Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: January 26-February 1
- 25 years ago:
Massive earthquake kills over 20,000 in India
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
First nuclear bomb test conducted at the Nevada Test Site
100 years ago:
2. Protest erupts as immigrant families demand “Let us go” at DHS South Texas detention facility
On Saturday, immigrant families imprisoned inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas staged a protest, denouncing their indefinite detention and demanding freedom for their children.
Their chants, “Let us out!” and “Liberty for the kids!” echoed across the razor-wire compound and were captured on video by immigration attorney Eric Lee.
Lee reported that dozens of mothers, fathers and children gathered inside the fenced‑in yards of the Dilley facility on Saturday, many wearing jackets against the winter cold and holding hand‑lettered signs. Up to 80 percent of the detainees at the facility engaged in the protest action. The facility holds 1,200 detainees, a third of whom are children.
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In videos Lee posted to X, detainees’ voices are heard shouting and clapping in unison while a staff member demands that he stop recording and documenting what he called a “major demonstration by detainees at Dilley Family.”
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The short clips and written updates were shared and reposted thousands of times within hours, propelling the Dilley protest into a widely reported example of resistance to the Trump administration’s regime of terror against immigrants and their families.
One detained mother, Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, 31, who has been imprisoned at Dilley with her nine‑year‑old daughter since October, summed up the sentiments of those protesting: “We’re immigrants, with children, not criminals,” she told an Associated Press reporter by phone from inside. “The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law.”
Lee was present at Dilley representing Hayam El‑Gamal and her five children, who are among those being held indefinitely in violation of basic constitutional and international protections. The family has been detained there for seven months.
El-Gamal and her children have been targeted for punishment by the Trump administration because of their relation to Mohamed Soliman, the man accused of firebombing a Colorado protest demanding the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
While Soliman faces charges in the criminal courts, his wife El‑Gamal and the children were swept up by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and locked in immigration detention, despite having committed no crime. Lee and others have denounced this as collective punishment and an ongoing illegal detention of a mother and children whose only “offense” is their family connection to a man alleged to have carried out an attack.
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Lee’s viral posts expose that the prison camp in Dilley is being used as a political holding pen for families whom the Trump administration wishes to punish and isolate. Lee linked the protest to a broader wave of repression against immigrants and pro‑Palestinian demonstrators, explaining that some detainees saw their own detention as part of the same national campaign that has targeted protesters and sanctuary cities.
Saturday’s protest also coincided with the transfer to Dilley of five‑year‑old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, who were seized by federal agents outside their home in the Minneapolis area earlier in the week. School officials and the family’s attorney have described how ICE agents detained Adrian in the driveway, as another adult family member outside the home pleaded with the officers to let them take care of the child, but was refused.
According to Columbia Heights Public Schools Superintendent Zena Stenvik, an agent then removed Liam from the still‑running vehicle, walked him to the front door, and instructed him to knock so officers could see if anyone was inside, “essentially using a 5‑year‑old as bait.” The boy was then flown with his father to Texas, hundreds of miles away from his mother.
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Lee said his clients told him the protest began as families gathered in solidarity with Liam and in opposition to the broader pattern of raids and detentions directed at immigrant communities and anti‑ICE protesters.
Neha Desai of the National Center for Youth Law, noted in response to the events, “The current conditions at Dilley are fundamentally unsafe for anyone, let alone young children… hundreds of families—including babies and toddlers—have been subjected to substandard medical care, degrading and harsh treatment and extremely prolonged times in custody.”
The South Texas Family Residential Center, located near the small town of Dilley and operated under federal contract by a private prison corporation, is the largest family detention center in the United States. Built on a 50‑acre site at an estimated cost of $260 million per year, it was originally promoted as a “residential” alternative for women and children who had fled violence in Central America and sought asylum in the US.
The facility functions as a high-security concentration camp with a surrounding fence, cameras, controlled entry through metal detectors and security guards called “residential supervisors.” Reports for the past decade have described overcrowded conditions, constant head counts and bed checks, and a climate of fear that expose as lies the DHS claims that Dilley is not a prison.
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Under Trump’s revived family‑detention policy, Dilley has become a key part of a nationwide system of camps, jails and “residential centers” used to detain asylum‑seekers and mixed‑status families. Texas state officials have deepened their collaboration with DHS, including the Texas Department of Public Safety and local sheriffs helping to arrest thousands of undocumented immigrants and funnel them into ICE and DHS custody.
The Dilley protest also exposes the criminal character of DHS in the year since Donald Trump returned to the White House. After declaring a national emergency and “invasion” at the southern border, Trump has unleashed federal immigration agents as an American Gestapo to carry out pre‑dawn home raids, arrests at schools and workplaces, indefinite detention and illegal deportation.
During 2025 at least 31 people have died in ICE custody, the highest annual toll in roughly two decades. In the first days of 2026, ICE has reported four additional deaths in its facilities, all men between 42 and 68, bringing the total since the crackdown began to some 34 or 35 known deaths in ICE custody.
On Friday, detained immigrant families, including children, staged a protest inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, shouting “Let us out” from behind the facility’s walls. The demonstration reportedly erupted in response to conditions at the facility and the treatment of five-year-old Liam Ramos, who was detained along with his father after being seized by ICE agents in Minnesota last week.
Immigration attorney Eric Lee was in the facility attempting to visit clients when the protest began. He was ordered to leave by guards. Lee represents the El Gamal family, which includes five children—two five-year-olds, a nine-year-old, a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old—who have been detained at Dilley for eight months, far exceeding the 20-day limit for child detention under the Flores settlement.
Lee spoke with MS NOW Friday about the protest.
Lee describes the conditions inside the facility—contaminated water, food containing bugs and dirt, denial of medical care—and recounts how one of his child clients nearly died of appendicitis after officials told him to “take a Tylenol and come back in three days.” He also reveals that adult detainees at other facilities have reported being beaten by guards who “wrap flannel around their fists” and take them “into the shower where there are no cameras.”
4. More than 30,000 Kaiser workers in California and Hawaii launch open-ended strike
More than 31,000 nurses and healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente began an open-ended strike today across 200 clinics and 20 hospitals in California and Hawaii. The walkout, involving a wide range of frontline medical staff, marks a major confrontation between healthcare workers and one of the largest corporate healthcare systems in the United States.
For years, nurses have warned that conditions in Kaiser hospitals and clinics have become unsafe for patients and staff alike. Chronic understaffing is pervasive, routinely driving staffing levels below established standards and forcing nurses to manage excessive patient loads. Exhaustion, injury and burnout are widespread, which raises sharply the risk of medical errors.
Insufficient staffing has produced long delays for primary and specialty care, overcrowded emergency departments and the routine placement of patients in hallways and waiting rooms for extended periods. Nurses are increasingly pulled away from bedside care by expanding administrative demands, reducing the time and attention each patient receives. Together, these conditions undermine care, violate basic medical standards and expose the human cost of a profit-driven healthcare system.
Kaiser Permanente holds enormous financial reserves and has accumulated billions in surpluses that could be used to hire and retain staff, reduce workloads and improve patient outcomes. Instead, management has refused any meaningful resolution of longstanding safety concerns. Nurses describe a calculated strategy of delay and attrition aimed at wearing workers down while conditions inside facilities continue to deteriorate.
Kaiser Permanente’s self-promotion as a “nonprofit” healthcare provider serves to obscure the reality of its operations. While accumulating vast surpluses, the corporation has systematically intensified exploitation inside hospitals and clinics. It generated $12.9 billion in net income in 2024 and $7.9 billion for the first three quarters of 2025.
Leading up to the strike, Kaiser has recruited thousands of travel nurses to replace striking workers and has also taken legal action to break the contract into separate local contracts to pit nurses against each other.
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The urgency of this struggle is underscored by the murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, who was murdered by a US Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. Pretti, who cared for critically ill patients, including military veterans and dedicated his life to healing, is the latest victim of the escalating conspiracy of the Trump administration to establish a presidential dictatorship.
