With Trump’s approval, Hegseth chose the unorthodox killing method of
the firing squad, stating, “Well I kind of like the mentality we had in
World War II.” The US Army of that war hanged most of the soldiers it
executed, many of them at the hands of a single Army hangman, and rarely
used the firing squad. Hitler’s Wehrmacht relied on the firing squad to
enforce obedience, shooting over 18,000 of its own soldiers, while the
Nazi occupiers carried out mass public hangings across Poland and the
Soviet Union, photographed and circulated as warnings. That is the
“mentality” Hegseth admires and seeks to emulate.
What purpose does this spectacle serve?
*****
The man staging the public execution is a sadist. Hegseth belongs to a
church network co-founded by the self-described Christian nationalist
Doug Wilson. His tattoos include the neo-fascist slogan “Deus Vult,”
Latin for “God wills it,” the battle cry of the medieval Crusades
against the Muslim world. At a livestreamed Pentagon prayer service in
March, he asked God for “overwhelming violence of action against those
who deserve no mercy.” Hegseth would have been at home in the Nazi
battalions that machine-gunned partisans and Jews across occupied
Eastern Europe, and he would have relished the work. But Hegseth is no
isolated psychopath. He is the Secretary of War, chosen by Trump and
confirmed by the Senate.
Hegseth is modeling himself on Heinrich Himmler, with Trump as his Führer. The Nazis built Himmler’s Waffen-SS
as a party army outside the Wehrmacht, sworn personally to Hitler and
selected for ideological reliability. Hegseth’s search for such men did
not begin at the Pentagon. In 2019, as a Fox News host, he lobbied Trump
to pardon soldiers accused or convicted of war crimes in Iraq and
Afghanistan, insisting they were “not war criminals, they’re warriors.”
Trump obliged. As Secretary of War, Hegseth has made a “warrior ethos”
the watchword of his tenure and purged generals and the military’s top
lawyers.
Hegseth is a product of the all-volunteer military, a force increasingly
insulated from the civilian population, and he aims to widen that
divide. His firing squad will be made up not of a professional
executioner but of ordinary soldiers, ordered to shoot a paralyzed man
before a mass audience. The aim is to bind the soldiers to the regime
through complicity and to select and cultivate within the military a
layer prepared to carry out such work.
Trump, Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and others in the regime are fascists
who aspire to copy Hitler, but they are not yet in a position to do so.
They confront mass opposition to their policies and their wars. Trump’s
approval rating has fallen to 32 percent, the lowest of either of his
terms, and fewer than three in ten approve of his war on Iran. It is
precisely because the administration lacks popular support that it is
turning to the armed forces.
Above all, the livestreamed execution
is a message to the military. At Quantico last September, Trump told
the assembled generals to use “some of these dangerous cities as
training grounds.” When six Democratic lawmakers reminded troops last
November that they may refuse illegal orders, Trump denounced the video
as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
*****
The men overseeing Hasan’s execution are unindicted war criminals.
Since September 2025, on Hegseth’s orders, the military has blown up
boats in the Caribbean, killing more than 200 people without trial. In
the first attack, after Hegseth reportedly ordered that no one survive, a
second missile killed two men clinging to the burning wreckage. The war
on Iran is a war of aggression, what the Nuremberg tribunal identified
as “the supreme international crime.” Trump’s repeated threats to
annihilate Iran’s civilian population are also war crimes.
The
execution of Hasan also draws on the darkest traditions of the American
Jim Crow South. The last public execution in the United States, the 1936
hanging of Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man, in Owensboro,
Kentucky, drew up to 20,000 spectators. In Waco, some 60 miles from Fort
Hood, a mob of over 10,000 tortured and burned alive Jesse Washington, a
17-year-old Black farmhand, on May 15, 1916. A local photographer sold
pictures of the burning as postcards. Hegseth’s livestream is the
lynching postcard of the internet age, with the state itself behind the
camera.
