Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. David North: The Financial Times and the nuclear gamble over Kaliningrad
On October 5 the Financial Times published a column by [Gideon] Rachman, under the headline “Putin’s nuclear threats no longer work.” Days earlier, the Russian government had delivered a note to NATO declaring that it would use “the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons,” if the alliance attempted to isolate the Kaliningrad region. The note warned that a conflict could open with strikes on “decision-making centers” in NATO countries. On October 1, at the Valdai Discussion Club, Vladimir Putin confirmed that the note meant what it said.Rachman’s response is to reassure his readers. Since February 2022, he writes, Putin has repeatedly used the nuclear arsenal to intimidate the West without acting on his threats. Tanks, fighter planes and long-range missiles, “all once off the menu,” have been supplied to Ukraine. Ukraine attacked Russia’s strategic bombers in June 2025, and nothing happened. The taboo against nuclear use, he concludes, has proven “very powerful,” and the decline of Russian deterrence is “mainly good news.”
The column merits a reply because it states with unusual frankness the premise on which the governments of Britain, Germany, France, Poland and the Baltic states are conducting the war against Russia: since Russia has not used nuclear weapons, it never will, whatever NATO does.
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Let us recall the history that Rachman has chosen to forget. Before 1914 the European powers passed through a succession of crises—Morocco, Bosnia, Agadir, the Balkan wars—each of which ended short of general war. In 1909 a weakened Russia gave way before a German ultimatum over Bosnia. In July 1914 Berlin acted on the expectation that Russia would retreat again. It did not. The tsar’s ministers concluded that a second capitulation would finish Russia as a great power. Rachman observes that in Britain “the travails of Manchester City football club were bigger news” than Putin’s warnings. In the last days of July 1914 the French public was absorbed by the trial of Madame Caillaux, acquitted of murder on the day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
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Seen from the Kremlin and the Russian General Staff, the record Rachman cites points to the opposite conclusion. Every non-nuclear means of halting NATO’s escalation has failed. As Rachman himself notes, “Nato’s stance on the war in Ukraine remains unaltered.” Russia is far weaker than the alliance in conventional forces, and Kaliningrad cannot be defended by conventional means. A nuclear guarantee publicly given and abandoned at its first test would lose its value on every other front. European governments declare that their rearmament must be complete by 2029 or 2030, which tells a Russian planner that the balance of forces will shift steadily against him. That was the reasoning that persuaded the German General Staff in 1914 that war was better sooner than later. A war with NATO would open with attacks on the command structure of Russia’s nuclear forces, creating pressure to use the weapons before they are lost. Sergei Karaganov, who sits on a scientific council attached to Russia’s Security Council, has publicly advocated a nuclear strike on Europe to restore the credibility of Russian deterrence. Rachman dismisses such voices as pundits who “fulminate and fantasise.”
The Putin government, which represents the oligarchy that emerged from the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, cannot appeal to the workers of Europe and America against their own governments. Its only instrument is military force, and defeat in a war with NATO would mean its end. None of this makes Russian nuclear use certain. Each step NATO takes, however, increases the pressure on Moscow to demonstrate that at least one of its red lines is real.
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Rachman ends his column with a statement that shatters his entire complacent argument: “Since the Ukraine war began, both Russia and Nato have had to adapt their ideas about how nuclear deterrence works. The taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is clearly very strong. But is it absolute? Nobody can be sure. That kind of uncertainty is dangerous.”
What, precisely, is the level of uncertainty? Is there a 10 percent, 20 percent or 50 percent chance that the nuclear taboo will be broken? At what point does the confrontation with Russia become a game of Russian roulette with four chambers loaded with nuclear-tipped bullets? When the consequence of being wrong may be the destruction of the European continent, what level of risk is Rachman comfortable with?
He does not say. Nor does he call for negotiations, or for NATO to pull back from Kaliningrad. The only lesson he offers his readers is that Moscow’s warnings can be ignored.
Rachman speaks for a ruling class that needs to believe Russia is bluffing. Its policy—rearmament to 5 percent of gross domestic product, the revival of German military power, the subjugation of Russia and the seizure of its resources—cannot be pursued on any other assumption. Its cost is being imposed through the destruction of social programs, which is provoking growing resistance. As in 1914, governments confronting social upheaval at home do not calculate the risks of war soberly.
The people of Europe have not been asked whether they accept the gamble being taken in their name. The working class of Europe, Russia, Ukraine and the United States must answer by building an international movement against war, directed against the capitalist system that produces it.
2. Germany’s intelligence agencies drum up support for war against Russia
The public hearing conducted by the heads of Germany’s intelligence agencies in the Bundestag on Monday was an undisguised propaganda event for preparations for a direct war against Russia and a massive expansion of the state apparatus of repression at home.
For three hours, the presidents of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) portrayed Germany as a country already under attack by Russia and therefore compelled to prepare militarily, politically and socially for war.
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This propaganda method has a long history in German imperialism. In his throne speech of August 4, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II portrayed the First World War as “forced self-defense.” The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 was likewise presented as a defensive action. Nazi propaganda claimed that the Wehrmacht had “struck into the massive deployment of enemy forces” in order “to ward off the threatening danger from the East.” In reality, Operation Barbarossa had long since been prepared as a war of conquest and annihilation.
The present-day narrative follows the same basic propaganda pattern: while Germany supplies Ukraine with ever longer-range weapons, jointly develops new weapons systems with Kiev, imposes far-reaching sanctions on Russia and officially intends to make the Bundeswehr “war-ready” by 2029, the confrontation is portrayed as something imposed unilaterally by Moscow. Anyone who questions the policy of war and rearmament is increasingly treated as susceptible to Russian “narratives” or “disinformation.” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has repeatedly stated publicly that Germany must be “war-ready” by 2029.
Every incident is processed accordingly. Take, for example, the attempted attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport. An actual or alleged attack is torn out of its concrete context and presented as proof that Germany is the victim of a war imposed from outside. In this way, Germany’s own ongoing military escalation is presented as nothing more than self-defense.
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Only the weekend before the hearing, Chancellor Friedrich Merz had traveled to Kiev to further expand military cooperation. He announced another package of military support worth around €1 billion, including interceptor drones, combat drones, long-range weapons and satellite technology. He was accompanied by Economy Minister Katherina Reiche and a high-ranking business delegation from the defense and energy industries. Merz explicitly stated that Germany and Ukraine wanted to deepen their cooperation in the defence industry.
This took place only days after Moscow had once again warned NATO of a possible use of nuclear weapons should the alliance attempt to isolate Kaliningrad or cut it off from the rest of Russia. Against the background of increasing NATO military activity in the Baltic region, the Russian exclave has become one of the most dangerous potential flashpoints for a direct military confrontation between Russia and NATO.
The German government is systematically crossing one threshold after another. Arms deliveries have been expanded to include systems capable of striking targets far behind the front. Now the joint development and production of such weapons with Ukraine is being pushed ahead.
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In August, the federal cabinet adopted what it described as the “most comprehensive and fundamental overhaul” of the legal foundations of the BND and the BfV in the history of the Federal Republic. The services are to receive “more powers and additional operational capabilities.” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has explicitly described the reform as a transformation “toward genuine intelligence services.”
The proposed powers are far-reaching. The agencies are to gain broader access to IT systems, including privately used mobile phones. The BND will be allowed to retain communications data for considerably longer periods. Above all, both the BND and the BfV are to receive so-called “active measures,” enabling them not merely to collect information but to intervene directly in events.
For the BND, the federal government explicitly lists as examples penetrating the IT systems of “chemical weapons laboratories or drone factories” in order to sabotage their production, as well as disabling servers. For the domestic intelligence service, the draft provides for intervention powers, among other things, when there is a threat of “significant unrest among large sections of the population.”
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War abroad and the dismantling of democratic rights at home go hand in hand. The further the federal government escalates the confrontation with a nuclear power and pours hundreds of billions of euros into rearmament, the more it must discipline a population expected to bear the consequences in the form of austerity, job destruction and conscription.
The warnings of the intelligence chiefs must therefore be taken very seriously—but in a very different sense from that intended by them and their supporters in politics and the media. They show how far the political and state preparations for a direct war against Russia have already advanced and what authoritarian structures are being created at home to carry it out.
3. France at center of global bond market storm
Since the start of the US war on Iran at the end of February and the surge in global inflation it has produced, the yield on long-term French government debt has risen more than for any other G7 country. The yield on the 10-year bond is approaching 5 percent, compared to 3.2 percent before the onset of the war.
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In early September, as the crisis was developing, Emmanuel Moulin, the head of the Bank of France said he would not say France was “in danger, but it is in a situation that is worrying and unsatisfactory.”
In the month since those comments were made, he appears to have become more concerned.
In an interview with the FT earlier this week he said the country risked being “strangled by interest rates” if it did not act on public finances.
“France is not Greece during the eurozone crisis,” he said. “If it can pass a budget this year to reduce spending and narrow the deficit as the government has proposed, then markets will be reassured by this concrete step of fiscal consolidation.”
But this is a very big if because the government is faced with massive social opposition in the working class and the youth as it seeks to impose budget cuts of €43 billion as military spending is increased.
As the World Socialist Web Site noted back in August as cuts were being prepared: “[President] Macron’s 2023 pension cuts provoked the rejection of an overwhelming majority of the French population and the largest wave of strikes since the May 1968 general strike. Nonetheless, the government is charging ahead, trampling democracy underfoot, toward a new confrontation with the working class.”
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The notion advanced by the head of the central bank that a “strong France”—that is one that carries out social devastation against the working class and war—can remain “master” of its own destiny is being shattered by the violent movement in global markets.
This was underscored by the announcement of the Japanese asset management firm Sumitomo Mitsui that its global fixed income funds had sold their entire holdings of French government bonds. It redirected its money into German bonds and short-term Japanese government bonds.
