Donald Trump ruined everyone’s Fourth of July holiday by signing what he so fatuously called the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. It may be the single most damaging piece of legislation signed into law since: who knows? 
Ronald Reagan’s first budget in 1981, which marked a major conservative turn in US social and economic policy, seems moderate by comparison. Comparisons to other historically racist, repressive and anti-immigrant laws of the past—the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, the 1924 Immigration Act or even the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—are not out of the question.
For such a radical change in social and economic policy, it barely squeaked by. Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate to pass it. And it received 218 votes in the House of Representatives, a four-vote majority in the 435-member chamber.
Many horrible things have been shoehorned into its nearly 1,000 pages, as Republicans who voted for it without reading it will discover. And while the GOP members might be pleasantly surprised by what they find, everyone else will be horrified. Three major impacts of this big, ugly mess are clearly discernible from the details.
The rich are made richer. The bill permanently extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that were tilted toward the rich. According to <a href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/1/senate-reconciliation-bill-budget-economic-and-distributional-effects">an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School</a>, the richest 0.1 percent of households will, on average, be more than $300,000 better off in 2027.
While the tax part of this bill preserves the status quo, it also exempts larger fortunes from estate taxes and increases the deductability from federal taxation of the amount of money taxpayers pay in state and local taxes. The “pro-working class” tax reforms that Trump and the Republicans will tout—no taxes on tips, added tax deductions for seniors 65 and over, and no taxes on overtime earnings—<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/temporary-tax-breaks-in-trumps-big-beautiful-bill.html">are heavily circumscribed and temporary</a>. All of them will disappear by 2028.
Even if one accepted the standard “trickle-down” argument that cutting taxes on the rich leads to a boom in investment and growth, it’s hard to see how largely preserving the status quo will provide “rocket fuel” for the economy, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/06/02/rep-darin-lahood-on-reconciliation-bill-this-is-going-to-be-rocket-fuel-for-the-economy.html">as Illinois Republican Representative Darren LaHood put it</a>. Even more fanciful is the notion that the unleashed economic growth will lower the government’s budget deficit and allow the tax cut to “pay for itself”. This has become an article of Republican faith approaching almost religious status, <a href="https://www.crfb.org/papers/tax-cuts-dont-pay-themselves">despite 50 years of empirical evidence to the contrary</a>. But Republicans have sustained their strategic goal of starving the government of funds and putting the onus on a future Democratic administration to raise taxes to cover government spending.
The poor are made poorer. To get the funds to make the 2017 tax rates permanent, to increase the military budget to more than $1 trillion for the first time and to establish a vast deportation machine, Trump and the Republicans are stealing from the poor. The University of Pennsylvania analysis suggests that the poorest 20 percent of households will endure a 7.4 percent decline in income by 2033.
Over the next decade, the bill cuts almost $1 trillion from Medicaid (medical insurance for low-income people) and about $500 billion each from Medicare (medical insurance for the elderly) and food assistance. This is the single largest cut ever to the already thin social safety net. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/conservative-lawbreakers-bigger-problem/">As Sasha Abramsky, writing in </a>the<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/conservative-lawbreakers-bigger-problem/">
Nation, put it:</a> 
“If you thought the safety net systems fought for, and secured, during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, were a mainstay of modern society, think again. If you thought that after a decade-plus of sparring, the increased healthcare coverage generated by the Affordable Care Act was now a generally accepted part of the social fabric, you were, it appears, sorely mistaken.”
Cuts to Medicaid will cost 12-17 million people their health insurance, depending on which estimate is more accurate. About 3 million will lose access to food assistance. But the effects go far beyond those cuts. Safety net hospitals, especially those in rural areas, will cut services and jobs, if not close altogether. Cuts to subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance will drive up out-of-pocket expenses. Soon, everyone’s health insurance will cost more and cover less.
This has nothing to do with rooting out “waste and fraud” or securing these programs for the future, as Republicans claim. Many of them have lied through their teeth, saying that the act doesn’t cut Medicaid, even though the black-and-white of the bill said so. The key point is that this represents, in crystallised view, the political right’s full agenda: tax cuts for the rich, entitlement cuts for the poor and the showering of money on the military and other repressive apparatuses of the state. 
“They pushed right up to the limit of what their budget could do and still hold enough votes to win a majority”,<a href="https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/why-they-did-it"> the liberal writer Paul Waldman explains</a>. “And with every immigrant parent torn from their children’s arms, every family that loses their health coverage, every young person who decides to forego college, every rural health clinic that shuts down, every research grant that gets revoked, every solar energy project that gets dismantled, they can sit back, smile, and say, ‘This is why we came to Washington. No matter what happens tomorrow, it was worth it’.”
Anti-immigrant repression will be turbocharged. One of this package’s biggest “winners” is the immigration enforcement apparatus, which will receive more than $170 billion over the next four years. To put it in perspective, the current budget for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency—whose masked agents are kidnapping people off street corners and from workplaces—is just under $10 billion.
The amount of money devoted to this arrest/detention/deportation operation will be more <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/congress-throws-more-money-at-removing-immigrants-than-most-countries-spend-on-their-armies">than is allocated to other federal agencies like the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons—even the US Marine Corps</a>. The sort of operation that ICE conducted in Los Angeles earlier this year will be expanded in every major city in the country simultaneously. And with an unaccountable, militarised police force operating nationwide, no-one—including US citizens—will be safe.
The federal government has been authorised to spend more than $45 billion to build a network of detention facilities like Florida’s <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/03/where-is-alligator-alcatraz-detainees-escaped-immigration-facility-nj/84457477007/">Alligator Alcatraz</a>, which will mostly house people who are not charged with a crime, but who are slated for deportation. The assault on the social fabric and civil liberties that is coming will be unprecedented since the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
Because most of these facilities will be privately operated and crash-built, the opportunities for corruption will be limitless. Talk about “waste, fraud and abuse”! They could even be a source of <a href="https://sentientmedia.org/people-in-ice-detention-forced-to-work/">forced labour for industries such as farming and construction</a> that depend on immigrant workers.
With states and localities losing Medicaid, one of the largest federal sources of local and state budgets, they will be hard pressed to resist the one source of federal money where the spigot is fully open—that is, the billions that will be available to sign up local law enforcement as a “force multiplier” for ICE. And if rural hospitals close down, the GOP is hoping that ICE prisons will provide substitute <a href="https://boltsmag.org/how-the-gop-megabill-would-turbocharge-local-immigration-enforcement/">jobs that will entrench them in local political economies for the foreseeable future</a>.
For now, the “big beautiful bill” is, by most reliable measures of public opinion, extremely unpopular. In fact, it is the second most unpopular bill considered in Congress since the 1990s (second to Trump’s 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act), <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/one-big-unpopular-bill">according to data journalist G. Elliott Morris</a>. The party-line vote, in which no Democrats in either the House of Representatives or the Senate voted for it, means that the GOP owns it and its consequences.
The Democrats expect its unpopularity and adverse effects will help them win one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. But November 2026 is a long way off.
Moreover, Democrats don’t have clean hands. Their messaging on the bill focused on how it would slash Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Fair enough. But in 2023 and 2024, in an effort to restore “normalcy” after the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration ended the expansion of Medicaid, tossing <a href="https://www.kff.org/report-section/medicaid-enrollment-and-unwinding-tracker-enrollment-data/">16 million people from the program</a>. This was one of the contributing factors to <a href="https://www.crisesnotes.com/one-election-takeaway-voters-hate-temporary-safety-nets/">Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 election</a>. 
Democrats were also reluctant to condemn the expansion of ICE and its gulag. Again, that’s to be expected from a party that has spent the last few years running away from any pro-immigration stance. Forty-eight House Democrats and 12 Democratic senators voted with the Republicans for the Laken Riley Act, which is helping ICE to round people up, and 75 of them <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/75-democrats-house-antisemitism-resolution-ice-gratitude-2083177">supported a resolution expressing “gratitude” to ICE</a>.
All of this means that the Democrats, the courts, and other institutions are not coming to save us. In fact, many of them are being coerced or corrupted into accepting Trump’s austere authoritarianism as the new normal. The labour and social movements can only depend on ourselves to prevent the US’s further slide into the abyss.
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Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920">The Democrats: A Critical History</a> (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534">US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a> (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.

