Dec 18, 2025

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Trump denounces actor-director Rob Reiner as “very bad for the country” following tragic killings

Trump has now gone from silence over the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a fascist supporter in November 2022 and lies and obfuscation in the case of the Minnesota Democrats murdered in June 2025 to open gloating.

2. Will Lehman: Every worker should be using Socialism AI

 

Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker who ran for president of the United Auto Workers in 2022, released this video explaining what Socialism AI is and why every worker should be using it. 

3. Abuse and exploitation endemic in Australia’s Pacific “guest worker” scheme

Under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, workers are recruited from impoverished Pacific countries to fill jobs in agriculture, meat processing and aged care, which provides money to be sent home. Workers must hold a temporary work visa tying them to an approved PALM employer. Short-term contracts are for a maximum of nine months, with long-term contracts up to four years.

Over 30,000 workers are currently employed under the scheme from Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. In 2021, Canberra launched an aggressive campaign to prevent workers from fleeing their jobs after more than 1,000 absconded. The campaign warned they would “bring shame to their families” and risked having their visas cancelled.

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The PALM scheme has long been rife with exploitation. A report in February by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Business and Human Rights Centre exposed severe conditions in the meat industry, with a harsh working environment, restricted freedoms and systemic inequities experienced by Pacific Island workers. 

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PALM workers are often paid the bare minimum within industry awards, with “deductibles” made for travel and accommodation. Many report being forced to work unpaid overtime or take on extra responsibilities without additional compensation. Those in isolated rural areas are often forced to live in overcrowded, high-rent accommodation. They describe long hours, excessive production targets and a lack of leisure time.

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Despite the complaints, exposures and official inquiries over many years, little has changed. An Australian Senate inquiry in 2022, an investigation by the New South Wales Anti-Slavery Commissioner (2024) and a review by the Vanuatu government (2022) all highlighted atrocious conditions experienced by temporary workers, to no avail.

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The exploitation and abuse endemic to the Pacific worker schemes has a long and brutal history. The local imperialist powers, Australia and New Zealand, have for over a century used Pacific peoples as cheap labor and, when it suited, as cannon fodder in times of war.

The practice remains an essential aspect of both governments’ continuing neo-colonial policy toward the island nations.

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New Zealand’s Recognized Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme, introduced by the Helen Clark Labour government in 2007, initially allowed for 16,000 workers annually from Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji to work in the $NZ10 billion horticulture and viticulture industries. The scheme has since expanded into the meat and seafood processing sectors and is now capped at 20,750 workers on visas for seven to nine months. The low pay and miserable conditions are used as a precedent for broader austerity attacks on the entire working class.

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The precursor of Australia’s PALM scheme, the Seasonal Worker Program, began in 2012 after a four-year pilot scheme, under the Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, supported by the trade unions. They revived comparisons with the country’s infamous “blackbirding” history. Up to a million workers from Pacific countries, many kidnapped and sold to landowners, were used as indentured or slave labor from the 1860s to the 1940s.

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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s official apology to the Pacific community in August 2021, in which she called the dawn raids “a defining moment in New Zealand’s history,” was meaningless. An official review by Immigration New Zealand in 2023 excoriated her Labour-led government, which included the Greens, for effectively continuing the practice. 

For their part, the Pacific Island governments do nothing to materially improve the conditions of the workers. They are closely involved in vetting applicants for the migrant labor schemes and even helping supervise their behavior. The schemes have been lauded by all the participating authorities for the purported economic “benefits” to fragile island economies, which depend heavily on remittances paid by overseas workers.

4. Water main break in Waterbury, Connecticut, exposes decrepit state of New England infrastructure

Late Friday night, December 12, a 42-inch high-pressure transmission water main burst with explosive force under a street in Waterbury, Connecticut. Pavement was thrown into the air and windows were shattered. Located about 30 miles southwest of Hartford, the city has a population of 114,000, making it the state’s fifth largest municipality. The break affected schools, businesses, and healthcare facilities, leading to closures and disruptions for several days. 

Waterbury—once the heart of the “Brass Valley” from the early 1800s through the early 20th century, with the operation of companies like Scovill Manufacturing, American Brass and Chase Brass & Copper—by the 1970s and 1980s was experiencing economic decline with the shuttering of factories and was ranked as having the worst quality of life of 300 US metropolitan areas by Money Magazine by 1992. The catastrophic failure of the city’s water system is emblematic of this economic decline. 

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Water Superintendent Brad Malay noted that the fragility and age of these pipes meant “it doesn’t take a lot for those pipes to ... let go.” Water loss continued for over 12 hours after the rupture because the older isolation valves were too fragile to be closed, preventing the break from being localized. Pernerewski explained that the inability to shut these valves meant the affected area had to “spread to bigger and bigger areas.” Malay noted the reluctance to even touch the ancient valves, stating that the risk of breaking them by “exercising” them was considered greater than the reward, leaving them alone for decades until a crisis forced the issue. 

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The crisis carried deep social implications spanning public health, equitable distribution, and public trust for the entire community. The public health response was immediate, requiring a boil water advisory due to the risk of harmful microorganisms contaminating the system. Residents were explicitly instructed to use boiled or bottled water for drinking, cooking, washing food and brushing teeth. 

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Waterbury is not unique, much of New England’s wastewater infrastructure dates from the late 19th to mid-20th century. In addition to Waterbury, many New England cities, including Boston, Providence, Hartford and Springfield, still rely on cast-iron or ductile-iron pipes that range from 80 to over 150 years old. They are made from cast iron that corrodes, becomes brittle and fails suddenly. Break rates increase sharply after about 75 years of age, resulting in boil-water advisories, health issues and emergency repairs, especially during cold snaps or heat waves.

The situation in Waterbury is only the latest in a series of crises affecting water systems across the country. The most notorious recent example is the ongoing crisis in Flint, Michigan (2014–present), in which a state‑ordered switch to Flint River water without adequate corrosion control led to massive lead poisoning, an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, and continued economic and health costs for residents.

In recent decades, investigations and reporting have identified elevated lead or industrial chemical contamination across the United States, including in Cleveland and Sebring, Ohio; Jackson, Mississippi; Newark, New Jersey; Baltimore, Maryland; Los Angeles and many other cities. These are not isolated incidents but part of a national pattern of decaying infrastructure and regulatory failure.

Lead service lines remained common for decades due to industry lobbying. A federal ban came only in 1986, and millions of miles of legacy lead pipe remain, creating an ongoing public‑health hazard.

Despite water being essential to human life, New England’s water systems fell into disrepair because the political system under capitalism rewards delay until failure. Only under a planned socialist economy can resources be properly allocated to prevent events like what happened in Waterbury, and the threats posed by similar crises across the US.

5. More Australian workers and youth are using Socialism AI

Christopher, a former accountant and mature-aged student at Macquarie University, said the launch of Socialism AI immediately stood out for its professionalism. Having already used mainstream AI tools in political and social media work, he said he was acutely aware of their conservative limitations.

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“What ChatGPT does is it takes all the information published in the whole world and it marshals the answers from all sources,” he said, “but it always picks the conservative option to be safe.” He said such systems do not disclose what information they discard or why. “It just presents the conservative viewpoint first up. It was developed by the bourgeoisie and they have a vested interest in making sure things do not change.”

While mainstream AI can sometimes be challenged, Christopher said Socialism AI represented a qualitative advance. He cited a demonstration he witnessed at a meeting. “The demonstration I was shown… where Socialism AI answered the question about Cromwell, that was masterful,” he said. “It shows to me that I’ll be able to put hard questions to it.”

Christopher said Socialism AI would be used as a tool to raise political consciousness, which he described as urgently necessary. Reflecting on his own experience coming toward the Socialist Equality Party, he said the depth of historical understanding demanded by the movement was initially a “culture shock,” but a necessary one. “What I want to understand is how the workers’ revolution is going to take place and my place in it,” he said. “There’s a need for the consciousness of the working class to be up for it.”

6. Australian government pledges to keep slashing spending

The Labor government’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), handed down yesterday, foreshadows deeper cuts to social programs, inflicting more financial pain on working-class households while boosting corporate subsidies and military spending to satisfy the financial elite. 

In delivering the mid-year budget update, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said there were difficult decisions in it, but there would be “more to come.” Anxious to meet the demands of the corporate elite, he framed the document as being “all about delivery, responsibility and restraint.” It was about “ensuring that responsible economic management continues to be a defining feature of this Albanese Labor government.”

By “responsibility,” Chalmers meant that the government had found an extra $20 billion in “savings and reprioritizations” in the update. He boasted that Labor had far outdone the previous Liberal-National government in cutting spending, saying it had taken the Coalition seven mid-year updates to find $20 billion in cuts.

Chalmers avoided the word “austerity,” but foreshadowed cuts for the rest of the decade, pledging to keep beating the Coalition’s record. “We’ve kept average real spending growth to 1.7 percent over the seven years to 2028–29, compared to our predecessors who averaged 4.1 percent,” he said.

That 1.7 percent figure barely matches the rate of population growth, without taking into account the higher costs of an ageing population. So more “difficult” decisions are being prepared.

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Just before the budget update, Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Michele Bullock was more blunt. In an interview with Nine Media newspapers, she warned the next five years could be marked by a slow-moving global economic decay as Trump’s tariffs and other policies to “make America great again” translated into higher costs and slower growth.

