South Asian confrontation escalates as Indian airstrikes hit inside Pakistan

Peter Symonds

The Indian government has provocatively escalated tensions with Pakistan after the Indian military struck targets inside Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and deep inside Pakistan itself shortly after midnight on Wednesday.

Rooftop of a mosque damaged by a suspected Indian missile attack near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan controlled Kashmir, on May 7, 2025. [AP Photo/M.D. Mughal]

The Indian defence ministry announced that nine targets had been struck but provided no details. It claimed that the attacks were “focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature,” targeting “terrorist infrastructure” and avoiding Pakistani military bases and facilities.

Without providing evidence, India has accused Pakistan of being behind the April 22 terrorist attack near Pahalgam in Indian-controlled Kashmir that killed 26 people and vowed retaliation.

The Pakistani government has flatly denied any involvement for the attack and offered a neutral investigation of the incident.

The airstrikes have deliberately inflamed one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints for war. The two nuclear-armed countries have already fought three wars over Kashmir which both claim. Now the conflict is intertwined with the US-led preparations for war with China, which has strong ties to Pakistan. As it has escalated its confrontation with Beijing, Washington has strengthened its military ties with New Delhi as its major strategic partner in South Asia.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has condemned the airstrikes as “cowardly attacks” by a “deceitful enemy” and vowed retaliation for carrying out “cowardly attacks.” “Pakistan has every right to give a robust response to this act of war imposed by India, and a strong response is indeed being given,” he said.

Pakistan claimed to have shot down at least five Indian air force jets. Its foreign affairs ministry said that the Indian aircraft had remained in Indian airspace and used “stand-off weapons” to carry out the attacks. According to Al Jazeera, the Pakistani military has already commenced heavy artillery fire along the Line of Control (LoC) separating Pakistan-held Azad Kashmir and Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. It claims to have destroyed an Indian infantry brigade headquarters.

Armed forces spokesman Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said India’s air force had “martyred innocent civilians, which includes women and children” in missile strikes near the cities of Muridke and Bahawalpur inside Pakistan, as well as in Bagh, Kotli and Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-held Kashmir. Eight people were killed, another 35 injured and two people are reported missing.

Among the dead were a child and two others who were killed in a strike on a mosque in Punjab.

The airstrikes followed nightly exchanges of small arms fire by Indian and Pakistani troops across the LoC over the past fortnight. Last night’s airstrikes are the first time since 2019 that India has attacked targets inside Pakistani territory, when its warplanes hit multiple locations after blaming Islamabad for a suicide car bombing that killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary troops. Moreover, the latest attacks on Ahmadpur East and Muridke in Pakistan’s Punjab province are the deepest inside Pakistan since the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war.

The attempts by New Delhi to downplay the severity of today’s strikes are belied by the bellicose response of India’s rightwing Hindu supremacist government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the April 22 terrorist attack. Since then, Modi and top government leaders have repeatedly threatened not just the perpetrators, but to smite the “masters of terror” and the “organizers”—a barely veiled threat against the Pakistani government and armed forces.

The Modi government has for the first time suspended its participation in the Indus Water Treaty threatening to cut off water for Pakistani towns and cities as well as agriculture. The Indus River Treaty signed in 1960 involved a complex sharing of water resources from the river system, on which Pakistan is heavily dependent, that has its ultimate source in China but flows through India.

In offhand remarks at the White House, US President Trump declared that the dangerous military escalation by India against Pakistan was “a shame.” He claimed to have just heard about the Indian airstrikes, adding: “They’ve been fighting for a long time. I just hope it ends very quickly.”

In reality, the Trump administration’s close relations and strategic partnership with India has only encouraged Modi to respond aggressively against Pakistan, exploiting the April 22 terrorist attack as the pretext. According to Indian officials, national security adviser, Ajit Doval, briefed Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the airstrikes immediately after they had taken place, but the Trump administration undoubtedly knew in advance that Indian retaliation was imminent.

On April 30, Rubio met with India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and denounced the “horrific terrorist attack” inside Indian-controlled Kashmir. While appealing to “de-escalate tensions,” Rubio nevertheless “reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to cooperation with India against terrorism”—remarks that only encouraged, not restrained, aggressive Indian retaliation.

The decades-long rivalry between India and Pakistan is a reactionary conflict that is rooted in the catastrophic 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India. Military conflict over Muslim-majority Kashmir erupted very rapidly after the Hindu ruler of the princely state opted, under pressure from New Delhi, to join with India.

Successive governments in India and Pakistan have relied on whipping up communal politics, in which the control of all Kashmir has been a key feature, as the means of dividing the working class and shoring up bourgeois rule. The ruling classes in both countries have trampled on the basic democratic rights of the Kashmiri people. India’s anti-democratic policies in Jammu and Kashmir only fueled the eruption of an armed insurgency from 1989, that has been manipulated by Pakistan, and resulted in India’s imposition of draconian police-state measures.

Tensions have only sharpened under Modi’s Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which in 2019 abolished the special, autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir and placed it more directly under the control of India’s central government.

Far from the latest airstrikes being “measured and non-escalatory,” the Indian government has embarked on a reckless military campaign aimed at undermining its longstanding regional rival, Pakistan. It was summed up in a jubilant post last night on X by Rajnath Singh, India’s defence minister, “Victory to Mother India.”

