Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The science and politics of ultra-processed foods
The rise of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) cannot be understood apart from the economic and political forces that have reshaped global diets over the last half century. What began as a corporate strategy to maximize profit through cheap ingredients and industrial food processing has grown into a dominant dietary pattern across much of the world. These products have become embedded in daily life because the system that produces them is designed to prioritize corporate returns, not human health.
The consequences are soaring rates of diet-related chronic disease, the replacement of traditional food cultures, and growing dependence on commodities engineered to be consumed rapidly, repeatedly, and in enormous volume. Claims that the spread of ultra-processed foods simply reflects consumer preference obscure the underlying economic imperative driving this transformation.
The Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, promoted by anti-vaccine quack Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, as a bold effort to confront the nutritional and metabolic crisis, has adopted rhetoric critical of ultra-processing. But it is advancing policies that leave the industry’s power untouched. This is a deliberate effort to take advantage of popular distrust of the giant agribusiness corporations while actually serving their interests.
It is in this global diet and nutrition situation that gives the Lancet Series—a comprehensive three-paper scientific assessment released in November 2025—its profound significance. The Series brings together 43 leading experts whose careers have shaped modern understanding of nutrition, food systems and corporate influence.
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Ultra-processed foods are not simply “processed foods” in the everyday sense; they are industrial formulations engineered to replace whole foods and traditional meals. Defined as Group 4 in the NOVA classification, these products are made largely from cheap ingredients extracted, refined, or chemically modified from food—starches, sugars, industrial oils, protein isolates—combined with additives that would rarely appear in home or commercial kitchens.
Their defining feature is not the degree of processing but its purpose: to create inexpensive, shelf-stable, hyper-palatable products that can be manufactured at scale and sold at high profit margins. To achieve this, they rely on cosmetic additives such as artificial flavors, colors, sweeteners, emulsifiers and thickeners that simulate taste, aroma and texture while masking the poor quality of the underlying ingredients.
Common examples include sugar-sweetened beverages, packaged snacks, mass-produced breads, sweetened breakfast cereals, instant noodles, reconstituted meat products, flavored yogurts, frozen entrées, and many “energy,” “protein” or “nutrition” bars and drinks. While not all industrially produced foods qualify—pasteurized milk and frozen vegetables remain minimally processed—the products that dominate the UPF category share the same design logic: low-cost base ingredients, extensive industrial transformation, and an additive-driven sensory profile.
Ultra-processed foods are created to be convenient, aggressively marketed, and consumed frequently. These characteristics, rather than individual nutrients, set them apart from minimally processed or traditionally prepared foods and explain why they have become central to modern diets and to the global health crisis.
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By the early 21st century, ultra-processed foods had become dominant sources of dietary energy in many high-income nations and increasingly central to diets elsewhere. Their global spread reflects not a response to nutritional needs but the logic of industrial production: low-cost ingredients, technological standardization, and a design philosophy aimed at maximizing consumption and profit.
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UPFs are disproportionately consumed by populations affected by economic constraints, gender, and time poverty. Their affordability and convenience make them attractive to people working long hours or living in constrained conditions, or to women, who disproportionately continue to bear the primary responsibility for food preparation in many cultures. Instead of alleviating these burdens, UPFs often reinforce structural inequities by facilitating low-wage labor, not challenging gendered domestic roles, and displacing environmental and social burdens to low- and middle-income countries.
This is not a side effect but an integral feature of a system that profits from the erosion of traditional diets and the intensification of time and labor pressures. The global expansion of ultra-processed foods is driven not by consumer demand but by the economic structures that shape that demand. By making minimally processed foods increasingly inaccessible—due to cost, time, or availability—while saturating markets with cheap ultra-processed alternatives, corporations shift the burden of nutritional harm onto populations with the least economic and political power.
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Ultra-processed foods have reshaped diets across the world, displacing traditional eating patterns at a pace unmatched in modern history. In high-income countries, this shift is now deeply entrenched: UPFs routinely make up half or more of daily caloric intake, and despite small declines in categories such as sugary beverages, overall consumption remains structurally high. The pattern has not reversed; it has simply recomposed itself within the same industrial model.
The most rapid transformation is occurring in middle-income countries. As the Lancet Series documents, transnational food corporations have aggressively expanded into Latin America, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, using low-cost pricing, supermarket penetration, and targeted marketing to replace longstanding dietary traditions. In China, UPF consumption has more than tripled; in countries such as Brazil and Mexico, it has doubled over recent decades. These markets now account for the strongest global growth, with sales projected to reach parity with high-income countries.
Children and adolescents have become especially exposed. UPFs saturate schools, childcare centers, sporting environments, digital platforms, and retail corridors. With taste preferences and metabolic pathways still developing, young people are uniquely vulnerable to habitual consumption. Evidence summarized by UNICEF and researchers in the Series links early UPF exposure to emerging metabolic disturbances, developmental concerns and mental health impacts.
