policy, together with
the growing use of economic sanctions and trade controls, that is
deliberately fracturing global production and trade chains.
Nor is
there any historical basis for presenting the United States as the
defender of Latin American sovereignty against supposed foreign
aggression. For nearly two centuries, the principal interventionist
military power in Latin America has been the United States. In the
Mexican-American War of 1846–48, Washington seized from Mexico an
immense territory that today comprises California, Nevada and Utah, as
well as parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. This was
followed by innumerable military interventions and Washington-backed
coups throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Fujimori’s
subordination to Washington also has deep roots in her government’s
internal crisis. Since she assumed the presidency, killings linked to
extortion have continued out of control, crime has become a growing
source of discontent and rising fuel and food prices have provoked
social conflicts. At the same time, Fujimori is having difficulty
imposing her will on the new bicameral Congress.
*****
Fujimori therefore seeks US backing not only against China and in
foreign policy, but also as support for a government preparing to
confront growing social opposition within Peru itself. The use of the
Armed Forces as an instrument of internal control and Peru’s alignment
with the US offensive abroad are two aspects of the same process.
The
breaking of relations with Iran must be understood in this context. It
is neither an isolated diplomatic decision nor a sudden concern on
Fujimori’s part for Iranian democracy. It is a political declaration
directed primarily at Washington: in the face of the growing
confrontation between the United States and China and the expansion of
war in the Middle East, the Peruvian government is offering its services
to US imperialism.
Without
any discussion with their members, a handful of highly paid trade union
bureaucrats agreed to every demand of the VW executive board and the
company's owners.
A New York City transit worker was killed by a train late Thursday
night, the latest victim in a series of workplace deaths across the
United States. Moet McCullum, 41, a conductor with only 11 months on the
job and a mother of three, was setting up flagging protection near
River Avenue and East 161st Street in the Bronx when a southbound D
train struck her just after 11:30 p.m. She was pronounced dead at
Lincoln Hospital at 12:42 a.m. Friday. The operator reported seeing no
warning lights before the collision.
McCullum normally worked from
a conductor’s cab, making announcements, opening and closing the doors
and watching the platform. Conductors can also be assigned as
construction flaggers. Before a track crew begins work, flaggers walk
onto the tracks to place colored warning lights that tell train operator
workers are ahead and require them to slow down or stop. While they
establish that protection, their safety depends on the control center
and dispatchers telling approaching operators where they are.
An
internal report by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the
state agency that runs New York City’s subways and buses, said
McCullum’s supervisor felt wind and heard a train approaching around a
curve. A lookout blew a whistle for the workers to clear. The operator
said he had been warned that flaggers were on the track but, seeing no
warning lights, proceeded at normal speed.
In the center of world
finance, subway workers still enter active tracks with hand-placed
lamps, whistles and radios. Wall Street’s 2025 bonus pool was $49.2
billion. The MTA’s $21.3 billion 2026 operating budget will send roughly
$2.9 billion—13.5 percent of its revenues—to principal and interest on
debt. The share is projected to reach 15.8 percent by 2029 as the
authority takes on another $18 billion in operating-budget-backed debt.
*****
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made no public statement on McCullum’s death
as of this writing. Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of
America, won office by appealing to widespread anger over inequality,
exploitation and the cost of living. Since taking office, he has courted
Wall Street executives and met twice with President Donald Trump,
retained Jessica Tisch—an heir to the billionaire Tisch family—as police
commissioner, fired Haitian city employees after the Trump
administration stripped them of work authorization, and has sued to
block $10,000 bonuses for public school paraprofessionals, among the
city’s lowest-paid education workers.
The death on the subway is
part of an ongoing industrial slaughterhouse in America. Within roughly
40 hours spanning September 2 and 3, at least five workers were reported
killed on the job: Bradley Clouse died in a machine incident at a
Kentucky auto parts plant; Ramiro Aaron Sanchez died while maintaining
machinery in El Paso; Army Corps employee Robert Scott Pannell was
killed beneath a falling tree in Mississippi; and sanitation worker Carl
Williams III died beneath an overturned garbage truck in Texas.
On
Sunday, at least five were killed and five injured when an Amazon cargo
plane overshot the runway and crashed into traffic in Miami.
*****
In 2024, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) found a growing
pattern of safety incidents that created a “substantial risk of death or
personal injury.” It recorded 38 near misses involving track workers in
2023, up 58 percent from 2022 and 65 percent from 2021. Its
investigators found improper flagging and communications, inadequate
track protection, lack of supervision, failures in territory using
computerized train control and train-operator inattention.
Failures
in flagging and communication have already led to the death of
construction flagger Louis Gray Jr. on November 3, 2016 and serious
injuries for Jeffrey Fleming. The two men were placing yellow lights on a
Brooklyn curve, and the G train operator had not been told they were
ahead.
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators
blamed the Rail Control Center’s failure to inform dispatchers that
flaggers were on the track. They also cited the MTA’s failure to assess
the risks and its decision to permit trains into unprotected work zones.
