Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump and Miller’s “iron law” of imperialist barbarism
In asserting the “iron law” that might makes right, Trump is not inventing a new doctrine but stripping away the tattered remains of the democratic pretexts that once accompanied American aggression. He is not inventing something new, and Trump is building on decades of escalating criminality that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But there is now a qualitative development.
This transformation is rooted in the deepening crisis of American capitalism. The post–World War II framework of international institutions and legal norms served for a time to regulate inter-imperialist tensions and stabilize global capitalism under US leadership. Now, that framework has collapsed. The global dominance of the dollar is under growing threat. US debt has soared to unprecedented levels. Any pretense that American policy is determined by anything but naked imperialist interests is being cast aside.
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Trump is the representative of a criminal oligarchy that has amassed its wealth through fraud, speculation and plunder. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in its first statement on the invasion of Venezuela, “He is the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster vomited up by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.”
What this demonstrates is the delusional character of all reformist nostrums. This is a ruling class carrying out a project of global war and dictatorship.
The same illegality, the same ruthlessness, the same criminality that is expressed in the kidnapping of Maduro is expressed in the assault on democratic rights at home—the mass deportations, the attacks on the press, the purging of the civil service, the deployment of the military against the population. These are two sides of the same war—a war waged by the oligarchy against the working class.
But the “iron law” of imperialist barbarism will be confronted with the “iron law” of the class struggle. Trump and Miller operate as if they can do anything, as if there are no consequences for their actions. This may be true in relation to their factional opponents within the ruling class, who have capitulated to every outrage. But it is not true in relation to the working class. The war on Venezuela is deeply unpopular. Polls show overwhelming opposition among the American population.
2. Censoring Palestine—and all forms of opposition to Israel’s war on the Palestinians
Censoring Palestine is a valuable exposé of how Britain’s political, media, educational and cultural institutions have systematically ignored and denied Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while simultaneously censoring criticism of Israel, branding solidarity with Palestinians as antisemitism and suppressing it.
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As yet, the producers have been unable to secure widespread distribution, with screenings blocked and problems organising events; further confirmation—if any was needed—of the pervasive censorship that surrounds Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
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First and foremost, Censoring Palestine explains that the relentless media focus on the October 7 attacks deliberately pushes out of sight the broader history and context of the Palestinians’ struggle against the Zionist project; the 1948 Nakba and ethnic cleansing of Palestine; Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since the 1967 Arab Israeli war; and its apartheid regime that has “made Israel the South Africa of our time”. That is, history itself is being censored.
The film then examines different forms of censorship across the mainstream media and the very different language used to describe the actions of Israel and the Palestinians.
It cites examples and includes commentary from the mothers of two imprisoned pro-Palestine activists, veteran filmmaker Ken Loach, comedian Alexei Sayle, musician Roger Waters, Labour Briefing editor Graham Bash, political activist and writer Jackie Walker and other activists.
Educational institutions, we are shown, have clamped down on protests, cancelling, disciplining or sacking academics for simply voicing their opposition to Israeli actions against the Palestinians. They have been aided and abetted by well-funded pro-Zionist organizations posing as Jewish community groups opposed to antisemitism, including the Union of Jewish Students, Lawyers for Israel and the Community Security Trust.
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Censoring Palestine adds, importantly, that the war on Gaza has led to a sea change in attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinians, particularly among young people, and that this is viewed as dangerous by the political establishment. Indeed, no other imperialist country has seen more massive and sustained opposition to the Gaza genocide than Britain—an anger shared with billions internationally.
The government’s pro-Israel narrative is being challenged daily on social media, helped by Israeli soldiers posting boastful videos of themselves abusing the Palestinians. People under the age of 50 no longer trust the BBC and the mainstream media, prompting attempts to censor social media, with shadow bans on pro-Palestine voices and censorship at the behest of Israel and its international supporters.
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However, without specifying the class and Britain’s geostrategic interests that lie behind the censorship and erosion of democracy, the question of who is meant to act and what action should be taken is left hanging in the air, with the film in danger of spreading despair rather than inspiring action. These are the questions which most need tackling, especially among an audience likely already very familiar with the material dealt with in the documentary.
3. Nine months since death of Michigan autoworker Ronald Adams
Nine months after the preventable death of 63‑year‑old machine repairman Ronald Adams Sr. at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan, the silence from the company, the United Auto Workers and state remains deafening. Production resumed at Dundee as if nothing happened, while the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) has still not released the results of its probe into the April 7 fatality.
On Tuesday, a spokesman from the state safety agency told the World Socialist Web Site that “the case remains open” nine months afterwards. Management and the UAW bureaucracy have offered no accountability to Adams’ family or his co‑workers.
This cover‑up is inseparable from broader political and economic developments: job cuts, the rapid imposition of automation and AI, and an outright assault on safety regulation by the Trump administration. Together they produce the conditions for industrial slaughter.
