Mar 30, 2026

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

 1. This week in history: March 30-April 5

  • 25 years ago:
Slobodan Milošević arrested at the behest of US imperialism

  • 50 years ago:

Palestinian general strike and the First “Land Day”

  • 75 years ago:

    Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sentenced to death for espionage

  • 100 years ago:

Kolkata gripped by communalist riots   
 
2. More than 8 million join mass anti-Trump “No Kings” protests3. Perspective:  The March 28 “No Kings” demonstrations: The political lessons

The scale of the March 28 protests reflected the depth of popular anger at the advance of dictatorship at home and the escalation of imperialist war abroad. A collision is unfolding between a capitalist oligarchy that is breaking with democratic forms of rule and the broad mass of the population.

The war against Iran, now one month old, was a decisive animating force for those participating. While it was downplayed by the organizations that called the protests, opposition was expressed in signs and chants in city after city. As the demonstrations were taking place, Trump was preparing a further escalation with potentially catastrophic consequences for the planet. The day after the protests, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is preparing for “weeks or months” of ground operations in Iran and that planning for such operations “has been in development for weeks,” under the cover of fraudulent “negotiations.”

4. Actors, performers oppose Trump at No Kings protests and elsewhere–the question of the Democratic Party looms large

Speaking at the No Kings rally in New York, veteran actor Robert De Niro told the crowd that he supported the anti-Trump movement “150 percent.” No other president has been such an “existential threat” to constitutional rights as Trump, he continued. “The president “must be stopped, he must be stopped now.” De Niro went on:

It’s time to say no to kings. It’s time to say no to Donald Trump. We’ve had enough. No King Trump, no unnecessary wars that rob our resources, sacrifice our brave servicemen and women and slaughter innocents. No corrupt leader enriching himself and the Epstein class buddies. No taking away healthcare from our most vulnerable neighbors, no unaffordable groceries, no unaffordable energy, no unaffordable housing and no inflation at its highest level since COVID. No government masked thugs shooting down our neighbors in the streets. Trump has to be stopped.

The actor added that Trump “can’t do all the f—-ed up things he’s been doing without the collusion of Congress and the goons in his administration…It’s diabolical…They should be afraid of us.”

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Every honest criticism of the Trump administration and the American ruling elite’s assault on democracy, drive to dictatorship and homicidal war on Iran is welcome. Every exposure of the government’s lies, every puncturing of its public posturing helps undermine confidence in an utterly rotten political and economic system.

However, that hardly resolves all the political issues and contradictions embedded in the present situation. The leading performers mentioned—Fonda, De Niro, Springsteen and Baez—all have histories of supporting the Democratic Party or one or another of its candidates, including various “mavericks.” Springsteen and Fonda appeared on a platform in St. Paul Saturday groaning with Democratic Party politicians, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Gov. Tim Walz, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Attorney General Keith Ellison. Walz introduced Springsteen.

In their comments, the prominent actors and musicians hewed closely to the Democratic Party line. Aside from De Niro’s reference to “the collusion of Congress,” there was no mention of the Democrats’ complicity with Trump all down the line, including on the massive aggression against Iran. In regard to the latter, in keeping with the official No Kings strictures, there was again almost no mention this past weekend of this brutal conflict by any of the artists. The general implication, left hanging in the air, was that the answer to the fascist Trump was voting for the Democrats in the mid-term elections (De Niro referred limply, for example, to the solution lying in the “ballot box.”)

The Democrats, however, are not an opposition party, they are a party of imperialism, soaked in blood from head to foot. They agree in fundamentals with Trump’s reactionary and sinister measures, objectively driven by the crisis of American and world capitalism, only differing on tactical and entirely secondary questions.
*****

Again, the vocal opposition to Trump’s wars, at home and abroad, is timely, but the basis for a movement to drive out this administration will have to be anti-capitalist and socialist, because there is no fight against war and authoritarianism without a fight against capitalism today. This also means that a genuine anti-war, anti-fascist movement must be independent of and implacably hostile to all the political parties and organizations of the capitalist ruling class, including every wing and faction of the Democratic Party.

The growth of profound radicalism among the artists is inevitable, given the present intolerable conditions created by capitalism. The force and influence of such a movement will not depend on a sudden turnaround in the orientation of an older generation, but above all in the upsurge of the working class in struggle and the consequent emergence of genuine, fierce opposition to the entire status quo by primarily younger and more determined artists. 

As Russia is being drawn into an escalating global conflict, class tensions in the country have been rising significantly. Over the last year mass layoffs have hit several key industries, including IT and various services industries, but also major state-owned companies such as the Russian Railways (RZD) and the metals producer Rusal. As of November 2025, at least 10 companies in mining, transport and machinery had shifted to shorter working weeks to cut costs, according to a report by the Moscow Times.

While media coverage of strikes and protests in Russia is slim, several strikes and protests have apparently taken place over the past year. According to a report by Solyanka Media, this year has seen strikes over the withholding of wages at several workplaces, including construction sites by Novoleks and facilities of Orgenergostroi. Since March 20, railway workers of the company SeverPut’Stroi have gone on strike in the Republic of Komi. One of the striking workers told the Moscow Times that they have received no full paycheck since December 2025. In February they were not paid at all. Alexandra told the outlet, “People need something to live on. I have three children, I have to pay for utilities, for school, and everyone of course also wants to eat.” According to a report dated March 25, workers from other companies that are supplied by SeverPut’Stroi also face months-long withholding of wages and are planning to join the strike.

Official figures by the agency Rosstat indicate that overdue wage arrears rose 2.3 fold and have now reached the highest level since 2016 (2.077 billion rubles or 25.169 million USD.) 14,700 workers did not receive their wages, an almost two-fold increase of 6,500 relative to 2024. In most cases, companies claim that they are unable to pay wages due to high interest rates of the Central Bank and a slowdown in the economy. Domestic demand has declined significantly, with many commentators pointing to the indebtedness of the population as a major factor.

More layoffs and wage cuts are already underway. The Russian Railways have announced plans to cut 15 percent of their staff in 2026, or around 6,000 people. Several auto plants have also announced layoffs and reduced working hours. Thus, one media report indicated that AvtoVAZ and GAZ, the two largest Russian car companies, officially transitioned to a four-day work week in September. Real incomes of auto workers have declined by some 20 percent.

The metal giant Rusal has been shutting down some of its key facilities. Thus, on January 1, Rusal’s Kremniy plant in the Irkutsk region stopped production. It was the largest silicon facility in the country. Several other factories of Rusal have shifted to reduced working weeks. Rusal is one of the country’s largest companies and one of the biggest metal producers in the world. Its workforce in Russia is estimated at between 40,000 and 50,000, the vast majority of them are factory workers. The company’s annual revenue frequently ranges around $12 billion to $15 billion.

 
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The case of Boksitogorsk’s Rusal plant has provoked considerable nervousness in the ruling class with the governor of the region calling upon the Kremlin to intervene. Rusal is owned by the billionaire Oleg Deripaska who has an estimated net worth of around $7.6 billion. Perhaps even more than other oligarchs, who have amassed their wealth through the plundering of state assets during the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, Deripaska is widely hated in the working class.

In 2009, a mass protest by workers of Rusal in another monotown, Pikaliovo, led to one of the most tense class confrontations in Russia under Putin. In the wake of the 2008 crash, Rusal stopped paying its workers for months while also ceasing to pay its water and electricity bills. As a result, local authorities shut down water and electricity for the residents, prompting an angry protest by workers who stormed the local city hall and blocked the highway to demand their wages and jobs. The situation became so tense that the Kremlin considered it necessary for President Vladimir Putin to intervene. At the time, Putin chided Deripaska on public television, forcing him to get the factory back running and presenting himself as a defender of the interests of workers against the oligarch. 

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The Ukraine war, now in its fifth year, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives with no end in sight. Ukraine also still regularly strikes targets on Russian territory, with dozens, sometimes hundreds of drones, intercepted each day. While some strikes hit residential areas, most target industrial and energy facilities and the casualties are often workers. In recent weeks, Russian forces have also been pushed back by the Ukrainian army, reportedly suffering significant casualties. 

Meanwhile, what is essentially already a global war has entered a new stage with the US-Israeli attack on Iran. Even while Russia might benefit in the short term from higher oil prices and the lifting of some sanctions, fundamentally the new imperialist carve-up of the entire continent targets Russia as well as China. The Russian press and pundits close to the Kremlin have also been alarmed by the prospect of the war spreading directly to the border of Russia, in both the Caucasus and Central Asia. Already, the conflict has dragged in Azerbaijan, a key country in the Caucasus which has long been built up by both the US and Israel as an important ally in a war against Iran.

In an indication of how desperate the Kremlin is in trying to reach a deal with US imperialism, the Kremlin not only abstained from a vote on a resolution condemning Iran for striking US allies in retaliation for the attack. According to a report in the Financial Times, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has also offered to stop sharing targeting intelligence with Iran, in exchange for an end to Washington’s intelligence partnership with Ukraine. Washington reportedly rejected the offer.

While haggling to reach a settlement with the imperialist powers, the Kremlin is simultaneously ratcheting up its campaign of internet censorship. Earlier this year, the Russian state blocked WhatsApp, which had been used by over two-thirds of the population. The Kremlin is also expected to shut down Telegram, the only nominally encrypted messenger still available to Russian users. Meanwhile, the rolling mobile internet shutdowns which have centered on the provinces have begun to significantly disrupt life in the country’s largest and economically most important cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg. In a recent poll, 83 percent of teenagers indicated that they opposed these shutdowns.

The decision by Donald Trump to have his signature placed on the US dollar bill will no doubt be greeted by anger and hostility as another expression of his drive to establish a personalized dictatorship in the United States, implement a fascist agenda of imperial conquest abroad and a war against the democratic and social rights of the working class at home. 

As critics of the decision have pointed out, the placing of a sitting president’s signature on the currency or his image on a gold coin violates the anti-monarchical principles on which the revolution was based.

But at the same time, it could well be that Trump’s decision to affix his signature to the dollar comes to be regarded as entirely appropriate, a fitting symbol of the economic, cultural and political decline of US capitalism, of which Trump, who resembles nothing so much as a Mafia gangster, is the personification.

Economically this decline and the deepening crisis to which it is giving rise is expressed nowhere more sharply than in the position of the dollar.

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In the past four decades, starting with the stock market collapse of 1987, the largest one-day fall in history, the US financial system has been rocked by a series of financial crises, each one more serious than the last. Major turmoil in the 1990s, of which the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 was the most serious, was followed by the bursting of the dot.com bubble at the turn of the century.

In the first years of the new century, it appeared, at least to short-sighted observers, principally those at the highest levels of the financial administration of the US state, that financial crises had been overcome and a veritable new epoch had dawned dubbed the “Great Moderation.”

That fiction was ripped apart by the financial crash of 2008, sparked by the outright criminal activities of banks and financial institutions and speculators, the very milieu from which Trump emerged and who he now represents at the top of the US state.

