Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Peter Thiel of Palantir’s private viewing of the Bayeux Tapestry: barbarians inside the gates
It is hard to conceive of a more degrading expression of the corrosion of culture under capitalism than the private viewing of the Bayeux Tapestry organised by the British Museum for billionaire Peter Thiel. The towering cultural achievements of human history are reduced to a day out for the financiers of fascism.
While up to 80,000 people queued for nine hours to buy tickets when the box office opened—with adult tickets costing £33 for a 40-minute viewing slot—the British Museum saw it as an opportunity to court oligarchs.
Believed to have been embroidered within decades of the battle, probably commissioned by William the Conqueror’s half-brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux, the 70 metres (230 feet)-long depiction of the 1066 Norman conquest of Britain was likely made in England before being delivered to Bayeux. It has been shown at the Louvre in Paris twice but has not left France until now.
It is a work of profound historical and artistic importance. Its narrative of the Norman conquest, culminating in the Battle of Hastings, is vivid, dramatic and often harrowing in its imagery. Its extraordinary margins are filled with mythic creatures and astronomical phenomena. This is history as great art.
But its loan was regarded on both sides of the Channel as an exercise in “soft power,” an occasion for the discussion of military and business relations between Britain and France. To further this, priority access was arranged for £1,000-a-night guests at the One Aldwych hotel. But this fawning before wealth and power was dwarfed by the laying on of a private viewing for Thiel.
*****
Thiel embodies the fusion of big tech with the military-intelligence apparatus. He uses some of his vast riches from providing surveillance technology for repressive and authoritarian regimes to finance and cultivate far-right movements internationally.
An early supporter of Donald Trump, he wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He backed Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and has been a major supporter of vice president, J.D. Vance.
*****
As a philosophy student at Stanford University, Thiel was influenced by the reactionary and misanthropic thinking of René Girard, who argued that people borrow or copy desires from each other, thus becoming rivals for the same things, provoking violence and scapegoating.
A self-described “small-o orthodox Christian,” Thiel drew from this a view of history heading towards Armageddon, heralded by the Antichrist. He has lately been giving invite-only lectures globally on the Antichrist at which attendees are forbidden to take notes. But reports made clear that Thiel once suggested the Antichrist might be Greta Thunberg and that the designation generally covers anything that suggests internationalism and social equality.
Along with Girard and religious thinkers, Thiel cites the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt as having helped form the core of his beliefs.
Since his student days, he has acted as a recruiting agent for the right wing. At Stanford he launched a libertarian newspaper whose proteges include Jay Bhattacharya, propagandist for the murderous policy of mass infection during COVID.
Since 2017, his Thiel Capital has been cultivating a network of far-right academics at Cambridge University. The “Thiel network,” was among the ringleaders of the witch-hunt that ended in the death of Professor Jason Arday.
James Orr, until last week Head of Policy at Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, was appointed in 2019 as Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge, reportedly accompanied by “a clandestine financial donation” from Thiel. Byline Times said documents indicated Orr had suggested the donation be kept anonymous, as he is also alleged to have done for Reform UK. Orr’s lawyers said Thiel had requested anonymity.
The far-right evangelist Orr hosted Thiel’s Antichrist lectures in Cambridge this year, calling them “the highlight of our academic year.” Perhaps Orr triggered Thiel’s interest in the Bayeux tapestry when he called immigration “the most existential threat facing our nation since the Norman invasion.”
*****
A co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, Thiel wallowed in the fiction that new tech entrepreneurs were “disruptive” innovators. But the reality was visible throughout, above all in the 2004 launch of Palantir Technologies.
Palantir was a CIA-backed startup, funded by its venture capital arm In-Q-Tel one year after the illegal invasion of Iraq. It has been a key component of US imperialism’s repressive work internationally and domestically ever since, with clients including the CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security and numerous police departments. Its current biggest US customer is the Department of Defense. Palantir this year reported 66 percent year-on-year revenue growth from government contracts, up to $570 million.
With the ruling class everywhere turning to authoritarian forms of rule, Thiel provides crucial mechanisms for mass surveillance. Documents released by Edward Snowden pointed to Palantir’s involvement in the NSA’s Prism surveillance programme.
Palantir’s AI software has been used in the escalating war against Iran, as well as in ICE immigration raids in the US. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has called for a reversal of the post-war disarmament of Germany and Japan, describing national service as “a universal duty.”
The Israeli Defence Forces use Palantir’s AI-based targeting to facilitate the genocide in Gaza. Perhaps, in opening the doors of culture to Thiel, the British Museum had in mind the destruction of archaeological and heritage sites in Palestine and Iran his company has enabled.
In Britain, Palantir was awarded a £240 million Ministry of Defence (MoD) contract in 2025. The company also profited from the Boris Johnson government’s criminal corporate handouts during the COVID pandemic to get a toehold in the National Health Service (NHS). Johnson and his strategic adviser Dominic Cummings reportedly met Thiel in 2019, but the government has rejected Freedom of Information requests for details.
Palantir built a COVID data store in 2020 without competitive tender, combining patient data with sources from operational data. When its initial three-month contract was made public, it emerged that tech firms were being given intellectual property rights to profit from access to NHS data.
Palantir may also have been allowed to use this data for training AI models. Questions remain over what the company is allowed to do with data “necessary to provide products or services.” It is now two years into the seven-year £330 million NHS contract, with Palantir providing technology for its Federated Data Platform (FDP), aimed at improving efficiency by aggregating patient data. More than half the NHS trusts in England use the technology.
