Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: September 21-27
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Anti-communist referendum voted down in Australia
100 years ago:
Chinese students protest at League of Nations assembly
2. Massive drone attack on Moscow marks new stage of US-NATO war with Russia
Ukraine's attack on Moscow with 450 drones, carried out with weapons paid for, jointly developed and often directly supplied by the NATO powers, marks a new stage in the de facto war between NATO and Russia.
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The US and European imperialist powers have arrived at a position analogous to that of the great powers in 1914. In the weeks after the assassination of the Austrian archduke at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, the governments of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, France and Britain concluded that war, with all its terrible consequences, was the least bad option before them. As in 1914, and as with Hitler in 1939, the ruling classes see war as a means of suppressing problems that they cannot solve. None of these governments is prepared to retreat, and there is no red line they are not willing to cross.
The governments have chosen escalation, but they do not control its consequences. If they could be shown what their cities will look like in two years, it would not stop them. Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution, wrote in the 1938 founding program of the Fourth International: “The bourgeoisie, of course, is aware of the mortal danger to its domination represented by a new war. But that class is now immeasurably less capable of averting war than on the eve of 1914.” This assessment is even more true today.
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he war, now in its fifth year, was instigated by the NATO powers. Three decades of NATO expansion to Russia’s borders and the arming of Ukraine as a NATO proxy were aimed at provoking the conflict that began with Putin’s invasion in February 2022.
The Ukrainian regime, which is waging the war on behalf of the imperialist powers, faces perhaps the deepest crisis of all. The Zelensky dictatorship rules by martial law, holds no elections and has banned opposition parties. It fills its army by seizing men on the streets, and it faces mounting resistance to forced conscription in Lviv, Ternopil, Lutsk and other cities.
On August 10, a Ukrainian court sentenced the socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, 27, to 15 years in prison for opposing the war and calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against it.
The reactionary invasion of Ukraine was the response of a regime that is itself the product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Russian government is a government of oligarchs who enriched themselves through the plunder of state property, and its policies have been bankrupt from the beginning. Putin’s strategy in invading Ukraine was to pressure the NATO powers, which he constantly called his “Western partners,” into an accommodation with Russia. Instead, they used the invasion as a pretext for a massive military escalation.
The greatest danger in the political situation is the chasm between the scale of the threat and the understanding of it among the population. Masses of people sense the danger, but they cannot believe that their governments would risk nuclear war. The governments are exploiting this incredulity. The media and political establishment are doing everything possible to prevent the population from knowing and understanding the dangers.
Workers and young people in every country must be warned that their governments are leading them into a war with Russia that can end in the use of nuclear weapons, and that no section of the political establishment will stop it.
Nothing can stop this war except a movement of the international working class. The basis for such a movement exists. There is mounting opposition in the working class in every country, expressed in a growing wave of strikes and protests. The impact of the war, including soaring prices and the gutting of social programs to pay for rearmament, combines with the general social crisis: staggering levels of inequality, mass layoffs and the assault on democratic rights.
These struggles must be united in a conscious political movement. It must be international, uniting workers in Ukraine, Russia, Europe and America against their common enemy. It must be independent of all the parties of the ruling class, which support the war. It must be socialist, directed against the capitalist system that is the source of war.
The alternative to world war is world socialist revolution.
3. “Krach against Nazis”—The latest election fraud by Berlin’s Social Democrats
In the election campaign, [the Social Democrats’ (SPD) lead candidate, Steffen] Krach presents himself as a candidate for the mayoralty, portraying himself as someone who cares about the most superficial everyday concerns. He claims to practice “politics based on common sense rather than ideological blinders,” he says he will “send out the rent police to crack down on rent gouging” (while concealing the fact that the SPD and the Left Party together sold off 150,000 state-owned flats to private investors), and he “will ensure that a 30 km/h speed limit becomes standard outside nurseries and schools.”
True to the unspoken motto “Why should I care about my policies of yesterday?,” he evidently assumes that Berliners have forgotten which party has held government responsibility—and thus taken the lead in social cuts, job losses and militarisation—for the greater part of the last thirty years at federal, state and many district levels: the SPD.
And last but not least, Krach is portraying himself as a supposed fighter against the far right. At several campaign appearances, he wore a red T-shirt bearing the slogan “Krach against Nazis.” The SPD has had campaign material produced featuring this slogan; stickers bearing the slogan can be found here and there on Berlin’s lampposts.
