Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump launches aerial strike on Venezuela amid Democratic Party silence
The fact that the United States has launched an air strike on a sovereign nation—an act of war under international law—has prompted no serious discussion in the political establishment or the corporate media. The attack was relegated to small headlines on newspaper front pages and did not even appear on the Washington Post front page by Tuesday evening.
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The drone strike takes place alongside an escalating campaign of piracy on the high seas. The United States has seized multiple oil tankers transporting Venezuelan crude, imposing what amounts to an effective blockade of the country’s primary source of revenue. One tanker seized earlier this month, the Centuries, was carrying Venezuelan crude oil purchased by a Chinese trading company. Another tanker, the Bella 1, has been fleeing US Coast Guard pursuit since December 21. As the vessel fled, the crew painted a Russian flag on the side in an apparent attempt to claim Russian protection.
The fact that Russia and China are being drawn into the US assault on Venezuela demonstrates that it is not merely a regional operation but part of a broader global confrontation. This escalation comes as the United States and European powers are provoking war all over the world. European powers are openly discussing sending troops to Ukraine. The war now being initiated against Venezuela has the potential to escalate far beyond Latin America.
Trump’s targeting of Latin America is aimed at providing a power base for war all over the world. The administration’s National Security Strategy explicitly calls for “restoring American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” and denying China “the ability to own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere.” The document effectively asserts US ownership over two continents—presented as “our hemisphere”—whose resources Washington intends to seize as a staging ground for confrontation with Russia and China.
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The Democratic Party has offered no meaningful opposition to Trump’s actions. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said only that “Trump needs to be straight with the American people and explain what his strategy is.” But Schumer, alongside other Democratic leaders, has made clear his desire to see Maduro removed from power.
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The so-called “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party has been equally silent. Neither Senator Bernie Sanders nor Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has issued any statement on Venezuela since Trump announced the strikes. There have been no calls for congressional hearings, no demands for an investigation into the legality of the attacks, no legislation to halt the military escalation. The Democrats ended the year by joining with Republicans to pass the $901 billion National Defense Authorization Act, funding the very military apparatus now being used to wage war on Venezuela.
The year 2025 was a year of war—of US-backed genocide in Gaza, of US-NATO escalation in Ukraine, of American military buildup across the globe. Trump’s drone strike on Venezuela makes clear that the United States intends to wage war all over the world in the new year.
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Venezuela was held up as a “model democracy”during a period in which CIA-backed military coups brought brutal dictatorships to power throughout most of South America. The Monroe Doctrine had undergone yet another revision, this time in the Kennan corollary, named after the US diplomat George F. Kennan who authored the policy of containment toward the Soviet Union. Applied to Latin America, this became the doctrine of “national security” in which any revolutionary threat from below was to be regarded as a manifestation of Soviet expansionism and ruthlessly repressed.
In reality, Venezuela’s “democracy” was no less ruthless than the torture regimes imposed by Washington elsewhere in the hemisphere. The government and its reviled secret police agency, DISIP, savagely repressed fledgling guerrilla movements along with left-wing and union activists. According to the government’s own estimates, nearly 900 Venezuelan civilians were murdered or disappeared by the repressive forces under so-called “democratic” regimes.
Under the presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez... the Venezuelan government nationalized the oil industry in 1976 in the midst of the sharp price hikes that accompanied the energy crises of that period. Contrary to Trump’s claims about Venezuela “stealing” oil and land from the US, the oil companies were compensated with roughly $1 billion. Moreover, neither the oil nor the land were ever US property, with Standard Oil and the others plundering the resources under generous concessions granted by successive Venezuelan regimes.
Nationalization under a capitalist government failed to alter the fundamental class relations in Venezuela. The country remained entirely dependent for income upon a single commodity, oil, which it sold overwhelmingly to the US, leaving it at the mercy of market fluctuations.
Alternating presidencies of the bourgeois Acción Democrática (AD) and its friendly rival, the Christian Democratic COPEI, presided over escalating social inequality and rampant corruption, while the country’s debts steadily rose. Returning for a second term in power, Carlos Andrés Pérez responded to a sharp decline in oil prices by further opening up the country’s oil fields to exploitation by the foreign corporations and imposing a drastic International Monetary Fund-dictated “shock therapy” program that included a 100 percent increase in fuel prices.
