Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Oxfam Canada report reveals record levels of income and wealth inequality in 2025
A report released in January by Oxfam Canada revealed that income inequality was at a record high in 2025. Even more significantly, economic inequality—which considers both income and wealth—has reached what Oxfam Canada rightly considers crisis levels.
“The Rise of the Super-Rich” details that in 2025 there were approximately 89 Canadian billionaires and that their wealth grew by more than 20 percent over the previous year. The country’s top 40 billionaires alone increased their wealth by $95 billion.
This coincides with a cost-of-living crisis, rising poverty and record food bank usage among the vast majority of the population. In 2020, 6.8 percent of Canadians were living in poverty, by 2023 that had risen to 10.9 percent. In 2024, more than 25 percent of Canadians were living in food-insecure households and as many as 300,000 were experiencing homelessness.
Rental costs have soared such that many are now spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing and in almost all areas of the country a full-time minimum wage worker cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment. In 2025, grocery prices were 27 percent higher than they were five years previously and the average family of four is expecting to pay another $1000 on top of that this year.
By contrast, the Oxfam report notes that the richest 1 percent in Canada holds nearly $1.25 trillion in wealth, or almost as much as the bottom 80 percent combined. To be included in that privileged category requires a net-worth of $7 million or above. Whereas the bottom 40 percent hold just over 3 percent of all the wealth in the country at an average net-worth just below $87,000.
At the narrower point of the wealth pyramid, the top 0.5 percent, with a net worth of almost $12 million, controls almost 20 percent of all wealth in Canada, and the top 0.1 percent holds more than 11 percent of all wealth at a net-worth of at least $36 million and combined wealth of $1.8 trillion.
At the 0.01 percent pinnacle sit approximately 1,800 families with a net worth of at least $170 million and who hold nearly $900 billion combined—or more than 5 percent of all wealth in Canada.
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Worldwide some 3,000 billionaires ride atop a population of 8 billion. The world’s billionaires had another record-breaking year in 2025, with their total wealth increasing to more than $25 trillion.
One of the main strengths of the Oxfam report is that it explains how official data presented by Statistics Canada obscures social inequality. The Oxfam report points to a 2024 report from Social Capital Partners, a pro-capitalist non-profit organization, entitled “Billionaire Blindspot: How official data understates the severity of Canadian wealth inequality.”
“Billionaire Blindspot” notes that the primary method of measuring wealth inequality used by Statistics Canada is the Survey of Financial Security (SFS), which it conducts every 3 to 6 years. These voluntary, interview-based surveys are essentially what the report describes as nicely asking a sample of the population to reveal their affluence by listing individual or family assets and liabilities. By oversampling what it believes are families in the top 5 percent of wealth, or “Very High Net Worth,” the SFS purports to create a reliable estimate of that layer’s net-worth distribution.
But by Statistics Canada’s own admission, the sample size is insufficient to accomplish that task, especially at the richest part of the distribution. The SFS lumps together those whose net worth can be measured in the low millions of dollars with those in the tens of billions. And given that the survey is voluntary, and the definition of “Very High Net Worth” overly broad, the probability of even one Canadian billionaire out of the thousands of non-billionaires in the top 5 percent category being asked to participate in the SFS, let alone agreeing to do so, is very low.
“Billionaire Blindspot” also points out that the notion that wealth inequality in Canada is lower than in the United States is based on false assumptions due to the way wealth data is collected and reported.
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The figures presented by Oxfam are a devastating indictment of Canadian capitalism. The claims repeated so often by all of the major political parties, governments, trade unions, and other official institutions about “Team Canada” sticking together amid a trade war with the US and a deepening economic crisis, or Canada as a “fairer society” than the Dollar Republic to the south, are laid bare in this report as lies.
These conclusions are of course not drawn by Oxfam, which maintains the absurd position in the face of the data it has itself gathered that the problem of inequality can be resolved through the adoption of a wealth tax, curbing the use and abuse of offshore tax havens, and supporting the establishment of an “International Panel on Inequality.” All that is required is “a level of boldness and ambition that is typically lacking in Canadian federal political leadership,” the organization claims, directing its appeal to a big business Liberal government led by the millionaire former central banker Mark Carney.