Hasan’s killing of 13 people, 12 of them soldiers, was a
reactionary crime. But as the World Socialist Web Site explained in
2009, the massacre was collateral damage from the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, which directly killed nearly a million people. The state
that waged those wars now makes the deaths of its own soldiers the
pretext for a public killing, amid a frenzy of executions across the
country. Last week, Tennessee injected Christa Pike with two lethal
doses of pentobarbital, which failed to kill her and left her arms
burned and blistered.
*****
As of this writing, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and
Zohran Mamdani have said nothing on the planned execution. True to form,
they will wait until enough right-wing figures have made opposition
respectable before adding their voices to it.
The firing squad at
Fort Hood captures the reactionary essence of the American ruling
oligarchy, whose counterparts from Germany to Chile are cultivating the
same fascistic forces. Its turn to such methods expresses the historic
crisis of world capitalism, which can no longer reconcile the wealth of a
handful of billionaires with democratic forms of rule.
On Wednesday, hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted New
York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s participation in a vigil on the third
anniversary of October 7, 2023, when Israel launched its genocidal war
on Gaza. The protesters denounced the mayor, a member of the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA), for his growing accommodation to Zionism.
The vigil was organized by the liberal Zionist group Israelis for
Peace to mark the Hamas-led attack on Israel that was used by Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the casus belli to carry out the
ongoing campaign of mass murder that has killed close to 74,000
Palestinians, mostly civilians. The DSA mayor chose to attend the
Zionist vigil rather than events called by pro-Palestinian groups.
Mamdani
was met by counter-protesters who chanted “traitor” and branded him an
“opportunist,” “coward” and “sellout.” Several pro-Palestinian youth
groups organized the counter-protest, including the Young Democratic
Socialists of America (YDSA). However, the YDSA’s parent organization
quickly intervened to shut down its participation.
*****
The turmoil in the NYC-DSA reflects an increasingly impossible
political task that Mamdani and the DSA face: managing the capitalist
state on behalf of a ruling class in deepening crisis while
simultaneously trying to placate the aspirations of radicalizing workers
and youth. This tenuous balancing act was on display on October 7, and
not only during the vigil. Earlier in the day, Mamdani issued a
statement condemning what he called “horrific war crimes of October 7”
by Hamas while simultaneously denouncing “the Israeli government’s
devastating, ongoing genocide.”
Mamdani, along with the NYC-DSA
and its “pro-Hamas dog whistle” charge, thoroughly accepts the narrative
that equates the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the
oppressed. It is a presentation that omits the conditions of life that
exist for millions of Palestinians, including the open-air prison of
Gaza, to say nothing of the 80-year history of Zionist dispossession and
oppression.
Leon Trotsky took up this class outlook in Their Morals and Ours, writing:
A
slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in
chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the
chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals
before a court of morality!
Unconditional defense of the right of the Palestinian people to
defend themselves against Zionist and imperialist oppression does not
imply political support for the bourgeois nationalist perspective of
Hamas. Securing the national rights of the Palestinian masses requires
the unification of the working class throughout the Middle East in the
struggle to overthrow imperialism and establish the United Socialist
States of the Middle East.
Yet even a moral equal sign is too much
for the modern-day political establishment, which has denounced
Mamdani’s October 7 statement in hysterical terms. Democratic
Representative from New York Dan Goldman termed it “reprehensible.”
Fellow Democrat from Florida, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who apparently
didn’t bother to read the statement, absurdly accused Mamdani of
“refusing to even condemn Hamas.” The New York Times let arch-Zionist columnist Bret Stephens vent his spleen, calling Mamdani’s references to Gaza genocide a “moral obscenity.”
The
Democratic Party, of which Mamdani and the DSA constitute a faction, is
directly complicit in the genocide, which was initiated by Israel with
the full support of Joe Biden. In New York, the Democratic Party played a
central role in attacking and victimizing pro-Palestinian protesters.
Some of those who led the repression at Columbia and other campuses,
including Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and NYPD intelligence chief
Rebecca Weiner, retain positions in the Mamdani administration.