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One of the major changes is the rise in interest rates in Japan when longer-term bonds are returning 3 percent. This shift is undermining the so-called carry trade in which investors borrowed money at ultra-low rates in Japan to invest in higher yield assets in other major economies. Japanese insurers, pension funds and asset managers have been among the largest investors in government debt internationally.
Japan has been one of France’s largest creditors holding around 5.2 percent of French foreign debt in 2025. Another estimate put Japanese holdings of French debt at about $145 billion in July this year.
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The French debt crisis and the intensification of the class struggle it is producing is by no means simply a national event.
It is the expression in France, with all its peculiarities, of a developing breakdown of the global capitalist system as governments the world over, the representatives of the oligarchs, carry out a war against the working class—a diktat transmitted to them via the global bond markets. It raises before the working class in France and internationally the fight for a socialist program as the only realistic and viable answer to this crisis.
4. French youth protests grow, as government cancels high school classes
Hundreds of thousands of high school and university students, teachers and workers marched across France on Tuesday in a third national day of action of the high school movement, now in its third week. According to the Interior Ministry, 256,000 people demonstrated in around 30 cities, while the organizers counted 450,000. The students are protesting against overcrowded and dilapidated classrooms, unreplaced teachers, exhausting timetables and the Parcoursup university selection platform, as Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu presses ahead with €54 billion in austerity cuts while tens of billions are poured into the military.
The movement is rapidly developing into a confrontation between French youth and the Lecornu government and lame-duck President Emmanuel Macron. In the afternoon, Lecornu announced that regular classes in all high schools would be suspended this week and replaced by “internal democracy” sessions. After mass protests against housing in Spain led to the calling of new elections, the government is desperate to prevent the youth movement from spreading further and leading to a general strike by the working class, as in May 1968.
In Paris, 100,000 people marched according to the organizers; 30,000 in Marseille and Toulouse, 25,000 in Lille and 20,000 in Lyon. Thousands more marched in Nantes, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Rennes and other cities, as well as in the overseas territories of Réunion and Mayotte.
According to the Education Ministry, classes were suspended in whole or in part at 891 schools in France, 250 of them in the Paris region. The National High School Students Union (USL) put the number of high schools blockaded by students or locked down by authorities at around 1,800, and the Union étudiante reported 57 university sites blockaded, including the Sorbonne and the ENS Paris-Saclay.
The day of action took place amid a brutal police crackdown. Around 2,000 police officers and gendarmes were deployed in Paris. Already in the morning, riot police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators on the Cours de Vincennes, and the march ended in clashes at Place de la Nation, where police used tear gas and stun grenades. In Lille, police kettled several hundred students, parents and union members. Since September 28, the authorities have arrested more than 6,000 people, the great majority of them minors, and placed more than 5,000 in police custody.
On Monday, a 15-year-old in Lens lost his hand when a police grenade was thrown at him in front of Auguste Béhal high school. A 14-year-old in the Val-d’Oise has lost sight in one eye, with injuries prosecutors call “compatible” with a rubber-bullet (LBD) shot. On Tuesday, prosecutors in Metz opened an investigation into suspected sexual assault after a video showed a police officer groping a schoolgirl lying on the ground during her arrest. In the National Assembly, Lecornu responded by accusing Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s populist La France Insoumise (LFI) party of making violence part of its “political project.”
World Socialist Web Site reporters intervened to interview youth and workers at the march in Paris.
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What is emerging is an international struggle of the youth and the working class against imperialist war, far-right reaction, and social austerity and inequality. This movement must be organized from below, with rank-and-file committees of action among workers and youth in struggle, that are independent of the bureaucracies that are seeking to stymie and sell out the movement. They must instead fuse this movement across national borders. The decisive question is uniting this movement internationally, freeing it from the influence of the national bureaucracies and capitalist politicians, and arming it with a socialist perspective for a revolutionary struggle against capitalism.
5. United Kingdom: Manchester City financial scandal rocks Burnham government
The escalating scandal around Manchester City Football Club’s (MCFC) breach of financial rules now threatens Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s premiership and multi-billion pound commercial relations between Britain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The scandal has laid bare the reality of the “Manchesterism” agenda Burnham declared would be the basis for governing nationally on entering Downing Street in July, following a decade as Mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham’s ethos is revealed as nothing more than slavish fawning after big business, including placing a city-region’s resources—even its globally recognized sporting institutions—at the service of private capital.
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Burnham’s first response, in a BBC interview on September 30, was that he would be “really concerned to lose” the club’s owners due to the case. He praised the Abu Dhabi owners for having been “such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester” while he was mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA).
As the scandal grew, Downing Street tried to row back. On October 1, a spokesperson said, “If wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.”
It emerged that, on September 14, just two weeks before the verdict, MCFC chair Khaldoon Al Mubarak met Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds in Downing Street. This was reportedly in his capacity as chief executive of Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s $330 billion sovereign wealth fund—with assets in more than 50 countries across six international offices. According to Bloomberg, they discussed UAE investment in Britain, covering defence, security, intelligence and trade.
The UAE has reportedly invested more than £30 billion in British industry—three times the initial £10 billion pledged—over the past five years under a 2021 Sovereign Investment Partnership led by Mubadala. Emirati officials have reportedly warned the government that the severity of the verdict could endanger further large-scale investment, according to Bloomberg.
The Telegraph reported that the UAE has also threatened to scrap billions in private capital the government is seeking for an Oxford–Cambridge technology corridor.
The relationship between Burnham and the Abu Dhabi oil-rich monarchs was such that, within a week of entering Downing Street he spoke on July 26 to UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of City’s owner—Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan (vice-president and deputy prime minister of the UAE). According to the official readout, the prime minister “began by thanking His Highness for his country’s investment into Manchester and the incredible impact it has had on the city.”
Manchester City was bought in 2008 by ADUG on behalf of Sheikh Mansour. The club already had a new stadium, the centrepiece of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, leased from the Labour-run Manchester City Council.
Built with public money, the stadium stands on the site of the former Bradford Colliery, which employed 1,500 miners when it closed in 1968. The club’s vast 80-acre training complex next door was built on the former Clayton Aniline chemical works, which employed 2,500 workers at its peak in the 1970s.
Once Abu Dhabi’s billionaires had bought the club—with MCFC paying the council a nominal rent for the stadium—the council offered it the prize of vast tracts of de-industrialized east Manchester.
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A 10-year “collaboration agreement” signed in 2015 gave ADUG the right of first refusal on council land across prime undeveloped areas between MCFC’s now renamed Etihad stadium—sponsored by the UAE’s airline—and the city centre. Manchester Life built more than 1,000 private rented apartments and 395 homes for sale—but not one social or affordable home.
A 2022 University of Sheffield study, Manchester Off-Shored, found the council had sold 999-year leaseholds on public land to Jersey-based ADUG subsidiaries “below comparable rates,” and had “sold the family silver too cheap.” The researchers described “a transfer of public wealth to private hands that is difficult to justify as prudent,” and estimated that Manchester Life property worth nearly £350 million was held by the same subsidiaries.
After leaving the council in 2017, Bernstein became a strategic adviser to the ADUG-majority owned City Football Group—self-described as “the world’s leading private owner and operator of football clubs—with total or partial ownership of 12 worldwide”. Leese stepped down as council leader in December 2021, appointed an honorary president of MCFC in May 2023.
By contrast, senior council official Dominic Hayes resigned in March 2018, after seven months as director of development and corporate real estate. According to The Mill, notes of a staff meeting on March 21, taken by development manager Gillian Boyle, record senior officer Eddie Smith saying: “You don’t criticise the council’s relationship with the football club” and expect to stay at the council. Smith denies making the remark.
Under Burnham’s control, the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund poured public money into private developers. Up to £1 billion in taxpayer funding was loaned to around 50 property companies for luxury apartment blocks, including £615 million to Renaker, owned by billionaire Daren Whitaker. The GMCA approved a £24.5 million loan to Manchester Life in October 2017, with the Sheffield research identifying around £55 million in public loans across three Manchester Life developments.
This largess was provided to a ruling family Bloomberg ranks the second-richest in the world, worth $335.9 billion.
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The scandal has engulfed Burnham’s flagship “Number 10 North” office, which he boasted would be his base as he revitalized the north of England. In July, the government confirmed its permanent home would be on derelict land within the area covered by ADUG’s first-refusal deal. According to the Telegraph, the council paid £35 million for the site in 2017, after a rival developer bid £29 million and an independent valuation put it at £33 million. A council document recommended “partnership type arrangements with ADUG” for its redevelopment.
On October 5, the Manchester Evening News reported that Number 10 North would instead be located at another city center location, where offices are already in place, with Downing Street insisting the switch had nothing to do with the scandal.
A Blairite loyalist, Burnham reinvented himself as the “everyman” mayor, and as prime minister offered a moderated critique of “wrong turns in the 1980s.” The MCFC scandal has blown that pretense apart. He and his Labour allies in Greater Manchester were central to the courtship of the Gulf oligarchy.
Federal immigration police have detained at least 506 US citizens since Donald Trump returned to the White House, according to an investigation published Tuesday by ProPublica. Those detained include children, Native Americans and people simply recording immigration raids.
The findings underscore that the administration’s mass deportation operation is an attack on the entire working class, regardless of immigration status. The methods used to terrorize immigrant workers are being deployed against citizens, including those who oppose or simply document the government’s kidnapping operations.
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Of the 506 US citizens ProPublica identified as detained by immigration police, 77 were from the state of Minnesota, with a majority of those occurring during the occupation of the Twin Cities dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” by the administration. At least 56 US citizens were detained by ICE during the month of January, which saw massive protests following the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
None of the immigration agents involved in the killings of Good, Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas or Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine have been charged for their violent and deadly actions. Under capitalism, the “special body of armed men,” the police, which include local and federal immigration agents, are given immense leeway in abusing, assaulting and killing workers in order to protect capitalist interests.
While federal immigration police assault and kill workers with impunity, their victims and surviving relatives are forced to pursue civil litigation to expose the government’s actions and demand accountability. Two lawsuits filed by Renee Good’s family on October 1 and another filed by Marimar Martinez on October 5 document the violence and official cover-ups accompanying the mass deportation operation.
