The Socialist Equality Party replies to Trump’s fascist address to Congress

David North

A perspective by National Chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US) David North [in full]:

In the United States, where the capitalist two-party system has been in place for 150 years, all those genuinely opposed to the policies and interests of the ruling class are denied the right to address the people. However, if the Socialist Equality Party had been given the opportunity to deliver a televised rebuttal, not only to Trump’s State of the Union Address but also to the Democrats’ reply, this is what we would have said.

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Good evening. The Socialist Equality Party welcomes this rare opportunity to present our assessment of the State of the Union.

Speaking as a representative of the SEP, I am addressing these remarks not only to workers and youth in the United States but to our class brothers and sisters throughout the world. You are not our enemies. American working people are opposed to and want no part of any war launched by the power-mad oligarchy in a desperate attempt to solve the crisis of the capitalist system.

What you have watched—if you could stomach it—has been a grotesque and degrading spectacle. There was Trump himself, spewing hate, threats and resentments for nearly two hours. In Spielberg’s cinematic biography of Lincoln, there is a scene in which the great radical leader, Thaddeus Stevens, berates a contemptible reactionary congressman. He is, proclaimes Stevens, “a moral carcass … more reptile than man.” As I watched Trump bobbing his head up and down, licking his lizard-like lips and mouthing his idiocies, the words of Stevens came to mind.

And then there were the congressmen and congresswomen. With few exceptions, they vindicate the words of another great American, Mark Twain, who observed: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

On one side of the aisle sat a pack of Republican fascists, leaping to their feet to grunt “USA, USA!”—the American equivalent of “Sieg Heil”—every time their Führer paused for breath.

On the other side sat the cowardly representatives of the fake opposition Democratic Party, hands folded in their laps, enduring nearly two hours of open insults, abuse and incitement from a man who called them “sick people,” “crazy,” “cheaters” who are “destroying our country.” And when it was over, they shuffled out of the chamber and handed the microphone to a former CIA officer, Governor Abigail Spanberger, who delivered a sleep-inducing rebuttal about “affordability” and “competent management.”

This is the state of American democracy in 2026. A fascist president and a compliant opposition. A ruling class united in its essentials—the defense of profit, the prosecution of war, the suppression of the working class—and divided only over which faction gets to manage the looting.

No one in that chamber spoke for you last night.

The fight against fascism, against imperialist war, against the dictatorship of the billionaire oligarchy, will not come from the marbled corridors of the Capitol. It will come from below—from the factories, the warehouses, the hospitals, the schools, the neighborhoods where working people actually live and labor. It will come from the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program. Or it will not come at all.

Trump’s speech was a pack of outright lies. He declared that the economy is “roaring like never before” and that “prices are plummeting.” He boasted of gasoline prices and investment commitments conjured out of thin air, and recited a string of cherry-picked and manipulated figures on jobs, wages and tariffs, as if repetition could turn propaganda into reality. This was a salesman’s pitch, delivered on behalf of the financial oligarchy, aimed at obscuring the facts known to every worker: that basic necessities are unaffordable, and society is being looted while billionaires gorge themselves at the public trough.

The president—whose agents committed the murder of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, whose administration justified the killings, whose vice president declared that Good’s death was “a tragedy of her own making”—stood before Congress and did not utter one syllable about them. Instead, he taunted the Democrats for refusing to stand when he demanded they affirm that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” 

He unleashed a torrent of racist lies, branding Minnesota’s Somali community as “pirates,” who have “pillaged” tens of billions from the American people. This is the language the Nazis used against Jews as they laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Trump speaks of “corruption,” not in relation to the looting carried out daily by Wall Street, the Pentagon contractors and the billionaires who write the laws but to manufacture a pretext for raids, mass arrests and the federal occupation of cities. He threatened that what was done there will be done elsewhere.

Under the banner of the “Save America Act,” Trump demanded measures to bar “illegal aliens and others” from voting and claimed, without a shred of evidence, that “cheating is rampant.” This is a preemptive declaration that any election outcome that does not produce a Republican victory is illegitimate. It is a blueprint for voter suppression, intimidation and the criminalization of opposition, with Trump preparing to hold the coming elections under the barrel of a gun, monitored by ICE demanding identification like Gestapo agents in Nazi Germany. 

Trump’s address was also a celebration of imperialist gangsterism and the supposed “right” of American imperialism to invade, bomb, assassinate and abduct at will. In the course of his remarks he treated the military invasion of Venezuela—the killing of civilians and the abduction of its elected president—as a triumph to be applauded. He awarded a Medal of Honor to a helicopter pilot wounded in the raid and narrated the operation with the relish of a man recounting a hunting expedition. 

Under the standards established at the Nuremberg trials after World War II, this is an illegal “crime against peace,” comparable to the acts which sent the Nazi defendants to the gallows. But for the Trump regime, international law, the sovereignty of nations and the prohibition of wars of conquest are, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it, “abstractions,” to be brushed aside. Trump boasted that the United States has “very seriously damaged their fishing industry as well. No one wants to go fishing,” a sadistic and gloating reference to the murders of fishermen carried out in the Caribbean and the Pacific. 

Gaza was erased from existence. The word “Palestinian” did not appear in the speech. With American weapons and political and logistical support, tens of thousands of men, women and children have been killed; hospitals were destroyed; universities were leveled; a civilian population has been subjected to starvation and bombardment. Israel continues to carry out airstrikes in defiance of the ceasefire Trump claims to have brokered. Hundreds have been killed since the so-called truce. The genocide proceeds, and the president who enabled it has declared it resolved.

Trump spoke for more than 90 minutes before mentioning Iran, as if no one in the country has any right to know why or when the United States plans to launch a war. And when he finally mentioned Iran, his remarks were confined to a few sentences which explained nothing, while the largest US military deployment in the Middle East since 2003 is currently underway.

The Epstein files—a veritable “Who’s Who” of the US and international ruling class—were not mentioned. Despite the release of over 3 million pages of documents exposing the degenerate social universe of the American and international capitalist oligarchy—the billionaires, politicians, intellectuals, tech executives and royalty circulating through the orbit of a convicted child sex trafficker—the president, whose intimate, decades-long association with Epstein, is documented in photographs, flight logs and witness testimony, said nothing. On the day of Trump’s speech, an NPR investigation reported that the Justice Department had removed or withheld Epstein-related records that reference allegations involving Trump, underscoring the ongoing cover-up by the state apparatus.

The Epstein files expose a ruling class composed of degenerates. Neither party wants them discussed because both are implicated—Clinton and Trump, Summers and Bannon, liberal academics and fascist operatives.

And now we arrive at the Democrats. The Democratic Party is not an opposition party. It is a party of the American ruling class. Its function is to absorb and neutralize social opposition, block the independent political movement of the working class, and ensure that no challenge to capitalism emerges from below. 

The party’s official reply was delivered not by a senator or congressperson but by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger. Always keeping their options open, neither Bernie Sanders nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insisted on delivering the Democratic Party’s response to Trump.

The Democrats, predictably, presented an ex-CIA operative who invoked her intelligence credentials and warned that Trump was “ceding economic power and technological strength to China” and “bowing down to a Russian dictator.” The message was not aimed at working people but at the ruling class: We are reliable, we are serious, we can run the empire with greater competence and fewer public embarrassments. 

What Spanberger did not say is a self-indictment. She did not demand the abolition of ICE. She did not speak the names of Renée Good or Alex Pretti. She did not denounce the invasion of Venezuela or the genocide in Gaza. She did not challenge the trillion-dollar military budget or the assault on social programs. 

The Democrats do not object to the machine of repression and war. They object only to the crudeness with which Trump operates it. 

In order to establish a dictatorship, Trump does not need to physically smash the Democratic politicians. Significantly, when one Democratic congressman, Al Green, held up a sign denouncing Trump’s racism, he was dragged from the chamber by security without any objection from his party colleagues.

The Democrats fear that if they do anything that undermines the obsolete procedures of congressional decorum, it will encourage popular opposition and mass working class action that they cannot control, and which will prove threatening to the capitalist system.

The working class must speak for itself

Governor Spanberger began her remarks by stating that the US was based on the idea that the people could “band together to demand better of their government.” 