But “Krach against Nazis”? Nothing could be further from the truth.
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It remains to be seen how the corruption allegations against Krach will develop in the near future. But there is no need to wait for that. Workers and young people should base their stance on Krach and the Berlin SPD on the party’s political track record and reject Krach—and the SPD—with all the contempt that this party has so diligently earned over the last three decades.
The state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, held on Sunday alongside that in Berlin, like the one in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago, is dominated by the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
For a long time, opinion polls had predicted a clear election victory for the far-right party. It is now running neck and neck with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of incumbent State Premier Manuela Schwesig. Nevertheless, the AfD, at 36 percent, is expected to almost double its vote share compared with the last state election five years ago.
The rise of the AfD is a damning indictment of the SPD and the Left Party, which have governed together in the state capital Schwerin for five years. The two parties are expected to suffer only relatively modest losses— 2.5 percentage points for the SPD and 1 percentage point for the Left Party—but at 9 percent, this would still be the worst result in the Left Party’s history.
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The Left Party is directly responsible for this social devastation. At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, its predecessor, the PDS, organised the introduction of capitalism with its devastating consequences, and suppressed resistance to this. From 1998 to 2006, it took part in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s first SPD-Left Party state government, and it has been back in government since 2021. That amounts to around thirteen years in state office in total. The party currently holds two ministerial posts, education and justice.
In government, the Left Party acts as a reliable accomplice of the SPD. “Boss Schwesig sets the tone, and the Left Party obediently follows,” writes the taz. The Left Party’s lead candidate, Education Minister Simone Oldenburg, is, in the words of taz, “a pragmatist through and through.”
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With the transformation of the Baltic Sea into a NATO staging ground against Russia, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is becoming a frontline state. On October 21, 2024, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius and State Premier Schwesig inaugurated the new NATO maritime headquarters CTF Baltic in Rostock. Pistorius described the Baltic as a “front line” and declared that Germany was ready to “take the lead in the Baltic Sea region.”
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Social devastation, militarization and the expansion of the police state are all part of one and the same process. The ruling class is preparing for a war on two fronts: against the working class at home and against its economic rivals abroad. The militarization of the Baltic Sea and the build-up of the police are two sides of the same policy. The government in Schwerin is implementing both at once—and the Left Party votes for both.
Anyone who votes for the Left Party thinking this can stop the AfD is voting for the very policy that has prepared the ground for the AfD. This is not the supposed “firewall” against collaborating with the AfD, but the continuation of the policy that made the rise of the extreme right possible in the first place.
The election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania underscores that the fight against social cuts and war requires the independent intervention of the working class. The Left Party supports the wave of social cuts, helps build the police state, and has voted for the largest rearmament program since the Second World War. The AfD channels social anger against immigrants in order to split the working class, leading it into a nationalist dead end. Both represent two forms of capitalist politics: one openly, the other under a false flag.
The working class needs its own party, a party that fights against war and militarism, against the capitalist profit system, for the international unity of the working class and for the building of a socialist society. That is why building the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) is the most urgent task.
Study the SGP’s program and history! Read the World Socialist Web Site! Get in touch with the SGP, and in Berlin, where it is standing in Sunday’s state election, vote SGP!
5. United Kingdom: Hackney Greens Anti-Austerity Summit 2026: a coalition to impose council cuts
The 1.95 million people nationally who voted Green in May's elections now face the reality that Greens-led councils are preparing to enforce the same cuts as their Labour predecessors. This was underscored at the anti-austerity summit in Hackney, where Green Party Mayor Zoë Garbett rejected calls to set “no-cuts” budgets.
6. Texas Railroad Commission nominee’s racist post exposes fascist transformation of Republican Party
Vile, racist comments from the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner have shed further light onto the GOP’s open flirtation with a conglomeration of far-right forces, including fascists, neo-nazis and virulent racists.
On Sunday, September 13, Bo French posted a photo of a crowd of University of Texas football fans, most of them students of South Asian descent, saying, “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
French subsequently doubled down on his original post, later writing, “I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans.”
French’s assertion is contradicted by the university’s enrollment figures. International students constitute only 4.3 percent of UT Austin undergraduates, while more than 80 percent of the student body consists of Texas residents. State law also requires 90 percent of the university’s entering undergraduate class to be Texas residents.
Semantics aside, French’s comments drew a certain amount of condemnation from his fellow Republicans in the Lone Star state, not from any genuine repulsion towards his racism but instead out of anxiety that French’s rhetoric could undermine Republican performance in upcoming state and federal elections. These include Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s reelection and the contested US Senate race between Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic state representative James Talarico.