Bullock said that while the central bank’s day-to-day focus was on China and the broader Asian region, the economic issues emanating out of the US were a harbinger of tougher times ahead.

Her remarks point to the basic dilemma facing Australian capitalism. China is its largest export market, primarily for iron ore, coal and gas. Yet the Albanese government, in line with previous governments, is fully committed to the US military alliance and preparations for a US-led war against China for global hegemony.

As a result of Trump’s tariff war and China’s slowdown, a downturn is already emerging. Australia’s latest gross domestic product figures showed zero growth of production per person in the September quarter of 2025. This is accompanied by rising inflation and low levels of big business investment, except for AI-related data centers.

Corporate media outlets are demanding that the government go much further in cutting social spending. Today’s Australian editorial declared the MYEFO a failure. “The government is yet to face the fact that taxpayers are not a money tree to fund largess to Labor’s favored constituencies,” it stated, particularly singling out spending on the NDIS, childcare, pensions and mental health programs.

The editorial concluded: “Entrapped in a vortex of big spending, only productivity improvements can deliver the returns and prosperity to create the major financial gains the budget and the nation need.” In plain language, that means driving up the rate of exploitation of the working class, at the expense of jobs and conditions, while gutting already inadequate programs on which millions of working-class people depend to barely survive.

7. European powers set course for escalation of war in Ukraine against Russia

While German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the German capital a “hub of peace efforts,” in reality it hosted a war summit. Behind closed doors, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump’s negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and a number of European heads of state and government haggled not over how to end the war, but how to continue it under new conditions.

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The Berlin Declaration speaks of a “legally binding obligation” to “take measures to restore peace and security” in the event of a future attack. The next sentence states that these measures could include military intervention, but also intelligence, logistical, economic or diplomatic support.

The backdoor is deliberately built in to give governments maximum flexibility. Politically, however, the message is clear: an attack on Ukraine—or a provocation that can be interpreted as such—should be considered an attack on Europe and responded to accordingly. Moscow attacked Ukraine, following constant Western provocations, to prevent a further expansion of NATO up to its borders. Berlin, Paris and London are now not only demanding an 800,000-strong Ukrainian army on Russia’s doorstep, but also a European force in Ukraine and alliance guarantees comparable to NATO membership.

The European powers are thus preparing something that is completely unacceptable from Russia’s point of view. The demands are deliberately worded in such a way as to sabotage any peace agreement and create a permanent war front in Eastern Europe.

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The German-European escalation of war is taking place against the backdrop of a deep rift in the transatlantic alliance. Trump’s National Security Strategy attacks the European Union head-on, promoting the rise of right-wing extremist parties and announcing that the US will in the future concentrate its resources primarily in Latin America and the Indo-Pacific region. Russia is no longer designated as the main adversary. Instead, Europe should find “strategic stability” with Moscow while Washington pursues its own interests.

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Today, German imperialism is once again pursuing the goal of removing Ukraine and other states that were once part of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire from Moscow’s sphere of influence and bringing them under the control of the German-dominated European Union. 

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The Putin regime, which emerged from the restoration of capitalism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, plays a reactionary role. It relies on war, militarism and dictatorship to defend the interests of the Russian oligarchy. Under pressure from imperialism, it vacillates between military threats, including the use of nuclear weapons, and submissive begging for a deal.

8. Germany: Italian artist Costantino Ciervo rebuffs criticism from Zionist lobbies, politicians seeking to close his exhibition 

Constantino Ciervo

Italian artist Costantino Ciervo has made a powerful short video for Instagram and Facebook. In the video, he denounces defamatory accusations of antisemitism that have been used to justify attempts by German politicians and lobby groups to shut down his exhibition “COMUNE – The Paradox of Similarity in the Middle East Conflict” at the Fluxus+ Museum in Potsdam (near Berlin).

The exhibition proposes a vision of Jews and Palestinians living together in a federation based on equal rights, directly contradicting claims that the work is antisemitic.

In the video Ciervo explains that: “After the opening [of the exhibition] a smear campaign was launched in Germany claiming that the exhibition was antisemitic. The smear campaign was initiated by the Commissioner for Antisemitism of the State of Brandenburg, the Israeli Embassy, the Jewish community in Potsdam, and Volker Beck, the president of the German-Israeli Society.”

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In response, Ciervo declared in his video:

I vehemently reject the accusation that I am an antisemite. Throughout my entire life I have always been committed to the struggle against racism and every form of oppression. I have advocated peace and coexistence among peoples. The exhibition is not about confronting one ethnicity against another, but rather a vision that in Palestine Jews and Palestinians could live together with equal rights in peace.

Ciervo’s video, available in German and Italian, has already been seen hundreds of times, accompanied by overwhelmingly positive reactions.

9. Trump-backed redistricting effort fails in Indiana

On December 11, a majority of Republican state senators in Indiana voted with Democrats to defeat a Trump administration-organized scheme to redistrict the state. Republicans control the Indiana Senate with a 40-10 majority.

The state Senate voted 31-19 to reject the mid‑decade congressional redistricting bill, which could have changed Indiana’s current 7–2 Republican advantage in the US House of Representatives to 9–0 by dismantling two Democratic‑held districts, based on Indianapolis and the Gary-Hammond area adjacent to Chicago. Similar undemocratic initiatives have been pushed through in the states of Texas, North Carolina and Missouri.

The defeat of the effort to redraw Indiana’s congressional map has been widely portrayed in the corporate media as a significant stand taken by state Republicans against overreach by President Trump. Headlines have celebrated the “courage” of senators who defied White House pressure, while editorials frame the vote as a victory for democratic norms and local sovereignty.

However, such narratives obscure the real class dynamics at play. The vote in the Indiana legislature was not a moral awakening, but a tactical decision by sections of the ruling class and the Republican establishment to avoid a destabilizing political and legal conflict that could threaten incumbent interests, expose bitter intra-party divisions, and undermine the legitimacy of the 2026 elections and capitalist politics as a whole.

Trump’s nationwide campaign to force Republican-controlled states to redraw congressional maps mid-decade is an unprecedented authoritarian intervention into state politics. Having failed to secure decisive congressional majorities in the 2024 elections, and facing the likely loss of the House, at least, in 2026, Trump and his cabal identified redistricting as a mechanism to maintain Republican control. The anti-democratic campaign is designed to engineer partisan outcomes by dismantling competitive districts and disenfranchising Democratic—particularly minority—voters.

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To force compliance, the Trump administration employed a combination of bribery, coercion, and incitement. Trump personally lobbied lawmakers, while Vice President JD Vance made multiple trips to the state. Behind the scenes, operatives like Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, along with affiliated organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point Action, orchestrated a pressure campaign that blurred the lines between political lobbying and outright intimidation.

Most chilling was Trump’s explicit threat—amplified by Heritage Action—to strip Indiana of all federal funding if the map was not passed. “Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop,” the group warned on social media.

This declaration confirmed that the White House viewed federal infrastructure and security funds not as public resources, but as leverage to blackmail state legislatures into enacting anti-democratic measures. It is an offer they can’t refuse, in the mafia-style thinking of Trump’s inner circle.

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Given the intensity of White House pressure, why did a Republican supermajority in the Indiana Senate ultimately reject the map?

In the first place, the political calculations were shifted by the collapse in Trump’s poll numbers, driven by the mounting economic squeeze on working people and mass hostility to Trump’s attacks on democratic rights.

Trump won Indiana over Kamala Harris last year by a margin of 59 percent to 40 percent. In the congressional delegation, Republicans control seven of nine seats, or 77 percent, and the redistricting plan would raise that to 100 percent.

Dissolving the two heavily Democratic districts would mean lessening the margins for Republicans in all of the state’s districts. Given the decline in poll numbers, Democrats might actually make gains under the new district boundaries, defeating Republican incumbents whose majorities would have been undermined.

Secondly, the new map threatened to set off bitter intra-party conflicts. Redistricting is a ruthless process that often pits sitting lawmakers against each other, disrupts local donor networks, and alienates county-level party bosses.

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Perhaps the overriding concern was that the redistricting conflict, not just in Indiana but nationally, threatens to discredit the US electoral system as a whole. It feeds popular alienation from both parties in the corporate-controlled two-party system, with both the Democrats and Republicans engaged in rival efforts to rig the 2026 electoral boundaries. 

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The Indiana struggle cannot be understood in isolation. It is part of a national redistricting offensive spearheaded by the Trump administration, with similar efforts by Republicans in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri, and retaliatory efforts by Democrats in California, Maryland, New York and Illinois.

It is essential to recognize that beneath the theatrics of Indiana conflict, both major parties remain committed to defending the interests of capital against the working class. Indiana’s Democratic legislators, while opposing the gerrymander, have no fundamental disagreement with the Republicans on issues of war, social inequality, or corporate domination.

10. For a united global movement against layoffs in the auto industry!

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on autoworkers around the world to join a unified counteroffensive against the escalating bloodbath of layoffs sweeping the global auto industry.

The defense of the right to a job requires common action on a world scale against the transnational auto companies. This fight requires the building of new organizational structures: rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers and based on the independent interests of the working class, not on nationalist collaboration with the capitalist elite.

On Friday, over 1,100 workers are expected to have their last day at General Motors’ Factory Zero in Detroit. The name of the plant (Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions, Zero Congestion) reflected GM’s claim that it was the centerpiece of the company’s electric vehicle future. Now the plant is to go down to a single shift and could soon be closed altogether.

