Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Charles III in Washington: Monarchy, oligarchy and the repudiation of 1776

In the evening, the king and Queen Camilla were honored at a white-tie banquet in the White House State Dining Room, with a guest list personally curated by Trump and populated by the oligarchs whose wealth and power constitute the real monarchy in America. Among those attending were Paramount CEO David Ellison, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. They dined on Dover sole and spring herbed ravioli alongside Trump’s fascist cabinet members and a host of right-wing media personalities and venture capitalists.  

From the standpoint of British imperialism, the visit was aimed at shoring up the somewhat strained “special relationship” between the US and UK. Charles’s address to Congress was packaged in the usual royal idiom of empty homilies about “peace” and “friendship,” anchored in the “Christian faith,” the wrapping for the real concern transmitted through the 77-year-old monarch: war. 

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Trotsky once observed that the British bourgeoisie had adapted “the old royal and noble castle to the requirements of the business firm”—a description that retains all its force today. The monarchy functions as an ideological prop of British capitalism, even as the royal household is steeped in corruption and scandal.

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But the more fundamental significance of Charles’s visit lies in the American context. The grotesque spectacle exposes the relationship of the American ruling class to the revolutionary traditions it has long since repudiated.

The American Revolution established the world’s first major bourgeois democratic republic on the basis of Enlightenment principles. The Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility, contained in Article I, Sections 9 and 10, was a conscious rejection of the social principle that birth confers authority and that the masses must bow before dynastic power.

Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense helped give political form to the American Revolution, poured scorn on hereditary monarchy. “One of the strongest NATURAL proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings,” he wrote, “is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION”—an appropriate future epitaph for both the honoree and the host of yesterday’s events.  

The visit of this representative of the British monarchy takes place under an administration that has repudiated, in word and deed, the democratic principles of 1776. The Bill of Rights has been trampled underfoot, and the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence against King George III read like a rap sheet for the present occupant of the White House.

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Trump, however, speaks and acts not just for himself, but as the representative of an oligarchy that regards constitutional restraints and democratic rights as intolerable obstacles to the defense of its wealth.

This is evident in the official response to Charles’s visit. The media fawned over the monarch, treating his banalities as a profound statement of democratic principle. The Democratic Party and the liberal press have spent years, through the New York Times’ 1619 Project and related efforts, depicting Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln as little more than racial villains. Yet they now bow before the living embodiment of hereditary privilege. Their problem was never with oppression as such, but with the revolutionary traditions that might inspire opposition to the present order. 

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In his work The Persistence of the Old Regime, historian Arno Mayer described the way in which European society before 1914 fused bourgeois wealth with monarchical, aristocratic and ecclesiastical forms. The bourgeoisie adapted itself to the old regime, even as it transformed the economic foundations beneath it. This alliance was ruptured only by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary upheavals that followed.

A similar dynamic prevails today, in somewhat different form. The American oligarchy has accumulated wealth on a scale without precedent in human history. Its central political preoccupation is how this wealth will be defended—legally, ideologically and physically—against the social opposition generated by its own accumulation.

The result is the revival of aristocratic forms. The oligarchs want deference. They want immunity. They want the masses to know their place, to bow and scrape when in the presence of their betters. They want inherited wealth and dynastic privilege to be recognized not only in fact, but in social practice and political culture. The constitutional prohibition on titles of nobility is being prepared for repudiation in practice, even if not yet in text.

When Trump posts “TWO KINGS,” he is absolutely serious. It is a declaration of intent by a president and the social forces behind him, which are seeking to establish the principles of hereditary rule and untrammeled executive power, enforced through the paramilitary police agencies of the state and the mobilization of fascistic gangs. 

Behind Trump stands Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the Wall Street financiers, the tech monopolists and the private equity barons whose wealth dwarfs that of any historical monarch. Their fortunes are measured not in palaces, estates and crown jewels, but in hundreds of billions of dollars, vast corporate empires, control over communications systems, military contracts, artificial intelligence, logistics, finance and the commanding heights of social life. 

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Charles declared in his address that the Anglo-American relationship is “a partnership born out of dispute.” In this way, he sought to reduce what was a revolutionary struggle against monarchy to a minor episode in the general triumph of reaction. But masses of people, in the United States and internationally, will draw very different conclusions and inspiration from this history. 

The defense of the democratic principles proclaimed in 1776 is impossible today outside of the fight for socialism. In the 18th century, the struggle against monarchy was bound up with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the creation of the democratic republic. In the 21st century, the defense and extension of democracy requires the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the socialist reorganization of society on the basis of human need, not private profit.

2. Canada’s Liberal government secures parliamentary majority after seven years of minority rule

Canada’s Liberal government has pasted together a parliamentary majority following a series of “floor crossings” by members of other parties and victories in three by-elections held earlier this month. For the first time since October 2019, a Liberal majority government now holds power in Ottawa.

The securing of majority status will enable former central banker and current Prime Minister Mark Carney to accelerate the rapid shift to the right in official politics he has overseen since replacing Justin Trudeau in March 2025.

Carney and decisive sections of corporate Canada hope to use a majority government to escalate a vicious onslaught on workers’ jobs and public services to pay for the planned explosion of military spending over the next decade and the enrichment of Canada’s financial oligarchy. 

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Corporate Canada is demanding the government act “boldly” in imposing “sacrifices” on working people. The Globe and Mail, the traditional voice of the financial elite, chided Carney in an editorial published Tuesday for not slashing public services and social spending more aggressively in last November’s budget; then added that now, armed with a parliamentary majority, he has the opportunity to “create a more competitive and entrepreneurial economy … all that is needed is political boldness.”   

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Each of the defections is significant. They reveal a realignment within establishment politics in response to the deep crisis provoked by American imperialism’s push to annex Canada as part of Trump’s “Greater North America” strategy to prepare Washington for war with China and other rivals, and the threat this poses to Canadian capitalism, its profits, imperialist interests and federal state.

Since Trudeau returned the Liberals to power in 2015 with a majority, the Canadian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government has relied heavily on its corporatist partnership with the trade union bureaucracy to smother the class struggle and pursue a right-wing, pro-corporate agenda.

Trudeau’s “progressive” rhetoric, amplified by the union bureaucrats in their 2015 “Anybody but Harper” campaign to oust Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper, was quickly shown to be a fraud. Once in office, the Liberals continued where Harper had left off. Public spending austerity, support for the US-led war for regime change in Syria, preparations for war on Russia by providing unyielding support to the far-right Ukrainian government, a concerted turn to rearmament and a brutal crackdown on refugees within the framework of the so-called “Safe Third Country Agreement” with the US: these were the chief features of Trudeau’s first term between 2015 and 2019.

Workers and young people, who had been duped by the union bureaucracies and other “progressive” forces to back the Liberals in 2015 to bring about “change” after close to a decade of Tory rule, refused to give the Liberals a second majority. After the 2019 election, Trudeau only held onto power thanks to the support offered by the social democratic New Democratic Party, with the strong backing of the union bureaucracy. Although the NDP had failed to make any gains at the polls under its right-wing leader Jagmeet Singh, it held the balance of power in the House of Commons and continued to do so after a further election in 2021.

The NDP ensured the Liberals could govern as they bailed out corporate Canada to the tune of hundreds of billions during the COVID-19 pandemic and infected millions of workers through their profits-before-lives policies. In 2022, the NDP-backed Liberal government made sure Canada played a major role in the US-NATO war on Russia in Ukraine, and it wholeheartedly endorsed Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza from October 2023. On the domestic front, Trudeau and later Carney enforced austerity spending through below-inflation transfers to the provinces, and waged a systematic onslaught on democratic rights, including workers’ right to strike. 

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At last year’s federal election, workers delivered their verdict on the despicable role played by the NDP and their union allies. The social democrats saw their share of the popular vote cut by two-thirds to a minuscule 6.1 percent, and were reduced to a parliamentary rump group of just 7 MPs, five below the number needed for official party status.