And the contradictions of the financial system erupted again in March 2020 when the US Treasury market, where US government debt is bought and sold and which forms the basis of the global financial system, froze. No buyers could be found for the supposedly safest financial asset in the world, a US government dollar-denominated bond. The Federal Reserve had to intervene with an injection of trillions of dollars to prevent a total collapse of the financial system.

Today the central question in the financial markets is not whether there is going to be another financial disaster, but what will trigger it. Will it be sparked by a withdrawal of the crucial supplies of international finance from the $30 trillion US Treasury market, leading to a liquidity crisis? Will there be a collapse of the bond market when the insatiable demands of the US state—driven by ever-increasing military spending—become too large to be met?

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 And outside the world of finance, in the real economy, there are deepening concerns. Key sections of industry have already taken a hit from the Trump tariffs and now there is the impact of the price increases flowing from the war against Iran, starting with gas and diesel but extending across a vast range of industrial commodities.

The much-touted revival of American industry pledged by Trump has not materialised and mass layoffs are taking place in key areas. The “golden age” for the US economy and American workers has turned into a cruel joke as they are hit first from one side and then another.

*****

The media release from the Treasury Department on the decision to put Trump’s signature on the dollar bill and to mint a gold coin with his image read as if they were written by Jonathan Swift or some other master satirist.

A statement issued in the name of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent read: “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are on a path toward unprecedented economic growth, lasting dollar dominance, and fiscal strength and stability. There is no more powerful way to recognise the historic achievement of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than US dollar bills bearing his name, and it is only appropriate that this historic currency be issued at the Semiquincentennial.” 

These statements have been issued to give the impression of strength. They indicate the exact opposite. Tinpot dictatorships, racked by internal crises, conflicts and divisions, have their officials give such paeans of praise to their “great leader.” Stable regimes have no such need.

President Herbert Hoover has gone down in history because of his intimate association with the Great Depression, giving his name to the “Hoovervilles,” shanty towns of unemployed workers and displaced farmers.

But on this occasion, as American capitalism lurches into crisis, there is no Franklin Roosevelt waiting in the wings with a New Deal to avert social revolution. Roosevelt had at his disposal the enormous resources of a still rising American capitalism. Those resources have now gone. They have been replaced by a mountain of debt and paper dollars which will now have Trump’s name on them.

The crisis of American and global capitalism cannot be resolved through reforms from within the system. There are none. The only resolution is the socialist revolution by the American and international working class, unified objectively by the global character of production and now the onslaught against workers in every country emanating from the war Iran, to reconstruct society on new foundations. Trump, together with his signed dollars, and the system he represents must be cast into the rubbish bin of history. 

On Saturday, as 8 million people marched across the United States and internationally in the “No Kings” protests against the Donald Trump administration, fascist operatives behind the US regime gathered in Dallas, Texas, for the CPAC 2026 (Conservative Political Action Conference). The event was addressed by Flávio Bolsonaro, who is running as the far-right’s candidate in the Brazilian presidential elections in October. Flávio is standing as the political representative of his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, now serving a 27-year sentence for the coup attempt that culminated in the January 8, 2023 fascist insurrection in Brasília.

In his speech before CPAC, Flávio Bolsonaro eloquently presented the fascist strategy driving his campaign. Demanding direct US imperialist intervention in the Brazilian elections, he pledged to continue the coup conspiracy for which his father was convicted.

“They called him the Trump of the Tropics,” Flávio said referring to his father. Addressing Bolsonaro’s imprisonment, the Brazilian junior fascist continued: “The formal charge is similar to what President Donald Trump faced: insurrection. Sound familiar? But the real reason is the same. … My father fought against COVID tyranny. He fought against drug cartels. He fought against global elite interests.”

Promising to follow the example of the frenzied dictatorial drive taken by the US fascist president upon returning to office, he added: “Trump 2.0 is being much better than Trump 1.0. Right? Well, Bolsonaro 2.0 will also be much better.”

Flávio also laid bare the deep connection between the Brazilian fascists’ domestic agenda and collaboration with US imperialism’s ruthless neocolonial and military aims in Latin America, particularly in the escalation of war against China. He declared:

Here’s what should really get your attention. Brazil is going to be the battleground where the future of the hemisphere will be fought, because Brazil is America’s solution to break dependence on China for critical minerals, especially rare earth elements. …

[Brazilian President Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] and his party are openly anti-American. He speaks publicly about undermining the dollar as the global currency. He has aligned Brazil with China on a massive scale. He has opposed America’s interests on every single issue of foreign policy, publicly criticizing President Trump’s actions on Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and the fight against drug trafficking. …

Opinion polls published in recent weeks have shown a rise in the number of Brazilians indicating their intention to vote for Flávio Bolsonaro, whose standing has risen continuously since his jailed father named him in December as his proxy presidential candidate. 

*****
Flávio Bolsonaro’s rise in the polls has provoked despair within the Workers Party (PT) which is seeking Lula’s reelection through a rerun of the “broad front” with right-wing parties with which he was elected in 2022. The catastrophic outcome of this political perspective is revealed by the fact that, six months before the elections, Flávio already appears in a technical tie with Lula. 
*****
Lula’s collapse in the polls represents a historic indictment, not only of this current term, but of the entire experience of PT governance. Selling itself as a better manager of capitalism in Brazil, with the idea that all social classes would benefit from the growth of national capital, PT administrations have proven incapable of significantly altering the economic and social reality of the country, which remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. 
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This pattern is repeated on a regional scale: the demagogic and pro-capitalist policies of the Pink Tide paved the way for the recent rise of Milei in Argentina, Kast in Chile, Paz in Bolivia and a host of other fascist-type figures across Latin America. As the World Socialist Web Site noted regarding the analogous phenomenon in Europe, “the fact that the right is strengthening has less to do with its intrinsic power than with the complete bankruptcy of what passes for the left.” The necessary political response to the rise of fascism, war, and the capitalist offensive is the construction of a revolutionary political alternative in the working class. 

In an interview published Sunday in the Financial Times, US President Donald Trump announced his “preference” to “take the oil” from Iran—a massive expansion of the US war of aggression that would only be possible through a ground invasion of the country.

Trump’s statement of his intent to massively expand the war was announced one day after what organizers said were as many as 8 million people took to the streets across all 50 states in the third round of “No Kings” demonstrations—which would make them the largest single-day protests in American history. Despite efforts by the organizers to downplay opposition to the war in Iran, the demonstrations expressed the overwhelming popular opposition to it.

The Financial Times interview, conducted by Edward Luce, was published as the Pentagon ordered thousands of additional troops to the region. Trump compared the planned seizure of Iran’s oil to Venezuela, where the US intends to control the oil industry “indefinitely” following its capture of President Nicolás Maduro. “To be honest with you, my favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran,” Trump said, “but some stupid people back in the US say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.”

Such a move would involve seizing Kharg Island, through which most of Iran’s oil is exported. Trump told the Financial Times: “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options.” He added: “It would also mean we had to be there for a while.” 
The Wall Street Journal reported separately Sunday that Trump is actively making plans for a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran—“a complex and risky mission that would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer.”
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Trump claimed he could take Kharg Island “very easily,” saying Iran has “no defense” on the island. The military’s own assessments contradict this. CNN reported that Iran has fortified the island with an estimated 30,000-40,000 personnel, air defense systems, underground trenches, land mines along the coastline and swarms of first-person-view kamikaze drones. Harrison Mann, a former Army major and Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, told

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham compared the planned operation to Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, and said: “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this. My money’s always on the Marines.” Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Sunday that the US was “secretly planning a ground invasion” while publicly talking about negotiations, according to Reuters.

More than 50,000 US troops are now deployed across the Middle East, according to the New York Times. The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU)—2,500 Marines and 2,500 sailors—arrived in the region on Friday. Another 2,200 Marines from the 11th MEU are en route aboard the USS Boxer. Roughly 2,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division have been ordered to the region. The Wall Street Journal and Axios reported that the Pentagon is drawing up plans to send another 10,000 troops to the region. 

In Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Sunday the expansion of what he called the “security zone” in southern Lebanon. More than 1,238 people have been killed and 3,500 wounded since Israel launched its assault on March 2, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, including 124 children. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced. Israeli forces have reached a tributary of the Litani River. PBS NewsHour reported that three journalists were killed Saturday in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a marked press vehicle in Jezzine.

After 30 days of war, the civilian death toll in Iran continues to climb. The human rights group Hengaw, using field documentation, reported at least 6,530 killed through Day 25, including 640 confirmed civilians. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) documented at least 1,551 civilian deaths, including 236 children. Iran’s Red Crescent reported more than 81,000 civilian sites damaged, including 61,000 homes and nearly 500 schools. Between 3.2 and 4 million Iranians have been internally displaced. A near-total internet blackout has sealed off 90 million people from the outside world for 30 days.

*****

On the Sunday talk shows, no Democrat on any of the four major programs used the words “war crime” or “international law” in connection with the Iran war. Last weekend, former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Donna Brazile declared on ABC’s Sunday news program: “Democrats understand that Iran has posed a threat, not just to the region, the Gulf, but to the world itself.”

The entire Democratic leadership—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar—voted for the $839 billion military budget that funds the war. 

9. Stalemate following parliamentary elections in Slovenia

The outgoing government, comprising the liberal Freedom Movement (GS), the Social Democrats (SD) and the Left Party (Levica), no longer has a majority of its own. GS, led by incumbent Prime Minister Robert Golob, came out on top with 28.6 percent, but only by the narrowest of margins ahead of Janez Janša’s right-wing conservative Democratic Party (SDS), which secured 28 percent. Even with the votes of the Social Democrats (6.7 percent) and the “left-wing” electoral alliance Levica-Vesna (5.5 percent), Golob does not have a majority in parliament.

A right-wing alliance comprising the SDS, a three-party right-wing conservative electoral alliance and the SDS splinter group Democrats also lacks a majority of its own. The far-right party Resni.ca (Truth) with 5.5 percent could now become the kingmaker. The party was formed at the height of the coronavirus pandemic by anti-vaxxers and coronavirus deniers, and combines social backwardness with hate speech against migrants. Like the SDS, it also maintains close ties to openly fascist circles.

Yet this has not deterred Golob from a possible coalition with the far right. On Friday, he invited the leaders of all parties and alliances represented in the new parliament—with the exception of the SDS—to explore the possibility of a “government of national unity.”

The right-wing conservative alliance (New Slovenia (NSi), People’s Party (SLS) and Fokus) declined the invitation. It stated that the Golob government had been voted out and that it would only join a government led by the SDS. The remaining parties, on the other hand, offered to work with Golob’s GS on an emergency law that would allow them to bypass parliament and pass legislation in the event of protracted coalition negotiations.

Numerous political commentators consider cooperation between the previous coalition partners and Resni.ca or the Democrats to be likely. This would result in a further, significant shift to the right. 

