Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Twilight at the Met: Capitalism’s contempt for culture
The company’s announcement this week of yet another round of devastating cutbacks exposes, with brutal clarity, the incapacity of American capitalism to sustain even its most celebrated cultural institutions. What is unfolding at the Met is not merely a financial crisis; it is a cultural execution in slow motion, and a scathing indictment of a system that has long since abandoned any pretense of nurturing the higher aspirations of human civilization.
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To grasp the enormity of this collapse, one must understand what the Metropolitan Opera once represented. Founded in 1883, the Met rapidly became the premier opera house in the Western Hemisphere and one of the greatest in the world. For over a century, virtually every legendary voice in opera graced its stage: Caruso, whose golden tenor made him a household name across America; Maria Callas, the volcanic dramatic soprano who redefined operatic acting; Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Rosa Ponselle, Renata Tebaldi, Jussi Björling, Birgit Nilsson and many others. The roster reads like a pantheon of vocal immortals.
For decades, the Met brought opera into millions of American homes through its legendary Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts, which began in 1931. These weekly transmissions, sponsored for years by Texaco, created an enormous national audience for an art form that might otherwise have remained the exclusive province of the wealthy. Families gathered around their radios to hear live performances from the Met stage. Opera was not an elitist curiosity; it was a vital part of American cultural life. Caruso and Callas were not obscure names known only to connoisseurs. They were celebrities whose fame rivaled that of film stars.
Under the management of Rudolf Bing, who led the company from 1950 to 1972, the Metropolitan Opera achieved historic significance in ways that extended beyond artistic excellence. Bing, though he fastidiously avoided public political pronouncements, integrated the company in 1955 by hiring the great African American contralto Marian Anderson. Six years later, Leontyne Price made her debut in Verdi’s Il Trovatore to a 42-minute standing ovation—one of the most celebrated moments in operatic history. Price, Grace Bumbry, George Shirley, Shirley Verrett and others of their generation found at the Met a stage worthy of their extraordinary talents. The opera house, for all its dependence on wealthy patrons, served as a vehicle for transcendent artistry that spoke to something universal in the human experience.
In 1966, the Metropolitan moved to its magnificent new home at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a complex conceived as the nation’s premier venue for the performing arts. The new Met, with its soaring travertine arches and its Chagall murals, was intended as a monument to American cultural ambition. But the unveiling of the new opera house coincided with a critical turn in the fortunes of American capitalism. As was soon to become clear, 1966 was the high-water mark of American liberalism.
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New York City—the world capital of financialized capitalism, home to the Wall Street banks and hedge funds that have looted trillions from society and presided over levels of inequality that almost defy comprehension—cannot apparently muster the resources to support its own opera company. Berlin maintains three opera houses. Vienna, Milan, Paris, Munich and London sustain thriving companies with substantial public funding. The difference is not that American capitalism lacks the resources. It is that American capitalism, long before Trump, became the spearhead of global social counterrevolution.
And now the Met has descended to begging for alms from the blood-soaked Saudi monarchy. The deal announced months ago would see Met productions touring to Saudi Arabia annually for eight years, in exchange for $200 million. Let us be clear about what this represents: the Metropolitan Opera, one of the most storied cultural institutions in the world, has agreed to serve as a propaganda vehicle for an authoritarian regime implicated in the assassination and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in the starvation and slaughter of tens of thousands in Yemen, in the systematic repression of women and dissidents.
General Manager Peter Gelb, defending this squalid arrangement, told the New York Times with breathtaking cynicism: “All the democratic governments that I know of are engaged in business with Saudi Arabia. I have to put the survival of the institution of the Met first. ... I don’t operate the Met according to my personal feelings on every issue.” This from the same Peter Gelb who transformed the Met into a virtual propaganda outlet for the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, who fired the world-renowned soprano Anna Netrebko because, while she condemned the invasion of Ukraine, she declined to denounce Putin by name—a distinction Gelb found unacceptable. Gelb’s “personal feelings” align perfectly with the policy imperatives of dominant sections of the American ruling class. When it comes to Russia, he is a moralist; when it comes to Saudi Arabia and its cash, he is a pragmatist. The hypocrisy is nauseating.
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The crisis at the Met recalls the 2013–2014 assault on the Detroit Institute of Arts during that city’s bankruptcy, when emergency manager Kevyn Orr sought to appraise and potentially sell the museum’s $20 billion art collection to pay creditors. The same logic is at work: the cultural heritage of humanity is to be liquidated to satisfy the demands of capital.
