Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
December 7 marked eight months since the death of 63‑year‑old machine repairman Ronald Adams Sr. at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan. His death on the shop floor—crushed while performing maintenance on a gantry hoist that suddenly activated—continues to be shrouded in silence.
The Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) has still not issued the results of its probe into the April 7 fatality, with MIOSHA spokesman Mike Krafcik informing the WSWS by email Monday that “the investigation remains open.” He did not provide any explanation for the long delay, stating only that “fatality investigations can take significant time due to their complexity, including the availability of witness interviews, technical and engineering review, records examination and required legal due process.”
Far from holding the company accountable, the United Auto Workers union has been complicit in suppressing the facts. UAW President Shawn Fain and UAW-Stellantis Department head Kevin Gotinsky assisted management in bringing the plant back to full production, and Stellantis is churning out engines for new Stellantis models as if nothing happened.
This cold bureaucratic choreography—management’s cover‑up, the union’s whitewash and the state agencies’ delays—is the logic of a system that treats workers’ lives as expendable.
“The holidays are especially difficult for our family” Ronald’s widow, Shamenia Stewart-Adams, told the WSWS. “We miss him in a way that is beyond words. We had no time to prepare. There was no illness. One day, he was just gone.
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On July 27 the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) held a public hearing in Detroit, where it presented the initial findings of its independent investigation into the death of Ronald Adams Sr. During the hearing, Adams’ widow made an impassioned appeal for his co-workers to come forward and provide information to uncover the truth and hold accountable all those responsible.
Now, Shamenia has spoken out in support of the families and co-workers of two United States Postal Service (USPS) workers, who were killed in the space of a week last month. On November 8, 36-year-old maintenance mechanic Nick Acker was crushed to death by a mail sorting machine at the Detroit Network Distribution Center in Allen Park, Michigan. One week later, on November 15, mail handler assistant Russell Scruggs, Jr., 44, fell and hit his head at a mail processing center in Palmetto, Georgia.
Shamenia said:
Find the strength and don’t stop fighting for workers to be treated not just as an employee ID number but a human being who was just trying to make a living for their family. These are not just numbers being sacrificed but are our loved ones, our husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles and grandfathers who deserve to be valued.
A lot of these companies have the mindset their workers are just numbers, who have no value. That’s where we are at now. My husband went to work. He did his job. He did it well. He saved lives on that job, multiple times, and I feel like his life was devalued and that hurts. In a nutshell, our family just wants answers.
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In his report to the public hearing, Will Lehman, a leader of the IWA-RFC, called Adams a “martyr in the class war against the working class,” explaining that at least 15 workers are killed on the job every day in the US, or roughly 450 workers each month, or over 5,200 every year. Globally, nearly 3 million workers lost their lives from workplace injuries and occupational diseases, an average of 8,000 deaths each day.
Lehman pointed to the broader political context pointing to the Trump administration’s drive to gut whatever is left of OSHA and lift any restriction on the exploitation of the working class and further enrich the oligarchy of mega-billionaires.
Workers cannot look to the Democrats or the union bureaucracies to defend their lives, Lehman said, but had to build rank-and-file committees in every workplace “to fight for the principle that no job should be carried out unless and until it is made safe. In consultation with trusted safety experts of our own choosing, workers must have full authority to set safety standards and shut down unsafe operations through collective action.”
In the early hours of Sunday morning, Teamsters Local 856 announced a tentative deal to end a strike of 1,500 school support workers at the West Contra Costa Unified School District (WCCUSD) in northern California. The deal isolates around 1,500 of the district’s classified staff from educators in the United Teachers of Richmond, with whom they launched a strike on December 4, following strike votes of 96 percent and 98 percent respectively.
The deal, which workers have not even voted on, is almost identical to one which workers overwhelmingly rejected only two weeks ago. Workers must reject this sellout, but this is only the beginning. Workers must organize themselves into rank-and-file strike committees to force the re-launch of the strike alongside their brothers and sisters among the teachers, and to override any further violations of their will by the union officials.
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Classified workers in WCCUSD earn as little as $34,000 a year, with the highest-paid positions rarely exceeding $60,000. Teachers, whose salaries average between $69,000 and $84,000, cannot afford the basic costs of living required to support a family in the Bay Area. Yet the union bureaucracy and the district insist that it is workers who must tighten their belts and accept “budget constraints,” even as billions continue to flow without question to Wall Street and the U.S. war machine.
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Almost every major school district in California has operated the entire fall semester on expired contracts, but the California Teachers Association has refused to call strikes anywhere. Recently, impasses have been declared in contract talks in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Oakland, Twin Rivers, Natomas, Madera and San Francisco. In San Francisco, more than 99 percent of United Educators members authorized a strike last week.
But the West Contra Costa strike shows that, if the CTA calls walkouts at all, it would do everything in its power to limit and undermine them. A stand taken by Local 856 members, on the other hand, would create momentum for a broader movement capable of overriding the delaying tactics and enforcing the rank-and-file’s decision for a statewide strike.
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The Teamsters contract would do nothing to address the funding crisis in the district. WCCUSD schools began the year with 71 classrooms lacking permanent teachers, relying on temporary replacements, substitutes and rotating staff. Special education is in crisis, with severe shortages in paraprofessionals and specialists. Educators report unbearable class sizes, collapsing learning conditions, and the near-impossibility of providing individualized support.
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The district claims that a $17 million deficit leaves its hands tied. But this crisis is not the fault of educators and classified workers. It is the product of decades of bipartisan austerity. For more than half a century, both Democrats and Republicans have slashed public education and privatized services, while pouring billions into tax cuts, policing and the global war machine.
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The Trump administration is brutally attacking immigrants, dismantling every vital social service, including education, to pay for capitalism’s endless wars and to secure profits for the wealthy. The democratic and social rights of the workers are under attack by the ruling class.
