Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
On Monday, 40,000 University of California (UC) service and patient-care technical workers launched a two-day strike at facilities across the state. The workers are members of AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) Local 3299.
AFSCME members are among the lowest paid in the entire UC system. They have been on the job for 17 months without a contract, while talks between management and union officials have led nowhere.
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The strike is the latest in a series in the healthcare industry across the United States. Last week, 600 nurses struck for three days at the University Medical Center in New Orleans. Nurses in western Michigan have been locked in a bitter strike for over two months. A series of major strikes have also taken place over the past few years in California, including some of the largest US healthcare workforces in history.
The conditions are emerging for a powerful movement in defense of the right to healthcare, under conditions where access to and quality of healthcare has been declining for years in America’s for-profit public health system.
Such a movement must be independent of both corporate parties. The UC struggle is a fight against the Democratic Party, which controls the UC Board of Regents. California governor Gavin Newsom sits on the Board as an ex-officio member. Before the strike, UC officials announced “contingency plans” to keep hospitals running and dismissed workers’ demands as “unreasonable” threats to UC’s “financial stability.” The same board presides over hundreds of millions in hidden surpluses, executive salaries padded into the millions, and vast real estate and investment portfolios.
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The UC strike that took place this week involved less than half the total number of workers originally scheduled to strike. This would have included 21,000 healthcare, research and technical staff in the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) union and 25,000 nurses in the California Nurses Association (CNA).
UPTE announced a sellout contract last week, pulling its members out of the strike. The CNA followed two days later with its own back-room deal on Sunday, the day before the strike.
UPTE’s own highlights make clear the deal is a betrayal. The union “boasts” that the deal keeps health insurance rates the same for “most” plans, meaning it will increase for some. They also declare that paid time off and vacation time accrual will not be reduced for existing hires, implying it will be reduced for new hires. The contract includes a meager 18 percent general wage increase over four years. UPTE tries to inflate this figure in the highlights by lumping it together with annual wage progression.
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In spite of the last minute sellouts, many UPTE and CNA members still took to the picket lines this week in solidarity. A certified nursing assistant joined the picket line Tuesday at UCSC Hillcrest in San Diego. When asked about the UPTE and CNA contracts, he said, “I think we should all be involved in negotiations.”
Another nurse on the picket line in San Diego explained: “We are here trying to get a livable wage. People have to work multiple jobs to pay rent. ... They treat us like we’re inferior.” She said the conditions are so bad that “We have people in the ER sleeping in hospital hallways.”
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The two-day strike has indicated the potential power of the working class. But to activate this potential, workers must build rank-and-file committees in every UC workplace, independent of the unions and both big business parties, and united with workers in healthcare, education, logistics, manufacturing and beyond.
2. Trump welcomes Saudi prince: Billionaire murderers meet at the White House
US President Donald Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House Tuesday, defended the prince’s bloodstained rule when questioned by reporters about the grisly murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and then hosted a formal dinner in the prince’s honor, attended by billionaires, corporate executives and Republican politicians.
For four years, bin Salman was unable to visit Europe or North America due to outstanding legal issues stemming from the Khashoggi murder. A team of Saudi assassins, headed by Salman’s security chief, seized Khashoggi when he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain documents for his marriage to his Turkish fiancée. The journalist was tortured, killed and his body dismembered and disposed of secretly.
During the course of the visit, Trump had an extraordinary exchange with a reporter that exposed the gangsterism and criminality of both governments. When ABC News reporter Mary Bruce raised two pointed questions—asking Trump about possible “incriminating evidence” in the Epstein files, and bin Salman about the Khashoggi murder and the Saudi government’s ties to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—Trump erupted in defense of both himself and bin Salman.
Referring to Khashoggi, he said, “You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you liked him or didn’t like him, things happen.” He continued, defending the prince, “He knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”
“Things happen.” This statement, about the murder and dismemberment of a political critic, could serve as the motto of Trump’s fascist presidency. ICE agents smash car windows and assault citizens. National Guard troops occupy major cities and are prepared for nationwide deployment. Millions are cut off from food stamps, Medicaid, and other vital services. US drones fire missiles at fishing boats, killing nearly 100 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. In Trump’s America, all these crimes are dismissed with a shrug: “Things happen.”
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As Trump said in his initial welcome to bin Salman, “I’m very proud of the job he’s done. What he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights and everything else.” This of an absolute ruler whose regime carried out 345 executions last year, a new record high.
The Trump–bin Salman meeting brought together two billionaire rulers perched atop political powder kegs, preparing violent repression as the only means of preserving the outmoded social order they represent. Trump personifies the criminality of the American financial oligarchy, while bin Salman heads a corrupt royal family that monopolizes Saudi Arabia’s vast oil wealth.
Trump is relying on Saudi investment to bolster his false claims that foreign investment will revive the American economy and create good-paying jobs. At his public meeting with bin Salman, Trump boasted of $600 billion in Saudi investment, which the crown prince promptly inflated to “nearly $1 trillion.” Like all of Trump’s investment claims, these pledges are largely fictional, with no real benefits for the broad mass of the population. In reality, his trade war policies have destroyed jobs and driven up prices, tightening the financial stranglehold on working class families.
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Bin Salman has come to the US to buy fighter jets and other weapons to suppress his own population and neighboring countries, particularly Yemen, where a Saudi-led war has killed hundreds of thousands and starved millions. He likely calculates that his complicity in the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza has earned him favor in Washington. The arms buildup also targets Iran, seen by Israel, the US and the Saudi monarchy as the principal obstacle to imperialist domination of the Middle East.
Trump is not merely speaking as an individual but as the personification of the American state and the interests of the ruling class it serves. His glorification of the Saudi regime’s brutality reflects the violence and criminality of American imperialism itself.