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The defense of culture cannot be entrusted to the ruling class, which has demonstrated its utter indifference to sustaining the artistic achievements of civilization. It cannot be entrusted to administrators like Gelb, who during the height of the COVID pandemic collected nearly $1.4 million annually while stagehands and chorus members were thrown out of work. The working class—the inheritor of all that is progressive in human civilization—is the only social force capable of defending the cultural heritage of humanity.
The Achilles heel of American artistic institutions has always been their dependence on private donors, on the whims of the wealthy. But art is not a charitable indulgence; it is an indispensable element of human existence. Society must guarantee the resources necessary for its flourishing. That this elementary truth is even contested exposes the barbarism of a system that subordinates every human need to private accumulation. The fate of art is inextricably bound up with the struggle for socialism and the reorganization of society’s resources in the interests of all humanity.
2. Union bureaucracy seeks to block strike action against ICE rampage in Minneapolis
An online question-and-answer event hosted January 20, 2026 by PayDay Report founder Mike Elk, ostensibly to discuss the general strike in Minneapolis on Friday, January 23, exposed the hostility of the union bureaucracy and its allies to the independent mobilization of the working class.
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The event featured Communications Workers of America (CWA) Union Local 7520 President Keiran Knutson as a main speaker. The local has 500 members, including AT&T and other telecom workers in Minneapolis. As a whole, the CWA has 700,000 current and retired members throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.
The online meeting was framed as a response to the federal occupation of Minneapolis, the mass Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and kidnappings, and the murder of Renée Nicole Good by Department of Homeland Security thug Jonathan Ross. In practice, the discussion made clear that while union officials and their political allies pay lip service to militant rhetoric, they are determined to prevent workers from exercising their collective power through strike action.
Under conditions where workers are demanding a general strike to drive federal immigration agents out of Minnesota, the bureaucracy is working systematically to confine opposition to an impotent protest, explicitly rejecting any action that would violate collective bargaining agreements and “no-strike” clauses negotiated by the unions themselves.
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When workers ask how a strike would be financed, the answer is clear. The resources exist, but they are monopolized by an apparatus that views any independent movement of the working class as a threat to its own position.
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Knutson... revealed the pro-corporate orientation of the bureaucracy by explaining that the strategy behind the January 23 protest is to appeal to wealthy executives to intervene with Trump. He stated:
One of the things that SEIU put forward, which I thought was interesting, was that in San Francisco, apparently, you know, I remember Trump had been talking about San Francisco’s one of the cities they are going to go to. But SEIU pointed out that I guess that one of the big Silicon Valley billionaire tech bros called up Trump and said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you in San Francisco,’ and Trump agreed to it. So part of the thinking I think behind this from SEIU’s point of view is that we’re gonna put pressure on the CEO of Target, of United Healthcare, of Delta Airlines, of 3M, of Medtronic, that kind of thing. And that that’s gonna be some leverage to try and get the dogs called off.
The orientation is unmistakable. The apparatus is seeking to smother growing opposition and redirect it behind an appeal to billionaires to persuade Trump to “get the dogs called off.”
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The role of figures like Knutson, a supporter of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, is to suppress the class struggle in defense of big business and the Democratic Party. Alongside the open violence of the ICE and federal police, the labor bureaucracy functions as a central mechanism for enforcing state repression by blocking independent working-class action.
But the development of events is escaping the union bureaucracies’ control. In Minneapolis, it has been the independent initiative of workers and young people that has led to walkouts, mass protests and the formation of neighborhood ICE Watch networks, not actions led or organized by the trade union apparatus.
In remarks to the meeting, SEP member Lawrence Porter raised the fundamental political issues involved in opposing the paramilitary occupation in Minneapolis.
Porter:
"If this rally becomes a platform for the Democratic Party, it will serve to contain opposition, not advance it."
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Porter:
"[The union] bureaucracies are closely allied with the Democratic Party. Their function is to prevent the emergence of an independent working class movement.
So we must ask plainly: Will this rally promote the very institutions that are collaborating with Trump? Or will it outline a strategy for a real counter‑offensive against fascism and dictatorship?
The central slogans of this rally must be:
- Break with the Democratic Party
- Abolish ICE, CBP and DHS
- Build an independent movement of the working class
- For a nationwide general strike to defeat the drive to dictatorship and fascism
That is why it is essential that this meeting and the rally include a speaker from the Socialist Equality Party—a party that is independent of the Democrats, opposed to the trade union bureaucracy, and fighting to build rank‑and‑file committees and a mass working class movement against capitalism itself.
If this demonstration is to be more than a gesture, if it is to contribute to a real struggle, it must advance a perspective that can guide the fight against Trump and fascism, not lead it into another blind alley."
4. Zohran Mamdani intervenes in effort to shut down the New York nurses strike
Eleven days into the strike by 15,000 nurses in New York City, talks are set to resume Thursday between the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and the hospital systems of Montefiore, Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian.
