Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
In a split decision on Thursday, a Wisconsin jury convicted Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan of felony obstruction while acquitting her of a related misdemeanor charge. Dugan was arrested by the FBI this past April as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to establish a political dictatorship and subordinate all branches of government to the White House.
Dugan is facing up to five years in prison for the crime of instructing Eduardo Flores Ruiz, a Milwaukee resident at the time, to use a side door to exit her courtroom as a gang of federal agents waited outside. After exiting the courtroom, Flores Ruiz and his attorney proceeded down a public hallway where two federal agents were waiting and arrested him. Prosecutors argued that even though Flores Ruiz did not evade arrest, Judge Dugan intended for him to avoid federal agents by using a stairwell and exit not typically accessible to the public.
Under previous administrations, courts and other so-called “sensitive areas” were generally off limits to ICE kidnapping operations in part because the government sought to ensure immigrants would appear for court hearings without fear of arrest.
The arrest and conviction of Dugan is one of the most consequential actions taken by the Trump administration in its drive to erect a presidential dictatorship. The Trump White House, which directed Dugan’s arrest, has demonstrated its willingness to imprison political opponents, including members of the judiciary, who take any action that impedes the ongoing mass deportation operation.
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Dugan’s conviction comes nearly 11 months after Trump, in one of his first official acts after returning to office, pardoned more than 1,500 fanatical supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempted coup. Many of those pardoned had been convicted of obstructing a federal proceeding for conspiring to block Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote.
While Trump’s fascist foot soldiers walk free, Judge Dugan now faces the prospect of imprisonment.
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As Republican officials circle, no prominent Democrats have spoken out in defense of Dugan. At the time of her arrest, Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer described the prosecution as an attack “on the separation of powers” and pledged to “fight this with everything we have.” As of this writing, more than 24 hours after the conviction, Schumer has issued no further public statement. Wisconsin Democratic Governor Tony Evers, who previously denounced Dugan’s arrest and Trump’s assault on the judiciary, has also remained silent.
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The Trump administration has seized upon virtually any violent incident to intensify its assault on immigrants and democratic rights. Following the shooting at Brown University and the murder of MIT Professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts by Claudio Neves Valente, a former Brown grad student and Portuguese national, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced on Thursday night the suspension of the diversity visa lottery program, even though DHS does not administer the lottery.
The lottery program is run by the State Department. DHS’s role is limited to issuing green cards to individuals already granted legal permanent resident status. By halting the issuance of green cards under this program, DHS is effectively placing legal residents at risk of detention by ICE for failing to carry documentation.
Hundreds of thousands of people have entered the United States through the diversity visa lottery since Valente did in 2017. Suspending the program will do nothing to address gun violence but will instead expose hundreds of thousands of people to immigration raids and detention.
The Democratic Party, which has just voted to provide Trump with a $1 trillion war budget, has demonstrated that it is both incapable and unwilling to defend democratic rights. As Trump launches daily attacks on the Constitution, the judiciary and the working class, Democrats have supplied the votes needed to keep the government and the detention camps operating.
This is a government of the oligarchy waging war on the working class. It is dismantling vital social programs on which millions depend. This week Republicans confirmed there would be no vote to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, ensuring that health insurance costs for millions will rise sharply in the coming year.
The decisive question is one of political leadership and organization. The Democratic Party will not oppose Trump’s drive toward dictatorship because, like him, it represents the financial aristocracy and is committed to the defense of the capitalist state and the wealth of the super-rich.
2. Jacobin magazine denounces left-wing criticism of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani
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Jacobin, the DSA and the pseudo-left more broadly speak fundamentally for privileged sections of the upper middle class. These forces work consciously to block workers and youth from drawing the necessary political conclusions from an analysis of present-day political, social and economic developments, sowing political confusion, disorientation and, ultimately, demoralization.
This social layer opposes the development of an independent movement of the working class in opposition to capitalist barbarism, the critical factor in the fight for socialism. Everything outside of the capitalist Democratic Party, its pseudo-left political appendages and the pro-corporate trade union bureaucracy is deemed not “feasible” or “desirable.”
What is lacking in the political landscape is not mass opposition to conditions that exist in the US and internationally but, rather, a political program and perspective to guide and organize the struggles of the working class against austerity, exploitation, war, assaults on democratic rights and the development of dictatorship.
