Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: February 16-22
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
US launches “Operation Killer” in Korea to prepare for recapture of Seoul
100 years ago:
On February 10, the US Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) announced a $28 million settlement with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan over failure to provide adequate mental health services. This follows only weeks after Kaiser agreed to pay $556 million to the state of California to resolve $1 billion in allegations of Medicare fraud.
The latest settlement took place during a strike by 31,000 Kaiser healthcare workers, intersecting broader working class opposition involving workers across healthcare, education, oil and logistics.
Federal investigators found that Kaiser had systematically failed to provide adequate access to in-network mental health and substance use disorder treatment for thousands of members in California. Patients seeking therapy, psychiatric care or addiction treatment faced long waits, insufficient provider networks and bureaucratic hurdles. Some were forced to seek care outside the Kaiser network, paying higher out-of-pocket costs.
Under the settlement, Kaiser will reimburse at least $28 million to affected members and pay $2.8 million in penalties. It has also pledged to implement “changes” aimed at improving access and reducing wait times.
For a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with $67 billion in reserves, these figures amount to less than a slap on the wrist. Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the United States, generates tens of billions in annual revenue, making the settlement simply a cost of doing business.
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The deeper issue is not merely regulatory noncompliance but the subordination of healthcare to profit. Mental health services are chronically underfunded, stigmatized and treated as secondary to more lucrative areas of medicine. Insurers have a direct financial incentive to restrict access, while delaying care and shifting costs onto patients.
Kaiser mental healthcare workers have repeatedly staged some of the longest strikes in US healthcare history, fighting both for their patients and better working conditions. In 2022, nearly 2,000 Northern California therapists represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) struck for ten weeks. In Hawaii, 50 Kaiser mental health clinicians were on strike for 172 days in 2022–23. Between October 2024 and May 2025, Southern California Kaiser mental health workers struck for 196 days, the longest healthcare strike by mental health workers in U.S. history.
Despite these prolonged actions, the NUHW ratified contracts that left the system’s core issues untouched. Moreover, the federal settlement offers no enforceable staffing ratios and provides only vague promises regarding patient care quality.
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Kaiser operates through a complex hybrid structure blending nonprofit status with for-profit medical practice. The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals are 501(c)(3) nonprofits, granting them major tax advantages and allowing the collection of prepaid premiums from millions of members. Care is delivered by the Permanente Medical Groups, organized as for-profit partnerships owned by physicians.
Through capitated contracts, the nonprofit Health Plan pays the for-profit groups while also sheltering them through tax-exempt ownership of hospitals, clinics and equipment. This arrangement relieves physician groups of major capital costs while enabling profit-sharing largely shielded from public scrutiny.
Leveraging tax exemptions, Kaiser has amassed tens of billions in reserves (reportedly $67 billion by 2024) while operating in ways that closely resemble private corporations.
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Systems like Kaiser accumulate extraordinary surpluses, finance expansions through tax-exempt bonds, spend heavily on marketing to capture market share, and engage in venture-style investments to generate returns. This “new nonprofit” model prioritizes profit-like surpluses and long-term market dominance, blurring the distinction with for-profit healthcare corporations.
There is a sharp conflict between Kaiser’s supposed public mission and its investment practices.
While promoting itself as a champion of “healthy communities” and environmental justice, labor reports (including the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals’ 2026 study Profits Over Patients) detail investments in industries linked to the military and police. Among the most controversial are financial ties to private prison corporations CoreCivic and GEO Group, major operators of prisons and immigration detention facilities long criticized for abusive conditions, medical neglect and overcrowding.
The reports also highlight connections to the defense sector. Henry Kaiser was a major military contractor during World War II, and Kaiser Permanente was originally founded to service employees at the yards and the industrialist’s other workplaces. While the Kaiser Shipyards no longer exist, Kaiser Permanente’s investment portfolios and pension funds reportedly include holdings in major military contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman.
Despite public commitments to carbon neutrality and sustainable operations, Kaiser’s broader investment strategy reportedly includes fossil fuel and fracking interests. Critics describe this as “greenwashing,” arguing that profiting from environmentally destructive industries undermines its stated commitment to public health and climate responsibility.
The latest report by the UNAC-UHCP union contains damning information, but the conditions it denounces did not emerge overnight. For nearly three decades, the unions and Kaiser have operated within the so-called Labor Management Partnership premised on collaboration and “joint problem-solving.” Successive contracts under this framework failed to address understaffing, access delays, or corporate-style restructuring.
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Guaranteeing the right to healthcare requires a complete reorganization of healthcare as a public good, democratically controlled and funded to meet the needs of the population rather than the financial interests of shareholders or executives.
As workers grow increasingly opposed to the profit system, they must confront a union bureaucracy whose role is to defend that system and limit the impact of worker action. The building of rank-and-file committees independent of union bureaucrats and politicians is essential to mobilize the power of the working class independently of the union officials and corporate politicians who attempt to keep them in narrow, controlled channels.
The 4,200 nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital have entered the sixth week of their strike. Last week, they delivered a strong rebuke to the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) by rejecting a thoroughly inadequate tentative agreement. NYSNA officials had ignored the executive committee’s recommendation and broken the union’s bylaws by bringing the agreement to a vote. The bureaucrats’ goal was to end the strike on the hospital’s terms and send everyone back to work.
The anger and distrust that this flagrant betrayal provoked still lingers among the nurses. Those who recently spoke to the World Socialist Web Site under condition of anonymity showed a determination to keep fighting until they have won their demands.
“I’ve been out here for my patients and for my coworkers,” said a recovery room nurse. “The job that we do on some days feels impossible…. I worked through COVID, I’ve worked hurt, and I do it because I want to show up for my colleagues and my patients. If they don’t give us the proper amount of staffing, the care that the patients receive is substandard, but also the support that we’re able to give each other is substandard.”
The need for safe staffing has been the prime motivation for the strike, “and it wasn’t addressed [in the tentative agreement],” the nurse continued. “The way that NewYork-Presbyterian and NYSNA leadership were portraying this to the public is that the amount of staff that they’re offering us is adequate for the units that are in critical need, and it absolutely is not.”
“They did not put wording to enforce the safe staffing,” said a recovery room and intensive care unit (ICU) nurse. “They say they’re going to hire five nurses and then they say, ‘Well, we don’t have the finances now. It’s going to happen next year.’” Safe staffing requires the hiring of full-time nurses, not the scheduling of travel nurses to cover the occasional shift, she continued. “There has to be language that is going to say, ‘Yes, we’re going to hold on to the promise that we’re giving you.”
Layoffs have worsened the staffing situation at NewYork-Presbyterian in the past year: about 65 nurses across the health system’s three campuses lost their jobs. “They closed units without prior notification,” said the recovery room nurse. “The contract which the leadership was trying to force on us, in a rushed 24-hour vote via SurveyMonkey without prior notification from our executive committee, didn’t include language that would project our jobs. NewYork-Presbyterian is trying to eliminate NYSNA nursing positions and fill them with nonunion people.”
“They did lay off people last May and did not even give them severance pay,” said a nurse practitioner. “They claimed it was due to healthcare cuts by the Trump administration. But the way the union acted was like they were supporting the hospital management’s methods. All nurses should be out together. I am willing to go back when the hospital is willing to accept our demands.”
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NewYork-Presbyterian management is renewing its efforts to break the strike. “They want nurses to go back inside, they’re luring them back inside, thinking that if a certain amount of nurses crosses the line, then everybody is going to be forced inside,” said the recovery room and ICU nurse. “But we haven’t been here for five weeks now for no reason. There had to be a reason. Why are we freezing here? Why are we standing here? Why are we not having insurance and not having a paycheck?”
“The hospital is inviting nurses to cross the picket line,” another nurse agreed, “but they would then be working without union protection, as well as working with the scab travel nurses.” When striking nurses returned to work at Mount Sinai Hospital, some travel nurses got them fired, she added. “They can do that by sabotaging them, assigning them unsustainable and unsafe assignments.”
The strike of 31,000 healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente hospitals in California and Hawaii has given the striking New York nurses extra encouragement. “The show of solidarity that we’ve seen from them to us and vice versa, through the use of social media, has really been a source of strength for a lot of people,” said the recovery room nurse.
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Defending the healthcare infrastructure and winning safe staffing will require a united struggle of all healthcare workers. The NewYork-Presbyterian nurses can take the first step by forming a rank-and-file committee that is independent of NYSNA, which is trying to sabotage the strike. This committee must lay out the nurses’ nonnegotiable demands and exercise control over negotiations.
The strike must not only continue but be expanded. Other healthcare workers at the hospital must join the nurses, and the rank-and-file committee must appeal to the nurses at all New York’s other hospitals to walk out in solidarity. This struggle must be united with the strike of the Kaiser Permanente workers and continue until all demands are met and all unjustly fired workers are reinstated.
