The “No Kings” coalition, which consists of groups in or around the
Democratic Party, has downplayed the war against Iran in its promotional
material. Indivisible, a central force in the coalition, was founded by
former Democratic congressional staffers and functions openly as an
instrument for Democratic Party electoral operations. The AFL-CIO and
major unions are promoted as “co-organizers” of the demonstrations even
as they maintain silence—or offer empty procedural objections—on the war
and do nothing to mobilize workers’ power against it.
Bernie
Sanders, headlining the flagship Minneapolis rally Saturday, mentions
Iran as one item in a litany of “dangerous times,” a rhetorical gesture
that places no obligation on anyone and commits the Democratic Party to
nothing. The role of Sanders, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and
other members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is to
channel opposition behind a pro-war party of the capitalist oligarchy.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party insists that the war against Iran must be
opposed without qualification and brought to an immediate end, along
with the broader US-Israeli assault on the Middle East. But ending the
war and driving out the Trump regime cannot be achieved through appeals
to Congress, the courts or the Democratic Party, which is a party of
Wall Street and the Pentagon and an accomplice in these crimes. It
requires the independent political mobilization of the working
class—workers and young people acting as a conscious force against war,
dictatorship and the capitalist oligarchy.
*****
The choice that confronts the working class is not between Trump and the
Democrats. It is the choice that the great Marxists of the 20th century
identified with increasing urgency and which the developments of the
21st have made undeniable: Socialism or barbarism? Either the working
class develops its own political program, its own organizations, its own
leadership and takes conscious action to overthrow the capitalist
system that produces war, dictatorship and social devastation—or that
system will continue, in ever more violent forms, to destroy the
conditions of human civilization.
Johannes Stern, editor of the German-language edition of theWorld Socialist Web Site:
"The book is a collection of central political analyses and statements
by the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, its chairman
David North, and other SEP and WSWS authors on developments in the
United States and their international implications. It demonstrates that
the rise of Donald Trump is not the result of individual aberrations or
political accidents, but rather the expression of a deep crisis of
American society and of the capitalist system as a whole.
It analyzes the historical roots of this development—the extreme
social inequality, the erosion of democratic rights, the decay of
political institutions—and situates them within the global context of
the crisis of capitalism. Above all, it develops a political perspective
against war and fascism.
It is not a journalistic commentary and
not merely an analysis of individual events. It is the product of a
Marxist method that examines the objective driving forces of social
development.
And for that very reason, the answer it gives is also
international: the building of an independent socialist movement of the
working class."
Simon Mukwarami, a 47-year-old boilermaker, was killed at work on
Saturday March 14 at South32’s Worsley Alumina refinery, near Collie,
200 kilometers south of Perth.
Emergency crews were called to the refinery around 3:50 a.m. and
first aid was attempted, but Mukwarami was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to the West Australian,
Mukwarami died after “falling from a significant height through grid
mesh while working on a digester”—a pressurized vessel in which bauxite
ore is cooked in caustic soda to separate alumina hydrate from sand.
Little
more information has emerged since the fatality. Descriptions of the
incident refer to a fall “through grid mesh,” though the condition of
the flooring and exact circumstances remain unclear. Refineries like
Worsley Alumina use grid mesh extensively to provide access to machinery
and elevated areas. These panels are typically heavy and secured in
place but may be removed or repositioned during maintenance.
A police report is underway and the state safety regulator WorkSafe WA is also investigating the death.
*****
The recent tragedy is the not the first at Worsley. In September 2014,
66-year-old electrician Colin Whitton, who had worked at the plant for
24 years, was fatally crushed between a moving lift car and shaft while
doing maintenance work on the elevator.
A 2018 investigation by the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation
and Safety (DMIRS) found “the company had failed to ensure that there
were clear written safety procedures that could have prevented Mr
Whitton’s exposure to the hazards,” according to the Australasian Mine Safety Journal.
Andrew
Chaplyn, then DMIRS mines safety director, said “Bypassing the safety
circuit effectively rendered what was theoretically a safe system
unsafe.… Allowing a person to attempt to resolve technical issues
without enforcing its policy for providing an integrated system for
isolating and controlling hazards led to a dangerous situation.”
South32 pleaded guilty to exposing Whitton to hazards and was fined
$65,000. This was nothing more than a slap on the wrist for a company
which last year reported post-tax profits of $US213 million. Despite the
investigation finding the company had created an ultimately fatal work
situation on its site, the company was able to absorb the death as a
cost of doing business and proceed.
*****
While the Australian Metal Workers Union (AMWU)—which covers workers at
Worsley—has said nothing about Mukwarami’s death on their website or
social media, they did issue a statement to the corporate press.
AMWU WA secretary Steve McCartney told the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation the union would be “investigating this issue” and “making
sure that it never happens again.”
Workers at Worsley should take note—these are the same hollow words uttered by union bureaucrats after every workplace tragedy.
*****
To defend their lives, as well as their jobs, wages and conditions,
workers need to take matters into their own hands. New organizations must be built—rank-and-file committees, democratically run by workers
themselves, not highly paid union bureaucrats—to enforce workplace
safety and fight for demands based on the needs of workers, not the
profit interests of management and shareholders.
Nearly 4,000 meatpackers at the JBS Swift plant in Greeley, Colorado
continued their historic strike on Thursday, in the largest meatpacking
strike in the United States since the 1950s and the first major walkout
in the industry since the Hormel and IBP strikes in the 1980s.
The walkout is part of a broader movement of workers, in the United
States and internationally, who are increasingly entering into struggle
against rising inequality, soaring health care costs and stagnant wages.
At the Greeley plant, many workers make less than $25 an hour and have
not received a raise in nearly a year. JBS, which reported
fourth-quarter net profits of $415 million, has answered workers’
demands with an insulting proposal of a 60-cent raise, followed by just
20 cents the following year.
The strike has underscored the
international unity of the working class. Many workers at the plant are
immigrants, and more than 50 languages are spoken inside the facility.
Reporters for the World Socialist Web Site spoke with workers on Thursday and distributed
hundreds of leaflets and statements in multiple languages, including
Creole, Spanish, French, English and Somali. Workers responded warmly,
with many approaching reporters and simply stating their preferred
language before being handed material they could read immediately.
The UFCW bureaucracy, meanwhile, has sought to suppress and
isolate the strike. On the picket line, union officials questioned why
WSWS reporters were speaking with workers, reflecting their hostility to
any independent discussion among the rank and file. Even as they
attempted to monitor contact with workers, officials acknowledged that
some production is continuing inside the plant.
Sheriff Chad Bianco, a former member of the fascist Oath Keepers,
seized the Riverside County, California ballots cast in in the November
4, 2025 special election over Proposition 50, an anti-Trump
redistricting measure that passed statewide by 7.5 million to 4.1
million votes. The referendum passed in Riverside 370,000 to 285,000, a
smaller but still overwhelming percentage.
The results were a
repudiation of Trump and and undercut Republican efforts to use
gerrymandering in states where they control the election machinery,
including Texas, Florida and North Carolina. With Trump’s approval
rating plunging, the Republicans now fear the loss not only of their
narrow majority in the House of Representatives, but of control of the
Senate as well.
*****
What is unfolding in Riverside County is another chapter in the
national campaign to place elections under the thumbs of pro-Trump
fascists who have demonstrated from January 6, 2021, onward, that they
will not accept unfavorable election outcomes.
Five years ago a
data breach of the Oath Keepers’ internal records revealed that Bianco
had been a dues-paying member of the fascist militia in 2014, prior to
his election as Riverside sheriff. The Oath Keepers formed armed
tactical teams during the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol,
and the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, was convicted of seditious
conspiracy and sentenced to a lengthy prison term before he was pardoned
by Trump.
Bianco was also affiliated with the Constitutional
Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a fascist organization built
around the bizarre theory that county sheriffs are the only legitimate
law enforcement officials, and that they outrank state and federal law
enforcement.
In June 2024, the day after Donald Trump was
convicted of 34 felony counts in New York, Bianco posted an Instagram
video in full uniform endorsing Trump for president. “I think it’s time
we put a felon in the White House,” he said, adding “Trump 2024, baby.
Let’s save this country and make America great again.” California law
explicitly prohibits public employees from engaging in overt political
activity while in uniform.
The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office is already being investigated for
the extraordinary number of inmates who have died in its jails, at least
91 since the beginning of 2020, making Riverside the second deadliest
jail system in the United States.