The raising of workers’ political and social consciousness through education in the history and politics of socialism, the exposure of political charlatans and scoundrels, and the building of a revolutionary socialist vanguard party of the working class to lead the developing mass struggles to expropriate the oligarchs and seize power are the central tasks of socialists.
3. United States: 1,600 students walk out against ICE in Hillsboro, Oregon
On December 12, some 1,600 students walked out at four Portland, Oregon-area high schools, Hillsboro, Liberty, Century and Glencoe, and three middle schools, South Meadows, Poynter and R.A. Brown. With approximately a total of 9,100 students in its middle and high schools, the number that walked out represents a significant percentage of the Hillsboro School District student population, the fourth largest in Oregon.
Waving home-made signs and yelling spirited chants, students marched along the major Tualatin Valley Highway, with many cars honking their support, to make clear their opposition to ICE raids. Congregating at Shute Park, students chanted, “We want justice, we want rights. We want ICE out of sight,” and “Hey, hey, oh, oh, ICE has got to go.”
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One of the student leaders in Oregon, Manny Chavez, whose testimony to the Hillsboro City Council denouncing ICE went viral in November, posted on his social media account: “For months, ICE has terrorized Hillsboro and all of Oregon. They claim to be targeting criminals, yet they target everyone with a brown skin complexion. U.S. citizens have been detained without reason. By doing this walkout, we are showing Hillsboro and the Oregon community that we stand for them and are tired of this reign of terror.”
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Recent data released by ICE show that it has arrested 644 people in Oregon since the Trump initiated crackdown. According to the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, a “heat map” indicating a higher intensity of ICE activity in a given location on its website, show that Hillsboro and Beaverton have both experienced a larger amount of ICE activity.
The large presence of ICE in Hillsboro is especially significant given that it is the most diverse city within Oregon, with slightly more than 40 percent of the population consisting of minorities. A large agricultural sector draws migrants from Mexico and Latin America, while an extensive tech industry, such as Intel, draws from Asia and South Asia. More broadly, it is an extremely working class town, many of whom are native-born, expressing the fundamentally class nature of the attacks by ICE on workers across the country.
The methods being deployed are part of a nationwide escalation. Federal agencies are building a mass data and policing apparatus, including airline passenger lists that have been handed to ICE by the TSA, while facial recognition and targeting software are used to generate arrest lists and quotas, making raids increasingly automated, indiscriminate and far‑reaching.
A trial in US District Court in Portland held at the beginning of December heard testimony from ICE officers detailing the generation of post-detention arrest warrants, false allegations inserted via copy-and-paste onto the warrants, arrest quotas and the use of facial recognition tools and, in addition, a software called Elite designed for ICE that can aggregate “names and photos of people in a general area who had prior contacts with immigration officials at some point in their lives.” The officer testified, “The goal was to make eight arrests per team per day,” adding, “We had to develop our own targets.”
Moreover, the raids have exposed the inability of the Democrats to oppose immigration raids. Despite Oregon’s Sanctuary Promise Act and the designation of Hillsboro as a “sanctuary city” in a 2017 city council resolution, ICE has proceeded with impunity to target, arrest, jail and deport hundreds of Oregon residents. While the law itself “prohibits federal immigration authorities from carrying out warrantless arrests in Oregon’s courthouses and their vicinities,” this has simply shifted the focus to minority-intensive towns like Hillsboro.
Under Trump’s second term, the Democrats have emerged as collaborators with the administration. The Democrats provided the necessary votes to end the government shutdown in October and in November on Trump’s terms, ordered local law enforcement to work alongside federal agents. Coinciding with attacks on the working class domestically, the Democrats have backed the escalation of America’s wars abroad, including the undeclared war against Venezuela.
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The targeting of Hillsboro by the Trump administration is not a mistake. The city is only about 17 miles west of Portland, a frequent focus of Trump’s fascistic agitation. In September, Trump ordered National Guard troops to Portland, with authorization to use “deadly force.” He posted at that time on Truth Social, “At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
4. Major shakeup at UAW headquarters as crisis of bureaucracy deepens
In a significant shakeup, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain’s chief of staff Chris Brooks has resigned amid allegations that he helped advance false allegations against UAW Secretary Treasurer Margaret Mock that resulted in her being stripped of her duties.