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The only way to break the cover‑up is by mobilizing workers themselves to collect testimony, preserve records and publicly demand answers. This is precisely the purpose of the IWA-RFC’s independent inquiry, which held a public hearing in Detroit last summer.
Equally criminal is the role of the UAW bureaucracy. Far from holding management accountable, UAW President Shawn Fain and his Stellantis department aided the company in returning the plant to full production. The UAW sanctioned the bypassing of lockout procedures and cutting corners on basic safety in order to return the plant to production as soon as possible. This is the outcome of the decades-long transformation of the UAW into an instrument of corporate management.
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Defending workers’ lives requires the democratic, independent organization of workers themselves, through rank‑and‑file committees on every shop floor and in every facility. These committees must be empowered to:
- Conduct independent inquiries—inspect lockout/tagout records, document bypassed safeguards, collect witness testimony and preserve photographic and video evidence.
- Abolish labor-management safety committees and organize rank-and-file committees with the power to halt operations until safe conditions are restored.
- Coordinate regionally and internationally to prevent employers from isolating local struggles and to mobilize solidarity across plants and industries.
Such committees are the embryonic organs of a movement that can enforce safety standards and defend jobs. They must link immediate demands—no permanent layoffs, full pay and benefits for displaced workers, shortened workweeks without loss of pay—to the broader struggle for workers’ political independence and socialism.
Workers at Stellantis, the USPS and across industry: do not accept silence or bureaucratic whitewash. Convene meetings, preserve records, form rank‑and‑file committees and connect with the International Workers Alliance of Rank‑and‑File Committees and the World Socialist Web Site.
4. Trump’s January 6 coup: Answers from Socialism AI
This is a report drawn up by Socialism AI on the background and course of the January 6, 2021 coup, which took place five years ago.
[Experimental: Visit this link to access an AI-generated voice reading this AI report aloud.]
5. North Carolina educators in first fight of 2026 against austerity and war
This comes from a report by the Educators Rank-and-File Committee:
The mass action by teachers across North Carolina is welcomed and supported by educators and working people everywhere. This is not just a local fight—it is the first battle of 2026 and part of the rising tide of opposition by the working class against the attack on the right to public education, growing austerity, the witch-hunting of immigrants, dictatorship and war.
Your fight for livable wages and healthcare is the fight of workers everywhere. These are not luxuries or special benefits. They are the basic social rights required to keep public education functioning and allow teachers to live where they work.
North Carolina funnels enormous tax cuts to the wealthy while schools remain underfunded. This is not simply mismanagement or a local problem. This is deliberate class policy imposed by both corporate-controlled parties to further enrich the corporate and financial oligarchy that rules America.
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The current “fiscal cliff” facing public schools across the country resulted from the Biden-Harris administration allowing federal ESSER pandemic funds to lapse with no replacement. The Democratic Party—including its leaders from the local to the federal level—has partnered with the Republicans in decades of defunding, charterization, and austerity. Appealing to Democratic state legislators or voting “lesser evil” will not restore the living standards and schools we need.
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The Trump administration has brought the war on public education to a new level. It is dismantling the Department of Education, slashing budgets and canceling grants. The goal is clear: destroy what public education has achieved and lay the basis for mass privatization and the transformation of schools into centers of religious, militarist and ultra right-wing indoctrination.
This is inseparable from a broader turn toward authoritarianism and imperialist war, including the invasion of Venezuela. While schools are starved, military spending surges. The federal government just allocated $1 trillion for war with bipartisan support. Public funds are redirected away from classrooms and into weapons, surveillance and war preparations.
The social logic is unmistakable: both political parties consider education to be an unbearable deduction of resources that can better be spent on war and enriching the oligarchs. Over the past year, billionaires in the US, consisting of 900 individuals, increased their wealth by a staggering 18 percent, to a record $6.9 trillion this year. Ten individuals alone increased their wealth by $750 billion.
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That is why the fight against underfunded and overcrowded schools, the exploitation of teachers and the cuts to public education must be combined with a fight against Trump, his Democratic Party enablers and the capitalist system they defend.
Young people in North Carolina have already shown the way. Thousands of students and youth have mobilized against ICE raids with powerful walkouts. These are not separate fights. The struggle to defend public education, to stop ICE’s Gestapo tactics and to oppose war and dictatorship are one unified struggle against the capitalist oligarchy.
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Fed up with the collusion of the AFT and NEA bureaucracies, tens of thousands of educators in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona began a series of wildcat strikes in 2018, which united teachers and all school workers and quickly won popular support. But this powerful movement was shut down by the AFT and NEA leaderships that isolated teachers, imposed secret backroom deals and redirected anger into elections and lobbying. Educators were told to return to work and wait for “friendly politicians.” Those politicians were never delivered.