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The United Auto Workers bureaucracy has said nothing about any of these job cuts. This guilty silence reflects its own role in helping to eliminate thousands of jobs since the phony 2023 “standup strike.” The UAW has also remained silent on dangerous working conditions, including those that led to the death of skilled tradesman Ronald Adams Sr. this April.

The only sustained and serious coverage of these developments has come from the World Socialist Web Site and from the IWA-RFC, which has exposed conditions that the union bureaucracy seeks to conceal.

11. Richest 125 Kenyans own more wealth than 42 million people

Charity organization Oxfam’s report, “Kenya’s Inequality Crisis: The Great Economic Divide,” is a devastating indictment of the capitalist system, imperialist domination, and the long-standing promises of the Kenyan national bourgeoisie that independence, carried out within borders imposed by colonialism and on the basis of capitalist property relations, would usher in an era of equality and prosperity.

The report shows that nearly half of Kenya’s population lives in extreme poverty, while a minuscule layer at the top has accumulated obscene levels of wealth. The richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than 77 percent of the population, that is, over 42 million people. At the same time, average real wages have fallen by 11 percent since 2020, the cost of food has risen by 50 percent compared to 2020, and public services are collapsing amid International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity.

The report documents that sustained economic growth has not led to reduced poverty. GDP has grown at an average of around 5 percent per year over the past decade, yet seven million more people have fallen into extreme poverty since 2015. Food insecurity has risen by more than 70 percent, and inflation has hit low-income households far harder than the rich.

This exposes the claim, repeated endlessly by successive Kenyan governments and the IMF, that growth alone will lift people out of poverty. Instead, it has confirmed what Karl Marx explained 150 years ago in Das Kapital, “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is … at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole”.

Debt plays a decisive role. In 2024, 68 percent of all tax revenue in Kenya was used to service debt. That is double the share of just seven years earlier. Debt repayment is now twice as much as the total budget for education and nearly 15 times more than the national health budget.

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This mechanism is common to all former colonies and semi-colonies, from South America to sub-Saharan Africa. In every case, the IMF and World Bank operate as instruments of imperialist domination, imposing policies that subordinate social needs to debt repayment and “investor confidence.”  

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The Oxfam report traces Kenya’s extreme inequality to the unresolved legacy of colonial land dispossession. Under colonial rule, land, the most important source of wealth in Kenya, was violently expropriated from the indigenous tribes and concentrated in the hands of a tiny settler population. By the 1930s, white settlers, who made up just 0.25 percent of the population, owned roughly a third of the most fertile land in the Kenyan highlands.

This created a racially stratified economy in which Africans were pushed onto overcrowded, less productive land or forced into low-paid wage labour, while being taxed to finance public services they were largely excluded from.

It was these conditions that gave rise to the peasant-based Mau Mau uprising against British imperialism in the 1950s, led mostly by Kikuyu, Embu and Meru tribes. While the movement was brutally suppressed, including the execution of its leader Dedan Kimathi in 1957, its existence underscored the impossibility of London maintaining colonial capitalist relations without draining its resources in constant counter-insurgency campaigns, prompting a negotiated settlement with the aspiring Kenyan elites.

The colonial system gave way to a post-independence system “repurposed by the local elite”, states Oxfam, who seized vast resources formerly controlled by white settlers. Land redistribution schemes after independence were shaped by patronage, political loyalty, and the ability to pay, rather than social need or restitution. Prominent politicians and politically connected individuals, including the first family, the Kenyatta’s, acquired land intended for landless and displaced populations, creating a new African bourgeoisie. Over time, land and inequality has worsened.

Today, land in Nairobi is concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy individuals, while millions are forced to live in slums such as Mathare, Kangemi, Kibera, Mukuru, Dandora and Kawangware, or remain entirely landless.

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Oxfam itself ultimately falls into a bankrupt reformist perspective. While its data are devastating, its usual prescriptions of progressive taxation, increased social spending, and debt restructuring remain confined within the framework of capitalism. They rest on the illusion that the ruling class can be persuaded to act against its own material interests.

Global experience, including Kenya’s, demonstrates the opposite. Capitalism responds not with reform but with austerity, repression, and war. Ending social misery requires an all-out assault on the ill-accumulated wealth of the financial aristocracy and the reorganization of economic life on socialist foundations.

12. Videos and statements: Striking resident doctors speak out from picket lines across England

Resident doctors in the National Health Service (NHS) spoke with World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reporters on the picket lines at hospitals around England on Wednesday at the start of their latest strike.

WSWS reporters distributed the article “Resident doctors strike goes ahead in England defying Labour Health Secretary ultimatum”, describing the government’s latest empty “offer” as a ploy to either secure strikers’ surrender or brand their action “self-indulgent, irresponsible and dangerous”, as health secretary Wes Streeting said Monday.

The offer’s overwhelming rejection was an indictment of the British Medical Association (BMA) Resident Doctors Committee (RDC) decision to even put it to members in the first place.

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The WSWS urges all resident doctors to contact NHS FightBack, which called for the rejection of Streeting’s insulting offer and outlined a strategy to end the isolation of their struggle through the formation of rank-and-file committees fighting for unity among the 1.4 million-strong NHS workforce.

13. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East

Africa

Egypt:

Journalists’ ongoing strike over low pay

Nigeria:

Health workers continue strike over pay and conditions, as unions prepare sellout
 
Judiciary staff in Kogi continue their strike despite threats from State Governor

Europe

Belgium:

Francophone workers in general strike against community government austerity

France:

Staff at the Louvre museum in Paris strike for improvements in pay and conditions

Greece:

Thousands of workers strike in protest at austerity budget

United Kingdom:

Hospital operating theater staff at Leeds hospitals, England to walk out over back pay claim

UK microbiology staff at Airedale hospital in Yorkshire, to walk out over pay grade and imposed extra duties

Teaching assistants at London school walk out in pay grading dispute

Middle East

Iran:

Continuing cost-of-living protests sweep Iran

14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

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.

Dec 17, 2025

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. In step toward war, Trump orders “a total and complete blockade” of Venezuelan oil

US President Donald Trump announced Tuesday evening that he is ordering “a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into, and out of, Venezuela.” This is an act of war aimed at devastating the Venezuelan economy and overthrowing the government of President Nicolás Maduro. 

Trump’s blockade and the series of murders American imperialism has carried out on the high seas off the coast of Venezuela are part of a campaign aimed at subjugating Venezuela, and all of Latin America, to colonial slavery in order to seize their energy and mineral resources.

In his statement on Truth Social, Trump declared: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.”

Trump demanded that Venezuela “return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” He wrote that he had designated the Venezuelan government a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

Trump’s statement dispenses with his earlier pretense that the US military campaign is aimed at combating drug trafficking. Trump is openly demanding that Venezuela hand over its oil and “land” to the United States in an act of colonial plunder.

The United States has no claim to any Venezuelan territory or resources. Trump’s claim that Venezuela “stole” US assets is a fraud: The country has stolen nothing from the United States. Trump acts as a gangster running a protection racket, but he speaks on behalf of a criminal oligarchy that believes that it can steal anything by force.

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Trump’s political allies are openly calling for regime change. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Tuesday: “If he’s still standing when this is over, this is a fatal, major mistake to our standing in the world. If, after all this, Maduro is still in power, that’s the worst possible signal you can send to Russia, China, Iran.” 

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Trump’s announcement Tuesday came hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to release video footage of the September 2 missile strike in the Caribbean that killed two people clinging to the wreckage of a destroyed boat.

“In keeping with long-standing Department of Defense policy, of course we’re not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth told reporters after delivering a classified briefing to senators.

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After the meeting, Schumer did not call for the video to be released to the public, only for senators to view it in a classified setting. Last week, the Democratic congressional leadership joined with Republicans to pass the largest military budget in US history—over $1 trillion when combined with supplemental funding.

2. 40 years since the suspension of the Workers Revolutionary Party from the ICFI

The Control Commission presented its interim report—based on an examination of secret internal documents—which meticulously exposed the unprincipled relations that had been established by the WRP leadership, behind the back of the ICFI, with several bourgeois regimes in the Middle East. Had the International Committee not insisted on the investigation, the documents and the relationships they exposed would have remained concealed and unknown.

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As a Trotskyist organization, the WRP was finished. It splintered into numerous groups, all of which turned away from Trotskyism in the following years. Slaughter became an anarchist; Banda denounced Trotsky and Trotskyism within weeks of the split with the ICFI, proclaimed his admiration of Stalin, and became a supporter of Kurdish nationalism. Pirani repudiated Trotskyism and made a career as an academic.

For the Fourth International, the suspension of the WRP marked a historic turning point. It was the culmination of the long struggle that the International Committee had waged against Pabloite opportunism since 1953. Now, after 32 years, the Trotskyists finally had reestablished control of the Fourth International.

A flowering of Marxism followed. The cadre reappropriated the rich theoretical and historical heritage of the ICFI, analyzed the objective changes underlying the crisis of the WRP, and thus prepared for the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. While the entire petty-bourgeois “left” reacted to the dissolution of the Soviet Union with a wave of renunciationism, declaring socialism a failure and making its peace with capitalism, the ICFI drew entirely different conclusions.