In a statement on its website, NYSNA attributed the resumption of talks to the hospitals “being urged back to the negotiating table by Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani.” It is clear that NYSNA is working closely with Democratic Party officials, principally Zohran Mamdani, who appeared on the picket line this week for the second time in an effort to bring the strike to a close as quickly as possible.
The NYSNA statement even suggested that the union is prepared to send workers back to the job before they have a chance to vote on any potential deal, stating that the strike will continue only until “tentative agreements are reached with the hospitals.”
At a rally outside Mount Sinai on Tuesday, Mamdani reiterated his role in pushing for a deal to end the strike, stating, “We are encouraging everyone to return to that bargaining table.” He added that a strike is “not where workers want to be” and called for a “swift and urgent resolution,” making clear his priority was to bring the nurses back to work as quickly as possible.
Mamdani’s comments were calculated to appeal to the sentiments of striking nurses, many of whom have emphasized over the past week and a half that their strike is a defensive action. It has become necessary because the hospitals refuse to address intolerable conditions. Chronic understaffing is jeopardizing patient safety and the wellbeing of nurses, driving many to leave the profession altogether. The hospitals are even going further, demanding cuts to benefits, including to nurses’ own health coverage.
But in waging this struggle, nurses are not simply reacting defensively to unacceptable contract proposals from the hospitals. Their fight for safe staffing levels poses a direct challenge to the priorities that dominate the healthcare industry—priorities set by millionaire executives and the billionaires who sit on the boards of New York’s hospital systems. Nurses are insisting that the needs of patients and healthcare workers must come first, not the financial interests of pharmaceutical companies, insurance giants or hospital-affiliated venture capital funds.
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In his commitment to govern for all New Yorkers, including the ultra-wealthy, Mamdani recently set aside his campaign pledge to raise taxes on millionaires and corporations at Hochul’s behest. Instead, the pair have announced their intention to phase in an expansion of child care, though the source of funding for even the initial, extremely modest phase remains unclear.
The abandonment of the proposal to tax the rich, presented as a “pragmatic” maneuver, is indicative of the political subterfuge that Mamdani specializes in. While Mamdani makes populist-sounding appeals to fight the oligarchy, his politics aim to convince workers that their interests can be reconciled with those of Wall Street, big real estate, and corporate CEOs who dictate economic conditions.
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The fact that nurses at some of the wealthiest hospitals in the wealthiest city in America have been forced to strike over such basic issues as safe staffing levels, the preservation of health care coverage, and safe working conditions demonstrates that the needs of workers are coming into direct conflict with the interests of the oligarchy. Nurses’ immediate demands, along with broader social needs, including the establishment of healthcare as a fundamental social right guaranteed to all, can only be realized to the extent that workers take up a struggle against the oligarchy rather than accept their subordination to it.
Mamdani’s intervention in the strike is an attempt to bring the workers’ mobilization to an end as quickly as possible on terms demanded by the ruling class. New York, along with the rest of the country, is experiencing levels of social anger that are bursting at the seams.
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To take forward the struggle, the World Socialist Web Site urges nurses to build rank-and-file strike committees—democratically elected and led by nurses themselves—to establish democratic control over the strike. Nurses should formulate their non-negotiable demands as the precondition for accepting any contract or ending the strike.
The real allies of striking nurses are the fellow hospital workers who are being forced by their union to cross picket lines, the nurses at other public and non-profit hospitals that face the exact same conditions, the transit workers who are launching a contract struggle of their own presently, and the logistics workers struggling against dangerous working conditions.
5. Democrats will allow full ICE funding in budget bill
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told a closed-door meeting of congressional Democrats that while he would personally oppose legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the remainder of the fiscal year—through September 30—the Democratic leadership would not seek to whip the vote, now set for Thursday.
The effect of this move is to ensure passage of full funding for the DHS and, in particular, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the wake of the murder of Renée Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, and the full-scale occupation of the Twin Cities by thousands of federal agents.
The American Prospect reported that several Democrats in closely contested districts would be voting for the ICE appropriation. “They’re terrified of being labeled anti–law enforcement,” an unnamed source told the liberal magazine. “They want this to go away so they can talk about the cost of living more. Problem is, it’s not going away.”
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There is little likelihood that Congress will allow spending authorization for the Pentagon or DHS to expire, particularly in the midst of nearly continuous US military operations in the Caribbean against Venezuela and against multiple targets in the Middle East. The Pentagon authorization will top $900 billion, while the DHS is to receive nearly $108 billion.
Even if the Democrats were to delay funding for DHS, as a political stunt directed toward the 2026 midterm elections, there would be no effect on ICE operations. The agency received a huge increase provided by Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBA), passed last summer, giving it virtually unlimited resources for arrests, detentions and deportations.
