Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Teachers, supporters speak out from San Francisco picket lines
District officials claim they face a $100 million budget deficit after slashing 500 positions last year. If the Democrats who control San Francisco, the governor’s office and the state legislature are demanding continued austerity it is due to a manufactured crisis of their own making. California is the home to Silicon Valley and 214 billionaires, the largest number of any state in the US.
School funding has long been undermined by decades of bipartisan corporate tax cuts and expansion of for-profit charter schools. This is being worsened by Trump’s federal spending cuts and existential threat to public education.
The United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), closely tied to the Democratic Party, has limited its demands to a paltry and inadequate 9 percent raise over two years for teachers and 14 percent for paraprofessionals. While the union is calling for “fully funded” healthcare, the district has proposed covering only 75 percent. Teachers report paying as much as $2,000 a month in co-pays for family coverage.
The strike is part of a growing wave of struggles across California, including the strike by 35,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers. Last week, 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) voted to authorize strike action, while teachers in San Diego have called a one-day strike for February 26. At least 18 other districts across California remain without contracts, as school officials continue to stonewall negotiations, primarily over wages.
Despite adopting the entirely hypocritical slogan “We Can’t Wait,” the California Teachers Association—affiliated with both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—has actively sabotaged coordinated action across the state. Even now, with an overwhelming strike authorization in Los Angeles, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) refuses to set a strike date.
This underscores the need for San Francisco educators to build a rank-and-file committee, independent of the UESF apparatus, to oppose any sellout of their struggle and expand the strike through the state.
Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to striking teachers and their supporters about the issues in the struggle.
Connor, a teacher for 23 years, said: “We’re striking for better working conditions for special ed teachers and students. We’re underfunded, so that’s probably number one. Number two is wages. The district’s offered us 2 percent, which isn’t even cost of living.”
“Third is healthcare,” he said. He explained the prohibitive cost burden of healthcare falls on teachers with dependents, which pits them against those without dependents. “If you’re a single person with no kids, your healthcare is about $150 a month. If you have a dependent it goes up to about $1,500-$2,000. It’s crazy.
“It’s untenable for teachers with kids. It’s the oldest play in the playbook, right? Having workers fight each other rather than coming together, which is what you see today at this strike.”
He referenced the strike authorization votes in Los Angeles and San Diego. “I think it’s sending a message to our governor that he’s going to have to find the money otherwise there will be strikes all up and down the state. There’s money, we know that. They have it, they’re just spending it on other things.”
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Kelly is a paraprofessional in a special education classroom:
“Our classrooms are overloaded. We need a cap size on the classrooms. So that gets me out here today as well as supporting all my teachers and students and children, and everybody who works.
“We’re already chronically underfunded. It is very frustrating that we’re in a wealthy city and I know a lot of our money comes from the state, some federal and some city, but we’re funding billion-dollar Super Bowl parties, and ballrooms, all kinds of stuff. Let’s put some money into the kids. Let’s figure out why the schools are underfunded. It doesn’t make sense when there’s so much wealth and there’s so much inequality.
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Alicia works as an usher with Cow Palace and at the Chase Center at her other two jobs. “Last night I went from being on a picket line from eight in the morning and turned around to go to my next job until nine at night.”
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Scarlet is a sophomore in high school who came to the rally with her brother. “My teachers have been there for me my whole life and I don’t think it’s fair that the district has all this money and they’re not using it for the people that really matter, which are our teachers.
“My classmates are on the side of the teachers. We know they care for us so we are showing our support back. A lot of the things that the district has been putting out, like what [School Superintendent] Maria Su has been saying online, does not add up.”
Scarlet also spoke about the student walkouts against ICE. “The people in power, what they are valuing is obviously not in line with what the people in this country are valuing. It’s important for these walkouts to be happening because it reminds the youth that they have power. We have voices and we have a say in this.