Nonetheless, the NDP continued to prop up the Carney government. In November it joined with the lone Green MP to ensure passage of Carney’s first budget, which imposed further austerity and over $80 billion in military spending increases by 2030. In line with NATO goals, Carney has since vowed to triple defense spending to $150 billion per year by 2035, and committed billions to strengthening Canada’s military-industrial base.

The union-NDP-Liberal alliance is continuing even now that Carney has cobbled together a majority, and even as the corporate media acknowledges that he has lifted many of his policies from the Conservatives and their far-right leader Pierre Poilievre. Newly elected NDP leader Avi Lewis held a friendly meeting with Carney on April 16 to open up lines of communication and collaboration.

The corporatist character of this partnership found expression in Carney’s new Canada-US advisory council unveiled last week. The body, which aims to assist the government in negotiating a new trade arrangement with Trump to secure Canada’s position as a junior imperialist partner in American imperialism’s “Fortress North America,” includes Unifor president Lana Payne and Quebec Federation of Labour President Magali Picard, as well as numerous CEOs and heads of business lobby groups. Retired Conservative politicians such as Lisa Raitt, Jean Charest and Erin O’Toole are also members.

Carney’s new majority is based on a concerted appeal to the Tory right, which under federal leader Pierre Poilievre has morphed increasingly into a far-right formation like the US Republicans. Ontario’s right-wing populist premier Doug Ford, who stated prior to this month’s by-elections that he hoped Carney would secure a parliamentary majority, declared that Carney’s majority would strengthen the bargaining position of Canadian imperialism in upcoming trade negotiations with the United States.

The defection of the far-right Conservative Marylin Gladu speaks volumes about the Liberals’ class war agenda. Gladu was a champion of the fascist-led “Freedom Convoy,” which occupied downtown Ottawa and two US border crossings in 2022 to demand the complete dismantling of anti-COVID-19 public health measures. It amounted to an attempt to overthrow the Trudeau government. Gladu has also signaled opposition to abortion rights and support for “conversion therapy,” a pseudo-scientific and abusive practice aimed at “converting” LGBTQ people.

Canadian imperialism is desperate to press forward with its aggressive agenda. Its plans for rearmament and global war with Russia and China and its defense of its profits and markets amid global trade war cannot be undertaken without escalating the class-war assault on the working class that has been ongoing under governments of all political stripes for the past four decades. 

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The reality is that Canada’s ruling class is increasingly adopting Trumpian policies. These include a dramatic escalation of military spending, expanded police powers, and attacks on immigrants and democratic rights. The allies of Canadian workers are not to be found in the corporate boardrooms of Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver, or around the cabinet table of Carney’s majority Liberal government. Rather, they will come from the factories and worksites of the industrial Midwest, California and the US south, and the maquiladoras of northern Mexico. Unifying the North American working class in struggle against war, dictatorship and attacks on worker rights requires above all a socialist and internationalist program, and a revolutionary leadership capable of fighting for it—the Socialist Equality Party, Canadian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Everyone who agrees with this perspective should join and help build the SEP as the revolutionary socialist party of the working class.

3. US Agriculture Department reports food price increases from Iran war, tariffs and drought

A report by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on April 24 shows a significant rise in food prices driven by multiple factors including tight supplies, weather shocks and upstream cost increases. Among the major causes are higher fuel and fertilizer costs from  the US-Israeli war against Iran, and the prolonged drought facing American farmers.

The summary in the USDA’s Food Price Outlook states that in 2026 “prices for all food are predicted to increase 2.9 percent,” while “food-at-home prices are predicted to increase 2.4 percent” and “food-away-from-home prices are predicted to increase 3.6 percent.”

The report adds that “prices for 7 categories are predicted to grow faster than their 20-year historical average rate of growth,” specifically beef and veal, fish and seafood, fresh vegetables, processed fruits and vegetables, sugar and sweets, nonalcoholic beverages and other foods.

The report also says prices for pork, other meats, poultry, cereal and bakery products, and fresh fruits are expected to rise more slowly than the average, while eggs, dairy products, and fats and oils are expected to decline.

On beef, the USDA said, “beef and veal prices were 12.1 percent higher in March 2026 than in March 2025,” and the agency forecasts a further increase of 6.3 percent in 2026. The report ties this rise to “a cyclical contraction of the cattle herd” and strong consumer demand despite tighter supplies.

Farmers are facing a “perfect storm” of circumstances: Fuel, fertilizer and other inputs are rising while weather and market volatility make harvests less predictable. CoBank reports that fuel and fertilizer prices have risen 20-40 percent since the Iran war began, warning that higher diesel costs alone could add thousands of dollars per farmer. 

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At the farm level, fuel is the cost that shows up every day. It powers tractors, combines, irrigation pumps, grain dryers and delivery trucks, so even a modest diesel spike can add thousands of dollars in expenses for a single operation and much more for large grain-handling systems. Those costs are hard to absorb because many growers already sell into thin-margin markets, so they cannot simply pass everything on immediately.

Fertilizer is even more important because it affects not just cost but output. When nitrogen or urea prices jump sharply, farmers may reduce application rates, delay purchases, switch to less fertilizer-intensive crops, or plant fewer acres altogether. That means the full damage may not appear until harvest, when lower yields work their way into grain, feed, meat, dairy and processed food prices.

Fuel also drives freight rates across the entire system. Trucking, rail, ocean freight, warehouse handling and cold-chain refrigeration all become more expensive when diesel and marine fuel rise, and those costs are quickly built into wholesale and retail pricing. For fresh produce, the problem is especially acute because refrigeration and fast transport are essential to avoiding spoilage. 

Storage and processing costs rise too. Grain elevators, flour mills, feed mills, canneries and packing plants use large amounts of electricity and fuel, so price shocks do not stop at the farm gate. As expenses rise, processors often cut order volumes, renegotiate contracts, or trim product sizes and margins, which eventually shows up as higher shelf prices or reduced availability.

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The prolonged drought in the US is widespread and severe, and is not a local or temporary dry spell. As of April 21, 2026, 63 percent of the Lower 48 states were in drought, and 52 percent of the US and Puerto Rico combined were in drought. The Southeast is especially hard hit with 97 percent of the region in moderate to exceptional drought and 82 percent in severe to exceptional drought.

The drought is hurting agriculture and water supplies. The Southeast drought update says soil moisture is limited or nonexistent in many areas, seeds are struggling to germinate, some land is too dry to plant, irrigation is needed to keep crops alive and stock ponds are low. It also says pasture conditions are poor, forcing producers to continue feeding hay to livestock far longer than normal.

This kind of prolonged drought does more than dry out fields. It reduces crop yields, raises feed costs, strains livestock producers, increases wildfire risk, and puts pressure on reservoirs, rivers and groundwater. Because drought is spreading across multiple major agricultural regions at the same time, it has a much larger impact on the food system than a short, isolated dry spell.

Meanwhile, weather shocks are also hitting food production in the same moment. USDA-linked reporting on Florida shows that freezing temperatures struck 66 of the state’s 67 counties, and caused more than $3.1 billion in agricultural losses with heavy damage to sugarcane, citrus, strawberries, tomatoes, watermelons, sweet corn, bell peppers, potatoes, cabbage and squash. 

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The Trump administration’s tariffs have also added another layer of price pressure, especially for canned and processed foods that depend on imported metal, packaging and inputs. A food-industry context report cited in the USDA’s Outlook links higher prices in processed categories to wholesale and input cost increases, including energy and commodity movements that feed through the entire chain. In the globally integrated food manufacturing sector, tariffs quickly become a tax on basic consumer goods.

Labor costs are also a major issue, especially in agriculture, meatpacking and food processing, areas where immigrant workers are significantly represented. Mass deportation policies have raised labor costs by shrinking the available workforce, pushing wages up, and creating bottlenecks in harvesting, packing and transportation. 

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While Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has vowed that the US agricultural workforce will become “100 percent American,” a recent Labor Department filing admitted that replacing undocumented farmworkers is nearly impossible. 

The Labor Department’s filing in the Federal Register said, “the Department does not believe American workers currently unemployed or marginally employed will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace large numbers of aliens no longer entering the country, voluntarily leaving, or choosing to exit the labor force due to the self-perceived potential for their removal based on their illegal entry and status.”

