Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. What do the Democrats know about Trump’s plans for dictatorship and war crimes?
[An] extraordinary confrontation between the executive and legislative branches [of the US federal government] and the obvious potential for violence demonstrate the intensity of the conflict raging within the American ruling elite. An obvious question is posed: What do the six Democrats know about Trump’s plans for dictatorship and illegal military operations that is so alarming that they felt compelled to issue an appeal to disobey unlawful orders?
The six Democrats are not “left” talkers or in any way identified with vocal opposition to Trump’s fascist political agenda. On the contrary, all six would be classified as “mainstream” Democrats, that is, part of the right-wing political establishment, who have stressed finding “common ground” with Trump.
Five of the six moved directly from military or intelligence roles into Congress. Slotkin is a former CIA officer with tours in Iraq and senior posts in the State Department and Pentagon. Kelly, the most prominent, is a former astronaut and husband of ex-Representative Gabby Giffords. Crow, a former Army Ranger, helped lead Trump’s first impeachment. Deluzio and Houlihan served in the Navy and Air Force, and Goodlander, a former intelligence officer, is married to Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan.
There is little doubt that all six have deep, ongoing ties to the military-intelligence apparatus. If they issue a warning about illegal orders, it is because they have information that they have chosen not to share with the public.
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All of the Democrats, however, shied away from identifying a specific military order from Trump that they believed to be unlawful, with Slotkin even saying that no such orders had yet been given, and that her warning was preemptive. Such statements have no credibility. Trump has already violated the Posse Comitatus Act repeatedly, first by deploying troops to the US-Mexico border to halt migrants, then by sending them into US cities.
There are definite political calculations behind the silence of the Democrats as well as their focus on the responsibility of individual soldiers to refuse illegal orders. They are diverting public attention away from the fact that the Democrats have done nothing to stop Trump’s unconstitutional actions, by impeaching him and removing him from office.
Congress has not so much as held a hearing on Trump’s illegal deployment of troops in American cities. The Democrats blame the Republicans for this, since they narrowly control both houses of Congress, but if the positions were reversed, an aggressive Republican minority would effectively disrupt the functioning of a Democratic administration.
The Democrats know very well that Trump and his inner circle of fascist aides, like Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance, are preparing for the establishment of a presidential dictatorship. This is expressed even in the responses of Trump’s spokespersons. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared, “Every single order that is given to this United States military by this commander in chief, and through this chain of command through the Secretary of War, is lawful.”
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There is also the matter of the timing of the video’s release to the public. The 90-second, scripted and crisply produced video was not put together overnight. The Democrats did not issue their appeal to the soldiers after Marines were mobilized and sent into Los Angeles in June, nor when Trump sent the National Guard into Washington DC in mid-August. Nor did they take action in September when Trump and Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth called their meeting of generals and admirals to declare a war on the “enemy within.” Why not?
One explanation is that the Democrats decided to release their video appeal in response to reports that Trump was moving rapidly to pull the plug on the collapsing Ukrainian regime of Volodymyr Zelensky, effectively conceding defeat in the war with Russia, now in its 46th month. Trump’s “peace plan” has been widely denounced by Democrats, and even a section of the Republicans, as an unacceptable abandonment of the Ukrainian regime. Only hours later after it was released, the video from the six Democrats was made public.
The war against Russia has always been the main focus of the Democrats’ opposition to Trump. For his part, Trump is a rabid militarist with a different geostrategy. He represents that faction of the ruling elite that wants to turn its attention to shoring up the home front—both in Latin America and Canada, and even Greenland—and erecting a police-state regime within the United States itself, in preparation for war with China.
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Whatever alarm it may occasionally voice, the Democratic Party is incapable of mounting any real opposition to the Trump dictatorship. It has worked with Trump at every critical juncture, including in voting to end the recent government shutdown on his terms. Its primary concern is not the defense of democratic rights, but the preservation of the capitalist system—and the credibility of the military-intelligence apparatus.
2. Brazil’s Bolsonaro arrested for plot to escape sentence for coup attempt
Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro was taken into custody on the morning of Saturday, November 22, and brought to the headquarters of the Federal Police in Brasília. His preventive detention was ordered by Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Alexandre de Moraes after the ex-president, who was already under house arrest, violated his electronic ankle monitor.
In a video appended to the case file that led to the arrest order, a federal agent questions the ex-president about burn marks around the monitoring device. “I put a hot iron to it. Curiosity,” Bolsonaro replies.
In a subsequent custody hearing, the ex-president confessed to the act and attributed it to “a certain paranoia” and “hallucination” caused by his psychiatric medication. He claimed to have believed there was a “bug” installed in the ankle monitor.
The action was interpreted as an attempt by Bolsonaro to flee on the eve of the execution of his 27‑year prison sentence for staging an attempted coup d’état.
On September 11, the First Panel of the STF convicted Bolsonaro along with members of the “crucial core” of the fascist conspiracy that culminated in the January 8, 2023 attack on government buildings in Brasília. Bolsonaro’s first appeals were unanimously rejected by the Court and, on Monday, the deadline expired for filing new appeals.
