Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The Voice of Hind Rajab: A harrowing account of the killing of a Palestinian child
The Voice of Hind Rajab, a moving docudrama written and directed by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, focuses on the response of the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) to the desperate cellphone calls of Hind, a five-year-old Palestinian girl trapped by Israeli fire in Gaza in January 2024. The girl, along with six members of her family and two Red Crescent paramedics, eventually died in a hail of lethal IDF fire.
The film, nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards (the ceremony will be held March 15), is currently playing in select theaters in the US. It is scheduled for digital release on February 24.
The case, of course, is a notorious one by now. Students taking over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in April 2024 to protest the mass murder in Gaza renamed the building “Hind’s Hall” in the murdered girl’s honor. American rapper Macklemore issued a protest song “Hind’s Hall” in May 2024. The massacre of the entirely defenseless Hind and her family members has come to epitomize for tens of millions the genocidal-fascistic character of the ongoing Zionist onslaught.
The tragic episode began when the black Kia Picanto in which Hind and her family were attempting to flee Gaza City in search of a “safe zone” was shelled. Her uncle, aunt and three cousins were immediately killed. Hind and another cousin initially survived but were trapped in the wrecked vehicle.
Hind and her 15-year-old cousin Layan Hamada are the only ones left alive in the car, as an IDF unit begins firing. Layan makes a desperate call to the Red Crescent, explaining they are being targeted, a tank is getting closer and that everyone in the car aside from Hind and herself are dead. Seconds after, gunshots are heard once again, and Layan’s screaming abruptly stops.
Hind is now the only one left alive in the vehicle, gravely injured and alone. The PRCS stay in contact with her, as they attempt to gain permission from the IDF to send paramedics to the location to save her. The film dramatizes the scene in the Red Crescent office, but uses the actual audio recording of Hind’s phone call—hence its title.
*****
Ben Hania’s script was developed through extensive interviews with the actual PRCS volunteers who handled the calls. The dialogue is rooted in this testimony, capturing the prayers and words of comfort passed on and the frantic internal debates that occur as the staff navigate the complex military and bureaucratic hurdles required to dispatch an ambulance. It focuses on the “invisible” elements of the tragedy — the waiting, the silence, and the agonizing pursuit of military clearance.
*****
The film places the audience inside the Red Crescent call center, where operators try to keep Hind calm and conscious while negotiating with Israeli authorities.
The most notable “dialogue” in The Voice of Hind Rajab takes the form of the emergency call between Hind and the Red Crescent operators. Those lines center on her fear (“I’m so scared, please come”) and her descriptions of the darkness and the “sleeping” relatives around her, while the operators try to soothe her, keep her talking and extract details about her location.
“If we hang up, she dies alone,” and “What does protocol mean when there’s a child on the line?” argue the desperate, traumatized responders.
The film transforms Hind’s situation into a single‑location, time‑pressured drama about frontline medics trying—and ultimately failing—to rescue one child, highlighting the human stakes of the Gaza assault and the burden on those who tried to help her.
*****
The chaos and terror build: initial organized response (logging details, radioing ambulances) shifts to emotional strain as Hind’s small voice (“I’m scared, come quickly”) dominates via speakerphone, freezing the room.
Operators pace, argue over protocols (“We need IDF clearance,” “She’ll die waiting”), sweat under fluorescent glare, their faces lit by phone screens—mixing professional duty with raw parental horror.
They weigh the dangers (ongoing shelling, recent PRCS losses) against the coordinated approval with the Israelis and Hind’s fading consciousness, deciding the chance to save her justifies deployment from nearby al-Ahli Hospital rather than waiting indefinitely.
Focus stays tight on four or five core staff like Rana and Omar, reacting in real time to Hind’s pleas; no music, just her audio, along with beeps and static, making the space a pressure cooker of helplessness.
*****
Hind’s voice—describing herself alone, scared, and surrounded by “sleeping” relatives—creates unbearable emotional pressure; operators like Rana repeatedly emphasize to supervisors, “She’s just a little girl, we can’t leave her,” framing inaction as tantamount to abandonment. The PRCS has already lost dozens of staff in Gaza by January 2024 but continues operations, as paramedics like al-Zeino and al-Madhoun volunteer knowing the risks, driven by professional commitment and the slim hope of success.
The two paramedics are killed when their clearly marked ambulance is hit. PRCS and multiple human‑rights and investigative groups insist the ambulance was deliberately targeted by Israeli forces despite prior coordination, while the Zionist regime has not provided a detailed public explanation addressing these specific allegations.
*****
Ben Hania chose the hybrid documentary-fiction structure to translate the impact of hearing Hind’s voice into cinematic form and maintain its impact. She explained in a director’s statement that upon hearing Hind’s voice
I immediately felt a mix of helplessness, and an overwhelming sadness. A physical reaction, like the ground shifted under me. I couldn’t carry on as planned. I contacted the Red Crescent and asked them to let me hear the full audio. After listening to it, I knew, without a doubt, that I had to drop everything else. I had to make this film. I spoke at length with Hind’s mother, with the real people who were on the other end of that call, those who tried to help her. I listened, I cried, I wrote. Then I wove a story around their testimonies, using the real audio recording of Hind’s voice, and building a single-location film where the violence remains off-screen.
She went on:
At the heart of this film is something very simple, and very hard to live with. I cannot accept a world where a child calls for help and no one comes. That pain, that failure, belongs to all of us. This story is not just about Gaza. It speaks to a universal grief. And I believe that fiction (especially when it draws from verified, painful, real events) is cinema’s most powerful tool. More powerful than the noise of breaking news or the forgetfulness of scrolling. Cinema can preserve a memory. Cinema can resist amnesia. May Hind Rajab’s voice be heard.