The strike by 3,800 JBS meatpackers in Greeley, Colorado has now been extended into its third week, a significant development in the growing confrontation between workers and one of the largest meatpacking corporations in the world.

Previously, officials from the United Food Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 had indicated that it would limit the strike to two weeks. That workers remain out shows both their determination and the depth of the anger over poverty wages, dangerous working conditions and soaring healthcare costs and the company’s refusal to meet their demands.

Eduardo and Ezekiel, two workers at the Greeley plant, told the World Socialist Web Site the company, “treats the animals better than us. They don’t care about us. We are not going back until we get something good. Without us they don’t make any money.”

Mac, another meatpacker said he supports “equal conditions for workers everywhere.” Jose noted the exorbitant costs imposed on workers’ for their personal protective equipment: “It’s $800. We shouldn’t have to pay for that out of pocket.” 
 
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Under these conditions, the company is gambling that it can outlast the strike, utilizing grinding poverty and government threats against immigrants—who are a large majority of the workforce at the plant—to soften workers up.

The proposed wage offer only underscores the contempt with which the corporation views workers. The 60 cent initial raise does not even keep pace with inflation and amounts to a real pay cut, before proposed increases to workers’ health insurance plans. Workers are being told to sacrifice while JBS reports enormous revenues and profits.

The UFCW itself says it remains “ready to meet with JBS at any time.” But talks could only lead to gains for workers if they are the ones taking the initiative, not the company. Instead, the bureaucracy’s perspective remains one of resuming normal production as soon as possible, not broadening the struggle into an industry-wide and international fight. 

*****
JBS is a multinational corporation with enormous resources. The UFCW’s own press release notes that JBS recorded $86 billion in revenue in 2025 and $2 billion in profits, while its stock rose on the basis of improved margins in the beef industry. 

JBS workers across the country should organize with the Greeley workers to shut down scab cattle processing at Cactus and other plants. Lines of communication must be established immediately between meatpackers in Greeley and workers at Cactus and other JBS facilities to accomplish this.

Workers must appeal for support across the industry and internationally. Meatpacking workers in every plant confront the same corporations, the same attacks on wages and benefits, and the same union apparatuses that seek to suppress a common fight.

This is a struggle with world dimensions because it is an international workforce fighting a multinational with operations in over two dozen countries. Recent statements of support for strike from JBS workers in Brazil shows enormous sympathy for the strike, which must be activated through global collaboration.

*****
Now is the time to draw the necessary conclusions. Workers have shown they are ready to fight. What is needed is an independent, socialist perspective, that can lead to victory. Workers in Greeley interested in forming a rank-and-file committee should contact the World Socialist Web Site. 

On March 25, the 210-day statutory deadline, which was imposed by the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, for the Trump administration to nominate a new director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expired. Consequently, the premier US public health agency remains officially headless but under the de facto control of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who simultaneously serves as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

Bhattacharya, an economist and co-author of the anti-science Great Barrington Declaration, shares Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hostility to established public health measures. He will continue executing the duties of the office despite legally losing the title of acting director. 

The expiration of the deadline comes just days after U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy issued a March 16 preliminary injunction blocking Kennedy’s overhaul of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and his sweeping rollbacks to the childhood immunization schedule. This administrative lapse also coincides with the government’s escalating efforts to validate right-wing anti-vaccine narratives, highlighted by a recently leaked federal report from an ACIP workgroup urging the formal medical codification of “COVID-19 vaccine injuries.”

It also follows the apparent stalemate in the Senate over the nomination of anti-vaxxer Dr. Casey Means as Surgeon General. Some Republican senators have balked over the nomination of an individual without a current medical license to the post, which is seen as America’s top doctor. This applies as well to Dr. Jerome Adams, Trump’s Surgeon General during his first term.

Under these conditions, pushing through a Senate-confirmed director risked a bruising confirmation battle, or the selection of a nominee who would assert the CDC’s traditional scientific independence. Keeping Bhattacharya in informal control instead ensures the agency remains paralyzed and subservient to Kennedy’s agenda at precisely the moment the federal courts are pushing back. Murphy’s ruling has sharpened the administration’s dilemma, because it must find a nominee ideologically aligned with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade who can nonetheless survive Senate confirmation. Former CDC officials and public health experts are unequivocal—This is not bureaucratic neglect but a deliberate strategy to keep the agency leaderless, legally diminished and incapable of resisting HHS directives.

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The vacancy is not an isolated failure but the predictable outcome of the administration’s war on CDC. Dr. Susan Monarez was confirmed by the Senate on July 29, 2025—the first CDC director ever to require Senate confirmation, a change made as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty-nine days later, Kennedy fired her for refusing to pre-approve his ACIP recommendations and purge career vaccine officials. Clearly any CDC director who resists the anti-vaccine agenda will be removed. 

The ACIP purge in June 2025 was the starkest expression of this strategy. Kennedy dismissed all 17 independent voting members and replaced them with ideological loyalists, provoking a federal lawsuit. On March 16, Judge Murphy issued a preliminary injunction that stayed the appointments of the 13 newly installed ACIP members, nullified all their 2025 votes and froze the January 5, 2026 decision memorandum that slashed the childhood immunization schedule.

The leadership vacuum mirrors a devastating internal collapse. Over the past year, mass layoffs, forced attrition and prolonged administrative leaves have cost the CDC roughly a quarter of its workforce. Frozen grants and contracts have devastated morale. Core disease surveillance is severely disrupted, and the agency’s flagship journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, is publishing far fewer scientific articles. While federal grants still reach state partners, severe staffing shortages mean this funding is distributed without vital technical assistance or accountability.

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Dismantling vaccine liability shields has been a central objective of Kennedy and the anti-vaccine movement for decades. The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005 currently insulates COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers from direct lawsuits, routing claims through the federal Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). Anti-vaccine law firms, such as Siri & Glimstad, are challenging this framework in court, seeking to open the floodgates for conventional civil litigation. Embedding an ICD-10 diagnosis for COVID-19 vaccine injuries into federal policy—even absent any scientific consensus on causation—would hand those litigants a powerful tool, one that risks bankrupting the compensation system and driving life-saving vaccines off the US market entirely.
On Wednesday, the Albanese Labor government made more explicit and blatant its move to block Iranians trying to flee the criminal US-led bombardment that has already killed and maimed thousands of civilians and destroyed basic infrastructure, including schools and hospitals. 
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke used his new powers, handed to him by legislation rushed through parliament with Liberal-National Coalition support two weeks ago, to issue a “control determination order” barring access to Australia for all Iranians—currently about 7,000—holding valid tourist visas. 

According to Science Alert on March 20, the Runit Dome nuclear waste dump on the Marshall Islands in the northwest Pacific is continuing to deteriorate with deepening cracks in the site’s concrete capping and the casing vulnerable to rising seas due to global warming.

The 115-metre (377 feet)-wide dome was built between 1977 and 1980 as part of a supposed military cleanup. The 18-inch thick structure holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet of radioactive soil and debris, more than 120,000 tons of material contaminated by US nuclear waste including lethal quantities of plutonium. The dome was intended as a temporary fix and, to save money, the actual bomb crater on which it was constructed was never lined.

Accelerating climate change now threatens to turn the potential catastrophe into an irreversible regional disaster. Recent reports of new cracking, the daily in‑and‑out movement of radioactive groundwater driven by the tides, and rising seas around the structure show that it may have serious consequences for the wider Pacific and its impoverished populations.

Situated mid-way between Hawaii and Australia, the Marshall Islands has a population of 53,000 people. The island chain was occupied by Allied forces in 1944 and placed under US administration in 1947. It achieved nominal independence in 1986 under a neo-colonial Compact of Free Association (CoFA) which effectively still binds it to Washington.

Between 1946 and 1958, the US carried out 67 atmospheric and underwater nuclear explosions and a series of biological weapons tests in the islands. The largest, the Castle Bravo bomb detonated in March 1954, was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blast vaporised part of Runit Island and sent a mushroom cloud six kilometres into the sky. Irradiated soil from the Enewetak and Bikini atolls, used as “ground zero” for the tests, was poured into a crater left from the detonations, mixed with concrete and covered with the shallow concrete dome.

Since the construction, groundwater has penetrated the crater, beneath which lies a bed of porous coral sediment. This is the main source of leaks, but experts are concerned that parts of the dome designed to sit above sea level will not stay above water much longer. US government data already shows sea level rise at Runit and project increases that will push waves higher over the dome, exacerbating cracking and infiltration.

With rising sea levels, the Marshall Islands is forecast to see many of its 29 atolls under water within 10 to 20 years. In 2019, the WSWS reported a Los Angeles Times investigation that showed climate change is breaking open the aging and weathered dome as it “bobs up and down with the tide,” threatening to spill nuclear waste into the ocean.  
 
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Of the 4,000 troops posted to Enewetak during the 1970s and 80s, only a few hundred are alive today, according to records from the National Association of Atomic Veterans. It was not until 2023 that the US government officially recognised the survivors as “atomic veterans” who could access disability claims. “We couldn’t go to the VA [Veterans Affairs] before that so a lot of guys couldn’t get treatment,” Celestial said. 

He described the clean-up effort as careless. “We didn’t do a good job,” he said. “We didn’t know what the plan was so a lot of the equipment and hot stuff we just dumped into the lagoon.”

Hundreds of Marshall Islanders were exiled across the Pacific—impoverished, their homes devastated and health imperiled. An international tribunal concluded in 1988 the US should pay $2.3 billion in claims, but Congress and US courts refused. Documents cited by the LA Times showed the US paid just $4 million.

Washington has falsely asserted that locals now face little risk from radioactivity. At Bikini and Rongelap, residents initially returned to their islands after the US told them it was safe. The resettlement was a disaster. Cancer cases, miscarriages and deformities multiplied. By 1967, 17 of the 19 children who were younger than 10 and on the island during the Bravo detonation had developed thyroid disorders and growths. One child died of leukaemia.

Under the Compact with Washington, in exchange for limited funding and continued US military access, “all claims, past, present and future” related to nuclear testing were declared resolved. US officials now exploit this arrangement to shield Washington from any responsibility, with the legal burden for any remediation of Runit Dome resting primarily with the impoverished Marshall Islands government.

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Today, the Marshall Islands are again assuming geo-strategic importance as part of Washington’s intensifying confrontation with Beijing. Once poisoned for nuclear weapons development, the tiny Pacific Island state is now, along with other parts of the Pacific, being secured and upgraded as a forward platform in the US-led drive to militarily encircle China. 

Democratic Party candidate for US Senate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed is appearing at back-to-back events at Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Michigan (UM) on April 7, along with US Representative from Pennsylvania Summer Lee and podcaster Hasan Piker.

El-Sayed is one of three candidates seeking the party’s nomination for US Senate in the November midterm election. His campus tour is a calculated intervention by a faction of the Democratic Party—along with its pseudo-left satellites—to corral the growing leftward movement of students behind capitalist politics.

