Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. San Francisco teachers strike ends under looming budget cuts, layoffs [article in full]
Teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) returned to class Wednesday after the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) ended the city’s first teachers strike in nearly 50 years.
Although the union predictably declared it a historic victory for teachers, school staff will see a decline in real wages from inflation over the two-year contract. What is more, the district and state are threatening layoffs, budget cuts and school closures.
The active role of prominent Democrats Nancy Pelosi (former Speaker of the House), Daniel Lurie (mayor of San Francisco) and American Federation of Teachers national president and Democratic National Committee member Randi Weingarten, highlights the concerted effort by the Democratic Party and its allies in the trade union bureaucracy to contain and halt this powerful strike before it could join with educators in Los Angeles and San Diego, who have also authorized mass strike action.
Little attempt was made to conceal the concessionary nature of the agreement at the February 13 press conference. “We stretched our resources to the limit to get this agreement done,” superintendent Maria Su said, “We still have a long way ahead of us where difficult choices remain.” When asked by a reporter specifically about layoffs and school closures, Su replied, “That has always been on the table.” Since May of 2024, the district’s finances have been overseen by the California Department of Education, after a projected $120 million deficit for the current 2025-26 school year.
The claim that there is “no money” for schools is absurd. San Francisco and the wider Bay Area are home to as many as 131 billionaires and over 340,000 millionaires, making it the second biggest city globally of high-net-worth individuals. “The Bay Area has more billionaires than New York City and everywhere else,” the San Francisco Chronicle declared in a headline last year.
Teachers, like the rest of the region’s working class, struggle to make ends meet. But the deal includes a provocative 4 percent raise over two years, with additional working days adding another 1 percent to staff pay. With yearly inflation rates over 2.5 percent over the past five years, this means that teachers will almost certainly be working longer for less money at the end of the contract. Moreover, without an expanded budget, even these insulting raises will simply be offset by cuts elsewhere.
The district estimates the cost of the tentative agreement at $183 million over the next two years, and had already been planning $102 million in cuts for the next school year to avoid being placed under state receivership. In other words, without additional sources of revenue, this deal becomes the official justification for redoubled budget cuts and layoffs.
Significantly, the “no strike clause” the UESF has agreed to will be used as a legal straitjacket to try to hold workers back when these massive cuts are made in the immediate future.
Mass action by the working class is essential to fight the attack by the ruling class on democratic rights, and many nationwide have discussed the need for a general strike following the ICE murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
But while doing their part to hold workers back, UESF is touting language in the tentative agreement around the district’s “sanctuary employer” status. This is a purely symbolic measure. The expanding onslaught of increasingly lawless ICE raids in Minneapolis, Detroit and beyond, coupled with the complicity of the Democrats, make clear that sanctuary status does nothing to protect the largely immigrant population served by San Francisco public schools.
From the beginning, the strike was carefully choreographed by the UESF bureaucracy, the district and Democrats at multiple levels. Although UESF educators have consistently protested over layoffs, school closures and the growing gap between educator pay and cost of living, the union refused to include economic demands in the strike, limiting it to a claim that the district was not “bargaining in good faith.”
Even though most major California school districts have been on expired contracts since last June, the California Teachers Association has deliberately kept teachers on the job, and isolating as much as possible those strikes that they are compelled to call.
Despite two overwhelming votes in favor of strike action in the past two months, the bureaucracy did not call a strike until after the release of a fact-finding report in late January, led by an arbitration firm and coauthored by California Teachers Association (CTA) representative Angela Su. The report analyzed the finances of the district, attempting to assess the level of raises, benefits and staffing that the district could “afford.”
In other words, the UESF accepts the framework that no additional funds can be used to secure educators’ right to a livable income and students’ right to a quality education. Meanwhile, Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has explicitly stated that he will veto any effort to tax billionaires in California.