*****
To their credit, executive producers of The Voice of Hind Rajab include prominent figures such as Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuaron and Jonathan Glazer.
A viewing of The Voice of Hind Rajab is painful but essential for an understanding of the present state of the world and the monstrous crimes being committed against the most defenseless populations.
2. Trump threatens executive order to curb voting in midterm election
In another fascistic rant on his social media platform, US President Donald Trump said he would be issuing an executive order “shortly” to impose ID requirements for voters in the 2026 midterm election.
Calling objections to requiring passports or other proof of citizenship at the polls a “SCAM,” he said that if the Republican-controlled Congress could not pass the necessary legislation, “there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”
Any presidential order on voting requirements would be illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution gives primary responsibility for the conduct of elections to the states, with Congress having final authority, and the president playing no role. Article One, Section Four of the Constitution reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
But Trump sought to browbeat the Supreme Court in advance to reject any legal challenge to his executive order, writing, “I hope the Supreme Court realizes … that these Corrupt and Deranged Democrats, if they ever gain power, will not only be adding two States to our roster of 50, with all of the baggage thereto, but will also PACK THE COURT with a total of 21 Supreme Court Justices, THEIR DREAM.”
As usual, Trump accuses his political opponents of the criminal actions he is carrying out himself. He claimed that if the Democrats win the election, they would move rapidly to seize total power, including impeaching him, overturning the filibuster rule in the Senate, and packing the Supreme Court.
*****
Trump’s series of posts on voter ID requirements followed the passage by the House last Wednesday of the so-called SAVE America Act, legislation that would require voters to show proof of citizenship both to register and when voting in person, and requiring states to purge voter rolls of supposed “noncitizens.” The near party-line vote was 218-213.
While the bill is not expected to pass in the Senate, the sheer scope is an indication of the dictatorial methods of rule being contemplated in the White House. It would allow, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security to seize the voter records of any state. DHS includes both ICE and CBP, targeting immigrants, but its only link to elections previously was in regard to guarding against foreign cyberwarfare attacks.
The voter ID requirements would threaten the ability of more than half the American population, since nearly half don’t have passports, while 70 million married women have birth certificates that don’t match their current legal names, and millions more don’t have access to birth certificates at all, particularly the poor, racial minorities and naturalized citizens.
*****
Trump is seeking to combine his longstanding “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen with the current nationwide militarized attack on immigrants by armed and masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection. He now claims that the 2026 election will be stolen by mass voting on the part of undocumented non-citizens.
From an evidentiary standpoint, the claim is simply preposterous. Reviews of election results in both Democratic-controlled and Republican-controlled states have found only a few dozen non-citizens registered to vote—usually done inadvertently when they applied for drivers’ licenses—and an even smaller number of non-citizens actually casting ballots.
The logic of Trump’s argument is even more bizarre. His election defeat in 2020 cannot be blamed on immigrants brought into the country by the Democrats since at that time Trump was in power and in control of border security. In 2024, after the supposed influx of “tens of millions” of immigrants under the Biden administration, Trump actually won the election, because of mass discontent over inflation and the impact of Biden’s policies of austerity and war.
The purpose of Trump’s ranting about voter ID is to whip up a fascist hysteria about “illegal voting” which would support his efforts either to manipulate the results of the 2026 election or to call them off entirely. Trump’s former top political strategist Steve Bannon cheered, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” He added a call to send Army troops as well.
Trump continues to prepare the military for intervention in the election. He traveled to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, one of the largest Army bases in the continental US, for a campaign-style rally Friday, in which he called on soldiers to vote Republican in the midterm elections.
Ignoring the longstanding principle that the military is to be politically neutral, Trump told the soldiers, “You have to vote for us,” and he paraded North Carolina Republican candidates before them. Pentagon policy forbids political activity by active-duty soldiers, with the Army field manual declaring, “The Army as an institution must be nonpartisan and appear so too.”
He later met for two hours behind closed doors with Special Forces troops who took part in the military raid on Venezuela which led to the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, now held in a Brooklyn, New York jail awaiting trial on narcotics trafficking charges.
Meanwhile the Justice Department continues to press states to turn over their voter lists for federal inspections, although Democratic-controlled states have refused to do so and federal courts have upheld their opposition. A federal judge in Michigan agreed to dismiss such a lawsuit last week, the fourth time the DOJ has been rebuffed in the courts.
A federal judge in Oregon took similar action the previous week, writing that the “presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to DOJ that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.”
3. Will Lehman’s UAW campaign wins broad support from workers, as DSA unleashes slanders
The launch of Will Lehman’s campaign for president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) is a political event of major significance for the entire working class. Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker, is running to organize a rebellion of the rank and file against a parasitic bureaucracy that has transformed the UAW into an instrument of management and the state.
Lehman’s platform centers on transferring power from the apparatus to workers on the shop floor through a network of rank-and-file committees, ending corporatist collaboration, opposing nationalist poison that pits workers against each other across borders, and mobilizing workers’ industrial power in defense of democratic rights and against war.
The initial campaign video, published on Lehman’s website, WillforUAWPresident.org, has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and the campaign has received messages of support from workers across industries and countries.
It is precisely this response that has provoked a frantic, malicious attack against Lehman’s campaign from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is a faction of the Democratic Party.
In a particularly revealing statement posted on X, Honda Wang, a member of the DSA’s National Labor Commission Steering Committee, wrote, responding to Lehman’s campaign video: “stop falling for these insane union busting weirdos … they send people to picket lines to tell workers to stop paying dues, decertify from their union, and form committees with their party instead … seems like pretty clear union-busting behavior to me.”