The killing of Pretti followed the massive demonstration of more than 100,000 workers and young people in Minneapolis on Friday, in which many nurses took part. Healthcare workers in particular are outraged over the efforts of ICE to seize immigrants who are seeking medical care. According to the nurses union, Kaiser invests in companies that run ICE detention centers and “provide health care and living conditions so substandard they border on criminal.”
Some 15,000 nurses in New York City have been on strike for more than two weeks against unsafe staffing, inadequate benefits and poverty wages. Tens of thousands of educators in Los Angeles, 40,000 University of California workers and researchers and growing numbers of logistics workers and public employees nationwide are confronting employers and governments determined to impose austerity despite soaring corporate profits.
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For months, the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP) has kept Kaiser workers on the job without a contract, isolating them from other sections of healthcare workers and blocking efforts to wage a unified struggle. The union’s role has been to contain opposition, not mobilize it.
To take this fight forward, initiative must remain in the hands of the rank and file. Nurses and health professionals must organize to enforce their democratic decision to strike and resist any attempt by the union bureaucracy to limit or cancel the walkout without their consent.
Kaiser workers should appeal directly to their coworkers in UFCW Local 770—clinical laboratory scientists and technicians—who are scheduled for a separate two-day strike on January 22–23. UNAC/UHCP is part of the Alliance of Health Care Unions, representing 23 locals at hospitals and clinics from Hawaii to Washington D.C. The entire membership must be drawn into joint actions through the formation of rank-and-file strike committees, independent of the union apparatus.
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The crisis facing healthcare workers cannot be waged in isolation. Nurses in California, Hawaii and New York must unite with workers in Minnesota and across all sectors in a common struggle against dictatorship, war, repression, and exploitation. This requires a new strategy: the building of rank-and-file committees, independent of the union apparatus and both capitalist parties, to coordinate mass action across workplaces, industries and regions.
5. Healthcare workers support striking New York nurses in online meeting
More than 100 workers participated in an online meeting titled “The New York nurses’ strike and the fight against the financial oligarchy” that the World Socialist Web Site hosted yesterday. The meeting was held in support of the 15,000 nurses who are beginning the third week of their strike at four private nonprofit hospitals in New York. It took place one day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents murdered Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse and US citizen, in Minneapolis.
During the meeting, panelists explained the connection between the New York nurses’ strike and the struggle of workers in Minneapolis against the federal occupation by ICE and other forces. They reviewed how the corporations, the government and the unions isolate workers and explained that the crisis demands the organization of rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions and both political parties, for a general strike against dictatorship.
The opening report, given by Erik Schreiber, placed the New York nurses’ strike in the context of an escalating assault on democratic rights, citing the ICE killing of Pretti as a warning of how the ruling class will respond to opposition. The speaker argued that the nurses’ struggle and mass protests against ICE repression are inseparable parts of a single conflict against the financial oligarchy.
Detailing the 14th day of the strike, the report exposed hospital management’s intransigence, multimillion-dollar spending on strikebreakers and the control of the hospitals by billionaire trustees. It reviewed New York State Nurses Association’s (NYSNA) ongoing efforts to isolate the strike, Governor Kathy Hochul’s efforts to break it by allowing out-of-state scabs to practice in New York and the role of Mayor Zohran Mamdani in covering for Hochul and sowing illusions in the possibility of class compromise. The speaker called for independent rank-and-file committees to unite nurses nationally and link their struggle to a broader working-class movement against the profit system and authoritarian rule.
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In his report from Minneapolis, Jerry White, labor editor of the WSWS, described mass opposition to the Trump administration’s ICE repression. The administration responded to demonstrations involving more than 50,000 workers and youth with escalating violence, which culminated in the killing of Pretti. White detailed the ICE raids, kidnappings and assaults on immigrants and citizens that have been carried out to terrorize the population, with the backing of both Republicans and Democrats. Citing the 1934 general strike in Minneapolis, he emphasized the growing calls for a nationwide general strike, while condemning the unions and Democrats for blocking collective action. White stressed that workers in Minneapolis and striking nurses in New York face the same financial oligarchy.
“You are resisting in New York City. The working class in Minneapolis is resisting,” said White. “The organization of a general strike requires the initiative of the working class. The preparation of a powerful nationwide strike must not be left to union bureaucrats, let alone the Democratic Party. They will do nothing. What is necessary is the formation of rank-and-file committees in every factory, work location and neighborhood.”
Katy, a medical-surgical and oncology nurse and Socialist Equality Party member, warned that the New York nurses’ strike must be taken out of the hands of the trade unions and expanded nationally. Drawing on her experience in the 2022 Stanford healthcare strike, she described how union officials imposed a sellout contract that worsened staffing conditions. She reported on the impending strike of 31,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses in California and Hawaii. “Kaiser’s investments include companies like CoreCivic and the GEO Group, which run ICE detention centers and provide healthcare and living conditions that are criminally substandard,” she said.
Katy also highlighted the five-month-long Genesis/Henry Ford strike in Michigan, detailing the brutal conditions imposed by healthcare financialization. She argued that nurses nationwide face the same corporate assault on healthcare, democratic rights and living standards. She stressed the immense potential of healthcare workers to unite across states in a broader struggle against austerity, repression and authoritarian rule.
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A physician and former professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, described having been fired for opposing the genocide of the Palestinians. “What was extremely shocking to me is none of the unions worked to speak out about what was happening to workers in Gaza,” she said. “And now every single hospital has been bombed in Gaza.” Today, ICE is using tactics it learned from the Israeli military on the streets of Minneapolis, she said. Effective resistance can only come from the working class, she added: “The ability to tank the economic engine of the United States rests in workers’ hands.”
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WSWS reporter Robert Milkowski described his conversations with striking New York nurses. The mood on the picket lines is determined but increasingly strained, as nurses face mounting financial pressure from lost wages, lack of strike pay and loss of health insurance. Many nurses have been forced to seek additional work, and supporters have launched grassroots fundraising efforts. Nurses have expressed concerns about possible concessions and the union’s isolation of their strike by withdrawing strike notices at other hospitals. Milkowski noted a growing awareness among nurses, although “framed within existing contractual and legal limits,” of the need for broader unity and coordination with healthcare workers nationally. The solidarity that has begun to develop in response to the ICE terror in Minneapolis has fostered this awareness.
6. Hundreds demonstrate in San Diego against the CBP murder of Alex Pretti
In the late afternoon of January 24, following the murder of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in Minneapolis, there was a spontaneous demonstration at a public park in a working class suburb in San Diego, California. It was attended by about 500 people from the neighborhood, including people who had not yet heard about the murder of Alex Pretti but nonetheless felt compelled to join a demonstration against Trump’s onslaught on immigrants.
Members of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) spoke to demonstrators about the call for rank-and-file committees to prepare for a nationwide general strike. There was widespread support for a general strike and the demands outlined in the statement issued by the Socialist Equality Party. Demonstrators carried signs calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prosecution of its leaders and the murderers of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good. There were also signs commemorating the dozens of victims of ICE over the past year.
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The organizers of the demonstration appealed to the audience to hear out the Democratic Party as a member of the coalition. The speaker continued, commenting, “I’m a part of a new generation of Democrats,” to which members of the audience retorted, “That’s what AOC said! She voted for genocide!” and “AOC said the same thing!” The hostile response from the crowd ultimately forced the speaker to cut his remarks short.
A member of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), David Rye, spoke from the platform, stating the demands from the Socialist Equality Party’s statement calling for the organization of a national general strike.
1. The removal of ICE agents from Minneapolis and all cities; the disbanding of the organization; and the criminal prosecution of its officials and all agents responsible for murder and other acts of violence.
2. The immediate end to the vicious persecution of immigrants living in the United States; the immediate release from detention of all immigrants who have been swept up in the ICE dragnet, and the prosecution of all members responsible for violence.
3. The removal of the Trump administration from power.
He urged workers and young people to call meetings in factories, workplaces, neighborhoods and schools to discuss these and other practical proposals for effective action. “The organization of a general strike requires the initiative of the working class,” he said. “The preparation of a powerful nationwide strike must not be left to union bureaucrats, let alone to the Democratic Party. They will do nothing. What is necessary is the formation of rank-and-file committees in every factory, work location and neighborhood.”