You must confront this reality with clear eyes. The unions and the Democratic Party will attempt to control, contain and betray your struggle. They will urge you to accept scraps and compromises. They will funnel anger into upcoming elections that benefit only the ruling class.
Do not let your power be stolen.
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The Educators Rank-and-File Committee urges North Carolina educators to fight for the following demands:
* Inflation-beating pay increases.
* Full staffing levels (counselors, nurses, special education support).
* Restored benefits with no premium increases.
* Safe schools for all students, regardless of immigration status.
* Billions for public education not corporate tax cuts and war.
Today’s call-out can be a one-day headline—or the beginning of a powerful movement that unites teachers, students and workers against austerity, repression, and war.
6. Ukraine: Zelensky names military spy chief to lead Office of President
The nomination of Budanov—a hardline CIA-trained militarist and supporter of bringing the NATO proxy war to Russian soil—comes at a pivotal time for the Zelensky administration. It is under immense pressure from the US to come to an agreement with Moscow to end the four-year-long war that has killed hundreds of thousands on both sides.
The EU, for its part, strongly opposes the Trump-backed peace plan and has been instrumental in urging Zelensky to “amend” the plan so as to sabotage it entirely and continue the carnage in order to funnel money into its domestic defense industries.
Last Wednesday, Zelensky stated that an agreement to end the war was “90 percent” ready. As the WSWS has explained, the Trump-backed plan is no way a “peace plan,” but rather a temporary agreement between the fascistic Trump government and an oligarchic Putin regime to end the war while maximizing US profits and control in the region at the expense of its EU rivals.
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With a background serving in Ukraine’s special forces during the post-2014 civil war in the Donbass region, Budanov was first named the head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) in 2020 and reportedly moved rapidly to prepare the country for a full-scale war with Russia and “modernize” Ukraine’s defense intelligence in close collaboration with the CIA. The New York Times reported in 2024 that Budanov was one of the members of the elite Unit 2245 of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate trained by the CIA. Budanov is also known to maintain direct ties with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the direct descendants of Ukrainian fascist Stepan Bandera’s World War II-era organization that was responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews and Poles.
Just 39 years old, Budanov has personally overseen countless numbers of adventurist sabotage operations, drone strikes and political assassinations of both Russian military and civilian figures on Russian soil. Such attacks achieved little militarily but have successfully escalated the conflict with Moscow while at the same time making it appear in Western media that Ukraine was somehow “winning” the war against Russia despite a continued loss of Ukrainian territory and soldiers at the front.
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Despite his history of seeking to continually escalate the NATO proxy war, Budanov is reportedly one of the few figures within the Ukrainian government that has maintained communications throughout the war with Moscow. Over the summer, he publicly acknowledged that Ukraine could not realistically recover all of the territory it had lost during the war.
Budanov, who had openly criticized the Zelensky administration’s mobilization drives as a failure, told Ukrainian broadcaster Suspilne last week that Kiev needed to speak with the Kremlin. “A negotiation process is definitely needed and cannot be avoided anyway,” he said.
In addition to his intelligence ties to the CIA, Budanov is also reportedly close with several figures from the Trump administration. These include the United States Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg, and Vice President JD Vance.
Within Ukraine, Budanov is also considered one of Zelensky’s potential political rivals should presidential elections ever take place again in Ukraine. According to a December 2025 poll conducted by the Kiev-based think tank Socis Center, Budanov would finish third in the first round, behind Zelensky and former commander in chief Valery Zaluzhny. The poll also showed both Budanov and Zaluzhny defeating Zelensky in a potential runoff election
By appointing Budanov, Zelensky has drawn himself closer to the country’s Western-backed military-intelligence leadership which has never fully supported Zelensky.
Under the direction of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and with the enthusiastic approval of President Trump, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) approved Monday a radical reduction in the schedule for childhood immunizations.
The number of routinely recommended vaccines, which have saved the lives and health of tens of millions of children in America—and countless more around the world—is being reduced from 17 to 11. Vaccines for influenza, COVID-19, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal disease will no longer be universally recommended. They have been shifted to a less urgent category, “Shared Clinical Decision-making,” in which anti-vaccine doctors and parents will be able to reject such protection for the children in their care, despite the inevitable social consequences as immunization rates fall and these communicable diseases become more widespread.
Even worse than the immediate consequences for children will be the longer-term effects on society as a whole. The downgrading of six vaccines represents a turning point in public health efforts. Under the Trump-Kennedy regime, science is being subordinated to ideological reaction and religious obscurantism. Workers and their children will live lives that are shorter and more vulnerable to disease and disability. Money diverted from public health will go to fatten the bankrolls of the super-rich and to accelerate the build-up of the military-intelligence apparatus.
