Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Gaza without the bombs: US regime change operation in Cuba deepens inequality, mass hunger
The deliberate strangulation of Cuba’s economy by the Trump administration has created a humanitarian catastrophe that could lead to mass death comparable to the Gaza genocide without the bombs.
The White House’s designation of Cuba as an “extraordinary threat” to US national security on January 29 has launched a US regime-change operation to unilaterally use hunger, disease and social collapse as weapons against an entire population. This is collective punishment on a national scale, banned under international law.
The tightening of the illegal, decades-long US blockade, combined with secondary sanctions and tariff threats against third countries supplying fuel and goods, has pushed living conditions to the edge.
Social infrastructure is disintegrating. The Spanish daily El País reports a 70 percent shortage of basic medicines, with doctors estimating that the physician-to-patient ratio has deteriorated from one per 350 inhabitants in the 1980s to roughly one per 1,500 today.
Dengue, chikungunya and other mosquito-borne and respiratory diseases are spreading rapidly, exacerbated by stagnant water, uncollected garbage and blackouts that shut down refrigeration, clinics and water pumps. Satellite imagery shows that power availability was already about 50 percent below normal in January. Now, reports indicate that over 60 percent of the island spends most of the day without electricity.
Universities have been forced to shut down or slash operations as scholarships are cut and campuses go dark. Many primary and secondary schools have also shut completely.
Families spend entire days queuing for cooking gas, fuel or a few scarce staples, instead of working or studying.
Analysts estimated the country had only 15–20 days of fuel reserves. This was three weeks ago. Emergency measures have temporarily extended this: a four-hour workday in many state institutions, drastic limits on interprovincial transport, and sharp reductions in hotel and tourism operations. But these are stopgap measures.
Barring a sudden reversal of US policy or massive external aid, the island’s economy faces an effective shutdown.
On Monday, Trump cynically declared that “Cuba is now a failed nation,” boasting that the island “has run out of fuel for airplanes” and adding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio “is talking to Cuba right now.” He concluded: “They should absolutely make a deal because it’s really a humanitarian threat.”
The gangster-like logic is unmistakable: Washington creates the “threat” through strangulation, then demands “negotiations” on its own terms to prevent an even greater catastrophe.
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The emerging picture is of rival factions of the ruling elite vying to offer themselves as US imperialism’s preferred conduit. While this conflict could escalate into violence, for the Cuban ruling elite as a whole, the current disaster is seen not only as a threat but as an opportunity: a chance to impose massive shock-therapy measures—privatizations, mass layoffs, the sell-off of state property—to restore profitability for international capital, offering Cuba as a cheap-labor platform and secure their own wealth and privileges.
This trajectory has roots that reach back to the origins of the Castro government. Four months after taking power in 1959, Fidel Castro insisted: “I have stated in a clear and definite manner that we are not communists. The doors are open to private investments that contribute to the development of industry in Cuba. It is absolutely impossible for us to make progress if we do not reach an understanding with the United States.”
The US embargo forced Havana to seek aid from the USSR and to place large sectors of the economy under state ownership; however, the orientation to a deal with US imperialism and the preservation of a capitalist state and class exploitation over the working class never disappeared.
2. Jesse Jackson: From civil rights to black capitalism
More than any other individual, Jackson embodied the transformation of the civil rights movement—its conversion from a mass working class movement against racial oppression into an “interest group” in the Democratic Party and a tool for the social advancement of a narrow stratum of the black upper middle class.
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For decades Jackson was one of the most recognizable figures in American politics. He seemed to be everywhere: on picket lines and in presidential campaigns, as well as in corporate boardrooms and cable-news studios—habitually presented, and in effect anointed by the media, as the heir to Martin Luther King Jr.
His death has prompted tributes from different quarters of the ruling class. Former President Biden remembered him as “a man of God and of the people,” while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called him “one of the most powerful forces for positive change in our country and our world.” Republican Nikki Haley commended him as “a principled fighter,” and none other than Donald Trump called him “a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts.’”