Thiel has said the NHS “makes people sick” and called for its privatisation.
Aware of mounting hostility to Palantir’s access to patient information, Keir Starmer’s Labour government mooted last year the possibility of exercising a break clause in the NHS contract, even as they renewed its MoD contract. Then Health Secretary Wes Streeting refused to act on the break clause. The Peter Mandelson protege is now Defence Secretary.
Palantir employed Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel, which was soliciting Jeffrey Epstein’s help with finding clients. Thiel remained in close touch with Epstein after his conviction on sex offences, with Epstein’s Southern Trust Company investing $40 million in a venture fund co-founded by Thiel.
The phrase “Barbarians at the gates” has ancient usage, referring to the fall of the Roman Empire, and underwent revived popularity in the late 1980s—usually to describe the cutthroat world of financial speculation. As corruption seeped into every aspect of social and political life, the phrase was ever more frequently modified to speak of “Barbarians inside the gates”.
Thiel is a true barbarian, an obscurantist arming repressive regimes, enabling spying on entire populations, financing emergent fascist tendencies and working against any progressive sentiment or movement. Those who consider him worthy of a private view of a great cultural masterpiece are barbarism’s servants and facilitators.
2. Volkswagen workers demand freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk
Three trade union members at Volkswagen’s Kassel, Wolfsburg and Braunschweig plants are calling on their colleagues to support a resolution demanding the release of the socialist opponent of war.
3. The way forward following the Alternative for Germany’s electoral victory
The AfD’s electoral success is part of an international shift to the right among the ruling elites. The struggle to oppose this must be based on a socialist programme directed against capitalism.
4. The oligarchy’s war on public education: money, militarization and social control
As teachers and students return to classrooms for the 2026–27 school year, a frontal assault on the democratic right to education is unfolding across the United States. This attack, spearheaded by the Trump administration, is a key part of the ruling oligarchy’s subversion of democracy, its construction of a dictatorship and the subordination of society to a rapidly metastasizing world war.
Public education is a product of the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Civil War and long years of class struggle. The oligarchy’s attack on it is driven by three interconnected goals: the seizure of education’s nearly $1 trillion in annual spending for war and profits; the destruction of any semblance of democratic control over the schools; and the imposition of thought-control and censorship on students and educators—what the Nazi regime called Gleichschaltung, the “synchronization of education” with state control.
Trump’s fascist program arises not just from his backward and grasping coterie—epitomized by the billionaire wrestling magnate and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and trillionaire fascist Elon Musk—but from the ruling oligarchy as a whole. He rules on behalf of an obscenely rich layer, backed by both big business parties, which has plundered its way to the heights of the capitalist state.
*****
During 2025, about 53,000 educators lost their jobs, and more than 1,000 schools were closed. More than half of the country’s 50 largest school districts—most run by Democrats—are imposing layoffs, school closures, larger class sizes, cuts to academic and arts programs and the destruction of support services.
The Trump administration is eliminating the Department of Education (ED). The first Department of Education was created in 1867 as part of Reconstruction and the expansion of public education to blacks and rural Americans.
Ominously, the administration of most K–12 grant programs has been shifted to the Labor Department through interagency agreements. That single administrative act announces the class content of the entire operation: Education is being formally re-subordinated to workforce production—children reprocessed as raw material for the labor market and the military.
In this vein, on September 3, the State Department made explicit the fusion of education with the military/security state, launching the “Foundry School,” an eight-university manufacturing-training program. It was unveiled at the Orwellian-named Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio explicitly framed civilian workforce education as a matter of national security.
The cruelest attack has been directed against migrant families. ICE has detained more than 6,200 children during Trump’s second term, holding an average of 226 children on any given day, and has deported more than 3,600. The democratic principle affirmed in Plyler v. Doe in 1982, that undocumented children cannot be denied a public education, is being attacked through raids, detention and fear even though the Supreme Court ruling has not been formally overturned.
The authoritarian transformation is accompanied by militarization. In Omaha, city police equipped 29 of 34 school resource officers with electric-shock G.L.O.V.E.s and used them twice on students. In Florida and Georgia, eight schools are preparing to pilot indoor attack drones designed to fire pepper balls and ram a target. The FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act enacted the most aggressive expansion of Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) in its history, aiming to funnel working-class youth directly into the military.
*****
Why does the oligarchy aim to destroy public education?
1. Money. Public education is the largest pool of socialized spending: nearly $1 trillion a year in K-12 alone, another $450 billion in public higher education and a federal student loan portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion. The ruling elites want these resources either in their bank accounts or diverted to the global wars that secure their domination.
Even more fundamentally, the United States faces state bankruptcy. Federal debt exceeds $40 trillion, and annual net federal interest outlays exceed $1 trillion. The ruling class must, if it is to preserve capitalism, make the working class pay for these bills—through the destruction of all social gains and through world war.
2. The destruction of what remains of democratic input into public schooling. Although they have long yielded to the demands of powerful corporate and political interests, an estimated 13,000 elected school boards would be eliminated if the school system was privatized. The past year has seen mass protests at local school boards across the US as parents and educators fought against layoffs and school closures. But under the voucher system, there is no pretense of democratic governance: The public is reduced to individual consumers whose only right is to shop.
3. Ideological control. The attack on public education is a war on the very practice of education, culture, science and critical thought. The Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” sent to major universities in October 2025, is a near reproduction of the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung. The compact demands that universities subordinate themselves to the “national interests” and “priorities” of the US government and calls for the political screening of international students for alleged “anti-American values.”