In fact, the Democratic Party has helped engineer a nationwide school funding crisis, when the Biden administration allowed supplemental COVID funding to expire in 2024. In California, they are even deliberately withholding $5.6 billion allocated to schools under Proposition 98. To the Democrats as well as Trump, the wealth of the billionaires is a right, and quality education for children is expendable.
After four days of powerful pickets and mass demonstrations, winning widespread support from students, families and workers across the city and beyond, the strike was unilaterally called off at 5:30 a.m. Friday morning, without any input from the membership, after the union bargaining and district agreed to the TA. This left educators blindsided, dissipating momentum with the hope of fostering an atmosphere that a yes vote was an inevitability.
A teacher from the eastern San Francisco Bay Area spoke with the WSWS: “It’s a giant web of betrayal, collusion, corruption. It’s really kind of hard to sort it all out. Especially for our colleagues who see this as basically just a contract issue.
“The teachers were allowed to get these small wins at the cost of a whole bunch of layoffs. Whether that was foreseen and planned upon by the district, it seems fairly likely that they kind of thought they would just give in on the contract and lay off a few more people. The unions will feel like they won something and keep quiet for a while.”
He sharply criticized the CTA’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign, which he said “was sold to us as ‘we will finally talk with the state.’ Newsom never had to pay any attention to us. The whole We Can’t Wait thing is a failure. The districts still aren’t doing rallies together.
“It sent me back to May of 2025, when there was a rally that CTA organized in San Francisco. There was a video of various people making speeches, including the UESF president. Her whole speech is a pretty good speech. They’re all talking about Trump and they’re all talking about the state of California funding schools. Nobody is talking about the problem as just our district.
“My union president was interviewed and he was talking about military spending. Now it’s eight months later and all of that’s gone and it’s us against the districts.”
He highlighted the union bureaucracies’ subservience to the Democrats as the main reason for this. “Apparently what happened is that a CFT [California Federation of Teachers] rep came to the union and told them that there’s no appetite for new taxes among the voters. They said we just need to support Prop 55 [which extends existing income tax increases]. They didn’t want the billionaires tax because voters won’t support both taxes. CFT is going around to the locals telling them not to expect more money from the state. Why are they saying that? Because the Democrats told them to.”
The defense of public education cannot be achieved within the confines of the Democrat-imposed austerity budgets. In order for teachers and staff in San Francisco to win living wages and protect their students from the ICE gestapo, they must break out of the union-imposed straitjacket. The first step is to vote no on a tentative agreement that leaves workers worse off at the end of it.
But a no vote on this TA is fundamentally a vote of no confidence in the union leadership presenting it as a historic victory. To take the initiative out of the hands of the conservative union bureaucrats, teachers and staff need to form rank-and-file committees to coordinate with educators in Los Angeles, San Diego and other districts, for an actual strike for the full funding of public education.
2. Two coup attempts: Ex-South Korean president jailed, while Trump sits in office [article in full]
The Seoul Central District Court in South Korea on Thursday sentenced former President Yoon Suk-yeol to life in prison for his failed military coup on the evening of December 3, 2024. A president who launched a violent attack on the country’s legislature with the intent of seizing power and overturning the constitution now faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars.
While Yoon sits in jail, in the United States, the world’s supposed leading democracy, Donald Trump, a gangster, convicted felon and fascist sits in the White House, more than five years after launching his own violent coup attempt to seize control of Congress and overturn the constitution in an attempt to stay in power following the November 2020 election.
The treatment of these two criminals, in particular that of Trump by the Democratic Party, holds significant lessons for workers in the US and internationally.
The South Korean court characterized Yoon’s declaration of martial law on the night of December 3 as an insurrection while the special prosecutors trying the case even recommended the death penalty. Several of Yoon’s accomplices in the military and police establishment also received significant jail terms. This includes former Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun, who received a 30-year prison sentence; former National Police Agency Chief Cho Ji-ho, 12 years; and former Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency Chief Kim Bong-sik, 10 years.
Presiding Judge Ji Gwi-yeon stated, “Former President Yoon planned the crime personally and in a leading role, and involved many people in the crime. The emergency martial law incurred an enormous social cost, and the defendant hardly expressed an apology for that.”
