In December, 650 nurses at Boston Medical Center Brighton (BMC) voted
by 97 percent to authorize a three-day strike against management
threats to cut staffing and benefits, and to freeze wages for most
nurses. The concessions proposed by BMC would worsen already chronic
staffing shortages and cost nurses thousands of dollars a year, hurting
patients and nurses alike.
The ongoing massive strikes by 15,000
nurses in New York City and 31,000 on the West Coast at Kaiser
Permanente show that there is immense support for healthcare workers and
the potential for strike at BMC to meet up with a growing nationwide
movement.
Across hospital after hospital, the effects of treating
healthcare as a profit-making enterprise are plain to see: unsafe
staffing levels, patients parked in hallways, nurses pushed into double
shifts, breaks routinely canceled, and maintenance and supplies
endlessly postponed. Wider resistance to both state repression and
economic austerity is also taking shape, with large crowds continuing
their protests after federal agents executed Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex
Pretti.
In spite of this, the Massachusetts Nurses Association
(MNA) continues to keep nurses on the job. To break through this
bureaucratic stonewalling, nurses must form rank-and-file committees,
independent of the union apparatus, to assert democratic control over
bargaining and strike strategy. If BMC nurses want to win their
struggle, they must take matters into their own hands, controlling the
strategy and decisions of their struggle and linking up with the
powerful struggle of nurses in New York and California.
The
previous contract through the MNA with prior hospital owner Steward
Healthcare was concluded in 2018 and extended in 2022. The contract
contained unenforceable language about safe ratios and gave, over the
length of the contract, a miserly below inflation 9 percent raise from
2017 levels.
But now BMC is demanding even deeper concessions.
This includes a three-year wage freeze for most nurses, with only a 1
percent annual increase for those at the top step of the 19-step pay
scale. They are also demanding sharp increases to out-of-pocket health
insurance costs that would cost nurses thousands of dollars year.
The proposal also raises parking fees at the hospital, eliminates
guaranteed pension access for newly hired nurses, and reduces paid
vacation and sick leave. In addition, BMC plans to eliminate
assignment-free charge nurses and the resource nurse position in the
maternity unit, measures that would increase workloads and seriously
jeopardize patient care.
Nurses at BMC Brighton, formerly known as St. Elizabeth’s Medical
Center, have faced years of brutal conditions amid the COVID pandemic
and ownership chaos at the facility. Former owner Steward Healthcare,
which went bankrupt in 2024, forced nurses to work with severe staffing
shortages and shortages of vital equipment, after vendors were not paid.
In 2023 this led to the death of a new mother when embolization coils
that might have saved her life were unavailable, because they had been
repossessed by the manufacturer.
Steward Healthcare was a
parasitic operation whose investors made fortunes off financial
manipulation of hospitals, leaving a trail of destruction across the
state, resulting in closed facilities like Carney Hospital in Dorchester
and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer when Steward went bankrupt.
Boston
Medical Center’s takeover of the hospital was bankrolled by the state
to the tune of $66 million. They were awarded the facility rent free and
given a cash guarantee of $387 million over five years from the state.
Now they are continuing Steward’s austerity operations, attempting to
run BMC Brighton with minimum staffing while paying nurses as little as
possible.
BMC, despite its pretensions to be a non-profit, is a massive money
operation, with $2.5 billion in revenue in 2024. It has increased its
income with lucrative state incentives to expand its operations to BMC
Brighton and Good Samaritan Hospital in Brockton.
*****
The Massachusetts Nurses Association, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, has
routinely worked with healthcare conglomerates and the Democratic Party
to isolate and sell out the struggles of nurses at hospitals across the
state. Union officials routinely negotiate behind closed doors, striking
facility‑by‑facility deals that then fractures potential statewide
unity. They accept so-called compromises that leave hospitals
understaffed and unsafe, with benefits and pay in constant decline.
Despite repeated contract violations, over 160 unsafe staffing
reports and charges by the National Labor Relations Board, the MNA never
struck at St. Elizabeths throughout the entire period of Steward
Healthcare’s ownership.
The dire situation facing BMC Brighton
nurses is part of a wider assault by capitalism on the working class and
on healthcare. The union apparatus is determined at all costs to
prevent a broad, coordinated struggle of healthcare workers throughout
the country to win enforceable protections for workers and patients,
since this would threaten to upset the trade union bureaucracy’s corrupt
relationship with the healthcare conglomerates and political
establishment.
While support is growing for a general strike
against the ICE rampage in Minneapolis, no major union has called any
action, issuing instead empty statements of support and calling for
toothless consumer boycotts. Even when core democratic rights are at
stake, they claim that workers cannot take action because they must
honor “no strike clauses” which the union officials themselves
negotiated into their contracts.
To win safe‑staffing ratios, wage
increases indexed to inflation and protections for benefits, requires
the formation of rank-and-file committees to coordinate strategy,
enforce strike decisions and resist sellouts.
*****
Securing the future for healthcare workers and quality care for patients
is inseparable from a political struggle against the profit system. The
capitalist domination of healthcare must be replaced by public
ownership of healthcare under the democratic control of the working
class as a basic social right.
Over the weekend, the two federal immigration agents who shot and
killed 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex F. Pretti on January 24 were
identified as Jesus “Jesse” Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez. Records
reviewed by ProPublica indicate that Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, are
both from south Texas.
As of this writing, the government has
neither confirmed nor denied ProPublica’s reporting. It has now been
more than 10 days since Pretti was attacked and gunned down in
Minneapolis, yet the Trump administration has refused to identify, much
less charge, his killers. Only because of mass outrage and sustained
protest following Pretti’s killing did the Department of Justice
announce that there would even be an investigation, conducted by the
Department of Homeland Security into itself.
Whatever
investigation takes place, justice will not be served. It has been
nearly a month since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent
Jonathan Ross murdered 37-year-old mother and poet Renée Nicole Good.
The only people being investigated by the government in her death are
her wife and their associates. Neither Ross, who deliberately placed
himself in front of Good’s vehicle before opening fire, nor the other
agents who refused to render aid or allow others to do so, have been
investigated, much less charged, for their criminal actions.
Democratic
Party claims that the only problem with the federal occupation and mass
deportation operation is that the immigration Gestapo is insufficiently
“trained” collapse in the face of the evidence. Like ICE murderer Ross,
both Ochoa and Gutierrez are not new recruits but longtime Customs and
Border Protection agents. Ochoa joined CBP in 2018, while Gutierrez
began working for the agency under the Obama administration in 2014.
Democrats
raise the issue of “training” to divert attention from and obscure the
class purpose of these agencies, which exist not to defend workers
democratic rights from external threats, but to function as an auxiliary
federal paramilitary force loyal to the executive branch and the
financial oligarchy. Terrified of a mass movement of the working class,
which is increasingly demanding a general strike to abolish the
immigration police and drive the fascists out of Washington, both
capitalist parties have supported the expansion of these agencies for
decades, alongside the construction of a nationwide network of
for-profit concentration camps.
A week after the Trump administration announced that White House “border
czar” Tom Homan would assume control of the federal occupation of
Minnesota, nothing has fundamentally changed. Immigration police
continue to violently abduct residents and deliberately provoke
confrontations to manufacture pretexts for violence against the working
class.
*****
Far from defending residents, local police departments are actively
coordinating with federal immigration agents while refusing to
investigate or arrest those who carry out violent crimes.
The same
day agents pulled guns on a US citizen in Minnesota, federal agents
violently assaulted a US citizen in Salem, Oregon. The woman, identified
only as Maria, is a member of Service Employees International Union
Local 503. She was pulled over by federal agents at approximately 11
a.m. while on her way to pay rent and buy a cake for her grandson’s
birthday.
In a statement released by the SEIU, Maria said agents
demanded to see her “papers.” She feared for her life, noting that she
suffers from severe asthma and was terrified she would be tear-gassed.
“The
agents shattered her car window, forcibly removed her from the vehicle
and threw her to the ground, causing numerous injuries,” the union
stated. After dumping out her purse and discovering her US passport, the
agents fled the scene. Maria later sought medical treatment for a torn
rotator cuff, concussion, and bruised ribs.
Days after the masked federal thugs violently assaulted Maria, a GoFundMe
in support of her notes she is “still terrified of going out of the
house and has asked her daughter to carry a tracking device when she
goes out. Her spirits are still suffering. She will be out of work for
some time, so these donations make all the difference.”
Maria contacted the Salem Police Department but was told to contact the FBI. Journalists with the Salem Reporter sought
comment from the police department regarding the assault and its policy
on crimes committed by federal agents. As of this writing, the
department has not responded.
As with the assault on SEIU official David Huerta last year, the
union has proposed no concrete action to defend workers. Instead, it
organized a protest centered on appeals to capitalist politicians for
“accountability.”
Following another weekend of mass protests
demanding a general strike, Democrats in the House signaled support
Monday for a spending deal negotiated between Senate Democratic leader
Chuck Schumer and the White House that will maintain funding for the
immigration police for at least two more weeks.
*****
Under conditions in which a clear majority of Democratic voters, a
majority of independents, and even a significant minority of Republicans
support abolishing ICE, congressional Democratic support for continued
DHS funding exposes the fraud of portraying the Democrats as an
opposition party.
The Democrats are not intimidated by Trump and
his federal paramilitary forces. They are far more terrified of workers
and students organizing independently, above all through a general
strike that would cut across the unions, the courts, and the two-party
system and pose a direct challenge to capitalist rule.
This is
why the fight against repression, war and dictatorship requires the
building of independent rank-and-file organizations, uniting workers
across industries and national borders in a conscious political struggle
against the capitalist system itself.
On Monday morning, ICE and other federal agents raided the Amazon
facility in Hazel Park, part of an escalating series of actions in
Southeastern Michigan. Sources confirm the arrest of one person, Edwin
Romero Guttierez, a Venezuelan national.
A video
posted on Instagram by the Metro Detroit News shows the interior of the
Amazon facility during the raid. One individual, apparently Romero
Guttierez, is shown surrounded by four or five agents.
Comments
on the video were overwhelmingly hostile to ICE. “We have to stand
against this,” one worker wrote. Another commented, “Why would Amazon
allow them on the premises?” Another declared that “the whole shift
should’ve walked out with [Guttierez].”
According to ICE, as reported by the Detroit Free Press,
Romero Guttierez entered the United States in 2023, at which time he
was arrested by Border Patrol. ICE agents claim that they attempted to
pull Guttierez over in his vehicle on Monday, and he attempted to flee
by car and then on foot, before entering the Amazon warehouse.
ICE
also stated that a security guard at Amazon permitted agents to enter
the facility to make the arrest. It is unknown at this time whether ICE
made additional arrests at the facility.
There is still much that
is not known about Guttierez’s arrest, and nothing ICE says can be
believed. However, ICE has not alleged that Romero Guttierez has
committed any crime that could justify his arrest, as living in the US
without documentation is not a crime, and entry into the US without
inspection can be a misdemeanor.
*****
The arrest in Hazel Park is part of a campaign of
state-sponsored terror across the United States, including the murder of
Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which has sparked
mass protests. While the Democrats are trying to present tactical
maneuvers on the part of Trump as a “retreat,” the administration is in
fact continuing ICE raids throughout the country, including in
Minneapolis itself.
Romero Guttierez, as an undocumented
immigrant, would have been acutely aware of his precarious legal status
and personal safety when confronted by immigration agents.
As of
this writing, it is unclear whether the security guard who permitted ICE
entry to the premises was under direct instructions from Amazon to
cooperate with immigration operations.