The Department of Education has likewise established a partnership with more than 40 right-wing organizations to develop civic programming for K-12 schools. The “America 250 Civics Education Coalition” includes outright fascistic forces, among them Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, the Heritage Foundation and PragerU. Its declared mission is to “reignite the fires of patriotism” through curriculum, federal programming and a 50-state speaking tour.
The historical analogy must be understood soberly. After Hitler took power, the April 7, 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service expelled Jewish and politically oppositional teachers and professors, initiating the subordination of education, science and culture to the Nazi state. The American ruling class is confronting the same fundamental contradiction: Democratic rights, scientific thought and historical truth stand in the way of a social order based on extreme inequality, war and authoritarian rule.
The present campaign against the teaching of slavery and racism, the banning of books, the persecution of transgender students, the censorship of opposition to the Gaza genocide and the political vetting of educators are elements of an effort to suppress the capacity of an entire generation to understand the society in which it lives and to block resistance.
The contrast reveals the class priorities of American capitalism: While the government claims there is no money for schools, the Fiscal Year 2027 military budget request approaches $1.5 trillion. The entire Department of Education budget is only a small fraction of the Pentagon’s annual resources.
The same ruling class that is waging a world war abroad is constructing a dictatorship at home. It requires schools stripped of democratic governance, teachers deprived of independence, young people habituated to surveillance and armed force and curricula purged of the historical knowledge needed to oppose capitalism.
*****
The battles of the 2025 -2026 school year
The last school year was marked by a growing movement of educators, parents and students. Strike votes in districts across the country registered near-unanimous support in the fight against inadequate wages, skyrocketing healthcare costs and rising class sizes. Teachers rallied with their students amid national walkouts beginning in January against ICE murders and deportations. The call for a general strike was on the lips of teachers from Minneapolis to North Carolina.
But in every case, the militancy of educators was sabotaged by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA). As tens of thousands of high school students walked out to protest the ICE murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the unions demanded passivity in the infamous words “Obey now, grieve later” and warned teachers that walking out was “unprotected activity.”
Indeed, 2025 was marked by a conspiracy by the AFT and NEA that blocked a potentially massive movement of educators that would have eclipsed the national strike wave of 2018–2019 and provided the impetus for a national movement against the destruction of education. Throughout, the apparatus was aided by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which supplied the “left” cover that describes every betrayed struggle as a “victory.”
The key battles underscore this treachery:
In Chicago, the DSA-dominated Chicago Teachers Union pushed through a “transformative” contract—the first in 15 years negotiated without even a strike vote—containing no protection against layoffs, even as the district faced a $982 million deficit. The CTU’s “Trump-proof” contract was followed by school closures, the announcement of 1,723 layoffs and an effective pay cut through unpaid furloughs.
In Philadelphia, the union leadership settled without a strike even after 94 percent had voted to walk out. The district is now closing 17 more schools.
The California Teachers Association (CTA) used a cynically misnamed “We Can’t Wait” campaign to keep 80,000 teachers working without contracts for nearly a year. The CTA derailed unified action, isolated each struggle and left districts subject to Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s fiscal stabilization cuts.
In the most significant teacher walkout, San Francisco’s February 2026 strike—the first in nearly 50 years—was strangled through the joint efforts of AFT President Randi Weingarten and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pink slips followed within days, even as the DSA house publication Jacobin celebrated the “win.” In Oakland, where 91 percent authorized a strike, the union imposed a deal on February 27; two days later, the school board voted to cut 421 positions, roughly 10 percent of the workforce.
Nationally, the high point of resistance to Trump’s agenda among educators was in Los Angeles. Nearly 70,000 school workers were within a day of walking out together for the first time in the district’s history, when the movement was strangled by the unions, in tandem with the Democrats and the DSA. Los Angeles is now reporting a $3.6 billion deficit by 2028-29 and has adopted its fiscal stabilization plan that would eliminate 5,690 positions.
The case could not be clearer. After each contract betrayal was initialed by the union apparatus, layoffs and cuts began. The unions’ deliberate sabotage of the class struggle gave the politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, a free hand to gut public education.
The unions covered their betrayal with endless “anti-Trump” lawsuits while shutting down the working class’s real power through strike action. They are now pushing another public relations operation, a “May Day Strong” campaign to divert teachers’ anger into support for the Democratic Party, rally foot soldiers for the midterms, and suppress strikes with the phony demand for a “general strike”… in 2028.
*****
The way forward
Public schooling was not handed down as a gift from a benevolent ruling class. It was won through centuries of struggle: the democratic and egalitarian impulses released by the two American revolutions and the Russian Revolution; the fight against child labor; the mass labor struggles of the 1930s and 1940s; the civil rights movement; and the battles for the rights of immigrant children and students with disabilities.
Education worthy of the name tells the truth, traces cause and effect, understands history and acts consciously to improve society. It is precisely this capacity that the oligarchy fears.
5. Mexican truck drivers block ports of entry to US over Trump’s mass revocation of B-1 visas
Hundreds of Mexican cross-border truck drivers blockaded the commercial ports of entry on the Mexican side of the Mexicali, Mexico-Calexico East (California) and San Luis Río Colorado, Mexico-Yuma, Arizona border from Thursday to midday Sunday. Truckers blocked the crossings to protest the mass revocation of their B-1 visas by US immigration authorities. The visas have allowed truckers to take cargo into the US.
