Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Mass murder in the Indian Ocean: The torpedoing of the IRIS Dena
In this case, a submarine of the most powerful military force in the world snuck up on an isolated vessel posing no threat to anyone, gave no warning, offered no opportunity for surrender, and sent more than 140 sailors to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Pete Hegseth, a Christian fascist who believes that he is an instrument of Armageddon, then walked to a podium at the Pentagon and boasted about it.
The Trump administration has not offered a single word of justification. It has not attempted to identify the legal basis of this killing. It has not claimed self-defense. It has not alleged that the IRIS Dena was engaged in hostile action. It has not argued proportionality, military necessity or imminent threat. It has offered nothing—because it does not believe that anything is required. So much for the “rules-based order” about which the US has been lecturing everyone for the last three decades. What has replaced it is the naked assertion that the United States may kill whomever it wishes, wherever it wishes, whenever it wishes and that the act of killing is itself sufficient justification. “Quiet death,” Hegseth called it.
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The Iranian sailors who were murdered have no names in the American press. They have no faces. They have no families that Western journalists have been dispatched to interview. They were mostly young men, who had spent months away from their families on a professional naval deployment.
The Iranian crew were given no warning. They had no time to fight, to flee, or even to understand what was happening to them. The ship went down so rapidly that when the Sri Lankan Navy—not the United States Navy, not any American vessel but the navy of a small island nation acting under its international maritime obligations—arrived at the scene, the IRIS Dena had already completely vanished beneath the surface.
The US submarine that killed them made no attempt to rescue survivors, in direct contravention of its legal obligations under the Second Geneva Convention (1949), Article 18. It fired its torpedo, confirmed its kill and departed. The 32 sailors who survived owe their lives entirely to Sri Lanka’s rescue operations. The United States, which possesses the most powerful and technologically advanced navy on earth, did not deploy a single asset to pull a single drowning man from the water.
We do not know what the American sailors aboard the submarine were told as they executed their orders. But when they discover the truth—that they fired without cause and sent 140 men to their death—many of them will feel traumatic regret and shame that will last for the rest of their lives.
The IRIS Dena was not in Iranian waters. It was not in the Persian Gulf, not in any declared exclusion zone. It was not maneuvering aggressively or targeting any vessel. It was not part of any active naval engagement. It was sailing alone, without escort, thousands of miles from the nearest combat theater, heading home after participating—at India’s explicit invitation—in the International Fleet Review 2026 and the multinational exercise MILAN 2026 at the port of Visakhapatnam. That exercise had included 74 nations. It had included the United States. American and Iranian naval officers had, days before the sinking, attended the same professional gatherings on Indian soil.
The United States possessed every means to warn this vessel. It possessed every means to demand her diversion to a neutral port. It possessed surface ships, aircraft, and global communications systems. The IRIS Dena was a surface vessel, visible, trackable, reachable by radio on any international maritime frequency. No warning was given because none was intended. The administration did not consider a warning necessary because it does not consider explanation necessary, because it does not recognize any legal or moral authority beyond Trump’s “morality.”
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The actions of the US government replicate those of the Third Reich. Admiral Karl Dönitz issued his Laconia Order in 1942, directing U-boat commanders to abandon all rescue operations for survivors and to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare without warning. The infamous order stated:
All efforts to save survivors of sunken ships, such as the fishing out of swimming men and putting them on board lifeboats, the righting of overturned lifeboats, or the handing over of food and water, must stop. Rescue contradicts the most basic demands of the war: the destruction of hostile ships and their crews.
At his trial at Nuremberg, Nazi Admiral Donitz defended this order by arguing that modern warfare had rendered obsolete the older conventions of naval chivalry.
He received a prison sentence of 10 years. Hegseth announced “quiet death” before cameras, without lawyers, without shame, without the remotest suggestion that the killing of 140 sailors in international waters—without warning, without threat, without a single attempt to save them afterward—was anything other than an occasion for national self-congratulation.
The chain of command that ordered these killings ran from the submarine’s torpedo room to the White House. The doctrine of command responsibility, established at Nuremberg and embedded in international law, holds that political and military leaders bear criminal responsibility for war crimes committed by forces under their command—not only when they order such crimes directly, but when they knew or should have known of the crimes and failed to prevent or punish them. On this occasion, knowledge is not in question. The crime was announced, celebrated and broadcast to the world by the Secretary of War himself, in the presence of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.*****
The torpedo that sank the IRIS Dena did not only kill 140 sailors. It announced to the world and without apology that the United States government is not bound by any law, any convention or any standard of civilized conduct. The only imperatives that it recognizes are those dictated by the capitalist system and the accumulation of profit.
Every day, every new crime adds increased urgency to the warning of Leon Trotsky: “Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.”
2. Iran death toll surges past 1,200 as Israel bombs two more schools
The death toll from the US-Israeli war on Iran surged past 1,200 on Thursday as two more schools were bombed in the city of Parand, southwest of Tehran—the third and fourth schools struck since the bombing campaign began six days ago.*****
According to the US-based Human Rights News Agency, at least 1,114 civilians have been killed since fighting began, among them 183 children.
The devastation of Iranian society is accelerating. Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday that 33 civilian sites have been hit, among them hospitals, schools, residential neighborhoods, the Tehran Grand Bazaar and the Golestan Palace complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Strikes also damaged the Azadi Stadium, the country’s largest sporting venue. Tehran residents reported intensifying bombardment. “Today is worse than yesterday,” one resident told Al Jazeera by phone. “They are striking northern Tehran. We have nowhere to go. It is like a war zone.”
Iran remains under a near-total internet blackout for a sixth day—connectivity at 1 percent of normal levels—disrupting hospitals, pharmacies and banks. The economy, already devastated by decades of sanctions and runaway inflation—food prices had risen 105 percent before the war began—is in free fall.
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In an interview with Axios, Trump declared he must be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next leader, calling the late supreme leader’s son “unacceptable” and insisting “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.”