The signing of a decision memorandum on January 5, 2026 by Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill was not a neutral policy update. It was the culmination of a pre-planned anti-science coup orchestrated by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., beginning with the unprecedented purge of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June 2025. All 17 sitting members—experts in pediatrics, immunology, and infectious disease—were fired and replaced with ideologically aligned figures tasked with providing a scientific veneer for predetermined political outcomes.
In this role, Kennedy has functioned not as an advocate of public health but as its enemy, as a secretary of death and disease—overseeing policies that normalize mass infection, dismantle collective protections, and subordinate the preservation of life to ideological and political imperatives.
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The consequences are immediate and measurable. The United States is experiencing its worst measles resurgence in three decades, even as the 2024–2025 influenza season has become one of the deadliest for children on record, with 288 confirmed pediatric flu deaths. These developments unfold precisely as universal vaccine recommendations are being withdrawn.
At the same time, the country remains mired in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The United States entered its twelfth major wave in late 2025, with daily infections peaking near one million. The current wave continues to generate roughly 2,000 excess deaths per week—losses increasingly obscured through administrative practices that code COVID-related fatalities as pneumonia or secondary cardiovascular and respiratory causes. What is presented politically as “endemicity” is in objective reality the normalization of mass death.
Claims that COVID-19 has become comparable to seasonal influenza are directly contradicted by the evidence. A landmark nationwide cohort study from South Korea—the first large-scale post-vaccine comparison of the two diseases—found that COVID-19 was associated with 76 percent higher odds of death within 30 days and more than a twelve-fold difference in crude mortality compared to influenza. The virus remains uniquely lethal, and repeated reinfections continue to exact a cumulative toll.
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The revised schedule rests on a 34-page assessment drafted between June and December 2025 under the authority of newly installed officials, including Martin Kulldorff at HHS and Tracy Beth Høeg at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Framed as an international comparison, the document selectively models US policy on Denmark while omitting the social foundations that sustain high vaccine uptake in those systems, including universal healthcare and robust public infrastructure. It substitutes advocacy for evidence, relying on selective citation rather than systematic review.
This assault on public health threatens to erase gains won over more than a century of scientific and social struggle. Routine childhood immunization programs alone have prevented more than one million deaths in the United States over the past three decades, eliminating or sharply reducing diseases that once killed or disabled hundreds of thousands of children each year.
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The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the international character of public health with brutal clarity. A virus that emerged in one region of the world spread within weeks to every continent, killing millions and demonstrating that no nation can insulate itself through borders, ideology or denial. Scientific advances—from genomic surveillance to vaccine development—were likewise global in character, dependent on international data-sharing and collective expertise. To dismantle public health institutions in one country is therefore not merely a national crime, but an international one, weakening the global capacity to detect, prevent and respond to future pandemics. In an interconnected world, the destruction of public health anywhere endangers lives everywhere.
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As 2026 begins, the working class confronts a stark reality: the defense of public health can no longer be entrusted to institutions that have been politically subordinated and stripped of scientific independence. The struggle for health has become inseparable from the struggle for democratic control over science itself. The independent political mobilization of the working class is therefore not only a social and moral necessity, but a biological one. Without it, the dismantling of public health will accelerate, scientific progress will be reversed, and the catastrophic losses of the COVID era will be recast as a permanent condition of life under capitalism.
8. Australian pseudo-left covers for Labor’s assault on democratic rights after Bondi attack
The horrific December 14 attack in the Sydney suburb of Bondi, and its aftermath, are major political events. The mass murder of 15 people and the wounding of dozens more, in a targeted antisemitic action, is one of the worst terrorist incidents in Australian history.
As with all such turning points, the Bondi attack has revealed the true character and role of all political tendencies.
With extraordinary rapidity, governments at the state and federal level, led by the Labor Party, have seized on the attack to dramatically escalate a longstanding campaign to shut down opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. In doing so, Labor is setting precedents for authoritarian measures that will be used against broader opposition, to militarism as well as to deteriorating social conditions and an assault on workers’ jobs, wages and conditions.
The offensive has involved the entire establishment media. All of the major outlets are endlessly repeating the lie that the actions of the terrorists, who were apparently motivated by the reactionary communalist ideology of ISIS, were somehow connected to the peaceful, multi-religious and multi-ethnic protest movement against the genocide.
The trade union bureaucracy, tied by a thousand strings to Labor and big business itself, has joined the onslaught on civil liberties, with senior union officials demanding an end to any actions opposing Israel’s ongoing war crimes.
Of particular significance for workers and young people is the response of organisations claiming to be socialist.
Whatever their occasional “left-wing” or even “revolutionary” rhetoric, the whole coterie of pseudo-left organizations have exposed their reactionary character in their response to the Bondi attack.
Under conditions of a sharp shift in the political situation, they are seeking to prevent workers from drawing any political lessons. Above all, they are trying to subordinate anger and opposition to the Labor Party and the fraud that endless protests will shift the establishment to the left.