*****
Incumbent Gavin Newsom is term-limited, leading multiple Democrats to
enter the race to succeed him. Because of the state’s jungle primary
system, the top two vote-getters in the primary advance to the general
election, regardless of party affiliation. Preliminary polls show Bianco
and Fox News host Steve Hilton leading the crowded field, raising a
remote possibility that these two right-wing Republicans could advance
to the general election despite Democrats holding an almost 2-1
registration advantage in the state.
Bianco’s ballot seizure is
intended to bolster his candidacy by gaining Trump’s approval through
his conducting the kind of armed interference in elections that other
Trump loyalists are threatening on a national scale. On Monday, as Trump
deployed ICE agents to airports, ostensibly to address security delays,
Steve Bannon called the operation a “test run” to “perfect ICE’s
involvement in the 2026 midterms.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, writing in the New York Times on
March 23, concluded with a familiar refrain: “Democrats are united in
opposing the SAVE Act. We know the right to vote is not a partisan
advantage to be engineered or withheld. It is the foundation of American
democracy.”
It is worth asking what, precisely, that unity has
produced? The Democratic Party has held the presidency, controlled both
chambers of Congress, and occupied the offices of attorney general and
secretary of state in numerous battleground states at various points
over the past six years, yet Donald Trump escaped the political and
legal consequence of his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election by
force, and in fact has been reinstalled in the White House.
The Democratic party is incapable of mounting such a fight because it is
bound to the same capitalist oligarchs as the Republicans. The defense
of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to a party that has
demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will not wage a serious fight against
the forces dismantling those rights.
Workers, students, and young people must organize independently of both
corporate parties, building a mass movement against ballot seizures,
voter purges, and all forms of election interference. The political
establishment of both parties fears this prospect far more than they
fear each other.
Committee for Public Education (CFPE) members and supporters interviewed
teachers, education support staff, parents and students at the March 24
statewide strike of Victorian public school educators, when tens of
thousands marched through central Melbourne after walking out of schools
across the state.
The
scale of the rally and determination of workers expressed a desire to
reverse decades of worsening conditions in public education amid a
global assault on living and working conditions which in Australia is
being spearheaded by Labor federal and state governments.
At the
same time, the Australian Education Union (AEU) is already preparing to
continue the role it has played for decades, working through back‑room
negotiations with the Allan Labor government to contain and ultimately
sell out educators’ demands, while that same government carries out a
wholesale assault on the jobs, wages and social conditions of the entire
working class.
Secondary school teacher Nicole told the CFPE:
“We’re understaffed and we’re stretched. We’re run off our feet all the
time. We feel like we’re being undervalued.”
“I think we feel
we’ve been failed by the Labor government. We need to stand up and be
strong and show them that we’re not going to be complicit and they’re
not going to have our support.”
She noted the broad support that striking teachers were receiving from the population.
“I’m
overwhelmed by the support from the parents and the families at our
school as well. I think it’s just acknowledged that we’re doing more
with less.”
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and
Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka urge workers and
students to attend the public meeting, “Stop the US-Israeli war against
Iran,” on April 7 at 3.30 p.m. at the Orient Educational institute in
Hindagala, near the University of Peradeniya.
There is mounting opposition among workers and youth in Sri Lanka to
the US-Israeli war against Iran, which is widely recognised as being
driven by predatory imperialist interests. Anger has intensified amid
statements by the fascistic US President Donald Trump that his
administration will not stop until it fulfils its long-term drive to
fully subordinate Iran.
The war has exacerbated a severe economic
and energy crisis in Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, broad layers of people
recognise the utter hypocrisy of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s
bogus “neutral” posture, even as his government provides tacit support
to the US and Israel.
As part of the global fight to build an
internationalist socialist anti-war movement, the SEP and the IYSSE in
Sri Lanka are holding a series of meetings and campaigns among workers
and university students. A well-attended public meeting was held in
Colombo on March 17 and another will be held on April 7 in Peradeniya,
Kandy.
Those who attended the March 17 meeting responded enthusiastically to the discussion of a socialist anti-war program.
Akalanka Seneviratne, a law student,
listened to the live broadcast of the meeting on Facebook. He said it
exposed the real roots of the war, in contrast to other parties that are
trying to mislead the public.
Hundreds of thousands marched across Argentina on Tuesday to mark the
50th anniversary of the US‑backed military coup of March 24, 1976. It
was the largest demonstration so far under the administration of
fascistic President Javier Milei.
Under the slogan “Memory, Truth
and Justice,” the demonstrations called by human rights organizations
and relatives of the victims of the dictatorship brought massive crowds
into the streets of Buenos Aires and dozens of other cities to denounce
the dictatorship’s crimes and the Milei government’s attempts to
rehabilitate the junta and intensify its attacks on social and
democratic rights.
On March 24, 1976, the Armed Forces moved to
consummate the long‑prepared coup by seizing state institutions in a
coordinated assault. In the early hours, troops surrounded the Casa
Rosada, and detained President Isabel Martínez de Perón, flying her out
of the presidential palace in a helicopter, as tanks and soldiers
established control over Buenos Aires.
A US‑backed junta headed
by General Jorge Rafael Videla assumed power, dissolved Congress, banned
political activity and trade union rights, and set in motion the
machinery of state terror—clandestine detention centers, torture,
disappearances and systematic economic “restructuring” in the interests
of finance capital and the Argentine ruling class.
Media estimates
place the crowd Tuesday in Buenos Aires at between 600,000 and 2
million, with tens of thousands more protesting in Córdoba, Rosario, La
Plata and other urban centers. In the late afternoon, in a packed Plaza
de Mayo, a joint statement adopted by human rights organizations was
read out, highlighting decades of struggle against the impunity enjoyed
by the military officials responsible for a political genocide and the
terrorist operations of the Triple A death squads under the Peronist
government that preceded the coup.
The size and combative mood of
the marches reflected both a living identification with the tens of
thousands murdered between 1976 and 1983 and a mounting anger over the
Milei administration’s authoritarian measures.
*****
The pseudo-left organizations in and around the Left and Workers
Front (FIT-U) that participated in Tuesday’s marches denounced the
complicity of Peronism in paving the way for the coup and its current
role in enabling Milei’s program, only to conceal their own
responsibility in appealing to these forces.
In fact, their
intervention was chiefly aimed at channeling the groundswell of
opposition back behind the Peronist union bureaucracy and the
parliamentary “opposition” through demands for a general strike and
legislative maneuvers.
Central to their agitation was the campaign of the FIT-U leadership
in the tire workers’ union SUTNA around the shutdown of the iconic FATE
tire factory last month. Rather than fighting to independently mobilize
workers, SUTNA and its pseudo‑left leaders have subordinated the
struggle to appeals to bourgeois parties. Their latest move is to lobby
provincial legislators—including right-wing Peronists and Radicals
(UCR)—to pass a bill calling on the Peronist Buenos Aires provincial
government to take over the plant. The main effect of this orientation
is to bolster illusions that Peronism can be pressured into defending
jobs and rights.
The commemorations took place amid a deepening
economic catastrophe and a historic liquidation of whole swathes of
Argentine industry as the Milei government enforces the diktats of
finance capital. Official data indicate that, counting both salaried and
self‑employed workers, some 540,872 formal jobs have been lost in
Milei’s first two years in office, including nearly 90,000 in the public
sector. The adjustment has sunk real incomes, further cutting demand
for goods.
*****
The program being implemented by Milei with the backing of the IMF
and the Trump administration is essentially the same as that pursued
through the 1976 coup: to eradicate what remains of the social gains won
by the working class in the 20th century, which can only be carried out
through dictatorial forms of rule.
Among his most aggressive
attacks on the limited democratic forms restored after 1983 is the de
facto elimination of the right to strike across broad swathes of
“essential” sectors, a strict “anti‑picket” protocol that legitimizes
police repression to clear roadblocks and strike pickets, and a January
executive order granting intelligence agencies powers to detain, arrest
and search people without a court warrant—approaching the unchecked
authority wielded in the junta’s “disappearances.”
Soaring prices
are compounding the crisis. In Buenos Aires, the price of standard
gasoline has jumped 63.6 percent in a year—far above overall inflation
of roughly 33 percent for the same period. This acceleration, the
Argentine media notes, has sped up in recent weeks due to the US-Israeli
war on Iran.