Ignoring all the issues Lehman raises—including fighting for wages that restore past losses, a zero-layoff policy, company-paid healthcare, and the 30-hour week with no loss of pay; uniting workers across borders against nationalist chauvinism; and mobilizing workers’ industrial power to defend democratic rights and oppose war—Wang fixates on the question of dues. This is telling, because it goes to what is, for the union apparatus, the heart of the matter: the income of the bureaucracy.
As a factual matter, Lehman does not call on UAW members to “stop paying dues.” Wang nonetheless raises the specter of workers doing so because he speaks as an apparatchik—furious at the possibility that the automatic flow of money from workers to a bureaucracy that exists to police them and enforce concessions could come under threat.
Workers, however, should have every right to decide whether they will fund an organization that claims to represent them. If workers believe a union is fighting for their interests—waging a real struggle against layoffs, speedup and concessions—they will pay dues willingly.
*****
When Wang and the DSA raise the prospect of an end of automatic dues payments, what they are defending is precisely what Lehman exposes in his campaign statement: a massive financial apparatus built on workers’ dues money, hoarded by a stratum of upper middle class executives. As Lehman explains, “As it is presently constituted, the UAW is a union in name only. It functions to isolate us, discipline us, and protect the interests of a privileged bureaucracy that is in bed with the companies and the government.”
*****
With the installation of Shawn Fain in 2023, in an election characterized by systematic voter suppression, the DSA and its periphery were brought directly into the top echelons of the UAW apparatus. The DSA and Labor Notes, both backed Fain and denounced Will Lehman’s campaign, opposing his call for rank-and-file committees and the transfer of power to the shop floor while promoting the fraud that Fain would be a “reformer”—a lie that has been comprehensively exposed over the past three years.
*****
Wang’s charge of “union busting” is the standard reflex of a privileged apparatus confronted with a rank-and-file challenge. For Wang and the forces he represents, the union is the apparatus. Workers are merely objects to be managed. That is why he equates the independent organization of workers to assert democratic control—over negotiations, strikes, communications and even over how their dues are collected and used—with “union busting.”
The apparatus that the DSA is so ardently defending has presided over the systematic suppression of the class struggle for more than four decades.
Over this period, the strike—historically the most powerful weapon available to workers—all but disappeared from American life. In 1970, there were 381 major work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers. By the 2010s, that number had collapsed to a handful per year. This did not happen because workers were satisfied. It happened because the trade union bureaucracy, over decades, smothered every impulse toward collective action, transforming the unions from organizations of struggle into instruments of labor discipline in the service of corporate management.
*****
In the UAW elections, Lehman is running as the representative of the rank and file, and that is why his central pledge is treated as intolerable by the apparatus and its defenders. As Lehman states, “The truth is, this bureaucracy can’t be reformed. It must be abolished. The union parasites who collaborate with management and the state must be removed, and the resources of the union must be taken out of their hands and placed under the democratic control of the rank and file.”
Fain is the candidate of that apparatus, and his backers in the DSA defend him because their own positions and incomes are tied to the preservation of the bureaucracy and the suppression of the class struggle.
4. Israeli air strikes kill 12 in Gaza on eve of Trump’s first “Board of Peace” meeting
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza on Sunday night and Monday morning, which killed at least 12 Palestinians on the eve of the first meeting of Trump’s so‑called “Board of Peace,” confirm once again that the US‑backed “ceasefire” is a cover for the continuation and escalation of genocide against the Palestinian people.*****
Israel’s military claimed that the strikes were aimed at militants and that one of the targets was a person identified as a commander of Islamic Jihad in the Tel al‑Hawa area of Gaza City, while other strikes were described as responses to alleged ceasefire violations and rocket fire. However, as always, the main victims were civilians—women, children and the elderly—crowded into tents and ruined apartment blocks, as they have been throughout the more than two‑year‑long campaign of annihilation.
Palestinian authorities condemned the attacks as a flagrant breach of the US‑brokered ceasefire that was supposedly in its second phase, pointing out that more than 500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the truce came into effect.
Gaza’s health ministry reports that around 71,700–71,800 Palestinians have been killed and more than 170,000 injured since the war began, meaning that more than 10 percent of the population has been killed or wounded, a scale of destruction now acknowledged by Israeli officials. Roughly 480–520 have been killed in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire began, figures also accepted by Israeli military sources.
*****
The timing of the latest massacre—on the eve of the first meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace in Washington on February 19—exposes the real content of the imperialist initiative. The Board has been presented by the White House as a mechanism to oversee “post‑conflict reconstruction” in Gaza and to manage the second phase of the ceasefire, including a UN‑mandated stabilization force and a technocratic committee to govern the Strip under international supervision.
The criminal character of Trump’s board is revealed by its composition, a tightly knit core of Trump‑aligned US officials, financial oligarchs and long‑time imperialist operators. Key US figures include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s Middle East envoy and real‑estate billionaire Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son‑in‑law Jared Kushner and senior White House adviser Aryeh Lightstone.
There are also members who are prominent international representatives of capital and imperialist policy. Among them are former British prime minister Tony Blair, a key architect of the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003; World Bank president Ajay Banga; Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan; and former UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov, who has been named “High Representative for Gaza” and the on‑the‑ground link between the Board and the new technocratic Gaza authority.
