Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Mamdani announces “partnership” with hated would-be dictator Trump
Mamdani bent over backwards to avoid any mild criticism of Trump. Asked about past statements calling Trump a despot, Mamdani dodged. “We are very clear about our positions and views … What I really appreciate about the president is that the meeting we had was focused not on issues of disagreements, but also on the shared purpose we have.”
At one point, Mamdani was asked directly by a reporter about his previous statements that Trump is a fascist. After fumbling for a reply, Mamdani allowed Trump to respond for him: “That’s OK, you can just say it. It is easier than explaining it. I don’t mind.” Trump then patted Mamdani on the arm, as Mamdani smiled. Thus the pair jointly agreed that Trump was a fascist, but that this would be no hindrance to their blooming “partnership.”
2. Mass layoffs escalate in US healthcare industry
Mass layoffs across the U.S. healthcare industry continue to accelerate, further straining a system already overburdened by workforce shortages. This is part of a wider jobs massacre, with US employers announcing 1.1 million jobs this year alone.
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These layoffs are part of a major escalation of healthcare workforce reduction. In July, the WCH Service Bureau released a ‘deep dive’ into the staggering level of healthcare layoffs in 2025, noting that the industry ‘is experiencing an unprecedented wave of workforce reductions in 2025, with 51 hospitals and health systems announcing layoffs affecting tens of thousands of employees.’
Federal workers have also been a primary target, with roughly 10,000 full-time jobs being cut in the Department of Health as part of the federal job cuts pursued by the Trump regime. This includes around 4,300 workers at the Centers for Disease Control, a third of the workforce.
These layoffs are taking place most of the way through the 5th year of the COVID-19 pandemic which is estimated to have killed more than 30 million people worldwide, with hundreds of millions suffering with long covid causing potentially life long disabilities. The COVID-19 virus continues to rapidly mutate and present a significant threat to public health.
Hospital closures have also increased this year, bringing devastating consequences in particular for rural communities. According to a November report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, 27 hospitals have closed or are in the process of closing so far this year, surpassing the 21 closures recorded in 2024.
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The ruling class is stripping away social spending in order to sustain ever-expanding profits. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law in July, slashed over $800 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, with Medicare likely to see $500 billion of cuts in the period between 2026 and 2034. These cuts will result in millions of people losing their healthcare, increased healthcare costs across the board, and an escalation of the mass layoffs among healthcare workers.
There is no shortage of resistance among healthcare workers, who are on the front lines of the class struggle, striking over understaffing, stagnant wages, and ongoing layoffs.
Earlier this week, hospital workers across the University of California (UC) healthcare system held a two-day strike, confronting the Democratic Party–controlled system that refuses to provide a livable wage. According to the union, roughly 40,000 workers participated.
Last week, 600 nurses in New Orleans held a three-day strike demanding improved staffing ratios and raises that many workers have not received in over a decade. This marks the fifth strike in two years.
Last month, 46,000 Kaiser healthcare workers held a limited five-day strike demanding better working conditions, wages and staffing. A month later, they are still working under an expired contract.
But in every case, these struggles are being limited and isolated from each other by the healthcare union bureaucracy. While workers want to fight to defend the social right to healthcare, the union bureaucracy is motivated by protecting its corrupt ties with management and the government. At Kaiser, the workers in last month’s strike are in the Alliance of Health Care Unions (AHCU), which participates in the Labor Management Partnership. This corporatist body receives millions of dollars a year from Kaiser, and its explicit aim is to prevent strikes.
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Healthcare workers must answer to the call of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to build rank and file committees as part of a broader movement of the working class to confront this catastrophe of widespread layoffs. The far advanced crisis of capitalism can only be resolved by the international working class in a united struggle against capitalism.
3. Trump calls for execution of Democratic Party legislators
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump reposted and endorsed comments calling for the arrest, prosecution and even death penalty for Democratic members of Congress—several of them former military and intelligence officers—for releasing a short, anodyne video reminding service members that they are legally required to refuse unlawful orders.