The 1976 coup remains an open wound. Earlier this
month, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) announced the
identification of 12 people who were detained and “disappeared” during
the dictatorship, through painstaking analysis of bone remains recovered
from the clandestine detention center La Perla, where an estimated
2,200 to 2,500 people were held, tortured and disappeared.
These
discoveries underscore that what occurred was not a “counter‑terrorist
operation,” as Milei claims, but the use of military dictatorship and
fascist methods to crush a powerful upsurge of the working class that
posed a revolutionary challenge from below.
To arm the working class with the lessons of this history, it is
necessary to examine the role of the left tendencies at the time. In a
1987 statement, the International Committee of the Fourth International
(ICFI) summed up the role of the Pabloite United Secretariat which
sought to liquidate the Trotskyist movement:
In
Argentina, where the most favorable conditions for the proletarian
revolution were rapidly maturing, the forces of the United Secretariat
were not only divided, they actually found themselves on the opposite
sides of the barricades. [Ernest]Mandel’s faction was liquidated into a
futile guerrilla war and isolated from the working class. At the same
time, [Joseph] Hansen’s faction—led by [Nahuel] Moreno—defended the very
state that was carrying out the physical liquidation of those who were
aligned with Mandel.
Having concluded that “the
dogma that the only class which can accomplish the democratic tasks is
the working class is false,” Argentine revisionist Moreno and his
Socialist Workers Party (PST) pledged allegiance to “constitutional
stability,” joining the Stalinists and Peronists.
On March 28, 1974, amid mounting polarization, President Juan Domingo
Perón convened eight parties including the PST, which then
editorialized: “The participants have confirmed their fundamental
commitment to spare no effort to maintain and consolidate the process of
institutionalization in our country within the context of the
democratic system and through the practice of coexistence and
constructive dialogue.”
On April 5, Juan Carlos Coral of the PST
met again with Perón and opposition forces, describing participation as
“obligatory in all the stages of this laborious process involving
constitutional democracy.” Lenin wrote that such pious appeals to
democracy before the bourgeoisie amount to “preaching morality to the
keepers of a brothel.”
As the ICFI explained, “In such a
situation, the ‘left’ party which appeals to the bourgeois state to
protect the workers—rather than calling upon the workers to arm
themselves and crush the fascists and the state which sponsors them—is
itself part of the whole reactionary bourgeois order.”
After
Perón’s death, the PST joined an October 8, 1974 “multisectoral” meeting
with his widow and successor, Isabel Perón, writing: “Let us say that
our party considers this form of dialogue, which is unprecedented in the
country, to be useful… The PST will continue struggling against all
those factors that create the putschist climate and will struggle for
the continuity of this government because it was elected by the majority
of the Argentine workers and because it permits the exercise of some
democratic rights that, in turn, are conquests of the workers’ and
people’s mobilizations that have shaken the country since the
Cordobazo.”
Meanwhile, the Peronist regime was organizing the Triple A death squads against militant workers and guerrillas.
This
wholesale capitulation to Peronism, on the one hand, and the suicidal
guerrillaism, on the other, led to the political disarming of the
working class before the 1976 coup. Hundreds of militants in both camps
were later murdered, but, as the ICFI noted, “The leaders who had
betrayed them fared better. Moreno escaped to Colombia. As for Mandel,
he continued to eat croissants in Belgium.”
*****
Today, the successors of Moreno continue to claim the mantle of the
Fourth International and Trotsky as they prepare a similar betrayal. The
Morenoites around La Izquierda Diario have renamed themselves the “Permanent Revolution Current”
in order to better appropriate Trotsky’s prestige, only to explicitly
renounce his Theory of Permanent Revolution, which states the need for
workers’ power as part of a socialist revolution extending to the
advanced capitalist countries as the only basis to defeat imperialism
and complete other democratic tasks.
These tendencies are again
leading the working class along a treacherous path, chaining it to
Peronism and the union bureaucracy just as Argentine and international
capital, backed by US imperialism, move headlong toward fascism.
The
immense outpouring on March 24 shows the potential social force for a
genuine reckoning with the crimes of 1976‑83 and for a struggle against
the drive to “abolish” the achievements of the twentieth century. But
this potential can only be realized through a break with all bourgeois
parties, including those in the FIT-U, and the construction of a
revolutionary leadership based on the program of the International
Committee of the Fourth International, to lead the working class in
Argentina and internationally in a socialist offensive against war,
dictatorship and capitalism.
Corpus Christi, Texas, a coastal industrial city of over 300,000
people, is in stage 3 drought restrictions, with regular lawn watering
and automatic irrigation systems not allowed.
Officials are
warning that the city could enter a water emergency in the next two
months and fall short of supply in six months. Two of the city’s three
main reservoirs have shrunk below 10 percent capacity. The city may soon
announce a mandatory 25 percent usage cut for residents.
The
city, the eighth-largest in the state, supplies a number of
water-intensive industries in and around it, which account for 50 to 60
percent of its total water usage.
Corpus Christi has faced
increasingly volatile rainfall patterns, featuring extreme swings
between drought and heavy rain, contributing to the ongoing historic
drought. Last year was the 19th driest year on record, while 2021 was
the wettest in 30 years. These variations are the result of climate
change, induced in no small part by the very same petrochemical
companies operating in and around the city,
The Corpus Christi
water system supplies a total of 500,000 people across seven counties.
Just one plastic plant, the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, a joint venture
between ExxonMobil and SABIC (which is 70 percent owned by Saudi
ARAMCO), accounts for 25 million gallons per day, equivalent to the
consumption of all city residents combined.
The Valero refinery and ExxonMobil ethylene cracker plant combined
consume one quarter of the total system supply. A nearby Tesla lithium
plant in Robstown, Texas is also taking in an estimated 1.1 to 3 million
gallons a day, with a potential peak of 8 million gallons, which would
be eight times the residential water use of Robstown itself. Flint Hill
Resources and Citgo also operate refineries in Corpus Christi.
To safely wind down ethylene crackers and refineries to a point where
water isn’t being consumed could likely be accomplished in days or
weeks. Restarting a plant after restoring water access could take weeks.
However, despite the impending crisis, none of this is being planned.
Clearly the millions in profits these facilities generate weigh far more
than resident’s access to water.
*****
Water experts have warned repeatedly about the mismatch between
projected demand and supply for over a decade. The city already faced
multiple water contamination incidents and boil notices in 2015 and 2016
due to supply not keeping up with demand. Despite this, city and state
leaders have worked to attract more industry to Corpus Christi while
doing little to alleviate the looming water crisis. Abbott has
celebrated billions of dollars in investments in the Coastal Bend
region, including major projects by ExxonMobil and Saudi ARAMCO (Gulf
Coast Growth Ventures) and the Tesla lithium refinery in Robstown.
The
state and local government, in collusion with industry, are conspiring
to force the cost of infrastructure upgrades for industry onto residents
of the city, overwhelmingly the working class. Abbott is trying to get
the city to foot the bill for another $1 billion for a desalination
plant. Essentially, it’s a scam.
This takes the form of an
emergency $757 million loan from the state to the city, to be paid for
by taxpayers of course, for the construction of an almost $1 billion
desalination plant. A previous version of the plan failed with voters
balking at the costs of the originally planned desalination plant, which
ballooned from an estimate of $160 million in 2019 to $1.2 billion by
mid-2025.
Corpus Christi produces around 5 percent of total US refined
products, including gasoline. The mouthpieces of the oil companies in
the corporate media are attempting to use the risk of even higher gas
prices to push through the corporate bailout.
The simple fact of
the matter is that the oil companies can more than pay for higher
projected water costs and to keep higher gas prices at bay, while still
having profits left over.
Daniel Kretinsky, the billionaire owner of Royal Mail, spoke before
the UK parliament’s Business and Trade Committee this week. His arrogant
performance exposed the Communication Workers Union (CWU)’s claim that
he would be held “accountable” for the collapse of the mail service.
Tuesday’s
proceedings were trailed heavily in the media, with Politico claiming
that Kretinsky faced a “grilling”. The CWU’s hyped coverage portrayed
the parliamentary committee as a “serious investigation” into
quality-of-service failures.
The committee reported that, given the current level of dysfunction,
Royal Mail would deliver late 220 million letters this year. MPs
highlighted missed medical appointments and the risk that ballot papers
might not be received in the upcoming May local elections across
England, Scotland, and Wales.