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In opposition to these forces, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) has elaborated an independent response to the Bondi attack and its aftermath, that articulates the interests of the working class.
The SEP has condemned the reactionary attack itself, and exposed the communalist, Islamist ideology that apparently motivated it. The SEP has exposed the continuous lies, attempting to tar mass opposition to the genocide with the brush of antisemitism and terrorism.
Above all, it has warned that the turn towards authoritarianism is a frontal attack on the working class. The Labor governments are not solely attacking opposition to the genocide. They are seeking to establish a precedent that will be deployed against mass opposition to war, including Australia’s integration into the US-led plans for a catastrophic conflict with China, and to austerity, under conditions of incessant demands from big business for ever deeper cuts to social spending and a “productivity” campaign aimed at driving up the exploitation of workers.
Governments, in Australia and internationally, know that they are sitting atop a social powder keg, which is why they feel compelled to dispense with even the trappings of democratic rule.
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The SEP invites workers, youth and World Socialist Web Site readers to an online meeting this Sunday, January 11 at 2 p.m. AEDT (January 10 at 7 p.m. PST), to examine the political significance of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, which is being exploited to implement a raft of anti-democratic measures that will inevitably be used against the working class. Register now.
9. Trump threatens second strike against Venezuela if interim president does not bow to US demands
The coordinated airstrikes on Caracas and multiple states in Venezuela, the abduction of an elected president on foreign soil, the declaration of a state of emergency and the mobilization of armed forces across the country is a violation of international law and a war crime.
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The unfolding crisis in Venezuela exhibits the same features as previous US regime-change operations reported on and analyzed by the World Socialist Web Site—from Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya to Syria—which invariably combined military aggression with the fomenting of internal civil war.
10. Trump freezes $10 billion in aid to working class families, as deportation raids expand
The Trump administration has announced plans to withhold more than $10 billion in federal aid for low income families in five states governed by Democrats: California, Minnesota, Illinois, Colorado and New York. The sweeping funding freeze, first reported by the New York Post on Monday and confirmed by multiple outlets Tuesday, targets core social assistance programs that support food, housing, childcare and basic income for working class families.
Roughly $7 billion of the funding freeze targets the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, a primary source of assistance for food, housing, home energy and childcare for impoverished and working class families. In some states, TANF also provides job training and limited access to higher education.
An estimated 1 million families received TANF assistance in 2023. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported in October 2025 that only 21 out of every 100 families with children living in poverty nationwide received TANF cash assistance that year, highlighting the already devastated condition of the program before Trump’s latest cuts.
The hollowing out of TANF has been driven by bipartisan policy. When the program was created in 1996 following the Clinton administration’s “welfare reform,” 68 out of every 100 families in poverty received assistance. By 2021, that figure had fallen to 19 out of 100. Had coverage remained at its original level, an additional 2.4 million families would have received support in 2021 alone.
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In addition to TANF, the five targeted states are being stripped of $2.4 billion from the Child Care and Development Fund, which provides assistance to working parents, who need help paying for childcare. Approximately 1.4 million children nationwide depend on federal childcare funding. Another $870 million is being blocked from social services grants that overwhelmingly benefit low income children.
None of the four states outside Minnesota have faced comparable fraud allegations. The political character of the cuts was made explicit when Trump declared on Truth Social Tuesday that California is “more corrupt than Minnesota” and announced a new federal fraud investigation of the state.
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The announcement of the austerity measures comes as approximately 2,000 federal immigration agents are en route to or already operating in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, carrying out mass detention operations. On Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem appeared alongside masked and heavily armed immigration agents, accompanied by a television camera crew, while federal officers carried out home raids as part of the expanding deportation campaign.
Trump and the Republican Party are justifying the funding freeze by invoking allegations of fraud, some real and many fabricated. In Minnesota, allegations that were largely investigated and prosecuted under the Biden administration have already been used as a pretext to suspend $185 million in federal funding. These cuts will impact at least 30,000 children, none of whom had any connection to the alleged misconduct.
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Succumbing to Republican lies, on Monday, Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz suspended his re-election campaign, citing the fraud investigations now being exploited by the Trump administration. His capitulation has provided political cover for a campaign of racial scapegoating that portrays Somali immigrants in Minnesota as participants in a vast criminal conspiracy orchestrated in collaboration with Democratic officials.
Appearing on Fox News with Jesse Watters, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem advanced this narrative without evidence. “He told them to just do their job and follow orders and overlooked all these criminals,” Noem claimed, accusing Walz of deliberately ignoring internal complaints. The remarks formed part of a coordinated effort to legitimize the funding freeze and the simultaneous expansion of deportation raids.
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The Democratic Party, which has funded wars abroad, expanded deportation infrastructure and presided over decades of welfare cutbacks, will not mobilize mass opposition to these policies. It serves the same corporate and financial interests as the Republicans.
The only social force capable of halting the deportation raids and reversing the assault on living standards is the working class.