With Democrat Gary Peters retiring, the seat is open in a state that Trump carried in 2016, lost in 2020, and narrowly recaptured in 2024, making Michigan a key state from the standpoint of bourgeois electoral politics. Former Representative Mike Rogers has emerged as the leading candidate for the Republican Party, advancing a law‑and‑order, national security platform aligned closely with the White House. 

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The essential political function of the campus tour—which pairs the Democrat El-Sayed with a “progressive” member of Congress and a media personality branded as a leftist—is to direct opposition behind the false hope that electing Democrats in 2026 will stop the threat of fascism and the descent into a Third World War. 
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Abdul El‑Sayed is a physician and former Detroit health director who first came to national prominence in 2018, when he ran in the Democratic primary for Michigan governor with the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez (AOC), ultimately losing to Gretchen Whitmer, who went on to win the gubernatorial election and is currently serving a second term.

Born in Detroit in 1984 to Egyptian immigrant parents, El-Sayed has become a significant figure in Michigan Democratic Party politics, with media and Democratic Party-aligned groups referring to him as the “Mamdani of Michigan.” This is an attempt to connect him to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York City mayoral election as a Democrat in 2025.

El‑Sayed’s posture on the US‑Israeli war against Iran illustrates clearly the alignment of his politics with that of the Democratic Party. On social media he has issued posts under slogans like “NO WAR WITH IRAN,” presenting himself as an opponent of the conflict. But his actual criticism centers not on the criminal character of the war itself, but on procedural objections and Trump’s betrayal of his “America First” rhetoric. 
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El‑Sayed’s criticisms are a repackaged version of this fundamental agreement between both parties, while carefully phrased to appear to align with widespread public anti-war sentiment. El-Sayed does not condemn the criminal murder by the US and Israel of the Iranian leadership, including the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in a series of “decapitation” strikes beginning on the first day of the war.

Branding himself as a “single‑payer champion,” El‑Sayed’s program is entirely reformist and pro‑capitalist. He has presented himself as one of the most prominent advocates of Medicare for All. He proudly declares that he has “never touched corporate money” and that he is the only candidate openly running on Medicare for All, which supposedly distinguishes him from the Democratic Party establishment.

Yet El‑Sayed speaks of building a “broad-based movement” that comes together around policies that address affordability and expand public goods—not to expropriate the capitalist class and place major industries under workers’ control—but to “prove out” a policy through the Democrats.

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Jacobin [Magazine] has praised El‑Sayed for never taking corporate money and for being the only Medicare for All candidate, presenting him as anti-establishment. The publication frames Michigan as a laboratory for demonstrating the viability of “movement” politics that can push the Democratic Party to the left on social issues, notably healthcare and affordability.

In an interview with Jacobin, El-Sayed emphasized that winning in Michigan would “suggest a way forward in the rest of the country,” meaning he had a strategy for rebranding the Democratic Party. While insisting he could “speak truth to power,” El-Sayed promised the ruling class that his proposals—single‑payer, limited debt relief, modest taxation of the wealthy—would not fundamentally threaten their wealth, property or control of the state.

This narrative is designed to obscure the lessons of Mamdani’s election-- that such figures—including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—do not represent the working class and are not independent in any way of American imperialism. The El‑Sayed candidacy represents the same perspective in Michigan. 

*****

Globally, strikes and protests by workers, from autoworkers to logistics and public sector workers, indicate that a new period of class struggle is underway. As the wars and attacks on democratic rights are pushing masses of people to the left, the El‑Sayed campaign and its April 7 campus tour serve a specific political purpose: to create a dead‑end trap for the emerging mass movement and divert it back into the Democratic Party.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) advances a fundamentally different perspective. The SEP insists that the fight against war, fascism and social inequality requires a break from the Democrats and the independent political mobilization of the working class based on a socialist program. War is not an aberration, but the inevitable outcome of the capitalist system. Ending war means abolishing capitalism.

The SEP fights for the construction of rank‑and‑file committees in workplaces and schools, independent of the trade union bureaucracy and the Democratic and Republican parties, to organize strikes and mass action, including a general strike against austerity, layoffs and war. It calls for the expropriation of the banks and major corporations, placing them under democratic control as public utilities; the cancellation of student and medical debt; the guarantee of free, high‑quality healthcare and education; and the defense of democratic rights.

n the first days of March 2026, the Philippine National Security Council (NSC) announced it had uncovered and dismantled a Chinese espionage network operating inside government agencies. The online news outlet Rappler simultaneously published a three-part investigative series claiming Filipino civil servants had been recruited to pass military secrets to Chinese handlers. The Philippine military amplified the claims. Senator Risa Hontiveros of the Akbayan party demanded new surveillance powers and the suspension of visa-free entry for Chinese nationals.

The announcement and escalating allegations against and attacks on China for “spying” come as the Ferdinand Marcos Jr administration confronts an immense economic and social crisis caused by the spike in prices and curtailed supply of oil as a result of Washington’s war on Iran. There are strong indications that Marcos is looking to distance the Philippines from the United States and improve relations with China.

Theresa Lazaro, head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, announced that the Philippines was planning on conducting joint patrols of the South China Sea with China. A leading Marcos ally, Senator Erwin Tulfo, head of the Foreign Relations committee, called for the re-examination and possible scrapping of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that allows the basing of US forces in the country and the deployment of US missile systems targeting China. On March 24, Marcos told Bloomberg that there would be a “reset” of relations between Manila and Beijing, and called for joint oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea.

Opposing this reset are many of the top brass of the Philippine military and the pseudo-left party Akbayan, which out of its merger with the elite Liberal Party, has become the most vocal proponent of Washington’s war drive against China in the Philippines.

It is in this context that the espionage campaign—whose immediate origins lie in a March 4 NSC press release and a Rappler series sourced entirely from military officials—must be understood. 
 
*****

The identification of this alleged operation as a Chinese government intelligence program rests on the NSC’s assertion that anonymous informants transmitted documents to un-named Chinese nationals. This is not merely flimsy: it is unsubstantiated allegations piled upon baseless claims.

The March 2026 allegations are the latest in a sustained cycle that has been running since 2024, each episode following the same template: an announcement by security officials, media amplification, and charges that fail to materialize. 

*****

There is a long history of espionage conducted against the Philippines, including the rigging of elections, the subversion of democracy, and sabotaging of popular sovereignty—but it was waged not by China but by the United States.

CIA officer Edward Lansdale arrived in the Philippines in 1950, ran psychological warfare against the Hukbalahap peasant insurgency, managed the 1953 presidential election—writing Ramon Magsaysay’s campaign speeches, funding his campaign through CIA channels, and running a smear operation against Magsaysay’s rival. Philippine presidents were funded by the CIA; cabinet ministers and members of Congress were paid CIA assets. The Philippines served as the training laboratory for counterinsurgency methods exported across Asia and Latin America; the techniques developed there were carried to South Vietnam and to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Clark Air Base and Subic Bay were the platforms from which the United States bombed Cambodia and Vietnam.

The operations have never stopped. US Marine Corps MQ-9A Reaper drones now fly continuous surveillance missions over the South China Sea from Basa Air Base in Pampanga—an EDCA site—providing real-time intelligence on Chinese vessels to US Indo-Pacific Command. A permanent US special forces task force, Task Force Ayungin, is embedded in Philippine maritime operations. The intermediate-range Typhon missile system, capable of striking the Chinese mainland, has been deployed to Philippine soil.

Washington, in a secret psychological warfare campaign documented by Reuters in 2024, operated hundreds of fake social media accounts in Tagalog and other Philippine languages to sabotage the Chinese-manufactured Sinovac vaccine—distributing fabricated claims that it was “rat poison”—during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are no Chinese drones flying from Philippine bases. There are no Chinese special forces embedded in Philippine commands. There are no Chinese missiles aimed at Washington on Philippine territory. China has never rigged a Philippine election, bought off a candidate, or flown bombing missions from its shores.

The scurrilous campaign against Chinese nationals and Chinese Filipinos waged by Akbayan and the Philippine military serve to buttress the violently tottering framework of the US empire in the Philippines, but it does more than this. In the context of explosive social unrest, Akbayan is bringing back into circulation the age-old racist scapegoating of the Chinese. They are employing the language of the pogrom.

16. Germany’s SPD leader launches attack on working conditions and pensions

Social Democratic Party leader Lars Klingbeil has reacted to the SPD’s recent election defeats with a frontal attack on pensions, working conditions, health insurance and other social achievements. 

17. DSA declines to endorse its own members in Los Angeles mayoral race

The DSA's role in the Los Angeles mayoral race exposes its function as an appendage of the Democratic Party in blocking the independent political mobilization of the working class. 

18. How humans’ capacity for cultural adaptation allowed them to spread across the planet

A comparison with the environmental settings and biological adaptations of nearly 6,000 terrestrial mammalian species demonstrates the profound advantages of human cultural adaptations.

19. Uganda military chief says would join Iran war if Israel faced defeat

General Muhoozi Kainerugaba is grovelling, to signal the loyalty of the Ugandan regime to US imperialism.

20. Hundreds of thousands march against far right in London to be told to vote for Labour

The growth of Reform UK was used by the Together Alliance, to mount a “get the vote out” drive for the Labour Party, backed as necessary by the Green Party. 

21. United Kingdom:  Doncaster bus drivers at First South Yorkshire strike for pay parity

The 230 Unite union members are determined to overcome a deal failing to give them parity with their First South Yorkshire colleagues in Sheffield, just 18 miles away.

22. 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.

Posted by at

Mar 28, 2026

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. ICE at airports: A dress rehearsal for police state dictatorship

Five days after President Donald Trump deployed hundreds of armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to airports across the US, not a single Democratic leader in the House or Senate has called for their removal. The same goes for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Instead, one day before millions prepared to take the streets in the “No Kings” protests, the Democratic Party effectively dropped its phony charade of reining in the ICE and Border Patrol killers. This was the significance of the bill unanimously passed by the Senate early Friday morning to fund the Department of Homeland Security, with the exception of ICE and Border Patrol.

2. US to send another 10,000 ground troops to Middle East, as war with Iran escalates

The buildup of ground troops capable of launching an invasion of Iran is the real content of Trump’s claims that he is negotiating with Iran. The administration has repeatedly used talk of negotiations as cover for military escalation—in last year’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, in the January kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and now in the current war. On Wednesday, President Trump extended his “pause” on strikes against Iran’s power infrastructure to April 6, even as Israeli strikes intensified—hitting a uranium processing facility in Yazd, the Khondab Heavy Water Complex and two of Iran’s largest steel plants on Thursday alone.

Any ground invasion of Kharg Island, a major focal point of planned operations, would involve significant US casualties. The Wall Street Journal reported that US ships heading for the Strait of Hormuz would have to pass through “narrow, shallow waters, flanked by Iranian forces armed with missiles and drones and potentially seeded with sea mines.” Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told the Journal that “supersonic antiship missiles could travel from the Iranian mainland in a matter of seconds.”