Under OBBA, the budget for ICE skyrocketed from $10 billion to $75 billion, divided into $30 billion for operations—the raids that are currently devastating city after city—and $45 billion for detention facilities, the massive concentration camps that are expected to hold hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of immigrant detainees.
ICE has already become the most-funded federal police force, more than doubling in size to 22,000. In terms of the number of agents, it trails only Customs and Border Protection (CBP), with 47,000. Both agencies have been mobilized for massive sweeps through targeted cities, with Minneapolis-St. Paul occupied for the past two months, and Portland and Lewiston, Maine facing anti-migrant sweeps this week.
6. Calls mount for rail strike after 42 die in high-speed train crash in Adamuz, Spain
At least 42 people are dead after a horrific train collision near the town of Adamuz on Sunday night, around 7:45 p.m. As anger mounts among workers who have long warned of poor maintenance and underfunding of rail security amid the rail privatization program overseen by Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government, train drivers are calling for strikes.
The accident occurred when the rear carriages of a high-speed train of the private Italian firm Iryo, traveling north from Málaga to Madrid, derailed on a straight stretch of track. It crossed onto an adjacent rail line and smashed into the front of an Alvia train of Spanish state operator Renfe going south from Madrid to Huelva. With both trains reportedly traveling around 205 km/h (127 mph), the Renfe train’s lead carriages derailed and crashed down a 4-meter embankment.
Anger among rail workers and the general public grew after news emerged that a trainee train driver had died in another derailment in Gelida, near Barcelona, when a commuter train collided with a retaining wall that had collapsed onto the tracks.
Tuesday morning, the Spanish Union of Rail Machinists (SEMAF) union was compelled to issue a strike call. Criticizing the “relentless deterioration of train materiel,” it called to “guarantee the safety and reliability of the network.” Claiming that its strike call aimed to “give legal authorization to mobilizations by working people,” it stressed the “criminal responsibility of persons tasked with guaranteeing the security of rail infrastructure.”
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The Madrid-Andalucia high-speed rail line is Spain’s oldest, launched in 1992. It has seen a surge in traffic amid rail privatization, as Ouigo and Iryo (private firms partly owned by the French and Italian state railways, respectively) grabbed parts of this lucrative rail corridor from Spain’s state rail operator, Renfe. But necessary upkeep was not done. Instead, a state company spun off from Renfe in 2005, Adif, was left to handle the tracks—even as revenues from their use were diverted from maintenance towards shareholders of private firms like Ouigo and Iryo.
Throughout last year, rail workers alerted Adif and state authorities of the dangers in the Adamuz area. Adif was forced to issue eight reports last year of problems in signaling equipment, potholes and bumps in the tracks, and imbalances in overhead power lines in the region. These reports continued at least until October, well after Puente claimed the rail track had been repaired.
In August, complaints from train drivers became so serious that the SEMAF union had to write a letter to Adif, warning of “severe wear and tear” on rail infrastructure. The letter said train drivers were raising concerns “daily,” but that no action had been taken.
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While more details must emerge on the precise causes of the accident, it is rooted in the refusal of state authorities and private firms to fund necessary maintenance. Such funding is incompatible with the right-wing priorities of the PSOE-Podemos, then PSOE-Sumar governments. As the railways were privatized, these governments handed out tens of billions of euros in EU bailout funds to Spanish banks. From when the PSOE-Podemos government took office in 2020 until today, they nearly doubled publicly-reported military spending, from €18 to €34 billion.
Over the same period, the wealth of top Spanish billionaires surged from €70 to 110 billion for Ormancia Ortega, €4 to 8 billion for Rafael del Pino, and €5 to 8 billion for Juan Roig.
Spain’s two rail disasters in the last two days underscore that society cannot function amid the monopolization of such vast wealth by parasitic capitalist oligarchs, abetted by middle class, pseudo-left parties like Podemos.
7. Japan signs new defense agreements with the Philippines
On January 15, Japan and the Philippines signed two new defense agreements in Manila, deepening the integration of Japanese forces into the US-led alliance system preparing for war with China in the Asia-Pacific. Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi met with Philippine Foreign Secretary Theresa Lazaro to conclude an Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) and an Official Security Assistance pact.
The ACSA enables the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to provide each other with ammunition, fuel, food and other supplies on a tax-free basis during training, joint operations, disaster response and related activities. The parallel $US6 million security assistance arrangement commits Tokyo to funding construction of storage facilities and boathouses for Japanese-donated patrol craft.
Both governments framed the agreements as responses to “increasingly severe” security conditions and “unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force” in the East and South China Seas—diplomatic language aimed squarely at China.