Kretinsky was in denial mode,
stating baldly: “It is not perfect, but it’s not catastrophic”. The
billionaire railed against the retention of First Class letters in the
Universal Service Obligation (USO). It is exempt (for now) from Ofcom’s
recent downgrade of standard mail from 6-day delivery to alternate-day
delivery.
His refusal to display contrition in front of the
cameras, or to acknowledge the evidence, caused some rancour. Liam
Byrne, Labour MP and chair of the cross-party committee, warned
Kretinsky he may be called back under oath, especially over his denial
that parcels were being prioritised over letters, implying he was at
risk of perjuring himself.
But Kretinsky had full measure of his adversaries: representatives of
the same political establishment that handed ownership of Royal Mail to
his private equity firm, EP Group, in December 2024, a prelude to its
carve-up and restructuring by investors.
Notwithstanding the faux
outrage by Labour MPs, every aspect of Kretinsky’s wrecking operation
was rubber-stamped by the Starmer government and by CWU officials Dave
Ward and Martin Walsh, who backed Kretinsky’s £3.6 billion takeover.
*****
In the United States, the entire postal service is being threatened
with bankruptcy. While the Trump Administration and Congressional
Democrats have handed $1 trillion to the military, they are demanding
massive job cuts and “efficiencies” across USPS to prevent its collapse.
Proceedings at Tuesday’s select committee reached absurd levels
when a panel member asked Kretinsky why, as a billionaire, he wanted to
take over Royal Mail. Kretinsky replied that he was “driven by the
challenge, not by profit”.
Kretinsky’s EP Group empire has been
built through buying up undervalued assets and injecting capital to make
long-term profits. It boasts a portfolio spanning energy,
infrastructure, logistics, retail, and media. Its Royal Mail takeover
was leveraged through borrowings of £2.3 billion from major investors
who are demanding their pound of flesh from the company’s workforce and a
carve-up and asset stripping of the company.
The corporate
oligarchy cannot be made “accountable”. Its parasitic interests are
incompatible with secure, well-paid jobs, safe working conditions and a
reliable mail service. The oligarchy’s grip over society must be broken.
This means building up a network of rank-and-file power and a new
leadership in the working class to prepare for the mass struggles
ahead.
An exhibition by Art Against War Club (AAWC) in Bristol, England, has
been censored by the Greens-led Bristol City Council (BCC).
Just
one day after “Anatomy of Solidarity” opened at Bristol’s M Shed,
artists arrived to find the venue roped off and their artworks taken
down.
The artists explained, “M Shed requested that we remove the
names of specific arms companies, as well as any representations of
individuals associated with them. In response, we literally took a knife
to our art and cut out the ‘offending’ material.”
References to
Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems (which operates a factory in
nearby Filton) and British-owned BAE Systems, embedded in Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs in local
schools, were cut from the artwork, leaving gaping holes.
A
collage depicting Bristol’s statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward
Colston, his head rendered as a quadcopter killer drone (of the type
manufactured by Elbit Systems), was removed in its entirety but later
reinstated.
*****
Visitors expressed disbelief that Green Party councillors were
complicit in the censorship of artwork, saying they planned to
investigate. Libby asked whether they had intervened to request changes
so that the exhibition could proceed. But she concluded, “Aesthetically,
it’s censored the artists’ right to freedom of speech, which is a
massive problem.
“If we start censoring art and music and culture, then we really are living in a different world.”
The
WSWS asked Greens MP for Bristol Central, Carla Denyer, to comment on
BCC’s censorship of local artists, but she has refused to answer.
The UK military will be sent to board ships suspected of being part
of Russia’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet”, threatening shoot-outs
between British and Russian soldiers.
Labour Prime Minister Keir
Starmer perversely declared that this was about “keep[ing] this country
safe and protect[ing] British interests here and abroad” in “an
increasingly volatile and dangerous world”. In fact, it threatens direct
conflict between nuclear-armed powers.
A government announcement
makes clear how reckless the plans are: “Military and law enforcement
specialists have been put through their paces in preparation for a
number of scenarios in recent weeks, including boarding vessels that don’t surrender, are armed, or use high-tech pervasive surveillance to evade capture [italics added].”
According to the BBC: “Specialist military units have been
undertaking training in recent weeks to wargame different scenarios,
including how to deal with armed crews.
“That training is
understood to now be complete and Ministry of Defence officials are
working on the assumption that the first operation of this type will
happen sooner rather than later.
*****
This January, the British military facilitated an American operation to seize the Russian-flagged Marinera
in the sea south of Iceland—in connection with the US blockade of
Venezuelan oil. From that point, UK government lawyers were set to work,
formulating the legal basis for British soldiers carrying out these
raids themselves; they have decided on the 2018 Sanctions and Money
Laundering Act.
Other European nations have already seized alleged
Russian shadow fleet ships. According to the International Institute
for Strategic Studies, Belgium, Finland and France have seized or
detained tankers; Germany, Italy, Latvia, Norway and Sweden have boarded
or detained cargo and bulk vessels.
These operations have largely
been carried out on the charge of ships flying a false flag,
interpreted as the ship being “without nationality” and therefore liable
to boarding by government vessels of any other state under Article 110
of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Belgian special forces boarded and seized the Ethera oil tanker in the North Sea earlier this month for falsely flying the Guinean flag; French forces seized the Grinch in the Mediterranean in January for falsely flying the Comoros flag.
The
interests at stake, and hence the potential for armed clashes, are
enormous. The US and Europe have collectively identified and sanctioned
over 540 shadow fleet vessels. According to the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), these and others move an estimated
$87bn–$100bn worth of oil per year, around 65 percent of Russia’s
seaborne oil trade.
*****
Moscow has responded by selectively reflagging ships as Russian,
affording them state protection. In January, the sanctioned tanker General Skobelev was escorted through the Channel by the missile corvette Boykiy.
The Labour government has not said, and the media has not asked, what the British military would do in such a case.
Given
Starmer has declared seizing Russian ships a matter of protecting
“British interests”, and his housing minister Steve Reed told the BBC
this week, “There is no precedent for a vote in Parliament for
defending British people,” Labour’s position is that a shooting war can
be started with Russia without so much as a press conference.
*****
Speaking ahead of a summit of the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force,
encompassing Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the
Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, Starmer told reporters, “We have to
accept that there’s a war on two fronts—there’s the Iranian conflict and
the continuing Ukrainian conflict.”
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.
A report released in January by Oxfam Canada revealed that income
inequality was at a record high in 2025. Even more significantly,
economic inequality—which considers both income and wealth—has reached
what Oxfam Canada rightly considers crisis levels.
“The Rise of the Super-Rich” details that in 2025 there were approximately 89
Canadian billionaires and that their wealth grew by more than 20 percent
over the previous year. The country’s top 40 billionaires alone
increased their wealth by $95 billion.
This coincides with a
cost-of-living crisis, rising poverty and record food bank usage among
the vast majority of the population. In 2020, 6.8 percent of Canadians
were living in poverty, by 2023 that had risen to 10.9 percent. In 2024,
more than 25 percent of Canadians were living in food-insecure
households and as many as 300,000 were experiencing homelessness.
Rental
costs have soared such that many are now spending more than 50 percent
of their income on housing and in almost all areas of the country a
full-time minimum wage worker cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment. In
2025, grocery prices were 27 percent higher than they were five years
previously and the average family of four is expecting to pay another
$1000 on top of that this year.
By contrast, the Oxfam report notes that the richest 1 percent in
Canada holds nearly $1.25 trillion in wealth, or almost as much as the
bottom 80 percent combined. To be included in that privileged category
requires a net-worth of $7 million or above. Whereas the bottom 40
percent hold just over 3 percent of all the wealth in the country at an
average net-worth just below $87,000.
At the narrower point of the
wealth pyramid, the top 0.5 percent, with a net worth of almost $12
million, controls almost 20 percent of all wealth in Canada, and the top
0.1 percent holds more than 11 percent of all wealth at a net-worth of
at least $36 million and combined wealth of $1.8 trillion.
At the
0.01 percent pinnacle sit approximately 1,800 families with a net worth
of at least $170 million and who hold nearly $900 billion combined—or
more than 5 percent of all wealth in Canada.
*****
Worldwide some 3,000 billionaires ride atop a population of 8
billion. The world’s billionaires had another record-breaking year in
2025, with their total wealth increasing to more than $25 trillion.
