Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. An American horror story: The failed execution of Christa Pike
There are incidents in contemporary American society so barbaric that they shock the sensibilities of anyone who stands for social equality, justice and human decency. The state of Tennessee’s attempted execution of Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday night is such an event.
There are incidents in contemporary American society so barbaric that they shock the sensibilities of anyone who stands for social equality, justice and human decency. The state of Tennessee’s attempted execution of Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday night is such an event.
The determination of the right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court to see this woman put to death is reprehensible, as is the failure of any section of the national political establishment to speak out forcefully against either the torture inflicted on Pike or the entire barbaric practice of capital punishment in 21st century America. They all stand with the right of the state to kill. The world deserves to be outraged.
Pike, 50, has spent three decades on Tennessee’s death row, more than a quarter century of it in virtual solitary confinement in a 7-by-12-foot cell. In January 1995, when she was 18, she and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps, into the woods, where they beat, tortured and killed her. It was a terrible crime, and Pike has acknowledged it as such. “I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend,” she wrote in her clemency petition. “It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
Pike was slated to become the first woman executed in Tennessee since before the Civil War, when it was a slave state. On Tuesday evening, the Supreme Court denied Pike's request for a stay in a two-sentence order with no noted dissents. Around 9 a.m. Wednesday, an hour before she was to die at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, a panel of the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to stay the execution. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's office rushed to the Supreme Court, denouncing “abusive delay tactics.” At about 5:50 p.m., the justices obliged, vacating the stay by a 6-3 vote.
Pike is one of more than 2,000 people on death rows across the country—overwhelmingly working class and poor, many suffering from mental illness or intellectual disability. Many, like Pike, endured childhoods scarred by abuse. She was sexually assaulted by her grandmother's boyfriend from the ages of 2 to 5, raped at 11 by a 37-year-old neighbor and raped again at 17 by a stranger. Her attorneys cite evidence that her mother's heavy drinking during pregnancy caused frontal lobe brain damage. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder only after she was condemned. Her inexperienced court-appointed lawyer presented none of this to the jury. She was convicted and sentenced to death.
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Pike had said she did not fear death, but the manner of it. “I am not afraid to die,” she wrote. “I’m only nervous about the process.” Experts had warned the courts that, given her history, she might “feel and believe that she is being raped to death” on the gurney. As her attorney Stephen Ferrell put it Thursday, her greatest fear “was a fear of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death, and that’s what happened. Minus the death.” As Pike hangs on to life, her nightmare has come true. She may also be left permanently impaired. Dr. Joel Zivot, an Emory University medical professor retained by her lawyers, told the BBC, “It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury.”
Responsibility for Pike's torture at the hands of the state lies with the entire US “justice” system, above all the US Supreme Court. Why the rush to execution on the part of the black-robed reactionaries in Washington? The 6th Circuit had merely asked for time to “adequately address and resolve” a new claim. At post-conviction hearings, the state had branded Pike a “pathological liar” about her abuse. In August, it conceded that it “does not dispute the terrible things” she suffered.
But the Court's majority could not allow time for these issues in the case to be examined. Pike's death warrant expired at midnight, and any delay would have sent Tennessee back to court for a new date. The state had set the day, and the execution had to be carried out on schedule.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented, but in the mildest of terms, objecting that the Court had granted “extraordinary relief solely to allow the State to execute Pike” before her litigation had run its course. None of the three had recorded a dissent the day before when the Court had denied a stay of execution.
The Court's judgment was not solely about the fate of Christa Pike; it was about maintaining the right of the state to kill. The death penalty is used above all to terrorize the population. Since the Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 after a brief hiatus, it has carved out narrow exceptions under the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment—barring execution of those who were juveniles at the time of their crimes, the intellectually disabled, those who cannot understand why they are being executed and those convicted of crimes that did not result in death. But it has consistently upheld the right of the states and the federal government to kill its citizens. The Court drew the line for juveniles at 18. Pike was 18.
The Court has ruled on the constitutionality of the numerous methods of state murder devised by the states and federal government—electrocution, lethal injection, nitrogen asphyxiation, the firing squad—but has consistently refused to rule the practice of capital punishment itself unconstitutional. The justices' wranglings over the various gruesome methods of killing are aimed at ensuring that the assembly line of death keeps moving. As for the suffering inflicted on the condemned, it was defended by a Court majority that declared in 2019 that the Eighth Amendment “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death.”
The death penalty is the ultimate weapon of class rule. The same state that straps a traumatized woman to a gurney to be subjected to torture and death at home is waging war on Iran and arming the genocide in Gaza, killing tens of thousands. The ICE Gestapo rounds up immigrants, detains tens of thousands in ICE camps and this year shot four innocent people in cold blood on the streets. On any given day, nearly 2 million people are incarcerated in America’s prisons and jails.