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The bombing campaign, now in its 28th day, has killed thousands of Iranian civilians. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has documented at least 1,500 civilian deaths, including 217 children. The Washington Post reported Thursday that nearly 1,500 Iranian civilians have been confirmed killed. Non-government Iranian health officials estimate the actual death toll at approximately 32,000. 

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Iran’s 90 million people have been sealed off from the outside world by a near-total internet blackout for 28 days. The internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported that connectivity has dropped 98 percent since February 28. According to Human Rights Watch, the government has threatened legal action against citizens who use virtual private networks (VPNs) or share circumvention tools. Iranians abroad cannot reach family inside the country. 

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In Lebanon, the Israeli assault launched under cover of the Iran war has killed at least 1,116 people and wounded 3,229 since March 2, including 121 children and 40 healthcare workers. The UN estimates 1.2 million Lebanese have fled their homes, roughly 20 percent of the population. The WHO documented 28 attacks on healthcare infrastructure in the first two weeks alone, killing 30 medical workers. According to Israeli military statements, three divisions are now operating inside the country. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz ordered the “acceleration of demolition” of border villages, citing “the Beit Hanoun and Rafah models” from Gaza. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared: “Very soon, Dahieh will look like Khan Younis.”

Ten American service members were wounded Thursday when Iranian missiles and drones struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, two of them seriously. More than 300 US troops have been wounded in four weeks of war. Thirteen American service members have been killed since February 28. 

3. ICE black sites exposed: secret detention network operated for years under both parties

A report by the Colorado Times Recorder (CTR) following a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operates at least 170 “hold rooms” - unofficial, undisclosed detention sites - across forty-nine states and four U.S. territories, excluding only West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and American Samoa. 130 of these are located in ICE field offices or sub-offices, locations where immigrants often must report for routine check-ins with ICE. Nearly every major American city has at least one hold room.  

Predictably, conditions of these black sites are deplorable. Several sites are nothing more than windowless warehouses, or low-quality structures near airports. Detainees are not provided beds, and must sleep on floors or chairs; and these facilities are not required to even have toilets.

According to analysis by CTR and No Concentration Camps in Colorado (NOCCC), these secret and inhumane detention cells have held more than 140,000 immigrants from January through October 2025. Immigrants who have been sequestered to these sites are frequently held for weeks at a time. 37 of these facilities held immigrant detainees for over a month, with one detainee being held for 292 days in Newark, New Jersey.

109 of these black sites have held at least one child. The New York site has held 927 children, and the Phoenix site has held 749. A one-year old girl was held at one of Colorado’s nine hold rooms. Both the New York and Phoenix locations are located in federal buildings housing government immigration offices, including U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices and Immigration Courts.

Under conditions of deep popular hostility to the Democrats and Republicans alike, and growing sympathy for socialism, the Democrats first established this secret detention network and both parties have maintained and expanded it for the past 15 years

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Given ICE’s planned $38.3 billion expansion of its concentration camp network, the only rational conclusion following the revelation that ICE also operates a network of secret black sites is that these, too, will grow and expand.

Detainees held at black sites are disappeared and are therefore placed outside the reach of the law, without access to legal remedies such as habeas corpus through which they might challenge their detention. More than 20 years after the exposure of the US government’s global network of secret prisons in the “war on terror,” these same anti-democratic methods are increasingly being deployed within the United States itself.

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Bipartisan support for Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda has provided ICE with an essentially unlimited budget. As a result, ICE has the capacity to allocate tens of millions of dollars as incentives and awards to local law enforcement agencies that participate in its 287(g) programs, paying off local and state police to turn them into immigration bounty hunters. 

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ICE funding for immigration bounty hunters reaches even small and obscure state agencies, such as the nine task force officers at the Point Comfort Police Department in Texas. The Key Colony Beach Police Department in Florida and the Coward Police Department in South Carolina can each boast only a single officer, but together receive more than $240,000 in ICE funding. A single officer in Bradley County Constable District 7 in Tennessee was awarded $107,525, followed by a salary bump of $11,500, and the District is now apparently to receive more than $1.8 million in additional ICE funding.

Significantly, neither the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office nor the Minnesota State Patrol has a 287(g) agreement with ICE, but that did not prevent them from attacking and arresting protestors at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, effectively functioning as state and local auxiliaries for immigration thugs.

The exposure of ICE’s nationwide network of clandestine detention sites, together with the lucrative payouts used to recruit state and local police as immigration bounty hunters, lays bare the class and bipartisan character of the repression of immigrants in the United States. The entire police apparatus operates in concert with the immigration police and cannot be relied on to defend the democratic rights of workers, regardless of immigration status. None of these agencies can be “reformed” to serve the interests of workers. They must be abolished, along with the capitalist system they defend.

4. Black Sea turns into a battlefield: A Turkish-operated tanker carrying Russian oil was hit

The crude oil tanker Altura, owned by Turkish company Pergamon Shipping and en route from Russia, was struck by an armed unmanned maritime vehicle (UMV) on Thursday, 26 kilometers (16 miles) from the entrance to the Bosphorus Strait.

No one has officially claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred in the fifth year of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. Carried out during the US-Israel war of annihilation against Iran, Türkiye’s eastern neighbor, the attack underscores the danger of escalation and expansion in the Ukraine war.

An explosion occurred on the bridge of the Sierra Leone-flagged tanker carrying 140,000 tons of crude oil, and the engine room began to take on water. Following an emergency call, rescue tugs belonging to the General Directorate of Coast Guard were dispatched. It was reported that the 27-member Turkish crew are in good health and that no injuries were sustained.

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Öncü Keçeli said Thursday evening that the attack within NATO member Türkiye’s Exclusive Economic Zone in the Black Sea was “in violation of international law,” adding, “To prevent the war from spreading to the Black Sea and escalating further, we are continuing our contacts with the relevant parties.”

*****

After being acquired by Pergamon Shipping in November 2025, the targeted tanker was renamed Altura. According to a report by the Cumhuriyet newspaper, the tanker was added to the European Union’s (EU) sanctions list in October, to Switzerland’s and Ukraine’s in December, and finally to the United Kingdom’s in February. The report claimed that the vessel was linked to Muhammad Hussein Shamkhani, the son of Ali Shamkhani, the former Secretary-General of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who was killed by Israel in February.

Five UMV have been found along Türkiye’s Black Sea coast over the past one and a half years. Most recently, on March 21, an armed UMV was detected off the coast of Ordu, a city in the Eastern Black Sea region. According to a statement made Thursday by Rear Admiral Zeki Aktürk, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense, this UMV is “of US origin and is believed to have drifted ashore due to a current after its engine malfunctioned.” It was “safely destroyed by teams from the Underwater Defense Command.” The UMV was reportedly carrying two tons of ammunition.

The situation in the Black Sea escalated after the Trump administration presented a 28-point plan to Kiev on November 20, calling for a negotiated resolution to the conflict with Russia. 

On November 28, two tankers—the Kairos and the Virat—en route to Russia were attacked in waters under Türkiye’s jurisdiction off the coasts of the provinces of Kocaeli and Kastamonu. On December 10, the Comoros-flagged tanker Dashan was struck in the Black Sea by a Ukrainian-made unmanned maritime vehicle named Sea Baby.

These targeted tankers had been listed among vessels sanctioned after the war began in 2022. Following its invasion, Russia has used a “shadow fleet” of hundreds of tankers—many sailing under different flags—to evade Western sanctions, especially those targeting its oil exports.

The attacks in the Black Sea are being carried out with NATO’s knowledge and approval. In early December, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte implied that they had approved such attacks, stating: “We are strengthening our support for Ukraine and increasing pressure on Russia. This includes countering Russia’s Shadow Fleet and other measures to pose strategic dilemmas for the Kremlin.”

Meanwhile, the UK military will be sent to board ships suspected of being part of Russia’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet.” According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Belgium, Finland and France have all seized or detained tankers; Germany, Italy, Latvia, Norway and Sweden have boarded or detained cargo and bulk vessels.

Russia also announced that Ukrainian forces had carried out more than a dozen attack attempts this month on facilities supplying the TurkStream and Blue Stream natural gas pipelines, both of which pass through the Black Sea, and that these attacks had been repelled.

According to Reuters calculations based ‌on market data “at least 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity is at a halt following Ukrainian drone attacks, a disputed ​attack on a major pipeline and the seizure of tankers.” It reported that this month Russia’s major Western oil export ports, including Novorossiysk on the Black ​Sea and Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea, were hit.

*****

Both the Zelensky regime [in Ukraine] and the European powers are opposing the Trump administration’s attempt to end the war in Ukraine through a separate agreement with the Kremlin—one that would allow it to reap the spoils alone—as well as its reduction of arms shipments. European powers, on the one hand, seek to recoup their investment in the war in Ukraine and, on the other, support escalating the conflict with Russia to enhance their military capabilities independently of the US to advance their predatory imperialist interests.

Türkiye, which has strong ties to both Ukraine and Russia, advocates for a negotiated solution between Kiev and Moscow out of concern that an escalation of the war would harm the interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie. The risk of the US-NATO war against Russia expanding is accompanied by the danger of Türkiye being drawn into an imperialist war against Iran.

After the attacks against Iran began, it was alleged that Iran had fired missiles at Türkiye on three occasions. Although Iran denied targeting Türkiye, NATO, Ankara and the Turkish media quickly issued statements condemning Iran. Last week, Ankara, along with allied Ajerbaijan, Pakistan, and Arab regimes, signed the Riyadh statement condemning Iran while remaining silent on the illegal war of aggression waged by the US and Israel.

NATO is bolstering its forces in Türkiye as it openly prepares to join the war against Iran. Using the alleged missile launches from Iran as a pretext, Patriot air defense systems were deployed to the Incirlik Air Base in Adana and the Kürecik Radar Base in Malatya, both of which are used by the US. 

NATO is establishing a new corps in Türkiye called the Multinational Corps Türkiye (MNC-TÜR). The news was confirmed by the Ministry of National Defense on Thursday.

5. Writers Guild of America West staff union moves to shut down strike

The strike against the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) by 115 employees, members of the Writers Guild Staff Union (WGSU), part of the Pacific Northwest Staff Union, is more than five weeks old. According to the WGSU, it is one of the longest strikes by union staff in US history.

The contempt with which the Writers Guild treats its own employees speaks to the relationship more generally between the various well-heeled union officialdoms and the rank-and-file: an implacably hostile one. The rights and living standards of the rank-and-file are incompatible with the privileges and pro-corporate existence and outlook of the union apparatus.

On Thursday, the WGSU addressed WGAW executive director Ellen Stutzman with what it described as a “strike-ending” proposal. Given the track record of the unions, including the WGSU-PNWSU itself, WGAW staff have every reason to be suspicious.

In its press release, the WGSU union accused the Guild leadership of having “chosen a war path with its own employees,” noting that the strike has collided with the broader negotiations between writers and the Hollywood studios. Staff have moved their picketing to the SAG-AFTRA building, where the Writers Guild of America East and West are bargaining jointly with the AMPTP, underscoring the proximity of this struggle to wider conflicts in the industry.