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The spectacle of Japanese forces preparing to operate from Philippine soil has profound historical significance. Both the United States and Japan subjected the Philippines to brutal colonial rule in the twentieth century. Washington conquered the Philippines in a bloody war that killed hundreds of thousands. Japan’s wartime occupation ravaged the archipelago. Manila was one of the most devastated capital cities of World War II, along with Berlin and Warsaw. Now, the two former rulers are back, in tandem, embedding their militaries in Philippine bases in preparation for a new and even more catastrophic war.
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What is being created is a layered offensive network: land-based missiles, naval and air forces, and island bases from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines, all linked by joint command structures and logistics pacts. The re-emergence of Japanese militarism is an integral part of these preparations.
The entire alliance structure is cloaked in the rhetoric of a “rules-based” or “law-governed” world order supervised and protected by Washington. At a press conference on December 31, 2025, Defense Secretary Teodoro denounced China’s “aggression,” and stated that the Philippines sought to uphold a “free, open, stable and rules-based Indo-Pacific where differences are resolved through peaceful means without deception, coercion or intimidation.”
The hypocrisy of such claims is staggering. The lynchpin to these whirling claims of “rules,” “freedom” and “peace” is Washington, the White House and Donald Trump.
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Washington asserts a limitless right to bomb other countries, abduct the head of a sovereign state, annex vast territories by force, and yet it lectures China on respect for international law and demands that its allies “deter” Beijing in the name of a “rules-based order.”
8. Davos World Economic Forum dominated by Trump threats over Greenland
The World Economic Forum, which opened Monday in Davos, Switzerland, was dominated by the deepening rift between the United States and the European powers over US President Donald Trump’s efforts to take control of Greenland. By the end of Wednesday evening, Trump had announced that he would walk back his earlier threats to annex Greenland by military force or impose tariffs against European states, in exchange for what he called an agreement over control of the territory.
Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding member of the NATO alliance. Trump met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Wednesday and announced the “framework of a future deal,” though the precise terms remain unclear and disputed.
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Trump withdrew tariff threats against eight European countries following the announcement, sending stock markets sharply higher after the S&P 500 had posted its worst day since October on Tuesday.
The crisis at Davos exposed the advanced state of disintegration of the transatlantic alliance. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking at the forum on Tuesday, delivered a stark assessment of the global situation. “Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney declared. He warned that “the rules-based order is fading” and invoked the ancient Greek historian Thucydides: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Carney received a standing ovation from the audience, while Trump’s address was met with tepid applause.
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While walking back his threat to use military force, Trump made clear he would use economic coercion to achieve his aims. “You can say yes and we will be very appreciative,” he declared, “or you can say no and we will remember.”
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The Trump administration’s drive to seize control of Greenland is part of a broader effort to reorganize the Western Hemisphere under direct US domination. The administration views the consolidation of American power over its “near abroad” as essential for projecting power against American imperialism’s principal rival: China. Canada and Greenland, with their vast mineral resources, energy deposits and access to Arctic seaways, are critical to this effort, as is the Panama Canal. This strategy of hemispheric consolidation aims to secure a continental resource base for great-power conflict.
Greenland’s strategic value has grown as climate change transforms the Arctic. The Northwest Passage, once impassable for most of the year, is becoming increasingly navigable, offering a shipping route that cuts thousands of miles and weeks of transit time from journeys between Asia and the Atlantic. Control of the Arctic waters and the territories that border them has emerged as a central preoccupation of all the major imperialist powers.
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The gathering of the world’s financial oligarchy at Davos took place against the backdrop of the staggering growth of billionaire wealth documented in the Oxfam report “Resisting the Rule of the Rich,” released to coincide with the forum. The report found that billionaire wealth grew at three times the rate of the previous five years, with the 12 richest individuals on Earth now possessing more wealth than the poorest half of humanity combined.
The crisis over Greenland sent investors fleeing toward safe-haven assets. Gold prices surged to record highs as precious metals registered their sharpest gains in months. The flight to gold and other stores of value reflects the deep unease within financial markets over the trajectory of great-power relations and the growing risk of a broader conflict. The surge in precious metals is a barometer of capitalist instability, indicating that sections of the ruling class see in the current crisis the harbinger of something far worse.
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Whatever the temporary resolution of the standoff over Greenland, the underlying trajectory is toward mounting conflict between the US and Europe, in which American imperialism will be increasingly impelled to rely on its one main advantage: military force. The eruption of this crisis at the premier gathering of the global capitalist elite exposes the crisis of the entire post-World War II international order.