Masses of impoverished Venezuelans reacted to the assault on living standards with a popular uprising that became known as the Caracazo. The government retaliated with martial law and bloody repression, turning automatic weapons on unarmed crowds and dragging people from their homes in poor neighborhoods for summary executions. The events signaled the breakdown of the supposedly liberal anti-communist consensus that had dominated after the fall of Pérez Jiménez.
Continuing unrest followed, marked by an abortive 1992 coup attempt led by a young officer, Hugo Chávez. Chávez assumed the presidency six years later in an election that saw the obliteration at the polls of AD and COPEI, both of which were widely hated for their corruption and defense of capitalist interests at the expense of the masses.
Initiating what became known as Latin America’s “Pink Tide,” the Chávez government utilized high oil prices to fund social programs that improved education and health care while ameliorating poverty. These fairly modest reforms were followed by the new government cementing economic and political ties with Cuba, while condemning the US invasion of Afghanistan, leading to mounting animosity from Washington.
This friction culminated in an April 2002 US-backed coup that saw Chávez briefly deposed and imprisoned before mass protests forced his reinstatement. Joining the collection of military officers, big business representatives and AFL-CIO-linked bureaucrats who backed the coup was Maria Corina Machado, the US-financed right-winger recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for supporting a US war for regime change.
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After the death of Chávez and his succession by Nicolás Maduro in 2013, a fall in oil prices, compounded by the imposition of punishing economic sanctions initiated under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama and intensified ever since, led to a dramatic shrinking of Venezuela’s economy, mass outward migration and a plummeting of living standards.
US intervention escalated, including through coup plots, attempted assassinations and even the landing of mercenaries on Venezuela’s shores. The Trump administration sought to impose its own president, the unelected and largely unknown right-wing legislator Juan Guaidó, whose “interim government” failed to gain popular support, proving adept only at pilfering millions of dollars in US aid funding.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The deployment of foreign fleets off Venezuela’s coasts leading to the proclamation of two corollaries to the Monroe Doctrine, 123 years apart, seems a confirmation of this saying, attributed to the celebrated writer, humorist and anti-imperialist Mark Twain.
Theodore Roosevelt, however, used the 1902 crisis to amend the Monroe Doctrine in line with the rapacious interests of US imperialism as a rising global power. Trump’s “corollary,” while tipping its hat to TR, is the expression of that same power’s increasingly intractable crisis and loss of global hegemony, which it desperately seeks to overcome by means of militarism and aggression.
China has already outstripped the US as South America’s leading trade partner and is expected to overtake it throughout Latin America and the Caribbean by 2035. It is carrying out large scale infrastructure investments, from the new deep-water port at Chancay, Peru to the creation of 5-G networks, that the US is unable to match. Meanwhile, the European Union is also seeking its own access to the region’s strategically vital sources of raw materials.
Under these conditions, the National Security Strategy document issued by the White House on December 4 states:
After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.
The path set out by this new assertion of the Monroe Doctrine seems, at first glance, more delusional than “common-sense.” It represents, more than at any other historical juncture, the sure road to war. The aims spelled out by the Trump administration cannot be achieved outside of military conquest and direct military confrontation with nuclear-armed China and Russia.
At the same time, the drive to impose neo-colonial shackles upon Latin America will inevitably provoke a gigantic eruption of the class struggle throughout the Western Hemisphere.
The alternatives have never been more stark. The working class must unite its struggles across national boundaries, in the Americas and beyond, to put an end to capitalism, or this moribund system will drag humanity into the abyss of a nuclear third world war.
3. Tens of thousands of school jobs cut in 2025 as Trump escalates war on education
The year 2025 has seen an unprecedented attack on the right to education and culture in the US, with tens of thousands of educators losing their jobs.
Upon taking office in January, Donald Trump announced the shutdown of the Department of Education, the opening salvo in a thorough-going assault on the population’s access to knowledge. As Democrats join with Republicans to divert $1 trillion to the military budget, schools are being starved of resources.
