Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. US bombs a wedding in Iran, killing four, amid escalating crisis in the US military
The US military fired a missile at a house hosting a wedding Tuesday in Kuhestak, in Sirik County on Iran’s southern coast, killing at least four people, including a 4-year-old child, and wounding dozens, Iranian officials said Wednesday. The Iranian Red Crescent asked the International Criminal Court to investigate.
The dead were Amir Ali Karimi, the 4-year-old child; Mohammad Malahi, 16; and Kolsoum Malahi and Zarkhatoun Taheri, both 43, the office of the governor of Hormozgan province said Wednesday. Iranian health officials counted 68 wounded at the wedding, Press TV reported Wednesday. The attack was one of dozens the US military said it carried out Tuesday along the coast between Chabahar and Bandar Abbas.
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Since the United States and Israel began the war on February 28 with the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, at least 3,527 people have been killed in Iran, Al Jazeera’s tally found August 28. Pentagon figures acknowledge 18 US troops have been killed and 758 wounded.
Despite six months of on and off bombing and missile strikes, the US military has failed to bring down the Iranian government or to achieve the supposed aims the Trump administration has set for the war, such as destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities, destroying its missiles and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. That failure has triggered a rapidly escalating crisis in the US military.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned Monday, the culmination of a protracted political conflict with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who fired the Army’s chief of staff, General Randy George, on April 2. Hegseth blocked the promotion of seven Army officers to major general this week, overriding a board of the Army’s senior leaders, and has fired over 80 generals and admirals or blocked their promotions since taking office, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Driscoll’s resignation followed report by the Washington Post Sunday that Admiral Daryl Caudle, who heads the Navy, and the commanders of US forces in Europe, the Asia-Pacific and Latin America had formally objected, in classified August 14 deployment orders, to keeping ships and troops in the Iran war into next year. Only about one destroyer in four was ready to deploy, Caudle’s assessment found, acccording to the Post. The very fact that such a secret assessment was leaked to the press is an indication of the intensity of the conflict within the Pentagon.
The extent of the supply and logistical crisis confronting the US Navy was spelled out Tuesday in the Times. It reported that Iranian missiles can reach every Middle East harbor deep enough to take an aircraft carrier: on the war’s opening day Iran destroyed the Navy’s logistics base in Bahrain, and the region’s other deep harbors are now covered by Iranian missiles and drones, “making them inaccessible.” Supply ships now sail 2,200 miles to Diego Garcia or 3,700 miles to Singapore.
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Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said Monday that Driscoll’s departure “leaves the Army without its top civilian and uniformed leaders, and a military service whose leadership ranks have been gutted by Secretary Hegseth.” Reed objected that the purge has weakened the military. He did not ask that the war be ended.
The US military has used up nearly four-fifths of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors in the war, CNN reported August 4, and about two-thirds of its Patriot interceptors, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies estimate cited by Defense News August 3.
In the post-World War II period, major crises of the US military have been accompanied by the removal of its top leaders. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara resigned in November 1967, nearly three years into the Vietnam escalation; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned in November 2006, nearly four years into the Iraq war. In the six months since the Iran war began, the Army secretary has resigned, four top commanders have filed formal objections and Hegseth is purging the officer corps.
On Tuesday the House passed, 370-48, a stopgap spending bill that funds the government through December 11, including the Pentagon at its current rate of $839 billion a year. The bill leaves out the supplemental the administration requested in June, $87.6 billion in all and about $67 billion of it for the Pentagon.
The 176 Democrats who voted for the bill effectively voted to fund the war, as they did before it began. On January 22, 149 House Democrats voted for the $839 billion military appropriations bill, and on February 2, 26 days before the assault on Iran began, 21 House Democrats supplied the margin for the stopgap that kept the government funded.
While supporting the Trump administration's murder of Iran’s leadership early in the war, the Democrats have criticized the conduct of the war on tactical grounds. Their essential criticism is that the administration has failed to secure the interests of American imperialism in the Middle East. All factions of the US political establishment support the aim of subjugating Iran to US domination.
1. ICE plans to spend up to $2 million on robot dogs for immigration raids
ICE says the robots will be used for “situational awareness” and “hazard assessment,” scouting buildings with cameras and chemical sensors before armed agents move in. An ICE spokesperson insisted the machines “will not make arrests” and are intended to “improve officer safety.” Boston Dynamics, for its part, issued the same boilerplate reassurance it has offered every time its machines have turned up in the hands of police departments over the past six years: the robots are “used to keep people out of harm’s way” and “any attempted weaponization of Boston Dynamics’ robots is strictly prohibited.”
These are the words of a company that has spent the last four years trying, with limited success, to launder its image after a history as a Pentagon-funded weapons laboratory. They should be treated with the contempt they deserve.