Rye stated that such a movement requires “a political break from the Democratic Party and the framework of capitalist politics.” Citing the experiences of the popular fronts in Spain and France in the struggles of the working class of the 1930s, he stated, “We can enter the fight against fascism with the lessons of history. We’ve seen this before. In Spain, in France, in Europe in the 1930s, workers fought against fascism. But the fatal mistake was keeping capitalist liberals in their coalition. This led to their defeat, they were betrayed.”
Rye concluded, “Let’s mobilize this workers’ movement!”
7. Trump officials defend Minneapolis murder while Democrats pretend opposition
Top Trump administration officials continue to defend the brazen murder of VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by a gang of CBP officers, despite the release of numerous videos shot by observers which show the officers beating him to the ground, removing his personal firearm, for which he had a legal permit, and then riddling the unarmed man with at least 10 shots at close range.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem branded Pretti a “domestic terrorist” Saturday, even before his identity had been made public, and slandered the victim of government violence repeatedly, claiming he had attacked CBP officers with a weapon.
Trump’s top fascist aide, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, went even further, calling Pretti “an assassin” who tried to murder federal agents. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, who is in direct charge of the CBP forces in Minneapolis, claimed that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Alex Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan Pretti, issued a statement declaring, “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.” They wrote, “Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world.”
In the face of this heartfelt statement, and the widespread public anger and outrage provoked by this state killing, representatives of the Trump administration continued to repeat their lies on the Sunday network television interview programs.
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Several of the Sunday interview programs discussed the letter sent by Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in which she suggested that the crisis in Minneapolis could be resolved by three acts of surrender by the state: handing over all state data on recipients of food stamps and other federal benefits for the poor (to help identify immigrants and fuel the ongoing witch-hunt over supposed fraud); repealing all state and local “sanctuary” laws, which bar certain forms of direct police collaboration with ICE; and turning over the state’s voter rolls to the Department of Justice, as part of the “election security” drive initiated by the Trump administration in an effort to rig the 2026 and 2028 elections (assuming elections are even held).
Walz has not yet responded to the Bondi letter, but Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon issued a statement declaring, “It is deeply disturbing that the U.S. Attorney General would make this unlawful request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”
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In the face of this open threat to democratic rights, Democratic Party leaders are proposing nothing more than impotent gestures. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer declared that the Democrats would block passage of legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security, set to be voted on this coming week, unless new restrictions were placed on ICE and CBP operations.
“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city. Democrats sought common sense reforms in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill, but because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE. I will vote no,” Schumer said in a statement. “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”
While the Democrats could block the bill, which requires a 60-vote margin to overcome a filibuster, this would have no effect on the funding of ICE and CBP, which was provided a four-year bonanza in last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Senator Adam Schiff of California acknowledged the hollowness of the threat, but said on “Meet the Press” that at least it would prevent any future increase in ICE and CBP funding.
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As for the supposed “left” wing of the Democratic Party, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, during a long appearance on CNN Saturday, denounced the killing of Alex Pretti and contrasted Trump’s demonization of peaceful anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis with his pardons of his own right-wing supporters who violently attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But when asked why Trump was intensifying the anti-immigrant raids and preparing to use troops in major cities, if he invoked the Insurrection Act, Ocasio-Cortez evaded the issue of Trump’s preparation of a presidential dictatorship, and claimed that the raids were an attempt to divert public attention away from presidential scandals such as the Epstein documents and Trump’s own profiteering from his office.
8. Trump’s “Murder, Inc.” and the execution of Alex Pretti
Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital, was executed on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday morning. His murder was the Trump administration’s brutal response to the massive protests the day before—when more than 100,000 people across Minnesota demanded an end to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) occupation and the police-state measures engulfing the state.
The description of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” by White House officials demonstrates that there is no limit to the depths to which Trump and his satraps are prepared to descend in order to justify their crimes.
Alex was a nurse, who worked in an intensive care unit and dedicated his life to saving the lives of others. His family described him as “a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for.” His father wrote: “I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman.”
That act of bravery cost him his life. As ICE and CBP agents pepper-sprayed a protester and knocked her to the ground, Alex intervened. He was holding a phone. Video evidence shows that he was tackled by federal agents, who removed his legally owned firearm from Pretti’s belt and then shot him as many as 10 times, the last several as he lay on the ground. This was murder—plain and simple—and it was carried out by what amounts to Trump’s “Murder, Inc.”: a network of Nazi-like stormtroopers operating entirely outside the law.
The identities of the masked gunmen who murdered Pretti in cold blood are being concealed from the public. But the main instigators of the crime are not in doubt. They are President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, chief White House adviser Stephen Miller, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, CBP commander Greg Bovino and FBI Director Kash Patel. Vance traveled to Minneapolis the day before the January 23 protests to deliver the message that there would be no backing down and that it was open season on opponents of ICE and the CBP (Customs and Border Protection).
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As with the killing of Renée Nicole Good, the video evidence is incontrovertible. Independent analyses from multiple major media outlets have confirmed that Pretti never drew a weapon and posed no threat. In this situation, the Democrats and the media call for an “independent investigation” and more “transparency” as if there were any doubt about the fact that Pretti was murdered. This is an attempt to buy time, cover up the truth and deflect mass outrage.
The murder of Alex Pretti is a vast escalation in the paramilitary terror in Minneapolis which is the spearhead of an ongoing conspiracy to invoke the Insurrection Act, send the military into American cities and establish a presidential dictatorship in the United States.
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Trump is the representative of the financial oligarchy, which is turning to fascism and breaking with all forms of legality. Beneath the growing violence of the Trump administration is a mounting panic within the ruling class over the crisis of American capitalism. The soaring price of gold, which has now burst through the $5,000 per ounce mark, signifies the ongoing collapse of the US dollar as the world reserve currency. With the national debt now approaching $40 trillion, the US is faced with the threat of state bankruptcy. As the economy teeters on the edge, the ruling elite is lashing out wildly and hysterically to defend its wealth and power.
The Democratic Party is doing everything it can to evade political reality. Even in the aftermath of the murder of Pretti, it desperately promotes the fiction that the actions of the Trump administration, however egregious, do not represent a fundamental break with legality and conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution.
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In the wake of Pretti’s murder, leading Democrats have raised the possibility of blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security in the Senate—a move that, even if successful, would not halt ICE operations, which are largely funded through permanent appropriations. Others have appealed to Republicans to “grow a spine” (Representative Angie Craig) and “speak out” (Senator Amy Klobuchar) against Trump, while the Democrats themselves grovel before the administration and its political co-conspirators.
As for appeals to “wait for the elections” in November—nearly 10 months away—there is no guarantee that such elections will even take place, or that they will be held under remotely democratic conditions. On Saturday, the Justice Department issued a memo demanding that Minnesota turn over its entire voter registration database for “eligibility review.” These ultimatums are aimed at dismantling voting rights and preparing to rig the 2026 election.
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others have issued statements calling for ICE to withdraw from Minneapolis. But they make no proposal for how this should happen, nor have they called for ICE to be disbanded. Their role is not to organize resistance but to foster illusions that the crisis can be resolved by appealing to the same institutions responsible for carrying out the repression.
The trade union apparatus, for its part, is seeking to suppress and block a genuine fight of workers against the Trump regime.
Alex Pretti was a member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which is proposing no action in response to his murder. In a statement issued Saturday afternoon, AFGE President Everett Kelley claimed that “details of the incident are still emerging” and called for “peace and calm.” He presented the lies of the DHS as legitimate but said they were “brought into question” by video evidence. However, there is in fact no “question” as to what actually happened.
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What both the Democrats and the trade union apparatus are seeking to prevent is the confrontation of the working class with the capitalist oligarchy that controls every institution of the state, that has elevated Trump because it is not able to enforce its interests, at home and abroad, through legal or democratic means.