The collapse of the Stalinist regimes was only the sharpest expression of the irreconcilable contradiction between the international character of the world economy and the nation state, on which both capitalism and Stalinism, with its perspective of “socialism in one country,” are based. It ushered in a new epoch of violent crises, wars and revolutionary struggles, in which the perspective of Permanent Revolution defended by the ICFI would play the decisive role.

The International Committee based all its work on this understanding. In the mid-1990s, it transformed its sections from leagues into parties, in recognition of the qualitative degeneration of the old national organizations and a corresponding change in the relationship of the Fourth International to the working class. In 1998, the ICFI founded the World Socialist Web Site as the authentic voice of international socialism. And on December 12, the WSWS presented Socialism AI as a groundbreaking application of cutting-edge technology for the political education and mobilization of the international working class.

Against this background, the historical significance of the events of 40 years ago becomes clear. The process of clarification within the revolutionary party anticipates the orientation of the masses in great revolutionary struggles. As a result of its principled intervention in the crisis of the WRP, the ICFI was able 40 years ago to set the course for the building of a truly international Trotskyist world party that corresponds to the global character of the modern working class. Under conditions of a deepening crisis of world capitalism, the Fourth International, led by the International Committee, will emerge as the leadership of mass revolutionary struggles throughout the world.

3. Documents of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the suspension of the WRP

4. Resident doctors’ strike goes ahead in England, defying Labour Health Secretary’s ultimatum

The British Medical Association announced the ballot result on Monday: a 65.34 percent turnout with an overwhelming 83.2 percent voting to strike between December 17 and 22.

5. United Kingdom: Stop David Lammy killing political prisoners! Release all Palestine protesters!

These are the vindictive, lawless actions of a police state. Labour has branded Palestine Action and its supporters “terrorists” to justify swallowing innocent people into the prison system and subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishment.

6. NATO-Ukraine war on Russia spreads to commercial vessels in the Black Sea

Attacks on civilian merchant shipping in the Black Sea expand the scope of the war and threaten to drag NATO members like Türkiye deeper into the maelstrom.

7. Fascist admirer of Pinochet to assume presidency in Chile

Boric’s government, like its “Pink Tide” counterparts in Latin America, paved the way for the right by defending capitalist property relations and failing to alter conditions of poverty and extreme social inequality confronting the masses.

8. What was behind the rise of Pinochet in Chile? Answers from Socialism AI

This new feature will highlight selected questions and answers from Socialism AI—concise, clear and politically insightful responses to some of the most pressing issues of our time. 

9. US unemployment highest in 5 years, as Ford, other companies announce layoffs before Christmas

The situation underscores the need for action by the working class to defend the right to a job.

10. Measles infections in Australia reach highest level since 2019

The rise in cases of the highly contagious, potentially deadly disease, 10 years after it was eliminated, is due to attacks on vaccination and public health, in Australia and internationally.

11. Russians at War: An honest portrayal of the people inside Russia’s military

As the US and NATO-instigated proxy war with Russia over Ukraine tilts dangerously toward a direct great-power clash and a potential nuclear catastrophe, broadening opposition to the war is finding expression in cultural productions. One of these is the documentary film Russians at War from Russian-Canadian director Anastasia Trofimova.

The film does not undertake to explain the origins of the conflict in Ukraine—the soldiers interviewed do not themselves agree about the causes, and in her public comments the filmmaker does not fully address the issue. Nonetheless, in its rejection of the bogus narrative peddled by US imperialism and its Canadian and European allies of “Putin’s unprovoked war”—a war which supposedly had no pre-history and erupted in February 2022 solely because of the greed and malevolence of the “Russian aggressor”—Trofimova’s film offers a refreshing look at the conflict. It makes clear that the war did not simply begin with the Russian invasion of February 2022, and gives voice to the ordinary Russian soldiers the western media has cast as brutes and worse, serving to humanize them.

12. Growing problems in Chinese economy

China has recorded a $1 trillion trade surplus for the first 11 months of the year, despite the imposition of tariffs by US President Trump, but all is far from well in its internal economy.

13. GM workers look to fight layoffs at Factory Zero in Detroit

In recent days many workers have reached out to the World Socialist Web Site to express their anger and frustration with both GM and the UAW.

13. Mass protests in Bulgaria: Government collapses immediately ahead of introduction of the euro

Sustained mass protests have forced the resignation of Bulgaria’s government just weeks before the planned introduction of the euro. The upheaval reflects deep popular opposition to austerity, corruption and militarization driven by the EU and enforced by successive governments.

14. Australia: Governments, police prepare a cover-up of Bondi shootings

Prime Minister Albanese and New South Wales Premier Chris Minns, along with top police and intelligence officials, are fashioning a narrative that protects the interests of governments and the state apparatus.

15. United States: Rod Paige, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education and the public face of “No Child Left Behind,” dies at 92

Rod Paige, US Secretary of Education under George W. Bush from 2001-2005, died on December 9, 2025, at the age of 92. While Paige himself is not particularly well known, his death provides an opportunity to review the bipartisan assault on public education in which he played a pivotal and disgraceful part.

Paige is best known for promoting Bush’s reactionary “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), signed into law on January 8, 2002. Paige, the first African American to head the Department of Education, framed the legislation as a defense and extension of civil rights. He argued that NCLB was the “logical next step” to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, by claiming NCLB would end the “soft bigotry” of educational neglect that allowed poor and minority students to fail.

This was, in fact, a grotesque lie. NCLB led to an estimated 4,000 school closures nationally, mostly in impoverished districts. Meanwhile, edu-businesses and charter school chains cashed in. Paige oversaw the most significant reorganization of education in 50 years, shifting the education landscape from neighborhood public schools to market-style choice systems. Siphoning funds from public education, NCLB systematically subordinated education to corporate interests and promoted Christian indoctrination.

*****

Rather than narrowing achievement gaps, NCLB institutionalized a two-track education structure: One of enriched programs for the privileged, and another of test, drill, austerity and punitive discipline for the working class.

But while Paige is justifiably notorious for these measures, none of them could have been implemented without bipartisan Democratic Party support. Subsequent history shows that Democrats’ role has been more systematic and ultimately more effective at embedding market-based “reforms” into American education.

The open partnership of the teacher unions with the capitalist reorganization of public schools was decisive. The well-heeled bureaucracy suppressed teacher opposition and in coming years would preach “reform with us, not against us,” enabling the big business agenda to be imposed on districts across the US. 

*****

If NCLB laid the foundation, the Obama administration built the demolition apparatus. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative, announced in 2009, represented a quantum leap in federal pressure for privatization. RTTT required states to commit to specific policies to be eligible to compete for federal funding: increasing charter school caps, implementing test-based teacher evaluations and closing “persistently low-performing” schools.

The impact was dramatic. Thirty-four states changed education policies and 48 states collaborated to create Common Core standards. The initiative’s competitive structure—pitting states against each other for federal dollars—created a “race to bureaucracy” that expanded standardized testing, data collection and centralization.

Standardized testing was wielded to produce a steady supply of “failing schools” that could be targeted for closure, forced reorganization, or conversion to charters.

Education was recast as a market. Parents became “consumers,” schools “providers,” students “data points,” and teachers “deliverers of measurable outcomes.” Public funds were shifted to charter operators, education management organizations (EMOs), and testing conglomerates such as Pearson and Educational Testing Service (ETS).

*****

High-stakes testing regimes served another critical function: weakening and disciplining the teaching profession. Merit pay schemes and “value-added” metrics stripped teachers of job security, intensified surveillance and eroded working conditions. By tying funding and employment to test scores—measures deeply correlated with poverty—the system scapegoated teachers for the growing social inequality caused by capitalism.

*****

RTTT was, for all practical purposes, designed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which invested hundreds of millions of dollars to reorganize the US education system as a reliable “human capital” pipeline for what was touted as a technology-driven economy. 

*****

Within months of Obama’s launch of RTTT, Gates invested $335 million in “effective teaching” and “fairer and more reliable evaluative measures” to meet RTTT standards. This was welcomed by AFT President Randi Weingarten, who endorsed Gates’ policy, saying, “This process has been a thoughtful, deliberative, collaborative way to understand—and then design and implement—systems that improve teaching and learning.”

Gates explicitly noted that “Important partners in this effort are the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) and their affiliates in the participating communities.” Between 2009 and 2014, the Gates Foundation gave over $10 million directly to the AFT and about $4 million to the NEA to “train” members on the new standards and ensure ideological alignment with the Gates mission.

Rising anger among rank-and-file teachers eventually boiled over, prompting Weingarten to stop accepting Gates Foundation funds. However, by then the critical rollout period had already passed, and Common Core and teacher-evaluation laws were firmly established in state law.

Throughout this period, the AFT and NEA bureaucracies suppressed strike actions over the results of NCLB/RTTT and the destruction of jobs. When strikes exploded out of their control, they demanded “cooling-off” deals, imposed return-to-work orders and isolated struggles.

*****

Rod Paige’s legacy is one of a brutal assault on education in line with the needs of the capitalist profit system. With Trump and current Education Secretary Linda McMahon repeating many of Paige’s lies and justifications, the lessons of the not-so-distant past are crucial.

Every attack on education has been carried out at the behest of the financial elite and executed by both Democrats and Republicans. The pro-capitalist union bureaucracies have acquiesced and prospered through the betrayal of workers and students. This underscores the necessity of forming independent rank-and-file organizations of education workers, politically independent from the union bureaucracy and the two capitalist parties.