Yoon’s coup attempt was the culmination of months of preparation. He dispatched troops to the National Assembly to arrest lawmakers, including leaders of both his then-ruling People Power Party and the main opposition Democratic Party. This was done to prevent them from exercising their legal ability to vote to overturn the martial law declaration, which they would do. The court made clear that it was not convicting Yoon over the martial law declaration itself, but rather the dispatching of troops to parliament.
Judge Ji stated, “It is difficult to deny that former President Yoon inwardly aimed to make the National Assembly unable to function properly for a considerable period by blocking and paralyzing the National Assembly’s activities by means of sending troops to the National Assembly to seal it off and arrest key politicians.” He added, “It is also recognized that he staged a riot by sending in the military.”
Mass protests as well as a growing strike movement broke out in response to Yoon’s coup attempt. On December 14, 2024, the president was impeached and suspended from office. He was arrested in January while still technically the president and ultimately removed from office in a unanimous decision by the Constitutional Court last April. Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party came to office in a special election shortly afterwards.
Yoon was impeached, arrested, removed from office, and sentenced to life behind bars in the space of less than 15 months. For attempting to overthrow the rule of law, Yoon now joins a list of former South Korean presidents imprisoned for crimes while in office, including Chun Doo-hwan, Noh Tae-woo, Lee Myung-bak, and Park Geun-hye.
Why is it then that South Korea’s Yoon sits in jail while Trump sits in the White House? As the World Socialist Web Site has described, Trump’s January 6, 2021 coup served as a watershed moment in international politics, not only signifying a turning point in US politics but also serving as a model for figures like Yoon.
In contrast to Yoon’s coup plotting, which took place largely in secret, Trump carried out his actions in full view of the public, making it clear he would not accept the results of the 2020 election if he lost and then promoting the “big lie” of the stolen election after Joe Biden’s victory. Throughout this period, Trump whipped up an atmosphere of violence against his political opponents. He then organized a mob of far-right fascists to attack Congress on January 6 with the intent of seizing and killing elected representatives to keep Trump in office.
Trump has not been held accountable for his actions in the slightest, whether in relation to the coup attempt or any of the other crimes he has committed, including his illegal attacks on Venezuela and Iran and the terrorizing of the population through the ICE gestapo. This is not due to the political prowess of Trump or the strength and support he commands; quite the contrary. Trump is a widely reviled figure in the US and internationally.
Yet the US Democrats have not offered any serious opposition to this fascist agenda. Even now as Trump assembles an armada in the Middle East in preparation for what have been called “sustained, weeks-long operations” against Iran, there has not been a single voice of opposition from the Democrats, let alone debate in Congress, which alone has the constitutional ability to declare war. This is not accidental, but a sign of the Democrats’ consent for yet another criminal imperialist conflict.
At the same time, South Korea is no paragon of democratic values. For four decades it was ruled by dictators, first the US puppet Syngman Rhee and then under the military dictatorship first established in a coup led by Park Chung-hee.
The façade of democracy that exists today was built on the scaffolding of this dictatorship. The military retains a strong influence behind the scenes as well as close connections to Washington, as does much of the South Korean state. Yet even the Democrats, who descend from the loyal opposition to Rhee and Park, today felt compelled to act against Yoon to pay lip service to “democracy.”
The South Korean Democrats and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions worked to dissipate the mass movement that was developing. They seemingly gave support to protests that were called to give the impression that they were actively fighting against Yoon’s attack on democracy. The decision to do so, and ultimately to remove Yoon, was meant to protect the state itself and prevent people from drawing conclusions about the necessity to break with the capitalist system.
Yet the US Democrats and the trade unions do not even go this far, instead bowing and scraping before the fascist in the White House, demonstrating how far even bourgeois democracy has degenerated in the US.