Five days after the Trump administration announced that the Pentagon had acquired an ownership stake in Venezuelan oil fields, not a single American politician, newspaper or legal commentator has addressed directly the most fundamental question the deal raises domestically: what it means for the constitutional subordination of the armed forces to civilian authority.
As the World Socialist Web Site warned Monday:
The implications inside the United States are no less dangerous. The armed forces are constitutionally subordinate to civilian authority and dependent on congressional appropriations. A Pentagon that accumulates equity stakes and revenue-producing assets abroad acquires its own direct economic interests and a degree of institutional autonomy the constitutional structure was expressly designed to prevent. Wars of plunder are being financed and directed outside the reach of whatever democratic forms survive in Washington.
The public statement that came closest to addressing the issue was by Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “President Trump is abusing his powers as commander-in-chief and eroding the military’s proper role in American democracy,” Reed said, posing the question whether American forces will be used to secure oil assets in which the Pentagon now holds a financial interest.
His proposal, however, was toothless. Reed concluded by demanding a “full accounting” of the legal authority and financial terms—a request for documents addressed to the officials he has just accused of abusing power. He proposed no legislation, subpoena or funding restriction, let alone an impeachment proceeding over a blatant constitutional violation.
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On Monday, ahead of a trip by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright to Venezuela, the White House issued a fact sheet that made the terms explicit for the first time. They are even more openly illegal than the initial reporting suggested.
Venezuela’s interim authorities have granted North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), a private firm owned by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, 100-year concessions over 17 oil fields holding approximately 65 billion barrels, which is roughly one-fifth of Venezuela’s proven reserves.
The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital receives a 35 percent equity stake in NABEP. The State Department receives the right to buy 20 percent of output at production cost, plus right of first refusal (first chance to buy) on the remaining 80 percent. The US government holds veto power over every board appointment, and a majority of directors must be US citizens. The agreement was signed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and “is governed by US law and is subject to the jurisdiction of US courts.”
The deal has emboldened Chevron, whose officials traveled to Caracas Wednesday to announce next to Energy Secretary Wright plans to double the US company’s oil production in Venezuela.
The White House fact sheet boasts openly that Trump has re-established the Monroe Doctrine, purging foreign influence from “our backyard” and ensuring American dominance in the hemisphere is never again questioned. It gloats over the fact that most of the fields were previously operated by Russian and Chinese firms.
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No one has addressed the immense constitutional issues, however. Article I, Section 9 provides that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury except by appropriations made by law. This is the mechanism through which an elected legislature controls a standing army—the reason the framers, who feared exactly this, limited military appropriations to two years. A Pentagon that holds equity, collects dividends and exercises rights to claim output of foreign enterprises possesses revenue Congress did not appropriate and cannot withhold.
The silence extends beyond politicians. A detailed legal analysis by international law expert Edmarverson Santos examined Venezuelan constitutional law article by article, permanent sovereignty over natural resources, treaty validity and coercion, and touched the question of direct US government ownership twice without once asking what it means for the American constitutional order. Mining.com published on the deal’s legal implications without mentioning it. PBS interviewed Rice University’s Francisco Monaldi on the obstacles the arrangement faces, with no reference to Pentagon ownership or revenue.
At an early stage of this erosion of civilian authority over the military, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address that the establishment of a large-scale arms industry had given rise to a “military-industrial complex.”
Today, the massive financial-military complex would be unrecognizable to Eisenhower. Yet, there is silence when the financial oligarchy and the Pentagon directly split the loot, with the Trump family getting first claim.
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The World Socialist Web Site has consistently documented this erosion of civilian authority and the military’s integration with the corporate-financial elite. In 2002, Patrick Martin’s article on the Crusader affair identified “the increasingly brazen role of the military and corporate elite in dictating the policies of the US government.” In 2006, Bill Van Auken reported how an Air Force colonel publicly rebuked a Supreme Court justice over Guantánamo—a stark expression of “the deepening assault on the constitutional principle of subordination of the armed forces to civilian government.”
In October 2017, after Trump installed three generals—Kelly, McMaster and Mattis—in key cabinet positions, the WSWS asked whether a coup would even be required for a transition to military rule in a country whose civilian leadership neither knows where its military operates nor dares to inquire. The Democrats, then as now, attacked Trump from the right, praising the generals as the “grown-ups.”
In June 2020, the Socialist Equality Party stated that Trump was attempting a coup against the Constitution to establish a presidential dictatorship resting on the military and police. In November 2020 the WSWS documented his packing of the Pentagon with loyalists; in August 2024 it warned that military involvement in a coup over a disputed election was a real and present danger. Today, the National Guard occupation of Washington D.C. that began with 800 troops now exceeds 5,000, drawn from Republican-governed states, authorized through January 20, 2029.
The Venezuela deal is where these lines converge. Wars of plunder are now financed and directed outside the reach of whatever democratic forms survive in Washington.