Amazon and Jeff
Bezos—Amazon’s largest individual shareholder and the world’s fourth
richest person, with a net worth of $253 billion—have deep ties to the
Trump regime. Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 Presidential
Inaugural Committee, and Bezos is actively allying himselfwith the Trump administration.
Amazon is slated to slash 16,000 jobs,
on top of the 14,000 jobs cut in late 2025, as it uses advances in
technology to implement a jobs massacre. More than 2,000 Amazon jobs
have already been eliminated in the Seattle, Washington area. Amazon
made $56.4 billion in profits in the first nine months of 2025.
Hazel
Park, a working class suburb of Detroit, has a population of
approximately 15,000, more than 97 percent of whom are US citizens.
Approximately 4.5 percent of Hazel Park residents were born outside the
United States, lower than the Michigan average of 7.4 percent. However,
as ICE has made repeatedly clear, its mission is not that of immigration
enforcement but as a federal occupying force aimed at suppressing the
working class.
ICE operations in Michigan have increased in recent weeks. In late
January, federal agents abducted at least four immigrant parents while
they were waiting to pick up their children from school in Ypsilanti.
The operations were carried out with such secrecy and violence that the
local school district issued warnings urging students to walk in groups
and use trusted carpools. Earlier in the month, three immigrants were
arrested during a traffic stop in Sterling Heights, one of many such
“routine” encounters now used to detain and deport people with no
criminal background.
ICE has also reportedly been sighted near Canton, Royal Oak and other cities in Southeastern Michigan.
According
to the most recent available data, ICE arrests in Michigan more than
doubled in 2025, reaching 2,349, a staggering 230 percent increase from
the previous year. Nearly three-quarters of those arrested had no prior
criminal history. Many were seized in everyday settings: at green card
interviews, on the way to work, near schools and in their own homes.
Agents now frequently wear plain clothes, refuse to identify
themselves and operate in unmarked vehicles. In one case last fall, a
Honduran immigrant with a US citizen spouse and two children was
abducted during his morning commute.
There is mounting public
resistance to this campaign of terror. Protests, marches and school
walkouts have taken place in Ann Arbor, Detroit, Traverse City and other
cities. On February 4, thousands of students in the Canton and Plymouth
school districts are planning to walk out in solidarity with their
immigrant classmates and families.
The Grammy Awards on Sunday, the annual event in which members of the
Recording Academy recognize music and recording artists across multiple
genres, became a platform for several award recipients to condemn
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and defend the rights of
immigrants.
During the evening, several recipients used their
brief time on stage to condemn the immigration dragnet carried out by
federal agents in cities and towns across the country. Artists
explicitly demanded “ICE Out,” thus identifying themselves with the mass
protests and walkouts that are taking place against the Trump
administration.
Media coverage of the ceremony at Crypto.com Arena
in Los Angeles acknowledged that immigrant rights and opposition to
repression—not celebrity gossip—was a central axis of the awards
program. Unlike previous award shows, where causes have sometimes been
mentioned, the 2026 Grammys saw several important denunciations of the
ICE crackdown.
By doing so, the artists who made statements were
expressing the widespread public anger over the hundreds of arrests,
raids and “disappearances” associated with the attempt by the White
House to scapegoat immigrants for the deepening social, economic and
political crisis of American society.
Awardees used their
acceptance speeches to denounce ICE and express support for all
immigrants, sometimes prompting CBS to censor them. Billie Eilish,
accepting the Song of the Year Award, declared, “No one is illegal on
stolen land,” before concluding with “F•ck ICE,” a phrase CBS bleeped
from the broadcast.
She also said, “We just need to keep fighting
and speaking up and protesting. Our voices really do matter, and the
people matter.”
*****
Bad Bunny, who won three Grammy awards and is slated to headline the
Super Bowl halftime show on February 8, started his acceptance of the
Album of the Year honor for “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” with the comment
“Ice Out!” followed by, “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not
aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” Bad Bunny’s comments
received a lengthy ovation.
British singer Olivia Dean, receiving
Best New Artist, explained that she was “up here as the granddaughter of
an immigrant” and insisted, “My existence is a testament to bravery,
and those individuals deserve recognition. We are interconnected.” These
remarks, which were clearly aimed against the anti-immigrant hysteria
being promoted by the Trump administration, also received a warm
response from the audience.
R&B artist Kehlani, honored before
the broadcast for Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Song,
returned to the microphone a second time to insist that the industry had
a responsibility to stand with the persecuted. “Together, we are
stronger in numbers, and we must voice our opposition to the injustices
occurring worldwide,” she said, closing with a clear “F*ck ICE.”
On
the red carpet and throughout the hall, Justin and Hailey Bieber,
Kehlani, Joni Mitchell and many others wore “ICE Out” pins, while Bon
Iver’s Justin Vernon attached an orange whistle to his lapel in
solidarity with Minneapolis observers who blow whistles to warn
residents of ICE and CBP incursions.
The reaction in the hall
showed that the anti‑ICE sentiments were widely held. The visible
sympathy among musicians and attendees contrasted sharply with the
nervous posture of CBS, which is owned by David Ellison of Skydance
Media, a close friend and wealthy political ally of Donald Trump.
*****
The radicalization on display at the Grammys cannot be separated from
the broader expressions of outrage against the Trump administration,
most sharply manifested in the conflict over Washington DC’s Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts. Since returning to the White House,
Trump purged the Kennedy Center’s leadership, stacked its board with
loyalists, made himself chairman and pushed through the renaming of the
institution as the “Trump‑Kennedy Center,” provoking widespread boycotts
and cancellations by artists.
On Sunday, Trump announced that the
center will be shut down for two years beginning July 4, supposedly for
“renovations” to transform the building into a “World-Class Bastion of
Arts, Music, and Entertainment.” This decision followed the
cancellations by prominent artists and organizations angered by Trump’s
takeover and the desecration of the original Kennedy memorial.
Trump’s
closing of the institution has been widely perceived as an attempt to
break the resistance of the arts community to the effort to centralize
control and reshape programming in line with the reactionary politics of
the administration.
The stance taken by Grammy performers in
defense of immigrants and against dictatorship is part of the movement
of musicians, actors and other cultural workers who refuse to legitimize
the Trump‑Kennedy Center and its takeover by the dolt in the White
House.
*****
The intervention of a relatively small number of artists at the Grammy
Awards is an indication of growing opposition and political activism
among a layer of musicians. While the official viewing audience numbers
of the live broadcast are not yet available, the public condemnation of
ICE and the willingness to speak out against Donald Trump in front of an
audience of approximately 15 million people is significant.
The coalition agreement for a future Dutch government unveiled on
January 30 is no “national compromise,” as hailed by the bourgeois
press, but a calibrated document by the Dutch ruling elite declaring
class war following last October’s snap elections.
It is the Dutch expression of a continent‑wide reorganization of
capitalist rule around permanent war, authoritarianism and a frontal
assault on the working class.
It
is the outcome of nearly 100 days of post‑election maneuvering. The
Democrats 66 (D66), the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and the
People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) have cobbled together a
right-wing minority cabinet commanding just 66 of 150 seats in the
Tweede Kamer. The future government rests not on popular support but on
the backing of finance capital, big business and the imperialist
alliances that determine Dutch foreign and domestic policy.
Under
the title “Getting to Work—Building a Better Netherlands,” the 67‑page
pact binds Dutch capitalism more tightly to NATO’s global war drive and
the European Union’s accelerating rearmament, while at the same time
enshrining a domestic program of austerity measures and state
repression.
Central to the agreement is the so‑called
Vrijheidsbijdrage, the “freedom contribution”—a euphemism for a war tax
imposed on the working population. Marketed as a “shared national
effort,” the levy on incomes is expected to fund roughly €5 billion
annually, each euro earmarked specifically for military and security
spending, pressing ahead with the course of the previous government of
Dick Schoof. Defense expenditure is expected to climb from around 2
percent of GDP to nearly 3 percent by 2030, reaching approximately 3.5
percent by 2035 in line with NATO and EU directives.
*****
The primary beneficiaries of this vast transfer of public wealth are the
major arms consortiums—Rheinmetall, Thales, Lockheed Martin and their
Dutch equivalents and subcontractors—while the working class foots the
bill through social cuts and regressive taxation.
*****
The same class logic governs the coalition’s much‑trumpeted
“investment” in education and research. In the wake of student protests
last December against the planned €1.2 billion cuts to higher education,
the redirection of an almost equivalent sum is portrayed as proof that
the government is “investing in the future.”
In fact, the money
is tightly ring‑fenced for universities and research institutes tasked
with bolstering the “knowledge economy” in sectors the agreement
designates as “strategic technologies”: artificial intelligence,
cybersecurity, semiconductors and data infrastructure. These fields are
intimately bound up with surveillance, trade and technology wars,
military logistics and weapons systems.
Dutch universities and
tech firms were exposed for their involvement in projects linked to the
genocide in Gaza, drawing thousands to last year’s “Red Line” demonstrations
in The Hague and Amsterdam. The coalition openly defines digitization as a “strategic instrument” that directly shapes “national security,
economic strength and the democratic rule of law” and calls for the
rapid implementation of EU cybersecurity rules, stronger central
governance of cyber policy, an expansion of offensive and defensive
cyber capabilities and a broadened legal framework for data sharing
between state and private actors under the pretext of “early threat
detection.”
In practice, this means integrating universities,
tech companies and communications providers ever more deeply into an
intelligence‑security complex in which “digital resilience” and “cyber defense” serve as pretexts for mass surveillance, data collection and
repression.
On the burning issues confronting the Dutch working
class—above all, the housing crisis and the rising cost of living—the
coalition offers only empty phrases and inducements to capital. In fact,
it rejects social housing construction, refuses rent caps and shields
rent sharks. Developers are granted incentives to build where returns
are highest, perpetuating chronic shortages in affordable housing
(currently at 400,000 housing units) resulting in soaring rents that are
already driving broad layers of youth and workers out of the major
cities.
Parallel to this, the agreement places “economic
resilience” and “competitiveness” at its center, signalling further
deregulation, weakened labor protections and an even more “flexible” labor market. This dovetails with the restructuring strategies of
corporations across Europe, including mass layoffs and accelerated
automation in logistics, manufacturing and services, as seen in the wave
of industrial job cuts in Germany over the winter months.
On
migration, the coalition refrains from adopting the full arsenal of
openly racist measures demanded by Geert Wilders’ far-right Party of
Freedom (PVV), whose calculated move over asylum policy helped precipitate the previous government’s collapse.
Yet, the new program continues and deepens the repressive trajectory
of recent years. Migration is framed not as a question of war, poverty
and imperialist plunder driving people from their homes but as a problem
of “order,” “capacity” and “control” within Fortress Europe.
*****
In this backdrop, the scapegoating of refugees and migrant workers will
continue to serve as a crucial political function in diverting popular
discontent away from the capitalist system itself and seeking to
fracture the class unity of Dutch and immigrant workers, the latter
comprising 30 percent of the nearly 10 million-strong workforce.
*****
The minority character of the new cabinet, its dependence on fragile
parliamentary alliances testify to the advanced crisis of bourgeois
rule. With democratic institutions hollowed out, austerity weaponized,
and militarism normalized, the Dutch “model” is collapsing under the
same contradictions afflicting the entire European order.
No
appeal to the coalition parties, to GroenLinks–PvdA, the SP or the union
bureaucracy will alter this downward trajectory. All of these forces
accept the inviolability of private property, the nation‑state system
and the imperialist alliances that generate war, austerity and genocide.
Their collaboration has opened the door for the far right and prepared
the conditions for deeper authoritarian reaction and social counter
revolution.