Meanwhile, Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien, who has helped destroy tens of thousands of jobs at UPS and other logistics companies, is one of many union bureaucrats to become major Trump supporters. Their joining the would-be Führer in his attacks on immigrants and foreign workers confirms that the apparatus stands squarely with U.S. nationalism and corporate interests.
The Teamsters tentative agreement must be rejected with the same determination workers showed before. But simply voting “NO” is not enough. The bureaucracy will continue to manipulate the process and attempt to ram through concessions even after multiple rejections, as seen throughout the country.
This is why workers must organize independent rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by educators, classified staff, parents and students, not the bureaucracy. Such committees should demand:
- Drastic pay increases, full staffing and safe learning conditions
- An end to all cuts, with budgets expanded dramatically at the expense of the state’s tech billionaires and massive corporations, and;
- Substantially improved classroom sizes.
To prepare for this fight, and to prevent another betrayal, classified staff must take the conduct of the struggle into their own hands. They should organize a rank-and-file strike committee, with joint membership of both Teamster members and teachers from the UTR, to enforce a new strategy including:
- Full strike pay, paid from the nearly half-billion in assets controlled by the Teamsters union, supplemented by the furloughing of non-essential union personnel;
- Full rank-and-file control over future bargaining sessions, which must be livestreamed publicly;
- No back to work without a ratified contract, and adequate time to study before the vote, and;
- Delegations of workers sent to school districts across the state to establish contact with other rank-and-file educators and prepare a statewide strike.
The strike has revealed enormous determination. Now workers must take the next step: seize control of their struggle and expand it.
Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government is mired in another corruption scandal. This one concerns its now well-documented use of a $2.5 billion Skills Development Fund to steer government largess to trade union and business supporters.
The Skills Fund is ostensibly meant to enable organizations to train, re-train and hire workers to ensure there is a resilient and skilled workforce to fill “in-demand” jobs in a “challenged” economic environment.
However, evidence continues to emerge demonstrating that the initiative has largely served as a political slush fund.
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The corruption evident in the government’s skills development program is of a piece with the charges of corruption surrounding the Ford regime’s dealings with big land developers in the Green Belt sell-off and in the recent Ontario Place development boondoggle. But scandal in bourgeois politics is not simply an accidental by-product of a few bad actors or even an unmoored political party. It is an expression of deeper social and economic processes rooted in the capitalist system.
At the most immediate level, corruption—bribery, patronage, crony contracts, revolving doors between state, corporations and union bureaucracies—represents the means by which the capitalist elites secure access to state funds and shape government policy to boost their profits. These practices are not extraneous to the functioning of the state; they are built into it. The capitalist state is a political instrument that organizes and enforces class rule. Corruption is the crude, visible face of that instrument when private interests circumvent norms and institutions to extract contracts and favors or privatize public wealth.
The fact that the union bureaucracies are so fully integrated in this process underscores their transformation over the past four decades into corporatist appendages of the state and big business. These organizations no longer even represent workers’ interests in a limited sense, but rather defend the privileges and perks of a privileged middle-class layer that functions as an arm of management and the state in policing the working class.
This corporatist partnership is expressed in the unions’ systematic suppression of the class struggle. They impose concessions and job cuts in the name of ensuring corporate “competitiveness,” and sabotage worker resistance by isolating strikes and enforcing anti-strike laws.
Politically, the unions subordinate workers to right-wing capitalist parties. For six years, the union bureaucracy—through its political mouthpiece, the NDP—has propped up successive minority Liberal governments, as they have broken strikes, massively increased military spending, and presided over a massive intensification of economic distress. Now, the union bureaucrats are serving as pliant junior partners in “Team Canada.” That is in the ruling class’ alliance to defend its profits and strategic interests in the name of opposing Trump’s trade war and annexation threats through a massive shift further right. This includes adopting large swathes of Trump’s oligarchic social policy.
The working class needs independent organs of struggle—rank-and-file committees—independent political organization, and a program to break the grip of the corporatist union bureaucracies over their struggles. This program must be based on the fight for the political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and their supporters, i.e., a socialist and internationalist perspective aimed at securing workers’ power to put an end to corrupt dealings and privileges for the few, and meet the social needs of the vast majority.
4. United States: The Bondi memorandum: FBI, DOJ seek to outlaw political opposition
A memorandum from US Attorney General Pam Bondi, issued December 4, instructs all federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to compile lists of organizations to be slandered and criminalized as “domestic terrorists” because they oppose fascism and capitalism and advocate for socialism.
The six-page document, uncovered and made public by journalist Ken Klippenstein, is a blueprint for federal officials on how to implement National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), issued by Trump on September 25, after the assassination of ultra-right activist Charlie Kirk, a close associate of the fascist cabal in the White House.
NSPM-7 is so broadly worded that, as the World Socialist Web Site warned at the time, it would criminalize virtually all political opposition to the Trump administration, even including the Democratic Party, which holds 47 out of 100 seats in the US Senate and 213 out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives.
Its language is reproduced in the Bondi memorandum, which describes “domestic terrorists” as advocating “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity” and “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality .…”
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A major factor underlying the actions of the Trump administration is preparations for elections in 2026. In addition to the Bondi memo, Trump officials have repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, giving the president the authority to deploy the military domestically. This would allow for any elections, if held at all, to proceed under conditions of effective martial law.
The latest document from Bondi spells out a series of steps by federal officials and agencies to fulfill Trump’s demand for a sweeping crackdown on political opposition.
Within 14 days of the issuance of the Bondi memorandum—December 18, 2025—all federal law enforcement agencies are to deliver to the FBI all files “for Antifa and Antifa-related intelligence and information.” Given that Antifa is not an actual organization but rather a label applied to anyone engaged in anti-fascist political activity of any kind, this means the centralization into the hands of the FBI of all information on virtually all left-wing political groups.