In posts on his social media platform, Trump described the short video as “seditious behavior,” “seditious conspiracy,” “treason” and “punishable by DEATH!” He amplified threats from his far-right supporters that the Democrats be “frog-marched out of their homes at 3 AM” with television cameras present, “hung” or treated as “domestic terrorists.” Trump’s own posts demanded: “LOCK THEM UP,” “An example MUST BE SET” and “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
Never before in American history has a sitting president spoken the way Donald Trump did this week. Not even during the Civil War did Abraham Lincoln demand the execution of the political leaders of the Confederacy.
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The video featured six “CIA Democrats” drawn directly from the military-intelligence apparatus, including Senator Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), a former CIA officer; Senator Mark Kelley (Arizona), a former Navy captain; Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander (New Hampshire), an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve from 2010 to 2022; Representative Chris DeLuzio (Pennsylvania), a former Navy surface warfare officer; Representative Jason Crow (Colorado), a former Army Ranger and paratrooper; and Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan (Pennsylvania).
That these representatives released the video now raises the basic question: What do they know that they are not telling the American people?
In the video, the six politicians addressed “members of the military” and the “intelligence community,” with Senator Elissa Slotkin opening: “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now.
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The video ended with a full-throated affirmation of the CIA, Army, Navy and Air Force, urging them to “stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans” and to “not give up the ship.”
The Democrats’ defense of the military and intelligence agencies comes after the same agencies have spent the last two months carrying out lethal and illegal strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela. These killings, presented to the public as routine anti-smuggling operations, have raised internal legal objections within the military itself. According to multiple press reports, at least one senior judge advocate at U.S. Southern Command warned that some strikes may violate US and international law.
Amid these operations, Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of U.S. Southern Command, is retiring early after less than a year in the position. His departure comes in the exact period when these murderous maritime operations have intensified.
Trump’s unpopularity is currently at levels unseen except in the immediate aftermath of the failed January 6 coup. In response to mass protests against his administration, Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy active duty troops into American cities ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. His administration has already used federal agents against demonstrators and immigrants.
In North Carolina and around the country, students, workers and community members are protesting and increasingly organizing independently to resist federal kidnapping operations targeting immigrants.
These internal fissures help explain the Democrats’ video. It is not an act of opposition to Trump. It is an attempt by a faction of the national security establishment to stabilize the situation and to preserve the legitimacy of capitalist institutions.
Despite Trump’s extraordinary threats, the Democratic Party has responded with its usual combination of cowardice and complicity. None of the Democrats featured in the video have called for Trump’s impeachment. None have called for soldiers or immigration agents to refuse participation in Trump’s domestic repression. None challenge the administration’s illegal wars abroad from the genocide in Gaza to the ongoing US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
4. Social resistance in Ukraine on the eve of the funding crisis
Independent socialist Ukrainian journalists report on growing resistance to government TRC centers (territorial military recruitment centers) and government operations to recruit cannon fodder in Ukraine. They also report on increasing desertions of Ukrainian soldiers from service.
They sum up their report:
Ukraine’s expected depletion of financial resources “until the end of the first quarter of 2026” can mean the final act of the war drama due to the lack of money for the army. In this bloody stalemate, the least illusory solution appears to be the most negative scenario for Ukraine: some heavy military fail, which in turn opens the way to some compromise, just as the severe military defeats in Donbass of 2014 and 2015 paved the way for the previous peace agreements in Minsk. This might well be why Trump said “let’s see in six months,” and Putin reacted so calmly to the US sanctions strike.
To ensure that a new ceasefire does not lead to the preservation and strengthening of the Maidan-born right-wing regime, it is necessary to revive the historical memory of the working class about the revolutionary anti-war legacy of 1917, as well as to elaborate its horizontal cooperation, both when it comes to social protests against the hunting down of men by the state on the streets and the leaving of the fenced prison called a “country of freedom and democracy.”