The only viable way forward lies in the conscious,
independent and international mobilization of the working class – within
the Netherlands, across Europe and worldwide – on the basis of a
socialist program that links the fight against war, austerity and
authoritarianism to the abolition of capitalist property relations.
Polling and worried commentary in the financial press is underscoring
the reality that the breakup of the Coalition on January 22 is only the
sharpest expression of an historic crisis of the entire two-party
set-up that has defended capitalist rule for more than 80 years.
On
the first regular sitting day of parliament for the year today, the
Liberals and the Nationals, the component parties of the erstwhile
Coalition, sat separately. Talks between Liberal leader Sussan Ley and
National’s David Littleproud prior to the sitting had failed to reunify
the federal opposition.
According to the polling, the primary vote of the Liberals and the
Nationals combined now sits at just 19 percent, the lowest level ever
recorded. It is 13 percentage points beneath the tally recorded by the
Coalition in the May 2025 federal election, when it suffered a rout and
the Liberals received their lowest vote since the party was founded in
1944.
The far-right One Nation party received its highest ever
polling at 26 percent, comfortably eclipsing the old parties of the
Coalition.
The governing Labor Party’s polling, by the AFR’s
measure, remained stagnant compared to its December levels, at 34
percent of the primary. That is the same level as in the May election,
when Labor returned to office with its second-lowest ever winning total
on the back of the Coalition meltdown.
That points to a situation
where, increasingly, discontent and crisis within one or the other of
the traditional parties is not benefiting the other. The hemorrhaging
support for the Coalition appears to have flowed directly to One Nation
and has not improved the position of Labor even slightly.
There is
an increasingly clear parallel with the political situation in the
United Kingdom. There, the Labour government of Prime Minister Keir
Starmer is implementing a program of sweeping austerity and a vast militarization, provoking widespread opposition.
The
Conservatives, the traditional opposition, has effectively been
supplanted by Nigel Farage’s Reform, which is being promoted by sections
of the ruling elite to shift politics even further to the right, and is
making a reactionary, anti-immigrant pitch to social discontent.
Similarly
in Australia, the Labor government’s pro-business program has inflicted
the biggest reversal to working-class living standards in history. Its
central focus has been on increasing military spending, above all to
prepare for a US-led war with China. Labor is implementing a right-wing
program that is indistinguishable from those of previous Coalition
governments.
Deeply divided, the Coalition has not been able to
present any credible opposition. Instead, One Nation, like Farage, is
posturing as an opponent of the widely-reviled two-party system, and is
similarly making a populist appeal centered on the scapegoating of
immigrants.
*****
The Labor Party has lost any stable, mass base in the working class,
having dispensed with even a nominal connection to social reform more
than 40 years ago, and having served as an unalloyed instrument of the
corporate elite ever since. Labor’s real base is an affluent upper
middle-class, the corrupt trade union bureaucracy and the intelligence
and policing agencies.
For its part, the Coalition has been roiled
by the disintegration of the relatively large middle-class of the
post-World War II period, upon which it was once based. Small businesses
account for a smaller share of economic activity than they once did.
Increasing numbers of professionals, such as teachers and medical staff,
have entered the ranks of the working class.
*****
Whatever the twists and turns, it is clear that the political
situation in Australia is transforming. The old exceptionalist nostrums,
including that a far-right movement could not develop in this country,
are being exposed as a fraud. Powerful sections of the ruling elite,
including the country’s wealthiest individual, mining magnate Gina
Rinehart, are increasingly seeking to cultivate a Trump or Farage-style
formation.
They are doing so, because they recognize that the
deepening social crisis and discontent presages major struggles by the
working class against the entire political establishment. The aim is to
channel discontent in a reactionary direction, and to create political
mechanisms for openly dictatorial rule, aimed at suppressing workers and
youth.
For the present, the ruling class is reliant entirely on
Labor carrying out the program required in the interests of Australian
capitalism. This means the intensification of the assault on working and
living conditions, wage rates and democratic rights of the population.
The scenes unfolding in the United States, the UK and more broadly are
the outcome of international conditions expressed sharply in this
country.
The critical issue for the working class is to establish
its political independence from the entire decrepit establishment. A
mass socialist movement must be built, in opposition to Labor, the
Liberals, Nationals, One Nation and all the parliamentary parties. That
is the only way in which to oppose the capitalist program of war,
austerity and authoritarianism that they all represent.
Recent reports in the Australian press have exposed that the federal
Labor’s government’s housing policies are not only failing to address
the national affordability crisis, but are actually driving home prices
further out of reach.
Internal Treasury documents cited last month by the Australian reveal
that Labor knew its expansion of the First Home Buyers scheme would
increase housing prices by far more than the 0.6 percent publicly stated
by the government. In fact, in just the last three months of last year,
the price of homes eligible for the scheme rose by 3.6 percent,
compared with 2.4 percent for ineligible homes.
The scheme allows first home buyers to take out a mortgage with just a
5 percent deposit, rather than the standard 20 percent, without paying
for costly Lenders Mortgage Insurance. The federal government guarantees
the remaining 15 percent, insulating banks from additional risk, while
allowing them to reap the rewards of writing more and larger home loans.
Labor’s
eligibility changes, which commenced in October, scrapped income tests,
removed the limit on how many buyers could enter the scheme and
significantly raised the property price caps—which vary regionally—to
bring them in line with soaring median housing prices.
In 1980,
the average home price in Australia’s eight state and territory capital
cities was $59,000, while the average salary was $13,500, according to
Integrity Finance Australia. The median capital city house price has now
skyrocketed to over $1.1 million, a rise of almost 1,800 percent, while
average annual wages have increased by just 450 percent to $74,100. [Aud 74,000 is today approximately equivalent to USD 51,920.]
*****
The soaring cost of housing since Labor’s expansion of the scheme is
not an unintended consequence. It was designed to further excite the
over-stimulated property market, under conditions where the vast
majority of homes are already unaffordable for working people. Its
intended beneficiaries are the banks and property developers, which will
be able to increase their customer base without reducing profits or
taking on additional risk.
*****
The fraudulent character of Labor’s claim to be addressing the
housing crisis is further exposed by the fact that while the federal
Labor government celebrates the construction of homes at the pathetic
rate of a few hundred a year, state Labor governments are destroying
public housing at a far more rapid pace.
The Victorian state Labor
government is in the process of demolishing 44 public housing towers in
Melbourne, which will displace some 10,000 poor and working-class
residents, many of them elderly, from their homes and communities. The
transparent purpose is to free up valuable inner-city land for property
developers. The New South Wales Labor government has begun the eviction
of more than 3,000 people from the Waterloo South housing estates in
Sydney, with the same agenda.
The housing crisis is one of the
starkest expressions of the reality of capitalism. While masses of
people cannot afford a decent home or are driven into poverty by surging
rents and mortgages, the profits of the banks and property developers
soar.
The alternative is a fight for socialism. The working class
must take political power and reorganize society to meet its needs. The
banks and the corporations should be placed under public ownership and
democratic workers’ control, to make society’s vast resources, currently monopolized by the wealthy elite, available to fund social necessities.
To address the housing shortage, a massive public works program must be
undertaken to build high-quality housing, with decent wages and
conditions for workers.
Sweeping cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
taking effect February 1 signal an escalation of the Trump
administration’s assault on what remains of the social safety net
program in the US. Nationally, 2.4 million people could lose their SNAP
benefits by 2034, while more than 1 million face the short-term risk of
losing their benefits in 2026 from work rules alone.
The cuts to
SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, are part of the “One Big Beautiful
Bill Act” (OBBBA), a budget reconciliation package signed into law by
President Trump on July 4, 2025. With it, the Trump White House has
weaponized hunger as a tool of class warfare.
This legislative
assault represents a massive upward transfer of wealth, slashing the
social safety net to fund trillions in tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy
and corporations. By imposing draconian work requirements for both SNAP
and Medicaid, the health insurance program jointly funded by the federal
government and states, the administration is deliberately exacerbating
economic inequality and placing millions of vulnerable Americans at risk
of hunger, malnutrition and starvation.
Established in 1964 to
address the scourge of hunger among low-income households, SNAP has long
served as the nation’s first line of defense against food insecurity.
It currently supports more than 42 million Americans, including 16-18
million children, with an average benefit of $6 per day.
Research
has consistently shown that SNAP is a critical public health tool. Food
insecurity is linked to higher risks of chronic conditions like heart
disease and diabetes, while SNAP participation is associated with
improved health outcomes and a 25 percent reduction in annual healthcare
costs. Despite this reality, the OBBBA slashes $186 billion from
federal nutrition funding over the next decade, a cut of approximately
20 percent.
The centerpiece of this assault on SNAP is the
expansion of work requirements that target the most marginalized
sections of the population. Starting February 1, able-bodied adults up
to age 64—up from the previous age limit of 54—must provide proof of 80
hours per month of work, training or volunteering to receive benefits
beyond a three-month window.
The bill also ruthlessly eliminates
exemptions for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and youth
aging out of foster care, while narrowing exemptions for parents to only
those with children under age 14. The bill also increases SNAP’s
administrative cost share for states from 50 percent to 75 percent.
*****
Beyond the direct cuts to food assistance, the OBBBA
represents the largest attack on federal health support in US history.
The bill slashes over $1 trillion from federal health programs,
including $793 billion from Medicaid and $268 billion from the
Affordable Care Act marketplaces. These cuts occur even as 30 percent of
Medicaid enrollees already report experiencing food insecurity.
While
the poor are told to tighten their belts, the administration is
funneling unprecedented sums into the machinery of state repression and
the pockets of the rich. The bill permanently extended the 2017
individual tax rates, benefiting the super-rich. It authorized $150
billion in new military spending, including $29 billion for
shipbuilding, $25 billion for the “Golden Dome” missile defense system
and $16 billion for AI and drone technology.
The legislation also
wages a two-pronged attack on immigrant workers and their families. It
allocated $170 billion for border security and deportation operations,
including $46.5 billion dedicated to the US-Mexico border wall, and
funding for 100,000 new migrant detention beds and 10,000 new ICE
agents. At the same time, it established $100 application fees for
asylum seekers and $550 fees for work authorization applicants. Contrary
to howls from the fascistic right, undocumented immigrants are not
eligible for SNAP benefits.
To implement the savage cuts to food
stamps, the Trump administration has also issued an unprecedented demand
for states to provide data on SNAP recipients, with the unstated aim of
denying benefits to as many people as possible. In what amounts to mass
surveillance, personal data requested includes SNAP recipient
identities, Social Security numbers, household composition, income
verification, work compliance proof (e.g., 80 hours/month) and
citizenship/immigration documents. At least 27 states have complied with
requests to turn over this sensitive personal information.
In
Minnesota, the target of ongoing ICE gestapo raids and deadly violence
by federal agents, the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) issued an
impossible demand for in-person interviews of 100,000 households within
30 days, threatening to disqualify the state from the program entirely
before a federal court intervened with a preliminary injunction.
Amid this crisis, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has
provocatively claimed that Americans can eat on just $3 a meal, with a
diet of pork, eggs, whole milk and broccoli. Critics have criticized
this as a “prison diet,” noting it lacks essential variety and ignores
the reality of rising grocery prices, which saw their largest jump since
2022 this past December.
As in all aspects of social life, the
super-wealthy live in a different universe compared to the poor. The
2024 BLS data (adjusted for 2-3 percent food inflation into 2026) shows
stark divides in spending on food for a family of four. The bottom
quintile, or lowest 20 percent of households, often earning under
$30,000 annually, spend about $450–$550 a month on all food and
beverages. This equates to roughly 30-35 percent of after-tax income,
prioritizing cheap staples and minimal eating.
