Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Thirty percent of US corporations planning holiday season layoffs
By some measures, this is the biggest wave of job cuts since the 2008–2009 recession. Last month’s report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that 1.1 million layoffs had been announced by US employers by the end of October this year. The November report is expected later in the week.*****
Corporations are using rapidly developing automation and artificial intelligence technology to eliminate vast swaths of the workforce, imposing the cost of the developing economic crisis on the backs of the working class. This crisis is driven by a combination of out-of-control speculative bubbles, including AI itself, and trade war measures worldwide that are being spearheaded by the Trump administration.
The picture that emerges is of a sweeping redistribution of wealth from a large majority of the population, including the working class and more economically vulnerable sections of the middle class, to the oligarchy and the wealthiest layers of society. It is the result of a policy of class warfare that finds its most direct expression in Trump’s ongoing plans for dictatorship.
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A majority of people are reporting severe economic distress during the holidays. A WalletHub study found that 85 percent will spend the same or less than last year.
Nevertheless, Adobe found that total spending is up 7.1 percent to $137 billion so far this year. A separate study by BMO bank found that Americans will spend around $2,800 during the holiday season, a 60 percent increase from last year.
This apparent discrepancy is accounted for by two factors. The first is the financing of spending through debt. “Buy now pay later” purchases increased by 9.0 percent, according to the same Adobe study. A survey commissioned by Beyond Finance found that one in three expects to slip into debt and that two-thirds say it is impossible to know how much to “safely” spend due to financial uncertainty. Most have overspent or expect to overspend, with “many … putting expenses on their credit cards (54 percent), pulling from their savings (21 percent) or using buy-now, pay-later plans (20 percent).”
The second factor is that declining spending by the vast majority is being offset by huge increases among the super rich, who are increasingly driving consumer spending. Reports refer to a “K-shaped” holiday economy, a reference to extreme polarization.
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This inequality has global dimensions. Gentleman’s Journal in Britain writes: “if you’re feeling the fiscal pinch this season, spare a thought for the uber-wealthy, who will be splashing out upwards of £1 million on escaping to the perfect, premium bolthole for Christmas. Whether they’re chartering a superyacht, commandeering a whole castle, or enjoying their own slice of splendid isolation on a private island … the people who have it all flaunt it at the most wonderful time of the year.”
The tech boom has produced a spectacular rise in luxury real estate. In San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country, the “artificial intelligence boom has reignited demand for high-end homes among buyers cashing in on soaring startup valuations,” with one analyst comparing it to a car accelerating to 100 miles per hour (162 kph). The city has seen a surge among home buyers from the AI industry from around 15 to 25 percent from the third to the fourth quarter this year.
“The ultrarich have shown renewed faith in the city,” Bloomberg writes. “Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs paid a city record $70 million for a home last year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman assembled a compound on Russian Hill, paying $14 million in January for three lots next to the estate he bought in 2020 for $27 million.”
One local realtor told Bloomberg, without a hint of irony: “Nob Hill was deader than a doornail. ... You could get a condo for $800 or $900 a square foot. Now it’s $1,200.” The latter figure for a single square foot is more than double the monthly rent paid by elderly resents at the Leland House in downtown Detroit, who are being forced out of their homes under threat of a utility shutoff only weeks before Christmas.
2. A top-level warning of heightened global financial risks
The combination of record levels of government debt and the involvement of speculative capital in its financing is presenting “new financial stability challenges,” according to the Bank for International Settlements.
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One is reminded of the famous passage in the Communist Manifesto where Marx likens capitalist society to the sorcerer “who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
3. Trump’s Ukraine plan destroys alliance with Europe
Until a few years ago, the US and European powers worked closely together to encircle Russia and bring Eastern Europe and large parts of the former Soviet Union under their control.
Between 1999 and 2004, NATO swallowed up all former members of the Warsaw Pact, as well as the former Baltic Soviet republics. This was followed by the successor states of Yugoslavia and “partnerships” with the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. In 2014, the US and Europe jointly organized a coup in Kiev to bring Ukraine under their influence, thereby provoking the current war.
But now the axis of conflict is shifting. The rivalry between the US and Europe is increasingly coming to the fore. The robbers are fighting over the spoils. Trump’s effort to strike a deal with Putin over the heads of the Europeans and Ukraine is meeting with bitter hostility in European capitals.
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The European powers are doing everything they can to sabotage Trump’s plans for Ukraine. So far, with some success. The five-hour meeting between Trump’s emissary Steve Witkoff and Putin, which took place in Moscow on Tuesday, produced no results. The European powers changed Witkoff’s original 28-point plan in tough negotiations to such an extent that it is unacceptable to Moscow.
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Now, the global crisis of capitalism and the accompanying bitter struggle for raw materials, markets and profits are tearing apart the alliance between the two largest imperialist power blocs, which together account for 45 percent of global economic output. Trump’s punitive tariffs against the EU are another expression of this development.