The great danger facing the working class, not only in South Asia but internationally, is that the escalating military confrontation between the two nuclear-armed states can draw in the US and China, along with other major powers, and become the flashpoint for a catastrophic global conflict.

Trump tariff war hits both China and US economies, threatening millions of jobs

Nick Beams

The impact of US President Trump’s tariff war against China is starting to show up in the economic data of both countries amid fears that much worse is to come in the months ahead.

On Wednesday, the US Commerce Department reported that GDP for the first quarter had contracted at an annual rate of 0.3 percent, largely as a result of companies trying to stock up on goods before the 145 percent tariff against China—a virtual economic blockade—comes into effect.

Incoming container ships line up outside the Port of Los Angeles as they wait for dock space. [AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes]

In China, official data showed a contraction in manufacturing activity and a slump in export orders to their lowest levels since the contraction due to COVID in 2022.

US GDP is calculated by subtracting imports from the total of government spending, exports, investment, and consumer spending. Imports for the first quarter surged by 41 percent, and the trade deficit hit a record high of $162 billion for March.

While the import surge was the main factor in the result, consumer spending showed signs of slowing, coming in at 1.8 percent growth, the smallest increase since mid-2023. Government spending also fell as the DOGE axe cut jobs and contracts.

Consumption demand, the main driver of US economic growth, is expected to slow further in the second quarter as Trump’s tariff hikes come fully into effect. Investment decisions by companies are being put on hold because of mounting economic uncertainty.

In a comment to the New York Times, Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist for the financial and insurance firm Nationwide, predicted worsening economic conditions.

“Once everything kicks in, we’ll have a slower economy, the labor market is slowing. Hiring has already stalled, and we expect the unemployment rate to start to rise.”

The chief economist at Moody’s, Mark Zandi, shared these sentiments in remarks to the Wall Street Journal.

The GDP report “probably overstates the economy’s weakness, but the economy’s weak,” he said, pointing to slower consumption spending and government cuts.

“If the administration can’t find an off-ramp on the tariffs soon… then I think we’re going to see a lot more negative GDP numbers ahead, and ultimately job losses.”

The sacking of 20,000 UPS workers is an indication of what is to come.

So far there are no signs of any significant easing of the economic war, the main target of which is China. In an interview on Tuesday to mark his 100 days in office, Trump acknowledged that the tariffs amounted to an embargo.

“That’s good,” he said. “They deserve it.”

“They were ripping us off like nobody has ever ripped us off. Almost every country in the world was ripping us off. They’re not doing that anymore.”

The administration has instituted a 90-day pause on the “reciprocal tariffs” against a wide range of countries to allow negotiations to take place. But all indications are that any lessening of the tariff for individual countries will be tied to an agreement that they act against China.

This is aimed at trying to overcome a perceived weakness in the US position. So far as exports to China are concerned—mainly grains and other agricultural products—China is likely to be able to find other sources of supply.

But there are few alternative sources of supply for the goods that the US imports from China, and, at least to some extent, China will be able to find other markets. Hence the push to ensure that barriers are put in place by third countries to shut off any escape route.

Beijing has stated repeatedly that there will be no negotiations with the US until the tariff hikes are withdrawn. President Xi Jinping has warned of a long battle and that China will “never kneel down” to Washington. The tariffs, however, are starting to have an effect.

The official purchasing managers’ index issued by China’s National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday dropped to 49 for April, down from 50.5 in March, with a level below 50 indicating a contraction.

The index for export orders dropped even more sharply to 44.7, its lowest level since December 2022, in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

The bureau said the decline in manufacturing activity was due to “sharp changes in the external environment.”

In a note to clients this week, Zichun Huang, China economist at Capital Economics, said the latest data “suggests that China’s economy is coming under pressure as external demand cools” and that steps by the government to pump money into the economy were “unlikely to fully offset the drag.”

Capital Economics, along with others, has forecast the Chinese economy will grow by only 3.5 percent this year, well below the government’s target of 5 percent.

Earlier this week, the Japanese financial firm Nomura Securities predicted that if Chinese exports to the US dropped by 50 percent, then 5.7 million workers would immediately lose their jobs, and the number would grow to 15.8 million as the effects spread.

Last year, China relied on exports for around one-third of its economic growth, with Goldman Sachs estimating that between 10 million and 20 million manufacturing jobs in China are dependent on exports to the US.

At the same time, the impact of the China embargo is showing up at US West Coast ports, posing risks for jobs.

The number of containers to arrive at Los Angeles is set to drop by more than 35 percent next week compared to the same period last year, and a quarter of the ships scheduled for May have been cancelled, according to Gene Seroka, the port’s executive director.

Based on conversations with companies, he told the New York Times that some of the 125,000 import companies which use the port, including big box retailers and home improvement firms, had halted nearly all their imports from China.

The situation is the same at the port of Long Beach, where the number of ships arriving from China dropped 38 percent this week from last week, and at least 30 ships scheduled in June have been cancelled.

In a report on the situation at the ports, the Times cited comments by Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, who said what was underway was a “pure demand destruction scenario.”