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The Bondi memorandum lists no less than 25 separate legal provisions that could potentially be used against targeted groups. This lumps together such crimes as murder for hire and planting explosives with non-violent civil disobedience tactics, described as “resisting or impeding federal officers” and “picketing or parading with intent to obstruct the administration of justice.” Virtually any political act of protest against Trump’s immigration Gestapo would be criminalized on this basis.
Whenever Trump and his fascist cohorts speak of “domestic terrorism,” they are not referring to actual advocates of violence but to left-wing political opposition, particularly that developing from the working class. Trump’s real attitude towards political violence was shown in his action on the first day he reentered the White House, when he pardoned all of the fascist thugs who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and temporarily halted the congressional certification of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
It is a measure of their utter cynicism and contempt for public opinion that Trump and Bondi propose to use the same laws under which the January 6 rioters were indicted and convicted to target those who oppose the administration’s persecution of immigrants and its preparations for presidential dictatorship.
While they denounce “anti-fascism,” claiming it is a smear tactic and a pretext for violence, the same administration has just issued a National Security Strategy document that openly aligns US foreign policy with fascist parties in Europe like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the French National Rally (RN), and effectively embraces the neo-Nazi “Great Replacement Theory,” that whites are being deliberately replaced by non-whites in a conspiracy orchestrated by wealthy Jews.
In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Socialist Equality Party issued a statement summing up the dangers posed to democratic rights and warning working people and young people. We declared: “It is necessary to put aside all self-deluding hopes that what is unfolding is anything less than a drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, based on the military, police, paramilitary forces and fascist gangs.”
In the 80 days which have passed, the danger has not lessened. On the contrary, the Trump administration has begun to systematize its attacks on democratic rights, beginning with the persecution of immigrant workers but directed ultimately against the entire working class.
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The response of the Democratic Party to the Bondi memo has been one of silence. Leading Democrats have not only failed to denounce this fascistic declaration of war against political opposition—They have made clear through their actions that they will do nothing to stop Trump’s drive toward dictatorship. Their response to the mass opposition expressed in the October “No Kings” demonstrations was to end the government shutdown on Trump’s terms and bail out the administration. When it comes to the assault on left-wing opponents of inequality, war and dictatorship, the Democrats—a party of Wall Street and American imperialism—are co-conspirators.
The Bondi memo must be understood as part of an ongoing and escalating conspiracy. The Trump administration, in crisis and facing growing opposition, is not retreating. It is doubling down. The working class must respond with its own offensive.
5. Zohran Mamdani, Jessica Tisch and the NYPD’s mass surveillance program
After officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested protesters who blocked ICE Gestapo forces from leaving a garage in New York City’s Chinatown late last month, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mayor-elect, took to social media (with a week’s delay) to comment on the incident. He advised immigrant workers of their rights—the need for a judicial warrant for ICE to enter private dwellings (that ICE routinely violates), the right to film ICE, etc.
But before the video clip is two-thirds done, Mamdani tells viewers not to “impede their investigation, resist arrest or run” and follows up with political pablum directed to his supporters, that he will as mayor “protect, support and celebrate our immigrant brothers and sisters.”
The essential political content of the video is, however, that the NYPD will arrest anyone who interferes with ICE operations. The intended audience of the video is the NYPD brass and the Trump administration. The video seeks to reassure them that a Mamdani government will uphold ICE operations in the city. It is worth noting that since Mamdani met with Trump in November, he has not posted a single item on social media criticizing Trump.
The pact between Trump and Mamdani has a concrete—and chilling—meaning: Mamdani will allow the work of the repressive apparatus of the state in the city, in this case primarily the NYPD, to continue its operations unimpeded.
This is the significance of his reappointment of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the pioneer of one of the most sinister mechanisms of repression aimed at the working class, the NYPD’s mass surveillance tools.
Tisch is not only a scion of an ultra-wealthy family that has played a prominent though largely behind-the-scenes role in New York City politics for the last 50 years. She has also devoted her career to designing and implementing a pervasive spying infrastructure known as the Domain Awareness System (DAS).
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DAS is constantly being expanded and modified. In August, an investigation by New York Focus uncovered a little-known NYPD program to expand CCTV (closed-circuit television) surveillance at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings and use the free internet service that the Adams administration had set up, Big Apple Connect, to link the cameras.
At City Council hearings in October prompted by New York Focus’s exposure, Anthony Mascia, the commanding officer of the NYPD’s Information Technology Bureau, testified that the NYPD plans to link 1,900 cameras across 19 more NYCHA properties and eventually 17,897 CCTV cameras across 119 NYCHA developments.
NYCHA houses almost exclusively the poorest sections of the working class in New York City. If not for cheaper city housing, below the current $4,000 monthly average rent for a one-bedroom apartment on the open market, hundreds of thousands of its residents would be homeless. This is the section of the working class most vulnerable to cuts in SNAP benefits and inflation.
As New York Focus noted about the city council hearings, “Michal Gross, a public defender at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, told the committee that police already use NYCHA CCTV footage for reasons other than responding to crimes. The police department, she said, has admitted in court to ‘surveilling youth via NYCHA video, watching who they spend time with, who their friends are, and even documenting how they spend time with their own family members.”*****
If any ruling class politician were looking for someone with deep connections to the ruling elite of New York City and to its worldwide financial operations, who has been embedded in the capitalist state apparatus for years and is now implementing the state’s “bodies of armed men” with technologies that scrape mass information about ordinary working people from multiple sources, Jessica Tisch would be that person.
It is significant that Mamdani’s public safety plan, released in March, does not even mention the NYPD’s pervasive spying on New York’s population. The Democratic Party has been involved with the deployment of this apparatus for decades, as the promotion of Tisch by de Blasio and Adams testifies. The close integration of the DSA with rest of the Democratic Party in New York indicates that it never had any intention of fighting it or any other tool of repression.