These new organizations of struggle, democratically controlled by workers themselves, must be built to link up the defense of public education, jobs and social rights with the escalating struggles against fascism and war by workers across the world.

16. UK Armed forces head demands “sacrifice for our nation” amid calls for military spending surge

“Sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans… will all have a role to play. To build. To serve. And if necessary, to fight,” Sir Richard Knighton insisted.

17. United Kingdom: Struggle against job losses at universities in Sheffield threatened by UCU/management collusion

This customization of HE workers’ struggles within a single city is an acute expression of the union's policy of isolating a series of local recent strikes over job losses, and other issues, including many dozens of course closures, at universities in Edinburgh, Nottingham, Cardiff, Bradford, Leicester and Dundee—all which face defeat.

18. United Kingdom: Lecturer and students speak on jobs fight at University of Sheffield

University and College Union (UCU) members at the University of Sheffield (UoS) held a rally December 12 at the end of their strike over ongoing job losses.

World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to some of the lecturers and students at the protest about the implications of shutting down entire departments and the continuing financialisation of higher education.

19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

 

The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.

Dec 16, 2025

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Trump threatens neo-colonial war of plunder against Venezuela

The US plan to seize Venezuela’s oil and natural resources targets both Russia and China. China is Venezuela’s largest creditor, having provided over $62 billion in loans since 2005, largely repaid through guaranteed oil sales, and currently purchases 80 percent of Venezuela’s exports. Russia has invested billions in Venezuelan energy infrastructure.

In its campaign against Venezuela, the Trump administration has dispensed with even the most flimsy pretenses to legality. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was itself criminal, the Bush administration at least attempted to construct some legal justification—however fraudulent—for its actions. No such effort has been made here. The administration has simply declared its right to murder people on the high seas, seize the property of foreign nations, and overthrow governments at will. There is no meaningful difference between the policy the United States is now pursuing toward Venezuela and Hitler’s invasions of neighboring countries in the late 1930s. 

2. Predator spying revelations rock Greek ruling elite

The trial proceedings around Greece’s spyware and phone-tapping scandal finally commenced on October 22 after repeated delays. At the center of the scandal is the use of the spyware Predator by Greece’s National Intelligence Agency (EYP) to hack the phones of leading politicians (including ministers of the ruling New Democracy party), journalists, government officials as well as high ranking military, police personnel and even EYP operatives.

With the witness list exceeding 50 people, the trial is expected to continue well into next year.

In June 2022 it was revealed that an attempt had been made to infect with Predator the phone of Nikos Androulakis, leader of the social democratic PASOK. Androulakis was then a candidate in the PASOK leadership election and the surveillance reportedly stopped shortly after he was elected party leader in December 2021.

*****

Predator was developed by North Macedonian start-up Cytrox in 2017 and was acquired in 2019 by Israeli cyber-security company Intellexa. Insight into how Predator works was provided by a report published this month—based on leaked internal Intellexa documents and a forensic analysis carried out by Amnesty International’s security lab.

The version of Predator at the center of the scandal uses a so-called “1-click” attack method. This requires a malicious link to be sent and then opened on a target’s phone, which installs the spyware. The report outlines the vast amount of data available once infection has occurred “including ability to access encrypted instant messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp, audio recordings, emails, device locations, screenshots and camera photos, stored passwords, contacts and call logs, and also to activate the device’s microphone.”

*****

Despite efforts to absolve the government of any wrongdoing, the incriminating evidence is so overwhelming it has proved impossible to keep a lid on it during court proceedings.

On December 2, former Intellexa employee Panagiotis Koutsios contradicted the government’s narrative by testifying that Intellexa “collaborated only with state authorities,” given that “police and army officials were always present” in state premises where the company would showcase its products.

*****

 The picture that emerges is of a ruling elite deeply steeped in criminality and rapidly moving towards the dictatorial rule associated with the military junta that ruled Greece between 1967-74. This is a manifestation in Greece of a global phenomenon. Over a decade ago former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor and whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed the vast scale of surveillance employed by the US government and its Five Eyes counterparts in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

*****

As opposition grows to war and austerity policies, ruling elites in every major capitalist country are preparing to confront this by dispensing with democratic forms of rule. The spyware industry is tapping the growing demand for surveillance capabilities by governments that don’t have Washington’s resources to develop these in-house. According to a 2020 estimate by Moody’s the industry was worth $12 billion and the market growing at an estimated 25 percent a year. In a December 2021 report, Citizen’s Lab noted that its internet scanning for Predator servers across the world found “likely Predator customers in Armenia, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Madagascar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Serbia.”

3. Australian governments, media target anti-genocide protests over Bondi Beach shooting

It is now clear from the location, planning and footage that the target of the two alleged gunmen, Sajid Akram, 50, and his son, Naveed Akram, 24, was a “Chanukah by the Sea” event for children at a beachside playground, marking the start of the eight-day Rabbinic Jewish festival of lights. Hundreds of children, their carers and volunteers, many elderly, were taking part in the festival.

The World Socialist Web Site has unequivocally condemned this attack, stating yesterday that Jewish people and their children living in Australia bear no responsibility for the ongoing slaughter by the Israeli Zionist regime in Gaza and the occupied West Bank of Palestine. In fact, many Jewish people have joined the massive, often weekly anti-genocide demonstrations in Australia, as part of the wider disgust and outrage.

Yet, those responsible for the continuing carnage in Gaza, above all the Israeli government and its backers, are seeking to exploit this reactionary and tragic killing spree to insist that all demonstrations and statements of protest against the genocide must be shut down.

*****

The actual perpetrators of the killings on Bondi Beach—Sajid and Naveed Akram—appear to have been associated with the Islamic extremist organization, Islamic State (IS), which is notorious for its acts of terrorism carried out under the false flag of defending Muslims and their faith.

However, the allegations being drip fed to the establishment media by anonymous police and intelligence sources—an IS flag, Naveed Akram’s past association with an Islamist group, and a trip last month to the Philippines—raise more questions than they answer. Such reports should be treated with suspicion. Naveed Akram remains in hospital under police guard after being wounded by police, while his father was killed.

Whatever the motivations of the two men, the mass shooting only plays into the hands of those responsible for the historic crimes in Palestine. To expose and combat this, workers and young people must reject ethnic division and scapegoating, defend Jewish, Islamic and other targeted communities, and oppose the assault on basic democratic rights and the plunge toward war.

4. “We were in a death trap”: Cyclone victims in central Sri Lanka speak out

On December 10, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reporters visited the Sogama settlement, located in the Udapalatha Divisional Secretariat (DS) Division, near Gampola—a town in the central hill district of Kandy—to speak with survivors of the disaster caused by Cyclone Ditwah.

The Kandy District is the worst-affected region in the country, with 237 confirmed deaths and 73 reported missing as of December 15. It ranks third in terms of total affected, with 51,168 families and 173,686 individuals impacted, following the Colombo and Puttalam districts.

Gampola, 16 kilometers from Sogama, experienced heavy rainfall and severe flooding that submerged homes and roads in surrounding neighborhoods, rendering key access routes impassable. The Sogama settlement comprises eight villages—including Ihalagama, Hunukotugama, Udagama, Millagaspitiya, Amuhena and Pallegama—and is home to about 500 families, totaling approximately 2,000 people.

Located in a mountainous area with unstable soil and scattered rock formations, the Sogama settlement is entirely unfit for human habitation. WSWS reporters observed that residents were living in constant danger, with their lives and livelihoods devastated—an assessment confirmed by villagers from Ihalagama.

*****

According to these residents, nearly 500 displaced individuals from 97 families in Ihalagama and two neighboring villages are now sheltering at the Atabage Udagama Maha Vidyalaya (school) in Gampola. 

*****

The reporters witnessed the dangerous conditions in which the people of Sogama live. The area lies on the slopes of the Central Highlands, where heavy rainfall can trigger deadly landslides. Most residents rely on dairy farming, vegetable cultivation and daily wage labor. They told the WSWS that no government has ever supported them. Many expressed the belief that, despite everything, they would rather face death than leave behind what they had built through years of hard work. 

*****

About 10 to 15 people took part in the discussion, listening attentively and participating with interest. The reporters explained the scientific causes of the disaster and the necessity of a socialist program as the only way to put an end to such catastrophes. The participants expressed their agreement and provided contact details for further discussion.

5. New Zealand navy vessel joins US-led provocations against China

The New Zealand Defense Force (NZDF) reported on December 8 that a NZ navy ship, the HMNZS Aotearoa, supported by a P-8A Poseidon maritime aircraft, carried out “surveillance and deterrence” activities in the international waters of the East China and Yellow Seas during November.

*****

Defense Minister Judith Collins declared that the provocative transit of the Taiwan Strait was done “in accordance with international law and best practice. By doing this, we are demonstrating our commitment to the international rules-based system in our near region—the Indo-Pacific.”

Collins’s statement was a pack of lies. The Taiwan Strait is not in New Zealand’s “near region,” but on China’s doorstep, some 9,000 kilometers from the southwest Pacific. The so-called “rules-based system” invoked by Collins is the set of post-World War II “rules” established by Washington to ensure its global hegemony.

*****

The US and its allies have militarized the region in preparation for war with China, deliberately staging exercises to provoke Beijing. Wellington has expanded bilateral and multilateral exercises and operational planning with allied forces, including the top-level Five Eyes spy network that involves the US, UK, Australia and Canada. 