Determining the exact number of jobs cut in education is challenging. The US education system is fractured into 13,859 school districts run by local, state, county, charter and church authorities. Additionally, media reports on layoffs are inconsistent and incomplete. Most importantly, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have failed to organize a response against the nationwide assault on jobs. Teacher and school worker unions do not even keep a national count of job losses, only tracking dues income—showing the union bureaucracy’s real priorities.
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The defunding and destruction of public education is a deliberate policy, long advocated by financial interests aiming for mass privatization, with bipartisan support. The current crisis arises from decades of state-level underfunding, the corporatization of education under George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top,” the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to allow the expiration of $190 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds and the Trump administration’s freeze of $6.2-6.8 billion in K-12 federal funding, hundreds of millions in cuts to federal research grants and the destruction of the Department of Education.
Acting directly in the interests of the ruling oligarchy, Trump has dramatically escalated the attack. Education is no longer promoted as necessary for human improvement, but crudely identified by the rich as an unacceptable deduction from social resources that they could otherwise pocket. While enacting draconian budget cuts, these forces are hell-bent on turning education into a direct training ground for the military and for low-wage, dead-end jobs.
The fascistic Trump administration also has clear ideological concerns. It seeks nothing less than the elimination of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human reason and science—the driving force in the creation of public education—and its replacement with patriotic, religiously driven instruction. This is patterned after Hitler’s policy of “synchronization” (Gleichschaltung) of all aspects of society and culture with Nazi ideology.
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Educators and students must oppose the class-war policy of sacrificing the right to education to serve the interests of Wall Street. We call for the formation of rank-and-file committees in every school, college and university to organize against budget cuts and connect education struggles with broader working class actions against layoffs, budget cuts and war. Only through independent, democratically controlled workers’ organizations and a political turn to socialist policies can the attack on public education be defeated.
4. Film, television and trends and events in art and culture in 2025
The growing worldwide radicalization, which heralds impending social upheavals, terrifies and appalls the ruling classes, and drives them into frenzied preemptive action. Spearheading the counter-revolution is the Trump administration, which has declared war on culture and critical thought, branding every sign of resistance to its barbaric policies as “lunacy” and “extremism” and “Marxism.” On various fronts in 2025 (the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, public broadcasting, the elimination of federal subsidies and support, the “National Garden of American Heroes,” “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” the tariff on foreign films and so on), it pursued crude, vicious and stupid attempts to nullify the past two centuries or more of social and cultural progress. None of this provoked any serious opposition from the Democratic Party or the media.
The governments of every country have no answer to the upsurge of opposition except repression and censorship, and this process will only deepen in an increasingly sinister and dictatorial manner. Similar processes repeat themselves in the US, Germany, Britain, Australia and elsewhere. The artists will have to learn that appeals to the authorities and to the “left” parties and trade unions are futile. The turn must be to the rank-and-file of the working class and its revolutionary potential. Art cannot save itself. It can neither evade the general crisis of society nor seal itself off from the latter. Its future is entirely bound up with the fate of the social revolution.
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It is not of course necessary for filmmakers to confine themselves to social problems or any particular set of “numbered strips.” Intimate, lyrical and poetic work is needed more than ever, but such work too will only prove meaningful or enduring if it takes into account the generalized conditions under which humanity lives and struggles, if it strives, in fact, to “feel the world in a new way.” A great many writers and directors (and critics) still want to watch themselves and their friends in the mirror—a small, shrinking, muddied mirror, one might add—but that’s as it must be. We will leave them to it.
5. Three police officers killed during an operation against ISIS in Turkey
The organization and attacks of ISIS in Turkey reveal the consequences of the Turkish government’s reactionary policies regarding jihadist forces.
6. UK politicians demand British activist Abd El-Fattah be deported to Egypt’s torture prisons
It is Abd El-Fattah’s pro-democracy campaigning which angers his persecutors, especially his defense of the rights of the Palestinians against the fascistic Israeli state and its genocide.
7. Eurovision 2026 plunges deeper into political crisis as boycotts multiply
“Participating in Eurovision allows Israel to maintain the illusion that it is a modern and exemplary Western democracy, and thus to more easily conceal its criminal actions”, said [a] collective of 170 Belgian artists and cultural figures.