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The acceptance of racism and fascism into the fold of Republicans politics is not isolated to Texas, however. Far-right candidates are winning elections across the country and have been found within the supporting staff of multiple Republican politicians.
In Florida, Marshall Rawson won the Republican nomination for state House District 10 after his earlier association with the neo-Confederate League of the South was already public. Subsequent reporting revealed that Rawson and his wife had attended the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Photographs placed him near James Alex Fields Jr., who later drove his car into counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.
Rawson reportedly accepted $15,000 in campaign contributions from individuals with ties to white supremacist organizations. His social media history is as vile as French’s. From 2017 to 2020, he operated a pseudonymous X account that he used to advocate for public lynchings and to defend slavery. In 2023, Rawson expressed glee that two gay men in Uganda would be put to death under laws criminalizing homosexuality, advocating for such draconian punishments be replicated in America. “This is how you would run the pervs and miscreants out of Florida,” he wrote, adding: “A one-way ticket to no more sexualizing of children and the lgbtq+ agenda in Florida!”
Stephen Woytek, recently hired as political director for Republican Senator Jon Husted’s Ohio campaign, had used an image of SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture and maintained a playlist celebrating Rhodesia’s former white-minority regime. Husted’s campaign fired Woytek after the posts became public. Woytek denied supporting Nazi ideology and attributed the material to his interest in military reenactments.
In Texas, Republican congressional nominee Brandon Herrera posted a video in which he displayed a Nazi-era submachine gun and called it the “original ghetto blaster.” In a 2023 video, he referred to children as “trophies” for women getting a man to ejaculate, arguing that the opinions of women and mothers are without value.
There are even staffers responsible for the White House’s social media presence who utilize their position to share Nazi-inspired rhetoric. For example, in January, the X account for the Department of Labor posted a video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American,” a line that echoes the Nazi slogan of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”
Summary provided by Socialism AI:
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) blames the victim after Virginia Tech finds Legionella 129 times the emergency threshold in rural Illinois water
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The residents of Beaverville, Illinois—a village of 300 some 80 miles south of Chicago—have endured dark, foul-smelling drinking water for over a year. The Illinois EPA dismissed the discoloration, caused by high iron and manganese levels, as a mere "aesthetic" problem and assured residents the water was safe.
That summer, the stagnant, nutrient-rich water bred Legionella pneumophila, the bacterium that causes Legionnaires' disease. Kathleen Butron and three family members fell ill with respiratory infections; her 87-year-old mother-in-law died of pneumonia, her body cremated before Legionnaires' was ever suspected.
Butron, who had reached out to the WSWS after reading its interview with Flint whistle-blower Miguel Del Toral, connected with Dr. Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech—the water expert who helped expose the Flint, Michigan cover-up. Edwards' team sampled two Beaverville homes in late August and found no detectable chlorine residual at either, and Legionella levels an alarming 129 times the CDC's threshold for immediate response—a finding that suggested contamination was community-wide, not confined to one household.
Rather than act, the Illinois EPA turned hostile. At an August 31 conference call, officials blamed Butron herself, absurdly alleging her reverse-osmosis filter had contaminated her water. They accused Edwards of trespassing for pacing off a distance on a public lawn, and refused to test chlorine levels at Butron's home to confirm or refute the findings before hanging up.
Butron has filed an urgent appeal demanding a community-wide legionellosis investigation, sampling beyond the two homes tested, immediate warnings that showering may be hazardous, and emergency coordination with federal EPA Region 5. The case exposes a broader crisis: roughly 83% of America's public water systems serve 3,300 people or fewer, and they carry the overwhelming share of violations while state funding is reserved for systems with already-documented health violations—leaving communities like Beaverville to fend for themselves against both deadly pathogens and an indifferent, even hostile, state bureaucracy.
8. Modern humans are the evolutionary product of different ancestral populations
Successful matings between anatomically modern humans migrating from Africa, Neanderthals, Denisovans and “ghost lineages” all contributed to the contemporary human genome.
9. Indonesian President Prabowo fires another finance minister
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto abruptly fired Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa on September 14, replacing him with his deputy, Suahasil Nazara. The dismissal, Prabowo’s second change of finance minister in barely a year, is an expression of the mounting crisis of the administration’s entire economic program.