A central aim of the US-backed genocide in Gaza is to entrench US domination over the Middle East and to solidify the alliance between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh. This is a bipartisan policy. In 2022, the Democratic administration of Joe Biden—who during his 2020 campaign vowed to make bin Salman a “pariah”—granted the crown prince sovereign immunity from civil or criminal prosecution in US courts. This came just months after Biden traveled to Riyadh and greeted the murderer with a now-notorious fist bump.
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The state dinner held on Tuesday night was attended by a who’s who of the financial oligarchy, with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, among the guests. It was Musk’s first visit to the White House since his much-publicized falling out with Trump during the summer, over Trump’s failure (in Musk’s eyes) to cut enough from federal social spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Joining Musk were Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone; Larry Fink of BlackRock; David Ellison of Paramount/CBS (and son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison); Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel; Henry Kravis, co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR); Apollo Global Management co-founder Joshua Harris; and top executives from Chevron, Qualcomm, Aramco, Cisco, General Dynamics, Pfizer and many others. Only Jeffrey Epstein’s demise in 2019—in a Manhattan prison cell after his second arrest for sex trafficking—kept him off the guest list.
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More will undoubtedly come to light about the sordid deals discussed behind closed doors—deals whose goals, beyond strengthening the global position of American imperialism against Iran, Russia and China, are to boost the profits of the US arms industry and the Saudi oil monarchy, at the cost of thousands, if not millions, of lives.
The Trump–bin Salman meeting exposes the utterly reactionary character of both regimes: the semi-feudal Saudi monarchy and the corrupt, billionaire-dominated oligarchy in the United States—each a historically doomed relic of a social order that must be swept away.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the Plantation Workers’ Action Committee (PWAC) in Sri Lanka will hold a public meeting on November 30 in Maskeliya, in the central plantation district, to discuss the tragic death of Krishnan Vijayakumar, who was killed while working at the Maussakelle tea factory in the central hill country.
Vijayakumar, 49, was killed instantly on November 5 when he was pulled into the tea-leaf rolling machine he was operating. The post-mortem report states that he died from “blunt force trauma,” causing “injuries to the neck, chest, and upper limbs.”
Vijayakumar fell victim to this entirely preventable tragedy because the mandatory safety guards on the rolling machine had been removed or were never installed. Fellow workers are unequivocal: Had the safety guards been in place, he would not have been killed.
The Maussakelle factory belongs to Maskeliya Plantations, part of the Richard Peiris Company (ARPICO), one of Sri Lanka’s largest conglomerates. For years, the factory administration knowingly compelled Vijayakumar and other workers to operate this hazardous machine, fully aware of its dangerous condition. The administration ignored every complaint and refused to take even the most basic corrective measures.
Such disasters—stemming directly from the deliberate gutting of safety standards to cut costs and boost corporate profits—are increasing rapidly in Sri Lanka and internationally. Vijayakumar’s death is the latest example of the deadly conditions prevailing in plantations and other workplaces.
4. United States: Workers speak out on dangerous conditions at Palmetto, Georgia mail facility
On Saturday, November 15, just one week after Nick Acker’s death in Detroit, another postal worker died at the Palmetto, Georgia USPS Processing & Distribution Center. Workers reported to the World Socialist Web Site that Russell Scruggs, Jr. died inside the facility after falling and hitting his head and that the lack of cell phone service inside the plant prevented workers from being able to contact emergency services in time.
Russell’s coworkers are coming forward and speaking out about dangerous conditions and a toxic environment inside the plant. Their names have been changed to protect them from retaliation.
Mary said, “The only thing management cares about is moving the mail. They have no regard to employee safety at all and it shows. There is a new plant manager and no one other than management has officially met him, he’s not personable and he’s well aware of these issues and has done nothing to obliterate the issues.
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Workers are coming forward and are not allowing Russell’s death to be swept under the rug, along with the other postal workers who have lost their lives in the Palmetto facility.
Over the summer, the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee launched an inquiry into working conditions, to “expose conditions at USPS to the workers of the world and to arm postal workers with crucial information which they need to organize a fight.”
Building 602 is where the explosion occurred. It manufactured commercial “boosters,” soup-can sized charges used to ignite the larger explosive charges required in mining and other industrial operations. These boosters are produced through a process known as melt casting, in which TNT is heated to a molten state and mixed with more sensitive compounds to increase its shock energy. The molten explosive is then poured into metal or plastic casings and set aside to cool and harden before shipment.
Workers who do this job cannot wear clothing that might produce static electricity. Cellphones and personal electronics are turned off or left outside of the building. The tools they use are made of wood or materials that will not produce sparks. The floors inside of the building are routinely dampened to prevent a static charge. The so-called FISH rule (friction, impact, shock, and heat), is a reminder to workers of the four conditions that can instantly detonate the explosive mixtures they work with.
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Despite [a wide] array of agencies and inspection regimens, Building 602 fell under none of their purviews. Its processes, equipment, and working conditions went uninspected year after year. This was not an accidental blind spot but the direct consequence of a regulatory framework deliberately structured to keep production flowing for both military and commercial clients.
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The explosion at AES cannot be viewed in isolation. It forms part of a widening pattern of deadly workplace disasters across the United States that exposes the systematic subordination of workers’ lives to corporate profit.
In the past week alone, two US postal workers—36-year-old Nick Acker and 44-year-old Russell Scruggs Jr. suffered grisly deaths in separate incidents in mail distribution centers in the Detroit and Atlanta areas respectively. On November 4, a UPS plane carrying 200,000 pounds of jet fuel exploded on take-off, killing three crew members and 11 people on the ground in Louisville, Kentucky.