Rising food costs are also deepening food insecurity. FRAC says the USDA’s latest food security report found 47.9 million people lived in food-insecure households last year, a number that captures the scale of hardship beneath the official inflation figures. Even modest increases in food prices can push families already living near the edge into skipping meals, buying cheaper but less nutritious food, or depending on charity.

Food banks are reporting this pressure directly. Community food organizations have warned that demand remains elevated as wages fail to keep pace with food costs, housing costs and utility bills. The social consequences are straightforward. The heaviest burden of food inflation falls on low-wage workers, the unemployed, retirees and single-parent households.

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The war-driven rise in food and fuel prices is a global phenomena, triggering protests and strikes in the Philippines, Haiti, India, Ireland and other countries. In the UK, the Food and Drink Federation says food inflation is now expected to reach at least 9 percent by the end of 2026, citing energy, transport, fertilizer and shipping disruptions tied to the war in Iran and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Bank of England has also reported that businesses fear food inflation could reach 6 to 7 percent this year. The Food Foundation says UK food price inflation reached 3.7 percent in April.

The Canada Food Price Report 2026 forecasts overall food prices will rise 4 to 6 percent, with the average family of four spending up to $17,571.79 on food this year. That is part of a wider cost-of-living crisis in which food bank use is climbing and households are increasingly unable to absorb further price shocks. The pattern is international: When energy, logistics and agriculture all become more expensive at once, food costs rise everywhere.

The long-term effect of war on the world food supply makes the global system more fragile. The USDA notes that prices for wheat peaked after the Russia-Ukraine war began and that farm-level wheat prices remain sensitive to war-related supply disruptions. The UK food industry is already warning that Middle East conflict and oil-market disruption are feeding increases in fertilizer, transport and packaging costs.

In poor and importing countries, fuel cost increases, shipping route disruptions and cuts to fertilizer production reduce harvest reliability and this translates into hunger and malnutrition. The food system is absorbing the combined impact of war, tariffs, labor shortages and climate shocks simultaneously. The result is an increase in inequality internationally, where millions pay more to eat while others are forced to go without.

4. The gutting of the NIH and the capitalist assault on public health

A recent report by the New York Times reveals that spending on new medical research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has fallen roughly $1 billion behind its historical pace during the second year of the Trump administration. Between October and late March, the NIH awarded only about 1,900 new and competitive grants. This figure represents less than half the number of grants typically approved by this point in the fiscal year under the previous administration.

The severe contraction in grant-making has been deliberately driven by a renewed effort to screen grants using a computational text analysis tool introduced to employees in December of last year. Designed to formalize a reactionary campaign against so-called “woke science” that was led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the algorithm scans proposals and existing projects for roughly 235 flagged terms, including “racism,” “gender,” “inequities,” “minority” and “vaccination refusal.” 

Within certain divisions, the tool flags up to half of all grants, ensnaring vital research on cancer, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. These grants are frequently flagged simply because they examine inequities in access to care or identify minority groups disproportionately suffering from specific diseases. Staff scientists are then forced to extensively justify or rewrite their proposals, creating immense bottlenecks where a biological science grant can be stalled for weeks, if not indefinitely. 

The severe contraction in grant-making is not solely the result of such ideological screening, but is driven by a deliberate assault on both the personnel at and operational funding for the NIH. Over the past year, the agency has lost nearly 3,000 employees, which accounts for approximately 14 percent of its total workforce. This systematic gutting of the scientific infrastructure was kicked off on April 1, 2025, when sweeping layoffs led to the mass termination of roughly 1,200 to 1,300 staff members. 

Concurrently, the Trump administration has engineered severe operational funding bottlenecks. In July 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget mandated that the agency pay the full cost of approved multiyear grants upfront rather than in annual installments, drastically shrinking the pool of capital available for new research. Furthermore, the Trump administration took the unprecedented step of canceling or freezing over 5,400 active agency grants throughout the year. 

These efforts by President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have caused a catastrophic hollowing out of the medical pipeline. The NIH is the primary public engine of biomedical research in the United States. Consequently, the severe drop in awarded grants directly translates into fewer laboratory hires, delayed scientific projects, weaker clinical response and far fewer discoveries moving into actual medical practice. 

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The consequence of this deliberate starvation of scientific funding threatens to permanently stall vital research projects. Furthermore, this structural sabotage of the scientific research pipeline sets the stage for the administration’s parallel assault on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where the attack shifts from blocking future cures to dismantling present-day disease surveillance and prevention. 

Perhaps more insidiously, the science that does manage to survive is now subject to blatant political censorship. Recent reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times reveal that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the acting director of the CDC, blocked the publication of a critical study demonstrating that COVID vaccines cut emergency room visits by 50 percent and hospitalizations by 55 percent last winter. 

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The suppression of such data exposes how federal health agencies are being transformed into ideological gatekeepers by subordinating scientific publication to the reactionary political preferences of the administration. This further and purposefully undermines public trust and eviscerates evidence-based decision-making. This act of censorship is not an isolated event. It represents a calculated component of a much broader restructuring of CDC authority and the national governance of vaccines. 

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The systematic dismantling of public health infrastructure finds its most devastating expression in the ongoing crisis of Long COVID, which serves as the ultimate bridge between public health and the economy, transforming a viral event into a permanent labor crisis.

Research from the University of Florida demonstrates that lost wages from employee sick time alone conservatively totaled $12.7 billion in a single year. However, this is merely a fraction of the real social and economic burden. Broader estimates, including those by Harvard economists, place the total economic cost of Long COVID at a staggering $3.7 trillion in the United States alone, with the condition erasing approximately $1 trillion annually from the global economy. This is not a niche clinical issue as Bhattacharya and company attempt to frame it. It is a massive, ongoing disaster that has permanently sidelined between 2 million and 4 million working-age Americans.

The economic consequences of this mass disabling event are catastrophic for the working class. Long COVID drastically reduces the labor supply and drives up rates of disability and absenteeism. Furthermore, millions of chronically ill individuals remain employed but operate at significantly reduced productivity due to debilitating fatigue and cognitive impairment. This burden is immense on an individual level, with Long COVID imposing between $4,098 and $11,641 in excess medical costs annually per person, representing an average of roughly $9,000 in additional yearly healthcare spending per patient. 

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While the macroeconomic drag of Long COVID is part of the global capitalist crisis, in the United States, this mass disabling event intersects with a uniquely brutal, market-driven healthcare system that was already failing the working class. Healthcare spending now consumes 18 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, reaching a staggering $5.3 trillion in 2024, or $15,474 per person. For the working class, this translates into an unbearable and escalating financial weight. The average employer-sponsored family premium hit $26,993 in 2025, with workers forced to pay $6,850 of that cost directly out of their own paychecks. Out-of-pocket expenses have also surged, compounding the economic strain on households.

Approximately 100 million Americans currently carry some form of medical debt, a crisis that contributes to roughly 530,000 personal bankruptcies every year. Nearly a third of the country is forced to make desperate material sacrifices just to afford healthcare, including cutting back on utilities, skipping meals and delaying vital medical treatments. As the Roosevelt Institute correctly noted, medical debt is not an individual financial failure but a “medical debt crisis [as a] result of a wholly broken health-care system that burdens patients, employers, and health-care providers alike for the benefit of a handful of insurance corporations, pharmaceutical companies, and pharmacy benefit managers.” In other words, it becomes the institutionalized transfer of medical costs from the capitalist healthcare system directly onto the backs of the working class.

This systemic crisis is now being aggressively weaponized to dismantle the foundational social safety nets of Medicare and Medicaid. The political logic driving this assault was starkly articulated by President Donald Trump during a private Easter luncheon on March 31, 2026. Trump explicitly stated that because of the growing demands on the war machine of American imperialism, it is “not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare” at the federal level, insisting instead that the government must focus on “one thing: military protection” and that citizens must “let states take care of them.”

This statement must be treated as a programmatic declaration of the ruling class rather than a mere throwaway remark. It makes the brutal priorities of American capitalism completely explicit: the financing of global imperialist war and the servicing of a massive national debt take absolute precedence over the health and survival of the population. With net interest on the national debt projected to hit $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026, surpassing both defense and Medicaid spending, the state is actively stripping the social wage to fund its military apparatus and enrich its creditors. 