Reed cannot name the danger without indicting his party, which has spent a decade presenting the national security apparatus as democracy’s last defense against Trump. As the Barry Grey wrote following the stolen election of 2000:
The unseemly haste with which the entire political establishment is rushing to put the election crisis behind it testifies to the fragility of the political system and the depth of the crisis of American society. In the end, the impasse revealed the lack of any significant constituency within the ruling elite for a democratic adjudication of the presidential election. The defense of democratic rights, which will increasingly become a mass question in America, falls directly to the tens of millions of working people who have for so long been effectively excluded from the political process, monopolized as it is by two parties controlled by the corporate and financial oligarchy.
3. German government provokes escalation of Ukraine war
The German government’s accusation that Russia carried out a failed terrorist attack at Leipzig Airport on August 4 is a political provocation. Its aim is to further escalate the war in Ukraine, rally the other European powers behind the war effort and prepare public opinion for a direct war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power.
It is telling that the German government announced its latest escalation against Russia on September 1 of all days—the day Hitler launched World War II. The Nazis staged a fake attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz (now Gliwice) to justify the invasion of Poland. “We have been returning fire since 5:45 a.m.!” Hitler told the Reichstag.
The German government is reverting to the same methods, as it prepares to cross the threshold from a proxy war to an open war against Russia. This is what Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt meant when he said, “We are not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare.”
The punitive measures imposed by the government—the closure of the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and the Russian House in Berlin, stricter entry requirements for Russians, and pressure on the so-called “shadow fleet”—all point in the same direction. The severing of diplomatic and cultural ties is a step toward war. The government fully expects Russia to respond by closing the Goethe Institute in Moscow and the German consulate in Saint Petersburg.
The accusations against Russia were carefully timed. On Sunday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced that an official “attribution of the Leipzig attack” would soon be made, and threatened: “They will pay for this.” On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt issued a joint press statement holding Russia responsible for the attack.
Wadephul then flew to Ireland for a meeting of EU foreign ministers to rally them behind the more aggressive stance against Russia. By the time he addressed the press, EU defence ministers had already met in Ireland and likewise decided to escalate the war against Russia.
Dobrindt and Wadephul did not present a single piece of credible evidence for Russia’s alleged involvement. Dobrindt spoke only in general terms of police and intelligence findings that the “means of commission”—the drone’s configuration, components, explosives and detonator technology—matched those of other Russian hybrid operations. He claimed that the technology was “professional” and the planning effort “considerable,” contradicting his own statement that the act had been carried out by “low-level agents,” i.e., amateurs.
The discovery of the drone at Leipzig Airport—which, in addition to civilian traffic, also serves as a hub for cargo and weapons shipments—raises numerous questions.
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Russia flatly rejected the German allegations. On the sidelines of a summit with China and India in Bishkek, President Putin called the punitive measures a “serious mistake” and accused the German government of fabricating evidence after the drone incident in order to level accusations against Moscow. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov accused Berlin of deliberately pursuing a “path of escalation.”
The German government’s reaction to the discovery of the drone in Leipzig stands in stark contrast to its response to the largest terrorist attack on infrastructure in recent memory—the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in 2022. Although the Ukrainian perpetrators have since been identified and the trail leads to the then-commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Valery Zaluzhny, the German government has never protested, let alone imposed punitive measures on Kiev. Its stance on terrorist attacks, whether real or fictitious, is determined not by facts but by its imperialist interests.
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German imperialism today finds itself in a situation much like that of the first half of the 20th century. During the Cold War, it exploited the European single market and reaped profits worldwide in the slipstream of the United States. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that changed. The German economy benefited more than any other from the eastward expansion of the European Union and NATO, but when NATO reached for Ukraine and Georgia as well, it provoked a defensive reaction from Moscow. The Putin regime, unable to appeal to the working masses, responded with a war that has now lasted four-and-a-half years and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
From the very beginning, Germany played a leading role in the escalation of the conflict. In 2014, together with the US, it organised the violent overthrow of the government in Kiev, which brought a pro-Western regime to power; it then helped rebuild the Ukrainian army; and today it is the largest financial backer and a major arms supplier of the Zelensky regime, with which it works closely.
Berlin is striving to hold the European ranks together. It is working closely with the British government, which is also providing massive military and financial support to Ukraine. Under the presidency of Ursula von der Leyen—who, like German Chancellor Merz, is a member of the Christian Democratic Union—the European Commission has massively expanded its powers. It coordinates the European defence industry, issues its own bonds on capital markets, and uses the proceeds to finance a 90-billion-euro loan for Ukraine.
Berlin and Brussels are also striving to keep the US, as the leading NATO power, on board. But Trump’s punitive tariffs, his claim to Greenland and his unilateral dealings with Moscow have sharply raised tensions. Trump is not the cause of this, but only the sharpest expression of imperialist contradictions that have long been building up.