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With his Ukraine plan, Trump has destroyed the myth that this war was ever about freedom, democracy, international law or other noble values. He links an end to the war so openly with economic blackmail and the business interests of his own family clan that even in the corruption-rich history of capitalism, it is difficult to find a comparable precedent.
Trump is not interested in peace. Even if the war in Ukraine were to end, it would only be the prelude to a new round in the violent struggle for the imperialist redivision of the world. Venezuela is already in the crosshairs of the US military, and China is being systematically encircled.
The Wall Street Journal, which criticizes Trump’s Ukraine policy from a right-wing perspective, has published a detailed article entitled “Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine” about the profitable plans that Trump’s business friend and chief negotiator Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev have been discussing for months. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has already raked in billions for his companies as a “peace negotiator” in the Middle East, is also involved.
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The plans range from joint extraction of gas, oil and rare earths in the Arctic to the use of $300 billion in frozen Russian central bank funds for US-Russian investment projects, the return of ExxonMobil and other US corporations to Russia, and the recommissioning of the damaged Nord Stream Baltic Sea pipeline and its sale to Stephen P. Lynch, an investor close to Trump.
Germany, which only gave up purchasing inexpensive Russian natural gas after the pipeline was blown up by saboteurs, could then buy Russian natural gas again—at a hefty markup to a US middleman. No wonder European stakeholders are up in arms. The only reason they are not doing so more vocally is because they have “no cards to play” and do not want to further provoke Trump.
The proposed deal also sheds light on the class character of Putin’s regime. The representative of the Russian oligarchs, who owe their wealth to the plundering of the Soviet Union’s social property, is sitting on a social powder keg and can only hold onto power through desperate manoeuvres. His pandering to Trump, the gangster and wannabe dictator in the White House, is like a pact with the devil that will inevitably backfire on Russia.
Putin’s chief negotiator, Kirill Dmitriev, is the prototype of the ruthless oligarch who makes money from war and conflict and changes sides when necessary. Born in Kiev in 1975, the investment banker has a personal connection to the Russian president through a close family friendship with Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova.
Dmitriev went to the US as a student, studied economics at Stanford and Harvard and then worked for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. In 2000, he returned to Russia and worked for a long time for Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, the second richest man in the country, who became the most important financier of the anti-Russian Orange Revolution and the Maidan movement. Pinchuk also had close ties to oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, the patron of current President Zelensky. Dmitriev owes his current position as head of the Russian state investment fund RDIF to Pinchuk’s recommendation in 2011.
The European powers feel cheated by Trump and are therefore angry with him. They have invested €178 billion in the war in Ukraine to control the country and subjugate Russia. And now they are in danger of coming away empty-handed and facing a stronger Russia.
Renowned economic journalist Wolfgang Münchau sees himself “On the eve of modern Europe’s most humiliating defeat.” He mocks the helpless European powers who “think they can safeguard their welfare and their influence through regulation, procedure, the rule of law, and international institutions. The Europeans dream of a world in which no one acts strategically,” he writes. “Like no US president before him, Trump exposes Europe’s delusions, its lack of strategic thinking and action. This is why the Europeans hate him so much. And to no avail.”
Similar thoughts can be heard and read everywhere in Europe’s ruling circles: “We must do as Trump does. Away with the welfare state, regulations, the rule of law and international institutions. We must think and act strategically—in other words, wage war!” European governments are rearming, doubling and tripling military spending, and passing the costs on to the working class. In doing so, they are also undermining the basis for any social compromise and putting fierce class struggles on the agenda.
Herein lies the answer to war and dictatorship. Only an independent movement of the international working class, fighting against capitalism and for the construction of a socialist society, can prevent society from sliding into catastrophe.
Fellow postal workers,
We write to you in the name of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA‑RFC) to get involved in the inquiry into the deaths of two postal workers last month.
The tragic, preventable deaths of our brothers Nick Acker and Russell Scruggs Jr. expose the deadly logic of the “modernization” being enforced on the Postal Service: profit and speed are being placed above our lives. The only way these tragedies can be stopped is if rank-and-file workers reveal the truth and take collective action to protect our lives.
We are calling on every postal worker to come forward with information for a worker‑led inquiry and to begin organizing rank‑and‑file committees to take control of safety and to oppose further privatization of the USPS.
5. The “garbage” in the White House: Trump’s racist diatribe against Somalis
The stream of fascistic filth emanating from the White House reached a new stage this week. At the conclusion of an over two-hour cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Donald Trump unleashed a racist tirade targeting all people from Somalia, using language that has never been publicly uttered by an American president in office.
Speaking in support of mass deportations and blocking asylum and refugee applications from 19 countries, including Somalia, Trump said, “We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”
After referring to all people from Somalia as “garbage,” Trump turned to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat and the first Somali American elected to Congress: “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”
Trump doubled down on Wednesday. Responding to a reporter’s question about Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey expressing pride in the city’s Somali community, Trump replied, “Well, then he is a fool. I would not be proud to have the largest Somalian. Look at their nation, look at how bad their nation is. It is not even a nation, it is just people walking around killing each other.”