None of the existing institutions—from Congress to the courts, from the trade union bureaucracy to the Democratic Party—will do anything to stop the descent into fascism. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that if Trump moves to deploy troops into American cities, he will face any meaningful resistance from the political establishment.
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But beneath the paralysis and complicity of the political establishment, a process of political and social radicalization is unfolding. Across the country, popular anger and outrage is developing from below. There is growing talk of the necessity for a general strike. In workplaces, schools and neighborhoods, discussions are intensifying over the need for decisive action.
The mass protests of January 23 marked a turning point in this developing movement. The demand for a general strike did not come from union leaders, Democratic politicians or any section of the official establishment. It arose from workers, students, and progressive sections of the middle class who are coming to understand that protest alone is insufficient, and that only the mass, coordinated action spearheaded by the working class can defeat the Trump regime and halt the escalating campaign of state violence.
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The Socialist Equality Party issues a special appeal to nurses across the country. Alex Pretti was one of your own—a healthcare worker who devoted his life to saving others and was murdered by the state. His execution comes amid a growing wave of resistance by nurses to intolerable and dangerous conditions imposed by a profit‑driven healthcare system, including the strike by 15,000 nurses in New York City and the strike by 31,000 nurses and healthcare workers in California and Hawaii that began Monday morning.
We also call on students and young people to take up the fight against dictatorship. With schools and campuses reopening, students must not return as if nothing has happened. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the student and youth movement of the SEP, urges the formation of committees to organize walkouts and link up with the working class. Go to the factories and warehouses.
What is taking place in Minneapolis is the spearhead of a nationwide conspiracy to crush democratic rights and establish a dictatorship on behalf of the corporate and financial oligarchy. It must be answered by a movement of millions, armed with the political consciousness and revolutionary program necessary to defeat it.
In response to US President Donald Trump’s threat to use military force to seize control of Greenland, Denmark’s Social Democrat-led government equipped soldiers deployed to the island earlier this month with live ammunition and an order to engage in combat if attacked. The report revealing these details from public broadcaster DR underlines the extent to which the Transatlantic alliance has broken down, a process that Trump’s temporary retreat on Greenland at last week’s World Economic Forum will do nothing to reverse.
Trump began the year by invading Venezuela and abducting its President Nicolas Maduro, and repeatedly issuing belligerent threats to bomb Iran with the aim of overturning the bourgeois-clerical regime in Tehran. Under these conditions, Danish officials felt compelled, in the words of the DR report, to prepare for “the worst of all possible imaginable scenarios.”
On 14 January, civilian and military planes were dispatched to Greenland from Denmark to strengthen military capabilities on the island as quickly as possible. The operation, referred to as “Arctic Endurance,” also involved small contingents of military personnel from Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Britain, the Netherlands, and Finland, who traveled to Greenland as part of a “scoping mission” to draw up plans for a larger NATO military presence in the Arctic. It was this operation that prompted Trump to issue his threat of tariffs against the eight countries involved—a threat he later walked back following a meeting with NATO Secretary General Marc Rutte in Davos last Wednesday.
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Notwithstanding the claims in the media and by leading European politicians that the threat of military conflict over Greenland has been removed by the deal struck between Trump and Rutte, the fact remains that two ostensible NATO allies came very close to all-out war. Moreover, it is clear that whatever the details of the agreement turn out to be, it has laid the basis for a massive escalation of military activity in Greenland and throughout the Arctic region, setting the stage for even more explosive clashes as the major powers jostle for influence.
The European Union (EU) held an emergency leaders’ summit on Thursday evening. Although the gathering was called prior to Trump’s climbdown on tariffs, the discussion among the European imperialists remained focused on how to assert themselves as an independent actor capable of confronting the US as a rival. Politico referred to the gathering as appearing like “a wake” to the “decades-long world order” based on the Transatlantic alliance.
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Under conditions in which Trump and other leading officials repeatedly assert US imperialism’s right to dominate the Western hemisphere by expelling all non-hemispheric competitors, the European military build-up in the Arctic, whether or not it takes place under the NATO umbrella, is a recipe for ever sharper conflicts. Just one day after the EU summit, the Trump administration released its latest National Defense Strategy, which declared Washington’s intention to focus on military operations in its “near abroad” and in the Indo-Pacific against China.
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The basic driving force underlying the growing Transatlantic rivalry is the deepening world capitalist crisis, which finds expression in Trump’s aggressive threats and erratic shifts in policy. Relations between the great powers resemble ever more clearly the inter-imperialist tensions that exploded into world wars twice in the 20th century, in 1914 and 1939. Trump’s “America first” agenda considers domination of the Western hemisphere not as some kind of retreat on the part of American imperialism, but as the basis for fighting wars with its rivals on a global scale, including China, Russia, and the European powers.
The European imperialists are equally as predatory, as was made clear in the speech last week by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The former BlackRock executive told his wealthy Davos audience that his right-wing coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in Germany was pursuing a course of the militarization of Europe under German leadership, a program that twice led the German bourgeoisie to war in the 20th century as it launched a grab for world power. If Merz has struck a more conciliatory tone over Greenland, emphasizing the need for NATO to play the leading military role in the Arctic, including the US, it is because the European ruling class feels it needs more time to rearm so that it can act independently of the US, on which it still relies for much of its military equipment. This strategy depends upon an assault on what remains of public services and the social conditions of the working class to fund bloated and expanding military budgets.
The smaller states like Denmark hope to secure their place at the table of imperialist plunder through alliances with the great powers. Nobody should be fooled by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s repeated invocations of Copenhagen’s defense of the “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” of Greenland, and their claim that only Greenlanders can determine their future. Denmark ruled Greenland as a colony for over two centuries, and sacrificed its “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” in 1951 when it concluded a bilateral defense agreement with the US as part of its Cold War alliance with Washington. The agreement allowed the US to build military bases essentially wherever it liked and use them for virtually anything, including the storage of nuclear weapons. At the height of the Cold War, Washington stationed some 10,000 troops on the island.
Today, the Danish ruling class hopes to reach some form of accommodation with the US that will at least give Copenhagen nominal control over Greenland. At the same time, they are quite prepared to facilitate a massive military buildup by the European imperialists in the region, just so long as the Danish flag can fly in Nuuk. In this way, they hope to secure Danish capitalism’s access to the rich natural resources on Greenland, as well as the potentially lucrative wealth it could control in the broader Arctic on the basis of its territorial water claims. This wealth is not only related to the untapped oil and gas under the seabed, but also the opening up of new shipping routes as sea ice melts.
The tasks of opposing the sharpening inter-imperialist antagonisms in the Arctic and elsewhere, and stopping the descent into another world war, can be accomplished only by the international working class. Workers on both sides of the Atlantic, including those entering struggle against Trump’s dictatorial rule in the US and the mass job and wage cuts in Europe to fund the continent’s military build-up, must unite in a joint anti-war movement to put an end to capitalist exploitation. They must counterpose to the program of war and austerity advanced by all governments the perspective of world socialist revolution.
Over 35,000 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), will vote January 27–29, 2026, on strike authorization. At the same time, the union bureaucracy is forcing through a separate vote on a concessionary healthcare bargaining tentative agreement (TA) reached with the district last December that shifts costs to teachers through various measures, including higher co-pays and deductibles.
The scheduling of a strike authorization vote expresses a profound buildup of anger, not only among teachers but across the working class in California and nationally. Forty thousand academic workers across the University of California system are preparing to strike. Thirty thousand school support workers in LAUSD, members of SEIU Local 99, are moving toward their own strike vote.
Across California, districts are reaching an impasse and preparing job actions. San Francisco educators are concluding a second strike authorization vote; five Sacramento-area districts, including Natomas Unified and Twin Rivers Unified, are described by unions as “strike ready” for spring 2026; and San Diego educators are planning a one-day strike in late February. Many others, from Oakland and Berkeley to Madera and Apple Valley, are at impasse.
Educators have repeatedly been at the forefront of mass struggles. In 2019, teachers’ strikes helped inaugurate a new period of working-class resistance in the United States after decades of suppression. Los Angeles was a central battleground, as tens of thousands walked out and won widespread public support.