All of Mock’s duties will be restored and the Fain administration will also return UAW Vice President Rich Boyer to his position as head of the union’s Stellantis Department. Meanwhile, UAW Communications Director Jonah Furman has been demoted and temporarily suspended over reports that he assisted in the scheme targeting Mock.
Both Brooks and Furman are members of the Democratic Socialists of America and former staffers for the Labor Notes publication whom Fain brought into the bureaucracy following their support for his election in 2022. They were given posts with six-figure salaries ($211,968 and $175,318 respectively) in the Fain administration to provide the corrupt apparatus with a “reformist” gloss.
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The shakeup in the UAW leadership represents a sharp reversal by the UAW International Executive Board, which had previously stonewalled the UAW monitor’s request to restore duties to Mock and Boyer. It follows new allegations of corruption and cover-up in the UAW at both the International and local union level.
The monitor, Neil Barofsky, alleges Fain and former UAW compliance director Marni Schroeder deleted large numbers of text messages sought by the monitor. Schroeder resigned earlier this year. In his latest status report released earlier this week Barofsky ridiculed lame assertions by Fain that the deletion of at least 123 text messages from his phone related to the removal of Mock was accidental.
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The central role played by Brooks and Furman in concocting allegations against Mock is of particular significance. These two pseudo-left operatives were brought in specifically by Fain to give a facelift to the apparatus as a whole. They specifically rejected the campaign of rank-and-file autoworker Will Lehman, who ran against Fain in 2022 on a platform of abolishing the bureaucracy, rather than reforming it, an impossibility.
They were brought into the union as part of Unite All Workers for Democracy, a union “reform” group created with the support of Labor Notes. They have been key supporters and advisers of Fain. Brooks was responsible for the proposal for the phony “stand up” strike in 2023, which kept UAW members working at the most profitable plants while other workers stood isolated for weeks on the picket line.
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At the time, Fain was acting as a de facto member of the Biden administration, being appointed to important economic bodies and appearing as an honored guest at the State of the Union and state receptions. Since the election of Trump, he has seamlessly transferred his loyalty to the Trump administration, which the DSA and Labor Notes have relentlessly defended.
Rather than promoting reform and democracy, the report from the monitor demonstrates that Brooks and Furman eagerly collaborated with Fain in corrupt and cynical maneuvers aimed at scapegoating and sidelining potential factional rivals in the UAW bureaucracy.
The latest shakeup at Solidarity House shows a bureaucracy in deep crisis. Barofsky was brought in as monitor in 2021 after a massive corruption scandal brought down much of the union’s top leadership, including two recent presidents. The appointment of a monitor, combined with a shift towards direct election of top union officials, was a maneuver supposed to restore some level of credibility to the apparatus. Instead, it is more hated than ever.
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Will Lehman, a rank-and-file worker at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania and a leader of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and- File Committees issued the following statement in response to the latest UAW leadership shakeup:
The corruption scandal has exposed what many on the shop floor already knew. The UAW apparatus has become a privileged managerial layer that protects corporate profitability and its own material interests rather than the working class.
The recent reinstatement of Mock and Boyer is not going to fix that rot. Decades of corporatist practices justifying board seats, joint training centers, secret deals and the substitution of “management rights” for workers’ democracy produced the conditions for bribery, cover-ups and the suppression of shop-floor resistance.
The union bureaucracy is not a vehicle for workers’ demands. It is opposed to militant rank-and-file action. The practical lesson is to stop placing hope in reforms that merely rotate one layer of career officials for another and instead recognize that the real leverage resides in organized workers on the job who take control of production and safety.
The reality we confront on the shop floor points to the need for democratically run, recallable rank-and-file committees in every plant to decide demands, coordinate tactics and refuse secret bargaining. We need to start organizing based on what we as workers need (jobs, safety, wages, no layoffs) rather than management’s “rights.” We need to consider management rights with as little regard as they consider our rights as workers.
We must refuse to be pitted against co-workers in other plants or countries by the nationalist UAW apparatus. We must coordinate across borders by building the IWA–RFC to block whipsawing and share leverage.