That such praise comes so readily—from leading Democrats and Republicans, and even from the fascist Trump—reveals something of Jackson’s chameleon-like role in American political life. Contrary to the image he cultivated and the fevered imagination of his media and pseudo-left cheerleaders, Jackson was at no point in his career a genuinely “left” or oppositional figure.
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His 1988 campaign won 13 primaries and caucuses and nearly 7 million votes, drawing on the residual authority of the civil rights struggles among workers battered by deindustrialization and the broader Reagan-era assault on living standards. But for all his rhetoric—he called Carter’s deregulation policy a “domestic neutron bomb”—Jackson proved himself again and again to be the party’s most reliable campaigner, delivering votes for Democratic presidential nominees, each one farther to the right than the last: Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Biden and Harris.
If Jackson is mourned in ruling circles, it is for this service: He could speak in the language of protest while channeling support back within the boundaries of the existing order. Jackson’s view of Obama is revealing. He quite correctly regarded the younger man as a carpetbagger dropped into Chicago to ride the Democratic Party machine to national office, and in 2008, unaware his microphone was live, was heard saying he wanted to “cut his nuts off,” adding that Obama was “talking down to black people.” This did not stop him from endorsing Obama and shedding a tear when Obama was elected.
Unlike Obama, Jackson had genuine connections to the black working class and the civil rights movement. Born in segregated Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, Jackson came of age amid the grinding poverty and daily humiliations of Jim Crow. The “shotgun shack” where he was raised by his grandmother lacked running water or sewerage. As a teenage student activist and then a college SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) organizer, Jackson was drawn into the civil rights movement at a time when activists were murdered and maimed in the South.
Jackson, however, quickly revealed his personal ambitions. He was present at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. By then their relationship was already strained, in no small part over King’s suspicions about Jackson’s financial operations in Chicago, where he had been sent in 1966 to head Operation Breadbasket, the movement’s arm in the urban North. In the hours after the assassination, Jackson appeared on national television claiming to have cradled the dying King and heard his last words—a claim disputed by others present—deepening the bitterness within King’s inner circle and coloring Jackson’s subsequent ascent.
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King was in any case a figure of fundamentally different character—a mass leader in the genuine sense, and one whose political evolution brought him into increasingly direct conflict with American capitalism and imperialism. The movement he led was marked by a deep internal contradiction between the conservative aims of its middle class, mainly clerical leadership and the revolutionary strivings of the masses.
King’s own answer to that contradiction had grown increasingly radical. He acknowledged that the movement’s gains had been “limited mainly to the Negro middle class” and argued that addressing the degradation of the majority required a multiracial movement of the poor. “We are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism,” he told his staff. “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
His denunciation of US imperialism—branding Washington as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”—made him an enemy of the American state, as FBI files have made abundantly clear. This likely contributed to his assassination in 1968, a crime never adequately explained.
After King’s death, his successors—with Jackson prominent among them—moved further to the right, abandoning talk of systemic change and aligning with the affirmative action framework advanced under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to cultivate a privileged black professional layer by giving them a “piece of the action,” as Nixon put it.
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When his 1988 tax returns were made public, they revealed that Jackson had been “parlaying his services in defense of the capitalist system and the Democratic Party into a personal fortune,” as The Bulletin, newspaper of the Workers League, reported at the time. His combined household income grew from $59,000 in 1984 to over $200,000 by 1987, while he donated less than 1 percent of it to charity. Jackson died with a net worth estimated at $4 million—tiny compared to the oligarchs who control American politics today, to be sure.
Jackson’s main activity was always to promote the black elite, as the conditions of the vast majority of black workers steadily declined along with those of the working class as a whole. “To black entrepreneurs, especially the big ones, Jesse Jackson is a benevolent godfather,” as his biographer put it. In 2001 he published a self-help book co-authored with his son Jesse Jackson Jr.: It’s About the Money!: The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony: How to Build Wealth, Get Access to Capital, and Achieve Your Financial Dreams.
Jackson’s prominence as a political figure faded after the 1980s. In that decade, from the steel and auto shutdowns to the Hormel and Phelps Dodge strikes, Jackson was dispatched again and again by the trade union bureaucracy to walk picket lines, to lead prayers and to urge “responsible” settlements. Veterans of those struggles recall that when Jackson arrived, it usually meant the vultures were circling and a dirty betrayal was being prepared to send workers back without their basic demands, or worse.