4. The Chomsky-Epstein files: Anatomy of petty-bourgeois political decay
Among the most politically significant revelations are those involving Noam Chomsky, the 97-year-old MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) linguist and anarchist intellectual who has long been promoted as the world’s foremost “left-wing” critic of American imperialism. Thousands of emails and text messages related to Chomsky have been released so far as part of the Epstein files, documenting an extensive personal bond spanning multiple years between the notorious sex trafficker and the academic once characterized by the New York Times as “the most important intellectual alive.”
In one letter, Valeria Chomsky wrote to Epstein: “Dear Jeffrey, We count you as our best friend. I mean ‘the’ one. It is always great to see you.” In another message, Noam Chomsky concluded with: “Like real friendship, deep and sincere and everlasting from both of us, Noam and Valeria.” These are not the words of a man who, as he told the Wall Street Journal in 2023, merely “knew him [Epstein] and we met occasionally.”
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There is no evidence that Chomsky, who was in his late 80s during this period, participated in any of Epstein’s sex crimes. One would have to be willfully oblivious, however, not to have known what Epstein was, and the documents make clear that Chomsky knew something was going on—which he excused, minimized and actively helped to conceal. These revelations have shattered his reputation as a principled opponent of the ruling class and a man of unimpeachable integrity.
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During the period leading directly to Epstein’s July 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, as media coverage intensified and revealed the vast scale of Epstein’s crimes, Chomsky provided Epstein with public relations counsel. In a February 2019 email, Chomsky expressed empathy for the “horrible way you are being treated in the press and public” and described investigative journalists as “vultures,” counseling Epstein, “I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it.”
Most significantly, the documents expose Chomsky as a participant in the sordid social and political networks of the ruling class, seeking out meetings with the fascist ideologue Steve Bannon and Israeli war criminal Ehud Barak. Chomsky’s pretenses of “holding truth to power” have been irretrievably compromised. He has combined personal self-degradation and political betrayal.
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Born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Noam Chomsky rose to academic fame in the late 1950s through his contributions to theoretical linguistics at MIT. His “generative grammar” was hailed as a paradigm shift in the study of language. But Chomsky’s broader reputation was built on his political writings, beginning with his 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” and his opposition to the Vietnam War.
Over the ensuing decades, Chomsky produced more than 150 books on politics, media and imperialism, including the 1988 work Manufacturing Consent. The book’s central thesis—that mass media functions as a propaganda system serving elite interests—was presented as a devastating indictment of capitalist democracy. But its underlying message was deeply pessimistic, arguing that the masses are passive victims of manipulation, and the best one can hope for is to expose the mechanisms of deception.
The pseudo-left have long treated Chomsky as a semi-deity. Jacobin, the house organ of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), published an article in June 2024 headlined “Let’s Celebrate Noam Chomsky, the Intellectual and Moral Champion.” In a 2022 interview with Chomsky, journalist Chris Hedges introduced him as “America’s greatest intellectual,” stating that “all intellectuals of our generation, at least if they’re genuine intellectuals, are in some sense children of Noam Chomsky.”
This appraisal, to the extent that it is justified, does little credit to Hedges or other “intellectuals” of his generation. Chomsky could appear as a giant only to intellectual Lilliputians steeped in the anti-communist environment of the past half-century, who have no connection with or understanding of the heritage of Marxist thought and genuine revolutionary activity rooted in the struggles of the working class.
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Already during his MIT tenure, Chomsky formed close associations with figures whose institutional roles contradicted his public anti-militarist stance. Notable among these was John Deutch, a fellow MIT faculty member who had directed Pentagon nuclear and chemical weapons programs before his appointment to lead the CIA. When the New York Times inquired about Deutch, Chomsky offered remarkable praise: “He has more honesty and integrity than anyone I’ve ever met in academic life, or any other life.” He added: “If somebody’s got to be running the CIA, I’m glad it’s him.”
Chomsky’s political trajectory was characterized by the same fundamental contradiction. While his anarchism positioned him as a critic of state power in the abstract, his actual politics consistently led him back to accommodation with the ruling class he claimed to oppose. He endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate for decades, promoting the bankrupt strategy of “lesser evilism” that has produced not the defeat of the right but its continuous growth.
In foreign policy, Chomsky repeatedly provided “left” cover for imperialist interventions when they were packaged in the language of “human rights.” Most significantly, in Syria, Chomsky emerged as a vocal advocate for the maintenance of US military forces on Syrian soil to “protect” the Kurds, joining David Harvey, Judith Butler and others in a letter that provided a pseudo-left gloss for the illegal US occupation. “In my opinion, it makes sense for the United States to maintain a presence which would deter an attack on the Kurdish areas,” he told The Intercept in 2018.
In recent decades, Chomsky became increasingly explicit in his pessimism about any possibility of revolutionary change. In a revealing 2021 interview with Jacobin, when asked whether socialism remained a useful political horizon for addressing the climate crisis, he responded bluntly: “We’re not going to overthrow capitalism in a couple of decades. You can continue working for socialism—but you have to recognize that the solution to the climate crisis is going to have to come within some kind of regimented capitalist system.” This amounted to an admission that, whatever his theoretical criticisms of capitalism, Chomsky had concluded that the existing order would persist and that radicals must accommodate themselves to it.
This pessimism flowed from a deeper political orientation. For all his voluminous writings against the ruling class, Chomsky always saw power as residing with the elites, not the working class. Opposing Marxism and Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party, he rejected the need to politically educate and organize workers for revolutionary struggle. Chomsky’s aim was never to raise the consciousness of the working class but to influence the thinking of the ruling class and its intellectual representatives.
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Chomsky and his wife Valeria were introduced to Epstein in 2015 at one of Chomsky’s professional events. By that time, Epstein’s criminal activity was a matter of public record. After 36 survivors, including some as young as 14, came forward, Epstein had been convicted in 2008 on charges related to child sex crimes. He received a lenient 18-month sentence and served only 13 months, with US Attorney Alex Acosta reportedly stating he was told to “back off” as Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”
The history of Epstein’s criminally abusive conduct did not trouble Chomsky. The access to gaudy wealth clearly overwhelmed him. The documents show that Epstein provided the Chomskys with a taste of luxury, including stays at his palatial 51,000-square-foot Manhattan mansion, bookings at the $1,400-per-night Manhattan Suite at the Mark Hotel, flights on his private jet and use of his Paris apartment. “Dear Jeffrey, We had a wonderful day. Valdson [Epstein’s butler] took good care of us. Drove us to the Louvre, went to pick us up, brought us to your wonderful apartment for a delicious meal,” Valeria wrote after visiting the Paris property.
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As the legal walls closed in around Epstein in late 2018 and early 2019, following the Miami Herald’s investigation, the billionaire turned to Chomsky as an unofficial crisis manager. “Noam. I’d love your advice on how I handle my putrid press,” Epstein wrote in February 2019. Chomsky counseled Epstein to remain silent.
When Epstein sent Chomsky a draft op-ed written in the third person presenting himself as a near-saint, Chomsky replied: “It’s a powerful and convincing statement.” He was, by Epstein’s own account, “all in” for a planned documentary designed to rehabilitate the sex trafficker’s public image.
Significantly, Epstein became Chomsky’s most trusted financial and legal adviser, a role that led to a near-complete rupture between Chomsky and his three children. They objected strenuously to Chomsky’s insistence that Richard Kahn—Epstein’s personal accountant, whom a 2021 lawsuit described as the “captain of Epstein’s international sex crime ring”—be placed on the board of the family trust. Chomsky sided with Epstein and Valeria against his own children, forwarding all the family correspondence to Epstein for guidance.
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Among the meetings Epstein arranged for Chomsky was a private dinner with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the summer of 2015. “I hope [you] enjoyed yesterday as much as the Baraks and I,” Epstein wrote afterward.
Barak served as Israeli prime minister from 1999 to 2001 and defense minister from 2007 to 2013. In the latter role, he directed Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day assault on Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009 that killed between 1,385 and 1,419 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians, including over 300 children. The UN Goldstone Report found “strong evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Barak’s name appears thousands of times in the Epstein files. The documents show he stayed repeatedly at Epstein’s New York apartment, explored numerous business ventures with the sex trafficker, and was photographed entering Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse with his face partially concealed.
Chomsky has built a substantial portion of his reputation on criticism of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. In a letter of support found in Epstein’s files, Chomsky wrote: “On another occasion, Jeffrey arranged a meeting with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whose record I had studied carefully and written about.” He claims this was to obtain a firsthand account of why peace talks collapsed at Taba in 2001.