Lance Selfa

US Republicans pass the most damaging laws in generations

Israel has spent the past two years on a relentless, extremely violent, calculated rampage of slaughter and destruction throughout the Middle East. And yet, we are still told, it is the real victim. 
The supposedly ever-present existential threat faced by Israel has been a core part of the ideological justification for every Israeli atrocity since the creation of the state in 1948. Supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/27/israel-gaza-propaganda">from President Isaac Herzog down</a>, claim that every Palestinian, including children, is a legitimate target to be expelled or killed, because every Gazan is either a current or future “terrorist”. 
Recently, Israeli Prime Minister and wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran was imminently going to acquire nuclear weapons and use them on Israel in a “nuclear holocaust”—the same claim he has been making for more than 30 years. Of course, the only nuclear-armed states that actually bombed anyone were Israel and the US, which killed nearly 1,000 Iranians in 12 days of strikes.
The mainstream media and politicians’ constant attempts to spin the story that Israel is the victim, the underdog, the state “defending itself”, are so out of touch with reality that they are becoming increasingly desperate and farcical. The UK Labour government is perhaps leading the Western world into this Orwellian abyss by its charging of the band Kneecap with terrorism offences due to their support for the Palestinian people, its attempts to censor artists at the Glastonbury music festival and now its proscription of non-violent protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation, all while the UK continues to arm and support Israel’s genocidal terror in Gaza. But if you were to listen to the UK political establishment, you’d think it was the IDF that was the victim.
Welcome to the upside-down world of 2025, where the daily mass murder and starvation of children is fine and normal, but speaking against that is extremism, violence and hate speech.
Israel is the dominant military power in the Middle East, a position considerably strengthened in recent years. It is the only nuclear-armed power in the region, and is thought to have as many as 400 nuclear warheads. It is backed to the hilt, armed and given favourable intelligence-sharing and economic deals by all the Western imperialist powers, while also enjoying friendly relations and trade deals with other major powers like China, Russia and India. The US State Department boasts: “Since its founding in 1948, the United States has provided Israel with over $130 billion in bilateral assistance ...This assistance has helped transform the Israel Defense Forces into one of the world’s most capable, effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide”.
Israel has, since October 2023, laid waste to Gaza, dropping the equivalent of six nuclear weapons’ worth of explosives on the tiny enclave, while also bombing Yemen, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter two which it also invaded and continues to occupy. Much of this carnage has been bankrolled by the US, with more than US$30 billion delivered in aid and other financial and military assistance packages in the past two years. Since its creation, Israel has begun wars with every one of its neighbours, some on multiple occasions.
Israel has turned Gaza into a killing field, where soldiers are <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000">ordered to shoot</a> starving civilians seeking aid. Many Israeli soldiers don’t need orders; they understand their mission is genocide, and they <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-12-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/when-you-enter-gaza-you-are-god-inside-the-minds-of-idf-soldiers-who-commit-war-crimes/00000193-f2a4-dc18-a3db-fee62b540000">shoot and torture</a> Palestinians for fun, while taking selfies, singing and dancing, in line with their extreme ethno-nationalist ideology, in which they are god’s chosen people and the Palestinians are not even human beings. 
Within the rest of the historic land of Palestine, Israel has constructed a suffocating apparatus of military occupation and control, built on the principles of apartheid, exclusion, constant surveillance, checkpoints, mass incarceration, torture, terror, impoverishment and humiliation of the Palestinian population. All this is conducted with cutting-edge technology and in conjunction with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority. Israel’s ambition for the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, or within what is now called Israel, is ultimately similar to Gaza: expulsion, death and the complete destruction of any Palestinian identity.
The state of Israel is manifestly not under any current existential threat. It is Israel that is the existential threat: to Palestinians and millions of others in the region. Despite the absurdity of the claim, it persists because the powerful repeat it over and over again, without regard for evidence. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently explained why: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”. He doesn’t mean the billions of people, including the majority of Germans, who oppose Israel’s rampage, but the billionaires, bureaucrats and military chiefs who run the system. For them, seeing their Middle East proxy wage death and destruction is satisfying proof of a good investment.

Josh Lees

Won’t somebody think of poor Israel?