That’s false. Thomas Jefferson, no coward, actually wrote that when confronted with an oppressive government, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” The Founders did not “demand better” of King George III. They declared independence and waged an eight-year revolutionary war. That is the tradition that should inspire the working class today.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the demand of the working class must not be that Trump or the Democrats “do better.” The time has come to break with the politics of self-delusion. 

The central lesson of last night’s spectacle is that the working class has no voice in the political system of American capitalism. Neither party represents your interests. Neither party will defend your rights. The entire framework of official politics exists to prevent the working class from recognizing itself as a class, from organizing itself independently, and from fighting for its own interests against the class that exploits it.

This must change. The working class must speak for itself.

The Socialist Equality Party calls for:

The abolition of ICE and the entire apparatus of immigration terror. Immigrant workers are not the enemy of the American working class. They are part of the international working class. The scapegoating of immigrants is the oldest weapon in the arsenal of the ruling class—the deliberate cultivation of racial and national divisions to prevent the unity of the exploited against the exploiters. We demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

The murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti must be independently investigated by committees of the working class. Those responsible—from the agents who pulled the triggers to the officials who gave the orders—must be brought to justice.

An immediate end to all imperialist military operations. Withdraw every soldier from the Middle East. End the blockade of Cuba. End the occupation of Venezuela. Stop the preparations for war against Iran. Not one dollar, not one life for the predatory interests of American imperialism. The trillion-dollar military budget must be redirected to meet the social needs of the working class—healthcare, housing, education, infrastructure.

The expropriation of the oligarchy. The concentration of $7.8 trillion in the hands of 905 billionaires, while millions lack healthcare, housing, and food expresses the logic of the capitalist system. The banks, the giant corporations, the hedge funds, the tech monopolies must be placed under public ownership and democratic control by the working class. The obscene fortunes of the oligarchy—accumulated through exploitation, speculation, fraud and the impoverishment of the majority—must be expropriated and used to fund a massive expansion of social programs.

The reversal of all cuts to social programs and the establishment of social rights. Restore every dollar stolen from Medicaid. Restore food stamp eligibility. Guarantee universal healthcare, free public education through to the university level, affordable housing, and a secure retirement for every worker. These are not utopian demands. The wealth exists, created by the labor of the working class, but now hoarded by the ruling class. The task is to take it back.

The building of rank-and-file committees in every factory, workplace and neighborhood. The apparatus of the trade unions, long ago transformed into adjuncts of corporate management, will not lead this fight. Their institutional interests are bound up with the preservation of the very system that is destroying the working class. Workers must organize themselves independently, through democratically elected rank-and-file committees that answer to no one but the workers themselves. These committees must be connected across industries, across state lines, across national borders, through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC)—the organizational framework for the unification of the struggles of the international working class.

The preparation of the conditions for a general strike. The crisis of American democracy cannot be resolved through the ballot box of a rigged political system controlled by two capitalist parties, both funded by the same oligarchs. The power of the working class resides in its labor—in its collective capacity to stop production, to halt the flow of profits, to bring the machinery of exploitation to a standstill. The political general strike is a powerful weapon of the working class, and the conditions for its deployment are maturing rapidly. The task is to build the organizational and political foundations now.

International working class unity. The working class is an international class. Capital operates globally; the working class must organize globally. The same corporations that exploit workers in Detroit exploit workers in Monterrey, in Shenzhen, in Dhaka, in Berlin. The same imperialist system that wages war in the Middle East impoverishes workers on every continent. The struggle against Trump and the American oligarchy is inseparable from the struggle of workers in every country against the world capitalist system. National divisions, racial divisions, ethnic divisions, religious divisions—All are weapons of the ruling class, deployed to prevent the one thing it fears above all else: the unity of the exploited.

The crisis of the working class is, in the final analysis, a crisis of revolutionary leadership. The objective conditions for a mass movement of the working class are not only present—They are intensifying with a speed that astonishes even those who have long anticipated them. What is lacking is the conscious political leadership that can transform the mounting anger, the spreading resistance, the growing recognition that the system itself is broken, into a unified movement for the socialist transformation of society.

In 1775, Tom Paine proclaimed in the immortal pamphlet, Common Sense, which inspired the American Revolution: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

The new world will be socialist. The power that will build it is the working class.

Join the Socialist Equality Party.

Build rank-and-file committees in your workplace and your neighborhood.

Build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.

Read the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) every day.

The future belongs not to the oligarchs and their political servants but to the international working class.

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Union bureaucracy sabotages the Kaiser Permanente strike

On Monday afternoon, the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals abruptly shut down the month-long strike by 31,000 healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii. There was no semblance of democratic discussion, no new contract and not even a tentative agreement. The UNAC/UHCP bureaucracy simply cited unexplained “significant movement at the bargaining table” and ordered workers back to work.

Once again a critical struggle of the working class has been sold out by the trade union bureaucracy.

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The shutdown of the strike was a deliberate act of sabotage, not only against Kaiser healthcare workers but against the broader movement emerging in the country. The strike was shut down the same day that 500 Kaiser operating engineers were to have joined the strike.

UNAC/UHCP ended the strike right when it was on the verge of gaining over 100,000 reinforcements from workers across California. Sixty-five thousand teachers and classified staff in the Los Angeles Unified School District have authorized strikes in the face of sweeping budget cuts. Forty thousand graduate and academic workers in the University of California system, members of the United Auto Workers, have voted to strike. A unified movement would have laid the basis for a powerful strike wave across the West Coast, encouraging similar action throughout the country.

The bureaucracy could not allow this because it would threaten their financial and social interests. Other similar betrayals have taken place over the last several days. Over the weekend, union officials in New York City shut down the final holdouts of a six-week strike by nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian, where nurses rejected an earlier deal the union put to a vote in violation of its own bylaws.

In California, union officials ended a four-day strike by 6,000 San Francisco teachers earlier this month. The city, awash in cash from the artificial intelligence boom, is pleading poverty for public schools. Layoffs were announced almost immediately after the strike ended, with the district citing declining enrollment.

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Similar patterns are evident elsewhere. The United Steelworkers pushed through a sellout agreement covering 30,000 refinery workers, setting the stage for an isolated strike at BP Whiting in Indiana, where management is demanding deeper concessions. As with the previous contract reached at the start of the Ukraine war, this is a war contract. Its purpose is to keep fuel flowing as the US military wages war against Iran.

Union officials in Minneapolis and across the country have directly opposed strike action against ICE raids. Teachers unions have instructed members not to encourage or participate in student walkouts protesting deportations. The UAW warns that the right to strike is at risk under the Trump administration, yet has proposed no action to defend it.

This conduct flows from the fundamental social and economic interests of the bureaucracy, not merely from a conservative outlook. Over the past four decades, even as strike activity was driven to historic lows, spending on union officials expanded dramatically. US unions spend hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from workers’ dues and invested in the stock market, on six-figure salaries, luxury travel and a host of other privileges.

Their hostility to the working class is bound up with entrenched anticommunism, nationalism and deep connections to corporate politicians. Historically, the Democratic Party has been their principal vehicle. Increasingly, however, sections of the bureaucracy have aligned themselves with Trump, drawn by their support for “America First” policies and economic nationalism. 

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A clear rule has emerged: the more powerful the objective position of workers and the more a broader movement begins to develop, the more openly the union bureaucracy intervenes to sabotage it. No amount of “pressure” can alter the social interests of this layer any more than pressure can induce corporate management to abandon the capitalist profit motive.

Workers therefore must organize themselves to confront and override this sabotage. The task is not the reform of the apparatus but its removal from control over the struggle and the restoration of power to the shop floor. This is a necessary step toward establishing the political independence and freedom of initiative of the working class, linking immediate contract struggles with the fight against fascism, war and social inequality.

2.  Cuban worker describes hellish conditions, appeals to US workers to force an end to embargo

The humanitarian situation in Cuba has undergone a catastrophic decline in the three weeks following Donald Trump’s January 29 executive order declaring the island a “national security threat” and threatening tariffs on any nation supplying it with oil. Washington has effectively turned its long-standing embargo into an overt attempt to starve the population into submission.