By contrast, the
top quintile of households, earning over $150,000 annually, allocate
$1,400–$1,800 or more monthly, or just 3-5 percent of income. This
covers premium groceries, frequent dining out and takeout, with
away-from-home spending on food topping at-home spending. The top 1
percent of households, earning $1 million-plus annually, allocate an
average of $3,000-$5,000 or more monthly on food and beverages, dining
at luxury restaurants, prioritizing premium food and imported wines and
spirits.
Multiple polls indicate that a majority of Americans oppose the cuts
implemented by the OBBBA, including those to SNAP. Researchers at Yale
and the University of Pennsylvania have warned that these cuts to health
and nutrition programs could lead to over 51,000 preventable deaths
annually. The OBBBA stands as a testament to an administration dedicated
to rewarding the wealthy at the direct expense of the health and lives
of the working class.
Facing escalating protests by doctors and school development officers,
the Sri Lankan government has issued a draconian decree declaring
electricity supply, fuel, hospitals and 15 other sectors “essential.”
The decree effectively criminalizes all strikes and other forms of
industrial action by tens of thousands of employees in these sectors.
Issued on January 28, the extraordinary gazette notification invokes
the notorious Essential Public Services Act No. 61 of 1979—legislation
with a blood-soaked history of crushing working-class resistance.
Elected
to power in a landslide election in mid-November 2024, after falsely
pledging to improve living standards, halt austerity and defend
democratic rights, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power
(JVP/NPP) government now confronts thousands of workers up in arms over
its failure to fulfil these promises.
*****
Sri Lanka’s essential services law was introduced by President
Jayawardene’s United National Party (UNP) government in 1977 to crush
workers’ resistance to his administration’s pro-investor, free-market
agenda. The draconian law has been invoked around 100 times by
successive Sri Lankan administrations since then, and for the same
purpose.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was undemocratically
installed after the mass uprising that brought down the Rajapakse
government in 2022, utilised the law 32 times against workers in just 26
months—the most intensive use of the measure for a comparable period.
The JVP/NPP, having already imposed it four times, is following in his
footsteps.
The JVP/NPP government imposed the Essential Services
order on November 29, 2025, immediately following Cyclone Ditwah. The
disaster claimed over 640 lives, displaced 230,000 people, and affected
more than 1.4 million across 25 districts.
Framed as a response to Ditwah’s devastation, the decision
represented far more than disaster management. It was a clear political
signal that the JVP/NPP government will ruthlessly impose the IMF’s
austerity measures, crushing all resistance from workers facing wage
cuts, job losses, the destruction of public services, and any mass anger
over the government’s inadequate response to the disaster.
This
agenda was reaffirmed by IMF mission chief Evan Papageorgiou during a
recent visit. He told the media that the Sri Lankan government would
“safeguard the gains that were achieved on fiscal and debt
sustainability,” making clear that the disaster would not alter this
commitment. The IMF insisted that cyclone reconstruction costs had to be
absorbed within the existing program framework, meaning even further
pressure on wages, services and public sector employment.
*****
Confronted with this anti-democratic onslaught, Sri Lanka’s trade
union bureaucracy has refused to organize any sustained campaign against
the Essential Services orders, the new anti-terrorism legislation, or
the government’s accelerating attacks on workers’ fundamental rights.
While
JVP/NPP-affiliated trade unions maintain a deathly silence and actively
block all anti-government action by their members, unions tied to
opposition parliamentary parties—including the Samagi Jana Balawegaya
and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna—have called only limited actions
aimed at defusing genuine working-class opposition.
The Frontline
Socialist Party, which falsely postures as a left-wing opponent of the
government, collaborates with this union apparatus, whitewashing its
betrayals and channeling workers into dead-end negotiations and appeals
to parliament.
Workers cannot trust any of these capitalist
parties and their affiliated trade unions. To fight the government’s
anti-democratic measures and its IMF-dictated program, workers need to
establish independent, democratically controlled rank-and-file action
committees across all sectors—in hospitals, power stations, schools,
offices, plantations and workplaces. Doctors, electricity workers,
education workers, state employees, plantation workers, rural masses and
students all face the same attack on jobs, wages, public services and
democratic rights.
Sri Lankan workers are not alone.
Internationally, workers are fighting similar attacks from a common
enemy—global capitalism and its state institutions. In the US, nurses
and other healthcare workers are striking against unsafe staffing
levels, low pay and the privatization of healthcare. In Europe, Asia and
Latin America, workers are fighting job cuts, rising living costs and
austerity imposed by governments acting on behalf of banks and
corporations.
The fight against IMF austerity in Sri Lanka can only succeed as part of
a broader struggle of the international working class. By linking up
with their class brothers and sisters across borders, sharing
experiences and coordinating struggles through rank-and-file organizations, workers can transform isolated national battles into a
powerful global movement. The unity of workers internationally is the
decisive force needed to defeat repression, overturn austerity and open
the way for a socialist society based on social need, not profit.
The convergence of these struggles reflects a deepening militancy
among healthcare workers nationwide, driven by intolerable working
conditions, chronic understaffing, falling real wages and the
indifference or outright hostility of corporate healthcare systems and
the political establishment. It also highlights the need for a broad,
working class movement in defense of public health, which the union
officialdom is doing everything it can to prevent.
Despite expired
contracts, the UFCW has deliberately prevented pharmacy and lab workers
from joining their coworkers already on strike. A Kaiser nurse told the
World Socialist Web Site on Monday that negotiations between
UNAC/UHCP (United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care
Professionals) and Kaiser Permanente are expected to resume imminently.
A top priority in restarting such discussions is to shut the strike
down before the UFCW strike begins.
The urgency of unity is
underscored by events in New York. Nurses at New York-Presbyterian,
Montefiore and Mount Sinai are being threatened with mass firings if
they do not return to the job in two weeks, and the union has issued a
“streamlined” proposal to shut the strike down without nurses’ demands
being met. Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has strengthened hospital
management by issuing Executive Order 56, declaring a state of emergency
and suspending licensing requirements for out-of-state nurses,
effectively facilitating strikebreaking.
Kaiser is seeking through
its legal team to reclassify the strike as an “economic strike,”
narrowing its scope to wages. If successful, the company could
permanently replace striking workers.
But Kaiser nurses are
objectively positioned to unite with their counterparts in New York.
Such unity cannot be entrusted to union bureaucracies with long records
of isolating struggles and cutting deals behind workers’ backs. It must
be organized through rank-and-file committees based on workers’
democratic control.
Solidarity must extend beyond symbolic gestures. What is required is the
building of a national network of rank-and-file committees linking
healthcare workers with broader sections of the working class to
coordinate strikes, mutual aid and political strategy. This raises
political questions, including the assault on democratic rights, extreme
social inequality and war, demanding a unified working class response.
Several recent media reports have revealed the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) has assembled a complex surveillance apparatus that
merges biometric identification, mass data collection and predictive
policing tools to target both immigrants and citizens alike. This
sprawling system is being used to track and locate individuals for
apprehension, detention and violence by lawless gangs of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents.
Awareness
of this infrastructure has grown following the public assassinations in
Minneapolis of anti-Trump activists Renée Good, who was murdered at
point blank range by ICE officer Jonathan Ross on January 7, and Alex
Pretti, who was beaten and murdered execution-style by CBP thugs who
have yet to be named, on January 24.
In flagrant violation of core
constitutional rights, including the First, Fourth and Fourteenth
Amendments, this surveillance infrastructure represents the
consolidation of a domestic spying regime aimed at suppressing
opposition to the government’s anti‑immigrant crackdown and its broader
policies of war and social counterrevolution.
Reports in the New York Times and Washington Post
describe how ICE, CBP and other DHS components have deployed facial
recognition apps, license‑plate databases, cell‑phone location tracking,
AI‑driven “target maps,” social‑media monitoring and drones against
both undocumented workers and citizens participating in protests.
These
technologies are integrated through platforms built by companies like
Palantir under multimillion‑dollar contracts to compile dossiers that
fuse immigration records, travel data, Social Security files, commercial
data brokers’ feeds and social‑media activity into a single,
continuously updated system.
This network directly is being used
to attack rights to free speech, protest, association and the press, by
identifying, tracking and blacklisting those who oppose the government,
including legal observers and bystanders filming ICE operations. It also
violates constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and
seizures, through warrantless facial scans, mass cell‑phone location
tracking, dragnet license‑plate collection and data mining via fusion
centers and private brokers.
Finally, the clandestine surveillance
apparatus contradicts due‑process and equal‑protection guarantees of
immigrants and protesters who are being placed under automated
suspicion, often misidentified and subjected to raids, detention and
even lethal violence without legal recourse.
DHS officials have
acknowledged that facial recognition and other tools are routinely used
in the streets without consent and civil rights organizations have
warned that there is no effective government framework limiting these
practices. As one ACLU attorney put it, the combination of these
technologies is giving the state “unprecedented capabilities.” Such
capabilities are a component part of the police‑state apparatus being
erected by the Trump administration across the country.
On January 28, the World Socialist Web Site published a perspective entitled, “Was Alex
Pretti the subject of a targeted assassination?” which argues that the
killing of the beloved Minneapolis ICU nurse and legal observer by
federal agents “was a targeted assassination carried out by the Trump
administration’s paramilitary forces in order to terrorize Minneapolis
citizens opposing and recording its criminal activities.”
CNN and
other outlets confirmed that roughly a week before his murder, Pretti
had intervened when he saw ICE agents chasing a family, blowing a
whistle and shouting at the agents, who then tackled him, broke his rib
and later described him as “known to federal agents.”
The WSWS perspective notes that cellphone video from January 24 shows
Pretti intervening to protect a woman knocked to the ground, being
tackled, disarmed and held face‑down while one agent removed his
holstered firearm, after which another agent pushed this colleague aside
and fired four shots into Pretti’s back, followed by six more shots
into his motionless body.
The article concludes: “Emerging
evidence strongly indicates that the murder of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by
federal agents on January 24 in Minneapolis was a targeted
assassination.”
Critically, the WSWS explained that Pretti and fellow observer Renée
Good were already being tracked by ICE and CBP through centralized
systems that collect license plates, IDs, photographs and video of
“agitators,” with Palantir and similar vendors compiling lists of
protesters and those filming immigration operations.
A DHS memo obtained by CNN ordered agents to gather such data for a
“centralized surveillance database,” making it overwhelmingly probable
that Pretti’s earlier confrontation, his identity, his vehicle details
and his role as a documenter of ICE abuses were recorded and flagged
well before the fatal shooting.
This context—combined with the
bystander video evidence and the prior assault by ICE agents—makes the
likelihood of a targeted political assassination on US soil not only
plausible but compelling. The use of body‑camera footage—partially
withheld from the public—to reconstruct events further underscores how
every interaction with these agencies is now mediated by a digital
infrastructure that can be selectively used to justify or conceal state
violence.
The surveillance toolkit fielded by DHS and its partners is extensive and expanding. Among the known tools are the following:
Mobile facial recognition (NEC’s Mobile Fortify and similar apps): - Purpose:
Instantly match face scans against “trusted source photos” including
passport, driver’s license, immigration and watch‑list databases. - Use: ICE
and CBP agents point phone cameras at people in the street, at traffic
stops and at protests to verify identity and immigration status;
numerous citizens in Minneapolis report being scanned without consent
near demonstrations against ICE.
Iris‑scanning and other biometrics: - Purpose: Rapid biometric confirmation at close range, often integrated with mobile devices. - Use: Deployed
in field operations, detention centers and border zones to enroll
migrants in databases that can track them indefinitely and flag them
whenever they interact with state institutions, from airports to local
police.