The action, organized by the drivers themselves through a WhatsApp group of 1,024 operators—the maximum capacity of the platform—spread within days and threatened to spread to the crossing between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico, and the busiest San Diego-Tijuana border crossing.
The blockade was sparked when, on September 2, at least 17 drivers from Mexicali—the capital city of Baja California—had their visas revoked. That was only the latest episode in a campaign of arbitrary enforcement which has been escalating for a year and which employers or state officials have done nothing to halt.
The National Chamber of Freight Transport (La Cámara Nacional del Autotransporte de Carga or CANACAR) estimates more than 25,000 visas have been revoked from commercial drivers along Mexico’s northern border, including potentially 4,000 in Baja California. CANACAR estimates that some 21 percent of the binational B-1 truckers—about 19,000 drivers—have been affected. Sixty percent of those impacted are from Mexicali and 40 percent from Tijuana and Tecate, the freight industry chamber of commerce estimates.
Approximately 300 drivers blocked the Calexico-Mexicali crossing and another 60 at Yuma-San Luis Río Colorado in Mexico. They used their semi-trucks, some with trailers attached, to physically block access, and set up tents directly outside the port of entry. Drivers protested in 105 degree heat, and they said the blockade was necessary even though they were sacrificing money and jobs.
Large banners posted on the trucks stating their grievances and demands that called for an end to abuses and harassment from ICE and CBP as well as clear and accurate information. One banner declared “Our work is not a crime, it is the engine that drives two nations.”
*****
Federal authorities in the US, including US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the US Department of Transportation (DOT), are accusing the primarily Mexican truck drivers of violating cabotage laws, or “cabotaje” in Spanish.
Cabotage is the hauling of cargo between two points inside the United States by a foreign-registered carrier, a practice that is legally reserved exclusively for US companies and workers. But the drivers’ proclaim that the accusations are arbitrary and unsubstantiated, and that no evidence has ever been presented to them or the public.
Drivers describe being accused of cabotage for making necessary pitstops, such as stopping at Walmart locations, or for taking several days to return to Mexico. One worker had his visa revoked because his trip took four days—even though his load was never dropped off at its final destination.
Workers say their trips can legitimately take up to nine days, given the normal logistics of an international delivery. Their trailer and vehicle data is monitored around the clock by the companies, so that any deviation or delay cannot be misconstrued by ICE or CBP as “cabotaje.”
*****
he drivers describe being interrogated by ICE agents at the crossings, harassed over their papers, documents, licenses and permits, subjected to extreme inspections. They say this has caused psychological trauma across the workforce. Allen Verdugo, one of the spokesmen of the workers, called it a “cacería de brujas”—a witch hunt. “Nos tratan como delincuentes,” he told the press—they treat us like criminals.
Worse, the drivers report that workers who have had their visas revoked have been forced by ICE to confess and sign statements admitting to cabotage they did not commit—under threat not only of losing their own visas, but of having their families’ visas revoked, and of facing arrest and detention. One worker described a coworker being tackled and arrested by ICE at the border crossing, and was forced to confess under these threats.
Drivers also report that ICE has begun testing truckers for English-language proficiency—a requirement that had never been enforced until this past year under the Trump administration’s escalated attacks.
*****
CANACAR is the employers’ association that manages the business and legal affairs of the Mexican freight industry, including negotiating with US immigration authorities. The drivers have waited in vain for roughly a year for CANACAR to resolve the visa issue.
The drivers have begun to draw the conclusion that the employers association does not represent them. At the Mexicali crossing, the local CANACAR president and a representative of the business council were confronted and heckled. When the CANACAR official explained that they had been in meetings with ICE and CBP when the 17 revocations occurred, a worker shouted back: “Exactamente, ustedes están con ICE y CBP”— exactly, you are with ICE and CBP.
*****
Neither the trucking companies, CANACAR, the Movement of National Regeneration (Morena) party nor the unions had anything to do with organizing the blockade. It is developing at the initiative of rank-and-file drivers themselves, the majority of whom work directly for large trucking companies.
CANACAR officials have urged them to pursue negotiations rather than expand the demonstrations to Tijuana. “My hope is that it does not extend to Tijuana,” Alfonso Millán Chávez, a CANACAR representative said of the protests. “The idea is that we be cautious with this issue.”
Drivers agreed to temporarily halt the blockade Sunday with a first meeting planned Monday, September 7 at the office of the General Secretariat of the Government (SGG) in which the transporters and officials from the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs participating.
However, the drivers warned, “If we don’t see that things have progressed and that visas continue to be withdrawn left and right, we will take action again … and next time it will be a little more organized and much bigger, including Tijuana, Tecate, Mexicali, San Luis and Nogales.”
The Mexican government to which the truckers have appealed is directly complicit in the attacks on immigrants. The government headed by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is not defending migrants against Trump but is imposing the repression on Mexico’s side of the border that Trump is demanding.
*****
The answer is not to appeal to the government, the unions or any political party. Instead, drivers must organize their struggle independently and broaden their struggle by appealing directly to manufacturing and logistics workers on both sides of the border to oppose the crackdown on immigrant workers.
6. Prominent Tamil newspaper in Sri Lanka publishes article demanding freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk
On August 10, a court in Pervomaisk sentenced Bogdan, a 27-year-old socialist and leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), to 15 years in prison on charges of “high treason” under martial law. His “crime” was writing articles for the World Socialist Web Site calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers to end the US-NATO proxy war with Russia.