The second stage of the three-part official UK COVID Inquiry—dealing with the response of the four governments of the UK (covering England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) to the pandemic—has issued damning findings, including that they were responsible for tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
Chaired by a former High Court judge, Baroness Heather Hallett, the findings are contained in 750 pages across two volumes. The hearings covering “Core UK decision-making and political governance” lasted seven months between October 2023 and May 2024.
In findings published Thursday, the inquiry found that the response of the UK governments to the pandemic was “too little, too late”. The first lockdown imposed by Boris Johnson’s government was not authorized until March 23, 2020, and began March 26. This was despite 116 confirmed cases of COVID across the UK having already being recorded—and the first death on March 5.
The Inquiry accepted evidence “that the mandatory lockdown should have been imposed one week earlier. Had a mandatory lockdown been imposed on or immediately after 16 March 2020, modelling has established that the number of deaths in England in the first wave up until 1 July 2020 would have been reduced by 48% – equating to approximately 23,000 fewer deaths.”
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This week’s findings argue the pandemic response was conditioned by a “toxic and chaotic culture” The report states, “By failing to tackle this chaotic culture—and, at times, actively encouraging it—Mr Johnson reinforced a culture in which the loudest voices prevailed and the views of other colleagues, particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making.”
Such explanations say nothing of the ferocity with which the Johnson government pursued its policy of reopening or keeping open the economy, and circulation of the virus with it. While it notes the interventions made by Rishi Sunak (the then chancellor, and later prime minister) to open the economy from the summer of 2020, there is not even a reference to the infamous statement Johnson made in Downing Street in October that year, as attested by several witnesses: “No more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands”.
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Labour’s nominally left leader Jeremy Corbyn never called for a lockdown prior to Johnson finally authorizing the first, instead offering to be “constructively critical” of his government. This was the same policy pursued by Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
While opposing the stance of right-wing forces—who maintain that the initial lockdown itself was a mistake—the Inquiry gives ground to such reactionary positions in stating that had a timely lockdown and other mitigations been put in place earlier, there would have been no necessity for later lockdowns. There is no scientific validity for this, given that the first COVID vaccine was not available in the UK for deployment until December 2020—almost a full year after COVID was first detected in the UK.
The Executive Summary states, “While the nationwide lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 undoubtedly saved lives, they also left lasting scars on society and the economy, brought ordinary childhood to a halt, delayed the diagnosis and treatment of other health issues and exacerbated societal inequalities.”
It concludes, “The Covid-19 lockdowns only became inevitable because of the acts and omissions of the four governments. They must now learn the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic if they are to avoid lockdowns in future pandemics.”
And with that the Inquiry report—despite its damning conclusions, which point the finger at politicians responsible for social murder on a vast scale—will be placed in the House of Commons Library to collect dust.
The call by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) for a rank-and-file investigation into the on-the-job deaths of USPS workers Nick Acker and Russell Scruggs Jr. has been endorsed by members and supporters of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) at Royal Mail in the UK.
Postal workers have drawn parallels with the exploitative practices which inevitably sacrifice workers’ health and endanger their lives at Royal Mail—privatized more than a decade ago and now under the sole ownership of Daniel Kretinky’s billionaire equity firm, EP Group. The leaders of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), Dave Ward and Martin Walsh, embraced the £3.6 billion takeover in alliance with the Starmer Labour government to drive forward the downgrading of the mail service and transform it into a low-wage parcel carrier.
This underscores the need for an international, rank-and-file-led fightback against the profit-driven dismantling of postal services worldwide—which are being carved up for privatization and handed over to the financial oligarchy.
7. Australia: Concerns over official responses to asbestos in children’s sand products
Concerns are mounting for the health of thousands of children, educators and their families after children’s colored sand products were recalled because testing revealed that the products contain asbestos.