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The Socialist Equality Party [opposes] capital punishment unconditionally, for the guilty and the innocent alike. The Christa Pike who committed a terrible crime as a teenager was herself the product of a society that subjected her to unspeakable abuse as a child, failed her at every turn and then answered the violence it had bred with the executioner’s needle.
The fight to abolish the death penalty cannot be entrusted to the courts, which have sanctioned every stage of this horror, or to the Democratic Party, which has backed state killing for decades and remains silent as Trump moves to expand it. It is part of the struggle of the working class against inequality, war and police-state violence—a struggle against the capitalist system itself.
2. European powers answer Russian nuclear warnings with further military escalation
Barely days after Moscow formally warned NATO that an attempt to blockade or isolate the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad could provoke the use of nuclear weapons, the governments of Europe are responding not with attempts to step back from the brink, but with declarations of increased military support for Ukraine, accelerated rearmament and preparations for a direct confrontation with Russia.
The public posture of the European governments is one of extraordinary brinkmanship. Each Russian warning is dismissed as intimidation or bluff, while each new confrontation is invoked as the justification for still greater military escalation.
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At the same time, Lithuania is advancing a constitutional amendment that would abolish Article 137, which prohibits weapons of mass destruction and foreign military bases on Lithuanian territory. On September 22, the Lithuanian parliament voted 99 to 13, with five abstentions, to advance the amendment. Further votes are required before the constitutional change can take effect. Its adoption would remove the existing constitutional obstacle to the future stationing of nuclear weapons in a NATO state directly bordering Kaliningrad and Belarus.
The Kremlin responded Thursday. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned governments contemplating the stationing of nuclear weapons close to Russia that they were “deeply mistaken” if they believed this would increase their security. Such moves, he said, would instead produce “further escalation and increased tensions.” Referring to European participation in the Ukraine war, Peskov added: “If you take part in a war on someone’s side, you cannot avoid consequences of various kinds.”
Putin personally reinforced the warning later Thursday. Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow, he declared that a direct attack on Russian territory, specifically including Kaliningrad, would place the use of “all the weapons at our country’s disposal” “inevitably and immediately” on the agenda.
He then issued an extraordinary warning about the dynamics of the confrontation itself. “The logic of escalating, increasingly harsh retaliatory measures leads to a fatal point of no return,” Putin said. He warned that this point could arrive “very quickly and unexpectedly” and referred explicitly to arsenals capable of destroying “all life” or reducing the planet to a catastrophic state.
These threats by the Kremlin offer no progressive alternative to NATO’s escalation. The Putin regime speaks for the Russian capitalist oligarchy. Its answer to imperialist encirclement and military pressure is Russian nationalism, military retaliation and nuclear threats—a reactionary strategy that itself pushes the world further toward catastrophe.
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The European powers are operating on the assumption that Russia can be subjected indefinitely to deep strikes, economic warfare, expanding NATO deployments and preparations around its internationally recognized territory without eventually responding directly against the states organizing and enabling this campaign.
No government can know where the limit lies.
The danger arises precisely because every previous threshold crossed without a Russian response encourages the conclusion that the next one can also be crossed. Ukrainian attacks on Moscow become normalized. Strikes on Russian refineries and strategic military installations become normalized. NATO exercises demonstrating the capacity to isolate Kaliningrad become normalized. The removal of constitutional restrictions on nuclear deployments becomes normalized.
Putin’s own warning about the “logic of escalating, increasingly harsh retaliatory measures” underscores the danger. Once the credibility of nuclear and conventional deterrence becomes bound up with demonstrating a willingness to retaliate, each side’s actions become the justification for the next escalation, and the confrontation assumes an increasingly uncontrollable logic.
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As was the case with the world wars of the twentieth century, this recklessness has an objective basis.
The First World War arose fundamentally from irreconcilable conflicts between the imperialist powers over markets, colonies and the division of the world. But the ruling classes also entered the war amid enormous domestic tensions and a growing socialist workers’ movement.
War then provided the framework for suppressing class conflict under the banner of national unity. In Germany, the Burgfrieden suspended political conflicts, and the SPD voted for the war credits on August 4, 1914. Shortly before this historic betrayal, the SPD had still organized mass anti-war protests involving roughly three-quarters of a million people.
There is an analogous relationship today between external military escalation and internal social crisis, although under vastly different historical conditions.
Nowhere is this clearer than in France. Tuesday’s public-sector strike brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets against wage freezes, austerity and the deterioration of public services. At the same time, an explosive movement among high-school students has spread across the country. By Wednesday, protests and blockades had affected 356 high schools, while more than 1,000 people—most of them minors—had been arrested over two days. Students have protested teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated school buildings and intolerable learning conditions.