While US officials discuss allowing only “small quantities” of fuel to prevent total infrastructure collapse, the White House demanded last week “very dramatic changes” in Cuba. The US Supreme Court, moreover, is considering cases demanding Havana pay billions in compensation to US corporations like ExxonMobil for key ports, plantations and other infrastructure expropriated six decades ago.

In this dire context, the World Socialist Web Site spoke with María, a 32-year-old worker and single mother in Matanzas (“María” is a pseudonym used to protect her identity.) Her harrowing testimony exposes the reality of “maximum pressure” and highlights the necessity of an independent mobilization of the international working class to break the siege.

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María describes a reality that exceeds the horror reported in the corporate media. Basic necessities like cooking gas have vanished entirely; many now rely on increasingly expensive charcoal or even broken furniture for firewood, she explains. While she views Trump’s policies as “asphyxiating,” she also holds the Cuban government responsible for the country’s debacle.

“I am 32 years old,” she continues, “I belong to a generation that went to university with enthusiasm and professional ambitions. The Cuban people are tired of being censored, without freedom of expression, afraid to speak freely about the fact that we live in a failed state.” The pain is sharpened by the fact that “Our friends and colleagues are political prisoners for peacefully disagreeing. The country has been on the road to disaster for years. This did not start with Trump, although it has worsened under him. … Nobody wants to stay here,” she says, noting that the sector of society that still trusts in the government is tiny and unrepresentative.

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The crisis has manifested in widespread hunger, including among children. María confirms that most families cannot afford three meals a day and survive on low-quality food with almost no protein. Often, a child’s only breakfast is an instant soft drink, as even bread has become scarce.

This malnutrition is compounded by outbreaks of respiratory and mosquito-borne diseases, which strike a population with weakened immune systems. In schools, meals are often reduced to a single boiled vegetable or a thin broth. María notes that a single bag of milk for her daughter costs half of her monthly salary.

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According to María, the Cuban government maintains a total monopoly on domestic media, while internet content is often manipulated by various political interests. Cubans are acutely aware that President Díaz-Canel and other officials frequently lie or provide incoherent data. During recent epidemics, the government denied the crisis even as people died in hospitals, choosing to minimize the crisis until the last possible moment.

Despite the misery, a “palpable” climate of fear prevents many from speaking out. Workers contacted by the WSWS reported being interrogated for hours, extorted, or threatened with jail for speaking out about social conditions.

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When asked about appealing to the American working class rather than the Trump administration, María notes that the ideological situation is complex. Decades of “indoctrination to remain silent, ideological disorganization, the lack of coherent political leaders, and the primitive survival mode” have left many Cubans unaware that the American people could offer real support.

But the thought that the American working class could mobilize to end the embargo is “moving,” she added, noting that most Cubans feel they do not matter to anyone.

María expresses interest in the fact that millions in the US have protested against the genocide in Gaza and that workers have the objective power to stop wars by mobilizing independently to stop weapons from reaching Israel. The same power could be used to supply Cuba with fuel, medicine, food and other vital goods and services and, ultimately, to end the blockade entirely.

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In the United States, workers instinctively recognize the need for solidarity. A New York teacher interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site stressed that more people need to be informed about the situation in Cuba, though many are currently pulled in different directions by crises in Gaza, Venezuela and Sudan. She explains: “I feel like the people that want to help are pulled in different directions.”

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A planned “Convoy to Cuba,” involving humanitarian organizations and figures like Greta Thunberg who supported aid flotillas to Gaza, is set to deliver humanitarian aid on March 21. Such efforts are courageous challenges to imperialist aggression, and the World Socialist Web Site insists that workers internationally must actively defend any such convoy against attempts to block it.

However, the limitations of such initiatives to overcome a decades-long embargo by the world’s dominant power must be recognized. The continuous provision of food, fuel and medicine requires the organized intervention of the international working class:

• Oil, logistics and transport workers, including dockworkers and maritime sailors, must use their control over production and distribution to further the shipment of supplies to Cuba.

• Port workers must also refuse to load or unload military and other ships enforcing the embargo.

• Workers across the Americas and Europe must coordinate these actions through rank-and-file committees.

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees provides the framework for this global struggle. Only on this basis can the Cuban working class begin to chart a path out of the nightmare created by the crimes of US imperialism and settle accounts with the island’s bourgeois regime. 

3. UK Labour government in meltdown at arrest of Peter Mandelson over Epstein connections, as election defeat looms

Mandelson’s career is intertwined with the transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of finance capital and an architect of illegal wars and imperialist plunder. Having now resigned five times from various positions—including being twice forced from office during the Blair years due to earlier scandals—he was repeatedly welcomed back to the summit of political power, including by Starmer. 

This was because, more than anyone else, Mandelson epitomized the New Labour agenda of serving every requirement of the money-mad banks and corporations. As this venal figure declared after New Labour took office, they were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

For the working class, the central issue is not holding Mandelson or Mountbatten-Windsor to account through parliamentary debates, humble addresses, or official inquiries—including the public inquiry advocated by Your Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. 

The fundamental task is the building of a new, independent political party of the working class and a decisive break with the entire parliamentary set-up and all its rotten parties. It is the capitalist system they all defend that enabled the financial oligarchy—and figures such as Mandelson and Mountbatten-Windsor—to thrive and profit.

4. Actor Robert Duvall (1931-2026): A realist who went beyond his own conceptions

Duvall’s greatest strength, by all accounts and on the basis of viewing his film work, was his attraction and indeed dedication to psychological and, in a more limited way, social truth, as he construed it. His intensity in that effort seems unquestionable. Duvall worked and studied indefatigably. He was known to “inhabit” his roles with great ferocity and single-mindedness.

He held the firm belief that “research, research, research” was essential to crafting a script, he told students at Hollins University in 2022. “Immerse yourself in the subject matter and then put forth something that you love. I haven’t written that many screenplays, but sometimes I just sit down and start writing and just see where it goes. I go from A to B to C to D and just follow the logic of the script.” Duvall directed himself in The Apostle, about a rural evangelical preacher, based on his own script.

5. Pentagon gives Anthropic 3 days to drop AI safeguards or face blacklisting 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to grant the military unfettered access to Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence system or face either blacklisting as a “supply chain risk” or compulsion under the Defense Production Act. The ultimatum was delivered in a tense meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday morning, attended by six senior defense officials, including the department’s top lawyer.

On the same day, Elon Musk’s xAI signed a deal with the Pentagon to deploy its fascistic Grok AI system on classified military networks, thereby breaking Claude’s exclusive position on classified networks. xAI agreed without restriction to an “all lawful purposes” standard, the exact formulation Anthropic has resisted.

The confrontation with Anthropic was triggered by revelations that Claude was used—without Anthropic’s prior knowledge—in the illegal January 3 US military assault on Caracas, Venezuela, in which between 83 and 100 people were killed and President Nicolás Maduro was abducted. As the World Socialist Web Site documented at the time, the assault was the culmination of a long-planned imperialist intervention driven by the US ruling class’s determination to control Venezuelan oil and reassert hegemony over Latin America.

The dispute between Anthropic and the Trump administration is being presented in the corporate media as a clash between “AI safety” and “national security.” In reality, it is a conflict within the American ruling class over the terms under which the technology giants will place their most powerful AI systems at the unrestricted disposal of US imperialism’s wars of aggression. 

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Claude is widely regarded as the most capable frontier AI model in the world. Claude Code—Anthropic’s AI coding tool—has transformed software engineering to such a degree that their own head of product, Boris Cherny, recently warned that AI will make 2026 “a painful year” for software engineers, predicting the job title will “start to go away.” Engineers at major firms report AI writing the entirety of their code.

The Pentagon is not threatening Anthropic because it can afford to lose Claude. It is threatening Anthropic precisely because it cannot—because the most powerful AI system on the planet is indispensable to its plans for AI-driven warfare, and because the precedent of any company imposing conditions on the war machine is intolerable to the state.