8. Germany’s economic crisis deepens as mass layoffs sweep industry
Germany is experiencing an accelerating economic crisis marked by mass layoffs across industry, as trade war, militarization and pro-corporate policies deepen social insecurity for millions of workers and their families.
9. Sylvia Ageloff and the assassination of Leon Trotsky
The 2025 Summer School lecture series held by the Socialist Equality Party on the topic of Security and the Fourth International is concluded by a noted immigration attorney and frequent contributor to the World Socialist Web Site who writes as Eric London.
10. Australia: Koolewong residents speak about recent bushfires
Their experiences are part of a broader pattern of inadequate preparedness and neglect by state and federal governments to so-called “natural” disasters, which are made more frequent and catastrophic as a result of climate change.
11. Estate workers in Sri Lanka’s central district protest, demand decent housing after cyclone
The decades-long demand for decent, livable housing for Sri Lanka’s plantation workers has reemerged with urgency after Cyclone Ditwah devastated estates across all 25 districts.
12. 85 years since Finland’s alliance with Nazi Germany
With Finland’s recent accession to NATO in preparation for war with Russia and China, the inheritors to Finland’s collaboration are preparing once again to throw Finnish workers into a devastating war of aggression, all in the name of “national defense.” Exposing the crude historical falsifications behind the current promotion of Finland’s “democracy” in World War II is necessary to arm Finnish workers against the present drive to war.
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Further reading:
Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events
Imperialist War And The Proletarian World Revolution
13. FBI frame-up of Indiana University postdoc Youhuang Xiang: Anti-China witch-hunt escalates
Youhuang Xiang, a 32-year-old postdoctoral research associate at Indiana University (IU), was arrested November 25 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and is now in federal custody, charged with conspiracy, smuggling goods into the US, and making false statements to federal officials. This arrest and prosecution, announced December 19 by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel, is the latest episode in an FBI/Department of Justice (DOJ) campaign to criminalize scientific exchange with China.
Xiang’s alleged crime—the transportation in 2004 of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria containing plasmid DNA, hidden in a package of commercial clothing—has been seized upon by far-right media and federal law enforcement to propagate panic over US food supply safety.
This is part of the same campaign of frame-ups that led to the deportation and destruction of the careers of Yunqing Jian and Chengxuang Han at the University of Michigan (U-M). Three more researchers at U-M, Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang, have been in federal custody since mid-October.
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The DOJ and the FBI have focused on the seizure of biological materials containing E. coli in a package addressed to Xiang’s residence in Bloomington, Indiana. Fox News headlines screaming of “smuggling E. coli” evoke images of poisoned lettuce, hospitalized children and a fragile food supply under attack by foreign agents.
However, the filings describe materials consistent with common laboratory E. coli strains used as plasmid hosts, which are non-pathogenic and incapable of surviving outside controlled culture conditions.
Such bacteria function only as replication “vessels” for plasmid DNA—small circular molecules used routinely in molecular biology to carry genes of interest. Plasmids and their common laboratory E. coli hosts are standard purchase items for life-science labs worldwide and, in their laboratory forms, do not present public health or agricultural threats.
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The universities and the media have enabled a political campaign that uses a fabricated “biosecurity” panic to isolate and expel international researchers. This must be answered by a political mobilization of scientists, students and workers demanding the immediate release of the accused researchers, the dropping of all charges against them, their reinstatement, and an end to visa-revocation and deportation as tools of political repression and warmongering. The Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality are organizing to link the defense of democratic rights with the broader struggle of the working class against imperialist war and corporate control of science. Join and act now.
14. Anti-immigrant confrontation in New Zealand
Far-right, anti-immigrant groups are being cultivated and accommodated by key sections of the political establishment in response to mounting social and political opposition.
15. Australian union leaders support anti-protest laws after Bondi shooting
Victorian trade union leader Luke Hilakari said pro-Palestine protesters had “made all the points they need to make about Gaza” and “they just need to back off.”