Trump is openly seeking the destruction of Iran as a functioning society through the effort to incite an ethno-communal civil war. The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces inside Iran with the aim of fomenting an uprising, according to CNN.
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Trump’s refusal to rule out ground troops—“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he told the New York Post—and his announcement that the Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz place American forces within range of Iranian anti-ship missiles in a waterway just 21 miles wide. Six US soldiers have already been killed with 18 seriously wounded.
Israel has seized upon the war to re-invade Lebanon and impose a total siege on Gaza. Israeli troops have crossed into southern Lebanon in a ground incursion, the military has ordered the evacuation of more than 100 villages and the entire Dahiyeh district of Beirut, and strikes since March 2 have killed at least 77 people and wounded more than 500. In Gaza, Israel shut every border crossing on March 1, halting all food, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid to more than two million people.
Iran has retaliated with waves of missiles and drones—more than 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 drones, according to Admiral Cooper—targeting Israel, US military bases and Gulf states. Iranian drones struck Nakhchivan International Airport and landed near a school inside Azerbaijani territory. Eleven civilians have been killed in Israel and at least three in the UAE.
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The Democratic Party, while quibbling over procedure, parrots the war aims of the administration. At a House Democratic Leaders press conference, Representative Ted Lieu denounced “a murderous, theocratic regime” that “funds terrorist networks and whose stated aim is to destroy the United States and Israel.” Representative Chrissy Houlahan declared: “I don’t mourn those leaders. I am clear-eyed about the threat that Iran is.” Representative Maggie Goodlander called Iran “a brutal and determined enemy... a regime that has blood of our fellow Americans on its hands.” Representative Jared Moskowitz denounced the war powers resolution itself as “the Ayatollah Protection Act.”
The Democrats’ procedural objections are a fig leaf. Not a single faction of the American political establishment opposes the war.
3. Entertainment industry turmoil intensifies as WGA staff walkout continues
The strike by 115 staff members at the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) is almost three weeks’ old, with no indication of an immediate conclusion. What may have seemed at first like a minor and perhaps brief dispute, has become quite bitter.
The strike helps expose basic truths about one of the most prominent unions in the entertainment industry and US trade unionism as a whole.
As the Writers Guild’s own employees walk picket lines outside its Los Angeles headquarters, the organization’s leadership has responded with maneuvers that reveal the chasm that exists between a well-paid bureaucracy and the rank and file.
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One of the most revealing episodes in the strike has been the cancellation of the Writers Guild annual awards program which was set for March 8.
Officially, the event was scrapped in the name of avoiding a “picket line dilemma.” Guild leaders claimed they did not wish to force members to choose between crossing a picket line or missing a major professional event.
The so-called “Picket Line Dilemma” arises because WGAW is functioning simultaneously as a union and as an employer. Its staff, members of the Pacific Northwest Staff Union, is demanding fair wages and protections in the face of rising living costs and glaring pay disparities. The guild’s executives, some earning more than $700,000 per year, are negotiating against their own employees.
By canceling the awards ceremony, WGAW’s leadership sought to sidestep a deeper political problem. The vast majority of writers identify instinctively not with the six-figure executives inside the building, but with the workers outside holding signs. To proceed with a gala celebration while staff members are on strike would have all too starkly revealed the social chasm within the organization.
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The salary figures speak volumes. In 2023, the year of the last strike, David Young, then Executive Director, received $1,065,657. Current Executive Director Ellen Stutzman is paid $761,624. Assistant Executive Directors Charles Slocum, Rebecca Kessinger and Lise Anderson earn between roughly $459,000 and $568,000. Chief Financial Officer Jean Ngo earns $390,617 and General Counsel Sean Graham $343,870. These sums are far removed from the precarious reality confronting most working writers.
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Under these conditions, the spectacle of guild executives earning Wall Street-level salaries while pleading financial constraints to their own staff only sharpens discontent.
The contradictions are equally acute at the Writers Guild of America East (WGAE), where staff are represented by the United Steelworkers (USW). While USW officials have issued empty statements expressing solidarity with the striking WGA West staff, they have refused to cancel a planned awards ceremony at WGAE, citing a legal loophole tied to their existing contract with the guild. This allows them to claim compliance with labor law while avoiding any action that would disrupt the institution’s operations.
In practice, the USW’s stance signals to management that it will prevent the strike from spreading and ensure rank-and-file anger does not develop into independent mobilization beyond the bureaucracy’s control. The “practice what you preach” hypocrisy is evident: leaders voice sympathy while guaranteeing no meaningful disruption occurs.
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Several prominent writers have publicly backed the striking WGAW staff. The most widely reported remarks came from Seth Rogen at SAG-AFTRA’s 2026 Actor Awards on March 1, where, accepting Best Male Actor in a Comedy for The Studio, he quipped: “You [SAG-AFTRA] were able to pay your own employees enough to keep the awards show from being canceled—take notes, WGA.”
Writer Jackie Penn stressed that staff were indispensable during the 2023 strike, calling their current demands “perfectly reasonable.” Joe Russo, CK Kiechel and Phillip Walker issued similar statements of solidarity.
These interventions are significant. The criticism suggests genuine unease within the broader membership. But appeals to the conscience of union executives, or to better internal “governance,” do not address the problems.
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The cancellation of a ceremony cannot conceal this reality. Nor can accusations of creating a “wedge” suppress the growing awareness among writers that their interests diverge sharply from those who administer their union.
The essential issue of the WGAW staff strike is the need for independent organization. Rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves, are required to break the stranglehold of the bureaucracy.
4. Macron commits France to joining neocolonial US war on Iran
On Tuesday night, President Emmanuel Macron gave a brief televised address to the French people announcing that France would assist the US-Israeli war against Iran. Trampling upon widespread hostility in France both to a US-led war with Iran and to the US president, Macron has plunged France into an escalating regional and global war.
While Macron acknowledged that the conflict is a “war which is spreading and whose ending no one today can predict,” he thereupon predicted that France’s role within it would be “strictly defensive, aiming to protect and to restore peace as soon as possible.”