Donald Trump is on a rampage against workers in the United States. According to the 2025 Global Rights Index, published by the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union federation, the new administration has “taken a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers”. Trump has stripped protections and bargaining rights for tens of thousands of public sector workers and paralysed the National Labor Relations Board, which protects employees’ rights to organise and join unions. And he’s just getting started.
The US union movement is historically weak. Strike rates remain at decades-long lows. Union density has steadily declined from a peak of 35 percent in 1954, recording a new low in every decade since then. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 10 percent of all workers are now in unions. This obviously poses challenges for the workers’ movement, particularly for workers who want to organise against Trump’s reactionary agenda.
Red Flag’s Ryan Stanton spoke to Joe Burns—a labour lawyer, union activist and bargaining negotiator since the 1990s—about where the US union movement has gone wrong and what needs to change. Burns recently completed negotiations for 27,000 United Airlines employees and Association of Flight Attendants members. He has written three books on labour organising: <a href="https://www.igpub.com/strike-back/">Strike Back</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Reviving-Strike-Working-Transform-America/dp/1935439243">Reviving the Strike</a>, and <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/class-struggle-unionism">Class Struggle Unionism</a>.
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What is the state of the American labour movement in the era of Donald Trump?
It’s obviously a difficult period with Trump in office. He has unleashed attacks on immigrant workers and workers in the federal government. But the problem is much bigger than just Trump. The United States has seen a decline in the percentage of workers who belong to trade unions. Only six out of 100 private sector workers now belong to unions. While there are flashes of success here and there, the reality is that the labour movement has been stuck for decades.
This is in large part because we’ve abandoned the principles of class struggle unionism. We put a lot of money into organising, but we’ve been unable to convince workers to join our weak and ineffective unions. We were told that when Democrats like Biden got in and we had a new NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], things would be different. But the similarities between presidential administrations over the last few decades outweigh the differences. The decline in union membership has continued at an equal rate under both Republicans and Democrats. All the Democrats have done is change some rules around the margins. 
We’re not going to revive the labour movement this way. The union reform movement and the left within the labour movement are the weakest that I’ve seen in decades. Certain sectors of the economy and certain states are better organised, but I think the crisis is pretty much throughout the labour movement in the entire country. There are a lot of fuzzy ideas about teaching organising approaches, as if that’s our problem. 
We really need a complete revamp of approach. Labour’s decline is not fundamentally a product of one party or another—they are both capitalist parties. It reflects a deeper problem with the labour movement. What we really lack are the principles of class struggle unionism and how we fight both inside and outside of our unions to take on the capitalist class. And I think it starts with the left of the labour movement coming to grips with the crisis that we face and what it’s going to take to move forward. That’s the fundamental problem. 
My first two books focused on reviving the strike in both the public and private sectors. My most recent book, Class Struggle Unionism, focuses on the internal problems within the labour movement, including our inability to confront the shifting regimes of labour law, the legal restrictions on the right to strike, worker self-activity and so on. Although my knowledge of the Australian union movement is somewhat limited, I do try to follow things over there and it seems that both union movements face similar problems. 
How have the unions approached the Trump administration?
Well, obviously Trump is doing this sort of right-wing populism thing. He’s certainly won over a base with his tariffs and protectionism, which have an appeal to auto workers and steelworkers, who have been decimated by decades of neoliberal attacks and the elimination of protections for workers. Many liberal labour leaders are aghast that Sean Fain from the UAW [United Auto Workers] and others support the tariffs. However, we spent a lot of the 1990s fighting against the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free trade agreements that were geared towards allowing corporations to shift manufacturing jobs overseas without regard for workers. These agreements allow capitalists to exploit workers around the world, while eroding manufacturing unionism. 
So, it’s not surprising to me that some of these unions support tariffs. It’s economic nationalism, but it’s also rooted in material reality in which workers have faced job losses. They’ve felt the effects of an era of neoliberalism that was spearheaded in many ways by the Democratic establishment. However, the tariffs are not going to fix things. To the extent you support them and take a narrow, sectional point of view, you cut yourself off from your natural allies and move away from class struggle unionism. In the worst case, you end up like the Teamsters [one of the largest unions in the US], who have been cosying up to Trump. This is an abandonment of working-class principles. 
Has there been much opposition to the Trump administration from the union movement?
For the most part, the union leaders oppose Trump—at least rhetorically. To be fair, while the UAW came out with qualified support for Trump’s tariffs, they have fought him on other issues. Although we’ve seen some protests, there hasn’t yet been the same kind of opposition we saw during his first term. I think he came on so ferociously that it put people on the back foot. While the union movement is participating in smaller, localised protests, I wouldn’t say they are doing much to seriously oppose Trump. 
What is the relationship between the US union movement and the Democratic Party? 
The union movement allied itself with the Democratic Party through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The unions deluded themselves into thinking they had an important role in business and government. They have the trappings of power, but not real power. Over the years, the labour movement has allowed itself to be incorporated into the Democrats and become increasingly dependent on the state for its existence. In doing so, we’ve accepted of a lot of restrictions on unions and the right to strike. 
However, despite what we are commonly told, the Democratic Party is no ally of the labour movement. We have to keep in mind that Trump is not the first president to attack migrants or attempt to gut the federal workforce. Democratic governors called out the National Guard in the 1980s to break the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Minnesota, where I’m originally from. Democratic President Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, got rid of 400,000 federal worker jobs in the 1990s, probably more than they’ve cut so far with Elon Musk and DOGE. 
The problem isn’t just that the labour movement spends a tonne of money supporting Democrats, money that could go into organising. And the problem isn’t just that this offers a false path and defrays the real issues affecting workers. The real problem is that it reflects the entry of capitalist ideology into the labour movement. As Tony Mazzocchi, the leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, who tried to start a labour party in the 1990s, used to say: the bosses have two parties, it’s time for workers to have one. The Democrats are a wholly corporate-funded and controlled political party. It was the Democrats’ anti-working-class policies that provided the basis for Trump’s rise to power. 
In your book Class Struggle Unionism, you loosely define three approaches to modern trade unionism: business unionism, liberal unionism and class struggle unionism. What do you mean by these terms? 
For the first 100 or so years of trade unionism, the fundamental divide was between what I call business unionism and class struggle unionism. Business unionism tended to be a narrower trade unionism, often focused on representing a group of workers under a particular employer or industry. Business unionists didn’t see themselves as having a broader role in society, and certainly not a role of transforming the relationship between workers and employers. Their slogan can be famously summed up by the slogan, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”. 
In contrast, we have a long, rich history of class struggle unionism, which takes a fundamentally different point of view. It recognises that the source of power and privilege in society is exploitation in the workplace. Whether you’re at Starbucks, Amazon or Ford, your labour creates value during your shift. You get paid a portion of that value in wages, and the rest flows upwards to a handful of people. That’s how we get billionaires in society; that’s the source of power and privilege. 
So, if you truly want to take on the billionaire class, you have to start in the workplace by challenging exploitation. When I talk about class struggle unionists in the United States, I think of the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies as they are better known, in the early 1900s. I think of the folks around the Communist Party in the Trade Union Unity League of the 1920s. I think of Farrell Dobbs and the Trotskyists who led the Teamsters rebellion of the 1930s. I think of the powerful, left-led international unions that came out of the 1930s, who were then decimated in the red scares of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 
In the 1970s, thousands of anti-war and student activists joined the new communist movement. Many of those people then joined the labour movement with a conscious viewpoint of class struggle unionism. They went into the labour movement to transform it and put it on a fighting class struggle basis. They saw the working class as critical to a broader transformation of society. A lot of those leftists who went into the labour movement in the 1970s engaged in a lot of good struggles. They were probably a bit ultra-left and spent too much time fighting each other, but I think a lot of good struggles came out of their efforts. 
However, in the 1980s, we faced a withering attack on trade unionism. We saw a wave of legal restrictions on the right to strike and on solidarity action, and the permanent replacement of striking workers. Great Britain, Australia and the United States shifted to restrain the sort of worker self-activity that had built a powerful labour movement, especially solidarity, cross-class and class-wide trade unionism. We were getting pummelled. This was one of the factors that led to the implosion of the socialist left in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States. A lot of these people drifted away into labour education, and some of them entered the mid-levels of the labour movement. This is when we saw the rise of the “third way” of labour liberalism in the 1980s. It was somewhat rooted in this grouping of people who were ideologically progressive or even socialist, but who began to turn away from class struggle unionism.
They hoped to straddle the two worlds of business unionism and class struggle unionism. They focused on things like the “corporate campaign” and the “organising approach”. A lot of this is rooted in the technical expertise of these sorts of mid-level staffers in the labour movement. Their politics flips from idea to idea. One minute we need social unionism, then we need broad community campaigns, then we need more trained organisers and so on. Unions have developed all sorts of alternatives to the strike, and they’ve begun to look more like NGOs than actual fighting organs of the class. In many ways, they have just walked away from the fundamental root of the crisis. 
A good example is the Service Employees International Union, which has led well-promoted campaigns to organise fast food workers. But this was all bullshit. They would lead “industrial action” that would have like 50 staffers and a handful of fired workers pretending that the workers were on strike. Some of the recent Amazon strikes were like that, too. There’s a real proliferation of these types of actions—what I call publicity strikes. Even groups such as Labor Notes talk less about the reform and how fucked up the labour movement is, and a lot more about the “secrets of the successful organisers” and “what are the techniques that organisers need?” 
Well, the problem isn’t the techniques. What we need is class struggle unionism. We need more fights with the bureaucracy that doesn’t want to engage in the sort of militant struggle that’s necessary to revive the labour movement. These bureaucrats don’t want to break with the Democratic Party or the state apparatus by violating injunctions and doing all the things that we would need to do to win and to attract workers to our movement.

Ryan Stanton

Class struggle unionism in the USA: an interview with Joe Burns

Sometimes, there is good news. In the era of Trump 2.0, it might come only in small doses, but we ought to grab it with both hands when it presents itself.
New York’s political earthquake is one such piece of news. In the nerve centre of global finance and the fortress of US liberal Zionism, a self-declared socialist who opposes Israeli apartheid and calls out its genocide has won the Democratic Party’s nomination for mayor. Zohran Mamdani overcame a campaign of slander—and a river of Wall Street money flowing to his chief opponent—by pulling together an army of volunteers and what appears to be an unprecedented mobilisation of young voters.
The immediate backdrop to the victory was millions of people protesting across the US, through April, May and June, against the Trump administration and its reactionary agenda, including militant protests in Los Angeles against deportations. New York ought to be viewed as part of the broader resistance to Trump and a repudiation of the Democratic Party’s failure to challenge the administration. 
While this was an electoral mobilisation, and therefore inherently limited compared to a social movement, it proved to be more transformative of the political situation than any of the street protests. They showed that masses of people are prepared to stand up to Trump in some way or another, but none significantly shifted the political dial.
The difference is primarily due to Mamdani defeating the combined efforts of the New York establishment. And that’s what people see: a precious victory on the terrain most favourable to the rich and powerful—capitalist elections that mostly go the way of those with the most money and connections. It’s a tremendous feel-good story for the left to break through at the very moment that people are most worried about a fascist takeover of US politics, and as Trump and the billionaires seem to have everything going their way.
Mamdani’s campaign demonstrated that there is a significant base of young people who want a left alternative to both Trumpism and the sclerotic, right-wing Democratic Party status quo. While his campaign focused on class questions—New York is the most expensive and unequal city in America—surely it is no coincidence that this earthquake followed last year’s major political tremor: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-weve-learned-in-new-york-city">the Palestine solidarity encampment movement</a>, which precipitated a crisis in liberal Zionism and among the Democratic base, and politicised campuses across the city. The Democratic establishment that now stands humiliated at the hands of a mass bloc of 18–35-year-old voters is the same establishment that relentlessly smeared and violently smashed the city’s encampments—and which declared that this election was primarily about Mamdani’s opposition to genocide.
Yet this is not only a New York story. The November mayoral election is shaping up to be one of national significance. Trump, the Republicans and a section of the Democratic establishment want to make Mamdani an avatar for everything they are against. Millions of people inspired by his program—doubling the minimum wage, making child care free, resisting the deportation agenda, making housing affordable and taxing the rich—likewise see in New York a vision of the sort of political alternative they want nationally.
This is not just an American tale, either. The US leads the world culturally and politically; often, that influence is malign. So when Trump wins, right-wingers on every continent import and adapt his toxic brand of politics to local conditions. When trash liberal social theories—often some variant of the self-absorbed, moralistic identity politics that dominate universities—become fashionable in the US, they permeate progressive circles around the world, stifling the development of a genuine left.
But the US also has a history of exporting hope. And right now, left-wing and progressive people around the world are cheering. Finally, it’s not another headline about another fascist advance somewhere in the world. Finally, the news coming out of America is not only about the latest horror inflicted by the White House on workers and the oppressed. Finally, there is a sense of victory—a feeling that the political establishment everywhere could be rocked, even defeated, by a political alternative organised around a simple message: less for the rich and more for the poor, regardless of race, gender or legal status.
Mamdani is not only on everyone’s lips. His coalition is the future of the left and potentially of big-city political culture and sensibilities: young, socialist-leaning, pro-Palestinian and open to anti-imperialism. That the Democratic establishment—Wall Street billionaires and liberal imperialists—have been totally embarrassed and are now seemingly engulfed in crisis is the cherry on top. 
Recognising these positives doesn’t mean drinking the Kool-Aid of municipal socialism, however. So to be clear: the good news is not
that Mamdani could become mayor of the biggest city in the United States. The mayor’s office is not akin to a seat in a legislature from which a socialist could consistently organise resistance and build a socialist party. The New York mayoral office is one of America’s most powerful executive positions—running the country’s largest police force, enforcing all local and state laws in its biggest city and ultimately ensuring that Wall Street finance functions smoothly. 