Purbaya learned of his removal by telephone while attending a parliamentary hearing on the government’s proposed 2027 budget. Hours later Prabowo swore in Suahasil, making him Indonesia’s third finance minister since the president took office in October 2024. The presidential palace supplied no substantive explanation.
Prabowo came to office promising to transform Indonesia by boosting state expenditure. His pledges included free meals for tens of millions of children and pregnant women, three million new homes a year, food and energy self-sufficiency, expanded military expenditure and the rapid development of downstream industries—domestic plants processing raw materials such as nickel into metals, batteries and other higher-value exports.
He declared that these measures would raise annual economic growth from approximately 5 percent to 8 percent. The newly created Danantara investment agency was placed in control of hundreds of billions of dollars in state assets, while state enterprises, banks and the military were assigned an expanding role in economic life.
Prabowo clothes this program in “Pancasila economics,” the language of Indonesian nationalism dating back to Sukarno, and invokes Article 33 of the 1945 Constitution, which mandates state control over strategic industries and natural resources. Its premise is that Indonesia’s wealth “leaks” abroad and must instead be mobilized by a strong state for national development.
Behind this rhetoric lies not hostility to foreign capital, but an attempt to secure more favorable terms for the Indonesian state and oligarchy. The nickel-processing industry depends overwhelmingly on Chinese investment and technology. Danantara, the sovereign wealth fund created by Prabowo to control some $900 billion in state assets and direct investment into strategic projects, likewise seeks foreign capital and commercially profitable returns. Prabowo’s economic nationalism aims to increase state control over investment and retain a larger share of resource revenues within Indonesia.
The program immediately collided with a fundamental contradiction. Prabowo promised greatly increased expenditure without substantially taxing the oligarchy or challenging the fiscal straitjacket imposed by the IMF in the aftermath of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis.
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Prabowo’s flagship free‑meals scheme has become a central target of popular anger. Mass food‑poisoning outbreaks linked to the program have already affected more than 50,000 people nationwide; in one week at the start of September nearly 2,000 students and teachers fell ill, prompting parents’ groups to demand criminal investigations and the suspension of unsafe kitchens. The National Nutrition Agency has now closed almost 2,000 kitchens for hygiene violations.
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Prabowo’s coalition controls 470 of parliament’s 580 seats. With virtually no institutional opposition, public discontent has repeatedly erupted in widespread but politically diffuse demonstrations over education cuts, living costs, elite privilege, police violence, fuel prices, military encroachment and the disastrous meals program.
The revolving door at the Finance Ministry expresses this mounting instability. Sri Mulyani enforced the demands of international finance too rigidly for Prabowo’s ambitions. Purbaya pursued those ambitions too aggressively and collided with the president’s own network. Suahasil is now tasked with reconciling promises that cannot be reconciled: massive state expenditure, fiscal austerity, investor confidence and mounting demands from the Indonesian population.
10. Plunder as state policy in Milei’s Argentina
Far from being an aberration, the $LIBRA crypto scandal was the first crack through which the criminal mode of operation of Milei’s entire government became visible.
11. Brutal stabbing of Sikh trucker in Wyoming follows racist DHS attacks on immigrant truckers
The attack occurred four days after the Department of Homeland Security told “Mr. Singh” to “get off our roads” in a social media post.
12. Lessons after one year of the Genesys nurses’ strike in Michigan
A year ago this month, more than 700 nurses and case workers at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan, walked off the job for enforceable nurse-to-patient ratios, improved wages and an end to conditions that made it increasingly impossible to provide adequate care.
They remain on strike today. During those 12 months, Henry Ford Health has maintained operations with replacements and steadily hardened its position. At the same time, tens of thousands of nurses and other healthcare workers have struck across the United States over the same basic issues of staffing, workload, wages and patient care.
The experience of the past year poses the need for a change in strategy. The isolation of the Genesys strike must be broken by uniting it with the far broader movement among healthcare workers, with workers themselves taking control of the struggle through independent rank-and-file organization.
The conditions that drove the nurses out have only become clearer over the course of the strike. Nurses have described assignments that left them unable to provide even basic care. One medical-surgical nurse told the World Socialist Web Site that understaffing forced her to choose between holding the hand of a dying patient and passing pain medication. “We all have a lot of shame and guilt from not being able to take care of people properly,” she said.