The NTSB recommended that trains be limited to restricted speed while
flagging protection was established.
Communication-Based Train
Control, installed on only part of the subway, can enforce a speed
restriction after it is entered into the system; it does not detect
workers. After Gray’s death, the MTA tested holding trains before
flaggers entered, posting another flagger at the preceding station and
carrying flaggers by train to the warning points. It never adopted those
measures systemwide.
The MTA has relied on the Transport Workers
Union bureaucracy to suppress opposition among transit workers and
prevent a common struggle across the authority’s workforce.
Transport Workers Union Local 100’s contract with the MTA expired at
midnight on May 16, the same time 3,500 Long Island Rail Road (LIRR)
workers began a strike against the agency. Local 100 professed support
for the strikers but kept 40,000 subway and bus workers on the job,
isolating the railroad workers. The strike ended three days later after
the MTA agreed to annual raises of 3 percent, 3 percent, 3.5 percent and
4.5 percent, plus a $3,000 payment.
*****
Local 100 enforces New York’s Taylor Law, which bars public employees
from striking, against its own members. In 2008, following the 60-hour
transit strike three years earlier, then-President Roger Toussaint and
the Executive Board pledged under oath that the union had “no intention,
now or in the future” of conducting or assisting another strike.
*****
Transit workers cannot leave either the investigation into McCullum’s
death or their contract fight in the hands of Local 100 officials. They
should form rank-and-file committees, independent of the union
apparatus and the Democratic Party, to conduct their own investigation
with full access to the MTA’s internal report, control-center
communications, train-speed data and the 2016 flagging agreement. These
committees must control safety and staffing, enforce restricted speed
before flaggers enter the tracks and stop work whenever conditions are
unsafe without fear of retaliation.
They must also unite subway,
bus and commuter-rail workers in a common contract struggle for
inflation-busting wage increases with automatic cost-of-living
adjustments, an end to healthcare concessions and the inferior Tier 6
pension plan imposed on workers hired since 2012 and the repeal of the
Taylor Law. These demands must be paid for not through fare hikes but by
canceling the MTA’s Wall Street debt and redirecting those billions to
rebuilding the system and protecting its workers.
Mack
Trucks worker and UAW rank-and-file presidential candidate Will Lehman
demanded the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk and called on
autoworkers to bring resolutions for his freedom before their locals.
The 55th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) summit, held this year in Palau,
concluded on September 4. The event was marked by intense diplomatic
pressure from the United States and its allies, Australia and New
Zealand, which pressured the small island nations to issue a joint
statement condemning a Chinese missile test conducted in the Pacific in
July.
When the 18-member PIF summit opened on August 30 the prime ministers of
Fiji, Solomon Islands, Samoa, Vanuatu and Kiribati had all withdrawn,
citing domestic politics, poor health and travel issues. Behind the
withdrawals, however, were escalating tensions caused by the advanced
war preparations of US imperialism against China.
*****
Palau and the Marshall Islands—both US semi-colonies—and Tuvalu, are
the only three Pacific states that maintain diplomatic relations with
Taipei rather than Beijing. Palau invited Taiwan to participate in this
year’s summit as a “development partner,” deliberately stoking tensions
with China. Taiwan, China and the US were all barred from last year’s
summit in the Solomon Islands.
In fact, there was no consensus at
the summit. Many Pacific countries do not want to alienate Beijing as it
provides significant development aid and loans. Naoero (formally Nauru)
and Kiribati had earlier opposed a Pacific Foreign Ministers’ statement
on the Chinese test. At the PIF Naoero formally dissented from the
official statement, while Kiribati’s representative David Teaabo was
absent from the leaders’ retreat.
The Australian Broadcasting
Corporation (ABC) reported that Kiribati Prime Minister Taneti Maamau
declared in parliament last month: “America has been bombing, and
testing its bombs … in the Marshall Islands, islands near us, and why
don’t we ask questions or criticise America?”
*****
In what has become an empty annual ritual, the PIF leaders’
communique declared that climate change remains “the single greatest
threat to the security, livelihoods and well-being of the Pacific
people.” As the summit was meeting in Palau, the UN Environmental
Program released a report which said global temperatures were now 1.4
degrees above pre-industrial levels and will continue to rise above 1.5
degrees, resulting in “irreversible losses and permanently changed
conditions.”
The major capitalist powers, which are responsible
for the bulk of carbon emissions, have done nothing to address the
climate catastrophe. They have barely lifted a finger to protect small
island nations from the consequences, including the existential threat
of rising sea levels and frequent natural disasters.
The
far-right party, which trivialities the Nazi regime, stirs up hatred
against migrants, seeks to ideologically co-opt culture and education,
and aims to establish a police state, secured 44.2 percent of the vote.
And this was achieved with a record turnout of 78 percent.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Wednesday,
September 2 that it had set a record for the number of arrests of
immigrants for the third straight month. The department, which includes
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border
Protection (CBP), claimed it kidnapped 50,925 people in August,
exceeding the nearly 50,000 the month before and the 49,000 in June.