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Resistance to the war can come only from the working class, which pays for it in social cuts, rising prices, lost jobs and conscription. Uniting workers internationally and winning them to a socialist program that links the struggle against war, social inequality and dictatorship with the struggle against their root cause—capitalism—is the goal of the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk has been sentenced in Ukraine to 15 years in prison on charges of high treason because he advocates ending the war through the unity of the Ukrainian and Russian working class. Syrotiuk is an opponent of the Putin regime. But the Ukrainian government, which honours Nazi collaborators and mass murderers from World War II as heroes, cannot tolerate any socialist opposition to its war.
The fight to free Bogdan is a critical struggle in the fight against imperialist war. We urge all readers of the WSWS to take up this cause: Sign the petition for his release at wsws.org/freebogdan, send letters of protest demanding his freedom to the Ukrainian courts at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua and inbox@mka.court.gov.ua, with a copy to freebogdan@wsws.org, and raise his case in your workplace, school and union.
4. Berlin Tenants are being fed a tissue of lies by the main parties
Fewer and fewer households can afford the city’s rapidly rising rents, and housing is increasingly becoming a luxury. Whilst families are forced to cut back on essentials to pay exorbitant rents, unscrupulous property corporations are raking in huge profits.
5. ICE kidnaps 76-year-old green card holder with stage 4 cancer at citizenship interview
For a 76-year-old man with advanced cancer, imprisonment in a detention system notorious for withholding medication and denying outside medical care amounts to a virtual death sentence.
Javar, a retired hotel worker, came to the United States from the Philippines in 1995. He has lived and worked legally in the country for more than 30 years, paid taxes and repeatedly renewed his green card, most recently in December.
On June 23, he arrived at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in Tukwila, Washington for an interview connected to the citizenship application he had filed last November. ICE agents were waiting inside. They arrested him and transferred him to the privately operated Tacoma detention center, run by the multibillion-dollar prison corporation The GEO Group.
6. Volkswagen board votes to close four plants, cut tens of thousands of jobs across Germany
If the owners and group chief executive Oliver Blume get their way, within eight years all German production sites will have been closed or sold off, apart from four: VW in Wolfsburg, Audi in Ingolstadt and Porsche in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen and Leipzig. Even Zuffenhausen will not escape unscathed: from 2030, the discontinuation of the Taycan line is to cut capacity there by around 30,000 vehicles a year.
The closures are part of a plan to break up the group and cash in its profitable divisions. According to Wirtschaftswoche, the executive board is leaving the four plants only one chance to continue producing cars. If they can bring their factory costs down to a competitive level by the end of June 2027, further use of the plants would at least be considered.
According to the supervisory board paper, factory costs at German sites averaged €6,490 [US$7,543.80] per vehicle in 2025, compared with just €2,832 [US$3,291.90] at European sites outside Germany. This figure covers only the direct operating costs, including wages, incurred in assembling a vehicle, and does not include material, development or administrative costs.
Last week, when the VW works council calculated that factory costs make up only one-seventh of a car’s total cost, that only two-thirds of that figure is labour costs, and that even “halving pay” would therefore cut the cost per car by only 5 percent, many workers were stunned: “Is that what they’re negotiating right now? Halving our wages?”
7. The Madrid Forum comes to Santiago: An international organization of counterrevolution
The fifth regional meeting of the Madrid Forum, which opens in Santiago on September 3–4, is the international organization of social counterrevolution, coordinated across national borders, in the service of the most reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie. The choice of Chile as host is, in the Forum’s own words, a statement that “the reconquest is possible.” José Antonio Kast—one of the original signatories of the Madrid Charter and now president of the republic—will deliver one of the principal addresses, with the Argentine president, Javier Milei, expected to follow.
The date was chosen because it marks the fourth anniversary of the “Rechazo” victory in Chile where an overwhelming majority of voters rejected a new draft constitution that aimed to replace the nation’s authoritarian charter. It is also a salute to the September 1973 US-backed coup d’etat that installed the 17-year dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, one of the heroes of the international fascist right.
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The yearly gatherings of the Madrid Forum have been themed around “democracy,” “freedom,” “the rule of law”—high sounding ideals that the cockpit of reaction centered in Washington under Trump is working towards eviscerating. The Latin American cohort have never been invested in these principles; they have a record of backing the military dictatorships that ruled over the region for more than three decades. They are all actively seeking to pardon the butchers who committed heinous crimes against humanity and have all brought into their cabinets active and retired military personnel.
The Latin American right are co-conspirators in US destabilization campaigns against Cuba and Venezuela—complicit in the sanctions regimes that have gutted both economies, fueled mass emigration and produced documented shortages of food and medicine that fall heaviest on the poorest sectors of the population, regardless of the body count this entails.
An indication of their “democratic” credentials is the current case of the Argentine Fernando Cerimedo, a behind-the-scenes “advisor” to the Latin American right. Cerimedo was serving the right-wing Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz when he was arrested just over two weeks ago for the attempted murder of Bolivian lawyer and activist Nadia Beller. Following raids on multiple properties linked to him in La Paz, Bolivian prosecutors have since accused Cerimedo of illicit enrichment and protection of narco-trafficking.