The nurses remained on the picket line through a brutal Michigan winter even after management forced the removal of tents, chairs and burn barrels that provided shelter. “We’re still going to stand strong out here,” one nurse told the WSWS. “You can take every tent, chair, whatever it may be. We’re still out here fighting for the community.” When a mass shooting struck a church less than two miles from the hospital, striking emergency-room nurses ran back to Genesys to help treat the victims, only to be ordered by administrators to “get out.”
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Genesys is part of Henry Ford’s 13-hospital, $12 billion healthcare system, which took over operations at the hospital in October 2024.
Nurses who hoped incorporation into a larger system would bring more staff and resources instead described shortages of adult briefs and wipes, unrepaired equipment and staffing cut to the bone. One nurse with 27 years at Genesys recalled when it was a smaller community hospital where staff would readily bring their own families for treatment. “Henry Ford … is terrible,” she said. “They do not care about the patients; it’s entirely about money.”
Over the course of the strike, a series of struggles involving tens of thousands of healthcare workers erupted across the country.
In October 2025, 46,000 Kaiser Permanente workers struck for five days in California, Hawaii and Oregon. In November, nearly 40,000 University of California service and patient-care workers struck. More than 25,000 UC nurses had announced a sympathy strike before the California Nurses Association reached a separate tentative agreement on the eve of the action and canceled their participation.
In January, roughly 15,000 New York City nurses walked out at major private hospitals, demanding improved staffing, protection from workplace violence and health benefits. Days later, more than 31,000 Kaiser nurses and healthcare professionals began an open-ended strike across California and Hawaii that continued into a fourth week.
The struggles continued through the summer. In July, more than 4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston struck, while hundreds of Mass General Brigham home-care clinicians began a separate seven-day strike. The hospital locked the Brigham nurses out for another four days after their one-day walkout ended.
These struggles arose from conditions healthcare workers encounter every day. The emergency measures imposed during the pandemic were turned into permanent expectations for smaller staffs carrying heavier workloads. “Management saw what we did during COVID … and expected us to continue doing exactly that,” one Genesys nurse told the WSWS.
Hospital consolidation and the penetration of healthcare by finance capital have accelerated the process. Private equity firms spent an estimated $505 billion on US healthcare acquisitions between 2018 and 2023. A study of 49 acquired hospitals found substantial reductions in employment and salary expenditures and increased mortality among emergency department patients.
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The enormous readiness of healthcare workers to fight has repeatedly collided with the policy of union bureaucracies that divide struggles according to employer, bargaining unit and contract expiration.
At the University of California, the California Nurses Association (CNA) canceled a planned sympathy strike by 25,000 nurses after reaching a separate agreement. In New York, NYSNA sent most of the 15,000 striking nurses back with separate agreements, while thousands at NewYork-Presbyterian remained out. At Kaiser Permanente, UNAC/UHCP ended its open-ended strike while negotiations continued.
The same policy has been applied to the extreme in Michigan.
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Genesys nurses have accumulated a year of experience from which to draw a different strategy. A rank-and-file strike committee, elected and controlled by the strikers themselves, would provide the means to act on these experiences. It should appeal directly to Corewell nurses for common action and to the technical and other workers at Genesys, while establishing links with nurses and healthcare workers involved in the struggles at Kaiser, New York, the University of California, Boston and elsewhere.
Such an appeal should extend to autoworkers and other workers throughout the Flint area and beyond. The question posed by the past year is how the enormous social power already demonstrated in separate struggles can be brought together against hospital systems that operate across cities and states and against the financial interests driving the deterioration of healthcare.
Safe staffing ratios, wages capable of retaining experienced nurses and benefits that protect workers and patients cannot be secured by waiting indefinitely for Henry Ford to change course. Breaking the isolation of the Genesys strike requires that the rank and file take control of the struggle and organize the unity that the existing apparatus has spent the past year preventing.
Over 60 members of the UCLA law faculty, joined by almost 300 law professors nationally, have published open letters defending UCLA’s recent symposium on 25 years of legal developments following the September 11 terrorist attacks, and denounced Chancellor Julio Frenk for accusing the program of supporting “terrorism” and “antisemitism.”
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Frenk was unanimously selected by a Board of Regents dominated by ultra-wealthy corporate interests and political appointees. The regents approved a starting salary of $978,904, in addition to university-provided housing. The World Socialist Web Site described him at the time as a “pro-Zionist corporate shill” chosen to intensify the attack on students and workers.