The family of Renee Good filed two civil lawsuits. The first names the United States as the sole defendant under the Federal Tort Claims Act, while the second names Good’s killer, Jonathan Ross, and 10 “John Doe” federal agents, along with several current and former Trump administration officials, including former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, “border czar” Tom Homan and former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino.
At a press conference last Thursday announcing the lawsuit, Becca Good, Renee’s partner, spoke publicly for the first time since the killing. She said living without Renee was like “trying to live without the sun.” She continued, “And you don’t know how much light something gives you until it’s gone, and then you feel that absence every single second.”
She added that “What happened to us should never happen to any family.” She called for “true accountability,” and added that while she did not “hate” the people who took Renee from her and her children, “I want them to understand... every single day, they get to look at their children, and their wives, and their sisters, and know what they took from our family. They took a mother away from her children. They know that, and they will carry it forever.”
Another woman shot multiple times by ICE thugs, Marimar Martinez, a US citizen and resident of Chicago, filed her own lawsuit on October 5 against the US government. Martinez was shot five times last year by Border Patrol officer Charles Exum during “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago. Following the shooting, federal agents and Trump administration officials lied and claimed Martinez was a “domestic terrorist” who had “weaponized” her vehicle and was trying to run over Customs and Border Protection agents. Body camera footage from inside the SUV occupied by CBP agents conclusively proved it was the CBP that initiated the contact and tried to murder Martinez.
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While Martinez was bleeding from gunshot wounds, Exum’s superiors were already moving to reward him. Within hours of the shooting, Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino emailed Exum offering to extend his service beyond retirement age. “In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much yet left to do!!” Bovino wrote.
Raymond L. Jensen Jr., the United Auto Workers official who posted a death threat against rank-and-file socialist presidential candidate Will Lehman, has been terminated from his $202,000-a-year position on the UAW International staff, Lehman reported Tuesday afternoon.
In a post on X, Lehman stated: “My attorneys have been informed by the UAW Human Resources Department that Raymond Jensen, the UAW official who issued a death threat against me, has been terminated from his position at the UAW International.”
Lehman continued, “This only happened because UAW members and workers throughout the world denounced this thuggery and demanded Jensen’s removal. But this was never about one bureaucrat. The entire UAW apparatus has to be abolished. This won’t be done by the UAW monitor or the courts. It is up to the rank and file.”
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From the outset, Lehman insisted that the threat was not aimed at him alone. “This threat is not aimed at me alone,” he stated. “It is an act of intimidation directed against the entire rank-and-file opposition.” The image, he explained, was calculated to teach a lesson to every worker who has voted down a contract, spoken up at a meeting or thought about challenging the apparatus in their own local.
Lehman was not intimidated. He demanded that Fain and the UAW apparatus publicly repudiate the threat and remove Jensen from the payroll. Instead, the apparatus closed ranks. At the July 30 presidential candidates’ debate, when Lehman confronted Fain directly from the floor, the UAW president said, “I don’t condone that stuff,” before immediately adding: “If you’re running for president, get ready, brother, because you’ll be getting them every day.” No other UAW International official—including Richard Boyer, the International Executive Board member who was himself the target of Fain’s retaliation—issued any denunciation of the threat.
What forced action was not the apparatus but the rank and file. Workers throughout the UAW, disgusted by the thuggish behavior, rallied to Lehman’s defense. A young worker at Bridgewater Interiors in Detroit told Lehman’s campaign team, “They’re trying to shut you up. And they usually only do that when somebody’s telling the truth.” Support poured in from autoworkers at Stellantis Warren Truck and Sterling Stamping, from Nexteer and Dana workers, and from workers in Canada, Mexico, Britain, Australia, Türkiye and New Zealand who demanded Jensen’s removal.
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The firing of Jensen is a victory for the rank-and-file movement that forced it. The apparatus that produced the threat remains intact—an organization of hundreds of functionaries taking home six-figure salaries, which has presided over decades of concessions, plant closures and the victimization of workers who speak out. Its abolition is not a task for the Monitor or the courts. It is the task of workers themselves, organized in rank-and-file committees in every plant, university and workplace.
8. Trump approves execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan by US Army firing squad
President Donald Trump has approved the execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan by a US Army firing squad for the November 5, 2009, mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, which killed 13 people and wounded 32 others. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced Monday on X that “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended and President Donald J. Trump has approved death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan.” Parnell added, “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”
If it is carried out, Hasan’s killing would be the first execution by the US military since April 13, 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The last soldier shot by an Army firing squad was Pvt. Eddie Slovik, executed for desertion in 1945.
The secretary of the Army will now set the time and place of the execution. According to Army Lawyer magazine, the date is to be set within 60 to 150 days of presidential approval, though a habeas corpus petition in the civilian federal courts could delay it for years. Hasan is one of four men on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth.
Hasan, a psychiatrist in the Army Medical Corps, walked into a medical building at Fort Hood where soldiers were undergoing checkups before deployment, shouted “Allahu akbar” and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun. Twelve of the 13 people killed were soldiers. Hasan was shot by a responding police officer and left partially paralyzed. Representing himself at his 2013 court-martial, he told jurors he was a soldier who had “switched sides” and said he had acted to stop troops from deploying to Afghanistan to kill Muslims. His standby attorneys, assigned to advise him at trial, warned that he was deliberately seeking a death sentence. He was sentenced to death, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in 2025.
The Fort Hood shootings were a bloody consequence of the criminal US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which killed hundreds of thousands and left a generation of soldiers scarred. None of this enters into the Pentagon’s announcement, which brands Hasan a “jihadist” and turns his execution into a display of military vengeance staged by an administration that has rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
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The administration has also carried out a vendetta against the 37 federal prisoners whose death sentences Biden commuted in December 2024, whom Trump told to “GO TO HELL!” At least 10 have been sent to ADX Florence in Colorado, the federal Bureau of Prisons’ only “supermax” prison. Prisoners are held in near-total isolation 22 to 24 hours a day at the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” as the prison is known, while the Justice Department urges state prosecutors to bring new capital charges against them.
Emboldened by Washington, death penalty states have sharply accelerated the pace of executions. There were 47 executions in the United States in 2025, the most since 2009, and 29 have been carried out so far in 2026. Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, executed 19 people in 2025—more than double the state’s previous annual record—and has executed 16 so far this year. DeSantis has already signed his 20th death warrant of 2026.
States are reviving old methods and devising new ones to keep the machinery of death running. South Carolina carried out three executions by firing squad in 2025—Brad Sigmon on March 7, Mikal Mahdi on April 11 and Stephen Bryant on November 14—the first in the US since Utah’s execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Mahdi’s autopsy found he had been struck by only two of three bullets. A pathologist concluded that he likely suffered excruciating pain for 30 to 60 seconds before losing consciousness.
Alabama carried out seven executions by nitrogen gas asphyxiation in 2024 and 2025, with witnesses describing condemned men convulsing and gasping for air. Idaho has made the firing squad its primary method of execution as of July 1, 2026, and has built a remote-controlled firing squad chamber.
Trump’s revival of the military firing squad is a political act. The death penalty is, above all, an instrument of state terror, and the Trump administration is wielding it as part of a broader campaign to intimidate the population.
The same government that is preparing to shoot a prisoner at Fort Leavenworth is waging war against Iran and arming the genocide in Gaza. At home, ICE agents have shot to death four people in the streets this year, while tens of thousands of immigrants are held in detention camps. Police killings continue to exceed 1,000 a year. The celebration of state violence, from the battlefield to the execution chamber, is aimed at conditioning the population to accept lethal force against all those deemed enemies of the state, above all workers and youth fighting against war and in defense of democratic rights.
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Nine more executions are scheduled in the United States through November: Jamaal Howard in Texas on October 7; James Robertson and William Reaves Jr. in Florida on October 13 and October 20, respectively; Jeffrey Weisheit in Indiana, Michael Taylor in Alabama and Jesse Guardado in Florida, all on November 5; John Rubio in Texas and James Pavatt in Oklahoma, both on November 12; and Reinaldo Dennes in Texas on November 19.
The Socialist Equality Party opposes the death penalty unconditionally, for the guilty and the innocent alike. The fight to abolish it cannot be entrusted to the courts, which have sanctioned every stage of this barbarism, or to the Democratic Party, which has backed state killing for decades and has said nothing as Trump moves to expand it. It is bound up with the struggle of the working class against war, dictatorship and the capitalist system that gives rise to them.
A statement issued by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality:
Stop the University of Michigan nuclear weapons data center
The University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory are proposing a $1.25 billion nuclear weapons facility on 144 acres along the Huron River in Ypsilanti Township, across the street from the Ford Rawsonville Plant—a fortified federal installation whose central purpose is to simulate, modernize and develop new variants of the American nuclear arsenal. It is a war project, and it must be stopped.
Asked at a January open house whether the facility would be used for nuclear weapons research, Los Alamos Deputy Director J. Patrick Fitch said, “The short answer is yes.” The data center is a military project with an academic fig leaf: a 50,000-square-foot “Academic Research Facility” bolted onto a 240,000-square-foot classified national security installation. At a September 9 town hall, university officials confirmed that the facility’s computing resources will be split 90 percent for Los Alamos and just 10 percent for the university.
The real costs
The facility will draw up to 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 75,000 to 100,000 homes. Its cooling systems will consume up to one million gallons of fresh water daily—enough for more than 3,000 households—siphoned from the same utility serving the civilian population.
The project will pay no property taxes. The development will contribute nothing to local schools, roads or first responders, while Ypsilanti Township is expected to absorb the costs of any emergency response to the facility.
The jobs promise has collapsed. The university expanded the project from 20 to 144 acres while the projected permanent on-site workforce shrank from 200 to as few as 30 or 35 positions.