11. Australia’s rising Aboriginal deaths in custody: Law-and-order and the assault on the working class
Australia has recorded the highest number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody in more than four decades, alongside a rise in fatalities among non-Indigenous prisoners. These figures reveal not an isolated crisis affecting one community alone, but a deepening social crisis driven by government austerity programs, the expansion of punitive “law-and-order” measures and the systematic criminalization of poverty across the entire working class.
Over the past year, the total prison population grew by 6 percent, a rate well above recent annual increases, continuing a decades-long trajectory of mass incarceration by capitalist governments that disproportionately targets the most vulnerable sections of society.
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For workers and youth experiencing severe disadvantage, contact with police is routine rather than exceptional. Lacking stable housing, access to legal representation or support services, they are far more likely to be refused bail and held in custody, regardless of the seriousness of alleged offences. Remand prisoners are held in overcrowded and understaffed facilities, ill-equipped to meet acute health or mental health needs.
Thirty-four percent of recent deaths in custody occurred among people who had not been convicted of any crime.
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At every point in the criminal justice system, Aboriginal people are incarcerated at vastly disproportionate rates. Adults are imprisoned at around 12 times the rate of non-Indigenous people. In several jurisdictions, close to half of all Aboriginal prisoners are unsentenced, with the proportion among women even higher.
Indigenous young people constitute the majority of those held on remand in youth detention, a practice that disrupts education, fractures families and entrenches future incarceration. In 2023–24, over 83 percent of Indigenous children aged 10 and over in detention were unsentenced.
Children are imprisoned not because they pose a danger, but because youth services, education and mental health supports have been systematically dismantled. In New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, the minimum age of criminal responsibility remains just 10, meaning children are prosecuted under criminal law in violation of international human rights standards.
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The rising incarceration of Aboriginal people is driven by poverty, over-policing, racism and discriminatory bail regimes. Indigenous communities are the most oppressed layers of the working class and therefore bear the harshest impact of deprivation and austerity. Increasingly, however, the social conditions of non-Indigenous prisoners mirror this same poverty and marginalization, exposing the class character of the crisis.
Prisons now function as warehouses for the most disadvantaged and vulnerable sections of society, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.
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The rising death toll in custody is not accidental, but the predictable outcome of government policies that prioritize punishment over social provision. Ending these preventable deaths requires more than procedural reforms, it demands the unified mobilization of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal workers and youth to overturn the capitalist system that produces poverty, repression and state violence.
12. After Trump’s attack on Venezuela: Germany’s Left Party supports European imperialism
The Left Party’s reaction to the illegal US attack on Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro once again exposes it as an openly pro-imperialist force. Although the party formally condemned Trump’s actions as “state terrorism” and a violation of international law, this criticism is not aimed at mobilizing the international working class against US imperialism on the basis of an independent socialist perspective. Rather, it expresses the role of the Left Party as an aggressive apologist for German and European imperialism.
Like the Greens and large sections of the bourgeois media, the Left Party criticizes Chancellor Merz not from the left, but from the right. Its reproach is not that Berlin supports Trump’s illegal actions and pursues imperialist interests of its own, but that the federal government is not positioning itself decisively enough against Washington. At a press conference on Monday, party chair Jan van Aken demanded “a very clear and strong reaction from Europe.” Anyone who now “reacts cowardly” and “ducks away” encourages the United States to continue in the same way. After Venezuela, “Greenland could come, after Greenland the Panama Canal.”
13. New York City’s emergency medical services begin new year in crisis
New York City’s emergency medical services (EMS) will begin the new year in a state of crisis. As the need for ambulance services increases, the number of EMS workers is declining, and response times, which can mean the difference between life and death, are climbing.
Moreover, EMS workers are beginning their fourth year without a contract and struggling with starvation wages. Posturing over this unfolding disaster, local politicians and union officials are paying lip service to reforms that are no more than palliatives even if they were implemented. The situation will not be improved until workers take matters into their own hands.
Entry-level emergency medical technicians (EMTs) receive roughly $18 per hour, which is little more than New York’s minimum wage, and less than the wage of food delivery workers. A living wage in Manhattan for one adult with no children is $32.85 per hour, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Living Wage Calculator. Even after five years of service, an EMT’s annual salary tops off at $59,800, which is still below a living wage in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
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While staffing has declined, demand for ambulance services has risen to 1.6 million EMS calls annually. This number represents an increase of 227,000 calls since 2021.
EMS response times for life-threatening emergencies, a key indicator of outcomes, have risen every year since the pandemic began. They approached 12 minutes in 2025, up 2 minutes from their 2021 average of 9 minutes and 34 seconds. These long response times negatively affect an untold number of patients.
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Since 2020, 10 of the city’s EMS workers have died of COVID-19, and 12 have committed suicide.