The escalation in preventable workplace deaths is not accidental. It flows from the basic workings of the capitalist system itself: the drive for profit, the alignment of state policy with corporate and military interests, and the role of the trade union apparatus in suppressing workers’ resistance. This process has been accelerated by the Trump administration’s gutting of OSHA and the effort to lift all restrictions on the exploitation of the working class.
The necessary response is the development of independent working class resistance. Workers must form democratic, rank-and-file safety committees in every workplace, linked across industries and internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
These committees are the means by which workers can investigate working conditions themselves, halt unsafe operations, challenge corporate and governmental cover-ups and assert the fundamental right to refuse dangerous work. By linking these committees across workplaces, industries and countries, workers can begin to coordinate a unified struggle against the capitalist system that sacrifices their lives for profit.
6. Australia: Cobar mine fully reopened, although cause of deadly explosion still unknown
Just three weeks after two workers were killed and a third injured in an explosion at the Endeavor mine in Cobar, New South Wales (NSW), the company has announced the full resumption of operations at the site.
Polymetals Resources Ltd, which had previously claimed it would gradually reopen in stages, announced yesterday that “mining and milling operations have successfully recommenced” and that continuous shift work was being reinstated.
The rapid reopening is proceeding although the official investigation has barely begun and no explanation has been provided for the explosion that caused the deaths of Patrick Ambrose McMullen and Holly Clarke and left Mackenzie Stirling seriously injured and traumatized.
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Polymetals Executive Chairman David Sproule admitted the company was reopening the mine despite having no idea what happened on October 28 and what must be done to stop it from happening again.
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The mining unions, the Australian Workers Union and the Mining and Energy Union, which have said nothing about the tragedy since their hollow promises in its immediate aftermath to ensure it never happens again, have also given their silent consent to the reopening.
This means Endeavor workers need to take matters into their own hands. A rank-and-file committee should be established to lead a fight to reverse the reopening, until workers can determine for themselves, through an investigation they oversee, that it is safe to return. They must insist that workers are fully compensated throughout this process, so they are not under financial duress to return to a dangerous workplace.
7. Australia: Cobar workers and residents speak out over Endeavor mine deaths
Workers and residents in Cobar, New South Wales, have spoken to the World Socialist Web Site last week about the explosion at the Endeavor lead-zinc-silver mine, which killed mining shift supervisor Ambrose Patrick McMullen, 59, and charge-up operator Holly Clarke, 24, and left Mackenzie Stirling, 24, with serious injuries.
Polymetals Resources Ltd, the owner of the mine, rushed to reopen just eight days after the tragedy. Although official investigations have only just begun and little is known about what caused the worker’s deaths, the company is now proceeding with the resumption of full operations.
The reopening is proceeding with the approval of the state safety regulator and tacit endorsement of the mining unions, which have been completely silent on the restarting of operations to date.
Those who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site described an industry driven by speed-ups, understaffing and cost-cutting, in which workers are pushed to breaking point and serious safety warnings go unheeded. The reopening was described as reckless and motivated entirely by profit, not the protection of workers’ lives.
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A mine worker with more than 40 years’ experience:
“[A]ll the procedures are written in blood, someone’s blood. If something works, nobody changes it until it doesn’t work.”
8. Australia: Patients and residents speak out against community health cuts
At meetings called to oppose cancellation of General Practitioner (GP) medical and counseling services at three inner Melbourne clinics, patients and doctors spoke out. A well-attended meeting held on October 24 at Fitzroy Town Hall with more than 500 people was followed by a meeting at a Kensington school hall with nearly 400.
Patients and doctors at the three centers in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Kensington run by the community health organization, cohealth, explained the important healthcare provided at the centers for vulnerable people who are homelessness, with severe mental health issues, are refugees or live in other complex social situations.
9. Australia: Rising anger over cuts to services at community health clinics in Melbourne
Cohealth, a community health network serving vulnerable patients in inner Melbourne, advised patients on November 12, “Our doctor, pharmacy and counselling services at 365 Hoddle Street, Collingwood, and doctor and counselling services at Fitzroy and Kensington, will be closing. We understand this may be concerning for you…”. Ending of General Practitioner (GP) medical services is planned for December 19 this year.
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Substantial opposition erupted when two meetings organized at short notice to oppose the cuts attracted nearly 1,000 people. This groundswell of support for community health reflects growing working class opposition to the attacks on healthcare and public housing by state and federal Labor governments which prioritize tax cuts and other concessions for big business and military spending over social needs.
Cohealth’s announcement is due to the chronic underfunding of community health by the federal Labor government.
This decision delivers another blow to some of Melbourne’s poorest residents. The three affected centres are all located within walking distance of public housing estates that the Victorian Labor government intends to demolish—44 high-rise towers housing around 10,000 residents—to make way for the private redevelopment of valuable inner-city land.
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Most GP clinics only survive by shortening appointment times and increasing patient throughput. At cohealth, GPs can spend up to 30 minutes with patients, often requiring interpreters and managing multiple complex conditions. Some of its 30 GPs regularly receive referrals from nearby private clinics unable to handle such cases within strict time limits. The federal Labor government has refused to properly fund this level of quality care.
Although cohealth receives funding from federal, state, and local governments, its financial situation remains dire. Official records from last year show revenue of $111 million against expenditure of $119 million.
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A statement issued by cohealth doctors warned, “If these clinics close, the people who have nowhere else to go will truly have nowhere else to go.”
Royal Australian College of General Practitioners chair Anita Muñoz expressed shock at the decision, stating, “When people live with homelessness, severe mental health issues, are refugees or live in other complex social situations, they need wraparound services delivered by people highly trained in those populations.”
Cohealth provides free, multidisciplinary, high-quality care at 20 sites across Melbourne and Tasmania. Services include medical, dental, mental health, allied health, pharmacy, drug and alcohol treatment, outreach, and social support for refugees, single parents, domestic violence survivors, homeless people, and others with complex health and social needs.