A
20-year-old leukemia patient who could not be vaccinated is among
Pennsylvania’s five measles-associated deaths. The CDC still
acknowledges only two deaths nationally, and New York has declared a
disaster emergency.
*****
The Pennsylvania Department of Health recorded 1,136 confirmed cases on October 9, up from 890 on September 27, when the World Socialist Web Sitelast reported on the outbreak, a rise of 246 in 12 days that includes 157 in the past week alone. Hospitals have admitted 219 patients,
a rate of 19.3 percent. Fewer than 1 percent of those infected were
fully vaccinated, and two-thirds are adults. Three of the five who died
were adults.
The CDC reported 4,080 confirmed cases
nationally on October 9, across 47 jurisdictions. Outbreaks account for
95 percent of infections, and 42 new outbreaks have been reported this
year.
Pennsylvania’s outbreak, more than a quarter of the national
total, is the state’s largest in more than three decades and now the
largest in the country. The national epidemic of 1989 to 1991, against
which it is measured, ran to about 55,000 cases
and 132 suspected deaths, concentrated among unvaccinated preschool
children. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia warned,
“Measles is now endemic in the United States. We’re going to be seeing
measles outbreaks for years.”
*****
The hollowing out of American public health began long before Robert
F. Kennedy Jr. became secretary of Health and Human Services. The
Democratic Party declared the COVID-19 emergency over while the virus
was still killing en masse, ended free testing and vaccination, and
established mass infection as the acceptable price of fully resuming
production. Kennedy inherited an apparatus that both parties had already
stripped of public confidence, and he has since cut its workforce by
more than a quarter.
In January the CDC cut the number of diseases
covered by the routine childhood schedule of immunizations from 17 to
11. After a federal judge stayed the change, President Donald Trump
reimposed it by executive order on August 10 and demanded that the MMR
vaccine be split into three shots, claiming without evidence that
“together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal.”
By
March, 29 states and the District of Columbia had rejected federal
childhood vaccine guidance, and New York has since joined 15 other
states in suing Kennedy to reverse the changes. The Northeast Public
Health Collaborative, which includes both New York and Pennsylvania,
follows the American Academy of Pediatrics schedule instead. That has
not spared Pennsylvania the largest outbreak in the country, because the
state lacks a public health apparatus capable of reaching the
communities where the virus spreads.
*****
The measles vaccine is safe and effective, and mass immunization is
an elementary requirement of public health and of the self-defense of
the working class. The collapse of confidence in vaccination has been
cultivated from the top, by a fascistic right that spread anti-vaccine
conspiracy theories and now directs federal health policy. The
anti-vaccine movement is a reactionary tendency fostered by sections of
the ruling class, and the working class must oppose it.
On the evening of October 8, workers of the Mexican Social Security
Institute (IMSS) walked out of talks at the Interior Ministry (Segob)
after more than seven hours that produced nothing. They called a
national stoppage on their own authority, without the approval of and
against their own union. By nightfall they had pitched tents outside
IMSS headquarters on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City.
By the
next morning, workers had shut outpatient care at clinics in Chihuahua
and were blocking roads in Mexico City, the State of Mexico, San Luis
Potosí and Querétaro. Over the two days, workers protested in at least
17 states and the capital.
The Segob table was meant to draw the
rank-and-file revolt into official channels before the October 14 vote
on the wage agreement negotiated by the National Union of Social
Security Workers (SNTSS), which gives only 2.9 percent on the base wage,
an increase below the rate of inflation.
However, it did the
opposite. Seven hours on Bucareli Street showed the delegates that the
ministry and the union bureaucracy were working together to impose that
agreement, and the workers answered by taking the struggle into their
own hands.
More
than two weeks after a teenage boy was crushed to death at a Dandenong
South factory, fundamental questions about the tragedy remain
unanswered. WSWS reporters spoke to workers and residents in Melbourne’s
southeast, several of whom had not even heard about the death.