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In addition to the violation of the electronic ankle monitor, the ex-president’s preventive detention was also motivated by the call for a mobilization around his residence for Saturday night. The action was called by Senator Flávio Bolsonaro as a “religious vigil” for his father’s “health” and for “freedom in Brazil.”
Moraes argued in his decision that, “considering the techniques employed by members of the criminal organization [that orchestrated the 2022–23 coup attempt], turmoil in the vicinity of the convicted man’s residence could create a favorable environment for his escape.”
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In August, President Donald Trump imposed tariffs against Brazil on the grounds that Bolsonaro’s trial was a “witch-hunt” that should “stop immediately.” Moraes, the judge-rapporteur in the case, was directly attacked by the US government, accused of being a “dictator judge” and heavily sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act.
The US imperialist intervention in Brazilian politics has not been mitigated at all by Trump’s recent negotiations with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party–PT) and the subsequent reduction of tariffs. This fact was once again demonstrated by the official reaction of the US government to Bolsonaro’s preventive detention.
On Saturday night, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on X condemning Bolsonaro’s arrest as “provocative and unnecessary.” Attacking Moraes and the Brazilian judiciary, Landau issued a menacing declaration: “The United States is deeply concerned in the face of his latest attack on the rule of law and political stability in Brazil.”
The United States Embassy in Brazil reposted Landau’s statement translated into Portuguese.
As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) warned, the trial of Bolsonaro and the coup‑plotting military did not mark the end of the dictatorial threat in Brazil.
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Announcing Washington’s military and political turn against Latin America and its aim of confronting Chinese influence in the region, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth declared in April: “We are going to take back our backyard.” Eduardo Bolsonaro, who moved to the United States to coordinate the activity of Brazilian fascists with the Trump administration, is directly involved in these imperialist plans.
In his post, Eduardo states that the “amnesty agenda” is only the beginning of the political reaction being prepared. Its development—as he declared after his father’s conviction in September—depends on increasing political and even military intervention by Washington. Eduardo cited specifically the intervention in Venezuela, against which Trump is openly preparing a war for regime change, as the paradigm for Brazil’s political future.
3. City of Los Angeles paid millions for homeless beds that did not exist
Last April, the City of Los Angeles reported to a district court that the Lincoln Safe Sleep Village, a homeless site in South Los Angeles, had 88 beds, but when a court-appointed monitor checked in June, she found only 44. The site, a makeshift campground on parking lots adjacent to the abandoned Lincoln Theater, is run by the nonprofit Urban Alchemy, which holds a $2.3 million contract to operate it.
During the June inspection, Michele Martinez, the special master overseeing the federal settlement, saw gray tents pitched on only one of the two lots. The other lot had 44 bare wooden platforms with no tents at all. The discrepancy prompted U.S. District Judge David O. Carter to sharply question city attorneys at a November court hearing, calling the situation “obvious fraud” and criticizing the city for failing to properly verify whether the shelter’s reported capacity matched reality.
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At the same time that Los Angeles is paying millions for phantom shelters, Los Angeles County is proposing deep cuts to its homeless services.
In a budget draft released earlier this month, the county plans to eliminate or drastically reduce funding for several key programs, effective July next year. The cuts include closing 20 of 30 Pathway Home sites, more than 700 beds total, reducing county street outreach staff in half, eliminating LAHSA’s housing navigation program, cutting all county homelessness prevention funding, including case management, removing $12 million for legal and job services and ending funding for all four of the county’s Safe Parking locations.
County officials argue that they are facing a “large projected deficit” in homeless services. Revenue from Measure A, the county’s dedicated sales tax for homelessness, has come in below projections; meanwhile, temporary federal and state funding is expiring even as operational costs rise.
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Urban Alchemy, the “safe sleep” operator, gets paid millions of dollars to operate sites like Lincoln. According to a LAHSA commissioner who inspected the site, $186 was paid per night per tent occupant, by his calculation, for a program billed as “low-cost, high impact.”
Urban Alchemy is typical of a private-nonprofit homelessness industry that has grown rich on public dollars while delivering minimal transparency and no significant social improvement. The organization won contracts in recent years to run outreach teams, safe-sleep villages and “ambassador” programs. Though the group touts its employment of formerly incarcerated people, it has also faced scrutiny for financial mismanagement.
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This scandal at Lincoln Safe Sleep Village is the logical endpoint of a system where homelessness has become an industry that redirects public money into private contractors, real estate interests and nonprofit executives with little transparency and almost no accountability.
Homelessness in Los Angeles is neither natural nor accidental. In a city dominated by speculative real estate, luxury development and financialized housing, the working class faces impossible conditions. Rents outpace wages while evictions occur on a mass scale and social programs have been dismantled over decades. At the same time, homelessness has become an industry, transferring billions in public dollars into private hands.
The crisis cannot be solved through contracts, nonprofits or police operations. It requires social reorganization based on human need rather than corporate gain. Los Angeles has vast private wealth and thousands of vacant luxury units in a real estate market serving global investment. What is missing is a political program treating housing as a right rather than a profit vehicle.