The militant tone of the press release is fraudulent. The substance of the union’s proposal reveals it is preparing to end the strike by making concessions. “Enough is enough. The time to enter a fair deal with your staff and reunite is now,” the WGSU declares. It continues: “Attached to this letter you will find a significantly revised contract proposal, in management’s desired ordering and formatting, that is intended to bring this strike to a close.”

The union further states that if no agreement is reached soon, it will support moving the dispute into arbitration within 60 days. In other words, the leadership is prepared to place the issues in the hands of a supposedly “impartial”  third party, i.e., a management-government-controlled process. This is both cowardly and reactionary. If the WGSU is not able to force its members to accept rotten terms, it will turn that job over to an arbitrator.

*****

The fact that this is a “union against a union” conflict only underscores the reality that these organizations function not as instruments of worker control, but as bureaucratic structures integrated into management and the state. When confronted with genuine struggle, they intervene to contain and suppress it. 

6. Edwin Soto (1953-2026): Transit worker and lifetime supporter of the fight for socialism

Edwin Soto

Edwin Soto, who joined the Trotskyist movement as a teenager in New York City more than 50 years ago, died last month at the age of 72.

Edwin was a member of the Workers League, the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party, for two decades. Both of his parents had come to the US mainland from Puerto Rico. He joined the socialist movement in 1973. He was part of a layer of the working class, including many African American and Hispanic youth, who became politically aware at a time of imperialist war in Vietnam and mass civil rights struggles in the US, the unraveling of the postwar capitalist boom, and the growing crisis of the two-party system of capitalist rule. Edwin was convinced by the struggle of the Trotskyist movement against the betrayals of Stalinism, Pabloism and petty-bourgeois nationalism.

In the 1970s, Edwin was on the staff of the party print shop for a number of years. He fought alongside Tom Henehan, the leader of the Young Socialists (the predecessor organization of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality), who was the victim of a political assassination on October 16, 1977.

Edwin actively sold the Bulletin, newspaper of the Workers League. He worked closely with Helen Halyard, the assistant national secretary of the Workers League and then the Socialist Equality Party, who died in 2023. Edwin participated in both the 1984 and 1988 presidential election campaigns of Ed Winn, the transit worker who became a leading member of the Workers League. Ed Winn won election to the Executive Board of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), where he fought against the betrayals of the union bureaucracy.

At the time of the decisive split in the world Trotskyist movement in 1985-86, Edwin stood with the majority of the International Committee of the Fourth International against the Workers Revolutionary Party leadership, which had capitulated to Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism.  

*****

Edwin had himself become a transit worker in the 1980s, first as a car cleaner and then a train operator. He worked in the New York City subway system for more than three decades before he retired around 2020. 

*****

Today, as the daily war crimes and outrages of the Trump presidency underscore the growing dangers of world war and fascism, the significance of Edwin’s political commitment becomes all the more clear. The perspective that he fought for until the end of his life will animate and guide the struggles of millions of workers and youth in the fight for international socialism, the only alternative to capitalist barbarism and the threat to human civilization.

6. Federal judge delays sentencing of Chinese researcher Youhuang Xiang despite “time served” plea agreement

Seeking an immediate end to his months-long ordeal behind bars, Xiang filed an unopposed motion to waive the Presentence Investigation Report (PSR) and proceed to sentencing. Judge Sweeney, a Trump appointee and member of the right-wing Federalist Society, flatly denied the request. In his March 9 order, Sweeney justified the delay by citing the need to investigate Xiang’s personal finances to extract a financial penalty. Because the smuggling charge carries a maximum potential fine of $250,000, Sweeney demanded a deeper probe into the modest monthly income Xiang earned as a university researcher, to determine his “ability to pay any fine that may be imposed.”

This delay is the latest outrage in a xenophobic dragnet targeting Chinese scientists at universities across the United States. It contrasts with the relatively short delay between plea deal and sentencing in similar recent cases. Former University of Michigan (U-M) researcher Chengxuan Han was sentenced to time served on September 10, three weeks after her plea of no contest. Yunqing Jian was immediately sentenced to time served as part of her plea deal on November 12. Three other U-M researchers—Bai, Zhang, and Zhang—were released the day after the federal cases against them were dismissed on February 4.

The delay in sentencing further highlights the scientific illiteracy and reactionary xenophobia driving the FBI’s operations. The initial criminal complaint filed in Chicago, and the inflammatory posts on X by FBI Director Kash Patel, accused Xiang of smuggling E. coli bacteria. However, by the time the formal indictment was filed in Indiana on December 16, the charges had quietly shifted focus. The indictment accused him of receiving a package containing “plasmid DNA of E. coli bacteria”.

Judge Sweeney’s March 9 order denying the motion to waive the PSR evinces the same elementary misunderstanding, conflating plasmid DNA with living E. coli bacteria: “The offense to which Xiang proposes to plead guilty is a serious offense involving the smuggling from China of plasmid DNA of E. coli bacteria, a pathogen, for use in Xiang’s research. The United States Department of Agriculture requires a permit for the importation of E. coli because its importation may negatively impact agriculture in the United States.” 

A plant biologist ridiculed the government’s false claim that plasmid DNA poses any danger:

“It’s purified DNA. It’s the same chemical as the DNA in our own cells, or in every organism on the planet. There’s no difference between DNA isolated from E. coli versus DNA isolated from a human cell, so the fact that it was isolated from E. coli is irrelevant.”

The continued imprisonment of Xiang exposes another way US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is used by the state apparatus to break foreign-born workers and scientists. At Xiang’s initial hearing in the Northern District of Illinois on November 26, the magistrate judge was prepared to release him on bail. However, the Department of Homeland Security had already revoked his J-1 visa, and immediately placed a detention hold on his case. This created a legal trap: if Xiang accepted bail and was released from criminal custody, US Marshals would immediately turn him over to an ICE detention facility.

Because time spent in an administrative ICE facility does not count toward a federal criminal sentence, Xiang was effectively forced into a corner. To ensure that his days behind bars would count as “time served” against any ultimate criminal penalty, Xiang had to remain in the Chicago jail. As a result of his revoked visa and the looming threat of ICE, he waived his right to a detention hearing and has remained in federal custody ever since.

Rather than defending against these politically motivated frame-ups, universities have functioned as willing accomplices in the state dragnet. In the cases of Bai, Zhang, and Zhang, it was the university’s internal investigation and subsequent firing of the researchers that abruptly canceled their visas, instantly stripping them of their legal status and exposing them to ICE detention and arrest. 

*****

The Socialist Equality Party, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and the World Socialist Web Site seek to link the fight for democratic rights to the broader struggle against imperialist war and capitalist austerity. Workers, students and scientists must demand the immediate release of detained researchers, the dropping of all charges against them, restoration of visas and employment, and an independent, publicly accountable inquiry into coordination between universities and the US Department of Justice. 

7. Sri Lankan government institutes huge fuel price increases

The Sri Lankan government has sharply increased fuel prices by 26–30 percent since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran placing even greater burdens on working people. The fuel price hike has triggered a series of increases such as transport fares, food prices and other essential goods.

After claiming his government could manage the crisis emerging in Sri Lanka, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake made an about-turn, warning of shortages, rising costs and electricity disruptions.

In a televised media discussion on March 17 and again in a parliamentary speech on March 20, Dissanayake stressed that Sri Lanka faced an “external shock” due to the war. He pointed to threats to global energy supplies, then declared that the government had little choice but to increase prices.

Neither Dissanayake nor his government has condemned the criminal war by Israel and US imperialism on Iran, but has maintained a false posture of “neutrality.” In fact, in a previous statement on the war, Dissanayake has singled out the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—a retaliatory action by Iran against naked US-Israeli aggression—as the chief disrupting factor in oil supplies and the global economy.

The risk of escalation is high. For a country like Sri Lanka, which imports 60 percent of its energy needs, much of it through the Strait of Hormuz, the war is having a serious impact. The island relies on energy imports for electricity generation, transport and much of its economic activity, under conditions where it is already forced to implement a severe International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity program.

*****

The government has restricted the distribution of fertiliser for paddy (rice) production which means that yields for the Yala season from May to August are likely to be severely affected. The prices paid to farmers for vegetables have plummeted because most trucks involved in transporting the goods to market lack fuel.

Echoing the desperate measures imposed after the country defaulted on foreign debts in 2022, the government has reintroduced a QR code-based fuel rationing system to curb consumption, intensifying the difficulties for three-wheeler and other taxi drivers in particular. Fearing a public outcry, it has deployed the military and police to fuel stations.

Sri Lanka lacks sufficient storage capacity for fuel and is thus dependent on regular shipments. Even minor delays risk shortages and long queues, as seen during the 2022 crisis. 

*****

Working people and the oppressed in Sri Lanka face the same fundamental issues confronting workers internationally. Only a unified working-class movement based on socialist policies is capable of ending the cycle of crisis and austerity and the plunge towards a far wider world war. 

8. Australia: More Victorian teachers and supporters call for better wages, conditions at mass strike

The World Socialist Web Site is publishing more interviews gathered by members and supporters of the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) at the March 24 statewide strike of tens of thousands of Victorian public school educators.

While rank-and-file teachers have shown their enthusiasm for a struggle to reverse decades of worsening conditions in public education, the Australian Education Union (AEU) bureaucracy is working behind closed doors with the state Labor government of Jacinta Allan to prepare another sellout agreement as it has done over decades.

CFPE members explained that the struggle to defend public education amid a global assault on living and working conditions requires a fight against the Labor governments that are spearheading the agenda of war and austerity in Australia. 

9. Australian Broadcasting Corporation staff strike over pay and conditions

In negotiations for a new enterprise agreement, ABC management has offered annual wage increases of just 3.5 percent, 3.25 percent and 3.25 percent, and a one‑off $1,000 payment that excludes casual staff.

The pay “increases” are scarcely above the current rate of inflation, which is predicted to surge to over 5 percent this year partly on the back of price hikes flowing from the criminal US-led war against Iran. The management offer does nothing to address untenable workloads, growing casualisation or other working conditions.

Staff at more than 60 ABC offices joined strike rallies, including in the capital cities and regional and rural centres. A protest outside ABC headquarters at Ultimo in Sydney was attended by several hundred, with a hundred or so rallying in Melbourne.

While there was a mood of defiance among staff, short speeches by union leaders were bereft. The Sydney and Melbourne rallies were addressed by officials from the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) which covers journalists and editorial employees, and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) which covers other staff.

The MEAA and CPSU leaders mouthed generalities about the importance of the public broadcaster and the need for “fair” pay and conditions. They said little about decades of funding cuts by successive governments, which continue under the current Labor government, presenting the issue as being one of current management. The union leaders could not explain how casual and contract work has soared over the years, because it is a consequence of the previous sellout enterprise agreements that they have enforced.

