Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Shawn Fain wins Eugene Debs award: Desecrating the memory of America’s great socialist leader
In an extraordinary exposition, historian Tom Mackaman describes how granting an award named after the American socialist leader, Eugene Debs to the venal UAW president Shawn Fain, is a blasphemy to all-- save to the operatives hoping to flatter themselves and keep their followers benighted.
Shawn Fain has nothing in common with Eugene Debs.
The socialist autoworker running for the UAW presidency, Will Lehman, is a true working class hero who truly deserves a "Debs award"-- if such were one as genuine as he.
The award given to Fain only serves to besmirch Eugene Deb's legacy.
Lehman's candidacy (it is his second) has been historic and virtually ignored by the corporate media.
Here is the court-appointed union monitor's video of this year's UAW presidential debate:
And here is the previous one from 2022:
Both are difficult to locate because the court-appointed monitor, Jenner & Block, operates distinct channels for different purposes: a corporate channel, and an administrative channel.
The official, unedited recordings remain accessible through the dedicated (but difficult to find!) portal on the UAW Monitor Elections Page. This hub serves as the official public record "to ensure transparency", completely bypassing standard union or corporate channels.
B’Tselem’s report finds, “The genocide in Gaza and the elimination project in the West Bank are different manifestations of the same regime project, directed against Palestinians’ ability to exist as a people.”
With British imperialism facing debt interest payments at £110 billion a year and plans to ramp war against Russia, along with deeper involvement in Middle East conflicts, Labour today has even less possibility of increasing social spending than under Tony Blair in the 1990s.
4. Milei exploits Malvinas to build up Argentina’s repressive apparatus
Milei’s “National Sovereignty Defense Law” uses a real grievance of an oppressed nation to arm the state against the working class, while the pseudo-left offers a nationalist perspective that excludes the unity of Argentine workers with workers in the US and Britain.
The crushing of ramp worker Oscar Robayo by the nose gear of an Airbus A350-900 while he was performing a routine pushback at Montreal’s Trudeau Airport in August has provoked sympathy and outrage among workers throughout the aviation industry and beyond.
6. The AI copyright lawsuits: What happens when machines learn from culture?
Who should control the huge cultural and artistic capital accumulated through centuries that is now being used by AI?
7. Cleveland Orchestra musicians end 3-day strike as crisis deepens for US cultural institutions
The walkout by Cleveland Orchestra musicians follows a nearly weeklong strike by members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra against savage cuts demanded by management, centered around a reduction in the number of guaranteed paid weeks of work per year and cuts to pay. The strike disrupted the season’s opener, Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, and several other performances. Terms of the final settlement have not been released.
Major US orchestras and operas are in crisis. The Metropolitan Opera in New York has been facing a continuing, severe funding crisis. A possible deal for the Saudi monarchy to provide a $200 million lifeline to the Met over the next eight years was scuttled by the Iran war. The future of the National Symphony Orchestra is uncertain amid threats by Trump to shut down its parent organization, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C.
Major orchestras have closed since the 2008 financial crash, including those in Honolulu (2010), Syracuse (2011) and New Mexico (2011). Musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra waged a six-month strike in 2010-2011, eventually being forced to accept a crippling 25 percent pay cut that has never been recovered.
More recently, the American Youth Symphony closed in 2024, and the San Antonio Philharmonic suspended its season this February after a long train of financial struggles. The Boston Philharmonic and its affiliated youth orchestra are permanently shutting down in June 2027 at the completion of the concert season.
There was no effort by the musicians union officials to oppose this ongoing assault on the arts or to seek to mobilize workers in Cleveland and more broadly behind the musicians. This is the predictable dead end of the unions’ nationalist pro-capitalist program, which finds expression in its political alliance with the Democratic Party. The Democrats, the oldest capitalist party in the US, have frozen or slashed arts funding for decades while pouring money into tax breaks for the super-rich and lavishing money on the Pentagon.
The emergence of opposition among truckers, who occupy a key role in the national and world economy, is extremely important. To carry this forward, truckers should build rank-and-file committees across North America, democratically elected by the rank and file, independent of the union bureaucracies, to unite truckers of all nationalities in a common struggle against the cost of living, war and attacks on democratic rights.
9. Where is our contract? Is the UAW still trying to put lipstick on a pig?
Three months after the UAW pushed through its "contract" after four tries, Nexteer workers have still not seen the written agreement.
10. German Morenoites tie workers and young people to the right-wing policies of the Left Party
The pseudo-left RIO admits the Left Party's record is one of cuts, rearmament and paving the way for the far-right AfD—yet its conclusion is that workers should stay inside the party, not break with it.
11. Hundreds of thousands march in French public sector strike against austerity and war
Workers and youth spoke to the WSWS at yesterday’s march in Paris of their growing anger and concern over economic hardship, war, and the fear of far-right dictatorship.
12. Turkish government, shaken by fund crisis, attacks freedom of expression
Facing a severe political crisis, the Erdoğan government is seeking to suppress the social powder keg through police state measures.
13. The Supreme Court clears the way for the execution of Christa Pike
In the appeal to the Court, Pike’s lawyers raised whether it is cruel and unusual punishment to execute a woman who was repeatedly raped as a child and who, experts warn, will relive those assaults as she is killed. The justices did not deign to reply.
The ruling is the work of the gang of fascists who control the Court, which declared in 2019 that the Eighth Amendment “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death.” No vote was announced, and there were no dissents recorded from the nominally liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
14. NZ welfare agency denies aid to thousands, says food is “not essential”
The Ministry of Social Development denied emergency food grants last year to 88,000 people and told thousands that food was “not an essential need”.
15. Australia: Public sector doctors to strike in Victoria
The Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation was forced to call the stoppage after doctors powerfully opposed the union bureaucracy’s last-minute cancellation of a 24-hour strike planned for September 15.
16. Australia: 15-year-old boy killed at Melbourne factory
According to WorkSafe Victoria, the boy “was fixing defects on a precast concrete panel when an adjacent panel weighing more than two tons fell onto him.”
17. Germany: Demonstrations against social cuts, workers’ anger met with trade union maneuvers
The union bureaucracy pretends it is fighting the attacks by the federal government and corporations. The opposite is true.
18. Trump condemns regulation in meeting with technology oligarchs
US President Donald Trump hosted the heads of Nvidia, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other technology companies for lunch at the White House Tuesday, condemning any government oversight or regulation of the technology sector.
The secrecy surrounding the proposed deal is a warning. Birmingham bin workers must establish a rank-and-file committee to enforce direct oversight of negotiations, agree on non-negotiable demands and mobilize alongside council workers nationally facing the same austerity cuts.
20. Thousands to protest Palantir's role in NHS, US deportations and Gaza genocide
Thousands will demonstrate in Britain and internationally on Thursday in a “People vs Palantir International Day of Action”, demanding that governments tear up their contracts with the American data corporation Palantir Technologies.
Events over the days since the five arrests saw revelations throwing a question mark over heavy suggestions of Iranian involvement, and even over whether there was any terror incident to be involved in.
22. 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.