A socialist approach would abolish the homelessness industry, establish democratic public control over housing, convert empty units into public housing and redirect funds now flowing to contractors into lasting social infrastructure.
4. Turkish parliamentary delegation meets with imprisoned Kurdistan Workers Party leader Öcalan
Members of parliament’s “National Solidarity, Brotherhood, and Democracy Commission” visited Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party imprisoned on Imrali Island, on Monday as part of negotiations between the Turkish state and the PKK.
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President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan supported the visit to Öcalan, saying on Monday: “We consider the latest decision taken by the commission to be a decision that paves the way for the process, contributes to the process, and accelerates the elimination of terrorism.”
As with previous meetings with Öcalan, the minutes of this meeting were not made public. As the World Socialist Web Site has stated from the outset, this process, conducted through secret diplomacy that serves to conceal the truth from the people, is an attempt by the Turkish and Kurdish bourgeois nationalist leaderships to reach an agreement in line with US imperialism’s efforts to reorganize the Middle East.
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The Ankara-PKK negotiations did not emerge in opposition to the nearly 35 years of imperialist aggression that the US has pursued to achieve complete domination of the Middle East; rather, they were part of that aggression. The Turkish and Kurdish bourgeois nationalist leaderships, which supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war for regime change in Syria launched in 2011, are trying to unite their reactionary interests, in the process of reorganizing the Middle East, which gained momentum with Israel’s 2023 genocide in Gaza.
When negotiations first came up last year, Erdoğan said, “While the maps are being redrawn in blood, while the war that Israel has waged from Gaza to Lebanon is approaching our borders, we are trying to strengthen our internal front. We want 85 million of us to come together under the common denominator of Turkey.” In this context, Ankara, facing increasing competition from Israel, is trying to turn the PKK-led Kurdish movement from a 40-year enemy into an ally and strengthen its hand, with the critical help of Öcalan.
For nearly two months, the Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex has been kept under what management calls “emergency status,” during which workers have been on 9–10 hour shifts, 6–7 days a week, with many not seeing a day off for more than three weeks. According to an internal safety memo posted inside the plant, the factory accounted for 30 percent of the injuries at all 75 Stellantis factories and parts distribution centers in North America over the past 10 weeks.
A longtime Toledo worker recently told WTOL 11 that he had gone nearly a month without a single day off. “On a weekly basis, we’re being forced a 10th hour of overtime, some days being forced Saturdays, Sundays,” the worker said. “The longest I’ve worked straight? Roughly three and a half weeks.”
The worker, who withheld his identity to prevent being targeted by management and United Auto Workers officials, explained how exhaustion is directly fueling the surge in accidents. “Both the union and the company are ignoring the fact that workers are burnt out. People need time off. People need see their families. People need to see their friends. They want to look forward to that weekend off, that one day off. It just isn’t happening.”
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These conditions have been imposed while still no full explanation has been provided for the death of 53-year-old father of four, Antonio Gaston, who was killed inside the Toledo plant in August 2024. According to his family’s wrongful death lawsuit, Gaston was working alone, amid staffing shortages, on a machine whose protective safety guards were likely removed or bypassed “to prevent loss of production.” Fifteen months later, neither Stellantis nor the UAW has provided Jeep workers with an explanation of his death—even as the company challenges the $16,000 fine imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
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Workers report that Toledo is not the only facility under emergency status. The Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) was placed on emergency status in July with the return of the HEMI engine, requiring all three shifts to work six to seven days a week.
The company has also routinely designates plants or parts of plants as “crucial to the integrated supply system of the Company” and “essential to meeting the scheduled production of one or more other plants or of customers.” This allows Stellantis to run them seven days a week for 90 days.
This directly exposes the fraud of UAW President Shawn Fain’s repeated claim that the 2023 national auto contract delivered a “better work-life balance” for autoworkers. There is no “work-life balance” in ten-hour shifts, seven-day weeks, emergency status or a plant responsible for 25 out of 87 injuries across all Stellantis facilities.
Fain’s slogan was designed to conceal the fact that the 2023 contract preserved and expanded the very forced-overtime provisions, seven-day operations clauses and emergency overtime memorandum the company is now using to abuse workers’ bodies.
he UAW bureaucracy which is enforcing this bears direct responsibility for the injuries and deaths. Fain’s bogus “stand up strike” and the sellout of the 2023 contract struggle was followed by two fatalities: Antonio Gaston at Jeep and Ronald Adams Sr., a 63-year-old skilled trades worker who was crushed to death at the nearby Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan on April 7, 2025.
More than seven months later, Stellantis, the UAW and MIOSHA have disclosed nothing about the causes of Adams’ death to his widow and co-workers. Nevertheless the engine factory has been brought back to full production.
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The forced overtime, rising injuries and concealment of worker deaths are the product of a corporate–union structure enforcing a system that sacrifices workers’ lives for profit. Toledo Assembly Complex workers showed in March 2020 that they can act independently, when they occupied the Local 12 offices and forced a shutdown of the plant during the first stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. That same initiative is needed now, on a broader and more organized scale. Building rank-and-file committees is the only path to protect workers’ lives, expose the truth and challenge the deadly alliance of Stellantis, the UAW bureaucracy and the political establishment.