This is the language of the Nazis and their publication, Der Stürmer, which portrayed entire populations, particularly Jews, as “parasites” and “vermin,” subhumans to be expelled or exterminated.
Millions of people in the United States and around the world watching Trump’s outpouring will draw the appropriate conclusion that the real “garbage” is in the White House. Trump, a real estate swindler and racist demagogue, longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, is the embodiment of the rot of American capitalism.
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Under conditions where Trump’s popularity is collapsing over his warmongering, corruption and self-dealing, his racist attacks aim to divert social anger away from Wall Street and the billionaire oligarchy he represents. His vulgar vernacular is textbook fascist agitation. He blames immigrants for the social decay produced by decades of deindustrialization and austerity. His latest broadside follows earlier lies on the campaign trail, such as claiming Venezuelan gangs had taken over Aurora, Colorado, or slandering Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, by claiming they were “eating pets.”
There is widespread revulsion among workers and young people toward these racist attacks. Only fascists and open racists respond with enthusiasm. On his December 2 show, neo-Nazi leader Nick Fuentes praised Trump’s remarks as “epic,” declaring, “He talks and sounds like we do. Nobody does it like him. He is saying what we are all thinking.” This is precisely the audience Trump is mobilizing.
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Somalia, it should be pointed out, is a country with a long and rich history whose people have lived in the region for thousands of years. Somalia’s present crisis is the result of decades of colonial plunder, by British and Italian imperialism, which partitioned the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then by American imperialism.
Somalia has been ravaged by repeated US military interventions: Clinton’s invasion in 1992, drone assassination campaigns under Bush and Obama, counterinsurgency operations by US-backed forces, and airstrikes during Trump’s first term and Biden’s administration. These interventions destroyed infrastructure, displaced millions and created the conditions that drive refugees to flee.
As the World Socialist Web Site has noted, Trump is not an interloper in the Garden of Eden of American democracy. He speaks, fundamentally, as the representative of a social class, the capitalist oligarchy.
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Trump’s escalating threats are a sign of weakness, not strength. The attacks on immigrants are provoking mass anger. Last month more than 56,000 high school students in North Carolina walked out against ICE raids. In neighborhoods throughout Chicago and Los Angeles, workers and students mobilize to block ICE operations and protect friends, family and co-workers.
The task before workers in the United States and internationally is not to plead with the Democrats or hope for a return to “normalcy.” It is to build an independent political movement based on the interests of the working class, rejecting both factions of the capitalist ruling class and preparing for a revolutionary struggle against the entire system of exploitation and war. This is the perspective advanced by the Socialist Equality Party and its sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The working class is an international force, bound together by shared interests that transcend borders, languages and nationalities. It is the most powerful social force on the planet—capable of breaking the grip of the corporate-financial oligarchy and reconstructing society on a democratic and egalitarian foundation. The ruling elite is terrified of this power. To realize it, the working class must be armed with a conscious, internationalist and socialist strategy.
6. Court rules dissolution of the Palestine Congress 2024 in Berlin was unlawful
The ban and dissolution of the Berlin Palestine Congress in April 2024 were illegal. This is shown by the ruling of the Berlin Administrative Court of 26 November this year. The judgment is a resounding slap in the face for the Berlin Senate (state executive) and the Berlin police, who trampled on the right to freedom of expression and assembly.
The full text of the judgment is not yet available, but the court’s press release is unequivocal: the police action was “unlawful” and “in any case, disproportionate.” There had been no violations of the conditions at the congress, nor any “criminally relevant language.” The ruling follows earlier court decisions that also declared bans on entry to Germany and bans on political activity for speakers who had been due to speak at the congress to be unlawful.
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What happened: In April 2024 a “Palestine Congress” was planned in Berlin to protest against Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, at which prominent human rights activists and politicians were to speak. Under the motto “We accuse,” the congress was also to address Germany’s responsibility in the Israeli genocide.
The organizers included the anti-Zionist Jewish organization “Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East” as well as several left-wing parties, among them the pan-European party DiEM25 of former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who was also scheduled as a speaker. Jewish Voice had made its bank account at the publicly owned Sparkasse Berlin available for managing the congress funds.
From the outset, the state and federal governments, politicians and the media conducted a virtually hysterical campaign of agitation and slander against the event.
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hortly before the Berlin ruling against the congress ban, the Higher Administrative Court (OVG) Münster, on 21 November 2025, overturned a condition imposed by the Düsseldorf police prohibiting any questioning of Israel’s “right to exist” at a demonstration. The judges held that disputing this “right to exist” was not in itself a criminal offense and that “critical engagement with the founding of the State of Israel” generally falls under freedom of expression.
It would, however, be wrong to hope for a political change of course or fewer repressive measures. In the meantime, in other cases, the German authorities have shown that they do not care whether their repressive actions violate the law.
In the case of the #Berlin4, in spring 2025, the Berlin state government sought to expel four non-German—from Ireland, Poland and the United States—pro-Palestinian activists for participating in protests, even though specialist officials had warned that this would not be legally tenable. After urgent court applications, all expulsion orders were suspended; the main proceedings are ongoing.