St. Louis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Detroit operate or have funded Real-Time Crime Centers. These centers function as surveillance hubs that achieve the same kind of data aggregation as the DAS. Invariably, the ruling class is seeking to ensure that the technology and techniques will come to every part of the United States, rural and urban. The National Security Agency (NSA), as Edward Snowden exposed in 2011, is already harvesting the metadata of millions of private calls, including all international calls whether they are made from New York or Little Rock. There can be no doubt that Artificial Intelligence is now being applied to the aggregation of data by DAS.
The essential political lesson of Mamdani’s reappointment of Jessica Tisch as New York City’s Police Commissioner is that the DSA, like all other sections of the Democratic Party, is actively facilitating a principal technology of dictatorship.
Body camera footage released this week exposes how El Centro police gunned down 14-year-old Mikey Jimenez. Jimenez was killed on October 5, yet the edited video was withheld for more than six weeks before being made public on November 19.
The footage leaves no ambiguity. Police opened fire almost immediately, unleashing a barrage of bullets at a terrified child who posed no threat. The video confirms Jimenez was executed in a storm of gunfire.
Police claim they were responding to an automated license plate reader alert that flagged a white Hyundai sedan as stolen. Officers located the car in the parking lot of a local restaurant, then moved in with multiple vehicles to box in 14-year-old Mikey Jimenez, setting the stage for the killing that followed.
The released footage shows Jimenez driving from behind the restaurant toward the exit as officers rush in. Before any officer opens fire, Jimenez turns the wheel to the right, appearing to steer away from police and their vehicles. Despite this clear attempt to avoid them, officers begin shooting almost immediately.
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Two other juveniles were inside the car during the shooting. Somewhat miraculously, neither was injured. Police detained both of them after the killing but filed no charges.
The El Centro Police Department claims it released all available body camera footage. This raises only two possibilities: the officer who fired first either was not wearing a camera in violation of department policy that requires every officer to carry a “portable recording device,” or the department is withholding the footage.
So far, the El Centro police have provided no proof that Jimenez stole the vehicle. Even if he had, the maximum penalty for a first offense is three years in jail. It is not summary execution by a police firing squad.
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Firing at a moving vehicle is widely recognized as reckless and ineffective. It rarely stops a car and often increases the risk of killing bystanders. For these reasons several major cities prohibit officers from shooting at moving vehicles and instruct them to move out of the vehicle’s path rather than open fire.
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This is the second police killing in El Centro this year. In May, officers shot and killed Ezequiel Obed Espinoza after a resident reported a man in her backyard with a gun. When police confronted him, Espinoza raised a bicycle seat, which officers later claimed resembled a “shooting stance.” They opened fire within seconds and declared him dead at the scene. The department released only limited, audio-less footage and brief excerpts of the 911 call and witness interviews. Nothing in the available material shows the officer attempting to determine whether Espinoza was actually armed or making any effort to deescalate before shooting him just 14 seconds after initial contact.
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The United States justice system functions to shield police and the wealthy from accountability, while workers and the poor bear the brunt of police violence and prosecutorial power. It is a system structured to protect the state and capital, not the lives of those it routinely targets. It cannot be reformed or “re-imagined” to serve the class interests of workers.
Imperial County law enforcement has a long record of corruption. In 2014, the nearby Calexico Police Department was raided by the FBI during an investigation into extortion, drug use, drug smuggling, missing guns, theft of city funds, and the misuse of money by the local police union.
Family attorney Marcus Bourassa underscored this history during the November 22 press conference. “It’s the same district attorney’s office that they work with, day-in and day-out,” he said. “The fear is that if this is an in-house, inside investigation, we’re going to get the expected results that there’s no prosecution and therefore there will be no criminal justice.”
Imperial County is among the most impoverished regions in California, with unemployment reaching 20 percent. The area depends heavily on its two state prisons and a large Border Patrol facility, making law enforcement and corrections some of the only stable, better-paying jobs available and a major conduit for state and federal funding. This economic dependence creates strong political pressures on local officials to defend police involved in incidents like this, further undermining the already slim prospects for an impartial investigation.
Jimenez is one of at least 1,079 people who have been killed by the police in the US in 2025. For more than a decade, increasingly militarized police in the US have killed over 1,000 people every year.
The execution of a 14-year-old is an indictment of a decaying and discredited economic, social, and political order that now relies on naked violence to sustain itself. It unfolds as the US military murders fishermen and boaters in the Caribbean and as US-backed Israeli occupation forces execute Palestinians in the West Bank and carry out genocide in Gaza. A system that commits atrocities abroad is fully capable of committing them at home, reflected in the destruction of due process and the transformation of the police into judge, jury and executioner.
7. English folk singer and guitarist Martin Carthy: An appraisal of his six-decade career
On the sixtieth anniversary of his first album, veteran folk singer Martin Carthy this year released Transform Me Then Into A Fish, revisiting and reinventing his debut album and other highlights of his influential career. At 84, he became the oldest person ever nominated for the Mercury Prize (awarded for the best album released by a musical act from the United Kingdom or Ireland), eventually won by Sam Fender.
Carthy wears his considerable history lightly. His album was reflective without being nostalgic or complacent, building on a lifetime’s commitment to the performance and interpretation of traditional music. His playing all but created revival guitar styles, while his compelling singing shaped the folk scene’s traditional repertoire. Paul Simon and Bob Dylan both picked up material from him.
He has always seen folk as reflecting social life and conditions, so has never shied away from social and political issues.
8. New Zealand Defense Force aims to double recruitment
New Zealand’s military head, Air Marshal Tony Davies, told a parliamentary committee on December 2 that the NZ Defense Force (NZDF) was “dusting off the history books” and looking at “what New Zealand had to do to survive and grow its military back in 1938.” The NZDF must make “drastic changes,” Davies declared, to raise recruitment numbers “significantly higher, just as our forebears did around each world war or each major conflict.”