6. Australian capitalism embroiled ever deeper in developing global crisis
The Australian economy and financial system are being drawn ever more rapidly into the gathering storm in international markets, according to warnings from some leading figures in the financial world.
The warnings are not making front-page news, but they are being discussed and closely followed in the financial press.
Last week, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) directed attention to a major speech in Canberra by Heather Smith, a former economic official and now a company director, in which she warned that the seeds of another global financial crisis were being sown.
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Her speech was described by the AFR as a wakeup call in the face of a significant underestimation in business circles and more broadly of the most difficult international environment since the end of World War 2.
According to the report, the dangers she cited included the trade war between the US and China, a retreat by the US from the international institutions it had created, the rise of nationalist populism, a ruthless China, unsustainable US debt, Trump’s attacks on the independence of the US Federal Reserve, a potential bubble in AI stocks, the undermining of the position of the dollar as the global reserve currency and tensions over Taiwan.
“To say that Australia is not well positioned for this world is an understatement,” she said.
“All of the institutions that matter to us are being disrupted and all at once. In my view we simply have not laid the foundations to be able to exist in this volatile and uncertain world where we are dancing on the head of a pin.”
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Pointing to the breakdown of the entire post-war order, she noted that as the risks of a crisis were rising, the global ability to respond was decreasing and Australia was increasingly exposed in this world, in particular because of the conflict between the US, its ally and largest investor and China, its largest trading partner.
“The diabolical choices that confront us of seemingly being caught in a pincer movement between China and the US should be starting to dawn,” she said. Australia was being caught in a “dangerous crossfire” as each looked to ways to disrupt the other’s economy as revealed in the rare earths conflict and efforts to de-dollarize trade.
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As the International Monetary Fund called on the Australian government to undertake budget repair—the code phrase for major cuts in social spending as the outlays on the military increase—to make the economy more productive and resilient, Heather Smith sang from the same song sheet in her speech.
“We are yet to move the dial on productivity growth—our performance is second lowest in the OECD,” she said as she looked to the possibility of “comprehensive reform” in this area.
7. Walkouts spread as students protest ICE and Border Patrol raids in North Carolina and Oregon
More than 56,000 students walked out across North Carolina last week to oppose sweeping immigration raids, and the protests have continued into this week as youth demonstrate against the growing presence of ICE and Border Patrol in their communities.
The walkouts were sparked after CBP and ICE agents descended on the state’s largest city last week, sweeping up nearly 400 people and driving as much as 20 percent of the student population into hiding while the raids continued.
Student protests have spread well beyond Charlotte, into Wake County and the wider Raleigh–Durham metro, a fast-growing region now numbered at about 1.6 million residents. In the city of Raleigh, North Carolina alone roughly 13.4 percent of the population, some 63,000 people, were born outside the US.
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On November 22, in Durham County, high school students protested across the city, conducting a walkout after lunch. Hundreds of students marched and converged in downtown Durham at CCB Plaza, where they climbed onto the iconic bull sculpture and chanted against the raids. By evening, the demonstration had expanded into a larger community gathering, with hundreds of workers and residents joining students for speeches and traditional performances.
The ongoing raids in North Carolina have turned neighborhoods into ghost towns. For more than a week residents of Charlotte, Raleigh and Durham went into hiding as armed federal agents prowled streets, parking lots and shopping centers.
The terror unleashed in the last year as part of Trump’s mass deportation operation has fallen heavily on children. In Charlotte, many immigrant families kept their US-born children at home to prevent the family from being split up. Children who did go to school often arrived with passports to prove their citizenship, while others wear tags that read “I am a US citizen.” In order to warn other children and parents, some kindergartners have begun carrying whistles to blow if they see immigration agents.
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The growing student resistance is not confined to North Carolina. On November 24, about 300 students at McMinnville High School in Oregon walked out after Christian Jimenez, a 17-year-old US citizen, was kidnapped by ICE during his lunch break. Video of the incident shows Jimenez telling agents repeatedly, “I am a US citizen, I am a US citizen.”
ICE thugs, after smashing the drivers’ side window replied, “I don’t care.”
The incident drew widespread outrage, forcing McMinnville School District Interim Superintendent Kourtney Ferrua to release a statement confirming that the student walkout was “in response to the ICE activity in our community last week,” referring to four US citizens who had been detained in Oregon by ICE that same week.
The student protest and walkouts represent an important and politically advanced response. Young people, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, have shown that they will not be intimidated by state violence. Their walkouts point to the emergence of a new social force prepared to defend democratic rights.
But walkouts by students, no matter how numerous, cannot alone stop these raids. The defense of our immigrant brothers and sisters requires the conscious intervention of the working class, the producers of all of societies wealth. Rank-and-file committees must be built in every workplace, school and neighborhood to organize collective resistance and actions. These committees must demand the release of all detainees, the immediate end to all deportation operations, and the abolition of CBP and ICE.