While courts have declared arbitrary state acts against pro-Palestinian protests unlawful, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has announced that he will visit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in early December. Netanyahu is still subject to a valid arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—officially recognized by Germany—for grave war crimes.
7. Ken Mantell, Australian Trotskyist: November 11, 1945–November 30, 2025
Ken worked in some of the most diverse, remote and demanding parts of Australia. While spending years on building sites and factories in the country’s major cities, he also worked in the scorching heat and dust of Condobolin in NSW, Western Australia and the central Queensland towns of Moura, Mt Isa and nearby Lake Julius, created by the dam he helped build.
Although Ken left school early, he was utterly determined to overcome his lack of education. Ken’s older brother, Martin, with whom he maintained the closest relationship until his death, would send him the Time magazine each week for Ken to read to improve his skills. He read each issue diligently.
It was as a steel fixer that he joined the Socialist Labour League (SLL), the precursor to the Socialist Equality Party, after being introduced to the party by his then-wife Liz in the early 1980s and won over to the program of socialist internationalism. During the SEQEB dispute, when in 1985 the hated right-wing Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland sacked more than 1,000 electricity workers, he and Liz, with a young Jason in a stroller, campaigned at the mass meetings selling Workers News, the weekly publication of the SLL.
Once Ken was convinced of the program and the need to build the revolutionary party, he never wavered and kept studying. Even when he struggled with harsh medication to manage his health issues, he insisted on attending the weekly education classes run by the SEP. He dedicated his considerable talents, effort and determination to the creation of the revolutionary party for mankind’s liberation through a socialist future.
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He was a party member deeply concerned with workers and young people—their lives, their experiences and their misconceptions—which he labored to combat and clarify. He always made a point of seeking out young members to discuss and guide them in their training and development. He was generous to a fault with his time and resources.
He understood that if the working class did not consciously embrace a revolutionary perspective, capitalism would impose the worst nightmare on the new and emerging generations of young people. He saw in his sons and grandchildren representatives of that generation and felt deeply about the risks they face. He loved them dearly and dedicated his life to overcoming the obstacles to a socialist future, which is the only way to ensure mankind’s future.
We send our very deepest condolences to the family, comrades and friends of comrade Ken Mantell. Future generations will look to him as a shining example to be emulated by workers and young people everywhere.
8. Zionist lobby groups and the German press attempt to censor pro-Palestinian art exhibition
The artist, Costantino Ciervo
A coordinated campaign is underway by Zionist lobby groups and the German press to censor and/or close the exhibition “Commune—The Paradox of Similarity in the Middle East Conflict,” which has been on display in Potsdam since mid-November. The multimedia exhibition by Italian artist Costantino Ciervo attempts to draw attention to the historical, anthropological and linguistic similarities between ordinary Jews and Palestinians against the backdrop of the genocide committed by the Israeli government, which is fully supported by the US, Germany and other leading states in Europe and the Middle East.
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The call to ban the exhibition, accompanied by sensationalist headlines such as “Exhibition allegedly trivializes terrorism,” was picked up by many leading German daily newspapers and magazines such as Stern and Die Zeit.*****
The artist:
"In terms of content, my pictures clearly contradict the claim that they are antisemitic.
In a series of hand-painted portraits, I deliberately juxtaposed different figures—young girls, older girls and women, young boys and older men—not against each other!
These are people who look very similar. I even used figures who look like twins. In doing so, I am making a deeply humanistic statement. Their only difference is their clothing, which refers to their religious or ethnic background. The association I want to evoke is not that of “perpetrators” or “victims,” but that of brotherhood. These are people whose ethnic groups have much more in common than divides them due to their linguistic and historical similarities.
Peaceful coexistence in a confederation based on social equality, thereby overcoming conflict—that is the vision of my exhibition."
A recent report on the conditions of artists in the US points to their economic difficulties at a time of the almost unimaginable concentration of wealth at the top of society. The “National Survey of Artists” was commissioned by the Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.
The survey solicited responses, according to the Mellon Foundation, from “a nationally representative sample of artists and culture bearers,” 2,618 in number, and “offers one of the most comprehensive portraits to date of how creative workers live, work, and sustain their practices.”
The artists were asked a series of questions about “their artistic practices, work and jobholding, earnings, wellbeing, and personal characteristics.”
One has a suspicion that the sample group may not in fact address the conditions affecting thousands and thousands of the youngest and most vulnerable artists, less likely to be included in such a study. The average age of artists in the survey was 43.28 years with 40 percent under the age of 35 years. About 18 percent artists were age 65 or older.
Nonetheless, the figures are still startling, revealing a body of men and women often obliged to work two, three or four jobs to stay afloat and facing uncertainty and precarity on various fronts.
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In its introduction, the National Survey of Artists reports that its key findings
reveal that artists across the United States continue to face significant financial insecurity and complex working lives. More than half (57%) of artists reported being somewhat or very worried about at least one form of financial vulnerability—such as affording food, housing, medical care, or utilities—with 22% concerned about having enough to eat and 32% about covering medical costs in the month ahead.