But the emails reveal a very different atmosphere than a tense confrontation between an anti-Zionist intellectual and a war criminal. The meeting was a friendly social dinner, organized by and including Epstein, a man whom an FBI informant described as a “co-opted Mossad Agent” and who had documented ties to Israeli intelligence. A genuine opponent of Israeli war crimes would not accept a cozy dinner arranged by an alleged intelligence asset with one of their chief architects.
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The most politically explosive revelation in the entire Epstein cache—and the one that the pseudo-left has studiously avoided discussing—concerns Chomsky’s active pursuit of a meeting with Steve Bannon, the fascist ideologue and Trump’s former chief strategist.
The documents show that in 2018, Epstein invited the Chomskys to a private dinner party with Barak and Bannon. Chomsky expressed regret at missing the opportunity and then emailed Bannon directly: “My wife Valeria and I were quite disappointed to have missed you the other night, and hope that we can arrange something else before too long. Lots to talk about.” Months later, Valeria personally invited Bannon to their Arizona home, writing, “Jeffrey is a very dear friend, and we look forward to meeting you. Would it be possible for you to come 4pm tomorrow?”
Bannon did visit, and the two evidently enjoyed each other’s company, with a widely-circulated photo showing them laughing and embracing.
Bannon is among the most prominent fascists in America, perhaps second only to Trump. As executive chairman of Breitbart News, Bannon transformed the outlet into what he openly described as “the platform for the alt-right.” As chief strategist of the Trump White House from January to August 2017, he was instrumental in implementing the Muslim ban, the family separation policy and Trump’s broader xenophobic agenda. After his departure from the White House, he worked to build an international fascist movement, courting the French National Rally, Italy’s Lega, the German AfD and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. He later played a central organizing role in the January 6, 2021 coup attempt and was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with the January 6 Committee’s subpoena.
What did Chomsky believe he had to “talk about” with such a figure? What is the intersection between a self-described anarchist and the architect of Trumpian fascism?
The answer lies in what unites them: a visceral and ferocious anti-communism.
Chomsky has spent decades attacking Marxism and the 1917 October Revolution. In his 1989 lecture “What Was Leninism?,” he declared: “Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement.” He characterized the October Revolution as “what’s called a revolution but in my view ought to be called a coup,” and claimed that Lenin and Trotsky “immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential” of the Soviets and factory councils. He went further, asserting that the Bolsheviks created “the basic proto-fascist structures” later refined by Stalin, thereby equating the leaders of the first workers’ revolution in history with the very fascism they fought.
In Understanding Power (2002), Chomsky dismissed the concept of a revolutionary vanguard party as “an intellectual scam.” On Trotsky, he has been particularly venomous, slandering the founder of the Red Army and leader of the Left Opposition against Stalinism as an advocate of a “labor army which is submissive to the control of a single leader.”
Bannon attacks “cultural Marxism” and glorifies Christian nationalism. Chomsky denounces Lenin and Trotsky as “right-wing” authoritarians and equates the dictatorship of the proletariat with “proto-fascism.” The rhetoric differs; the target is the same. Both seek to discredit the revolutionary movement of the working class.
Within weeks of meeting with Bannon in Tucson, Chomsky stood before 700 people at the Old South Church in Boston on May 27, 2019 and delivered a speech broadcast on Democracy Now! in which he described Bannon as “the impresario” of an “ultranationalist, reactionary international” movement and warned of the spread of fascism. The hypocrisy is staggering. The man who had just gladly hosted Bannon in his home, who had written that they had “lots to talk about,” who had his wife tell Bannon that Epstein was “a very dear friend,” then went on national television to posture as a fearless critic of the very fascism he was cultivating in private.
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The exposure of Chomsky is politically significant, but it must be placed in its proper context. While there is no evidence of criminal activity by Chomsky himself, the 3.5 million pages of Epstein files implicate broad sections of the ruling class—presidents, prime ministers, billionaires, intelligence operatives—in sex trafficking, rape and the exploitation of children. The World Socialist Web Site demands the full release of all the Epstein files, unredacted except where necessary to protect victims, and the immediate prosecution of every individual implicated in these crimes.
The events of early 2026 have demonstrated that the real force of opposition to the degeneracy and criminality of the oligarchy comes from the working class. On January 7, federal immigration agents murdered Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Two weeks later they gunned down Alex Pretti. The killings provoked mass protests in Minneapolis and across the US on January 23 and January 30, under the banner “ICE Out,” with workers walking off the job to denounce the Trump administration’s terror campaign.
The term “general strike” has reentered the political lexicon through the direct experience of millions of workers confronting the murderous violence of the state. These developments confirm in practice what Marxism has always insisted and Chomsky has always denied: the working class is the revolutionary force in modern society.
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Workers and youth must draw the sharpest conclusions from this experience. They must reject the cynicism, pessimism and class collaborationism of Chomsky and every variant of petty-bourgeois pseudo-radicalism. They must turn to the revolutionary optimism of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky—the conviction, grounded in the entire experience of the class struggle, that the international working class, organized and led by a conscious socialist vanguard, can overthrow capitalism, bring the criminals of the oligarchy to justice and build a truly humane society based on social equality.
5. Perspective: The Munich War Conference
The Munich Security Conference (MSC), which brought together around 60 heads of state and government and hundreds of ministers, politicians, high-ranking military officials and security experts from around the world over the past three days, was marked by sharp tensions. But on one issue, all participants agreed: The era in which the interests of the imperialist powers were concealed by diplomatic manoeuvres and international institutions is over. A new era has begun in which they are decided openly through military force and war.
The debates at the conference did not revolve around how to prevent a third world war but on how best to prepare for one. Ruling circles in the US and Europe view war as necessary and inevitable.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz opened the conference with the words: “Together, we have crossed the threshold into an era that is once again openly characterized by power and, above all, great power politics.” The international order based on rights and rules no longer exists, he said. It is the task of the European powers to recognize this reality and “make preparations for the new era.”
In a fascistic diatribe, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio attacked the international politics of recent decades. The idea that the end of the Soviet Union 35 years ago meant “the end of history” was a “dangerous delusion” that is now being corrected by the Trump administration.
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While U.S. Vice President JD Vance launched a frontal attack on the European powers at last year’s Munich Security Conference, Rubio struck a more conciliatory tone. In a speech full of anti-communist and fascist stereotypes, he invoked “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together” and emphasized: “We want Europe to be strong.”
The statesmen present thanked him with a standing ovation. Rubio’s statement, “We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame,” was no doubt particularly well received by the Germans present, who have long advocated that the crimes of the Nazis should not be allowed to slow down their renewed aspirations for greatness.
However, Rubio was unable to resolve the sharp transatlantic tensions. The European powers are not troubled by Trump’s fascist policies—the destruction of democratic rights, the ICE Gestapo’s hunt for migrants, the deployment of the army domestically, the establishment of an authoritarian regime. Nor do they object to his imperialist wars—the genocide in Gaza, the bombing of Iran, the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro—or his preparations for war against China. Here, the European ruling class is fully on board.
Although Trump is assembling a huge armada against Iran and threatening massive military strikes against the country, not a single voice was raised against this at the conference. On the contrary, the conference served as a promotional platform for the next imperialist crime. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah who was overthrown by the 1979 revolution, was invited as a guest and spoke on the sidelines of the conference to supporters who had been carted in from all over Europe. His demand: The US should bomb Iran and install him as the new ruler, just as the CIA did with his father after the 1953 coup.
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The escalation of the war against Russia is at the heart of the “preparations for the new era” that Chancellor Merz called for in his Munich speech. Russia’s attack on Ukraine has long served as a pretext for the European powers to arm themselves without limit and push ahead with their own plans for great power status. But their claim that Russia is the aggressor and plans to conquer all of Europe turns reality on its head.
In fact, it is NATO that has broken all agreements since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union and has continued to advance eastward. All of Eastern Europe is now part of the military alliance. In 2014, the US and Germany organized a pro-Western coup in Kiev and began systematically arming the Ukrainian army. Plans to bring the country, with its 2,000-kilometre-long (1,242-mile-long) border with Russia, into NATO ultimately provoked an attack by Moscow, which saw its existence threatened. NATO deliberately provoked the war.
Since then, NATO has been waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Since the start of the war, €380 billion in Western military and financial aid has flowed to Kiev. Without it, the war would have been decided long ago. But Trump has largely cut off US financial aid and insists that the Europeans bear the full cost. US weapons will only be supplied to Ukraine if the Europeans pay the bill in advance.
They are not prepared to back down. They want to subjugate Russia and need the war to realize their own plans for great power status. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Germany alone has appropriated over €1 trillion for the rearmament of the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) and the preparation of its infrastructure for war. The entire society is to be put on a war footing and conscription reintroduced.