“For the third straight month, ICE set a new record for the highest
number of illegal aliens arrested in a single month, nearly 51,000,”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gloated in a DHS press
release.
DHS claims over 3 million people have left the country
since Trump returned to the White House. This includes those who were
deported, illegally renditioned to a third country, or, under threat of
being kidnapped and held in a for-profit concentration camp,
“voluntarily” left the country.
While the Trump administration
scapegoats immigrants for all the problems created by the capitalist
system—from rising home prices and stagnant wages to every form of
criminality—ICE arrest data analyzed by Cato Institute immigration
analyst David Bier showed that 79 percent of those arrested had no
criminal conviction. Fifty-five percent had neither a conviction nor a
pending criminal charge, while only 4 percent had been convicted of a
violent offense. Bier testified before the House Judiciary Committee
last week.
The assault on immigrants is part of a broader attack
by the ruling class directed against the entire working class. Under
conditions where the national debt has soared past $40 trillion and
workers and young people are increasingly interested in socialist
politics, the US government is criminalizing opposition and making
people “illegal” who had lived legally in the country for years.
*****
On Thursday, the Trump
administration carried out its third consecutive weekly deportation
flight to Haiti since TPS ended, and at least the 11th flight this year.
The flight originated in Alexandria, Louisiana and landed in
Cap-Haïtien with 101 deportees aboard, according to a Haitian Foreign
Affairs Ministry official.
In a fascistic post celebrating the
deportation, DHS Secretary Mullin shared an image on X featuring black
men in chains, with the caption, “Good morning, America. Today’s
deportation destination: HAITI.”
*****
As ICE is increasing its kidnapping operations, resistance is growing
among workers, students and community members throughout the country.
Last
Wednesday, September 2, more than 1,000 people protested against ICE
kidnapping operations in Danbury, Connecticut. In the week prior, Connecticut Mirror
reported that ICE had taken over 100 people in the state, a majority
from Danbury. The town is located about 50 miles north of New York City
and is home to just under 90,000 people.
Residents report that ICE thugs have been going after immigrants at
work, while shopping for groceries and even while dropping off their
kids at school bus stops. Juliana Soares, a lead organizer of the group
“Danbury Unites for Immigrants,” told NBC that at least 65 families in
the community had been impacted by ICE operations.
Speaking with
Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!,” Soares surmised that Danbury was being
targeted by ICE because “Danbury is a diverse city, it’s one of the most
diverse cities in the country.” Roughly one third of the city’s
population is Latino, according to the US Census Bureau, including a
large Brazilian population.
Describing the police terror, Soares
said, “The streets were empty, kids stayed home from practice, kids
stayed home from school, kids were seeing [their parents taken] from
inside the bus, as agents, masked agents often, would shut down the
street to just abduct people.”
In Colorado on Friday, September 4,
students from more than 200 high schools throughout the state walked
out of class to protest attacks on immigrants. Walkouts featuring dozens
to hundreds of students occurred in Denver, the surrounding suburbs,
Colorado Springs and, significantly, Greeley, where some 3,800
meatpacking workers went on strike earlier this year in the largest
meatpacking struggle in decades.
A majority of the workers at the
JBS plant in Greeley are immigrants, with dozens of languages spoken
inside the plant. During the strike, a worker at the plant told WSWS reporters, “We represent the immigrants and all the people of color. That’s us, that’s the people that are doing these jobs.
“Without immigrants, there is no food, there is no work.”
Video
from Friday’s protest in Greeley shows students marching while
chanting, “Get ICE out!” Students carried handmade signs that read,
“Immigrants make America great!” and “Abolish ICE.”
*****
In Denver, hundreds of students rallied at La Alma-Lincoln Park to protest ICE kidnapping operations. In an interview with ColoradoNewsline,
15-year-old student Macy Brown said, “I think human rights are really
important, and I think we all need to speak up against injustices that
are happening right in front of us.”
Naya Ferguson, a 16-year-old
student at Bear Creek High School in Jefferson County, said she drove to
the park to attend the protest after seeing students walking out of her
school. She told ColoradoNewsLine, “What ICE is doing is just
unconstitutional, unlawful. It’s inhumane, and I just don’t want to sit
back and just watch it happen. It’s not who I am.”
On Friday, on the other side of the country, in Fredrick, Maryland, ICE thugs, with police watching, bludgeoned and assaulted
non-violent protesters who had formed a human chain around a house
targeted by the immigration Gestapo. Residents and local reporters claim
ICE began menacing residents in Fredrick on Monday, August 31, and
specifically in the Taskers Chance neighborhood beginning on Wednesday.
Residents
reported seeing SUVs with tinted windows and masked and armed men on
street corners and parked outside houses. In response, residents began
organizing shifts to observe the agents and their activities.
On
Friday night, after agents had occupied a section of the neighborhood
for more than 40 hours, ICE thugs lined up several vehicles and began to
surround a house. Observers on the sidewalk were forced to move out of
the path of the ICE vehicles, which drove onto the sidewalk, nearly
striking several observers.