From the Pittston Coal strike in 1989 to the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995 to the Flint water crisis of 2016, he continued to appear as a fixer and a conciliator rather than the advocate he claimed to be. But his sway over working people had sharply diminished. When he visited Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after the police murder of Michael Brown, the crowd greeted him with taunts: “When you gonna stop selling us out, Jesse?” and “We don’t want you here in St. Louis.”
In subordinating opposition to the Democratic Party, Jackson facilitated and was part of the decades-long lurch of American politics to the right, which has now entered a new stage as Trump erects a presidential dictatorship. As he wages a war on the Constitution, acting on behalf of the oligarchy, Trump is reviving and bringing forward all the reactionary filth of the past, including the most backward forms of racism and chauvinism.
3. New York University contract faculty threaten strike action to win first contract
The current strike authorization vote, which goes from February 9 to 20, comes after more than a year of bargaining where NYU administration has rejected key demands, according to the union.
4. 1,100 California State University skilled trades workers launch 4-day strike across 22 campuses
On February 17, roughly 1,100 skilled trades workers across the California State University system launched a four-day strike after voting to support a walkout by an overwhelming 94 percent last December. The dispute with campus administrators is a direct confrontation with the austerity measures being implement by Governor Gavin Newsom and other state Democrats.
The workers, members of Teamsters Local 2010, include plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, locksmiths and building maintenance staff at all 23 campuses of the California State University system. They are demanding wage increases and step raises that were promised under their agreement but are now being withheld.
These workers make the campuses function. They maintain electrical systems, repair plumbing, ensure fire safety compliance, service heating and cooling during extreme weather and keep student housing operational. Without their labor, classrooms cannot open safely, laboratories cannot function and dormitories cannot remain habitable. Yet despite the centrality of their work, they are being told that the state cannot afford to honor a 5 percent general salary increase and scheduled step raises that were to take effect in July 2025.
At the center of the dispute is the administration’s refusal to implement those increases. Workers fought to restore a step system recognizing years of service and skill, reversing earlier concessions. Now CSU management claims it lacks the funds, citing a 3 percent reduction in base state funding and reliance on a one-year zero-interest loan from Sacramento to close the gap. The university argues that certain raises were tied to “new, unallocated, ongoing state budget funding” and that such funding did not materialize under the current budget framework.
Instead of permanent wage gains, the administration has proposed a one-time 3 percent bonus. For workers confronting soaring rents, rising healthcare costs and persistent inflation in California, a non-recurring payment does nothing to reverse long-term wage erosion. It does not increase base pay, does not compound over time and does not improve retirement calculations. It is, in effect, an attempt to cut compensation.
A building service engineer with 38 years at the university said, “We shouldn’t be paid less than the cost of living. The inflation rate right now is about 2.5-2.7 percent. We’re trying to get 2 percent, and they say no.
“It’s just outrageous to see how workers are fighting for just 2 percent. You see the ultra-rich people getting their money. They take advantage of the workers. Lots of people are working two jobs. Some have the kids and the uncles and everybody pitching in just to buy a house for a big family. Otherwise, you cannot buy a house anymore. That’s very sad. This is the wealthiest country in the world, and the workers are not being rewarded. So the best thing to do is walk off the job.”
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The CSU walkout is unfolding amid a broader wave of labor unrest in education and healthcare. At the University of California, 48,000 graduate student workers affiliated with the United Auto Workers have voted overwhelmingly to authorize strike action. In K-12 education, 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles within the Los Angeles Unified School District have approved strike action over pay, staffing and class size, even as LAUSD announced 657 layoffs. In Northern California, educators represented by United Educators of San Francisco conducted a four-day strike before union officials announced a tentative agreement that remains unratified.
Combined, these education workers number close to 100,000 in California alone. When healthcare workers are included, such as the 31,000 on strike at Kaiser Permanente facilities and others across hospitals and clinics, the collective social power is immense. A unified movement of university staff, graduate workers, K-12 educators and healthcare workers would constitute a direct political challenge to the state government responsible for funding priorities.