Today, these struggles are intersecting with broader social and political upheavals. Nurses are striking in New York and preparing job actions at Kaiser facilities in California and Hawaii. In Minneapolis, a general strike was conducted January 23 in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement terror following the killing of Renée Nicole Good. This was followed the next day with the brutal ICE killing of nurse Alex Pretti.
Los Angeles teachers face especially brutal conditions. The city is among the most expensive in the world, yet starting pay for LAUSD educators is only about $65,000 a year, with average salaries ranging from roughly $45,000 to $71,000 depending on experience. About 21 percent of full-time teachers qualify as low income for affordable housing programs, and 28 percent rely on second jobs to survive.
A single adult with one child needs around $96,000 annually to cover basic living costs in the region. Median rents for a one-bedroom apartment exceed $2,500 per month, consuming more than half of a new teacher’s gross income. These figures expose the lie that educators’ demands are unreasonable. They are fighting simply to live.
Yet teachers have been kept working without a contract since June 30, 2025—not by accident, but by design. UTLA has deliberately delayed decisive action while attempting to dissipate anger through controlled gestures. Now, the union is combining a necessary and overdue strike authorization vote, which must be a resounding YES, with a healthcare TA that represents a major sellout and must be voted down.
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Teachers must vote YES for strike authorization and NO on the healthcare sellout. But to win their fight, they must take the struggle out of the hands of a bureaucracy determined to contain and betray them. The objective necessity is to expand the fight, prepare for a general strike, and transform the struggle into a conscious political movement of the working class, fighting for its independent interests against capitalism and its political representatives.
11. Macron pushes new agreement securing France’s grip over New Caledonia
After four days of talks in Paris between French President Emmanuel Macron’s team and representatives of New Caledonia’s political parties a new document, the Élysée Oudinot Accord which proposes to chart a new constitutional future for the Pacific colony, was signed on January 19.
The talks involved Macron, Overseas Minister Naïma Moutchou and leaders of five parties from New Caledonia’s Congress; the pro-France Les Loyalistes and Rassemblement-Les Républicains; Calédonie ensemble; Eveil Océanien; and two “moderate” pro-independence groups from the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance (UNI). The latter recently formalized their breakaway from the main Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) umbrella.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Macron expressed his “gratitude” for the participants’ sense of “compromise” and “responsibility.” He hailed their “courage” in the face of “unacceptable threats” on social media that he claimed some had been subjected to, warning that individuals who had posted them would be prosecuted.
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The summit was called by Macron to break through the impasse surrounding the draft Bougival agreement, signed in Paris last July, which was gazetted by the French government in September. According to the official Élysée-Oudinot statement, the agreement is designed to “complement” and “clarify” the Bougival text.
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The Élysée Oudinot agreement repeats the pattern of the Bougival project and previous stabilization measures instituted by Macron after the [seven-month uprising in 2024 by indigenous Kanak youth against French colonial rule]. Behind the constitutional wording, the capitalist socio-economic order, including a labor market that discriminates against indigenous Kanaks and extreme social inequality, remains firmly in place. France may convert loans of €1 billion into grants, but this will still be insufficient to alleviate the economic collapse, high unemployment, destruction of businesses and social costs from the unrest.
The transfer of limited powers from France to the territorial administration will require passing a new constitutional law in the French parliament followed by a consultation of Caledonian nationality voters and an organic law in the second half of this year.
Crucial provincial elections, postponed three times since 2024, will once again be rescheduled to the last quarter of 2026. The “unlocking” of restricted provincial electoral rolls to give voting rights to later residents in the colony—the issue that triggered the Kanak uprising— will proceed after the ratification consultation.
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Accordingly, Élysée-Oudinot will be imposed under ongoing heavy police and military supervision. Currently 15 squadrons of French mobile gendarmes are deployed in the islands, alongside 1,200 local gendarmes and police. According to National Gendarmerie commander General François Haouchine, another five mobile gendarmerie squadrons are on permanent standby, “ready to be deployed to New Caledonia in case of emergency or necessity.”
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Formal independence for New Caledonia, while it might boost the status and privileges of sections of the territory’s elite, would solve none of the problems facing the working class and impoverished rural population. Like other fragile Pacific Island countries, it would remain heavily in debt and under the control of France and other imperialist powers.
The colony’s working class must establish its political independence from all bourgeois parties—the nationalists and the loyalists—and must link their struggle to that of workers in metropolitan France and the wider Pacific. Only a socialist program that unites workers across borders can oppose imperialist domination and plunder, and tackle unemployment and social infrastructure collapse.
12. The US withdrawal from the WHO and the assault on public health
On January 22, 2026, the United States formally completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), ending a 78-year relationship that began with the agency’s founding in 1948. This rupture comes at a moment of heightened global risk. As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its seventh year and domestic outbreaks of measles and other preventable diseases rise to levels not seen in decades, peer-reviewed research shows that the forces driving pandemic emergence are accelerating rather than receding.
A major 2022 study led by Colin Carlson of Georgetown University’s Department of Biology and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that climate change alone is expected to trigger thousands of new cross-species viral transmission events in the coming decades, sharply increasing the likelihood of novel human infections. By withdrawing from the WHO, the United States has weakened its access to coordinated global disease surveillance and early warning systems at precisely the moment when scientific evidence indicates that new pandemic threats are becoming more frequent and harder to contain.
In a joint statement announcing the withdrawal, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the decision by accusing the WHO of mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic and failing to implement what they described as necessary institutional reforms. The statement asserted that the WHO delayed declaring a global health emergency, minimized the risks of asymptomatic and airborne transmission, and offered praise for China’s early response despite later evidence of reporting delays and data gaps.
By all credible accounts, the global response to COVID-19 unfolded under unprecedented conditions. In late December 2019, clinicians in Wuhan began reporting clusters of pneumonia cases of unknown cause, prompting local investigations as health authorities worked to identify the pathogen and determine whether sustained human-to-human transmission was occurring. On January 3, 2020, after several days of internal assessment, Chinese health authorities formally notified the United States and the WHO of the outbreak through established public health channels, as the virus began spreading beyond the initial cluster.
Within days, Chinese scientists had sequenced the virus and identified it as a novel coronavirus, and the genetic sequence was shared publicly in mid-January, allowing laboratories worldwide to begin developing diagnostic tests. As evidence of international spread mounted, the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020. By early February, senior US officials already understood that the virus posed a serious airborne threat. In a recorded interview on February 7, 2020, then-President Donald Trump told journalist Bob Woodward that the virus “goes through the air,” acknowledging privately what had not yet been communicated clearly to the public. This assessment reflected information available through internal briefings from public health agencies and intelligence reporting, even as official messaging continued to minimize the danger.
As the pandemic escalated globally, communication continued at the highest political levels. On March 27, 2020, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke by phone about the spread of the virus, with both governments publicly describing the call as focused on cooperation and information sharing.
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The consequences of the United States’ formal withdrawal from the WHO have now begun to unfold. In response, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the decision as a loss “for the United States, and also a loss for the rest of the world,” warning that it ultimately makes the US less safe. While the WHO has maintained that the withdrawal is technically incomplete until the United States settles substantial financial arrears, estimated at nearly $200 million in unpaid assessed contributions for 2024 and 2025, the agency has nonetheless been forced to move ahead with deep structural cuts. These include a budget reduction of roughly 22 percent and significant workforce reductions to offset the loss of its largest historical donor. Tedros described the U.S. exit as a major factor in one of the most difficult years in the organization’s history, while stressing that international cooperation and solidarity against shared biological threats remain more important than financial disputes.
The U.S. departure has triggered a fiscal crisis within the WHO, forcing the agency to cut its 2026–2027 budget to approximately $4.2 billion and eliminate nearly one quarter of its global workforce. Despite a 20 percent increase in assessed contributions from other member states, the organization continues to face a projected funding shortfall of about $1.05 billion, worsened by the US refusal to pay between $200 million and $278 million in outstanding arrears. According to reporting by Politico, the WHO’s long-term stability, and any prospect of renewed US engagement, is now tied to the impending leadership transition, as Tedros is set to step down in 2027 due to term limits.
