u/DryDeer775

The following letter, signed “A. Lincoln” but without a return address or subject line, appeared in my email this morning. No sooner had I made a copy of the letter than it disappeared from my inbox. Despite its strange and unexplained origin, the signature demands that attention be given to the letter; and, for this reason, it is being made available to readers of the WSWS.

[Hope everyone will read the whole letter about conditions today form our today from the 16th US president]

"The thing itself is this. In my time, one man was permitted to own the body of another and to take, by the lash, the whole fruit of his labor. We abolished that ownership, and rightly, and I went to my death believing the work substantially done. I see now that I saw only the crudest form of an older thing. For there grew up beside the chattel, and outliving him, a system in which a few need not own the laborer’s body because they own the field, the forge, the rail, the mine, the roof above him and the tools in his hands—so that he must sell his days to them or not eat, and they keep the difference between what his labor makes and what they are pleased to return to him, and call the keeping by the name of profit, and the arrangement by the name of liberty. The whip is retired; the wage does the work of the whip, and is thought gentle because it draws no blood the eye can see. This is the cause of the present crisis, as slavery was the cause of mine: a form of exploitation, lawful, respectable, defended from every pulpit of wealth, and for that respectability the harder to name.

"From this root the rest grows as the branch from the trunk. Wealth so gathered cannot rest; it must seek to own the government framed to bridle it, for a government it does not own is a danger it will not abide. Beyond its borders, wealth so gathered must seek markets and matter beyond the sea, and so it sends the nation’s sons to make the world safe for its increase, and dresses the errand in the flag, and calls conquest by the name of defense. And the citizen, told each evening by instruments the wealthy own that he is free and that his unease is his own fault, grows used to it, and christens his custom peace. The plutocrat, the disreputable client in my house, the armies abroad, the people taught to mistrust their own discontent—these are not four troubles. They are one trunk and its branches."

“Get these people back what they want,” a bus driver said. “Meet the demands so we could move forward, because it’s just not fair. I think what they’re aiming for, they should get it. That’s it. Bottom line.

“We all should unite collectively. Do what we need to do to get done because that’s the only way it’s going to get done. And we collectively do it, you know, as a whole and stand on it and be consistent and mean it. You know, we move the city. The city don’t move us.”

“We all should unite”: New York bus drivers speak out in support of Long Island Rail Road strike

The banning of the docudrama reveals the depth of relationship now established between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-supremacist government and the murderous Zionist Netanyahu regime.

“We all should unite collectively. Do what we need to do to get done because that’s the only way it’s going to get done. And we collectively do it, you know, as a whole and stand on it and be consistent and mean it. You know, we move the city. The city don’t move us.”

No worker should be compelled to vote on—or live under—a contract they have not seen, have not read and have not had the time to study and discuss collectively.

Science magazine, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed publications in the world, has published an investigative report titled “Researching While Chinese,” detailing the Department of Justice (DOJ) persecution of Chinese researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) and Indiana University (IU). The report names the FBI operative at the center of every prosecution and exposes retaliation against IU Professor Roger Innes, a leading American plant biologist.

The strike can be won, but it depends on the degree of unity workers can build and their ability to act against interference from the union bureaucracy and the state. Transit workers have a history of defying anti-strike laws, which have always been deployed against every attempt to win fundamental rights, including in 1966, 1980 and 2005.

Transit workers also have a rich tradition of anti-capitalist politics, including Trotskyist transit workers Ed Winn and Edwin Soto. In 1980, Ed Winn was the only member of the TWU Local 100 executive board to oppose the union’s premature shutdown of the strike at the point where Mayor Ed Koch was on the verge of surrender.

"We bring revolutionary May Day greetings from the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the IYSSE in Sri Lanka. We deliver this speech jointly in Sinhala and Tamil as an expression of our fight for the unity of Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim workers, against the communal divisions on which the Sri Lankan ruling class has relied for nearly eight decades."

The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran launched on 28 February is deepening. The terror bombing and naval blockade of Iran, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have driven up oil prices globally, contributing to inflation, high unemployment and economic stagnation.

The right-wing Finnish government led by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo and President Alexander Stubb—members of the right-wing National Coalition Party (NCP)—has pursued a strategy of subservience to US militarism and support for war crimes, paid for by extensive cuts to social services and living standards at home.

Britain’s ruling elite is preparing an unprecedented crackdown in central London on Saturday, directed above all against opposition to the Gaza genocide.

The Metropolitan Police’s £4 million operation has the character of a military deployment. Alongside 4,000 officers, the force is placing armoured police vehicles on standby.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana on Thursday and met with Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, Interior Minister Lazaro Alvarez Casas and the head of Cuba’s intelligence services, according to statements made by a CIA official to The Miami Herald.z

The purpose of the trip, he said, was “to personally deliver President Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.”