If you want concrete assistance in organizing and linking with a wider political strategy, consider contacting the Socialist Equality Party and the growing rank-and-file movement to discuss forming factory committees and building an international, socialist alternative.
5. New Zealand primary school teachers reject pay-cutting deal
More than 35,000 primary teachers in public schools across New Zealand have voted against the Ministry of Education’s latest pay-cutting offer. The breakdown of votes has not been released but the union NZEI Te Riu Roa described it as a “resounding” No vote.
This is an important stand against the right-wing National Party-led government, which is imposing brutal austerity measures and pay cuts across the public sector. Teachers, nurses, doctors and other public health workers held a mass strike, involving more than 100,000 workers, on October 23—the biggest strike since 1979—to oppose this agenda.
The vote cuts across efforts by the union bureaucracy to divide and demobilize workers following the “mega strike,” and to persuade them that there is no alternative to accepting real wage cuts. Teachers must now take the next step: build rank-and-file committees, controlled by teachers and school staff, to break the stranglehold of the union leadership and fight to unite the working class in a powerful movement against austerity and militarism.
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To fight back, workers have to rebel against the pro-capitalist unions. They must also recognize that they face a political struggle against all the established parties, including Labour and the Greens, which are seeking to channel rising anger over the soaring cost of living into their election campaigns next year. This is a dead-end: Labour and its allies fundamentally agree with the government’s program of war spending and austerity.
The Socialist Equality Group (SEG) calls on workers to urgently build new organizations: rank-and-file committees, in every school, hospital and other workplaces, independent of the capitalist parties and unions. These committees must resist the unions’ efforts to split and shut down workers’ struggles. They must prepare new strikes and other industrial actions involving the largest possible number of workers across the public sector and private industries—all of whom have experienced real wage cuts in the past year.
This fight must link up with workers in Australia and internationally, who are also entering into struggles.
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The funding required for high-quality public education, including well-staffed and properly resourced schools, and a high standard of living for all workers, must be obtained by expropriating the billionaires and major corporations and ending all spending on the military. This means putting an end to the profit system, which is the source of inequality and war, and placing society’s resources in the hands of the working class.
6. Australian Senate universities report covers up Labor’s onslaught on tertiary education
When an Australian Senate committee released its final report of a year-long inquiry into university governance this month, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) hailed it as marking “a new dawn for higher education.” Yet the report features two noticeable silences.
First, no mention is made of the ongoing destruction of nearly 4,000 jobs throughout the country’s 39 public universities over the past year, nor of the underlying pro-corporate and war-related restructuring agenda of the Albanese Labor government.
Second, while the report documents some of the deterioration of conditions in the universities over the past four decades—such as huge class sizes, the casualisation of the workforce and the ever-greater reliance on private funding—there is no explanation as to why and how this has occurred.
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The agenda of the Albanese government is set out in its Universities Accord which is a political blueprint to subordinate higher education to the imperatives of corporate profit, militarization and the state.
It proposes “mission-based compacts” for university funding, requiring universities to serve “national priorities,” including AUKUS-related war preparations, while financially pressuring universities into line, including through cuts to international student enrollments.
Universities are being reorganized to produce technicians, managers and researchers for corporate and military projects, not to foster broad, critical and democratic learning. The Universities Accord’s “national priorities” specifically name “green” energy, critical minerals and technologies and defense. That means that decisions about courses, staffing and research are being driven by state and corporate strategic aims, not social need.
For both academic and professional staff, the Accord has produced mass redundancies, forced “spill-and-fill” competitions and soaring workloads. For students, there is a narrowing of curricula, erosion of humanities and critical disciplines, and increased surveillance and censorship in the name of “national security” or by falsely equating opposition to the Gaza genocide with antisemitism.
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Lessons must be drawn from the bitter experiences of the past four decades. Democratic, high-quality, publicly funded education can be achieved only through a political struggle that breaks with Labor and the unions and challenges the subordination of learning to corporate profit and war. That means:
- Build independent, democratically elected rank-and-file committees (RFCs) of staff and students at every campus to coordinate resistance beyond union control and to develop concrete demands—halt and reverse job cuts; end visualization; protect academic freedom; no requisitioning of research to war projects.
- Link struggles internationally via the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to confront multinational corporate and state interests. This international perspective is vital because the restructuring is part of a global capitalist and militarist realignment, spearheaded by the fascistic Trump administration.