The
Liberal-National announcement demonstrates the fundamental unity
between the capitalist parties in trying to divert growing working-class
discontent into anti-foreigner and nationalist directions.
The
very fact that they were called upon to vote on the union-Labor deal
demonstrates that no such fight can proceed within the framework of the
ASMOF bureaucracy.
İzmir Metropolitan Mayor Cemil Tugay, elected on the ticket of the
Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), joined the ruling Islamist
Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Wednesday, October 7. President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan personally pinned the party badge on him at the
AKP’s headquarters.
Since its founding in 2001, the AKP had never won the İzmir
metropolitan mayoralty in an election. It has now taken control of
Izmir—Türkiye’s third-largest city, located on the Aegean coast—through
non-electoral means. With Tugay, the number of mayors who were elected
on the CHP ticket in the 2024 local elections and later switched to the
AKP has passed 30. This unprecedented situation demonstrates that not
only the AKP, but also the CHP and the New Party that split from it,
regard the will of millions of voters as something that can easily be
trampled underfoot.
Elections in Türkiye are already profoundly
undemocratic contests between establishment parties favored by the
financial oligarchy. Rendering even these elections meaningless marks an
escalation in the assault on basic democratic rights, including the
right to vote and to stand for office, and in the construction of a
dictatorship. The working class must oppose it.
Tugay’s switch is
undoubtedly unprincipled and a betrayal of those who voted for him. But
this and the earlier defections cannot be explained by individual
failings alone. More fundamentally, they are an expression of the rot of
bourgeois politics as a whole. Municipalities, as part of the bourgeois
state, are not independent of the pervasive network of capitalist
interests and corruption—whether they are run by the AKP or by
opposition parties—and are completely beyond the control of workers.
The
Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality
Party–Fourth International) opposes the jailing of elected mayors
through politically motivated judicial operations, as well as their
transfer to the ruling party, based on the defense of democratic rights,
including the right to vote and to be elected, and does not provide
even the slightest political support to the CHP or the New Party.
*****
The government has used judicial operations as an instrument of
blackmail to seize municipalities. Among others, Aydın Metropolitan
Mayor Özlem Çerçioğlu joined the AKP in August 2025. In June 2026, the
mayors of Gölbaşı, Keçiören and Haymana in Ankara followed. They were
joined in early August by the mayors of Tuzla, Çekmeköy and Şile in
Istanbul and of Çerkezköy in Tekirdağ. In September, the mayors of Çiğli
and Foça in İzmir switched to the AKP. Following the June arrest of
Adalar Mayor Ercan Akpolat, during a mass protest held in Büyükada, CHP
Şanlıurfa deputy and lawyer Mahmut Tanal told
the WSWS, “They mount operations against CHP mayors. [But] if [a mayor]
goes over to the AKP … any investigation is closed; a non-prosecution
decision is issued,” and he cited several examples.
The fate of
CHP mayors who refuse to join the AKP is illustrated by a message from
Sinem Dedetaş, the jailed mayor of Üsküdar, stating: “I know that I am
here [in prison] for political reasons. The public now also knows about
the offers that were made to me before I came here. If I had wanted to, I
would not be here.”
Where mayors had been jailed, oppression and
threats were applied through municipal council members. Some of them
were detained ahead of the votes to choose acting mayors. Members who
had defected to the AKP, along with some who remained in Kılıçdaroğlu’s
CHP, then voted for the AKP’s candidates. This is how the Üsküdar and
Adalar municipalities in Istanbul passed into the hands of the AKP.
New
Party leader Özel said the AKP had appointed a trustee to İzmir and
“pinned a badge on a puppet.” Özel now calls Tugay a “traitor.” Yet it
was Özel himself who chose Tugay as the party’s candidate in 2024.
*****
The record of Stalinist and pseudo-left forces undeniably reveals the
deliberate political role they have played in preventing the development
of a genuine socialist alternative within the working class that is
independent of the political establishment.
*****
As the New Party is being marketed as a new trap to replace the CHP, the lessons of the 2023 elections must be stressed today more sharply than ever. The New Party openly defends the US-NATO alliance in its program.