Around this inner circle sits a Gaza Executive Board composed of a cabal of regional and international power brokers: Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan; a senior Qatari diplomat Ali al‑Thawadi; Egypt’s intelligence chief Hassan Rashad; UAE minister Reem al‑Hashimy; Israeli‑Cypriot billionaire Yakir Gabay; and former UN and EU reconstruction officials like Sigrid Kaag, among others. Other fascists supporting the board include Argentina’s Javier Milei, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and, of course, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
*****
The World Socialist Web Site has consistently condemned this entire structure—the so-called ceasefire, the “framework” for Gaza’s future and the Board of Peace—as a political fraud whose aim is to provide a pseudo‑legal and “humanitarian” cover for a US‑directed plan to depopulate Gaza, destroy all organized resistance and transform what remains of the enclave into a colonial protectorate dominated by Israeli and American imperialism.
The insistence on “technocratic” administration, “security guarantees,” the disarming of resistance organizations and the permanent presence of foreign and Israeli forces is a blueprint for the completion of the removal of Palestinians from all the Israeli-occupied territories.
*****
While the missiles continue to strike Gaza, a video from Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank has shed light on the systematic abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees that is an integral part of the same genocidal campaign.
The footage broadcast on Israeli and regional media on Friday showed around 20 heavily armed officers storming a hallway leading to Palestinian prisoners’ cells and forcing detainees to the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, before dragging them out and leaving them face down on the floor.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society, which sent lawyers to meet inmates afterwards, reported that far‑right National Security Minister Itamar Ben‑Gvir personally “stepped on prisoners’ heads” and filmed their humiliation, boasting of the crackdown as cameras rolled.
*****
Ben‑Gvir’s presence at Ofer on Friday was a calculated act of fascistic intimidation. Accompanied by senior police and prison officials and civilian Zionists, he toured the prison just days before Ramadan, while guards fired stun grenades near prisoners’ cells and stormed sections of the facility.
During the visit he declared that the harsh measures imposed on Palestinian detainees were “not enough,” demanded still more repressive legislation, including a death penalty law for Palestinian prisoners, and sneered that Ofer was “not a luxury hotel” but a “real prison” whose conditions he welcomed as a “fundamental change.”
*****
The Israeli government has not announced any serious investigation or review of the incident. Instead, the Times of Israel and other outlets amplified Ben‑Gvir’s own video of the raid, underlining the state’s endorsement of his actions. The imperialist governments have responded with silence, as they continue to arm Israel and coordinate policy with Netanyahu’s government, which includes fascists like Ben‑Gvir.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a component of the drive by US and European imperialism to redivide the world in the lead‑up to a new world war in which rival powers carry out colonial wars and proxy military conflicts. Trump’s Board of Peace, the sham ceasefire, the militarized “stabilization” of Gaza and the complete impunity granted to Israeli war criminals are elements of a global strategy by US imperialism to secure strategic chokepoints, energy routes and military bases across the Middle East.
5. Kennedy’s attack on science and public health finds a platform on Theo Von’s podcast
In a February 12 appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared, “I’m not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off toilet seats.” The remark spread quickly online. His comments prompted calls for his resignation. But the significance of the exchange lies beyond its vulgarity. It provokes outrage because this is the official responsible for national health policy at a moment defined by pandemic risk, resurgent infectious disease and deepening social crisis.
Kennedy is not a scientist engaged in research or clinical practice. He has no training in epidemiology, immunology or public health administration. He was chosen for this position by Trump for precisely that reason—to put in charge of the most important health institutions a man who has spent decades attacking them and seeking to undermine the methods through which scientific knowledge is collectively developed and applied.
Through Children’s Health Defense, he promoted false claims linking vaccines to autism and other chronic conditions despite overwhelming epidemiological evidence to the contrary. He campaigned against routine childhood immunization programs, opposed vaccine mandates in schools and portrayed public health scientists and researchers as corrupt.
Kennedy had a trial run for his stewardship of public health in 2019, when the Pacific island of Samoa experienced a catastrophic measles outbreak after vaccination rates collapsed. More than 5,700 people were infected and 83 died, most of them young children. In the months before the outbreak, Kennedy wrote to Samoan officials questioning vaccine safety, and Children’s Health Defense circulated material casting doubt on immunization campaigns. After the deaths, Kennedy denied any responsibility.
Public health agencies, however constrained as part of the capitalist state, are a byproduct of the struggles of the working class for social measures that will benefit the entire population. They translate scientific knowledge into regulatory policy and impose some limits on corporate activity in the name of population protection. The attack on them is a key element of the social counterrevolution carried out in the interests of capitalist profit over human life. In this sense, Kennedy’s hostility to public health institutions is not aberrational or merely personal. It aligns with a political necessity for the ruling elite of which he is part.
*****
During the podcast, Kennedy congratulated himself on what he described as a sweeping first year at Health and Human Services. He portrayed cuts, personnel removals and institutional upheaval as overdue reform, while repeating right-wing horror stories about fluoridation, chronic disease and scientific corruption that have been examined and refuted in detail.
Kennedy exploited the popular distrust provoked by the completely inadequate response to the pandemic. Initial public health measures, and particularly workplace lockdowns, were forced on the ruling class by pressure from below, particularly the factory walkouts in the auto industry. Trump peddled a series off quack remedies—ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, even bleach—before signing off on a policy of fully reopening the economy, based on the mantra that the “cure can’t be worse than the disease.” That is, for the capitalists: Profits had to take precedence over human life.
Workers were compelled back into factories, warehouses and schools while transmission remained widespread. Mitigation measures were rapidly abandoned even as death tolls remained high. Emergency relief programs expired. Corporate profits recovered swiftly while the working class suffered long-term health consequences. And all these policies were continued under the Democratic Biden administration. Biden had declared, referring to Trump, that any president who was responsible for 200,000 dead Americans did not deserve reelection. Another 900,000 died on Biden’s watch.