César Díaz, Frederick City Council president, told the Baltimore Banner
he witnessed Katie Nash, vice president of the Frederick City Council,
nearly run over by an ICE agent. “People had to move or risk getting run
over,” he said, identifying Nash as a person at risk. “I had to step
back to avoid from getting hit by the car.”
In front of the home,
several community members and anti-ICE protesters were seated with
locked arms to prevent ICE officers from entering. It is unclear if ICE
agents ever presented a warrant of any kind, judicial or administrative.
With
local police watching, ICE goons began attacking the nonviolent
protesters in front of the house. Video taken by bystanders shows ICE
agents swinging batons at people seated on the ground.
*****
The Trump administration is able to carry out the mass deportation
operation only because of the collaboration of the Democratic Party.
Last week the House, in a resounding bipartisan 370-48 vote, passed
legislation to fund the federal government, including DHS, through
December 11.
The bill, which was supported by Trump, had already cleared the Senate. It was signed by Trump on September 2.
The
necessity of building an independent movement in the working class
against both parties and the capitalist system they represent could not
be any clearer. While posturing against Trump’s fascistic regime, the
Democrats do everything in their power to ensure that his legislative
and police state agenda moves forward.
The protests against ICE in
Colorado, Maryland and throughout the country point the way forward.
But protesting is not enough. The protests must become the starting
point for uniting the working class, immigrant and native-born, and
mobilizing its social power independently of both capitalist parties on
the basis of a socialist perspective.
Two events in the past week have illustrated the growing lack of
international confidence in the stability of the US financial and
political system.
Last Wednesday the Dutch National Bank (DNB)
revealed that between March and August it had moved part of its gold
holdings from New York and Ottawa to London because of “increasing
geopolitical unrest.”
This was followed by an announcement from
the manager of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund that it was proposing an
overhaul of its government bond holdings which could result in a cut to
its stock of US Treasury bonds by as much as $80 billion as it looked to
other kinds of debt which could bring a greater return.
The Dutch
central bank said it had moved around 86 tonnes of its total gold
holdings of 313 tonnes in the US and Canada and that it was
“strengthening its crisis preparedness.”
The language used in the
DNB statement was carefully guarded but it did not take too much reading
between the lines to pick up the essential meaning. It said that gold
held with the Bank of England was regarded as “the world’s most easily
tradable gold and will therefore be the most readily available for DNB
in a crisis situation. The gold reserves in New York and Ottawa cannot
be utilised as quickly in such a situation.”
In its report on the move the Financial Times (FT) said it
followed calls in Europe for repatriation of gold from the US amid
warnings that “an unreliable American government under President Donald
Trump may otherwise seize them amid growing transatlantic tensions.”
*****
France already moved all its gold from the New York Fed between July
2025 and January 2026, with the governor of the French central bank at
the time saying it was not politically motivated.
But others are
pointing to this issue. Laurent Schwartz, president of the Paris-based
National Gold Counter, which is involved in gold trading in France, told
Agence France-Presse that central banks had been moving their gold
reserves around over the past decade.
“The current political
context in the United States might also push certain central banks into
favoring other storage locations,” he said.
Apart from giving details about how the transfer was carried out—a
mixture of physical movement and selling gold in New York and then
buying it in London—the DNB statement made a significant comment, shared
by other central banks, about the role of gold in the international
monetary system.
“Keeping a large share of the gold reserves in
London strengthens the function of gold as an anchor of trust. Gold is
seen as the ultimate reserve asset because it is ideally suited to hedge
extreme systemic risks.”
Ever since President Nixon removed the gold backing from the US
dollar in August 1971 and the international monetary system was based on
the dollar as a fiat currency—no longer backed by gold as the ultimate
embodiment of value but by confidence in the US financial
system—bourgeois economists and some who considered themselves to be
Marxists have maintained that Marx’s analysis of the pivotal role of
gold had been refuted.
But Marx’s analysis is being confirmed by what might be considered unlikely sources.
*****
The enhanced role of gold and the erosion of confidence in US financial assets are expressed in facts and figures.
In June, the European Central Bank reported on a significant jump in the portion of gold in the reserves held by central banks.
It
rose from 20 percent at the end of 2024 to 27 percent at the end of
last year. The proportion of US Treasury bonds fell from 25 percent to
22 percent over the same period. The rest of the reserves were made up
of dollar-denominated assets, coming in at 42 percent. Gold was now the
second highest component of reserves after topping the euro in 2025.
Renowned jazz artist Cassandra Wilson died in her hometown of Jackson,
Mississippi September 2, at the age of 70. In her performances, she
strove to break down stereotypes and expose listeners to music they
might or might not have heard before, but which she presented in a fresh
and original manner.