Such a party cannot defend democratic rights. While Özel assures
Western newspapers that only his party can prevent an explosion of mass
opposition, the pseudo-left presents these forces as the “lesser evil,”
or as a progressive ally against the Erdoğan regime. In this way, they
seek to subordinate workers and youth to them and to bourgeois rule.
The
defections from the CHP to the AKP, and the bankrupt perspective of
class collaboration, raise more fundamental questions. As Leon Trotsky
explained in his theory of Permanent Revolution, in countries of belated
capitalist development, such as Türkiye, the bourgeoisie is incapable
of carrying out its democratic tasks because of its dependence on
imperialism and its fear of the working class. The tasks of establishing
a democratic regime, securing social equality and achieving
independence from imperialism can be accomplished only through the
conquest of power by the working class, as part of the struggle for
world socialist revolution.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi, the
Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth
International, advances a genuinely independent and revolutionary
political line for the working class. It bases itself on the theory of
Permanent Revolution and on the lessons of the struggles waged by the
world Trotskyist movement against Stalinism and all forms of national
opportunism. The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi will be built as the
revolutionary vanguard of the working class, in irreconcilable political
opposition to all the bourgeois parties, which are tied to imperialism,
and to the petty-bourgeois tendencies that function as their “left”
appendage.
There is growing support in Sri Lanka for the international campaign
to secure the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Trotskyist
socialist imprisoned in Ukraine. Many workers and young people have
registered to attend the October 13 online public meeting
organised by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality
(IYSSE), titled “Free Bogdan Syrotiuk! Build an International Antiwar
Movement Against World War!”
The meeting will be conducted in Sinhala and translated live into Tamil. Register here to attend on Zoom.
Bogdan
is a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), a
Trotskyist organisation operating in Ukraine and other parts of the
former Soviet Union. On April 25, 2024, he was arrested by the fascistic
Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on fabricated charges of “high
treason under martial law.” After more than two years in detention, he
was sentenced on August 10 to 15 years in prison for the “crime” of
writing articles for the World Socialist Web Site calling on workers in Russia and Ukraine to unite and end the war.
Reflecting
workers’ support for this campaign, the Alton Estate Workers’ Action
Committee unanimously passed a resolution on September 27 demanding the
immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk. It denounced his imprisonment as
an attack on basic democratic rights and said: “The struggle for
Bogdan’s release is connected to the mobilization of workers to stop the
war. Only through such unity can the massacre of hundreds of thousands
of people in Russia and Ukraine be stopped.”
In the latest attempted murder by the immigration Gestapo, 28-year-old
Oscar Belgal was shot in the neck by an Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agent on Thursday, October 8. The shooting took place
at 4:00 p.m. in the Marble Hill neighborhood of Upper Manhattan near
stores, restaurants, schools and residential buildings.
The ICE thugs who carried out the operation wore masks and at least one,
identified as ICE supervisor Brenden Cuni, was seen wearing a yellow
construction vest in an attempt to disguise himself as a construction
worker. It is unclear how Belgal would have known that federal agents
were attempting to apprehend him or if he was being targeted by a gang.
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a press
conference Thursday night that the agent who shot Belgal fired seven
rounds into his SUV. Belgal’s son, a five-year-old, was in the back seat
of the vehicle during the shooting and miraculously escaped physical
harm. Photographs and video from the scene show the vehicle riddled with
multiple bullet holes, including one through the windshield and a
shattered back window.
After shooting Belgal, ICE agents took him
out of the vehicle and handcuffed him as he bled. Footage released by
the New York City Police Department (NYPD) on Friday morning shows that
it was NYPD cops who loaded Belgal into their SUV and drove him to a
nearby hospital.
The shooting immediately provoked mass anger and
protests in the city. In a late night Thursday press conference held by
Mayor Zohran Mamdani amid chants of “No ICE, no KKK, no fascist USA,”
the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mayor confirmed ICE agents
wore masks and construction vests to conceal their identity. He noted
that “school had just gotten out, the street was crowded with families
and children.”