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French President Emmanuel Macron demanded that Europe must become a geopolitical power, explicitly including nuclear deterrence. He said he had already begun a “strategic dialogue” on this with Chancellor Merz and other EU heads of government.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer committed to close military cooperation with Europe. Europeans must “build our hard power, because that is the currency of the age. We must be able to deter aggression, and yes, if necessary, we must be ready to fight.”
There is no opposition among the established parties to this military superpower policy, which will inevitably lead to a third world war absent the political intervention of the international working class. In addition to Germany’s Social Democrats, the Greens, the Left Party and their sister organizations also support it.
The Democrats who traveled to Munich from the US supported the European demand for an intensification of the war against Russia. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which is allied with Germany’s Left Party, accused Trump of creating conditions through his withdrawal “where Putin can sabre rattle around Europe and try to bully around our own allies there.”
The threat of war can only be stopped by an independent movement of the international working class, which must bear the costs of war and militarism. Such a movement must combine the struggle against social spending cuts, dictatorship and war with the struggle against their cause, capitalism, and for the construction of a socialist society. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the Socialist Equality Parties (SEP) are fighting for this perspective.
Ahead of her appearance, the World Socialist Web Site wrote that [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez would “make her debut as an imperialist strategist.” She lived up to this prognosis.
Speaking at a conference sponsored by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and BAE Systems, Ocasio-Cortez accused the Trump administration of insufficient commitment to the US-NATO war against Russia, echoed the Trump administration’s accusations that Iran has killed “tens of thousands of protesters” and refused to rule out sending American troops to fight China over Taiwan.
Ocasio-Cortez’s method throughout the conference was to portray Trump’s “authoritarianism” as aligned with that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, thereby seeking to subordinate widespread popular opposition to Trump into support for the war against Russia. She warned that Trump and Rubio are “looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianisms, ... where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and try to bully around our own allies there.”
Opposing any peaceful settlement of the Ukraine war, she declared: “We shouldn’t reward imperialism, and I don’t think that we should allow Russia to continue, or any nation, to continue, violating a nation’s sovereignty and to continue to be rewarded.”
Speaking as a representative of the world’s greatest imperialist power, which has been perpetually at war during her entire lifetime, Ocasio-Cortez wielded the epithet of “imperialism” to designate those the US would target for conquest and subjugation. In her accusation that Trump is enabling Putin’s “bullying,” she was demanding the continuation of a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and brought the world closer to nuclear conflict than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Her solution to the supposed threat of “authoritarianism” was the Trans-Pacific Partnership—Obama’s trade deal designed to isolate China. She called for “our global alliances” to serve as “a hard stop against authoritarian consolidation of power, particularly in the installation of regional puppet governments.” This is the program of the Democratic Party: not opposition to war but a different strategy for waging it—not opposition to imperialism but a return to the multilateral framework through which the US waged war in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Asked at a panel Saturday whether the US should commit troops to defend Taiwan if China were to invade, Ocasio-Cortez refused to rule it out. “This is, of course, a—uh—a very long-standing policy of the United States. And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point,” she said.
This is a question about war between the world’s two largest economies—both armed with nuclear weapons. That Ocasio-Cortez could not bring herself to say “no” is an expression of how deeply the Democratic Party is committed to military confrontation with China.
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Asked whether she supports further US strikes on Iran, she gave a statement that effectively supported the Trump administration’s goals of regime change while adding minor tactical quibbles. “There’s still so much runway,” she said. She repeated the administration’s own regime change talking points: “Right now, what the Iranian regime is doing, particularly with respect to protesters, is a horrific slaughter—some estimates have tens of thousands of people now.” She took the unsubstantiated claims presented by the administration to justify its plans for regime change as good coin.
She spoke at a conference that on January 16, under pressure from the German Foreign Ministry, withdrew its invitation to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. In his place, the conference offered a platform to exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah overthrown in 1979, who called for “humanitarian intervention” and declared that “help is on the way” from Trump. On January 29, the EU unanimously designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization—with all 27 member states voting in lockstep with Washington’s escalation. Ocasio-Cortez said nothing to oppose any of this.
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The working class cannot look to any faction of the political establishment—whether Trump’s “America First” nationalism or the Democrats’ multilateral imperialism—to oppose war. The same Congress that is preparing to devastate Iran voted to hand the Pentagon $839 billion, while millions of American workers cannot afford healthcare. Opposition to war must be built from below, through the independent mobilization of the international working class against the capitalist system that produces war, dictatorship and social inequality.
7. Congress deepens social counterrevolution with assault on D.C. home rule and budget
The intervention involves both big-business parties collaborating in an even more direct assault on social conditions through a federal decree that the city’s budget must be reorganized according to Trump’s tax boondoggle for corporations and the wealthy.
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The leading contender to replace Bowser is Ward 4 councilmember Janeese Lewis George, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who has based her campaign on progressive rhetoric about making D.C. “affordable for all.”
George has previously pledged to implement universal child care, expand affordable housing, and protect social services from cuts. She touts her role in passing measures for childcare workers, supporting eviction moratoria during the pandemic and backing measures to fund housing for the homeless.
On paper, such promises stand in direct contradiction to a budget regime dominated by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and enforced by congressional decree. In practice, however, the budget crisis exposes the fundamental limits—and class character—of George’s politics.
With a gaping and rapidly widening hole in the city’s finances, any mayor who accepts the framework of capitalism and federal authority will be compelled to implement austerity, regardless of their campaign slogans. The experience of DSA‑backed figures in other cities, such as Zohran Mamdani in New York, is highly instructive: once in office, their “democratic socialist” platforms are steadily walked back and adapted to the demands of big business, the real estate industry and the state apparatus.
George’s response to the tax override has consisted above all of hand‑wringing and appeals for Congress to “respect D.C.’s democracy,” coupled with vague suggestions that the city can still raise revenue by taxing the wealthy. But even on this terrain, her record shows that she is perfectly prepared to align with major capitalist interests. She backed the framework for a new stadium project, offering substantial tax incentives to developers and team owners in the name of “economic development.”
The only “progressive” gloss George added, as a condition of voting last September in favor of spending $1 billion to build a new stadium on the site of the former RFK Stadium in Southeast D.C., was to insist on language guaranteeing “union jobs” in the stadium’s construction and operation. This is a typical DSA formula that combines corporate giveaways with limited concessions to the trade union bureaucracy.
This fig leaf has paid dividends in the form of endorsements from a swath of local unions, including Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689, SEIU 32BJ, UFCW Local 400 and UNITE HERE locals, which together represent more than 50,000 workers in the region.
ATU 689’s backing is particularly revealing. The union, which represents thousands of D.C.-area transit workers, has repeatedly collaborated with management and city authorities to block or contain struggles. Its leadership has pushed through concessionary agreements, including a memorandum of understanding presented to Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) workers while refusing to divulge the full details of the document. It presented a tentative agreement to Fairfax Connector workers before key terms were even finalized, effectively asking workers to sign a blank check for layoffs and restructuring as the transit system faces its own financial crisis.
These are the forces now rallying behind George, not because she threatens the existing order, but because she offers a means to preserve their privileged position within it while channeling working‑class anger back into the Democratic Party.
The federal imposition of Trump’s tax program on D.C. thus has a dual character. On the one hand, it is a brutal act of social counterrevolution, aimed at stripping hundreds of millions of dollars from local budgets and deepening poverty and inequality in the nation’s capital. On the other, it exposes the bankruptcy of all factions of the Democratic Party and its satellite organizations, including the DSA. While Republicans openly boast of “protecting taxpayers” by enforcing the One Big Beautiful Bill, Democrats—from Biden, who helped overturn the D.C. crime reform, to George, who promises social reforms within an austerity framework—accept the basic premise that society must be organized around the profit requirements of the capitalist class.
8. United States: Widespread enthusiasm for Will Lehman’s campaign for UAW president
Workers are outraged by the betrayals of the UAW bureaucracy and the escalating attack on jobs and the social and democratic rights of the working class.
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One Worker:
“Will Lehman will get my vote. The last election they did everything they could to suppress the vote. Just like the contract, they want you to vote for something that you don’t even know what’s in it. The union wants to control you. It’ll be good for the people within the shop to have an opportunity to make the decisions. The union and the company are in each other’s pockets. They both want to keep the line rolling whether somebody dies or not, no matter what. We make jokes about it, but it’s not a joke.”
9. ICE memo outlines massive $38.3 billion expansion of concentration camp network
On February 13, a memorandum issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outlined the agency’s plan for a massive permanent expansion of detention facilities across the United States involving tens of billions of dollars, thousands of new federal agents and the construction of “mega-centers” to hold human beings for months at a time.