Automated license‑plate readers (ALPRs): - Purpose: Capture and store images of vehicle plates, locations and times, building a historical map of movements. - Use: ICE
purchases mobile readers from Motorola Solutions and taps into
commercial systems like Thomson Reuters’ 20‑billion‑record database, as
well as local police networks and Flock Safety cameras, to track where
targeted vehicles live, work, attend meetings and protest.
Cell‑phone location tracking (Stingrays and bulk data): - Purpose: Use cell‑site simulators that mimic towers, and commercial location data, to identify and follow mobile devices in real time. - Use: Agents
can either search for a specific device or sweep entire areas around
protests and immigrant neighborhoods, mapping networks and identifying
who attends demonstrations or visits targeted homes.
Digital forensics and device exploitation (Cellebrite, Paragon, others): - Purpose: Break into locked phones and computers, bypass encryption, extract and recover deleted files, messages and app data. - Use: Once
ICE or CBP seize a device—during raids, checkpoints or
arrests—specialized teams use these tools to download years of
communications, contacts and media, feeding this data into central
systems for further analysis and cross‑matching.
AI‑driven ImmigrationOS and Palantir targeting platforms: - Purpose: Integrate
multiple data streams—immigration records, travel histories, commercial
databases, social media, license plates and biometrics—into a single
map‑based interface that assigns “confidence scores” to addresses and
individuals. - Use: A Palantir app shows agents a map
dotted with “potential deportation targets,” providing dossiers that
include names, photos, Alien Registration Numbers and calculated
likelihood of presence at given locations, effectively automating where
to raid and whom to prioritize.
Social‑media monitoring and data‑broker contracts: - Purpose: Monitor
platforms such as X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit
around the clock, scraping posts and metadata to identify organizers,
slogans, locations and networks. - Use: ICE has assembled
teams that track protest hashtags, livestreams and viral clips of raids,
linking online speech to physical identities via facial recognition, IP
tracing and data purchased from private brokers.
Drones and aerial surveillance (including MQ‑9 Predator): - Purpose:
Provide persistent overhead monitoring of wide areas, using
high‑resolution cameras and, in some cases, signals‑intelligence
payloads. - Use: Small drones have been deployed over
immigration protests, while CBP flew a military‑grade MQ‑9 Predator over
anti‑ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, demonstrating the fusion of
foreign‑war technology with domestic repression.
Fusion centers and nationwide data sharing: - Purpose: Aggregate data from federal, state and local police, as well as private sources, under DHS coordination. - Use: Fusion
centers act as clearinghouses for Suspicious Activity Reports, gang
databases and immigration “intelligence,” allowing ICE, CBP, FBI and
local departments to share watch lists and surveillance data outside
traditional warrant procedures.
Body‑worn cameras and “evidence” management systems: - Purpose: Record encounters and feed video into analytic tools, including face recognition and pattern detection. - Use: Though
DHS scaled back plans for universal ICE body‑cams, some agents involved
in the Pretti killing wore them, and the selective release or
suppression of this footage is part of how the state shapes the
narrative of its own crimes.
Each tool, taken alone,
undermines basic rights. In combination, these technologies are an
integrated apparatus of population control directed especially against
immigrants and political opponents of Trump’s presidential dictatorship
drive.
*****
For more than two decades, the World Socialist Web Site has
warned that the “war on terror” launched after September 11, 2001,
provided the pretext for building a comprehensive surveillance and
repressive apparatus that would be turned inward against the working
class. The Snowden revelations in 2013 exposed the National Security
Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and its PRISM
program to harvest emails, photos and other content from major internet
companies, revealing that the intelligence agencies were systematically
lying about domestic spying and working directly with the telecom and
tech monopolies.
In January 2014, then-President Obama announced
that the NSA’s bulk data collection operation was being ended and, in
June 2015, the USA Freedom Act was signed into law formally claiming
that mass surveillance was being halted. However, as Edward Snowden
himself pointed out, these programs continued in more sophisticated
forms.
In 2020, a federal appeals court ruled that the NSA’s
telephone metadata dragnet was illegal and likely unconstitutional,
confirming that the state had violated both statutory limits and
constitutional protections on a vast scale. Yet rather than dismantle
this machinery, successive administrations—including Obama, Trump and
Biden—adapted it, shifting from overt NSA programs to a more fragmented
system of policing, immigration and “homeland security” surveillance
that relies heavily on private contractors, data brokers and fusion
centers.
The present DHS technology stack—Palantir’s real‑time
tracking platforms, AI‑driven targeting, ubiquitous biometric collection
and corporate data‑broker feeds—represents the continuation, not the
abandonment, of the system exposed by Snowden. It has been repurposed to
criminalize immigrants and dissenters.
The integration of Social
Security records with immigration databases discussed in internal DHS
communications shows that the same logic of total information awareness
is now being applied to every aspect of social life, from work to
travel. Moreover, the recent attempt by Trump’s Attorney General Pam
Bondi to blackmail the state of Minnesota into handing over its
databases of Medicaid and SNAP benefit recipient data and voter
registration data is particularly ominous.
*****
The exposure of DHS’s surveillance infrastructure—including the role
of tech corporations, data brokers and a vast network of “fusion”
partnerships—demonstrates that democratic rights cannot be defended
within the framework of capitalism. A state that protects the wealth of a
tiny oligarchy amid staggering inequality, domestic militarization and
imperialist war will inevitably treat immigrants, protesters and workers
as enemies to be monitored, controlled, suppressed and killed.
The
working class, which produces everything in society and operates the
very technologies being used by the state, is the only social force
capable of dismantling this machinery. The ICE and CBP repressive
apparatus and the entire system of immigration raids, detention and
deportation must be abolished and the full legalization and equal rights
of all immigrants guaranteed. DHS fusion centers, predictive‑policing
and data‑broker contracts, facial recognition and mass biometric
collection by the state must be shut down.
The tech giants and
surveillance contractors like Palantir and critical infrastructure must
be seized and placed under the democratic control of the working class
to address social needs, not the profits and repressive requirements of
the capitalist oligarchy. The struggle against surveillance and
police‑state measures must also be linked to the fight against war,
austerity and authoritarian rule. Only the conscious, independent
mobilization of the working class in the struggle for socialism can halt
the descent into dictatorship and secure a future for workers and young
people free of police repression and based on genuine democratic rights
for all.
A measles outbreak is now ripping through the Dilley Immigration
Processing Center in South Texas, where the Trump administration
confines hundreds of immigrant families and children under conditions of
deliberate brutality and medical neglect. The outbreak, confirmed
January 31 by the Texas Department of State Health Services, is a social
crime committed by a fascistic regime that treats human beings as
disposable and public health as an obstacle to profit.
*****
Measles spreads through the air and can linger in a room for up to
two hours after an infected person leaves. In crowded, poorly ventilated
facilities where medical care is rationed such as at the Dilley
detention center, a single case can ignite mass transmission. The
conditions now exist for explosive spread among children, parents,
workers and surrounding communities.
The Dilley center, run by the
for-profit prison contractor CoreCivic, has a capacity of 2,400. It is
the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was held before his
recent release home to Minneapolis. On January 24, a protest broke out
at the facility, with hundreds shouting, “Let us out!” and “Liberty for
the kids!” This was first made public by attorney Eric Lee, who
represents five children detained at Dilley.
In interviews
following these protests, Lee described conditions inside Dilley, noting
that baby formula is mixed with “putrid” water, food has “bugs in it,”
and guards are “often verbally abusive.” When one of his clients with
appendicitis collapsed in the hallway, he was initially denied treatment
and told to “take a Tylenol and come back in three days.”
The
Department of Homeland Security’s response to the measles outbreak at
Dilley has been to issue empty statements through Assistant Secretary
Tricia McLaughlin, who claimed that ICE “immediately took steps to
quarantine and control further spread” and that “all detainees are being
provided with proper medical care.”
This statement is a blatant lie. The same apparatus that denies
medical treatment to children with appendicitis and provides them with
putrid water and food couldn’t care less about the health of those it
incarcerates. The “lockdown” is a control measure designed to keep
journalists, independent doctors and attorneys out while giving ICE full
discretion to conceal illness and continue the neglect that created the
outbreak. There is a growing danger that hundreds of children and their
parents will be infected inside Dilley, and that some will die, with
virtually nothing reported to the outside world.
The Dilley
outbreak is unfolding amidst a national measles resurgence. In 2025, the
US recorded 2,255 measles cases, the highest annual total since 1992,
while two unvaccinated children succumbed to the disease. In January
2026 alone, 607 cases were confirmed. The largest outbreak is currently
in South Carolina, where 847 cases have been confirmed, 813 of them in
Spartanburg County.
*****
The nation’s measles elimination status, maintained since 2000, is
now in jeopardy. Dr. Demetre C. Daskalakis, a former CDC official who
resigned amid the Trump administration’s mass purges last year, warned
that the US public health system is “about to code” and stated bluntly:
“We do not have the capability to actually control measles. I’m going to
say that elimination is already lost.”
The Trump administration,
above all Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy
Jr., bears central responsibility for this catastrophe. For decades,
Kennedy has played a major role in spreading anti-vaccine
disinformation. As HHS director, last year Kennedy purged all 17 members
of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the first
time in the committee’s 61-year history its entire membership has been
dismissed. He fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after she refused to
pre-approve anti-vaccine recommendations and, most recently, revised the
childhood vaccine schedule at the start of January to no longer
recommend universal vaccination for influenza, COVID-19, rotavirus,
hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal disease.
Under the
banner of “Make America Healthy Again,” the Trump administration has
fired more than 20,000 scientists and public health workers from HHS,
dissolved the CDC’s Global Health Center, and scrubbed thousands of
pages of scientific information from government websites.
These
policies mark a deepening and broadening of the bipartisan assault on
public health throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, which began under the
first Trump administration and escalated under Biden. In total, over 1.5
million Americans have now died from COVID-19 or its aftereffects,
while Long COVID continues to impact tens of millions.
The measles outbreak at Dilley concentrates many of the main features of
the Trump administration’s fascist program: the expansion of the
police-state apparatus and ICE terror gangs, the erection of a network
of modern-day concentration camps, the subordination of human life to
profit, and the destruction of all public health protections. The
imprisonment of immigrant families under increasingly barbaric
conditions is inseparable from the global crisis of capitalism—the wars,
economic plunder and climate disruption that have displaced tens of
millions, whom the imperialist powers then criminalize and cage.
But the working class cannot rely on the Democratic Party, which has
continuously enabled the expansion of the detention regime and the
destruction of public health. The Dilley child detention center was
built under the Obama administration in 2014 and operated for most of
the Biden administration. Today, as ICE agents prowl the streets of
Minneapolis and murder innocent civilians including Renée Nicole Good
and Alex Pretti, the Democrats are working with Trump to suppress
opposition and ensure the ongoing funding of the repressive state
apparatus.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the expansion of... neighborhood committees and the building of a network of rank-and-file
committees in every factory and workplace, to unify with workers
globally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees (IWA-RFC). This network of committees, organized
independently of the corporate-controlled union bureaucracies and the
entire political establishment, must advance the following demands:
All
immigrant detention centers, including Dilley, must be closed
immediately, with those released free to live and work where they
please.
A massive public health program must be launched
to test everyone at Dilley, in the surrounding community, and wherever
measles is currently spreading in the US, with patients safely isolated
and treated.
Vast resources must be provided to
vaccinate all those eligible for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR),
COVID-19, influenza and other vaccines essential for public health, both
in the US and internationally.
All ICE operations, detentions, deportations and the criminalization of migration must end now.