It turns out that Cerimedo has the closest links to the Trump administration through his former campaign manager Brad Parscale. The criminal investigations have opened a Pandora’s box of electoral interference orchestrated by the fascist right spanning six countries including Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Honduras and Mexico. The Madrid Forum, whose Argentine operative stands accused of orchestrating a disinformation campaign against a sitting government, habitually brands its political opponents as “criminals,” “narco-terrorists” and threats to democratic order.
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A fascist international is a contradiction in terms: fascism’s ideological substance is irreducibly nationalist. The nation is the supreme object of loyalty and sacrifice. Yet they feel the need to project an international unifying theory and to build international organization. They require the financial and political support of imperialism. And they need a unifying mythology that transcends the particular nation. Hence the “Iberosphere,” invoked by Abascal, or the “the West,” and the “Judeo-Christian civilization” invoked by Bannon and Milei.
This is because their true enemy is the working class, a genuinely international social force.
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It is the betrayal of immense expectations in the working class and oppressed masses that facilitated the victory of the fascistic right, notwithstanding the electoral interference orchestrated by Cerimedo & Co. The spontaneous mass eruptions across the region—in what was part of an international resurgence of the class struggle beginning in the 2010s—produced a situation that was explosive and less predictable because of the absence of the bureaucratic buffers that previously dominated the working class. But the social movement, resting predominantly on students and youth, lacked the political perspective and leadership to convert that force into political power, which would have required an explicit orientation toward the working class and a break with the anarchist middle-class radicalism that defined the outer limits of the movements’ politics.
It was precisely into this breach that the Pink Tide inserted itself to contain the mass movement from below, channeling the accumulated rage of the streets into electoral processes and constituent assemblies. Having dissipated the revolutionary energy into parliamentary forms, the Pink Tide governments suppressed every manifestation of struggle.
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The historical crisis of humanity reduces to the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The defeats of the twentieth century were not inflicted by the superior strength of the bourgeoisie but by the betrayals of social democracy, Stalinism and every species of reformism that channeled working-class struggle back into the service of capital. But these same forces cannot repeat their betrayals. They no longer hold the organizational and political grip on the working class they once exercised. The conditions that sustained that grip have been destroyed by the very globalization of capital they accommodated.
It is in this context that the International Committee of the Fourth International represents something historically decisive: the continuity of genuine revolutionary Marxism through the decades of defeat, betrayal and assassination. That continuity is not merely organizational, it is theoretical and programmatic, embodying the lessons of a century of class struggle that the working class does not have to relearn from scratch.
The situation is dangerous and the timeline is sharp. The fascist right is organized, internationally networked, and integrated into the state in ways it has not been since the 1930s. But the objective conditions for socialist revolution, the globalization of production, the socialization of labor, the manifest bankruptcy of every capitalist alternative, have never been more mature. Against the fascist menace, austerity and the opening salvos of World War III, there is a socialist alternative. The task is to build it.
8. Florida executes Harold Gene Lucas after 50 years on death row and 5 death sentences
Florida killed Harold Gene Lucas on Tuesday evening, ending a half-century ordeal manufactured by the state itself. Lucas was condemned to death five separate times for the same crime. Four times the Florida Supreme Court found the sentencing proceedings so badly botched that the death sentence had to be thrown out. Four times prosecutors returned to court and demanded his execution rather than accept a life sentence.Fifty years of this grinding vengeance produced a 74-year-old man who told a judge in July that he was too tired to continue fighting. What the state calls justice is vindictiveness organized as legal procedure.
Lucas was pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m. at Florida State Prison near Starke after an intravenous sequence of etomidate, a sedative; rocuronium bromide, a paralytic that immobilizes the muscles; and potassium acetate, which stops the heart. Asked whether he had any last words, he answered, “No.”
He had awakened at 5:45 a.m. His sister was his only visitor. The executioner, as in every Florida execution, was an anonymous private citizen selected by the warden and paid $200 for the gruesome job.
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Lucas’s life followed the same trajectory as that of many people Florida has executed: rural poverty, a violent home, an abandoned education and addiction. The social order that abandoned him to poverty, violence and drug abuse found ample resources for five death sentences, decades of litigation and finally a gurney.
The same week Lucas was killed, the DeSantis administration announced new restrictions on what Florida’s poorest families may buy with cash assistance averaging roughly $250 a month. The prohibited purchases include vaping products, video games, entertainment tickets, theme park admission and other items classified as luxuries.
Capital punishment is but the sharpest expression of this system of retribution against society’s most vulnerable.