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While working artists struggle to make ends meet and continue their creative activity, the multi-millionaires and billionaires who operate the global art market, despite ups and downs, continue to reap vast rewards.
The New York Times reported last week that the last three years had been characterized by “layoffs at auction houses. Major galleries closed. Sales continued to shrink, by 12 percent last year, according to the recent survey of global collecting by Art Basel and UBS.” Other estimates indicate that global art market sales reached an estimated $57.5 billion in 2024, down from $65.2 billion in 2023 and $67.8 billion in 2022.
However,
with some business strategy and a little luck, auction houses sold $2.2 billion worth of art last week. Altogether, the November marquee auctions in New York generated a 77 percent increase over last year’s equivalent sales (though still down 30 percent from the market’s recent peak of $3.2 billion in 2022).
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High-net-worth individuals (HNWIs)—those with more than $2 million in investable assets—are spending a bit less on art these days, according to Forbes, and more on other “collectibles.” Those individuals are planning, on average, to spend $108,270 on art, $29,243 on designer watches, $23,695 on designer jewelry and $12,619 on designer accessories (including handbags).
As Forbes notes soothingly, “amid the art world’s shifts, the wealthy are still finding value in the broader collectibles category, and auction houses are expanding their offerings.”
10. Australian inquest whitewashes the far right over fatal Wieambilla shootout
Terry Ryan, the Queensland state coroner, last month released the findings of an inquest into a December 2022 shootout in the rural locality of Wieambilla that left three police officers and a member of the public dead as well as the three perpetrators, Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train.
The findings, held after an inquest that heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, span 264 pages. There are detailed descriptions of the lives of the Trains, the highly-prepared character of their ambush of the police and the progress of a shootout that lasted for several hours.
The findings, however, are a whitewash on two fronts.
Firstly, they assert that the violent actions of the Trains cannot be classified as politically or religiously motivated terrorism, despite ample material in the report itself testifying to their right-wing extremist views and connections.
Secondly, they give the Queensland Police a clean bill of health, despite clear indications, including within the report itself, that elements within it had adopted an unusually lenient and hands-off approach to the Trains.
The findings summarize the testimony of Dr Josh Roose, an associate professor of politics at Deakin University, who is billed as an expert on terrorism and has been featured in the press. Roose, the findings note, had examined more than 2,500 primary source documents associated with the Trains.
In his assessment, their decision to ambush the police officers who came to the Wieambilla property was an act of politically motivated terrorism. It was a product of the Trains’ millennial Christianity, and was “done with the intention of advancing a religious ideological cause and with the aim of coercing and intimidating the Queensland Government.”
Roose periodized the radicalization of the Trains. In the first stage, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gareth Train had been attracted to right-wing, conspiratorial conceptions.
In the second period, between January and December 2020, coinciding with the onset of the pandemic, Gareth Train “contributed to a variety of online political forums, which demonstrated strong antigovernment views but little religious content.” Excerpts from his online activities, provided earlier in the findings, show that he viewed the pandemic as an orchestrated plot.
The third phase, between January and July 2021, involved a deepening of that radicalization. It included the beginning of a communication with Donald Day, a US-based extremist who shared what would become the Trains’ right-wing brand of Christianity. In the following fourth phase, the Trains’ developing Christian views “fused with anti-government and institutional hatred in which state actors, including police, were viewed as corrupt and evil,” and in the fifth, immediately preceding the attack, they had adopted what Roose described as a “dispensational premillennialism,” in which they viewed their own interactions, including with the authorities, as events of an “end times” scenario.
Roose is a state-aligned figure and his views need not be accepted uncritically. However, he provided a coherent and cohesive explanation of a political radicalization which culminated in the Trains’ decision to stage a violent assault on visiting police officers.
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The inquest, both in pointing to police sympathy for the Trains and in whitewashing their far-right motivations, again underscores the role of the state as an incubator of fascistic forces. Such elements are being promoted and brought forward by sections of the ruling elite, as a battering ram against growing social opposition from the working class, a role that was already foreshadowed in the manner in which the establishment made use of the anti-lockdown movement.
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway has taken the extraordinary step of referring Advanced Micro Targeting (AMT) to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claiming—without evidence—that the canvassing firm was “employing illegal aliens in their efforts to undermine the will of the people’s elected representatives.” AMT was hired on behalf of the statewide referendum campaign against House Bill 1, an aggressively partisan redistricting plan designed to lock in a 7–1 Republican congressional map by eliminating the Kansas City-based district currently held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver.
Under Missouri’s constitution, citizens can suspend a newly enacted law by gathering signatures for a referendum. Hanaway’s threat to involve ICE is part of a multi-pronged effort by Republican officials in Missouri to prevent voters from exercising their constitutional right to challenge the state’s new gerrymander. Backers of the referendum have until December 11 to gather the required 106,000 signatures across six of the state’s eight Congressional districts. Organizers already claim to have gathered over 200,000.
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The Democratic Party, integrated into the same capitalist framework and committed to preserving the same institutions, has limited its opposition to lawsuits and retaliatory gerrymandering in states like California where it has control of the political machinery.