Davies’ referencing of two world wars is a stark warning of the rapidly advancing political and military crisis. NZ’s ruling elite is complicit in US-led imperialist wars around the globe—from supporting the Gaza genocide and the NATO war against Russia over Ukraine to warmongering against China. These are fronts in a developing third world war, which threatens a catastrophe far greater than the wars of the last century.
In May, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that China posed an “imminent” threat and demanded that US allies in Asia prepare for war over Taiwan by 2027.
New Zealand, a minor imperialist power allied to the US, is in the process of doubling military spending from 1 to 2 percent of GDP. Invoking the Australia and NZ Army Corps (Anzac) alliance of World War I, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon stated earlier this year: “We want to be a force multiplier, we want to be one essential Anzac force operating within our region.”
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Winston Peters recently announced another $NZ15 million to supply Ukraine with weapons and equipment. This brings NZ’s total support for the war against Russia, including during the previous Labour-Greens government, to over $NZ168 million.
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A new Defense Industry Strategy, launched in October by Defense and Space Minister Judith Collins, puts the development of space related technology “front and center” at the same time that US space weapons are in record demand. The strategy emphasizes strengthening local companies to take advantage of growing export potential, including the production of drones and other hardware.
The NZDF has already begun playing a regular part in “kill chain” multinational exercises, joining with allied command-and-control centres across a mega-network of sensors, which is among the US Pentagon’s top priorities. The US-NZ company Rocket Lab, with a capacity to launch satellites from NZ soil, has recently expanded its ability to supply space-based missile warning systems.
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The expanding drive to war abroad means war against the working class at home. The $12 billion allocated over four years for the military will only be found at the expense of the social programs and living standards of workers, who have already undertaken significant strikes against the government attacks on wages and conditions.
The first word in almost a month from government safety authorities about the October 28 explosion at Endeavor mine in Cobar, outback New South Wales (NSW), which killed two miners and injured another, provides more questions than answers. The NSW Resources Regulator’s “Investigation information release” neither explains what caused the tragedy nor makes any recommendation for how to stop more workers being killed.
The mining safety authority published the document on November 25, exactly 28 days after the incident, in line with the agency’s statutory responsibilities. The regulator is not required to provide any further updates until the investigation is complete, likely years from now.
The entire process is opaque. The report gives no explanation of what investigators have examined so far, what they have found, who has been spoken to, what steps are next, or how long the whole operation is expected to take.
While the agency has taken four weeks to prepare this perfunctory document, mine owner Polymetals has not wasted a moment. With the agency’s approval, the company began reopening the mine just eight days after Ambrose McMullen and Holly Clarke were killed, and fully resumed operations on November 15.
The report does not mention that the mine has been reopened, let alone explain why this was allowed when, at least according to what has been publicly stated, neither the regulator nor the Polymetals know what caused the tragedy.
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The Mining and Energy Union and the Australian Workers Union have not said a word in response to the regulator’s release, just as they have maintained a complicit silence as the company has herded workers back in to the Endeavor mine. This is revealing of the union bureaucracy’s attitude to workers, not just in Cobar but throughout the mining industry. The unions’ silence is a deliberate act to suppress discussion of, and opposition to, the continued use of electric detonators and ballistic disc explosives, potentially risking the lives of countless mining workers elsewhere.
Mining workers, their families and the Cobar community can place no faith in the government safety regulator or the trade unions. The truth will only be exposed through an investigation led by Endeavor workers themselves, overseen by a rank-and-file committee. In the first instance, this committee should oppose and fight to reverse the reopening of the mine and insist that workers are paid in full for the duration of the investigation.
The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party pledge to provide every political assistance in this fight for truth. We urge workers at Endeavor and others in Cobar and throughout the mining industry to contact us with whatever information you have about the October 28 incident and safety in the mines. We will protect your anonymity from the companies, unions and government authorities.
World Socialist Web Site reporters visited the village of Iyankoyiladi, Murasumottai in the Kilinochchi District, located in Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged Northern Province, to speak with survivors of Cyclone Ditwah, which has devastated large parts of the island.
According to the Disaster Management Centre (DMC), the island-wide death toll has risen to 627, with 73 people still missing. The DMC further reported that at least 275,819 individuals from 84,729 families have been affected. Temporary shelter centers are housing 7,177 families, comprising 22,139 individuals.
In the predominantly Tamil Northern Province, the death toll stands at nine, with four people reported missing. Due to the inadequate conditions in the government-run shelters, many survivors told the WSWS they preferred to remain in their homes, despite extensive damage.
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Nadarasa Ravichandran, a daily wage worker, explained: “The flood rose above our waists. Our stored food and paddy sacks were destroyed. Crocodiles that came with the flood ate our cattle.”
He described their current conditions in the shelter: “We survive on the food relief we received while staying here. The government gave us 5,000 rupees [about 16 US dollars].”
He continued: “I support my family as a daily wage worker. If I work full-time, I earn 3,000 rupees a day. But there is no work during the rainy season. We are now living in extreme poverty. The flood broke our doors, and our house is damaged.”
Ravichandran described their ongoing hardship: “We keep facing the same situation over and over again. Previous governments promised to provide us with a house or land in another place. But nothing has been given.”
He explained why they cannot move: “We can’t relocate. We can only go to daily wage jobs if we stay here, because we do agricultural work. Everything we have depends on the income from that. We are not able to educate our children. There are four of us in the house. We don’t have the money to buy land elsewhere. We’ve lived on this land for almost 40 years.”
He also spoke about the impact of the communal war and broken promises afterward: “Our situation hasn’t changed since the war ended. Our relatives were killed. We have gunshot wounds. My wife was also injured. After the war, we lived in refugee camps. We had to leave everything behind. When we returned, we had nothing. We resettled in temporary huts. There was no compensation for the damages caused by the war.”