- Advance a socialist program that defends free, first-class public education as a social right.
7. Doubts mounting over viability of AI boom
Fears of a bursting of the AI investment bubble, which have been increasingly voiced for some time, are now manifesting themselves both on the stock market and in investment decisions.
AI and tech stocks took a hit on Wall Street this week when the private capital group Blue Owl announced it would not be going ahead with a $10 billion deal to build a data processing center for the tech firm Oracle in Saline Township, Michigan.
Blue Owl has been the primary backer for Oracle, funding a $15 billion site in Abilene, Texas and an $18 billion project in New Mexico.
The Larry Ellison owned company has been engaged in a race to try to catch up with Google, Amazon and Microsoft to capitalise on AI and has been making large investments funded in the main by debt.
Oracle’s debt has increased substantially this year, rising from $92.6 billion at the end of May to around $111 billion today, an increase of 44 percent compared to the year before. And it is set to go even higher with Morgan Stanley predicting it will reach $290 billion by 2028.
Oracle shares tumbled on the news and are now down 46 percent since they reached their peak in early September. But Oracle is not the only company to be caught in the slide. The high-tech companies Broadcom and CoreWeave have experienced significant falls. In the case of Coreweave, this amounts to a 65 percent decline, with its share falling from a high of $186 earlier this year to $64 in a situation which has been described as “getting worse by the day.”
The Blue Owl decision to pull out of the latest Oracle project reverberated through the market because it was taken as a sign that “they’re not so bullish as [some investors] are” on the AI boom, according to one analyst who spoke to the Financial Times (FT).
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A recent comment piece on Bloomberg by Brad Stone began by citing a warning issued two months before the Wall Street crash of 1929 which warned that “sooner or later a crash is coming and it may be terrific.” There was an initial dip on the warning but then the markets continued to power ahead because of optimism of new mass markets opened up by autos and the radio.
The article noted that tech companies were on pace to spend around $1.6 trillion annually on data centers by 2030 under conditions where the profit-making capacities of AI at this stage “remain entirely hypothetical.”
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The Bloomberg writer said he had no strong opinion on whether there was an AI bubble but then went on to make an important broader point.
“If you define a speculative bubble as any phenomenon where the worth of a certain asset rises unsustainably beyond a definable fundamental value, then bubbles are pretty much everywhere you look. And they seem to be inflating and deflating in lockstep.”
Crypto is a case in point—an asset which has no intrinsic value—but whose market value rose $636 billion from the start of the year to October before losing most of that in the two months to December. Then there is the $3 trillion market in loans by private credit.
In a recent email, cited in the Bloomberg piece, Carlota Perez, a British Venezuelan economic historian and analyst, who has studied the development of capitalist economy for decades, said the innovation in high tech had created a casino economy that was overleveraged, fragile and prone to bubbles.
“If AI and crypto were to crash,” she wrote, “they are likely to trigger a global collapse of unimaginable proportions.”
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It is estimated that data center investments have accounted for 80 percent of the increase in US private sector demand for the first half of the year. Some estimates put it even higher at 92 percent. Overall, AI-related capital expenditures make up around 5 percent of total US GDP. If this dried up for any reason or were significantly reduced the US economy would fall rapidly into recession.
There are any number of triggers that have the potential set off a collapse. These include the sudden withdrawal of financial backing from the private credit market, as seen in the case of Blue Owl and Oracle, or doubts about what revenue the massive AI data centers will generate when they come online.
In addition, there is an existential threat to the present investment model. It is based on the belief that the construction of giant centers under the control of the so-called hyperscalers will place them in control of the market, enabling then to extract super-profits because of their monopolistic position.
As was noted in a recent comment piece published in the FT: “Current AI valuations assume massive durable moats. Investors have priced in the assumption that only a few companies can build frontier AI models, allowing them to extract monopoly rents.
“But if open-source models can match the performance of closed models at a fraction of the cost, that assumption collapses.”
The entry of the open-source DeepSeek model back in January, which sent a shock wave through the markets, may have been only the first of such developments, the like of which are to be found throughout the economic history of capitalism, which have the potential to bring down the financial edifice built on AI.