If GP services end at the three cohealth sites, 12,500 patients will be forced to attempt to find alternative care. Many nearby clinics are full and not accepting new patients, meaning already-overcrowded hospital emergency departments—underfunded and understaffed—will bear the overflow. This effectively shifts costs from federally funded Medicare services to state-funded emergency departments (EDs), where many treatments are no longer free.
10. Texas Governor Abbott declares CAIR and Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations
On Tuesday, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a proclamation designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
The action, which is politically and legally dubious, fits directly within the far-right and xenophobic drive that has defined Abbott’s administration and the trajectory of the Republican Party nationally during the second term of Donald Trump as US President.
Abbott’s official statement describes the Muslim Brotherhood as a “group that supports organizations, including Hamas, that conduct terrorism in various countries,” noting that “a series of countries have already imposed restrictions on their local Muslim Brotherhood branches.”
Regarding CAIR, Abbott’s proclamation calls it a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and “an effective front group for Hamas in the United States,” further accusing CAIR of seeking “to spread Sharia law in the country by infiltrating public office and other areas of public life.”
Abbott maintains in his statement, “Today, I designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations,” adding that the move will “ban both groups from buying or acquiring land in the state and allow the state’s attorney general to sue to shut down the two groups and potentially impose fines on those involved.”
The provocative language and tone of Abbott’s proclamation notwithstanding, US states do not have the legal authority to designate organizations as foreign terrorist entities. According to federal law, such authority rests solely with the US Secretary of State, following consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury.
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While the legality of Abbott’s action is dubious under federal law, the threat is clear: Texas will seek to curtail the ability of these and similar organizations to function by threatening their operations, finances and physical presence in the state.
CAIR is the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the United States, with a stated mission to “enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties and empower American Muslims.” It was founded in 1994 and works both in the courts and broader society to push back against anti-Muslim discrimination, defend free speech, and represent the interests of Muslim Americans facing state harassment, media defamation, or discrimination in employment, education and housing.
CAIR responded forcefully, reiterating its mission as “an independent American civil rights organization that has spent 30 years protecting free speech, advancing religious freedom, and promoting justice for people here and abroad. We have consistently condemned all forms of unjust violence, including hate crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and terrorism. In fact, we condemn terrorism so often that ISIS once put a target on our national executive director.”
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The Muslim Brotherhood is a global Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 as a religious, social and political movement. While some governments, including Egypt’s military regime, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have designated it a terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in the US are limited and primarily revolve around cultural and religious engagement, student groups and overseas political advocacy. US intelligence and legal authorities have long found no evidence of terrorism links within Brotherhood-related entities in the US.
The Muslim Brotherhood has not issued a distinct public response as of this writing, but global Muslim organizations and their US supporters have condemned the move as part of an intensifying crackdown on Muslim civil society organizations.
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Texas has seen a marked increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes and violence in recent years, consistent with national trends since the rise of Trumpism. The FBI and civil rights groups have reported yearly surges in mosque vandalism, physical assaults and anti-Muslim harassment.
In 2023 and 2024, these attacks—which have included bomb threats, mosque arson, and assaults on students and activists—have often followed incendiary rhetoric from Republican political leaders and policies targeting Muslim immigrants and activists. There is a direct link between state policy and anti-Muslim violence.
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Abbott has functioned as Trump’s attack dog in Texas, willing to defy federal law, target civil rights groups, and assist in the mobilization of police and National Guard troops as part of the ongoing establishment of an authoritarian regime in the US.
Greg Abbott’s anti-Muslim proclamation, while likely unenforceable from a legal standpoint, serves as an encouragement to far-right and fascist forces in Texas and nationwide. In the face of such attacks, the working class must unite across national, religious and ethnic lines to defend democratic rights and oppose all forms of bigotry and repression.
11. The class issues in Katie Wilson’s Seattle mayoral election victory
On Thursday, November 13, incumbent Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell conceded the 2025 mayoral election to challenger Katie Wilson. The official vote count put Wilson ahead by just over 2,000 votes, out of over 270,000 votes cast. Both Harrell and Wilson are Democrats.
Wilson’s victory in Seattle, coming on the heels of the election of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, marks the second time this year that someone calling themselves a socialist has been elected mayor of a major American city.
There is enormous outrage at the two-party system and capitalism as a whole, and growing support for socialism. The vote for Wilson is an expression of the hatred of the current socioeconomic order and the effort of workers and youth to fight against social inequality and the escalating assault on democratic rights under the Trump administration.
Like Mamdani, however, Katie Wilson is not a socialist. Her “bold progressive platform” consists of minor reforms, including building more affordable housing, providing emergency housing assistance to the homeless, the introduction of limited progressive taxes, universal childcare and cheaper mass transit in the city.
Even such minimal liberal reforms are intolerable to the oligarchy and have drawn vicious attacks from the capitalist media. The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, published an opinion column Sunday night that attacked Wilson’s election. Wilson’s proposal for modest tax increases for “high earners” in Seattle drew particular ire, with the newspaper claiming that “residents find the city unaffordable because it’s long been a petri dish of failed progressive social experiments and absurdly high taxes.”
The newspaper, owned by the founder of Amazon, which is headquartered in Seattle, also levied a veiled threat. “Major employers like Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos, have relocated thousands of workers from Seattle to Bellevue, right across Lake Washington, because it’s safer and friendlier.” The Post declared that Wilson’s plans “will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals.”
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The Trump administration has responded to Wilson’s election by threatening to move the 2026 World Cup out of the city next year because of Seattle’s new “communist mayor.”