A project of war and dictatorship
It is not a matter of moving this project somewhere else. The problem is not basically the location, but the project itself and the social order that produces it.
The data center is part of the expanding global war being driven by American imperialism, which includes the war against Iran, the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. These wars are metastasizing, and are ultimately directed against nuclear-armed Russia and China.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Michigan Democratic establishment have worked to transform the state into a computational hub for the military-industrial complex, using the Michigan Strategic Fund and CHIPS Act subsidies to reshore military supply chains.
The University of Michigan’s role in the war drive is inseparable from its assault on democratic rights on campus. The administration collaborated in the federal prosecution of the U-Mich Eight, eight pro-Palestinian students and employees indicted in June on conspiracy charges, who face up to 20 years behind bars. It banned Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) and hired private investigators to spy on activists on and off campus. The University of Michigan was an epicenter of the nationwide crackdown on student opposition to the Gaza genocide. The central demand of the students was that the university divest from Israel, with which U-Mich maintains deep financial and research ties.
The university fired and facilitated the prosecution of five Chinese scholars on trumped-up charges, and it suppressed news of the suicide of Danhao Wang, a 31-year-old postdoctoral researcher who took his own life on March 19, the day after he was questioned by ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents. A week after Wang’s death, U-Mich President Domenico Grasso boasted to a congressional committee of his top-secret clearance and of having “acted swiftly and decisively” to terminate the five researchers’ visas.
AI is being employed by the Trump administration to carry out the police occupations of cities, the persecution of immigrant and the construction of a system of mass detention. The same technology that could plan abundance for all is being turned into an instrument of dictatorship.
Who owns the technology?
Opposition to this war project must not be conflated with opposition to artificial intelligence itself. AI is a revolutionary advance in humanity’s productive forces, holding the potential to cure disease, help orchestrate the complex reorganization of society’s energy infrastructure necessary to resolve the climate crisis and make possible a planned economy that provides for all.
The problem is not the technology, but the social relations of the capitalist system to which it is subordinated. In the hands of the working class, in a socialist society, AI would be turned to human need. Under the control of the corporate oligarchy, it is used to destroy jobs, increase exploitation and escalate war. The working class must take hold of the data centers, the computing power, the AI systems, and wrest them from the class that has monopolized them.
Bernie Sanders and other “left” Democrats have promoted a “freeze AI” campaign and a data center moratorium that leaves ownership of the technology in the hands of the ruling class. In September, Sanders shared a platform with the fascist Steve Bannon and January 6 coup organizer Amy Kremer at the “Pro-Human Assembly” on AI, where Bannon called for expelling all Chinese nationals from US labs. Sanders voiced no opposition to this xenophobia, giving it his tacit approval.
Socialism AI (ai.wsws.org), which was established by the World Socialist Web Site to give users access to the assembled knowledge of the world socialist movement, shows how AI can advance the fight against war, dictatorship and inequality.
A warning to protesters
The military-nuclear project cannot be stopped by appeals to the university administration or to the Democratic Party. Democratic politicians, including Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, are attempting to attach themselves to the community opposition and adopt the protest as part of their election campaigns.
This is a trap. They will channel the anger of Ypsilanti Township residents back into the dead end of the Democratic Party—into petitions, hearings and “community input” sessions that change nothing while the project proceeds. The movement must not be subordinated to any politician or party of the ruling class.
Our demands
This is not a question of stopping one project in one township. It is a national and international question, requiring a struggle against the entire existing political and economic order.
What is required is an independent movement of the working class in opposition to the capitalist system and its two parties. The working class produces the technology, and it is the only class with the power to take hold of it and utilize it to meet the needs of humanity for peace, equality and economic security.
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality support the opposition of Ypsilanti Township residents to this project, and we call for its cancellation. We put forward the following demands:
- Stop the U-Mich–Los Alamos nuclear weapons data center. No nuclear weapons research, simulation or development in Ypsilanti Township or anywhere else.
- No militarization of the university. End all classified research, all defense contracts and all collaboration between the University of Michigan and the military-intelligence apparatus.
- Full transparency and democratic control. All communications between the university and the township must be made public.
- Expropriate the technology monopolies and dismantle the military-industrial complex. The computing power, the data centers and the AI systems must be taken out of the hands of the corporations and the Pentagon and placed under the democratic control of the working class. They must be directed to human need and the planning of the world economy.
What you can do
Build a rank-and-file committee of workers, students and residents fighting this project. Take this statement to your workplace, your classroom and your neighbors. Contact the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.
The Labor government in Western Australia (WA) mobilized what Police Minister Reece Whitby described as the “biggest police operation” in the state’s history to prevent demonstrations at Australia’s largest military weapons exhibition in Perth, the state capital, yesterday.
An estimated 600 people marched to a rally outside the large exclusion zone that the government declared around the Perth Convention Centre, in the heart of the city, to shield the display of high-tech weaponry. Nearly 2,000 officers were reportedly mobilised for the three-day Land Forces event.
The Labor government imposed police-state powers under the Land Forces (Special Powers) Act, passed by the WA parliament last month, including to ban targeted people from the entire area.
That legislation enabled police to set up checkpoints, cordons and roadblocks to block entry, and stop and search people and vehicles. Police can seize items, force people to provide ID and remove any headgear, and issue directions, including move-on orders.
Criminal offences range from “fail to comply with a direction” or “behave in a threatening manner,” such as to use offensive language, to be punished by imprisonment for one year and a fine of $12,000, to attempt to enter an exclusion zone after being banned, with imprisonment for three years and a fine of $36,000.
The police commissioner was given the power to declare wider exclusion zones on the spot. Such declarations cannot be challenged in any court or other legal proceedings. Police are also protected from liability for any wrongdoing, even if it causes injury.
The Land Forces International Land Defence Exposition is held every two years. The selection of Perth to host the gathering for the first time is part of Australia’s transformation by the federal and state Labor governments into a crucial platform, on behalf of Australian imperialism, for a US-led war against China.
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Two years ago, the Victorian state Labor government unleashed a violent police attack on demonstrators against the last Land Forces Expo in Melbourne. Some 1,800 police were mobilized for the event, almost outnumbering protesters. The Public Order Response Team used stun grenades, shot rubber bullets and fired tear gas against people. After 89 people were arrested at the scene, a further 21 people were arrested following police use of CCTV and bodycam footage.
Labor’s Melbourne police operation was a clear provocation intended to create an atmosphere in which the protesters could be labelled as violent. Labor leaders, including Albanese, blamed the protesters for the police attacks.
Since then, the Albanese government has only intensified the integration into US war operations. After a meeting between US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles in Washington last month, the Pentagon announced that it would “accelerate force posture initiatives at Australian bases”—that is, expand the stationing of troops and military assets.
Last month, the Guardian published a report showing that the US government already controls more than 17 defense facilities in Australia and has access to another 75 Australian installations. In addition to forward-deployment bases in the north and west of the continent, and spying and targeting centers at Pine Gap in central Australia and the North West Cape, this includes HMAS Stirling and other facilities close to major population centers, like Perth.
In addition to being complicit in Israel’s war crimes, the Albanese government has sent weaponry and military personnel to join the illegal US-Israeli war against Iran, and is actively supporting the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. As underscored by the events in Perth, it is at the center of the preparations to open up another front in this developing global war—a potential nuclear conflict with China.
Workers and young people must defend the right to protest, and all the other fundamental democratic rights that the federal and state Labor governments are tearing up.
11. No to Türkiye’s deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia and the US war against Iran!
The announcement that Türkiye and nuclear-armed Pakistan will deploy troops to Saudi Arabia at Riyadh’s request is a reactionary move targeting Iran, which is under imperialist attack, and its allies, including the Houthi Ansar Allah movement in Yemen. The Ansar Allah movement, besides fighting a US-backed, Saudi-led Arab coalition, opposes Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran. The announcement follows French imperialism’s offer to send troops to defend the Saudi regime.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party–Fourth International), the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, calls on workers and youth in Türkiye and internationally to oppose US imperialism’s aggression, which aims at the full domination of the Middle East, and the Mecca Agreement, which operates in collaboration with it.
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Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman’s statement that the alliance would activate its collective deterrence measures “in response to the attacks and all those responsible for them” makes clear that the target is not only the Houthi forces but their main ally, Iran.
The drawing of Türkiye, which has NATO’s second-largest army, and Pakistan into this war—both share a land border with Iran—opens the door to a conflict that could engulf the entire region. As the World Socialist Web Site warned when the agreement was signed, this pact offers no protection to the working class of the signatory countries. On the contrary, it means chaining them to a series of conflicts stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to South Asia and driving them into war.
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The Riyadh meeting took place as the war of aggression launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28 was being prepared for a new stage. Saudi Arabia had opened its bases to the US offensive on Iran and had been one of the targets of Iran’s retaliation in legitimate self-defense.
The US Navy has blockaded Iran’s ports since July, and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Trump, who rejected Tehran’s latest proposals, told Time magazine that a resumption of bombing after the November 3 midterm elections was “possible.” The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and an amphibious group carrying about 2,000 Marines are heading to the region, which could thus have three aircraft carrier strike groups at the same time. Trump threatened Iran, saying, “They’ll either sign a very fair deal, or they won’t exist any longer.”
In the same period, the war between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis flared up again. After Riyadh struck Sanaa airport in July, the Houthis targeted Saudi territory for the first time since 2022. In mid-September, the Houthis seized the port city of Mokha and areas around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, choking off the second-largest oil transit route after Hormuz. Since then, the Houthis have announced attacks on Aramco facilities in Riyadh, Yanbu and Rabigh.
On October 4, Rashad al-Alimi, the head of Yemen’s Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council, announced the launching of a comprehensive offensive to retake all Houthi-held territory. The following day, as the parties to the Mecca Agreement gathered in Riyadh, government forces claimed to have retaken Mokha and positions near Bab el-Mandeb, while the Saudi-led coalition announced that 100 warplanes were providing air support. The Houthis deny that Mokha has fallen. This is the background against which the Mecca Agreement is being put into effect.