The campaign for Bogdan’s immediate release, including an online petition, has gained widespread support from workers, intellectuals, academics, young people and others across the world. In Sri Lanka, hundreds of people, including workers, intellectuals and young people, have expressed their support and anger toward the fascistic Zelensky regime in Ukraine.
Most of the Colombo-based capitalist media have remained totally silent and ignored the calls from the WSWS to report on the persecution of Bogdan. Police have harassed supporters of the Socialist Equality Party at the University of Jaffna during a campaign for Bogdan’s freedom—an indication of the ruling elite’s nervousness about support among students for the imprisoned socialist.
Sunday’s article in Uthayan was headlined “Court buries a voice against war.” Based on WSWS coverage of Bogdan’s conviction and sentencing, the article presented the fundamental issues at stake in the campaign for his immediate release and included color photos of Bogdan.
7. Mamdani praises New York police amid 2 fatal shootings
New York City police officers shot and killed two emotionally disturbed individuals last week. Neither killing has prompted a word of protest from Democratic New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member who was swept into office by politically radicalized workers and young people looking for an alternative to the capitalist system.
Presenting himself as a rebel against the Democratic Party establishment, Mamdani promised to implement social reforms and rein in the police.
But within hours of the second shooting last week, Mamdani was on social media defending the police who gunned down the victim, while he and New York Governor Kathy Hochul devoted their public energies to denouncing the Trump administration for withholding police funding.
On the afternoon of August 31, a 49-year-old Queens woman, Pamela Cisneros, stabbed two people in Times Square. Cisneros had struggled with serious mental illness for decades and had a documented mental health history with the New York Police Department (NYPD). She pulled two kitchen knives from a plastic shopping bag and used them to kill one victim and injure another. At least 10 officers surrounded her and demanded that she drop the knives. One officer deployed a taser that failed to incapacitate Cisneros. When the woman shuffled toward the police, waving the knives, an officer shot her in the abdomen.
The second killing came early Friday morning, September 4, on the Brooklyn Bridge. Forty-one-year-old Bronx resident Chaun Bottom, a welder unemployed for the last five years, had climbed the bridge cables while holding a knife. He told the police: “I want to die. I want you to kill me.” Officers reportedly spent an hour trying to talk him down. When he descended the cables toward them, they shot him. He was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital.
In the department’s own words, both were “EDPs”—emotionally disturbed persons—a category that has defined many of the NYPD’s deadliest encounters for generations. Last week’s killings were the latest entries in an extensive record of NYPD murders of mentally ill individuals: Eleanor Bumpurs in 1984, Gidone Busch in 1999, Deborah Danner in 2016, Saheed Vassell in 2018, Win Rozario in 2023. According to the NYPD’s own official account, 48 people were shot and killed by New York police between 2020 and 2024.
This policy is now Mamdani’s. In January, Jabez Chakraborty, a 23-year-old Queens resident, was shot at least four times in his own home after his family called 911 for an ambulance because he was having a mental health crisis. Mamdani praised the officers who shot him, writing on X: “I’m grateful to the first responders who put themselves on the line each day to keep our communities safe.” Chakraborty survived the gunshot wounds and is now being charged by the Queens District Attorney with attempted assault and criminal possession of a weapon.
Mamdani has been silent on the murder of Cisneros. His statement on the killing of Bottom reads like an NYPD press release. He praised officers for working “to de-escalate,” emphasized that Bottom “threatened the officers,” and concluded that the shooting would be reviewed internally.
One day after the killing of Cisneros and three days before the fatal shooting of Bottom, Mamdani stood at a Bronx police roll call beside NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch—the billionaire heiress who built the NYPD’s mass-surveillance apparatus and oversaw the violent crackdown on Gaza genocide protests—to tout the department’s crime statistics. The DSA mayor declared that “the NYPD worked around the clock to keep New York City safe” and gushed that he was “grateful for their service today and every day.”
*****
On the same day that Mamdani lavished praise on this police force, he joined Governor Kathy Hochul, a right-wing Democrat, to denounce Trump for withholding $87 million in federal counterterrorism funds—money for police bomb squads, intelligence operations, and surveillance. “Donald Trump is defunding the police,” Hochul declared, demanding that Trump “release the $87 million you owe us.” Mamdani said, “At the very moment we should be strengthening the systems that protect New Yorkers, the federal government is walking away from that responsibility.”
These statements further reveal the true character of the Democratic Party, responsible for the militarization of police across the country. In the summer of 2020, some Democratic politicians briefly mouthed the slogan “defund the police” to contain massive protests over the police murder of George Floyd. Under attack from Republicans and from within their own party, they abandoned the slogan within weeks of the protests subsiding.
*****
Mamdani campaigned on reining in the NYPD, notorious for its brutality towards workers and poor people. But from the moment of his election, he moved to reassure the financial oligarchy that nothing fundamental would change under a DSA administration. A clear signal was his announcement that he would retain Tisch as police commissioner. Since then he has repeatedly praised Tisch’s “success” in bringing down crime rates. The Mamdani administration has remained silent on a lawsuit challenging the integration of some 18,000 public housing security cameras into the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System.
Meanwhile, the same Trump administration that Hochul denounces for “defunding the police” has escalated its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the city. Fascistic Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced on September 1 that ICE had arrested more than 2,100 people in New York City in a month-long “Operation Rotten Apple” and threatened to send still more federal agents into the streets.
Apart from a few tepid words about “sanctuary” policies, Mamdani and Hochul have not lifted a finger to defend immigrants, while Mamdani has boasted of his “partnership” with Trump and met with him twice in the Oval Office. Last month, when Trump and the Supreme Court stripped 350,000 Haitian immigrants of their Temporary Protected Status, Mamdani fired Haitian city employees who had lost their TPS.