He revealed that he had been speaking on the phone with President Donald
Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for “two hours”
trying to negotiate the release of Belgal from ICE custody but was
“unsuccessful.” Mamdani said nothing about the deployment of the NYPD’s
Strategic Response Group against protesters Thursday night.
Mamdani claimed he wanted ICE to be abolished before turning the
microphone over to his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. Police under
the Zionist billionaire’s command were filmed assaulting demonstrators
as they protected the ICE agents and then escorted the agents away.
Tisch said that video reviewed by the NYPD showed two different
“plain clothed” agents approaching Belgal’s gray SUV. One approached the
driver side window “with gun drawn,” while another approached “the
driver’s side headlight.” She said the vehicle “started to move forward
out of camera view.” Tisch claimed the NYPD did not have footage of the
shooting itself.
In a Friday morning press conference, Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Mullin justified the shooting and
attacked “sanctuary politicians” and “sanctuary policies.” He claimed
the department was going after the “worst of the worst,” a blatant lie.
The latest statistics from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
find that as of July 11, 2026, 70.6 percent, that is 46,436 people out
of the 65,765 in ICE detention, had no criminal conviction.
*****
This is the second time in less than a month that the ICE
Gestapo shot someone and then abducted him from a hospital before he
received proper medical care. On September 20, a still unidentified ICE
agent shot husband, father and DoorDash delivery driver Wilber Garces
Perez in the back on a Sunday afternoon in Austin, Texas.
Garces
Perez was forced to languish in prison for 11 days before he was
allowed to have surgery to remove the bullet that was lodged in his
back, near his spine. While the bullet has been removed, Garces Perez
remains in federal custody.
Mullin claimed at his press conference
Friday that ICE did not know a child was in the car when the agents
began firing into it. Mullin blamed Belgal for ICE shooting into the
vehicle, claiming that he “rammed two different vehicles” and “appears”
to have been going toward officers. This is the same excuse the DHS has
used to justify the murders of Renée Nicole Good, Lorenzo Salgado
Araujo, Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez and
Ruben Ray Martinez. Good and Martinez were US citizens.
*****
At his press conference Friday, Mullin said the agents did have body
cameras but the department was not releasing the footage until later—a
clear indication of a cover-up.
Early Friday evening reporters, from the World Socialist Web Site attended a protest against ICE held at Foley Square. They spoke to multiple people about the attempted murder.
*****
A woman attended the protest holding a sign demanding “ICE out of New
York. Abolish ICE now. Release the footage now.” She told the WSWS that
the police had “all the footage” of “ICE breaking the windshields of the
car, dragging the guy out, taking him out on the street.” She said
police would not release all the footage “because it’s obviously going
to show ICE in a bad light, as they should be.”
She noted that that NYPD had released selected footage of them rushing
Belgal to the hospital “instead of the actual act, which was pure
attempted murder.”
Robayo,
a 39-year-old employee of the French-based multinational Samsic, was
crushed to death by the nose gear of an Airbus A350 at Montréal-Trudeau
International Airport on August 24.
*****
Aviation workers from across Canada resolved at a meeting Tuesday to
establish the Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee and voted to
launch an independent workers’ inquiry into the death of Montreal
Airport ramp worker Oscar Robayo. Robayo, a 39-year-old employee of the
French-based multinational Samsic, was crushed to death by the nose gear
of an Airbus A350 at Montréal-Trudeau International Airport on August
24.
The meeting endorsed the following resolution:
For an Independent Workers’ Inquiry into the Death of Oscar Robayo!
Oscar
Robayo, a ramp agent employed by Samsic Assistance Canada at
Montréal-Trudeau International Airport, was crushed to death by the nose
gear of an Airbus A350-900 during a routine pushback maneuver on August
24, 2026.