The
fight to stop the measles outbreak at Dilley, defend the right to
asylum, and halt the Trump administration’s war on science is
inseparable from the fight for socialism. Public health and democratic
rights cannot be defended within a system that subordinates every social
need to private profit and state repression. The task before the
working class is to take up this fight consciously and internationally,
building the political leadership necessary to put an end to capitalism
and establish a society based on economic planning and with the aim of
providing for human needs, not the wealth of oligarchs.
The contract for 30,000 oil refinery workers in the United States
expired on Sunday, but the United Steelworkers (USW) union is keeping
workers on the job under indefinite, 24-hour rolling extensions.
Marathon Petroleum, the lead negotiator for the oil companies, is
demanding sweeping concessions that would cut real wages and pave the
way for automating away workers’ jobs.
Together, the workers at
these facilities account for about two-thirds of the refinery capacity
in the United States, meaning they have immense economic power. Under
conditions of growing calls for a general strike against ICE murders in Minneapolis and tens of thousands of striking nurses,
a refinery workers’ strike would meet instantly with wide support. It
would also encourage the 25,000 steelworkers at US Steel,
Cleveland-Cliffs and other companies whose USW contracts expired on
September 1.
Fear of such a development is precisely why the
union bureaucrats, with their close connections to management and the
government, are refusing to call a strike. The decision to extend the
contract was announced in a short post to the USW website late in the
night on January 31 without any explanation or reason given. In a text,
the USW instructed workers: “Continue to show up to work as scheduled,
show your support and solidarity and look out for updates from your
local leadership.”
*****
The USW openly bragged
that the last contract in 2022, worked out in close consultation with
the Biden White House, “did not contribute significantly to
inflation”—that is, wages did not keep pace with the rising cost of
living. That contract was also worked out past the expiration date, on
rolling 24-hour contract extensions. The contract was also reached, as
the current one also is, on the cusp of major wars—the US proxy war
against Russia in Ukraine in 2022 and wars against Venezuela and Iran
today.
Workers are furious at the news. They are demanding a minimum of 25 percent, according to social media posts.
Comments include:
“If we are going to strike you shouldn’t just do one refinery. Do them all!”
Another,
denouncing the near total silence on negotiations from the union,
wrote: “It’s sad that I have to come here for contract information.”
Another proposed a new demand: “Yearly wage increase to percentage
match the average cumulative percentage raise of the CEO, CFO, and COO
of each corporation.”
Unconfirmed reports indicate that other
aspects of the offer currently include no COLA (Cost-of-Living
Allowance), no shift differential increase, no vacation increases, no
retirement medical assistance and no AI protection.
The last one
is crucial because companies are introducing AI to refineries for
predictive maintenance, real-time operations adjustments and other
purposes. As in other industries, such as on the railroads or at UPS and Amazon, this technology will be used to slash thousands of jobs.
The companies are tightening capacity, having closed two large
facilities last year and preparing a third this year. Oil and gas output
is at record levels in spite of a dramatic fall in employment,
according to a Bloomberg report. Greater work is being placed on fewer
workers’ shoulders creating deadly conditions, as shown by the massive explosion last October at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery in suburban Los Angeles and the 2022 deaths of brothers Max and Ben Morrissey at the BP Husky refinery near Toledo, Ohio.
The
struggle must be waged against the union bureaucrats, who are working
with management as well as the Trump administration to impose another
concessions contract. Workers should demand an end to the rolling
extensions and an immediate strike to bring the oil companies to their
knees. They must organize rank-and-file committees to prepare to enforce
a democratic decision to strike, not wait for permission from above.
To
provide itself with some cover, USW locals are holding a series of
plant rallies calling for a “fair contract.” No doubt the participation
by workers in these rallies reflects a determination to fight. But a
real struggle can only begin once workers wrest the initiative out of
the hands of the union bureaucrats, assert control over the bargaining
process and link up with each other across the country to prepare joint
actions.
Workers must oppose attempts to isolate workers at
individual refineries. BP is maneuvering to remove its large facility in
Whiting, Indiana, from the national pattern bargaining framework.
*****
Workers cannot allow BP Whiting workers to be isolated the way the USW did in 2022 with 500 workers at the Richmond refinery in California. This was also preceded by a 10-month lockout
at ExxonMobil in Beaumont, Texas, where the USW allowed the company to
remove itself from the national bargaining framework as a prelude to
sweeping concessions. In 2024, the Teamsters union betrayed a three-month strike with a new seven-year agreement at the Marathon refinery in Detroit.
The last national strike in 2015 was limited initially to only nine
sites, eventually rising to 15. When it was shut down, the union left
workers at the Galveston Bay refinery on the picket line for months.
Part of that facility had suffered an explosion in 2005 that killed 15
and injured 180 when it was owned by BP.
*****
Workers are not only in a battle against the energy giants but the
Trump administration, which has fully backed the corporations by
stealing Venezuelan oil and dismantling environmental and workplace
safety regulations.
That is why the fight to defend jobs and
living standards must be combined with a fight against imperialist war
and dictatorship. New wars for oil in Venezuela and Iran would kill
workers all over the world for US profits. At the same time, the violent
suppression of popular protests against ICE in Minneapolis is a
demonstration of the methods being prepared against all workers who
resist the demands of the corporate oligarchy.
The USW and
officials in other unions support “America First” trade war policies on
the false grounds that they will create jobs in America, even when they
themselves are allowing companies to carry out deep layoffs. There were
1.2 million layoffs announced last year, the highest since 2020 and,
before that, the 2008-2009 recession.
In the pre-dawn hours of January 26 in the Philippines, the
roll-on/roll-off passenger ferry MV Trisha Kerstin 3 sank in the Sulu
Sea off Baluk‑Baluk Island while on its regular run from Zamboanga City
on Mindanao Island to Jolo City on Sulu Island. Dozens have been killed
while the exact cause of the disaster is still under investigation.
As of February 3, the Philippine Coast Guard has confirmed 42 dead,
including two children and a crew member. About 40 are still listed as
missing, while 316 people were rescued. Ten crew members, including the
captain, have also been reported missing.
As is often the case in
the Philippines, overloading of passengers leads to inconsistent
passenger data, making exact casualty figures unclear. This is the
second serious deadly accident connected to the ferry’s owner, Aleson
Shipping Lines, in the last three years.
Many of the survivors
floated in the water for several hours as they waited for rescue. “We’re
near Basilan, but it took them more than three hours to respond to us,”
said survivor Aquino Sajili, who called the response from the
Philippine coast guard “unacceptable.” Instead, local fishing vessels
were the first to arrive on the scene to rescue those in the water.
*****
Various accounts point to different causes for the ferry capsizing.
Zamboanga City Mayor Khymer Adan Olaso, a former ship captain and
married to one of the ferry company’s owners suggested, “Perhaps the
lashing materials couldn’t handle the strain. Maybe a truck was heavy,
perhaps it was overcapacity, so they didn’t notice it. The rolling
materials snapped and the ship rolled to one side—when it rolled, the
truck went with it and tilted. As the truck tilted, the ship hit an
‘angle of loll,’ and then the ship proceeded to sink.”
The
Philippines coast guard has suggested a squall, or sudden intense wind
led to the capsizing though Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and
Astronomical Services Administration weather forecaster Benison Estareja
noted that it is rare for such an event to cause ships to sink in the
country. Another survivor, Jun Guro, also contradicted the claim of a
squall, stating, “I hope there will be an investigation, because the
weather was fine. We sank even though there was no typhoon.”
The Department of Transportation (DOTr) on January 27 ordered a ten-day safety audit of Aleson
Shipping Lines and its vessels, which have been grounded. However, poor
vessel maintenance, overloading, and a lack of safety enforcement is
commonplace throughout the Philippines, where many working class people
rely on ferries for travel due to its relatively inexpensive costs.
In
the meantime, the ruling class has provided paltry assistance to the
survivors and the families of the dead. The Department of Social Welfare
and Development, for example, pledged just ₱10,000 ($US169) each to the
families of only two confirmed fatalities to assist with burials and
₱5,000 ($US85) each to 134 survivors for medical expenses.
Ferry transport is essential to millions in an island nation like the
Philippines. It should be a public utility run safely for the benefit
of the working people, yet private operators cut maintenance costs,
skimp on crew training, and overload vessels while state agencies simply
look the other way. Whatever the results of the DOTr’s “safety audit,”
it will ultimately lead to nothing more than issues being covered up and
ignored. The result is an ongoing pattern of “social murder,” where
working people and the poor pay with their lives for corporate gain.
This
is evident from the fact that inquiries have followed every major
incident in recent decades and yet have not prevented tragedies from
repeatedly occurring. Temporary probes and token punishments are meant
to obscure the fact that under capitalism safety is subordinated to the
drive for profit. According to the DOTr, Aleson has been involved in 32
safety-related incidents since 2019. Despite this record, the company
was allowed to continue operating.
The first round of Costa Rica’s 2026 presidential elections, as
reported by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), delivered a resounding
victory for Laura Fernández of the ruling Sovereign People’s Party
(PPSO), with 48.2 percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff.
In the
unicameral Congress, the PPSO led by incumbent President Rodrigo Chaves
tripled its seats to 31 out of 57, securing a majority and the most
right-wing Congress in the Central American country’s history.
Fernández
served as a stand-in for Chaves, who was barred by constitutional term
limits from re-running. She has pledged continuity, even offering Chaves
the Ministry of the Presidency. On election night, Fernández shared a
video call with Chaves before her acceptance speech, where he confided
in her ability to “push back against Communism” and advance free-market
policies.
*****
The election’s result is the political responsibility of the nominal
“left”, in particular the pseudo-left Broad Front (FA) and its satellite
organizations, which entered a de facto alliance throughout the
legislative period and electoral campaign with the traditional parties
of the local oligarchy in opposition to Chaves.
This coalition
included candidates Ariel Robles of the FA, Claudia Dobles, the former
first lady under the Citizen’s Agenda (CAC, formerly PAC)—Costa Rica’s
version of the “pink tide”— and Álvaro Ramos of the National Liberation
Party (PLN).
While banding together to ostensibly “defend
democratic freedoms,” none of these candidates made any attempt to
address the underlying causes of the authoritarian surge. Why should
workers and youth vote for forces directly implicated in defending one
of the highest inequality levels in Latin America, synonymous with
massive corruption and incompatible with genuine democracy?
A
young FA supporter at a Curridabat voting center captured this
bankruptcy: “I believe I represent youth when I say the priority is
kicking Chaves out of power. I actually feel very comfortable with the
fact that Frente Amplio has joined PLN and the old parties for this.”
Asked about the international push toward dictatorship and relations
with the Trump administration, he dismissed it: “I’m not interested in
that.”
This nearsighted perspective is the product of the
pro-capitalist and nationalist politics fomented by the FA, whose roots
lie in the Stalinist Vanguardia Popular and its long record of
popular-front coalitions with “democratic” sections of the oligarchy.
The ideological closeness between the Chaves-Fernández regime and the
Trump administration is unmistakable. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio
congratulated Fernández on Monday, stressing Washington’s “enduring
partnership” with San José.
*****
Fernández centered her campaign around fascistic anti-immigrant
poison and the promotion of close cooperation on security with
Washington—bolstered by Costa Rica’s increasingly militarized police
force.
Although there was no open Trump endorsement, unlike in
Honduras, Chile and Argentina last year, this was due to widespread
repudiation of Trump’s policies. Yet Nayib Bukele, Trump’s close ally,
was among the first to back and then congratulate Fernández. This
follows Chaves’s visits to El Salvador’s CECOT counter-terrorism prison,
amid promises to build a similar massive facility in Costa Rica—open to
US deportees.
