1. New video confirms ICE Gestapo murdered Renee Good in cold blood
On Friday morning, cellphone footage originating from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross showing the murder of Minneapolis mother and wife Renee Nicole Good was leaked to right-wing media. The new footage conclusively demonstrates that Ross deliberately positioned himself in front of Good’s vehicle to justify murdering her.
The 47-second video, recorded on Ross’s cellphone, begins by showing him exiting his vehicle and approaching Good’s maroon Honda sport utility vehicle. A dog is clearly visible in the back seat as Ross walks in front of Good’s car. As Ross walks in front of the vehicle, filming the driver and license plate, Good is seen behind the wheel with her window down, both hands clearly visible, smiling at the agent. As Ross continues to circle the vehicle, he records Good warmly greeting him, saying, “That’s fine, dude. I am not mad at you.”
As Ross reaches the back of the vehicle, he records Good’s license plate and another woman standing behind the car filming him. The woman, Becca Good, Renee’s wife, tells Ross it is fine that he is recording their license plate: “It will be the same plate when you come talk to us later. It’s fine.”
At this point Ross has completed a full circle of the vehicle and appears to be leaving. Becca Good is heard telling Ross that she is a “U.S. citizen former f*cking veteran… You want to come at us, I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.” Roughly 32 seconds into the video, Ross switches his cellphone to his left hand, allowing him to more easily access his pistol holstered on his right hip.
Becca Good then turns to enter the passenger side of the vehicle. As she reaches for the handle, a different ICE agent wearing a mask approaches the driver’s side and yells at Renee Good to “get out of the f*cking car!”
Agent Ross proceeds to walk directly in front of Good’s vehicle and remains there as she begins backing up.
Ross, cellphone in hand, continues recording as Good begins turning the wheel away from him and puts the car in drive. As the car accelerates forward, Ross leans onto the hood, his phone in his left hand and his pistol in his right, and fires three rounds at Good in less than one second.
After shooting Good, a voice believed to be Ross’s says, “fucking bitch” as the Honda SUV accelerates wildly forward and smashes into a parked car. The video ends. Other footage from the scene shows that neither Ross nor any other agent on site provided first aid to Good. Instead, agents blocked a man who identified himself as a physician from providing aid and created a barrier that forced emergency medical technicians to park their ambulance away from the immediate scene.
The US economy added only 50,000 jobs in December, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures released Friday. This brings to an end a year which saw a jobs bloodbath against the working class carried out by corporate America, with all indications that the assault will accelerate in the new year.
What is being carried out is nothing less than a social counter-revolution aimed at eliminating whatever remains of the gains of a century of class struggle. According to the latest figures, the labor share of income for the nonfarm business sector dropped sharply in the third quarter to its lowest level ever, of only 53.8 percent. In 1990 by comparison, following a decade of unprecedented plant closures and deindustrialization, it was 67.3 percent.
Even the corporate media, generally concerned with the monthly jobs report only insofar as it affects interest rate policy at the Federal Reserve, was compelled to take note. With only 584,000 jobs created during the year, CNN reported that 2025 marked the worst year for job growth outside of an official recession since 2003.
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The ruling class is imposing on the backs of the working class the costs of unsustainable levels of debt and a massive, brewing economic crisis. This is being carried out through mass unemployment and, for those workers who remain employed, levels of exploitation not seen in generations.
These conditions have found expression in a series of high-profile deaths and disasters at industrial sites over the course of the past year, including the deaths of two postal workers and autoworker Ron Adams, as well as explosions at an oil refinery in Los Angeles, a Tennessee munitions plant, and the fiery crash of a UPS cargo plane in Louisville.
While artificial intelligence has the potential to vastly reduce the burden of work and improve the quality of life for billions of people, Wall Street views it as a weapon for mass unemployment and is deploying it as such. The intensified exploitation of labor is also a major source of funding for new speculative bubbles, including the AI bubble itself, which by some estimates already dwarfs the real estate bubble that produced the 2008–2009 financial crash.
Such policies cannot be imposed democratically. They lie behind the police rampage under Trump, including the shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis and the killings of two unidentified individuals in Portland. These events are bound up with a broader plan to overthrow the Constitution and impose a dictatorship, backed by oligarchs such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others.
There is a direct continuity between foreign and domestic policy. New sources of surplus value are being sought not only through intensified attacks on the working class at home but also through foreign conquest and robbery. The abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is being openly justified by seizing the country’s oil wealth. Trump has declared the Western Hemisphere “our hemisphere,” while preparations accelerate for war with China and even potentially against erstwhile allies in Europe.