Whereas Samsic, a French multinational, was installed
at Montréal-Trudeau in 2023 as the lowest bidder operating with reduced
labor costs—a process known to create risks for workers and passengers;
Whereas
testimonies from Robayo’s colleagues and a former Samsic supervisor
have established that Samsic systematically flouts basic safety
procedures;
Whereas the federal government has long followed a
policy of deregulation, semi-privatization, and the proliferation of
subcontracting, which has produced a race to the bottom in safety
conditions;
Whereas Transport Canada and the Labour Program
ignored a May 2024 report documenting dangerous equipment at Samsic,
proving that state regulatory agencies are unable to enforce their own
laws;
Whereas the International Association of Machinists (IAM),
of which Robayo was a member, facilitated contract flipping and signed a
collective agreement with Samsic despite knowing that workers’ safety
was being systematically ignored;
Whereas the official
investigations by the federal Transportation Safety Board and Quebec’s
CNESST are overseen by the same governments responsible for the
deregulation;
Be it resolved that:
The Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee, supported by the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site
(WSWS), launches an independent workers’ inquiry into the death of
Oscar Robayo. The purpose is to collect testimonies from ramp agents,
ground staff and all workers in the aviation industry with knowledge of
the conditions at Samsic, Montréal-Trudeau Airport, and throughout the
air travel sector, and to publish its findings publicly.
The
inquiry will be conducted in solidarity with the International Workers
Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), in order to place the
conditions at Montréal-Trudeau within the broader context of workers’
struggles worldwide to stop workplace deaths and for better working
conditions in every industry.
US federal agents announced Wednesday that they had seized 90
shipments of biodiesel bound for Cuba at Port Everglades, Florida, and
the Port of Houston, Texas. It was the second seizure of fuel headed for
the island announced in a week.
The roughly 620,000 gallons,
valued at $2.8 million, were destined for ENETEC, a state-owned
wholesaler in Havana that Washington sanctioned in July. Under the fuel
blockade imposed in January, only Cuban private companies may receive
fuel from the United States.
“An effort of this magnitude to
undermine US sanctions does not occur by accident,” said José Figueroa,
the Homeland Security Investigations agent in charge in Miami, warning
that others “should be on notice.”
Five days earlier, the Coast Guard disclosed that a tactical team had boarded the Comoros-flagged freighter Grace
with guns drawn on September 5, in international waters between Mexico
and Cuba. The ship was escorted to the Mexican port of Progreso, where
the Mexican Navy reported finding fuel in its ballast tanks.
“The high seas are not a sanctuary for lawlessness,” declared Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Kevin Lunday. When La Jornada asked what legal authority permitted the boarding, it received no answer.
*****
The seizure of biodiesel, the boarding of a freighter at gunpoint and
renewed boat strikes all advance US imperialism’s efforts to subjugate
the entire hemisphere by means of military force, with Washington having
long lost its economic competitive edge to Chinese and European
interests.
*****
No boardings have been reported since September 16. The two operations
since then, on September 19 and October 4, were both in the Caribbean
and left no one alive to testify. UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul has
called the campaign “serial extrajudicial killings” that “plausibly
constitute crimes against humanity.”
*****
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is preparing an occupation. Last month, CBS
News reported an internal Army Reserve message asking whether units
could be provided to SOUTHCOM “possibly needed in 90-120 days.” They
include logistics and engineering battalions, a medical brigade, a
forward surgical detachment to treat casualties near the front, and a
military police brigade, whose missions include detentions.
Pentagon
planners have also drawn up options for an air assault on Cuba by
several thousand troops of the 101st Airborne Division.
*****
Trump’s advisers have told the New York Times that the Cuban government “could be gone by the time of the midterm election” on November 3.
None
of the governments that claim to oppose Washington’s unprovoked war of
aggression has defended the Cuban population. The Sheinbaum government
in Mexico cut off oil shipments in January, and its navy has now
inspected a ship seized by the US on the high seas. Moscow’s tankers
turned around. China has offered limited humanitarian aid. The Cuban
government itself has courted US companies and Miami investors in search
of a deal.