He indicated that if the downturn were sustained, the job consequences would go beyond port workers, extending to trucking and warehouse jobs, with “ripple effects for the broad economic community.”

In a research note issued last month, Torsten Slok, chief economist at the financial firm Apollo Global Management, said the fall in shipments from China could lead to “significant layoffs” in trucking, logistics, and retail in May.

Christmas is still some way off, but it is at this time of year that retail outlets place their orders for toys, Christmas trees, and decorations, the vast bulk of which come from China.

An article in the Times this week said that “alarm in the industry is palpable,” with some business owners consulting bankruptcy lawyers because they are simply unable to continue with 145 percent tariffs.

The article reported that in a survey of 410 toy companies, around 60 percent had cancelled orders, and around 50 percent said they would go out of business within weeks or months if the tariffs remained.

Ukraine, US sign critical minerals deal

Clara Weiss

President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky at Trump Tower, Sept. 27, 2024, in New York. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]

After tumultuous conflicts between Kiev and Washington, and between the imperialist powers in Europe and the US, the US and Ukraine signed a critical minerals deal on Wednesday.

The deal grants the US significant prerogatives in the exploitation of 57 mineral resources in Ukraine, including critical minerals, oil and gas. Shortly after the signing of the deal, on Thursday, the Trump administration announced that it had released $50 million in US military aid to Ukraine, ending the previous US hold on military assistance. 

Although watered down from the contract of naked neocolonial plunder that the US presented in February, the deal underscores the imperialist and predatory character of the war in Ukraine. Far from defending “democracy” and “liberty,” the conflict has always been rooted in the drive of the imperialist powers to assert control over the vast resources and riches of the entire former Soviet Union, including Ukraine and Russia. This is why they deliberately provoked the reactionary invasion of Ukraine by the Putin regime, seeking to make it the starting point for the imperialist carve-up of the entire region.

As the World Socialist Web Site analyzed in 2022, underlying the war was the rapacious quest of the imperialist powers for critical earth minerals that are vital to the functioning of the modern economy, especially the production of microchips and the development of the most advanced technologies, such as AI and electric vehicles. The vast majority of the extraction and processing of critical minerals in the world today is taking place in China, which is the principal target of the war preparations of US imperialism.

It is in this context that the raw material resources of the former Soviet Union, including but not only in Russia and Ukraine, have acquired strategic significance for the imperialist powers. In addition to significant holdings of raw materials like oil, gas and gold, both Russia and Ukraine have large known deposits of critical minerals, such as lithium and titanium. 

Cloaked in the language of “human rights” and “democracy” under the Biden administration, the Trump administration now openly upholds these predatory interests as the driving force of US foreign policy.

In contrast to the February draft, which would have given the US full ownership and rights to the extraction of all of Ukraine’s raw materials, the signed deal provides for the formation of a “Joint Reconstruction Investment Fund” with equal representation from the US and Ukraine. For the first 10 years, all revenues will be directed toward the “reconstruction” of Ukraine. But US companies will have the first right to invest in and purchase any projects initiated by this fund.

Any further US military assistance to Ukraine will count as a contribution to the fund. For this deal, the US has dropped earlier demands by Trump that Ukraine “repay” all the military aid the US has provided to Ukraine so far, an estimated $67 billion. As in the past, the US has refused to mention any “security guarantees” for Ukraine in the deal.

Ukraine will have to use 50 percent of all revenue generated from new licenses for oil, gas and critical minerals to finance its participation in this Fund. 

Whereas the February draft would have given the US exclusive rights to the extraction of Ukraine’s minerals, the signed deal mentions EU membership for Ukraine as an option and allows for renegotiations of conditions “in good faith” to allow Ukraine to abide by potential contractual obligations to the EU. 

The draft in February had triggered angry responses by the European imperialist powers, which fear being sidelined in the plunder of Ukraine. Like the American ruling class, the European bourgeoisie, especially in Germany, France and Britain, has invested billions in the conflict with Russia in Ukraine in order to secure its “right” to the vast raw material resources of the region. To rival the US bid for Ukraine’s raw materials and secure deposits for the European bourgeoisie, the EU in February initiated negotiations about a “win-win partnership” with Kiev.

Notwithstanding a vague nod to the interests of Germany, France and other European imperialist powers, in the language of the deal, it was clearly struck in a successful effort to preempt their moves to get a hold of the booty. The US-Ukraine agreement stipulates that “notwithstanding any new legislation of Ukraine or amendments to legislation of Ukraine that may be adopted in the future,” the US and American companies will “receive treatment no less favorable than required by this Agreement.”

This “treatment” ensures that there will be no taxes, tariffs, duties, deductions or withholdings of any kind to the profits made by US corporations in the extraction of Ukraine’s raw materials. 

Nominally, Ukraine retains full ownership and control over its resources and can decide who will extract what and where. But, from the standpoint of the working class, this “independence” is a fiction. Ukraine is ruled by a criminal oligarchy that, like its Russian counterpart, has emerged out of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s destruction of the Soviet Union, carried out hand in glove with the imperialist powers. Since then, the oligarchs in Ukraine, as in Russia, have amassed enormous amounts of wealth by plundering state assets and selling off the country’s resources to imperialist countries.