Wilson received her first Grammy nomination in 1995 for Best Jazz Vocal Album for her Blue Note release Blue Light ‘til Dawn. The following year she spoke to Time magazine about her musical approach:
We
live very segmented lives … There’s Black music and there’s white
music. There’s R&B and funk and whatever. This has always bothered
me. People don’t see things in streams, they don’t see what tends to
connect us all together. That’s what I see. That’s what I try to get at.
There
was a continuity in her approach and opinions. In an interview given
last year in Mississippi, Wilson spoke about that earlier album and the
Grammy nomination:
Now, what’s interesting about this
music, and this Grammy ... it was a new direction in jazz. No one had
ever tried to do something like this. I was combining the blues, with
jazz, with the music of Appalachian, with a little bit of rock, which is
what we do here in Jackson. We are at the crossroads of the South, and
so this is the music that I grew up listening to. But no one had ever
tried to bring all of these influences together in one big pie.
Though
Wilson’s most unmistakable musical attribute was her sultry contralto,
she was not just a singer. She was proficient on several instruments
and was the primary creative force in her production arrangements.
Most importantly, her music drew upon compositions without genre
limitations. One of her most surprising efforts was “Last Train to
Clarksville,” a tune written for the Monkees’ first NBC television
season, aired in 1966. The group and television series of the same name
was formed by media producers in part as an answer to the 1965 film Help! starring the Beatles.
Wilson's version of Last Train to Clarksville
The Monkees’ version
quickly became the band’s biggest hit. It’s an upbeat melody with a
young man on the phone arranging for his lover to meet him at the train
station to spend a last night together. But the final words “And I don’t
know if I’m ever coming home,” were, though not obviously, a reference
to the fate that every American young man had to consider as more and
more were drafted to provide US military forces to fight and often die
in Vietnam.
On her 1995 album, New Moon Daughter, Wilson included “Last Train to Clarksville.”
Her version evoked an entirely different feeling. From the first
measure, the listener is forewarned to pay attention. This isn’t the
ditty that many may be familiar with. Minor intervals darken the mood
and unusual instrumentation portrays a sense of foreboding that the
story deserves.
*****
Education played a major role in Wilson’s early life. What she has to
say about it is of considerable significance today. She noted that “the
love for music” was something
you have to get ...
very young. In order to, for it to expand and to grow up in individuals.
It is important, I think, it’s so, it’s such a tragedy that the
programs have been cut from our public schools. We don’t have the same
kind of funding for music education, in schools anymore.
And that
really, I think it shines a light inside of a young person’s spirit. If
you don’t have that for children, they can go astray. Music is very
important. Music, poetry, all of the arts. Very important.
Wilson
made 16 studio albums and performed all her life until her untimely
death. Every one of her albums and all of her performances are well
worth listening to. She performed on nighttime television like David Letterman’s show in 1996 and in concert. All of those recordings are now precious.
In that 2025 interview, Wilson shared some thoughts on jazz, speaking about the importance of keeping the genre alive.
Jazz takes time and it takes a disciplined ear to understand it.
I
sang at the Lincoln Center, did a special performance. It was all about
democracy and how jazz represents that democracy. Jazz is the music
that symbolizes who we are as a people, you know, being able to have
your own voice and celebrating that voice and listening, all of us
listening to each other.
On Sunday afternoon, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) held a rally
at Brandenburg Gate as part of its campaign for the Berlin House of
Representatives election under the slogan, “Stop the war in Ukraine!
Freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk!”
In the heart of the capital’s
political center, the rally delivered an important message against the
increasingly dangerous escalation of the war against Russia and for the
freedom of imprisoned Ukrainian socialist and opponent of war Bogdan
Syrotiuk.
*****
The first speaker was Johannes Stern, editor-in-chief of the
German-language WSWS. He explained that the demands “Stop the war in
Ukraine!” and “Freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk!” are inseparably connected.
Bogdan, he said, had been convicted “not for espionage, not for
sabotage, not for passing on military secrets.” His actual “crime”
consisted of opposing the war from a socialist and internationalist
standpoint.
*****
The second speaker was historian and SGP candidate Katja Rippert. She
examined in greater detail the political and social reality in Ukraine
and showed, based on the verdict itself, that it is precisely Bogdan’s
criticism of repression, forced mobilization and the glorification of
fascist forces that is being criminalized.
Among other things, the
court accuses him of the “non-recognition of Ukraine’s legitimately
elected political leadership and democratic processes,” “comparisons of
Ukrainian citizens with fascists and Nazis,” and the “denigration of
national heroes and historical figures.” His criticism of forced
mobilization and, explicitly, “propaganda for communist ideology and the
political current of Trotskyism” are also cited against him.
“These
points prove neither high treason nor any criminal offense,” Rippert
explained. “Above all, they demonstrate one thing: Bogdan spoke the
truth—and this truth is to be covered up and distorted by force.”
*****
The final speaker was Christoph Vandreier, the SGP’s lead candidate in
the Berlin House of Representatives election. He explained that the
party is deliberately placing Bogdan’s freedom at the center of its
election campaign because “all the essential issues of the election
campaign are crystallized in the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk.