This prescription relies on the false notion that bourgeois governments are anything but the political representatives of the ruling class—and especially of the super-rich, which the Oxfam report acknowledges wields vastly outsized political influence. It entirely ignores the fact that capitalist governments of all political stripes are responsible for the dramatic growth in social inequality globally over the past four decades, since they have slashed public spending and corporate taxes, demolished business regulations, dismantled worker rights and job protections and handed over billions to the wealthy elite in the form of government bailouts and subsidies.
Oxfam Canada, and other NGOs of their type, depend on a mixture of public donations, foundations and government grants creating material pressures that shape priorities and narratives acceptable to those donors and state partners.
The bankruptcy of the charity’s strategy was summed up in a recent “guest column” in the right-wing Postmedia-owned Windsor Star authored by Lauren Ravon, the executive director of Oxfam Canada, and Emma Davis, a “high net worth Canadian” and board member of Patriotic Millionaires Canada.
Patriotic Millionaires Canada is a group of wealthy individuals that claims to appreciate that their wealth is based on “a healthy, educated, and housed workforce and consumer base, high quality infrastructure, and a stable environment”—as if describing a desirable habitat for livestock. The fact is that all of these conditions have been deliberately eroded for decades in the massive transfer of wealth upwards under government-enforced austerity and the intensified drive to subordinate all of society’s resources to funding imperialist war.
Both Oxfam and Patriotic Millionaires advocate for a wealth tax not to fundamentally alter the division of wealth and power in Canada but as a sop to rising anger in the working class.
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The obscene concentration of wealth within a tiny oligarchy and the outrageous control it exercises over all areas of social and political life makes clear that the issue is not a matter of broken policy but of a bankrupt social system.
The only progressive solution consistent with the objective needs of the majority is socialist revolution: the political mobilization and independent organization of the working class to overthrow capitalist rule, expropriate the oligarchy and replace market anarchy with democratically planned production under workers’ control.
Because capitalism is global, this program must of necessity be international: the working class can only emancipate itself by organizing across borders. This means building rank‑and‑file committees in workplaces, linking struggles in Canada with struggles across North America and internationally, and developing a conscious revolutionary leadership committed to the program of the Fourth International by building the Socialist Equality Party (Canada). Only through such a strategy can the question of inequality be definitively resolved and human need be placed before private profit.
2. White House threatens to “unleash hell” against Iran, as US surges troops to Middle East
According to multiple reports, between 2,000 and 3,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force have received written deployment orders for the Middle East. The 82nd Airborne is an elite Army paratrooper force designed for rapid insertion into combat zones—the unit the Pentagon sends when it intends to strike, not negotiate.
The paratroopers would augment two Marine amphibious groups now closing in on the Gulf: the Tripoli, with 2,200 Marines of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), and the Boxer, which left San Diego last week carrying 2,500 Marines of the 11th MEU. The Tripoli is expected to reach the theater Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal, the day Trump’s five-day “pause” on strikes against Iran’s power grid expires.
3. As Trump escalates war on Iran, a strike wave spreads across the United States
Taken together, these struggles—whatever the immediate issues at stake in each—express a common underlying reality: the response of workers to intensifying exploitation, staggering inequality, a corporate jobs bloodbath and the diversion of society’s resources into war.
4. Billionaires target Social Security for cuts
The US financial oligarchy launched a coordinated campaign to reduce Social Security benefits this week. The effort will lead, sooner rather than later, to significant cuts in benefits, reduced eligibility by raising the retirement age, and privatization of all or part of the massive program, which currently pays benefits to 68 million Americans, most of them elderly and retired.
There is bipartisan support for such measures, demonstrated in the joint proposal by Republican Senator Bill Cassidy and Democratic Senator Tim Kaine to establish a $1.5 trillion market-based supplement to Social Security.
This and other possible measures were discussed at a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, at which federal officials said that the Social Security Trust Fund reserves would be exhausted between 2032 and 2034. That means the Trust Fund would only be able to pay out as much as it takes in from payroll taxes, a shortfall they estimated at 28 percent.
The demands for major restructuring of Social Security began with a letter to shareholders in BlackRock, the world’s largest investment fund with $14 trillion in assets under management—twice the annual budget of the federal government, and nearly half of total US Gross Domestic Product.
Larry Fink, the billionaire CEO of BlackRock, told shareholders that the financial crisis of Social Security was coming to a turning point, and he endorsed the bipartisan Cassidy-Caine proposal, which amounts to attaching a privatized fund to Social Security, as a Trojan horse leading to full-scale privatization.