The memo states that by the end of November 2026, the same month the midterm elections are scheduled to be held, the agency will be overseeing “eight large-scale detention centers and 16 processing sites, as well as the acquisition of 10 existing ‘turnkey’ facilities where ICE ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations] already operates.”
While there is “no money” for social services, public healthcare, education or housing, ICE estimates $38.3 billion will be spent on the “Detention Reengineering Initiative.” The plan makes clear that despite the ending of “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the US government plans to continue mass arrests and removals of those it deems “illegal” throughout 2026 and beyond.
The memo states that the “new model is designed to strategically increase bed capacity to 92,600 beds.” The increased detention space coincides with the hiring of “12,000” additional immigration Gestapo.
Making clear that this is not a temporary measure in response to a made-up “border crisis” but the expansion of a police state directed against the working class, regardless of immigration status, the memo emphasizes that the facilities, “will be built to handle the immediate surge capacity and sustained long-term operations, providing a unified, scalable solution that delivers continuity, safety, compliance, and control.”
It calls for “Regional Processing Centers” that will house “1,000 to 1,500” people for “3-7 days.” These centers are envisioned as “staging locations for transfers or removals.” The centerpiece of the fascist proposal are “Large-Scale Detention Facilities” capable of “housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees for periods averaging less than 60 days. These sites will serve as the primary locations for international removals.”
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As Trump’s mass deportation operation and the nationwide construction of a network of concentration camps continues, “border czar” Tom Homan appeared on national television to defend the administration, while once again touting the support immigration police have received from Democrats in Minnesota.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Homan boasted of the Trump administration’s enforcement results, saying: “Bottom line is President Trump sent me up there to deescalate, to get state and local cooperation, to stop being a ‘sanctuary state’ and to arrest illegal aliens with a focus on criminals. Over 4,000 arrests, done. Deescalation, done. Collaboration and cooperation with the prisons and the counties, done.”
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Homan rejected many of the Democrats’ proposed limitations on ICE tactics, claiming, “Masks right now are for officer safety.”
On the issue of constitutional protections, Homan claimed that current immigration statutes allow agents to enter private residences without a judicial warrant. “That’s not what the federal law requires. Congress themselves wrote the Immigration and Nationality Act that gave power under an administrative warrant to arrest somebody and that’s what set up federal statutes... right now ICE is acting within the federal framework.”
Homan’s rejection of the Fourth Amendment comes as more evidence has emerged refuting official DHS accounts of immigration police violence. Last week federal prosecutors in Minneapolis moved to dismiss charges against two Venezuelan men, one of whom was shot by an ICE agent. Two of the ICE agents involved have been placed on leave amid a criminal investigation into possible untruthful testimony.
The prosecutor, Daniel N. Rosen, asked that a judge “dismiss charges against a man who was wounded in that shooting, as well as another man who had been accused of attacking the agent.” He wrote that “newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations” previously presented by federal officials both in charging documents and in testimony.
Judge Paul A. Magnuson subsequently dismissed the charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled.
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In response to the murderous and illegal actions of DHS agents, Democrats are calling for cosmetic “reforms” to ICE and CBP. DHS is currently in a “partial shutdown” after Republicans refused virtually all of the Democrats requests to “rein in” ICE.
This pretended opposition serves to permit the continued operation of Trump’s mass deportation operation, while allowing Democratic politicians to claim they are addressing public concerns. A growing majority of the public supports the abolition of ICE outright, but negotiations in the Senate and elsewhere have centered on modest limits—such as restrictions on roving patrols or mask-wearing—rather than abolishing the agency itself.
10. Thomas “TJ” Sabula is back at work—but the lessons must be learned
The Ford Rouge Workers Rank-and-File Committee has received reports that Brother Thomas “TJ” Sabula has returned to work at the Dearborn Truck Plant after being suspended without pay for calling Donald Trump a “pedophile protector” during the president’s January 13 tour of the plant. According to United Auto Workers Vice President Laura Dickerson, Sabula has retained his job and has “no discipline on his record.”
We welcome our courageous brother back. His return is not a gift from management, the White House or the UAW bureaucracy. It is the result of massive public support from working people across the country and around the world.
When TJ spoke out, Trump responded with obscenities and gave him the middle finger. Reports indicate Trump demanded he be fired. Ford immediately suspended him without pay. This was not about “shop rules.” It was a political message: workers who speak out against the powerful will be punished.
The White House and Ford management wanted to make an example of TJ. They wanted to intimidate every worker at the Rouge and beyond. They wanted to send the message that political dissent on the shop floor will not be tolerated.
But that is not what happened.
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This episode teaches important lessons.
First, the corporations and the government are hostile to the democratic rights of the working class. If a worker can be suspended for speaking out politically, then freedom of speech means nothing inside the workplace. The First Amendment does not stop at the factory gate.
Second, the union apparatus cannot be relied on to defend our rights. The bureaucracy works hand in hand with management and both corporate-controlled parties. Their priority is “labor peace” and protecting their own positions, not defending rank-and-file workers.
Third, only the broad mobilization of the working class can defend democratic rights. TJ’s reinstatement came because working people acted. Statements and small donations from thousands gave a glimpse of the real social power that exists when workers stand together.
But there is no room for complacency.
What happened in Minneapolis—the repression of protests, the targeting of immigrants and the murder of political opponents—shows that Trump is moving to install a dictatorship. Immigrants were the first targets. But attacks on democratic rights will not stop there. The methods used against immigrants today are being prepared to use against striking workers tomorrow.
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That is why we call for the building of rank-and-file committees at the Rouge and in every Ford plant. These committees must be controlled by workers ourselves—not by union officials. They must be democratic, with representatives elected and subject to recall, and based on the methods of the class struggle, not class collaboration.
Such committees can:
• Defend any worker targeted for political speech or shop-floor activity.
• Organize meetings so workers can discuss and decide on action collectively.
• Link up with workers at other Ford and auto plants, suppliers and other workplaces.
• Break down the divisions promoted by nationalism and unite workers across borders.Power must be transferred from the UAW apparatus to the shop floor.
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These policies are at the center of the campaign of Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker who just announced his candidacy for UAW president. Lehman is running on a program to abolish the UAW bureaucracy as a privileged layer and transfer power directly to rank-and-file workers through democratic shop-floor committees. He calls for international unity of workers and the complete independence of the working class from both big business parties.
The Ford Rouge Workers Rank-and-File Committee endorses and supports Will Lehman’s campaign. His fight is our fight.
The support for TJ showed what is possible. But spontaneous support is not enough. It must be organized into lasting structures that can respond immediately to any attack.
An injury to one is an injury to all is not just a slogan. It must be a practice.
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TJ’s return is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a broader struggle.
11. After another anti-ICE school walkout, Los Angeles students confront federal thugs
On Friday thousands of high school students walked out of Los Angeles-area schools to protest ICE’s Gestapo tactics, participating in another national “day of action.” Those who gathered outside the federal jail in downtown Los Angeles heroically stood up against an attack with gas and batons by federal agents.
Helicopter video by local television stations show demonstrators standing their ground near the U.S. Metropolitan Detention Center, many obviously teenagers, some shoving back and throwing objects at the federal thugs in self-defense.
As described by the Department of Homeland Security, “A group of about 200-300 rioters and agitators gathered outside the ICE building in Los Angeles [sic]. They threw objects, including rocks, at law enforcement. One ICE officer was hit in the head with a rock thrown and was injured,” adding, that two Federal Protective Services officers were injured as well, “one in the hospital with a concussion and the other with a cut over his eye. The rioters remain at large.”
“Assaulting federal law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime,” according to the DHS statement. “Secretary [Kristi] Noem has been clear: Anyone who assaults or obstructs law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Law and order will prevail.”
The Los Angeles City Fire Department claims it dispatched paramedics to transport a federal agent to a hospital at 1:34 p.m., but as of this writing no further details of an injury to a federal official have been released.
As usual, there have been no reports regarding the injuries invariably sustained by demonstrators. Over the past eight months, Los Angeles protesters have lost eyes and testicles, among other life-altering injuries ignored by the authorities.
Also, despite the plethora of video recordings, no arrests have been made. Supposedly the “suspects who attacked the federal agents blended into the march.”
In a related retaliatory action, Ricardo Lopez, a history teacher at the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Charter Synergy Quantum Academy in South Los Angeles, was fired for opening a locked gate to allow students, who were then risking injury by climbing over gates and fences, to join the walkout, a move school administrators labeled insubordination. Already [over] a thousand signatures have been collected demanding Lopez’s reinstatement. To date the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) bureaucracy has issued no statement in support of the victimized teacher.
There is every reason to believe the federal agents’ alleged injuries were fabricated or grossly exaggerated, and that the only victims of Friday’s violence are among the students.