A substantial body of scientific evidence now shows that ultra-processed foods harm the body through multiple, reinforcing pathways. Large prospective studies and systematic reviews—synthesized in the Lancet Series and in recent umbrella analyses published in the BMJ—link high UPF consumption to more than 30 chronic conditions, including type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, several cancers and increased all-cause mortality. These associations are not isolated observations but follow a clear dose-response pattern: for every 10 percent increase in the share of UPFs in the diet, the risk of premature death rises by roughly 15 percent, and cardiovascular disease risk increases by about 12 percent.
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In practice, MAHA aligned itself with the voluntary “self-regulation” model favored by the very corporations driving the crisis, a framework that has repeatedly proven ineffective in every country where it has been applied. MAHA’s recommendations therefore functioned not as a challenge to the UPF industry, but as a political shield that preserved its dominance.
This underlying contradiction became even more apparent when placed in the context of the administration’s broader agenda. While MAHA spoke of improving national nutrition, the government simultaneously advanced deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and proposed reductions to Medicaid. Public health researchers, anti-hunger advocates and independent economists unanimously warned that these cuts would intensify food insecurity, worsen diet-related disease and leave millions of families unable to afford medical care. A program that claims to “make America healthy” while stripping away the foundations of food and healthcare access stands exposed as a political fraud.
MAHA also placed extraordinary emphasis on “precision nutrition research”—a highly individualized biomedical framework centered on personalized genetics, supplements and boutique diagnostics. Nutrition scientists criticized this approach as “the antithesis of public health.” By shifting attention from the food environment to individual biology, precision nutrition obscures the structural forces that determine dietary patterns simply as another version of the promotion of the false premise “medical freedoms.” This is not accidental. It mirrors corporate narratives that frame diet as a matter of personal responsibility, rather than the predictable outcome of food environments saturated with ultra-processed products.
The administration simultaneously elevated a series of pet grievances—food dyes, seed oils and isolated chemical additives—while ignoring the structural drivers of the UPF crisis. These issues, loudly amplified in public appearances, functioned as political theater. They channeled public confusion and frustration without ever confronting the economic structure responsible for the production, distribution, and marketing of ultra-processed foods. They also aligned closely with the administration’s broader hostility toward scientific institutions, which has included dismantling advisory structures, promoting ideologically driven claims and undermining evidence-based public health.
In this context, MAHA does not represent a break with past failures. It is a continuation and acceleration of them. Its political contradictions are intrinsic to a program that seeks to present the appearance of public health concern while maintaining allegiance to the corporate interests that dominate the US food system. It is this dynamic—an initiative that acknowledges the crisis while deliberately avoiding the measures required to resolve it—that defines MAHA as a paradigmatic expression of political evasion in the present period.
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The global crisis caused by ultra-processed foods cannot be resolved within the framework of the existing capitalist order. The food system is not malfunctioning; it is functioning according to its design. Ultra-processed foods dominate global diets because they are the most profitable commodities the modern food industry has ever produced, built on extremely cheap ingredients, industrial processing, and branding strategies that extract vast wealth. Between 1962 and 2021, publicly listed food corporations distributed more than $1.45 trillion to shareholders, with UPF manufacturers capturing much of that value.
Baker’s analysis in the Lancet Series exposes how deeply this model is embedded in global political structures. Eight corporations—Nestlé, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever, Danone, Mars, Mondelez, and Ferrero—anchor a network of 207 industry interest groups, nearly half located in Washington D.C. and Brussels. These groups coordinate lobbying, influence regulatory bodies, and intervene in trade negotiations to block public health measures. Their political playbook includes voluntary industry codes, scientific front groups, trade disputes through the WTO, threats to relocate investments, and strategic litigation—mechanisms designed to neutralize any attempt at binding regulation.
These corporations operate with state support. Agricultural and fossil fuel subsidies provide artificially cheap inputs. Codex Alimentarius—the international body jointly run by the FAO and the WHO that sets global food standards—focuses primarily on acute food safety and allows a wide range of additives and processing aids that facilitate UPF proliferation, while largely ignoring concerns related to chronic disease and long-term health. Competition policies remain weak or unenforced, and trade agreements regularly privilege corporate interests over public health. The result is a regulatory environment built around the priorities of global agribusiness corporations rather than the nutritional needs of populations.
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The scientific evidence leads inexorably to the political conclusion: ultra-processed foods will continue to harm health if the food system is governed by the logic of profit. Protecting human life demands replacing this logic with one grounded in social need. Only through the collective organization of the working class, acting on a global scale, can society build a food system that nourishes rather than exploits, sustains rather than destroys, and prioritizes human well-being over corporate power.