9. Turkish Independent Miners Union organizer Başaran Aksu on hunger strike in prison
In announcing the hunger strike, Aksu wrote that, “The legitimate adversaries of a labor union are the bosses, the employers’ organisations, the state and the government. If a union cannot criticise these structures, whose interests differ from those of the workers, and cannot raise its voice against them, then there is no need for it to exist.” He added that the arrests were carried out “at the instigation and demand of holding company headquarters, employers’ organisations and the yellow union lobbies.”
Aksu has explained the reason for the hunger strike, stating:
Together with workers, villagers, farmers, tradespeople and small producers who are in difficulty, weaving fraternity and struggle and declaring that we are not condemned to such a [social] order, in order to break the wheel of exploitation—based on impoverishing the people—of the international monopolies, the holding companies and their government, which are descending on the people’s future, the only thing I can do in the prison where I am held is to point to the danger of hunger in every household and to share in it.
Reyhan Aksu, who visited her brother in prison, reported that Başaran Aksu has not been examined by a doctor a single time since entering prison and has not even been given vitamins. She said that, despite his health problems, he will continue the hunger strike until his demands are met, and that two prisoners held on ordinary criminal charges in the same ward have also begun a hunger strike in support of him.
While hospitals and schools are falling into disrepair, 600 million euros are being cut from public transport, rents are skyrocketing, and social infrastructure is collapsing, billions are being poured into rearmament.
Millions of workers across the continent are disgusted by the fascist threats of US President Trump as he seeks to establish a presidential dictatorship and expands world war. Anger is building across Canada to dangerous working conditions and the vicious class war that the financial elite and their political hirelings are waging on us, even as they hypocritically call on workers to rally around “Team Canada.”
In the United States, a rank-and-file rebellion is developing among autoworkers, who have repeatedly rejected contracts the United Auto Workers bureaucracy has sought to impose. The most conscious expression of this insurgency is the candidacy for UAW president of the socialist autoworker Will Lehman, who calls for the abolition of the bureaucracy and the return of power on the shop floor. Lehman has issued a statement backing our strike and calling for cross-border unity among the working class. Because of his courageous stand, Lehman has received death threats from the UAW bureaucracy. A campaign against the threats, supported by workers in Canada, led to the two-year suspension of the bureaucrat who threatened him.
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Under conditions of an upsurge in the class struggle across North America, we are fighting to turn to our real allies—other steelworkers, railway workers in Canada and the US, and all workers confronting brutal exploitation and the rising cost of living. As we wrote in our statement last week, the NSC-RFC must be broadened throughout the plant, send delegations to other sections of workers to link up with them in struggle, and elect its own negotiating committee to bypass the pro-corporate USW.
Workers in Canada, the United States and Mexico confront the same corporations, politicians and union bureaucracies. Our strength lies in uniting across national and union boundaries against them: class war, not trade war.
A major step in this fight is securing the support of rail workers throughout the US to set aside all rail cars marked NSCX. These are the cars that Aziz makes us produce for him at the end of every contract order and leases to operators throughout the US so he can still cash in during the strike. Set NSCX cars aside to back our struggle!
We say:
Build the NSC-RFC throughout our plant!
Make the National Steel Car strike the spearhead of a working-class counteroffensive against dangerous workplaces and capitalist austerity, and for decent-paying, secure jobs for all!
Unite Canadian and US workers against the fascist Trump and the central banker Carney! No to trade war, rearmament and war! For international working-class unity!
12. Two weeks after deadly Brent Industries explosion in Toledo, Ohio families, residents demand answers
Two weeks after a deadly explosion ripped through Brent Industries in Toledo, Ohio, the families of the deceased workers and community members are still seeking answers to the cause of the disaster and the potential broader environmental impact on residents of the area.
Two workers died in the early hours of August 18 as a result of two explosions at the industrial textile-recycling/dry-cleaning site on South Avenue. They have been identified as Heladio G. Perez, age 46, and Mary Allen, age 64. An autopsy revealed they both died as a result of blunt force trauma. The blast partially collapsed the building and blew out the wall and the roof.
Up to 100 fire personnel were called in to fight the blaze. Twelve workers were inside the building at the time; 10 others escaped. However, two or three workers reportedly received minor injuries. While up to 100 fire personnel were called in to fight the blaze. Smoke and flames hampered search and rescue efforts for the two missing workers, whose bodies were recovered and identified only later.
The company is an industrial reconditioning and recycling facility for textiles that contain hazardous and non-hazardous materials, including shop towels and work gloves used in auto and other manufacturing industries. It has locations in Brent, Alabama and Toledo, Ohio. Neither Brent Industries nor any of its officials has issued any public statements since the explosion or offered condolences to the families of the two workers killed at the facility.
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Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for United Auto Workers president, visited the Brent Industries location Wednesday during a campaign stop in Toledo where he spoke to workers at the nearby Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex and Dana Driveline plant. In a statement on the deaths of Heladio G. Perez and Mary Allen, Lehman said:
They went to work to earn a living. They didn’t come home.