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To fully grasp the magnitude of the current destruction, the National Institutes of Health must be understood not as a peripheral government agency but as the historical product of the post-World War II settlement between the working class and the capitalist state.

The architecture of modern American science was decisively shaped by Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier. Bush argued that government-funded basic research at universities and medical schools was the essential precondition for disease control, economic growth and national security. His report recognized that the relentless pressure of commercial necessity within private industry was incapable of sustaining the foundational scientific research required to ensure public health and prosperity. Operating within this postwar compact, the NIH evolved into the critical backbone of the American biomedical research enterprise. By linking vast sums of public funding to university laboratories, the agency built an immense public infrastructure that downstream pharmaceutical innovation has entirely relied upon. Research funded by the NIH was linked to every single drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 2010 and 2019, representing a massive $187 billion public investment in foundational science.

This arrangement operated on a specifically capitalist logic, where public science subsidized private corporate profits while providing partial health benefits to the working class. Nevertheless, it created an infrastructure that yielded vital therapies and catalyzed the entire biotechnology sector. The current operational slowdown and funding freeze therefore represent a reversal of the very architecture that made modern biomedical science possible. The institution currently being sabotaged is not peripheral; it is the central engine of medical discovery. 

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The historical context of this assault extends beyond the postwar period and requires a return to the very foundations of social medicine. To fully understand the systematic destruction of the scientific pipeline, one must look to the German physician Rudolf Virchow.

Doctor Virchow

Born in 1821 and widely recognized as the father of modern pathology, Virchow was commissioned by the government in Berlin in 1848 to investigate a devastating typhus epidemic among the impoverished peasants of Silesia. He concluded that the outbreak was not merely a biological event, but a profound social problem rooted in abject poverty, malnutrition and squalid living conditions. This realization led to his famous formulation that medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale. 

Virchow demonstrated that public health has always been an inherently political domain, arguing that epidemics could only be eradicated through the equitable distribution of society’s resources and the elimination of social inequality. The current crisis facing the NIH and the broader medical system is a brutal demonstration of the class organization of life and death.

The brain drain currently underway in the United States is a direct result of the enacted policy changes, and both China and Europe are aggressively taking advantage of this scientific exodus. A recent survey found that 75 percent of researchers based in the United States are considering moving abroad. The European Union has allocated €500 million specifically to recruit scientists, while countries including France, Austria and Germany have launched active recruitment programs explicitly targeting American talent. Applications from US-based scientists for early-career grants to the European Research Council nearly tripled from 60 in 2024 to 169 in 2026. During this same period, applications from senior American researchers surged from 23 to 114.

Simultaneously, China is capitalizing on the crisis by launching a new K visa to attract scientific talent, and in 2024, China officially surpassed the United States in research and development spending, investing $1.03 trillion compared to the $1.01 trillion spent by the United States.

The structural sabotage of public health and scientific research is driven by a massive reallocation of resources toward militarism and the servicing of federal debt. While the NIH faces a proposed 40 percent budget cut and essential health programs are starved, the state has allocated nearly $1 trillion for the Pentagon and spent between $31 billion and $34 billion (equivalent to the cuts in the NIH budget) on military operations in the Middle East alone since late 2023. A war-centered state is fundamentally incompatible with universal social care, rendering public health collateral damage in the competition for resources. 

Ultimately, the operational slowdown at the NIH, the blatant political censorship at the CDC, the mass disabling event of Long COVID, surging healthcare costs, the rollback of Medicaid and Medicare, the ballooning war budget and the unprecedented scientific brain drain are not isolated phenomena. They are all interconnected manifestations of a single systemic social crisis. Public health is being systematically dismantled because it stands in direct opposition to a ruling class project organized entirely around imperialist war, massive debt accumulation, privatization and deepening class division. The crisis in public health is therefore not a mere side effect of reactionary politics. It is a central arena of the international class struggle, requiring the independent political mobilization of the working class to defend human life against the dictates of the capitalist system.

5. Iran war hits Australian economy

Banks are reporting that they expect an increase in defaults from companies already reporting sharp increases in their cost structures well above the rise in petrol and diesel prices. Major companies are issuing profit downgrades. The cost hikes go across the board, from energy, to fertilizers and building materials.

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Earlier this month at an event in New York, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), Andrew Hauser, said the “stagflationary shock” from the war on Iran was a “central banker’s nightmare” with soaring fuel prices delivering a “big income shock” as consumer confidence was falling to its lowest level in years. 

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How far and how fast the outlook can change is illustrated by the plunge in the share price of the hearing implant manufacturer Cochlear, a global leader in this field.

Last Wednesday its share price fell 41 percent followed by a further 4 percent the next day.

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The company has not been directly affected by the energy price hikes, but its sudden decline nevertheless highlights their global impact, not least in the US. The company said in its statement that it was forced to make the downward revision because demand for its implants, which are treated as discretionary healthcare purchases, has declined as the result of consumer sentiment in the US falling to a record low—one of the consequences of the war on Iran. 

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Retail has not yet been affected, at least as far as available statistics reveal, but it appears to be only a matter of time as has been predicted by Ten Cap portfolio manager Jun Bei Liu whose firm owns stock in the pizza making chain Domino’s among others. 

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One of the major lenders to businesses, the NAB, has made increased provision for a sharp rise in bad debts.

Earlier this month it said that its interim results, to be released next week, would include an increase in the provision for impairments—that is a permanent reduction in the recorded value of an asset on a balance sheet below the recoverable amount—to $706 million, up from $485 million, with an additional $300 million set aside for bad debts.

NAB said the increase in the provisions was based on the likelihood that some fuel dependent businesses would be unable to repay their loans. NAB is the biggest lender to businesses in agriculture and transport which have been hit by higher fuel and fertilizer costs.

6. Trump rushes migrant children through deportation courts, while Walz backs federal raids in Minnesota

According to a CNN report published Tuesday, the Trump administration is seeking to fast-track the deportation of migrant children in US custody by abruptly advancing immigration court hearings, in some cases by weeks or months and with only days’ notice.

Children as young as four and five years old are being forced to appear repeatedly in immigration court, sometimes without legal counsel. Attorneys for the children warned that the rushed schedule makes it far more difficult to obtain legal relief, including Special Immigrant Juvenile status, which requires proceedings in state court before an application can be adjudicated by federal immigration authorities.

CNN reported that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently pressed Health and Human Services officials to move faster to get migrant children out of custody and return them to their countries of origin.

The fascists in the Trump administration are presenting the policy in the language of “rescue,” claiming that accelerated deportations will protect children from trafficking and exploitation. In reality, the policy places traumatized children, many of whom fled abuse, abandonment, poverty or violence, on a fast track to removal before they can even understand the proceedings against them, much less secure counsel.

What meaning does “due process” have when a five-year-old is ordered into court without a lawyer and expected to answer for themselves? The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applies to “persons,” not only citizens. Yet the government is compelling traumatized children to participate in adversarial proceedings they cannot possibly understand, while accelerating deadlines so their attorneys cannot obtain relief. 

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The same administration that refuses to release the Epstein files, pardons and commutes the sentences of fascist militia members and wages illegal war around the world is now pressuring immigrant children and families into abandoning their legal rights. 

*****

The same day CNN reported the administration’s move to accelerate the deportation of children, federal agents carried out 22 raids across the Twin Cities as part of bogus investigations into alleged fraud in Minnesota’s social welfare programs. The FBI and Homeland Security Investigations executed the warrants, while the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension partnered with federal investigators and the state attorney general’s Medicaid fraud unit to participate in searches at autism-related facilities.

These “fraud” investigations are a bogus pretext through which the Trump administration is seeking to justify sweeping attacks on the democratic rights of the working class, regardless of immigration status. For months, Trump has seized on allegations of fraud in Minnesota’s social programs to whip up a racist campaign against Somali immigrants and Somali Americans, denouncing them as “garbage” and demanding that they be sent “back to where they came from.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz responded not by opposing the federal operation but by endorsing it. “Today’s raids by state and federal law enforcement happened because our state agencies caught irregular behavior and reported it,” Walz declared. “That’s how the system is supposed to work, and our agencies will keep at it as long as there are fraudsters around to put behind bars.” 