“Just because you can’t vote doesn’t mean that you can’t speak up. Young people should fight for the things you believe in. The youth have always been the radical people. They’re supposed to be the ones that are standing up for things that no one else is. If we don’t do it, then who’s going to?”
2. Trump and Netanyahu hold Iran war conclave
US President Donald Trump held a war council at the White House Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finalize plans for a massive military assault on Iran.
3. Pentagon weapons test forces closure of El Paso Airport
The seven-hour shutdown was ordered by the FAA out of concern that US military anti-drone weapons might hit commercial air traffic.
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The FAA notice to airlines and air traffic controllers in El Paso caused extreme concern among pilots, controllers and others involved in air travel. It classified the airspace around El Paso as “national defense airspace” and warned that “pilots who do not adhere [to the order] … may be intercepted, detained and interviewed by law enforcement/security personnel.”
It went on to threaten “the United States government may use deadly force against the airborne aircraft, if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat.”
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The incident takes place amidst the militarization of virtually the entire US-Mexico border, and repeated threats by President Trump that he will order airstrikes and even a ground invasion of northern Mexico on the pretext of suppressing drug cartel activity.
The claim that the El Paso shutdown was linked to cartel drone activity is preposterous on its face. According to testimony by federal officials before Congress, drones are present everywhere along the US-Mexico border, with at least a thousand incursions a month. A Pentagon spokesperson refused to discuss whether the testing of anti-drone weapons had precipitated the shutdown.
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Remarkably, given the apparent use of laser weapons that the FAA feared could affect air traffic, there was no effort to contact the Mexican government or to extend that shutdown from El Paso to Juarez, Mexico, its sister city just across the Rio Grande. The result is that Mexican airliners were landing in Juarez even as the FAA was declaring it too dangerous to fly in the area just to its north.
While the El Paso shutdown has been lifted, the 10-day shutdown remains in effect for a stretch of the US-Mexico border west of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, beginning about 20 miles west of El Paso. It is unclear what military activities may be taking place in this area.
The U.S. Northern Command, which controls all military operations within the continental United States, has created a counter-cartel task force, while the Trump administration has allocated $1.5 billion in counter-drone contracts for Customs and Border Protection.
Last June, the Pentagon was put in charge of land along the lower 250 miles of the Rio Grande, which had been run by the State Department and its International Boundary and Water Commission. This was designated National Defense Area 3 (NDA), under Joint Base San Antonio, an Air Force unit. Last Friday, the Air Force announced that it had added nearly 200 miles of the middle Rio Grande to its jurisdiction.
Other NDAs have been set up in California, Arizona and New Mexico. This serves two purposes. It aids the persecution of immigrants. People crossing the border through NDAs can be arrested on federal trespassing charges, a criminal rather than a civil offense, making them subject to far more stringent detention and penalties.
And NDAs give the Pentagon room to carry out its military build-up along the border without public scrutiny, secrecy that would be of considerable military advantage in the event Trump goes forward with his imperialist plans for war in northern Mexico.
A resident doctor and supporter of NHS FightBack appealed for a unified struggle against dangerous workloads, real-terms pay cuts, and the absence of tens of thousands of specialty training post.
5. The Mandelson-Epstein crisis and the socialist struggle against the Starmer government
The impact of the Epstein crisis on Britain’s Labour government has reached the point where the survival of Prime Minister Keir Starmer is threatened.
Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador in December 2024, fully aware of his intimate connections with the pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The extent of Mandelson’s relations with Epstein were shown by the latest batch of US Department of Justice releases to have included extensive lobbying on his behalf and leaking state secrets to him.
Known as the “Prince of Darkness”, Mandelson embodied New Labour’s connections with the financial oligarchy established under Tony Blair—epitomized in his declaration of being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”.
His appointment as US ambassador was seen by Starmer and his allies as epitomizing the triumph of Labour’s Blairite orthodoxy, following the crushing defeat of the Corbynites. His political and business record—especially his intimate connections with Epstein—were also intended to reassure the incoming Trump administration that the Labour government was a trustworthy ally, economically and militarily, wholly embedded in the same criminal oligarchy.