“Billionaire Blindspot” notes that the primary
method of measuring wealth inequality used by Statistics Canada is the
Survey of Financial Security (SFS), which it conducts every 3 to 6
years. These voluntary, interview-based surveys are essentially what the
report describes as nicely asking a sample of the population to reveal
their affluence by listing individual or family assets and liabilities.
By oversampling what it believes are families in the top 5 percent of
wealth, or “Very High Net Worth,” the SFS purports to create a reliable
estimate of that layer’s net-worth distribution.
But by
Statistics Canada’s own admission, the sample size is insufficient to
accomplish that task, especially at the richest part of the
distribution. The SFS lumps together those whose net worth can be
measured in the low millions of dollars with those in the tens of
billions. And given that the survey is voluntary, and the definition of
“Very High Net Worth” overly broad, the probability of even one Canadian
billionaire out of the thousands of non-billionaires in the top 5
percent category being asked to participate in the SFS, let alone
agreeing to do so, is very low.
“Billionaire Blindspot” also
points out that the notion that wealth inequality in Canada is lower
than in the United States is based on false assumptions due to the way
wealth data is collected and reported.
*****
The figures presented by Oxfam are a devastating indictment of
Canadian capitalism. The claims repeated so often by all of the major
political parties, governments, trade unions, and other official
institutions about “Team Canada” sticking together amid a trade war with
the US and a deepening economic crisis, or Canada as a “fairer society”
than the Dollar Republic to the south, are laid bare in this report as
lies.
These conclusions are of course not drawn by Oxfam, which
maintains the absurd position in the face of the data it has itself
gathered that the problem of inequality can be resolved through the
adoption of a wealth tax, curbing the use and abuse of offshore tax
havens, and supporting the establishment of an “International Panel on
Inequality.” All that is required is “a level of boldness and ambition
that is typically lacking in Canadian federal political leadership,” the
organization claims, directing its appeal to a big business Liberal
government led by the millionaire former central banker Mark Carney.
This prescription relies on the false notion that bourgeois
governments are anything but the political representatives of the ruling
class—and especially of the super-rich, which the Oxfam report
acknowledges wields vastly outsized political influence. It entirely
ignores the fact that capitalist governments of all political stripes
are responsible for the dramatic growth in social inequality globally
over the past four decades, since they have slashed public spending and
corporate taxes, demolished business regulations, dismantled worker
rights and job protections and handed over billions to the wealthy elite
in the form of government bailouts and subsidies.
Oxfam Canada,
and other NGOs of their type, depend on a mixture of public donations,
foundations and government grants creating material pressures that shape
priorities and narratives acceptable to those donors and state
partners.
The bankruptcy of the charity’s strategy was summed up in a recent “guest column” in the right-wing Postmedia-owned Windsor Star
authored by Lauren Ravon, the executive director of Oxfam Canada, and
Emma Davis, a “high net worth Canadian” and board member of Patriotic
Millionaires Canada.
Patriotic Millionaires Canada is a group of
wealthy individuals that claims to appreciate that their wealth is based
on “a healthy, educated, and housed workforce and consumer base, high
quality infrastructure, and a stable environment”—as if describing a
desirable habitat for livestock. The fact is that all of these
conditions have been deliberately eroded for decades in the massive
transfer of wealth upwards under government-enforced austerity and the
intensified drive to subordinate all of society’s resources to funding
imperialist war.
Both Oxfam and Patriotic Millionaires advocate
for a wealth tax not to fundamentally alter the division of wealth and
power in Canada but as a sop to rising anger in the working class.
*****
The obscene concentration of wealth within a tiny oligarchy and the
outrageous control it exercises over all areas of social and political
life makes clear that the issue is not a matter of broken policy but of a
bankrupt social system.
The only progressive solution consistent
with the objective needs of the majority is socialist revolution: the
political mobilization and independent organization of the working class
to overthrow capitalist rule, expropriate the oligarchy and replace
market anarchy with democratically planned production under workers’
control.
Because capitalism is global, this program must of
necessity be international: the working class can only emancipate itself
by organizing across borders. This means building rank‑and‑file
committees in workplaces, linking struggles in Canada with struggles
across North America and internationally, and developing a conscious
revolutionary leadership committed to the program of the Fourth
International by building the Socialist Equality Party (Canada). Only
through such a strategy can the question of inequality be definitively
resolved and human need be placed before private profit.
According to multiple reports, between 2,000 and 3,000 paratroopers
from the 82nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force have received
written deployment orders for the Middle East. The 82nd Airborne is an
elite Army paratrooper force designed for rapid insertion into combat
zones—the unit the Pentagon sends when it intends to strike, not
negotiate.
The paratroopers would augment two Marine amphibious
groups now closing in on the Gulf: the Tripoli, with 2,200 Marines of
the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), and the Boxer, which left San
Diego last week carrying 2,500 Marines of the 11th MEU. The Tripoli is
expected to reach the theater Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal, the day Trump’s five-day “pause” on strikes against Iran’s power grid expires.
Taken together, these struggles—whatever the immediate issues at stake
in each—express a common underlying reality: the response of workers to
intensifying exploitation, staggering inequality, a corporate jobs
bloodbath and the diversion of society’s resources into war.
The US financial oligarchy launched a coordinated campaign to reduce
Social Security benefits this week. The effort will lead, sooner rather
than later, to significant cuts in benefits, reduced eligibility by
raising the retirement age, and privatization of all or part of the
massive program, which currently pays benefits to 68 million Americans,
most of them elderly and retired.
There is bipartisan support for
such measures, demonstrated in the joint proposal by Republican Senator
Bill Cassidy and Democratic Senator Tim Kaine to establish a $1.5
trillion market-based supplement to Social Security.
This and
other possible measures were discussed at a Senate Budget Committee
hearing Wednesday, at which federal officials said that the Social
Security Trust Fund reserves would be exhausted between 2032 and 2034.
That means the Trust Fund would only be able to pay out as much as it
takes in from payroll taxes, a shortfall they estimated at 28 percent.
The
demands for major restructuring of Social Security began with a letter
to shareholders in BlackRock, the world’s largest investment fund with
$14 trillion in assets under management—twice the annual budget of the
federal government, and nearly half of total US Gross Domestic Product.
Larry
Fink, the billionaire CEO of BlackRock, told shareholders that the
financial crisis of Social Security was coming to a turning point, and
he endorsed the bipartisan Cassidy-Caine proposal, which amounts to
attaching a privatized fund to Social Security, as a Trojan horse
leading to full-scale privatization.
While conceding that Social Security is “one of the most effective
poverty-prevention programs in history,” Fink wrote, “The issue is:
Social Security provides stability, but it doesn’t allow most Americans
to build wealth in a way that grows with their country.” Translated into
plain English, Fink is expressing the frustration on Wall Street that
it cannot lay hands on the trillions in the Social Security trust funds
and extract profits from them.
*****
On Tuesday, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a
corporate-backed bipartisan think tank, issued a plan to address the
financial crisis of Social Security by capping annual benefits at
$100,000 a year for couples retiring at the normal retirement age,
currently 67. Single retirees would face a cap of $50,000. Those who
retire at a younger age would face an even lower ceiling on benefits.
The
number of couples currently receiving more than $100,000 a year from
Social Security is tiny—estimated at 0.05 percent of all recipients. The
CRFB cited that fact to argue that the proposal was “radically
progressive,” applying to only the wealthiest retired
couples. But depending on how the ceiling is indexed, inflation will
rapidly increase the number and the ceiling would rapidly become a major
factor in holding down benefit payments for large numbers of retirees.
The CRFB plan was hailed in the lead editorial of the Washington Post,
published the same day, under the headline, “Nobody needs over $100,000
per year in Social Security benefits.” The editorial claimed that
capping benefits “would help restore sanity” to the program, adding, “a
wealthy retired couple receiving nearly six figures from a national
pension program is absurd. A more typical maximum public benefit for a
retired couple in the developed world is between $30,000 and $40,000.”
The
editorial goes on to argue that “Capping benefits is a better way to
reform Social Security than increasing revenue.” This is a deliberate
lie, since the simplest—and by far the most popular—proposal to save
Social Security is to eliminate the income ceiling on the payroll tax.
Currently, all income above $184,500 a year is exempt from payroll tax.
CEOs pay Social Security tax on that amount only, no matter how many
millions they take in during the year.