In a separate post, Walz added that “joint investigations work,” while also calling for a joint investigation into the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good.

*****

The raids are being used to lend legitimacy to the administration’s broader claims that social programs are riddled with criminality and must be placed under police supervision or stripped of funding altogether. The real target is not “fraud” but the social rights of the working class. Programs for children, the disabled, the poor and immigrants are being treated as suspect and expendable, while hundreds of billions are funneled into war, repression and the enrichment of the corporate oligarchy. As Trump himself said earlier this month while appointing Vice President JD Vance as his “fraud czar,” “Don’t send any money for daycare,” because “we’re fighting wars.” 

He added, “You gotta let states take care of daycare and they should pay for it too ... Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” The only concern of the US government, Trump stated, should be “one thing, military protection.”

Walz’s call for a joint investigation into the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti only underscores the fraudulence of his position. When federal agents killed Good in Minneapolis on January 7, the FBI did not work transparently with Minnesota investigators.

On Tuesday the Daily Beast reported that Good’s killer, ICE agent Jonathan Ross, has been quietly relocated to another state and allowed to resume work while the FBI investigation has stalled. Senior DHS officials told the outlet that ICE’s own internal review cannot begin until the FBI probe is completed, effectively and conveniently, freezing the agency’s accountability process.

The report confirmed that the FBI “investigation” into Good’s death was compromised from the outset. FBI supervisor Tracee Mergen resigned from the Minneapolis field office after saying she was pressured to reclassify her civil rights inquiry into Ross as an investigation into Good herself. Whistleblower accounts obtained by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin described FBI Director Patel as directing agents to reframe warrant language so that Good would be portrayed as a suspect rather than a victim.

Multiple senior DHS officials also told the outlet that the decision to exclude Minnesota state investigators from federal evidence and the crime scene was directed by the White House.

The real fraud is not in Minnesota clinics and daycare sites but the claim that the American justice system, the police and the immigration Gestapo exist to protect workers, children and their families. These institutions are not neutral bodies that can be reformed into instruments of democracy. They are instruments of class rule, directed against the working class, immigrants and all opposition to the policies of war and austerity. The defense of children, immigrants and democratic rights requires the independent political mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system and both parties that defend it.

7. German government plans massive cuts to health, pensions and social benefits

German military spending rose by 24 percent last year. At €97 billion ($114 billion), Germany ranks fourth in the world behind the US, China and Russia. This is according to the latest report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). And the increase continues, from currently 2.3 to 5 percent of economic output. That amounts to more than €200 billion a year, about 40 percent of the current federal budget.

The bill for this massive rearmament programme is being presented to the working class in the form of falling social spending, poorer healthcare, lower pensions, lower wages and mass unemployment. Not a day goes by without business associations and leading media outlets demanding that the government must finally “deliver,” decide on “bold reforms,” “break the resistance” and “withstand the anger.”

*****

As early as Wednesday, the federal cabinet wants to decide on the cornerstones for the future budget and pass healthcare reforms that will cut the spending of the statutory health insurance funds by €20 billion next year. The consequences will be poorer care and more expensive medicines for patients and even more unbearable working conditions for healthcare personnel.

Before the summer holidays, the “Old Age Security Commission” will then present its proposals for pension reforms, which are to be decided upon in the autumn. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has already announced drastic cuts. “Statutory pension insurance will at best still be the basic security for old age,” he said last week at an anniversary event for the German banking association. “It will no longer be sufficient to secure the standard of living in the long term.”

Additional “capital-funded elements of occupational and private old-age provisions” were necessary, said the former BlackRock manager Merz, “and on a much larger scale than we currently have, largely on a voluntary basis.” This not only means old-age poverty for everyone who cannot afford such capital-funded insurance, but it also provides banks and investment funds with additional money and hands over old-age provisions to the whims of the financial markets. 

The government is also taking a sledgehammer to social spending. It has already abolished Bürgergeld (basic welfare payments) and replaced it with a “New Basic Security Benefit,” which is tied to much harsher requirements and enables the state to force the unemployed into any job, no matter how poorly paid. But that was only the beginning.*****

The Paritätischer Gesamtverband (Equality Welfare Association) recently published a secret, 108-page document in which representatives of the federal, state and local umbrella organizations compiled cutback proposals affecting people with disabilities, children, young people and their families. To the extent they are quantified, they amount to €8.6 billion annually. However, two-thirds of the proposals do not contain a cost estimate, so total savings are likely to be significantly higher. 

*****

While the government parties agree on the basics, the question of how exactly the cuts are to be formulated is leading to fierce conflicts. In particular, Finance Minister Klingbeil and Economics Minister Katherina Reiche (CDU), an unscrupulous lobbyist for the gas industry, clash repeatedly.

Chancellor Merz and Vice Chancellor Klingbeil have been meeting in private for weeks to coordinate the austerity measures. Nevertheless, according to a report in newsweekly Der Spiegel, an open conflict occurred on March 12. At a meeting of the coalition committee at Villa Borsig, the two shouted at each other.

However, it would be a dangerous illusion to hope that the conflicts within the coalition—or occasional objections from the trade unions, Labour Minister Bärbel Bas (SPD) and the so-called “CDU Social Committees”—would prevent or even slow down the austerity measures. The objections serve exclusively to dampen resistance against the austerity policy. 

The trade unions also stand unreservedly behind the government’s war and austerity policies. Yasmin Fahimi, chairwoman of the German Trade Union Confederation, was formerly general secretary of the SPD. Her husband, the chairman of the chemical union IG BCE Michael Vassiliadis, has been an SPD member for 45 years and is a vehement advocate of collaboration with the corporations.

The crisis of the coalition, which is also reflected in growing criticism of Merz in the bourgeois media, has resulted in sections of the ruling elites orienting ever more openly towards the Alternative for Germany (AfD). This far-right and partly fascist party, similar to Trump’s MAGA movement in the US, uses the anger at the ruling elites to present itself as an opposition, while simultaneously representing the interests of the most greedy and corrupt elements of capital.

*****

The ruling class and its lackeys in the media claim that society can no longer afford social spending, pensions and decent wages. In reality, it can no longer afford the billionaires and millionaires who senselessly squander vast sums, are plunging the world into war and misery and use groundbreaking technologies like Artificial Intelligence to destroy jobs instead of improving the living conditions of all.

8. Australian Education Union divides teachers to prepare sellout in Victoria—build rank-and-file committees

The powerful statewide strike by more than 40,000 Victorian public school teachers, education support staff and principals on March 24 marked a significant turning point. It was the first such action in 13 years. It expressed a long-suppressed anger over plunging real wages, chronic staff shortages and crushing workloads. 

However, even as educators rallied at the state Parliament House in Melbourne, the Australian Education Union (AEU) apparatus was already moving to contain, dissipate and ultimately shut down this movement.

A brief chronology of the lead up to the March 24 strike reveals the union’s strategy. On March 16, after nearly nine months of closed-doors negotiations, Premier Jacinta Allan’s state Labor government put forward a 17–18 percent pay offer over four years—tied to increased workloads—which the AEU formally rejected. 

Yet, just four days later, on March 20, the AEU executive and the union’s primary and secondary state council voted to water down the campaign, voting for regional half-day strikes and limited, largely ineffectual bans. The rhetoric about “pulling back the throttle,” against the state government, promoted by AEU Victorian branch president Justin Mullaly, quickly proved hollow.

The so-called escalation in Term 2 replaces a unified statewide strike with fragmented regional half-day stoppages, isolating teachers, dissipating momentum and ensuring the government faces no sustained pressure. The proposed bans—fewer after-school meetings, limits on administrative tasks, reduced report comments and refusal to participate in departmental initiatives—will have little or no impact on the Allan government.