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The current negotiations between EMS and New York are taking place amid an ongoing crisis that was triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and is growing due to the attacks on healthcare led by Trump.
At a City Council hearing in November, Councilman Justin Brannan sponsored legislation aimed at splitting New York’s EMS from the fire department (FDNY). The proposal is ostensibly intended to shore up EMS and improve patient care. Brannan and union officials linked EMS worker-retention problems and increasing response times to the lopsided FDNY budget, only 20 percent of which is allocated to EMS, even though 70 percent of emergency calls are medical.
Since the merger of EMS and FDNY in 1996 under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, EMS calls have doubled, while staffing has remained the same, Anthony Almojera, vice president of the Uniformed EMS Officers Union Local 3621, said at the hearing. The lack of EMTs and paramedics has contributed to longer response times. As the staffing crisis in EMS has deepened, the media have reported many patient deaths that might not have occurred if these medical emergencies had been addressed more quickly.
Brannan and Almojera blamed the low numbers of EMTs and paramedics on the fact that many of the FDNY’s EMS personnel go on to become firefighters. After five years, a top-paid EMT receives an annual salary that is only half of what a firefighter makes.
When asked by journalists about the proposal to separate the two agencies, new mayor Zohran Mamdani was noncommittal and said that he would have to be briefed further on the issue. But he has appointed retired EMS Chief Lillian Bonsignore, a 31-year veteran of the FDNY who opposes the separation, as fire commissioner.
By retaining Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, appointing former acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and making a pathetic pilgrimage to the White House, Mamdani has shown that his priority is to reassure and serve the interests of Wall Street.
*****
EMS workers must form rank-and-file committees to wage their struggle outside the control of the treacherous union. They must appeal for support from other healthcare workers, who are facing similar attacks, and warn the public of the consequences of the accelerating collapse of the EMS system. The fight to save New York’s EMS ultimately requires a fight against for-profit medicine and for workers’ control over healthcare.
14. New Zealand Deputy PM visits Argentina’s fascist President Milei
In a provocative post on X on January 1, New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour boasted about an “inspiring” end-of-year meeting he had with Argentina’s fascist President Javier Milei and Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno.
The post includes a photo of Seymour at a table with Milei, presumably at the presidential building in the capital Buenos Aires. Seymour offers no explanation about the status of the meeting—or how his visit was funded. Seymour’s post appears only on his personal X account. He is not, however, a “private” individual but leader of the “libertarian” ACT Party in NZ’s National Party-led coalition government, in which he holds numerous ministerial posts.
Milei in turn reposted a tweet by Augustin Echebarne, Director General of the far-right think tank Fundación Libertad y Progreso, declaring: “President @jMilei received the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand yesterday and reinforced their alignment on liberal reforms. David Seymour is enthusiastic about the Argentine government’s reforms!!” (Translated).
Seymour waxes lyrical about the supposed achievements of the Milei government, which he falsely claims has “halved its number of departments, cut spending by 30 percent, is posting the first fiscal surpluses in decades, seeing poverty down and economic growth up.” He was personally “struck by Milei’s deep economic knowledge and his humility considering his enormous achievements. Legend.”
Seymour’s claims about the “successes” of Milei’s brutal austerity program are a litany of lies. In October, Milei’s most powerful international ally, US President Trump threw him a lifeline in the form of an extension of a $US40 billion bailout package and $20 billion currency swap to prop up Argentina’s ailing peso. Trump painted a dire picture of the country’s stagnating economy, telling reporters: “Argentina is fighting for its life … They are dying.”
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Milei’s “chainsaw” program of privatization, layoffs and deregulation has imposed catastrophic social consequences on working people, while strengthening the hand of domestic and international capital. Real incomes and living standards have collapsed, poverty has surged to historically high levels and millions face hunger, homelessness and the loss of basic services.
Devaluations and budget cuts have sharply eroded wages—public-sector pay fell, minimum and pension incomes lost purchasing power, and unemployment and job losses skyrocketed. Cuts and privatization have slashed budgets for health, education and social programs.
Austerity measures, aimed at funneling more money to the capitalist elite, pushed the poverty rate from 42 to 53 percent by mid-2024. Official figures show a decline to 32 percent by mid-2025, primarily due to reduced inflation—this represents a still-extreme level of deprivation, including children going hungry, pensioners denied medicines and millions pushed into insecurity.
*****
Seymour’s glorification of Milei’s shock therapy and police state regime must be taken as a sharp warning by the New Zealand and international working class. The NZ deputy prime minister’s embrace of the fascist Argentinian president is further evidence of the sharp rightward lurch of political establishments in every country, amid escalating popular resistance to capitalist breakdown and the drive to war.