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Popular opposition in Türkiye to US aggression in the Middle East and its war against Iran is overwhelming. According to a survey published by the Areda Survey in March 2026, 93.2 percent of participants opposed a US and Israeli attack on Iran. These same millions view the Houthis with sympathy because of their opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the imperialist assault on Iran. There is no sympathy whatsoever for the Saudi regime, which brutally murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate, carries out savage repression at home and slaughters the impoverished people of Yemen with bombs and starvation.
This is why the Saudi regime and the pro-government media seize on unverified claims that Houthi retaliatory strikes targeted Mecca and Medina, cities holy to Muslims. The Houthis categorically reject these claims, stating that their attacks target military installations and oil infrastructure, and accuse Riyadh of resorting to the “holy sites under attack” narrative to legitimize military intervention and the naval blockade.
The rejection of the Mecca Agreement and the deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia is an integral part of the struggle against the US imperialist war of aggression in the Middle East and the genocide in Gaza. This requires establishing the independence of the working class from the entire pro-imperialist political establishment, including the Erdoğan regime, and mobilizing it in the struggle for a United Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi calls on workers and youth in Türkiye to demand the annulment of the Mecca Agreement and of the decision to deploy troops to Saudi Arabia, the closure of the İncirlik and Kürecik bases, which are used for the benefit of the US and Israel, a halt to oil shipments to Israel that pass through Türkiye, and an end to Türkiye’s integration into the US-led imperialist war machine.
[The Southern Pennsylvania Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee asks that all postal workers who agree with its statement get in contact, and explains how at the World Socialist Web Site.]The postal workers of southern Pennsylvania declare the formation of a rank-and-file committee in solidarity with all postal workers in the United States and around the world. We are in solidarity with all workers who confront dangerous speed-up, the absence of safety on the jobs, attacks on our pay and benefits.
We call for a struggle that unifies all postal workers with workers in the parallel, privatized delivery services—UPS, FedEx, Amazon and others—as well as with workers in manufacturing, office and clerical work, and every other industry, in the United States and internationally.
The postal service—a product of the American Revolution—has been systematically bled over decades by both Democratic and Republican parties. We have been forced to operate like a profit-making company despite the clear intention by the Founding Fathers to have the mail system as a universal right to all in the name of having an informed society able to fight back against tyranny.
Instead, we are losing workers: clerks are cut and are being forced to bid against mail handlers in the facilities to keep their jobs while CCAs are being kept as part-time workers forever. We face delivery trucks that reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and grueling overwork. At our facility, never a day goes by where we know when we’re getting off. You can’t make an appointment or plan your life around such circumstances.
At the same time, overtime is being removed by the postmaster, who is illicitly deleting our clock rings when we work late, to save money and remove the obligation to pay us our rightful compensation. When this is brought to the attention of our union leaders in the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), our rightful grievances are ignored or bartered away like a bargaining chip between the union leaders and management.
At the national level, the fascist Trump administration has gone to work laying off and firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers through the misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency,” and it has likewise tried to push our own members out of their jobs and close entire post offices. It is attempting the destruction of a public service on behalf of the private delivery corporations that want our work and our routes.
While our service is bled dry and we are told there is no money for jobs, Postmaster General David Steiner—a former executive on the board of private competitor FedEx—has awarded himself generous bonuses, including a $170,000 bonus upon assuming the position in 2025. Congressional reports have cited payments as high as $305,000 during his time at USPS.
Steiner’s office has issued a report threatening the complete destruction of USPS by early next year. The scenarios now on the table include ending six-days-a-week delivery, closing most local post offices (more than 70 percent are deemed “unprofitable”), eliminating the universal service obligation that guarantees every American equal access to the mail, and steep rate hikes. Management has already suspended payments into our pension funds to “save” $400 million on our backs.
Likewise, we oppose the efforts of the existing unions to artificially separate us and weaken our struggles. The National Association of Letter Carriers has led us into a dead end, sending our contract to mediation and arbitration rather than organizing a single day of struggle.
The decision by outgoing NALC president Brian Renfroe to resign his post is a cheap face-saving move by the union so that it can continue to sell us out under the direction of another “leader” who has none of our interests in mind. None of the so-called reformers in the election have a plan to address the challenges we face, nor do they even bother directly stating what the serious issues are.
In a recent public statement, presidential candidate and current NALC vice president James Henry sought to hypocritically call out the “division within our Union,” failing to add that—with a yearly salary that is nearly $486,000—Henry has presided over this “divide” between the workers and the bureaucracy. He acknowledges this was “unmistakably reflected when approximately 71% of voting members rejected the 2023–2026 tentative agreement.”
Henry and the other candidates for leadership are merely vying for the chance to directly control our dues money. Nothing more will change in the election. Furthermore, the election for NALC president is set to conclude following the December 12 deadline of our union contract’s arbitration, meaning we won’t even have any say about the conditions we work under.
The effort to contain us while the destruction of our jobs is underway shows that the NALC, the American Postal Workers Union and the rural carriers union are plotting against us together with our employer. We reject the idea that we can elect the right “pro-worker” leaders to get the job done for us.
As with the 1970 postal worker wildcat strike, any real fight is going to have to come from the efforts of our own members over the heads of the so-called leaders. We must organize ourselves into our own rank-and-file organizations to coordinate and unite our struggles to avoid being co-opted by the union leaders and management.
Thus, we endorse the recent call of the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee for all USPS employees to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to weaponize our jobs to suppress the vote in the upcoming elections. We will not be the instrument of the disenfranchisement of the American people. The efforts to slash spending on the postal service and all other public programs is connected to Trump’s plans for dictatorship, which is being done not because Trump represents some kind of unspeakable evil but because he is seeking to compensate the capitalist investors and shareholders whose interests he serves above all else.
Unlike the official NALC, APWU and rural unions, we call for real worker solidarity and don’t discriminate by trade or employer. All workers—trade union or no trade union—are going through the same things: unsafe work, low pay, long hours.
As such, we also endorse the campaign of our fellow worker Will Lehman for president of the United Auto Workers. Will’s campaign embodies the basic principles we stand for: building worker power from the floor up and removing power and decision-making from the overpaid and unaccountable union executives who take our dues and charge us for the “privilege” of being sold out again and again. His fight is our fight, and we extend to him and to autoworkers everywhere our full solidarity.
We vow to fight to defend democratic rights, the economic rights of all workers, and the historic legacy of our institution—a testament to what a revolution can accomplish. The current crisis of American capitalist society means that we need a workers’ revolution to defend all of our rights from a system that can no longer sustain even its own institutions, such as USPS, formed in 1775.
The post office was built by and for working people. We will not surrender it to FedEx, to UPS, to Amazon, or to the political establishment that serves them.
Join us. Build a rank-and-file committee in your own workplace. Unite with the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. The future of the post office—and of the entire working class—will be decided by our independent, organized struggle.
End the speed-up and pay us for every hour worked.
No privatization—keep the post office a public service.
Reject the sellout union leadership and lead the fight ourselves.
Solidarity with all workers, everywhere—and we won’t suppress the vote.
13. After failed execution last week, Christa Pike is conscious and talking, attorneys say
Christa Gail Pike is conscious and speaking nearly a week after the state of Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her by lethal injection, her attorneys announced Tuesday.
“Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care. Despite the severe damage she endured to her arms, she is still handcuffed and shackled to the bed. Her recovery is medically unprecedented. Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason of the Tennessee Office of the Post Conviction Defender and Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen of Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee said in a statement.
Pike, 50, was scheduled on September 30 to become the first woman executed in Tennessee since it was a slave state. She was sentenced to death for the January 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Job Corps center in Knoxville. Pike, then 18, and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured Slemmer to a secluded area, where she was beaten and killed. Shipp, a juvenile at the time, was sentenced to life in prison.
“She survived two complete rounds of lethal injection per Tennessee’s protocol, despite her attorneys’ warning to the state of specific challenges with her veins,” the attorneys’ statement said.
Those warnings had been explicitly laid out by her attorneys. In their petition for a stay filed with the US Supreme Court, Pike’s lawyers argued that her small, fragile veins and a blood disorder, thrombocytosis, would make establishing IV access difficult and that lethal injection would cause her “serious pain and suffering” in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
On the night of September 30, the execution team took about an hour and multiple attempts to establish IV lines. The first dose of pentobarbital was administered at 7:30 p.m. Central Time. Four minutes later, Pike said, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open,” according to media witnesses. For the next half hour she breathed deeply, snored, yawned and moved on the gurney. At 7:46 p.m. prison officials closed the curtains to the death chamber, reopening them three minutes later, apparently after administering a second dose. Witnesses described her snoring, grunting and making choking sounds. At 8:05 p.m. the curtains were closed again, and the journalists were left in the dark for some 50 minutes before being ordered out. Pike was then rushed to a Nashville-area hospital.
Her attorneys believe the IV lines were improperly placed or her veins had blown, causing the caustic drug to flow into the tissue of her arms rather than her bloodstream. Her arms were burned, blistered and swollen when she arrived at the hospital. She was placed on a ventilator while doctors worked to clear the pentobarbital from her system, and she remained unconscious through the weekend. As recently as Sunday, Ferrell said he was not aware of her having regained consciousness at any point.
The attorneys thanked the ambulance crew and hospital staff for providing Pike with humane care, as well as the many people who have sent messages over the past week, writing:
“We are incredibly grateful to the first responders and the medical team at the hospital who treated Christa like a human and have provided exceptional care to her. We also want to thank thousands from all over the world who sent messages offering prayers and support for Christa.”
Pike is alive but not for lack of effort by the state of Tennessee and the US Supreme Court, which were determined to see her dead. The Supreme Court twice refused to stop her execution—first denying her request for a stay on September 29 without a single noted dissent, then, on the day of the execution, vacating by a 6-3 vote a stay granted by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals so that the killing could proceed before her death warrant expired at midnight. Republican Governor Bill Lee had already refused to grant clemency.
