Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: February 23-March 1
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified
100 years ago:
1. Plan for massive Georgia concentration camp for immigrants provokes outrage
Reporting by The Guardian noted that the scale of the proposed facility has generated significant opposition among Social Circle residents, including in a community that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the last election. Local outrage has forced the mayor and police chief to publicly express resistance to ICE’s planned purchase after details of the project became known. When the city posted the “first floor” schematics online—showing dense rows of beds representing thousands of human beings—the images circulated widely on social media. Many commenters drew historical comparisons to the cramped conditions of 18th-century slave ships and to the concentration camps established in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Opposition is not confined to rural Georgia. Reporting by Stateline documented similar outrage in Oklahoma City, where residents learned of federal plans to convert a vacant warehouse into an immigration processing facility. Facing bipartisan opposition, the out-of-state warehouse owner ultimately abandoned negotiations with the federal government. Comparable resistance has emerged from Utah to Texas to Virginia and Mississippi, where public pressure has derailed or delayed warehouse conversions and large-scale detention projects.
The backlash comes as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) undertakes a sweeping expansion fueled by a record $80 billion multi-year congressional allocation for detention. ICE is currently holding more than 70,000 people nationwide—the highest number in the agency’s history—and internal documents outline plans for 16 processing sites holding up to 1,500 people each and eight detention centers capable of holding up to 10,000 each, for a total projected capacity of 92,600 beds. The agency is also pursuing roughly 150 new leases and office expansions across the country.
The rapid expansion of detention capacity is occurring alongside soaring profits for the private prison industry. An investigation by The Appeal found that at least one investor in CoreCivic was disappointed that the Trump administration has yet to detain 100,000 human beings.
2. Where is America Going? Fascism or Socialism—Foreword to the German edition
The World Socialist Web Site presents the foreword to the German edition of the new book Where is America Going? Fascism or Socialism which will soon be published by Mehring Verlag.
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This book does not merely document a dramatic phase of American history and intervene in it but provides a contribution to the political arming of an international movement of the working class. It makes clear that the defence of democratic rights, the fight against war and the overcoming of social inequality are only possible on the basis of a revolutionary transformation of society.
The question posed by the title—Where is America Going? Fascism or Socialism—is not a rhetorical one. It is posed worldwide with enormous urgency. Its answer depends on the conscious intervention of the working class into history and the building of a new revolutionary leadership. This book is intended to and will contribute towards drawing the necessary political conclusions and taking up the fight for a socialist future.
3. Supreme Court ruling against Trump tariffs exposes ruling class crisis
The decision in Learning Resources v. Trump and its fallout expose deepening divisions within the ruling class that ultimately stem from the decline of US capitalism.
After labeling the three liberals a “disgrace to our nation,” Trump accused the entire majority of being “swayed by foreign interest and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.”
Trump called the forces challenging his unbridled assertion of power to set and modify tariffs, “major sleazebags” who are “foreign country-centric,” and the two justices he nominated who voted with the majority, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, “an embarrassment to their families.”
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The legal issues presented are relatively straightforward. Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution expressly allocates all taxation power, including the imposition of duties on imported goods and services, to Congress. Following President Richard Nixon’s resort to extraordinary measures in response to the collapse of the post-World War II Bretton Woods financial framework, Congress enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which allows the president to identify an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and declare a “national emergency,” triggering executive power to “investigate, block, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit” transactions involving foreign-held property. The list of executive powers notably does not include tariffs, and for almost 50 years no president invoked IEEPA powers to impose them.
Shortly after resuming office, however, Trump declared a national emergency based on drug trafficking to justify a 25 percent duty on most Canadian and Mexican imports, and another national emergency citing trade deficits to justify an array of tariffs, modifications, reductions and exemptions that sent equity markets careening. The rate on Chinese goods was ratcheted up in rapid succession—from 10 percent to 20, then to an additional 34, then 84, and finally 125 percent—bringing the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent.
Trump’s IEEPA tariffs account for almost three-fourths of US tariffs imposed last year. Without them, the average effective US tariff rate would fall from 17.4 percent to 6.8 percent.