*****
“The attack on Bogdan’s freedom is an attack on the freedom of us
all,” Vandreier said. If a young socialist in Ukraine could be sentenced
to 15 years in prison for articles opposing the war, this was also a
warning for Germany. Here too, demonstrations are banned, opponents of
war criminalized and the SGP defamed as “left-wing extremist” by the
Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Bogdan’s
persecution also exposes the real character of the Ukraine war. “The
Ukraine war is certainly not being waged in defense of peace and
freedom,” Vandreier said. It is about the same economic interests as 80
years ago.
While billions are poured into rearmament, jobs are
being destroyed, social spending cut, conscription reintroduced and
Bundeswehr officers sent into schools “to turn an entire generation once
again into cannon fodder for the rich.”
*****
The rally ended with repeated chants of “Free Bogdan Syrotiuk!”
The
response on Pariser Platz underscored the growing opposition to war,
rearmament and social cuts. The SGP is fighting to connect this
opposition with the struggle for Bogdan’s freedom and the building of an
international socialist anti-war movement of the working class.
The Sri Lankan government is celebrating its compliance with
International Monetary Fund (IMF) targets for austerity cuts, while
workers and oppressed people are falling deeper into poverty.
In
an August 26 speech to diplomats in Colombo, Central Bank Governor
Nandalal Weerasinghe declared that the economy had recovered to “almost
the level seen before the crisis”—the economic collapse which led to a
debt default in 2022. He cited stronger government revenue, improved
fiscal balances and progress on debt restructuring.
Earlier, on August 18, speaking to Bloomberg Television during an
“Invest Sri Lanka” roadshow in Australia, Weerasinghe urged foreign
investors to “take a fresh look” at Sri Lanka. Claiming the economy was
“recovering nicely,” he said “this is the time” to invest.
He
pointed to economic growth of around 5 percent and improved foreign
reserves. This “recovery,” overseen by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-led
National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government, is benefiting the
island’s wealthy capitalist elite—at the direct expense of millions of
workers, farmers and the rural poor.
The economic stabilization achieved since 2022 has been built on making working people pay for the
crisis through higher taxes, reduced real wages, cuts to public spending
and higher prices.
Signaling that the government is committed to
deepening its austerity measures, Department of Fiscal Policy Director
General M.K.C. Senanayake declared on August 30 that “all the conditions
will be met” for the seventh review of the IMF’s Extended Fund
Facility. IMF officials will visit Sri Lanka next week for the review.
*****
The increasing burden on workers is reflected in a staggering 33
percent decline in public sector wages since 2022. The private sector is
no better: economist Nishan de Mel recently cited provident fund (EPF)
data showing that 92 percent of formal private-sector employees earn
less than 100,000 rupees ($305) a month.
Prices of essential
goods continue to rise sharply: a kilogram of wheat flour increased by 9
percent last week to 207 rupees. Official inflation reached 8 percent
last month.
A recent comparison based on International Labour
Organization (ILO) data placed Sri Lanka 120th among 130 countries in
purchasing-power-adjusted minimum wages, at the equivalent of only $200 a
month. This is below Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
The
scale of the plunder is laid bare in the accounts of the ruling elite’s
own flagship companies. John Keells Holdings—Sri Lanka’s largest listed
conglomerate, with interests in banking, insurance, hotels, ports, tea,
food manufacturing, and supermarkets—closed the financial year to March
2026 with profit attributable to equity holders up 155 percent to Rs
13.24 billion, on recurring pre-tax profit that surged 143 percent to Rs
35.72 billion.
Commercial Bank, Sri Lanka’s largest private
bank, reported a June-quarter 2026 profit of Rs 17.49 billion, up nearly
8 percent year-on-year, bringing first-half 2026 profit to Rs 34.9
billion—a 13.56 percent increase over the same period in 2025.
*****
Workers are increasingly being compelled to launch struggles in
defiance of the official trade unions, which seek to confine them to
isolated and futile appeals to the capitalist state and employers.
Workers must break the stranglehold of the union bureaucracy, which
exists to enforce the demands of big business.
To build a united
struggle against the relentless attacks of the capitalist class, workers
must form their own independent action committees—rank-and-file bodies,
controlled democratically by workers and answerable to no union
official, no capitalist party and no pseudo-left organization.
Only
such committees, built in the workplaces across all sectors of the
economy, and united with farmers, students and the rural poor, can give
the scattered struggles now unfolding a common program and a common
direction.
These committees must join and build the International
Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, to unite workers in Sri
Lanka with those in India and other countries who confront the same
conditions of worsening poverty and exploitation. What is required is an
international struggle against the capitalist system itself, based on a
socialist perspective.
In an “exclusive interview” published in the Murdoch media’s Australian
on Friday, New South Wales (NSW) Labor Premier Chris Minns doubled down
on his defiant defence of unconstitutional anti-protest laws that his
government imposed to ban demonstrations against the US-Israeli genocide
in Gaza.