*****

According to the NZDF, the Aotearoa “was shadowed by seven different People’s Liberation Army (Navy) (PLA) warships, which maintained a safe and professional distance throughout.” This admission drove a frenzied response from the New Zealand media, with headlines declaring that the Chinese had “shadowed” the NZ vessel “around East Asia.”

The hypocritical media responses aim to blame Beijing for the rising danger of war. In February, the NZ government and media joined their Australian counterparts in hysterically denouncing the activities of three Chinese naval vessels, using it to demand greater military spending to meet a supposed imminent “Chinese threat.” The Chinese ships were closely monitored by the NZ military as they conducted live-fire exercises in international waters in the Tasman Sea, which separates Australia and New Zealand by 1,500-2,000 kilometers. By contrast, the Taiwan Strait is about 180 kilometers wide.

*****

Responding to reports of the NZ navy’s activities, Chinese Ministry of Defense spokesman Jiang Bin stated on November 27: “We firmly oppose any country stirring up trouble in the Taiwan Strait or sending wrong signals to Taiwan independence separatist forces.”

China is concerned about growing naval activity in its close waters, particularly in the Taiwan Strait. The US and its allies, including New Zealand, have increasingly been using passages through the Taiwan Strait as one method of undermining the One China policy despite continuing to nominally recognize it. The policy regards Beijing as the legitimate government of all China including Taiwan. Beijing, which treats Taiwan as a renegade province, has warned that it will use force if Taipei declares formal independence from China.

*****

For 15 years successive US governments have built up the US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region. The Trump administration, driven by the historic crisis of capitalism, is sharply accelerating the warmongering against China, as it seeks to shore up its dominant global position. In May, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that China posed an “imminent” threat and demanded that US allies in Asia prepare for war over Taiwan by 2027.

New Zealand, a minor imperialist power allied to the US, is closely integrated into these plans—despite the fact that China is New Zealand’s major trading partner.

6. Australia: Tasmanian teachers strike again but unions block a unified fight

The crisis engulfing public education has again been exposed in Tasmania, where teachers and support staff have taken their second strike in two months. Last Friday, educators across the Australian island state walked off the job for half a day, closing most public schools in Hobart, Launceston and Burnie.

The Australian Education Union (AEU) has refused to lead a genuine fight against the minority state Liberal government’s austerity regime, which has driven educators to breaking point. While teachers have stopped work twice since October, the AEU leadership continues to isolate their struggle from those of other public sector workers and similar battles in Queensland and Victoria, blocking a national fight against low pay and onerous workloads.

The stoppage was held in support of school support staff, teachers’ assistants, cleaners, lab technicians, library and admin staff. They are among the lowest-paid workers and head into the Christmas break without a pay rise. These essential workers face weeks of unpaid stand-down over the holidays, unlike their mainland counterparts.

*****

Tasmanian teachers are now the second-lowest paid in Australia. This did not arise overnight. It is the product of decades of attacks by successive governments, including the Labor-Greens administration formed after the 2010 election, which enforced austerity budgets, closed schools and deepened the erosion of public education.

What is happening in Tasmania is part of a global offensive in which governments cut funding, push privatization and prioritize corporate profit and war spending. Educators from South Korea, the UK and the US are striking over parallel policies.

The core issues driving the strikes are intolerable workloads, under-staffing and unsafe classrooms. Teachers are forced to manage students with complex needs, such as those on the autism spectrum, and students traumatized by family breakdown, often without resources or assistance.

Teaching staff are working beyond school hours catching up on emails, wellbeing referrals, attendance and lesson planning. This is compounded by a rise in violence in schools, reports of which have nearly tripled since 2022, under conditions of a broader cost-of-living and social crisis. Educators report concussions and other injuries from student assaults.

One teacher stated on social media: “[I]t’s not just a pay dispute—it’s about conditions, especially the escalation of violence against staff by students. Things that are making staff leave in droves and that can’t just be fixed with a bit more pay.”

*****

The AEU bureaucracy is not opposing austerity but pleading for talks that will subordinate teachers’ demands to “budget repair.” Its aim is to dissipate anger through limited actions such as half-day strikes. Genford said AEU members “didn’t want to interrupt school at all” underscoring the bureaucracy’s opposition to any real fight. The union’s claims serve as bargaining chips to steer the dispute back into negotiations within the confines set by the government.

Conditions nationwide are marked by real wage cuts, relentless underfunding and impossible workloads. Labor and Liberal governments, assisted by the union apparatuses, enforce austerity dictated by corporate interests, including cuts affecting thousands of public sector jobs. The AEU and its state affiliates deliberately divide teachers by state, isolating each struggle.

*****

The lesson, confirmed by the current disputes in Tasmania, Queensland and Victoria, is clear: When teachers are diverted into negotiations and arbitration, pay, staffing and safety are sacrificed. Teachers must build new democratic organizations of struggle—rank-and-file committees in every school, uniting educators and support staff across state lines, and advancing demands based on the real needs of teachers, support staff and students, such as:

  • An immediate 40 percent wage increase, indexed to inflation, to make up for past losses.
  • Maximum class sizes of 15–20.
  • A minimum of eight hours of in-school planning time weekly.
  • Psychologists employed in every school.
  • Hiring thousands of teachers and support staff to end crushing workloads.

What the governments and union bureaucrats fear most is unified action across all states, a struggle that would challenge the capitalist agenda prioritizing war preparations, including AUKUS, and corporate infrastructure over public education. The fight for fully funded public education is inseparable from a political struggle against the private profit system defended by both major parties and the trade union apparatus.

7. United States: 30,000 LAUSD support workers must strike now and take control through Rank-and-File Committees!

On Wednesday, 30,000 Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) support workers are demonstrating against poverty and exploitation which the district is seeking to deepen in a new contract. The support workers include bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, teacher assistants, special education assistants, playground aides and other classified staff, and are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99.

These workers keep 1,000 schools in the country’s second-largest school district functioning for more than 400,000 students across the region, performing essential labor that makes public education possible on a daily basis. Yet despite their central role, the majority earn near or below $30,000 a year, with many making far less, condemning them to poverty wages in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the country.

There is enormous potential for a powerful statewide strike movement uniting educators across California. Workers in virtually every major school district have been working for months without a contract, while talks with the districts have gone nowhere. Recently, San Francisco teachers voted by 99 percent to strike. Educators in the West Contra Costa County Unified School District struck earlier this month, before the union officials abruptly shut the strike down.

*****

The union bureaucracy knows full well that a strike vote would pass by a landslide, just as it did in February 2023, when 96 percent voted to authorize strike action. Rather than allow workers to exercise their collective power, the union leadership chose to shut down the struggle, fearing that an independent movement would escape their control.

Local 99 has called Wednesday’s rally to let workers blow off steam before things get out of officials’ control. It has been deliberately timed with the tail end of the semester in order to prevent workers from building momentum to take action.

For educators, they must use the rally to start organizing with each other to enforce the will of the membership and prepare for a strike for inflation-busting raises, smaller class sizes, adequate funding for infrastructure, protection from immigration raids and other key demands.

LAUSD began negotiations by proposing a 0 percent wage increase, an open declaration that the district intends to impose further austerity on workers already living in poverty. This, in a city with 56 billionaires and the center of the world’s television and film industry!

The $18.8 billion district budget leaves classrooms without basic supplies. This is the outcome of a political and economic framework that systematically diverts resources away from students and school workers. The district enforces austerity through attendance‑based funding formulas, with layers of bureaucratic overhead and legally restricted spending mechanisms at the school level, particularly in working class communities.

California’s Democratic Party establishment oversees public education while subordinating it to the interests of finance and corporate elites. The union bureaucrats work with them to contain independent resistance and block effective organization by workers. This has produced decades of decline in public education.

While the Trump administration openly moves to dismantle public education at the federal level, Democrats in California pursue the same outcome through austerity, insisting that school districts and public universities “have no money” while refusing to challenge the vast concentration of wealth at the top of society. The same Democrats have readily voted for bloated military budgets that fund imperialist war and repression abroad. There is money for war, but not for schools.

*****

The SEIU has fully transformed into an instrument of corporate and state management. Local 99 Executive Director Max Arias, responsible for day-to-day operations and bargaining strategy, received $219,955 from membership dues in 2024. A privileged bureaucracy has emerged whose interests are bound up with institutional relationships, political access and budgetary constraints. Its function is to contain struggle, not to wage it.

The immediate priority is to call a strike. This is the essential first step in reclaiming the power that has been usurped by the union bureaucracy and demonstrating the strength of the workers’ collective force. A strike must be organized, sustained, and controlled by the rank and file, not by a leadership that has repeatedly betrayed its own members.

At the same time, rank‑and‑file committees must be established in every school. These committees, elected and controlled by workers themselves, should oversee negotiations and manage strike funds.

Most importantly, coordinate with teachers across the state, the country and the world. They must also link up with other sections of the working class. Their purpose is to link with teachers, parents, students and other public-sector workers to transform a single-district strike into a wider movement of the working class against inequality and oligarchy.

8. United States: New York nurses raise demands as contract expirations loom at year’s end

The contract expirations create the potential for a major, coordinated fight for safe staffing, raises that surpass inflation and the best possible healthcare benefits. They also create an opening for nurses to oppose management retaliation, such as the disciplinary measures taken against three nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital who raised safety demands after an attempted shooting at their workplace. 