While conceding that Social Security is “one of the most effective poverty-prevention programs in history,” Fink wrote, “The issue is: Social Security provides stability, but it doesn’t allow most Americans to build wealth in a way that grows with their country.” Translated into plain English, Fink is expressing the frustration on Wall Street that it cannot lay hands on the trillions in the Social Security trust funds and extract profits from them.
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On Tuesday, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a corporate-backed bipartisan think tank, issued a plan to address the financial crisis of Social Security by capping annual benefits at $100,000 a year for couples retiring at the normal retirement age, currently 67. Single retirees would face a cap of $50,000. Those who retire at a younger age would face an even lower ceiling on benefits.
The number of couples currently receiving more than $100,000 a year from Social Security is tiny—estimated at 0.05 percent of all recipients. The CRFB cited that fact to argue that the proposal was “radically progressive,” applying to only the wealthiest retired couples. But depending on how the ceiling is indexed, inflation will rapidly increase the number and the ceiling would rapidly become a major factor in holding down benefit payments for large numbers of retirees.
The CRFB plan was hailed in the lead editorial of the Washington Post, published the same day, under the headline, “Nobody needs over $100,000 per year in Social Security benefits.” The editorial claimed that capping benefits “would help restore sanity” to the program, adding, “a wealthy retired couple receiving nearly six figures from a national pension program is absurd. A more typical maximum public benefit for a retired couple in the developed world is between $30,000 and $40,000.”
The editorial goes on to argue that “Capping benefits is a better way to reform Social Security than increasing revenue.” This is a deliberate lie, since the simplest—and by far the most popular—proposal to save Social Security is to eliminate the income ceiling on the payroll tax. Currently, all income above $184,500 a year is exempt from payroll tax. CEOs pay Social Security tax on that amount only, no matter how many millions they take in during the year.
The vast bulk of ruling class income, taken in the form of dividends, capital gains and other forms of financial plunder, is not subject to Social Security tax at all, which is applied only to payrolls.
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The average US worker makes about $137 a day. Bezos’s wealth increases each day by approximately 700,000 times that amount. These numbers illustrate the obscene social inequality of capitalism.
Moreover, despite the claims that an income of $100,000 a year makes a couple on Social Security wealthy, that figure is a bare minimum income for survival in New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, while just adequate in cities like Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia. And for the retired widow or widower living in any of those cities, an income cap of $50,000 means poverty, plain and simple.
5. Governing parties suffer losses in Danish election
Neither the traditional “red block” of parties on the left or “blue block” of right-wing parties reached the 90 seats needed for a governmental majority in the 179-seat parliament. The result produced a highly fragmented parliament, with 12 parties represented.
6. LaGuardia disaster exposes dangerous airport conditions as Trump deploys ICE agents to terminals
New details from the NTSB point to overworked controllers, inadequate tracking technology and a chain of preventable failures behind the deadly LaGuardia runway collision.
7. More Berlinale short films: Cosmonauts, With a Kind Regard, Graft Versus Host
In the face of official prejudice and indifference, filmmakers fight for solidarity and compassion in a series of short films at the Berlin film festival.
8. Peter Daszak and the scientific verdict on the origins of COVID-19
Furthermore, this assault on public health and objective truth has been institutionalized at the highest levels under Trump’s appointees, particularly Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya—a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration who has publicly claimed a lab origin is “certain.” The depth of that institutionalization was on full display recently when on March 20, 2026—the same day a new Cell study delivered the most technically rigorous genomic refutation of the lab-leak theory yet—Bhattacharya inaugurated the NIH’s new “Scientific Freedom” lecture series with a conversation featuring Matthew Ridley, a British hereditary peer and former journalist with no scientific credentials, promoting his book Viral, which has been widely condemned by working virologists and evolutionary biologists for its factual inaccuracies and misrepresentation of the scientific literature on COVID origins.
The choice of Ridley is not incidental and certainly calculated. By hosting a lab-leak advocate inside the NIH’s own Masur Auditorium, under the banner of “Scientific Freedom,” Bhattacharya has used the institutional prestige of the world’s largest biomedical research funder to grant a discredited narrative the appearance of scientific legitimacy. The label “Scientific Freedom” is itself a gross misrepresentation—implying that the overwhelming peer-reviewed consensus for natural origin is a form of suppression rather than the product of years of independent, multi-disciplinary scientific investigation. It is beyond shameful that the director of the NIH has spent taxpayer dollars to platform, in the halls of American science, a conspiracy theory the science published today directly demolishes.