Separate suits were filed by businesses hammered by tariffs, joined by 12 states. Several lower courts ruled the IEEPA tariffs illegal prior to the Supreme Court taking the case, where nine justices splintered into three camps of three, producing seven separate opinions totaling 170 pages.
The decisive opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, contains language that amounts to a remarkable indictment of the White House’s dictatorial aims. Roberts wrote that the Framers, “having just fought a revolution motivated in large part by ‘taxation without representation,’” gave Congress “alone … access to the pockets of the people,” and deliberately excluded the executive branch from any part of the taxing power. This was, Roberts noted, the “birthright power” of Congress—a characterization that underscores how fundamental the majority considered the constitutional question.
Gorsuch went even further in his own concurring opinion, warning that “our system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.”
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Trump craves the tariff power to bully and extort foreign nations, to promote or harm certain economic sectors, and to steer wealth to favored industries and companies, including those that directly benefit his family. Roberts’s opinion, read in full, describes a president who has arrogated to himself the unilateral power to tax the entire population, even the world, answerable to no one, on the basis of an “emergency” declaration that he asserts cannot be reviewed.
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The invocations of the American Revolution by the majority justices are not merely rhetorical ornaments. As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches this July, the Revolution and the democratic principles it evoked are intruding into political life—and not only into the sphere of legal opinions. The language of 1776 retains an explosive contemporary relevance.
That a chief justice of the Supreme Court felt compelled to invoke the memory of the Revolution against a sitting president’s assertion of unchecked taxing power is itself a measure of how deep the present constitutional crisis has become. The ideals of the American Revolution, rooted in the Enlightenment and in the struggle against monarchical tyranny, stand in irreconcilable opposition to the regime Trump is attempting to construct.
The Supreme Court has not, however, undergone a democratic awakening. The Court is, and remains, a pillar of the capitalist state. Its function is to uphold the property relations and class interests upon which the existing social order depends. Nothing in Friday’s ruling alters that fundamental character. The same Roberts Court that struck down Trump’s tariffs has gutted voting rights, overturned Roe v. Wade, and granted presidents sweeping criminal immunity. To recognize the political significance of the divisions within the Court on specific issues is not to harbor any illusions in the nature of the institution itself.
Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh—the uncompromising Nazis on the Court—argued that IEEPA gives the president essentially unlimited power to impose tariffs. Thomas, in his separate dissent, suggested a bare and temporary congressional majority can delegate virtually any power to the president.
The conflict between the two factions is not absolute. Roberts, Gorsuch and Barrett have provided critical support for large portions of Trump’s fascist agenda. They have backed the brutal assault on immigrants—the mass arrests, the deportation flights, the use of military facilities as detention camps—that constitutes one of the most vicious attacks on democratic rights in modern American history. On the tariff question, however, which impinges directly on the economic interests of powerful sections of the ruling class, a part of Trump’s judicial majority has been compelled to blurt out—though in carefully worded legal language—that the president is seeking to overthrow the Constitution.
The ruling exposes a profound crisis within the American ruling class. One faction, represented by the Wall Street Journal and the internationally oriented sections of finance capital, recognizes that Trump’s tariff war is a catastrophe—raising consumer prices, disrupting supply chains, and provoking retaliatory measures that threaten the global position of American capitalism. The other views the tariff power as an instrument of personal rule and plunder, a means of rewarding allies and punishing enemies entirely outside the framework of democratic accountability.
The ruling class is deeply divided, its democratic institutions are breaking down, and the working class has no voice in official politics. The defense of democratic rights and the struggle against the emerging dictatorship can be carried forward only through the independent social and political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program. It is the working class that is the true heir of the revolutionary principles and spirit of 1776, and it is the working class that must fight to defend them.
The decision of Britain’s premier cultural institution to cave into Zionist browbeating has prompted a furious backlash from scholars in Middle Eastern history, archaeologists and experts in ancient Levantine cultures.
5. US planes flood UK bases in preparation for attack on Iran
The United States is using UK bases to prepare for an attack on Iran, despite an earlier fallout over permission to use Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands and Fairford, England.
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The crisis over the Chagos deal highlights the political costs of maintaining the UK as the premier military ally of the US. The Islands occupy a strategic location in the Indian Ocean, halfway between India and East Africa. US imperialism, enabled by successive British governments, has long used Diego Garcia to support its criminal operations from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.