Kennedy and Trump exploited the confusion and despair created both by the impact of the pandemic and the conflicting explanations and policies advanced. The failures of pandemic governance were recast as proof that scientific institutions themselves were illegitimate. Anger that might have been directed against the capitalist system, which subordinated public health to profit, was redirected against science and public health itself.
The Theo Von podcast functions as an efficient political conduit to channel right-wing disinformation. Von himself, like Kennedy, is a recovering cocaine addict. The two apparently first met in rehab. In this sense, Kennedy’s initial comments about snorting cocaine off toilet seats becomes not merely a disgusting anecdote but supposed proof of authenticity. Kennedy seeks to signal to Von’s audience, “I am one of you,” although there is an unbridgeable social gulf between the mass audience and an heir of one of the wealthiest and most politically prominent American families.
This fraudulent appeal is as deceitful as it is tasteless. Addiction in the United States has overwhelmingly devastated working class communities. It has led to incarceration, unstable housing, untreated illness and premature death for millions. Recovery for those without wealth or connections is uncertain and often inaccessible, while those with means find their way to returning to their esteemed positions. However, these distinctions, unfairness and injustices were not the point of Kennedy’s comment.
By invoking their past addictions as a form of moral credential, Kennedy and Von convert a social catastrophe into personal authority. The structural roots of addiction in economic dislocation, pharmaceutical profiteering and the erosion of public services disappear. What remains is an ethic of individual survival and suspicion. In that framework, collective institutions are not instruments of social protection but crutches for the undeserving.
*****
Kennedy is not a reformer of public health institutions. He is a political operative whose function is to delegitimize them. His boast that he is “not scared of a germ” expresses a distinctly fascist worldview. Infectious disease becomes a test of personal toughness. Collective safeguards become weakness, and public health becomes overreaction. Meanwhile, the United States lost more than 1 million lives to COVID-19, not because the virus couldn’t be stopped, but because the ruling class did not care one iota for the well-being of the population; death and disease were normalized.
To trivialize contagion is not irreverence. It signals rejection of social responsibility by the ruling class, which controls all the levers of power, economic, political and military. This class has forfeited any right to speak for the great majority of the population. The working class must come forward as the true defender of science, public health and other elements of social progress.
6. United States: GM workers denounce ICE operation outside Factory Zero in Detroit
Detroit residents recorded masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stopping and detaining motorists Monday morning outside the General Motors Factory Zero assembly plant. The factory is located on the border of Detroit and the heavily immigrant enclave of Hamtramck.
In a video posted on Reddit, at least four unmarked vehicles can be seen boxing in a white van on the service drive just outside one of the main driveway exits at the GM plant. Masked agents can be seen in front of and on the side of the van. A witness posted: “I saw ICE today at 9:35am outside Factory 0 on Grand Blvd. No uniforms, vests marked ERO for Enforcement and Removal Operations.”
The action by federal agents in the industrial center of Detroit, just outside a factory with more than 2,100 autoworkers, is a major provocation against the working class. It is part of the rapid expansion of ICE operations in Detroit and cities across the country, as Trump’s paramilitary squads are redeployed after “Operation Metro Surge” and the murder of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
*****
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker from Pennsylvania who is running for UAW president, issued a statement Monday opposing the ICE operations. It stated:
I condemn the deployment of ICE agents in Detroit and surrounding communities and call on workers to prepare collective action to defend our immigrant brothers and demand the removal of ICE from Detroit and every city.
After the mass kidnappings of immigrant workers and children in Minneapolis and the murders of Renée Good and ICU nurse and union brother Alex Pretti, Trump is expanding the use of paramilitary forces nationwide. This assault is aimed not only at immigrants but at the entire working class. To defend their wealth and power, the corporate and financial oligarchy is determined to destroy our jobs, public schools and social programs and launch new wars—and it knows this requires suppressing what it calls the “enemy within,” the working class.
UAW President Shawn Fain recently said, “Fascism is back on our doorstep,” and warned that workers are “fooling themselves” if they think what happened to Pretti “could not happen on a UAW picket line.” But beyond voting for Democrats in the midterms—who are functioning as Trump’s enablers—Fain proposes no action.
The real way to fight dictatorship was shown by autoworkers in Detroit, Flint, Toledo and other cities in the 1930s. They used their collective strength against Hitler-admirer Henry Ford, anti-immigrant demagogues like Father Coughlin, and the Black Legion and other fascist gangs used by GM. Led by socialist militants, they united workers of all races and nationalities in struggle against the corporations and both big business parties.
Today, such a fight requires breaking the grip of the UAW bureaucracy, which backs Trump’s chauvinist campaign against our brothers in Mexico, Canada and beyond. Workers must build rank-and-file committees in every factory, workplace, school and neighborhood to link the defense of jobs and living standards with the defense of democratic rights. That means taking up the call from Minneapolis for a general strike to end Trump’s reign of terror, remove ICE from every city, and hold accountable those responsible for violating our constitutional rights.
7. Mass protest against Israeli war criminal Herzog in Melbourne, Australia
Thursday’s turnout, more than double the size of the previous demonstration in the Victorian state capital the previous Monday, was in large part a response to the brutal police rampage orchestrated by the New South Wales (NSW) state Labor government in Sydney just days earlier. The scenes of state violence in Sydney—where peaceful protesters were pepper-sprayed, bashed and charged at by hundreds of riot police—have sent a shockwave of horror and opposition across the country.