The tragic irony is that a coherent and overwhelming body of peer-reviewed scientific evidence sharply contradicts the lab-leak narrative, pointing conclusively to a natural zoonotic spillover at the Huanan Seafood Market—precisely the kind of event Daszak spent his career working to predict and prevent. That body of evidence has grown substantially in the past year. Three major peer-reviewed studies—Pekar et al. in Cell in May 2025, the WHO SAGO report submitted in June 2025, and Havens et al. in Cell this month—have each added a distinct and decisive layer of proof. Notably, the peer-reviewed Havens study arrived nine months after SAGO had already closed its deliberations, confirming that the science has continued to accumulate independently of any single institutional assessment. Taken together, they represent an unbroken, multi-disciplinary scientific consensus. Meanwhile, the political and media witch-hunt has effectively destroyed Daszak’s career and dismantled the global surveillance networks he built—the very infrastructure the new science confirms was essential.
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Independent scientific investigations across multiple disciplines—phylogenetics, phylogeography, selection dynamics, epidemiology, and environmental metagenomics—conducted between 2022 and March 2026, all converge on the same conclusion: the COVID-19 pandemic began as a natural spillover driven by the wildlife trade, completely devoid of laboratory manipulation.
Consider what this body of evidence represents in evidentiary terms. On one side stands a years-long, multi-disciplinary, peer-reviewed scientific record: phylogenetic analyses, phylogeographic reconstructions, genome-wide selection studies, environmental metagenomics, and epidemiological mapping, produced independently by dozens of scientists across multiple institutions and countries, all reaching the same conclusion.
On the other side stands a set of classified intelligence assessments of “low” to “moderate” confidence, political declarations by congressional committees that had predetermined their verdict, and a conspiracy theory traceable to fascist operative Steve Bannon, accepted without scrutiny and codified into official government policy. In any court of law, the prosecution’s case would have been thrown out before trial.
The evidence for a lab leak has never met the threshold of proof required in science, in law, or in basic logic. Yet it is Peter Daszak—the scientist whose life’s work the evidence vindicates—who lost his career, his organization and his livelihood. The question is not whether the science supports his innocence. It does, overwhelmingly and on every available measure. The question is whether the proceedings that destroyed him bear any resemblance to justice—or whether they were, from the outset, a kangaroo trial in which the verdict preceded the evidence.
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There is an inextricable connection between the networks that violently opposed every measure to mitigate the pandemic, and the promotion of the lab-leak lie. The same political forces that demanded the normalization of mass infection now promote the Wuhan conspiracy smear to redirect blame away from capitalist production while gutting public health systems and pandemic response capacities.
The right-wing political establishment, aided and abetted by the corporate media, has orchestrated a vicious campaign to portray Dr. Daszak as the central figure in a manufactured Wuhan “cover-up.” The suspension of EcoHealth Alliance’s federal grants, the multiple aggressive congressional investigations, and Daszak’s eventual firing as the organization’s president do not represent a legitimate response to scientific misconduct. They are the milestones of a calculated, fascistic political witch-hunt. As documented in recent WSWS interviews and Christian Frei’s documentary film Blame, Daszak has endured death threats requiring police protection, extreme public vilification, the loss of his livelihood, and ostracism from sections of the scientific community cowed by the political climate.
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Daszak’s core scientific program—mapping bat coronaviruses in rural habitats, tracing the vast wildlife trade, and identifying spillover hotspots—is precisely what the studies by Pekar, Havens and the WHO now confirm is essential to understanding and preventing zoonotic emergence. Long before these papers were written, it was Daszak who stood before a national television audience and described, with scientific precision, the threat that would become COVID-19. He could not have realized then that when that threat arrived, the politics of the pandemic would charge him with the very catastrophe he had spent his life trying to prevent. A scientist working at the critical interface of ecology, virology, and public health—who had built the global surveillance infrastructure to detect exactly the kind of bat sarbecovirus spillover that caused COVID-19—was transformed into a scapegoat to deflect attention from the real drivers of pandemics: the global wildlife trade, industrial agriculture, and the systematic destruction of natural habitats by capitalist production. Destroying EcoHealth Alliance’s capacity and dismantling its international surveillance networks is therefore not merely an injustice to one scientist. It is a direct and devastating blow against global pandemic preparedness.