2. Democrats join Republicans to grant Trump $1 trillion in military spending for 2026
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday to pass the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), authorizing $901 billion in military spending—the largest Pentagon spending bill in US history.
The legislation, which is expected to pass the Senate next week, received overwhelming bipartisan support, with Democratic Party leaders voting in favor, as President Donald Trump threatens to launch a major new war in Latin America.
The vote was 312-112, with 115 Democrats joining 197 Republicans to pass the act. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California all cast “Yea” votes.
Combined with the $156 billion in supplemental military funding included in the reconciliation bill signed in July, the NDAA pushes total military spending for fiscal year 2026 to over $1 trillion—a new record in absolute terms and a level relative to GDP unseen since World War II.
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The massive military spending bill comes as the Trump administration has deployed more than 15,000 troops, a dozen warships and scores of aircraft to the Caribbean and Pacific in preparation for military action against Venezuela. This week, the Vermont Air National Guard confirmed that F-35 stealth fighters are being deployed to the Caribbean for “Operation Southern Spear.” EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets, typically used to suppress enemy air defenses before airstrikes, have also arrived at Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. The deployment is the largest US military mobilization in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
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The bill massively expands US nuclear weapons programs, shipbuilding and aircraft procurement in preparation for what the Pentagon openly describes as great-power conflict with China. According to the House Armed Services Committee summary, the United States is now “operating in the most dangerous threat environment since World War II” and faces “an axis of aggressors comprised of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.”
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A New York Times editorial published this week declared that the US must not be “overmatched” by adversaries and supported a major expansion of military capabilities. Citing a classified Pentagon assessment called the “Overmatch brief,” the Times reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last November that in war games against China, “we lose every time.”
“The picture it paints is consistent and disturbing,” the Times wrote. It added that “in the short term, the transformation of the American military may require additional spending, primarily to rebuild our industrial base.”
In other words, the “newspaper of record” aligned with the Democratic Party is openly advocating for even greater military spending than the record $1 trillion now authorized, framing it as necessary to prepare for war with China.
The trillion-dollar military expenditure comes amid deepening economic strain on American households. According to a Politico poll conducted last month, nearly half of Americans find groceries, utility bills, healthcare, housing and transportation difficult to afford. More than a quarter—27 percent—said they have skipped a medical check-up because of costs within the last two years, and 23 percent said they have skipped a prescription dose for the same reason. While working people are forced to choose between food and medicine, Congress has voted to hand over $1 trillion for global wars and the defense contractors who profit on them.
3. DHS secretary Kristi Noem before Congress: Fascist lies and Democratic Party pretense
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem testified Thursday before a semi-annual oversight hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, flatly denying that ICE and Border Patrol agents have violated the rights of immigrants and American citizens alike. In a final display of contempt for Congress, she left the hearing early, claiming a meeting at the White House, which had in fact been cancelled.
The nearly three-hour hearing demonstrated two fundamental political facts: The Republican Party and the Trump administration have embraced a fascistic policy towards immigrants; and the Democratic Party is content to do nothing about it, substituting handwringing or political theatrics, depending on the political requirements of each member.
Noem is one of the most corrupt members of the Trump cabinet, as well as one of the most slavish in her adulation of the president. In virtually every response to questions, both friendly and hostile, she combined fawning praise for Trump and denunciations of his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, as an alleged advocate of open borders (although he continued most of the repressive policies of Trump’s first term, deporting millions of immigrants and asylum seekers).
Two other officials, Joe Kent, head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, and Michael Glasheen, who oversees the FBI’s National Security Division, testified alongside Noem. Glasheen is a career official who was sent instead of FBI Director Kash Patel, in a calculated display of defiance of congressional oversight. Ranking Democrat Benny Thompson of Mississippi took note of the slight, but the Republican majority said nothing.
The presentation by Noem and Kent—a Special Forces veteran with 11 tours of duty in the Iraq war, twice defeated as a far-right Republican candidate for Congress—was taken apparently word for word from the new National Security Strategy document issued by the Pentagon last week. They declared the supposedly uncontrolled immigration during the Biden administration to be the greatest national security threat to the United States.
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Noem and Kent repeatedly denied that ICE agents had ever engaged in misconduct, that any US citizens had been wrongly deported, and that the immigration sweeps were rounding up thousands of ordinary workers, not the “worst of the worst” as Trump incessantly claims.
They made no attempt to disguise the blatantly racist and Islamophobic basis of Trump’s immigration policies. This was particularly apparent when two members of the fascist House Freedom Caucus, Eli Crane of Arizona and Andy Ogles of Tennessee, had their five minutes of questioning.
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The Democratic response consisted largely of political stunts, confronting Noem and Kent with cases of illegal and anti-democratic actions of immigration agents that flagrantly contradicted their own claims during the hearing.