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Anthropic’s post-meeting statement confirmed the dynamic. “During the conversation, Dario expressed appreciation for the Department’s work and thanked the Secretary for his service,” the company said. “We continued good-faith conversations about our usage policy to ensure Anthropic can continue to support the government’s national security mission in line with what our models can reliably and responsibly do.” The language—expressing gratitude to the man who had just threatened to destroy the company—is the unmistakable posture of a corporation preparing to capitulate. 

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The corporate press has largely presented Anthropic as a courageous company standing up to military overreach. This narrative is a fabrication.

Anthropic has pursued military integration aggressively over the past two years. Most significantly, in November 2024, it partnered with Palantir—the surveillance contractor whose entire business model is built on serving the US military and intelligence apparatus—and Amazon Web Services to deploy Claude on classified networks. In June 2025, it launched “Claude Gov” for national security agencies. The following month, it celebrated its awarding of a $200 million Pentagon contract. And last August, it offered Claude to government agencies for $1 to undercut competitors and win market share.

The company’s “red lines” are remarkably narrow. Its Acceptable Use Policy prohibits “fully autonomous weapons” and “mass domestic surveillance of Americans.” These are not prohibitions on targeted killing, foreign surveillance, drone targeting with a human “in the loop,” or planning assaults on sovereign nations, the very operation that triggered this crisis. The policy explicitly reserves the right to negotiate exceptions for government customers. The “red lines” are not lines at all; they are opening positions in a negotiation.

Any assessment of Anthropic’s independence must also reckon with who owns it. Amazon—whose AWS built and continues to provide the CIA’s primary cloud infrastructure—has invested $8 billion. Google has invested approximately $3 billion. Microsoft and Nvidia committed a combined $15 billion. Early funding included $500 million from Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research—invested using misappropriated FTX customer funds, as prosecutors established at Bankman-Fried’s fraud trial, in one of the largest financial swindles in American history. The notion that a company embedded within this web of military-intelligence capital represents an independent ethical actor is a fantasy.

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The confrontation with the Pentagon reveals the terminal limit of this liberal bourgeois position: when the state demands unconditional submission, corporate ethics and philanthropic pledges are powerless. 

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The announcement Tuesday that the Pentagon will begin using Grok AI on classified military networks, clearly timed to coincide with Amodei’s meeting with Hegseth, is an unmistakable sign that the Trump administration intends to utilize AI in the service of the most extreme surveillance and repression of democratic rights.

As Lawfare has documented, Grok has a “documented history of biased, misleading, antisemitic, and harmful outputs.” The record is extraordinary. In July 2025, Grok called itself “MechaHitler,” praised Adolf Hitler, recommended a second Holocaust to users with neo-Nazi profiles, deployed the antisemitic phrase “every damn time,” and blamed “Jewish executives” for “forced diversity” in the entertainment industry. xAI dismissed the episode as an “unintended update.”

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The Pentagon’s demand that Anthropic drop its prohibition on “mass domestic surveillance of Americans” must be understood in the context of what the Trump administration is already building. ICE has deployed Clearview AI facial recognition under a $3.75 million contract. Palantir—Anthropic’s own partner on classified systems—operates the $30 million “ImmigrationOS” platform providing “granular tracking” of immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has “significantly expanded the operational scope” of facial recognition and AI surveillance. The fascistic Trump regime is already using AI for mass surveillance; the Pentagon’s demand is that the most powerful AI model be made available for the apparatus of a police state and escalating war abroad.

6. Measles cases in the US surge past 1,000 in 2026

The United States has reached a catastrophic milestone in the resurgence of preventable infectious diseases, exposing the devastating consequences of a systemic assault on public health infrastructure. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation has already confirmed 982 measles cases in 2026, while CNN’s measles tracker reports an even higher toll of 1,030 infections.

The US did not breach the 1,000-case threshold last year until May, putting the country on a rapid trajectory to greatly surpass 2025’s three-decade high of 2,281 infections. This is not merely an epidemiological failure, but a historic regression in which a highly contagious virus, officially eliminated more than a quarter-century ago, is being allowed to rampage through the population. 

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The CDC has all but been left rudderless in a storm of infectious disease and politics. This is not incompetence; the absence of leadership is not a failure of policy but the intended policy itself—to bury the CDC in the quagmire and make it impossible to fulfill its mission.

The agency is now helmed on an acting basis by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the notorious Great Barrington Declaration—the herd-immunity-through-mass-infection manifesto widely condemned by public health experts as a blueprint for mass death—who has entirely failed to flag South Carolina’s systematic underreporting or demand transparent hospitalization data, signaling a tacit federal endorsement of the state’s obfuscation.

The geography of this crisis highlights the social terrain where vaccine refusal has been deliberately cultivated. South Carolina has emerged as the undisputed epicenter, recording 973 cases in a massive outbreak centered in Spartanburg County. As the measles crisis explodes across the state, public health officials are engaged in dangerous obfuscation of the disease’s true severity. South Carolina does not require its hospitals to report measles-related admissions to the state. Consequently, the state is reporting a staggeringly low hospitalization rate of just 2 percent, or a mere 20 admissions. 

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South Carolina state epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell has openly admitted that the agency is “not getting an accurate picture at all” of how the virus is ravaging the community, yet she simultaneously declared that the state has not even considered adding measles hospitalizations to its mandatory reporting list. This bureaucratic negligence is compounded by intense political pressure from right-wing state legislators and corporate health systems that are collectively pandering to a vocal, vaccine-resistant minority. Doctors treating patients on the front lines are left entirely in the dark, forced to rely on Facebook posts and local rumors to learn about severe local complications like pneumonia, dehydration or life-threatening encephalitis. 

This complete lack of federal oversight aligns seamlessly with the broader Trump-Kennedy administration agenda of normalizing mass infection and downplaying the deadly realities of vaccine-preventable diseases. By allowing states like South Carolina to hide the true extent of this outbreak, the CDC further erodes whatever fragile public trust remains in its authority, proving once again that the health and safety of the population have been entirely subordinated to anti-science political expediency and vaccine disinformation—and the results are now manifesting in communities across the country.

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The current public health crisis represents a tragic and deliberate reversal of one of the greatest scientific and social achievements of the 20th century. The combination of decades of sustained public health initiatives, comprehensive school immunization laws, and the removal of financial barriers through the Vaccines for Children program culminated in the historic elimination of endemic measles in the United States in 2000. These advances were not merely medical breakthroughs; they were monumental social gains won through collective effort, demonstrating that human progress and science could conquer ancient, deadly scourges.

Today, these hard-fought protections are being systematically dismantled by a ruling class and a social order in advanced decay. Having normalized mass death and debilitation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to protect corporate profits, the political establishment now treats disease prevention as an unacceptable impediment to profit-making.

7. IMF chief hails Sri Lanka “success story” as its austerity agenda deepens social crisis

The three-day visit of International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, who repeatedly hailed Sri Lanka as a “success story” under the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility program, has once again laid bare the class character of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government. 

According to media reports, the purpose of the IMF visit was to “assess” the destruction caused by Cyclone Ditwah, which killed around 1,000 people, devastated homes and critical infrastructure, and affected more than 2.3 million people last December. The International Labour Organization has estimated the economic losses at $US16 billion, or approximately 16 percent of GDP.

Nearly three months after the disaster, neither the JVP/NPP government nor the major international powers have provided anything remotely close to the resources required to rebuild the shattered lives of thousands of families or restore devastated infrastructure. Anger is mounting among working people and the rural poor over the government’s failure to deliver adequate relief, including permanent housing for families who lost everything in cyclone-triggered floods and landslides.

Georgieva made clear that the devastation created by Cyclone Ditwah cannot justify any deviation from the IMF’s harsh austerity program. “IMF programs are designed to be flexible when circumstances change,” she said. But this “flexibility” operates strictly within the boundaries of debt sustainability and creditor confidence. Disaster relief must be administered without undermining fiscal targets. The government’s 2026 budget, prepared before the cyclone struck, will remain intact. There will be no policy reversal.

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For working people, the economic consequences are becoming catastrophic. Although headline inflation has dropped, prices of essential goods and services remain far above pre-crisis (i.e., 2022) levels. VAT increases and other indirect taxes are consuming a larger share of household income. Electricity, water, fuel, and cooking gas prices have risen sharply over the past two years under IMF-mandated adjustments. Real wages, however, have not recovered to their pre-2022 levels, and the government has told public sector workers there will be no wage increases.