Workers in the United States and internationally must
oppose unconditionally and actively the blockade and any military attack
on Cuba, uniting against imperialist war on the basis of an
international socialist program.
The candidate of the ruling Labour government, Sagal Abdi-Wali, won
Thursday’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election with 12,292 votes (45.1
percent). She took a majority of 3,364 over Green Party leader Zack
Polanski, who polled 8,928 votes (32.8 percent).
The by-election,
called after former prime minister Keir Starmer resigned as an MP last
month, confirmed mass popular disaffection with Labour and the fragility
of the Green Party’s revival under Polanski, who became leader in
September 2025.
Labour proclaimed it proof of a continuing “Burnham bounce” for Prime Minister Andy Burnham—who replaced Starmer in July. The Financial Times declared Labour’s win “evidence that the party has stemmed the flow of voters on the left who had been drifting to the Greens.”
The
Greens countered that their vote share had tripled since the general
election in July 2024 when it won 10.4 percent. But Andrew Feinstein,
the “left” independent who took 19 percent in that election, promoting a
new Corbyn-led party, did not stand this time and backed the Greens.
Polanski’s 8,928 votes compare with nearly 11,350 combined votes for the
Greens and Feinstein in 2024—a rise of just 3 points.
Largely
absent from commentary was the significance of a turnout of just 38.7
percent—the lowest for any by-election held in England this parliament
and 15.4 points down on the 2024 general election. This contrasts to
February’s Gorton and Denton by-election—hailed as the measure of a
Green revival—where Hannah Spencer defeated Labour on a high turnout
with a 26.5-point swing. In Holborn and St Pancras, the Labour-to-Green
swing since 2024 was 13.1 points—less than half.
Despite being such a high-profile election, turnout was so low because no genuine alternative to the status quo was on offer.
*****
On all fundamentals, the Greens are indistinguishable from Labour. They
are a capitalist party that supports NATO, backs immigration controls,
and whose leaders in local government enforce austerity.
Polanski is a vocal proponent of the proxy NATO war on Russia in
Ukraine and proposes “an alternative alliance, based on working with our
[equally war-crazed] European neighbors”.
*****
Stalinist George Galloway’s attempt to pose as an alternative in the
by-election failed. The Workers Party of Britain leader won just 1.1
percent and lost his deposit—his worst performance in a Westminster
election since 2005. His demagogic opposition to war in Ukraine and NATO
cannot conceal a noxious pro-Brexit agenda of right-wing nationalism.
Responsibility
for this debacle rests with Britain’s pseudo-left tendencies, which
have boosted Polanski and the Greens following the wreckage of Corbyn’s Your Party
as the latest reformist alternative to Labour. The Socialist Workers
Party (SWP), Socialist Party and Revolutionary Communist Party presented
Polanski’s rhetoric as evidence of a turn to “green socialism”—with the
SWP even forming an electoral pact with the Greens in May’s council
elections.
No-one reading the SWP’s Friday commentary on the
by-election would conclude anything other than that they share the goal
of a Burnham government in an electoral pact with Polanski’s Greens.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) explained in our by-election
statement the urgent need “for the working class to formulate a
socialist response to the pro-war, pro-austerity, anti-immigrant and
authoritarian program of the Burnham Labour government.” The
by-election was being held “under the shadow of an escalating war
against Russia by the NATO powers” as part of “an expanding world war”.
We warned, “Neither a victory for Burnham’s Labour Party nor the
Greens will advance the interests of the working class a single inch.”
That
assessment rested on a record aimed at mobilizing workers and youth to
build their own party based on socialist internationalism. This included
standing assistant national secretary Tom Scripps as a candidate in
Holborn and St Pancras at the 2024 general election, where he opposed
Feinstein and the pseudo-left’s push to beg Corbyn to found a new
reformist party.
The lessons of the last two years reaffirm the
urgency of our call in 2024. “The building of a new and genuinely
socialist leadership must begin now. We advance the socialist and
internationalist program on which this new leadership must be built.”