Neither Trump’s “America First” nationalism nor the European bourgeoisie’s response offers any way forward for the working class. Both represent factions of a ruling class that is incapable of resolving its conflicts through any means other than violence, economic warfare and ultimately military confrontation.
9. Bolivian union bureaucracy calls off general strike, betraying workers and peasants
The COB ended the strike to prevent it turning into a struggle to bring down the government.
10. Wall Street impacted by Trump’s Greenland annexation threat
After several months of seemingly being unaffected by the attacks by US President Trump on the post-war international economic order and the independence of the US Federal Reserve, Wall Street, after surging to record highs, reacted to his determination to annex Greenland when markets fell sharply on Tuesday.
They rose yesterday after Trump withdrew his threat to impose tariffs on Europe from February 1, following a speech at the Davos meeting in which he reasserted his determination to have the US own the territory. No doubt the turbulence in the markets played a part in the tariff backdown. In his rambling speech, Trump said that “Iceland” had cost a lot of money.
On Tuesday, the S&P 500 index fell more than 2 percent, erasing all its gains for 2026. The Dow was down almost 900 points, a fall of 1.8 percent, and the NASDAQ dropped 2.4 percent. It was the worst day for the three major stock indexes since October and recalled the “sell America” movement last April when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs.
All seven of the tech giants suffered a fall of at least 1 percent—Tesla and Nvidia were down 4 percent or more—the first time this has happened since last October. Collectively, they lost $653 billion, the seventh biggest one-day loss they have recorded.
The dollar fell by 0.9 percent against a basket of currencies, continuing its slide of 9 percent for 2025. Gold went well over $4,700 per ounce, a new record, while the yield on longer-term Treasuries rose.
Trump had threatened a tariff of 10 percent against major European countries, rising to 25 percent by June, if they did not agree to his demand that the US take over Greenland. In response, the European Union (EU) suspended the earlier trade deal it reached with the US and threatened to impose tariffs of some €93 billion.
There has also been discussion about the invocation of what has been called the “big bazooka”—the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI)—which provides for sweeping powers to ban US goods and to hit the operations of US companies in the EU.
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The breakdown of the international financial and economic order that the Greenland conflict signifies was highlighted in an address by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
“Stop invoking the ‘rules-based international order’ as though it still functions as advertised,” he said. “Call the system what it is: a period where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.”
While it has not been advanced by any European government, there has been discussion in ruling political and financial circles of using an even bigger weapon than the ACI. It was set off by a note issued on Sunday by George Saravelos, the head of global currency research at Deutsche Bank.
“Europe owns Greenland, it also owns a lot of [US] Treasuries,” he wrote.
“For all its military and economic strength, the US has one key weakness: it relies on others to pay its bills via large external deficits.”
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US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the issue of a European withdrawal from US financial markets as “media hysteria”—a completely “false narrative” without any logic. But if the media hares were set running, it was because of a note issued by a major German bank.
And there are indications of a movement by financial institutions.
The Danish pension fund, AkademikerPension, which started winding down its holdings of US Treasuries last year, said it would completely exit this market at the end of the month because of the credit risks.
“The US is basically not a good credit risk and long-term the US government finances are not sustainable,” the chief investment officer at the fund Anders Schelde told Bloomberg.
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The financial interdependence of the US and Europe has meant that the threat of a European withdrawal from the US Treasury market has been largely dismissed, because it would be the financial equivalent of nuclear mutually assured destruction. Nonetheless, like the nuclear option, it is being discussed and not only in Europe.
In a comment piece published in the Financial Times this week, Rebecca Patterson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed to the European holdings of Treasury debt, noting that in the conflict with Trump, “Europe has more leverage than some might suppose.”
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The conflict over Greenland is not the only source of potential financial market destabilization. A major shift in Japan will have international ramifications. Japan has been marked by ultra-low interest rates which have led to the yen carry trade, in which investors borrow money in Tokyo and use it to secure higher returns in the US.
But the interest rate landscape is shifting. This week, the interest rate on Japanese 40-year bonds hit 4 percent, the first time this has happened since their introduction in 2007. The interest rate on the 10-year bond went over 2 percent, at one point reaching its highest level since 1999.
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In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal, one of the foremost advocates for cuts in government spending—except on the military—warned that Tokyo’s “monetary normalization and its dire fiscal situation rank as one of the more serious threats to global financial stability at the moment,” and that it was “an extreme case of a high-debt-low-growth policy that infects most other Western economies.”
11. Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government tries to join in US plans to plunder Venezuela
There will be no genuine opposition to wars of plunder from a government that is also working to loot Venezuela—whether through sanctions, diplomatic activities, or active complicity with Trump.
12. War abroad, austerity at home: French government presents budget with aid of New Popular Front
The budget presented by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu confirms the crisis of French democracy and the complicity of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front.