3. Germany’s CSU pushes war, police-state measures and social cuts at Seeon retreat
The traditional winter retreat of the Christian Social Union (CSU) parliamentary group, which took place from 6 to 8 January 2026 at Seeon Abbey, marks a further authoritarian and militaristic shift to the right by Germany’s ruling class.
What was formulated there in internal policy papers, speeches and interviews goes far beyond party-political positioning. In Seeon, the CSU drafted a coherent program of mass deportations, the expansion of the police state, social counterrevolution and the large-scale rearmament of the Bundeswehr. This is a program that largely corresponds to that of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and is supported by the entire federal government, a coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU) with their Bavarian sister party the CSU and Social Democrats (SPD).
The retreat was dominated by agitation against migrants and refugees and by a so-called “deportation offensive 2026.” In an internal position paper, the CSU calls for “scheduled flights to Afghanistan and especially to Syria,” a dedicated deportation terminal at Munich Airport, and the withdrawal of protected status for “most Syrians.” Although the new Islamist regime in Syria is using brutal violence against minorities, the CSU claims that the country is “under reconstruction,” meaning that there is “no longer any general reason for protection.” Party leader and Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder threatened: “2026 is the year in which deportations to Afghanistan and Syria will take place.”
These announcements are accompanied by a massive expansion of repressive state powers. The CSU is demanding increased video surveillance in public spaces, harsher penalties for attacks on police officers and a stronger prioritization of “internal security” within the state apparatus. Media reports quote CSU sources saying that this is to become the “second pillar” of policy alongside the economy and external security.
The political content is unmistakable: immigration is criminalized, social problems are ethnicized and the security apparatus is deliberately strengthened in order to suppress growing social resistance.
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Significantly, Chancellor Friedrich Merz had for the first time floated the prospect of deploying German troops to Ukraine just two days before his appearance in Seeon, at a summit meeting in Paris. In his speech in Seeon, he fully endorsed the plans of the Bavarian sister party. His appearance made clear that the line of Söder’s CSU is the program of the entire federal government—including the Social Democrats.
Particularly threatening was Söder’s demonstrative commitment to the United States. He declared that Germany’s security was “unthinkable without the USA,” especially regarding military and intelligence cooperation. This declaration came only days after the illegal attack by the United States on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro—an illegal war of aggression that the World Socialist Web Site has sharply condemned. European governments, including the German government, responded with empty phrases about the importance of international law, but refused to clearly condemn the attack, instead welcoming the overthrow of Maduro.
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The CSU retreat in Seeon is therefore a grave warning to the working class. Germany’s ruling class is responding to the deepest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s with the same methods as its counterpart in the United States: war abroad, social cuts, agitation against refugees and the expansion of the police state at home. This course cannot be stopped by appeals to capitalist parties, all of which support it, but only through the building of an independent, international socialist movement against war, dictatorship and capitalism.
4. Seattle’s “socialist” mayor silent on Venezuela attack as while continuing to court business elite
Seattle’s self-styled “socialist” mayor, Katie Wilson, has remained silent on Saturday’s attack on Venezuela by the Trump administration and the kidnapping of the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife Cilia Flores. Both the attack and the kidnapping are acts of war under US and international law. Wilson was inaugurated as mayor of Seattle on Friday, January 2 after being elected as part of the left shift among the working class in the US in response to the full-scale assault on democratic rights by the Trump administration.
In President Donald Trump’s gloating speech following the abduction, he characterized the operation as a “warning” to “anyone who would threaten American sovereignty.” He continued by threatening further deployments of the National Guard, saying, “They should do it with more cities.”
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It is thus all the more incredible that Wilson has said nothing about Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro or the undeclared war against Venezuela more broadly. The attack on Saturday killed at least 100 people, a number that is continuing to grow. Since September, Trump and Hegseth have ordered 30 strikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean that have killed at least 107 people, all of whom are most likely civilians.
Moreover, Trump has specifically called Wilson out for being a “very, very liberal/communist mayor,” and threatened to shift this summer’s World Cup football matches, some to be held in Seattle, to other locations.
There is also the not-so-small matter of principle. Genuine socialists oppose all acts of imperialist aggression, which has been upheld in the Marxist movement since the colonial wars of the 19th century. It is a recognition that such attacks on the working class in any part of the world is an attack on the entire world proletariat and must be opposed.
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Wilson’s silence on Venezuela aligns with her broader political orientation to align herself with the “left” wing of the Democratic Party, which has become clearer in her first days in office. In December, Wilson announced her selection of Brian Surratt to be her deputy mayor. Surratt was the head of Seattle’s Office of Economic Development from 2015 to 2017 and is the founder and head of Greater Seattle Partners. He is also the former vice president of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc., and is well known in the business community as a deal-maker, most significantly the redevelopment deal with Jeff Bezos, then the CEO of Amazon, for the Climate Pledge Arena complex in Seattle Center.