Without the backing of a mass socialist party and an insurgent working-class movement, even the most principled of revolutionary Marxists would be incapable of withstanding the institutional and ruling-class pressures that are brought to bear on the chief executive of capitalism’s most important city. 
Given the current balance of class forces, a moderate like Mamdani has no chance. His organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America, would be no counterweight to the social and economic power of New York’s ruling class and upper-middle classes. The party can’t even hold to account elected representatives with zero formal responsibilities—the list of DSA members or DSA-endorsed legislators who have gone on to make peace with the Democratic Party establishment is hardly a secret. Indeed, if Mamdani were to win, many DSA members would likely be brought into government jobs to help administer New York capitalism. 
Mamdani is already working hand-in-glove with sections of the Democratic Party. That ought to come as no surprise—he ran as a Democrat, after all. He may go further trying to prove himself a “competent” safe pair of hands for the New York business class. If he were to compromise enough, he could even be welcomed into the fold before the November election. Stranger things have happened. 
If such things transpire and Mamdani’s supporters aren’t prepared, they could easily become demoralised or cynical, or politically drift to the right as they justify the capitulations as just being realistic. 
That’s why Marxists emphasise the building of politicised social movements and the organised power of the working class. Our side can certainly have victories in which people play a more or less passive role. However, lifting political consciousness and building political resilience require much more than electoral campaigning. Genuine “realism” begins with understanding that capitalist institutions—such as the Democratic Party and the state—are obstacles to social change that need to be smashed rather than embraced.
Nevertheless, another scenario could be that the New York establishment coalesces around an alternative candidate who seems likely to win easily. In that case, Mamdani could double down on the most left-wing aspects of his program and inspire even more people to look to socialist politics for solutions to the obvious problems of capitalist society.
These “ifs”, “buts”, “maybes” and “probablys” will be the subject of more coverage and conversations in the coming weeks and months as the campaign unfolds. The script isn’t entirely written in advance—time, as always, will tell.
But for now, the good news is in: a socialist message has politically galvanised masses of young people in the heart of global capitalism; and that message has echoed from the five boroughs of New York, inspiring people across oceans. True, the good news could be short-lived. But it ought to be a shot in the arm for everyone trying to build a socialist party.

Editors

Fairytale of New York?

Robert Dale, writing at <a href="https://www.counterfire.org/article/at-last-50000-march-for-palestine-in-berlin/">Counterfire</a>, a socialist website in Britain, reports that a Palestinian solidarity protest in Berlin on 21 June was a breakthrough for Germany's Gaza solidarity movement.
--------------------
The centre of Berlin was a sea of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs on Saturday 21 June. Banned slogans were held aloft and chanted loud. At least 50,000 turned out to show solidarity with Gaza. The mobilisation was national, the crowd largely young. They chanted slogans that would have had them arrested only weeks ago. The police were powerless to stop them.
Unusually, the protest was not called by an organisation or coalition, nor were organisations visibly present. It was initiated by two German-Palestinian online influencers, whose appeal spread by word of mouth. They expected 5,000. At least 50,000 came from all across Germany.
Ferocious repression
The German authorities have stamped on Gaza protests harder than any other government in Europe. In October 2023, demonstrations for Gaza were initially banned altogether. So the right to protest at all literally had to be won on the streets. An early candlelit vigil by Jewish Voice for Peace created a protest form that the authorities hesitated to crush. By 21 October 2023, it was possible to hold a proper demonstration, with about 5,000 attending in Berlin.
Ever since, there have been regular marches across the country, but attendance has rarely exceeded a couple of thousand. Rallies often begin with the organiser reading a long list of statements that the police have banned. No “From the River to the Sea”, no expression of support for Hamas or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, no comparisons with the German Holocaust. Brutal physical force has been used to arrest protesters for repeating them. Participants at a protest camp at the Reichstag [parliament] were forbidden to speak Hebrew, Arabic or Irish Gaelic, for fear that they might speak or sing illegal words without the police knowing.
The authorities have tightly policed public discussion altogether. Until very recently, essentially any form of solidarity has been beyond the pale. Prominent Jewish artists have had exhibitions cancelled for speaking out. A conference in Berlin in April 2024 was closed down by the police just as it began. People have been sacked for statements of support, including at least one civil servant. There has been a lot of discussion about withdrawing residency status or requiring applicants for citizenship to declare their support for Israel.
One indication of the severity of the suppression is that the authorities even targeted Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. When she came to Berlin, the city government ensured that her meeting at a university was cancelled and alternative venues were denied. She eventually spoke in a small room provided by the left-wing Junge Welt newspaper, where she said she was utterly shocked by the level of repression here. All this naturally has had an absolutely chilling effect.
Why the clampdown?
Germany’s political leaders had the same reaction as their Western colleagues: support Israel come what may. And they were certainly not alone in wanting to suppress any dissent. The legacy of the Holocaust gave them an additional—and heavy—cudgel to swing. Anyone who criticises Israel is an antisemite. But what allowed them to get away with it was the weakness of the German hard left and the complicity of the parliamentary parties. The German Social Democrats and Greens back Israel to the hilt. The Greens have been particularly vicious; apparently, it’s fine to deport people for saying the wrong thing about Gaza.
The Left Party has seen debate over the issue, but its leaders at all levels have ensured that it does not get tarred with solidarity or anything like that. The few individuals and a couple of branches that put their heads above the parapet took a lot of flak, and at least one prominent activist was expelled from the party. In recent weeks, the party’s tone has softened a little, though, mirroring the slight shift in the rhetoric of major Western leaders. The Left Party officially supported Saturday’s demonstration. This was, I believe, the first time it has done so since October 2023. They were visibly present too, though only with a dozen flags.
The trade unions have been completely absent from the solidarity movement. Given the general atmosphere, that is not entirely surprising. The nearest comparison I can think of would be support for Irish Republicanism in England in the 1980s. However, the immigrants’ caucus at the public service union Verdi put its name to a demo call recently and turned up with union flags. Apparently, the national leadership was not amused.
If public discussion is verboten [forbidden] and no organisation or coalition has the strength to push back, it can quickly become a vicious circle. Speaking out is felt to be a real personal risk, making it hard to organise protests. And the lack of protests discourages speaking out.
That is what makes 21 June such a breakthrough. Not only was the demonstration too large for the police to crush or harass. It also broke through the speech bans. Participants chanted the banned slogans, sometimes directly towards the police, keenly aware that this was their victory.
First published at <a href="https://www.counterfire.org/article/at-last-50000-march-for-palestine-in-berlin/">Counterfire</a>.