13. Anger in Australia’s fire zones as government underfunding and negligence exposed
Another inquiry is not a solution but a smokescreen: a mechanism to channel anger into years of hearings and reports, while the same underlying policies remain untouched.
14. Quebec intensifies assault on worker rights with its Bill 3
Bill 3 will impose stricter state oversight over the province’s trade unions with the aim of smothering working class opposition to the CAQ’s right-wing, class-war agenda.
15. Right-wing Coalition breaks apart in crisis of Australia’s two-party system
With extraordinary rapidity, the Coalition, the opposition in the federal parliament, broke apart today with its leaders publicly hurling mutual recriminations at one another.
The immediate trigger of the rupture was a dispute between the erstwhile Coalition partners, the Liberals and the Nationals, over whether to back anti-democratic legislation introduced to parliament by the Labor government on Tuesday.
The divisions, however, run deeper and the break-up of the Coalition is not a conjunctural development. Instead, it is the sharpest expression of a crisis of the entire parliamentary set-up, under conditions of mounting popular discontent and the collapse of any stable, mass base of the old parties of capitalist rule.
The Coalition has been in place for almost the entire post-World War II period. Together with the Labor Party, it has been one of the two mainstays of the two-party system. Amid a massive social polarization over the past forty years, the broad, middle-class base of the Liberals—the urban component of the Coalition—has collapsed.
That longer-term erosion was expressed in the May 2025 election, when the Liberals suffered their worst result in history, retaining just nine out of 88 metropolitan seats across the country.
Since then, the rump Coalition has only just held together, with Liberal leader Sussan Ley widely viewed as a lame duck. Elements of the Coalition have peeled off to One Nation and other far-right outfits, amid attempts by segments of the ruling class to cultivate a right-wing populist or even fascistic movement to capture discontent and serve as a mechanism for deeper authoritarianism.
Those issues were at play in the conflicts within the Coalition over Labor’s legislation. Labor, acting on behalf of the ruling class, has exploited the December 14 Bondi atrocity to accelerate attempts to ban mass opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and to institute police-state measures.
It recalled parliament a fortnight early at the beginning of this week, in a bid to pass some of the most authoritarian legislation in decades. Both Liberal leader Ley and National head David Littleproud had publicly demanded that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urgently convene parliament to press ahead with the crackdown on civil liberties after Bondi.
But when he did, divisions were exposed. Together, both elements of the Coalition opposed expanded racial vilification offenses. Fraudulently presented by Labor as a bid to combat “hate speech,” the legislation potentially criminalized political speech, including strident denunciations of Israel or any other power.
The opposition of the Coalition had nothing to do with the sweeping implications of such measures for democratic rights. Instead, it was fearful that the broad character of the legislation could capture its own racist dog-whistling and attacks on immigrants, refugees, Indigenous people and other minorities. The Coalition had thus called for more targeted measures, particularly directed against Muslims and opponents of the genocide.
That basic reality has been covered up by the corporate media, which has obfuscated the reasons for the Coalition’s opposition. The fear is that the Coalition’s effective defense of racism exposes the hypocrisy of the official discussion on “hate speech,” and the extent to which genuine xenophobia is being promoted from above.
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The crisis of the two-party set-up presages major social and political struggles, which will pit an increasingly radicalized working class against the moth-eaten parliamentary establishment and the profit system itself. The critical issue is transforming the opposition that exists into an organized, mass movement of the working class fighting for socialism.
16. USPS workers report on initial findings of rank-and-file safety inquiry
The conditions at USPS are, in particular, the product of the Delivering for America program to consolidate operations into a smaller number of massive automated facilities. Parallel restructurings are underway at UPS, Amazon and FedEx. New technology is being deployed not to make jobs easier or safer, but to intensify labor and discipline workers.
Government regulators offer no protection. OSHA does nothing. Even when workers are killed, fines are typically on the order of $15,000 and are quickly appealed or reduced. Management temporarily cleans things up when OSHA inspectors arrive or when a congressperson visits in response to resident complaints. Once the inspection is over, conditions revert immediately to what they were before.
The union bureaucrats at NALC, the APWU and NRLCA are worse than useless. Union officials cultivate friendly relations with management and openly support restructuring. Their primary function is to let management off the hook and block independent action from below by workers.
The only answer is for workers to take matters into our own hands. We fight for workers’ control over safety, because safety is fundamentally incompatible with the interests of the corporate politicians and former private sector executives who run USPS as a business.
17. UPS workers back Minneapolis general strike, oppose Teamsters sabotage of walkout against ICE
Public filings and earnings reports show that UPS reduced its workforce by about 48,000 positions over the course of 2025, equivalent to roughly 10 percent of its 490,000‑person workforce. Most of the cuts were taken from the “operational workforce,” including package drivers and inside sort workers.