Within weeks of taking office, Frenk demonstrated the purpose of his appointment. In February 2025, he announced the suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine following a protest outside the home of UC Regent Jonathan “Jay” Sures. Sures is a trustee of the Los Angeles Police Foundation and has served on the boards overseeing two laboratories involved in the development and testing of US nuclear weapons.
Frenk’s campus-wide email depicted the protest as an outbreak of antisemitic violence and declared, “There is no place for violence in our Bruin community.” The suspension barred both organizations from reserving meeting rooms, receiving student funding or formally associating themselves with UCLA.
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Frenk should know better than to side with the fascists. A fourth-generation physician, his direct ancestors fled Nazi Germany for Mexico in the 1930s.
14. Trump bans 3 media outlets from White House in further step towards dictatorship
The ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico took effect Saturday morning, in a brazen violation of the First Amendment.
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Making his hatred of press freedom explicit, Trump said, “It’s sick. I mean, there’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories. Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine. But I don’t have to let them into my—into the people’s house.”
The last verbal slip was revealing of Trump’s real attitude to the presidency: the White House is his house. It does not belong to the American people. The government exists for his own self-aggrandizement, both financially and politically. He embraces the monarchical principle going back to Louis XIV of France—L’État, c’est moi (the state, it is me).
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All three of the targeted media outlets issued statements of protest, and by Sunday all three were reported to be preparing legal challenges. But the giant corporations that own them are confining their response to the courts. The White House Correspondents’ Association, whose current president is a Fox News correspondent, issued a statement of support for the banned outlets and nothing more. While the exclusion was the leading topic on most Sunday television interview programs, no section of the corporate media has suggested collective action, such as a joint boycott of White House briefings and press “availabilities.” Every other outlet has kept its seat.
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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted on X Friday that his department “fully supports” Trump’s decision. “We are grateful these outlets already chose to self-deport from the Pentagon,” Hegseth wrote. “They endangered our troops with false stories, leaks, and trafficked in fiction and lies about the President, our Warriors and their mission.”
The reference is to the purge carried out at the Pentagon last October, when the department demanded that reporters sign a pledge not to solicit or publish any information not authorized for release, including unclassified material, or lose their credentials. A federal judge has since struck down parts of the policy. The Pentagon responded with a replacement, which was also blocked, but that ruling has been stayed pending appeal.
Hegseth has also fired the editor and publisher of the Stars and Stripes, which has had limited independence, after it reported the dire conditions inside the Navy carrier Abraham Lincoln during its deployment against Iran
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The ban follows the exclusion of the Associated Press from the Oval Office last year, the Pentagon credential purge and Trump’s multibillion-dollar lawsuits against the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. Its timing is bound up with the war against Iran and the approaching elections. As the comments of Navarro, Waltz and Hegseth make clear, a government waging an unpopular war and facing a rout at the polls is moving to brand factual reporting on the war as aid to the enemy.
The targeted outlets are not opponents of American imperialism, and their corporate owners have repeatedly capitulated to Trump, as in the multimillion-dollar settlements paid by ABC and Paramount. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer compared Trump to a dictator, but the Democrats propose to do nothing. The defense of press freedom and all democratic rights cannot be left to the media conglomerates, the courts or the Democratic Party. It depends on the independent mobilization of the working class against the Trump administration and its drive to dictatorship.
15. Fund bubble bursts in Türkiye, freezing the savings of half a million people
Last week the speculative bubble built up around several portfolio management companies on the Istanbul stock exchange (Borsa İstanbul) burst. The savings of hundreds of thousands of small investors have been frozen, and the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has once again mobilized public resources to shield the rest of the system.
The crisis began when the Istanbul-based Pusula Portföy announced Tuesday that some of its funds would be unable to make repayments to investors on time, setting off a rush by investors to withdraw their savings. The following day, two funds of Tera Portföy, with a combined size of 366 billion lira (US$7.5 billion), likewise failed to meet redemption demands.
The panic that began on Tuesday peaked on Wednesday. A three-day wave of selling wiped nearly 10 percent off the BIST 100 index. On Thursday morning the Financial Stability Committee, chaired by Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek, declared that the problem was concentrated in one segment of the fund market and was “temporary and manageable.” The Capital Markets Board (CMB) then laid down the procedures for liquidating a total of 131 investment funds belonging to seven portfolio management companies. The liquidation of these funds, worth more than 800 billion lira (US$16.5 billion), directly affects over 500,000 investors, who will not be able to reach their money—or whatever is left of it—for roughly three months.