Robert Dale

At last! 50,000 march for Palestine in Berlin

The line peddled by Western politicians and media outlets is that the US and Israel had to go to war because Iran was just weeks or months from developing nuclear weapons. 
<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iran-produce-nuclear-weapon-couple-weeks-white-house/story?id=123016638">The White House claimed</a> that Iran could have produced a nuclear weapon “<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iran-produce-nuclear-weapon-couple-weeks-white-house/story?id=123016638">in a couple of weeks</a>”. Financial Times correspondents <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/46c60c82-7e5c-4013-a789-459e785d33fd">John Paul Rathbone and Charles Clover warned</a> of “the nuclear mountain that haunts Israel”. And Australian Defence Minister <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/defence-minister-richard-marles-stumbles-over-policy-gap-between-australiaus-in-iranisrael-conflict/news-story/5bf8bf19b4005ac6f1afc989a814dd9a">Richard Marles asserted</a>: <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/defence-minister-richard-marles-stumbles-over-policy-gap-between-australiaus-in-iranisrael-conflict/news-story/5bf8bf19b4005ac6f1afc989a814dd9a">“T</a>he Iranian nuclear ballistic missile program is most definitely a threat to the peace and stability of not only the Middle East”.
The problem is that there is no evidence to support these claims, which have been repeated for more than 40 years by war hawks. 
As early as 1984, shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, British defence journal <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/iran-has-been-two-years-away-from-a-nuclear-bomb-since-the-1980s/389333/">Jane’s Defence Weekly reported</a>: “Iran is engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years”. Timelines have varied since then, but the claim has stayed the same. In 1992, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions">Benjamin Netanyahu asserted</a> that Iran was three to five years away from a nuclear weapon, a claim he repeated three years later, and again in 2002. 
In 2012, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions">Netanyahu displayed a cartoon picture of a bomb</a> in front of the United Nations general assembly while claiming that Iran would be in the final stage of weapons development “at most by next summer”. Somehow, Iran has managed to bend the rules of time, being just a few months or years away from going nuclear for almost half a century.
Intelligence agencies themselves have reached different positions. 
<a href="https://archive.md/kbqyy#selection-355.0-361.59">A 2007 US national intelligence estimate</a>, touted by the director of national intelligence as the “most authoritative written judgments on national security issues”, concluded with “high confidence” that Iran had been trying to develop nuclear weapons, but ceased its program in 2003. It went on to admit: “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005”.
Just three months ago, current US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, <a href="https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/congressional-testimonies/congressional-testimonies-2025/4061-ata-hpsci-opening-statement-as-delivered">in her opening remarks</a> at a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, included the evaluation: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003”.
This isn’t an intelligence failure. The Western ruling classes are manufacturing consent for a major war against a rival state in the Middle East by lying. In some ways, it’s a repeat of the Bush administration’s strategy in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Iraq, according to Western politicians and journalists at the time, had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbP8HGxrgo8">US President George W. Bush</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/18/foreignpolicy.iraq1">British PM Tony Blair</a>
and <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/what-led-john-howard-to-invade-iraq-the-question-remains-shrouded-in-mystery/3p4hsqleo">Australian PM John Howard</a> peddled claims that Iraq had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.
There was no evidence to support these claims. In the months before the US invaded in March 2003, UN inspectors in Iraq found nothing. <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/disarming-saddam-chronology-iraq-and-un-weapons-inspections-2002-2003">The Arms Control Association later noted</a>: 
“UN weapons inspectors worked in Iraq from November 27, 2002 until March 18, 2003. During that time, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspections Commission conducted more than 900 inspections at more than 500 sites. The inspectors did not find that Iraq possessed chemical or biological weapons or that it had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.”
This didn’t matter to Bush and his allies, who were determined to invade and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050629021102/http:/downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html">A July 2002 memo from the British Prime Minister’s office</a>, leaked to the press three years later, showed that a great hoax was being perpetrated:
“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [the US National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record.”
Over the next decade, up to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24547256">half a million Iraqis</a>
were killed either directly or indirectly, as a result of the invasion, occupation and destruction of the country.
Two powers operating in the Middle East are known to have weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them: Israel and the United States.
Although Tel Aviv doesn’t publicly acknowledge its existence, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal">Israel’s nuclear weapons program is an open secret</a>. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons estimates that Israel has between <a href="https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_arsenals">90 and 200 warheads</a>. Israel is one of four nuclear powers that are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea), which means that there is no monitoring of its nuclear program.
Israel is also believed to have extensive <a href="https://www.nti.org/countries/israel/">chemical and biological weapons</a>
programs. <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/lebanon-evidence-of-israels-unlawful-use-of-white-phosphorus-in-southern-lebanon-as-cross-border-hostilities-escalate/">Amnesty International reported</a> on the military’s use of white phosphorus, a horrific chemical that burns flesh down to the bone, on civilian areas of Lebanon in October 2023. The group called for Israel to be investigated for war crimes. But this wasn’t the first time Israel had used chemical weapons—<a href="https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/white-phosphorus-in-urban-environments">it did so in the 2008-09 war on Gaza</a>.
The United States has waged brutal wars to dominate the people of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East for the better part of a century, often involving the most heinous weapons ever produced. 
America was the first state to develop the atomic bomb, and later the even more deadly hydrogen bomb. It remains the only state to have used the weapon against civilian populations. <a href="https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/">The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimates</a> that up to 210,000 people were killed in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US dropped atomic bombs on them in 1945. Hundreds of thousands of people lived, stripped of limbs or suffering from radiation poisoning, for decades afterwards.
The United States has also murdered thousands of people with chemical weapons. The US military dropped napalm by the ton on the people of Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, burning men, women and children alive. In Iraq, having denounced the regime for its non-existent WMDs, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/nov/15/usa.iraq">America admitted to using</a> napalm and white phosphorus.
If the US and Israel truly want to rid the world of WMDs, they should start by destroying their own nuclear and chemical weapons. And if they are worried about threats to peace and security, they ought to stop invading other countries.

Lucas Brunning-Halsall

West recycles old lies to justify attack on Iran

As long as capitalism survives, there will be no reckoning for the Gaza genocide or the naked aggression of Western imperialism in the Middle East. 
Every day, Israeli soldiers murder dozens of defenceless and starving Palestinians queuing for rations among the rubble of their now almost uninhabitable homeland. That no government in the world will do anything about it should be evidence enough of the impunity.
Now, Tel Aviv and Washington are exporting even more violence to yet another country, Iran. How many deaths in this region are they responsible for over the last 25 years? Up to 4.7 million, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Yet these murderers receive sinecures rather than sanctions. 
This perennial spectacle of mass murder, and the spectre of more of it, have not elicited a rethinking of priorities among those who rule the world, let alone contrition or reparations. Instead, they are launching more wars and preparing for others—everywhere. Twenty-seven million active-duty military personnel are spread across the globe. But even this is insufficient. 
“If you have weapons, don’t abandon them; if you have the ability to produce weapons, produce them. Weapons of all kinds”, Lithuanian Defence Minister Dovilė Šakalienė last week told Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. “Saying let’s disarm, let’s be peaceful pigeons—that’s suicidal.”
This exhortation is but a reflection of what’s already happening. Global military spending is rapidly expanding, increasing by nearly 40 percent in real terms over the last decade to US$2.7 trillion (A$4.2 trillion) and accounting for approximately 7 percent of government expenditures worldwide. All indications suggest that this is only the beginning, as an increase in the means of violence in one country begets a commensurate increase in its neighbours’ and competitors’ capacities.
The US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel together already possess more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2,100 are “kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles”—more than enough destructive capability to eradicate all human life several times over. 
Yet more countries are reportedly considering joining this nuclear club—a death cult by any reasonable definition. “The era of nuclear weapons reductions appears to have ended”, notes the SIPRI Yearbook 2025, released this month. “The signs are that a new qualitative nuclear arms race is gearing up and, compared with the last one, the risks are likely to be more diverse and more serious.”
It is too generous to say that the great challenges of the 21st century—the climate catastrophe and decimation of the planet’s ecosystems, the 700 million people undernourished and living in extreme poverty, the 2.2 billion without drinking water, the 3.5 billion lacking safe sanitation services, and more—are afterthoughts to the imperialist states and their capitalist ruling classes.
Increasingly, the primary feature of their system is destruction: destruction of living standards, destruction of life-support systems, destruction of cities and countries and peoples and spirit. The more it destroys, the wealthier the class of billionaires at the top becomes. The arms dealers, the fossil fuel barons, the tech oligarchs, the financiers—all of them profiting, and profiting all the more, as the destitution and destruction increase.
This is capitalism’s logic: unchecked, unending rapaciousness.
Last century, at least 180 million people were killed because of war; not a single year passed without cannons being fired or bombs being dropped. But every part of the world is now linked to the rest by some means. As long as this system grinds on, there will be no respite, let alone a reckoning, and no escaping the calamities resulting from so many natural resources and so much human energy being devoted to the military-industrial complex.
With the world entering a potentially even more destructive phase, there is an urgent need to tear down the existing imperialist order and replace it with a socialist order: a society run according to the maxim “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, and in which cooperation, rather than competition, is the guiding principle.