Yet, few schools and day care centers using the sand have been closed for its removal. It is shocking that the only Australian state or territory to temporarily shut all affected schools has been the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), centered on Canberra.
Over the past two weeks, about 1,000 schools and early learning centers across Australia have reported using the sand during curriculum activities, and 87 retailers have been involved in a voluntary recall of the products.
While some governments and agencies insist there is a “low risk” of health damage, it is a medical fact that all exposure to asbestos is potentially dangerous. Consisting of tiny fibers, it can be inhaled without knowing it. These fibers can get stuck in your lungs. Even one-time exposure can be harmful, so no amount of asbestos exposure is safe.
The health risks, especially to workers, were known to manufacturers for decades, but use of the material was not completely banned in Australia until 2003. Thousands of people have died from mesothelioma, lung cancer and asbestosis as a result, often many years after their exposure.
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The crisis first emerged on November 12, when the Australian Competition Consumer Commission (ACCC) issued recall notices over children’s sand products that were sold at various retailers. The sand was brightly coloured and designed for children to play with and for educational purposes. It was labelled as Kadink Sand, Educational Colours—Rainbow Sand and Creatistics—Coloured Sand. A voluntary recall was issued on the same day in New Zealand.
The ACCC urged customers to stop using the products immediately and place the sand in heavy-duty plastic bags, double tape them securely and keep them out of reach of children. The agency advised taking precautions such as a wearing disposable gloves and a mask and not disposing of the sand in general waste.
Since then, only some schools, preschools and childcare centers have undergone searches, and some full and partial closures have occurred. Multiple schools were temporarily closed in New Zealand
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According to a 2025 study, 5 percent to 10 percent of people exposed to asbestos at work will develop a related cancer. In most cases, these cancers do not reveal themselves for many years, even decades, as the history of mesothelioma disease internationally has shown.
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An Australian Border Force (ABF) spokesperson said it had strict requirements in place for imported high-risk goods. For many lower-risk goods, however, the ABF considered mandatory testing to be inefficient and costly to industry.
Even the discovery of the asbestos was the result of a one-off test at a laboratory on a new machine, the ACCC said. Despite the sand products entering the country for over five years, they were never previously tested.
An ACCC representative told the media: “That would be an extremely extensive exercise and it’s not currently required under Australian regulation. It’s a matter for suppliers to determine the risk of the products that they’re selling and to engage in appropriate testing.”
In other words, the deadly dangers of asbestos have been left in the hands of profit-driven companies, just as the mining of it was left in the hands of employers for many decades.
8. Liberals’ “Canada strong” class-war budget passed with NDP, union and Green Party complicity
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s minority Liberal government pushed its first budget through the House of Commons last Tuesday in a politically stage-managed vote that demonstrated the unanimous support of all sections of the ruling class for sweeping austerity and massive rearmament in preparation for global war.
Carney’s “Canada Strong” budget slashes public services while funneling tens of billions into the military and corporate coffers. The budget and the government prevailed in Tuesday’s parliamentary “confidence” vote only because of the calculated intervention of the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), their sponsors in the trade union bureaucracy, and the Green Party. The role of these forces, representing privileged layers of the upper middle class, in securing the budget’s passage confirms their function as props of a right-wing big business government committed to restructuring class relations in the interests of Canadian capitalism at a time of rapidly deepening social and economic crisis.
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That the budget ultimately passed 170 to 168 was the product of cross-party abstentions and backroom agreements designed to keep the former banker Carney in office, while the ruling class tests both him and far-right Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre as instruments for ratcheting up the exploitation of the working class at home to improve Canadian imperialism’s “competitiveness” and pay for rearmament.
The budget’s attacks on public services and federal workers underscore how Canada’s ruling class is determined to offload the cost of the ongoing trade war with the US and preparations to participate in a third world war onto the working class. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost over recent months in the auto, steel, lumber and other industries impacted by steep US tariffs.