Public hospitals continue to report severe shortages of essential medicines, equipment, chemicals, and staff. Schools, particularly in rural areas, struggle with overcrowding and inadequate resources and teaching staff. Many families remain heavily indebted after years of high interest rates. According to a World Bank survey conducted late last year, almost one third of the population (32.4 percent) lives below or just above the poverty line of $US2 per day. 

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The working class and rural masses are not responsible for the country’s foreign debts, which are the product of decades of borrowing to fund tax concessions for the wealthy, vast military spending, corrupt mega-projects, and integration into volatile global capital markets.

The so-called economic success story is built on the backs of working people. Only their independent mobilization, based on a socialist and internationalist perspective, can offer a genuine alternative to the austerity now being prescribed as the future of the working population.

8. At meeting to defend public health, Sri Lanka’s health workers express solidarity with counterparts in US

The meeting was organized as part of the Health Workers Action Committee's campaign to advance a socialist strategy to defend the country’s collapsing public health system and oppose the government’s austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was held against the backdrop of more than a month of protests by 20,000 doctors demanding the restoration of allowances and the resolution of long-standing grievances.

Around 90 participants attended the meeting, including doctors, nurses and other health workers, as well as youth and workers from several other sectors. The broad composition of the audience underscored growing concern over the deepening crisis in the public health sector amid sweeping budget cuts, staff shortages and deteriorating hospital conditions.

Speakers addressed the mounting pressures faced by health workers and the crisis in public health system, linking them to the IMF austerity program being implemented by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/ National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government. Government austerity, the speakers explain, threatens to dismantle the island’s free public health system, which has long been regarded as a major social gain of the working class.

9.  Demand the immediate release of Communist Party Marxist-Kenya leader Booker Omole!

The Central Committee of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) has reported that its secretary general, Booker Ngesa Omole, was violently abducted on Monday in Isiolo town by the Kenya Police Service.

In a public statement February 24, the party wrote: “This was not an arrest. This was not lawful detention. This was a kidnapping.” Omole was “beaten severely. Tortured. Brutalized to near death. His tooth was broken. His finger was cut with a pen knife.” They state that after the assault he was “dumped at Mlolongo Police Station,” a facility associated with extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. His phone signal, they report, was traced there.

The party posted a photo of Omole in a Mlolongo Police Station cell February 25, explaining that he is being held unlawfully, “and the police have refused all access to him. No lawyers. No comrades. No family.”

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) denounces Omole’s abduction and demands that the Kenyan regime release him immediately.

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The repression against the CPM-K is part of the escalating violence of the Ruto regime since he came to power in 2022. In 2023, Ruto’s first year in power, security forces killed at least 31 demonstrators. In June 2024, during the Gen Z protests against Ruto’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) Finance Bill that sought to impose savage tax hikes, police killed more than 60. In 2025, at least 50 were killed in protests and hundreds injured.  

The abduction of Omole takes place amid an escalating campaign of repression against opposition figures in the run-up to next year’s elections. Weeks ago, police violently dispersed a rally in Kitengela organized by the former and expelled the general secretary of ODM, Senator Edwin Sifuna, firing tear gas and live rounds at thousands of supporters. One of the victims, 28-year-old Vincent Ayomo, was shot in the eye as he crossed the road from work and another 50 attendees were injured.

This deepening turn to repression unfolds against a backdrop of extreme social inequality and mounting economic hardship. Oxfam reports show that nearly half of Kenya’s population lives in extreme poverty, surviving on meager daily incomes, even as wealth accumulates at the very top. A minuscule layer of the super-rich has amassed obscene fortunes: the richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than 77 percent of the population—over 42 million people.

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The attacks on the CPM-K, the abductions, arbitrary detentions and cross-border renditions to neighboring Uganda under brutal dictator Yoweri Museveni, carried out by the Kenyan government, are political preparations for far broader assaults on the democratic rights of the population as a whole. What is being tested against one organization today will be used tomorrow against striking workers, protesting youth and impoverished communities resisting austerity.

These events lay bare the grave dangers confronting the masses as social tensions intensify and the ruling elite closes ranks in defense of its wealth and power. 

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The turn to open repression in Kenya is being emboldened by the example set by would-be dictator Donald Trump in the United States. Thousands of armed ICE agents have been sent into major urban centers, while detention centres have been built across the country, with 66,000 people held in immigration custody—the highest level in US history. These crackdowns have left two American protesters killed.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron and the political establishment have exploited the death of fascist activist Quentin Deranque—following clashes around an event addressed by Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed)—to whip up a reactionary campaign against the left. Backed by the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and the Socialist Party, a broad political front is seeking to criminalize opposition and prepare the ground for an authoritarian shift in advance of next year’s presidential elections. As with Charlie Kirk in the US, the death of a fascist is being weaponized to strengthen the repressive powers of the state and legitimize far-right forces.

In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) government is deploying the army into townships under the pretext of restoring order. It follows the mass killings of protesters in Tanzania in the aftermath of last year’s elections, where thousands were reported killed or disappeared amid a brutal post-election crackdown, and the ongoing suppression of opposition forces in Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni.

These developments are expressions of a global crisis of capitalism. From Washington to Paris, Pretoria to Nairobi, ruling elites confront deepening inequality, mass anger and political instability. Their common response is to fortify the police state apparatus, promote far-right forces and normalize violence against social opposition.

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The ICFI has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the CPM-K, which have been clearly presented in the World Socialist Web Site. But it unequivocally opposes this brutal attack on the organization’s general secretary, demands Omole’s immediate release, and calls for an end to all state threats and repressive acts against the CPM-K. 

10. An historic attack on citizenship rights: Labor blocks entry to Australians interned in Syria

It is now clear that the Albanese Labor government, urged on by Australia’s political and media establishment as a whole, is doing everything it can to prevent the return home of Australian citizens—women and children—who have been incarcerated in primitive concentration camps in Syria since 2019. 

This constitutes a historic assault on the core democratic right of citizenship, without which no other political or civil rights can effectively be exercised—including the rights to vote, reside, politically communicate, travel, work and access health, education and welfare services. It takes away the basic right to challenge government decisions, including arbitrary detention without trial.

To strip a person of Australian citizenship constitutes punishment “tantamount to civil death,” according to the High Court, Australia’s supreme court, which ruled in 2022 that citizenship cannot be revoked by ministerial decree.

The most immediate targets are 11 women and 23 children—all Australian citizens with valid passports—who were prevented from returning to Australia last week because of alleged various links to killed or imprisoned Islamic State (ISIS) fighters. 

The 11 families had left the Al Roj internment camp in northeastern Syria with plans to travel to Beirut and then Australia, only to be turned around 50 kilometres into their journey. Many of the children were born in detention and have known no other life, deprived of essential care and education, resulting in illnesses and deaths. 

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While the Labor government has denied media reports that it directly blocked the repatriation of the women and children by telling Syrian authorities they were unwanted “terrorists,” Albanese has doubled down on his declarations that the government will do nothing to assist them, even if it is “unfortunate” for the children. 

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Every day sees this assault taken to a new level. Yesterday, the opposition Coalition demanded that the government join hands with it to make it a criminal offense to help Australians “linked to terrorist hotspots or terrorist organizations” return home. This would even include charities such as Save the Children. 

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Last week, the Murdoch media’s Australian published an editorial insisting that lack of legality should be no obstacle to indefinite imprisonment. If the government could find no legal basis to bar the re-entry of the families, “a way (unspecified) must be found for them to be detained and evaluated for an extended period in a secure facility such as the one that already exists on Christmas Island.” The editorial said the women and children must be “effectively deradicalized before there is any chance they will be set loose on Australian soil.”

Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, hosts one of the notorious “offshore” detention camps in which successive Coalition and Labor governments have indefinitely incarcerated asylum seekers in violation of international and domestic law. Now that “black hole” regime is being proposed for Australian citizens who are deemed by a government and ASIO to require “deradicalization.”