Wilson’s political career began in 2011 when she co-founded the Transit Riders Union, a Seattle based non-profit that advocates for reforms concerning public transit, such as free and discounted transit passes. During the ensuing decade, she participated in unsuccessful efforts to introduce a progressive income tax in Seattle. This effort, called “Trump-Proof Seattle,” brought her into a coalition with Kshama Sawant, who at the time held a seat on the Seattle City Council.
At the time, Sawant was a member of Socialist Alternative, a pseudo-left organization that operates in the orbit of the Democratic Party. The tax reform was passed in chambers, but this result was overturned by the courts. Wilson and Sawant, incapable of and opposed to mobilizing support workers, accepted this result and moved on with their individual careers.
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In response to a question from a Seattle reporter concerning her politics and whether she was a socialist, she declared herself to be so, but said, “I’m not out here waving a socialist flag, because I’m not a super ideological person.” She continued, “I’m also not sure that label will help me in the general election. But yes, I’m fine with being called a socialist.”
She then shared with the interviewer an article printed on August 24th, 2025, in The Atlantic, titled “The Real Reason American Socialists Don’t Win.” She commented, “As a council member, Kshama was trying to tear down the system. … But mayor is an executive position. You can’t run for mayor and say you want to tear down the system. You’re asking to run the system.”
In other words, Wilson is ready to work closely with the existing political institutions of Seattle.
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Many workers no doubt see in Wilson a call to fight for their own interests. But the real way forward is not through Democratic Party politics, but by mobilizing independently and turning to all sections of the working class and fighting for a genuinely socialist program.
The social rights of the working class cannot be won, and opposition to Trump’s dictatorship developed, without a frontal assault on the wealth of the ruling elite, including those corporations centered in Seattle like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Starbucks and others. Their ill-gotten gains must be expropriated, a struggle which must be led by the working class as part of a revolutionary program to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism.
12. Germany: Berlin Christian Democrats misuse millions in public funds for Zionist war propaganda
While the Berlin state government, a coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD), plans to tighten the city’s police and domestic intelligence laws, accusations have emerged of questionable public funding practices in the cultural sector. The CDU-led state culture ministry is said to have awarded large sums to certain party-aligned projects, favoring Zionist lobby organizations.
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While public funds flow into Zionist projects and are used for war propaganda under the false label of “combating antisemitism,” the Berlin Senate (state executive) is simultaneously hacking away at education and culture, which are quite literally being cut to pieces.
This year alone, the Senate has slashed €130 million from the total culture budget. Severe cuts have also been made to the healthcare sector and public infrastructure, all justified with the claim that “there is no money.”
For war propaganda, beefing up the police and surveillance, however, there is more than enough money! This is the government’s response to the growing popular opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, ensuring that defending the Zionist regime remains a matter of “German state policy.”
Two years ago—reacting to October 7, 2023—the Berlin state government created a €20 million special budget for 2024–2025, which it cynically described as funding “projects against antisemitism and to promote interreligious dialogue.”
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The working class must not leave the fight against genocide and war to the Left Party. Wherever it exercises government responsibility, it supports or organizes cuts in every socially significant area and endorses the rearmament and war plans of the federal government.
13. Trump breaks up the Department of Education, accelerating attack on public schools
The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is transferring key functions of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to other federal agencies, marking the most aggressive step yet in its systematic dismantling of public education. “The clock is ticking,” posted Education Secretary Linda McMahon, as the administration seeks to fulfill Trump’s campaign pledge to abolish the Department of Education without congressional approval.
The Trump administration is moving the Offices of Elementary Education and Postsecondary Education to the Labor Department, according to an interagency agreement announced Tuesday and back-dated to September 30, just before the government shutdown. At least $28 billion in funding streams are affected, including Title I appropriations, teacher training programs, English-language instruction and TRIO (a group of student service programs that support disadvantaged students).
The shifting of all oversight and funding for public education from pre-K through college to the Labor Department highlights the administration’s goal of subordinating the public schools and universities to corporate and military interests and reducing them to “work-readiness.”
Additionally, international education grants and Fulbright programs will be moved to the State Department to better align with US military interests. The ED justified the measure claiming these programs have “deviated from the core mission of supporting international education for global competitiveness.” The Office of Indian Education will be moved to the Interior Department, over the objections of Native American education advocates, who said they were made without the consent of tribal leaders. Also, some childcare access and medical programs will be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services.
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The announcement unleashed a torrent of opposition from educators and parents. On social media a New York parent posted, “Neither Trump nor McMahon attended public school nor went hungry because they couldn’t afford lunch. They were both born into multimillionaire families. It’s glaringly obvious they shouldn’t be guiding public education, let alone destroying it. The only motive can be to keep the public dumb and under their control.”
Baltimore_Jack wrote, “And, of course, Congress sits idly by, doing nothing.” MollyG added, “Trump is openly violating federal law and the Constitution. Under normal circumstances, this would be a major scandal.”
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The transfers follow weeks of public statements by McMahon claiming that the 43-day government shutdown, the longest in US history, proved the Department of Education is unnecessary. “The 43-day shutdown, which came smack in the middle of the fall semester, showed every family how unnecessary the federal education bureaucracy is to their children’s education,” McMahon wrote in a November 16 op-ed. “Students kept going to class. Teachers continued to get paid. There were no disruptions in sports seasons or bus routes.”
This is a calculated lie. Head Start programs serving nearly 65,000 children across more than 40 states either closed or faced imminent closure when federal funding was withheld on November 1, leaving thousands of low-income families without childcare and early education services.
Impact Aid payments—critical funding for school districts with non-taxable federal property, such as military bases—were delayed, destabilizing districts across the country. A survey of 90 federally impacted districts found more than one-third were experiencing budget pressures, forcing them to cut programs, freeze hiring and drain reserves.