Thus, by virtue of its entire socio-economic basis and history, the Ukrainian oligarchy is intrinsically tied to the imperialist powers, between which it constantly maneuvers and on whose behalf it has sent hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to the slaughter. While the deal may provide the oligarchs with a basis to siphon off parts of the profits from the extraction of raw materials for their own enrichment, at its core, it is the pseudo-legal basis for the neocolonial exploitation of the country’s resources.

As in many colonial forays in the past, its objective basis is highly tenuous. A study by the Canadian NGO SecDev in 2022 estimated that the worth of Ukraine’s critical mineral deposits at $12 trillion, figures that have been echoed by NATO politicians since. Yet the vast majority of them are undeveloped, and many experts cast doubt on the envisioned “critical minerals bonanza” in Ukraine.

Javier Blas, an energy and commodities columnist for Bloomberg, noted on Twitter/X:

It’s not the first time that the US has gotten its geology wrong in a war zone. Back in 2010, the US announced it had discovered $1 trillion of untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including some crucial for electric-car batteries, like lithium. It was utter fantasy. … So does Ukraine have some mineral riches? Yes. It does have large deposits of iron ore and coal, neither of which are strategically important from a global perspective. Before the war, Ukraine produced just a bit more iron ore than countries like the US, Canada and Sweden. ... But the key is that Ukraine doesn’t have any commercial deposits. Almost universally, the documents found online mistake (small) accumulations of some rare-earth-bearing minerals as equating with a commercial mine. They aren’t the same.

Moreover, an estimated 50 percent of all of Ukraine’s mineral resources are now in territories controlled by Russia. They no doubt feature prominently in the current US-Russian negotiations. 

The ravages of war will further complicate any extraction of raw materials. After more than three years of war, Ukraine is now the most mined country in the world. Estimates suggest that, as of late 2024, between 25 and 30 percent of the country’s territory—roughly 174,000 square kilometers—are contaminated with millions of landmines and other explosives. At least 413 people have lost their lives because of landmines since 2022. The heavy mining has already severely undermined Ukraine’s agriculture, which has lost arable land the size of Belgium as a result. It will inevitably pose significant obstacles to the extraction of raw material resources of any kind.

Anti-migrant Reform UK makes major gains in elections in England

Robert Stevens

The far-right Reform UK made major gains in the Thursday’s elections in Britain at the expense of both the ruling Labour Party and opposition Conservatives.

Reform, led by Nigel Farage, won the majority of seats in local elections in England and won the parliamentary by-election for the Runcorn and Helsby constituency in northwest England—formerly considered one of the safest Labour seats.

Nigel Farage addressing Reform UK rally during the General Election campaign at Trago Mills, Devon, June 2024 [Photo by Owain.davies - Own work / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The seat became vacant when Labour MP Mike Amesbury stood down after being convicted of assaulting a man who he punched repeatedly in the street.

Elections were contested across 24 local authorities and 1,641 council seats; and for seats on 14 county councils and eight unitary authorities in England. Six mayoral elections were held, including inaugural mayor contests in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire.

Reform UK won Runcorn and Helsby by just six votes (12,645 to 12,639) but slashed Labour’s majority of almost 14,700 at the general election held in July last year. The narrowest margin of victory in a by-election since the war was therefore achieved due to a 17 percent swing to Reform on a turnout of 46 percent. Reform also picked up votes from the Conservatives to win the Runcorn seat—with the Tories share of the vote falling by nearly 9 percent from the 2024 general election.

Local elections, held on a rotating basis, were mainly in Conservative held seats that were last contested in 2021, when the Tories were in power under Boris Johnson. Around 1,000 of the seats (957) in the local election were being defended by the Tories, with just 297 being defended by Labour and 224 by the Liberal Democrats.

Reform won most seats taking an average of around 10 percent above other parties. With 20 of 23 councils declaring results by Friday evening, Reform had taken eight, winning 635 seats. The Tories lost 15 councils, taking just 300 seats—a fall of 633. Labour lost one council as it took just 88 seats—a fall of 180. The Liberal Democrats won three councils.

Reform won the mayoralties in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire. The party’s Tory defector candidate Andrea Jenkyns, with a huge majority of nearly 40,000 votes, was elected Greater Lincolnshire mayor, and Reform also took Lincolnshire council wiping out a 38 seat Tory majority. Giving vent to Reform’s anti-immigrant agenda, Jenkyns said of asylum seekers in her victory speech, “I say no to putting people in hotels… Tents are good enough for France, they should be good enough for here in Britain.”

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Reform UK mayoral candidate Andrea Jenkyns look towards the media during their election campaign in Scunthorpe, England, April 29, 2025 [AP Photo/Darren Staples]

Reform also took Kent, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire councils.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was partially shielded by contesting fewer seats but still proved itself to be massively unpopular after having enforced cuts to pensioners income and £5 billion in welfare cuts with Starmer’s own ratings falling to a record low. Such is the hatred for Starmer that party strategists advised him not to visit Runcorn to campaign for Labour’s candidate.