It has consistently refused to make any appeal to the population against the Trump-led attacks on democratic rights, as it fears any popular mobilization would quickly escalate beyond its control and threaten the capitalist system as a whole.
The working class cannot defend its democratic rights by appealing to the very institutions that are attacking them. The attack on immigrants, the weaponization of ballot language, the manipulation of referenda, the ICE intimidation campaign, and the covert sabotage of the signature-gathering effort reveal a political order that is no longer compatible with even the most elementary forms of democracy.
12. Hundreds of federal agents begin anti-immigrant raids in New Orleans
Federal Border Patrol agents began stepped-up raids in the New Orleans and Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan areas Wednesday, as the Trump administration escalated its police-state attacks on immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security set a target of 5,000 arrests in New Orleans alone, more than were seized and detained in weeks of raids in Chicago, a much larger urban area.
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who has spearheaded previous city-wide campaigns in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina is overseeing the patrols in New Orleans, focusing on Home Depot stores and other sites where day laborers gather in suburban Jefferson County, just north of the city.
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Officials of the Republican-controlled state government said they welcomed the influx of hundreds of Border Patrol agents. Governor Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill have ordered full collaboration of the Louisiana State Police with the raids, while the New Orleans field office of the FBI said its agents would focus on “attempts to obstruct law enforcement actions”—that is, cracking down on protests expressing the widespread popular opposition to the anti-immigrant raids.
The Democratic mayor-elect of New Orleans, Helena Moreno, who was herself born in Mexico, pointed to widespread fear in the Hispanic community over the Border Patrol operations. “The reports of due process violations and potential abuses in other cities are concerning,” she said. But the city government is doing nothing more than informing potential targets of the raids of their legal rights—rights that are generally ignored by the federal agents.
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While Moreno’s father, or even Moreno herself, could well be targeted by the immigration Gestapo, the Democratic Party has not lifted a finger to oppose the policies of the Trump administration, merely filing lawsuits while seeking to tamp down the mounting public outrage, which has led to the formation of safety patrols and alert networks in immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago, as the World Socialist Web Site has reported.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a statement announcing what it called the “Catahoula Crunch,” the latest in a series of juvenile nicknames for operations in which men, women and children are snatched by masked men, beaten and otherwise abused, and thrown into detention whether they have legal papers or not.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin denounced the “sanctuary city” policy adopted by New Orleans, claiming that such policies “endanger American communities by releasing illegal criminal aliens and forcing DHS law enforcement to risk their lives to remove criminal illegal aliens that should have never been put back on the streets.”
But despite the howling from Trump, Bovino and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem about targeting “the worst of the worst,” only a small proportion of those swept up in the raids in Chicago, Memphis, Charlotte, Los Angeles and other cities actually have criminal records, and these are frequently limited to driving violations and other non-violent offenses.
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As many as 100,000 Hispanic immigrants have moved to the New Orleans area over the last 20 years, an influx triggered by rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina, which inundated much of the city in 2005. Without workers from Mexico and Central America, even the limited reconstruction of devastated neighborhoods that has taken place could not have been accomplished.
The campaign against immigrants in Louisiana is accompanied by an open attack on democratic rights more broadly. The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana has filed a lawsuit against Act 399, passed earlier this year, which makes it a crime to “knowingly commit any act intended to hinder, delay, prevent, or otherwise interfere with or thwart federal immigration enforcement effort.”
Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, the plaintiff represented by the ACLU, offers legal assistance to immigrants in New Orleans and throughout the state, but stopped holding “Know Your Rights” workshops for immigrants after the passage of Act 399. The lawsuit challenges the new law as a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech.
13. Mamdani, speaking with comedian Adam Friedland, reviews “productive” meeting with fascist Trump
Most of Mamdani and Friedland’s half-hour discussion consisted of casual, empty-headed banter, punctuated by soccer score updates and ad breaks for nicotine and sexual performance products. The overall absence of political content serves to deaden thought, while presenting Mamdani as a representative of the “common man.” He likes soccer, loves his wife, and enjoys meeting with fascist warmongers—truly the salt of the earth....
14. Sri Lanka: Survivors of Cyclone Ditwah demand permanent housing, not temporary patchwork solutions
World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reporters visited flood-affected areas in the Colombo District following Cyclone Ditwah. These areas include Kolonnawa, Kuruniyawatte, Meethotamulla, Wellampitiya, Orugodawatta, Modara and Madampitiya. Hundreds of survivors have been placed in temporary makeshift shelters with minimal facilities.
Kolonnawa, Orugodawatta, and Meethotamulla fall under the jurisdiction of the Kolonnawa Urban Council (KUC). According to a 2002 UNDP/UN-Habitat study, 70 percent of the KUC area lies below sea level. As a result, tens of thousands of impoverished residents face the threat of flooding year after year.
Survivors told WSWS reporters about the immediate hardships they and previous generations have endured during repeated floods. Most said they need proper, permanent housing, not just food. Having lost all their belongings, they are now struggling to rebuild their lives. They expressed deep resentment over decades of broken promises from successive governments to resolve their housing crisis.