No perspective was presented as to what would be done next. In a sure sign of preparations for another sellout, the unions had lowered their own wage claim from an already inadequate 5.5 percent per annum to 4.5 percent at the beginning of the week. They are returning to negotiations with ABC management this coming Monday.

Socialist Equality Party members campaigned at the Sydney and Melbourne rallies, placing the dispute in the context of broader struggles by workers, including teachers, health staff and academics, who all face sub-inflationary real wage cuts and increasingly onerous conditions.

*****

Kelli in Melbourne: 

“I don’t work here for the pay. I work here for love. The pay is a struggle. A lot of people, myself included, would be in a really terrible financial situation if they didn’t have partners that worked in other industries. If I didn’t have a partner that earned a wage that keeps up with inflation, then paying the rent would be difficult.” 

10. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will cut school and homeless programs to balance New York City’s budget

The administration of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was elected in November amid mass anger over unaffordable housing, collapsing social conditions, and staggering inequality in the nation’s largest city. Less than a year later, it is moving to implement austerity—preparing cuts to education, housing and homeless programs to meet the legal requirements of a budget “balanced” on behalf of the bond markets and the financial aristocracy.

In a hearing on Wednesday before the City Council, Sherif Soliman, Mamdani’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—a veteran of the Bloomberg, de Blasio and Adams mayoral administrations—noted that the city’s recently appointed Chief Savings Officers had identified $1.7 billion in cuts to various city departments. These include vacating underused office space in the Sanitation Department, lowering telecommunications pricing in the Fire Department, and modernizing technology and downsizing leases.

The presence of another career austerity technician at the head of OMB underscores the class continuity of the Mamdani administration: behind the DSA brand stands the same apparatus that has enforced decades of cuts.

*****

The Mamdani administration is in deep crisis precisely because the DSA has no answer to the budget diktats of Wall Street except capitulation. Its role is not to mobilize working people against the financial oligarchy, but to impose austerity while smothering opposition with “progressive” rhetoric. 

On March 11, the credit rating agency Moody’s shifted the city’s outlook (the likely direction of the rating over the next six to 24 months) from Stable to Negative.

On March 20, Fitch/Kroll, another major credit rating agency, announced that its outlook for the city’s finances was also negative, noting that it “expects the city’s fiscal profile to weaken as it navigates a period of elevated expenditure pressure.” This is the bureaucratic language of austerity, and the billionaires whom the ratings agencies represent are clearly concerned that Mamdani’s proposed solutions to the budget crisis are unworkable and insufficient.

Mamdani has floated two of those solutions in recent months. The first is to encourage Governor Kathy Hochul, a right-wing Democrat, to approve a 2.5 percent tax increase on all incomes over $1 million and a just-under-2 percent tax increase on corporations.

Only the state legislature can implement these taxes. While a joint session of the Democrat-dominated Assembly and Senate has “approved” the tax increases, it has not voted on them. Even if it does so, as part of the 2027 budget, it is highly unlikely that Hochul will sign them into law. Even if she did, the taxes would still have to be approved by the New York City Council. The new speaker of the Council, Democrat Julie Menin, has indicated that she would oppose this.

*****

The implications of the inability to raise revenue by increasing taxes and the pressure exerted by the credit rating agencies are significant not only because education and social conditions will continue to deteriorate in the most socially unequal big city in the United States—as gas and commodity prices rise because of the war against Iran—but, just as importantly, because it exposes the utter bankruptcy of the Democratic Socialists of America in power.

The DSA was voted into the mayor’s office promising minor reforms—such as free bus service, about which virtually nothing has been heard in recent months—and a freeze in rents for the city’s million rent-regulated apartments, a pledge that is itself in doubt and about which Mamdani’s rhetoric has notably cooled.

Instead, the pseudo-left DSA is now offering austerity and police repression, both conditioned and exemplified by Mamdani’s notorious political alliance with Donald Trump, the benefits of which go entirely to the fascist in the White House.

The second meeting between Mamdani and Trump, on February 26, occurred after Trump’s ICE goons had murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, two days after Trump’s State of the Union address, and just as the forces of Operation Epic Fury were preparing to launch an unprovoked war on Iran.

This is the path followed by the DSA: not only an alliance with the corporate Democratic Party, but collaboration with the most odious representative of the financial oligarchy. While Mamdani has called the attack on Iran an “illegal war of aggression,” he has refrained from naming Trump or members of his cabinet as war criminals and calling for their arrest and prosecution.

13. Mass layoffs, inflation fuel strikes across Mexico

Mexico is witnessing a marked upturn in class struggle as inflation, mass layoffs and factory closures provoke a wave of strikes and strike deadlines in key sectors—above all auto and auto parts, education and services.

Similar pressures—soaring prices, speed‑ups, layoffs—are propelling a parallel strike wave north of the border in the United States, including the important strike by 3,800 meatpacking workers at JBS in Greeley, Colorado, underscoring the objective basis for a common, international struggle.

The union bureaucracies, however, including the so-called “independent” unions in Mexico, are working relentlessly to contain workers’ anger by confining their strategy to appeals to the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum and the labor courts—institutions that exist to safeguard the profit interests of transnational corporations and keep Mexican labor cheap.

The looming conflict at General Motors’ giant Silao assembly plant in Guanajuato, which employs roughly 7,000 workers and is one of the key hubs of the North American auto chain, provides a sense of the overall picture. GM workers had backed the demand raised by the “independent” union SINTTIA for a 20 percent wage increase, a figure that, even if won, would barely keep pace with rising prices.

At Silao, the union has already signaled its role as an arm of management: it agreed to postpone the strike hours before the deadline, announcing a preliminary deal for a wage increase of just 10 percent now, another 1 percent in October and a further 1 percent for certain categories in December—an 11-12 percent raise over two years amid accelerating inflation, without any concrete gains on hours, break times or safety conditions, which are central issues for workers on the line.

The reaction among Silao workers has been one of anger and contempt. On social media and in comments to the World Socialist Web Site, workers have called the agreement a “joke,” a “disappointment” and a “circus.” One worker summed up the prevailing sentiment: “The union told us half the truth. They made us lose a rest day in a meeting where they said they would not back down.”

*****

In the sprawling network of plants owned by First Brands Group—covering brands like Tridonex, Trico, Cardone and Autolite— workers producing parts for Ford and General Motors have been hit by a wave of closures after the parent company’s bankruptcy filing in the United States. In Matamoros, Tamaulipas alone, across the border from Texas, around 5,000 auto‑parts workers are directly affected, while more than 10,800 maquiladora factory jobs—about 4 percent of the sector’s workforce in the state—have been wiped out just in the first quarter of 2026.

Workers have responded with militant defensive actions that go beyond the legal framework of “conciliation.” At Tridonex in Matamoros, they have launched a plant occupation and strike, while Trico workers compelled the union to announce a strike. However, these occupations and strikes are being framed by the unions not as a defense of jobs, but merely to prevent the removal of machinery to cover severance pay and outstanding wages.

The struggle at Tornel, a tire manufacturer, has revealed both the ferocity of employer repression and the courage of workers. More than 2,000 workers, including 1,050 who are unionized, have been on strike since late February across several plants. Their demands include overdue wage increases of 7 and 5 percent, improvements in lagging benefits and, crucially, a reduction in working hours in a sector where workers are exposed to lead, carbon black and dyes that gravely affect their health.

On March 18, after three weeks on strike, workers maintaining the picket at the Tultitlán plant came under gunfire from company thugs around 4:00 a.m., leaving four strikers wounded. Striking workers apprehended two of the attackers, who were reportedly wearing company uniforms.

In a powerful show of resolve following the shooting, workers held a court‑supervised vote on March 22 on whether to continue the strike. Of the 1,051 workers eligible to vote, 883 voted to maintain the strike and only 113 to end it. This overwhelming defiance of armed intimidation stands in sharp contrast to the response of the union leadership and the government.

*****

At Goodyear México, a strike deadline was over wage demands, with the company offering around 4.7 percent while the union called for roughly 15 percent and a broader contract review.

While, on its surface, these are traditional contract negotiations, the growing struggles unfold against a backdrop of war, automation, and cross‑border supply chain and profit‑driven restructuring.

Beyond the auto sector, major struggles include:

  • At Nacional Monte de Piedad, a large pawn‑broking and social assistance institution with over 300 branches, some 2,300 workers have been on strike since October 2025—more than five months—over contract violations, cuts to benefits and disputes over management decisions, with the union now threatening to escalate the legal battle up to the Supreme Court.

  • In education, the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) led a 72‑hour nationwide stoppage from March 18 to 20, with mass mobilizations in Mexico City and other states. Teachers are demanding the repeal of the 2007 ISSSTE pension law, the elimination of regressive education reforms and a significant wage increase, and are warning that they may escalate toward an indefinite national strike.

  • In higher education and science, multiple unions—such as STAHUACh, SUTUACM, SPAUAZ and SUTIN—have filed strike deadlines and organized coordinated mobilizations over wages, job security and funding, with a notable strike at the Autonomous University of Chapingo. There, the union is confronting a 4 percent wage cap imposed by the Finance Ministry while it demands a 30 percent increase.

  • Caterpillar workers have carried out a strike that has paralyzed operations for more than two and a half years, since September 23, 2023 to demand an initial collective bargaining agreement. 

*****

Since August 2023, formal manufacturing employment has fallen from 3 million to 2.82 million—a net loss of 180,000 jobs by the end of 2025—with layoffs intensifying this year, particularly in the maquiladoras.

What unites all these conflicts—from GM Silao and the plant occupations in Matamoros to the Tornel strike, teacher stoppages and JBS—is their fundamentally political character. Mexico plays a central role in the North American and global economy as a low‑wage export platform for auto, electronics, agriculture and other industries that directly feed US imperialism’s drive for hegemony through war and recolonization.

The defense of jobs, wages and conditions in Mexico is inseparable from the struggle against the imperialist war drive and the assault on labor and democratic rights across the continent.

What is urgently needed is the formation of rank‑and‑file committees in every workplace— “sellout‑proof” organizations that workers control directly and that can link up across factories, industries and national borders. As part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), these committees can coordinate their struggles with teachers, industrial workers and public employees in the US, Canada and beyond, countering the mobility of capital and the use of new technologies to undermine their power.

Only through such an independent, international offensive of the working class can the working people of Mexico defend their rights, oppose war and fight for a society organized on the basis of human need rather than corporate profit.

15. Canada’s NDP to pick new leader one year after election debacle

For six years beginning in 2019, the NDP, with the support and at the behest of the trade unions, propped up successive Justin Trudeau-led minority Liberal governments that implemented capitalist austerity, rearmament and war. The unions, meanwhile, derailed the biggest strike wave in decades. As workers sought to mount a counter-offensive against surging prices and intensifying worker-exploitation, the unions systematically isolated their struggles, pushed through concessionary contracts, and enforced government antistrike laws and orders.