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The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security arrogantly denied any violations of democratic rights by the ICE and Border Patrol gestapo, and walked out of the hearing before it was half over, thumbing her nose at Democratic Party protests.
4. Democrats release small group of photos from massive Epstein trove
Despite the news media hype about the photos, the release is extremely narrow when measured against the scale of what is known to exist. In other words, more than 99.9 percent of the known photos remain under wraps, not counting the additional visual materials in the possession of the FBI, the Justice Department and other agencies as part of the broader “Epstein files.”
The extremely restricted nature of the photo release further underscores efforts by both parties of the ruling class to engage in a calibrated, politically motivated leak operation, in which carefully chosen images are used for factional purposes while the mass of documentary material remains hidden from public view. Still by releasing 89 photos there is no doubt that the Democrats are casting Trump and his Justice Department as the principal obstacles to revealing the full truth about the financier’s connections.
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The White House has also portrayed the timing of the release—days before the December 19 deadline for the Justice Department to comply with the transparency law—as an effort to preempt and discredit whatever controlled disclosure the administration intends to make. In this narrative, Democrats are accused of trying to “smear” Trump personally while ignoring what the administration presents as its own commitment to “letting the facts come out” through the Justice Department’s document releases.
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With the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, compelling the Justice Department to release Epstein-related investigative materials by December 19, the materials are subject to redactions for victim identities and other active probes. An open struggle has emerged between different sections of the state: the DOJ has tried to slow-walk and narrow the release, while federal judges and now congressional Democrats have moved to pry open specific components of the files, using the law as a lever and each seeking to control the political narrative that will flow from the eventual disclosures.
5. General strike brings Portugal to a standstill
The general strike that brought Portugal to a standstill on December 11 marks a decisive escalation in the confrontation between the working class and the minority right-wing Democratic Alliance (AD) government of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro.
Its immediate trigger was the AD’s sweeping attack on what remains of workers’ rights established after the 1974 Carnation Revolution. The Trabalho XXI package is presented by the government as a “profound reform” of the Labour Code, revising more than 100 articles and aiming to “flexibilize, to value and grow.” It includes easier dismissals, expanded employer control over working hours and outsourcing, weakened collective bargaining, and attacks on maternity protections. The government also seeks to broaden minimum service obligations during strikes, extending them to more sectors and further limiting their impact.
On the eve of the strike, Montenegro insisted the government would not retreat, declaring, “The government respects the right to strike… but it is a government with a reformist spirit and will not give up on being reformist and transformative.” Despite his public refusal to “make a deal with Chega,” he will require the fascist party’s votes to pass the reforms in parliament.
Portugal’s first general strike in twelve years, jointly called by the Socialist Party (PS) aligned UGT and the Communist Party (PCP) aligned CGTP, shook the country, extending the wave of escalating class struggle across Europe. The action follows general strikes in Greece and Belgium, and in Italy where workers in the main CGIL union federation are striking today to oppose the budget of Georgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy government.
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By dawn on December 11, the scale of the walkout was unmistakable. Train services ground to a halt nationwide as rail workers joined the strike, leaving stations deserted and long-distance and suburban lines paralyzed. Lisbon’s metro—whose workers were among the first to walk out overnight—shut down almost entirely, operating only the minimal services enforced by the government.
Hospitals remained open for emergencies, but most surgeries and appointments were postponed as nurses and other health sector staff joined the walkout. Schools closed or operated with skeleton staffing, while municipal services, postal operations, and administrative offices were severely disrupted. Urban waste collection was almost universally halted, and major sanitation and water treatment companies shut down.
Air travel was similarly affected. TAP Air Portugal operated only one third of its usual 250 daily flights, with hundreds of cancellations across Lisbon, Porto, and Faro. Lisbon Airport—normally one of Europe’s busiest—was almost deserted. All 17 major fishing ports, operated by Docapesca, ceased activity—an extremely rare occurrence.
One of the most politically significant features of the strike was the unprecedented participation of private sector workers, long burdened by precarious contracts, low wages, high turnover, and fear of dismissal. For more than a decade, strikes had been dismissed as the actions of “privileged” public sector employees.
The December 11 walkout shattered that narrative. The strike extended into banking, insurance, industry, communications, and the cultural sector, with some companies reporting participation rates of 50 to 100 percent. Goods drivers and truckers joined the stoppage, disrupting deliveries and fuel logistics. The Volkswagen Autoeuropa plant—Portugal’s largest industrial exporter—was effectively shut down, with production halted and its supply chain paralyzed.
Even workers unable to strike voiced their anger. João Silva, a 32-year-old stationery worker, told Reuters, “I don’t have a permanent contract. I can’t go on strike… They want to fire older people so they can hire younger people with lower salaries. Why do labor changes always have to be in favor of company profits?”