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The funding shock triggered by the US withdrawal has placed several core WHO functions at immediate risk, weakening the global systems that detect, contain and prevent disease outbreaks.
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One of the most consequential losses is the destabilization of the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, the international network of 152 national influenza centers that tracks how flu viruses evolve across regions and seasons....
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The withdrawal has also intensified the crisis facing the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a decades-long effort that has brought the world to the brink of eliminating the disease....
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In conflict and humanitarian settings, the loss of US funding has weakened the Early Warning, Alert and Response System, which operates in places such as Syria, Somalia and South Sudan where the health infrastructure has collapsed. This system is often the only means of detecting outbreaks of cholera, measles or Ebola before they escalate into regional emergencies....
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Beyond individual programs such as maternal and child health services, neglected tropical disease elimination and chronic disease surveillance, the withdrawal has hollowed out the WHO’s technical capacity itself....
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The US withdrawal from the WHO is not a stand-alone foreign policy move. It reflects a parallel dismantling of public health at home.
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The consequences of this “America First” health strategy are already visible in the United States. The country is experiencing its twelfth wave of COVID-19 alongside a severe influenza season that has already claimed the lives of 44 children. Preventable diseases once thought to be under control are resurging at an accelerating pace. By late January 2026, 416 confirmed measles cases had been reported across 14 jurisdictions, already exceeding totals from the unprecedented surge seen in 2025.
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Under new leadership, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has shifted away from its long-standing role of prioritizing population-wide protection. Its chair, Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric physician, has stated that a parent’s individual right to refuse vaccination supersedes risks to the broader community. He has argued that mandatory vaccination undermines informed consent and has treated the return of diseases such as measles and polio as acceptable consequences of individual choice. This reasoning abandons the central premise of public health: that individual decisions cannot contain threats that spread through shared spaces, shared air and shared vulnerability.
While officials present these policies as a restoration of liberty, their impact on children tells a different story. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that children with Long COVID are two and a half times more likely than their peers to experience chronic school absenteeism, often accompanied by memory impairment and persistent fatigue. These outcomes stand in direct contrast to the administration’s insistence on a rapid return to normalcy. Together, they expose the practical meaning of the claim that the cure cannot be worse than the disease. In prioritizing economic activity and political ideology over biological risk, the federal government has effectively accepted widespread infection, long-term disability and preventable death as tolerable outcomes of its policy choices.
The dismantling of the World Health Organization alongside the erosion of domestic health agencies constitutes a direct assault on the social gains won by the working class over the past century. The public health infrastructure that dramatically extended human life through sanitation, disease surveillance, and vaccination was not bestowed from above. It emerged from collective struggle and the disciplined application of scientific knowledge. That infrastructure is now being deliberately dismantled by an administration that treats mass infection and the loss of measles elimination status as acceptable outcomes, described openly as the cost of doing business. As institutional expertise is stripped away and scientific standards are subordinated to claims of individual choice, the state is abandoning its responsibility to protect the population from biological threat, replacing evidence-based governance with policies that place profit above human life.
This destruction of public health is therefore not a technical failure but a class question with direct consequences for democratic rights. The normalization of mass illness and premature death has accelerated a widening gap in life expectancy, as those with wealth retain access to private protection while working families are left exposed to preventable disease, long-term disability, and early death. The defense of science and public health cannot be entrusted to institutions that have been repurposed to legitimize this outcome. It must be taken up as a political struggle, rooted in the defense of collective life itself. A globally coordinated, scientifically grounded public health system is not optional. It is inseparable from the right to live.
Amazon announced a second round of massive job cuts Friday as part of its earlier announced goal of laying off 30,000 corporate employees. The latest cuts will remove 14,000 white-collar jobs and will affect the company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video and human resource units.
Plans to eliminate the 30,000 positions had been announced in October and were primarily attributed by management to advances in artificial intelligence software.
However, in a third quarter earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared that the cuts were “not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven.” In other words, the company, which made $59.2 billion in 2024 net income and will likely exceed that figure this year, had already determined to destroy a considerable portion of its workforce and divert even greater sums into shareholders’ pockets regardless of financial conditions or advancements in technology.
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[Amazon} is the world’s second-largest private employer after Walmart and has already planned to cut more than 500,000 employees overall within the next few years, which would represent approximately 33 percent of its global workforce and nearly 50 percent of its US-based workforce.
Other recently-announced white collar job cuts either announced or implemented this month include:
• San Francisco-based design software creator Autodesk announced plans to eliminate roughly 7 percent of its 15,300 global employees, a cut of 1,000 positions.
• 1,000 to 1,500 employees were cut from Meta as part of its 2026 “year of efficiency” strategy. The job slashing represents between 10 to 15 percent of its Reality Labs division, responsible for Metaverse and related virtual reality technologies. They follow 4,000 company job cuts in 2025 representing 5 percent of its global workforce.
• A thousand job cuts at Citigroup, with the banking giant promising an additional round of layoffs in March. These also follow significant 2025 job losses with Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason reporting a 2025 workforce reduction of 240,000 to 226,000 in a recent earnings call.
• The virtual obliteration of online video platform Vimeo after its acquisition by Bending Spoons, a company specializing in hostile takeovers of smaller web applications. A few months after the acquisition, the entire video team was let go, putting in jeopardy the company’s vast archive of historical and independent films and short videos.
• 24,000 job cuts at Intel. Despite the AI boom and consequent rising demand for its chips, the company announced the massive cuts this month, which equal approximately 15 percent of its staff.
• 15,000 job cuts at tech giant Microsoft. The cuts played a significant part in panicked employees taking to social media warning of an additional pending job loss involving 22,000 employees this month. In a virtually unprecedented move, the company’s communications officer went on social media to refute the rumors as unfounded, although it is highly likely that the company will be announcing further cutbacks to its 210,000 person workforce later this year.
• Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson announced a 1,600 person job cut on top of a 5,000 person head count reduction in 2025. The company is seeking to offset sluggish growth through layoffs and has also become involved in military defense projects for the first time in its history as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, along with escalating tensions between Europe and the United States.
The response of the trade unions to this assault on the lives and conditions of its members and their families has been total silence.
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It is critical for workers to recognize that a) there will no return to previous conditions. The “restructuring” plans of the tech and corporate oligarchs are exactly that; they include mass layoffs with no rehiring plans even in the distant future. And b) that the unions will do nothing to mobilize against this urgent state of affairs.
Even when faced with the cold-blooded murder of two workers in Minneapolis, the unions, including the Minnesota AFL-CIO, have defied calls to expand strike action beyond city borders despite the strivings of workers and young people to do precisely that.
The only way to stop the massive jobs bloodletting—and literal bloodletting—is through the development of independent rank-and-file committees within Amazon and beyond. Lines of communication and coordination must be made with striking New York and California healthcare workers, teachers, public sector workers and others across all industries and professions. We encourage all workers to contact the World Socialist Web Site for information on both joining and forming rank-and-file committees here.
14. Amid Australian political crisis, editorials demand OECD austerity agenda
Confronted by last week’s fractious split in the Liberal-National Coalition, editorials in the Australian corporate media are demanding that the Labor government and whatever formation emerges from the Coalition’s collapse re-commit themselves to intensifying austerity measures and the boosting of military spending.
There is alarm in the financial elite that the breakup of the Coalition—one of the two main parties of rule, together with Labor, since World War II—could shatter the capacity of the political establishment to impose the required agenda. That agenda includes enforcing deep cuts to social spending and corporate taxes amid widespread discontent over plummeting living standards, global militarism and war preparations.
Editorials in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) and the Australian have insisted on the implementation of the type of measures outlined in a 110-page survey of the Australian economy issued last week by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD, whose 38 members represent the largest Western capitalist powers, is a voice of the global capitalist oligarchy, issuing such reports every two or three years.