“Christa’s life has been extraordinarily difficult,” the attorneys wrote. “She survived multiple childhood rapes, which political leaders in this state acknowledge leave lifelong scars. She survived nearly 30 years of solitary confinement and, more recently, escalating restrictive confinement leading up to her execution date.”
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That Pike remains handcuffed and shackled to her hospital bed—her arms severely damaged by the drug meant to kill her, barely recovered from days on a ventilator—is an act of sheer sadism by the state.
Chloe Freeman, a Michigan registered nurse formerly employed by Trinity Health Ann Arbor, is being prosecuted by the federal government for helping an injured immigrant escape from the Border Patrol Gestapo. Her courageous act of working class solidarity has generated an outpouring of support from fellow workers.
A GoFundMe page was set up for Freeman, organized by the mother of one of her friends. Hundreds of donations have poured in, and the page has so far raised over $31,000 of the $35,000 it sought. Donors have expressed their support for Freeman on the GoFundMe page with messages of solidarity. Readers can contribute to the fundraiser supporting Freeman here.
On May 28, 2026, Freeman helped an immigrant patient, who suffered injuries attempting to flee from immigration agents, to leave Trinity Health and escape his jailers. On August 28, a criminal complaint against her was filed in the Eastern District of Michigan. If convicted, she faces up to a year in prison. A Preliminary Examination is currently scheduled for October 20.
According to the criminal complaint, Border Patrol agents were conducting a “targeted immigration enforcement operation” in Ann Arbor against a Mexican worker identified in the complaint only by the initials “OBP.” As the man fled, he tripped over a curb, fell and struck his face on the pavement.
Immigration agents took the man into custody and transported him to Trinity Health Ann Arbor Hospital for a CT scan. There, at approximately 11:30 p.m., Freeman entered the CT room, removed the man’s IV and escorted him out through the ambulance bay doors. Security footage shows him leaving the hospital shortly after Freeman retrieved him. He has not been located since.
For this act of human compassion and working class solidarity, Freeman is being prosecuted by the federal government for “instigating or assisting escape.” She is, in fact, the target of a political prosecution aimed at intimidating any worker who seeks to defend immigrants from state persecution.
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The support for Freeman from workers stands in sharp contrast to the silence of the Democrats and the trade union bureaucracy. No prominent Democratic Party politician has made a public statement about Freeman’s case, including “progressives” such as Abdul el-Sayed and Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members such as Zohran Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Similarly, no labor union, including unions in the healthcare field, has released a public statement of support.
This silence is no mistake. The Democratic Party helped construct and fund the deportation machine and has maneuvered with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party to expand funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), while placing no restrictions on their police state operations. The union apparatuses, integrated into the state and the corporations, have no interest in mobilizing workers in defense of democratic rights. Their true function is to contain and demobilize the anger and opposition of the working class, of which the support for Nurse Freeman is one expression.
Freeman’s principled stand in support of immigrant workers and the support for her from fellow workers must take an organized and collective form. This means the establishment of rank-and-file committees, independent of the big business parties and the trade union bureaucracy, in every hospital, workplace and neighborhood. The demands must be raised:
- Drop all charges against Chloe Freeman!
- Stop the assault on immigrants! Defend the right of workers to live and work in the country of their choosing! Workers of the world, unite!
15. Mussolini: Son of the Century - Benito Mussolini and the rise of Italian fascism
Joe Wright’s eight-part limited series Mussolini: Son of the Century (original title: M. Il figlio del secolo), adapted from Antonio Scurati’s Premio Strega-winning novel, chronicles Benito Mussolini’s rise to fascist dictator of Italy.
First released at the Venice Film Festival in fall 2024, the series has won wide praise and been watched by millions in Italy and elsewhere in Europe since it aired streaming early last year. The series is an ambitious, technically accomplished production, though not without shortcomings. Luca Marinelli’s performance as Mussolini is its centerpiece.
Mussolini: Son of the Century begins on March 23, 1919, when Mussolini gathers war veterans, demobilized arditi (Italian special forces) and nationalists in Milan to found the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. This marks the birth of fascismo, an ideology that has carried its Italian name all over the world.
The series ends with his January 3, 1925 parliamentary speech, in which Mussolini assumed “moral, political and historical responsibility” for the killing of socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti and buried what remained of parliamentary democracy. Wright charts the transformation of a marginal movement into a state apparatus: from the electoral disaster of 1919, when the Fascists won virtually no votes while the Socialist Party swept the polls, through Mussolini’s alliance with the liberal politician Giovanni Giolitti, to the fraudulent elections of 1924 and the collapse of ruling-class opposition.
What the series does well it does quite well. Viewers feel the ferociously anti-working-class, anti-socialist and anti-communist nature of fascism. They encounter the human scum Mussolini mobilized. They see the impotence of official Italian socialism’s feckless, reformist leaders in the face of a gathering nightmare. They witness Italian capitalism—its owners, its monarch, its church and its military—ensure that a weak and politically isolated force would come to rule.
The similarities between Mussolini and Donald Trump—corpulent bodies and jutted-out chins spewing the same vomit—are intentional. At one point in the drama, Mussolini turns directly to the viewer and declares, “Make Italy great again.”
Son of the Century arrives amid the far right’s rapid growth. Giorgia Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia, a party that descends directly from Mussolini, govern Italy. Nazism’s heirs are winning elections in Germany. In the US, Trump wages war against the international working class, deporting immigrants, destroying democratic institutions and promising to annihilate entire civilizations. He aspires to be the 21st century Mussolini.
Artistic efforts that help people grasp, even if only partially—and feel—what fascism is and what it did are a contribution.
Wright’s work has particular value for an American audience, where fascism is generally presented as “totalitarianism” no different than communism. The miseducated will at least walk away from Mussolini: Son of the Century with a new, and unsettling, impression. They will have questions and look for serious answers.
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Mussolini: Son of the Century is particularly effective at exposing Mussolini’s political cynicism and the baseness of his appeals. He maneuvers. He operates. He exploits. He is vain, sexually predatory, physically unimpressive and without principle. Those he surrounds himself with are sly, but not intelligent. Their moral bankruptcy shows itself on the outside. They revel in death and excrement.
Mussolini’s mistress, played by Barbara Chichiarelli, is grotesque. The wealthy Jewish patron of the arts, eyelids covered in near-black makeup and lips painted blood red, crows about the future dictator’s greatness and weeps over his indifference to her.
But what the series does badly, it does rather badly.
Mussolini: Son of the Century’s focus on Mussolini’s opportunistic cunning and psychological pathology creates the conception that fascism was, to a significant extent, the product of this man’s diseased mind. Fascist violence was an extension of his personal magnetism. Wright’s intentionally kinetic editing and strobe-heavy visuals and Tom Rowlands’ industrial soundtrack—jarringly at odds with the period setting—warp the drama and intensify this effect.
The focus on Mussolini’s personality veers towards engendering a perverse sympathy for the butcher. Using fourth-wall monologues in which Mussolini speaks directly to the audience, the filmmaker places us inside the dictator’s calculations. We are invited to admire his cynicism, marvel at his ability to escape political traps, be fascinated by his penchant for violent sex and even sympathize with his distaste for the behavior of his fascist thugs. He did not like the way they behaved at the dinner table.
Many scenes focus on such themes. At times the approach is so caricatured and myopic, we are inclined to stop watching.
In describing his artistic aims, filmmaker Joe Wright declared of Mussolini, “I want the audience to be seduced.” The dictator, he has said, should be seen as a “deeply flawed human being,” and fascism as “a politicization of toxic masculinity” that “exists everywhere.”
Seduction, according to Wright, is the explanation for Mussolini’s rise.
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This is the moral philosophy of liberalism in concentrated form. The class divide disappears into the pronoun “we.” The capitalists are absolved, and fascism is the product of something universal and innate.
But the workers murdered by fascist squads were not “the fascists.” The socialist organizers whose offices were destroyed were not “the fascists.” The laborers in the factories and peasants on the land were not “the fascists.” Nor were the capitalists and landed elites who embraced fascism interchangeable with their victims.
The central question—why the Italian ruling class needed fascism, of what was it so afraid—is largely absent from Son of the Century.
Following the First World War, Italy was shaken by mass strikes, factory occupations and land seizures. In the summer of 1919, cost-of-living riots swept the country. The socialist landworkers’ union grew to more than a million members. In 1920, factory councils modeled on soviets emerged in Turin, and in August and September more than 500,000 occupied their factories in Milan, Turin, Genoa and beyond. Workers raised red and black flags over Fiat, Pirelli and Alfa Romeo. At Fiat, workers answered the phone, “Fiat Soviet.” Troops in Ancona mutinied, sparking a revolt across central Italy.
Speaking of Italy during the Biennio Rosso—Two Red Years—Leon Trotsky observed, “The dictatorship of the proletariat was an actual fact.”
It was part of a revolutionary upsurge spearheaded by the 1917 Russian Revolution, which saw the workers and peasants of the world’s largest country beat back the capitalists, feudalists and imperialists and proclaim a socialist republic. Over the subsequent decade, massive class conflicts erupted across Europe and Asia, as global capitalism careened from crisis to crisis. In 1919, the Communist International was formed. In 1921, the Italian Communist Party was founded.
Menaced and terrified, the ruling classes turned towards the fascist solution. Little of this class war makes it into Mussolini: Son of the Century, or if it does, only in disjointed fragments. The series makes virtually no reference to anything happening outside Italy; fascism appears as a national disease. The name Lenin is stated offhand once. Hitler, who modeled his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch on the March on Rome, goes unmentioned.
Workers make it on screen only as helpless victims, getting their skulls cracked or suffering violent humiliation. The viewer is left to believe that the Italian working class never had a chance. They stupidly gathered at their socialist meetings and printed their newspapers, neither anticipating nor doing anything to stop being mowed down by history. They were the object of history, but never its subject.