Yet such coordination has been prevented by the union apparatus. Teamsters Local 2010 has confined the CSU strike to its own bargaining unit. There has been no organized effort to link the struggle with UC graduate workers, LAUSD teachers, San Francisco educators or striking nurses, despite shared grievances and overlapping timelines. Contracts are compartmentalized. Bargaining is isolated. The fragmentation of what is objectively a common fight is not accidental.
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At the national level, Sean O’Brien, general president of the Teamsters, has aligned the union apparatus with President Donald Trump and his reactionary “America-First” chauvinism. At the same time, the Teamsters bureaucracy has sold out major struggles, including of UPS workers in 2023, paving the way for mass layoffs.
For CSU workers, the immediate question is how to overcome isolation. The broadening of the struggle and winning this fight will not be achieved through closed-door negotiations by Teamsters bureaucrats, campus administrators and Democratic politicians.
Last week, academic student employees across the University of California system voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike by 48,000 members of the United Auto Workers at one of the largest and most prestigious public university systems in the United States.
Three UAW locals whose members are graduate student researchers, teaching assistants, postdoctoral scholars, professional academic staff, Student Services and Advising Professionals and Research and Public Service Professionals participated in the vote. According to UAW Local 4811, more than 23,000 workers cast ballots, with 93 percent voting in favor of strike action.
With contracts set to expire March 1, academic workers are demanding wages and benefits that keep pace with soaring housing, food and transportation costs, as well as secure teaching and research appointments.
The strike authorization is part of a broader eruption of struggles among educators and other workers throughout California. It follows the four-day strike by San Francisco teachers and huge strike votes by educators in Los Angeles and Sacramento. On Tuesday, more than 1,000 skilled trade workers walked out at 22 campuses in the California State University system. In addition, 35,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers in California and Hawaii have been on strike since January 26.
More than 1,000 members of Contract Faculty United-UAW at New York University are also currently voting on strike authorization.
The University of California system, which includes campuses such as the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego, employs tens of thousands of academic workers who carry out much of the teaching and research at the state’s flagship public universities.
UC academic workers previously waged a three-week strike in May–June 2024 to oppose the violent crackdown on anti-genocide protests and the violation of free speech rights on campus. That powerful walkout was shut down by the UAW leadership after Orange County Superior Court Judge Randall J. Sherman issued a strikebreaking injunction, claiming—on the specious grounds—that the strike, not police violence, was causing “irreparable harm” to students’ education.
The latest vote comes as the UAW apparatus moves to contain struggles elsewhere. On Tuesday, the union announced a last-minute deal to prevent a strike by 3,700 graduate workers at the University of Pennsylvania. As of this writing, however, the union has not released the full contract language, and rank-and-file graduate workers have had no opportunity to review, discuss or vote on the agreement.
In response to the UC strike authorization, Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker from Pennsylvania and candidate for UAW president, issued a statement urging academic workers to take their struggle “out of the hands of the UAW bureaucracy” and place it under the democratic control of the rank and file.
“The overwhelming strike-authorization vote by some 48,000 University of California academic workers is a powerful expression of class anger,” Lehman said. “Graduate student researchers, teaching assistants, postdocs and professional academic staff sustain teaching, research and the daily functioning of the UC system while surviving on wages and stipends that leave many at or near poverty in one of the most expensive states in the country.”
Lehman stressed that the struggle pits academic workers not only against university administrators but against the Democratic Party establishment that dominates California politics. Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democratic supermajority in Sacramento oversee a state that is home to more billionaires than any other in the US.
“The Democrats insist there is no money to meet the most basic needs of workers and students,” Lehman stated. “Yet they pour billions into corporate tax cuts and subsidies for Silicon Valley tech giants, Hollywood monopolies, energy conglomerates and the military industries.”
Many corporate executives and financiers sit on the UC Board of Regents, which governs the university system and ensures its alignment with Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.
Lehman urged workers to draw the lessons of their 2024 strike. That walkout, he noted, was initiated from below in response to police repression of campus protests against the US-backed Israeli assault on Gaza. The UAW delayed calling a strike and initially limited it to a handful of campuses. Only under mounting rank-and-file pressure did it expand the action.