6. Brazil’s Lula uses imperialist intervention in Venezuela as bargaining chip with Trump
On December 2, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva contacted Donald Trump by telephone to request further tariff reductions for Brazilian exports and to discuss a security agreement with the US government, which was publicized at the end of the call.
In an official statement, the Brazilian government declared that the 40-minute call resulted in a “very productive conversation” about “topics on the trade, economic, and fight-against-organized-crime agenda.” The statement added: “Lula indicated that the United States’ decision to remove the additional 40 percent tariff imposed on some Brazilian products, such as meat, coffee, and fruit, was very positive,” but “emphasized that there are still other tariffed products that need to be discussed.”
This friendly conversation between the supposedly “left-wing” Brazilian president and the aspiring US Führer took place as the Trump administration moves ever closer to the brink of full-scale war against Venezuela.
The second official topic on the call’s agenda was the Brazil-US cooperation on the “fight against international organized crime.” On this point, Lula “highlighted the recent operations carried out in Brazil by the federal government aimed at financially suffocating organized crime and identified branches that operate from abroad.” The statement concluded that “President Trump underscored his full willingness to work together with Brazil and that he will provide full support for joint initiatives between the two countries to confront these criminal organizations.”
It is precisely on the pretext of combating “narco-terrorism” that US imperialism under Trump is launching its unprecedented military and political intervention not only against Venezuela but Latin America as a whole.
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Lula is fully aware that attacks on defenseless fishing boats and Trump’s offensive against Nicolás Maduro’s government and others—such as Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, who Trump recently declared “is next”—have nothing to do with “combating narco-terrorism.”
On December 9, in an interview with the Guardian, Celso Amorim—one of Lula’s closest advisers and a former foreign minister—described the closure of Venezuelan airspace as “an act of war.” He stated that “it would not be just a war between the US and Venezuela. It would end up having global involvement and that would really be regrettable.” Amorim concluded: “If an invasion occurred, a real invasion… I think, without doubt, you would see something similar to Vietnam—on what scale, it’s impossible to say.”
In this context, while seeking concessions from Trump on his nationalist ambitions, Lula advances the idea that common ground between the aims US imperialism’s naked campaign of aggression and the interests of Latin America can be reached at the negotiating table.
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Refusing to make any direct condemnation of the most recent criminal attacks by US imperialism against Venezuela, Lula declared on December 11 in his usual Aesopian language: “I told Trump, ‘We don’t want war in Latin America, we are a zone of peace.’”
The working class cannot harbor any illusion that Lula or his counterparts in the region’s other bourgeois nationalist Pink Tide governments will fight imperialism and stop a catastrophic war. These dangers can only be overcome through a struggle to unify the working class in Latin America with its brothers and sisters in the United States in a fight to overthrow capitalism and establish international socialism.
7. Turkey: DEM Party international conference: The bankruptcy of the nationalist perspective
One of the main functions of the conference was to spread the illusion that negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), supported by US and European imperialism, could bring about democratization and peace, and to endorse Öcalan’s role and the anti-Marxist postmodern perspective he has developed.
Doctors have immense public support. Their fight is not a narrow pay issue but part of a broader political confrontation. It can become a rallying point for all National Health Service workers against the Starmer government’s austerity, privatization and militarism.
Teaching staff at The Valley Leadership Academy secondary school in Bacup, England are continuing strike action to protest pupils being taught by a virtual teacher (VT). After first walking out December 3, they took to the picket lines again on December 10 and 11.
Teachers were joined by supporters, including parents and pupils, making up a 40-strong picket. After picketing the school, they moved on to picket the headquarters of the Star Academies Trust in Blackburn, which runs the school.
The Star Academies Trust runs 36 schools across England in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, the Midlands, and London, including primary, secondary and grammar school.
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The action underlines the ongoing crisis in teacher recruitment and retention--bound up with decades of funding cuts, curriculum reforms and attacks on conditions by successive Conservative and Labour governments.
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The employment of VT staff sets a dangerous precedent. With ongoing spending cuts in education, VTs will be used to shore up the shortage of teachers, threatening jobs while blighting the learning experience of pupils which depends on face-to-face interaction with a teacher.
SchoolsWeek reported an increase to 1,200 schools expecting to face a budget deficit for 2024-25. It is not beyond the imagination that schools could contract one virtual teacher to be beamed simultaneously into many classrooms nationwide to save money.
A reporting team from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) spoke with parents and teaching staff, distributing the article “Teaching staff at Bacup secondary school in north-west England strike against virtual teaching introduced by Star Academies Trust.”
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A report commissioned by the Department for Education and issued last month, “Working lives of teachers and leaders: wave 4”, confirmed that overwhelming workload is a major contributor to teachers leaving the profession. Full-time teachers work over 50 hours per week, while school leaders put in 56 hours. Eight out of 10 teachers reported work-related stress, while two thirds said work leaves no time for a personal life. 29 percent said they are contemplating leaving within a year.