In reality, Macron is aligning France with a neocolonial war of aggression by Washington against Iran, continuing his support for the Israeli regime throughout its US-backed genocide in Gaza. After polls found only 8 percent support for a US war with Iran, Macron acted with open contempt for public opinion, above all in the working class. He did not even bother to go through the motions of parliamentary debate and approval of his war policy. Instead, he unilaterally committed France to a war that threatens the world with an economic and military catastrophe.
To promote the barefaced lie that his policy is somehow “defensive and peaceful,” Macron stood reality on its head, blaming Iran for the war launched against it.
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It has been widely reported that the Trump administration had decided for war on Iran last year, and that it negotiated with Iranian officials this year in bad faith, having already decided to bomb them. Yet earlier this year, Macron declared in a text message to Trump that he was “totally aligned” with Trump’s policy in Syria and that together they could “accomplish great things in Iran.”
In a nod to mass opposition to imperialist war and the Gaza genocide, Macron briefly acknowledged the illegal character of the US-Israeli war but then dismissed it as irrelevant, citing the Iranian regime’s repression of protests late last year. US-Israeli strikes on Iran, he admitted, “have been conducted outside of international law, which we cannot approve of. But in any case history never mourns the executioners of their own people.”
This argument is, from the outset, utterly hypocritical. Trump in the United States and Macron in France, no less than the Iranian regime, rest upon the use of deadly force to crush social protests. Trump dispatches militarized ICE anti-immigration police to occupy US cities and gun down US citizens after mass protests mobilized millions against his policies; Macron in 2019 briefly authorized the French army to fire on mass Yellow Vest protests against social inequality which saw draconian police repression.
The Trump administration’s conduct of the war on Iran makes a mockery of Macron’s pose of concern for the well-being of the Iranian people. In less than a week, it has bombed schools, abandoned Iranian sailors whose ships it had sunk to die at sea, and pursued large-scale targeted assassination of Iranian officials. These crimes flow, moreover, from the imperialist character of the war against Iran that Macron is joining, as world capitalism plunges ever deeper into global war.
5. Trump fires Noem as DHS secretary, but war on immigrants continues.
The corruption issue is significant but secondary compared to the determination of Trump, Stephen Miller and other White House fascists to continue the attack on immigrants unabated. [Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi ] Noem is a penny ante scam artist compared to Trump himself, whose family has netted billions from the first year of his second term. Her most flagrant offense was a $220 million public relations campaign featuring herself, urging undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.”
Noem awarded the largest contract for the campaign to a company set up by the husband of her press spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin. The company was founded only 11 days before it received a government contract worth about $160 million. McLaughlin left the department last month, a departure which foreshadowed the ouster of Noem.
At the Senate hearing Tuesday, Noem came under intense questioning from Republican senators as well as Democrats, suggesting that the word had already gone out that Trump was no longer insisting on her defense. Or more likely, the Republicans had been told to attack because her ouster was imminent—dead woman walking.
When Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, an arch-Trumper, asked Noem about the $220 million contract, she claimed that Trump knew of and had approved the arrangement. Press reports Thursday indicated that Trump had called Kennedy to say he had not known of the deal. That would mean that Noem had lied under oath before a Senate committee (or that Trump was cutting off the limb on which she was sitting, to cover up his own responsibility).
This episode gives a glimpse of the Borgia-like atmosphere of vicious infighting, combined with money-grubbing corruption and the inevitable sexual scandals. (Noem was actually asked at the Senate hearing whether she was having an affair with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, who now serves as a special government employee, acting as an unpaid adviser and de facto chief-of-staff to Noem.)
While expressing the escalating crisis within the Trump government, the most important aspect of this sordid affair is that it will not have the slightest change in the Trump administration’s onslaught against immigrants. More than likely, Noem’s self-promotion and corruption were increasingly regarded as an obstacle to the continuation and intensification of these Gestapo-style assaults. Firing her was the principal demand of the Democrats, in the wake of the Minneapolis ICE murders, and throwing her overboard leaves the ICE thugs and the massive and growing network of detention camps untouched.
Trump announced on social media he was nominating Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin to replace Noem. Mullin was a Republican congressman for five terms, before winning the Senate seat in 2022 left vacant by the early retirement of James Imhofe. He is fully aligned with Trump on all major political questions, campaigning as a Christian conservative, hostile to abortion rights, supporting the oil industry and further expansion of the gargantuan US military apparatus.
He was one of the majority of House Republicans who voted against certifying the Electoral College victory of Biden over Trump in 2020, even after the fascist mob summoned by Trump stormed the Capitol and temporarily blocked the certification vote.
Mullin said the rioters should be prosecuted but claimed they were “professional agitators” and “not normal Trump supporters.” He said any suggestion that Trump bore responsibility was “absolutely ridiculous.”
Last November, amidst the Trump administration’s murder campaign in the Caribbean and Pacific, Mullin gave an interview with CNN defending the killings and connecting it to paramilitary operations within the United States. “The president and the Secretary of War have made very clear,” he said, “that they are going to use lethality against our enemies, home and abroad.”
6. Australian architects and building professionals demand halt to demolition of public housing towers
Nearly 700 built environment practitioners have signed an open letter demanding an immediate halt to the Victorian state Labor government’s planned demolition of Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers that will lead to the displacement of more than 10,000 working-class residents and the destruction of entire communities.
The open letter is a significant development in the broad and growing opposition to the biggest destruction of public housing in Australia’s history.
The open letter, addressed to Victorian Labor government housing minister Harriet Shing, has been signed by a range of building industry practitioners including architects, interior designers, town planners, engineers, project managers, electricians, carpenters, academics, students and building contractors. It was authored by the Building Action Now (BAN) group headed by Melbourne-based architects Cat Macleod of Bellemo & Cat, Bonnie Gordon of Playstreet, Carey Landwehr of CLAD, Nina Tory-Henderson of NMBW, Steve Mintern and Simon Robinson of OFFICE.