Eleven months after the April 28, 2025 federal election and under conditions where the Liberal government, reorganized under the former central banker Mark Carney, has lurched sharply further right, support for the NDP remains tepid. Most polls show its popular support hovering around 10 percent. Looking for greener pastures, NDP politicians continue to defect to the Liberals. These include Nunavut MP Lori Idlout, who earlier this month crossed over to the Carney Liberals, and Doly Begum, who last month resigned as Ontario NDP deputy leader and a Toronto-area MPP so that she can stand as the Liberal candidate in an upcoming federal by-election.

Nevertheless, within the ranks of the union bureaucracy and the middle-class pseudo-left there is much interest in rebranding and reviving this anemic, right-wing social-democratic party. This is because they fear that the mass opposition that will soon emerge to the Carney Liberal government—its support for the imperialist wars on Iran and Russia, diversion of society’s resources to preparing for world war, and assault on workers’ social and democratic rights—will escape their stultifying political grip. 

*****

Whatever their tactical disagreements, all of the candidates for the NDP leadership are staunch defenders of Canadian capitalism and its state, and inveterate opponents of class struggle. They are determined to contain and neuter social opposition by shackling it to the pro-employer trade unions, protests to the corporate elite and parliamentary-electoral politics.

None has repudiated the NDP’s role in propping up the Trudeau minority Liberal government, which has continued under Carney, as in last November’s budget vote.

All support “Team Canada,” the federal government-led, union and NDP-supported “national front” against Trump’s tariffs and threats. Team Canada serves to both pit Canadian workers in trade war against their US and overseas class brothers and sisters and to provide, behind a parade of Canadian nationalist flag-waving, political cover for the ruling class to push politics far to the right. Carney’s union and NDP-backed calls to strengthen Canadian “sovereignty” and economic “resilience” have invariably taken the form of massive rearmament, measures to strengthen Canada’s military-industrial base and steep cuts to public services and federal jobs. 

*****

The NDP is a political vehicle of the trade union bureaucracy and other petty bourgeois layers that are entirely beholden to Canadian capitalism and its state. It serves as a mechanism for politically suppressing the working class. It cannot be transformed into an instrument for opposing imperialist war and capitalist austerity, let alone a means for workers to fight for socialism. On the contrary, workers will only be able to wage such struggles through a decisive political break with social democracy and its sponsors in the pro-capitalist trade union apparatuses.

This requires the building of new organizations of class struggle, rank-and-file committees that refuse to subordinate workers’ interests to the profit and geopolitical imperatives of Canadian imperialism. One of the principal tasks of these committees will be to fight to fuse the struggles of workers in Canada with the growing working class upsurge in the United States against Trump, his operation dictatorship and the Iran war. Above all, the fight against war, oligarchy and the threat of fascism and dictatorship requires the building of a mass revolutionary party of the working class to impart its struggles with an international-socialist program and strategy. That party is the Socialist Equality Party.

16. Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani targeted in attempted assassination plot

Nerdeen Kiswani, a prominent Palestinian activist and co-founder of the New York-based group Within Our Lifetime, was the target of an imminent plot to assassinate her and/or firebomb her home, amid an escalating campaign of threats and incitement by Zionist organizations and pro-war politicians.

The New York Police Department and federal agents arrested a 26-year-old New Jersey man, Alexander Heifler, after an undercover NYPD detective infiltrated online communications and, in the course of the operation, identified what officials described as an imminent attack. Heifler was charged with making and possessing destructive devices and is expected to appear in federal court in Newark.

*****

The threatened attack on Kiswani takes place in the context of a sustained campaign of intimidation and violent incitement against opponents of Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza, encouraged and enabled by the state, the corporate media and both big-business parties.

Kiswani has been a target of pro-Israel groups for years. In February, she filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against Betar USA and its leadership under the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Act of 1871, charging that the organization orchestrated a coordinated campaign of “racial harassment, violent threats, stalking and intimidation.”

Kiswani is represented by Eric Lee and Christopher Godshall-Bennett of Lee & Godshall-Bennett LLP, and Daniel Kornstein and Jonathan Abady of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP. 

The lawsuit, together with a lengthy appendix, documents repeated social media threats, intimidation tactics, and bounty-style incitement directed at Kiswani and other antiwar protesters.

Betar USA has publicly characterized Kiswani as a “domestic terrorist,” threatened to work with the Trump administration to denaturalize and deport her, and boasted of providing “the names of hundreds of protesters and activists” to the Trump administration and DHS to urge ICE arrests and deportations. 

A central component of the complaint concerns Betar’s attempts to terrorize Kiswani by repeatedly trying to force her to accept a pager or “beeper,” a menacing reference to Israel’s September 2024 operation in Lebanon. The suit cites Betar’s public bounty offer: “We offer 1000 to anyone who hands @NerdeenKiswani a beeper tomorrow. We have them for distribution.” 

The lawsuit also cites the New York Attorney General’s January 13, 2026 investigation finding Betar engaged in “bias-motivated assaults, threats and harassment targeting Muslim, Arab, Palestinian and Jewish New Yorkers” —underscoring that these threats are part of an escalating campaign of political intimidation aimed at silencing opposition to the US-backed genocide in Gaza.

The attempt to assassinate Kiswani also comes amid a broader escalation of political repression in the United States, bound up with imperialist war abroad and the growth of authoritarianism at home, spearheaded by the Trump administration. The anti-Muslim campaign, aimed at dividing the working class, is being cultivated by broad sections of the US ruling class and the Republican Party as Israel carries out genocide in Gaza, widens its assault on Lebanon, and wages a joint illegal war with US imperialism against Iran.

17. UK Labour government speeds up deportations to Nigeria in expanding anti-migrant crackdown

Britain’s Labour government used a state visit last week by Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to announce an expansion of its anti-migrant crackdown.

The Home Office statement, “New UK–Nigeria partnership to speed up removals,” said the agreement ensures that “Visa overstayers, foreign criminals and failed asylum seekers will be removed from British soil far more easily…” The agreement was signed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Nigerian Interior Minister Dr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo.

Central to the deal is that “UK letters, an alternative identification document issued to individuals without a valid passport and used to support the return of people with no right to remain in the UK, will be recognised by the Nigerian government for the first time.”

This was condemned by human rights organisations in Britain and Nigeria. Renowned Nigerian human rights lawyer Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, stated, “The use of the ‘UK letters’ to return Nigerians is not and cannot be a substitute for proper travel documents. This was “fundamentally at odds with international human rights standards,” as it “lowers the threshold for deportation—potentially allowing individuals to be removed without proper verification of their identity or nationality.” He warned that this could lead to “wrongful or arbitrary deportations.”

Currently, there are 961 Nigerian asylum seekers in the UK who have exhausted their rights of appeal and have no claim to refugee status. There are 1,110 foreign nationals from Nigeria convicted of crimes in UK jails whom the Home Office is seeking to deport. Regardless of the severity of their crimes, they will be removed more rapidly under the new system.

 The Home Office framed the deal as central to its agenda of mass round-ups of migrants. Tens of thousands have been deported since the government came to office in July 2024.

*****

Britain’s right-wing tabloid media, constantly demanding more draconian anti-immigration policies, hailed the policy. The Daily Mail said Mahmood had addressed the problem that, “Currently, one of the main barriers faced by the Home Office in its bid to deport a foreign national is waiting for their home country to issue a passport or other travel papers”. 

*****

British imperialism is bolstering links with Nigeria, a country rich in oil and mineral resources. During the visit, the government announced that UK Export Finance (Britain’s export credit agency and a government department) would guarantee £746 million ($902m) in loans to Nigeria. This will fund the redevelopment of two major Nigerian trading ports: Lagos Port Complex (Apapa Quays) and the Tin Can Island Port Complex.

The state visit—the first by a Nigerian leader to the UK in 37 years—included a lavish banquet at Windsor Castle. King Charles III described Nigeria as an “economic powerhouse, a cultural force and an influential diplomatic voice.”

Streamlined deportations to Nigeria are part of a sweeping attack on the rights of migrants in the UK, including arguably the most severe curtailment of asylum protections in the post-war period.

Previously, asylum seekers whose claims were accepted were granted five years of protection under the Labour government of Tony Blair. From this month, adults and accompanied children claiming asylum will receive only 30 months of protection. After that, their cases will be reviewed, and deportation will be enforced if the country of origin is deemed “safe.”

*****

The Labour government—supporting genocide and war overseas and imposing xenophobic anti-migrant and pro-social austerity at home—is a deeply right-wing party, social democratic only in name. It joins social democratic parties across Europe complicit, and even playing a leading role, in the stripping back of asylum protections, demonization of migrants, construction of detention camps and strengthening of “Fortress Europe”—as thousands continue to die on its walls. 

18. United Kingdom:  Staff at Sheffield Hallam University balloting again to strike over job losses and attack on pensions

Members of the University and College Union (UCU) at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) are being balloted for industrial action after the university executive board put forward proposals for cuts of almost £27 million.

These include £16 million of savings from 200 academic job losses, £8 million in reduced contributions to staff pensions, ending nationally agreed pay progression, and other savings carved off the backs of the workforce.

*****

Higher education institutions—including Russell Group universities, redbrick universities, and post-92 former polytechnics—along with private education providers such as Study Group, which runs USIC, are implementing cuts, restructuring, and austerity measures to protect revenues and align higher education with corporate priorities. 

This is reflected in shifting priorities across institutions: at USIC, the focus is on the international “student experience” rather than education; at SHU, on maximizing research revenue; and at the UoS, on meeting the scientific demands of the military-industrial complex.

*****

Any meaningful defense of pay, pensions, jobs, and working conditions cannot be entrusted to the UCU bureaucracy. Its refusal to coordinate strike action even across Sheffield’s three ongoing HE disputes, and to link it with workers in Further Education, as well as its repeated suspension of strikes, are central to the impasse workers face, not just in that city but nationally.

UCU leaders act as mediators for management, repeatedly isolating and atomizing workplace struggles, converting strike mandates into token or intermittent action that is called off on the flimsiest pretext, while bargaining away core demands and rights. 

*****

This fight requires transferring power away from an entrenched union apparatus back to college and university workers facing huge attacks from management.

19.  Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific

Australia:

Queensland’s Glencore copper refinery stops wages of workers involved in industrial action
 
Academic workers at the University of Technology Sydney strike for 24 hours
 
Manufacturing workers strike at Vinidex in Victoria
 
Western Australia’s Curtin University educators strike

Bangladesh:

Apparel workers protest over outstanding payments

India:  

Punjab community health workers protest reaching two weeks
 
Transport workers protest in Ludhiana, Punjab
 
Karnataka: Sanitation workers protest for better wages and benefits
 
Karnataka: Sanitation workers hold mass sickout in Bengaluru
 
Tamil Nadu: Samsung workers protest for reinstatement of suspended workers

New Zealand:  

Firefighters continue strikes 

Pakistan:

Capital Development Authority workers protest in Islamabad

20. Please defend and help free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk! Please add your name to our petition! 

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.

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