As well as losing Runcorn, Labour suffered huge losses on Durham Council to Farage. Labour had run the northeast council for almost a century until 2021. With Durham under no overall control, Reform managed to capture the 50 seats needed to take the council (taking 65 in total), with Labour winning just four. An ecstatic Daily Mail described Durham, located in a former coal mining region, as the “spiritual home of the labour movement”.

Reform more than consolidated the gains it made in last July’s General Election in which Farage’s party won over 4 million votes and 14 percent of the poll. Due to Britain’s undemocratic first past the post system, this translated into just five MPs in a 650 seat Parliament. Just prior to the local elections, however, it was polling as the first party nationally on around 26 points, ahead of Labour on 24 and the Tories on 21.

Based on the local election results, Sky News estimated that Reform’s national share of the vote in a general election would reach 32 percent, well ahead of Labour on 19 percent and the Tories on 18 percent.

While the official policy of Kemi Badenoch’s Tories and the Reform leadership is that they will not form a coalition at a national level, with Farage deriding the Tories as a “waste of space”, the parliamentary arithmetic now points to a Reform UK/Tory coalition and the wipeout of the Starmer government at the next election.

Former Tory cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg told the World at One on Friday, “In terms of policy, there’s very little difference between the Conservative party and Reform. It’s basically a matter of personality… I think we need to work together. … conservatism is having a fantastic 24 hours.”

Reform originates in Farage’s earlier UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party (which became Reform UK in 2021). It has only been able to make a breakthrough due to the abandonment of any defence of the working class by Labour and the trade unions.

This has created fertile ground for Farage to win a hearing—including among a layer of mainly older workers in former industrial heartlands—based on an appeal to social despair being channeled into scapegoating migrants for the decimation of housing, education and the National Health Service.

Labour and the Tories share much of the anti-immigration platform of Reform, with Labour boasting of its “successes” keeping out migrants and even using Reform’s turquoise branding. But Farage’s party continually insists that only it is serious about slashing migration. He called in the election campaign for a new Department of Deportations to be created. His agenda is constantly promoted by a filthy tabloid media, keeping a daily tally of how many “illegal” migrants get to the UK on small boats and denouncing Labour’s policies, as did the Express this week, as “migration madness”.

Reform UK are openly aping the fascist US President Donald Trump, who Farage counts as a friend having spoken at Trump rallies and attending his inauguration in January. One of Reform’s slogans is “Make Britain Great Again”. On Thursday, Farage announced that he would end Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in any council Reform won, and reiterated his call for a Trump/Elon Musk-style Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in Britain.

Nigel Farage, the then leader of the Brexit Party speaking at a Donald Trump campaign rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport in Goodyear, Arizona, October 2020 [Photo by Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0]

But not only does Labour fuel anti-migrant sentiment. Its pro-business agenda and refusal to put forward anything whatsoever to ameliorate massive social hardship, with the cost of living at unbearable levels, allows Reform to portray migration as the root of all evil.

Jeremy Corbyn’s betrayal of the mass movement that backed him as Labour leader—centred on demands to end austerity and war and to kick out Labour’s Blairites—put Starmer, a right-wing man of the state, at the party’s head—paving the way for his government’s savage welfare cuts, warmongering and anti-migrant policies.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) campaigned in the local elections via their Stand Up to Racism campaign, declaring that it was “so important” that they “labelled Reform UK a racist party and campaigned against the myths about immigration.” 

But while the SWP raised the “need for a left alternative at the ballot box that could mobilise breaking with Labour to the left,” those they say should lead this project—Corbyn and the trade union leaders—have no intention of leading any movement against Starmer. Indeed, the pseudo-left’s recent Summit of Resistance, with Corbyn the main draw, specifically ruled out the formation of any political party to challenge Labour “from the left”.

Jeremy Corbyn speaking at the Summit of Resistance

Reform UK have filled the political vacuum this creates. Its rise belatedly mirrors already far advanced developments in major European countries, as evidenced by the rise of the fascist Alternative For Germany and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France.

Teamsters financial documents show record income, 213 officials making $200,000 or more a year

Alex Findijs

Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien giving a contract campaign update, July 1, 2023. [Photo: Teamsters]

The 20,000 layoffs at UPS are the latest in massive attacks on the working class with the support of the union bureaucracy. Since the passage of a new UPS contract in 2023 on the basis of lies, tens of thousands of jobs have been destroyed through the so-called “Network of the Future” restructuring, with the guilty silence of the Teamsters union.

Their role in the layoffs express the hostility of the bureaucrats to workers they claim to represent. This is not the result of bad policies but of social interests. This has drawn it into alignment with the extreme right against the working class. Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien, elected four years ago as a bogus “reform” candidate, is one of many top union officials openly backing Trump, especially his tariff policies which will put countless Teamsters out of a job and lead to war.

These social interests were exposed in a recently published annual financial reports for the Teamsters for 2024. The Teamsters bureaucracy sits upon a treasure chest of nearly $650 million dollars, which it uses almost exclusively to pay itself exorbitant salaries and benefits.

These documents demonstrate that the bureaucracy is an unreformable institution that must be swept away by a rebellion of the rank-and-file to return power to the shop floor and seize back control over the immense financial resources stolen from it.