8. Australia: The political issues behind the Bondi Beach terrorist attack
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) unequivocally condemns the terrorist shootings of innocent people attending a “Chanukah by the Sea” event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14, marking the start of the Jewish Hanukkah festival. Among the 15 dead were a 10-year-old child, two elderly survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, a local rabbi and three others who, unarmed, courageously attempted to disarm the gunmen.
While many questions remain unanswered, the two alleged shooters—Sajid Akram and his son Naveed—were evidently motivated by the reactionary and divisive ideology of Islamic State. It blames the monstrous crimes of the Israeli regime and US imperialism in the Middle East over decades, not on capitalism, but on Jews and other “infidels,” to justify indiscriminate acts of slaughter as took place last Sunday.
The Jewish people are not responsible for the Zionist regime’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, nor for the wider war being waged throughout the Middle East in league with US imperialism and its allies. Thousands of Jewish people have joined the mass anti-genocide demonstrations in Australia and around the world against the atrocities in Gaza being carried out in their name.
Despite their mutual hatred, Islamic State terrorists have a great deal in common with the proponents of Zionism—both insist on a false identity of the Israeli state with Jewish people throughout the world. Benjamin Netanyahu, fallaciously claiming to represent all Jewish people, seized on the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach to demand the stamping out of all opposition to his far-right government’s barbaric war on the Palestinian people.
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...How was it that Sajid Akram was able to get a gun license in 2023 and purchase six rifles and shotguns, just four years after his son had been subject to investigation by ASIO, the domestic intelligence agency, for his association with organizations with Islamic State connections?
For more than two decades since the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, successive governments have vastly expanded intelligence and police resources and powers devoted to the so-called “war on terror.” The claim by ASIO and the police that the Akrams simply went off the radar for six years, even though they spent last month in the southern Philippines, known for its Islamic extremist connections, is simply not credible. A cover-up is underway to obscure how and why the Bondi Beach shootings were able to take place.
The Bondi Beach shootings were the most violent terrorist attack ever on Australian soil. Just as September 11 was exploited by US imperialism to launch illegal wars of aggression and erect a vast police-state apparatus, so the Australian ruling class is rapidly moving to use the reactionary slaughter last Sunday for its own ends.
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The far-reaching legislation and measures being prepared by state and federal governments under the banner of combating antisemitism will be used not only to ban anti-genocide protests but to suppress opposition to war and militarism more broadly. The strengthening of the police and intelligence apparatuses will be directed against the inevitable social unrest that is emerging as the burdens of war are imposed on working people. Above all, it will be targeted against working-class militants and socialists—as is happening in the United States under the fascistic Trump administration.
To expose the role of the capitalist state in the Bondi Beach shootings, a completely independent and transparent inquiry is needed. The purpose of the “full investigation,” as promised by Albanese and Minns, whether by police, a parliamentary committee or a Royal Commission, will be to cover up the truth. The 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed by fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant, is instructive. A blanket of secrecy was thrown over what the police and intelligence agencies knew prior to the attack, despite Tarrant’s well-known links to fascist organizations in Australia and Europe.
The expansion and strengthening of the state apparatus must be opposed by the working class. The SEP calls on workers and youth to take matters into their own hands and come to the aid of Jewish people or any community that comes under racialist attack. Just as we call for the establishment of rank-and-file committees in factories and workplaces to defend jobs, working conditions and safety standards, so rank-and-file committees are needed in working-class suburbs to protect basic democratic and social rights.
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In the final analysis, the eruption of poisonous ideologies based on race and religion is an expression of the acute and deepening crisis of global capitalism. The resort to war, austerity and far-right autocratic forms of rule is threatening to plunge humanity into the abyss. The defense of democratic rights in Australia and around the world is completely bound up with the struggle by the working class for a socialist future in which the resources of humanity are used to meet pressing social needs, not the corporate profits of the handful of multi-billionaires.
9. Trump Justice Department violates Epstein Act, continues coverup of sex trafficking network
On Friday, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released a heavily redacted fraction of the “Epstein files” in a politically calculated continuation of the decades-long coverup of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and his global network of wealthy and powerful co-conspirators.
News media reports said the DOJ posted approximately 10 percent of the records from the investigations into Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, drawn from its own records, the FBI, the Southern District of New York and other federal entities.