Politically, the “lab leak” narrative is not a legitimate scientific controversy; it is a manufactured, state-aligned propaganda campaign. This fascistic lie has been weaponized by the ruling class to escalate the war drive against China, dismantle public health institutions, and scapegoat principled scientists—among them the very researcher who predicted COVID-19 before it had a name.
9. Workers in Australia paying the price for the criminal war against Iran
As a result of the illegal US-Israeli war on the people of Iran, working-class households are already facing soaring petrol and diesel prices, as well as growing shortages.
10. Sri Lankans will meet to demand: Stop the US–Israeli War Against Iran!
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka will hold a public meeting titled “Stop the US-Israeli War Against Iran!” to discuss the escalating imperialist war against Iran and the tasks facing the working class in Sri Lanka and internationally. It will take place on April 7 at 3:30 p.m. at the Orient Educational Institute in Hindagala, near the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.
As the US–Israeli war nears its first month, the naked imperialist interests behind it are being exposed: the US aims to establish control over the resource-rich Middle East, including Iran, and to block energy access to its economic rivals, mainly Russia and China. Fascistic President Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that he does not care about international law in achieving US predatory aims.
During the course of the criminal war, massive US and Israeli strikes have killed around 1,500 people, including hundreds of school children in an American missile strike on a girls’ school. Over 4,000 civilian buildings, including hospitals, have been damaged. As the Trump administration prepares to deploy ground forces, the war will expand further, along with the destruction.
The war has provoked a huge economic and energy crisis throughout the world, and in Asian countries in particular. Sri Lanka has already been forced to increase fuel prices, followed by rising costs of all consumer goods and services, placing the burden of war directly on working people and the oppressed.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-led National People’s Power (JVP/NPP), closely following the stand taken by India, are providing tacit support to the US and Israel in this war of aggression. Behind the facade of “neutrality,” Dissanayake’s complicity in this war has been repeatedly exposed.
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Speakers will discuss the causes of the war, its global implications, the historical and theoretical issues involved and, above all, the necessity for the working class to intervene politically to stop it. We call on workers and students to participate in this important discussion.
Early Wednesday, less than 48 hours after nearly 1,000 full-time contract faculty launched a strike at New York University (NYU), the Contract Faculty United—United Auto Workers (CFU-UAW) leadership announced a tentative agreement with the NYU administration and ordered the membership back to work. The few details of the tentative agreement that have been released indicate an attempt to sell out the strike.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in New York calls on contract faculty at NYU to reject this tentative agreement, vote “no” and prepare to resume the strike. The 2024 student worker strike at the New School, which the UAW bureaucracy shut down and sold out after only three days, must not be repeated!
For over 16 months, highly exploited full-time non-tenure track faculty at NYU have been demanding higher salaries, raises that exceed inflation, academic freedom, job security, subsidized housing and protection against artificial intelligence. These workers, many experts in their fields, struggle day to day to make ends meet in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
The union leadership announced the agreement around 2:00 a.m. on social media. Brendan Hogan, a philosophy professor and spokesperson for CFU-UAW, said in a statement, “We have won the highest minimum salaries of any unionized full-time, non-tenure track faculty in the country.”
The announcement of an agreement has received the usual bombardment of celebration from Democratic politicians and the UAW bureaucracy, which undoubtedly had a hand in cobbling together the agreement. But the details released so far do not paint such a rosy picture.
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NYU is a massive, multibillion-dollar business. The university had a consolidated operating budget of roughly $18.8 billion for Fiscal Year 2025. It is one of New York City’s largest private landowners, holding around 14 million square feet of property with an estimated value of $15 billion. NYU’s President, Linda G. Mills, earns over $1 million per year, down from previous President Andrew Hamilton’s $3.5 million annual salary.
New York City is a playground for the corporate-financial oligarchy; the rich live like kings and queens while workers struggle every day to survive. The top 1 percent in New York City holds roughly 32 percent of the city’s wealth, while the bottom 90 percent hold only 23.8 percent. Of the city’s 8.5 million residents, 26 percent are impoverished, twice the national average.
Contract faculty at NYU, expressing the sentiments of millions of workers across the city, the United States and internationally, are determined to reverse the unlivable circumstances they confront. Their strike both continues and anticipates a rising tide of class struggle, which includes the strike by 15,000 nurses in New York City earlier this year.
This fighting sentiment is shared by hundreds of thousands of workers in New York City and millions across the country and globe. Over 2,000 NYU students and community members have signed an open letter standing with contract faculty. UPS delivery drivers under Teamsters Local 804 have issued a letter stating they will not cross the picket line to deliver packages to NYU.