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Reporters explained that decent housing and basic rights cannot be secured under capitalism, which prioritizes private profit over human need. They outlined the need for the working class to fight for a socialist program, which prioritizes human need over private profit.
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Residents told the WSWS that despite promises to provide housing elsewhere, no initiative has been taken by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government since it came to power one year ago.
15. Australia: Two workers killed on Queensland building sites in 24 hours
In the first fatal incident, Beau Bradford, just 15, was reported to have died instantly on Monday when he was struck by a large object that fell from the boom of a concrete pump truck. This terrible event occurred at a building site in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast, south of Brisbane, the state capital.
Just 24 hours later, Kimura Dixon, 45, died at the scene when a retaining wall collapsed on an apartment block site at West End in inner Brisbane on Tuesday morning. His stepson Rama, only 19, was trapped under the rubble for about 90 minutes before he was freed and taken to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s hospital with serious injuries to his legs and chest.
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Data from Safe Work Australia indicates that about 400 workers died on the job in 2023 and 2024 in all industries. Of all the reported workplace fatalities, the construction industry was the third-most deadly. During that two-year period, it produced 82 deaths, or more than 20 percent of the total, only behind “agriculture, forestry and fishing” and “transport, postal and warehouse.”
These figures understate the true toll because chronic occupational illnesses and unreported incidents are often excluded from official counts.
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To fight this, workers need to take matters into their own hands. Rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracies, must be established in workplaces everywhere to fight for improved safety, wages and conditions.
Under the democratic control of workers, not union bureaucrats, these committees could assess site conditions, investigate deaths and injuries, formulate demands and enforce safety measures, including through strike action.
Above all, what is posed is the need to fight for a workers’ government to implement socialist policies, including placing the construction industry, along with the banks and major corporations, under public ownership and democratic workers’ control.
16. Canada officially loses its measles elimination status amid sustained assault on public health
After more than a year of sustained community transmission of the measles virus, the WHO/Pan American Health Organization has had to officially acknowledge that Canada is no longer among countries that have eliminated the potentially fatal disease.
This ominous development is the predictable result of years of governments undermining public health, intensified by the catastrophic rollback of COVID-19 mitigation measures early in the pandemic.
More than 5,000 measles cases have been confirmed in 2025 compared to 147 in 2024, with infections reported in nine provinces and the Northwest Territories. Two deaths have been recorded, both infants exposed to the virus in utero. A country once held up for its public health achievements now faces widespread circulation of a disease considered eliminated for a quarter century.
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Although increased global travel and waning immunity contribute to case importation, the central cause of the present crisis is the systematic dismantling of the public health infrastructure and the growing influence of vaccine hesitancy fueled by right-wing anti-science propaganda. Federal data show that 83 percent of infections involve unvaccinated individuals, while the vaccination status of another 12 percent is unknown. These figures reflect collapsing routine immunization, reduced access to primary care and the disintegration of community health units. The entire Pan-American region had eliminated measles in 2016, becoming the first WHO-designated region to do so, before an outbreak in sanctions-devastated Venezuela spread to Brazil, leading to that status being revoked 2 years later. Renewed efforts to halt measles spread resulted in the Americas again being declared measles free in 2024, just before an outbreak erupted in New Brunswick, on Canada’s east coast, last year. With the outbreaks ongoing in the United States and Mexico, it’s unlikely the region will regain measles-elimination status in the near future.
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The decay of public health has been accelerated by the political capitulation to far-right anti-science forces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in Ottawa and the provinces, under pressure from business associations and major media outlets, dismantled public health protections in the name of economic reopening; then moved rapidly to scrap what mitigation measures remained in the wake of the far-right “Freedom Convoy,” which menacingly occupied downtown Ottawa for three weeks at the beginning of 2022.
The Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, Bloc Québécois and CAQ all adopted the language of “personal responsibility” and abandoned mask mandates in schools, ventilation upgrades, systematic testing and coordinated vaccination outreach. Jurisdictions reopened schools and workplaces despite ongoing transmission, creating conditions for the spread of both COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. By normalizing mass infection, the political establishment ensured the collapse of the infrastructure required for routine immunization, including staff redeployed during the pandemic who were never replaced.
The unions played a central role by keeping workers on the job throughout successive waves of COVID, blocking any independent movement that could have forced serious public health measures. They upheld the official drive to maintain production and profits, enabling the unchecked spread of SARS-CoV-2 and draining already weak public health units.
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Canada’s loss of measles elimination status stands as a warning. The ruling elite that has sacrificed tens of thousands of lives and counting to COVID-19 is normalising a future in which once-controlled diseases circulate freely while new pathogens spread with minimal restraint. As billions are diverted from social needs to rearmament and war, the working class confronts an escalating public health emergency.
17. Erdoğan government escalates the class war over minimum wage
The Minimum Wage Determination Commission will start working this week on setting the 2026 minimum wage, which affects millions of workers’ families in Turkey.