Signatories of the open letter include architects from practices such as ARM, Snohetta, BVN, Neeson Murcutt Nielle, DCM, Spowers, NH, Law, CO.OP and CHC. These architects explain, “Built environment practitioners are bound by ethical codes requiring evidence-based and sustainable practice, we will not side-step our professional duty and cannot remain silent. These demolitions proceed without evidence of assessments, ignore $1.5 billion of potential savings, violate legislated climate commitments, worsen acute housing and homelessness crises, and displace 10,000+ residents in breach of international obligations.”
Two of the 44 towers in inner suburb Carlton have already been demolished following a fraudulent eviction pretext by the government agency, Homes Victoria, that faulty sewer stacks meant they were uninhabitable. The demolition of three towers has been temporarily delayed by a class action by residents. But Homes Victoria has opposed the court ordered injunction, claiming without evidence that delaying demolition would cost an estimated $4.2 million per month.
In January, Homes Victoria listed the next seven towers targeted for demolition. These towers specifically house elderly residents, many of whom are in their 80s and 90s and may not survive the forced evictions.
The Victorian Labor government is pressing ahead with demolishing Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers amid an acute housing and cost-of-living crisis which is gripping ordinary workers and youth across Victoria and Australia more broadly.
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The aim is to open up prime inner city sites to large private developments, guaranteeing lucrative contracts, management fees and windfall profits for property developers, construction firms and real estate investment interests.
In the section headed “managed decline” the open letter states: “Government deliberately let buildings deteriorate, then used that deterioration to justify demolition. This is not evidence-based renewal, it is manufactured obsolescence.”
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By portraying Labor’s demolition drive as a policy mistake that can be corrected through better “consultation,” “transparency” or “evidence-based planning,” they conceal its real character as a calculated social counter-offensive to open inner-city land for intensified private accumulation. Their perspective keeps resistance trapped within the legal, regulatory and parliamentary channels that have facilitated the demolition from the outset, rather than directing it into a direct political struggle against Labor, its allies and the capitalist system they defend.
A crucial component of this fraud is the insistence that the trade unions, above all the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU), will—or can be forced to—lead the fight. In reality, the CFMEU bureaucracy has from the beginning accepted the destruction of the 44 towers, limiting itself to token criticisms while ensuring that its members continue to staff Labor’s demolition and redevelopment projects. This is entirely in line with its broader record of enforcing Labor’s industrial agenda and suppressing any independent movement of construction workers.
The destruction of public housing in Melbourne is one spearhead of a wholesale assault on the working class being driven by Labor governments at every level. The same program is unfolding in other states through the sell-off and demolition of public housing, alongside a frontal offensive on jobs, wages, health, education and all the basic social conditions of life. Labor’s housing and “renewal” policies form part of a nationwide restructuring in the interests of big business, finance and the property oligarchy.
The way forward lies in the opposite direction to that charted by the Greens, the pseudo-left and the union apparatus. Architects, planners, engineers and other building professionals who oppose this social crime must orient not to lobbying Labor, but to the independent mobilization of rank-and-file workers—above all on the sites where demolitions and rebuilds are being prepared. This means building committees in the towers, on construction and demolition jobs, in building materials, transport and logistics, and among students and young people, to coordinate a campaign that can halt work on the projects and block the destruction of any further homes. Such a struggle must consciously reject the framework of capitalist “urban renewal” and fight instead for a socialist program in which high-quality, fully funded public housing is guaranteed as a social right, not a sacrificial zone for developer profits.
7. Stop the war against Iran! Against imperialist war! Against conscription in Germany!
This statement was distributed at the nationwide school strikes against conscription in Germany on March 5.
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While we are demonstrating today against conscription, the US, Israel and their imperialist allies are unleashing a brutal war of aggression against Iran. Since February 28, American and Israeli armed forces have been systematically bombarding a country of 93 million people, with the open aim of turning it into a colony. In the first 48 hours, they destroyed around 1,200 targets, including among them the political leadership, air defense and the country’s communication networks. The Middle East is ablaze.
The struggle against conscription in Germany cannot be separated from this war madness, which is openly supported by Chancellor Merz and his government. That would be a naive and dangerous illusion. Conscription is not a stupid idea; it serves to use us as cannon fodder in such wars.
The US itself admits the imperialist character of the war. President Trump boasts: “We haven’t even really started yet. The big attacks are coming soon.” He stated that the war could last “four to five weeks,” perhaps “much longer.” The US’s weapons would last “forever.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has declared total war—just as Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once did—without regard for international law or civilian casualties. The war would be waged “entirely on our terms, with maximum authorities, without stupid rules of engagement, without the morass of nation-building, without politically correct wars,” he declared at the Pentagon. “We fight to win.” In 1945, the Nazi criminals in Nuremberg were convicted and executed for precisely this reason: for “crimes against peace,” the “supreme international crime.”
8. Australian and Canadian PMs fully committed to illegal US war against Iran
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed the Australian parliament yesterday, as part of a visit that has been the subject of some anticipation.
Carney’s address and his other remarks in Australia have served primarily to highlight the threadbare character of his suggestions that Canada, Australia and other “middle order powers” can chart a way forward in opposition to the breakdown of the “rules based order” and increasingly flagrant illegality in international relations.
Carney repeated those talking points. But the most striking aspect of his trip was the total support he extended to the criminal US-Israeli bombardment of Iran, which overshadowed it. In that, Carney was joined by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who, having been among the first world leaders to have endorsed the war of aggression, has now gone further, explicitly backing regime change.
At a press conference after the parliamentary address, both Carney and Albanese brushed off suggestions that they would call for a ceasefire, under conditions of a US carpet bombing of Iran that has acquired a genocidal character.
Both said there needed to be a “deescalation,” but immediately made clear they were referring to Iran’s defensive response to the unprovoked attack against it. “We're seeing Gulf states that have not been involved attacked across the board,” Albanese stated, as though he were unaware that Iran was firing on US bases, from which the attacks on it are being launched.