The vast bulk of ruling class income, taken in the form of dividends,
capital gains and other forms of financial plunder, is not subject to
Social Security tax at all, which is applied only to payrolls.
*****
The average US worker makes about $137 a day. Bezos’s wealth
increases each day by approximately 700,000 times that amount. These
numbers illustrate the obscene social inequality of capitalism.
Moreover,
despite the claims that an income of $100,000 a year makes a couple on
Social Security wealthy, that figure is a bare minimum income for
survival in New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, while just
adequate in cities like Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia. And for the
retired widow or widower living in any of those cities, an income cap of
$50,000 means poverty, plain and simple.
Neither
the traditional “red block” of parties on the left or “blue block” of
right-wing parties reached the 90 seats needed for a governmental
majority in the 179-seat parliament. The result produced a highly
fragmented parliament, with 12 parties represented.
New
details from the NTSB point to overworked controllers, inadequate
tracking technology and a chain of preventable failures behind the
deadly LaGuardia runway collision.
In
the face of official prejudice and indifference, filmmakers fight for
solidarity and compassion in a series of short films at the Berlin film
festival.
Furthermore, this assault on public health and objective truth has
been institutionalized at the highest levels under Trump’s appointees,
particularly Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya—a
co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration who has publicly claimed a
lab origin is “certain.” The depth of that institutionalization was on
full display recently when on March 20, 2026—the same day a new Cell study
delivered the most technically rigorous genomic refutation of the
lab-leak theory yet—Bhattacharya inaugurated the NIH’s new “Scientific
Freedom” lecture series with a conversation featuring Matthew Ridley, a
British hereditary peer and former journalist with no scientific
credentials, promoting his book Viral, which has been widely
condemned by working virologists and evolutionary biologists for its
factual inaccuracies and misrepresentation of the scientific literature
on COVID origins.
The choice of Ridley is not incidental and
certainly calculated. By hosting a lab-leak advocate inside the NIH’s
own Masur Auditorium, under the banner of “Scientific Freedom,”
Bhattacharya has used the institutional prestige of the world’s largest
biomedical research funder to grant a discredited narrative the
appearance of scientific legitimacy. The label “Scientific Freedom” is
itself a gross misrepresentation—implying that the overwhelming
peer-reviewed consensus for natural origin is a form of suppression
rather than the product of years of independent, multi-disciplinary
scientific investigation. It is beyond shameful that the director of the
NIH has spent taxpayer dollars to platform, in the halls of American
science, a conspiracy theory the science published today directly
demolishes.
The tragic irony is that a coherent and overwhelming body of
peer-reviewed scientific evidence sharply contradicts the lab-leak
narrative, pointing conclusively to a natural zoonotic spillover at the
Huanan Seafood Market—precisely the kind of event Daszak spent his
career working to predict and prevent. That body of evidence has grown
substantially in the past year. Three major peer-reviewed studies—Pekar
et al. in Cell in May 2025, the WHO SAGO report submitted in June 2025, and Havens et al. in Cell this
month—have each added a distinct and decisive layer of proof. Notably,
the peer-reviewed Havens study arrived nine months after SAGO had
already closed its deliberations, confirming that the science has
continued to accumulate independently of any single institutional
assessment. Taken together, they represent an unbroken,
multi-disciplinary scientific consensus. Meanwhile, the political and
media witch-hunt has effectively destroyed Daszak’s career and
dismantled the global surveillance networks he built—the very
infrastructure the new science confirms was essential.
*****
Independent scientific investigations across multiple
disciplines—phylogenetics, phylogeography, selection dynamics,
epidemiology, and environmental metagenomics—conducted between 2022 and
March 2026, all converge on the same conclusion: the COVID-19 pandemic
began as a natural spillover driven by the wildlife trade, completely
devoid of laboratory manipulation.
Consider what this body of
evidence represents in evidentiary terms. On one side stands a
years-long, multi-disciplinary, peer-reviewed scientific record:
phylogenetic analyses, phylogeographic reconstructions, genome-wide
selection studies, environmental metagenomics, and epidemiological
mapping, produced independently by dozens of scientists across multiple
institutions and countries, all reaching the same conclusion.
On
the other side stands a set of classified intelligence assessments of
“low” to “moderate” confidence, political declarations by congressional
committees that had predetermined their verdict, and a conspiracy theory
traceable to fascist operative Steve Bannon, accepted without scrutiny
and codified into official government policy. In any court of law, the
prosecution’s case would have been thrown out before trial.
The
evidence for a lab leak has never met the threshold of proof required in
science, in law, or in basic logic. Yet it is Peter Daszak—the
scientist whose life’s work the evidence vindicates—who lost his career,
his organization and his livelihood. The question is not whether the
science supports his innocence. It does, overwhelmingly and on every
available measure. The question is whether the proceedings that
destroyed him bear any resemblance to justice—or whether they were, from
the outset, a kangaroo trial in which the verdict preceded the evidence.
*****
There is an inextricable connection between the networks that
violently opposed every measure to mitigate the pandemic, and the
promotion of the lab-leak lie. The same political forces that demanded
the normalization of mass infection now promote the Wuhan conspiracy
smear to redirect blame away from capitalist production while gutting
public health systems and pandemic response capacities.
The
right-wing political establishment, aided and abetted by the corporate
media, has orchestrated a vicious campaign to portray Dr. Daszak as the
central figure in a manufactured Wuhan “cover-up.” The suspension of
EcoHealth Alliance’s federal grants, the multiple aggressive
congressional investigations, and Daszak’s eventual firing as the
organization’s president do not represent a legitimate response to
scientific misconduct. They are the milestones of a calculated,
fascistic political witch-hunt. As documented in recent WSWS interviews
and Christian Frei’s documentary film Blame, Daszak has endured
death threats requiring police protection, extreme public vilification,
the loss of his livelihood, and ostracism from sections of the
scientific community cowed by the political climate.
*****
Daszak’s core scientific program—mapping bat coronaviruses in rural
habitats, tracing the vast wildlife trade, and identifying spillover
hotspots—is precisely what the studies by Pekar, Havens and the WHO now
confirm is essential to understanding and preventing zoonotic emergence.
Long before these papers were written, it was Daszak who stood before a
national television audience and described, with scientific precision,
the threat that would become COVID-19. He could not have realized then
that when that threat arrived, the politics of the pandemic would charge
him with the very catastrophe he had spent his life trying to prevent. A
scientist working at the critical interface of ecology, virology, and
public health—who had built the global surveillance infrastructure to
detect exactly the kind of bat sarbecovirus spillover that caused
COVID-19—was transformed into a scapegoat to deflect attention from the
real drivers of pandemics: the global wildlife trade, industrial
agriculture, and the systematic destruction of natural habitats by
capitalist production. Destroying EcoHealth Alliance’s capacity and
dismantling its international surveillance networks is therefore not
merely an injustice to one scientist. It is a direct and devastating
blow against global pandemic preparedness.
Politically, the “lab
leak” narrative is not a legitimate scientific controversy; it is a
manufactured, state-aligned propaganda campaign. This fascistic lie has
been weaponized by the ruling class to escalate the war drive against
China, dismantle public health institutions, and scapegoat principled
scientists—among them the very researcher who predicted COVID-19 before
it had a name.
As
a result of the illegal US-Israeli war on the people of Iran,
working-class households are already facing soaring petrol and diesel
prices, as well as growing shortages.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri
Lanka will hold a public meeting titled “Stop the US-Israeli War Against
Iran!” to discuss the escalating imperialist war against Iran and the
tasks facing the working class in Sri Lanka and internationally. It will
take place on April 7 at 3:30 p.m. at the Orient Educational Institute
in Hindagala, near the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.
As the US–Israeli war nears its first month, the naked imperialist
interests behind it are being exposed: the US aims to establish control
over the resource-rich Middle East, including Iran, and to block energy
access to its economic rivals, mainly Russia and China. Fascistic
President Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that he does not care
about international law in achieving US predatory aims.
During the
course of the criminal war, massive US and Israeli strikes have killed
around 1,500 people, including hundreds of school children in an
American missile strike on a girls’ school. Over 4,000 civilian
buildings, including hospitals, have been damaged. As the Trump
administration prepares to deploy ground forces, the war will expand
further, along with the destruction.