Prior to her inauguration, Wilson made the decision to retain Seattle police chief Shon Barnes, who has been accused of maintaining a “siege mentality” within the police, and recently promoted a senior officer who had driven into protesters assembled on a sidewalk and covered up the harassment of a trans woman.
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Wilson also exposed her political orientation in an interview with Jacobin magazine, a publication connected to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which functions as a faction within the Democratic Party. In the interview, she claimed that “there’s this opportunity for socialists or people coming from the progressive left who are coming into executive positions like mayorships to really show that we can govern.”
She then openly admitted she will not oppose the capitalist social order. “It’s tempting for me to use my mayoral platform to start a big conversation around socialism, but I don’t think that’s what I was elected to do.”
There are no doubt many among the 139,000 who voted for Wilson that thought that’s exactly what they were voting for. They mirror the 1.1 million who voted for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the DSA, who also ran as a socialist. Both almost immediately betrayed those aspirations, with Mamdani meeting with Trump last month and declaring a “partnership” with the fascist and would-be dictator. Wilson said that she would be willing to follow suit.
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The crises facing the working class in Seattle, including war, homelessness, spiraling rent, unaffordable health care, stagnant wages and so much more, cannot and will not be effectively addressed through silence, gentle criticism or coalition building with the wealthy. There must be a frontal assault on the wealth of the ruling elite, including those corporations centered in Seattle like Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Starbucks and others. Their ill-gotten gains must be expropriated, through a struggle which must be led by the working class as part of a revolutionary program to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism.
5. Israel kills 14 Palestinians as Trump prepares imperialist “Board of Peace” for Gaza
Israeli air strikes across the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours have killed at least 14 Palestinians, including children. The attacks, launched under the pretext of responding to a “failed rocket launch” by Palestinian militants, targeted displaced families sheltering in tents and schools, as well as residential areas in Gaza City.
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In a formulation supported by multiple Western outlets, the IDF asserted that these strikes were a legitimate response to a “failed projectile” launched by Palestinian militants, the same narrative that has been used to justify previous atrocities such as the bombing of Gaza’s al‑Ahli hospital in 2023 and other attacks later exposed as Israeli war crimes.
A Palestinian militant source told Reuters and other wire services that the organization was still “checking” the allegation of a misfired rocket, underscoring that even on its own terms, Israel’s story remains unsubstantiated while the civilian death toll mounts.
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As the latest crimes unfold in Gaza, the American and international media have increasingly focused on the US intervention in Venezuela and on the explosive political crisis triggered by the murder of an American citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Wednesday. In Venezuela, the arrest of Nicolás Maduro by US forces is part of the same imperialist strategy of violence and conquest that has been driving the genocide in Gaza.
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The genocidal conditions imposed on Gaza are expressed most graphically in the plight of Palestinian infants and small children. Al Jazeera reports that Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has warned of a surge in respiratory infections, skin diseases and other illnesses among Palestinians living in makeshift shelters, as Israel continues to block the entry of tents, tarps and temporary housing amid freezing winter temperatures.
MSF states that babies in Gaza are “suffering from severe cold” as displaced families endure torrential rain and strong winds in flimsy tent encampments and ruined buildings, with no heating, electricity or proper clothing. In December, a two‑week‑old infant, Mohammed Khalil Abu al‑Khair, froze to death in Gaza after Israel’s restrictions on shelter materials and aid turned the winter cold into a lethal weapon.
The Trump administration is now preparing to dress up the ongoing massacre with a new stage‑managed diplomatic façade. US officials have leaked that Trump will soon announce the formation of a so‑called “Gaza Board of Peace,” the body tasked under Washington’s plan with overseeing Gaza’s “reconstruction,” structuring its future administration and distributing international funds.
Trump has declared that he will personally lead this board, which is expected to comprise around 15 imperialist figures and their bourgeois nationalist partners, including representatives from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. Reports indicate that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, notorious for his role in the carnage of the Iraq war, has been named as a founding member, while a former UN Middle East envoy has been designated as the board’s representative “on the ground” in Israel and Gaza.
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The purpose of this Board of Peace is not to end the suffering of the Palestinians but to create a technocratic façade for a regime in Gaza that will exclude Palestinians from any governing role and ensure that reconstruction funds are tied to the political and economic dictates of the Trump White House. The board’s purpose is to supervise the establishment of a “Palestinian technocratic government” and to police the enclave under the rubric of “stability,” while the underlying structures of occupation and siege remain unchanged.