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Starmer has not faced a leadership challenge to this point, despite plunging popular support, because the entirety of his deeply corrupt government is committed to serving the interests of the global financial oligarchy.
None of the MPs within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) who the media suggested would deliver the coup de grâce to Starmer were prepared to do so at the risk of rocking the bond markets and the City of London, and the international relations of British imperialism. The insistence in the highest echelons of the ruling class which Labour serves was that political stability be maintained to ensure the continued imposition of austerity through a war on the working class, and to preserve British imperialism’s ability to project its global interests under conditions of escalating trade and imperialist war.
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None of this guarantees Starmer’s long-term survival. But it shows how the bourgeoisie is working to ensure that any replacement for Starmer continues and deepens the Labour government’s agenda of austerity and trade and military war in alliance with Washington. If this fails, then Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is being prepared to head an alternative right-wing government—likely in alliance with the Conservatives.
Responsibility for the ruling class’s ability to make such preparations must be laid squarely at the door of Labour’s Corbynite left and the trade union bureaucracy, which have functioned as the key mechanisms for preventing the working class intervening amid a deepening crisis of British and world imperialism.
Mandelson’s political fate should have been sealed in 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour leader because of an outpouring of opposition to the Blairites and their criminal political record—above all, the illegal war against Iraq.
Instead of honoring his mandate, Corbyn capitulated all along the line to the Blairites—including Mandelson, who made no secret of his own efforts to get rid of Corbyn—in the name of preserving Labour’s “broad church”. Starmer did not replace Corbyn through the genius of McSweeney, but the cowardice of Corbyn, who betrayed a huge popular movement to the point of his own suspension from the parliamentary party in 2020, and expulsion in 2024.
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Corbyn’s election in 2015 was hailed as an opportunity to transform Labour into a means of the working class defending itself against big business and opposing war by returning to the party’s past reformist program. This chorus was led by Britain’s pseudo-left tendencies, the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and forerunner for today’s Revolutionary Communist Party.
Instead, Corbyn presided over a disastrous rout culminating in Starmer coming to power on the lowest share of the popular vote in British history, with millions of workers refusing to vote Labour above all due to Starmer’s support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
Yet once again, a chorus went up that this could be answered by Corbyn leading a new left reformist party, together with the only other dissident—Labour MP Sultana—and a handful of formerly Labour and Liberal Democrat independents allied to Corbyn and elected due to their opposition to the Gaza genocide.
The result, Your Party, has since collapsed into factional infighting, with Corbyn occupying a position firmly on its right-wing and witch-hunting anyone calling in the remotest terms for a socialist struggle against Starmer’s government.
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To formulate a response to Starmer’s government means understanding the objective causes leading to the creation of such a monstrosity—and in this way to understand the type of party that must be built to replace Labour as the new party of the working class.
Ahead of the last general election, the Socialist Equality Party rejected the lie of a “lesser evil” vote for Labour advocated by all the pseudo-left groups. We explained that Labour has always functioned as a political defender of British imperialism, one half of the two-party parliamentary mechanism of rule in the UK. Its role was either to divert opposition to the Conservative Party as the naked party of business into safe channels or, as it did in 1997 under Blair, to replace an exhausted Tory government and continue its essential agenda.
We insisted that that the right-wing evolution of the Labour Party could not be answered by efforts to build a new reformist party. Its junking of its old reformist policies and transformation into a Thatcherite advocate of free market capitalism was rooted in fundamental transformations within world capitalism.
Globalization—the development of a worldwide system of production involving huge transnational corporations and their integration with globally mobile flows of financial capital—has rendered impossible measures to implement social concessions through the regulatory apparatus of the nation state.
6. The Artamonov Business (1925): Maxim Gorky and the Russian Revolution
Gorky’s novel, chronicling the vast social changes and processes that led to the 1917 October Revolution, deserves the widest possible rediscovery and recognition today, a century after being published.