In one scene in Mussolini: Son of the Century, Mussolini boasts that the moment the Socialists failed to seize power during the Biennio Rosso, the advantage passed into Fascist hands. This is an important insight. But the question is not why Mussolini was clever enough to recognize an opportunity. It is why the working class failed to act beforehand.
Fascism did not develop because the Italian masses were passive dupes, but because their leadership betrayed them, thinking that if they could hold back the working class, the Italian bourgeoisie would hold back the fascists.
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While Mussolini: Son of the Century shows us Mussolini’s fate in its opening sequence, because it ends in 1925, the audience views Mussolini’s rise, not his fall.
The series pushes the working class offstage because its presence would destroy the premise that fascism lives in all of us. The class struggle, not Mussolini, would become the protagonist, and “toxic masculinity” would collapse as an explanation.
In the 1920s, the working class made its first experience with fascism in Italy. At that time, it had little historical framework to understand the depths the ruling class would plumb to preserve its power. As Trotsky noted in his 1932 essay warning the German working class what awaited them, “The [Italian] reformists had dampened the powder so long, in their fear lest it should explode, that when they finally with a trembling hand did apply a burning fuse to it, the powder did not catch.” The Italian masses and even these leaders paid a terrible price.
But now a century has passed, and the lessons of history must be assimilated. That requires seeing fascism not as the product of one man’s charisma or of a “fascist inside us,” but as a weapon of the capitalist class, one that the working class can disarm only by taking power itself.
16. Mexican truckers call for national strike to free driver jailed after crash with federal agents
Mexican truck drivers are calling for a national strike to free a fellow driver detained after a September 25 collision with a patrol vehicle of the Federal Attorney General’s Office (Fiscalía General de la República, FGR) on Federal Highway 54, near the community of Sierra Vieja in Villa de Cos, Zacatecas. One agent was killed. Authorities announced within hours that they had arrested “the responsible person,” before any charge was filed or evidence presented. Workers have overwhelmingly rejected the official account, and many accuse the agents of trying to extort the driver.
The strike call is the latest sign of growing militancy among truck drivers across North America. From September 3 to 6, hundreds of Mexican cross-border drivers blockaded the Mexicali-Calexico and San Luis Río Colorado-Yuma ports of entry to protest the Trump administration’s mass revocation of their B-1 visas. In the United States, calls for an October 1 shutdown spread among drivers crushed by diesel prices that reached $6.44 a gallon at the end of September, driven up by the US-Israeli war on Iran.
On both sides of the border, drivers are organizing through WhatsApp groups and social media, outside the employers’ chambers and the official unions, and confronting a state that treats them as suspects.
The fight to free the Zacatecas driver raises basic political questions for workers in Mexico and internationally. The FGR checkpoints that drivers denounce as extortion rackets belong to the security apparatus that the Morena (National Regeneration Movement) government of President Claudia Sheinbaum has expanded in close coordination with Washington, and which it has repeatedly turned against truckers and farmers who protest. The employers’ chambers and transport organizations have spent the past year “coordinating” with the same agencies. The defense of this driver, and of drivers generally, rests with the rank and file, organized independently of Morena, the employers and the union bureaucracies, and united with transport and logistics workers in the United States and across the Americas who face the same companies, the same supply chains and the same war-driven crisis.
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The struggles of Mexican drivers cannot be won within national borders. The same war-driven fuel crisis is squeezing drivers and owner-operators on both sides of the US-Mexico border, and cross-border drivers move the freight of the same corporations on both sides of the line. The Trump administration has revoked more than 25,000 B-1 visas from Mexican commercial drivers, according to CANACAR estimates, accusing them of illegal cabotage on the flimsiest grounds. In the United States, it seized on a fatal crash in Florida in August 2025 involving an immigrant driver to launch a sweeping crackdown on immigrant truckers’ commercial licenses. In both countries, a crash becomes the pretext for criminalizing drivers.
The call for a national strike shows the right instinct. To succeed, drivers need their own organizations: rank-and-file committees, controlled democratically by drivers themselves, independent of the employers’ chambers, the CROC and the other union bureaucracies, and of Morena and every capitalist party. Such committees can demand the driver’s release, the public disclosure of what the agents were doing on Highway 54 and the dismantling of the extortion checkpoints. They should reach out to logistics, port, auto and agricultural workers in Mexico and connect with drivers in the United States and Canada through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), uniting workers across the borders against the corporations and the governments that serve them.
17. German government plans to strip Syrian refugees of their protected status
The German Interior Ministry plans to revoke the protected status of Syrian refugees on a large scale. Yet under the new ruler, former Al Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Islamization of the country is being driven forward. Government troops and allied militias have taken part in massacres and extrajudicial killings of members of religious minorities, in particular Alawites and Druze. Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in Syria as a whole is catastrophic.
About 1 million people of Syrian origin currently live in Germany. More than half of them have protected status, and their safe residence in Germany and Europe would thus be endangered by such a move by the German government. Many of them came during the great refugee movements of 2014 to 2017 and have lived in Germany for around a decade. They have built a new life there, completed training, found work, had children, opened businesses and made friends.
At the time, they fled not only from the authoritarian Assad regime but in many cases also the Islamist militias that already controlled various parts of the country and terrorized the population. One of these “Islamist terrorist” militia leaders is today’s head of state, al-Sharaa. Under his former name, Mohammad al-Jolani, he was emir of the al-Nusra Front, which was initially closely linked to the “Islamic State” (IS) and later directly to Al Qaeda. The al-Nusra Front carried out numerous bloody attacks in which countless civilians lost their lives. The United Nations classified the organist as terrorist as early as 2013.
Al-Sharaa and his militia, meanwhile renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), rose to become the ruling force in Damascus at the end of 2024 with the support of the Western powers. Ever since, they have continued to use violence against religious minorities and political opponents. Thousands of Alawites, Druze and Christians have already fallen victim to Islamist terror under al-Sharaa.
The humanitarian situation is catastrophic overall. In 2025, 49 percent of the Syrian population said they lacked food, shelter, electricity and protection. In the same survey, a further 39 percent of Syrians said they did have the basic prerequisites of life but that these were inadequate. The official minimum income covers only about 10 percent of the cost of living at the most basic level, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). The “Minimum Expenditure Basket” for a family of five was calculated at around €220 in 2025.
In around three-quarters of the country, there are only two to six hours of electricity a day, which is insufficient for either domestic needs or industrial production. Since the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran, the energy crisis has worsened further. Likewise, 75 percent of all communities in Syria reported that there was not enough food available to supply the population.
Humanitarian aid does not reach 86 percent of communities, even though they have reported a “severe need.” Russia and Iran had supported the Assad government with aid funds, but after the fall of their proxy, these resources are no longer available. The aid coordinated by the United Nations is no longer financially supported by the US, as a result of which various aid programs had to be discontinued. AP reported in February 2025, for example, that 10 clinics run by Doctors of the World in northern Syria had to close because of the US aid freeze. Germany and the EU each contribute around 12 percent of this wholly inadequate UN aid.
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To justify their hard line against refugees, Chancellor Merz and Interior Minister Dobrindt cite Denmark as a model. The Social Democratic government under Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has pursued an asylum policy since 2019 so restrictive that refugees practically no longer receive protection, and what is granted is in any case only temporary. The aim is maximum control over immigrants and “zero asylum applications,” as the government itself has put it.
As early as 2021, Syrian refugees in Denmark were stripped of their protected status and parts of the country around Damascus were declared safe. The refugees affected, who can neither return to Syria voluntarily nor be deported, are locked up in so-called “centers for foreigners.” Ellebæk is one such deportation prison run by the Danish state, the conditions of which have been amply documented by Danish media: structural defects, untenable hygienic conditions, a lack of medical care and restricted access for inmates to fresh air.
Council of Europe inspectors noted during a visit to the Ellebæk center that living conditions there were worse than in Russian prisons. Ellebæk, they said, was one of the worst institutions in Europe.
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Germany and Denmark are now jointly pushing efforts within the European Union to outsource asylum procedures to non-EU states and to intern rejected asylum seekers in deportation centers in other countries. The European Commission has since presented a draft that is intended to make precisely that possible and is supported by a majority of the other EU states.
Syria is not a safe country. The country’s infrastructure has been devastated for years to come by 14 years of war, and in al-Sharaa, a jihadist leader has replaced Assad in power. There continue to be many reasons to flee Syria. No one must be forced to return to the shattered country.
Deportations and threats of deportation are a crime against refugees and immigrants. The shift to the right in immigration policy is no coincidence in Germany, Denmark and elsewhere. It is the ideological accompaniment to rearmament, the drive to war and social cutbacks. The ruling class needs scapegoats to distract from the real causes of social misery—rampant profiteering, war and austerity measures.
The defense of Syrian and other refugees is not simply a humanitarian principle. The working class is an international class. Almost a million people of Syrian origin live and work in Germany in all sectors of the economy—in industry, healthcare, construction, catering and the post office. They are not “guests” but part of the working class. To defend them means to defend the unity of the working class against nationalist attempts to divide it.
Legal certainty for all Syrians living in Germany and full right to remain for all who have lived, worked and started families in Germany for years, regardless of employment or passport status—these must be the demands of the working class. Furthermore, it must campaign for equal wages and working conditions for all workers regardless of origin and citizenship, so that refugees are not exploited as a cheap labor reserve and wage levels are not driven down as a result.
18. Growing anger over death sentence for Sri Lankan migrant worker in Saudi Arabia
The death sentence imposed by a Saudi Arabian court on Sri Lankan migrant worker Sivarasa Anojan has provoked growing public opposition. The barbaric sentence must be unconditionally rescinded and Anojan immediately released.
The Al-Ahsa Criminal Court convicted Anojan in July of insulting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in a Facebook post. Though Anojan had published a video statement expressing his regret and quickly deleted the first post, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of three million Saudi Riyals ($US800,775), the maximum punishment available under the first paragraph of Article 6 of Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Cyber Crime Law.
Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, however, told parliament that on September 21 the Saudi Court of Appeal had increased Anojan’s sentence to death. Anojan had appealed for his sentence to be reduced, but the court accepted a separate appeal by the state prosecutor for it to be increased to death.
Anojan, 27, is from Narpittimunai in Kalmunai on Sri Lanka’s eastern coast, an area where Tamil, Muslim and Sinhala communities live and Muslims constitute the majority. He had been working in Saudi Arabia for less than a year, and had been planning to get married this year.
His younger brother Sivarajah Remsidhan told the World Socialist Web Site that Anojan travelled to Saudi Arabia last year to work as a technical engineer at a battery factory after studying mechanical engineering at Uva Wellassa University.
There are four members of the family, and neither their father nor mother is employed. Remsidhan said that, following the incident, he was forced to leave his job at an insurance company to devote his time to trying to secure his brother’s release.
Since news of Anojan’s death sentence appeared in the local media, hundreds of people have protested, particularly in Sri Lanka’s eastern and northern provinces, calling for the government to intervene to secure his immediate release. On September 22, Anojan’s relatives reportedly submitted an appeal to the Saudi Embassy in Colombo with the assistance of Amnesty International.
The sentence once again exposes the brutal and reactionary character of Saudi Arabia’s imperialist-backed monarchy. The Sharia law invoked to justify it is an instrument of class rule and repression. It is used by the monarchy to terrorize and suppress any opposition to conditions facing workers, including heavily exploited migrants, whose labor generates tens of billions of dollars for the Saudi ruling class.
Nearly half of those who receive the death penalty in Saudi Arabia are migrant workers. In 2007, Rizana Nafeek, a 17-year-old Sri Lankan domestic worker from Muttur in the Eastern Province, was found guilty of murdering a four-month-old infant in her care—a conviction that was obtained through coercion. She was executed on January 9, 2013.
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The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was responsible for the criminal operation that brutally murdered Saudi national and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018. Despite official US intelligence reports confirming bin Salman’s direct responsibility for the murder, both Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden continued to protect the Saudi ruler.
US imperialism maintains close relations with his regime, which is critically important to Washington’s geopolitical interests in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a key provider of infrastructure for the criminal US war against Iran.
Amid growing public opposition to the death sentence imposed on Sivarasa Anojan, Sri Lanka’s Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government and the opposition parties said they would act on his behalf. None of the Colombo politicians, however, has made any criticism of the Saudi monarchy’s brutal repression, including the death penalty itself, or the ruthless conditions confronting migrant workers in the country.
After Anojan’s parents met with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, Dissanayake stated in a LinkedIn post on September 21 that “a formal written diplomatic appeal” would be submitted “to the King of Saudi Arabia, requesting that he grant a pardon.”
Foreign Minister Herath said he expected to meet the Saudi foreign minister on the sidelines of a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, where he would request that Anojan’s death sentence be commuted or reduced.
A four-member legal delegation, led by Additional Solicitor General Azard Navavi, will travel to Saudi Arabia to prepare and pursue a Supreme Court appeal of the sentence.
The JVP/NPP government’s real concern is not the protection of migrant workers but the potential for the sentencing of Anojan to disrupt its relations with Saudi Arabia, which is a major source of remittances for Sri Lanka’s economy. The government also fears that mass protests against the sentencing will add to mass anger among workers and the rural poor over social inequality and attacks on democratic rights in Sri Lanka.
As it imposes sweeping austerity measures dictated by the IMF, the Sri Lankan ruling elite is resorting to its own brutal methods to intimidate opposition—as indicated by the death sentences imposed on 12 people who took part in the 2022 mass uprising, following a frame-up trial over the killing of a member of parliament.
19. Ineos mothballs Hull chemical plants threatening thousands of jobs across UK’s Humber region
Chemical group Ineos, headed by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, announced on September 22 that it is mothballing its three plants at the Saltend Chemicals Park in Hull “until further notice.” Two had already stopped production, with the third to follow within days. No restart date has been given.
Ineos directly employs around 245 workers at the site, with the plants indirectly supporting almost 4,000 jobs across the Humber region. The fate of thousands of workers is being left in limbo, with an Ineos spokesman telling the Press Association that all employees would remain at work, because of the operational demands of the site, while the plants are idled”. The firm claims that no redundancies are planned.
The plants have annual capacity of 500,000 tonnes of acetic acid, 150,000 tonnes of acetic anhydride and 200,000 tonnes of ethyl acetate. According to Ineos, they are the last world-scale acetyls units in Europe—supplying raw materials for food, pharmaceuticals and military explosives.
Ratcliffe blamed the price of gas. In the company’s statement, he said: “I’m sure people will find it hard to believe that we are being forced to mothball some of the most efficient plants in Europe, but with gas prices now 12 times the level in the US and 8 times that of China, we just cannot compete.” He called on “European regulators” to act on carbon taxes, claiming that current policies “encourage coal-based production in China and the wholesale export of jobs to both China and the USA.”
Ratcliffe founded Ineos, now one of the world’s largest chemical companies, in 1998. He has lived in tax-free Monaco since 2020. He is a ruthless enemy of the working class, but who depends above all on the aid provided by the union bureaucracy.
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A Labour government spokesperson called the closure “a commercial decision from Ineos,” adding that it would be “a concerning time for workers.” The spokesperson pointed to £350 million for “strategically important” chemicals producers, available only on a co-investment basis, meaning companies must put up money alongside the state; to trade measures on foreign chemical imports; and to schemes cutting industry’s electricity costs.
With hundreds of jobs at stake, Prime Minister Andy Burnham declared that Britain is “open for business” and invited Ratcliffe to “work with me in Yorkshire,” as in Greater Manchester where he was previously mayor.
The government is prepared to underwrite a billionaire to keep producing the materials of war, but not to guarantee a single job. In December, Ineos secured a £150 million package to keep ethylene production at its adjacent plant running for at least five years, including a £50 million government grant and a £75 million government-backed loan guarantee. Business Secretary Peter Kyle called the site “of strategic national importance,” citing supply chains that include defense.
The restructuring at Ineos is part of a global rationalization of the industry. On September 11, GlaxoSmithKline announced it would close its Dresden vaccine plant in Germany, shutting it by summer 2028, with the loss of 641 jobs. Last November, the Chemical Industries Association said UK capacity utilization had been “hovering around 70 percent or less for far too long.” Whether the pretext is “energy costs” and “carbon taxes” at Ineos or falling demand at GSK, this is a Europe-wide offensive by the chemical and pharmaceutical monopolies to shed jobs and shift production wherever returns are highest.
El Niño, the recurring warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, was first named by Peruvian fishermen for a warm current off their coast, but it has long been understood to reshape weather across the globe. In today’s world economy, its effects are felt not only in the climate, but through global supply chains linking agricultural production, fisheries, trade and food prices.
The event now developing threatens to be the most powerful on record, translating into billions of dollars in losses, hunger, destroyed homes and livelihoods, displacement and death.
In its September 10 diagnostic discussion, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put the probability of a “very strong” El Niño during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter at more than 90 percent. It gave a 75 percent chance that between October and December it will become “a historic event that would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950.”
On September 21, the daily temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region of the central Pacific, which measures El Niño’s strength, reached 3.11°C, breaking the record of 3.08°C set in November 2015, according to Carbon Brief. The forecast models it surveyed project a peak of around 4.1°C later this year, well beyond any El Niño in the instrumental record.
On September 30, UNICEF reported that at least 25.8 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean, roughly one in seven, are exposed to droughts and floods associated with El Niño.
A convergence of global warming, exceptionally warm waters in the equatorial Pacific and the geopolitical catastrophe produced by the US-Israeli war against Iran has created the conditions for a “perfect storm.”
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None of this is just a natural disaster. El Niño is striking a world in which capitalism has already created the conditions for mass hunger. The poorest countries depend on the world market for food, an imperialist war has choked off fertilizer shipments from the region that supplies a third of the world’s urea exports, and the major powers are gutting food aid while pouring record sums into armaments. Whether a climate shock becomes a famine is decided not merely by ocean temperatures, but by social relations.
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Economic globalization has multiplied the ways a regional climate disaster becomes a worldwide crisis. A failed harvest in Latin America, Africa or Asia can drive up international prices for grains, coffee and cocoa, and with them the price of food for families thousands of miles away. Small farmers are particularly vulnerable. According to a 2021 FAO estimate, farms of two hectares or less produce approximately 35 percent of the world’s food, yet they have little capacity to absorb drought, flooding and rising fertilizer and fuel prices at the same time.
The war against Iran has turned that last danger into a reality. After the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed at the end of February, the price of urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer, roughly doubled within weeks. The Gulf supplies about a third of the world’s urea exports. Farmers who cannot afford fertilizer plant less and harvest less. El Niño, global warming and war therefore cease to operate as separate crises. Their consequences converge on the same populations: workers, farmers and fishermen all over the world.
Global warming forms the backdrop. Rising temperatures are accelerating the loss of glaciers in the Himalayas, Greenland, Antarctica and Patagonia, and the ruling classes see in this an opportunity for plunder. The Trump administration’s drive to seize Greenland is bound up in part with access to minerals exposed by retreating ice. In Argentina, the Milei government, Washington’s closest ally in South America, pushed through a reform of the Glacier Law this year that allows provincial governors to open periglacial zones to mining.
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The climate crisis is not a failure of science or technology, but of the social relations under which they operate. Under capitalism, production is driven by the accumulation of profit rather than human need.
This contradiction is especially destructive because the climate crisis is global, while the world remains divided into competing nation-states, each defending the interests of its own ruling class. Every climate summit runs into this wall.
Every hungry child therefore poses the same fundamental contradiction. Humanity has the productive and technological capacity to feed the world’s population, yet hundreds of millions go hungry. The fight against hunger and climate catastrophe is inseparable from the struggle to unite the international working class and reorganize the world economy on the basis of human need rather than private profit: the fight for socialism.
21. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