Behind the bogus “Team Canada” rhetoric, the Carney government has made clear that it stands on the side of Canadian big business in its drive to slash workers’ rights and augment profits. It has virtually criminalized the right to strike, as shown by its aggressive interventions into labor disputes at Canada Post and Air Canada. In this it has relied both on the draconian powers that it has arrogated through a bogus “reinterpretation” of a section of the Canada Labour Code and the trade union bureaucracy to smother rank-and-file militancy.
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In the weeks leading up to the budget, the Carney government used Canada Post as a proving ground for its broader agenda. The Liberals ordered the Crown corporation to deliver a “restructuring” plan that will end daily and home mail delivery and destroy tens of thousands of full-time jobs over the next decade. Canada Post CEO Doug Ettinger in remarks this week openly boasted that as many as 30,000 positions out of a current workforce of 68,000 will be eliminated through attrition over the next decade, with no clarity on what will remain of the public post office or how many of the surviving jobs will be part time and precarious.
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The Globe and Mail’s response to the budget is a clear expression of ruling-class expectations. In a recent editorial urging the government to “restore Canada’s fiscal stability,” the paper scolded Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne for failing to match the brutal austerity imposed by Liberal Finance Minister Paul Martin in the mid-1990s. The editorial hailed the 1995 budget which initiated a massive years-long assault on public services and social supports, at both the federal and provincial levels, and eliminated tens of thousands of public sector jobs as a model for today.
The Globe’s warnings about credit ratings, debt servicing costs and “generational inequity” are not neutral financial observations, but ideological cudgels used to justify a far deeper offensive against workers and retirees. Behind the handwringing over aging populations and “unsustainable” benefits lies a demand that the state claw back pensions from working class retirees while protecting corporate tax cuts and expanding military spending.
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The Globe and Mail’s response to the budget is a clear expression of ruling-class expectations. In a recent editorial urging the government to “restore Canada’s fiscal stability,” the paper scolded Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne for failing to match the brutal austerity imposed by Liberal Finance Minister Paul Martin in the mid-1990s. The editorial hailed the 1995 budget which initiated a massive years-long assault on public services and social supports, at both the federal and provincial levels, and eliminated tens of thousands of public sector jobs as a model for today.
The Globe’s warnings about credit ratings, debt servicing costs and “generational inequity” are not neutral financial observations, but ideological cudgels used to justify a far deeper offensive against workers and retirees. Behind the handwringing over aging populations and “unsustainable” benefits lies a demand that the state claw back pensions from working class retirees while protecting corporate tax cuts and expanding military spending.
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The “Canada Strong” budget must be understood in the context of the global capitalist crisis. Across North America and Europe, ruling classes are dismantling social protections to fund military buildup. Governments are expanding police powers to repress strikes and protests. The political establishments in all the major countries are legitimizing far-right forces and incorporating them into governance. The Carney budget is the Canadian expression of this worldwide turn toward authoritarianism and imperialist conflict.
The working class faces a stark choice. It cannot defend its democratic rights, jobs and future through the NDP, Greens or through the pro-capitalist trade union apparatuses. These forces serve the ruling class and collaborate in its assault. What is required is the building of new organizations of class struggle to mobilize its social power and arm it with a revolutionary socialist program and strategy—rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions and rooted in workplaces and working class neighborhoods, and the Socialist Equality Party.
9. United States: The CDC reverses its position on bogus claims of autism-vaccine links
On Wednesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quietly amended its “Autism and Vaccines” webpage to state that the familiar assertion—“vaccines do not cause autism”—“is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” The agency further acknowledged that studies suggesting such a link “have been ignored by health authorities.”
In so doing, the world’s preeminent public health institution surrendered to the anti-science agenda of the Trump administration, enforced by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most notorious proponent of the myth that vaccines cause autism.