On Thursday, university students began joining the movement. Around 30 university campuses were reported blocked, including in Paris, Strasbourg, Marseille, Lyon, Reims, Poitiers and Nanterre. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu convened an interministerial crisis meeting and ordered ministers to cancel official travel as the unrest continued to spread.
The developments inevitably evoke the experience of May 1968. Then, a student revolt became the detonator for the intervention of millions of workers and the largest general strike in French history. Today, once again, anger among youth is developing alongside increasingly bitter struggles by workers against austerity and the destruction of public services.
The decisive question is how and when broader sections of the working class intervene independently.
This is precisely what the ruling classes throughout Europe fear. Their governments confront economic stagnation, industrial decline, exploding military budgets, attacks on pensions and public services, mounting political instability and profound popular hostility to the existing parties. War does not originate simply as a device for diverting attention from these problems. It arises from the same crisis of the capitalist system and inter-imperialist antagonisms that produce the social crisis at home.
But once underway, militarism also becomes a mechanism for dealing with domestic opposition. The invocation of an external enemy provides the justification for gigantic arms expenditure, austerity, censorship, expanded surveillance, police powers, conscription and demands for “national unity.” Social antagonisms are to be redirected outward, while the machinery of the state is strengthened against opposition from below.
This is why the danger cannot be overcome by hoping that either the NATO imperialists or the Kremlin will eventually behave “rationally.” The only force capable of breaking this spiral lies outside the governments conducting the war.
3. Part 2: Democratic Party runs more than 60 military-intelligence candidates for Congress
The number of “CIA Democrat” candidates for seats in the House of Representatives has doubled this year, compared to the past four elections.
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The CIA Democrats played a significant role in triggering the first impeachment of Trump, over his temporary withholding of military aid to Ukraine after a phone call to President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump demanded Zelensky help him politically by digging up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, whom Trump correctly viewed as his likely Democratic opponent in the 2020 election.
Seven House Democrats with national-security backgrounds issued a joint letter in September 2019 calling for Trump’s impeachment. They included Crow, Slotkin, Spanberger, Sherrill, former Air Force officer Chrissy Houlahan, former Navy commander Elaine Luria and former Navy officer—and later assistant Navy secretary—Gil Cisneros. This was followed shortly by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi throwing her support behind the impeachment drive.
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Each election since 2018 has seen another 30 or so military-intelligence candidates winning Democratic congressional nominations, with enough elected in November to maintain the strength of that faction in the House of Representatives. This held true even after the Democrats lost their majority in 2022, and the Republican Party maintained a razor-thin margin in 2024.
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The new group of national-security recruits for the Democratic Party does not include any former CIA agents, at least according to their campaign biographies (as in previous studies, we report only the information publicly available on their campaign websites and local press reports, which is damning enough).
Since Elissa Slotkin and Abigail Spanberger have moved on to higher office, the House Democratic caucus will include large numbers of former national-security officials and military officers, but no acknowledged former CIA agents. We will nonetheless retain the label “CIA Democrats” for convenience, although it should be understood that this refers to any Democratic candidate whose primary background is in the military-intelligence apparatus.
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In August, former admirals Lacore and Laubacher issued a joint statement in response to the reports of brutal conditions aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln during an extended deployment in the war against Iran:
This ill-conceived and unnecessary war is having terrible consequences for our national security and taking a serious toll on our sailors, Marines, and military families. The damage to morale, readiness, and recruitment could last for years. This is a failure of leadership at the Pentagon and in Congress. Pete Hegseth has failed to provide the leadership our service members deserve, and Congress has failed to demand accountability or a clear path forward.
Like the Democratic Party as a whole, the two former admirals oppose the Iran war because of its negative impact on the US military, not because it represents a criminal act of aggression against a country of 93 million people. Both were in high-level military positions during the last two years of the Biden administration, which aggressively intervened against Russia in Ukraine and backed the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
4. Wealth of America’s richest 0.1 percent doubles since 2019, as profits hit record share of income
The richest 0.1 percent of American households more than doubled their wealth between the end of 2019 and June 30, Federal Reserve figures released last month show.
5. Bonds gripped by a “vicious loop”
The global bond market sell-off is continuing as yields (interest rates) in the US reach their highest level in a quarter of a century in what has been characterized as a “vicious loop.”
This is a situation where investors in bonds record losses because of the fall in their prices, leading them to sell some of their holdings in order to maintain their cash position or meet margin calls (demand for increased collateral) from their lenders, resulting in further falls in the market.
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The size of the sell-off is indicated by the sharp rise in yields. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury bond, which forms a base line for US and global financial markets, was 3.96 percent on February 27 on the eve of the launching of the US war on Iran. It now stands at 5.3 percent, having risen by 0.5 percentage points in September. These are major movements in a market where the shift of a small fraction of a percentage point can be significant.
