Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Oppose the Trump administration’s drive to strip Ilhan Omar of citizenship!
The immigration Gestapo has been deployed against an elected representative over paperwork filed when she was a child three weeks before an election in which she is all but certain to win a fifth term. The first Somali elected to Congress, Omar won her last two elections with 74 percent of the vote and her August primary with 81 percent.
The Trump administration is asserting the power to overturn the election and drive a political opponent out of Congress and out of the country. This is an attack on democratic rights that must be opposed by the entire working class.
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Omar is a member of the Democratic Party, and the Socialist Equality Party has fundamental political differences with her politics. But she is being targeted for definite political reasons.
Omar came to the United States as a child refugee from the civil war in Somalia and has represented Minneapolis in Congress since 2019. She was an original member of the “Squad” of four “progressive” Democratic women first elected to Congress in 2018, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressely and Rashida Tlaib.
Omar and Tlaib are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration due to their characterization of Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide. Omar has also called Trump’s war against Iran an “unlawful operation” that “must end immediately.” In January, at a town hall in her district, she declared, “We must abolish ICE for good.”
The persecution of Omar is also bound up with a fascistic and racist campaign against Somali immigrants. At a cabinet meeting last December, Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage,” and said, “Their country stinks.” That month, ICE launched Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which spread across Minnesota and produced more than 3,000 ICE abductions, along with the murders of US citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
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The fusion of anti-immigrant agitation with the persecution of left-wing opposition has a long history in the United States. Between 1917 and 1921, as the United States entered the First World War and the ruling class reacted with fear to the Russian Revolution, the American state waged a war against democratic rights at home.
Victor Berger, the Socialist Party congressman from Milwaukee and himself an immigrant, was convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing the war. On November 10, 1919, the House voted 311 to 1 to bar him from his seat. His constituents elected him again, and on January 10, 1920, the House excluded him again, 330 to 6.
The anarchist Emma Goldman’s citizenship derived from her marriage to Jacob Kershner, and in 1908 the government revoked his naturalization. When it moved to deport her in 1919, officials ruled that the revocation of her husband’s citizenship had annulled hers as well. On December 21, 1919, Goldman and 248 others were put aboard the Buford, the “Soviet Ark,” and deported to Russia. J. Edgar Hoover, then 24, was on board to see them off.
This was part of a broader assault on all political opposition. Opponents of the war were jailed under the Espionage Act, socialist newspapers were barred from the mails, and the Immigration Act of 1918 authorized the deportation of immigrant anarchists, socialists and labor organizers. Joe Hill, singer, song writer and labor activist, was executed at the Sugar House Prison in Utah in 1915 after being framed for murder. Frank Little, like Hill a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), was brutally lynched by Pinkertons in Butte, Montana in 1917.
The lesson of that period is that the attack on immigrants and the attack on left-wing politics form a single operation. Opposition to war and exploitation is branded the work of foreigners, and foreign birth is made grounds for silencing it.
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The attack on Omar is also part of a conspiracy against the elections themselves. On October 15, the Justice Department sued California to block the counting of mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters it claims are likely noncitizens. A similar claim of nearly 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s rolls collapsed when the state’s review did not establish a single one.
The aim is not to purge the rolls of a handful of ineligible voters. The administration is laying the basis for declaring the results of the November 3 election fraudulent, for throwing out ballots in states it does not control, and for treating any outcome it rejects as the product of “alien” voting.
The response of the Democratic Party establishment is virtual silence. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Democrat and fellow “Squad” member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not have so much as a press release on her congressional web site denouncing the fascistic campaign against Omar. While Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram is filled with daily updates on the congresswoman's’ efforts to freeze her eggs, there is nothing about ICE and the Trump administration’s attempt to denaturalize and deport her colleague.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, an ardent supporter of the genocide in Gaza, has said nothing during the more than five days since Omar’s home was raided.
The Democrats’ sharpest attacks on Trump are reserved for his policy toward Russia, not for his assault on democratic rights. What they fear is not dictatorship, but a movement of the working class they cannot control. A party that answers the persecution of one of its own office-holders with nothing more than a mildly worded press release will not defend the rights of workers.
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The defense of the democratic rights is a class question. Native-born and immigrant workers must unite in rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood to oppose the raids, deportations and denaturalizations. This fight must be connected to the struggle against war, the capitalist oligarchy and the system that give rise to them.
The hotel workers’ agreements expired August 31, when 85 percent of members at 46 hotel properties authorized a strike. But just six hotels have walked out.