The revolutionary developments in technology bound up with the use of the Internet and AI has the potential to greatly enhance teaching and learning. It must be employed to assist qualified teachers in the classroom, not replace them or shore up a crisis in teacher shortages.
The danger is that the NEU bureaucracy is isolating the Bacup strike while Star Academies rolls out virtualization nationally. NEU Regional Officer Martin Ogilvie told WSWS reporters that “we think Star is looking to expand VTs out to other academies…” A spokesperson for Star Academies told the BBC The Valley remained open during the strikes; also, that there are already three VTs employed across the Trust.
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To achieve high-quality, fully staffed and funded education, educators must take the fight out of the hands of the trade union bureaucracy and build independent rank-and-file committees. Educators must link their fight with workers across public services who face similar attacks. This is a political struggle against a Labour government committed to austerity, war spending and the profits of the big corporations.
10. United Kingdom: Greater Manchester tram drivers to strike over fatigue
Tram drivers cannot entrust their dispute to the Unite apparatus, which attempted to sabotage their struggle before it even started.
The decision of the New Democratic Party’s unelected, three-person Leadership Vote Committee (LVC) to bar left-wing author and anti-war activist Yves Engler from standing in the race for the federal party’s next leader is a politically calculated act of censorship. One that is aimed at excluding any opposition, however limited, to Canadian imperialism from the spectrum of official NDP politics and bourgeois politics more generally.
A proponent of left Canadian nationalism, Engler announced via social media on the evening of December 9 that he had been declared ineligible to stand for NDP leader. Canadian Press subsequently reported that the party’s vetting committee had nixed Engler’s candidacy due to purportedly “credible evidence of harassment, intimidation and physical confrontation” of NDP members, staff and volunteers, and his alleged spreading of pro-Russian “disinformation” on the war in Ukraine and issuing of comments “consistent with antisemitic attitudes.” NDP president Lucy Watson issued the usual boilerplate about upholding “integrity, honesty and respect for human rights,” while the party refused to publish either the names of the committee members or the letters and material on which they claimed to have relied.
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Engler is being targeted because his past record as an anti-war campaigner and critic of Canada’s role in Haiti, the NATO war on Russia (including Ottawa’s decades long alliance with the Ukrainian far-right) and the genocidal onslaught in Gaza cuts across the NDP leadership’s slavish alignment with the foreign-policy objectives of Canadian imperialism.
The ruling class fully supports the Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney as it massively hikes military spending so that Canadian imperialism can assert its aggressive interests in a rapidly escalating third world war for the redivision of the world’s resources. This agenda necessarily entails a savage onslaught on what remains of public services, worker rights, and social supports, because the ruling class needs every penny for war and its own enrichment. Under these conditions, the social democrats in the NDP leadership and their sponsors in the trade union bureaucracies are terrified that giving a platform to any anti-war candidate, however confused and misguided his program, would legitimize social opposition and help fuel a social explosion in the working class that they would struggle to control.
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The most poisonous of the NDP’s accusations is the claim that Engler has made “comments consistent with antisemitic rhetoric.”
This is the standard slander now deployed across Canada and internationally to smear anti-genocide protesters and left-wing critics of Zionism and imperialist war. It has nothing to do with combating real antisemitism and everything to do with criminalizing opposition to Israel’s crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, and to the wider US–NATO campaign of aggression against Lebanon, Syria and Iran in which Israel functions as a forward operating base for imperialism.
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Engler was arrested by Montreal police in February on manifestly trumped-up charges of harassment and obstruction of justice based on a complaint filed by a Zionist activist in Toronto over his political activity on X. While the initial charges were dropped, he now awaits a judge’s verdict on charges of harassing police, because he urged his supporters email the authorities to demand they drop the original charges against him.
The smear of “antisemitism” against Engler is not an isolated case, but part of a conscious strategy deployed by the ruling class and its political parties. In Ontario, NDP leader Marit Stiles expelled Hamilton MPP Sarah Jama from the caucus after she issued a statement condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza and calling for an end to the occupation; her removal was accompanied by a media frenzy painting her as antisemitic for demanding a ceasefire and expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Across Canada, pro-Palestinian encampments and demonstrations have been met with police violence, disciplinary measures and legislative “anti-hate” initiatives that, as civil liberties lawyers have warned, systematically stigmatize Palestine solidarity and treat criticism of Zionism as suspect hate speech.
Internationally, the same playbook has been used to destroy and discipline left-wing tendencies inside the official parties of the bourgeoisie. In Britain, the Labour right and the media forged a campaign around antisemitism allegations to oust Jeremy Corbyn from leadership and purge his supporters; even the party’s own Forde Report acknowledged that antisemitism had been used as a “factional weapon” in the intra-party struggle.