In Sydney, the Labor government of Premier Chris Minns, acting in lockstep with the federal Albanese government, had invoked “major event” legislation to erect a virtual police state, banning marches and granting police draconian powers to control the CBD. The resulting violence was a calculated provocation. Footage showed a grandmother’s back being broken after she was pushed by police and a group of Muslim men being attacked while they were in the middle of prayer.
However, as the scale of the movement grows, so too do the efforts of the Greens and their pseudo-left satellites to politically neuter it.
The February 12 rally in Melbourne served as a platform for these forces to attempt to contain the working-class anger and channel it back into the dead-end of the parliamentary system and appeals to the very Labor Party responsible for the crimes being denounced.
*****
The protest organizers, including representatives from Free Palestine Melbourne (FPM), further disoriented the crowd by downplaying Labor’s active participation in the slaughter. FPM speakers repeatedly claimed that Labor’s crime was its “silence” or “complacency.” This narrative serves to obscure the material reality that the Albanese government is a full partner in the imperialist eruption in Gaza and more broadly.
Labor provides diplomatic cover for the Zionist regime, maintains critical military and intelligence ties, and exports weapons components that are essential for the ongoing carpet-bombing of Gaza. By welcoming Herzog and coordinating with his visit, the government sends a message that ethnic cleansing and genocide are acceptable instruments of policy, and that it is prepared to align itself openly with such crimes.
Yet, the political leadership of the protest continues to direct the movement toward impotent moral appeals, asking protesters to “send the government a message” through the ballot box. The underlying premise is that the same parties and institutions orchestrating genocide abroad and repression at home can somehow be pressured into a humane course.
*****
The massive turnout in Melbourne confirms that there is a deep and growing hostility to war and the turn toward authoritarianism. But unless this anger is armed with a clear political perspective, it will be dissipated and betrayed. The capitalist class is responding to its global crisis by tearing up democratic norms and turning toward world war, with the Herzog visit and his red-carpet reception by Labor signalling that there are no red lines when it comes to imperialist interests.
The struggle against genocide cannot be separated from the fight against the capitalist system that produces it. The necessary perspective is the unification of the international working class on a revolutionary socialist program to abolish capitalism, the source of imperialist war, dictatorship and social devastation, and to establish workers’ governments that place the vast resources of society under democratic control.
A demonstration of around 50,000 workers, students and youth took place in central Melbourne on February 12, the largest of a series of nationwide protests against the Albanese Labor government’s invitation to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, a war criminal who has openly incited the Gaza genocide.
The rally took place just days after the New South Wales Labor government used “major event” laws to impose police-state conditions in Sydney, where peaceful protesters were kettled, pepper-sprayed and assaulted under sweeping new powers aimed at deterring any opposition to Herzog’s visit and to Australia’s complicity in the US-backed onslaught on Gaza.
In Melbourne, World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to a cross-section of demonstrators about why they opposed Herzog’s tour, how they viewed Labor’s role in the genocide and the broader assault on democratic rights.
Laura, a legal assistant, said it was her first time attending a rally against the Gaza genocide.
“I’ve come tonight because I believe in the freedom of Palestinian people and I’m here to support that. Australia shouldn’t agree with war crimes and shouldn’t give any incitement to anyone that has anything to do with war crimes. So the invitation of Herzog is absolutely awful.
“Labor has supported the genocide for the past couple of years now. I like to think I try to see the best in people. But I’m not seeing it at the moment in this government.”
In response to the claim by Labor that the protests are antisemitic, Laura said: “That’s ridiculous. People have a right to freedom of speech, including when it’s speaking out against the oppression of a people. That’s not antisemitic. They’re completely different things and no one should say otherwise.”
On the police rampage in Sydney the previous Monday, she said: “That was police brutality, and I was shocked to see that happening here. It’s the sort of thing we associate with videos of countries overseas, including the US with what ICE is doing to civilians. I’m ashamed for my overseas friends to see that that’s happening in Australia.”
Please visit the original article at the World Socialist Web Site to read other responses and to view videos.
9. Australia: Filipino migrant worker “increasingly fearful” of boss before his death, inquest finds
A New South Wales (NSW) coronial inquest into the death of 21-year-old Filipino worker Jerwin Royupa has revealed the brutal slavery-like conditions he endured while in Australia under a so-called “training” visa. Deputy State Coroner Rebecca Hosking found Royupa was “exploited” and exposed to “potentially criminal” behavior during his sponsorship.
Royupa died at Royal Melbourne Hospital on March 15, 2019, from “complications of multiple blunt force injuries” sustained the day before, when he jumped or fell out of a moving vehicle driven by his sponsor. The inquest was not held until late 2024, and the findings were only released last month.
The forced labor conditions that contributed to Royupa’s death were allowed by the complete lack of oversight by the Department of Home Affairs (DHA), a situation that remains in place now, almost seven years later. Hosking found that “the DHA does not take active steps to supervise compliance or prevent employers taking advantage of overseas trainees thereby exposing vulnerable overseas workers to an unacceptable risk of exploitation in high risk industries such as the agricultural industry.”
Royupa, a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture graduate, arrived in Australia on February 7, 2019. He had been granted a Subclass 407 Training Visa to undertake professional development training at a remote vineyard in the NSW Riverina, a major agricultural region near the Victorian border.
His sister Jamaica told the inquest he intended to work in agriculture and at a local church upon returning to the Philippines. Another of his sisters, Jessa-Joy, said “we all thought he would be safe in Australia.”
*****
The International Labour Office, the UN agency for labor standards, identifies 11 indicators of forced labor—including withholding wages, restricting movement, and retaining identity documents—several of which the inquest found Royupa had experienced.