3. AFT President Weingarten’s AI “safety standard” is a corporatist pact with Microsoft
The AFT’s “iron-clad” AI safety standard was signed with the company that funds the union’s own AI academy, then carried to a platform shared with the fascist strategist Steve Bannon.
4. Faculty and staff at City Colleges of Chicago vote 96 percent to strike; walkout set for October 19
By Monday, workers in two major industries could be on strike simultaneously in the third-largest US city, only weeks before the November elections
5. Two serious accidents at postal processing facility in Pontiac, Michigan
Several recent incidents involving the activation of machinery during maintenance highlight unsafe conditions at the Michigan Metroplex mail processing center in Pontiac, Michigan.
6. Australia: BHP to cut 300 Pilbara iron ore jobs as unions impose sellout deals
The unions covering BHP workers in the Pilbara issued token denunciations of the job cuts, before immediately pledging their assistance in delivering them.
7. EU summit in Brussels: European powers intensify war drive against Russia
While the Trump administration, amid its conflict with the European powers, is seeking at least for the moment a certain accommodation with Russia, the EU governments, led by Berlin, are pressing for the continuation and expansion of the Ukraine war.
The Socialist Equality Party is standing candidates in the November 28 Victorian election to provide workers with a socialist and internationalist perspective against every other party.
9. Interest rise starts to hit AI boom
The major American AI firm CoreWeave was hit by a “tornado” this week, as its shares plunged at one point by around 28 percent.
10. A warning sign: Australian government unlawfully held citizen for 945 days in immigration detention
The Labor government’s rising number of wrongful immigration detentions is another warning of the anti-immigrant bidding war underway in the political establishment.
11. Trump calls off livestream of Fort Hood shooter’s firing squad execution
President Trump announced October 16 that the firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, set for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas, will not be livestreamed, reversing the plan by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to broadcast the killing.
12. Sri Lankan government assures IMF it will present 2027 austerity budget
The latest IMF staff-level agreement means another round of austerity to guarantee debt repayment and protect the interests of international capital.
Autoworker, socialist, and working class hereo Will Lehman
This statement was issued by Will Lehman, a rank-and-file worker at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania who ran for president of the UAW in the recently-concluded elections.
Will Lehman:
Brothers and sisters,
The most significant fact about the UAW elections that just concluded is that, according to the figures released last week, the vast majority of workers did not take part. Of roughly 1.1 million eligible members, only 98,029 cast ballots. More than 90 percent of the membership stayed away.
Fain received 66,166 votes, or 68 percent of the votes cast, but this is only 6 percent of the membership. Subtract the tens of thousands of officials, staff and appointees whose jobs and salaries depend on the apparatus, and the figure is closer to 3 percent of the rank-and-file. He had the full backing of the bureaucracy, and workers answered by boycotting the vote.
The corporate media and the union apparatus are nonetheless telling us that Fain won a “mandate.” This is a lie, and everybody knows it. The election, in fact, was a complete debacle for the apparatus.
What accounts for the low turnout? Four years after the last election, many workers once again never received a ballot or did not know an election was taking place. And the only campaign that challenged the apparatus itself, my own, was placed under restrictions designed to keep workers from hearing about it.
Under rules adopted at the 2022 convention and applied for the first time in this election, non-members were barred from contributing “anything of value” to a candidate. That rule was used to cut my campaign off from the World Socialist Web Site and its Autoworker Newsletter, which tens of thousands of autoworkers followed during the 2022 election.
The result was that hundreds of thousands of workers never knew that there was a militant, socialist alternative in this election. I am convinced that, had they known, many of those who stayed away would have cast their ballots for me.
Moreover, absolutely nothing that either the UAW or the Monitor says can be believed. Many workers are completely sceptical of the reported results, and they have every reason to be.
But the dominant factor is the hatred of rank-and-file workers for the apparatus. Fain came into office promising to transform the union. He now claims his re-election is an expression of workers’ confidence in his leadership. If that were so, why did fewer members vote this year than in 2022?
Where workers have had a real choice, they have voted in large numbers. This summer, thousands of workers at Nexteer, Dana, Bridgewater and other parts suppliers rejected the pro-company deals pushed by Fain by margins of over 90 percent. At Nexteer, workers rejected three sellout agreements and voted by 86 percent to strike. The UAW buried the strike vote and rammed through a fourth deal on company property. But workers stayed away from an election for the leadership that imposed those contracts.