When the UC administration secured a court injunction declaring the strike illegal, the UAW bureaucracy immediately capitulated and shut it down.
At the time, the Biden administration was overseeing a nationwide crackdown on campus protests, with Democrats and Republicans alike denouncing anti-genocide demonstrators and threatening funding cuts. Lehman pointed out that the UAW leadership aligned itself politically with the Biden-Harris administration, even as anti-genocide protesters were expelled from a UAW meeting endorsing President Biden.
Repression has intensified further under the Trump administration, Lehman said, pointing to the detention and deportation of international students for their political views and the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in major cities.
“The function of the trade union bureaucracy is to contain working class struggles and subordinate them to the political framework of the two corporate parties,” Lehman stated.
He cited the blocking of the strike at the University of Pennsylvania as a warning of how the UC struggle could be dissipated. “After months of bargaining and a strike authorization vote, a last-minute tentative agreement was announced and the strike called off before the full contract language had even been presented to the membership,” he noted.
Lehman called on UC academic workers to form democratically elected rank-and-file committees, independent of the UAW apparatus, to oversee bargaining, demand full transparency and ensure that no strike is suspended without a full membership review and vote.
“Academic workers are part of a broader eruption of struggle—healthcare workers, teachers, logistics workers and manufacturing workers across California and nationally,” he said. “The objective conditions exist for coordinated action.”
Lehman, who is running for UAW president on a program of abolishing the union apparatus and transferring power to rank-and-file workers, argued that the fight for wages and job security cannot be separated from the defense of immigrants, democratic rights and opposition to war.
“UC academic workers have taken an important step,” Lehman concluded. “The task now is to ensure that this strike mandate is not dissipated. Build rank-and-file committees. Demand full democratic control. Link up with workers across the country and internationally. Take the struggle out of the hands of the bureaucracy and place it where it belongs—in the hands of the working class itself.”
6. Seven Los Angeles County public health clinics to end clinical services
Seven county-run public health centers in Los Angeles County will terminate clinical services on February 27, 2026. The decision, announced by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, will end vaccinations, tuberculosis screening and treatment, sexually transmitted infection testing and other services. The move impacts some of the county’s most impoverished and medically underserved communities, deepening the crisis in a public health system that serves more than 10 million people.
County officials have attributed the closures to a $50 million shortfall within the department’s current budget and a projected $2.4 billion deficit across the broader county health system over the next three fiscal years. The clinics slated for closure are located in Antelope Valley, South Los Angeles, Inglewood, Hollywood-Wilshire, Pomona, Torrance and at the Dr. Ruth Temple Health Center. In several of these communities, the centers being closed function as the primary or sole point of access for preventive and infectious disease care.
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Notices of layoffs, reassignments and reductions are already being issued with potential layoffs of up to 5,000 county staff. A hiring freeze is already in effect and current staff are facing reassignments, job insecurity and the real possibility of termination if roles cannot be found or funded. Even if they are reassigned, being forced to commute long distances serves as a “de facto” layoff for those who cannot manage.
Affected workers are in Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 721, the California Nurses Association (CNA) and other unions. As of this writing, the union bureaucracy has said nothing about this development, while tens of thousands of nurses are on strike in New York, California and Hawaii.
These closures are tied directly to sweeping reductions in federal and state funding, under Democrats and Republicans alike.
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At the state level, the Democratic administration of Governor Gavin Newsom has played a direct role in worsening the crisis. While posturing as an opponent of Trump, through the 2025-26 state budget the California Democrats have curtailed expanded Medi-Cal eligibility for undocumented adults and reduced reimbursement rates, measures that further destabilize county clinics already under strain.
At the local level, the Democratic-controlled Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has responded to the mounting deficit by shifting the burden onto working class residents. The “Essential Services Restoration Act,” placed on the June 2026 ballot as a referendum, would impose a temporary half-cent sales tax increase projected to raise roughly $1 billion annually.
Sales taxes are inherently regressive, consuming a larger share of income from low-wage workers and poor families rather than from the wealthy. The proposed county tax would force those losing neighborhood clinics and preventive services to finance their partial restoration out of shrinking paychecks.