The murderous strikes on tents, schools and homes in Khan Yunis, Jabalia and Zeitoun, the freezing to death of infants, and the daily toll of Palestinians killed under the so‑called ceasefire expose the situation in Gaza. It is an ongoing genocide carried out by Israel with the support of US and European imperialism. The Trump administration’s ceasefire, peace plan and Board of Peace are instruments of this policy, designed to deflect mass opposition and provide a diplomatic cover for ethnic cleansing that aims to drive Palestinians out of the occupied territories.
6. Devastating fires in Australian state of Victoria burn out of control
Tens of thousands of people across the southeast Australian state of Victoria are confronting a mounting social catastrophe as out‑of‑control bushfires, fanned by record heat and ferocious winds, tear through farming districts and rural townships in the state’s central and northeastern regions and could continue for weeks.
The inferno centered in Longwood and Ruffy (130 kilometers northeast of state capital Melbourne) alone has burned more than 84,000 hectares, while a second major blaze near Walwa and Mount Lawson on the New South Wales border has scorched over 19,000 hectares. A third major fire is also sweeping through the bushland and former gold‑mining country centred on the town Ravenswood—near major regional centres Castlemaine and Bendigo—about 120 kilometres northwest of Melbourne.
Up to 300,000 hectares has burned across the state as fire fronts advanced in multiple directions. In total, 36 bushfires continue to burn across the state.
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At the same time, a brutal heatwave is gripping neighboring state New South Wales, with temperatures exceeding 45°C (113ºF) across the state’s west, raising the risk of new fire outbreaks, while northeastern state Queensland faces an intensifying cyclone threat as a tropical low off the coast near Townsville threatens to develop into a category one cyclone. These simultaneous crises across eastern Australia underscore the escalating climate extremes confronting working-class communities from one end of the continent to the other.
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Meteorologists reported that inland districts in rural Victoria hit about 46–47°C (115–117ºF) with hot, dry north-westerly winds and very low humidity, producing what Victorian emergency authorities yesterday described as the worst fire danger day since the “Black Summer” bushfires in 2019–20. Blazes have been unpredictable and fast-moving.
A powerful cold front on Friday brought severe thunderstorms and “dry lightning” which ignited dozens of new fires across the state in a matter of hours.
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Despite the obvious and long‑foreseen danger, the Labor administration in Victoria and the federal Labor government stand exposed as utterly unprepared and unwilling to provide the resources necessary to prevent such a disaster.
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Around the world, wildfires are increasing in scale, severity and frequency to higher average global temperatures. In the past year alone, massive fires have devastated North America, Japan, South Korea, the Mediterranean and Turkey.
Yet communities have been left with ageing power and road infrastructure, inadequate local health and evacuation facilities, and volunteer fire brigades forced to stretch limited tankers and crews across vast areas of highly flammable grassland and forest.
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Scientists and firefighters repeatedly warned that climate change, driven above all by the continued burning of coal, oil and gas, was lengthening fire seasons, drying forests and making extreme fire weather more frequent, yet official policy remained dominated by the defense of fossil‑fuel profits and tokenistic emissions targets.
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Each catastrophe produced official inquiries, recommendations and solemn promises of reform, yet the underlying pattern has persisted: Mitigation, planning and emergency capacity are pared back under the dictates of austerity, “efficiency dividends” and privatisation.
This historical record underscores the urgent necessity for a fundamentally different approach. A genuinely effective bushfire strategy would require a permanently and generously funded full‑time emergency service, with modern equipment and staffing levels sufficient to protect all fire‑prone communities, not just major tourist or agribusiness assets.
It would integrate large‑scale hazard‑reduction and land‑use planning, massive investment in resilient public infrastructure and housing, and serious, binding measures to phase out fossil fuels and address the climate crisis that is making each fire season more lethal than the last. Such a program is impossible within a capitalist framework in which every major decision—from energy policy to local fire‑service budgets—is subordinated to the profit requirements of banks, energy conglomerates and developers.
What is required is socialist planning on a global scale: the democratic control of the economy by the working class, so that society’s vast productive resources can be redirected from military spending, fossil‑fuel expansion and corporate enrichment to protecting human life and the environment. Only on this basis can a comprehensive system of fire mitigation, emergency response and climate action be developed that corresponds to the real scale of the danger confronting ordinary people in Victoria, across Australia and around the world.
7. Australian writers’ festival bans Randa Abdel-Fattah in pro-Zionist purge backed by Labor
In a calculated act of political censorship, the Adelaide Festival Board announced this week that academic and author Randa Abdel-Fattah had been disinvited from Adelaide Writers’ Week, one of Australia’s oldest and largest literary festivals, due to begin on February 27.
Abdel-Fattah, the only author of Palestinian descent on the program and the recipient of numerous literary prizes, was scheduled to speak about her recent novel Discipline, which focuses on the lives of two Muslim girls and exposes institutional racism and censorship in universities and the media.