Civil rights enforcement came to a complete halt. The Office for Civil Rights, already decimated by earlier layoffs that eliminated half its workforce and closed seven of its 12 regional offices, ceased all investigations into discrimination complaints during the shutdown. This left thousands of students—including those facing sexual harassment, disability discrimination and racial bias—without recourse or protection.
Federal grant-making activities were suspended entirely. Technical assistance to schools stopped. And while McMahon claims teachers “continued to get paid,” this misleading statement ignores that teachers are paid by local districts, not the federal government—a fact that reveals her fundamental dishonesty about the department’s actual functions.
Since taking office in January 2025, McMahon has systematically gutted the Department of Education through multiple rounds of mass layoffs. The department’s workforce has been slashed from 4,133 employees when Trump took office to approximately 2,183—a reduction of nearly 50 percent.
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further proposed transfer of special education oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services, run by medical quack Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is particularly ominous. Advocates warn that this shift would promote a “medical model” of disability that treats students as diagnoses to be managed rather than learners with potential, undermining decades of progress toward inclusive education. The gutting of the ED’s Office of Civil Rights has already effectively ended federal oversight of special education, leaving 7.5 million students with disabilities at the mercy of individual states’ willingness and capacity to provide services.
The Democratic Party’s response to this existential threat to public education was characterized by its usual complacency and complicity. The trade union bureaucracies were no different. National Education Association (NEA) President Betsy Pringle criticized Trump for making his announcement during Education Week.
Feeling required to evince opposition, she said, “Not only do they want to starve and steal from our students—they want to rob them of their futures.” But Pringle advanced no measures to mobilize the 3 million NEA members against the open dismantling of the Department of Education, a spearhead in Trump’s social counterrevolution.
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It is clear to all what the administration’s aim is: to destroy public education and transfer the schools into centers of religious, nationalist and militarist indoctrination. The Democratic Party is acting as Trump’s enablers and the union bureaucracies as a labor police force offering their services in exchange for a seat at the Führer’s table.
14. United States: Texas A&M University bans “race and gender ideology”
Last Thursday, the Texas A&M University System’s board of regents voted to ban “race and gender ideology” in the classroom across the system’s 12 campuses. As part of this process, the oversight body outlined revisions to A&M’s Civil Rights Protection and Compliance, and Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure policies. The university’s move follows similar changes at both of the state’s larger higher education systems, Texas State University and University of Texas.
The anti-democratic measure was enabled by the recent adoption of Texas Senate Bill 37, which removed any previous authority over public institutions of higher learning enjoyed by faculty senates and student-led bodies in favor of direct state control. Another recent Texas bill, which was passed but struck down by a federal court, would have required the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
The fascistic administration of Governor Greg Abbott, at the behest of Trump, is seeking to ensure that the approximately 1.6 million students attending public universities in Texas only come into contact with instructional material acceptable to the far right.
As the World Socialist Web Site has previously reported, the Texas maneuvers are part of an attempt to resurrect the Nazi campaign of Gleichschaltung in the modern era. Schools at all levels are to be turned into centers of political and religious indoctrination accompanied by an attack on science and the purging of all thought that does not serve the aims of US imperialism.
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The Texas A&M ban not only places course instructors in an impossible position as they try to avoid the “ideologically impure,” it also threatens entire areas of study, including subjects like Black history, Native American studies, and many other fields and sub-fields. The university’s gender studies minor was threatened with elimination last November.
The university’s attack on “racial and gender ideology” follows the firing of A&M professor Melissa McCoul for discussing gender in a class on children’s literature, precipitating the forced resignation of university president Mark A. Welsh III in September. Far-right Texas state legislators and Governor Gregg Abbot demanded that he go.
It also takes place little over a month after Texas State University upheld the firing of professor and labor historian Tom Alter over his participation in an online conference for socialism that bore no relation to his campus job responsibilities.
Texas is only the spearhead of a nationwide assault on academic freedom being carried out by the Trump administration in collaboration with state governments. The real target of all these efforts is the working class.
The Republican Party is currently taking aim at “racial and gender” ideology, advancing its assault on free speech by making use of the hostility many feel towards the toxic and dishonest claims of identity politics. For decades, academia, sections of the media and the Democratic Party have sought to recast American society and history as little more than an endless tale of racial, gender and sexual oppression, while obscuring the fundamental division: class.
This has rendered the universities vulnerable to the current right-wing assault, as people of all backgrounds become frustrated with conceptions that blame human suffering not on capitalist exploiters but, allegedly, universally privileged “whites,” “men,” “heterosexuals,” etc., no matter how poor and miserable they are. The quality of contemporary studies of race, gender, ethnicity and other dimensions of identity—legitimate areas of research—has for years declined dramatically as a result of this unscientific approach.
However, the intent of the far right’s attack on “racial and gender ideology” is to ban all critical speech, and even thought, about the class divide in society. They seek to use the attack on “racial and gender” ideology as a springboard to strangle opposition to capitalism and class exploitation.
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The Democrats, far from being in any sense an opposition party, are in fact fully on board with the drive to war and the attack on academic freedom. It was the Biden administration which initiated mass suppression of anti-genocide protests on college campuses, creating a framework which was handed over to the Trump administration, which has in turn resumed and accelerated the process. Despite the massive attacks on schools across the state, the teacher and education worker union locals have proposed no actions whatsoever, mirroring their parent unions nationally.
After nearly three months on strike, the United Steelworkers International is trying to ram through a sellout contract behind the backs of 650 workers at Libbey Glass in Toledo, Ohio. The USW bureaucracy has scheduled a snap vote for Wednesday, November 18, immediately after short “explanation meetings.” This is a deliberate effort to suppress debate and stampede workers into accepting a deal that cannot withstand serious scrutiny.