The trade union bureaucracy is deeply integrated with the Democratic Party, especially in California, and functions to corral the class struggle before it can threaten the status quo.
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In a market-driven framework, healthcare operates as a commodity. Capital flows to hospital chains, insurers and pharmaceutical corporations, while preventive clinics in low income neighborhoods generate no returns. Tuberculosis outreach, STI tracking and free vaccinations are socially essential but financially marginal.
Programs like Medicaid once offset this imbalance, but those gains were always vulnerable. The attack on healthcare at the federal level under President Donald Trump further eroded public health protections. California officials have followed the same logic, shifting costs downward rather than confronting concentrated wealth.
The consequences are concrete. Clinic closures weaken disease surveillance, delay treatment and push preventable conditions into emergency rooms, raising costs and suffering alike. What is unfolding is not merely local mismanagement but part of a national erosion of public health gains won through decades of struggle.
Responsibility lies with a political order, bipartisan in character, that subordinates social need to profitability. The crisis in Los Angeles County is a systemic signal: Vast wealth exists, but under capitalism it is allocated according to accumulation at the top, not human well-being.
7. Los Angeles school district announces hundreds of job cuts
Some 3,200 layoff notices will be sent and at least 657 jobs cut, part of plans to reduce as much as $1.4 billion from the district's budget.
8. Washington mobilizes for war, as Iran’s bourgeois-clerical regime offers major concessions
The threat of a massive American military onslaught on Iran and a broader region-wide war continues to loom large over the Middle East following the latest round of bilateral talks in Geneva Tuesday.
9. AI turmoil continues on 2 fronts
With the development of new AI tools disrupting established business models, financial markets are “wracked with uncertainty” about what comes next.
10. Zohran Mamdani threatens to increase property tax on New York City workers
Mamdani announced that unless the New York state legislature increases taxes on the rich and on corporations, he will implement a 9.5 percent increase in property taxes in the city to balance the annual budget.
11. Volkswagen to impose 20 percent cost reduction across all brands, threatening jobs and plants
Thirteen months after agreeing to cut 35,000 jobs, the Volkswagen Board of Management is planning the next round of cuts—this time across all group brands.
12. Leader of Australia’s far-right One Nation party goes on Islamophobic tirade
Hanson’s comments underscore the reactionary climate that has been cultivated by the political and media establishment, particularly in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack.
13. Australia: Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee supports striking US nurses and healthcare workers
Australian doctors, nurses, pathology and disability support workers, as well as other hospital services employees, passed a powerful resolution backing the determined strike action by health workers in New York, California and Hawaii.
14. Australian state Labor government imposes anti-democratic “code of conduct” changes on school staff
While presented as necessary to combat “hate speech” and ensure students feel safe, Labor’s conduct rule changes are a weapon to silence opposition to the ongoing Gaza genocide and imperialist war more broadly.
The February 2 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at an Amazon facility in Hazel Park, Michigan, aroused widespread anger and alarm among workers in the Detroit area.
The ICE raid was conducted in full view of Amazon workers at the Hazel Park facility, resulting in the arrest of two Venezuelan men—Edwin Vladimir Romero Gutierrez and Angel Junior Rincon Perez—who are now imprisoned at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan.
Romero Gutierrez and Rincon Perez were both reporting to work when they were seized and abducted by ICE agents.
The assault on immigrants is the tip of the spear in the Trump administration’s attempts to destroy whatever is left of democratic rule and establish himself as a dictator.
The ongoing ICE rampage in Minneapolis and across the country has made it clear that this terror operation is not only aimed at the immigrant community but at the working class as a whole, native- and foreign-born alike.
The targeting of Amazon Flex drivers in particular is especially significant, due to the fact that a considerable number of gig workers are immigrants who take on these highly exploitative positions when they are faced with no other means of employment.
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According to Amazon, “Flex is at the forefront of delivery operations, owning a significant piece of Amazon's ‘Last Mile’ delivery strategy at present and into the future.”
Amazon intentionally misclassifies these workers as self-employed “independent contractors” in order to extract the maximum amount of surplus value from its workforce and minimize its legal and fiscal responsibilities by transferring economic risk and business costs onto the workers themselves.