Those hoping to oppose Trump needed only look to
Venezuela to understand that the FA and their partners are not an
option. At breakneck speed, the “Bolivarian Revolution” submitted to
Trump’s demands, handing over control of oil and the economy.
*****
While the far-right is now emboldened, Fernández’s triumph reveals
that dominant sections of the Costa Rican bourgeoisie and their US
imperialist overlords recognize the fragility of this “stability.” The
rise of Chaves and Fernández, like that of similar forces
internationally, lays the groundwork for a direct confrontation with a
working class that is immensely more powerful than at any other time.
Recent
decades have seen the arrival of key levers of US industry to the
country—including the production of medical devices, microchips and
other high-tech products. At the same time, workers have now become an
even greater target for Wall Street as it intensifies the exploitation
of workers across Latin America and the US itself to counter the crisis
of US hegemony and finance preparations for war.
It would be
fatal to believe economic tides won’t turn harsh. The Chaves-Fernández
regime and the ostensible opposition are equally subordinate to foreign
capital and will impose the full burden on the working class and poor to
shield the oligarchy.
The Costa Rican working class and youth cannot secure democratic
rights or social gains and oppose imperialism through alliances with
bourgeois factions. It must seize power through independent action,
expropriating the banks, corporations, and imperialist holdings, and
forging a socialist federation with their brothers and sisters across
the continent as part of the world socialist revolution.
The
building of a Costa Rican section of the International Committee of the
Fourth International, fighting for this program, is the urgent task
facing workers, youth and the oppressed.
The Indonesian stock market plunged last Wednesday and Thursday in what
has been characterized as the most severe fall since the Asian financial
crisis in 1998. There was a slight rally on Friday, but the market fell
nearly 5 percent yesterday.
Last week’s fall, which wiped off around $80 billion from the market,
was sparked by an adverse report from the global index provider Morgan
Stanley Capital Investment (MSCI) which sets ratings for markets.
It
warned that it may downgrade Indonesia from an “emerging” to a
“frontier” market. The designations cover issues like good corporate
governance, fair dealing in financial markets and transparency in the
ownership of assets.
“Emerging” market status sits between
“frontier” and “developed,” indicating that the country has a better
system than the lowest grade but still carries risks.
*****
An article in the Financial Times yesterday cast some light
on the issues behind the MSCI decision which centered on the operations
surrounding so-called “deep-fried stocks” which have highly restricted
ownership that contribute “to rallies that can lift their tycoon owners
into the ranks of Asia’s richest people overnight.”
In its
announcement the MSCI cited “opacity in shareholding structure and
concerns about possible co-ordinated trading behaviour that undermines
proper price formation.”
In the wake of the MSCI report, the heads
of both the Financial Services Authority and the Indonesia Stock
Exchange resigned from their posts on Friday.
*****
One of the chief reasons for the sharp fall was that major large
investment funds which scour global markets for profitable opportunities
are not permitted to hold assets in countries with a “frontier” status.
Bloomberg
reported that according to analysts at Goldman Sachs in an extreme
scenario the outflow of such funds in the event of a downgrade could be
as much as $13 billion.
“The exit of such a large chunk of capital
would put pressure on Indonesia’s rupiah currency and make Indonesia
more dependent on domestic savings and official funding sources.”
The
concern of the MSCI agency centres on the structure of the market and
Indonesia’s very low “free float”—that is the proportion of a company’s
shares that are freely available for public trading.
This means
that a large proportion of the shares are in the hands of company
founders, family groups and large conglomerates and thereby more subject
to price manipulation, making it more difficult to large investors to
enter and exit markets safely.
There have long been concerns about
the concentration of share ownership in Indonesia, especially the
control exercised by conglomerates owned by billionaires. In its report
the MSCI said investors had expressed concerns over Indonesia’s
shareholder reporting rules and opaque ownership structures that
created conditions for improper trading and market manipulation.
In response to the sell-off, Indonesian regulators said they would
double the minimum free float level to 15 percent and would undertake an
overhaul of stock market ownership to encourage greater
diversification.
The MSCI warning came at a very “unfortunate
time,” in the words of one asset manager in Singapore, because of
growing problems in the economy and a weakening currency. No doubt
investors also have their eye on the prospect of further social
upheavals following the demonstrations and protests last August.
The
immediate trigger for the protests, which extended from the capital,
Jakarta, to major cities throughout the country, was the decision to pay
an accommodation allowance to parliamentarians as much as 10 to 20
times the minimum wage paid to millions of workers.
It was a
catalyst for the eruption of social anger over deepening inequality,
expressed not least in the elevation of the stock market tycoons.
*****
Investors are concerned that an expansion of the government deficit beyond a 3 percent limit will lead to market turmoil.
Those
concerns were heightened with the decision last month by Prabowo to
appoint his nephew, Thomas Djiwandono, as deputy governor of the central
bank. The rupiah, which has been trading at lows approaching the levels
seen in the 1998 crisis, fell on the news as it was seen as
compromising the independence of the central bank.
*****
Financial and economic analysts have likened the situation to that in
the US where president Trump is insisting that the central bank pursue a
more pro-growth monetary policy.
*****
There is also concern in financial circles that populist economic
measures undertaken by Prabowo in the effort to quell social opposition,
in particular the $28 billion free lunch program for school children,
will blow out the fiscal deficit under conditions where government
revenue is failing to grow.
Commenting on the market selloff,
Purbaya said: “This is surely just a temporary shock because there is no
issue in our fundamentals.”
But the movements in financial
markets and the lowering of the value of the rupiah point in the other
direction and the potential for the emergence of further economic and
financial turmoil, leading to the re-emergence of the social struggles
which erupted last August on a wider scale.
In the run-up to the works council elections in March, opposition to
Germany’s biggest union, the IG Metall, is growing in many big
companies. Numerous opposition slates want to break the union’s majority
and organize a fight against job cuts and wage cuts. Although 160,000
industrial jobs have already been destroyed in the last 12 months, IG
Metall has not organized a single industrial action. On the contrary, it
is working closely with companies and the government to prepare the
corporations for war and trade war at the expense of workers.
The
Socialist Equality Party (SGP) welcomes the rapidly growing opposition
to the union apparatus and supports workers who want to free themselves
from its straitjacket. In recent weeks, we have received a number of
letters from opposition works council lists asking for advice or
support. The groups are very diverse, ranging from honest workers
seeking a way to fight back to union bureaucrats who see their positions
slipping away.
We want to respond publicly on the World Socialist Web Site
to a request we received in December because it raises important
questions about how the fight against workplace massacres must be
developed. A worker from the Volkswagen main plant in Wolfsburg asked to
what extent Dirk Kaiser’s initiative is capable of breaking out of the
IG Metall straitjacket and waging a genuine struggle. Some time ago,
Kaiser founded the alternative “Union for Transformation” (GFT) and is
running his own list in the works council elections.
The GFT
criticizes IG Metall’s austerity policy, thereby tapping into widespread
opposition among the workforce to the job cuts and wage reductions that
were pushed through at the end of 2024 as part of the so-called
“Christmas miracle.” In a statement from October 2025, the GFT explains
that IG Metall had already entered the negotiations at that time with
demands that were too low: “A 7 percent pay increase was not enough to
offset the rise in the cost of living and inflation.” Instead, IG Metall
went on to agree to the destruction of 35,000 jobs.
The GFT is
calling for a “real union” that “actively and critically represents the
interests of the workforce” to replace IG Metall. Kaiser cites Claus
Weselsky, the long-standing head of the German Train Drivers’ Union
(GdL), as a positive example, describing him as “one of the last
authentic trade unionists in Germany.” Weselsky also advises the GFT.
The
GFT’s program does not differ fundamentally from that of IG Metall. GFT
leaders are quite prepared to cut jobs and wages, as long as there is a
decent “quid pro quo” in return, which they do not, however, quantify.
They are not even demanding a halt to job cuts, but merely better
negotiation and “future prospects.”
*****
Driven by the deep crisis of capitalism, individual countries and
companies have entered into a fierce conflict over the imposition of the
lowest wages and the worst conditions of exploitation. The US tariffs
on European goods are only the beginning of an increasingly fierce trade
war. By 2025, VW’s sales in the US had already fallen by 13 percent and
the trend is rising.
The burden of the trade war is being borne
by workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Last year’s job massacre
served directly to prepare German corporations for the trade war. But we
must not be under any illusions: if workers do not put an end to this,
conditions of exploitation resembling those of the 19th century will
return.
*****
Like IG Metall, the GFT accepts the conditions of the capitalist
crisis and the trade war and will therefore become the administrator of
the cuts in the same way. The alternative union even explicitly
champions plant by plant nationalism. It declares that the
competitiveness of German companies must be improved through cheap
energy prices and an end to the “SPD-Green ideology” and calls for the
expansion of German locations at the expense of Mexican ones.
This
Sankt-Florian policy (spare my house, set fire to others) will not save
a single job or protect wages, but rather further fuel the downward
spiral of layoffs and wage cuts. Companies can play plants off against
each other and intensify conditions of exploitation, while the major
powers continue to prepare for war.
*****
The example of the GDL shows that the inability of the unions to
represent the interests of workers cannot simply be attributed to the
depravity of individual officials or mafia-like structures, even though
both are beyond question. The unions side with the companies and support
the government’s war policy because they are closely linked to the
nation-state, which forms the framework for all their activities.
As
conflicts between the major powers intensify, they move closer to their
own government and serve as its police force to suppress the workers.
This was the case in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, when the
unions concluded a so-called truce with the Kaiser, and also in May
1933, when union officials marched under swastika flags and offered
Hitler their cooperation, only to be banned the very next day.
Today,
conflicts between the major powers are escalating once again. Trump
began the year with a criminal attack on Venezuela and is threatening
new attacks on Iran. Even a direct military conflict between Europe and
America can no longer be ruled out, as Trump’s threats against Greenland
show.
The ruling class in Germany is responding by developing its
own great power ambitions and seeking to enforce its economic interests
around the world by military means. The stated goal is to put Germany
in a position to win a war against nuclear power Russia within three
years. Workers are expected to pay for this madness through cuts in
healthcare, education, social services, job losses in industry and
ultimately with their lives.
Those who accept this framework can only lose!
But that does not mean that workers can no longer defend their
rights, as the unions would have us believe. Struggles have been won in
the past and they can be won again today. But that requires three
fundamental principles:
The struggle must be waged independently
of the union bureaucracies, which are closely linked to the state and
government and act as police forces against the workers.
The
struggle must be waged internationally. Today, it is the most normal
thing in the world to exchange information and coordinate across
borders. Each of us does this constantly at work and in our private
lives. The only reason this does not happen in our struggles is because
of the blockade by the union apparatus. The VW Group has almost 700,000
employees worldwide, including almost 300,000 in Germany. If they fight
together and do not allow themselves to be played off against each
other, these attacks can be repelled and conditions for all workers
improved. Such a struggle must be the starting point for a broad
offensive by the working class against the war policy and the attacks on
workers.
The struggle must not be guided by corporate profit
motives and the interests of individual nation-states but must focus on
the needs of workers. Enormous technological developments, above all
artificial intelligence, make it possible to improve the lives of all
people to an unprecedented level. But under capitalist conditions, the
same technology leads to mass layoffs, war and destruction. This cannot
be accepted.
In order to organize the struggle on the basis of
these principles, action committees independent of the union bureaucrats
must be established in every factory and every department, which must
network internationally and organize counterpower to the government and
management.
On Monday, around 100,000 bus, train and tram drivers in 150
municipal transport companies across Germany are paralysing local public
transit.