This watered-down campaign was determined before the March 24 strike even took place. The purpose of the one-day action was to let off steam after decades of union sellouts, allow the AEU bureaucrats to posture as militant and promote illusions such as a 35 percent pay claim over three years—which they have no intention of fighting for—while preparing to demobilize educators.

The AEU has also used the dispute to try to rebuild membership after thousands resigned from the union in disgust over its 2022 sellout. Under the reactionary enterprise bargaining laws imposed by the Keating federal Labor government and the unions in the 1990s, workers must be union members to participate in legally-protected industrial action, so many educators joined or rejoined the AEU to participate in the March 24 strike and register their opposition to the intolerable conditions in the schools.

At the March 24 rally, amid boasts of a record number of members and bureaucrat-led chants of “union power,” there was no mention of the 1,500 Tasmanian teachers who walked out the same day over similar conditions. 

*****

The events in Tasmania are a sharp warning to Victorian educators of the sellout being prepared behind closed doors. The decision of the Tasmanian AEU to call off action and isolate educators from their colleagues in Victoria created the conditions for another appalling betrayal. 

*****

The Allan government is under pressure from international credit rating agencies like Moody’s and S&P Global to impose “fiscal discipline” amid soaring state debt, projected to reach $236.6 billion by 2029. Consequently, $2.4 billion in promised public school funding has already been deferred, while funding to the elite private schools is reaching unprecedented levels.

The same applies federally, where the Albanese government is funnelling tens of billions of dollars into AUKUS and military spending while deepening its assault on public education. Just last week, the Albanese government announced another funding boost for the military, headlined by an additional $53 billion over the next decade in the 2026 National Defence Strategy as part of preparations for a US-led war against China. This was followed by the government’s announcement of a $35 billion cut over the next four years to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), attacking the most vulnerable sections of society. That is the largest single cut to an Australian government program this century, and likely the largest ever.

The AEU, tied hand-and-foot to the Labor Party, is imposing Labor’s war and austerity agenda in schools. 

*****

These groups falsify past struggles to preserve illusions in the unions. They portray defeats such as the 2022 Victorian schools agreement as the result of too little industrial action, rather than a conscious betrayal, involving misinformation and censorship, carried out by the union leadership in collaboration with Labor.

In this way, the pseudo-left acts as a political shield for the discredited union apparatus and a buffer for capitalism amid deepening crisis, war and austerity. They attempt to channel opposition into protest politics, parliamentary pressure and appeals to Labor.

Their central aim is to prevent educators drawing the necessary conclusion, that the defense of public education requires an independent movement of the working class, based on rank-and-file committees and a socialist struggle against capitalism itself. 

*****

The AEU functions as a corporatist organization integrated into the structures of government. Its officials sit on advisory bodies, negotiate behind closed doors with ministers and Treasury, and enforce industrial laws that restrict strike action to tightly-controlled bargaining periods. Senior union officials enjoy six-figure salaries while policing Labor’s agenda.

The powerful walkout on March 24 demonstrated educators’ readiness to fight, but it must become the starting point for an independent struggle.

The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the educators’ rank-and-file network, urges all teachers and staff to:

• Establish democratically elected rank-and-file committees in every school. These committees must be independent of the union apparatus and dedicated to a politically independent struggle against the Allan Labor government’s austerity agenda.
• Establish direct links across schools, regions and states, to overcome the deliberate divisions imposed by the unions. 
• Advance demands based on the needs of teachers and students, not budget dictates: inflation-indexed wage rises; major reductions to face-to-face teaching with guaranteed in-school planning time; enforceable class size limits; full special needs staffing; and properly funded support services.
• Build solidarity with parents, students and other public sector workers to broaden the struggle.
• Demand full transparency: immediate publication of all government offers, full briefings to members and genuine debate before any vote. Reject backroom deals and censorship of oppositional voices and insist that any agreements be decided through informed democratic votes, including mass meetings.
• Link the struggle to the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to unite with the international working class in a common fight against capitalism and war.
  

The resources for a world-class public education system exist, but they are being siphoned into military expansion, elite private schools and corporate profits. To finance the government’s war program, billions are being cut from public education, health and the NDIS. This is part of Labor’s support for the criminal US-Israeli assault on Iran and continued suppression of opposition to the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Securing the wages and conditions that teachers require demands a socialist perspective that rejects the subordination of education to the budget dictates of the capitalist market and the war machine. 

9. Australian pseudo-left Socialist Alternative hysterically denounces workers who voted for One Nation

Socialist Alternative’s annual Marxism conference, held over the Easter long weekend, marked a further lurch to the right by this pseudo-left organization. 

That was shown by the suppression of any discussion of the US war against Iran, which was not the subject of a single one of the conference’s almost 150 panels. SAlt displayed a contemptuous indifference to the historic war crimes that are underway and covered for the Australian Labor government’s active participation in it.

It was also demonstrated by the central theme of the event, the rise of the far-right and the anti-immigrant One Nation party in Australia. SAlt’s essential line is to blame the population, including sections of workers, thus consciously deflecting attention from those who are responsible for the ability of the far-right demagogues to win a hearing: Labor and the corporatized trade union bureaucracy.

That was most starkly expressed in the contributions of SAlt’s longtime leader Mick Armstrong. He denounced workers who voted for One Nation or may have indicated support for it in opinion polls as “lumpen” and “racist scum” who had to be “physically crushed.” 

Armstrong’s hysterical outbursts were a concentrated expression of the real class character of the pseudo-left. Whatever the “left” phraseology it employs, SAlt represents affluent layers of the upper middle-class that are intensely hostile to the working class and the fight for a socialist perspective within it.

10. School budget proposal threatens 200 job cuts in Paterson, New Jersey

On May 4, the school board of Paterson, New Jersey, will vote on a proposed budget for the coming school year that would cut jobs. The board’s professed goal is to preserve classroom instruction while managing rising costs.

The board is using technocratic language to camouflage its attack on public education in this poverty-stricken, working class city. Paterson’s schools rely heavily on state aid, but annual increases in this aid are capped at 6 percent. This year’s increase will mostly go to charter schools and not to public schools.

In February, Business Administrator June Gray warned that Paterson faced a “fiscal cliff,” largely because of the expiration of COVID-era funding and other nonrecurring revenue sources. In late March, the Board of Education introduced a budget of $851.9 million. 

*****

Like last year’s budget, the current budget would increase the school tax by 8 percent. The capital outlay would drop sharply from $9.2 million to $876,346. This 90 percent cut would mean delayed repairs to Paterson’s school buildings, many of which are between 90 and 120 years old, and increased risk of hazards like leaks and mold.

The board estimates that it will send $188.1 million to charter schools, which is an increase of $27.5 million over last year. Thus, charter schools will absorb most of the $37 million in additional state aid that Paterson is receiving. In practice, this means austerity for public schools, which have fixed costs and higher overhead than charter schools.

If the budget is rejected or further cuts are necessary, then as many as 200 school jobs could be cut, according to the board. 

Paterson is New Jersey’s third most populous city. Nearly 65 percent of the city’s population is Hispanic, and 44.6 percent are immigrants. Paterson also has one of the highest proportions of Muslims of any US city.

In the early 1790s, Paterson became a center for industrial manufacturing powered by the Great Falls, a 77-foot waterfall on the Passaic River. In 1792 the Great Falls was chosen by Alexander Hamilton as the cornerstone for America’s first planned industrial city. Using a pioneering water raceway system, it powered industries like textiles, locomotives and silk.

It was the site of one of the most significant mass strikes in US history, the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. It was led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and important figures of the American labor movement such as Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Carlo Tresca helped organize the diverse workforce, which included Italian, Jewish, Polish and Irish immigrants.

But after World War II, economic changes brought a long process of deindustrialization to the city. Today, Paterson is a city of small businesses and low wages. Its poverty rate is 21.2 percent. Such levels of social misery are incompatible with promoting academic achievement and providing young people with opportunities to flourish.

The poor conditions in Paterson’s public schools have contributed to increasing enrollment in charter schools. In consequence, charter schools have been receiving even more funds, thus depriving public schools of resources. But charter schools are not associated with decisively better academic outcomes. Paterson’s charter schools have modestly higher rates of English and math proficiency but still perform far below state averages. Two of them rank in the bottom 50 percent statewide.