The inquest found that Royupa exclusively performed manual labour and received no education or training, “contrary to what had been proposed to him.” This labour was up to 60 hours a week “outside in excessive heat without having been provided with adequate clothing or sunscreen.”
His visa agent promised him a “generous allowance” of $134.92 per month which his employer would keep for the first six months. Even if this had been paid, the sum was “wholly inadequate,” Hosking found. At the time of Royupa’s death, Australia’s national minimum wage was $18.93 per hour, meaning the monthly “allowance” would have amounted to less than one day’s pay.
The nearest town was 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from the employer’s property where Royupa lived and he had no means of transportation. His employer confiscated his passport, and his internet access was restricted.
No check-ups by any government agency were done in the five weeks between Royupa starting work and his death to confirm that he was actually being trained, even after a contact reported Royupa’s abusive working conditions to the Fair Work Ombudsman on March 13.
*****
Labor’s response to the Royupa case—that is, to try to cover for the DHA and preserve a system that facilitates the blatant exploitation of migrant workers by employers—exposes the government’s denunciations of “human trafficking” and “modern slavery” as nothing more than hypocritical bluster.
This is in line with Labor’s continuing support of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, under which tens of thousands of workers from impoverished Pacific Island nations are brought to Australia on temporary visas to provide dirt-cheap labor to meet the profit demands of big business.
Notably, the Australian trade unions have not said a word about Jerwin Royupa’s death or the inquest findings revealing the forced labor conditions he, and no doubt countless other migrant workers, was subjected to.
To defend the rights and lives of migrant workers, as part of the fight for decent working conditions, wages and democratic rights of the working class as a whole, workers need to take matters into their own hands. This means building rank-and-file committees in workplaces across the country, independent of and in opposition to the nationalist, pro-business program of the unions and Labor.
India’s far-right, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government has tabled a budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1 that combines deepening austerity for working people with a massive 15 percent hike in military spending and huge subsidies and stimulus for Indian big business.
Faced with intensifying global strategic conflict and growing economic turbulence, including Trump’s tariff war, the Indian bourgeoisie is determined to intensify the exploitation of the working class and rural poor.
In the run up to the budget, the government introduced legislation to abolish the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee, which for the past two decades has provided a vital lifeline for tens of millions of small farmers and agricultural laborers. Under the program that will replace it, the state is no longer legally obligated to provide 100 days of unskilled labor per year to one member of every rural household. The central government has shifted much of the responsibility for funding its rural relief program onto the financially hard-pressed state governments. Furthermore, with the express aim of depressing rural wages, the new program is to be entirely suspended during the 60 peak days of the agricultural calendar.
The BJP government has also begun implementing a sweeping labor “reform.” It guts minimum workplace standards and the inspection regime meant to enforce them; promotes precarious contract-labor employment; and eliminates restrictions on mass layoffs at all but the biggest factories and workplaces. With the aim of criminalizing most worker job action, the BJP’s labor code “reform” also introduces numerous new restrictions on the legal right to strike.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP have long touted India as the fastest growing large economy. In reality, India’s economy is mired in crisis, with private sector business investment falling or stagnant for most of the past decade.
Moreover, the fruits of economic growth are highly concentrated in the super rich and upper middle class. Tens of millions are unemployed or underemployed—a phenomenon that is only partially concealed in India’s notoriously inaccurate economic statistics by the spurt in “self-employment.” This spurt can be traced back to New Delhi’s criminal mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a huge number of migrants to flee the cities for their rural ancestral family homes.
*****
Modi, [Finance Minister Nirmala] Sitharaman, and the Indian bourgeoisie as a whole view the building of transport, power and other infrastructure as crucial to realizing their ambition to transform India, in partner with US and European imperialism, into an alternative production chain hub to China. However, progress toward this goal has thus far been quite limited. Despite the headline economic growth, manufacturing has stagnated at roughly 15–17 percent of GDP for decades. Capacity utilization, which is a measure of the percentage of existing production capabilities, is below 75 percent.
In her budget, the Finance Minister projected a real economic growth rate (after inflation is discounted) of between 6.8 and 7.2 percent for the coming fiscal year as compared to a projected 7.4 percent in the 2025-26 fiscal year, which ends March 31.
Real GDP growth is promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) as the crucial measure of national economic health. In reality, India’s economic “rise”—it is now the world’s fourth largest economy—has overwhelmingly benefited India’s oligarchs, foreign investors, and CEOs at the expense of its workers and rural toilers. Even according to the government’s own Household Consumption Survey, over 80 percent of India’s population of over 1.1 billion people live on less than $3 a day, which is below the World Bank poverty line of $3.20. As opposed to this, India’s top 100 richest persons now command a collective wealth of $1.1 trillion—equivalent to about 30 percent of India’s GDP.
Another aspect of the budget that stands out is the rapid rise in India’s debt and debt payments. Deficit financing amounts to about 23 percent of the budget expenditure, nearly double the 12.3 percent share that government borrowing represented in FY 2017-18. According to the IMF, in 2024-25 the Indian government’s total debt amounted to slightly more than 81 percent of GDP as compared with 69 percent in 2015-16.
As a result of India’s swelling accumulated debt, interest payments, at a little over Rs. 14 trillion ($155.6 billion), are the budget’s single largest expense.
Just three items, interest payments, capital or infrastructure expenditure, and the military budget account for some 64 percent of the entire budget.
*****
India’s annual defense budget has increased more than five-fold since 2000, when it was around $13 billion. Expanding India’s military might, including building a blue-water navy and a nuclear triad has been a key objective of New Delhi, under BJP and Congress Party governments alike. It is a central element of its anti-China “global strategic partnership” with US imperialism.