Legal experts say many of the documents are already publicly available from previous court disclosures. The latest documents are being released under the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by President Trump on November 19, which stipulates that they all will be released within 30 days.
The online DOJ portal aggregates “data sets,” including an evidence list and trial exhibits from US v. Maxwell, flight logs for Epstein’s private aircraft, a partially redacted “contact book,” and a “masseuse list,” alongside videos and transcripts from a two-day 2025 interview of Maxwell by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in Tallahassee, Florida.
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The documents are riddled with redactions, especially where they concern victims, non-charged individuals, and the concrete operational details of Epstein’s trafficking apparatus. The DOJ’s public notice on its disclosure site explicitly announces that “redactions of victim names and other identifying information have been applied,” and that in audio files, the names of victims and other identifiers have been replaced with a steady tone.
The Transparency Act gives the department “wide latitude” to withhold information on several grounds: to protect victims’ identities and child sexual abuse material, to safeguard “open investigations or litigation,” and, most ominously, to exclude any material whose disclosure is deemed contrary to “national defense or foreign policy.”
Media reports have stressed that, while this language is presented as a protection for survivors, it also provides a sweeping legal pretext to remove names, financial trails, and communications that might implicate government agencies, intelligence-connected figures or foreign regimes.
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One significant document that has emerged is the child pornography complaint file by Maria Farmer on September 3, 1996. This document proves that the FBI received specific, credible warnings about Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of minors more than a decade before serious federal action was taken—and ignored them.
While her name is redacted, Farmer’s handwritten complaint details Epstein taking nude photos of her sisters (aged 16 and 12), stealing negatives, and threatening violence, flagging potential child pornography and coercion. Its release implicates the federal agency in a coverup, raising questions about the Justice Department’s 2007 intervention in the Epstein scandal as part of the systemic protection of the powerful over vulnerable teenage girls.
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Additionally, the number of Epstein’s victims has now been confirmed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as 1,200 individuals. In his letter to Congress on Friday accompanying the initial release, Blanche acknowledged for the first time the scale of the Epstein sex trafficking and abuse operation, writing that the investigation “resulted in over 1,200 names being identified as victims or their relatives.”
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Previous statements by victims’ lawyers in the wake of the August 2025 Maxwell transcript release accused the government of “dribbling out” information in a way that “maximizes political advantage while minimizing real transparency,” a method which is now being repeated.
Family members of victims, quoted in recent coverage, have pointed to the continuing omission of a full accounting of Epstein’s contacts and collaborators in Palm Beach, New York, Paris and the US Virgin Islands, regions where his abuse of underage girls was systematically organized and protected.
They note that the files so far add little to the list of already known names—politicians, billionaires, royals—while continuing to obscure the mechanisms by which law enforcement, intelligence agencies and financial institutions enabled Epstein’s operations and then closed ranks after his death in custody.
The new document dump—which has been framed by Trump, Blanche and the DOJ as an unprecedented gesture of transparency—is the latest stage in a protracted coverup of Epstein’s criminal operation and the layer of the financial and political elite that participated in and benefited from it.
Even now, more than six years after Epstein’s death in a federal jail under suspicious circumstances, and decades after his abuses began, the state is invoking “ongoing investigations,” “victim protection,” and “national security” to maintain a regime of secrecy over the most sensitive aspects of his network.
As previous analysis on the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the conflicts within the American ruling class over how much of the Epstein story to reveal are driven entirely by considerations of factional advantage, not by a desire to expose the truth about what occurred over decades in Palm Beach, New York, Paris and the US Virgin Islands.
The selective, heavily redacted nature of the so‑called Epstein files confirms the WSWS assessment: Even when compelled by law to disclose, the state has responded by carefully curating what becomes public, preserving deniability for institutions whose legitimacy is already deeply corroded.
The pervasive depravity, corruption and indifference to human life manifested in cases like Epstein’s are not aberrations but expressions of the advanced degeneration of American capitalism and its ruling establishment.
The Epstein affair exposes the intertwining of the financial oligarchy, the intelligence agencies, the courts and both major parties in crimes against the most vulnerable, and the December 19 release stands as further proof that no section of this class can or will provide a genuine reckoning with those crimes.
While the unions were still able to secure social concessions during the post-war economic boom, this is no longer possible under conditions of globalization.