It is not the person of Trump whom the Democrats bow before, but the oligarchy he represents and that dominates political and economic life. Any action taken against Trump would be seen as an infringement on the oligarchy’s ability to extract profits from the working class and to wage wars overseas in pursuit of their imperialist interests.
Therefore, the Democrats assure Trump of their bipartisan support while passing his budgets, including to fund the military and ICE. The Democrats are conscious that any movement against Trump, even in a limited form, could easily turn into a larger mass movement out of their control and that of their allies in the trade unions.
During its four years in office, the Biden administration refused to take any serious actions to hold Trump accountable. Legal actions against Trump were filed largely over secondary issues while the government took its time in bringing charges against the then-former president for his role in the January 6 coup, charges that were ultimately dropped after he was reelected. No charges were brought against Trump for insurrection.
Instead, the Biden administration and the Democrats paved the way for Trump to return to office by focusing their attention on the agenda of US imperialism for which it needed the Republican Party’s support, in particular waging war against Russia in Ukraine and ensuring Washington’s full-backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Trump capitalized on this as well as the Democrats’ arrogant indifference to the devastating impact of inflation on workers’ living standards.
The Democratic Party in the US claims that nothing can be done to stop Trump aside from waiting for the next elections, if they are even held. Yet protests and growing public outrage towards the events in Minnesota last month demonstrated the strength of the working class, forcing the Trump administration into a tactical retreat. But what frightens the Trump administration also frightens the Democrats, that is the development of a mass working class movement against the capitalist system itself.
Despite its limitations, the jailing of South Korea’s Yoon exposes the lie that nothing can be done. It also exposes the fact that no opposition to Trump, even in limited forms, will come from the Democrats or any section of the US political establishment. Instead, the fight against Trump and the oligarchy that both he and the Democrats defend must come through a movement of the working class.
5. US draws up plans for “leadership change” and “targeting individuals” in Iran strike
An attack on Iran would constitute a war of aggression—the “supreme international crime”—as defined at the Nuremberg trials. Iran has not attacked the United States. There is no UN Security Council authorization. There is no congressional authorization. Trump has made clear he regards none of this as a constraint. “I don’t need international law,” he told the New York Times in January.
The threat of attack comes as Iran’s government has been desperately appealing to the Trump administration to negotiate. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that a draft counterproposal would be ready “in the next two, three days” following indirect talks in Geneva this week and that a deal could be achieved “in a very short period of time.”
Iran’s diplomatic efforts will count for nothing, because for the Trump administration “diplomacy” is merely a pretext and cover for murder and extortion. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro sought to negotiate with the Trump administration in the months before the January raid that seized him and his wife, offering as late as the day before to discuss a deal.
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The war against Iran is a component of the eruption of American militarism all over the world. The carrier now entering the Mediterranean to attack Iran was redeployed from the Caribbean, where it took part in the seizure of Venezuelan President Maduro. The attack on Venezuela, the threatened seizure of Greenland and the Panama Canal, and the war against Iran are components of a single strategy: the use of military power to control the world’s critical resources and chokepoints in preparation for conflict with Russia and China.
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On Friday, as the [aircraft carrier USS Gerald R.] Ford entered the Mediterranean and the administration announced plans for “leadership change” and “targeting individuals,” neither House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, nor the leaders of the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party—Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last weekend at the Munich Security Conference repeated the administration’s regime change talking points about Iran—issued any statement.
The Democrats have voted to fund every weapon now being assembled for this attack. The $901 billion National Defense Authorization Act passed the House 312-112 in December, with 115 Democrats voting yes. In the Senate, it passed 77-20 with the vast majority of Democrats in favor. In January, 149 House Democrats voted for $839 billion in defense appropriations.
4. Andrew’s arrest, the British monarchy, and the international oligarchy
The arrest and ongoing investigation of the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has set in motion the gravest crisis Britain’s constitutional monarchy has ever faced.