What has taken place is only the visible tip of the financialization of the economy and the parasitism that accompanies it. While the financial oligarchy has amassed vast fortunes under the government’s supervision, the cost of the crisis is being loaded onto the working class the moment the bubble bursts.
The mechanism is a modern version of the Ponzi scheme. Certain domestic funds bought up large quantities of shares in companies with a small free float. These concentrated purchases inflated both the share prices and the apparent value of the funds holding them. High returns drew in more investors, supplying fund managers with fresh money to buy the same or related shares. As a result, two Pusula Portföy funds posted gains of 164 and 144 percent in the first seven months of 2026.
All of this took place in full view of the government and as a product of its own regulations. In June, MSCI pointed to suspicions of coordinated trading in funds tied to small companies and announced that it could begin reassessing Türkiye’s standing in its indices if no concrete progress was made by November. Earlier, on November 4, 2025, Şimşek himself had spoken of manipulation in the funds. Yet regulation was put off for some 10 months while the bubble went on growing. Not until August 28 did the CMB tighten the rules.
Why the government looked the other way for so long becomes clearer on examining the management and ownership structures of the companies whose funds have been shut down. While millions of working people are crushed and impoverished by the cost of living, these profiteering financial circles have woven a network of ties with the ruling party and the state bureaucracy.
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A significant portion of the investors in these frozen funds consists of workers and retirees who are seeking alternative sources of income to offset the erosion of their wages by inflation, and who often invest in these funds at the recommendation of the banks where they hold their accounts.
The rule of Erdoğan’s AKP, which began in 2002, was itself erected on the wreckage of the 2001 financial crisis. The loosely regulated banking system collapsed, overnight interest rates shot above 1,000 percent and the floated Turkish lira swiftly lost roughly half its value. The economy contracted by 5.7 percent that year. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs, wages were slashed and small tradesmen ruined. The “Transition to a Strong Economy Program” of Kemal Derviş, brought in from the World Bank, meant austerity for the workers and full guarantees for the banks and creditors. The following year the AKP came to power on the back of the social anger that had built up over this crisis.
Now, a quarter of a century later, the AKP confronts a similar but far more explosive situation. Sitting atop a financial bubble that could burst at any moment and a fragile economy, the government has been imposing austerity for three years.
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This crisis of financialization is by no means specific to Türkiye. In the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic, central banks pumped trillions of dollars into the markets, and they intervened once more to rescue the banks in the 2023 US banking crisis. This “cheap money” regime fed not productive investment but speculation in stocks, real estate and derivatives. While the world’s stock markets hover at record highs on the speculative surge in artificial intelligence shares, social inequality has reached staggering proportions.
The Financial Times, the voice of the City of London, treated the crisis in Türkiye largely as a technical malfunction. For the FT the real question was whether the crisis constituted a test of Şimşek’s effort to restore international confidence in the Turkish economy. Within this framework the crisis was reduced to the lax supervision and cronyism of an “emerging” market, the proposed remedy being tighter rules, more transparent ownership structures and the measures demanded by MSCI. The hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees whose savings have been frozen figured in this account only as “investors” seeking to exit the funds—that is, as one parameter of a liquidity problem.
In fact, this mechanism is not an aberration peculiar to Türkiye but an expression of the normal functioning of financialized capitalism. The cycle in which purchases concentrated in a handful of companies mutually inflate prices and fund values is not qualitatively different from the dynamic driving up the market capitalization of AI giants on Wall Street today.
More fundamentally, the Şimşek program which the FT presents as an effort to “rebuild [Türkiye’s] international economic credibility” is not the antidote to the crisis but its basis: it is precisely the program that suppresses wages in order to secure high real returns for international capital and drives workers into risky funds to protect their savings. The financial press’s call for “better regulation” amounts, as in every crisis since 2008, to a prescription for propping up the system while making the working class foot the bill once again. The problem is not inadequate supervision, but the capitalist profit system itself, under which the wealth of society is subordinated to the speculation of financial oligarchs.
The government is now declaring the crisis “manageable” and seeking to defuse social anger by arresting a few scapegoats. The answer of the working class must be to demand the expropriation of every fortune amassed by this swindle and its transfer to public ownership, the full compensation of working people’s frozen savings out of that expropriated wealth, and the nationalization of the banks and major financial institutions under the democratic control of workers.
This requires that the working class build rank-and-file committees independent of the trade union bureaucracies and all the parties of the establishment, and struggle to take power on the basis of an international socialist program.