At my Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania, we rejected Fain’s sellout contract in 2023 and walked out. Fain sabotaged our strike and signed a contract that got us an extra two-and-a-half hours of work a week.
Workers are looking for a way to fight. Despite the joint effort by the bureaucracy and the Federal Monitor to keep workers from learning about my campaign, we won nearly 2,000 votes in the factories and among academic workers. To every worker who voted for me, thank you. Yours was a class-conscious vote for the abolition of the bureaucracy, for rank-and-file power and for the international unity of the working class. It is part of a growing radicalization and turn toward socialism.
The election changes nothing about the situation we face or what we must do. My campaign was never about any individual or about winning a position in the apparatus. I ran to put a program before workers and to build a movement. The idea that workers can vote someone in at the top and things will change is finished. That is as true in the UAW as it is in the elections for Congress and the White House.
The convention in June showed how the apparatus works. Of roughly 100 resolutions submitted by local unions, the resolutions committee advanced only a handful, while all 35 resolutions from the International Executive Board went to the floor. The convention blocked promised dues reductions and it authorized pay increases for the top officers. Everything is controlled from the top down.
Nothing will change unless workers take the initiative. That means building rank-and-file committees in every factory and workplace, controlled by workers ourselves, to organize the fight over wages, jobs and conditions without waiting for permission from Solidarity House. The aim of these committees is to abolish the UAW apparatus and transfer power and decision-making to workers on the shop floor.
That fight must be international. The UAW bureaucracy supports Trump’s tariffs and promotes economic nationalism. While the ballots were being counted, my supporters were in Windsor, Ontario, fighting for the unity of US, Canadian and Mexican workers against the Stellantis job cuts. The trade war sets us workers against each other while the corporations work together to destroy our jobs on both sides of the border.
The struggles ahead are coming fast. We are locked into multi-year contracts that do not keep up with the cost of living. The government says inflation is 3.7 percent, but every worker knows that the real cost of the necessities of life—rent, groceries, health care, gas, child care—has risen far faster. Layoffs in auto have already begun, and the corporations are investing billions in AI and automation to eliminate millions of jobs.
The billionaire oligarchy is waging war on democratic rights at home and escalating war around the world, and it is making us workers pay for both. These are not separate issues from the fight in the plants. The same corporations that cut our jobs and wages control both parties, Democrats and Republicans alike. The UAW apparatus is tied to the Democratic Party, and the media is already promoting Fain as a possible presidential candidate in 2028. Workers cannot defend our jobs, our wages or our rights by relying on either party of big business.
The union apparatus has no base beyond its paid stooges and flunkeys. The real power is in the hands of the hundreds of thousands of workers who boycotted the election. They want to fight. That opposition must now be organized. Build rank-and-file committees in every plant and workplace, linked across industries and national borders through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
But organization in the workplace is not enough. The fight against layoffs, inflation, dictatorship and war is a political fight against the capitalist system itself. It requires building a mass socialist movement of the working class, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, to take the vast wealth produced by our labor out of the hands of the oligarchy and place it under the democratic control of the workers who produce it. That is the fight I will continue, and I urge every worker who voted for me, and all workers in the UAW, to join it.
In solidarity,
Will Lehman
14. Police Commissioner Tisch mocks Mandani, DSA at New York banquet
Tisch used the occasion of the Al Smith banquet to taunt her nominal boss, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for rejecting the call of the Democratic Socialists of America that he fire her for assaulting anti-ICE protesters and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
15. Mexican health workers vote down wage deal as rebellion grows against the union and the government
IMSS workers rejected the SNTSS wage deal after a national march called over the union’s head. The union and the Sheinbaum government are now moving to suppress the struggle.
16. Canada: Carney’s investment summit: More profits for oligarchs, more exploitation for the workers
Carney demonstrated during the two-day summit what his government really stands for: enhanced profits for the oligarchy, intensified worker exploitation and a full-throttle drive to expand Canadian imperialism’s ability to wage war against its rivals in pursuit of resources, markets, and strategic influence.
17. United Kingdom: Royal Mail workers must take charge: scrap DM26, end the two-tier workforce!
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee calls for the scrapping the DM26 delivery model, ending the two-tier workforce and a defence of the universal mail service as a social right.
Branch members discussed how Bogdan's case punctures the dominant media narrative on Ukraine, with the term ‘meat grinder’ used to describe the grim reality of the conflict.
19. Turkish government takes over pro-opposition Halk TV
Halk TV, one of Türkiye’s most-watched news channels, has been taken over by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a police raid on the morning of October 14.
20. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