The political significance of welcoming the CIA director to Havana cannot be overstated. The agency owes much of its nickname—Murder Inc.—to its record of organizing relentless terrorist attacks on Cuba.

The meeting took place in the shadow of the US attack on Iran that was launched less than three months earlier. Despite the brutality of the US onslaught, the Trump administration has failed to achieve its aims of overthrowing the Iranian government, destroying its military and gaining control of the Strait of Hormuz. 

Trump hoped to arrive in Beijing as the conqueror of Iran, ready to dictate terms to China with a stranglehold on its energy supplies. Instead, he was facing a geopolitical disaster, and he sought Xi’s aid in resolving the crisis created by the war.

The 2026 MV Hondius cruise ship outbreak represents a terrifying milestone in global epidemiology. As the first known shipborne Andes virus event in recorded history, the outbreak has already claimed three lives and scattered a highly lethal pathogen across multiple countries.

Hantaviruses belong to a family of RNA viruses that are naturally maintained and carried by wild rodents. While most hantaviruses are transmitted exclusively from animals to humans, the Andes strain is uniquely dangerous because it is the only hantavirus in the world with documented person-to-person transmission capabilities. This distinct biological property transforms the virus from a localized ecological hazard into a pathogen with profound global reach.

Workers at parts supplier Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan decisively voted down a second sellout tentative agreement Friday. According to United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 699, the contract went down by 73 percent to 27 percent. Production workers voted down the contract by a resounding 76 percent. Skilled trades workers also rejected the contract.

The contract rejection is a major victory for rank-and-file workers and represents a repudiation of the UAW bureaucracy that negotiated the sellout, which betrays the workers’ fundamental demands. The rejection took place in the face of fear-mongering and lies by local union officials, who falsely claimed that a strike would be “illegal” and suggested that workers could lose their jobs if they voted “no.”

Britain has entered a new stage of political crisis. Labour leader Keir Starmer’s premiership is on the verge of collapse—shaken by resignations and no-confidence letters, including from the arch-Blairite Health Secretary Wes Streeting—and now awaits the final trigger for an open leadership challenge.

To mount a socialist response, workers and young people must look past the media psychodrama that reduces politics to soap opera and personality clashes, and focus instead on the underlying realities driving the crisis.

The Starmer government’s crisis is the outcome of two intertwined, long-term processes: the global decline of British imperialism amid the convulsions of world capitalism, and the complete collapse of the Labour Party’s working class constituency.

In the nearly 30 years from 1979 to 2007, Britain had only three prime ministers. Two of them—Margaret Thatcher for the Conservatives and Tony Blair for Labour—served continuous 10-year terms. Since then, in less than twenty years, Britain has churned through seven prime ministers, with four—and now potentially five—coming in just the last four years.

In every case, the fall of a British prime minister has been precipitated by an international shock that exposed the brittleness of British imperialism’s global position and, in doing so, sharpened domestic class antagonisms at home.

Days after making a splash in the local Calgary media by unveiling a new $75 million state-of-the-art warehouse facility, Coke Canada Bottling unceremoniously axed a worker with 35 years at the company who was injured on the job—essentially crying poor.

Shawne Hopkins was terminated on the basis of the doctrine of “frustration of employment”—a legal term of which most workers are probably unaware. It can be invoked when there is no reasonable likelihood of an employee being able to return to work within a reasonable time after an unexpected situation occurs, such as an illness or injury.

The proposals, made at the May 8 Board of Governors meeting, amounts to the abolition of USPS as a public service, converting it openly into a for-profit model and setting the stage for its privatization.

Next month, The New School in New York—one of the most prominent ostensibly progressive academic institutions in the United States—plans to conduct mass layoffs of up to 20 percent of its full-time workforce. The cuts will fall on faculty as well as staff, across finance, IT, HR and support positions, as the administration implements a sweeping restructuring plan to eliminate a $48 million budget deficit.

On the evening of May 7, agents operating under the direction of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), together with university police, barred researchers from entering six rooms in a biology laboratory at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington, halting ongoing experiments and establishing a de facto police occupation of the facility.

The primary target was the laboratory of Distinguished Professor of Biology Roger Innes. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Innes has pioneered research on plant immune systems that holds the potential of increasing global crop yields and mitigating the need for toxic agricultural chemicals. The sudden closure of his workspace is the latest escalation in a campaign of terror against scientists of Chinese descent. The police-state operation is no longer limited to international researchers. It is now directed as well at senior American-born faculty.