Of these, approximately 34,000 were operational jobs and about 14,000 were management positions, many achieved through “voluntary” buyouts that were coerced under the threat of mass layoffs, with 90 percent of participating full‑time drivers forced out by August 31, 2025.
The destruction of jobs is inseparable from a drastic consolidation of UPS’s physical network. In the first nine months of 2025, UPS shut down daily operations at 93 leased and owned facilities and signaled that more buildings are “under review” for closure.
UPS management projects that this restructuring will wring at least $3.5 billion in annual cost savings from the workforce between 2025 and 2027. These “savings” represent the unpaid wages, destroyed livelihoods, and intensified exploitation of the remaining workforce and are contributing to improved UPS profitability.
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Automation and robotics are not an incidental feature of the UPS strategic plan. They are a core mechanism of the offensive against workers, with UPS pouring resources into automated sorting, robotics and AI‑driven routing as part of what one logistics analysis describes as a shift toward more machines, fewer workers and 24/7 throughput.
Around 400 UPS centers are being partially or fully automated, and at the company’s flagship “UPS Velocity” facility in Louisville, Kentucky, robots now outnumber workers 15 to 1, reportedly boosting productivity by up to 300 percent, an obscene ratio that sums up the real content of the so‑called “network of the future.”
The ruthless character of UPS’s restructuring exposes the complicity of the Teamsters leadership, which only months earlier hailed the 2023–2028 national UPS agreement as a “historic” victory while suppressing any serious struggle by the rank and file against the giant multinational corporation.
When UPS began preparing its buyout and layoff program in mid‑2025, the Teamsters bureaucracy’s primary objective was to prevent the 340,000 UPS workers from conducting a nationwide strike. Carefully worded statements were issued by the union that combined phony outrage with assurances that the union would respect management’s “right” to eliminate jobs in corporate and non‑union layers.
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The union’s stance—explicitly endorsing corporate downsizing of “management” and confining its objections to narrow contractual technicalities—flowed directly from its own role as junior partner in enforcing UPS’s cost‑cutting agenda against the workforce.
From the outset of the 2023 contract fight, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the Teamsters leadership under O’Brien—backed by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Biden administration—was engaged in a coordinated operation to impose a pro‑company contract, prevent a strike and prepare conditions for massive job cuts and automation.
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In the WSWS analysis, the central issue is not only the greed of UPS management but the transformation of the union apparatus into instruments of corporate management and the state, hostile to the interests of rank‑and‑file workers and indispensable in enforcing the dictates of finance capital in the logistics sector. This view was confirmed by O’Brien’s support for economic nationalism and his tacit backing of the fascist Donald Trump for US president in 2024. Since then O’Brien has become an outspoken backer of Trump, including his witch-hunting of immigrant workers.
18.London bus workers condemn US aggression against Venezuela, Trump’s domestic repression
The Socialist Equality Party statements were welcomed by workers, who opposed the imperialist banditry of the Trump administration and declared their solidarity with US workers mounting a struggle against the would-be dictator.
19. Online meeting Sunday: The New York nurses’ strike and the fight against the financial oligarchy
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) will host an online meeting in support of the 15,000 striking New York nurses at 3 p.m. EST on Sunday, January 25. Click here to register for the meeting.
The issues nurses are fighting against—inadequate staffing ratios, substandard pay and benefits—are part of a corporate attack on public health. At the federal level, Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is suppressing medical science and attacking vaccinations, leading to the resurgence of previously suppressed or eliminated diseases such as measles and hepatitis.
The nurses’ strike, located in the center of world finance, is part of a broader movement of the working class, whose logic culminates in a national and international movement against oligarchy and dictatorship. On Friday, workers in Minneapolis will conduct a general strike against the occupation of the city by ICE agents, who have already killed one person, Renée Nicole Good.
The World Socialist Web Site welcomes this development and calls for the expansion of such actions to New York City and across America. An upcoming strike by 31,000 West Coast nurses, strike votes by teachers in Los Angeles and academic workers at the University of California, as well as the contract expiring next month for 30,000 oil refinery workers, shows the potential for a broader movement in which the demands in every workplace coalesce into a class movement aimed at the entrenched privileges of the capitalist elite.
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Register now to attend the public meeting, support the striking nurses and organize a fight for workers’ control of society.
20. Donate to the WSWS New Year fund!
Your donation to the World Socialist Web Site goes directly toward daily coverage of critical events, socialist educational content which is translated into multiple languages, and which plays an indispensable role in training a new generation of fighters for socialism.
21. 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.