The decision, which followed a recent letter to the board from the Jewish Community Council of South Australia demanding Abdel-Fattah’s removal, has been angrily denounced by leading writers and cultural figures across the country and internationally. According to current estimates, more than half the scheduled speakers have decided to boycott the event.
In a statement posted on Instagram on Thursday, Abdel-Fattah accurately denounced the decision as a “blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship, and a despicable attempt to associate me with the Bondi massacre.” She said she was being treated as if her very existence as a Palestinian voice had rendered her “persona non grata in cultural circles.”
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A previous attempt to silence her and other anti-Gaza-genocide writers was mounted at last year’s Bendigo Writers Festival via the imposition of a last-minute “code of conduct” by the event’s sponsors—La Trobe University and the City of Greater Bendigo.
This failed, however, after Abdel-Fattah and more than 50 other featured writers boycotted the event in protest. The “code of conduct” was introduced following agitation by a pro-Israel academic lobby group targeting Abdel-Fattah and branding her “a direct threat to the Jewish community.”
The timing of the latest attack is revealing. After Labor’s campaign to strip her of her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship failed, a new pretext—the Bondi shooting—was seized upon to step up the witch hunt.
Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation by the Adelaide Festival Board has met with significant and rapid opposition. Within hours of the board’s announcement, prominent authors angrily denounced the decision and began withdrawing from the festival. Those pulling out include British author Zadie Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Russian-Jewish writer M. Gessen.
Among the scores of local writers boycotting the festival are two-time Miles Franklin and Stella Prize winner Michelle de Kretser, Miles Franklin laureate Melissa Lucashenko, Helen Garner, former Egyptian-jailed Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste, poet and scholar Evelyn Araluen, historian Clare Wright, Chelsea Watego, academic Bernadette Brennan, journalists Amy Remeikis and Jane Caro, and many others.
The Australia Institute, a prominent public policy think tank and long-time festival partner, has cancelled its sponsorship and events, while Writers SA, the state’s peak organization for writing and literature, has withdrawn from the event, as has South Australian publisher Pink Shorts Press.Statements by many of those boycotting the festival go beyond the Gaza genocide, forthrightly denouncing the anti-democratic and authoritarian character of the board’s decision and its consequences.
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The principled decision by writers, artists and organizations to boycott the Adelaide festivals is a powerful expression of the deep-seated opposition to the ongoing Gaza genocide and Labor’s attacks on free speech and other basic democratic rights.
The rapid response against this repressive attack on free speech is the product of almost two and a half years of vicious assaults and pro-Zionist, state-backed victimizations against academics, creative workers, journalists, health workers, teachers and others speaking out against the Gaza genocide and Israeli war crimes. These political experiences have not been in vain but have produced a deeper understanding that fundamental rights are at stake and have deepened the resistance.
But this opposition cannot be confined to moral appeals to festival boards, governments or universities in the hope that these institutions can be pressured into changing course.
While Australian authors and writers have powerfully condemned the censorship of Abdel-Fattah, they need to recognize that this fight must be linked to a broader working-class struggle against the entire political establishment and the pro-imperialist Labor governments—state and federal.
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A key step for all those opposing the political censorship of Randa Abdel-Fattah is to register and participate in the Socialist Equality Party’s online public meeting at 2 p.m. (AEST) tomorrow [7 p.m. PST today, January 10]. Titled “Bondi terror attack—a socialist assessment,” the meeting has been called to discuss these vital questions.
8. Australian Labor government tacitly backs Trump’s illegal assault on Venezuela
The Australian Labor government, like its imperialist counterparts in Europe and internationally, has effectively lined up behind the Trump administration’s lawless assault on Venezuela, including its kidnapping of that country’s President Nicolás Maduro on January 3.
At the same time, Labor’s response has been marked by an evident nervousness. It is fearful of being too closely identified with Trump’s act of aggression, because of popular opposition. And the brazen illegality of the onslaught against Venezuela has triggered concerns over the potential international implications, with commentators noting that all of the old norms of international relations are finished.
The tone was set by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. In the immediate wake of the US sneak attack, he issued a statement so vague and evasive as to be almost unreal.
The government was “monitoring developments in Venezuela,” Albanese wrote. “We urge all parties to support dialogue and diplomacy in order to secure regional stability and prevent escalation.”
By that stage, Maduro was in New York, having been abducted by US Special Forces. What sort of “dialogue” or “diplomacy” was Albanese talking about, when Venezuela’s elected head of state had already been subjected to an “extraordinary rendition” in violation of the most basic precepts of sovereignty and national self-determination?
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While adopting the position that Trump can essentially do as he pleases, Labor’s preoccupation since its reelection in May has been in deepening US-Australian ties in those preparations for war against China.