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T. Sivakumar, a 50-year-old farmer from Jaffna:
“Politicians only come during election time. They don’t visit to see people’s suffering or offer help. Rice crops and vegetable gardens have been destroyed. Because of this, it is possible that prices for commodities will rise. Even now, a kilo of tomatoes costs 1,000 rupees. In the future, people won’t be able to survive.”
11. Supreme Court poised to empower Trump to fire independent regulators without cause
On Monday, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that, if decided in Trump’s favor, would vest within the White House the power to remove independent regulatory agency commissioners and members of boards created by Congress without cause.
The case heard Monday has far-reaching consequences for the management of the capitalist state. It directly concerned whether President Donald Trump can fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission who does not support Trump’s agenda and whom Trump fired earlier this year.
For 90 years, the courts have followed the unanimous 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States which held that the president can only fire heads or board members of independent agencies, such as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Trump’s lawyers have never claimed that Slaughter was guilty of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” They have instead advanced arguments based on the ultra-right “unitary executive theory” which claim that Article II of the Constitution vests within the presidency immense power to rule over all “executive” decisions, including the hiring or firing of the members and heads of independent agencies specifically created by Congress so as to not be under the same White House purview as departments of the executive branch.
The Court’s ruling will affect dozens of agencies that regulate and mediate large sections of the US economy, including transportation, finance, nuclear energy and communications. Agencies potentially impacted by the overturning of Humphrey’s Executor include the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
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In 1887, 10 years after the Great Railroad Strike and one year after the Haymarket frame-up, Congress created the first so-called independent regulatory agency through the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887. Under conditions where rail barons like Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt wielded enormous monopoly power, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) acted as a stabilizer between rival capitalist dynasties, not a neutral arbiter protecting the public or workers.
To this day, agencies such as the NLRB or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are touted by capitalist politicians and elements of the pseudo-left as mechanisms of reform, or independent and bipartisan neutral bodies capable of protecting the interests of workers. In reality, agencies such as the NLRB, often working with union bureaucracies, are used to suffocate strikes and workers’ militancy and channel the class struggle into the dead end of legalistic processes that do not challenge the power of the capitalist state.
Today, under conditions of inequality not seen in a century, in which a tiny handful of oligarchs dictate the policies in both parties, the nominal independence of some of these agencies is no longer to be tolerated. The dictatorship of the oligarchy is reflected in the structure of the state itself. Congress, the “people’s chamber”, is increasingly sidelined and ignored as more power is vested in the executive branch through a bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court.
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Last summer the Supreme Court, in the counter-revolutionary ruling Trump v. United States, granted Trump immunity from his failed January 6 coup, and from any new crimes he should commit in office. That the Supreme Court now appears poised to hand more power to the fascist executive only confirms that the working class must intervene in the situation independently of both political parties and the institutions of the bourgeois state. The question for workers is not saving the capitalist state, but abolishing it and the capitalist system.
12. Fraud charges mount in Honduras after week-long vote count and no clear winner
More than one week after the November 30 national elections in Honduras marked by an unprecedented level of intervention and intimidation from Washington, there is still no clear winner.
As of Monday, after the vote count remained frozen for more than two days due to what election authorities described as “technical difficulties,” the margin separating the candidates of Honduras’ two traditional right-wing parties, Nasry Asfura of the National Party and Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party, fell to as little as 11,000 votes. Rixi Moncada, candidate of the incumbent Libre Party was running a distant third, with less than 20 percent of the vote.
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Asfura is the chosen candidate of US President Donald Trump, who labeled Moncada a “communist” and Nasralla a “borderline communist,” while threatening that there would “be hell to pay” if the election did not turn out to his liking.
On the eve of the election, Trump sought to further plant his thumb on the electoral scales by pardoning former National Party President Juan Orlando Hernández, who in 2024 was convicted in a US Federal Court for his leading role in what prosecutors described as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison, famously told his co-conspirators that he wanted to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He was credited with facilitating the importation of a staggering 500 tons of the drug into the US.
The pardon has given the lie to all of the pretensions by the Trump administration that its ongoing killing spree in the Caribbean and its massing of an unprecedented armada off the shores of Venezuela are directed at halting the flow of drugs from Latin America. Its aggression against Venezuela, which is responsible for a negligible share of this flow, and the pardon for Hernández, the archetype of a narco-dictator, are both rooted in the drive by US imperialism to reconquer its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and reverse the ever-growing influence of its strategic rivals, in particular China.
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US interventionism and electoral fraud have a long and filthy history in Honduras. The country was used as a staging ground for Washington’s imperialist interventions in the region for decades, from the 1954 CIA coup that overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala to the US-backed counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador and CIA-organized “contra” war against Nicaragua that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1980s. During this period, it was ruled by a succession of right-wing regimes and military dictatorships that unleashed death squads against their opponents.
The country continues to host the most important overseas US military base in the region, the Enrique Soto Cano air base, where at least 1,500 US troops operate the country’s largest airstrip, a critical hub for the projection of military power throughout the hemisphere.
The present electoral crisis traces its immediate history back to the US-orchestrated 2009 coup that overthrew President Mel Zelaya, then of the Liberal Party. A conservative businessman, Zelaya had aligned his administration with the so-called “Pink Tide” of bourgeois nationalist Latin American governments that utilized windfalls from the commodities boom of the first decade of the century to fund minimal social assistance programs and achieve a semblance of independence from Washington based upon economic ties with Beijing. In the case of Honduras, a key attraction was the supply of discounted Venezuelan oil by the government of Hugo Chávez.
The coup, supported by the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, brought the National Party back to power, with the gunpoint election of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who ushered in more than a decade of intense repression and rampant corruption. In 2014, Lobo was succeeded by Juan Orlando Hernández, who ran again in the 2017 election, riding roughshod over Honduran constitution, which prohibits any more than a single term.