Whatever attempts are made to portray this as a problem exclusively of the disgraced ex–Duke of York, the entire Royal Family and successive British governments face the possibility of devastating revelations about their knowledge of Andrew’s sordid dealings with the billionaire child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
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Little wonder that King Charles’ first response to the arrest was to issue a statement throwing Andrew to the wolves, declaring “the law must take its course” and promising his “full and wholehearted support and co-operation” with the investigation. Similar statements were issued by Labour Prime Minister Starmer and Justice Secretary David Lammy.
But efforts to take distance from Andrew will not withstand scrutiny. The then prince was protected at every turn by the palace, in an operation led by the former queen, Elizabeth II. No visit to the palace by Epstein or his victims could happen without the knowledge of the queen and her staff. When rumors first began to emerge publicly, she responded by elevating him to Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order—the highest honor she could bestow.
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The unprecedented scale of the crisis is reflected in the near universal references to the last senior royal to be arrested, Charles I, by Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War. He was subsequently tried and executed for high treason in 1649.
No one faces a similar fate today, but the long period of constitutional monarchy that began in the aftermath of Cromwell’s Protectorate, with the restoration of Charles II and then the installation of William of Orange in the “Glorious Revolution”, is finally unravelling.
This has major implications for British imperialism. The monarchy is not merely a symbol. It plays a major role in the system of class rule in Britain. Its recent and prolonged crisis has been intimately connected with the cancerous growth of the global financial oligarchy epitomized by Epstein.
Increasingly close relations with that oligarchy, the intermingling of the old and new aristocracies, have accelerated the public fall of the royal family from its appointed position of aloof propriety into the sewer of bourgeois politics and corruption.
The bitterness of the then Prince Charles’s breakup with Diana and the damage done was fuelled in large measure by her ability to win the support of members of the global super rich when the palace moved against her—above all in the US, and then later with Mohamed Al-Fayed. It saw support for the monarchy fall to an historic low of 26 percent.
In many respects, Andrew followed in the grooves dug by Diana. Similarly, when relations broke down with Diana’s son Prince Harry surrounding his marriage to Meghan Markle, he turned to the American super-rich as a new power base and source of continued income and privilege.
Attempts to keep the royal flagship afloat through these crises have been dashed on the rocks of Epstein’s island.
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The last comparable corruption scandal in the UK was the Profumo Affair (1961-63), which ended in the fall of the Macmillan government. The Epstein scandal, international in scope, is already reverberating far beyond Britain’s shores, and its impact will only intensify in the coming period.
5. Strong support at Ford Rouge for rank-and-file campaign of Will Lehman for UAW president
Dozens of workers stopped to speak with campaigners, voicing frustration with unbearable workloads, forced overtime, harassment, and indifference from UAW reps who “side with management.”
6. Pennsylvania high school students violently attacked by police during anti-ICE walkout
From Pennsylvania to Virginia, Oklahoma and Texas, authorities are suspending and criminalizing youth protesting immigration enforcement.
According to his attorney, Caceres was driving his work truck when he was pulled over by a Border Patrol agent despite having no traffic violations.
After exposing alleged forgeries on dozens of employee files and management pressure on injured workers not to go to the hospital, a part-time UPS supervisor says she was targeted for retaliation.
9. NYSNA holds snap vote on second sellout agreement for NewYork-Presbyterian nurses
The new tentative agreement differs little from the previous deal which workers overwhelmingly rejected a week ago.
10. Operating engineers at healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente to join 31,000 currently on strike
The engineers’ walkout expands the Kaiser Permanente strike, intensifying the nationwide confrontation between the healthcare workers and the industry and signaling the growing unity among technical and clinical workers.
11. Marty Supreme: a table tennis star’s frantic fight for fame
The director and co-writer of Marty Supreme is Josh Safdie, and the film bears some artistic-emotional resemblance to his earlier Uncut Gems (2019), a movie—on which he shared directing credit with his brother Benny—dealing with another hustler, this one from New York City’s Diamond District.
Like Uncut Gems, Safdie’s latest movie is an example of what has been called “propulsive filmmaking,” characterized above all by breakneck speed, assaults on the senses and rapid editing and camerawork, often with few opportunities to stop and think about what is being depicted.