Graduate student workers at Columbia University, also organized in the UAW, have voted overwhelmingly to strike. Faculty and students at the New School in Manhattan, many represented by the same UAW Local 7902 that includes NYU faculty, face devastating layoffs and department cuts. More than 620 shipyard workers at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, also in the UAW, walked off the job Monday after overwhelmingly rejecting a contract offered by General Dynamics.
The contract for tens of thousands of New York City transit workers expires in May. Tens of thousands of city workers will likewise enter into contract struggles later this year.
On Monday evening, socialist autoworker and candidate for UAW president Will Lehman issued a statement calling for broad support for the NYU academic workers’ strike. “As a rank-and-file autoworker and UAW presidential candidate, I fully support your strike,” he wrote. “Your fight is not an isolated campus dispute but part of the developing offensive of the working class against austerity, dictatorship and war.”
The screws are being tightened on cash-strapped young people and workers facing the threat of default, garnishment and financial ruin. Estimates in late 2025 found that roughly one-quarter of all federal borrowers are facing default. If the current trend continues, it is projected that 13 million borrowers will be in default by the end of 2026.
But at the same time, the Trump administration is demanding a massive $1.5 trillion war budget and a $200 billion supplemental appropriation for a war of extermination against Iran. That combined figure is roughly equal to the entire federal student loan portfolio. Capitalism’s interests, however, require new and expanding predatory wars, not education, which is why neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have supported or ever will support mass loan cancellation.
On March 19, the Trump administration began transferring defaulted federal student loan accounts—some $180 billion in debt—from the Department of Education to the Treasury Department. Officials presented this as a “first step” toward moving the entire $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio out of the Education Department and into the hands of the federal tax and collection apparatus. Borrower advocates have warned that the move will increase errors, accelerate collections and further privatize enforcement functions.
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A key element in this reorganization is transforming student aid from a nominally “educational” function into a pure instrument of revenue collection. Trump officials are denouncing past attempts at loan forgiveness or cancellation. They insist that the fact that fewer than half of borrowers are currently making payments is evidence not of social crisis but of insufficient “discipline.”
Under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)—passed with only nominal opposition by the Democrats—the administration is moving to “simplify” and then sunset Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) programs. Options like Pay As You Earn (PAYE) are being eliminated. Others are being capped or phased out by 2028, and the entire structure is being replaced with a single, harsher Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP).
For new federal loans issued after July 1, 2026, borrowers will effectively be locked into either a rigid standard plan or RAP. RAP demands up to 30 years of payments before any balance is forgiven, extending indebtedness well into late middle age for large layers of the population. Existing IDR plans are being phased out even for current borrowers, with officials openly signaling that whatever replacement is offered will yield higher monthly payments than the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan and do nothing to address ballooning principal balances.
Behind these measures stands a definite class strategy: to intensify financial coercion on young people and workers, to channel ever greater sums from household budgets into Wall Street and to send a message that joining the workforce early or enlisting in the military is preferable to a life of debt.
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Young workers aged 25-29 have experienced the greatest slowdown in pay gains in decades, according to a late 2025 report by JPMorgan Chase. Additionally, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 soared to 5.6 percent at the end of last year, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, up sharply over the past three years and outstripping the overall rate of 4.2 percent at the time.
The cumulative result is the student loan “default cliff” that is already turning into a tidal wave. Borrower advocates estimate that roughly 3.6 million borrowers have defaulted since January 2025 following the expiration of pandemic-era protections. By early 2026, about 8.8 million borrowers were in or precariously close to default.
This cliff is not just a rise in defaults, but a large cohort of borrowers reaching roughly 270 days past due at the same time that pandemic pauses, forbearances and deferred reporting are ending. Many made little headway on principal during the pause—median balances remain above 80 percent of prior levels—and they are being thrust back into repayment amid rising living costs and a weakening labor market.
Advocates note that in 2025 a borrower defaulted roughly every nine seconds, a cadence that now risks becoming the norm rather than an exception. The immediate social and economic consequences are profound. Default triggers wage garnishment, loss of federal tax refunds and offsets of other benefits, exclusion from future federal aid, and years of damaged credit that can hamper employment.