This is a sweeping proposition, embracing some kind of brainwashing. It goes beyond those accused of sympathy for Islamic fundamentalism, without being convicted of any crime. It goes beyond Palestinians and anti-Gaza genocide demonstrators who have been falsely accused of antisemitism.

Such “deradicalization” language, linked to references to threats to “our way of life” or “Australian values,” can be used to justify barring entry or incarcerating anyone—including Australian citizens—who is designated by a government to be a “radical” enemy of the existing capitalist economic and political order.

Historically, there has never been a constitutionally protected right to citizenship in Australia. In fact, there is no bill of rights guaranteeing any basic right, including the right to vote. Instead, the 1901 Constitution, a British colonial era document adopted by the emerging Australian capitalist class, treated residents as “British subjects.” 

That designation continued until after World War II, when the Chifley Labor government introduced the 1948 Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948. Under this legislation, birthright (jus soli) citizenship made anyone born in Australia a citizen. That principle was overturned by the Hawke Labor government’s legislation in 1986, which mandated that at least one parent be a citizen or permanent resident. 

That marked a historic shift from basing citizenship on birth to requiring allegiance, or “loyalty to Australia,” and supposed shared values, together with a “pledge of commitment” from immigrants. Today that commitment, amended several times, requires new citizens to pledge their “loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect and whose laws I will uphold and obey.”

Yet these “rights and liberties,” as far as they ever existed, are being increasingly torn up.

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The intensifying saga surrounding the women and children trapped in Syria shows that the most basic legal and democratic rights, even citizenship itself, are threatened in the hands of the ruling class and its political servants. The defense of all such rights depends on the development of a mass movement of the working class, guided by a socialist perspective for the total reorganization of society on the basis of genuine democracy and equality, with full rights for all people, regardless of their country of birth.

11. Militarization of Australian universities intensifies: More than $200 million in defence contracts since 2024

The expanding contracts with universities feed into the next phase of the AUKUS military pact between the US, UK and Australia, targeting China.

12. Two Pennsylvania students remain imprisoned 4 days after anti-ICE protest as “Quakertown 5” face felony charges

Five teenagers arrested last Friday after police attacked an anti-ICE student rally in Quakertown, Pennsylvania are now facing felony aggravated assault charges, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Notably, no charges have been filed against Quakertown Police Chief Scott McElree, who was captured on video in plain clothes grabbing students by their shirt collars and placing a teenage girl in a chokehold.

The Inquirer reported that the five teens “face charges of aggravated assault and related crimes,” citing two people with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.

More than four days after the police assault, the cops have refused to release the teens’ names, ages, or specific charges. Despite tracking the students after they left the campus on Friday, police have refused to provide a detailed timeline of events leading up to the attack. They have withheld body camera footage and offered only a brief statement claiming police intervened after students were “throwing snowballs” and “blocking traffic.”

The paper confirmed that only children were arrested during the incident, contradicting earlier reports that an adult had been taken into custody.

A 17-year-old girl who attended the protest but was not arrested told the Inquirer that students were speaking with a uniformed officer when Chief McElree “barged onto the sidewalk” and grabbed a teenage boy by the back of the neck.

The students did not know the man in plain clothes was the police chief. “All the kids thought he was a counter protester. So everyone started to protect their friends.” 

She said she saw McElree throw one student to the ground and choke another. At least three students suffered significant injuries. One student’s nose was broken while a separate student suffered a chin injury that required stitches.

The teen recorded part of the encounter. “It was really scary, because it was a group of kids versus this really angry man.”

The students were held for over 72 hours before appearing before a judge Tuesday morning in a more than three-hour hearing that was closed to the public. Prosecutors declined to answer reporters’ questions after leaving the courtroom.

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These teenagers now face the possibility of spending years in prison, a significant portion of their young lives, while the billionaire president and his criminal administration continue to cover up the murders of American citizens in Minnesota, prepare for illegal war against Iran, carry out deadly murders in the Caribbean and Pacific, and suppress evidence of their own criminal conduct exposed in the Epstein files.

13. UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman calls for solidarity with Turkish miners’ wildcat strike

The miners have halted production to demand payment of unpaid wages, enforcement of promotion rights, retroactive contract benefits, guaranteed seniority and severance protections, and genuine health and safety measures.

14.. United Kingdom: Royal Mail workers in Keighley, West Yorkshire: “They are trying to kill off the postal service”

Postal workers at the Keighley delivery office in West Yorkshire spoke out against intolerable working conditions, mail backlogs and the collusion of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) leadership in enforcing Royal Mail’s restructuring agenda.

15. Mass protests in Detroit area against plans for ICE detention and operational centers

Hundreds of people in Romulus and Southfield, Michigan, protested Monday evening against plans to expand ICE operations across the Detroit metro area.

16. 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.

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

A patrol car blithely cruises past distressed people on Turk Street in San Francisco while the Democratic Party National Convention takes place mere blocks away

1. The World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board describes the real state of Trump’s America: Social misery, dictatorship, war—and an upsurge of class struggle

This is the real state of Trump’s America in the 250th year since the Declaration of Independence: a society riven by class antagonism on a scale not seen since the Gilded Age, ruled by a criminal oligarchy that has dispensed with even the pretense of democratic governance, lurching toward war abroad and dictatorship at home.

But there is another side to the equation, and it is the decisive one. The same crisis driving the ruling class toward fascism and war is propelling the working class into struggle. A developing strike wave, the mass anti-ICE protests, last year’s “No Kings” marches, the ongoing and walkouts by high school students—These are the initial expressions of a social force that neither party of big business can contain.

The critical question is one of political program, perspective and organization. The opposition to the Trump administration cannot be entrusted to the Democrats, who are complicit in everything he does. It must be based on the independent mobilization of the working class.

Workers must form rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood to coordinate resistance, demand an end to the ICE terror, defend immigrants, and prepare for a general strike against the government’s program of war, austerity and dictatorship. The building of such committees, organized on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program, is the only realistic strategy for defeating the fascistic conspiracy of the American oligarchy.

2. Union bureaucrats shut down Kaiser Permanente strike without a contract

The strike was shut down without a contract, without a membership vote and without any substantive details about negotiations. Workers were instructed to return to their jobs by 7:00 a.m. Tuesday morning.

The union justified this betrayal with the deliberately vague claim of “significant movement at the bargaining table.” But rank-and-file nurses, pharmacists and clinicians had been told repeatedly that the strike would continue until a “fair contract” addressing wages, staffing and patient safety was secured. Instead, they were directed to stand down without knowing what, if anything, had been won.

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This is a flagrant violation of members’ basic democratic rights, and healthcare workers should organize to overturn this decision made over their heads. They must continue the strike, under new leadership drawn from rank-and-file healthcare workers rather than career officials, with democratic control over all future talks to prevent a betrayal. 

The order to shut down the strike came the same day that 500 operating engineers at Kaiser from the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) launched their own strike. By ending the larger strike, UNAC/UCHP is isolating and betraying fellow Kaiser workers.

The shutdown of the strike comes after similar maneuvers by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) to shut down a strike by 15,000 nurses in New York City. After 6 weeks, NYSNA forced an end to the last holdouts at NewYork-Presbyterian with a sellout contract. The strike went on another week at that hospital after workers overwhelmingly rejected a contract which had been brought to a vote in violation of the union bylaws.

Both strikes are part of a broader resurgence of the class struggle, driven by impossible social conditions, which is intersecting with mass opposition to the Trump administration’s rampage against democratic rights. Tens of thousands of workers across California are poised to strike in the coming weeks, including teachers at the Los Angeles Unified School District and graduate students across the University of California system.

The mass protests against ICE raids point to a growing radicalization in the United States. During the mass protests in Minneapolis following the ICE murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, people around the country began discussing the need for a general strike. This shows that broad layers, disgusted with the inaction of the Democrats, are turning to the working class as the new basis for a fight against fascism and oligarchy.

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For nearly three decades, relations between UNAC/UHCP and Kaiser management have been governed by the so-called Labor Management Partnership, which was explicitly founded to prevent strikes. Kaiser even threatened to walk away from national contract talks on the grounds that the union’s modest criticisms violated the LMP agreement’s commitment to “norms and behaviors reflective of mutual respect, trust, and the Parties’ joint commitment to creating a workplace culture of collaborative problem solving.” 