9. Congress votes down resolutions to restrict war on Iran
In what has become a political ritual, both deeply degrading and entirely predictable, the Congress of the United States has refused to take any action to limit or bring to a halt the illegal and unconstitutional war launched by President Donald Trump against Iran.
The Senate voted 53-47 Wednesday against taking up a resolution under the War Powers Act to require Trump to get congressional approval for the war. The House voted against a similar resolution Thursday by 219-212.
Both votes were largely by party line, with one Republican senator and two Republican House members voting against Trump’s war, while one Democratic senator, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and four Democratic House members—Henry Cuellar of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine, Greg Landsman of Ohio and Juan Vargas of California—voting for the war.
Even if the votes had gone the other way, there would have been no effect on the massive military violence unleashed on the Iranian people. Trump would veto the resolution, with no possibility of a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress to override. All of those participating in the perfunctory debates and roll call votes were aware they were engaged in an exercise in political posturing.
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The Democratic leadership in the House and Senate made it clear from the beginning that they did not really oppose war with Iran, only objecting to Trump’s failure to consult with Congress and obtain authorization in advance. Virtually every Democrat who spoke in the debates began their remarks by denouncing the Iranian regime as evil, autocratic, terroristic and a threat to the United States—the very reasons given by Trump for launching the military action.
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Significantly, neither Senator Bernie Sanders nor Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the supposed leaders of the mythical “left” wing of the Democratic Party, even bothered to speak in the debate. They sat silently, cast their votes along with nearly all other Democrats, and that was the end of their “opposition” to the mass murder taking place against the Iranian people.
Both have posted statements on social media, striking an anti-war posture, appealing to the position shared by the vast majority of the American people. But the purpose of such actions is not to actually bring a halt to imperialist wars—both Sanders and AOC have voted regularly for military appropriations and military aid to Israel—but to divert anti-war sentiment back within the framework of the Democratic Party and the corporate-controlled two-party system.
10. Labor’s promises will not resolve the South Australian housing crisis
With the South Australian (SA) election just over two weeks away, it is clear that housing affordability, along with broader cost-of-living pressures, is a major issue confronting the state’s working class. But while Labor, the Liberals and the Greens have all placed housing at the center of their campaigns, none of their election promises would resolve the deepening housing crisis.
Over the past five years, median home prices in Adelaide have almost doubled to $929,000, with an increase of $118,600 in the past 12 months alone, according to PropTrack. Average rents have increased with similar rapidity, to an average of around $630 a week. There is an estimated shortfall of 36,000 affordable dwellings in the state and at least 7,000 people are homeless.
The housing policies of the parliamentary parties, however, are not aimed at pulling the working class out of crippling housing stress, but at further enriching property developers, banks and wealthy investors.
Workers and youth cannot halt the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran and the escalating war across the Middle East by relying on the military and diplomatic initiatives of the European powers. This reality was starkly illustrated by the unprincipled and cowardly zig zags of Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government.
This week, after the PSOE-Sumar government refused to allow US-Spanish military bases of Rota and Moron to continue being used to bomb Iran, US President Donald Trump threatened to sever all US trade with Spain.
Trump delivered this threat during a meeting in the Oval Office with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Speaking to reporters, Trump denounced Madrid: “Some European nations have been helpful and some haven’t, and I’m very surprised,” Trump said. “Germany’s been great […] Others have been very good. […] But some of the Europeans, like Spain has been terrible.” He then instructed his Treasury Secretary to sever economic relations with Spain. “I told Scott [Bessent] to cut off all dealings with Spain.”
Trump’s statements revealed the collapse of relations between US and European imperialism that is intensifying even as the European powers collaborate with Trump in his war against Iran.
The next day, speaking from the Moncloa Palace, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared that “the Spanish government can be summed up in four words: No to war.” (No a la guerra.) This was the main slogan of mass protests that erupted across Spain against the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Washington, he said, “dragged us” into the Iraq war, which unleashed “the greatest wave of insecurity” in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The invasion, justified by false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, produced “greater insecurity, terrorism and economic instability.”
Sánchez sought to portray himself as speaking for the overwhelming opposition to war in the European, American and international working class. He declared, “We are not alone; the government stands with whom it must stand—with the values of the Constitution, of the EU, with the UN Charter, with peace. Millions of people around the world stand for peace and prosperity.”
Yesterday, however, Madrid suddenly moved to reassure Washington that Spain remains a reliable ally committed to military operations targeting Iran.
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Underlying the zig zags in the PSOE-Sumar government are the imperialist interests of the Spanish bourgeoisie that it represents. On the one hand, it does not feel itself or Spain’s European allies militarily strong enough to risk a clash with Washington and seeks to accommodate to US policy. On the other, it fears the deep-seated opposition in the working class to Trump and to imperialist war and seeks to cynically posture as an opponent of the war.
At every decisive juncture, however, its anti-war pretenses are exposed as political frauds aiming to dupe the workers while the Spanish and European ruling classes pursue their own predatory interests.
12. CDC belatedly deploys team to South Carolina amid deepening measles outbreak
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced this week that it is deploying three Epidemic Intelligence Service officers to South Carolina five months after the state’s measles outbreak began and with the case count approaching 1,000. The deployment comes as 1,136 confirmed measles cases have been reported nationally, across 28 states, between January 1 and February 27, on pace to far exceed the 2,281 cases reported in all of 2025, itself a 30-year high.
Simultaneously, a measles outbreak is spreading through Camp East Montana, the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility, a sprawling tent camp on Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas. To date, there have been 14 confirmed cases and 112 quarantined detainees at the camp, now a site for the convergence of the Trump administration’s war on public health and its war on immigrants.
The three CDC “disease detectives” are not being sent to South Carolina to conduct the basic work of containment. Their role is limited to analyzing data “to better understand transmission chains,” as South Carolina state epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell explained. She drew a pointed distinction between these officers and the dozen CDC Foundation-funded public health workers who arrived weeks earlier to handle “day-to-day work that supports those disease containment efforts.”