Minns also declared that the policing strategy behind allowing the
first anti-genocide march to proceed to the Sydney Opera House on
October 9, 2023 was “bullshit” and that he went along with it because he
was still a new “baby Premier” at the time.
Minns insisted that
the failure to stop the Opera House protest—which was against the
screening of the Israeli flag across the building’s famous roof as the
massacre of Palestinians began—encouraged the subsequent anti-genocide
demonstrations, which became massive across Australia. Once again, he
falsely depicted the protests as antisemitic and violent.
This
must be taken as another warning of the readiness of all the Labor
governments, both state and federal, to outlaw not just Gaza protests
but all forms of political dissent, violating basic legal and democratic
rights, regardless of court decisions.
*****
Minns’s latest comments are part of an escalating campaign by the
Murdoch outlets and other ruling class elements, including former
military and intelligence leaders, to insist that the Labor governments
go even further.
Last month’s conclusion of public hearings in the Albanese
government’s witch-hunting Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social
Cohesion saw demands from these quarters for a greater assault on the mass opposition to the genocide.
In
reality, this inquiry has scarcely examined the Bondi Beach atrocity,
which triggered the royal commission, including the many unanswered
questions about the failure of the intelligence and policing agencies to
hinder the two Islamic State-inspired gunmen, despite them having been
on terrorism watchlists.
This media and political campaign comes
after all the efforts over the past three years by the Labor
governments, the corporate media and Zionist groups to paint
anti-genocide outrage as antisemitic have been discredited.
Allegations
of a wave of antisemitic graffiti and arson attacks across Sydney in
late 2024 and early 2025 were demolished. Minns and Albanese had rushed
to depict these incidents as acts of antisemitic terrorism. They
exploited the incidents to impose far-reaching “hate speech” and “hate
group” laws that seek to outlaw opposition to the US-backed Gaza
genocide and can be used to criminalize other anti-war or political
dissent.
But the Australian Federal Police and the NSW Police
revealed in March 2025 what they had concluded all along—that the
attacks had been directed by organised crime figures located overseas.
*****
Minns’s interview was given for a book, titled Bondi Terror,
written by Murdoch media personality Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin,
the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, which again
seeks to blame anti-genocide demonstrations for the Bondi Beach
atrocity.
The book also features an unprecedented private
“sit-down” interview with Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
(ASIO) chief Mike Burgess, in which he criticised government leaders for
not doing more to crack down on alleged antisemitism, despite his
escalating warnings, in one public speech after another, about
“extremism.”
As a result, Burgess asserted, antisemitic behavior became “normalized” and this “increased the permission for politically
motivated violence.” He made a pitch for extra funding for the
intelligence and police apparatus.
That only raises further questions about ASIO’s seeming failure
to detect or prevent the Bondi massacre, under conditions where one of
the alleged perpetrators had previously been on the agency’s watchlist.
This cannot be explained by a lack of resources. Since the Albanese
government took office in 2022, it has boosted ASIO’s budget from $716.9
million in 2021–22 to over a billion dollars—$1.081 billion—in 2026–27.
Minns’s latest comments underscore the warning made by the World Socialist Web Site that
the coordinated police rampage during the Herzog visit was a turning
point in Australian politics. By backing the police repression of
dissent, regardless of its unconstitutional lawlessness, the Labor
governments have reiterated their full support for imperialist war and
barbarism, not just in Palestine but globally, and their readiness to
tear up basic democratic rights.
A worker died at the Applied Materials Harris Branch manufacturing
facility in Austin, Texas, in Building 34. Details of the death remain
scarce, and the company has not publicly explained what happened.
Two
internal emails were sent to workers at the site. The first, sent on
the day of the death, informed workers of a medical emergency in
Building 34 after a large number of emergency vehicles were already on
site. An email the following day confirmed the death, stated that the
worker was a contractor and that the relevant contract agency was
notifying the family. The company attributed the death to an unspecified
non-work-related medical event.
An Applied Materials worker said
coworkers reported hearing a large pop or bang around the time of the
incident. The source said the contractor had been at the facility only a
few weeks and was working as a test technician, a job that involves
electrical test equipment.
Workers in the area where the death
occurred were sent home for the day. Many were visibly shaken or crying
following the incident.
*****
Basic questions remain unanswered. Applied Materials has not said
what work the contractor was performing at the time, what the medical
event was, what emergency treatment was provided or whether the
electrical equipment and systems in the area were examined after the
incident. It is also not known why workers in the area were sent home
for the day.
Workers have a right to know how one of their
coworkers died while on the job and what emergency response was
provided. Response time, the availability of emergency equipment and the
training of responders can be the difference between life and death.
The
facility directly employs around 1,800 to 2,400 workers and also
employs a large number of contract workers, including maintenance
workers and technicians. According to OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application
data, the site recorded 30 injuries in 2025 and an annual average of
4,325 employees working at the site. No fatalities were listed in the
2025 data.