The war has provoked a huge economic and energy crisis throughout the
world, and in Asian countries in particular. Sri Lanka has already been
forced to increase fuel prices, followed by rising costs of all
consumer goods and services, placing the burden of war directly on
working people and the oppressed.
President Anura Kumara
Dissanayake and the ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-led National
People’s Power (JVP/NPP), closely following the stand taken by India,
are providing tacit support to the US and Israel in this war of
aggression. Behind the facade of “neutrality,” Dissanayake’s complicity
in this war has been repeatedly exposed.
*****
Speakers will discuss the causes of the war, its global implications,
the historical and theoretical issues involved and, above all, the
necessity for the working class to intervene politically to stop it. We
call on workers and students to participate in this important
discussion.
Early Wednesday, less than 48 hours after nearly 1,000 full-time
contract faculty launched a strike at New York University (NYU), the
Contract Faculty United—United Auto Workers (CFU-UAW) leadership
announced a tentative agreement with the NYU administration and ordered
the membership back to work. The few details of the tentative agreement
that have been released indicate an attempt to sell out the strike.
The
International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in New
York calls on contract faculty at NYU to reject this tentative
agreement, vote “no” and prepare to resume the strike. The 2024 student
worker strike at the New School, which the UAW bureaucracy shut down and
sold out after only three days, must not be repeated!
For over 16
months, highly exploited full-time non-tenure track faculty at NYU have
been demanding higher salaries, raises that exceed inflation, academic
freedom, job security, subsidized housing and protection against
artificial intelligence. These workers, many experts in their fields,
struggle day to day to make ends meet in one of the most expensive
cities in the world.
The union leadership announced the agreement
around 2:00 a.m. on social media. Brendan Hogan, a philosophy professor
and spokesperson for CFU-UAW, said in a statement, “We have won the
highest minimum salaries of any unionized full-time, non-tenure track
faculty in the country.”
The announcement of an agreement has
received the usual bombardment of celebration from Democratic
politicians and the UAW bureaucracy, which undoubtedly had a hand in
cobbling together the agreement. But the details released so far do not
paint such a rosy picture.
*****
NYU is a massive, multibillion-dollar business. The university had a
consolidated operating budget of roughly $18.8 billion for Fiscal Year
2025. It is one of New York City’s largest private landowners, holding
around 14 million square feet of property with an estimated value of $15
billion. NYU’s President, Linda G. Mills, earns over $1 million per
year, down from previous President Andrew Hamilton’s $3.5 million annual
salary.
New York City is a playground for the corporate-financial
oligarchy; the rich live like kings and queens while workers struggle
every day to survive. The top 1 percent in New York City holds roughly
32 percent of the city’s wealth, while the bottom 90 percent hold only
23.8 percent. Of the city’s 8.5 million residents, 26 percent are
impoverished, twice the national average.
Contract faculty at NYU,
expressing the sentiments of millions of workers across the city, the
United States and internationally, are determined to reverse the
unlivable circumstances they confront. Their strike both continues and
anticipates a rising tide of class struggle, which includes the strike
by 15,000 nurses in New York City earlier this year.
This fighting sentiment is shared by hundreds of thousands of workers
in New York City and millions across the country and globe. Over 2,000
NYU students and community members have signed an open letter standing
with contract faculty. UPS delivery drivers under Teamsters Local 804
have issued a letter stating they will not cross the picket line to
deliver packages to NYU.
Graduate student workers at Columbia
University, also organized in the UAW, have voted overwhelmingly to
strike. Faculty and students at the New School in Manhattan, many
represented by the same UAW Local 7902 that includes NYU faculty, face
devastating layoffs and department cuts. More than 620 shipyard workers
at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, also in the UAW, walked off the job
Monday after overwhelmingly rejecting a contract offered by General
Dynamics.
The contract for tens of thousands of New York City
transit workers expires in May. Tens of thousands of city workers will
likewise enter into contract struggles later this year.
On Monday evening, socialist autoworker and candidate for UAW president Will Lehman issued a statement
calling for broad support for the NYU academic workers’ strike. “As a
rank-and-file autoworker and UAW presidential candidate, I fully support
your strike,” he wrote. “Your fight is not an isolated campus dispute
but part of the developing offensive of the working class against
austerity, dictatorship and war.”
The screws are being tightened on cash-strapped young people and
workers facing the threat of default, garnishment and financial ruin.
Estimates in late 2025 found that roughly one-quarter of all federal
borrowers are facing default. If the current trend continues, it is
projected that 13 million borrowers will be in default by the end of
2026.
But at the same time, the Trump administration is demanding a
massive $1.5 trillion war budget and a $200 billion supplemental
appropriation for a war of extermination against Iran. That combined
figure is roughly equal to the entire federal student loan portfolio.
Capitalism’s interests, however, require new and expanding predatory
wars, not education, which is why neither the Democrats nor the
Republicans have supported or ever will support mass loan cancellation.
On
March 19, the Trump administration began transferring defaulted federal
student loan accounts—some $180 billion in debt—from the Department of
Education to the Treasury Department. Officials presented this as a
“first step” toward moving the entire $1.7 trillion student loan
portfolio out of the Education Department and into the hands of the
federal tax and collection apparatus. Borrower advocates have warned
that the move will increase errors, accelerate collections and further
privatize enforcement functions.
*****
A key element in this reorganization is transforming student aid from a
nominally “educational” function into a pure instrument of revenue
collection. Trump officials are denouncing past attempts at loan
forgiveness or cancellation. They insist that the fact that fewer than
half of borrowers are currently making payments is evidence not of
social crisis but of insufficient “discipline.”
Under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)—passed with only
nominal opposition by the Democrats—the administration is moving to
“simplify” and then sunset Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) programs.
Options like Pay As You Earn (PAYE) are being eliminated. Others are
being capped or phased out by 2028, and the entire structure is being
replaced with a single, harsher Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP).
For
new federal loans issued after July 1, 2026, borrowers will effectively
be locked into either a rigid standard plan or RAP. RAP demands up to
30 years of payments before any balance is forgiven, extending
indebtedness well into late middle age for large layers of the
population. Existing IDR plans are being phased out even for current
borrowers, with officials openly signaling that whatever replacement is
offered will yield higher monthly payments than the Saving on a Valuable
Education (SAVE) plan and do nothing to address ballooning principal
balances.
Behind these measures stands a definite class strategy:
to intensify financial coercion on young people and workers, to channel
ever greater sums from household budgets into Wall Street and to send a
message that joining the workforce early or enlisting in the military is
preferable to a life of debt.
*****
Young workers aged 25-29 have experienced the greatest slowdown in
pay gains in decades, according to a late 2025 report by JPMorgan Chase.
Additionally, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27
soared to 5.6 percent at the end of last year, according to an analysis
from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, up sharply over the past
three years and outstripping the overall rate of 4.2 percent at the
time.
The cumulative result is the student loan “default cliff”
that is already turning into a tidal wave. Borrower advocates estimate
that roughly 3.6 million borrowers have defaulted since January 2025
following the expiration of pandemic-era protections. By early 2026,
about 8.8 million borrowers were in or precariously close to default.
This cliff is not just a rise in defaults, but a large cohort of
borrowers reaching roughly 270 days past due at the same time that
pandemic pauses, forbearances and deferred reporting are ending. Many
made little headway on principal during the pause—median balances remain
above 80 percent of prior levels—and they are being thrust back into
repayment amid rising living costs and a weakening labor market.
Advocates
note that in 2025 a borrower defaulted roughly every nine seconds, a
cadence that now risks becoming the norm rather than an exception. The
immediate social and economic consequences are profound. Default
triggers wage garnishment, loss of federal tax refunds and offsets of
other benefits, exclusion from future federal aid, and years of damaged
credit that can hamper employment.
This social crisis coincides with the war on Iran, the continuing
genocide in Gaza and the attempted recolonization of oppressed countries
in every region of the globe. The same ruling class that is stripping
away the right to affordable education is prosecuting a predatory
redivision of the world. For the American government, a central priority
is staffing the military after years of failing to meet recruitment
quotas. A generation trapped between debt peonage and poverty wage
employment is easier to funnel into the armed forces.
*****
What must be done? The achievements of public education and access to
higher education are no longer compatible with the needs of capitalism.
While defensive demands—cancellation of all student debt, restoration
and expansion of Pell Grants, full funding for public higher education
and the reestablishment of borrower protections and public oversight—are
important, the only substantive remedy is the expropriation of the
ruling oligarchy. The fight to defend public education is the fight
against war and capitalism.