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As a serious film, Marty Supreme comes up short. The “propulsive” style has drawn praise, but it is something that needs to be thought about critically. Almost an iron law of filmmaking is that a work insisting on “non-stop,” ceaselessly “breathtaking” action does so because it has relatively little of interest to say when it slows down. Often, the relentless motion substitutes for capturing life in a genuinely dynamic manner and obscures an essentially static drama or comedy. Safdie’s type of art, and there are many directors from the same “school,” is a form of violent moving in place. Too many of the sequences are tedious and pointless.
Linked to that static approach, is an almost obsessive worship of the accomplished fact. Safdie and his collaborators approach various degrading and dispiriting features of American postwar life and contrive to make out of them, in the words of the film’s admirers, a delirious “underdog” “thrill ride” through New York’s “underbelly.”
Along the same lines, Safdie explains to an interviewer, “These wide-eyed determined people who live with a sense of urgency, outside of time, are very attractive to me,” and refers to “Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? and Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.” But both of those novels are sharply critical of their unscrupulous, ruthless “entrepreneurial” protagonists (Sammy Glick had “not a single principle to slow him down,” wrote Schulberg, who was in the Communist Party when he started writing the book), even while taking into account the circumstances, including antisemitism, that produced them.
Safdie’s accommodation to what exists extends to the “villain” of the piece, Rockwell-O’Leary. Tellingly, the director told the Guardian, “Milton [Rockwell] is a vampire. He’s a cold, corporate, capitalist colonialist. And they’ll be around forever; I don’t see them going anywhere. There is an art to what they do—obviously a lot of destruction, too—but sometimes a beauty.” Finding beauty in the activities of a vile capitalist is not a strength in an artist, it is, in one way or another, a form of social capitulation.
The secret to Marty Supreme’s critical success, in a more fundamental sense, likely lies in the appeal it holds for certain identity politics-obsessed journalists and commentators. They clearly identify with the character of Marty, whom they see as a lovable rogue, and a kind of standard-bearer for Jews who have “made it” or are role models for how to live and how to fight. These critics see Marty Supreme as a tale of how to achieve fame and fortune in capitalist America, not just for Jews but for other “identities” as well.
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The New York Times is leading the identity politics parade once again, as it did with racial identity politics in the discredited 1619 Project, which appeared as a special issue of its Sunday Magazine some six and a half years ago. More than 20 separate articles on Marty Supreme have appeared in the Times in recent weeks, one more enthusiastic than the last.
12. National strike in Argentina fails to halt historic labor counterreform and mass layoffs
The Chamber of Deputies’ approval of fascist President Javier Milei’s “Labor Modernization Law” clears the way for a ruthless regime of mass layoffs, wage cuts and workplace abuse.
13. US Department of Labor reports 5,070 US workers killed on the job in 2024
The US Department of Labor’s annual report on worker deaths for 2024 reveals 5,070 preventable workplace fatalities, a figure that will surely rise as safety protections are eviscerated.
14. Real wages to continue falling in Australia
Wages grew by just 3.4 percent over the past year, well below the annual inflation rate of 3.8 percent, amid warnings of deepening real pay cuts for at least the next two years.
15. IMF calls on China to restructure its economy
Following last year’s record Chinese trade surplus of $1.2 trillion, the latest IMF report on China released earlier this week was more specific on what it considers needs to be done.
Echoing continued complaints by major powers that the surge in Chinese exports and the increased competitiveness of a wide range of its products on world markets is in violation of so-called “free market” principles, the fund estimated that China spends about 4 percent of its GDP to subsidise companies in critical areas of the economy and this should be halved to 2 percent in the medium term.
It said China’s policies were “giving rise to international spillovers and pressures” and in combination with weak demand in the domestic economy make China “more reliant on manufacturing exports as a source of growth.”
The significance of the trade surplus issue is highlighted by the fact that references to “external imbalances” appeared more than ten times in the current report compared to no such mentions in the report of 2024.