In all 16 federal states, Verdi is negotiating with the
Municipal Employers’ Associations (KAV) on the framework contracts that
regulate working conditions. In Bavaria, Brandenburg, Saarland,
Thuringia and at Hamburger Hochbahn, negotiations on wages and salaries
are also taking place.
Verdi is reacting to the growing anger
among public transit workers over unbearable working conditions and low
wages by holding “warning strikes.”
*****
The Verdi apparatus—forced by transit workers’ anger over the unbearable
working conditions and low wages that Verdi has prescribed in recent
years—has put forward demands that it never intends to enforce. We can
be sure that the Verdi negotiators will agree to one sell-out after
another with the respective employers in the coming negotiations.
*****
In Bavaria, Brandenburg, Saarland, Thuringia and Hamburg, cuts in
real wages are being agreed. Every percent more in wages is paid for
with dirty deals like the extension of working hours. Given the already
low wages, the “voluntary nature” of such deals is not worth the paper
it is written on. Working conditions nationwide are not being improved,
but worsened, and the risk of accidents increased.
The union
leadership, in which members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and
the Left Party primarily call the shots, has no intention of improving
working conditions and increasing wages appropriately. The contract
bargaining in all federal states, including the city-states, sees
members of the SPD, Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Greens and Left
Party, and frequently even union members, often sitting opposite each
other on both sides of the negotiations. Lucrative posts in municipal
transit companies usually go to local politicians and not infrequently
to “deserving” union officials, works council or staff council members.
Verdi boss Frank Werneke himself has been a member of the SPD for
decades and supports the government’s rearmament and war policy.
The Verdi apparatus agrees with the representatives of the municipal
employers that hundreds of billions must be poured into rearmament and
war and that the money must be saved elsewhere for this purpose,
including from us bus and train drivers. Various studies demonstrate
that the financial requirement for a nationwide functioning public
transport system will rise to almost €60 billion annually by 2030.
Instead, one austerity program after another is decided and enforced.
30-hour week with no loss of pay and automatic adjustment to regional costs of living
€30 minimum hourly wage in public transport nationwide
Maximum 8 hour shift length, abolition of split shifts, mandatory rest periods—at least 12 hours—and genuine breaks
No extensions of working hours, not even “voluntary” ones—for the protection of drivers and passengers
No staff cuts, immediate hiring offensive to relieve the burden;
No privatization; public investment instead of billions for rearmament—money for public transport, not for war.
These demands are the minimum to enable dignified working and living conditions in major cities.
*****
Part of such a reorientation must be close international cooperation.
All problems take on an international form nowadays. Workers everywhere
in the world face the same or similar problems.
For example, bus
transport in the Greater Paris area is to be privatized by the end of
2026. Around 19,000 bus drivers and technicians are to be forced to
switch to private operating companies—at significantly worse wages,
longer working hours and with the loss of central achievements such as
protection against dismissal, holiday regulations and social security.
In
Chicago, more than 40 percent of public transport faces being broken up
because the deficit of $700 to $730 million is no longer being covered
by the state government. The consequence will be the destruction of
thousands of jobs as well as the destruction of public transport.
In
Minneapolis and the entire US, a strong movement is currently
developing against Trump and his ICE Gestapo. Workers are discussing a
general strike against the fascist in the White House. These questions
are coming to a head all over the world and we can only defend our
rights if we fight together. Therefore, we from the Transport Workers
Action Committee stand in close political cooperation with the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
We
call on all employees and beyond: Build independent action committees
in your depots with trustworthy colleagues. Link up with the Transport
Workers Action Committee in Berlin.
The handover of Venezuela’s oil reserves to US imperialism by its
Bolivarian regime is unmasking anti-Trotskyist forces internationally,
including the Communist Party Marxist–Kenya (CPM-K). Its general
secretary, Booker Omole, has responded hysterically to the World Socialist Web Site’s exposure of his support for the Venezuelan regime, in its January 19
article “Kenyan Stalinist CPM-K attacks WSWS while praising Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez ahead of CIA talks.”
Omole’s reaction constitutes a devastating political self-indictment.
Even as US workers enter into mounting struggles against the Trump
administration, such as the mass strike in Minneapolis, Omole is
doubling down on defense of Rodriguez’s collaboration with Trump. He
tries to justify this by hailing Stalin and Stalin’s 1939 alliance with
Nazi Germany in the Stalin-Hitler Pact as a model of political “realism”
which he applauds the Bolivarian regime for following.
Within
hours of the WSWS article’s publication, Omole erupted into a frenzied
campaign of on X/Twitter, claiming that “Trotskyists of WSWS are
peddling slander.” Defending his support for Venezuelan interim
President Delcy Rodriguez, he asserted that “to praise resistance to US
aggression is not CIA collaboration. It is anti-imperialism.” But it is
Omole, not the WSWS, that builds an argument on slanders. The regime he
is defending is collaborating with the CIA to subjugate Venezuela to
imperialism.
After US forces invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its President Nicolas
Maduro, interim President Delcy Rodriguez announced an “exploratory
diplomatic process” reaching out to Washington. The Bolivarian regime
worked with the US Navy to seize shipments of Venezuelan oil purchased
by China that were being transported on a Russian tanker. Trump praised
Rodriguez as a “terrific person” and promised a “spectacular”
partnership centered on oil, aiming to exclude Russia and China.
Rodriguez agreed to place Venezuelan oil revenues in a Qatari bank
account administered by Washington.
On January 14, the CPM-K organized a protest outside the US embassy in
Nairobi that was violently suppressed by Kenyan police. Seeking to
posture as an opponent of imperialism, the party tweeted that the police
had acted “with instructions from Washington and CIA intelligence.”
Barely had the ink dried, however, when Rodriguez met directly with the
CIA Director John Ratcliffe himself in Caracas for talks.
*****
Omole’s response to the Venezuelan crisis exposes the class forces
underlying Kenyan Stalinism. The CPMK leadership does not aim to improve
workers’ living standards in former colonial countries; in fact, it
hails measures that plunder social resources from workers to hand them
over to imperialist banks and courts. Rather, it is driven by
petty-bourgeois hostility to the independent, international movement of
the working class that it justifies theoretically by defending the
crimes of Stalin.
*****
Omole’s portrayal of the Stalin–Hitler Pact as a nationalist
masterstroke that defended the Soviet Union is a despicable political
lie. The Stalin-Hitler Pact disoriented workers in the Soviet Union and
internationally amid the eruption of Hitlerite military aggression. It
came on top of Stalin’s Great Purges, a political genocide of Soviet
Marxists that killed much of the top military leadership of the Red
Army. This left the Soviet Union vulnerable and unprepared for the Nazi
invasion when Hitler’s surprise attack came in June 1941, leading to a
war in which the Soviet Union was victorious, but at the cost of a
staggering 27 million Soviet lives.
Omole’s
praise for Stalin’s pact with Hitler as he defends the Bolivarian
regime’s emerging pact with Trump, on the false and cowardly pretext
that capitulation to fascism buys time, exposes the CPMK. Omole is
defending a genocidal leader such as Stalin and covering up the
reactionary role of the Bolivarian bourgeois regime, even as conditions
rapidly develop for an international struggle of the working class
against imperialist war and fascism.
Across Africa, a wave of Gen Z–led protests has erupted from Kenya
and Nigeria to Madagascar and Tanzania, as anger explodes over mass
youth unemployment, poverty wages, corruption and police-state
repression.
In the US, a powerful resurgence of class struggle is
unfolding in direct opposition to Trump’s far-right dictatorship. Mass
strikes have erupted against ICE police murders in Minneapolis in line
with a growing strike wave across key industries. Fifteen thousand
nurses in New York City have been on strike for three weeks, while
31,000 Kaiser Permanente workers launched a nationwide strike last week.
Critically, 30,000 US oil refinery workers are set to enter into
struggle as their contracts expired on Sunday.
These workers, who
account for approximately two thirds of total US refining capacity,
occupy a strategic position at the heart of US energy infrastructure and
the global oil supply chain. They process the Venezuelan oil Rodriguez
is now handing over to US imperialism.
*****
In the epoch of imperialism, the struggle against imperialist
domination and for democracy cannot be left to the bourgeoisie. The
bourgeoisie in countries of belated capitalist development are corrupt,
tied to imperialism by a thousand threads, and incapable of realizing
the progressive tasks carried out by the great bourgeois-democratic
revolutions in the 18th century. These tasks fall to the revolutionary
movement in the working class, fighting to take power and use the
resources of the world economy to build socialism, a society in which
economic resources are used for social needs, not private profit.
Omole’s defense of Stalin and his support for Rodriguez’s collaboration with
CIA underscores the urgency of building a Trotskyist revolutionary
leadership, sections of the International Committee of the Fourth
International in every country. The statements of Omole are, on the
other hand, a warning as to the defeats and crimes towards which he is
leading those that would place their faith in the CPMK.
This international mobilization unfolds amid deepening global war and
the disintegration of the postwar imperialist order. The growing rupture
between the United States and the European Union reflects deep conflict
between rival sections of the global ruling class over markets,
resources and strategic influence. Trade coercion, military threats and
diplomatic confrontations such as the US-EU conflict over Greenland are
symptoms of this systemic breakdown.
*****
The International Day of Protest on February 6 represents an
important development, but it poses a decisive political task that goes
beyond symbolic opposition to war. Critical historical lessons must be
drawn, in particular from the experience of three years of mass protests
against the Gaza genocide. Workers cannot halt genocide, fascism and
war while remaining tethered to national bureaucracies who work
politically within the framework of the capitalist nation-state system.
Many
of the unions involved in the February 6 action—particularly those in
Italy, Greece, and Spain—emerge from a Stalinist tradition. Without
explicitly rejecting internationalism in words, they reject it in
practice. Instead of building a unified struggle of the global working
class, they advocate “international coordination” between national union
bureaucracies, each of which attempts to influence supposedly
“progressive” politicians in their own capitalist national-state
machine.
Antiwar sentiment among workers participating in the
February 6 action highlights the objective basis for socialist
internationalism: the shared interest of workers across borders in
stopping war and dictatorship, and opposing “their own” capitalist
oligarchies at home. The syndicalist perspective of unions controlling
the February 6 action does not, however, tend in this direction. It
presents workers opposed to war with no perspective beyond using the
strike to build parliamentary pressure, via moral appeals to national or
municipal officials.
The involvement of figures like US Amazon Labor Union founder Chris
Smalls in the February 6 protest illustrates this point. Smalls is known
for founding the Amazon Labor Union and a successful vote at JFK8. Yet
within months, the ALU displayed tendencies common to other unions:
bureaucratic disputes and reliance on the official union bureaucracies
and the Democratic Party, which under President Joe Biden armed and
backed the Gaza genocide.
*****
Growing mass demonstrations and calls for a general international strike
indicate that hostility to war resonates deeply among workers. However,
this sentiment can only become a material force if it is consciously
organized and politically clarified—in particular, on the necessity of
left-wing opposition to pro-imperialist parties of the affluent middle
class like Rifondazione.
It is urgently necessary to build rank-and-file committees,
democratically controlled by workers themselves and united across
national borders. Such committees must be independent of union
bureaucracies, capitalist parties and governments, and unified in the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
The construction of the IWA-RFC provides the organizational foundation
for a unified international movement of the working class against
imperialism, genocide, and far-right dictatorship.
Such a movement
can only be built in a political war against capitalist police states
led not only by fascist politicians like Trump or Italian Prime Minister
Georgia Meloni, but also by forces like the Socialist Party-Sumar
coalition in Spain. This underscores the decisive importance of the
International Committee of the Fourth International’s (ICFI)
decades-long defense of Trotskyism against both Pabloism and Stalinism.
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.