Wall Street and the financial oligarchy that control New York and both capitalist parties are well aware that an explosive conflict with the powerful New York working class is coming. The DSA administration, for all its left rhetoric, is an instrument of that oligarchy. It is no less frightened and no less determined to shore up the state forces of repression, beginning with the police.
8. 1,300 casino workers strike Wynn Resorts’ Encore Boston Harbor
The strikers are housekeepers, cooks, food and beverage staff, slot attendants and cage cashiers, valet and limousine drivers, dispatchers, traffic attendants, groundskeepers, warehouse workers and call center staff.
9. Madrid Forum seeks to strengthen Vox’s hand amid Ceuta fallout
The Madrid Forum represents a section of the ruling class, allied with the US state security apparatus and leading a growing number of far-right Latin American governments, organizing internationally against their own populations.
10. Hyundai autoworkers’ union in South Korea imposes sellout contract
The new agreement was imposed as the union isolated workers at different companies, all of whom face similar attacks on their wages and conditions.
11. 10,000 public servants to strike against pay cuts in New Zealand
The Public Service Association is limiting the strike to half a day and fostering illusions that electing the Labour Party will stop austerity.
12. No mention of Labor’s agenda at Australian university staff strikes in Sydney and Melbourne
The trade unions kept the stoppages apart and remained silent on the Albanese government’s pro-corporate and pro-military restructuring of the universities.
13. Canada’s Algoma Steel agrees to wrist-slap fine after admitting guilt in the death of Damien Bryant
When Senior Crown counsel David McCaskill announced the $250,000 in fines imposed on Algoma Steel for Bryant's death, he conceded the penalty could have been higher, but said the US tariffs on Canadian steel had to be taken into account.
14. Massachusetts prosecutors weigh retrial of Lindsay Clancy after jury deadlocks with lone holdout
Eleven of 12 jurors voted to acquit the mother who killed her three children in the throes of postpartum psychosis.
15. Armed Republican attacks Ohio Democratic candidate for governor
An armed man, a registered Republican whose brother is a party activist, tried to attack the Democratic candidate for Ohio governor, Dr. Amy Acton, as she made a public appearance Sunday in the Youngstown suburb of Canfield.
Acton was speaking to a group of supporters inside the Democratic Party tent at the Canfield Fair, an annual event that draws a wide local audience. Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was also scheduled to make an appearance at the fair.
Patrick M. Havas, 38, was grabbed by Ohio State Highway Patrol officers as he sought to push his way through the crowd toward Acton. “Havas knocked multiple fairgoers over while trying to get towards Dr. Acton, and was found to be in possession of a taser and two pistols,” state police said.
Havas was also equipped with brass knuckles, but he did not remove any of the weapons from his pockets or brandish them, and he was arrested and taken to Mahoning County Jail without incident. He was charged with disorderly conduct and two counts of assault, for knocking over an elderly man and woman as he charged toward Acton.
Acton was not injured and remained at the fair, reportedly assisting in providing medical treatment for the two people who were injured.
The state highway patrol and the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office were investigating the event further, seeking to determine what precipitated the apparent attack, including Havas’s intentions and motives.
The attacker’s brother, Andrew Havas, was the volunteer chair for the Senate campaign of Republican candidate Jon Husted in Franklin County, which includes Columbus and is the state’s largest, with 1.4 million people. He resigned in July after a local NBC News affiliate discovered that he had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge on a teenaged girl in 2009, when he was 22, but had not disclosed the conviction to the Husted campaign.
A registered lobbyist with the state government, Andrew Havas also donated more than $10,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. After his guilty plea became public, the Democratic Party made an issue of the donations.
Dr. Acton directly criticized Ramaswamy for accepting the money. “Ohioans deserve leaders who exercise good judgment and who put integrity first,” Acton wrote in July. “I find it appalling that Vivek Ramaswamy accepted over $10,000 from Andrew Havas.”
Under other circumstances, such an exchange would represent the mudslinging which is typical of two-party capitalist politics in the United States. But in 2026, when President Trump denounces his political opponents as lunatics, communists and traitors, political tensions increasingly threaten to erupt in acts of violence.
*****
In reality, violence plays an increasing role in American politics, driven by mounting social tensions and the direct provocation of violence by Trump and his fascist coterie.
A major factor in the deepening political crisis is the impact of deindustrialization and growing poverty in areas that were once the centers of steel, auto and tire production. Canfield, Ohio, is only a 20-minute drive from the shuttered General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and the scrapped steel mills in downtown Youngstown. It is only 50 miles west of Butler, Pennsylvania, another ruined industrial town where Trump himself was the target of an assassination attempt during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Acton, a professor of public health at Ohio State University, was recruited by Republican Governor Michael DeWine to head the state health department. She became well-known in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving accurate briefings about the dangers, advocating people stay at home as much as possible and supporting school closures.
Though widely praised by health experts and scientists for her aggressive response to the pandemic, Acton resigned in June 2020 after becoming the target of vitriolic right-wing hostility, including demonstrations outside her home, and efforts by the Republican-controlled state legislature to limit and revoke her authority to issue health orders.
Acton and Ramaswamy have been effectively tied in the polls during the summer months. Acton was unopposed for the Democratic nomination and has raised more than $21.8 million for her campaign. Ramaswamy, a billionaire biotech investor who briefly ran for president in 2024 before backing Trump, has raised nearly $50 million. The contest is one of a handful of competitive governor’s races on the November 3 ballot.