ICE and its federal enablers have been caught in lies repeatedly. Last week certain charges were dropped against Ashleigh Brown, who was accused of interference when Jonathon Redondo-Rosales was beaten and gassed at a Los Angeles anti-ICE demonstration last August. Video recordings demonstrated that the alleged victim, Federal Protective Service Officer Zachary Conte, had lied about being punched by Redondo-Rosales, and then federal prosecutors covered up the three criminal convictions that were on Conte’s record when he was hired in 2022—during the Biden administration.
To date, there have been plea bargains in only 23 of the approximately 100 cases filed against Los Angeles anti-ICE protesters, as compared to a national average of about 90 percent of criminal cases being resolved by a plea. Coincidentally, the same number, 23, have been dismissed outright, an extraordinarily high number for federal criminal filings, which traditionally are made carefully after extensive investigation and have dismissal rates far below 10 percent.
All six anti-ICE Los Angeles demonstrators who have refused to plead guilty and therefore face federal juries for assaulting federal agents—risking the imposition of much more severe sentences—have been acquitted, the most recent being Isaias Lopez, a professional photographer, on February 6.
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Fascist White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who grew up in nearby Santa Monica, posted on X that all the Trump administration’s recent legal defeats in Los Angeles are the result of “mass judge and jury nullification, deep in blue territory, of slam-dunk assault cases against federal law enforcement.”
Miller is, of course, lying. Assault cases brought against anti-ICE demonstrators have collapsed throughout the nation. A Los Angeles Times study published last December showed that more than twice as many had resulted in dismissals or acquittals than convictions.
Most recent, last week the Department of Justice dismissed the criminal charges against Venezuelan immigrants Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who was shot in the leg by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
DHS Secretary Noem accused both of “attempted murder of federal law enforcement,” supposedly with a snow shovel and broom handle. Federal prosecutors admitted that ICE agents were suspected of filing “false statements,” which were exposed after a review of video evidence.
More than 45,000 Australian Education Union (AEU) members in Victoria—teachers, education support staff and principals in public schools—are being asked to vote in a protected industrial action ballot after seven months of AEU negotiations with the state Labor government headed by Premier Jacinta Allan. The ballot opens today and closes on March 12.
The Committee for Public Education (CFPE)—the educators’ rank-and-file network—urges educators to vote yes on the ballot, including for strike action, but we warn that the AEU bureaucracy is preparing another sellout deal, as it did in 2022 on the last enterprise agreement.
To prevent another betrayal, educators must establish democratically elected rank-and-file committees in every school to take the struggle forward. These committees must be independent of AEU officials, open to union and non-union staff alike, and accountable solely to their members.
Years of falling real wages, relentless workloads and chronic underfunding have driven thousands out of the profession. Educators are at breaking point, teaching overcrowded classes amid chronic staff shortages and without the resources needed to support student wellbeing and increasingly complex learning needs.
A yes vote would demonstrate educators’ readiness to fight—something the union apparatus has suppressed for decades. The last major strike action, involving some of the largest mass meetings ever, took place in 2013, before the state Labor government took office in 2014.
The AEU leadership is calling on educators to authorise only limited actions, ranging from various work bans up to one-day stoppages. The union stresses that the ballot wording is intentionally broad, giving officials flexibility to apply pressure to the government “over time.”
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The present confrontation extends beyond wages and conditions. It is fundamentally political. The Allan government’s move to delay full SRS funding until 2031 lays bare its agenda. Behind the backs of educators, parents and students, it took a budgetary decision not to spend the full education budget, to satisfy the money markets and their credit ratings agencies.
In recent months, Moody’s has warned that Victoria must show “more restrained spending and sustained reform.” S&P Global has stressed the need to curb operating costs and stabilise debt. In practice, this means cuts to public services and strict wage caps.
The resources to fully fund public education exist, but under the capitalist system they are subordinated to maintaining investor profits, servicing rising state debt and protecting financial markets, along with ever-increasing military expenditure.
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To translate a yes vote into a genuine fight:
- Immediately establish direct links across schools, regions and states—including Queensland and Tasmania—to unify struggles around common demands and break the isolation that enables governments to divide and conquer.
- Formulate demands based on the needs of teachers and students, not budget dictates: inflation-indexed wage rises; substantial cuts to face-to-face teaching with guaranteed in-school planning time; enforceable class size limits; full special needs staffing; and properly funded support services.
- Build solidarity between parents, students and other public sector workers to widen the struggle.
- Demand full transparency: immediate publication of all government offers, comprehensive briefings to members and genuine debate before any vote. Reject back-room deals and insist that any agreement be decided through a fully informed democratic vote, including mass meetings.
The attack on public education forms part of a wider offensive against working people. Austerity, privatisation and increased military spending, involving hundreds of billions of dollars, are not isolated policies but interconnected elements of a global crisis of capitalism that is plunging into militarism, genocide and suppression of dissent.
Internationally, educators confront the same dynamic—unions that channel anger into tightly managed protests while capitalist governments escalate spending on the military, slash social services and tear up basic democratic rights.
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The Victorian teachers’ struggle must be linked to broader movements of workers, both nationally and internationally. Educators should reach out to colleagues in other states and connect with rank-and-file networks globally.
Opposition to the company’s proposals is enormous at Whiting, which voted 98 percent to strike. But if the USW’s pattern agreement is accepted at other refineries, it sets the stage for a strike to be isolated, giving management the upper hand.
14. United States: 53-year-old Flint worker crushed to death in scrap yard
On February 6, an excavator crushed a 53-year-old worker to death at the RJ Industrial Recycling scrap yard in Flint, Michigan. According to the report filed by Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA), two workers were standing in the bucket of a front-end loader while attempting to reinstall a pin on an excavator arm.
While the pair worked, a third worker, the operator of the front-end loader, went to start and move the excavator arm to assist the reinstallation. During this operation, the excavator cab and arm rotated, pinning one of the two workers between the excavator arm and the bucket. The worker was transported to the local Hurley Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
Strategically located amid the shuttered and torn down auto plants of Flint, RJ Industrial boasts that it has “become a national leader in asset recovery, demolition, and metal recycling for the automotive, railroad, shipping, energy, and general manufacturing industries.”
In 2023, the company, also known as RJ Torching, reached a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and paid $150,000 in civil penalties for violations of the Clean Air Act. Under a consent decree, the company agreed to install a pollution capture and control system at its Flint facility to reduce visible emissions of inhalable metallic particulate matter.
According to media reports, MIOSHA is in the process of investigating the death and has not yet released any additional information. This death is the second this year in Michigan’s industrial slaughterhouse.
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Such inquiries often stretch on for months or years, during which time families and coworkers receive little information. When findings are eventually released, they result in limited penalties that leave the conditions leading to the fatal incident largely unchanged. Throughout the process, production continues, corporate operations remain uninterrupted and official reviews serve to contain scrutiny rather than to address the causes of workplace deaths.
February marks 10 months since the rushed retooling at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan resulted in an overhead gantry crane brutally crushing and killing 63‑year‑old machine repairman Ronald Adams Sr. while performing maintenance on an industrial washer inside an enclosed factory cell.
Stellantis and the United Auto Workers, of which Adams was a member, remain deafeningly silent, as production quickly resumed at Dundee as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, facilitating the cover-up, MIOSHA has refused to release its probe into the April 7 fatality. Earlier this month, a MIOSHA spokesman told the World Socialist Web Site that the “case is still open.”
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Workers at RJ Industrial Recycling in Flint who have information on this industrial murder and other violations of workers’ rights to safe working conditions should write in to the IWA-RFC Newsletter. The only way workers can protect themselves against the threat of injury and death is through the relentless exposure of these violations and the building of rank-and-file safety committees that put workplace operations under workers’ control and oversight.
15. United Kingdom: The crisis at Royal Mail: postal workers need a rank-and-file strategy to fightback
A mobilization of postal workers is posed directly against Royal Mail’s new owners, billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group and renewed job losses, terms and conditions driven into the floor and the collapsing of the mail service.
This struggle requires a political fight against Communication Workers Union (CWU) leaders Dave Ward and Martin Walsh and their collusion with Kretinsky and the Starmer Labour government.
The disaster confronting postal workers flows directly from the Framework Agreement they signed behind closed doors with Kretinsky in December 2024. That deal was bound up with the Labour government’s green light for the £3.6 billion takeover, secured through a Deed of Undertaking premised on “light-touch” regulation designed to enrich private equity billionaires.
More than a year after their “ground-breaking agreement,” Walsh and Ward now act as spurned partners, claiming Kretinsky has not “honoured” his undertakings. But they told postal workers to leave everything in their capable hands having co-authored and vouched for a fraud: these are grounds enough to demand the entire CWU leadership be stood down and replaced.