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The story follows a family of peasants, the Artamonovs, newly liberated by the 1861 abolition of serfdom, and traces their rapid transformation into wealthy owners of a textile factory. Ending with the business’ takeover by revolutionary workers in 1917, the novel moves through the whole half-century leading up to the October insurrection, a turbulent period of vast social changes and political upheavals.
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Gorky, born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in 1868, grew up in a working-class family at the dawn of Russia’s industrialization. His childhood was a hard one. At seven, he was raised and beaten regularly by his tyrannical grandfather. Orphaned at nine, he went to work as a child laborer and traveled the breadth of Russia, finding jobs as a shoemaker’s apprentice, a dishwasher on a Volga steamboat, a baker’s assistant, a railway worker in Georgia, and dozens of others. At 19, he shot himself in the chest but miraculously survived.
Adopting the pen-name Gorky (meaning “bitter”), his first short stories were published in various magazines and papers throughout the 1890s and brought him instant fame. Stories such as “Chelkash” and “Makar Chudra” stood out for their portrayals of the urban poor: tramps, casual laborers, Gypsies, wandering fishermen, outcasts of all kinds, whom Gorky elevated into heroic figures taking arms against a cruel system. His proletarian origins helped him to introduce a “bitter” new element into Russian literature, while his most celebrated contemporaries, Tolstoy and Chekhov, largely depicted members of the upper classes and rural peasantry.
7. “Return Hubs”: EU organises deportation camps outside Europe
The European Union has again announced the tightening of migration and asylum policy. The aim is to further expand “Fortress Europe” and significantly accelerate deportations.
8. Australia: Queensland LNP government matches Labor by banning “prescribed phrases”
The Queensland bill is similar to the “hate speech” and “prohibited groups” laws imposed in recent months by the federal and state Labor governments.
US President Donald Trump openly threatened this week to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, linking Windsor, Ontario to Detroit, Michigan. Built at a cost of Canadian $6 billion, the bridge is set to be the largest border crossing between Canada and the United States by trade volume.
Trump’s threat is part of a widening campaign of economic coercion directed against Ottawa.
In a Monday night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump declared, “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve. We will start negotiations, IMMEDIATELY. With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset. The revenues generated because of the US Market will be astronomical.”
The threat was reinforced Tuesday by the White House. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that “the fact that Canada will control what crosses the Gordie Howe bridge, and owns the land on both sides, is unacceptable to the president,” adding that it was also “unacceptable that more of this bridge isn’t being built with more American-made materials.”
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Ontario Premier Doug Ford likewise dismissed the threat, insisting the bridge would open because it was “in the best interest of the American economy.” Ford noted that Trump himself fast-tracked elements of the project during his first term, before abruptly reversing course.
Trump’s threat constitutes a naked act of economic blackmail. Since returning to the White House, Trump has repeatedly vowed to use economic force to crash the Canadian economy and turn the country into America’s 51st state. He has also taken steps to realize his threats by imposing tariffs on key sectors of the economy including steel, aluminum, lumber and automobiles.
Trump has laid out his quest to secure unchallenged US hegemony over the Western hemisphere in the so-called “Donroe Doctrine.” It declares Washington’s right to seize strategic assets, dictate government policy, and even topple governments from Greenland to the southern tip of Latin America. His deadly seriousness in pursuing this agenda was shown with the invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolas Maduro in early January.
For Trump, dominance of the Western hemisphere, including Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, is seen as an essential preparatory step for world war against the US’s main rivals, China, Russia and the European powers. The financial oligarchy for which Trump speaks increasingly views this as the only way out of American imperialism’s mounting crisis as it seeks to offset its weakening economic position through the deployment of ever more aggressive imperialist violence.