In the United States, Congress and state legislatures have pressed to codify definitions of antisemitism that explicitly fold in core slogans and demands of the Palestine solidarity movement, such as the call for a single democratic state “from the river to the sea,” in an effort to criminalize boycotts and protests against Israel.
Taken together, these facts make clear that the NDP’s charge of antisemitism against Engler is not a good-faith concern for the safety of Jewish workers and youth, but an expression of a global campaign to equate opposition to genocide and imperialist war with hatred of Jews.
The party leadership has aligned itself with the Canadian state and its imperialist allies in seeking to silence and intimidate anyone who names Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and points to the role of Washington and Ottawa in arming and financing the slaughter. In doing so, the NDP not only slanders an anti-war activist; it trivializes real antisemitism and hands a powerful ideological weapon to the forces waging a murderous war against the Palestinian people and preparing even wider bloodshed in the Middle East.
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At the same time, the Engler episode is an indictment of the NDP Socialist Caucus and its Pabloite political parent organization, Socialist Action, which drafted him as their candidate and have for decades peddled the fraud that the NDP can be taken “back to its socialist roots.”
In a detailed analysis published last month, the WSWS explained that Socialist Action’s promotion of Engler as a vehicle to transform the NDP into an “eco-socialist” party that fights the billionaires and imperialist war is a cynical operation aimed at keeping workers and youth politically chained to a moribund, right-wing social-democratic apparatus. Canada’s social-democratic party, as we have shown, long ago completed its evolution into an openly bourgeois party indistinguishable from the Liberals and Conservatives on all fundamental questions of imperialist war and capitalist class rule.
Engler himself accepts the political framework of this operation. He does not call for a break with the NDP, but for its “democratization,” and is now threatening to wage a campaign of protest stunts to pressure the party’s Federal Council to overturn the decision. His program, centred on nationalizing sections of industry, cancelling student debt and reorienting Canadian foreign policy along more “independent” lines, remains entirely within the confines of bourgeois nationalism and the capitalist profit system. Furthermore, Engler’s turn toward protest theatrics is not a strategy to mobilize the working class, but an expression of the political dead end of petty-bourgeois radicalism and moralizing that seeks to pressure the NDP establishment rather than break from it.
His anti-war stance, while genuine in its outrage over imperialist crimes, is framed entirely within the limits of a nationalist critique that accepts the capitalist state and repudiates the central role of the international working class in opposing war.
12. Sri Lankan fake-left FSP offers to aid government amid crisis over cyclone devastation
The Frontline Socialist Party’s proposals to the JVP/NPP government are to help cover up its responsibility for the disaster and the capitalist system that produced it.
13. Sri Lanka: Cyclone-affected plantation workers demand decent houses in safe places
Nuwara Eliya district, predominantly inhabited by Tamil-speaking tea plantation workers earning low wages, is among the worst affected by heavy rainfall, flooding, landslides, and stone slides caused by the cyclone.
10. Job losses in Massachusetts hit retail, biotech, healthcare and education sectors
The 11,000-plus job cuts in September 2025 were the largest monthly loss of jobs in the state since the onset of the COVID pandemic in early 2020.
14. Deutsche Bahn: More deaths and a mounting number of victims on Germany’s railway tracks
A wave of serious and fatal workplace accidents at Deutsche Bahn has claimed numerous lives in 2025, exposing recurring patterns of danger in shunting yards, track construction sites and overhead line work. Far from being the result of individual “human error,” these deaths are the outcome of systemic safety failures driven by profit-oriented restructuring, austerity and the complicity of management, government and trade unions.
More than half a million workers across Italy took part in a one-day general strike on December 12, called by the CGIL union against the government’s 2026 Budget Law. The strike, which shut down large sections of the public and private sectors, expressed the deep anger among workers over collapsing living standards, the dismantling of social services and the all-sided drive toward war and authoritarian rule.
Officially, the CGIL announced a nationwide general strike of all workers for the entire day in protest against what it described as an “unfair, wrong and ineffective Budget Law.” The measure, approved by the Meloni government, imposes sweeping cuts to health care, education and public services while diverting tens of billions toward military rearmament and preparations for war. The initiative was endorsed by the CGIL assembly of delegates and promoted by General Secretary Maurizio Landini, who declared the goal was to “highlight the economic choices harmful to workers and pensioners” and pressure the government to revise its plan.
The strike saw an overall participation rate of approximately 68 percent according to CGIL figures. More than 50 demonstrations were held across the country, including a 100,000-strong march in Florence where Landini delivered his concluding speech in Piazza del Carmine. Transport, schools, public health and key private industries were hit by significant slowdowns or closures. The nationwide character of the mobilization doubtlessly revealed the scale of popular opposition to the ruling class agenda of austerity and war.