The strike itself, however, shows that there can be no “collaboration” between nurses fighting for the right of their patients to high quality healthcare and corporate executives seeking to maximize profits by slashing spending to the bone.

The fight at Kaiser is not just over wages and staffing ratios at one network—It is against the domination of US healthcare by profit interests. Recent court cases have exposed the “non-profit” sham of Kaiser and other major healthcare providers. The corporation agreed to pay $556 million to settle allegations of Medicare fraud involving the inflation of patient risk scores to obtain higher government reimbursements, a scheme that federal investigators said generated roughly $1 billion in improper payments.

Even after paying the settlement, Kaiser sought to recover $95 million from insurers through litigation, an attempt to offset losses and preserve surpluses. Just weeks ago, it reached another $28 million settlement over failures to provide adequate mental health services.

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Ultimately, the decisive issue is: What social interests dominate the healthcare system? The financial oligarchy that subordinates care to profit and war, or the workers whose labor sustains safe and humane treatment for patients? The experience of the Kaiser strike demonstrates that this question demands that workers themselves assume conscious leadership of their struggle. 

3. Union shuts down South Australian nurses’ strike in backroom deal with Labor government

The union-government deal is a betrayal of nurses and midwives’ deep-seated anger over real wage cuts and intensifying workloads throughout South Australia’s public health system.

4. US begins pulling staff from Beirut embassy amid Iran attack buildup

The pullout follows a pattern established before Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, when the US reduced its presence at embassies in Baghdad, Kuwait and Bahrain in the days before B-2 bombers struck Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22.

The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest warship, arrived at Souda Bay on the island of Crete on Monday after transiting the Mediterranean and is expected off the coast of Israel within days. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is operating in the Arabian Sea. Scores of fighter jets, bombers, refueling aircraft and antimissile batteries have poured into the region. More than 40,000 US personnel are stationed across military bases and naval assets in the Middle East.

The New York Times reported Sunday that this is “the largest military force [the US] has concentrated in the region since it prepared for the invasion of Iraq, nearly 23 years ago.” The Washington Post wrote Monday that a senior Persian Gulf official told the paper that Arab countries have informed Washington they would not allow their bases to be used for a strike against Iran, and that Iran’s threat to retaliate against any country that supports the US operation has raised questions about Washington’s ability to secure overflight rights.

Talks between the US and Iran are scheduled for Thursday, February 26, in Geneva. But the record of US “diplomacy” with Iran refutes any belief that Washington is seeking a negotiated settlement.

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The reported debates within the administration point to the massive stakes and consequences of the threatened war. An attack on Iran would involve a vastly greater scale of retaliation than Venezuela, potentially involving significant numbers of US casualties. Iran possesses over a thousand ballistic missiles, advanced drones, cruise missiles and a network of proxy forces. It has threatened to strike US bases across the region if it is attacked.

The Washington Post reported Monday that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine cautioned Trump and senior officials at a White House meeting on Tuesday, February 17, that “shortfalls in critical munitions and a lack of support from allies will add significant risk to the operation and to U.S. personnel.”

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Iran has placed its armed forces on the highest state of alert and is positioning ballistic missile launchers along its western border with Iraq and along the Persian Gulf, within range of US military bases.

Ayatollah Khamenei told an audience last week: “The most powerful military in the world might receive such a slap that it won’t be able to get on its feet.” He has named four layers of succession for each military and government role, named three potential successors to himself, and delegated authority to a tight circle of confidants in the event he is killed.

The Democratic Party has offered no opposition to the preparations for war. None of its leading figures, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, has issued any statement condemning the threatened attack.

5. Canada’s Liberal government backs imperialist regime change in Iran

Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand emphasized the federal Liberal government’s full-throated support for imperialist-imposed regime change in Iran at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month.

“We will not open diplomatic relationships with Iran unless there is a regime change. Period,” she told reporters from the Globe and Mail. Earlier the same day, Anand announced sanctions against seven individuals she claimed were “linked to Iranian state bodies responsible for intimidation, violence and transnational repression targeting Iranian dissidents and human-rights defenders.”

In remarks dripping with hypocrisy, Anand demanded that “the repressive Iranian regime must curtail the consistent and illegal violation of Iranian human rights, including by respecting international law and international humanitarian law.”

As the Trump administration massed its naval and air forces in the Middle East to prepare a potentially devastating assault on Iran, 60 heads of state and hundreds of high-ranking foreign affairs and defence officials gathered in Munich to navigate what conference organizers termed a new era of “wrecking ball politics” and “sweeping destruction.” With a US aircraft carrier battle group looming in the Arabian Sea, a second en route and over 120 fighter jets poised to launch weeks of air strikes, Anand cynically refused to say whether Canada would support an unprovoked and illegal US military attack on Iran.

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Anand’s declaration of Canada’s support for imperialist-orchestrated regime change in Iran coincided with the “global day of action” called by the exile Iranian Crown Prince for February 14. Right-wing opponents of the Iranian regime demonstrated in Munich, Los Angeles and Toronto, where the pre-1979 Iranian flag with the monarchy’s emblem and pro-monarchy chants were widespread. Demonstrators denounced the regime’s bloody crackdown on protests that began in December of last year, which were initially motivated by the economic hardships induced by the US-led sanctions but quickly became dominated by right-wing, pro-imperialist forces. The imperialist powers seized on the bourgeois-clerical regime’s violent crackdown against the protests to escalate preparations for war as part of American imperialism’s relentless drive to secure dominance of the Middle East. The demonstration in Toronto explicitly called for the Canadian government to recognize Pahlavi as the leader of Iran’s “democratic transition.”  Draped in the flag of the Iranian monarchy, demonstrators, many of them wearing Make America Great Again caps, marched down Yonge Street chanting “King Reza Pahlavi!”

6. Fascist mobilisation after Quentin Deranque’s death

A political front, embracing fascist groups, the Socialist Party, the extreme right National Rally (RN), all the way up to Macron and his government, seeks to carry out an offensive against democratic rights and a mounting opposition to the installation of a police-state dictatorship. The objective is to clear the way for either of RN’s candidates, Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella, to assume power after the current local elections and presidential elections next year.

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The ruling classes seem to have made their choice for the RN. The millions of voters who aspired to a left government and voted LFI are now considered a problem for the potential victory of the RN. The state’s immediate role is to repress the opposition of youth and workers to the installation of an authoritarian regime in France.

7. After Supreme Court decision, Trump tariff war to intensify

The US Supreme Court may have ruled that sweeping tariffs imposed by invoking an “emergency” under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) were illegal, but the tariff war will go on and possibly even intensify.

That was the message from US President Trump after the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision struck down his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” first unveiled last April and subsequently used to impose a series of shakedown deals on major US trading partners, including commitments from Japan and South Korea to make investments of hundreds of billions of dollars in the US.

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In an action not carried out by any president before him, Trump has invoked the tariff under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act.

This provides for a tariff of up to 15 percent to be imposed for 150 days after which Congressional approval is required for an extension.

During the operation of the Section 122 tariff, which applies across the board and unlike the “reciprocal tariffs” under the IEEPA cannot be varied for individual countries, the Trump regime will seek a more permanent basis for its tariff regime, initially using Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act.

In television interviews, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the new tariffs would be temporary to ensure the continued inflow of money. He described the Section 122 imposts as a “five-month bridge during which studies on Section 232 tariffs and Section 301s are done.”

In a social media post over the weekend, Trump hinted that other means may also be developed.

“During the short number of months, the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible tariffs, which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of Making America Great Again,” he wrote.

While he suffered a setback as a result of the decision, Trump made clear he was determined to press ahead using presidential authority.

“While I am sure they did not mean to do so, the Supreme Court’s decision made a president’s ability to regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful, and more crystal clear,” he said. 

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Trump said that in response to the decision he would seek to use Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. This provides for the US to impose tariffs long-term if it is decided, after an investigation, that a country is engaged in unfair trade practices against the US.

While tariffs imposed by this means may be “potentially higher” than those previously imposed, they cannot be applied across board, as was the case with the “reciprocal tariffs,” but only on a country-by-country basis and the investigation which is required to precede their imposition can sometimes take months.