Trump’s sudden outburst over the Gordie Howe Bridge also underscores the extent to which his administration is a tool of the handful of multi-billionaire financial oligarchs that dominate social and economic life in the US. According to the New York Times, billionaire trucking magnate Matthew Moroun met Monday with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in Washington. Moroun’s family owns the privately controlled Ambassador Bridge, which has connected Ontario to Michigan since 1929 and carries a quarter of the annual merchandise trade between the US and Canada.
Shortly after that meeting, Lutnick reportedly spoke with Trump by phone. Hours later, Trump issued his Truth Social post threatening to block the opening of the competing public bridge, a move that would protect the Moroun family’s revenues.
For decades, the Morouns have mounted a legal and political campaign against the construction of a second crossing outside their control. They have filed lawsuits up to the Supreme Court of Canada and lobbied aggressively in both countries. Trump’s action marks the direct government intervention to advance the interests of a billionaire family defending its private monopoly over a strategic international chokepoint.
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A review of the background of the Gordie Howe Bridge further exposes the lawless character of Trump’s threat. Major construction was completed in late 2025 and the project now faces only final administrative steps before opening. Trump’s assertion that the United States “owns nothing” is false, as is his claim that Canada exercises unilateral control.
The bridge spans the Detroit River between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan. It forms a fourth transit crossing in the busiest trade corridor between the two countries, alongside the Windsor–Detroit Tunnel, the privately owned Ambassador Bridge and the Michigan Central Railway Tunnel. Construction proceeded under the Canada–Michigan Crossing Agreement, signed in 2012, which guarantees joint binational ownership even though Canada assumed the upfront construction costs.
Canada financed the project on the basis that toll revenues would repay the investment over time. Ownership and oversight are shared with the state of Michigan through an International Authority composed of equal Canadian and Michigan representation. Day-to-day operations will be handled by the Windsor–Detroit Bridge Authority, a Canadian Crown corporation operating within the binational framework.
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Within Trump’s trade war against Canada, the Gordie Howe Bridge represents a particularly potent pressure point. The Windsor–Detroit corridor functions as the central artery of North American auto production, with components crossing the border multiple times during the manufacturing process. Any disruption would carry immediate consequences for supply chains, employment and investment decisions on both sides of the border.
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Trump’s criticism notwithstanding, significant business interests still favor the bridge being opened. Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer emphasized that the bridge was built with “union labor on both sides” and described it as “a really important part of our economy.” Her remarks echoed those of Canadian officials and business leaders who stress its importance for trade.
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Opposing Trump’s threats requires an independent political mobilization of the working class on both sides of the border.
The way forward lies in uniting Canadian workers with the developing movement of workers and youth against Trump in the United States. This requires the construction of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and communities, independent of the union apparatus, to organize a cross-border struggle against job destruction, trade war and militarism. Defending workers’ interests demands an internationalist and socialist program aimed at ending the capitalist system that produces trade war, dictatorship and imperialist barbarism, and placing production and infrastructure under democratic workers’ control in the interests of society as a whole.
9. In advance of White House meeting, Brazil's Lula sanctions US abduction of Maduro
In pursuit of US tariff relief, Lula has effectively legitimized Washington’s invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro.
The New York Healthcare Workers Rank-and-File Committee hosted a well-attended meeting Tuesday evening, bringing together striking nurses in New York with other hospital workers in New York, strikers in California and other sections of workers.
The meeting was held a day after the New York State Nurses Association announced sellout tentative agreements with Montefiore and Mount Sinai and moved to shut down the strike at the remaining hospital system, NewYork Presbyterian. Union bureaucrats, including NYSNA President Nancy Hagans and Executive Director Pat Kane, intervened directly to reach a tentative agreement through bypassing the local negotiating committee, in blatant violation of the union’s bylaws.
Rank-and-file healthcare workers at the meeting discussed and adopted a resolution calling on nurses to overwhelmingly reject the illegitimate effort by the NYSNA leadership to ram through these sellout deals.
The opening report to the meeting was delivered by Katy Kinner, a med-surg and oncology nurse in Michigan, a member of the Socialist Equality Party, and a leader of the Healthcare Workers Rank-and-File Committee.