Documented assets of the Teamsters International is the highest it has been in at least 25 years. At $650 million dollars in 2024, the Teamsters bureaucracy holds immense wealth in the form of financial and real estate assets, not even including the assets of various local unions.

Annual income for the Teamsters is also the highest in decades, at $375 million. Of this sum, $215 million is generated from member dues, at an average of $172 a year per member. A further $120 million was made from the sale of financial assets to fund the purchase of additional assets, primarily Collective Trust Funds, which are typically used in retirement accounts.

This is what the bureaucracy is preoccupied with, not defending its members but shuffling assets around to maximize benefits for itself.

The rank-and-file received just $23 million back in strike benefits. The rest was largely consumed by the bureaucracy for General Overhead ($29 million), Representational Activities ($61 million), Union Administration ($20 million), and employee benefits ($43 million). Distributed among these categories are employee salaries and other disbursements totaling $58 million. This means that the bureaucracy consumes a total of $153 million just for its own salaries, benefits and activities, or 71 percent of member’s dues payments.

In the documents there are 655 people listed as officers or employees of the Teamsters headquarters, placing the total average spending for each employee at $233,587. This does not include the additional income union officials may make from their locals, which can have assets of their own in the tens of millions.

It is not surprising then that the Teamsters have increased the number of people making $200,000 a year or more from 160 in 2023 to 213 in 2024. This “200k Club” is monitored by the message board T-Union Link, which publishes an annual list of officials making $200,000 or more in total. Among this list are 30 officials making more than $300,000 a year and three making more than $400,000 a year, including Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who made $431,000 in 2024.

This level of income places the 200k Club members in the top 6 percent of American society. Figures like Sean O’Brien make enough to be in the top 1 percent of income earners.

O’Brien’s Teamsters United slate of candidates for 2026, backed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, is full of 200k Club members.

• Fred Zuckerman, who is running for General Secretary Treasurer and who has caucused with the TDU, makes $391,327 a year.

• Juan Campos, running for general Vice President, makes $311,695.

• Matt Taibi, running for Eastern Region Vice President, makes $256,044.

• Thomas Gesuladi, also running for General Vice President, makes $456,638, second highest in the bureaucracy.

The list goes on, filled with long-time bureaucrats who make several times what a typical Teamster makes every year.

While these bureaucrats gorge themselves on members’ dues money, they allow thousands of Teamsters to lose their jobs. This includes the 22,000 workers at freight company Yellow who lost their jobs in 2023 when the company went under, and the continuing barrage of layoffs at UPS.

At UPS, warehouses have been closed all over the country. This includes the recent closure of the Swan Island hub In Portland, which has been hotbed of opposition. Over 200 workers will lose their jobs upon closure and another 700 will see their jobs threatened when the upgrades are complete.

These layoffs are sweeping across UPS, with the company firing 10,000 people in middle management in preparations for automating 200 locations, setting the stage for mass layoffs. The “Network of the Future” restructuring is using automation to destroy as much as 80 percent of inside jobs.

The treachery of the bureaucracy rooted both in social interests and history. Over the past 50 years the rapid globalization of the world economy has rendered the program of national reform untenable. To defend its social interests the bureaucracy has turned from class compromise to class collaboration, subordinating the unions to the interests of capitalism and turning deeper into support for nationalism and war.

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien is emerged as a top supporter of Trump since his speech at the Republican National Convention last year. He has given extensive support to Trump’s Labor Secretary pick, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, calling her the “only choice” in an interview with PBS. He has said that he speaks with Trump on the phone “three to four times a month” and praised Trump for “making certain that working people, especially union people, were taken care of.” O’Brien’s “union people” in the bureaucracy are certainly taken well care of.

He has also given public praise to fascist Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s rants against transgender people and foreign companies and has given tacit support for Trump’s trade war policies, joining other union leaders in promoting the illusion that tariffs will bring back manufacturing jobs to the US.

This is part of a broader shift, involving those hailed by the pseudo-left as “reform” candidates only a short time ago in the front rank. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has been very vocal in his support for the tariffs, falsely claiming that the tariffs will restore jobs in the auto industry while advertising the UAW’s services to the American state as a buttress for American war manufacturing, invoking the UAW’s role during the Second World War as the “arsenal of democracy.”

Both dockworker unions, the International Longshoreman Association (ILA) on the east coast and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on the west coast, have thrown their support behind trade war policies which will cause the ports to grind to a halt and lead to mass layoffs spreading through the country and the world.

The union bureaucracy is not simply mistaken on Trump’s policies, they are making a conscious political decision to line up behind his policies for global trade war, and eventually imperialist war. They support the tariffs, not because they will bring back jobs (which they will not), but because they support the plans to consolidate economic forces in North America under US dominance in preparations for world imperialist war. The bureaucracy’s social interests are tied to the profitability of the national capitalist system and they see Trump’s policies as essential to defending and bolstering their social position.

More than 5,000 doctors strike in New Zealand

Tom Peters

About 5,500 doctors held a 24-hour nationwide strike in New Zealand on May 1 in protest against a pay offer of just 1.5 percent, spread over two years. This would be a major pay cut in real terms, with annual inflation at 2.6 percent for the year to March.