8. Germany’s economics professors call for pension cuts
In an open letter, 22 prominent economics professors are calling for the complete withdrawal of the government’s pension package, which the Bundestag (parliament) is due to vote on at the end of November, and which is to come into force on January 1. The package is far too expensive, they argue. It aggravates “the structural problems of the pension system caused by demographics” and leads “to an additional shift of burdens between the generations—at the expense of the young.”
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The letter is a typical example of how so-called science is misused to push a political agenda. The professors join the chorus of industry associations, the Christian Democrat Young Union and other representatives of the wealthy who accuse the government of having delegated the attack on pensions to a commission that is to begin its work in early 2026, instead of launching it immediately.
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Pension contributions are paid exclusively by wage-dependent workers and, on a voluntary basis, by the self-employed. There is a contribution ceiling of €8,050 (US$ 9,312) per month. Anyone earning more pays no contributions on their additional income. And the enormous incomes from share ownership, property finance and speculation are completely exempt. They contribute not a single cent to pension financing.
As a result, pensions are already insufficient to live on. But 50 percent of people in Western Germany and 74 percent in Eastern Germany have no other form of old-age provision besides the statutory pension.
In 2024, the poverty rate among senior citizens was 19.6 percent—1.2 percent higher than the previous year. They have a monthly net income below €1,378 (US$1,596). A total of 1.26 million people received basic income support (welfare) in old age, 4.1 percent more than the year before. This trend will continue even under the government’s pension package. The 48 percent minimum does not prevent pensioners from falling into poverty; it merely slows the decline slightly.
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The far right is needed to intimidate and suppress resistance to the social onslaught. The AfD’s election manifesto contains plenty of social demagogy, such as demanding a pension level of 70 percent. But this is aimed at luring voters. At the same time, the AfD advocates tax cuts and debt reduction. It follows the example of Donald Trump, who showered his election campaign propaganda with social posturing only to surround himself after the election with billionaire oligarchs and create the richest cabinet in US history.
The SPD and the Left Party have repeatedly shown that they support all social attacks whenever they are part of a government. The defense of pensions—like the fight against job cuts, fascism and war—requires the development of an independent, international movement of the working class based on a socialist program. Banks, corporations and great fortunes must be expropriated, and the economy reorganized according to social need rather than profit.
9. Australia: Polymetals holds AGM after fatal Endeavor mine explosion
On November 21, just over three weeks after two workers were killed and a third seriously injured in an explosion at the Endeavor mine, north of Cobar in outback New South Wales (NSW), mine owner Polymetals Resources Ltd held its annual general meeting (AGM).
The overall tone of the company’s presentation to shareholders was jubilant, declaring from the beginning “2025 is a milestone year.” It emphasized the company’s rapid development, from acquisition of the Endeavor mine in August 2024 to first achieving cashflow in July 2025.
Mention of the workers’ deaths was limited to a token reference on page seven, under the heading “Endeavour’s restart [in May] was a testament to our hard-working team.” In utterly cynical fashion, the presentation boasts that “Polymetals is now 200 plus people strong,” before noting, “We will forever remember Patrick ‘Ambrose’ McMullen and Holly Clarke who lost their lives on October 2025 [sic].” This was followed by the claim, “The safety and well being of our team will always be our number one priority.”
The thrust of the presentation was that the still-unexplained explosion and the death of two workers just 24 days earlier was a minor blip that will not disrupt the company’s future prospects.
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Polymetals’ latest annual report reveals the company lost $47.8 million in the 2024–2025 financial year, and that, as of June 30, its current liabilities (not including the bond) exceeded its current assets by more than $24 million. The company’s “continuing viability,” the report says, hinges entirely on whether it can “transition successfully as a mining producer which would be substantially bolstered by successful exploration.”
In other words, the existence of Polymetals not only depends on the uninterrupted continuation of the mining already underway, but on the success of its attempts to locate and develop new deposits.
“These figures indicate,” the report continues, “a material uncertainty which may cast doubt as to whether the consolidated entity will continue as a going concern.” To address this uncertainty, the company said it planned to raise additional capital, through the issuance of shares and “other forms of financing.”
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Polymetals, a small company that is “all in” on the financial success of its only mine, is proceeding with the full resumption of operations at Endeavor because, like any company under capitalism, it is compelled to serve the financial demands of shareholders, not protect the lives of workers.
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Across Australia and globally, miners and workers in every industry confront escalating demands for speed-ups and increased “productivity,” as well as attacks on real wages and other working conditions. Workplace deaths are the sharpest expression of the voracious appetite of corporations and their financial backers for ever-growing profits.
This underscores that the struggle for a workers’ investigation of McMullen and Clarke’s deaths must be part of a broader fight for workers’ safety and lives everywhere. Through building a rank-and-file committee at Endeavor, workers in Cobar can begin to link up with their counterparts around the world, through the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
10. European leaders accuse US of “betrayal” over Ukraine
It remains unclear what the outcome of the new US initiative to end the war in Ukraine will be. Negotiations are currently underway in various locations with different participants.