The administration has other weapons as well, the use of which could be extended. Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act allows the president to impose tariffs on specific goods for “national security” reasons. It has already been used by Trump to impose tariffs on steel, aluminum as well as to initiate investigations into pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and other high-tech goods.

A key issue which has arisen as a result of the court decision is the fate of the “deals” imposed on a range of countries with the threat if they did not comply, they could be hit with massive “reciprocal tariffs.”

At this stage it appears that these so-called agreements will largely remain intact, though there may be some maneuvering where a final deal has not been reached.

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The deals with South Korea and Japan, which involved major concessions to the US in the form of investments, will remain in place because of the threat of auto tariffs not subject to the Supreme Court ruling.

The European parliament is meeting this week to consider the ratification of the so-called Turnberry agreement of last year—widely regarded as a capitulation by the European Union to the US.

The European Commission said it wanted “full clarity” on the next steps by the Trump administration. European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde said clarity from the administration was critical and that new measures would need to be “in compliance with the constitution, in compliance with the law.”

*****

Within the US, one of the major issues will be the reimbursement of corporations which have paid the bulk of the tariffs so far—despite Trump’s insistence they were being borne by “foreigners.”

The Supreme Court made no ruling on this issue; neither to say the administration could keep the money it had already collected nor indicating any means by which corporations might seek redress. It appears to have thrown the matter back to the lower courts. 

*****

The Supreme Court ruling does not mean that there will be some return to constitutionality by the Trump regime or a restoration of the status quo ante as far as international economic relations are concerned—quite the opposite.

8. United Kingdom: Reject CWU/Labour government whitewash of Royal Mail crisis: for rank-and-file opposition to corporate collusion

Public anger must not be diverted, nor our independent organization blocked against renewed attacks on jobs, terms and conditions and the crippling workloads imposed by those responsible for a wrecking operation.

9. Turkish parliamentary committee overwhelmingly approves report on negotiations with Kurdish Workers Party

The parliamentary commission established as part of Turkey's negotiations with the PKK mainly advances the outlook of the Erdoğan government while receiving the support of the Kurdish DEM Party. 

10. Oppose the persecution of high school students protesting ICE! Mobilize the working class against dictatorship!

Across the United States, students are being threatened, suspended, arrested and violently attacked for exercising basic democratic rights.

11. High school students protesting ICE remain jailed days after police assault in Pennsylvania

Days after video showed a police chief choking a student, at least five youth remain in custody as authorities stonewall the public.

12. US-backed "execution" of Jalisco Cartel chief threatens greater carnage in Mexico

Far from marking a “victory” in the so-called war on drugs, the “execution” of El Mencho under US pressure threatens to provoke an even more violent and destabilizing struggle within and between cartels, which will in turn be used as the pretext for a massive strengthening of the repressive apparatus against the working class.

Defense Secretary Ricardo Trevilla openly acknowledged that US intelligence was decisive. El Mencho was located after being tracked when he traveled to meet a lover already under surveillance.

“This administration has greatly strengthened its relationship with the US Northern Command, and there has been an exchange of information and data. This is a very important flow of information, and that is how we arrived at this specific case,” Trevilla said.

At the same time, Trevilla insisted that the operation demonstrated the “strength of the Mexican state” in a nationalist statement suggesting that the Mexican state can act on its own. The White House confirmed that Northern Command played a key role and publicly “thanked” the Mexican military for the “successful execution” of Oseguera.

Nevertheless, US President Donald Trump added contemptuously on social media: “Mexico must intensify its efforts against the cartels and drugs!”

Trump’s statements underscore the openly colonial attitude of US imperialism. Only days before, in a Fox & Friends interview, he declared that “the cartels are running Mexico. She’s not running Mexico,” referring to President Claudia Sheinbaum, and again threatened to deploy the US military south of the Rio Grande.

*****

The fundamental reality facing Mexico—the Hitlerian ambitions of the White House for neocolonial control, the major social crises in both the United States and Mexico and the country’s geographic position feeding countless billions into drug trafficking—lays bare that capitalism offers no solution to the mass violence ravaging Mexico.

The safety of workers and their families do not depend on strengthening the Army, the National Guard or their ties to the Pentagon. It cannot be achieved through any of the bourgeois parties—from Morena to the PRI and PAN—or through nationalist appeals to “unite the nation” behind the security forces. On the contrary, it is only possible through an international political struggle against all factions of the ruling class and against imperialism, aimed at dismantling the entire apparatus of capitalist exploitation and repression.

13. Berlinale award winners demand festival and its backers take a clear stand against Gaza genocide

The support for Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza by the German government and the country’s official cultural institutions was the subject of fierce and prolonged protest at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). 

From the start of the festival, Berlinale management and the head of the festival jury, Wim Wenders, had determinedly sought to evade any discussion of the devastation taking place in occupied Palestine and block all criticism of the state of Israel.

On several occasions, festival director Tricia Tuttle declared that taking a clear position on the genocide in Gaza was not possible due to the “complexity” of situation. Tuttle repeated the phrase once again in her defensive speech at the festival closing ceremony. Wenders had gone even further, declaring at the start of the festival that the correct response by artists was to “stay out of politics.” This led to novelist Arundhati Roy’s cancelling her appearance at the festival and other expressions of outrage. Wenders later nervously retreated somewhat, asserting that: “Activists are fighting, mainly on the internet, for humanitarian causes, namely the dignity and protection of human life. These are our causes as well.”

In any event, to the dismay of Tuttle and Wenders and the German establishment, politics dominated the closing evening of the Berlinale.

 *****

A series of further articles [at the World Socialist Web Site in coming days] will deal with some of the most notable films on show at the festival. 

14. Australia: Early childhood educators in Victoria set to strike

Educators remain trapped in a cycle of low pay, excessive workloads and chronic staff shortages.

15. Australia: Questions about Bondi terrorist attack remain unanswered

More than two months since the December 14 terrorist attack on a Jewish gathering at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in which two Islamic State-inspired gunmen murdered 15 people, questions about how the atrocity was able to be perpetrated remain entirely unanswered.

*****

But despite its centrality to political life, the attack itself is increasingly remote in the official discussion. It is invoked in passing to justify sweeping attacks on the democratic rights of millions of people, without reference to the background, political identity or connections of the perpetrators themselves.

There are two basic reasons for that contradiction.

Firstly, the attack has been seized upon by the ruling elite and its political representatives, above all the Labor governments, to crackdown on the mass movement against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which had no connection whatsoever with the Bondi atrocity. Secondly, information that has emerged about the perpetrators raises grave questions about the role of state and federal authorities, particularly the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), the domestic spy agency.

*****

There is also the question of the relationship between western intelligence agencies and Islamic State itself. The organization was spawned by a US-led intervention into Syria beginning in 2011, when the CIA funneled billions in cash and weaponry to Islamist militias fighting the Iranian- and Russian-linked government of Bashar Al-Assad. The US was in a de facto alliance with the group that would become the Islamic State, only beginning operations against it when it crossed back into Iraq, threatening Washington’s control over oil resources.

The current Syrian regime is the end product of the regime-change operation. Its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, an Al Qaeda terrorist who previously had a US bounty on his head, has been feted in Washington and has moved to normalize ties with Israel.

That is a reminder that in foreign policy, reactionary Islamist forces have frequently been used as the direct or de facto instruments of US imperialism and its allies. Domestically, their activities, often conducted under the eye of the intelligence agencies, have been invoked to crackdown on democratic rights and to legitimize further militarism.

16. Workers Struggles: The Americas

Argentina:

Protests against anti-labor legislation continue in the wake of a 24-hour general strike

Brazil:

Protests by indigenous groups against Cargill warehouse

Mexico:

Retired workers protest in Guerrero state

 

Health workers hold protest at the federal capitol

Canada:

Saskatchewan Catholic school workers vote to strike 

Education workers at Yukon University move toward legal strike position

United States:

USDA to allow increase in meatpacking line speeds

Arizona legislature proposing draconian penalties against protest actions by teachers in wake of anti-ICE killings

 

Palmyra, New York machinists strike over living standards and working conditions

 

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

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