Moreover, teachers at charter schools face generally worse conditions than those at public schools. They tend to have longer working hours, larger workloads, more non-instructional responsibilities, more turnover and more burnout. Charter schools also rely on teachers with less experience. They tend to be nonunion, and their educators enjoy fewer labor protections.

*****

The proposed budget for Paterson’s schools follows the first budget of New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a CIA Democrat. In her address to the state legislature, Sherrill noted that her “fiscally responsible” budget contained $2.6 billion in “tough, necessary cuts.” In its budget materials, her administration warned that “more money alone cannot solve long-term fiscal challenges facing school districts.” Perhaps this rationale is intended to justify the aid reductions that 167 of the state’s 574 school districts face.

Paterson remains millions of dollars below what the state’s own formula says it needs for a “thorough and efficient” education. The 6 percent cap on annual increases in state aid prevents the district from ever catching up to that adequacy target. In addition, when Paterson’s health insurance and transportation costs spike because of inflation, the 6 percent cap results in a net loss of purchasing power.

Neither Sherrill, a former Navy officer, nor her fellow Democrats insist on fiscal responsibility when it comes to funding for the Pentagon. The Democrats joined hands with the Republicans to provide the nearly $1 trillion that President Trump is using, without congressional approval, to wage an illegal war of aggression against Iran. 

*****

The wealth that could eliminate Paterson’s poverty and replace its crumbling schools is being hoarded by New Jersey’s billionaires. These figures include hedge fund manager John Overdeck, who has a net worth of $8 billion, and businessman Peter Kellogg, who has a net worth of $5.5 billion. Providing the best education for Paterson’s children and ensuring that they have opportunities to develop themselves and find satisfying jobs requires the expropriation of this wealth by the working class.

11. Justice Department revives firing squad, electrocution and gas asphyxiation for federal executions

The Trump administration announced Friday, April 24, that the US Department of Justice will expand the methods used to execute federal death row inmates to include firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation. The measure, outlined in a 48-page DOJ report titled “Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty,” marks a further regression into barbarism by an administration that has made the expansion of state killing a central pillar of its political program.

The report, released by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, directs the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reinstate the single-drug pentobarbital lethal injection protocol used during Trump’s first term while expanding federal executions to include firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation. The stated justification, difficulties in obtaining lethal injection drugs, is a pretext. The real purpose is to signal to the American working class and the world that the capitalist state claims the unlimited right to kill by whatever means it has at its disposal.  

*****

The announcement fulfills a directive Trump issued on his first day in office, January 20, 2025. Among the dozens of executive orders signed on Inauguration Day was one titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” which called for a dramatic expansion of capital punishment. The order directed the attorney general to pursue the death penalty “for all crimes of a severity demanding its use” and specifically targeted the murders of law enforcement officers and capital crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. These categories were chosen not because of any surge in such offenses, but to whip up law-and-order and anti-immigrant hysteria in the service of dictatorial rule.

The Inauguration Day order also called on the attorney general to take “all appropriate action to seek the overruling of Supreme Court precedents that limit the authority of State and Federal governments to impose capital punishment.” This amounts to a sweeping assault on decades of constitutional jurisprudence, including rulings barring the execution of the intellectually disabled and those who committed crimes as minors.

*****

Friday’s announcement cannot be understood apart from the trajectory of the Trump administration’s relationship to capital punishment. In July 2019, then-Attorney General William Barr directed the Bureau of Prisons to reinstate federal executions for the first time in 16 years. What followed was an assembly line of state killing. Between July 2020 and January 2021, the Trump administration executed 13 federal prisoners, more than the federal government had put to death over the previous three decades and more than all 50 states combined in 2020.

The final days of Trump’s first term saw a particular frenzy of state killing. In the week before Inauguration Day on January 20, 2021, the administration executed three prisoners in rapid succession: Lisa Montgomery on January 13, Corey Johnson on January 14, and Dustin Higgs in the early hours of January 16. Montgomery, whose history of gang rape, incest and child sex trafficking had left her severely mentally ill, was the first woman executed by the federal government in almost seven decades. Both Johnson and Higgs were likely intellectually disabled, yet the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 ultra-conservative majority, allowed their executions to proceed without giving either man a proper judicial hearing on his eligibility for the death penalty.  

*****

[Former US president Joe] Biden, upon taking office, imposed a moratorium on federal executions. In December 2024, he commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row to life in prison without parole, sparing all but Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Robert Bowers. Trump responded with volcanic fury on his Truth Social platform, falsely denouncing Biden’s commutations as a “pardon” of “the 37 most violent criminals” and telling the prisoners whose lives had been spared to “GO TO HELL!”

On his first day back in office, Trump signed the Inauguration Day death penalty order directing the attorney general to investigate whether the 37 commuted prisoners could be charged with state capital crimes. The measure was a legally dubious effort to exploit the “separate sovereigns” doctrine to nullify Biden’s acts of clemency. The administration has since transferred a number of these men to ADX Florence in Colorado, the federal supermax facility known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” imposing what amounts to extrajudicial punishment intended to ensure that their conditions of confinement match, in Trump’s words, “the monstrosity of their crimes.” 

*****

The federal expansion of execution methods follows a pattern already established at the state level under the political cover Trump’s administration has provided. 

*****

The DOJ’s Friday announcement is not simply a technical adjustment to execution protocols. It is a political act, rooted in the Trump administration’s drive toward authoritarian rule. The promotion of the death penalty, with its deliberate cultivation of fear, anti-immigrant hysteria and celebration of state violence, is integral to the effort to intimidate the working class with the lethal power of the capitalist state.  

*****

As Karl Marx wrote in the New-York Daily Tribune in February 1853: “It would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expediency of capital punishment could be founded, in a society glorifying in its civilization.” His words have lost none of their force. The expansion of the death penalty, the revived firing squad and the remote-controlled execution chamber in Idaho are expressions of a system that holds human life in total contempt—and of a ruling class that knows it is sitting atop a social order heading toward an explosion. 

12. Amid popular outrage, no official explanation of secret CIA operation in Mexico

The US government has made clear there will be no explanations, let alone apologies, after two CIA agents died in a road accident during a supposed anti-drug operation in the Mexican state of Chihuahua—an operation the Mexican federal government claims was carried out without its permission or even prior knowledge.

The incident reportedly occurred at 2 a.m. in a remote area of the Sierra Madre mountains, when the vehicle veered off the road, crashed, and exploded.

Initially, US Ambassador Ronald Johnson—a former Green Beret and CIA officer—claimed the deceased were merely “members of staff from the United States Embassy.”

It was soon revealed, however, that the dead were not ordinary US personnel, but CIA operatives engaged in a covert mission.

The CIA officers are among the first fatalities in Trump’s escalating war in Latin America, following the death in February of a lance corporal who fell off the USS Iwo Jima while conducting operations in the Caribbean.

The political dimensions grew when Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum revealed that the four individuals in the vehicle were “working jointly” on a mission of which the federal government had not been informed.

But as the US government conducts policing and intelligence operations across the border without even notifying Mexican authorities, Sheinbaum’s response has been remarkably restrained. She sent a letter to the US embassy requesting information. 

*****

Subsequent reporting has exposed the extent of US covert activity. Two US officials speaking on condition of anonymity to The Intercept confirmed that the CIA has been running clandestine operations in Mexico, working alongside vetted state-level police forces and other agencies. According to these sources, the Americans died after a raid on a synthetic drug laboratory. It has also emerged that one agent entered Mexico on a tourist permit and the other with a diplomatic passport.

In contrast to Sheinbaum’s response, the incident has raised alarm among the Mexican working class and broader population, as the Trump administration behaves with unrestrained violence and open criminality across the hemisphere and the world. 

*****

The reality is that the United States conducts covert operations around the world without permission. As Carlos Pérez Ricart, a researcher at Mexico’s CIDE, explains: US agents “operate, move, and make contacts without consulting the Mexican government… whether the federal government knew or not is irrelevant, since it lacks the capacity to prevent or track these actions.”