The updated webpage means that the CDC has crossed the Rubicon in the ongoing dismantling of science-based public health in the United States.
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Kennedy and his anti-vaccine network have repeatedly called for stripping long-standing liability protections for vaccine manufacturers, reshaping the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and rewriting federal vaccine guidance from the ground up to reflect their anti-vaccine views. The decades of accumulated scientific evidence showing no credible association between childhood vaccines and autism are now being discarded.
In response to the CDC’s falsified and politically altered webpage, the Autism Science Foundation (ASF) issued an unusually direct statement on Thursday. “We are appalled to find that the content on the CDC webpage ‘Autism and Vaccines’ has been changed and distorted and is now filled with anti-vaccine rhetoric and outright lies about vaccines and autism,” the organization wrote.
ASF underscored that the scientific consensus on this question is unequivocal. “The science is clear that vaccines do not cause autism. No environmental factor has been better studied as a potential cause of autism than vaccines. … All this research has determined that there is no link between autism and vaccines. This is consistent across multiple studies, repeated in different countries around the world, with different individuals, at different ages including infancy, and using different model systems.”
The Foundation also pointed to evidence of prenatal neurological differences in autistic children—“as early as the second trimester”—confirming that autism’s developmental origins precede any exposure to vaccines. Their statement amounts to a direct repudiation of the CDC’s new language and a stark reminder of how thoroughly the agency has broken with decades of accumulated scientific research.
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In the United States, childhood vaccination rates have declined significantly in recent years, a trend closely linked to sustained anti-vaccine campaigns driven by Kennedy and allied groups such as those within the Make America Healthy Again movement. For decades, they have used social media, political platforms and disinformation to erode public trust in scientific institutions and cast doubt on the foundations of evidence-based medicine.
Now, these same figures—having moved from what used to be called the “lunatic fringe” into positions of federal authority—are using official channels to legitimize those narratives. Their claims, now published on CDC webpages that traditionally serve as scientific reference points, do more than distort specific findings: they rewrite the language of science itself, replacing established standards of evidence with deliberate misrepresentation.
Against this backdrop, two policy proposals now under active consideration—and for which the revised CDC webpages appear designed to provide justification—are expected to define the December 4-5, 2025, ACIP meeting. The first is the removal of aluminum adjuvants from certain vaccines; the second is the dismantling of established multivalent vaccines, such as the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) shot, into separate monovalent doses. Both run directly counter to decades of scientific evidence showing the safety and efficacy of these formulations.
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What is unfolding at the CDC is the opening phase of a political project that seeks to dismantle the scientific infrastructure underpinning modern public health. These changes reflect a much deeper shift in the political landscape, where mounting economic pressures are pushing the ruling establishment toward increasingly authoritarian and anti-scientific solutions. The attack on vaccines and public health is part of a broader drive to weaken the social protections that were built to safeguard ordinary people.
In the end, it is the working class—the families who rely on public hospitals, routine immunizations, and functioning health systems—who will bear the full cost of this manufactured crisis. And so it is the working class, allied with principled doctors and other health professionals, that must lead the fight back against this attempt to turn back the clock by decades, even centuries.
The Muziekgebouw concert hall in the southern Dutch city of Eindhoven has canceled a performance scheduled for December 4 by the Soviet-Austrian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya (or Leonskaja). The cancellation is part of the anti-Russian hysteria sweeping European governments and political and cultural establishments in particular.
In its dishonest and misleading statement, Muziekgebouw officials claim that the guidelines of the industry association VSCD (Association of Directors of Theaters and Concert Halls) leave them “no choice.”
These recommendations, among other things, indicate that Russian and Belarusian artists are welcome if they have not openly expressed support for a special military operation on Ukraine.
There is no indication that Leonskaya, who conspicuously refrains from commenting on political events, has offered support to the Putin government or its war effort in Ukraine. Nonetheless, Muziekgebouw continues:
Despite her Russian background, she was not born in Russia and also has Austrian citizenship. Although she does not live in Russia, she has nevertheless chosen to perform in Moscow, where the theatre where she is performing has now decided to make tickets available free of charge to members of the army and their families.