Under Modi, India has aggressively sought to establish pre-eminence over Pakistan, while establishing a vast network of bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral strategic ties with Washington and its principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia. According to the Indian elite’s reckless strategic ambitions, its military must be ready to wage war on two fronts—against China and Pakistan simultaneously.
The Modi government and India’s ruling elite welcomed Trump’s return to the White House. But to their shock and dismay, he has destabilized Indo-US ties with his trade war tariffs and demands that New Delhi cease Russian oil imports and otherwise downgrade its ties with Moscow.
In an attempt to placate the Trump administration, Sitharaman’s budget speech announced tariff cuts on electronics, electronic components, semiconductors, and other items as demanded by the White House. The very next day, America’s would-be dictator president boasted on his Truth social media account that Washington and New Delhi had concluded a trade agreement. Trump claimed India has made numerous concessions to secure the rolling back of US tariffs from 50 to 19 percent, including pledging to halt Russian oil imports and opening the door to large-scale US agricultural imports.
New Delhi subsequently confirmed that an agreement in principle has been reached, but both sides acknowledge key details remain to be hammered out. Without directly challenging Trump’s claims of Russian imports, Indian officials have suggested New Delhi has not given any firm commitment to eliminate them. Over the past four years discounted Russian oil has provided a much needed shot in the arm for India’s economy.
11. Verdi union agrees sell-out contract for Germany’s federal state workers
Verdi has agreed to a new contract covering the public service of the federal states, which can only be described as a slap in the face for its members. The union is in the process of selling out all contract struggles—including those in local public transport—and enforcing cuts in real wages, so that the insane pro-war policy of the federal government can be financed.
Under conditions of workers growing willingness to fight, and anger over the constant social attacks, there can be only one answer to this: the building of independent rank-and-file Action Committees in all sections of the working class to organize a nationwide strike movement against social cuts and war.
The result had been determined for a long time. It lies far below the already modest demands for a 7 percent wage increase and at least €300, with a one-year contract term: Only 5.8 percent was decided, distributed in three steps (2.8 percent from April 1, 2026; 2 percent from March 1, 2027; 1 percent from January 1, 2028) with a total term of 27 months. In other words: The first increase will not be paid out until this April, after a pay freeze of five months (!). This is only just above the official inflation rate of 2.2 percent. However, as is well known, price increases for petrol, food and rent burden working class households significantly more than average households, and the official inflation rate in no way reflects this.
Even the shift allowances, which Verdi is now highlighting, which are to rise by €100 monthly (to €200 for rotating shifts and to €250 in hospitals), are by no means compensation for the labor these workers perform. These are largely gross amounts that will be taxed and hardly make a dent in the end. While the public sector continues to be cut to the bone, the workforce who keep social life running every day are supposed to accept cuts in real wages again.
The resulting new contract is practically the same as arbitration produced for federal government and municipal employees last year, only it is even worse in many respects. Back then, there was an additional day off for everyone, which will not apply for state employees. The negotiator for the states, Andreas Dressel, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and finance senator (state minister) from Hamburg, told Handelsblatt: “An additional free day, an additional vacation day, that would not have fit into these times.” As the World Socialist Web Site has already written: “Everyone knows that Verdi will in the end nod through a deal that lies significantly below [demands].”
The predictable contract negotiations in Potsdam already made a mockery of the membership. After the Verdi leadership had spent days behind closed doors with their party colleagues from the SPD, Verdi boss Frank Werneke (SPD) appeared “sleep-deprived” before the cameras and claimed that the negotiations had been “more difficult than for a long time.” And the press adopted the Verdi version of a “four-day negotiation marathon” and of tough negotiations lasting days and nights.
*****
Precisely in the current situation, the deal speaks volumes about the role Verdi plays. Germany is currently witnessing a broad mobilization by various sections of the working class, where not only kindergarten teachers, nursing staff, garbage collectors, forestry workers and employees in administrative offices, local authorities and universities have demonstrated their willingness to take action in numerous warning strikes, but bus and tram drivers, train drivers, pilots and flight attendants are also engaged in industrial action. Under these conditions, by signing the contract for public service workers, the Verdi leadership has effectively agreed to a no-strike clause lasting 27 months, until January 31, 2028.
*****
The latest sell-out comes under conditions in which the Merz government is massively attacking the eight-hour day, sick payments, protection against dismissal and pensions. “We can no longer afford the welfare state,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz said last year. Workers in Germany were sick too often; they must work more again. Even dentist costs are to be paid by those with statutory insurance in the future.
Just a week ago, Verdi boss Frank Werneke had described such proposals as “insolent and presumptuous” and unacceptable. Now he is demonstrating his real attitude by forcing through a contract that will tie down workers and include a no-strike clause on the 925,000 employees in the federal states. And the contract at stake here has an indirect effect on millions of other people, both on civil servants and pensioners, as well as on further agreements in local public transport, at airports, etc.
The deal also isolates those affected from their international colleagues who are currently engaged in industrial action, such as nursing staff in New York and California, as well as the movement against ICE in Minneapolis. The US offers a picture of intensified class struggles: Millions of workers and young people are confronted with a state that suppresses protests with brute force and arrests and deports foreign workers. In this situation, the signing of the new contract by Verdi means far more than a bad deal—it is a betrayal of the international working class.
12. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Canada:
Ontario Special Care Center workers mark 12 weeks on the picket line
Mexico:
United States:
Nurses launch three-day strike at West Anaheim Medical Center
13. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