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The brutish intervention of the Trump administration in the Honduran election is part of a broader strategy spelled out in the 2025 National Security Strategy document released last week. This openly fascist document announces the advent of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. It is aimed at extending the 200-year-old US foreign policy statement, first drafted to oppose European recolonization of newly independent countries in Latin America, beyond anything ever seen before in the long and bloody record of US interventionism.
Eschewing any of the previous pretenses of promoting “democracy” or a “rules-based order,” the new Trump doctrine asserts US imperialism’s “right” to intervene wherever it sees fit “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region,” as well as to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
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Whatever temporary successes achieved by Washington through this policy of violence and intimidation, it cannot reverse the historic decline of US economic and political dominance in Latin America or, more importantly, overcome the deep social crises that prevail in this, the most socially unequal region on the planet.
The burning question is that of revolutionary leadership. No section of the Latin American bourgeoisie, including the left-talking populists of the Pink Tide, is capable of mounting a genuine resistance to the pressures of US imperialism and the capitalist world market. That task falls to the Latin American working class, which must unite its struggles with those of workers in the United States and internationally to put an end to the profit system and oligarchic rule through the socialist reorganization of society.
13. Trump’s National Security Strategy deepens split within NATO
The new US National Security Strategy shows that the transatlantic alliance is not just superficially damaged, but deeply divided. What President Donald Trump has announced in individual tweets and Vice President JD Vance in a speech at the Munich Security Conference is now official US foreign policy.
The strategy document, which is usually revised once during each presidency, translates Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” into the language of foreign policy. Since President Woodrow Wilson published his “14 Points” at the end of World War I, the US had always veiled its quest for world domination with phrases about “freedom,” “democracy,” and “the rule of law.” This was still the case in Trump’s first National Security Strategy in 2017. That is no longer true today.
The new strategy openly states its predatory goals. “The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of this strategy,” the document states. The strategy aims to ensure “that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come.”
To this end, the US wants to “recruit, train, equip, and field the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military,” build “the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent,” and have “the world’s strongest, most dynamic, most innovative, and most advanced economy.”
All relations with all other countries will be subordinated to these goals.
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The strategy document has caused a storm of indignation in the European press. The French newspaper Le Monde wrote:
The split is final, pending the division of assets. That is how the publication of the national security strategy by the White House on Friday, December 5, appears from a transatlantic perspective. ... [It] marks a historic rupture. Never before had an official document of this nature demonstrated such indifference toward America’s adversaries and such disregard toward its traditional allies, especially those in Europe.
The German weekly Die Zeit described the document as an “anti-Europe doctrine” and a “brutal wake-up call for all transatlanticists who wanted to hold on to the idea of a value-bound West,” while the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called it a “paper in which the US settles scores with Europe.”
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The European powers have no answer to the growing conflict with the US other than war and class war. The US enabled discredited Western European capitalism to survive after World War II, and the Cold War against the Soviet Union welded the imperialist powers together. This formed the basis for the economic upswing and social compromises of the postwar period.
But now, as we wrote in an earlier article, “The global crisis of capitalism and the accompanying bitter struggle for raw materials, markets, and profits are destroying the alliance between the two largest imperialist power blocs, which together account for 45 percent of global economic output.” Trump is not the cause, but merely the subjective expression of this development.
Germany and the other European powers have been striving for years to free themselves from US hegemony and once again play an independent role as a major power. Now they are accelerating these efforts, investing hundreds of billions in rearmament, continuing the war against Russia, and compensating for the enormous costs through social cuts and mass layoffs. Like Trump, they are building a police state and have long since adopted the brutal migration policies of the far right.
The working class must not support either side in the escalating transatlantic conflict. It must unite internationally and fight on both sides of the Atlantic for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist society.
Negotiators for the Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 234 and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) announced a tentative agreement on Monday, aimed at heading off a strike by over 5,000 SEPTA transit workers in Philadelphia. Transit workers in Pennsylvania’s most economically important region have been laboring without a contract for more than a month.
After holding a strike authorization vote on November 16 under conditions of mounting rank-and-file anger, TWU officials deliberately kept workers on the job, demobilizing their power while openly collaborating with management and the state.
“I am very pleased that we were able to settle without a strike,” said TWU 234 President Will Vera in a public statement following the announcement. Vera singled out Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro for special praise, stating the latter had “got key people from both sides in the same room last night, stopped the run-around, got promises from both sides and we reached a deal. Without the Governor’s intervention, we would have been on strike this morning.”
After the expiration of their one-year contract on November 7, the TWU 234 leadership kept members guessing about what would come next. Only after mounting pressure from below did the leadership formally call a strike authorization vote more than a week later on November 16, when members voted unanimously for a strike.
The announcement comes just a few days after TWU officials declared a strike to be “imminent.” On Friday, Vera declared that his “patience has run out” and the TWU International President John Samuelson joined the local leadership at a press conference. However, the statements were followed by a weekend of negotiations in which Governor Shapiro was said to be “closely” involved. On Sunday, the transit union and management officials were apparently on good terms again and the “imminent” threat of a work stoppage was called off.
Far from a near-miss, the transit union officialdom knew a deal was at hand, deciding to issue pompous threats in order to make the impending deal appear to be the product of their so-called “militant” posturing. Similar farces have occurred in recent times, such as the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers’ series of “strike ready” events, which preceded the announcement of a sellout contract in August. These were modeled on the Teamsters’ own “strike ready” campaign at UPS, which it used to help force through a contract under suspicious circumstances in 2023.
The tentative agreement (TA) is a blatant sellout of the membership, which has had zero say on the terms and conditions of their employment throughout the entire ordeal. The TA’s ratification has been presented to the membership and public as a done deal. This is despite the fact a ratification date has not even been set. “What have we lost? Because we definitely lost something as usual!” stated one SEPTA worker on social media in response to the union’s announcement on Monday.