The venue management goes on disingenuously to assert that while it understands that “this will disappoint music lovers … the grief caused by the military conflict on Ukraine is our priority at the moment.” Pardon us if we remain entirely unconvinced.
The cancellation has everything to do with Dutch and European bourgeois politics and machinations.
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Leonskaya has merely been caught in the reactionary crossfire.
She has had an extraordinary life and career, and is often described as “one of the outstanding representatives of the Soviet piano school.”
One biographer explains that she was born in 1945 in Tbilisi,
the capital of what was then the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both her parents had moved there from Odessa (Ukraine), which had been occupied by German and Romanian forces from 1941 until 1944. In the first months of occupation alone some 280,000 people, many of them Jews, were deported and/or assassinated.
Her mother, who had studied piano and voice, but gave up thoughts of a musical career because her parents died and she had to support herself, “was forced to flee to Georgia, leaving behind little more than a house buried in ashes and carrying all her papers and personal belongings.” Her half-Russian, half-Polish father, a lawyer, “also fled from the anti-Semitic crusade. His first wife died in a concentration camp.”
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The decision by the Muziekgebouw is not only vicious and stupid, and hypocritical, it is dangerous. Whatever the venue’s officials think they are doing, they have become entangled in the campaign to justify war against Russia and a new imperialist slaughter with incalculable consequences.
“We need to be more efficient,” new Postmaster General David Steiner told a meeting of the USPS (United States Postal Service) Board of Governors on November 14. “We need to look at innovative methods to reduce costs and bring artificial intelligence into our logistics network.”
But, Steiner boasted, “modernization” efforts “have already dramatically improved our middle mile operations to transform the postal service into a logistics powerhouse.” The USPS has already cut 12 million man-hours this fiscal year and hopes to cut another 12 million in the next year.
He added: “Furthermore, the nine regional processing and distribution centers, 19 regional transfer hubs, 17 local processing centers, and 133 sorting and delivery centers ensure that we have the space needed to process volume and serve customers during peak season and year round.”
Neither Steiner nor the Board members said anything about the November 8 death of Nick Acker at the Detroit Network Distribution Center (in fact, nobody at the meeting said anything about safety at all). Acker was killed by a mail sorting machine while performing maintenance, a machine which workers say had key safety features disabled. His body was not found for another eight hours.
The day after Steiner’s report, another postal worker, Russell Scruggs, Jr., died at a Processing & Distribution Center in Palmetto, Georgia. Scruggs died after falling and hitting his head and bled out while management instructed his coworkers to get back to work. Critical delays in emergency services, made worse by the lack of cell phone coverage inside the building, were a major contributing factor.
“While we may change specific initiatives as we move forward, and our execution needs improvement,” Steiner concluded, “I do not see the need for a fundamental reassessment of our processing and logistics modernization strategies at this time.”
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The USPS is now in its fifth year of a massive restructuring effort, “Delivering for America” (DFA). As the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee explained two years ago, its purpose is to “transform the USPS from a public service, which used to pay decent wages and pensions, into an entity beholden to … profits, with a super-exploited, Amazon-style workforce.” This is being accomplished through the elimination of thousands of local post offices and delivery routes and the consolidation of the network into a smaller number of large, highly automated facilities requiring less labor.
12. Texas university board upholds firing of labor historian Tom Alter
On Thursday, the governing body of the Texas State University (TSU) system voted to uphold the firing of historian Thomas Alter, who was removed from his position as a professor at TSU’s San Marcos campus in September for political speech. Alter, who has been battling his dismissal in court and via administrative processes, had appealed to the Texas Board of Regents to overturn the action of his college’s president, Kelly Damphousse.