Vast efforts were devoted to securing a meeting between Trump and Albanese in November, at which the two signed an agreement on critical minerals, which are decisive to the confrontation with China. Labor has vastly expanded US basing, is committed to the AUKUS pact, under which Australia will acquire nuclear powered submarines from America at a cost of $368 billion and has increased domestic military spending to record levels.
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The attack on Venezuela was not simply an assault on its national sovereignty in another criminal intervention by US imperialism in Latin America. It was very much part of a developing global war that is already underway and was aimed at undercutting China’s growing influence and ties in the region.
9. Quebec imposes pro-landlord rent “reform” amid unprecedented housing crisis
Quebec’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government has overhauled the legal framework that has governed landlord-tenant relations in Quebec for nearly half a century.
Adopted in the face of widespread popular opposition, the new framework, which came into force on January 1, 2026, radically shifts power in favor of landlords and real estate investors, allowing them to impose bigger rent hikes at the expense of tenants, who are overwhelmingly working-class. Presented as a means of “simplifying” the calculation of rent hikes in dwellings subject to “rent control,” the CAQ’s “reform” will inevitably aggravate an unprecedented housing crisis—one that Premier François Legault and his CAQ government have systematically sought to blame on immigrants.
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The CAQ’s “reform” also makes it practically impossible for tenants to challenge a rent hike, as they’ll no longer have access to the detailed breakdown of landlords’ expenses that was required under the previous regulatory regime. While landlords must deduct any government subsidies they receive for renovations, the calculation is otherwise opaque, preventing tenants from verifying whether an increase is justified... or mounting an effective challenge.
Nearly 15,000 Quebecers signed a petition opposing the government’s pro-landlord changes, with tenant advocacy groups warning they will lead to historically high rent increases and deepen the housing affordability crisis. However, this gives only a pale indication of the undoubtedly mass opposition to the status quo which goes unreported, under conditions where broad sections of the working population are facing a housing crisis without precedent.
This crisis was prepared by the systematic withdrawal of government funding for social housing—at the federal, provincial and municipal levels—over the past four decades, the correlated rise of rents, and the emergence of real estate as a lucrative and massive area of speculative investment.
In Quebec, the average price of a home skyrocketed from $48,715 in 1980 to $424,844 in 2021—an increase of over 770 percent.
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In the postwar period, federal and provincial governments played a leading role in constructing non-market housing. This came to a halt in 1993, when the last federal budget tabled by Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government ended all new federal funding for social housing construction, a policy maintained and deepened by the incoming Liberal Chrétien government, which froze funding and reduced social transfers to the provinces. Most provinces, including Quebec and Ontario, followed suit, downloading responsibility to cash-strapped municipalities.
As a result, Canada's social housing stock currently around—600,000 to 700,000 units—has barely grown in 30 years, even as the population has increased by millions, without any corresponding housing plan.
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A ruthless defender of Quebec’s big business and financial elite, the CAQ has systematically implemented policies designed to deepen exploitation and austerity. The agenda on the order of the day is an all-out assault on the social position of the working class. The CAQ has already cut approximately $1 billion from public health care and over $500 million from education. These austerity measures, combined with decades of underfunding, have left hospitals and schools in crisis. Meanwhile, the government has handed out billions in tax cuts to large corporations.
For these policies to be implemented unopposed, it is vital for the ruling class to keep workers divided on the basis of language, ethnicity, and nationality. At the same time as the CAQ’s Housing ministry implements policies which further aggravate the housing crisis, its immigration and culture ministries scapegoat immigrants and minorities for this crisis. The far-right Parti Québécois (PQ) and CAQ are experts at the promotion of ethnic chauvinism and xenophobia. However, all parties promote their own brand of nationalism or identity politics. This includes such nominally “left” parties like Québec solidaire (QS) who have repeatedly adapted and lent credence to the far right’s promotion of anti-immigrant measures as a way to address the housing crisis.
These policies must be understood in the context of the sharp rightward movement of the entire Canadian ruling class, which is echoing the fascistic turn of the Trump administration in the United States.
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The rapid rise in the cost of housing is a major factor in the global crisis of capitalism. This is not just because dwelling represents the biggest portion of the working class’ living expenses, but also because land and buildings have become speculative commodities to a historically unprecedented degree, reflecting the movement of capital away from production toward rent and interest bearing assets.
For decades, and accelerating after the 2008 financial crash, central banks pumped trillions of dollars of cheap credit into the financial system. This ocean of liquidity fueled a speculative mania in real estate, transforming homes into financial assets for hedge funds, REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts), and wealthy investors. In Canada, federal and provincial governments of all stripes facilitated this process. They deregulated the mortgage market, offered tax incentives to speculators, and gutted social housing programs.