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The unanimous strike authorization reflects growing militancy within the working class. Philadelphia in particular has been at the epicenter of growing working-class anger on the United States East Coast. Five months ago, 9,000 city municipal workers launched a powerful eight-day strike that brought city services to a standstill, upending the city amid a heat wave and the lucrative July 4 Independence Day holiday.
Only with the combined efforts of the AFSCME District Council 33 leadership, the city’s Democratic Party government and the trade union bureaucracy was the strike corralled and isolated. Despite popular support from the city’s working population, workers were offered a TA that met none of their demands and only gave them a raise 1 percent higher than the offer they had rejected when they went on strike.
Following this, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers rammed through a sellout in August right before the contract for 14,000 public school teachers expired. Teachers were given one two-hour Zoom call in which criticism of the TA was suppressed before a vote was called. This was a deliberate move to ensure the contract’s ratification and keep the workforce from striking.
Since then, the School District of Philadelphia has advanced plans to close or co-locate a substantial portion of its 300 public schools. In November, the school district announced it would delay the plan’s release until it could receive more community feedback. SDP superintendent Tony Watlington has previously declared plans to “rightsize” the school district, a euphemism for closing “underperforming” schools.
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It is a burning need for SEPTA workers to oppose this TA, organizing in rank-and-file committees to enforce its rejection. But voting “no” is only the beginning. The rank and file must take the initiative out of the hands of the TWU leadership.
As the Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Committee wrote last August: “It is a proven, iron law that as long as a struggle remains in the hands of the bureaucracy, the only possible outcome is a betrayal. The only path to victory is building independent rank-and-file strength and solidarity.”
Such a struggle will necessarily bring workers into conflict with the capitalist state, including the Democratic Party, which runs both the city and the state. This is most of all reflected by the Shapiro administration’s decision to get involved in the SEPTA talks. It is critical that workers mobilize wider sections of the working class to deepen their struggle and prepare for a direct confrontation with the capitalist state, the enforcer of inequality and poverty.
15. Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler 1956–2025: Trotskyist and fighter for the working class
Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler devoted her entire adult life to building a better, socialist society. In 1975, at the age of 19, she joined the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and remained an active and leading member for the rest of her life. On November 28 she died from the consequences of a tragic accident in her flat in Duisburg.
Her German and international comrades will remember “Elli,” as everyone called her, for the tireless energy with which she championed Marxism among workers and party members, for her firmness of principle and for her human warmth. Dozens of messages of condolence received by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) from all over the world express this.
The World Socialist Web Site provides a comprehensive and informative memorial article describing Elisabeth's remarkable life and times.
16. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Bolivia:
Canada:
Canadian Air Transat pilots set to strike
Puerto Rico:
United States:
Tentative agreement in Moses Lake, Washington week-long teachers strike
Teamsters announce strike authorizations at three dairy plants in Southwestern Wisconsin
17. 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.
18. Leading Ukrainian criminologist finds charges of “state treason” against Bogdan Syrotiuk baseless
On December 4, a Ukrainian court in Pervomaisk reviewed the linguistic expertise commissioned by the defense lawyers of imprisoned Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk. Now 26 years old, Syrotiuk was arrested in April 2024 and charged with “state treason under martial law,” a crime which carries between 15 years and life in prison. Far from operating on behalf of the Putin regime, as the prosecution charges, Syrotiuk was the founder and leader of Trotskyist youth group the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, which has opposed the war in Ukraine by fighting for the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian working class.
The defense lawyers commissioned Yuri Borisovich Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists, to conduct a “linguistic examination” of the statements and articles that Bogdan wrote and published, and that have served as the principal foundation for his prosecution. Irkhin found that they provide no basis whatsoever for his prosecution as a “traitor” and a supporter of the Putin regime.
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In his 65-page report, Irkhin examined more than a dozen publications by the World Socialist Web Site, which the indictment cited, denouncing the WSWS as “a Russian propaganda and information agency.” Among them are several statements by the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, such as their November 2022 statement against the war, articles by Bogdan Syrotiuk on Ukrainian fascism, reports on the mood among Ukrainian youth, articles by the WSWS on NATO’s role in the war, as well as an October 2023 lecture by David North on the Gaza genocide. Irkhin subjected all of these publications to a thorough semantic analysis, highlighting terms expressing opposition to the invasion of Ukraine by the Putin regime and the Putin regime itself.
His conclusion is unequivocal:
1. “….there are no statements, phrases, sentences, or word combinations that contain public calls aimed at undermining the national security of Ukraine, its national interests, the elimination of Ukrainian statehood and the destruction of Ukrainian identity, and the conduct of subversive activities against Ukraine in the information sphere to the detriment of Ukraine's information security, are NOT contained (in the articles and statements under examination).
2. ….there are NO statements, phrases, sentences, or word combinations that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.” (Emphasis in the original)
Given the authority of Irkhin and the thoroughness of his analysis, even the Ukrainian court, which has so far routinely ruled in favor of the prosecution, despite its lack of evidence, could not ignore it. In light of the extreme contrast between the results of the examinations by the prosecution and the defense, the court was forced to rule on December 4 that a third expert will have to produce another expertise. This decision marks a significant set-back for the prosecution. However, while this is an important legal development in the campaign to free Bogdan, the significance of Irkhin’s examination goes well beyond its implications in the courtroom.
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The linguistic report marks a major development in the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk. It will be an important tool before the European Court of Human Rights, which accepted his case earlier this year. Above all, however, it should be seen as a powerful vindication of the struggle for the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk and for the principles of Marxist internationalism that he was imprisoned for. We call on all readers to respond to this development by expanding their efforts for his freedom!
- Sign the petition demanding his immediate release!
- Donate to the campaign!
- Make this case as widely known as possible!