The Board of Regents, all appointees of far-right Governor Greg Abbott, released a single-line statement this week, declaring,
After a thorough review of the facts, as well as information provided during Dr. Thomas Alter’s due process hearing, the Board of Regents has voted unanimously to uphold President Damphousse’s decision to summarily dismiss Dr. Alter and revoke his tenure.
The firing of Alter is an attack on free speech. It sets a precedent for the systematic dismantling of democratic rights on the campuses and the initiation of a purge at universities of all those who do not subscribe to the fascist ideology pushed by the Republican Party.
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The political and social character of the Board of Regents makes clear the absurdity of the appeal issued by Aimee Villarreal, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at TSU, at a rally in support of Alter the same day that the board made its decision. “The regents have the power to stop this unraveling, to restore order, to restore trust, and to protect the integrity of this institution and to all state employees,” Villarreal said.
There was never any prospect that the Board of Regents would do anything of the sort. What is required is not appeals to Abbott’s far-right political cronies, but the mobilization of students and workers against Abbott, the Board of Regents, Damphousse, and all attacks against higher education. This is the position of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE).
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The eruption of fascist politics at the heights of US society emerges from the ruling elite’s desperate effort to preserve a capitalist system that can no longer tolerate any economic or political concessions to masses of ordinary people. The endless extraction of profit from the bottom 90 percent of humanity must now be secured by violence and by silencing opposition, such as that voiced by Alter.
13. Trump administration victimizes federal worker for press appearance during shutdown
Ellen Mei, a program specialist at the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, which administers SNAP, WIC and vital food aid programs, appeared on MSNBC on October 2, just a day after the longest partial shutdown in US history began. The interviewer clearly stated at the onset that Mei was speaking in a personal capacity and as a chapter leader of the National Treasury Employees Union, not on behalf of the agency.
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Mei went on to discuss the anxiety felt by many federal workers, whom Trump targeted with layoffs during the shutdown, and the uncertainty over the devastating impacts that would be felt if, as ultimately happened, food aid was delayed to the millions who depend upon it.
The mere act of giving voice to this undeniable social reality was sufficient for the Trump administration to issue a notice to Mei the following day that she would be fired 30 days after the shutdown ended. She is now on administrative leave and has until early December to appeal her firing.
The Trump administration’s reaction is indicative of a deeply unpopular regime, highly sensitive to any expression of opposition and determined to suppress it. During the course of the shutdown, millions of people took to the streets in the largest demonstrations in US history under the banner of “No Kings.” The elections this month were a rout for Trump and the Republicans. Yet Trump’s biggest strength is the collaborationist Democratic Party, which quickly moved after their electoral victory to provide Trump a lifeline and end the shutdown on his terms.
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The victimization of federal workers underscores the criminality of the Trump administration and the entire social class it represents. Trump’s withholding of food stamps during the shutdown was itself a historic social crime, using hunger as a weapon in political warfare. But it comes atop the systematic violation of constitutional norms, including the deployment of troops to US cities and unleashing ICE agents to disappear immigrants.
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The destruction of jobs alongside the shuttering of agencies has been immense. All told, more than 200,000 federal workers have been laid off or compelled into resignation or retirement so far this year, with many more threatened.
Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order aimed at removing collective bargaining rights for a large swath of federal workers, amounting to the largest union-busting action in US history. As of September, nine agencies had unilaterally terminated contracts covering 445,000 workers. It is notable that, faced with an attack on its very survival, the bureaucrats at the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal union, sided with Trump during the shutdown, backing the president’s call for a clean continuing resolution.
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The victimization of Mei and others like her is an issue for the entire working class, with core principles of free speech and democratic rights at stake. There must be no illusions that these rights can be defended through the mechanism of the unions and appeals to the Democratic Party. To defend jobs, social programs and democratic rights, workers must take the initiative.
14. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and New Zealand
Bangladesh:
India:
Sri Lanka:
Australia:
New Zealand:
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.