Their families have no answers. We’re told it was an “accident.” As if no one was responsible. But Brent Industries knew. This company has a history of safety violations—in Alabama, and here in Toledo. The dangers were known. They were tolerated. Because fixing them costs money.
This is American capitalism. Every company puts profit before our lives. Over 5,000 workers die on the job every year in this country. Tens of thousands more die from disease caused by their work. Our workplaces are a slaughterhouse.
And Toledo knows this better than most cities in America.
In 2022, two brothers—Ben and Max Morrissey—burned to death in an explosion at the BP-Husky refinery. Investigators found their deaths were preventable. BP was fined $156,000. For two lives.
In 2024, Antonio Gaston was crushed on the line at the Toledo Jeep plant. He was 53. A father of four. Stellantis was fined $16,000. They contested it. They paid $11,000 for his life.
In 2025, Ronald Adams Sr., another Stellantis worker, was crushed by a gantry crane at the nearby Dundee Engine plant. Sixteen months later, his family still has no answers. Not from Stellantis. Not from the UAW. Not from the state. The plant just went back to running. As if he never existed.
Now add Heladio Perez and Mary Allen to that list.
It doesn’t matter if the plant has a union, or is non-union, like Brent Industries.
At the union plants, the company-union safety committees did nothing to stop deaths and injuries. They exist to give the illusion that workers have a voice. While management and union officials keep the line running. No matter the cost.
Union or not—the result is the same. Workers pay with their lives.
The answer is workers organizing ourselves. Independent of the company. Independent of any union bureaucracy.
I’m running for UAW president to fight for this. Abolish the company-union safety committees. Replace them with rank-and-file safety committees. Run by workers, on every shop floor—union and non-union alike. Give workers full access to every record. Give workers the power to stop production when conditions are unsafe.
No company investigation will ever tell the truth. No bureaucracy will either. Only the workers standing next to the machine know what really happened.
To the families of Heladio Perez and Mary Allen, you are not alone. Your fight is our fight.
To every worker in Toledo and everywhere else, this fight is about putting an end to a system that sacrifices our lives for profit. We produce all the wealth in this society. We are the only ones who can fight for ourselves.
Form a rank-and-file committee in your workplace. Union or not. Take control of safety.
13. Growing divisions at G20 finance ministers meeting
It is a clear political fact of life that the Trump administration has been working to shatter all the post-war organisations and mechanisms set up, largely on the initiative of the United States, to maintain the economic and financial stability of the global capitalist system.
This reality has been underscored by the meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bankers held for two days earlier this week in Asheville, North Carolina.
The fundamental view of the Trump administration is that all the supposed mechanisms of international cooperation, established by the US in the immediate post-war period to advance its interests, have turned into the opposite.
Instead of being the means through which US capitalism could prosper, through a stable and expanding global economy, they have become a means through which it is taken advantage of, robbed and “ripped off,” not least by its one-time partners and allies.
Confronting the US decline, the Trump administration—expressing in its most naked form the drive of the financial oligarchy to restore the dominance of American capitalism and take it to new heights—has initiated sweeping tariff measures, deployed financial sanctions against a range of countries and used Mafia-like standover tactics to demand foreign investments in the US—Japan and South Korea being two notable recipients of this treatment.
The operation against the post-war organisations is now being extended to the G20 formation, which was set up in response to the financial crises that started to engulf global capitalism from the end of the 1990s.
*****
Underscoring the deepening divisions, the meeting opened on Monday with uproar from the European powers over the US decision, without informing its nominal allies across the Atlantic, that the Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov had been invited to attend in person. They protested by refusing to pose for a group photo with him present. While the European powers were up in arms, it was reported that Siluanov had held “productive” discussions with Bessent.
High on the US agenda was the drive to secure support for its economic sanctions against countries and entities that have trade and financial dealings with Iran. China is the main target, but Bessent has not specifically named it nor set a timeline for action, commenting when he announced the plan that he did not want to “blow up” the world financial system.
But the US is determined to go ahead with what it has called “Operation Economic Outcast.” In an interview on Sunday, Bessent said the administration was prepared to exact “financial violence if we have to” in order to completely cut off Iran from the global economy.
*****
Hanging over the meeting, as each of the participants sought the most favourable overcome for them, were the deepening problems in the global financial system. These were outlined in a letter to the gathering from Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, in his capacity as chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a global financial watchdog.
The letter had two key messages: the new risks posed to the financial system by the development of ever more powerful AI models and the risks that are already present.
Bailey said the financial risk landscape had been complicated by the “emergence of frontier AI models, which are showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities.”
The most immediate concern was the potential impact on cyber risk and that frontier AI may have the ability to “materially alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk, which could undermine market confidence system-wide.”
Needless to say, Bailey did not comment on the fact that, within utterly irrational capitalist economic relations, a technology which has the potential to enormously increase the productivity of human labour and economic advancement should contain the potential to set off a devastating financial crisis.