*****
Global capitalism, including in New Zealand as well as Argentina, has reached a dead end and offers nothing but disaster. The only force capable of resisting austerity, repression and imperialism is an independent working class movement armed with an international socialist perspective, the program of the Socialist Equality Group (NZ) and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
A broad movement is developing across Germany in the struggle against the reintroduction of conscription. On December 5, 55,000 school students went on strike in more than 90 cities. Strike committees are forming at numerous schools, and preparations are already underway for the next strike on March 5.
This movement is developing at a time when the situation in Germany resembles a powder keg. The policies of war and militarism are deeply hated. The Merz government—a coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD)—has historically disastrous approval ratings. Rearmament is accompanied by massive social devastation: thousands of jobs are being destroyed week after week, and every social sphere is being slashed in order to finance war.
In this situation, a serious school strike could be the spark that ignites this powder keg. It could develop from a strike in schools into a broad movement throughout the working class, not only against conscription, but against militarism itself.
However, the self-appointed protest leaders are doing everything possible to prevent this and to lead school students into a dead end. While tens of thousands are taking part in the movement because they want to wage a genuine struggle, the organizational structures are dominated by pseudo-left and Stalinist groups such as the “Socialist German Workers Youth” (SDAJ), which use their present dominance to suppress political discussion and isolate the movement.
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With their support for the horrific genocide in Gaza, the ruling elites have long since demonstrated that they are not concerned with “peace” or “human rights.” As in the first two world wars, they are rearming to bolster the profit interests of the corporations and banks internationally. Capitalism is once again leading to barbarism and war.
*****
Millions of workers face wage cuts and the destruction of their jobs, through which Germany is to be made capable of waging war and trade war. They make up the vast majority of the population and bear the full burden of the policy of war. But they also have the power to stop militarism, because they keep the entire country running. If a mass movement of workers expropriated the major banks and corporations and placed them under democratic control, war and capitalism could be overcome.
Such a movement can only be international. Instead of adapting ourselves to the warmongers, who want once again to pit German students and workers against those in other countries, we must counter rising nationalism with international unity in the struggle against war and capitalism. War can only be prevented by an international movement from below. The basic precondition for such an international movement is the struggle against the warmongers in one’s own country.
16. UK Labour government supports US abduction of Maduro, while pledging to defend Greenland
Britain’s Labour government has continued its tacit support for the US invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, even as it comes into conflict with the White House over Greenland.
On January 3—after confirming to the media that the UK had not been involved—Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to condemn the military action carried out hours earlier against the leader of a sovereign state.
Starmer was interviewed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg who said of the US operation: “that surely flies in the face of international law?” The Labour leader dodged the question, insisting he was not sufficiently versed in the facts while squirming, “I’ve been a lifelong advocate of international law”. Starmer was a human rights barrister and authored legal opinions arguing that the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain was “not lawful” as it lacked a clear UN Security Council resolution.
Later Saturday evening, in words that could have been drafted by the White House, Starmer declared,“The UK has long supported a transition of power in Venezuela. We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime.” The only actual mention of Washington was to state that the UK would “discuss the evolving situation with US counterparts in the days ahead as we seek a safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate government”.
*****
Labour’s response to such flagrantly illegal imperialist aggression was perhaps the most unabashed of any of the European powers, whose governments overwhelmingly welcomed Maduro’s abduction, while hypocritically prattling about the sanctity of international law.
Starmer’s subservience continues his efforts since coming to office 18 months ago—following Britain’s economically and geostrategically disastrous withdrawal from the European Union—to cement Britain’s relationship with the US as its main junior partner and secure favorable trading relations. He has repeatedly fawned over Trump, including by hosting him for a historic second state visit, and has marched side by side with the President in supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
*****
Trump’s actions in Venezuela and comments since have emphasized the fragility of British imperialism’s strategy, however. As supportive as Starmer has been of Trump’s crimes, the UK has been excluded from the spoils and is increasingly in the firing line of a White House which views Europe as an enemy and only draws a distinction with Britain as far as it can be wielded like a club against the continent.
*****
By Monday, Trump’s predatory statements were such that Starmer himself was forced to issue a rare, if indirect, rebuke. After repeated intimations from the White House about seizing Greenland, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she would “strongly urge the US to stop the threats against a historically close ally. Starmer commented, “I stand with her. She’s right about the future of Greenland.”
On Tuesday, both joined the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain in signing a statement which reaffirms Greenland’s membership of NATO via Denmark, and therefore protection by its collective defense (Article 5). “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” they wrote, adding, “These are universal principles, and we will not stop defending them.”
Within a few hours, the UK’s premier foreign policy think tank Chatham House published the article, “US intentions towards Greenland threaten NATO’s future,” which argued, “European countries need to think seriously about what NATO without the US would look like, and accelerate investments in those capabilities where the US remains strongest…
“They will now also need to seriously consider what kind of an adversary the US might be, especially in the event that it attacks Greenland. Much of this should and will be done quietly or privately. But states can no longer afford to ignore this possibility.”
17. 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.