By the late 1980s, Diego Garcia, which hosts between two and five thousand US military personnel, had become one of the leading overseas military bases of the US and the main base available to Britain in the area. The base has facilities to accommodate nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and large airplanes, and playing a key role in US intelligence-gathering serves as a surveillance center for the Middle East. Diego Garcia has provided a “dark site” where the CIA detained and tortured people and refueled “extraordinary rendition” flights.
The Times reported that Starmer had blocked “a request by President Trump to allow American planes to use British bases to attack Iran, telling him that it would be in breach of international law.” It added, “Under the terms of long-standing agreements with Washington, these bases can only be used for military operations against third countries that have been agreed in advance with the government.”
The Foreign Office insisted that the Chagos agreement is “the only way to guarantee the long-term future of this vital military base”, while ministers emphasized that the deal is “crucial to the security of the UK and our key allies”.
The decision was made six years after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion in 2019, noting that “the process of decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed” and that the UK had violated United Nations resolutions prohibiting the breaking up of colonies before granting independence.
As the World Socialist Web Site noted, “With its customary imperial arrogance, the British government ignored this and similar rulings. But there was another much more important [2021] opinion by the United Nations International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) that the British government could not ignore, despite its protestations at the time. ITLOS had ruled that the UK had no sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and thus it considered all the seas and therefore airspace around the Chagos islands as belonging to Mauritius.”
The problem facing the UK—and by extension the US—was that this opinion could be made binding in law, meaning that “Mauritius could take legal action against Washington and London or any company supplying their operations for invading its air or sea space if they had done so without permission from Mauritius. Furthermore, Mauritius would be entitled to open up the Islands to Chinese or Russian bases. This was a risk the US and UK governments were not prepared to take.”
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Located some 2,400 miles from Iran’s southern coastline, well within striking range, Diego Garcia is a crucial platform for US aerial power, with long runways capable of hosting heavy bombers and a deepwater port that can accommodate aircraft carriers. Prior to last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities by the US and Israel, a squadron of B-2 bombers was readied on the island.
Starmer’s hesitation over the use of Diego Garcia and Fairford reflects fear in British ruling circles over direct legal and military entanglement in a war crime. The BBC noted that under international law there is “no distinction between a state carrying out the attack and those which have supported that state, if the latter has ‘knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act’”.
But London has made repeated statements endorsing US threats against Iran, while stating its preferred outcome is the US disarming Iran via a negotiated settlement.
6. United States: NYSNA pushes through sellout to end nurses’ strike at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
On Saturday, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) announced the ratification of a contract at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, ending a six-week strike by more than 4,000 nurses. This was the last of four facilities still on strike following a vote just over a week before, in which NewYork-Presbyterian nurses overwhelmingly rejected their tentative agreement.
The new contract does not adequately address the nurses’ demands, including safe staffing, and the nurses will soon find themselves fighting management again over the same issues. NYSNA secured the ratification not because of genuine enthusiasm for the deal, but because the union bureaucrats isolated the nurses on the picket line in below-freezing temperatures, while withholding strike pay.
Voting for the tentative agreement took place only hours after it was announced on Friday, giving the nurses no time to read, discuss and consider the agreement. There was no meaningful democratic oversight to ensure the integrity of the ballot. Each worker received a link to an online ballot and was urged not to share the link with anyone else. This instruction suggests that anyone with a link could have cast a ballot for someone else.
NYSNA acknowledged workers’ “valid concerns” about the previous online vote, which was conducted over Surveymonkey, a platform which is unsuitable for secure, audited elections. Instead of explaining what measures they were taking to ensure the integrity of the vote this weekend, NYSNA urged the nurses to take screenshots of their ballots. Tellingly, the union justified the vulnerable electronic voting procedure by stating that it “helps expedite getting to results” and “helps to ensure a speedy return to work.” NYSNA thus admitted that its main concern was not the legitimacy of the vote but nurses’ swift return to work to satisfy management.
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The new contract does not resolve any of the issues over which nurses fought admirably for six weeks. Their struggle will continue, albeit in a different form, and it is essential that the nurses draw the lessons of this experience.