Ward and Walsh have not been duped. They have been faithful retainers from day one having signed up to the wrecking operation now underway. This was the content of their 12-page Framework Agreement under the pro-business jargon of Universal Service Obligation (USO) “reform”.
In December 2024, Works Council leader Daniela Cavallo and IG Metall union district manager Thorsten Gröger announced a “Christmas miracle” at Volkswagen. The miracle consisted of 35,000 jobs being cut and remuneration being reduced by up to 20 percent. With this, according to Cavallo and Gröger, compulsory redundancies and plant closures would be averted and “security for livelihoods, families and future generations” created.
Then, between Christmas and Easter that year, another “miracle” occurred at VW. Cash reserves of €6 billion were suddenly found in the allegedly cash-strapped coffers—slightly more than necessary for the Volkswagen Board of Management members to collect bonuses of up to €1.75 million each!
According to VW Chief Financial Officer Arno Antlitz, the money shower was the result of cancelled investments. In other words, it was stolen directly from the workforce. The IG Metall and Works Council had cited the necessity of huge investments in the course of converting to electromobility to justify the greatest cutbacks in the company’s history, which would save the group €15 billion annually.
Now it is clear: What was taken out of workers’ pockets ends up as a bonus in the bank accounts of the Board; instead of employment security for the workforce, there is a self-service cash dispenser at the top of the company.
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Anger at the self-enrichment of the Board is enormous. One month before the works council election, the workforce is seething. On the VW intranet, a debate is unfolding about the “scam” being carried out by the Works Council and IG Metall, who are trying to contain the anger by demanding a special payment. There is talk of €5,000. With 120,000 employees, that would amount to €600 million or one tenth of the cash inflow. The special payment is to be paid out in May, i.e., in the month in which the second part of the bonuses for the workforce fall victim to the cuts.
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The never-ending attacks on wages, jobs and conditions affect not only VW workers. In the global competition for market share, the car companies have long since ceased to argue about who builds the best vehicles, but rather who squeezes their workforce most efficiently. It is a competitive struggle on the backs of the workforce for lower wages, more pressure and greater exploitation—in the interest of the shareholders.
The cutbacks agreed in 2024, which were officially justified by citing “competitiveness” and the “transformation to e-mobility,” were in truth about higher returns for shareholders and million-euro payments for management. The profit rate of the core brand was to be doubled and tripled: to 6.5 percent. Above all, for the owner families Porsche-Piëch (estimated wealth around €40 billion), who own over 53 percent of VW shares, additional billions in profits beckon.
What is happening at VW shows that the entire policy of “social partnership” is bankrupt. IG Metall and its Works Council do not represent the interests of the workforce—as co-managers, they ensure it is squeezed more effectively. Therefore, the workforce must urgently reorganise and reorient itself. It must build independent rank-and-file action committees.
During the opening press conference at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), festival jury president and veteran German filmmaker Wim Wenders shamefully declared the role of film artists was to “stay out of politics.”
Wenders’ extraordinary comment came in response to a journalist who asked why the festival had failed to express any solidarity with Palestinians suffering from Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza.
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The last and most damaging word was left to jury president and veteran German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who declared bluntly: “We have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics; but we are the counterweight to politics.”
Wenders’ remark that artists are not obliged to take a position on a genocide which has now entered its third year is scandalous and must be firmly rebuffed.
Art is not a an empty formal exercise separated from social life and politics, nor is it merely a form of personal self-expression. What role does Wenders, now an “ecumenical Christian filmmaker,” attribute to art? According to critics, considering the “inner life,” exploring redemption, longing and the “presence of the unseen.”
In a 2018 interview, Wenders told the Hollywood Reporter:
“Every artist basically is the sum of his experiences. And spiritual experiences are very important. You can, of course, decide to live a life that is opposed to that. I was a radical student in 1968, and I turned away from my religious upbringing. I came back in a big way in the ’80s and found that I hadn’t really lost it. It was very much linked to the death of my father. Seeing him face death without fear, and actually with some anticipation and joy, was an incredible experience.”
Wenders has made valuable films in the past, but the conception he advanced in Berlin is both retrograde and utterly false. If art is to mean something important it cannot be indifferent to the upheavals of our day. What sort of art would it be that ignores the burning questions and convulsive events shaping and often devastating the lives of the planet’s population? Those events, as Trotsky observed, are prepared by people and made by people, and fall upon and change people. “Art, directly or indirectly, affects the lives of the people who make or experience the events. This refers to all art, to the grandest, as well as to the most intimate.”
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Wenders’ positions do not come out of the blue. In 2000, we wrote, discussing some of his films:
Compared with other figures of the New Cinema movement, for example R. W. Fassbinder or Volker Schlöndorff, Wenders exhibits a tendency to pull back from difficult social and historical questions. Both Fassbinder (one of whose principal cinema influences was the German-American director Douglas Sirk) and Schlöndorff have tackled head-on issues emanating from the German past and fascism in particular….
In Wenders’ own films the traces of the past remain either traces—political slogans daubed on a wall in the background—or assume an absurd form—such as the Nazi war movie being rehearsed in Wings of Desire (1987). This is not to insist that every German filmmaker has to devote all of his work to making films devoted to the German past, but Wenders evinces a reluctance to really come to grips with the roots of the problems displayed by the figures in his films, loneliness, despair, disorientation.
Unfortunately, Wenders was not alone in this sort of “anti-political” backlash, in reality, an accommodation to the official political and media barrage directed against opposition to the Gaza genocide and political and fascistic reaction generally. Actors Neil Patrick Harris and Michelle Yeoh offered similarly submissive comments in Berlin.
One appropriate response to Wenders and the others came from Indian author Arundhati Roy, who issued a statement explaining she now planned to turn down an invitation to attend the festival due to her disgust at the comments made by jury members.
Roy insisted angrily: “To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time–when artists, writers and film-makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”
Roy continued by noting that: “Although I have been profoundly disturbed by the positions taken by the German government and various German cultural institutions on Palestine, I have always received political solidarity when I have spoken to German audiences about my views on the genocide in Gaza.”
The opposition to the Israeli genocide, of course, is not confined to Germany. It has found expression in innumerable mass demonstrations, protests and strikes across the globe, including protests by significant numbers of prominent workers active in the film industry.
In May 2025 more than 350 prominent directors, writers and actors signed an open letter denouncing the “genocide … taking place in Gaza” and deplored the lack of action on the part of the film industry. Additional significant protests and demonstrations against the slaughter of civilians in Gaza took place at last year’s film festivals in Cannes and Venice.
The stance taken by [US-born Berlinale director Tricia ] Tuttle and Wenders reflects the political agenda of the German establishment, not the thinking of wide layers of the population.
18. Political conflict in the Philippine elite deepens over Washington’s war preparations
On February 2, the Philippine Senate removed Senator Imee Marcos as chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations and replaced her with Senator Erwin Tulfo, a close ally of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The post controls oversight of treaties, alliances, and foreign policy. Sen. Marcos is both the president’s older sister and one of the most insistent elite critics of his tight alignment with Washington and confrontational stance toward China.
Her ouster is a calculated blow by the pro‑US camp of President Marcos against the rival faction of the elite, aligned with former President Rodrigo Duterte, which has sought closer economic integration with China and distance from Washington’s war preparations.
This change was prepared by the Senate realignment in September 2025, when a new majority bloc deposed Sen. Francis Escudero and installed Sen. Vicente Sotto III as Senate President. The move was presented as a response to public anger over the multibillion‑peso flood‑control “ghost projects” scandal, in which funds for supposed flood‑mitigation works were revealed to have been diverted through fictitious or overpriced projects. The shake-up in the Senate was in reality a manoeuver by a recomposed majority—dominated by forces willing to stand with Marcos Jr. and the US—to secure control of the upper house as mass anti‑corruption protests erupted and fissures widened between the Marcos and Duterte camps.
The flood‑control scandal has implicated both political factions. The schemes began under Duterte and continued under Marcos Jr., channeling enormous sums through networks of contractors and political brokers, while deadly floods and landslides exposed the absence of real protection for the population. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Manila and elsewhere in September, demanding accountability and the return of stolen funds. At the same time, impeachment complaints were filed in the House against both Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte—nominally over corruption and abuse of power, but in fact reflecting a far‑reaching struggle within the elite itself. The House justice committee junked the impeachment cases against Marcos Jr. on February 10, but the political crisis continues unabated.
Marcos Jr. has so far managed to emerge dominant in this faction fight. He has reshuffled congressional leadership, secured the backing of key generals, and used the machinery of the state to contain the immediate fallout of the scandal, even though his administration is directly implicated in it. The removal of Imee Marcos as Chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations must be seen in this light. It is not a family quarrel but a move by the dominant pro‑US faction to tighten its grip on foreign policy, remove a prominent critic from a strategic post, and send a message to the Duterte camp that opposition to Washington’s war plans will not be tolerated at the summits of power.