Striking doctors and supporters in Auckland [Photo: Mountain Tui/Facebook]

It was the first ever full-day strike by senior doctors in the country’s public hospitals, called by the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS). It follows strikes last year by thousands of junior doctors and by tens of thousands of nurses, and repeated strikes this year by medical laboratory workers.

The doctors’ strike coincided with strikes by 370 perioperative nurses at Auckland City Hospital, in protest over understaffing, and by nearly 1,000 home support workers employed by Access Community Health, who have received no pay increase for nearly two years. The unions involved—the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) and the Public Service Association (PSA)—limited these strikes to just two hours.

These actions reflect widespread opposition to the right-wing National Party-led coalition government’s intensifying assault on the public health system.

The day before the doctors’ strike, Health NZ confirmed that it has axed 540 jobs from its IT department, reducing its staffing by about a third. This will place further pressure on public hospitals’ antiquated computer systems.

Hospitals are being instructed to find hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings and are leaving vacant positions unfilled. According to the ASMS, the vacancy rate for senior medical officers across the country is 12 percent, but in some areas it is more than 40 percent.

Health Minister Simeon Brown said he was “disappointed” with the strike. He cynically told the media that “an estimated 4,300 procedures such as hip operations, knee operations, cataract removals and critical specialist assessments would be delayed as a result of this strike.”

In fact, the austerity measures imposed by his government—and the previous Labour Party-led government—have produced the crisis of unmet need. According to Newsroom, “The waitlist for elective procedures sat at 76,677 at the end of September, with 30,173 waiting for more than four months and 2,159 waiting for more than a year.”

One News reported that 200,000 people are currently waiting to receive a specialist assessment, with long wait times often leading to serious harm. Doctor Allan Moffitt told the outlet: “I have a patient who had cancer and I could tell that it was a serious type of cancer. Her referral took over six months to be seen.”

Emergency departments are frequently filled above capacity, resulting in significant delays for urgent cases. Newsroom reports that data for 2024 shows ambulances “waited 35 minutes, on average, to hand patients over to hospitals.”

One doctor wrote in the r/newzealand Reddit forum that, for them, the strike was “about retaining colleagues so that work isn’t utter misery. We are haemorrhaging specialists at our hospital, and with each resignation, there’s more strain on those who stay.”

Striking Wellington physician Andrew Davies told Radio NZ the staffing crisis was the major issue: “We’ve got vacant jobs that we’re not allowed to advertise. It’s lies that they’re not getting rid of front-line staff.”

In response to the crisis, the government is outsourcing thousands of procedures to private hospitals, further undermining the public system and paving the way for privatisation.

More budget cuts are being prepared. Finance Minister Nicola Willis revealed on April 29 that in response to the deteriorating economic outlook—the US trade war targeting China could trigger a global recession—the government will slash new spending in this year’s budget from the previously announced $NZ2.4 billion to just $1.3 billion.

This will be the smallest spending increase in a decade. Treasury officials previously stated that $2.5 billion in new spending was the minimum required just to meet the growing cost of delivering services.

The opposition Labour Party’s criticism of the government’s cuts is thoroughly hypocritical. The previous Labour-led government oversaw a worsening crisis in the health system, including expanding waiting times for surgery and an effective wage freeze, which prompted strikes by nurses, midwives, doctors and other workers. Labour’s decision in 2022 to remove all restrictions on the spread of COVID-19 led to thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of hospitalisations, placing extraordinary pressure on hospitals.

Labour supports the government’s plan to double military spending from 1 to 2 percent of gross domestic product, which will be funded at the expense of health, education and other essential programs. The government has pledged an extra $12 billion for defence over four years to further integrate New Zealand into US-led imperialist war plans.

Workers also confront a trade union bureaucracy that is enforcing government cuts and preventing an effective, unified struggle against austerity. The various health unions have ensured that different sections of workers remain isolated from each other, with strikes limited to a day or less.

It has been more than five months since more than 30,000 nurses struck after rejecting a 1.5 percent pay offer, with the dispute still unresolved. The NZNO is seeking to wear down its members and persuade them to accept a sellout.

The PSA is demanding that even more money be spent on the military, while the union collaborates in imposing redundancies across multiple government departments.

The ASMS returned to negotiations with Health NZ the day after the doctors’ strike. The government agency has requested facilitated bargaining by the Employment Relations Authority.

The union’s Sarah Dalton signaled that the union leadership is backing away from its claim for a 12 percent pay increase. She told the New Zealand Herald: “It may not be that we achieve 12 percent, but if we can’t achieve better than what is on offer at the moment, we will not be able to settle this.”

Global explosion of military spending and the struggle against imperialist war

Jordan Shilton

Airmen with the 436th Aerial Port Squadron use a forklift to move 155 mm shells ultimately bound for Ukraine on April 20, 2022 at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]

The urgency of this perspective was underscored by the release this week of a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), documenting a staggering $2.7 trillion in global military spending in 2024.

Over a third of global military spending was accounted for by American imperialism, with Washington spending $997 billion on war during 2024, the last year of the Biden administration. The figures also revealed dramatic increases in war budgets in Germany (to $88.5 billion) and Japan (to $55.3 billion), increases of 28 percent and 21 percent in a single year, respectively. Germany rose from the seventh-largest military spender in 2023 to the fourth-largest last year.