“Transitioning to a consumption-led growth model should be the overarching priority,” the IMF said.
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The IMF said that “reorienting China’s growth model requires significant cultural and economic transformation.”
There is a little indication of that taking place. Responding to the assertion in the report that the Chinese currency was about 16 percent undervalued and this gave China an advantage in world markets, China’s representative on the IMF’s executive board, Zhengxin Zhang, said Beijing’s currency policy was “clear and consistent” and relied on market forces to play “a decisive role.”
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There are indications that the key area of artificial intelligence, which the US is counting on as it strives to maintain its global dominance, is going to be under increasing challenge from China.
An article published in the Financial Times this week by June Yoon noted that the price of using AI was falling and that what she called China’s “hottest AI group” Zhipu was providing entry level access to AI at $3 a month compared to $20 a month by US AI providers.
“Markets are pricing a world in which US AI groups maintain outsized control over global AI revenue and dominate the highest margin segments, while global users continue to accept higher price points. But how sustainable is that assumption?” she wrote.
It may well be that the AI market or a major part of it goes the way of solar panels, electric vehicles and many other commodities where Chinese firms dominate the global market.
In a revealing interview with the business channel CNBC, Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, said that the progress of Chinese tech companies, including in AI, was “amazingly fast.”
He said that in some areas, Chinese companies lagged behind but in others they were near the frontier.
Altman said OpenAI was growing at an “extremely fast rate right now.” The company, which has yet to turn a profit as it burns through cash—the loss estimate for this year is $14 billion—should focus on continuing to grow faster and faster, he said, adding that “we’ll get profitable when we think it makes sense.”
But such is the pace of technological development and production innovation that it may find that it has been undercut in some areas of the market before that stage is even reached.
16. Berlin: Factories in ailing industrial sectors bought up to produce military weapons
In the German metal and electrical industries, 10,000 to 15,000 jobs are being destroyed every month, but there is a gold rush atmosphere in the arms industry. Arms companies like Rheinmetall are turning struggling factories into weapons production plants.
Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman is running in the United Auto Workers (UAW) presidential election on a program calling for the transfer of power to the rank and file. His campaign includes four key demands: abolishing the bureaucratic apparatus and building rank-and-file committees so workers on the shop floor can take control of decision-making power; ending the UAW’s corporatist collaboration with big business and the government; repudiating the UAW’s American nationalism and endorsement of Trump’s “America First” trade war policies; and mobilizing the industrial and political power of the entire working class to defend democratic rights and oppose war.
Under conditions in which the Canadian ruling class has responded with foul Canadian nationalism to the would-be fascist dictator Trump’s threats to annex the country and launching of trade war, workers north of the border have reacted with enthusiasm to Lehman’s call for international working class unity. Canadian workers have experienced firsthand how the union bureaucracies, like those in Unifor, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Quebec unions, have used the same tactics as the UAW to enforce sweeping concessions and job cuts over the past four decades.
A laid-off worker at the General Motors CAMI plant in Ingersoll was eager to voice his support for Will Lehman’s campaign. The plant faces permanent shuttering after GM laid off its workforce amid a drop in sales for the EVs produced at the facility. Unifor, working hand-in-hand with the federal Liberal government, is championing a proposal to have the facility manufacture military vehicles as part of Canadian imperialism’s rearmament drive for world war.
“Without a deeper international cooperation of our unions, the UAW and Unifor, along with our union and non-union brothers and sisters working in Mexico and abroad, we are far too susceptible to the divide and conquer strategy our multinational tyrant employers use to exploit us,” the worker commented. “I believe Will Lehman with his unvarnished message of international unity has us directed towards the right goals. Solidarity!”
18. Heads of British and German armed forces insist Europe’s population must be made ready for war
For the working class the generals’ statement must be seen as a declaration of the class war that must be conducted if imperialist war is to be waged—one emanating from the highest echelons of the military.
19. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
Sri Lanka:
Taiwan:
20. 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.