According to the official Amazon Flex website, “Most drivers earn $18–$25 an hour delivering with Amazon Flex. Actual earnings will depend on your location, any tips you receive, how long it takes you to complete your deliveries, and other factors.”
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However, through the Amazon Flex labor model, where workers are deemed “independent contractors,” all legal and financial liability falls onto the workers themselves. Business expenses such as cars, gas, tolls, maintenance, insurance, work phones, cellular service and other equipment are deducted from the overall pay of the worker.
When an Amazon Flex driver experiences a car breakdown, a broken phone or an injury on the job, the workers themselves must foot the bill.
According to a Human Rights Watch survey, gig workers in Texas earn an average of $5.12 an hour—approximately 70 percent below a living wage—after taking into account the costs associated with gas, maintenance, insurance, and unforeseen repairs such as flat tires or broken windows.
It is common for gig workers to report making less than their city’s or state’s legally mandated minimum wage and often being forced to choose between paying for either rent or food at the end of the month.
16. CBS censors Stephen Colbert’s interview with James Talarico, Texas Democrat for US Senate
The interview with Talarico was taped in New York as a standard “Late Show” segment and was slated to air on Monday’s broadcast. The interview is part of Talarico’s campaign to unseat Republican Senator Ted Cruz in Texas in the November midterm election. After the taping, however, CBS’s lawyers informed the show that, according to the new guidance from Trump’s FCC stooge Brendan Carr, airing the discussion could trigger “equal time” obligations to other candidates, including Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett and Republican contenders.
According to multiple reports, the legal department explicitly told Colbert’s team that Talarico could not appear in the broadcast and warned that even acknowledging the network’s decision on air could create additional regulatory risk. Colbert nevertheless opened Monday night’s show by telling viewers that the interview had been pulled and that he had been instructed not to say so, turning the first minutes of the program into an open confrontation with his own network.
With the broadcast segment suppressed, the Colbert show shifted the full, roughly 15‑minute conversation with Talarico to YouTube and other online platforms, which are not governed by the broadcast‑era equal time rule. The Monday CBS broadcast then promoted the online interview while refusing to show it, a split distribution that dramatized the widening gap between regulated broadcast outlets and comparatively less regulated streaming and digital platforms.
As of this writing the YouTube stream has received 3.1 million views which is greater than the average nightly viewership of Colbert’s program which is reported to be between 2.3 and 2.8 million viewers.
During his opening monologue, Colbert defied the orders not to mention either Talarico or the internal decision to cut the segment from the broadcast. “Talarico was supposed to be here,” Colbert told the audience, before explaining that “we got a call directly from my network’s lawyers, who said, in no uncertain terms, that we could not have him on the show.”
He went further, describing how the censorship was meant to be invisible. “I was told—not very clearly—that not only could I not have him on, I could not even say that I couldn’t have him on.” Colbert then turned that instruction on its head, adding, “Since my network clearly prefers we not talk about this, let’s talk about it.” Thus, Colbert was making it clear he would use the remaining months of his show to challenge corporate and state interference with political content.
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A telltale sign of the hand of the Trump White House was the ever-evolving series of lies about what happened. The network insisted that, “The Late Show was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview,” but that it “was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled.”
With this explanation, CBS was claiming that it was the show’s own decision to move the Talarico interview to YouTube and promote it from the broadcast “rather than potentially providing the equal-time options,” as though it were a matter of a cost-benefit analysis.
No one believes this. This explanation shows how far CBS, owned by Paramount Skydance, is prepared to go to support the Trump White House, no matter the claims about “guidance” and “options” coming from the FCC. The corporate decision makers issued an order and tried to use the threat of an FCC enforcement as justification.*****
What is at stake is not formalistic compliance but the use of equal time as a pretext to suppress political speech in entertainment formats that reach millions of viewers and often provide the only venue where candidates are questioned aggressively or informally. By treating Colbert’s interview as a potential violation—while also leaving the propaganda function of sympathetic right‑wing outlets untouched—the Trump‑led FCC is signaling that it will selectively deploy regulatory tools against media as needed for explicitly political purposes.