In Geneva, representatives from the US, Ukraine, and the European powers are haggling over a revision of the 28 points presented by Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin's confidant Kirill Dmitriev, under the supervision of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Ukraine is represented in Geneva by President Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff Andriy Yermak and the secretary of the National Security Council Rustem Umierov. Witkoff himself, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll were also in Geneva for a time.
Driscoll, 39, a college friend and confidant of Vice President JD Vance, is considered a rising star in the US Department of War and is playing a central role in US policy toward Ukraine. In Kiev, he demanded the acceptance of the 28-point plan with the words, “We are not negotiating details,” and, “We need to get this shit done.” According to the Financial Times, he has been holding secret talks with a Russian and a Ukrainian delegation in Abu Dhabi since Monday.
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Meanwhile, leading European heads of state and government are trying to prevent an agreement. They were surprised by the Witkoff-Dmitriev paper at the G20 summit in South Africa, which was boycotted by the US, and have since been working hard to dissuade Trump. They have presented their own plan, which is unacceptable to Russia, and German Chancellor Merz has spoken to Trump on the phone.
But what they succeeded in doing after Zelensky’s expulsion from the White House in February and the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska in August, namely preventing an agreement, could fail this time around.
Ukraine has been bled dry. The army has lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and, due to mass desertions, can no longer recruit the necessary reinforcements. It also relies on intelligence, weapons, and ammunition from the US, the cessation of which would massively exacerbate the crisis on the front lines. Since the beginning of the war, the population has shrunk by about 10 million due to mass emigration, low birth rates, and war deaths, and Zelensky’s popularity is at rock bottom. The latest corruption scandal has made it clear to everyone that his government is no less corrupt than its predecessors.
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Though it is not yet clear whether an agreement will be reached or whether the war will drag on, one thing is certain: even an agreement would only be another step on the road to World War III. It would not lay the foundation for lasting peace, but would cement lines of conflict over the heads of the Ukrainian and Russian populations that could be reignited at any time.
Real peace can only be achieved through the independent intervention of the European, American, Ukrainian, and Russian working class, uniting and putting a stop to the warmongers.
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The European powers in particular have made it clear that they will redouble their rearmament and war efforts if an agreement is reached between Russia and Ukraine.
Under the false pretext of defending “Western values,” they have dragged Europe deeper and deeper into a war that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, swallowed up billions of euros, and raised the spectre of a Europe-wide escalation. Their goal was to control Ukraine with its valuable natural resources and to destroy Russia. They have also used the war as a pretext to rearm on a scale not seen since World War II.
Now they have been left empty-handed. They could have had a deal more favorable to their interests than the one the US is now seeking three years ago without the war. They feel betrayed. For years, they worked with the US to expand NATO eastward. In 2014, they collaborated with Washington to organize the overthrow of the then Ukrainian president, turned the country into a military outpost of NATO, provoking Russia's reactionary invasion, and largely severed economic ties with Russia, especially the import of cheap natural gas. But now the US is set on making a deal with Putin at Europe’s expense and securing most of the Ukrainian spoils.
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Europe is responding to Trump’s rise in the US by “Trumpizing” its own policies. This underscores that the slide into militarism and dictatorship is not an individual phenomenon, but the ruling class’s response to the hopeless crisis of capitalism. Only the overthrow of capitalism by the international working class can stop this madness.
The collapse of a trench at a worksite in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, on November 18, claimed the life of 61-year-old worker Miguel Reis and injured two others. Reis, of Fall River, was buried and killed by the collapsing trench. He was married with two children and was an involved member of the Portuguese community in Fall River, where he had lived for over 40 years. A second worker was buried up to his waist for more than four hours while firefighters and rescue teams tried to free him. A third worker was able to escape the trench himself shortly after it collapsed.
The site at 152 South Shore Drive was being run by Revoli Construction, a company that has been subject to at least six Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigations in the last 10 years. The company has a history of serious and willful safety violations going back decades.
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In the aftermath of the recent tragedy, the town is claiming it was compelled to select Revoli because it was the lowest bidder for the project. According to Yarmouth Town Administrator Robert Whritenour, state laws provide “very little flexibility” in terms of selecting a contractor as long as they are certified by the Massachusetts Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance.
Despite this argument, which has been raised to deflect blame, there was no legal mandate forcing the town to give the contract to Revoli Construction. In fact, a specific provision to deal with public safety, which can be found in Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 149, Section 44A, states:
“The contract shall be awarded to the lowest responsible and eligible bidder, except that the awarding authority may reject all bids if it is in the public interest to do so.” The town’s own legal disputes with Revoli show that they were both aware of the dangers represented by doing business with the contractor and ample grounds to reject its bid.
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Trench collapses are a major threat facing construction workers, with construction being the most dangerous industry in the United States. There were 373 trenching deaths nationwide between 2003 and 2017. In 2016 two workers died in Boston when a 12-foot trench filled with water after a fire hydrant burst. OSHA fined the company responsible $1.4 million.