Officials in South Carolina turned to outside experts rather than the CDC itself because the agency tasked with protecting the public from epidemic disease is being systematically destroyed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine fanatic.
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The South Carolina outbreak, now at 990 confirmed cases as of March 3, has decelerated from the peak of more than 100 new cases daily in mid-January to just 17 new cases since February 17. But as epidemiologist Amy Winter of the University of Georgia warned, “Hitting 1,000 [cases] in February is unprecedented. ... This is 100 percent a reflection of recent declines in vaccination rates.” Nationally, 39 states have fallen below the 95 percent MMR kindergarten coverage threshold, and 94 percent of 2026 measles patients have been unvaccinated or of unknown vaccine status.
The measles outbreak at Camp East Montana, a tent camp holding an average of 2,954 detainees daily, has replicated conditions endemic to detention centers and prisons across the US.
The camp is operated under a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a Virginia company with no prior experience running immigration detention facilities, run by a single contractor from his suburban Virginia home. Three detainees have died in custody at Camp East Montana, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death was ruled a homicide due to asphyxia from neck and torso compression. More than 45 detainees have reported abuse and serious injuries to attorneys, including a teenager who was hospitalized after being “slammed to the ground and beaten.”
The outbreak is the latest in a series of public health crises which have been met with callous indifference. The facility had already documented tuberculosis and COVID-19 outbreaks in January 2026. Detainees with diabetes, HIV, pregnancy and broken bones have been languishing on medical waiting lists since September 2025, six months without care.
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The measles epidemic unfolding across the United States is the product of a decades-long assault on public health, reaching its most extreme expression under the Trump-Kennedy administration. The gutting of the CDC, the promotion of anti-vaccine pseudoscience from the highest levels of government, the barbaric conditions of mass immigrant detention, and the refusal of state legislatures to mandate childhood vaccination are not disconnected phenomena. They are the policy of a ruling class that treats the health and lives of working people and immigrants with open contempt.
The United States is now on track to officially lose its measles elimination status—a public health achievement declared in 2000—when the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) reviews the situation later this year, after postponing a special session originally scheduled for April. Neither the Democrats, who built the detention camps, nor the Republicans, who are filling them while dismantling the public health agencies that might respond to the outbreaks they produce, will defend the population. The defense of public health is a class question that requires the independent political mobilization of the working class against both parties and the capitalist system they serve.
The late Kirk, who never completed a college degree, frequently voiced his hatred of public and higher education through a national Turning Point USA (TPUSA) campaign arguing that attending college is a “scam.” Kirk’s invective against education did not concern the deterioration of job prospects of those with advanced degrees or the inaccessibility of higher education to those who can not afford growing tuition costs, nor did he criticize the student loan racket.
The argument Kirk made against colleges and universities was that they supposedly “discriminated” against right-wing students and “indoctrinated” students with “Marxist thought.” The placing of his image prominently on the headquarters of the Department of Education is an outward expression of the elevation of Kirk’s anti-intellectual propaganda to the level of state policy.
The Tennessee House Finance, Ways & Means Subcommittee advanced legislation this week requiring every public school to collect and report data on students’ citizenship or immigration status.
The proposed bill, drafted under the direction of the extreme-right Heritage Foundation, would set a national precedent. Its aim is to intimidate immigrant families, drive down school enrollment, and prepare the legal and bureaucratic groundwork to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1982 Plyler v. Doe ruling, which upholds the right of every child, regardless of immigration status, to free public education.
The measure would compel schools to establish a database on immigrants and their families, essentially making them a data-collection agency for deportation.
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In 1982, the Supreme Court’s decision in Plyler v. Doe held that states cannot deny undocumented children access to K–12 public education, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause applies to “anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State and reaches into every corner of a state’s territory.”
Justice William Brennan warned that denying these children schooling would have an “inestimable toll” on their social, economic, intellectual and psychological development and cause a “lifetime hardship” marked by the stigma of illiteracy. He concluded that any minimal “savings” claimed were far outweighed by the harm to the children and society as a whole.
Plyler thus affirmed three core principles: that all children physically present in a state are entitled to equal protection, that children cannot be held responsible for their parents’ actions, and that public education is essential to participation in civic life, regardless of citizenship.
Tennessee’s insistence on collecting immigration status data on all students is precedent‑setting. The closest analogue is Alabama’s H.B. 56, passed in 2011, which required schools to determine the immigration status of all newly enrolling students and to submit annual reports to the state on the number of undocumented children.
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For more than a decade, federal guidance and legal advocacy have stressed that schools should not ask about or record students’ immigration status and should limit documentation to proof of age, residency and similar neutral criteria, precisely to avoid violating Plyler and federal civil rights law.
Tennessee politicians are now attempting to resurrect and expand this discredited model on a statewide basis, with mandatory participation, reporting names to an immigration office, and an explicit political agenda to build a test case against Plyler—going beyond the already‑condemned Alabama template.
By early 2025, Republicans in at least five states—Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas and Utah—had introduced measures to deny enrollment, demand tuition, or conduct censuses of “unlawfully present” students explicitly aimed at provoking a challenge to Plyler.
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Even in its amended form, Tennessee’s package preserves key structural features designed to function as a “trigger” system. By normalizing immigration status questions at enrollment and routing data to state and immigration offices, the bill creates a ready-made mechanism that can be flipped from “anonymized reporting” to outright denial of enrollment or tuition charging as soon as federal law or Supreme Court precedent changes.
In this sense, the “compromise” is more dangerous than an openly exclusionary bill that might have been struck down swiftly. It stabilizes a surveillance infrastructure and everyday practice of questioning families about immigration status, while leaving the door wide open for a future legislature or court decision to weaponize that data.