Twelve hundred Bradford White workers in Middleville, Michigan are continuing a strike that began September 16 against near poverty wages and abusive conditions.
17. Ukrainian Prosecutor General flees the country
Last Tuesday, former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko fled the country just hours before his official dismissal by the right-wing government of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Kravchenko is a central figure in yet another major corruption scandal engulfing the Zelensky regime, known as “Operation Carthage.”Kravchenko’s downfall began when the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) announced they had uncovered a money laundering scheme from the profits of fraudulent call centers targeting primarily Russian citizens.
According to Russian news media, such Ukrainian scam call centers have exploded since the outbreak of the full scale NATO-backed proxy war with Russia and have generated billions of dollars from defrauding foreign victims. The call centers allegedly paid approximately $7,000 per month for protection to the Prosecutor General’s office. Hundreds of such call centers are operating, employing tens of thousands of people across Ukraine. Ukrainian call centers have also been implicated in the recruitment of Russian citizens in terrorist and sabotage operations.
While the head of NABU, Semen Kryvonos, claimed that the call centers were part of a “Russian subversion act”, the scale of the call center operation and the fact that the vast majority of victims are Russian citizens leaves little doubt that the call centers are operating with full knowledge of the dictatorial Zelensky government.
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The corruption investigations are part of an escalating conflict within the Ukrainian ruling class and state apparatus. NABU was set up in the wake of the Western-backed 2014 coup, which triggered an eight-year-long civil war in East Ukraine, leading up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022. The agency was founded in 2015 by the right-wing nationalist government of Petro Poroshenko. From the beginning, its staff was trained directly by the FBI and the European Union. For the imperialist powers, NABU is an important means to control Ukraine’s domestic political apparatus.
Throughout its existence, NABU has played a key role in the ongoing conflicts within the Ukrainian oligarchy and state apparatus and in the past been strongly backed by both the EU and the United States as means to intervene directly in Ukraine’s turbulent and clannish oligarchical politics. In 2020, the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, complained that NABU was created by order of then US Vice President Joe Biden in order to undermine Ukraine’s own State Bureau of Investigation and “put there emissaries who listen to the United States.”
As conflicts within the state apparatus intensified, in July of 2024, Zelensky moved to limit the power of NABU and SAP. This triggered to the largest protests since the beginning of the NATO-backed proxy war in February 2022. Zelensky claimed that stripping the agency of its independence was necessary to combat “Russian influence”. At the same time, Ukraine’s security services (SBU), which is closely linked to the country’s far-right and aligned with Zelensky, carried out raids of NABU to arrest alleged Russian spies. As a result of an enormous domestic and foreign backlash, Zelensky was forced to backtrack and withdraw his attempt to take over NABU.
Since then, one corruption scandal after another has shaken his government, as domestic support for the war keeps eroding. A Gallup poll from June 30 found that 66 percent of Ukrainians want a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, against 24 percent who favor fighting on until victory. A poll taken last summer showed that 70 percent of Ukrainians believe that political leaders use the war to enrich themselves. These sentiments are fully justified: While Ukrainian workers are forcibly abducted from their homes and streets to be sent to die at the front, or have to eek out a living at an average salary of $660, Ukrainian oligarchs and capitalist politicians are enriching themselves by robbing the state of hundreds of millions. Even as they are used as part of internecine conflicts within the oligarchy, the corruption scandals, ultimately, expose the class character of the war in Ukraine. It is waged not for “democracy”, let alone “freedom”, but as part of an imperialist redivision of the world, targeting Russia and China. Completely dependent on imperialism, the Ukrainian oligarchy is as determined to continue its subservient relationship to the EU and US as it is to enrich itself at the expense of the working class. Meanwhile, any political opponents and critics of the war, most recently the Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk, are being violently persecuted, imprisoned and silenced.
At least for now, the imperialist powers, for their part, are still supporting Zelensky over his rivals within the Ukrainian ruling class and state. Following Kravchenko’s dismissal, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Thursday that the EU would disburse €3.3 billion ($3.7 billion) to Ukraine to procure missiles and drones for its in ongoing war with Russia. “I just had a phone call with President Zelenskiy. Tomorrow (Friday) we will disburse €3.3 billion for missiles and drones in Ukraine,” von der Leyen posted to X. On Friday, Ukrainian news outlet European Pravda reported that an anonymous EU diplomat had revealed that as part of the bloc’s budget plan for 2028-34, Ukraine will receive approximately $115 billion.
18. 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.