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There are two immense pressures that drive the spiraling conflict in the Philippine elite: the fraught question of alignment with Washington’s war drive, and the question of who will head the repressive apparatus of the state to suppress explosive levels of social anger.
Under Marcos Jr., the United States has effectively secured a military foothold for staging war with China over the South China Sea or Taiwan. Washington now bases military forces at nine “agreed locations,” throughout the archipelago including in strategic locations of northern Luzon and Palawan. Rotational US military units cycle through these sites on a continuous basis. Advanced systems such as the Typhon Mid‑Range Capability missile battery, capable of firing Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM‑6s, have been deployed on Luzon, from where they can hit targets across the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Over 500 joint military activities have been scheduled for 2026—far more than an average of one a day—with the annual Balikatan war games expanding into multi‑national, live‑fire rehearsals for conflict with China.
These developments generate a certain unease in Manila. Business groups and officials worry that the volatility of the Trump administration—its threat of tariffs, restrictions on migrants, and transactional approach to alliances—could devastate exports and remittances or leave the Philippines exposed mid‑crisis. Yet this anxiety has not led to a break with the US alliance. On the contrary, the dominant response of the Marcos faction and its liberal allies is to deepen integration with Washington in the hope of securing firmer commitments and more military and economic aid, even as the danger of war grows.
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One of the starkest expressions of the social crisis is the surge in labor migration. After the pandemic slump, overseas deployment and the total number of overseas Filipino workers have climbed to record highs. Millions of Filipinos, a growing majority of them women, now labor abroad as domestic workers, caregivers, factory employees, and seafarers under conditions of harsh exploitation and precarious legal status. Their remittances prop up the Philippine economy, but the price is the disintegration of family life and the exposure of millions to exploitative conditions and abuse around the world.
The first responses to these conditions—the protests over corruption, the initial strike actions, the anger over rising prices and collapsing services—remain politically limited. They are channeled into impeachment maneuvers, appeals to the courts, and hopes in one or another wing of the bourgeois opposition. Meanwhile, the ruling class prepares to answer any deeper challenge with repression: either through the openly fascistic methods associated with Duterte or through the more traditional authoritarianism of the son of the former dictator Marcos.
19. New Zealand firefighters continue strikes
Firefighters who spoke with the World Socialist Web Site denounced government ministers and right-wing media commentators who attacked them for striking against pay cuts and rundown, faulty equipment.
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Firefighters should reject any attempt to impose a sellout and instead fight to broaden the struggle against austerity by appealing to other sections of the working class. To do this, workers need new organizations that they control. Rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracy, must be built to link up the struggles of firefighters, teachers, healthcare workers and other public and private sector workers, all of whom face ruthless attacks on their living standards and working conditions.
Workers should base themselves on a socialist political program. The money wasted on war and hoarded by the super-rich should be used for essential services that workers rely on, including a fully resourced and expanded fire service with modern, reliable equipment and well-paid staff.
David North, Chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and National Chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (United States), will deliver lectures via video conferences titled “Where is America headed? The American volcano and the global tsunami” at two universities in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, this week. These will be North’s first lectures at universities in Turkey.
At the invitation of Social Democracy clubs and sponsored by Mehring Yayıncılık, North will speak at Bilkent University on February 17 and at Middle East Technical University (METU) on February 19. Both events will start at 6 p.m. We urge our readers in Ankara to register here to attend the public lecture at METU.
North will address the crisis in the US, which is the most intense expression of the crisis of the global capitalist system, from a historical and international perspective. The events will be a further elaboration of his lectures given in Berlin and London last November.
21. United Kingdom: UCU members to strike again at the University of Sheffield International College
Teaching and administrative staff at the University of Sheffield International College (USIC) have voted to strike over management’s refusal to offer any pay rise for the following year. This represents a pay cut, with inflation currently measured by the RPI at 4.2 percent.
Workers are set to strike for five alternate days on February 16, 18, 20, 24 and 26.
USIC is owned by Study Group and operates in partnership the University of Sheffield (UoS), using the UoS prefix and their coat of arms to attract international students to study preparation courses to progress and study at UoS. Courses at USIC can cost students up to £26,000 per year.
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Education workers’ struggles are confronted by a union bureaucracy that repeatedly isolates, demobilizes and betrays them. As on previous occasions there are no calls for unified or solidarity action throughout the Higher Education, Further Education or private sector. There are no attempts to unify struggles with other UCU members in struggle at UoS (even though USIC is an appendage of the university), nor with workers at SHU who remain in an unresolved dispute with management, or with those at the Sheffield College.
The UCU disaggregates both national and city-wide disputes, suspending or calling off coordinated action when employers offer token deals; converting successful strike mandates into brief, intermittent or symbolic stoppages while pleading for management to act reasonably and return to negotiations. Enabling voluntary redundancies at both UoS and USIC, the union is the conduit through which jobs are destroyed not defended.
Private education providers are hyper profit driven by fictionalization and increasingly universities are run as profit-seeking enterprises. Therefore, closing academic departments and courses, redundancy schemes and attacks on staff pay are methods by which to maintain margins. There is a renewed emphasis on market driven priorities include for instance at the UoS in research aligned to the growing arms industry and at SHU’s grandiose London property projects, while shifting costs onto staff and students.
The UCU bureaucracy functions as a mediator that legitimizes marketization by limiting confrontation and ensuring that workers are not allowed to do anything that might disturb corporate‑union relations. At the time of the USIC ballot result last year, UCU General Secretary Jo Grady said: “Our demands are not unreasonable, and the hard-working staff employed by USIC deserve better. Instead of pushing their own workforce towards taking industrial action, management needs to work with us to resolve this dispute.”
Any successful defense of jobs, pay and Higher Education cannot be “reasonable” in the eyes of bosses concerned only with revenue and profit targets. To wage a successful fight means mobilizing independently from the trade union bureaucracy. Workers at USIC must form rank‑and‑file committees at every HE, FE and educational workplace, involving academic and non‑academic staff, and students together, to coordinate demands and democratically plan action.
On Tuesday, the European Parliament voted to revise its “Asylum Procedure Regulation” (APR) and create a list of “safe countries of origin”, paving the way for mass migrant deportations. The vote passed by a large majority of 224 (408 in favour, 184 against and 60 abstentions).
On the list are multiple countries run by repressive regimes known for massive violations of democratic rights: Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, India, Bangladesh, Colombia and Kosovo. European officials will be told to presume that nationals of the designated countries do not qualify for international protection, placing the burden on applicants to prove they would be unsafe.
Another vote approved, by a majority of 170, was a Return Border Procedure Regulation extending European governments’ ability to deport migrants to “safe third countries”. These “return hubs” are countries which the asylum applicant did not hail from, but to which they can be said to have a connection by one of the following criteria:
the presence of members of their family in the country, the previous presence in the country of the applicant, or if there are linguistic, cultural or similar links;
the applicant has transited through the third country on the way to the EU and they could have requested effective protection there;
an agreement or arrangement exists with the third country at a bilateral, multilateral or EU level for the admission of asylum seekers, with the exception of unaccompanied minors.
The passage of the laws is the outcome of the EU’s adoption of the Migration and Asylum Pact (CEAS) in 2024. This included 10 articles aimed at establishing “a European solution” to prevent migration into the continent. It specified prioritizing “more secure European borders”, “faster and more efficient procedures for asylum and return” and “more solidarity with Member States at external borders”. Critical to the Pact, and its planned full adoption by June this year, was the adoption this month of a harsher Asylum Procedure Regulation and Return Border Procedure Regulation.
The measures adopted last week represent a significant strengthening of the Fortress Europe agenda of the European ruling elite, as they accept, continent-wide, the model established by Georgia Meloni’s far-right Italian government, under which Albania hosts two detention camps in its territory to hold migrants while their claims for asylum are processed in Italy. Migrants bound for Italy intercepted at sea are transferred to these camps, which are expected to hold up to 3,000 people a month.
Alessandro Ciriani, an MEP and member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, hailed the votes in the European Parliament: “This is the beginning of a new phase: migration is no longer endured but governed.”
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Thousands of migrants already die at Europe’s external borders every year—especially in the Mediterranean, with 2024 the worst year on record for deaths in the sea. Thousands more died in 2025, but this year could be the most horrific yet.
In just 40 days to February 10, at least 524 migrants have died or been reported missing attempting the crossing from North Africa to Europe. Speaking to La Monde, an International Organization for Migration spokesman warned, after 53 people died in a sinking off the Libyan coast, “This is the worst start to a year we have seen in over a decade… Also the deadliest.”
23. 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.