11. British playwright, screenwriter Tom Stoppard (1937-2025): Dazzling, erudite, damaged by history
Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), known for plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), screenplays as diverse as Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and television adaptations like Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (2012), was a talented and clever writer for stage, screen and radio.
Described by fellow playwright David Hare as “spendthrift with jokes,” he could be highly entertaining, using humor to show off undoubted intelligence. The critic Kenneth Tynan said Stoppard’s understatement amounted to “see how self-deprecating I can be and still be assertive… Tom’s modesty is a form of egotism.”
Stoppard was also, in his own words, a “timid libertarian,” who defended bourgeois liberalism with a superficial but explicit anti-communism. His identification of Marxism and communism with the repression of its Stalinist distortions hampered his work. He exemplified the intellectual crisis of the later 20th century.
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Stoppard’s Englishness was based around identification with a bourgeois liberalism he treated as essential and eternal: “The strong argument is to behave decently before you do the arithmetic because the arithmetic is never going to be that bad. There’s a lot of space, money and goodwill in England.”
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Hooked on theater, Stoppard found initial success with radio and television plays and short stories. Radio drama was undergoing a period of inventive experimentation. An imaginative medium that does not require literalism, it allowed Stoppard’s clever wit space for invention.
Translating this to the stage inclined his earlier works to a sometimes-dazzling excess of cleverness. Although not shallow, the plays were not as deep as their learning and wit suggested.
His breakthrough came with Rosencrantz, which brings two hapless, ultimately overwhelmed and doomed courtiers from Shakespeare’s Hamlet center stage. The absurdist piece, with comic and tragic elements, expands on the activities of these minor characters, taking place in the interstices, as it were, of Shakespeare’s work.
Stoppard admitted his big influences were T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“No! I am not Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord…”) and the bleak absurdism of Samuel Beckett, with its existentialist background.
They are revealing influences, disillusioned and world-weary, with Eliot championing a mystical high church traditionalism. Stoppard had a good sense of the theatre’s potential for physical surprise—the arguments in Jumpers (1972), a satirical treatment of academic philosophy likening it to a gymnastics competition, are conducted by a philosophy don and a troupe of acrobats—making his plays theatrically exciting but hobbled intellectually.
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Rosencrantz went through various versions before the Oxford Theatre Group had a hit with it at the Edinburgh Festival. Tynan requested a script for Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. Stoppard had arrived.
Although his later plays would move away from the often-dazzling absurdism and theatricality, Jumpers and Travesties (1974) outlined the conservatism of political and philosophical thought that marked his work.
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Stoppard claimed Marx’s “theory of capital, his theory of value, and his theory of revolution, have all been refuted … In short he got it wrong.” Stoppard, the traditionalist liberal, praised Eduard Bernstein for saying “Marx had got it wrong, but that it didn’t matter because social justice was going to come through other means … human solidarity was a better bet than class solidarity.”
12. The bloody record: Florida executes Frank Walls amid 2025’s unprecedented US killing spree
The 2025 surge in Florida adds to the grim assembly line of state murder, in which the gears of “finality” grind over the complexities of mental illness, military trauma and institutional abuse.
13. Ford plant in Cologne: Death by instalments
Ford’s strategic turn away from larger electric vehicles is being used to drive through the destruction of thousands of jobs at the main plant in Cologne, aided by the IG Metall union and the works council, who are helping to enforce a coercive severance scheme.
The SEIU, which has kept workers on the job without a contract for over a year, is delaying in a bid to block a strike, announcing it would only hold an Unfair Labor Practice strike vote sometime “early next year.”
Alberta's Bill 9 invokes the Canadian constitution’s anti-democratic “notwithstanding clause”— which allows governments to run roughshod over basic democratic rights—to shield three laws targeting transgender youth from legal challenge.
16. Seasonal workers at Amazon face grueling quotas and draconian computerized surveillance
Amazon workers face grueling quotas and draconian computerized surveillance techniques, used to enforce productivity during the peak holiday season with resultant injury rates double the industry average.
17. Oil and postal workers strike across Brazil
The strikes, part of a global movement, continue a struggle by Brazilian federal workers against attacks by the Lula administration.
18. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
Pakistan:
New Zealand:
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