The January 22 AFR editorial insisted that as “the Liberals and Nationals pick through their smouldering wreckage,” they must “reject the siren song of populism” and pay attention to the OECD’s “laundry list of reforms to fix the nation’s economic malaise.”
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Whatever the immediate outcome of the meltdown taking place in the parliamentary establishment, the OECD report is a warning of the brutal measures that the Labor government, and any future government, will seek to inflict on the working class.
This means a more frontal assault by the Albanese government and its partners in the union bureaucracy in 2026 against working-class jobs and conditions, fuelling growing discontent.
15. National Book Award winner The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Rabih Alameddine’s 2025 National Book Award for Fiction winner The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press 2025) is an eminently readable, if uneven, book.
Pleasant in its cranky humor, quite sad in places, Raja the Gullible is told in the voice of a 63-year-old Beiruti philosophy teacher, whose world weariness and snarkiness as well as his tempestuous relationship with his audacious mother have entertained most of its readers and reviewers. In its best section, however, a 75-page set piece, it is considerably more.
Raja the Gullible takes place in Beirut between 1960 and 2023, its story divided non-chronologically into seven sections, which themselves are given to bouncing between past and present according to the storytelling’s demands and the storyteller’s consciousness. Because the focus is always on Raja and his experience, the nonlinear structure does not prove to be overly challenging.
The ostensibly central story, which disappears for the majority of the novel only to reappear near the end in a genuinely surprising plot twist, is that Raja has received an email from an organization called the American Excellence Foundation offering him a three-month writing residency in Virginia. Although he had written a book earlier in his life (a walking tour of Beirut, incongruously written in Japanese), he has written nothing in over 25 years. Yet, flattered and in need of money, Raja fails to smell a rat.
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Alameddine is the author of six previous novels, including The Wrong End of the Telescope, which won the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Born in Jordan in 1959, Alameddine spent his early years in Kuwait and Lebanon, then traveled to the US where he earned a degree in engineering at UCLA. After working for some time as an engineer, he turned to painting and writing.
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In Raja the Gullible, Alameddine has written in many ways a good book. But it is not a great book. Its finest achievement is in its serious treatment of its theme. While Raja repeatedly refers to himself as gullible, his only real instance of gullibility occurs when he takes the offer of the American writing residency as good coin. On the whole, while he is compassionate, Raja is actually a somewhat closed and suspicious character. He approaches almost every interaction as a potential threat to his privacy, tranquility and sense of order. In fact, Raja the Gullible is not a novel about innocence and gullibility. It is a novel about coercion.
Slyly, movingly, Alameddine paints for the reader a mural filled with moments of bullying, wheedling, attempted blackmail and seduction. Even at age 63, Raja regularly succumbs to the will of others, to coercions that are physical, psychological, social, sexual and financial. In Raja, Alameddine depicts with a clear eye the costs of timidity, compassion, weakness of all sorts, decorum and love. Read from this angle, Raja the Gullible is a minor triumph....
The World Socialist Web Site strongly condemns the sacking of Assistant Professor Lora Santhakumar by the SRM Institute of Science and Technology (SRMIST) in Chennai, India, and her subsequent expulsion from her place of residence.
Assistant Professor Santhakumar has been victimized for expressing opposition, in her personal WhatsApp account “Status,” to the aggressive war that India’s Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government launched against Pakistan in May 2025.
Professor Lora Santhakumar noted that the principal victims of such military violence are the innocent and vulnerable.
The young academic, according to a News Minute website report, posted 12 anti-war messages. She warned of the real-life consequences of war such as economic crisis and dislocation and loss of innocent lives. In another message she denounced the celebration on Indian social media of the killing of civilians in Pakistan after an Indian military strike, calling this cowardice, not bravery.
Professor Santhakumar spoke to the WSWS at length and detailed her ordeal with SRMIST management.
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Lora Santhakumar’s blatant victimisation does not occur in isolation. It must be understood in the context of India’s aggressive military posture toward Pakistan (the government insists Operation Sindoor is only “suspended”); the whipping up of chauvinist hysteria by the BJP government; and a systematic state crackdown on all expressions of dissent.
As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned during the course of the current escalation of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, the Modi government’s bellicose actions are inseparable from intensified authoritarian measures at home, aimed at silencing opposition from workers, youth, students and intellectuals.
In December 2023, the government pushed a new “sedition law” through parliament, “Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023.” Its aim is to suppress all dissent against the “Nation,” which in practice means the Modi government. It documents a long list of criminal offenses including “Offenses against the State, the Armed forces and Public Tranquility.” As compared with India’s previous sedition law, which was itself a reactionary carryover from the British colonial regime, the BNS imposes increased jail sentences for 33 offences, and increased fines for 83 offenses.
The draconian BNS is now being routinely used to silence voices critical of the government’s war mongering, communal incitement and repression.
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This campaign is not driven by “national security” concerns but by the ruling class’s fear of domestic opposition. India’s conflict with Pakistan is bound up with the strategic interests of the Indian bourgeoisie and its alignment with US imperialism in the Indo-Pacific region. At the same time, the government is enforcing brutal austerity measures, privatization and pro-corporate restructuring, which have generated mounting social anger. War serves as a means of diverting social anger outward, while inciting communalism and justifying repression at home.
Universities occupy a critical position in this process. As centers of intellectual life and potential opposition, they are under particular pressure to conform. This phenomenon was widely displayed in the brutal suppression of protests against the imperialist-backed Gaza genocide at universities in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
Private universities such as SRMIST, deeply integrated into corporate networks and dependent on state patronage, are especially susceptible to political intimidation. By sacking Lora Santhakumar, the SRMIST administration sent a clear signal that opposition to the government’s war policy will not be tolerated within its walls.
The targeting of Professor Santhakumar also intersects with entrenched social inequalities. She hails from a Dalit Christian family, a traditionally impoverished layer of the population subjected to ongoing discrimination. While the immediate trigger for her dismissal was her anti-war stance, the broader pattern of repression in India has consistently fallen most heavily on minorities, workers and those who challenge dominant nationalist narratives.
The response of the establishment parties and trade unions to Professor Lora Santhakumar’s victimization has been telling. The Congress Party, the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), its close ally, the CPI, and the DMK and Tamil Nadu’s other ethno-regional parties have all failed to come to Lora Santhakumar’s defense. None have denounced the violation of her basic democratic rights.
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The defense of academic freedom cannot be separated from opposition to war itself. As long as the Indo-Pakistan conflict is prosecuted in the interests of the rival ruling classes, repression will intensify. Universities, media organizations and cultural institutions will be subordinated to the war effort, and individuals who speak out will face intimidation, dismissal or worse.
The defense of Lora Santhakumar is thus not a matter of a mere personal injustice. Nor should it be entrusted to the courts, university administrations or parliamentary maneuvers, all of which operate within the framework of the politics of a capitalist ruling class that is hurtling to the right.
It requires the independent mobilization of the working class, uniting workers, students, and academics across ethnic, religious and national lines, and linking the fight for Santhakumar’s immediate reinstatement to the fight against war, authoritarianism and communal reaction and for social equality. The same ruling classes that are driving India and Pakistan toward war are responsible for poverty, unemployment, and the dismantling of public health and education.
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The defense of academic freedom cannot be separated from opposition to war itself. As long as the Indo-Pakistan conflict is prosecuted in the interests of the rival ruling classes, repression will intensify. Universities, media organizations and cultural institutions will be subordinated to the war effort, and individuals who speak out will face intimidation, dismissal or worse.
The defense of Lora Santhakumar is thus not a matter of a mere personal injustice. Nor should it be entrusted to the courts, university administrations or parliamentary maneuvers, all of which operate within the framework of the politics of a capitalist ruling class that is hurtling to the right.
It requires the independent mobilization of the working class, uniting workers, students, and academics across ethnic, religious and national lines, and linking the fight for Santhakumar’s immediate reinstatement to the fight against war, authoritarianism and communal reaction and for social equality. The same ruling classes that are driving India and Pakistan toward war are responsible for poverty, unemployment, and the dismantling of public health and education.