The US-led NATO alliance spent over $1.5 trillion, or 55 percent of the global total. This is 10 times more than the $149 billion allocated by Russia, which is being targeted by the imperialists for plunder in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The surge in military spending has been relentless over the past decade, rising by over $1 trillion, from the $1.67 trillion total in 2015. But this is only a down payment. The imperialist powers have unveiled further huge increases to their war budgets with the aim of ensuring their share of the spoils in the new redivision of the world among the major powers.

US President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposal released Friday calls for a 13 percent increase for the Pentagon, to $1.01 trillion. To help fund this gargantuan sum, Trump plans to slash the education budget by 12 percent and impose massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with other critical social programs.

In Europe, Germany has committed €1 trillion ($1.13 trillion) to prepare for war: a €500 billion “special fund” to ensure social infrastructure—like roads, bridges and hospitals—is being readied for military use; and €500 billion to procure military equipment. The €500 billion for military equipment equals 11 percent of Germany’s GDP, more than the 8.6 percent of GDP that German war credits amounted to during the first year of World War I. Hitler only reached a comparable level of military spending in 1938, after his Nazi regime had been rearming feverishly for five years and just one year before the beginning of the Second World War.

The vast growth of military budgets promises handsome profits for arms manufacturers—the modern-day merchants of death—and the financial oligarchy. The top 100 global arms manufacturers recorded total sales of $632 billion in 2023, $317 billion of which were accounted for by US producers.

Germany’s Rheinmetall, which supplied the Nazi regime with weaponry during World War II, saw a staggering 36 percent growth in sales in 2024 and expects a further 25-30 percent growth this year. Rheinmetall suggests that an increase of military spending by the NATO powers to 3.5 percent of GDP—a goal endorsed by the German, French and British governments—would boost orders by “up to €400 billion” by 2030.

All of the imperialist powers claim their military expenditures are purely for defensive purposes, with budgets designated as “defense spending.” This is a grotesque lie. Whether in Washington, Berlin, London, Paris or Tokyo, the ruling elites are arming themselves to the teeth to advance their predatory economic and geostrategic interests by military means against their rivals and nominal “allies” in every corner of the world.

As for Russia and China, whose regimes desperately seek an accommodation with the imperialist powers, they deploy military sabre-rattling and reactionary nationalism to push for a deal with imperialism and defend their “right” to exploit the working class in their own countries.

The explosive growth in military spending over the past decade has gone hand in hand with the eruption of imperialist wars for control over raw materials, markets, pools of labour and spheres of influence around the world. In 2014, the US and Germany orchestrated a fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev to topple the pro-Russian president and bring Ukraine directly under imperialist control, a process that provoked Moscow’s invasion in 2022 and the US-NATO war on Russia.

Ten years on, Washington, led by the fascist-minded Trump, is escalating conflicts on multiple fronts in what is rapidly developing into a Third World War. In addition to the ongoing war aimed at subjugating Ukraine, Russia and the entire Eurasian landmass to the interests of American capital, Washington is openly preparing for war with China in the Asia-Pacific to prevent its economic rise.

The latest SIPRI report explicitly pointed to the 2022 US National Defense Strategy as a driver for sharp military spending increases over recent years. That document described China as “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security” and was released just two weeks after the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, which pledged to defeat Russia and China in the coming “decisive decade.”

In the Middle East, Washington’s determination to secure its unchallenged hegemony over the energy-rich region has led it to back Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Washington and Berlin supplied tens of billions of dollars of weapons to the Zionist regime, allowing it to expand its bloody onslaught into Lebanon, where it killed and maimed tens of thousands, and launch strikes on Iran, the main regional target for US imperialism.

In just the first month of a savage bombing campaign against the Iranian-aligned Houthis in Yemen begun by Trump in March, the US has reportedly expended $1 billion in munitions and military resources.

The European imperialists increasingly view their former US ally as an adversary and have no intention of being sidelined by Washington in the struggle for global dominance. Recognizing that Trump’s “America first” foreign policy means the end of the transatlantic relationship that dominated the post-war period, the European powers are all stepping up rearmament drives so they can wage war independently of the United States.

This process will sharply exacerbate class conflict. Across the European Union, which recently pledged that its 27 member states would commit an additional €800 billion to war spending, some 93 million people, or 21 percent of the population, were living in poverty during 2024.

The financial oligarchies that dominate official political life in every imperialist country intend to impose the burden of militarism and war on the backs of the working class.

To this end, governments are gutting public spending and all social services and establishing dictatorial forms of rule to suppress popular opposition to imperialist war. The trade unions are whipping up the nationalist jingoism used by the ruling class to mobilise workers for war and enthusiastically promoting the conversion of civilian manufacturing into military production.

Trump’s announcement of further military spending increases has been accompanied by his relentless push to erect a presidential dictatorship in the US, lay off hundreds of thousands of federal workers and close entire government departments.

In Germany, the resurgence of military spending by over 80 percent in the past decade has taken place as levels of poverty and inequality have spiked. The ruling elite has systematically rehabilitated fascism in the form of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and budgets for healthcare have been slashed to the bone.