USW District 1 Director Donnie Blatt reportedly bypassed the local union bargaining committee, which considered this offer so rotten that it would not bring it back to the membership—and instead cut a unilateral deal directly with the company. This is not negotiation; it is collusion and open strikebreaking on behalf of Libbey’s corporate executives and top shareholders.
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Rank-and-file workers have not walked the picket lines for more than three months to accept this garbage. The USW bureaucracy never wanted this strike in the first place. They wrapped up sellout agreements at the other glassmakers and have kept 2,800 O-I workers on the job since the expiration of their contract in March.
But the local leadership knew that rank-and-file workers would not accept the company proposal after seeing the company profit from the massive concessions USW officials handed Libbey during bankruptcy. The USW officials called the strike not to win it but to isolate this fight and starve workers into submission. But the Libbey workers are not patsies and they are going to have their say.
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The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) urges Libbey workers to:
1. Vote NO on the sellout contract. Reject a deal that imposes poverty wages, soaring healthcare costs, and authoritarian management control.
2. Form a Libbey Rank-and-File Strike Committee. Elected by workers—not the USW bureaucracy. Such a committee must:
- Oversee the vote.
- Demand full disclosure of the entire contract and side letters.
- Organize independent mass meetings.
- Establish communication with workers in auto, steel, healthcare, oil, logistics, and other industries.
- Break the isolation imposed by the USW bureaucracy.
3. Turn this struggle outward. A NO vote will send a powerful message across the country and the world: Workers will not accept union-backed corporate concessions.
By doing so, Libbey workers will be joining tens of millions of workers across the US who want to fight job cuts, skyrocketing cost-of-living expenses, the murder and maiming of workers in America’s industrial slaughterhouse and the historic attack on the democratic and social rights of the working class being carried out by the Trump administration with the aid of the Democrats.
US companies have already announced 1.1 million job cuts so far this year. The number of layoffs in October were the highest of any month since 2008, during the Great Recession. Twenty-two states, plus Washington, DC, are already in recession. The end of the government shutdown is being followed by the permanent slashing of billions for food stamps, public schools and health care.
At the same time, ten billionaires in the US increased their wealth by $700 billion over the past year. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has just been awarded a pay package worth up to $1 trillion.
The corporate and financial oligarchy that rules this country knows that it cannot impoverish and enslave the working class without mass resistance. That is why it is moving to implement a dictatorship. The Gestapo methods now being employed against immigrant workers will be used against strikes and mass demonstrations of workers fighting to defend their jobs and living standards.
Rank-and-file Libbey workers must defeat the USW bureaucracy’s stab in the back and take the conduct of this struggle into their own hands. Such a rebellion will inspire and win the support of rank-and-file workers at the Jeep and Dana plants, steelworkers at the oil refineries, Cleveland Cliffs and other locations, healthcare workers at ProMedica, Mercy St. Vincent and elsewhere, and thousands of workers and young people looking for a way to fight poverty and threat of dictatorship. The spirit of the 1934 Auto Lite strike and Toledo general strike must be revived by rank-and-file workers taking their future into their own hands.
The Montreal daily La Presse recently published an op-ed by former Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume criticizing certain aspects of the foul campaign that the province’s national-autonomist (Quebec First) Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government has waged against immigrants and religious minorities.
However, Labeaume’s main target was the Parti Québécois (PQ), Quebec’s main pro-independence party. For years, the PQ has competed with the CAQ in making strident chauvinist appeals scapegoating immigrants for the housing crisis and collapse of public services and accusing religious minorities, especially Muslims, of threatening “Quebec values.”
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As the Trump administration in the United States demonstrates, this unbridled anti-immigrant chauvinism is the spearhead of political reaction. Used by the ruling class to justify the massive expansion of the repressive powers of the state, an explosion of militarism, and an all-out offensive on democratic rights, it paves the way for dictatorship.
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Anti-immigrant chauvinism is not limited to the Quebec elite. Under pressure from the dominant faction of the Canadian ruling class, Ottawa has moved since 2023 to massively reduce the number of new arrivals and temporary residents in Canada. The federal Liberal government of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau amended the reactionary Safe Third Country Agreement between the United States and Canada to prevent migrants persecuted by the Trump administration and its immigration Gestapo, ICE, from finding refuge in Canada. The Carney Liberal government recently introduced Bill C-12, which brutally attacks the rights of refugees, a particularly vulnerable group of immigrants.
Like his brutal austerity measures and massive increase in military spending, Carney justifies his clampdown on immigrants by citing the supposed need for national unity— “Canada Strong”—to fight Trump, his tariffs, and his threats to annex Canada.
Canadian nationalism, like its Quebec counterpart, is an ideological tool to divide French-speaking, English-speaking, and immigrant workers in Canada and across North America, and to strengthen the capitalist elite’s political grip over the working class. Workers in Canada, wherever they live and whatever their origins, must oppose the orgy of anti-immigrant chauvinism coming from all factions of the ruling elite and unite their struggles in a mass movement against capitalism, which is the cause of mounting social inequality and economic insecurity, fascism and imperialist war.
17. Palestine 36: Britain’s brutal suppression of the Palestinians during the 1936-39 Arab Revolt
Palestine 36 is an important historical feature film that deals with the causes and events of the first phase (1936-7) of the Great Arab Revolt that took place between 1936 and 1939 and was suppressed with great brutality by the British army.
The mass Palestinian uprising, its defeat and the expulsion and imprisonment of its leaders at the hands of the British army is largely unknown outside the Middle East, particularly in Britain itself. While most of Britain’s former possessions were able to achieve formal independence, Palestine was one of the few that did not.
The 1936-39 Arab Revolt was one of a number of bitter anti-colonial struggles against British imperialism, including 1919-21 in Ireland that led to its partition into the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland) and occupied Northern Ireland, the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, the Iraq Revolt of 1920, the Malayan Emergency 1948-60, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya 1952-60, the 1955-59 Cyprus Emergency and Aden 1963-67.