The main obstacle that the nurses face is NYSNA, which did everything possible to weaken and betray them. The more powerful the nurses’ position, the more shamelessly the union strove to undermine them. NewYork-Presbyterian was one of 15 hospitals in New York City and Long Island whose contracts expired the same day last month. Instead of waging a powerful, united fight, NYSNA withdrew strike notices at 11 hospitals without even having reached agreements at the time.
Unable to prevent strikes at four of these hospitals, NYSNA withheld strike pay to starve its members into submission. After several weeks, the union reached tentative agreements with three of the hospitals, sent nurses back to work and left its members at NewYork-Presbyterian stranded.
In a flagrant act of bullying, NYSNA tried to force the NewYork-Presbyterian workers to ratify an agreement that the executive committee had already rejected. When the nurses overwhelmingly voted it down, NYSNA retaliated against them by temporarily stopping food deliveries to the picket line and stopping daily strike updates.
Only one week ago, local bargaining committee head Beth Loudin took part in a demonstration outside NYSNA headquarters calling for President Nancy Hagans to be disciplined. But now, Loudin has issued statements alongside Hagans praising the new deal, which is little different from the previous one.
The New York nurses’ strike took place amid an upsurge of walkouts, and healthcare workers have tremendous potential power. The ongoing strike of 31,000 healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente facilities in California and Hawaii has been reinforced by more than 500 operating engineers, who walked out today. About 700 nurses and case workers at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Michigan have been on strike for nearly six months. These strikes demonstrate the potential for healthcare workers to launch a national fight to defend medical science and patients’ rights against attacks by management, ICE and the state.
NYSNA’s betrayal, however, shows that this movement requires new organizations and a new strategy. Healthcare workers everywhere must form rank-and-file committees that are independent of the trade union bureaucracy and of both big business political parties. These committees, which workers must control democratically, will provide the organizational means for formulating demands, developing a strategy and uniting struggles across state, national and industrial boundaries.
The raid is the first known enforcement action in the national capital under the Commonwealth hate-symbol provisions and is being treated as a test case.
On February 17, staff members at the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) walked off the job, launching an unfair labor practices strike against the organization that presents itself as a defender of writers against corporate exploitation. Picket lines went up outside the guild’s Fairfax Avenue headquarters in Los Angeles in a politically charged confrontation: a union functioning as an employer, accused by its own employees of retaliation, surveillance and bad-faith bargaining.
The walkout, involving about 115 administrative and professional staff, coincides with a sharp intensification of class struggle. More than 31,000 nurses and healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente are striking, while tens of thousands of educators in the Los Angeles Unified School District and the University of California system are preparing walkouts. Workers across various sectors are pushing back against intensifying exploitation, austerity, war, repression and the fascist policies of the Trump administration.
WGAW staff workers are responsible for core guild operations, including administering residuals, enforcing contracts, conducting research and coordinating communications.
In spring 2025, staff formed the Writers Guild Staff Union (WGSU) to win collective bargaining rights and workplace protections. The guild leadership granted voluntary recognition, but negotiations for a first contract soon revealed sharp divisions last September. Over nineteen bargaining sessions, WGSU co-chairs Dylan Holmes and Missy Brown accused management of surface-level bargaining, saying proposals failed to address their core demands.
Central to the dispute is “just cause” protection. Workers cited alleged retaliatory firings during the organizing drive and demanded strong due-process safeguards, while the union leadership proposed performance-based exceptions that staff argued would preserve unilateral authority.
In January 2026, 82 percent of members authorized an unfair labor practices strike, filing charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging surveillance, retaliation and bad-faith bargaining. The guild management has rejected the accusations, maintaining that discipline was performance-related and its proposals comprehensive.
The WGSU affiliated with the Pacific Northwest Staff Union (PNWSU), founded in 1979 as union employees sought to defend their own working conditions within increasingly corporatized labor institutions. The affiliation was intended to avoid conflicts of interest that might arise if the guild staff were represented by unions inside the same federation.
PNWSU’s existence reflects a broader trajectory. Emerging during the economic crises of the late 1970s, it expressed efforts by union staff to resist deteriorating conditions inside growing bureaucratic organizations. Yet such initiatives have done little or nothing to halt the unions’ wholesale accommodation to management and the state.