Capitalism’s ruthless new order

“I saw it with my own eyes. My father was blasted out of the house. His face was burned, and his ears were torn off.” Amin Ahmad, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/16/athlete-pilates-instructor-teacher-human-toll-of-israels-attack-on-iran">speaking to Al Jazeera’s Saeedeh Fathi</a>, recounted his father’s death in eastern Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Sunday afternoon. An Israeli airstrike on the family home left him and his mother trapped inside. 
“I had to force the window bars open and call out for help. Someone brought a ladder, and my mother and I escaped”, he said. Amin’s father was a teacher. He worked all his life with the hope that he would one day retire in peace. “Now he’s dead, and the house is destroyed.” 
Amin’s story is one of hundreds. Israel has so far <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-conflict-news/card/iran-s-death-toll-surpasses-450-rights-group-says-Y8tyR2w2VwItM2BII2Ae">killed more than 450 people</a>, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a nongovernmental organisation that monitors the country. The Western political establishment calls this Israel’s right to self-defence. But like in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Israel’s war on Iran is an act of naked aggression. 
The wounded come in waves to Tehran’s major hospitals. One doctor described it as a bloodbath. He told <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes">the Guardian</a>, “We were overwhelmed by chaos and the screams of grieving family members”. Many of the wounded had been struck by deadly shrapnel from Israeli airstrikes. Patients were found with metal lodged in femur bones and the soft tissues of the hip joints. 
Iranian petrochemical workers on Karkov Island, their workplace having been deemed a high-risk target, were left by their bosses to fend for themselves. In a statement on their Telegram channel, they said: “[The managers] have not even put a plan in place for the possibility of an attack. There is no shelter or equipment. There is no catalog [sic] of instructions on what to do in the event of an attack, where to go, or how to protect our lives”. 
It’s impossible to know the real toll of Israel’s air war. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes">Hospital staff have reported</a> being told not to post online about the number of wounded or dead. But we do know that Israel’s attacks are widespread. 
A Children’s Hospital in southern Tehran. An assistant professor of neonatal medicine and her three-year-old child. A student sitting in her home with her family. They were destroyed in a flash of fire as bombs rained down. Israel says that they’re all “legitimate targets”—just like the hospitals in Gaza; just like the residential buildings in Lebanon. 
“[They have] directly targeted the country’s infrastructure, such as oil and gas resources, automotive industries, water, airports, the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation and even Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah”, a student in central Iran told Red Flag via Telegram. “Israel keeps saying that it’s only targeting military sites, which is not true at all.” 
The Middle East Monitor <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250616-report-israel-threatens-dahiya-style-assault-on-tehran-in-bid-to-destabilise-iran/">reported two days ago</a> that Israel is preparing for a massive, “Dahiya-style” attack on the capital:
“The plan, disclosed by Israeli broadcaster Channel 14, reportedly seeks to destabilise Iran’s government through systematic bombing of strategic sites while coercing mass evacuation from densely populated areas.
“The operation, said to have been greenlit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz, draws directly from Israel’s controversial military doctrine first employed during its 2006 war on Lebanon.
“That assault saw the wholesale destruction of the Dahiya district in southern Beirut—a stronghold of Hezbollah—marking the beginning of what military officials would later describe as a deliberate strategy of ‘disproportionate force’ and the targeting of civilian infrastructure to achieve political objectives.”
Indeed, Defence Minister Israel Katz warned: “Tehran will be treated like Beirut”. 
The Israelis are trying to exploit the deep unpopularity of the Iranian regime to gain support for their war. In a<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO8WlACdCB8">
televised address</a> to the Iranian public, Netanyahu smugly asserted: “We are clearing the path for you to achieve your objective, which is freedom”.
This narrative—that bombing people while they sleep will facilitate their freedom from the forces of political oppression—has been repeated time and again over the last twenty months of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. 
And it continues. Western media outlets <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLqP7SAlrYg">such as the British Broadcasting Corporation</a> have given a platform to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the disgraced former dictator of Iran, who says that Israeli strikes will help “liberate” the country. As if 90 million Iranians are hoping for the return of a US-backed monarchy. As if freedom rises out of the rubble of an Israeli bomb. 
“Most people still oppose the government”, the student in central Iran said. “The rulers of Iran, like many other countries, are dictators ... but they believe the invasion [by Israel] is wrong.” 
World leaders speak of “restraint” and “de-escalation” while arming Israel with advanced heavy weaponry. Netanyahu’s war on Iran is made in America, where the Congress approves billions for “bunker-busting” bombs, where politicians and the media manufacture consent for war crimes. 
President Trump is now <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/17/world/israel-iran-trump#trump-iran">calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”</a>, declaring: “We [Israel and the US] now have complete control of the skies over Iran”. 
Israel is unleashing hell across the Middle East with the backing of the world’s most powerful state and with the support of most of the “civilised” world. They speak of the “Iran-Israel conflict” when it’s an invasion. The Western media and politicians have tried to desensitise the world to such horror over the past twenty months of genocide in Gaza. 
Tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of Lebanese have been slaughtered with impunity. The calculation now is that hundreds or thousands of Iranians added to the toll will not be of any international consequence. But each death is more than a number. It’s a child who will never become an adult; it’s a family torn apart forever. 
Parnia Abassi was one of these lives: a student killed, along with three of her family members, as they slept in their home in Sattarkhan, Tehran. Parnia’s friends described her as funny and full of life. In interviews and <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://hammihanonline.ir/%25D8%25A8%25D8%25AE%25D8%25B4-%25D8%25AC%25D8%25A7%25D9%2585%25D8%25B9%25D9%2587-23/40566-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25DB%258C%25D8%25B1-%25D9%2585%25D9%2588%25D9%2587%25D8%25A7%25DB%258C-%25D8%25B1%25D9%2588%25DB%258C-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B4%25DA%25A9-%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25D8%25B1%25D8%25AA%25DB%258C-%25D9%2585%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B9%25D9%2584%25D9%2582-%25D8%25A8%25D9%2587-%25D9%25BE%25D8%25B1%25D9%2586%25DB%258C%25D8%25A7-%25D8%25A7%25D8%25B3%25D8%25AA&amp;sa=D&amp;source=docs&amp;ust=1750205171857941&amp;usg=AOvVaw2c8RZUFj86VcTYEMPKZiN3">online</a>, they recounted their favourite memories. How she took them camping outdoors for the first time, how she gave them gifts, how her sense of humour often took a moment to sink in and then bowled them over with laughter. 
All of that, gone, in a second. Parnia was an aspiring poet. One of her last compositions reads: 
I burn
I fade,
I become a silent star,
That turns into smoke
In your sky