This is a worldwide phenomenon rooted in the international movements of capital, and resting on an international division of labor which produces the materials and machines necessary to build and maintain housing. Globally, housing crises are endemic in virtually every advanced capitalist country. From Sydney to London to New York, house prices have soared relative to wages, driven by the same fundamental process: the financialization of housing, in which homes are treated as financial assets rather than basic necessities.
If the working class is to defend its right to housing, it has to take as its non-negotiable starting points that the crisis cannot be resolved on a local or national basis, and that housing is a social need which, like all social needs, should not be subordinated to capitalist profit and speculation.
10. Starmer’s agreement to send UK troops to Ukraine fuels demands for urgent military expansion
The crowing by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the agreement signed Tuesday with France to send British and French soldiers to Ukraine after a ceasefire with Russia has rapidly subsided. For the ruling class, it has only underscored the questions: how many, how soon, and how will this be paid for?
The Times has led demands in ruling circles during the Ukraine war for a rapid reprioritization of spending away from social welfare to re-armament, enabling Britain to fight a prolonged, high-intensity war.
It responded to the Anglo-French-Ukrainian deal with a barrage of articles within 24 hours, led by longtime columnist Edward Lucas, a “consultant specializing in European and transatlantic security”. He is a known British imperialist asset, part of an organized cluster of anti-Russia mouthpieces.
The first paragraph of Lucas’ op-Ed, “Empty words on Ukraine spell doom for NATO,” got down to brass tacks: “We are promising forces we do not have, to enforce a ceasefire that does not exist, under a plan that has yet to be drawn up, endorsed by a superpower that is no longer our ally, to deter an adversary that has far greater willpower than we do. Apart from that, Britain’s defenses are in great shape.”
With “at best 25,000 combat-capable troops” and already “struggling to keep even 1,000 of them deployed as a tripwire in Estonia,” the well-connected Lucas observes, and lacking “air defenses”, “munitions and spare parts stockpiles” and other “enablers”, the UK is realistically incapable of acting as an independent military force.
The situation is now perilous because “Under Trump, the US has become a predator not an ally. Pressuring Denmark over Greenland is the death knell for NATO: for hawks in the White House, shedding European allies and associated entanglements is a bonus not a minus. Without the US brains in planning and intelligence, muscle (stockpiles and enablers), and the political will to fight, Nato is an empty shell”.
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As a separate Times editorial, “Labour must get serious about increasing defense spending,” pointed out: “To be anywhere near credible in the deterrence role, Britain would have to deploy a brigade, preferably an armored one, for an extended period, quite possibly a decade. That would mean rotating troops in and out of theater, placing an enormous strain on an army that is now at its smallest since the late 18th century.
“Britain’s land force is short of everything: personnel, modern armored vehicles, artillery and air defense. Its manpower and ammunition stocks would be exhausted in a few weeks of intense fighting.”
The same is true of all of Europe’s armed forces. In Lucas’s words, “none is currently capable of deterring either Russia or the US… We have spent 35 years paring back our defenses.” The same point was made in a recent Economist article asking, “if Europe could take on Russia without American help,” and which answered, “Without greatly improved capabilities, it must hope for a short war.”
*****
Writing in the Telegraph, columnist Jeremy Warner said, “Whatever the wider geopolitical and economic consequences of Donald Trump’s latest escapade in Latin America, there is one thing it has highlighted closer to home—the urgent need to put a rocket under UK defense spending”. The only conclusion was that, “Welfare must take the brunt of the pain in efforts to boost defense spending.” It was time for the government to grasp the nettle as “A radical re-imagining of spending priorities is approaching at pace. The obvious target here has to be welfare—and particularly working-age benefits—where spending is plainly out of control.”
That Starmer has been reluctant to act on these demands shows his recognition that he leads an already hated Labour government which would meet fierce opposition to this class and imperialist war agenda. But the ruling class is increasingly adamant that he proceed anyway or be replaced by someone who will. The working class must act with even greater urgency to build a political movement against this threat.
11. Venezuela and Ukraine highlight the bankruptcy of Britain’s official anti-war movement
America’s neo-colonialist intervention in Venezuela and the agreement signed by the UK and France preparing for the widespread deployment of NATO forces in Ukraine place the necessity of building an anti-war movement squarely before the British and international working class.
No way forward is provided by the Stop the War Coalition, the Corbynite Your Party or the Greens, whose response underscores the fact that only a socialist program provides the basis for a fight against imperialism and the danger of world war.
As ever, Jeremy Corbyn has been made the figurehead of the “opposition” put forward by Stop the War; his article in Tribune magazine, “Starmer’s Passivity on Venezuela is Cowardice” is republished on the STWC website. It argues in his usual handwringing fashion against “Britain’s ‘special relationship’ of unthinking submission to the White House’s interests.”
Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s actions in supporting Trump are “blind”, “absolutely staggering” and “utterly pathetic”, an “abomination” and a “humiliation”, huffs Corbyn. His moral outrage covers for a bankrupt perspective of persuading British imperialism to adopt a new course by distancing itself from the United States: “a consistent, ethical foreign policy based on international law, sovereignty and peace”.
This is a fantasy. Starmer is undoubtedly prostrating himself before Trump, who is using the military in a reckless pursuit of US imperialism’s predatory interests. But both policies are rooted in a common underlying crisis of capitalism—including spiraling national debts and social tensions—and a common effort to resolve it at the expense of their rivals through military means.
That is why Starmer has also signed a statement with other European powers defending Greenland against the US President. British capitalism has its own imperialist interests. These rely heavily on the use of NATO, and US military force within NATO, to further the war against Russian in Ukraine—a crumbling joint effort of the alliance which Trump’s ambitions against NATO-member Greenland/Denmark threaten to completely collapse.
By referring to “another Labour Prime Minister… doing his best to cement the UK’s status as a vassal of the United States,” Corbyn is following the line laid down by Stop the War since its inception. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote previously: “not an anti-imperialist strategy, but rather one levelled only against the United States and appealing directly to a section of the ruling class which felt Britain was paying too high a price for too little gain from US-led wars.”
On this basis, Corbyn and Stop the War pre-emptively limit a movement against the aggression in Venezuela to impotent appeals to the government to change course. The STWC demands “that the British government immediately stops all involvement with the illegal, provocative and more and more extreme actions of President Trump, and publicly condemns Trump’s gangsterism.”
Corbyn’s Your Party, now formally founded, has only been able to rouse itself as far as organizing a petition, which reads: “We call on you, Prime Minister, to 1) unequivocally oppose and condemn Trump’s armed assault, 2) ensure the UK votes to condemn it at the UN Security Council, and 3) demand the safe return of Venezuela’s head of state.” It has garnered fewer than 20,000 signatures; less than half the party’s membership.
*****
When the horrors of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and outrage at British governments’ complicity once again moved millions to take to the streets, Stop the War and Corbyn spent two years refusing to educate these forces in the wider imperialist war drive reflected in Gaza. Not a word was said from the platform at over 30 national rallies in London about the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine.
Corbyn’s silence on this critical issue has continued this week, even as Britain signed an agreement which raised the prospect of thousands of British troops being deployed to Ukraine, and participated in a US Navy operation seizing a Russian-flagged oil tanker. Both raise the dire prospect of a shooting war between London and Moscow, both nuclear-armed powers.
*****
As with the Gaza genocide, Stop the War extends the freedom given to Corbyn to play the anti-war leader to the trade union bureaucracy, cheering general secretaries for issuing pro-forma statements which commit them to nothing.
This week it republished a belly-crawling editorial from the Stalinist Morning Star which describes Trades Union Council leader Paul Nowak’s call “on the UK government to condemn this blatant violation of international law” as “an excellent lead,” adding that other trade union leaderships have “issued similar powerful condemnations”.
The article even suggests a rebellion in Starmer’s viciously right-wing, pro-war Labour Party, writing that “very few Labour MPs could be found in the Commons on Monday night prepared to give Starmer and Cooper their unequivocal backing,” clearly “unpersuaded by the assertion that the government prioritizes international law[!]”.
Nothing more is offered either by Your Party’s Zarah Sultana or Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who repeat Corbyn’s criticisms of Starmer as a “vassal of Washington” or of Trump as an “unreliable ally”—in Sultana’s case with a sprinkling of anti-imperialist rhetoric.
Workers and young people must grapple with the challenge in front of them: the construction of an anti-war movement on entirely new, the only possible, principles of socialist internationalism.
Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and murder of a US citizen in Minneapolis this week shows there is no wall between wars waged on the working class abroad and at home. Starmer’s backing for the Venezuela aggression, the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, combined with his starving of anti-genocide political prisoners, proves the same. As the military violence grows, so too will the attacks on workers and so too their resistance.
It is on this process that building an anti-war movement depends, linking the resistance to the class war of the government at home with resistance to its imperialist aggression abroad. But this will have to be done in constant opposition to the semi-pacifist political paralysis preached by Corbyn and company, and the insistence that action be subordinated to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.
Through this fight, new forms of working-class struggle—rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees with global links—will take root and take ownership of the fight against war and to defend and advance democratic rights and social conditions. A fight which can only be completed in the struggle for socialism.
12. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
New Zealand:
South Korea:
13. 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.