The minimum wage has become the main front in the war waged by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government against the working class, in line with the demands of financial capital. Faced with growing discontent over rising living costs and the insistence of companies and the government on suppressing wages, the maneuvering space for union bureaucracy is shrinking. It is trying to conceal its complicity and keep workers under control.
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In previous years, the government increased the minimum wage by the official inflation rate or a few points above it, and workers suffered a loss equal to the difference between real inflation and official inflation. However, following the 2023 presidential elections the offensive intensified with the appointment of Mehmet Şimşek as Minister of Treasury and Finance to impose the severe austerity program demanded by international and domestic financial capital. Increases are now based on the target inflation rate rather than the actual official inflation rate. This has exacerbated the real wage loss.
In 2024, while official inflation reached 44.38 percent, the government only increased the minimum wage by 30 percent. Despite high inflation over the past two years, no interim increase to the minimum wage was implemented in July. An increase below the official inflation rate is also planned for the coming year. Various banks are announcing how much they want the minimum wage to increase under the guise of a “forecast.” HSBC announced that it expects a 20 percent increase. Last year’s rate was also dictated by financial capital.
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The reason the government is suppressing wages is to offer capitalists, who are under global competitive pressure, a cheap labor market with high rates of exploitation. A recent article on the World Socialist Web Site drew attention to the shift of production in Turkey “to Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs) in Egypt, where the minimum wage is less than one-third of that in Turkey (the monthly minimum wage in Egypt is approximately $150, while in Turkey it is $520).”
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Whether pro-government or opposition, the common concern of the union apparatus is not low wages but of the growing anger among the working class spiraling out of their control.
Although they will issue various calls for protest, as they did last year, this will stem from an effort to control the growing opposition of the working class and preserve their reputation. The demands they put forward at press conferences or token actions are empty calls, begging the government. Far from raising questions about how the working class will fight for these demands to be met, they serve to suppress these questions.
Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal advocates in its program for “automatic adjustment of wages in line with inflation” and “reduction of working hours with no loss of pay.” To realize these demands, which require mass mobilization, workers must take matters into their own hands, build rank-and-file committees independent of the trade union bureaucracy, and combine the struggle for better wages and living conditions with the struggle for workers’ power based on social needs rather than private profit.
Striking Birmingham bin workers—now in their eleventh month fighting job destruction and vicious pay cuts by Labour-run Birmingham City Council (BCC)—have been joined for the first time by agency workers previously used as part of the strike-breaking operation.
Around 400 Unite members began action in January, escalating to an all-out strike from March 11 against abolishing the safety-critical Waste Reduction and Collection Officer (WRCO) role of senior loaders to axe 150 jobs and cut wages by up to £8,000 a year. Downgrading and pay cuts were extended to drivers, who walked out with their loader colleagues from day one.
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The militant struggle waged by Birmingham bin workers could act as a catalyst for a wider mobilization of hundreds of thousands facing the same fate. To prevent this is Unite’s main aim. BCC is imposing £300 million in cuts to frontline services under the direction of Whitehall-installed commissioners—first imposed under the Conservative government in September 2023 and retained under Starmer.
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The claim by Unite officials that the dispute can continue until next May not only highlights their continued isolation of Birmingham bin workers but allows the Labour council to chip away at resistance through its intimidation tactics. Anti-strike laws preventing secondary action ill not be challenged by Unite because the union bureaucracy is terrified of unleashing a broader mobilization of the working class against the detested Starmer government.
Monday’s rally at the Smithfield depot in Birmingham was attended by around 200 strikers buoyed by agency workers now joining their ranks. But they were faced with the same empty speechifying. Graham did not attend. Instead, Zarah Sultana, Coventry South MP and leading figure within the newly formed Your Party, was given center stage.
Sultana has pitched to leftward sentiments with declarations that “politics does not belong to the billionaires” and “We’re not begging for crumbs off the table. We are coming for the lot.” But her remarks to the rally avoided explaining how such a perspective could be put into practice.
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Sultana’s emphasis on being a Unite member was to solidarize herself with the union bureaucracy, not the embattled rank-and-file workers. She made no demand to end to the isolation of the 11-month fight, or any criticism of the Graham leadership. No call was made to take the fight to the Starmer government.
This underscores the central issue posed by the World Socialist Web Site:
“The Birmingham bin workers’ fight is in the eleventh hour. Its success depends on a mass mobilization of the working class against Starmer’s authoritarian methods being used to spearhead austerity. Pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party have abetted Unite’s isolation of the dispute. Their promotion of token ‘mega-pickets’ in May and July were used by union officials to spout empty words of ‘solidarity’ while justifying their continued partnership with Labour based on the claim they can be pressured to ‘do the right thing.’
A new path of struggle must be opened. The Birmingham bin strike can and must be won—but not through stunts, hollow appeals, or reliance on the union bureaucracy. A rank-and-file strike committee must be formed to take control of the dispute and break its isolation, issuing an appeal to council workers nationwide for a collective fight against austerity and the frontal assault on workers’ rights by the Starmer government.”
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