Take the next step, join and build the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.
The constitutional referendum held in Italy on March 22–23, 2026 has
resulted in a significant political defeat for the government of fascist
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. By a margin of roughly 54 percent,
voters rejected the proposed judicial restructuring
advanced by Justice Minister Carlo Nordio. With turnout approaching 59
percent, the vote assumed the character of a national plebiscite, far
exceeding the narrow constitutional and technical questions formally
placed before the electorate.
Presented as a modernization of
Italy’s notoriously slow and bureaucratic judicial system, the so-called
“Nordio reform” sought to amend multiple articles of the postwar
constitution governing the role and organization of the judiciary.
Its
central provision to separate career tracks between judges and public
prosecutors was justified by the government as a measure to ensure
impartiality and align Italy with other European legal systems. In
reality, the reform was widely understood as an attempt to weaken
prosecutorial independence and concentrate power in the executive,
undermining the separation of powers established after the fall of
fascism.
The rejection of the reform represents the first major
institutional defeat for Meloni’s right-wing coalition since it came to
power in 2022. More fundamentally, it punctures the phony image of
political invulnerability cultivated by the government and signals a
sharp escalation of social and political tensions within Italian
society.
*****
The concurrence of escalating militarism abroad and deteriorating
living standards at home has fueled a powerful wave of social
opposition. Between late 2025 and early 2026, Italy witnessed mass
protests and strikes involving millions of workers. The
September-October “standstill” saw over 2 million people mobilize across
85 cities, disrupting transportation networks and blocking key ports
such as Genoa, Livorno and Trieste.
Initially sparked by
opposition to the war in Gaza, these protests rapidly expanded into a
broader movement against militarism, austerity and social inequality
which is still unfolding. Dockworkers played a particularly critical
role. On February 6, 2026, coordinated strike action across 11 ports
disrupted the transport of military goods, underscoring the strategic
position of the working class within global supply chains.
The
government responded with escalating repression. Security decrees
introduced harsher penalties for protest activity, including prison
sentences for blocking roads and critical infrastructure. A February
2026 decree followed clashes in Turin, triggered by the eviction of a
social center, and was used to justify expanded policing powers. These
measures formed part of a broader effort to suppress dissent and
normalize authoritarian methods of rule.
It was in this context
that the referendum assumed its true political significance. The “No”
vote expressed not merely opposition to a specific constitutional
amendment, but a broader rejection of authoritarianism, war, genocide
and the subordination of society to the interests of the ruling class.
The high turnout underscores the extent to which large sections of the
working population perceived the reform as a direct threat.
*****
The real significance of the referendum lies not in the maneuvers of
parliamentary factions, but in the intervention of the working class.
The result reflects a growing awareness among broad layers of workers
and youth that the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the
struggle against war, austerity and social inequality.
At the same
time, the vote does not resolve the underlying crisis. The forces
driving militarization and authoritarianism remain fully in operation.
Sections of the ruling class will inevitably seek new mechanisms to
achieve the same objectives rejected in this referendum.
The
Meloni government has already indicated its intention to proceed with
further constitutional changes, including proposals for the direct
election of the prime minister (“Premierato”). Such measures would
represent an even more direct concentration of power in the executive
and a further erosion of the institutional framework established in the
aftermath of World War II.
The referendum result has nonetheless
created a new political situation. It has confirmed the potential for
unified mass opposition and has exposed the fragility of the
government’s position. As Italy moves toward the 2027 elections, the
ruling class faces a more volatile and uncertain landscape.
*****
The events in Italy are part of a broader global process. Across
Europe and internationally, governments are responding to economic
crises and geopolitical conflict with militarization and attacks on
democratic rights. The Italian referendum stands as an early indication
of the explosive social opposition this agenda is generating.
The
essential task is to transform this opposition into a conscious
political movement, uniting workers across national boundaries in a
common struggle against war and exploitation. Only on this basis can the
threat of authoritarianism and the catastrophic consequences of
escalating global conflict be overcome.
One of the main financial effects of the continuing US war against
Iran is the fall in government bond prices and the consequent rise in
their interest rate or yield, as investors consider that stagflation—a
combination of sharply rising prices coupled with a slowdown or even
recession—is becoming increasingly likely.
Bloomberg reported
earlier this week that “the spectre of stagflation caused by the Iran
war has wiped out more than $2.5 trillion from the value of global bonds
in March,” putting it on course for the biggest monthly loss in three
years.
It noted that while the loss in market value in bonds was
considerably less than the estimates of the $11.5 trillion wiped off
global stock markets, it was “more unexpected as debt typically gains in
times of geopolitical turmoil.”
This is because under so-called
“normal” conditions government debt is considered a “safe haven” amid
financial turmoil. But with government debt reaching record highs in
many advanced economies—led by the US, where the national debt has now
topped $39 trillion—that is no longer the case and old norms are being
overturned.
There is a significant move out of US government debt
as a new burst of inflation, reflected most sharply in the escalation of
petrol and diesel prices, begins to take hold, wiping out the prospect
of an interest rate cut by the US Federal Reserve any time this year.
The
yield on the two-year Treasury bond, which tends to move in line with
expectations of what the Fed will do on rates, has risen by 0.5
percentage points so far this month—a significant hike where movements
up or down are usually only a tiny fraction of that amount.
At
the same time, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury bond, regarded as a
benchmark for markets around the world, has risen by 0.44 percentage
points so far this month.
The marked rise at the shorter end of
the market has significant implications for the funding of US debt,
because the Treasury has been increasingly seeking to obtain funds via
two-year bonds to lessen the higher interest rate costs at the longer
end. But this strategy is being thrown awry by the rise in rates on
two-year debt.
*****
Before the war was started on February 28, the market expectation was
that the BoE would signal rate cuts at its March meeting, and even
after it began there was a hope that it would “look through” the energy
price hikes in determining its policy.
Instead, there was a very
different message from the central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee,
which said that should the surge in energy prices prove “larger or more
protracted” and started to feed into wages, it would have to tighten
monetary policy.
This was an expression of what is the guiding
thread of all central banks in the so-called “fight against inflation,”
which is concerned, above all else, not with bringing down prices but
with suppressing the wage struggles of the working class in response to
the hit on living standards.
*****
Besides its effect on the supply and price of oil and a whole range
of products—such as urea, used for fertilisers, helium, jet fuel and
diesel, and a range of other industrial commodities—the war threatens to
disrupt the flow of money from the Gulf countries into major financial
markets.
In an article in the FT, economic and financial analyst
Mohammed El-Erian noted that the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC)—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE—“have
collectively grown over the decades into one of the most consequential
forces in global finance, investing across the world.”
The scale
of their influence can be gauged from the size of investment commitments
into the US from their sovereign wealth funds last year. They amounted
to a total of $3 trillion in a series of multi-year projects, including
semi-conductor infrastructure, energy and the military. But now there
are reports that some of the GCC members may be reconsidering because of
the financial pressures on them created by the war.
The GCC
countries are already heavily invested in the US, pumping money into
stocks, bonds, hedge funds, real estate and infrastructure to the tune
of $2 trillion.
The anger of some of the GCC business elites was
given vent in an X post by the Dubai-based billionaire Khalaf Al-Habtoor
earlier this month, in which he asked Trump “a direct question.”
“Who
gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran?” he
asked. “And on what basis did you make this dangerous decision? Did you
calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger? And did you
consider that the first to suffer from this escalation will be the
countries of the region itself!”
In his comment piece, El-Erian noted that “with the energy sector
experiencing a ‘sudden stop,’” the region faces “unanticipated near-term
revenue pressures.”
What impact this will have on the US and
global financial markets remains to be seen, but any change in global
capital flows and a rise in interest rates hits financial markets
already experiencing a degree of fragility, due to the surge in
government debt and the financing demands of the AI industry.
The
net result of “higher for longer” borrowing costs, El Erian concluded,
will have a “disruptive impact on virtually every country, corporation
and household, which compounds the longer the war lasts. It’s an
environment that also risks aggravating existing financial
frailties—such as those associated with the AI bubble, certain segments
of private credit and some sovereign debt concerns—while potentially
exposing new ones.”
The
South Australian election shows how the far right is exploiting a
social crisis inflicted by Labor and the union bureaucracy amid a
breakdown of the two-party system.
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.