New York nurses are also facing attacks by the administration of President Donald Trump on their profession and on public health itself. The US Department of Education’s declaration that nursing is no longer a professional degree will slash much-needed financial resources for students and worsen the problem of understaffing.

*****

A real struggle requires that nurses begin preparing to take the initiative into their own hands. This means forming a rank-and-file committee to formulate nurses’ demands, assert democratic control over bargaining to prevent a sellout, and to prepare for a strike, appealing for support from other healthcare workers and the working class across the city.

Reporters for the World Socialist Web Site spoke to nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital about their contract struggle and the broader political situation in which it is unfolding. Conditions at the hospital have changed greatly over time, according to an experienced catheterization lab nurse who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Our unit used to be very pro-patient,” he said. “And now, it’s all about business.”

*****

Many nurses are ready to strike, but the danger of a rotten last-minute agreement between management and NYSNA looms. When the union announced a sellout contract in 2023, many nurses objected to it. “But NYSNA went through with it anyway because they said the majority of people agreed to it,” said the the catherization lab nurse, adding that the vote count was never made public. Nurses continued to voice their complaints to the union. “They gave us the runaround, saying this and that. But we felt slighted.”

*****

To wage their contract struggle, which at bottom is a struggle against the system of for-profit healthcare, the nurses must form rank-and-file committees that are independent of the union and of both capitalist parties. Only by taking initiative from below the nurses can break out of the isolation that NYSNA is attempting to impose and reach out to other healthcare workers, as well as workers in other industries, for support.

9. Berlin state government to expand surveillance powers with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany

The amendments to the police law adopted by the Berlin House of Representatives (state legislature) on December 4, with the votes of the Christian Democrats (CDU), Social Democrats (SPD) and the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD), undermine fundamental democratic rights. The more than 700-page revision of the General Security and Order Act (ASOG) was presented by the state Interior Ministry in mid-July this year. 

The ASOG reform not only creates expanded powers for observation and video surveillance in public spaces, but also legalises the covert entry into homes to install so-called “state trojans” spying software. This goes far beyond previous practice. With judicial authorization, police officers will in future be permitted to break into dwellings in order to install surveillance software on computers, smartphones and other networked devices.

The state spyware enables access to encrypted messages, the extraction of files, the activation of microphones and cameras, and the monitoring of running applications—all in real time.

At the same time, the reform expands the legal basis for the comprehensive monitoring of telecommunications. With judicial approval, not only ongoing communications but also stored content, metadata and the communications of “contact persons”—so-called bystander collection—can be accessed. In this way, anyone can become a target who happened to be in contact with a person being monitored.

The legislative amendment also grants the police far-reaching technical powers in public spaces. Under the new regulation on mobile phone cell data requests (Section 26e), the police can demand the traffic data of all mobile phones that were present at a specific time within a precisely defined transmission cell from network operators.

This mass data collection allows the retrospective creation of large-scale movement profiles—a measure that can be deployed not only against specific suspects but against thousands of innocent people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, such as participants in demonstrations.

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Video- and AI-based behavioral analysis, the expansion of biometric data collections and the merging of police and intelligence service databases create instruments with which strikes, demonstrations and critical networks can be criminalised and smashed. The reform therefore not only attacks individual rights, but equips the state in advance against any form of social opposition.

The state government justifies the measures by pointing to the need to combat “threats.” The police state is being expanded in order to suppress the resistance that austerity and pro-war policies will inevitably provoke. This is not a phenomenon isolated to Berlin, but is an international one. The police state is being expanded worldwide and endowed with authoritarian powers.

Particularly revealing is the role played by the AfD in the passage of the ASOG amendment. Although the parties governing the state of Berlin—SPD and CDU—possess a comfortable majority, they relied on AfD votes for the expansion of the police state. The boundaries between the establishment parties and the far right are increasingly disappearing. 

Built up by the ruling class to channel growing opposition into nationalist and racist channels, the AfD’s programme has by now become official policy. The attacks on immigrants, the abolition of the right to asylum, the gigantic armaments budget, the reintroduction of conscription and the assaults on the welfare state are entirely in line with the policies of the AfD. At the same time, mass layoffs in industry are sharpening class conflicts ever further.

Like its sister parties in Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and the United States—where the AfD maintains close relations with Trump’s Republicans—the AfD is needed to build an authoritarian police state and to proceed against the opposition of the working class and youth.

10. Modi greets Putin with pomp and ceremony as Trump demands New Delhi downgrade its ties with Russia

India’s demonstrative display of the “warmth” and “strength” of its decades-long strategic partnership with Russia was intended as a message to Washington that New Delhi will not allow the US to define its relationship with Moscow.

The Modi government, building on the Indo-US Global Strategic Partnership its Congress Party predecessor negotiated, has dramatically expanded India’s military-security ties with Washington during its eleven years in office, transforming India into a veritable frontline state in US imperialism’s strategic confrontation with China.

Yet to the dismay of Modi, his BJP government and the whole Indian ruling class, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly struck at India, demanding that it remove barriers to US exports and investment, cease Russian oil imports and otherwise downgrade its ties with Moscow.

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From the standpoint of the BJP government and the Indian ruling class, Putin’s visit for the 23rd India-Russia Annual summit was part of a precarious balancing act. India has long tried to straddle the growing geopolitical divide between Russia and the US and its NATO partners. But this has become ever more difficult, especially since the outbreak of the US-NATO-instigated Ukraine war.

Trump is a further complicating factor. In a desperate bid to arrest the rapid erosion of US imperialism’s economic and geopolitical power, he is lashing out against avowed US strategic enemies and ostensible allies alike.

Putin’s December 4-5 visit was his first to India since the outbreak of the Ukraine war. Eager to show that the western powers have failed to isolate Russia, Putin, like his Indian hosts, took every opportunity to play up the strength of Russo-Indian ties.

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The sixteen agreements India and Russia concluded during the summit covered a wide range of sectors, from trade and nuclear energy to health care, culture and counter-terrorism.

Putin and Modi set a target of raising the annual value of Russia-India trade to $100 billion, an increase of 50 percent, by 2030. They also reported progress on linking RuPay (India’s domestic card payment system) with Russia’s Mir payment system with the aim of circumventing US sanctions on Russian trade. The establishment of such a rupee-ruble payment and exchange is crucial if India is to continue to benefit from massive purchases of discounted Russian oil in defiance of Washington and the NATO powers.

Modi also highlighted progress toward a possible free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), a Russian-led regional bloc of five-post Soviet states.

In respect to defense, India and Russia reaffirmed their longstanding close defense cooperation, and signed new agreements relating to joint weapons production, technology transfer, and expedited delivery of existing orders.

However, New Delhi clearly decided to adopt a wait-and-see stance in regards to major new weapons purchases from Russia, as it gropes to find a means to patch up relations with Washington.

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Under US pressure, New Delhi has reduced its dependence on Russian weapons purchases in recent years. However, Russia remains a vital defence partner, supplying a large portion of India’s existing weapon-systems—including fighter jets, tanks and missiles—through multi-billion-dollar contracts, and the parts needed to keep them operational. The BrahMos missile, a joint venture with Russia, is among India’s most advanced and widely exported missile systems.

Following India’s recent border war with Pakistan, India went on a crash program of restocking its war material, with Russia in many cases the only or best supplier.

At the same time, New Delhi, already wary of Washington’s long record of controlling its allies through arms dependency, has been shaken by Trump’s sudden turn on India. This has involved Trump not only making India a special target of his global trade war, and seeking to dictate its relations with Russia, but also a sudden thawing of Washington’s relations with Pakistan, which, to India’s dismay, has continued apace even in the aftermath of the recent Indo-Pakistani war.

The Indian ruling class is anxious to maintain its so-called “all-weather” alliance with Moscow, and therefore Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP, hitherto notorious for theirs slavish courting of Washington, have been compelled to push back against the Trump administration.

This has included an outreach to Beijing. In late August, Modi traveled to China for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. This was his first trip there in seven years, and marked a significant de-escalation of the five-year border stand-off between India and China that began in May 2020 and saw both sides forward deploy tens of thousands of troops, tanks and warplanes along their disputed Himalayan border for years.

Nevertheless, the current array of conflicts with the Trump administration notwithstanding, the Indo-US strategic partnership remains the cornerstone of the foreign and geopolitical strategy of Modi, his BJP government and the Indian bourgeoisie.

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India also continues to strengthen its relations with Israel, whose genocide in Gaza it has staunchly backed alongside the US and the other imperialist powers. Israeli Prime Minster and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is set to travel to India later this month. While Modi’s Hindu supremacist BJP has a close affinity with Netanyahu’s fascist wing of the Zionist movement, the Israeli-India alliance is a corollary to New Delhi’s pursuit of closer ties with US imperialism. This includes supporting, and hoping to profit from, Washington’s drive to carve out through aggression and war a “New Middle East” and an Israeli-anchored India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor.

In the days prior to Putin’s visit to India there was a swirl of diplomatic activity surrounding Trump’s attempt to broker a so-called peace deal with Russia, over the heads and at the expense of Washington’s NATO allies.

India’s ruling class largely views the prospect of such an agreement favorably, believing that an improvement in Russian-US relations would be to its benefit and to the detriment of China, which it considers its principal obstacle to emerging as the regional hegemon of South Asia and a global power. It similarly viewed Trump’s return to office last January favourably, calculating he would prioritize American’s conflict with Beijing and close relations with India, including supporting India’s ambition to emerge an alternative production chain hub to China.