The yield on the 30-year US Treasury bond has risen to 5.62 percent, its highest level since June 2002. This is despite efforts by Treasury secretary Scott Bessent to intervene in the market by increasing buybacks of longer-term bonds from $2 billion per operation to $6 billion. When the initiative was announced in mid-August the yield on the 30-year was 5.2 percent. It has risen more than 40 basis points since then, with no sign of coming down.
Bessent, who offered criticism of former US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen when she did the same thing, has shifted the issuance of new US debt to the shorter end of the market—one- and two-year bonds and even shorter—to try to lessen the higher interest rate cost at the longer end.
But these maneuvers—expected to amount to around $1 trillion over the next year—fail to address the fundamental problems: the US debt mountain, now at more than $40 trillion and rising and the growing interest bill of more than $1 trillion, fast becoming the largest item in the US budget.
In fact, they may even increase financial risks because of the need to constantly refinance the debt.
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The growing US debt crisis is being replicated across the major capitalist countries to one degree or another and is particularly sharp in France which is very much in the eye of the storm in Europe.
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The increase in debt used to finance the massive AI build out is another factor which could set off global financial turbulence, as highlighted in the prospectus issued by the AI giant Anthropic for its initial public offering (IPO) expected in November, a preview of which was obtained by Reuters.
It must surely rank as one of the most extraordinary documents ever issued in the history of capitalism. Anthropic has warned that its technology may pose “existential risks to humanity” and almost a third of the document detailed a series of “risk factors.” It testifies to the utter irrationality and crisis-ridden nature of the capitalist system that a major company issues a prospectus which says: supply us with billions and put us in a position where we may risk blowing up the world.
The threat to humanity does not arise from the technology itself but from the fact that it is privately owned and in the hands of giant monopolies each of which is in a relentless drive to become top dog and appropriate for itself the lion’s share of the profits to be obtained from AI at whatever the cost.
It has already been noted that the circularity involved in the AI boom, in which companies are providing money to others which is then used to buy their products, contains the risk of a financial crisis.
It has now been reported that the Anthropic prospectus acknowledged that close to a quarter of its revenue last year came from just two clients.
But on this somewhat shaky foundation, and with no clear prospect of how sufficient profits will be made to earn a sufficient rate of return on the hundreds of billions being outlaid, the Anthropic IPO, coming in with a valuation of $2 trillion, is set to be the largest in history.
The highly regarded Nashville Symphony is suspending the rest of its 2026-27 season due to lack of funding.
7. New Census poverty report conceals the social catastrophe facing working people
Official poverty statistics expose a deepening crisis for which Democrats and Republicans bear joint responsibility.
8. Strikes spread across Brazil on the eve of the elections
A wave of strikes in the public and private sectors exposes the class character of the Lula government and the need for an independent struggle of the working class against austerity, fascism and imperialism.
9. The pseudo-left and Brazil’s crisis elections
The function of the pseudo-left is to subordinate the working class to the PT, the trade union bureaucracy and, ultimately, the bourgeois nation state.
Among survey respondents, 63 percent skip meals to save money, 9 percent used a food bank during the last academic year, and 28 percent hold two or more jobs.
11. South Korean steel and shipbuilding workers hold partial strikes
The country’s labor unions, regardless of affiliation, are attempting to stifle worker opposition to the growing attacks on their living and economic conditions.
Against all other political parties, their fake-left hangers on and the trade union bureaucracies, the SEP alone advanced a revolutionary socialist program during the 2022 mass uprising.
13. Fourth nationwide school strike in Germany: 45,000 protest against conscription
The school strikes show the continuing opposition among young people to conscription. But the movement can only advance if it bases itself on the international working class and a revolutionary perspective against war.
The founding congress of the SEP, held in Montreal in August, unanimously adopted the following resolution denouncing the Ukrainian state’s persecution of Bodgan Syrotuik.
15. Sri Lankan filmmaker supports campaign to free Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk
“I hope that the struggle to secure Bogdan Syrotiuk's release will become the foundation for an anti-war movement.”—Prasanna Vithanage
Gary Tyler, the former political prisoner who spent nearly 42 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola State Penitentiary for a murder he did not commit, has endorsed the international campaign for the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk.
17. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Ghana:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Tunisia:
Ireland:
Over 100,000 public sector workers take industrial action in pay dispute
Italy:
Port workers in 24-hour strike for improved employment and pension rights
Spain:
Tens of thousands of public education workers, parents and students demonstrate in Madrid for improvements in public education
United Kingdom:
Further strike by UK Foreign Office civil servants over proposed job cuts
Academic staff at Nottingham University, UK strike over job and course cuts
Staff working for Nottingham tram network strike over pay
Traffic enforcement officers in London Borough of Camden walk out over pay
Hospital porters at Reading hospital in England strike over pay cut
Middle East
Iraq:
Five days of protests capital over jobs and social conditions
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