The article includes the full report.
11. Military-aligned BJT wins most seats in Thai election
The BJT win was a product, above all, of the political bankruptcy of the People’s Party and Pheu Thai, which have falsely postured as defenders of democratic rights and opponents of military rule.
11. Bondi hearing exposes Epstein cover-up and secret “domestic terrorist” lists
The hearing itself was an indictment of the political and economic order presiding over it. Bondi responded to substantive questions with open hostility, evasions and non sequiturs. At the same time, numerous Democratic lawmakers, many of whom have repeatedly voted to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the broader apparatus of repression, used their time not to demand accountability but to grandstand over Jeffrey Epstein.
Bondi, for her part, adopted the political style and rhetoric of Trump himself. She repeatedly personally attacked Democratic lawmakers, praised Trump effusively and at one point responded to pointed questions about the ongoing Epstein cover-up by boasting about record stock market gains.
“You should all apologize to Trump,” Bondi declared, characterizing Trump and the administration as the most “transparent” in history. She added, “because Donald Trump, the Dow, the Dow right now is over, the Dow is over 50,000… the S&P is over 7,000 and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ retirement and 401(k) savings are booming, that’s what we should be talking about.”
As survivors of Epstein’s crimes sat in the hearing room, Bondi went on to insist, “The Dow has shattered 50,000 for the first time.” The exchange laid bare the real priorities of the ruling class: not accountability for a multi-decade child sex trafficking conspiracy but the defense of financial markets, wealth and profits.
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The most ominous exchange of the hearing came near its conclusion, when Pennsylvania Representative Mary Gay Scanlon raised questions about National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, a subject otherwise ignored during more than four and a half hours of testimony. Scanlon was the only member of the committee to press Bondi on the memorandum, which brands anti-fascism and opposition to capitalism as “domestic terrorism.”
Citing Section 3 of NSPM-7, Scanlon noted that the directive instructed Bondi to send to White House officials, including Stephen Miller and Donald Trump, a list of “groups or entities whose members are engaged in acts that meet the definition of domestic terrorism.” She further referenced Bondi’s December 4 directive ordering the FBI to work with multiple law enforcement agencies to compile such a list and asked whether, following a January 3 update, the report had in fact been completed.
Bondi did not deny that the list exists. Instead, she interjected, “I know that Antifa is part of that,” before accusing lawmakers of asking questions “they don’t want answered.” When Scanlon asked directly whether Bondi would commit to providing Congress with any list of organizations she had recommended be designated as domestic terrorist organizations, Bondi paused and replied only, “We will comply with the law in all matters.” Pressed again, she flatly refused: “I am not going to commit to anything to you because you won’t let me answer questions.”
Scanlon summarized the implications of Bondi’s refusal. “We do understand that your current position is that you have a secret list of people or groups that you are accusing of domestic terrorism but you won’t share it with Congress,” she said, noting that when the government designates a foreign terrorist organization, it must notify Congress and the accused entity precisely because “the government can make a mistake” and the designation can be challenged. Under the framework described by Bondi, Scanlon warned, Americans or domestic organizations falsely labeled as terrorists would have no such recourse.
“So your position seems to be that if you falsely designate an American or an American organization as a terrorist group, there is nothing they can do about it,” Scanlon continued. “I think we get it, you don’t want to answer the questions.”
Bondi responded curtly, “No, you don’t get anything … regarding public safety. Nothing.”
12. Detroit area student walkouts declare, “ICE are the criminals, not us”
On Tuesday, hundreds of Cass Technical High School in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood students held their second major protest in two weeks.
13. Munich Security Conference overshadowed by Transatlantic conflict
This Friday, more than 60 heads of state and government, around 100 foreign and defence ministers, and numerous high-ranking military officials, politicians and foreign policy experts will gather for the 62nd Munich Security Conference.
14. 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.