New Delhi is walking a tightrope, aiming to maintain strong relations with both Russia and the US without sacrificing its strategic interests. Nothing can be said with certainty, but even were a deal to freeze the Ukraine war reached, there is nothing to say Trump would back off in his attempts to leverage what he perceives as India’s economic and geopolitical weakness to force New Delhi to dramatically downgrade its relations with Moscow.

Putin’s visit to India underscores just how fluid, unstable and explosive global economic, diplomatic and strategic relationships are, and how perilous are New Delhi’s efforts to chart a “strategical autonomous” course to advance the Indian bourgeoisie’s own predatory global interests.

11. Washington state floods force more than 100,000 to evacuate

The series of floods across western Washington that began December 8 have exposed decades of infrastructure neglect and the class character of disaster response under capitalism. More than 100,000 residents faced evacuation orders as rivers shattered records, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson declared a state of emergency on December 10. 

The immediate cause of the floods was an atmospheric river, a meteorological formation containing abnormally high amounts of moisture, that drifted over western Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, Canada. The storm system has dumped an estimated 5 trillion gallons on the region and also triggered an enormous amount of snowfall runoff from nearby mountains.

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A significant part of the cost forced on workers is the conscious refusal by insurance companies to insure against floods. Only 36,000 flood insurance policies exist in Washington, while more than 2 million residents live in flood-vulnerable areas. The National Flood Insurance Program’s maximum coverage of $250,000 has remained unchanged since 1994. Average annual premiums of $936 deter many working families from purchasing coverage, while standard policies explicitly exclude flood damage.

The official response has been anemic, from both the state Democratic administration and the Trump administration at the federal level. Reports indicate that only 300 state National Guard have been deployed to aid in disaster relief, with another 150 sent from California. Mount Vernon Fire Chief Bryan Harris acknowledged the inadequacy in a comment to Cascadia Daily News, stating, “We know that that is not enough for everybody.”

For its part, the Trump administration has gutted FEMA, cutting its staffing by 9.5 percent this year and canceling the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. In addition, the administration has proposed quadrupling the damage threshold for public assistance, which would exclude many smaller communities.

The floods and landslides have also come amid the passage of a record $1 trillion military budget with mass bipartisan support. Compared to the sums allocated for flood prevention, it is clear that the destruction of human life is on the order of 1,000 times more important for the American bourgeoisie than projects to preserve life.

Similar to the floods in Texas over the summer and the recent floods in Sri Lanka, the floods across the Pacific Northwest are not a natural disaster but the direct result of all aspects of capitalist society being geared toward the accumulation of private profit and the waging of war both abroad and at home.

12. Trump administration ordered TSA to provide passenger travel lists to immigration Gestapo

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which conducts airport security screening, has been forwarding the names of all expected air travelers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to assist in the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations.

The program, which has been operating since at least March 2025, includes lists of people flying both within the United States and into the country. The New York Times, which first reported the existence of the passenger data-sharing operation on December 12, wrote that ICE is using the TSA-provided lists to match names “against its own database of people subject to deportation.” ICE agents are dispatched to airports to seize anyone on its lists who is attempting to travel.

The TSA was created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to conduct airport passenger screening. It was incorporated into the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), along with ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Coast Guard and other internal security agencies, all except the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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While the TSA has long collaborated with federal police agencies, including the FBI, in enforcing so-called “no-fly” lists, this is the first confirmed instance in which the agency has gone beyond airport security functions to directly serve as an arm of the deportation apparatus. 

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This TSA-ICE data-sharing operation is unfolding alongside a separate but closely related initiative by CBP, which has proposed requiring foreign travelers entering the United States under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) to submit years of social media history, mandatory “selfie” photo uploads and a mobile-only Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) which would require travelers to download an invasive app on their phone as a condition of travel authorization. Taken together, these programs function in tandem to compile vast centralized databases of personal, biometric, travel and political information.

Under the CBP proposal, the new screening requirements would apply primarily to travelers entering the US under the VWP, which covers citizens of more than 40 countries, overwhelmingly in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. These include, among others, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Israel, Singapore and Taiwan. Citizens of these countries are normally permitted to enter the United States for up to 90 days for tourism or business without a visa, provided they obtain authorization through the ESTA.

According to CBP, not every traveler from a VWP country would necessarily be required to submit the same volume of information. However, the proposal would make the disclosure of social media identifiers mandatory for many applicants, transforming what had previously been a nominally voluntary field into a de facto requirement for entry. CBP has indicated that the information could be used for automated vetting, risk scoring, and cross-referencing against law enforcement and intelligence databases, with little transparency regarding how determinations are made or how long the data is retained.

Canadian citizens occupy a partial exception within this framework. Canada is not part of the Visa Waiver Program, and most Canadian visitors do not require either a visa or an ESTA to enter the United States for short stays. As a result, Canadian tourists are not currently subject to the proposed ESTA social media disclosure requirement. Nevertheless, Canadians remain subject to questioning, inspection, and discretionary enforcement at the border, and are already affected by the TSA’s domestic passenger data-sharing with ICE when traveling by air within the United States.

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Under conditions in which the Trump administration is openly declaring broad layers of political opposition to be “antifa terrorists,” criminalizing protest and equating dissent with treason, the expansion of this domestic surveillance and policing apparatus is especially ominous. It constitutes a warning to the working class that mechanisms initially justified in the name of “security” are being repurposed to facilitate political repression, mass deportations and the suppression of opposition to the capitalist state.

12. Socialism AI answers the question: How can GM workers at Factory Zero in the US oppose layoffs?

Since its launch on December 12, Socialism AI has provided thousands of users throughout the world with access to the revolutionary perspective of Marxism, drawing from more than 175 years of historical material and nearly three decades of World Socialist Web Site coverage. With each interaction, it is helping workers and young people understand the world and how to change it.

This new feature will highlight selected questions and answers from Socialism AI—concise, clear and politically insightful responses to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

13. Departing SEC official warns of coming “winter” for US capital markets

The rise of Trump to the presidency of the US and his efforts to construct a fascistic dictatorship represent the violent realignment of the political superstructure to more openly and directly express the domination of the American economy and increasingly all aspects of life by a financial oligarchy.

In its mode of existence, its social being, this oligarchy, based on the endless accumulation of wealth through stock market speculation, financial market operations and parasitism, demands the abolition of all remaining restrictions on its activity.

One of the expressions of this process, which derives not from the personal characteristics of the individuals involved but from the objective logic of the system they head, is the evisceration of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the regulatory authority of the stock market.

The extent of this gutting operation was highlighted in a speech last week by Caroline Crenshaw upon her impending exit from the SEC. She first referred to the dismantling of the SEC block by block back in May and expanded on this assessment in her latest remarks.

Summing up what she called the “chaos” of the past year, Crenshaw said: “The appetite to deregulate has been rapacious; the analysis of the costs and benefits of our policies has been non-existent; and the repercussions… could be dire.”

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Crenshaw presented her remarks within the framework of what has functioned as the prevailing official mythology over many decades—that the SEC functions to ensure that the financial system and the stock market is a “system for everyone, and not for any special interest or market participant.”

The SEC was established in 1934 by the Roosevelt administration in response to the stock market crash of 1929. But from the outset it was clear that the SEC, while imposing some controls, was no inherent threat to the giants of Wall Street.

Its first chairman was Joseph Kennedy, father of the future president, John Kennedy. He was not a regulator—far from it. He had made his money in the very kind of speculation and dubious practices which the SEC was set up to curb. He was also accused during the prohibition era of being a bootlegger, though no charges were ever brought.

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During the Clinton administration, the regulations which had been introduced under the New Deal of Roosevelt were largely scrapped culminating in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 in 1999.

The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis saw a marked shift in the operation of the SEC under the Obama administration. Prosecutions were increasingly replaced by financial settlements and the “revolving door” through which individuals passed back and forth between Wall Street and the SEC was swung open with increasing frequency.

Most significantly, even though investigations, including a major report prepared for the US Senate, revealed that some of the biggest finance houses had engaged in criminal activity leading to the crash of 2008, not a single executive was charged, let alone convicted and jailed. Banks were provided with bailouts on the basis they were too big to fail while executives were considered too important to jail.

The activities of SEC chair Gary Gensler, appointed by the Biden administration, were aimed at trying to reintroduce some tightening of regulation after the first Trump administration but largely failed as a result of legal action.

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For years the SEC, like all the regulatory institutions of capitalism, operated behind a kind of mask, promoting itself as the guardian of the public interest. It has become increasingly tattered and frayed over the past decade and a half but today the remnants are being torn off.

14. Workers and youth in Australia and New Zealand urge the use of Socialism AI

Launched on December 12 2025, Socialism AI represents a transformational development for the political education of the working class. This new application of augmented intelligence is to make the scientific method and historical perspective of Marxism accessible on a mass scale, and facilitate the strengthening of socialist consciousness. Its inauguration opens the means through which workers, students and young people can engage directly with theory, historical experience and practical political questions in real time. 

15. Workers Struggles: The Americas

Argentina:

Police attack peaceful protest opposing mining project

Bolivia:

Workers mobilize against price increases

Canada:

Ottawa airport in-flight meal prep workers strike

Mexico:

Student strike at National Pedagogic University continues

United States:

Ohio teachers rally in wake of 10-day strike notice
Proposed school closings roil Minnesota school district

16. 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.