This social crisis coincides with the war on Iran, the continuing genocide in Gaza and the attempted recolonization of oppressed countries in every region of the globe. The same ruling class that is stripping away the right to affordable education is prosecuting a predatory redivision of the world. For the American government, a central priority is staffing the military after years of failing to meet recruitment quotas. A generation trapped between debt peonage and poverty wage employment is easier to funnel into the armed forces.
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What must be done? The achievements of public education and access to higher education are no longer compatible with the needs of capitalism. While defensive demands—cancellation of all student debt, restoration and expansion of Pell Grants, full funding for public higher education and the reestablishment of borrower protections and public oversight—are important, the only substantive remedy is the expropriation of the ruling oligarchy. The fight to defend public education is the fight against war and capitalism.
Take the next step, join and build the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.
13. Italy rejects constitutional attack with “No” vote
The constitutional referendum held in Italy on March 22–23, 2026 has resulted in a significant political defeat for the government of fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. By a margin of roughly 54 percent, voters rejected the proposed judicial restructuring advanced by Justice Minister Carlo Nordio. With turnout approaching 59 percent, the vote assumed the character of a national plebiscite, far exceeding the narrow constitutional and technical questions formally placed before the electorate.
Presented as a modernization of Italy’s notoriously slow and bureaucratic judicial system, the so-called “Nordio reform” sought to amend multiple articles of the postwar constitution governing the role and organization of the judiciary.
Its central provision to separate career tracks between judges and public prosecutors was justified by the government as a measure to ensure impartiality and align Italy with other European legal systems. In reality, the reform was widely understood as an attempt to weaken prosecutorial independence and concentrate power in the executive, undermining the separation of powers established after the fall of fascism.
The rejection of the reform represents the first major institutional defeat for Meloni’s right-wing coalition since it came to power in 2022. More fundamentally, it punctures the phony image of political invulnerability cultivated by the government and signals a sharp escalation of social and political tensions within Italian society.
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The concurrence of escalating militarism abroad and deteriorating living standards at home has fueled a powerful wave of social opposition. Between late 2025 and early 2026, Italy witnessed mass protests and strikes involving millions of workers. The September-October “standstill” saw over 2 million people mobilize across 85 cities, disrupting transportation networks and blocking key ports such as Genoa, Livorno and Trieste.
Initially sparked by opposition to the war in Gaza, these protests rapidly expanded into a broader movement against militarism, austerity and social inequality which is still unfolding. Dockworkers played a particularly critical role. On February 6, 2026, coordinated strike action across 11 ports disrupted the transport of military goods, underscoring the strategic position of the working class within global supply chains.
The government responded with escalating repression. Security decrees introduced harsher penalties for protest activity, including prison sentences for blocking roads and critical infrastructure. A February 2026 decree followed clashes in Turin, triggered by the eviction of a social center, and was used to justify expanded policing powers. These measures formed part of a broader effort to suppress dissent and normalize authoritarian methods of rule.
It was in this context that the referendum assumed its true political significance. The “No” vote expressed not merely opposition to a specific constitutional amendment, but a broader rejection of authoritarianism, war, genocide and the subordination of society to the interests of the ruling class. The high turnout underscores the extent to which large sections of the working population perceived the reform as a direct threat.
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The real significance of the referendum lies not in the maneuvers of parliamentary factions, but in the intervention of the working class. The result reflects a growing awareness among broad layers of workers and youth that the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the struggle against war, austerity and social inequality.
At the same time, the vote does not resolve the underlying crisis. The forces driving militarization and authoritarianism remain fully in operation. Sections of the ruling class will inevitably seek new mechanisms to achieve the same objectives rejected in this referendum.
The Meloni government has already indicated its intention to proceed with further constitutional changes, including proposals for the direct election of the prime minister (“Premierato”). Such measures would represent an even more direct concentration of power in the executive and a further erosion of the institutional framework established in the aftermath of World War II.
The referendum result has nonetheless created a new political situation. It has confirmed the potential for unified mass opposition and has exposed the fragility of the government’s position. As Italy moves toward the 2027 elections, the ruling class faces a more volatile and uncertain landscape.
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The events in Italy are part of a broader global process. Across Europe and internationally, governments are responding to economic crises and geopolitical conflict with militarization and attacks on democratic rights. The Italian referendum stands as an early indication of the explosive social opposition this agenda is generating.
The essential task is to transform this opposition into a conscious political movement, uniting workers across national boundaries in a common struggle against war and exploitation. Only on this basis can the threat of authoritarianism and the catastrophic consequences of escalating global conflict be overcome.