But the political role of the CGIL is to blunt and contain this opposition, not mobilize it toward an open clash with the ruling class. This function is not accidental. The CGIL is the direct product of the Stalinist heritage in Italy and Europe, whose historical role has been class-collaborationism, subordinating the working class to the national state and the capitalist order.
Its decision to call a separate general strike on December 12, isolating it from the November 28–29 protests organized by USB and other base unions, was entirely deliberate. By fragmenting workers’ initiatives, the CGIL ensured that the growing anger over austerity and war would remain confined within safe, state-sanctioned channels. The union’s demands were crafted to be perfunctory, offering a controlled outlet for discontent while guaranteeing that nothing would challenge the foundations of “business as usual.”
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The union bureaucracy seeks to prevent the growing opposition to NATO’s war drive from developing into a unified political movement of the working class. In this it plays an indispensable role for the Meloni government, which relies on the unions to police and fragment the working class.
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Internationally, general strikes have unfolded in Italy, Portugal and Belgium. Dockworkers have coordinated actions in recent months to refuse handling weapons cargo in ports across the Mediterranean. This glimpse of international solidarity shows what is possible and what terrifies capitalist governments. It is also what union bureaucracies of every country seek to suppress, since their privileges depend on loyalty to the national state, including when fascists hold power.
The crisis today is global. Syndicalist organizations trapped within national frameworks have become an objective obstacle to the development of an international working class movement against capitalism, the root cause of war, austerity and dictatorship. Decades of experience have shown there are no reforms capable of reversing this trajectory. The task before workers is not to pressure the CGIL but to break free of its grip.
New organs of struggle must be built: rank-and-file committees in every workplace, democratically controlled by workers themselves, and connected internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. Only such an independent, global movement can confront not a single government but an entire capitalist system pushing humanity toward disaster.
Residents of two historic downtown Detroit building face loss of utilities due to landlord neglect in the midst of cold wave.
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Elsewhere in the city, 1,140 workers at GM’s Factory Zero on the Detroit-Hamtramck border face imminent layoffs as a result of management’s decision to pull back on electric vehicle production. GM recently re-categorized those layoffs as permanent. The cuts are part of cuts across the global industry due to Wall Street demands for cost cutting and restructuring. They also follow more than a year of steady downsizing at Detroit-area auto plants, imposing extreme hardship on thousands of working class families.
Outgoing Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and mayor-elect Mary Sheffield, both Democrats, have said nothing about the layoffs or the hardship facing working class residents. Duggan, a multi-millionaire former hospital executive, took office in 2014 six months after Detroit filed for bankruptcy. He acted as a front man for the corporate interests that profited off the bankruptcy, which slashed pensions for retirees and handed over tax breaks and prize city assets to the rich.
Sheffield, current Detroit City Council president, was hand-picked by Duggan to succeed him. During her tenure Sheffield voted for Duggan’s tax handouts while seeking to deflect opposition with token gestures such as “tenant protections.”
Under Duggan’s tenure the city handed out massive tax breaks to the likes of Ford and billionaire Quicken loans CEO Dan Gilbert, while starving funding for vital city services for working class residents. Gilbert and other billionaires snapped up prime real estate on the cheap and converted it into stadiums, high class lofts and other amenities for the corporate elite and upper middle class.
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The revaluation of downtown neighborhoods in the aftermath of the bankruptcy produced evictions of long‑term residents, including elderly tenants in from the Griswold Building in downtown Detroit in March 2014 to make way for “The Albert” luxury apartments.
The process has continued. Rising downtown property values due to gentrification have put pressure on low income renters as property values and rents rise, forcing renters out of areas that were once relatively affordable. While the city has touted the construction of affordable housing units, the reality is that most of the rents are out of the price range for working class families in a city where the median household income is about $35,000.
The housing crisis in Detroit was highlighted by the horrific deaths of 9-year-old Darnell Currie Jr. and his 2-year-old sister, A’millah in February 2025. Their mother, Tateona Williams, had been unable to get housing assistance from public agencies. She parked her van inside the Greektown Casino parking structure near downtown hoping to shield her family from the cold; her children died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The fight against tenant evictions, affordable housing and rising layoffs are part of the same fight against a ruling class intent on self-enrichment of the backs of the working class while funneling ever greater resources in the military and police intelligence apparatus.
17. US, Australia, UK pledge “full steam ahead” on AUKUS preparations for war against China
The Washington meetings raised questions that were not publicly answered, including whether the Australian Labor government gave commitments to increase military spending beyond even the current record levels.
18. New York healthcare workers speak out amid strike authorization vote
Understaffing and the federal designation of nursing as a nonprofessional degree are arousing healthcare workers’ opposition.
19. Australia: Staff members expose disastrous “Reset” at Western Sydney University
Many displaced WSU workers are being shunted into lower-paid positions, face higher workloads or are yet to be allocated alternative positions.
20. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
New Zealand:
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.