What is pivotal is the response of both governments to this involuntary exposure. Washington has reaffirmed its presumed right to act unilaterally anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, Sheinbaum—who presents herself as a left nationalist defending sovereignty—continues to deepen Mexico’s economic and military integration into US war plans. Mexico already serves as an “essential” supplier of military components for the Pentagon, participates in joint exercises with US forces while hosting American trainers, and has joined the tariff war against China. 

*****

The Mexican government has deployed National Guard troops to harass, kill and deport migrants headed to the US. It has also carried out at least 92 extraditions of alleged traffickers to the US, violating Mexican constitutional protections.

At the same time, Sheinbaum’s admission that she was unaware of operations in a border state exposes more than a blind spot. It demonstrates that within the Mexican ruling class she represents there is no constituency for opposing the US drive to recolonize Mexico and Latin America. There is merely an eagerness and apprehension about securing a “fair share” of the profits from this process, including in the ongoing renegotiation of the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal. This is as far as Sheinbaum’s talk of defending national sovereignty goes.

13. 1,100 artists call for boycott of Eurovision over Israel’s Gaza genocide

More than 1,100 artists have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of next month’s Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, over the inclusion of Israel “despite its ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

The letter was produced by No Music For Genocide, which calls for a cultural boycott of Israel in line with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Among the signatories are Brian Eno, Roger Waters, Macklemore, Hot Chip, Peter Gabriel, Paul Weller, Sigur Rós, Kneecap, Paloma Faith, and Massive Attack. Former Eurovision winners Emmelie de Forest and Charlie McGettigan have also signed.

Eurovision is the world’s biggest music event. Last year’s event in Basel, Switzerland, attracted 166 million viewers.

The letter is a powerful rejection of this year’s event, stating it is “being used to whitewash and normalise Israel’s genocide, siege and brutal military occupation against Palestinians.” It aligns itself “with Palestinian calls for public broadcasters, performers, screening party organisers, crew, and fans” to boycott the event until the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) “bans complicit Israeli broadcaster KAN.” 

*****

The letter asks, “How can any performer or Eurovision fan in good conscience participate… amidst US-Israeli plans for hyper-surveilled concentration camps in ‘New Gaza’? There are moments in time when passive silence is not an option.”

The letter is a moving assertion of opposition to the ongoing genocide and the cultural devastation that accompanies it, and a significant recognition of the requirement for artists to speak out. 

*****

It concludes simply: “No stage for genocide. #BoycottEurovision.”

The letter applauds the withdrawal of broadcasters from Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Slovenia, and the Netherlands, and the national selection finalists who have committed to refuse to go to the event. It explicitly harks back to the boycott movement against apartheid South Africa as its model. 

*****

Many of the signatories have long records of opposition to the oppression of the Palestinians, and have been targeted for this. Macklemore’s consistent criticism of the genocide, for example, led to a smear campaign by Der Spiegel. 

The sustained campaigns against artists criticising the genocide make the courage of their continued response all the more noteworthy. The Irish rap group Kneecap, who have been dragged through the courts under baseless terrorism charges, wrote on social media, “We have paid a price for speaking out—canceled gigs, legal cases, visa bans—and we would do it again tomorrow. Silence is complicity.”

Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja was among the 523 people arrested this month for carrying placards reading “I oppose genocide; I support Palestine Action”, after a High Court ruling that the proscription of that organisation was unlawful. Like Kneecap, Del Naja spoke of the pressures on him as a musician—“there was a lot of trepidation around how we might not be able to travel and get visas”—but felt the action was necessary.

After three years, and with growing popular support, opponents of genocide must increasingly face the underlying cause of the escalating brutality before them—the capitalist system. 

14.  Italy’s Meloni government in crisis as rift with Israel and Trump opens

On April 14, the government of Giorgia Meloni announced the suspension of Italy’s military cooperation agreement with Israel, the 2003 memorandum codified as Law 94/2005. “In view of the current situation, the government has decided to suspend the automatic renewal of the defense agreement with Israel,” Meloni said in Verona.

Presented as a decisive response to escalating tensions, the move exposes the deepening contradictions confronting Italian imperialism.

At the center of this crisis stands Italy’s role in the Middle East, where military, economic and diplomatic interests collide. Italian troops deployed under the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) are presented as “peacekeepers,” but are part of an imperialist presence in a region critical to European energy and strategic interests. With roughly 1,000 troops, Italy remains one of the mission’s largest contributors, treating the deployment as essential to maintaining influence in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Tensions erupted on April 8, 2026, when Israeli forces fired warning shots at an Italian convoy in southern Lebanon. Meloni denounced the incident as “completely unacceptable,” citing a violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 and invoking national sovereignty.

The agreement had enabled extensive military, industrial and intelligence collaboration in the last two decades, including joint weapons development and training operations conducted largely beyond parliamentary scrutiny and with the support of the entire political establishment.

Italy’s government is entering a period of acute crisis. Its increasingly erratic foreign policy expresses the growing inability to reconcile global tensions, economic fragility and social unrest within the framework of capitalism. Rome’s gyrations signal not independence or peace plans, but the breakdown of the postwar imperialist order.

Italy’s strategic fixation on Lebanon and the wider region reflects major economic interests, including gas exploration and pipeline projects tied to Eni.

Crucially, the suspension does not halt the flow of arms. Italian weapons manufacturers such as Leonardo S.p.A. and Fincantieri S.p.A. can continue fulfilling existing contracts. Unless licenses already granted are revoked deliveries will proceed uninterrupted. The government has made clear it will not take that step. 

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Italy’s historical alliance with Israel is not an aberration, but part of a broader imperialist offensive in the Middle East. As a secondary power, Italy operates as a junior partner within a US-led framework aimed at maintaining imperialist dominance over a strategically vital region.

Yet this alignment is under acute strain. The escalation of the US-Israel war against Iran in early 2026 exposed deep fissures within the Atlantic alliance between Washington and the major European powers, including France, Germany and the UK. Like them, Italy refused to participate in offensive operations or support a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Italy’s dependence on maritime energy flows makes it vulnerable to disruptions in the Gulf. A closure of Hormuz would threaten global oil and gas supplies, with severe consequences for an already fragile economy. The government framed its stance as a defense of “freedom of navigation,” participating instead in limited efforts to secure shipping routes.

Trump denounced Italy’s refusal as a failure of alliance obligations, exposing tensions that reflect the erosion of the postwar framework.

In March 2026, Meloni denied a US request to use the Sigonella base for Iran-related operations, signaling a willingness to restrict American military activity when it conflicts with national interests.

Meloni also criticized Trump for attacking Pope Leo XIV after the pontiff spoke out against the war in Iran.

At the same time, Italy has maintained commitments elsewhere, including NATO operations in Eastern Europe. This selective alignment attempts to balance obligations with national interests but deepens underlying contradictions. 

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Faced with mounting anger, the ruling class fears a broader eruption of social struggle. This concern affects foreign policy. The reluctance to fully align with US war plans against Iran reflects fear that such actions could trigger mass opposition at home.

In the April 25 demonstrations marking the 81st anniversary of Italian liberation from fascism, hundreds of thousands protested war, authoritarianism and the erosion of democratic rights. While invoking democracy and unity, the government moved to discredit the protests, using dubious isolated incidents to justify repression and equating opposition to Israel’s war with antisemitism.

Actions by dockworkers in Italy and across the Mediterranean point to the potential for a more powerful movement. Refusals to handle military cargo demonstrate the capacity of the working class to disrupt the machinery of war and indicate the emergence of international opposition.

The crisis of the Meloni government encapsulates a broader historical and international breakdown. The postwar order, built on US economic and military dominance, is fracturing under the weight of global capitalism’s contradictions. No faction of the ruling class offers a progressive alternative.

The decisive question is the development of a global independent political movement of the working class. Growing opposition to war and austerity must be transformed into a conscious struggle against capitalism. Only through the international unification of workers can the drive toward imperialist conflict be halted and a new social order established based on human need rather than profit. 

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

A video reminder describes Syrotiuk's ongoing plight 

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.