Applied Materials is a multinational manufacturer of
semiconductor production equipment with operations in the United States
and internationally. The company reported record third-quarter 2026
revenue of $9.12 billion, up 25 percent from a year earlier, amid a
sharp expansion of investment in advanced semiconductors driven in large
part by artificial intelligence. Its second-quarter 2026 revenue was
$7.91 billion, with GAAP net income of $2.806 billion. CEO Gary
Dickerson received $29.6 million in total compensation for 2025.
*****
The Applied Materials death comes amid a series of high-profile workplace fatalities. On August 13, 28-year-old Jonathan Stepp was killed while operating a pot hauler at Cleveland-Cliffs Burns Harbor Works in northwest Indiana. On August 18, 43-year-old Andrew Block was crushed while performing maintenance at Kaiser Aluminum in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The same day, Heladio Perez and Mary Allen were killed in an explosion at Brent Industries in Toledo, Ohio. On September 2, 33-year-old Bradley Clouse was crushed while performing maintenance at the Astemo Americas auto parts plant in Berea, Kentucky.
The prosecution and jailing of 27-year-old journalist Bogdan Syrotiuk is
contrary to the precepts of freedom of speech that should apply in
Ukraine. I write as a filmmaker/journalist who spent 15 months in a
maximum-security prison in Cambodia on espionage charges that were
demonstrably false. I was eventually sentenced to six years in jail
despite the total absence of evidence of my guilt.
It took over a year for the Australian government to go public in its
defence of my legal and human rights. This did not occur until the
Australian media took an interest in my case. Three weeks after
receiving my sentence, all charges against me were dropped and I was
deported from Cambodia.
I write also as a supporter, from afar, of
Ukraine’s efforts to repel the invading Russian army. This, however, is
beside the point. Bogdan Syrotiuk, as I understand it, has done nothing
more than express opinions critical of the Ukrainian government. He has
not spread pro-Russia propaganda.
I am disappointed, to say the
least, that a critic such as Bogdan has received any jail sentence at
all, let alone fifteen years. My own experience suggests that this
excessive sentence has a dual purpose—not just to punish Bogdan, but to
intimidate other Ukrainian journalists and critics of the government.
All
countries, including my own Australia, that are supporting Ukraine must
let the government know that Bogdan must be released immediately. We in
Australia are engaged in a seemingly never-ending battle to protect our
right to speak freely. It is a fight we must all engage in all the
time.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of
the Fourth International have launched a new website for the campaign
to free Bogdan Syrotiuk at the address FreeBogdan.org.
The platform brings together the petition, the letters of protest to
the Ukrainian courts, the statements of support from around the world
and the means for every reader to carry forward the fight to free
Bogdan.
*****
Visitors can sign the petition directly on the front page and choose
whether their name appears publicly on the signatures page. Signers are
encouraged to add a statement in their own words, and the statements
from workers, students and professionals explaining why they signed are
among the most powerful material the campaign has.
Dozens of
letters of protest have already been published on the WSWS. The site now
houses those that supporters wish to make public, so that the breadth
of the opposition can be seen in one place. Thirty-one are posted there
so far, most of them written since the verdict.
The site also
collects the most important statements of support from social media,
going back to Bogdan’s arrest. It carries the campaign’s news, the
statements of the WSWS and the ICFI, and a printable sheet with a QR
code that supporters can post in workplaces, on campuses and in their
neighborhoods.
Writing to the court
The most significant
addition to the new site is the tool for writing to the court. A visitor
who opens the letter-writing page is given three starting drafts, picks
one, edits it in their own words and signs it with their own name. With
one click the site adds a Ukrainian translation to enable the writer to
send their letter in both languages. It is addressed to the Pervomaisk
City District Court, copied to the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal and copied
to the WSWS so that it can be published alongside the others. The
visitor can then send it from their own email client.
The translation answers a specific maneuver. As David North explained
in the WSWS Perspective of September 3, the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal
has responded to the flood of protest letters by declaring that
correspondence must be in Ukrainian, “the language provided for by court
office work.” The WSWS rejects the chauvinism of this demand, which is
aimed at the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine itself as much as at
supporters abroad. But the answer to the court’s maneuver is not to
write less. It is to write more, and in both languages, which this tool
facilitates.
*****
Deepening the fight to free Bogdan requires resources. The legal
defense of Bogdan, the international mobilization on his behalf, the
building of the site and the translation of the campaign’s material into
the languages of the workers who must be reached all entail substantial
costs. The WSWS accepts no funding from corporations, governments or
foundations. Everything the campaign does is paid for by its readers and
supporters. Every donation, whatever its size, goes directly to the
fight to free Bogdan.
The platform launched this week is a step forward in the
fight to free Bogdan. It is currently in English, and other language
editions are being prepared. Other features will be added as the
campaign develops. FreeBogdan.org will be at the center of the political
offensive to free Bogdan.
The days before September 9 are decisive. The WSWS urges every reader to go to FreeBogdan.org and act:
Sign the petition, and add a statement of support in your own words.
Write to the court,
in your own language and in Ukrainian, using the letter-writing tool.
If you have written before, send your letter again with the Ukrainian
translation.