Bella Beiraghi

The human cost of Israel’s war on Iran

Israel’s military strikes against Iran are the latest evidence, if any more were needed, that the US and its proxies are rogue states.
Despite the US government’s earlier attempts to distance itself from Israel’s aggression, it is clear that Washington was in on it from the start. President Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Friday, US time, that he had spoken to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and knew “what’s going on”. The Financial Times on Saturday quoted “a person familiar with the situation” who indicated that the US had been informed of Israeli plans as early as Monday, “was in the know all along” and “raised no objection”. 
And so came another attack on another country and another people. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. The Zionist state is off the leash, again, promising to continue indefinitely its assault, all the while stocked with weapons and backed by a US carrier group in the Mediterranean and B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. 
Netanyahu insists that Israel faces an existential threat from Tehran’s nuclear program. This flimsy pretext of “existential threats” has been trotted out again and again over the last twenty months to justify everything from the starvation of Gazan children to the flattening of hospitals and schools to terrorist attacks on Hezbollah members to the bombings of Lebanon and Syria to the ever-greater annexation of West Bank territory.
Like its cousin charge of “antisemitism”, which is casually levelled against even the mildest critics of apartheid, anything in the Middle East capable of sneezing in the direction of Tel Aviv is labelled an “existential threat” to the nuclear-armed, US-backed Israeli state. 
Whatever Netanyahu might claim, Tehran is considered enemy number one not because of its military capacities, but because of its recalcitrance. Iran is perpetually in the crosshairs of the US and Israel because no other country in the Middle East bends less to Washington’s will. 
Iran has been demonised, harassed and sanctioned ever since the Western-backed torture state of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979. Washington and London more than tolerated the horrors of Pahlavi’s regime. The two Western governments had conspired, in 1953’s “Operation Ajax”, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalised the oil industry two years earlier.
“Since Venezuela and the Middle East are the only sources from which the free world’s import requirements for petroleum can be supplied, these sources are necessary to continue the present economic and military efforts of the free world”, noted <a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v01p2/d159">a joint departmental report</a> to the US National Security Council eight months before the coup. “It therefore follows that nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world.”
Torture states are acceptable if they serve Western interests. So Pahlavi was installed to prevent popular aspirations from being realised and to ensure that Western companies could again exploit the country’s oil wealth. That is, he was brought in to rule with an iron fist. It went swimmingly for the oil companies and for US Middle Eastern strategy until the Iranian population rose from the dungeons to reclaim their country.
But miraculously, after 1979, the West suddenly became deeply concerned about the human rights record of the Iranian government. Washington and Israel have repeatedly declared it a rogue state and a threat to peace ever since.
The US was so concerned with regional peace that it funded Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, supplying President Saddam Hussein’s regime with weapons and intelligence. Several hundred thousand Iranians were killed during the war. The US also helped the Iraqis launch chemical weapons attacks. 
“[S]enior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks [in 1988]”, Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid wrote in <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/">an exclusive investigation</a> for Foreign Policy journal in 2013. “They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.”
Unlike Israel, Iraq was no solid ally of the US. After he had done the work against Iran, Hussein fell out of favour with Washington. The US invaded in the first Gulf War (1990-91) before imposing sanctions that were responsible for killing an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Questioned about this horror in 1996, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1T5JRVR53Eo">US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded</a>: “We think the price is worth it”. 
Then the US invaded again in 2003 after lying about Hussein’s regime, which, the Americans said, possessed weapons of mass destruction, was sponsoring terrorism and was an imminent threat to regional and even world peace. To keep the peace, US destroyed the country, left <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html">hundreds of thousands dead</a> in the first few years of the occupation, and created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State.
This criminal history isn’t deemed relevant to contemporary reporting of Israel’s attack on Iran. It’s scandalous, but of little surprise, that the media today is parroting the US and Israeli line when both countries have, in recent history, persistently lied, persistently invaded other countries, persistently supported dictatorial regimes, and persistently killed masses of people throughout the region. 
No doubt, the Iranian regime is despotic. It will be a welcome day when Iranian workers overthrow it. But any honest accounting of the last several decades in the Middle East shows the US and Israel to be partners in a criminality that throws shade on Tehran’s record.
It should go without saying that Israel’s aggression, backed again by the US, should be opposed. With its Gaza genocide, assaults in the West Bank, occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the latest attack on Iran, the Zionist state is attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East—a redrawing most favourable to fascists and dictators aligned with one of the greatest purveyors of violence in history.