The 1936 Palestinian uprising was the longest and largest revolt and strike (from April to October 1936) against British colonialism at that time. But the defeat of the 1936-39 Revolt was crucial in paving the way for the establishment of the Zionist state in 1948, the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948-49 and the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians, known as the Nakba. The methods used by the British were to foreshadow those of successive Israeli governments.
Palestine 36, directed by Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, When I Saw You and Wajib) and produced by Ossama Bawardi and Azzam Fakhriddin for Philistine Films, with backing from the BBC and the British Film Institute (BFI) among others, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival where it received a 20-minute standing ovation. It has been selected as the Palestinian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.
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The film, while a work of fiction, is based upon actual events and historical figures. Researched and prepared with great attention to historical detail, to the extent of rebuilding villages and planting cotton fields that are still in use today, and incorporating colourized black and white film found in Britain’s public archives at Kew, in London, the film took almost eight years to make.
The onset of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians coincided with the start of filming, forcing the cast and crew to move from the West Bank to Jordan, although they were eventually able to return to Palestine.
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The film does not really address the issue of the Palestinians’ political leadership, its class composition—landowners, clerical leaders and middle-class layers—the various political parties, largely based on different groups of the leading families, and their ideology. But it shows some of the wealthy Palestinian bourgeoisie hobnobbing with the British and hints at divisions. It does not show how the British consciously sought to sow divisions between the leading families.
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There is no mention of the role of either the Palestinian Communist Party or the Soviet Union. While some Palestinian Jews had formed the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP) in 1921, this was perpetually divided between Jews, who formed the majority, and Arabs, and was subject to frequent splits. This was because the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow, which had turned its back on international socialist revolution and the Theory of Permanent Revolution that underpinned the 1917 October Revolution in Russia in favor of “building socialism in one country”, used the PCP to serve its foreign policy needs.
The unprincipled twists and turns of the Kremlin bureaucracy and its subordination of the various communist parties in the Third International, including the PCP, to bourgeois nationalism, and participation in the Popular Front alliances with capitalist parties, had a disastrous impact on the PCP. It led to the PCP subordinating itself to the Arab Higher Committee in support of the independence struggle. It simultaneously treated the Jews as one hostile body, thereby ignoring the class differentiation among them and failing to make a class appeal to Jewish workers for the socialist reorganization of Palestine—leading to the splintering of the party along nationalist lines.
The Palestinians endured enormous hardship during and after the Revolt. The strike devastated their economy and the fighting destroyed their crops and orchards. Many lost their homes as well as their livelihoods. The British security forces killed around 5,000 Palestinians and wounded nearly 15,000 during the three-year revolt. They assassinated, exiled, imprisoned and divided the Palestinian leadership. Without the full force of the British military, the Zionist project could never have succeeded.
The turn to history is an important development and the film makes a valuable contribution by showing the role of British imperialism in suppressing the Palestinians in the period before the 1948 Nakba, whose antecedents are rarely explained.
18. Labour “left” prostrate as UK Starmer government rolls out fascistic anti-immigration policy
The Labour’s government adoption of an anti-immigration program which has received praise from the far-right Reform UK party and the fascist Tommy Robinson has confirmed the bankruptcy of a collapsing Labour “left”.
Despite talk of a “revolt” against the Labour leadership over the measures, which include ending the permanent residency status of refugees, less than two dozen of the party’s MPs have bothered to register any form of protest.
The Metro led its front-page Tuesday with the headline, “Labour asylum mutiny begins”, but by the time it went to press all such talk had faded.
By the end of Monday, just 18 MPs had come forward to offer timid criticism of the proposals outlined earlier that day by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. By Tuesday, just four more had joined taking numbers to 22 MPs—plus the Labour peer Lord Dubs. Labour has 405 MPs meaning barely above 5 percent have dared say anything in opposition to the measures.
According to the Guardian earlier, “the harshness of Mahmood’s plans has led to significant unease among senior Labour aides and ministers, with at least one on resignation watch.” It speaks volumes for the monstrosity that is Starmer’s party that one just minister among the 121 MPs that hold front bench ministerial posts (92 Members of Parliament and 29 members of the House of Lords) was thinking about resigning. But 24 hours after Mahmood published her plans—which were trailed for days beforehand in the media and by the Home Office as the most significant changes to the rights of asylum seekers and refugees since the Second World War—not a single MP has resigned any position.
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The refusal of the Labour left to mount any fight meant that some of the opposition came from figures to the right of the party, including on grounds that Mahmood’s policy would end up being too costly. Stella Creasy, who supported the right-wing coup to remove Corbyn as Labour leader in 2016, said that Mahmood’s agenda was “not just performatively cruel, it’s economically misjudged.” She added, “It’s... clear that this policy would make refugees more costly to help—if you can’t stabilize your status, you will always struggle to get a job, a bank account or a mortgage, making it more likely you will be dependent on state or charity support.”
The only MP to accurately describe Labour’s policy was Zarah Sultana, who stated in Parliament “these measures are straight out of the fascist playbook.” Sultana left the Labour Party in July and declared she would co-lead a new left party with Corbyn.
But whatever rhetoric Sultana comes out with, she and Corbyn seek at all costs to present their politically rotten and spineless Labour “left” colleagues as part of a fighting socialist alternative to Starmer.
On Tuesday, Corbyn reposted on the X platform a video of an interview he held with Channel 4 News earlier this year. When asked if he—as someone who had also held the post—had any sympathy for Starmer, Corbyn replied, “Being leader of the Labour Party is very, very difficult indeed.”
Corbyn then paid tribute to his “old friends” in the party such as McDonnell who he described as “very active and very good people.”
19. 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.