16. Glasgow SNP and Greens vote to cut council workers’ pay via “fire and rehire”
Scottish National Party–controlled Glasgow City Council is using a long-delayed equal pay settlement to cut local authority workers’ salaries. The city council is preparing “fire and rehire” measures against as much as 11 percent of its 24,000 non-teaching workforce.
17. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Canada:
University of Toronto workers vote to strike
Jazz Aviation flight attendants vote to strike
Chile:
Mexico :
United States:
Workers at Tufts University Medford, Massachusetts campus authorize strike action
Cleveland Orchestra musicians authorize strike; will walk out September 23 if negotiations fail
18. “The case of Bogdan Syrotiuk shows: War abroad requires repression at home”
Johannes Stern's speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany:
Dear comrades, friends and participants in this rally,
We are standing here today in front of the Brandenburg Gate to unite two demands that are inseparably connected: “Stop the war in Ukraine!” and “Freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk!”
On August 10, 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and opponent of war Bogdan Syrotiuk was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Fifteen years! For what? Not for espionage. Not for sabotage. Not for passing on military secrets. Not for any collaboration with the Russian government.
Bogdan was convicted for six political articles published on the World Socialist Web Site and for his correspondence with WSWS editors. In these articles, he opposed the war. He condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the reactionary Putin regime. At the same time, he opposed NATO and the imperialist powers that are using Ukraine as the battlefield for their war against Russia.
Bogdan opposed Ukrainian nationalism and fascism and the state glorification of Stepan Bandera, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and other forces that collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War.
And above all, Bogdan called on Ukrainian and Russian workers not to slaughter one another, but to unite on the basis of an international socialist perspective against their oligarchs and governments.
That is his real crime. That is the position this verdict is intended to criminalize.
An independent expert assessment by a leading Ukrainian criminologist concluded that Bogdan’s writings contained no propaganda in support of the Putin government. In more than two years of imprisonment and court proceedings, the prosecution was unable to present any evidence that Bogdan was an agent of the Russian government.
Because there is no evidence. Bogdan is a Trotskyist and, as such, an opponent of the NATO imperialists, but also of the Putin regime. Yet the court nevertheless convicted him of “high treason under martial law.”
It not only sentenced him to 15 years in prison and ordered the confiscation of his property. It also ordered the destruction of the program, brochures and leaflets of his socialist youth organization, the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists.
We have to grasp the significance of this. A court orders socialist literature to be destroyed. It punishes a young man for political articles. It declares opposition to war and nationalism to be treason. This is not justice. This is political persecution.
And the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk destroys the entire propaganda with which this war has been justified for years. We are told: NATO is defending “freedom” and “democracy” in Ukraine. But what kind of democracy is this?
Since the beginning of the war, no national elections have taken place. All left-wing opposition parties have been banned. Critical media have been suppressed. The World Socialist Web Site was blocked in Ukraine just weeks after Bogdan’s arrest. Hundreds of thousands of young men are being forcibly mobilized and sent to the front. And a socialist receives 15 years in prison because he says that Russian and Ukrainian workers have no interest in killing one another.
That is the truth about the so-called war for democracy. And that is precisely why the major German media are silent about Bogdan’s case.
Just imagine what would happen if a Russian court sentenced a 27-year-old opponent of war to 15 years in prison for political articles. The case would be on every front page. There would be special broadcasts. Government spokesmen would issue statements. Chancellor Merz, Foreign Minister Wadephul and Defense Minister Pistorius would talk about human rights in order to beat the war drum against Russia even more loudly.
But Bogdan? Silence.
And why? The answer is clear. Because reporting on his case would immediately raise the question: What kind of regime is the German government actually financing and arming? And this question leads directly to the real character of the Ukraine war.
This war is not simply a conflict between Russia and Ukraine that Moscow started out of the blue. It is the outcome of a decades-long imperialist offensive following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. NATO was expanded ever further eastward.
In 2014, the United States and Germany supported the overthrow in Kyiv and relied in the process on extreme-right and fascist forces. Since then, Ukraine has been systematically armed and transformed into a military outpost against Russia.
Putin’s reactionary invasion in February 2022 then provided NATO with the pretext to transform this conflict into an open proxy war against Russia. And by now, the development is moving ever further toward a direct war between NATO and Russia—between nuclear-armed powers.
In recent days, the German government has taken this escalation to a new level. It claims that Russia was responsible for a foiled drone attack at Leipzig Airport and has responded with new punitive measures against Russia. Foreign Minister Wadephul and Interior Minister Dobrindt did not present a single piece of publicly verifiable evidence for the alleged Russian responsibility. Nevertheless, Chancellor Merz threatened that Russia would “pay” for it.
Russian institutions are being closed, diplomatic and cultural relations are being further severed, and additional sanctions and military operations against Russian ships are being prepared.
It is significant that the German government announced its escalation precisely on September 1—the day Hitler unleashed the Second World War. The Nazis staged a fake attack on the Gleiwitz radio station to justify the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland.
Now the German government is once again resorting to the same methods as it prepares to cross the threshold from a proxy war to an open war against Russia. That is exactly what Dobrindt meant when he said: “We are not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare.”
Step by step, the German government is creating a situation in which every provocation, every miscalculation and every incident can trigger a direct military confrontation.
The dark historical continuity in which this stands must be stated with absolute clarity, especially here in the center of Berlin. For the third time in modern history, German imperialism is directing its war drive against Russia.