The core content of the new wave of state bills, from Tennessee to Texas and New Jersey, is to transform schools into sites of surveillance and exclusion. These measures are inseparable from a broader fascistic campaign of mass deportations, and the targeting of formerly “sensitive” locations such as schools and churches. Like the whole campaign of witch-hunting immigrants it aims to redirect anger over collapsing public education—produced by decades of bipartisan austerity and privatization—away from the ruling class and onto the most vulnerable, while building the legal pathways needed to destroy Plyler and, with it, a central pillar of modern democratic rights.
More than three months after the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) announced “agreements in principle” with Canada Post and ordered workers back on the job, the full draft collective agreements for Urban Postal Operations and Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers were finally released on February 24.
A review of the tentative agreements makes clear that workers must reject these rotten deals with a resounding “No,” while voting “Yes” in the parallel strike authorization ballot.
Such action would be a vital first step in a renewed struggle by the 55,000 postal workers to defend their jobs and working conditions, the postal service and public services more broadly.
This fight will require a broadening of the struggle to all sections of workers, public and private, under conditions where the Mark Carney-led federal Liberal government is hell bent on using society’s resources to fund a massive military build-up and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
The agreements’ contents confirm the warnings made by the World Socialist Web Site in January: the CUPW-backed deals constitute a historic sellout that establishes the mechanism for the Amazonification of Canada Post demanded by the Liberal government and Canada Post management. They aim to shred jobs, working conditions and living standards.
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A key component of the new model is the creation of Parcel Delivery Part-Time (PD PT) positions assigned to centralized parcel delivery installations. The agreements specify that most of these workers’ hours will be scheduled on weekends. Staffing levels will be determined through formulas that divide parcel volumes by “activity-per-hour” productivity targets. In plain language, management will calculate how many parcels each worker is expected to deliver per hour and then determine how many workers are needed. If productivity targets increase, fewer workers will be required.
This is exactly how Amazon and other logistics giants organize their operations. The agreements lay the groundwork for transforming Canada Post into a weekend-driven parcel logistics operation staffed increasingly by a precarious, low-wage workforce.
New classifications such as Permanent Flex Employees and Part-Time Unstructured workers will create a large pool of highly exploited postal workers with virtually no rights in the face of management’s drive to boost profitability. These new classifications will also be used to undermine conditions for all workers, mirroring the two-tier schemes imposed in other industries after the 2008 financial crisis. Autoworkers and others were told these changes would be temporary concessions, but they became permanent tools for degrading conditions across the workforce.
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CUPW has sought to reassure workers by pointing to wage increases and benefit improvements. Yet the wage provisions must be assessed in light of the suspension and restructuring of cost-of-living protections.
By tying later-year wage increases to the official Consumer Price Index while suspending automatic cost-of-living protections, the agreements guarantee real wage erosion as housing, food and transportation costs continue to rise faster than official inflation. At the same time, productivity demands will intensify as routes are recalculated and parcel volumes drive scheduling.
The CUPW bureaucracy bears direct responsibility for the government-backed onslaught against postal workers. The bureaucracy’s posture of internal dissent, with a minority of five out of 15 national executive members voting against the deal, functions as an alibi for a leadership that has steered the struggle into a dead end and tied it to the pro-business collective bargaining framework under government supervision. While CUPW has systematically isolated postal workers from their allies across the working class for three years, the Canadian Labour Congress and its other affiliates have remained silent, even though it is clear that the government sees Canada Post as a benchmark for the kind of attacks it wants to enforce against all public- and private-sector workers.
Postal workers have demonstrated their willingness to fight, and the conditions exist for a broader mobilization in their defense. Federal public sector workers face mass job cuts. Manufacturing workers, including those at GM’s Oshawa plant, have been thrown out of work amid a roiling trade war launched by US President Donald Trump and fuelled by the retaliatory measures adopted by corporate Canada. The assault on postal workers is part of a wider offensive against jobs, wages and the right to strike.
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The Canada Post workers’ struggle must become the starting point for a mass industrial and political mobilization of the working class as a whole to protect and massively expand public services; place AI and other new technologies at the service of the working class rather than corporate profit; expropriate the ill-gotten wealth of the super-rich and use it to meet social needs; and fight for workers’ power.
The fight to defend jobs and public services is inseparable from a broader struggle against austerity and war policies that place corporate profit and the predatory geopolitical interests of Canadian imperialism above social need. Postal workers stand at the forefront of that struggle and will receive powerful support throughout the working class if they appeal for it. CUPW’s corporatist ties to the government and management make it organically hostile to such a strategy, which requires the active intervention of the rank and file with their own organizations of class struggle and a socialist program.
16. Students at San Diego State University protest war on Iran [with videos]
On Tuesday March 3, approximately 100 students at San Diego State University demonstrated to express their opposition to the criminal war against Iran launched over the weekend by the United States and Israel in violation of international law.
The demonstration drew participation from students in the vicinity, several student organizations, and interest from dozens of students who could be seen standing at the windows of buildings near where speeches were taking place. Protesters rallied and then marched across campus. Students wore keffiyehs, carried Palestinian flags and handmade anti-war signs reading “I am not dying for the Epstein class,” “No war on Iran” and “End American Imperialism.”
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The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), which has a club at San Diego State University, intervened in the demonstration, distributing the Socialist Equality Party’s statement “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!” to hundreds of participants and students....
17. Kennedy deepens assault on the childhood vaccine schedule
In mid-February, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) communications director Andrew Nixon announced the cancellation of the February meeting of the nation’s premier vaccine advisory panel.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was scheduled to convene Feb. 25-27 to discuss COVID-19, mRNA vaccines, and recent drastic cuts to childhood immunization recommendations. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and HHS were forced to scrap the session after failing to meet federal legal deadlines to publicly post its agenda. The meeting has now been tentatively rescheduled for March 18-19, buying time for the administration as it faces mounting legal challenges against its attempt to hijack the national vaccine schedule.