Rogue empire

As the mass ICE raids began on Friday in Los Angeles, members of the socialist group Tempest participated in rapid response and other protest efforts with mass organisations into the weekend. The Community Self-Defence Coalition, in which Tempest members participate, is a key formation that coordinates LA’s rapid response efforts. Tempest’s LA branch members were actively involved in defence efforts during skirmishes across downtown LA, the pitched battle in the city of Paramount and rapid response efforts to repel ICE in the city of Pasadena. They compiled and recorded their experiences throughout the weekend, covering the first days of mobilisation. All photos are by the Tempest LA branch and friends. This piece was first published at <a href="https://tempestmag.org/">Tempest magazine</a>.
--------------------
FRIDAY 6 JUNE
The first day involved nearly a dozen raids near downtown Los Angeles, Sun Valley and North Hollywood neighbourhoods, and LA County suburbs, including Pomona. Emergency rallies were called and converged around the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. After dispersing protesters there, different law enforcement officers went over to the adjacent district of Chinatown to stage late night around 9pm. There was a lot of contradictory and confusing information spread across different protest chats throughout the night. At first, we were told that they were setting up for a night raid; later, word on the block was that they were setting up for Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan’s press conference at 7am the next morning. Dozens of FBI agents stationed in a parking lot in Chinatown on Hill St., later joined by Border Patrol, LAPD, and Homeland Security. Protesters quickly gathered to monitor and heckle them, soon outnumbering law enforcement, which also reinforced their numbers. Know Your Rights information was blasted on megaphones in English, Spanish, and Cantonese, as protesters informed local residents of their rights.
Things became more intense as armoured personnel carriers and additional law enforcement personnel poured in, although it was still unclear why they were staging in Chinatown. Some protesters, including bikers, tried to block vehicles from entering the lot. Some identified undercover officers and their vehicles on the protesters’ side and successfully heckled them to leave. Others followed various vehicles exiting the lot to figure out where they were going. Soon, law enforcement occupied the whole street beyond the lot to pressure the protesters out. Loud popping sounds started, with some claiming that they were sound cannons being blasted by the police. The pressure from protesters continued into midnight, after which all law enforcement retreated without explanation. There were no further reports of mass raids and Homan’s press conference the next day. (Homan later appeared on television the next afternoon to announce the deployment of the National Guard.)
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-1.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
SATURDAY 7 JUNE
On the second day, rapid responders rushed to the city of Paramount in the morning, located about a half hour drive south of LA, upon reports of an ICE raid at a Home Depot. Paramount developed into a war zone throughout the day. Paramount is a majority low-income and Latinx area, and one of LA’s key industrial regions. The organised left has little presence in this area, but the militancy seen on 7 June demonstrates the spontaneous power of Brown working-class youth in defending their communities. ICE cars were seen burning. Hundreds of law enforcement officers were deployed throughout Paramount, throwing tear gas and flash bombs as protesters fought back and the Home Depot barricaded itself for safety.
As the Paramount battle stretched on, supporters continued to respond to different reports of ICE raids across LA, as some continued to support detainees at the downtown detention centre. More people began gathering back at the detention centre early in the evening. Around 100-150 protesters were there around 7pm. LAPD gathered en masse to use tear gas and shoot pellets at protesters in this area between 8 and 10pm. Most of the street around the detention centre was cleared out and occupied by hundreds of LAPD officers. In the meantime, Homan confirms on national television that he’ll be federalising the California National Guard for deployment in LA, against Governor Gavin Newsom’s dissent. It was unclear that night what this meant or when exactly the Guard would arrive. The day-long battles in Paramount stretched west into the city of Compton, which was one of the last sites where militant mobilisation continued that day.
There were reported ICE sightings at probably six other locations throughout southern California but the majority of protest and state activity occurred primarily in the vicinity of the Home Depot in Paramount and Compton that went into the early morning Sunday, and again at the Downtown LA Metropolitan Detention Center where protesters had been gathered the entire day.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-2.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
SUNDAY 8 JUNE
LOS ANGELES
On 8 June, Angelenos woke to the news that over 2,000 National Guard had been deployed. A protest in the predominantly Latinx working-class Boyle Heights neighbourhood was planned by Centro CSO and other immigrant rights and local groups for the morning. Crowds had also already begun to gather back at the detention centre downtown.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-3.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Activists gathered at Mariachi Plaza to protest the ICE raids of the previous two days. Speakers included labour movement icon Dolores Huerta. Speakers generally emphasised not only the rights of immigrants but also applauded the courage and rapid response of the activists gathered, as well as the importance of showing the Trump administration that people will continue to fight back against his draconian methods. The gathering mobilised to march down 1st Street for 1.5 miles to the Federal Metropolitan Detention Center on Alameda Street where they met a larger crowd of activists that had been gathering from the previous two days. Within minutes of arrival, the authorities fired upon the crowd of protesters, presumably with only tear gas, and the front of the crowd began to disperse. There did not appear to be any serious injuries, though many seemed unprepared for tear gas, and some were adversely affected. The Centro CSO organisers, worried about crowd safety, encouraged those remaining from the Mariachi Plaza rally to return to Boyle Heights. Many of us stayed to record the events, in particular the fully militarised presence of local, state, and federal authorities, including the National Guard. I left soon afterward when the tear gas became too overwhelming.
The crowd at the detention centre remained at about 100-300 people for the next two hours and had not yet encountered further violence. Protesters stood off with the ~20 California National Guard members stationed at the rear of the building. Eventually, a squadron of ~15 LAPD cars arrived further down the road, pre-positioned to block one exit along the walled-in road. A large portion of the crowd then moved around the guarded door and went around the corner, escaping a potential kettle. The police formed a line around their vehicles and appeared to fully surround a portion of the protesters, but did not make arrests.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-4.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Around this time, a rally called by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) at the city hall nearby began to march toward the detention centre. It was unclear whether the march was part of the original rally plan or if the crowd spontaneously decided to march. This mass contingent arrived just in time to reinforce the surrounded protesters near the detention centre. As they arrived, the police were forced to retreat promptly. Thousands of protesters continued to flood the streets outside the detention centre throughout the afternoon and occupied the nearby intersection at Alameda and Temple. Some remained around the intersection while others continued to march. This contingent went through Little Tokyo back to the Federal Building.
At this point, the crowd was too large to be effectively organised. Some remained at the detention centre, others continued to march, while a smaller group occupied the freeway.
A formation of LAPD officers opposed the crowd of ~200 protesters, who kept a close distance from the line. The police continued to shoot volleys of less-lethal weapons into these different sites, though protesters remained steadfast for hours. Pro-Palestine slogans and clothing were not only ubiquitous, but many of those furthest in the front defending the protests from the police were wearing keffiyehs. We witnessed multiple people around us injured. Street medics helped many protesters tend to their injuries. The police soon declared unlawful assembly but were unable to fully sweep the intersection for hours. At one point, the police declared that they would begin arrests in a minute, but were halted by a protester’s car that slowly rolled through the intersection with a child sitting at the window, raising a Mexican flag with his fist up. The crowd protected them, and the sweeps were delayed for another half an hour.
After another stand-off, the protesters crossed over the median of the freeway, stopping the flow of traffic in the opposite direction. As soon as this happened, the police widened their line and began shooting flash bangs in the sky above the protesters on the freeway. Peaceful protesters were met with disproportionate state violence that increased with time, including being fired on with less-lethal guns from rooftops. Several Waymo automated cars were burned. Significant numbers of protesters remained in the streets at various points around downtown LA into the evening and after nightfall. They were forced off the freeway but continued to march to other locations. As the protesters’ numbers grew thinner, police aggression increased. By sunset, the remaining protesters were forced to construct makeshift barricades using benches and signs.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-5.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
PASADENA
In Pasadena, word got out early in the morning across rapid response chats that ICE and DHS agents were staying at three local hotels: the Westin, Dena Hotel, and the new AC Hotel. There were reports of ICE agents questioning hotel workers who were servicing the rooms. By noon, Unite Here and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network brought out more than one hundred people from Pasadena and Altadena to inquire about and protest ICE’s presence. Faith leaders, community organisations and politicians, including Mayor Victor Gordo, showed up afterwards, and the crowd swelled to several hundred. Speakers at the rally denounced the intimidation and the hotel’s collaboration with ICE as they profit from family separation.
Throughout the day, protesters marched and circled the block, vowing to stay until ICE left. Some of the ICE vehicles’ tires were damaged. The protest served as a rallying point for the community. Community organisations like AUSIIME and the pro-immigrant band Los Jornaleros del Norte kept spirits high throughout the day with chants, cumbia, and anti-ICE songs. After several hours of protests, local politicians who had been intermediating with management announced that ICE had been asked to leave the hotel, and the crowd erupted in jubilation. Still, protesters did not leave until the agents had checked out and continued waiting, anticipating any movement. Since the morning, workers had been informing the rally of potential ICE movements, and everyone anticipated the humiliating exit from the hotel. After fixing their popped tires under the hot sun, ICE agents began to exit swiftly from the parking structure where protesters waited for them at all exits. As vehicles swerved through the parking structure, they were chased out by triumphant protesters who celebrated their victory, chanting “Si se pudo!” (We did it!)
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-6.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
MONDAY 9 JUNE
Early in the morning, families of several workers (mostly women and youth) who were detained in Friday’s mass raid at Ambiance garment factory gathered for a press conference, assisted by the Garment Workers Center and other community organisations. A Tempest member assisted with security. The detained workers were the main providers in their families, and the families shared that they have not been able to hear from them yet. They called on ICE to free them, and to leave our communities. A group of over 100 people gathered to support them, including Palestinian and Palestine solidarity organisations, Indigenous organisations, progressive clergy, and other community nonprofits. The families also shared that Ambiance has still not released the workers’ owed wages to them, and a delegation of them went to the company offices after the press conference to demand these wages. There was no visible police presence or counter-protests, but many of us were informed throughout the event that ICE activity was beginning again in other parts of LA, including in Huntington Park, and the Fashion District again just a mile away from us. Many attendees went directly to the Grand Park rally to support David Huerta and SEIU right after.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-7.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Later that morning at 11am, there was a rally at Grand Park in downtown led by SEIU in support of SEIU California President David Huerta, who was detained for participating in the protest against the mass raids at the detention centre on Friday. There was a curiously light police presence at first, despite the clashes over the weekend. In addition to SEIU International and various locals, many other major unions were present, including AFSCME, UHW, LULAC, Teamsters, UNITE HERE!, ILWU, LIUNA, IBEW and IATSE. There were also representatives of various civic and community organisations, like Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), LAUSD, CARECEN, UCLA Labor Studies and LA County. The DSA-endorsed City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado was also present and spoke.
The general theme was that David Huerta’s arrest is also an injury to all of us. It was a demonstration of around 2,000 to 3,000 people that affirmed courage in the face of the federal presence sent by Trump. A band, Las Cafeteras, performed some songs like “La Bamba”, “If I Was President”, “Stand By Me”, which also asked the audience what they would change if they were president for a day. Prominent labour leaders spoke and affirmed labour’s role in the fight against fascism, including SEIU president April Verrett, Dolores Huerta, NAACP president David Johnson (who connected workers’ and civil rights, drawing on the Black struggle). Johnson powerfully declared that the Black struggle has taught him that saying nothing about the oppression of the most vulnerable would be an invitation for more abuses against everyone. Representatives from Justice for Janitors USWW, like Luis Fuentes, spoke about David Huerta’s labour bona fides.
But there was little emphasis on the need to build a resistance outside of the Democratic Party. Dolores Huerta emphasised nonviolence and the need for electoral strategies during the midterms, which was reaffirmed by the SEIU political policy director. Another policy representative spoke about the importance of forming coalitions with allies in other movements, emphasising the need for strength in numbers and solidarity.
Police presence and pressure began to ramp up toward the end of the rally, as a student walkout that morning converged at the nearby Federal Building. Hundreds of students and other community members began to join, and police vehicles from other cities, such as Vernon, Torrance and San Marino, appeared.
The Trump administration announced the deployment of Marines into LA around this time, as mass raids ramped up targeting many cities across Orange County, south of LA.
The situation remains highly fluid, and more protests are sure to occur in the coming days and weeks. There have already been reports of heightened ICE activity for the next 30 days. Tempest LA branch members will continue to participate and report on any resistance activities.
This piece was first published at <a href="https://tempestmag.org/">Tempest magazine</a>.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-8.jpg" alt="" /></figure>

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