Some 10,000 Canadian federal public service workers were warned in letters over the past week that their jobs could soon be cut. The vicious cost-cutting onslaught is a central component of the federal Liberal government’s drive to raise tens of billions of dollars for Canada’s war machine and the enrichment of its financial oligarchy.
The targeted employees include workers at: Health Canada; Global Affairs Canada; Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada; Transport Canada; Employment and Social Development; Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada; Agriculture Canada; Statistics Canada; Shared Services Canada; the Treasury Board Secretariat and Public Services and Procurement Canada.
Prime Minister Mark Carney aims to “save” $60 billion through the axing of 28,000 federal positions over the next four years and other cuts to “discretionary spending.” At the same time, his government is funneling vastly more into rearmament, committing $80 billion in additional funding for the Canadian military and the expansion of Canada’s military-industrial base just in last fall’s budget.
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The layoffs sweeping through the federal public service are the result of the Liberals’ “Canada Strong” budget passed last year—an openly right-wing program of class war and military rearmament that was implemented through the complicity of all the parties in parliament. Its passage depended on the calculated intervention of the New Democratic Party (NDP), backed by its sponsors in the trade union bureaucracy, along with the Greens, all of whom ensured that Carney’s minority government survived and that the austerity drive could be accelerated and intensified without interruption.
While posturing as opponents of the federal cuts, NDP MPs used abstentions and parliamentary manoeuvres to keep Carney in office and the budget intact, thereby authorizing the job destruction now spreading through the federal public service.
Since 2019, the NDP has propped up successive Liberal governments that have massively hiked military spending, waged war against Russia, supported the Israeli genocide in Gaza and imposed austerity and inflation-driven real wage cuts. One of the Liberal government’s most significant initiatives has been the virtual outlawing of the right to strike, using a concocted redefinition of an obscure clause in the Canada Labour Code to ban strikes by ministerial order without so much as a parliamentary vote. None of this got in the way of the NDP and unions continuing their collaboration with the Liberals.
Even as the budget’s job cuts were being unveiled, the Canadian Labour Congress urged the NDP not to bring down the government, but to collaborate in “improving” the budget—an explicit pledge to keep workers chained to the very political framework responsible for the assault.
’s response was of the same character: mild criticism and immediate accommodation, coupled with a refusal to mobilize the membership in any fight to stop layoffs. The bureaucracy’s objective is not to defend workers but to manage their opposition, keeping it within a collective bargaining system rigged in favor of the employer and enforced by the courts, labor boards and the coercive apparatus of the capitalist state.
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The PSAC bureaucracy’s hostility to any working class resistance is rooted in the class interests of the corporatist union apparatus. The PSAC leadership—as with the union bureaucracy as a whole, from the Canadian Labour Congress on down—has intimate ties with the state and big business, from which the privileged, middle-class union bureaucrats profit handsomely. They support the job cuts and other austerity measures, as well as the rearmament program and all of Canadian imperialism’s wars around the world, because they benefit from the stepped-up exploitation of workers at home and Canadian imperialist plunder abroad.
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The assault on federal public service workers parallels the Carney government’s restructuring of Canada Post. CEO Doug Ettinger has said the Crown Corporation aims to eliminate some 30,000 jobs over the next decade. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers is collaborating in management’s attacks by isolating worker opposition and attempting to ram through rotten tentative agreements reached behind the backs of the rank and file.
Federal workers must draw the essential conclusion: the fight against layoffs and the defense of quality public services requires a unified industrial and political struggle against the Carney government and its backers in the union bureaucracy and NDP. Workers can succeed only through a conscious political break with the nationalist, pro-capitalist politics advanced by the NDP and the unions and by breaking out of the anti-worker, capitalist state-regulated “collective bargaining” system that the union bureaucracy upholds.
What is required is an entirely new strategy, one based on the unification of the working class across Canada and internationally in an industrial and political counter-offensive for decent-paying, secure jobs, an end to austerity, no more money for militarism and war, and the defense of all democratic rights, including the right to strike. This fight is possible only on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program and requires the construction of rank-and-file committees so workers can seize control of their struggle from the hands of the union bureaucracy.
18. United Kingdom: For a rank-and-file response to the UCU’s sabotage of Further Education strikes
The three-day strike of 17 colleges across England last week highlighted the challenges facing Further Education workers.
What could have been a powerful united fightback across the sector was split up into local disputes which have been rapidly shut down. Even the figure of 17 was barely half the 33 colleges who voted to walk out, with the rest demobilized to vote on deals all below the pay demand of 10 percent.
The latest deal announced as a “victory” at Sheffield College added only 2 to 3 percent on top of a 2 percent pay rise which was given in August to reach a total of 5 percent for lecturers and 4 percent for other workers.
The University and College Union (UCU) leadership under general secretary Jo Grady excluded from the very beginning a unified struggle in which members could stand together until everyone had won their demands. These are, according to the union: a 10 percent or £3,000 pay rise, parity with schoolteacher pay within 3 years, a minimum starting salary of £30,000, reform of the pay spine, equalities gaps closed, national agreements on workload, a return to national bargaining and putting FE at the heart of a new government’s plans
Such a fight would require a battle with the Labour Party government which is systematically starving the sector of funding—maintaining funding per student in FE colleges at levels 11 per cent lower than in 2010-11, and 23 percent lower in sixth forms. But the UCU does everything possible to maintain ties with Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
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Since her election in 2019, Grady has epitomized the left-talking trade union bureaucrat, delivering radical-sounding speeches while demobilizing action by UCU members, preserving relations with employers and the government. She was a leading figure—alongside Rail, Maritime and Transport union leader Mick Lynch—in Enough is Enough, which directed mass sentiment for a general strike in 2022-23 into calls for a Labour government.
Grady won election following a mass rebellion within the UCU against her predecessor Sally Hunt in 2019. Hunt had sold out the pensions dispute in Higher Education. But having gained her position with a few left phrases, Grady proceeded to wind down the “Four Fights” dispute.
FE workers should study the fight against job losses in Higher Education, which was divided and betrayed in exactly the same way as their own struggle. The UCU announced in October last year that by the time it opened a national strike ballot for demands including an end to redundancies, 15,000 university jobs had already been lost.
The year leading up to that point saw the UCU claim victory after victory in local disputes over job losses, almost invariably with an agreement to stop only compulsory redundancies. Thousands of workers were pressured to take “voluntary” redundancy or early retirement by the threat that new cuts would be made if they didn’t. Many of the “victories” came simply because the universities could cut the jobs they were planning to without resorting to compulsory redundancies.
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Within the union, the UCU Left, politically led by the Socialist Workers Party [SWP], is the most prominent faction calling for a united struggle in FE. But it provides no strategy for doing so beyond running for positions within the union and seeking to encourage its leaders to be more militant.
In 2019, although opposing her candidacy, the UCU Left welcomed the election of Grady—a bureaucrat soon to be taking home more than £150,000 in pay and benefits—with the promise that it would “look forward to working with [her] to transform UCU into a democratic fighting union that can send shivers down the spine of every employer.”
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During the strike held January 14-16, the SWP confined itself to offering a few polite words of advice. An article in the Socialist Worker acknowledged that the strikes are being wound down but could only respond, “Activists at other colleges should argue for more action, and push the union to call more than token strikes.”
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The whole trajectory of Grady’s leadership since UCU members forced out Sally Hunt shows what will come of “pushing the union”. Workers need their own bases of power and organization to exert democratic control over their disputes: rank-and-file committees which can link up colleges in a fight against any attempt to isolate and betray the strikes.
As a first step, all deals currently being voted on should be rejected, and collective action resumed. No workplace should fight alone; no one should be left behind.
In this way, the dispute can be made the first step of a sector-wide fight for improvements in pay, job security and working conditions. FE workers’ allies are not to be found in the Labour government, but throughout higher, primary and secondary education and in the wider working class. They can find enormous support for a struggle against Starmer’s starving basic social services to fuel a money and war-mad ruling elite.
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
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.