14. Major financial fallout from US war on Iran
One of the main financial effects of the continuing US war against Iran is the fall in government bond prices and the consequent rise in their interest rate or yield, as investors consider that stagflation—a combination of sharply rising prices coupled with a slowdown or even recession—is becoming increasingly likely.
Bloomberg reported earlier this week that “the spectre of stagflation caused by the Iran war has wiped out more than $2.5 trillion from the value of global bonds in March,” putting it on course for the biggest monthly loss in three years.
It noted that while the loss in market value in bonds was considerably less than the estimates of the $11.5 trillion wiped off global stock markets, it was “more unexpected as debt typically gains in times of geopolitical turmoil.”
This is because under so-called “normal” conditions government debt is considered a “safe haven” amid financial turmoil. But with government debt reaching record highs in many advanced economies—led by the US, where the national debt has now topped $39 trillion—that is no longer the case and old norms are being overturned.
There is a significant move out of US government debt as a new burst of inflation, reflected most sharply in the escalation of petrol and diesel prices, begins to take hold, wiping out the prospect of an interest rate cut by the US Federal Reserve any time this year.
The yield on the two-year Treasury bond, which tends to move in line with expectations of what the Fed will do on rates, has risen by 0.5 percentage points so far this month—a significant hike where movements up or down are usually only a tiny fraction of that amount.
At the same time, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury bond, regarded as a benchmark for markets around the world, has risen by 0.44 percentage points so far this month.
The marked rise at the shorter end of the market has significant implications for the funding of US debt, because the Treasury has been increasingly seeking to obtain funds via two-year bonds to lessen the higher interest rate costs at the longer end. But this strategy is being thrown awry by the rise in rates on two-year debt.
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Before the war was started on February 28, the market expectation was that the BoE would signal rate cuts at its March meeting, and even after it began there was a hope that it would “look through” the energy price hikes in determining its policy.
Instead, there was a very different message from the central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, which said that should the surge in energy prices prove “larger or more protracted” and started to feed into wages, it would have to tighten monetary policy.
This was an expression of what is the guiding thread of all central banks in the so-called “fight against inflation,” which is concerned, above all else, not with bringing down prices but with suppressing the wage struggles of the working class in response to the hit on living standards.
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Besides its effect on the supply and price of oil and a whole range of products—such as urea, used for fertilisers, helium, jet fuel and diesel, and a range of other industrial commodities—the war threatens to disrupt the flow of money from the Gulf countries into major financial markets.
In an article in the FT, economic and financial analyst Mohammed El-Erian noted that the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE—“have collectively grown over the decades into one of the most consequential forces in global finance, investing across the world.”
The scale of their influence can be gauged from the size of investment commitments into the US from their sovereign wealth funds last year. They amounted to a total of $3 trillion in a series of multi-year projects, including semi-conductor infrastructure, energy and the military. But now there are reports that some of the GCC members may be reconsidering because of the financial pressures on them created by the war.
The GCC countries are already heavily invested in the US, pumping money into stocks, bonds, hedge funds, real estate and infrastructure to the tune of $2 trillion.
The anger of some of the GCC business elites was given vent in an X post by the Dubai-based billionaire Khalaf Al-Habtoor earlier this month, in which he asked Trump “a direct question.”
“Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran?” he asked. “And on what basis did you make this dangerous decision? Did you calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger? And did you consider that the first to suffer from this escalation will be the countries of the region itself!”
In his comment piece, El-Erian noted that “with the energy sector experiencing a ‘sudden stop,’” the region faces “unanticipated near-term revenue pressures.”
What impact this will have on the US and global financial markets remains to be seen, but any change in global capital flows and a rise in interest rates hits financial markets already experiencing a degree of fragility, due to the surge in government debt and the financing demands of the AI industry.
The net result of “higher for longer” borrowing costs, El Erian concluded, will have a “disruptive impact on virtually every country, corporation and household, which compounds the longer the war lasts. It’s an environment that also risks aggravating existing financial frailties—such as those associated with the AI bubble, certain segments of private credit and some sovereign debt concerns—while potentially exposing new ones.”
The South Australian election shows how the far right is exploiting a social crisis inflicted by Labor and the union bureaucracy amid a breakdown of the two-party system.
16. Australia: Mass strike of Victorian educators reveals anger over pay and conditions
The stoppage expressed explosive anger over pay and conditions which the union is trying to dissipate.
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