The delay is the latest maneuver in a coordinated assault on public health led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Operating under President Donald Trump’s fascist agenda, Kennedy is weaponizing his long-standing anti-vaccine crusade to dismantle the scientific and procedural machinery behind vaccination policy in the US. The project’s central prize is the ACIP and the CDC’s immunization schedules: capture them, and the Trump administration gains de facto control over national vaccine policy without passing a single new statute.
Kennedy’s strategy operates on two tracks simultaneously. First, purge independent scientific oversight. In June 2025, he dismissed all 17 ACIP members and replaced them with a cadre of vaccine skeptics. He then used his captured panel to strip universally recommended status from vaccines protecting against rotavirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), meningococcal disease, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, and COVID-19—cutting the schedule from 17 vaccine-preventable diseases to 11 without independent vetting or consensus. Second, when even that process moved too slowly, he sought to bypass it entirely. On Jan. 5, 2026, the administration issued a unilateral “Kennedy schedule” via secretarial decree, with no ACIP vote and no scientific review.
Both tracks have now triggered federal litigation. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and allied medical groups are seeking to block the “Kennedy schedule” and freeze the captured ACIP’s actions, while a 15-state coalition filed a parallel lawsuit in late February to overturn the committee’s unlawful reconstitution entirely.
In response to the litigation and the canceled February meeting, Kennedy has doubled down, appointing four new ACIP members—Florida physician Sean Downing, Texas pediatrician Angelina Farella, obstetrician-gynecologist Kimberly Biss, and maternal-fetal medicine specialist Adam Urato—constructing a more clinically credentialed facade for an ideologically captured panel ahead of the rescheduled March meeting.
18. Israel expands the war on Iran, ordering mass displacement in Lebanon
Within days of joining the US in an unprovoked and illegal bombardment of Iran, Israel has opened a second front, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, signalling the war’s transformation into a region-wide conflagration.
Israeli jets have launched more than 250 strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs, eastern Lebanon, and the southern coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon. At least 75 people have been killed, including Mohammed Raad, the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, and some of Hezbollah’s senior commanders. There are more than 400 wounded.
According to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, three paramedics were killed and six injured in Tyre while rescuing people wounded in earlier explosions, in what appeared to be a “double-tap” strike by Israel.
Israel claims its aim is to eradicate Hezbollah, an Islamist group allied with Tehran, and thereby eliminate Iran’s remaining influence in the Middle East. Hezbollah, backed by the Shi’ite Amal party and the impoverished Shi’ite masses, emerged in the 1980s as a mass movement amid the bloody convulsions of Lebanon’s civil war, fueled by US interference and Israel’s brutal occupation of the south.
The Zionist state has long sought to expand its borders, including up to the Litani River—encompassing roughly a quarter of Lebanon—under the guise of establishing a “demilitarized zone” in the south of the country. A Lebanon subordinate to Israel would also give Tel Aviv leverage over developments in Syria.
Israeli officials have framed the latest aggression as retaliation for Hezbollah rocket fire into northern Israel early Monday—fire Hezbollah said was a response to the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran on Saturday.
But Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the government had already approved a strike on Lebanon the previous night, before any rockets were launched. According to this account, Israel waited for a token number of rockets to land to manufacture the necessary pretext for a full-scale assault. Officials have stated that Israel’s attacks “will only intensify in the coming days, regardless of what Hezbollah chooses to do.”
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Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem, speaking on television, denounced Israel’s actions as a “prepared aggression” and demanded a withdrawal from southern Lebanon. “We will not surrender no matter the sacrifices,” he said, insisting that Hezbollah’s response was “not connected to any other battle” and constituted retaliation for “15 months of violations.”
According to the UN and the Lebanese Health Ministry, in the twelve months since the November 2024 ceasefire with Israel, the IDF violated the ceasefire more than 10,000 times, killing more than 330 people, including 127 civilians, and injuring about 945, with no reported instances of Hezbollah firing at Israel during that period.
Israel’s offensive has the backing of Lebanon’s Sunni political elite. On Monday, in a historic announcement, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam declared that Hezbollah’s military activity was illegal and ordered the LAF to prevent rocket fire into Israel and arrest anyone trying to do so.
His government also greenlit the army’s plan to disarm Hezbollah north of the Litani River in areas where the organization maintains its long-range missile stockpiles, ammunition depots, and production facilities. With the LAF lacking the resources or capabilities for such an operation, this is a nod to the IDF to take the lead in disarming Hezbollah.
Israel maintains that its military operations are coordinated with the United States and, through Washington, with the Lebanese government, which has the backing of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which pay some of the LAF’s salaries.
Salam has also announced a two-year postponement of elections—reportedly after consultation with Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, leader of the Shi’ite Amal movement and a longtime Hezbollah ally. Berri wants to see the state carry out reconstruction in the south, requiring Hezbollah to disarm, which the party refuses to do.
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None of the major powers has condemned Israel’s mass displacement of Lebanese civilians or its bombardment of Beirut and Hezbollah strongholds. President Emmanuel Macron of France, the former colonial power, merely urged Israel and Iran not to embroil Lebanon in the conflict sweeping the Middle East. He said he had drawn up a plan to end hostilities, including providing military aid to the Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah.
19. Video: Stop the illegal war on Iran, end Britain's collusion!
The Assistant National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK), Tom Scripps, released a video statement Wednesday opposing the war on Iran, denouncing the complicity of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, and calling for a socialist anti-war movement.
20. South Africa: ANC-led government roiled by Iran war
21. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) is desperately clinging to its policy of non-alignment, following the war launched against Iran by the United States of America and Israel. Just as it did after the attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro.
In a statement the ANC expressed “deep concern at the escalating tensions in the Middle East” and conveyed its condolences to “the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran following reports of the passing of their Supreme Leader”. The ANC then called on all parties to “exercise maximum restraint”, follow international law and Article 51 of the United Nations Charter which “provides for self-defense only in response to an armed attack, and does not permit anticipatory self-defense based on assumption or conjecture”.
The ANC is incapable of even characterizing a criminal war carried out by Washington and Tel Aviv. Indeed, the statement does not mention the United States or Israel once.
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.