The other message was to repeat warnings the FSB has made on numerous occasions. This was that markets “remain vulnerable to potentially disorderly correction [a euphemism for a meltdown] that could spread across borders, particularly given fragilities in sovereign debt markets.”
*****
The G20 finance ministers meeting did nothing to address these concerns, nor will the leader’s summit in December, assuming the organisation staggers on until then.
14. Australia: Public sector doctors strike in Melbourne for first time in decades
Doctors walked off the job in opposition to the state Labor government’s attempts to inflict deeper real wage cuts and further entrench dire conditions in the sector.
15. Labor’s NAPLAN widens education inequality in Australia
National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy results show that the gap between rich and poor school students is growing at an increasing rate.
16. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Canada:
Paraguay:
Peru:
United States:
On September 1, the date on which the Second World War began, various events were held in Türkiye to mark what was described as “World Peace Day.” Members of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi—Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party—Fourth International) intervened in two events in Istanbul and called for support for the international campaign for the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the 27-year-old socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison in Ukraine on August 10 for his writings on the World Socialist Web Site.
The event held by the Turkish edition of Le Monde diplomatique at the Kadıköy Municipality’s Caddebostan Cultural Center, under the main heading “Journalism is not a crime,” opened with an exhibition of the covers of the newspaper’s editions, which are published in 27 languages in 35 countries. The first panel of the event, on “Journalism in a time of war” and moderated by journalist Hazal Ocak, featured Halk TV foreign policy writer Mustafa Kemal Erdemol, Sözcü TV Foreign News Director Burak Tatari and Le Monde diplomatique Turkish edition writer Rasıh Reşat.
Speaking during the question-and-answer section of the panel, Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi National Committee member Emine Balkan explained that she was attending on behalf of the Turkish edition of the WSWS and brought Bogdan’s case before the hall. She stated:
As you noted in your remarks, many journalists have lost their lives in wars, and there are also those imprisoned for their writings. Last month the 27-year-old socialist writer Bogdan Syrotiuk was sentenced to 15 years in prison over six articles he wrote on the NATO-backed Ukraine’s war with Russia. What is happening in Ukraine confronts not a single socialist writer but many opponents of the war.
Bogdan is suffering this oppression not because he sides with any particular party or with Russia, but because he has advocated for Russian and Ukrainian workers to join forces with workers around the world in the struggle [against the war]. He has 10 days left to appeal. If this campaign is not supported, he will be trying to survive 15 years under extremely harsh prison conditions. Practicing journalism and defending the truth is far more important in this era.
*****
Following the panel, French journalist and author Serge Halimi delivered a lecture titled “Warmongers: Press institutions and journalists.” Halimi, who served as editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique from 2008 to 2023, drew attention to the way the war in Ukraine and the genocidal war in Gaza have been covered in the Western press in a manner biased in favor of NATO and Israel. This pro-imperialist “journalism” is also plainly evident in the fact that not one of the major media outlets in the United States and Europe has reported Bogdan’s trial and verdict.
Halimi said it was deceptive for the Western media to date the war in Ukraine from February 24, 2022 and events in Gaza from October 7, 2023. He recalled that following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO incorporated the former Warsaw Pact members and the Baltic republics into the alliance, and that the same project was kept on the agenda for Ukraine and Georgia. The Maidan coup of February 2014 in Kiev had been largely forgotten because it complicated the narrative too much, and much of the media characterizes such historical context as “Russian disinformation.” Those who question the narratives that legitimize wars are declared “advocates of a foreign government.”
This points to the international background of the frame-up organized against Bogdan Syrotiuk by the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime. Bogdan was sentenced to 15 years in prison because, while opposing Russia’s reactionary invasion, he also opposed NATO’s proxy war and the Ukrainian regime from the standpoint of the international working class. Here too lies the answer to the question of why Bogdan’s conviction found no place in the New York Times, on the BBC or in Le Monde itself: this case demolishes everything that remains of the Ukrainian “war for democracy” narrative.
Despite the silence in the mainstream media, the campaign has grown rapidly since August 10. More than 7,200 people have signed the petition demanding Bogdan’s release, with close to 1,500 new signatures from dozens of countries arriving in the days after the verdict alone. Historians, academics, artists, journalists and workers from around the world have protested the ruling. Many antiwar and left-wing parties, organizations and publications, including the Stop the War Coalition in Britain, have issued statements supporting the campaign.
At the close of the event, Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi members distributed Turkish, English and French copies of the party statement “Free Bogdan Syrotiuk!” to journalists and members of the audience.
“History is littered with a plethora of men who start homicidal wars. In far fewer numbers, history is peppered with courageous men who stand up to the behemoth of war and say ‘No!’ Bogdan Syrotiuk is such a man.”
Among those denouncing the sentencing is the German scholar Alexander Bahar, co-author of The Reichstag Fire - How History is Created.20. 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.