Recent years have seen a rising number of trench collapse deaths, with 39 deaths in 2022 alone. Citations and the paltry fines imposed by OSHA, often reduced further on appeal, provide scant deterrent. A database compiled by National Public Radio of trench collapse deaths between 2013 and 2023 revealed that in trench collapses that resulted in deaths, only 5 percent of employers were criminally charged. They found that most got away with “little punishment.”
*****
The World Socialist Web Site has described the chronic fatalities and injuries of workers and the millions of industrial accidents that occur in the United States as “America’s industrial slaughterhouse.”
Under the Trump administration, there has been massive deregulation and reduced government oversight and standards, including the Trump administration’s attempt to remove the “general duty clause,” which covers workplace safety violations that are not covered by an existing category.
These recent workplace tragedies are rooted in the subordination of all aspects of social life to the bottom line of Wall Street. No confidence can be placed in OSHA, the corporate controlled media or pro capitalist union to put a stop to these needless and preventable deaths. We urge workers to build rank-and-file committees in every workplace, democratically controlled by workers themselves and independent of the union apparatus.
12. New Jersey hospital shut down after months of deception by owners
Heights University Hospital (HUH), a 152-year-old community hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey, has shut down all services except for its emergency department and limited support functions. The sudden closure forces tens of thousands of patients to travel to Hoboken or Bayonne for inpatient care, surgeries, maternity services, imaging and routine treatment.
Workers learned last week that paychecks for the previous pay period would not be issued. Hudson Regional Health (HRH), the network that operated the hospital, began laying off staff in early November without issuing the legally required WARN Act notices. It claims to have “absorbed” about 100 workers into its network and may reassign another 100 workers. This leaves most of the hospital’s 699 employees facing layoffs or unemployment.
HRH justified the shutdown of HUH by claiming in a November 13 statement that “the state will not be providing the critical funding needed to sustain operations.” But in October, HRH received a $2 million emergency grant from the New Jersey government that was intended to stabilize payroll and prevent service disruptions.
On October 14, HRH filed a certificate of need requesting a staged, full closure of the hospital—weeks before it publicly alleged that it faced a funding crisis. HRH executives insisted that they had “pumped $300 million into operations.” They blamed the community for the hospital’s losses by claiming that “six out of every 10 patients cannot afford the health care they need.”
The collapse reveals as a fraud what was publicized as HRH’s “rescue” of the hospital. In January, the network assured a bankruptcy court and state regulators that it had the funds to keep the facility, then known as Christ Hospital, running. During a ribbon-cutting event on September 15, HRH executives, flanked by state and local officials, announced a $75–100 million investment in “transformative upgrades to services, technology and infrastructure.” They declared HUH to be a key part of a new regional network.
Yet an HUH healthcare worker, who spoke under condition of anonymity, told World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reporters that he had seen no improvements since the HRH takeover. “I’ve worked at several hospitals. There’s no way you can miss improvements,” he said. “[During construction,] people are talking about them. Contractors are walking around; they stand out. There are areas closed off temporarily, employees being shifted around. That never happened here.”
*****
The true reason for HRH’s takeover is now clear. In its certificate of need filing, HRH, which owns the land beneath HUH, described plans to develop the property into a mixture of residential units and commercial space. It vaguely mentioned plans of building a “future hospital” elsewhere. This scheme was consistent with the record of HRH’s Chair Yan Moshe.
Since 2007, major insurers have sued Moshe nine times under the federal RICO Act for fraudulent billing schemes, kickbacks and using straw owners to conceal his control of medical practices. In 2018, one of his surgical centers was shut down after state inspectors found sterilization lapses that exposed hundreds of patients to infection.
Moshe donated more than $400,000 to Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, who publicly backed HRH’s takeover of HUH. Under outgoing Democratic Governor Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive and millionaire, the New Jersey Department of Health approved HRH’s takeover despite Moshe’s well-documented record.
The closure of Heights University Hospital is not the result of poor judgment but the predictable outcome of the state’s placement of health services in the hands of profiteers. Regulators stood aside as HRH closed floors, emptied departments and withheld workers’ pay. Even as HRH moved toward shutdown, the Department of Health told NJ Advance Media it was merely “monitoring the situation.” In its own correspondence, the Department has since admitted that HRH “failed to fund their payroll … failed to fully perform as it represented” and “has not followed through on its commitments to the community it serves and to the state.”
*****
The closure of HUH is part of a nationwide breakdown of public health. Under President Donald Trump, federal public health programs have been gutted, scientific agencies have been undermined and emergency preparedness systems have been dismantled. These attacks intensify a decades-long bipartisan process that has starved hospitals of funding, accelerated mergers and handed the healthcare system over to private equity, insurance conglomerates and real estate developers. Community hospitals across the country are being closed or stripped down not because they are “unsustainable” but because they are unprofitable.
Healthcare workers cannot prevent hospital closures or defend their jobs through appeals to the political establishment that enabled the closure of HUH. Instead, they must act independently by forming rank-and-file committees that connect them with other workers across the state and internationally.
On November 15, postal worker Russell Scruggs Jr. died at the Palmetto, Georgia USPS Processing & Distribution Center.