16. Popular music in 2025: Signs of resistance emerge amid war, fascism and corporate conformity
The past year witnessed tremendous and ongoing upheavals, including the revival of fascism, genocide, war, mass layoffs, the slashing of social spending and attacks on democratic rights. This onslaught led to major strikes and protests in the United States, Italy, Bulgaria, Nepal, Kenya, Indonesia, Madagascar and elsewhere. These crises inevitably intersected with major cultural moments in international music, from festivals such as Glastonbury to public confrontations between artists and the political establishment.
But to a large extent, popular music has failed to register these ground-shaking developments. The most successful and best promoted artists instead offered escapism, fantasy, romance and titillation. Artists who took a more serious approach have nevertheless addressed questions of fascism, war and inequality in limited or tentative ways (and these limitations have objective roots).
Overall, musicians made their strongest statements outside the recording studio, reflecting the growing mass opposition within the world population. This is an appropriate time to take stock of the popular music of 2025.
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As social inequality intensified in every country throughout the year, a similar stratification has been taking place among popular musicians. A handful of major stars enjoyed broad exposure and fabulous commercial success, while conditions stagnated or deteriorated for most musicians. Corporate control over streaming platforms, touring infrastructure and festival circuits have reinforced this divide, rewarding political conformity and punishing those who step outside the accepted boundaries.
17. SEP Sri Lanka holds public meeting on death of two plantation workers
The meeting was originally scheduled for November 30, but had to be postponed due to the disastrous impact of Cyclone Ditwah across the island, with the central plantation districts among the worst-hit areas.
In the first week of November, two plantation workers—Vijayakumar (49) of the Maussakelle Estate, Maskeliya, and Rajinikantha (25) of the Kiriporuwa Estate, Yatiyanthota—died in industrial accidents. These deaths are part of a growing wave of workplace accidents globally.
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As the World Socialist Web Site explained, these deaths were not simply industrial accidents, but industrial murders caused by companies ignoring workplace safety measures in the drive for profit.
18. Industry analysts predict “wave of bankruptcies” in 2026, as job losses mount in auto parts industry
A deepening wave of layoffs in the US and global auto and auto parts industry will continue into 2026 amid mounting trade war and problems arising from the transition to electric vehicles.
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Earlier this year financial markets were rocked by the sudden bankruptcy of highly leveraged auto parts maker First Brands, a leading supplier of replacement parts. While the exact trigger is not exactly clear, the pressure on the auto and auto parts industry flowing from Trump’s tariffs and pressures on consumer spending were no doubt major factors.
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Even at companies that have not implemented layoffs, work at auto parts suppliers is increasingly precarious, marked by both forced overtime followed by extended periods of short time or furloughs.
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A worker at a Detroit area Flex-N-Gate plant, a supplier for Ford, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter about the constant anxiety confronting workers employed in the auto parts factories.
“I have learned a horrible truth about the automotive industry: You could end up without a job. Every summer we have layoffs. Every time there is a problem, the biggest hit would be taken by the workers. I have found that it is not a stable source of income.
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Major battles by auto parts workers lie ahead with more than 70 contracts set to expire next year at Independent Parts Suppliers like American Axle, Nexteer, Adient, and Dana. Many of these workers, including at Dana, produce parts not only for the auto industry but for mining, warehousing and construction.
In 2021, Dana workers waged a rebellion against the UAW and United Steelworkers bureaucracies, forming the Dana Workers Rank-and-File Committee. Dana workers voted massively to reject a sellout contract the unions tried to foist on them and called for strike action. However, the unions refused to call a strike and instead sought to divide and confuse workers, eventually pushing through a rotten deal. Since then conditions have gotten worse as the companies seek to cut costs, impose exhausting schedules and deadly work conditions and at the same time slash jobs.
To prepare for the coming year’s struggles, auto parts workers need to build and expand a network of democratically controlled rank-and-file committees at each plant and workplace. These committees, operating independently of the trade union apparatuses, are the eyes and ears of shop floor workers, enforcing safe working conditions, providing timely and true information and preparing for mass collective actions against jobs cuts, speedup and poverty wages.
19. Workers Party-controlled union federation betrays oil workers strike in Brazil
The Unified Federation of Oil Workers’ latest betrayal underscores the need for Petrobras workers to form independent rank-and-file committees with an internationalist and socialist perspective.
20. 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.