In the First World War, the German Empire sought to bring Eastern Europe and large parts of the then Russian Empire under its control. The second attempt was Hitler’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.
On June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. That war aimed at conquering vast territories, controlling raw materials, enslavement and extermination. It culminated in the Holocaust, and at least 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives.
Today German tanks and soldiers are once again stationed on Russia’s borders. In Lithuania, Germany is permanently deploying a heavy combat formation abroad for the first time since the Second World War. It is producing long-range weapons for Ukraine. It is rearming on a scale that only a few years ago would have been regarded as completely unthinkable. Conscription is being reintroduced in order to generate the necessary cannon fodder here as well.
The economy is increasingly being converted to war production. Jobs are being destroyed, social spending is being cut, schools and hospitals are decaying—and at the same time ever larger sums are flowing into tanks, missiles and ammunition. Rearmament and social cuts are two sides of the same policy.
The working class is supposed to pay for the war twice: first through falling wages, job cuts and destroyed social infrastructure—and ultimately with its life.
And that is precisely why Bogdan’s case is so significant. Because war abroad requires repression at home. The ruling classes know very well that the overwhelming majority of the population is not voluntarily prepared to sacrifice its living standards and send its children into a war against a nuclear power.
That is why the tendency toward authoritarianism, state repression and fascism is growing everywhere.
Bogdan shows us where this development leads, but his case shows something else as well. It shows the power of an international campaign. Since the verdict, protest letters from more than 30 countries have been sent to the Ukrainian courts. Historians, artists, academics, workers and students are demanding Bogdan’s release.
Workers are also beginning to make Bogdan’s defense their own cause. Just a few days ago, VW workers published a resolution demanding his release—at a time when they themselves are confronted with plant closures and tens of thousands of job losses, while billions are simultaneously being poured into rearmament.
The campaign is clearly beginning to put pressure on the Ukrainian authorities. The Court of Appeal in Mykolaiv responded to the influx of international protest letters by declaring that letters had to be written in Ukrainian. That is remarkable.
For months, the Ukrainian judiciary was able to persecute Bogdan virtually without international public scrutiny. Now the court is receiving so many protest letters that it feels compelled to respond.
And how does it respond? Not by addressing the arguments in any substantive way. Instead, it is trying to choke off the protest with a bureaucratic language requirement.
But this attempt will fail. The protests will continue, and we must fight to make them much larger. Because for Bogdan, this is a matter of life and death. He already had serious health problems when he was arrested. For a long time, he was denied necessary medical treatment. Under the catastrophic conditions of the Ukrainian prison system, a 15-year prison sentence can effectively amount to a death sentence.
That is why we say: Freedom for Bogdan! The verdict must be overturned!
Of course, we place no trust in the Ukrainian courts, the German government or any other imperialist government. Bogdan’s freedom will ultimately not be won through appeals to those who are waging this war. It must be won by the international working class. That is the decisive perspective.
Bogdan has never claimed that the alternative to NATO’s war is support for Putin. On the contrary. He opposes both camps from a socialist and internationalist standpoint.
He says to Russian workers: Your enemy is not the Ukrainian worker. Your enemies are the NATO imperialists, the Russian oligarchy and the Putin regime. And he says to Ukrainian workers: Your enemy is not the Russian worker. You have nothing to gain by dying for Zelensky, the Ukrainian oligarchs, NATO or German and American corporations.
We say here in Germany: Our enemy is not in Moscow. Workers in Germany have no interest in killing Russian workers. They have no interest in billions flowing into weapons while their factories are shut down and their wages and pensions are attacked. They have no interest in a third German war against Russia.
The allies of German workers are the workers in Russia, Ukraine and throughout the world. That is why the central task is to build an international socialist anti-war movement of the working class. Not appeals to the German government. Not the illusion that any capitalist great power can bring peace. But the independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system that produces war, nationalism and fascism.
That is also the significance of our campaign for the Berlin House of Representatives election. The Socialist Equality Party is standing in this election to oppose the all-party coalition for rearmament, war and social cuts with a socialist perspective.
We say: Socialism instead of war!
And this slogan is not simply an election slogan. It expresses the fundamental alternative we face. Either the capitalist crisis increasingly intensifies the tendency toward militarism, fascism and world war, or the international working class intervenes in developments and reorganizes society on a socialist basis.
That is why we call on you today: Sign the petition for Bogdan’s freedom! Distribute it! Write to the Court of Appeal—in German, English, Ukrainian or whatever language you choose! Speak about his case in your workplaces, schools and universities! Call on trade unions, works councils, artists, academics and organizations to issue public statements!
Distribute the book The Ukraine War and the Fight for Socialism: The Case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, which documents the political background to this show trial.
And above all: Connect the fight for Bogdan’s freedom with the fight against war! Bogdan is in prison because he fights for the unity of the international working class.
Let us make sure that this perspective reaches millions! The answer to the persecution of a socialist must be the building of a powerful socialist movement. The answer to nationalism must be the international unity of the working class. The answer to rearmament must be the class struggle against the policy of war. And the answer to the danger of a third world war must be the fight for international socialism.
Stop the war in Ukraine!
Stop NATO’s war escalation against Russia!
Against rearmament, nationalism and fascism!
For the unity of the Ukrainian, Russian, German and international working class!
Join us in building a powerful socialist anti-war movement!
Support the election campaign of the Socialist Equality Party!And above all:
Freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk!
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