FCC chair Brendan Carr–who played a filthy role in the Jimmy Kimmel affair last year–has been central to this policy. In a January 21 notice to networks and in subsequent comments at his monthly press conference, Carr argued that the long‑standing exemption for daytime talk shows and late‑night programs had been abused, saying the agency would take a “more proactive stance” in responding to complaints from candidates excluded from such shows.
Carr warned that programs that want the exemption must behave like genuine news operations: “If you’re fake news, you’re not going to qualify for the bona fide news exemption,” he said, in comments that late‑night hosts and press freedom advocates interpreted as a threat to treat comedy shows as campaign advertising rather than editorial content.
At the same time, Carr lashed out at reports that he is “removing” the exemption, insisting he is merely enforcing the statute and its legislative history. The contradiction between Carr’s formal denials and the practical effect of his guidance reveals the fundamentally political character of the move.
The conflict over the Talarico interview is part of the Trump administration’s threats to revoke broadcast licenses of networks he considers hostile or “fake news,” and has sought to use regulatory agencies, including the FCC, to intimidate and discipline media outlets.
The Talarico case is also bound up with Trump’s obsession with Texas, a rapidly changing state where demographic and political shifts have raised the prospect of a competitive Senate race. As Talarico himself noted in the YouTube segment, “I think Donald Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas,” linking the FCC’s sudden focus on his appearances on “The View” and “The Late Show” to the administration’s desire to limit the exposure to his criticisms of Trump.
Paramount Skydance is controlled by David Ellison, who became chairman and CEO of the combined company after the Skydance–Paramount merger closed and the new Paramount Skydance Corporation was formed. Under the post‑merger ownership structure, Ellison holds about 50 percent of the voting rights, with his father Larry Ellison holding 27.5 percent and RedBird Capital 22.5 percent, making David Ellison the key controlling owner in practice.
Estimates of David Ellison’s personal net worth before the merger put it at around 500 million dollars, largely tied to his stake in Skydance and its hit franchises like “Top Gun: Maverick.” After the merger his wealth is now widely understood to be significantly higher, although precise current figures are not publicly disclosed.
Ellison has a close, collaborative relationship with Donald Trump and his administration. He has repeatedly visited the White House during Trump’s second term, often alongside his father, a long‑time Trump ally.
News reports indicates that David Ellison met privately with Trump at the White House in early February 2026, holding two extended discussions just days before Trump publicly claimed to be “not involved” in Paramount’s aggressive bid to take over Warner Bros. Discovery and CNN. Ellison has reportedly assured Trump officials he would “reform” CNN if he acquired it.
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The role of Paramount Skydance shows that decisions about what tens of millions see are made by a tiny group of billionaires whose overriding concern is their profits and making sure that their candidates remain in office while trampling on fundamental democratic rights.
The gangsterism of the financial oligarchy is exercised through de facto control over the information environment by ownership concentration, regulatory leverage, and the constant threats of economic retaliation. Under the oligarchy, information is being managed such that anything that could offend the Trump regime or threaten the concentration of corporate assets is silenced by fines, legal action or being put out of business.
17. François Legault and the sharp right-ward lurch in Quebec politics
Outgoing Premier François Legault and his CAQ government have played the leading role—alongside the separatist Parti Québécois—in fomenting an ever-more explicitly far-right, anti-immigrant Quebec nationalism.
18. Sri Lanka: 12 death sentences imposed for killing an MP amid 2022 uprising
On the basis of threadbare evidence and flawed legal reasoning, a court sentenced 12 people to death in what amounts to an act of class vengeance, designed to intimidate rising opposition to the present government’s austerity program.
19. South Africa’s ANC to deploy army to police the working class
Protests in South Africa, and the conditions that gave rise to them, echo the experience of the youth-led uprisings seen elsewhere on the continent. The deployment of the army is a pre-emptive measure by the ruling class.
20. Royal Mail workers in London oppose CWU union leaders
Royal Mail workers at the Mount Pleasant Mail Centre in central London have been discussing the call by the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee for a fightback against CWU collusion with billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group and the Starmer government.
21. 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.