Coworkers told the World Socialist Web Site that Russell died in the plant when his head hit the ground after falling. The exact cause of his fall remains unclear, but workers raised concerns over the lack of medical emergency protocol and zero cell phone service throughout most of the building. The lack of cell phone service caused significant delays in contacting emergency services for help.
Russell’s sister, Latoya Scruggs, has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help cover funeral expenses and legal fees.
*****
On November 19, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) issued a call for an independent inquiry—led by rank-and-file workers—into the deaths of Russell and Nick Acker, a postal worker who was killed at the Allen Park DNDC in Michigan just two weeks prior.
Nick Acker and Russell Scruggs, Jr. died at two separate US postal facilities in the past two weeks. Postal workers who want to get involved in the inquiry can read the IWA-RFC statement and fill out the form to get involved.
After months of boosting Corbyn and Sultana, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) now admits the Your Party initiative is dead on arrival.
November 24 saw the publication by the RCP of an explanatory comment, “Where does the RCP stand on ‘Your Party’?” Written by general secretary Ben Gliniecki, it admits, “This weekend, Your Party’s founding conference will take place. Unfortunately, the potential to forge a radical, working-class mass movement has been driven into a ditch by the reformist leaders and their petty squabbling,” before adding the caveat, “at least for now.”
What follows is a mournful presentation of “What could have been” had Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, after announcing Your Party in July, successfully channeled the “wave of enthusiasm” this aroused by giving “political expression to the pro-Palestine movement and all the strike action erupting across the country,” attacking “the rich and the capitalist system as the cause of the crisis in Britain” and similar.
In other words, had Corbyn and Sultana listened to the friendly advice offered to them by the RCP, beginning with prominent member Fiona Lali’s July 4 “Open letter to Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana”, we would now be living clover. “Unfortunately,” Gliniecki complains, “we couldn’t be farther from that today.”
*****
On July 24, with no indication that Jeremy and Zara were listening, the RCP announced that it was “getting on board” and mobilizing its members “to help make a success of this new—much-needed—party.” Naturally the RCP would be building “a revolutionary communist force” within Your Party, but only by “hoping to fill in the details of the rough outline already sketched by Jeremy and Zarah.”
*****
This was a return to political form for the RCP, we wrote:
The group, now led by Alan Woods, was founded by Ted Grant. He broke from the Fourth International following the Second World War and subsequently built his entire perspective for decades on the argument that the postwar restabilization of capitalism, made possible only by the suppression of revolutionary struggles by Stalinism, had disproved Trotsky’s revolutionary prognosis. Instead, for a protracted historical period, independent revolutionary action by the proletariat was impossible thanks to the completion of the “democratic counter-revolution,” necessitating extended entry into the Labour Party in Britain while advocating an essentially left reformist program of achieving socialism through Labour’s nationalization of the top 200 monopolies.
The entire activity of what became known as the Militant Tendency, and continued by its splinter led by Woods, was based on the assertion that entry work in Labour—justified above all by its base in the trade unions—could push it to adopt a socialist program.
In 2015 the Woods group, then known as Socialist Appeal, urged workers, young people and trade unions to help the “Corbyn revolution” transform the Labour Party, insisting that he would not buckle before opposition from the ruling class like Syriza and its leader Alexis Tsipras had done in Greece because “The Labour Party has a far greater historical weight and much deeper roots within the working class than Syriza ever had. It is not an ephemeral trend, but the traditional mass party of the British working class, with strong links to the trade unions.”
It was only after millions, especially among the youth, had begun turning away from discredited forces such as Tsipras and Corbyn and leaving the Labour Party in droves that, in mid-2022, the Woods group announced the building a new independent party, proclaimed as the Revolutionary Communist Party, part of a new Revolutionary Communist International.
*****
The RCP and other pseudo-left groups are not genuine advocates for socialism. They act as the last line of defense for capitalism through their insistence on “tactical”, “critical” support to strengthen the “real movement” represented, in turn, year after year, by Tsipras and Syriza, the Labour Party under Corbyn, Corbyn and Sultana’s Your Party, Polanski and the Greens, Mamdani, or whatever fraudulent petty bourgeois alternative is thrown up next following their inevitable betrayals.
In opposition, the SEP insisted as early as July 27:
We will not be advocates of and apologists for “Your Party”. It is not ours. We will engage energetically with the many workers and young people who currently look to Corbyn for leadership and seek to educate them in the fundamental historical experiences of the past decade and beyond, which point to the necessity for a revolutionary, internationalist and socialist perspective and party.
Our aim is to ensure that the working class does not spend its energies in a demolishing campaign for a party which will lead them to betrayal and defeat, to ensure that illusions in Corbynite reformism are dispelled as quickly as possible in preparation for the revolutionary class battles ahead.
We can cite extensively from our record because we have nothing to be embarrassed about, because we take seriously our responsibility to the working class to provide a consistent revolutionary perspective. The RCP has no such scruples. It takes no responsibility for what it said a few months ago, or for educating the working class, even its members, in anything other than acceptance of each new pragmatic, opportunist turn.
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.