The staff unionization drive rested on a simple premise: collective bargaining should apply inside unions as well. While apparently reasonable, this approach largely aimed to stabilize existing structures rather than challenge their evolution into corporatized apparatuses. As unions expanded with sizable assets and professional leadership layers, staff unions often managed internal tensions without confronting bureaucratic consolidation.
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The staff strike has elicited mixed reactions across the entertainment labor landscape. Organizations such as SAG-AFTRA, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have expressed cautious, if not ambiguous solidarity, while the staff union of the Writers Guild of America East publicly supported the walkout and called for good-faith bargaining.
Among rank-and-file writers, responses have been more pointed. Some have highlighted the apparent hypocrisy of a union accused of denying its own staff protections it demanded from studios. Individuals and political organizations seeking careers within the union bureaucracies, including the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, have remained largely silent.
Rank-and-file writers have demonstrated concrete support for the strikers. A hardship fund for striking staff raised over $25,000 within three days, much of it from guild members. This reaction suggests significant sympathy at the rank-and-file level and hints at the potential for broader solidarity independent of the official channels.
The strike’s political significance is already evident. The conflict has exposed the role of the union apparatus and highlighted the futility of relying on entrenched bureaucratic apparatuses to advance workers’ interests.
9. New Zealand: 15 years after Christchurch earthquake, families still fighting for justice
During the 2011 earthquake, 115 people were killed in the poorly constructed CTV building, which breached numerous regulations, yet those responsible for its design have faced no accountability.
10. Australian government banning Islamist group under laws that could illegalize political parties
Labor’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke described the attempt to prohibit Hizb-ut Tahrir as “the first time we have been able to ban a group which falls short of a terrorist listing.”
11. US military buildup in Middle East against Iran largest since 2003
A war against Iran, a country of 90 million people that has not attacked the United States, would constitute a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime” as defined at the Nuremberg trials.
The Democratic Party continued its silence over the weekend. As the Ford steamed toward the eastern Mediterranean and the administration weighed plans for “targeting individuals” and “leadership change,” no leading Democrat issued any significant statement opposing the impending attack.
Lehman connected the assault to the wider crackdown on dissent under the Trump administration’s escalating immigration offensive. “Children cannot learn while living in terror,” he stated. “Authorities are targeting youth because they understand that young people can inspire workers to stand up and use our social and economic strength to oppose dictatorship and stop Trump’s war against the working class.”
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“Our immigrant brothers and sisters work alongside us and their kids go to school with our kids,” Lehman said. “We must stand shoulder to shoulder just like we need to do at work. An injury to one is an injury to all.”
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Lehman urged workers to demand that all charges against the Quakertown students and their supporters be dropped immediately and that they be returned to their classrooms with no disciplinary measures. He added, “all those violating Constitutional rights, from the police to the Trump administration, must be held accountable.”
Lehman’s statement situates the defense of the Quakertown students within a broader strategy: the independent mobilization of the working class against the police-state apparatus and the bipartisan political establishment.
13. Great Barrington Declaration author Jay Bhattacharya takes control of CDC as measles cases surge
Bhattacharya’s dual appointment to head the NIH and CDC places the nation’s disease surveillance apparatus under the stewardship of one of its most vocal critics. It is, in practical terms, a fox guarding the henhouse. A Stanford health economist with no formal training in public health administration and no experience directing infectious disease response, Bhattacharya now oversees both the federal government’s primary biomedical research agency and its leading disease monitoring institution.
His primary qualification for this wrecking operation stems from his role during the COVID-19 pandemic as a leading propagandist for the mass infection policies demanded by Wall Street. In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the notorious Great Barrington Declaration at the libertarian American Institute for Economic Research, a right-wing think tank tied to billionaire oligarchs like Charles Koch. The declaration advocated for the pseudoscientific policy of “herd immunity,” demanding that the virus be allowed to spread unchecked among the working class, young and supposedly healthy, falsely claiming that the elderly and vulnerable could somehow be shielded through “focused protection.”
This suppression of socialist ideas serves to channel the explosive potential of youth into mere harmless appeals to politicians, while the ruling class prepares an entire generation for war.
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
