Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Union bureaucracy sabotages the Kaiser Permanente strike
On Monday afternoon, the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals abruptly shut down the month-long strike by 31,000 healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii. There was no semblance of democratic discussion, no new contract and not even a tentative agreement. The UNAC/UHCP bureaucracy simply cited unexplained “significant movement at the bargaining table” and ordered workers back to work.
Once again a critical struggle of the working class has been sold out by the trade union bureaucracy.
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The shutdown of the strike was a deliberate act of sabotage, not only against Kaiser healthcare workers but against the broader movement emerging in the country. The strike was shut down the same day that 500 Kaiser operating engineers were to have joined the strike.
UNAC/UHCP ended the strike right when it was on the verge of gaining over 100,000 reinforcements from workers across California. Sixty-five thousand teachers and classified staff in the Los Angeles Unified School District have authorized strikes in the face of sweeping budget cuts. Forty thousand graduate and academic workers in the University of California system, members of the United Auto Workers, have voted to strike. A unified movement would have laid the basis for a powerful strike wave across the West Coast, encouraging similar action throughout the country.
The bureaucracy could not allow this because it would threaten their financial and social interests. Other similar betrayals have taken place over the last several days. Over the weekend, union officials in New York City shut down the final holdouts of a six-week strike by nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian, where nurses rejected an earlier deal the union put to a vote in violation of its own bylaws.
In California, union officials ended a four-day strike by 6,000 San Francisco teachers earlier this month. The city, awash in cash from the artificial intelligence boom, is pleading poverty for public schools. Layoffs were announced almost immediately after the strike ended, with the district citing declining enrollment.
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Similar patterns are evident elsewhere. The United Steelworkers pushed through a sellout agreement covering 30,000 refinery workers, setting the stage for an isolated strike at BP Whiting in Indiana, where management is demanding deeper concessions. As with the previous contract reached at the start of the Ukraine war, this is a war contract. Its purpose is to keep fuel flowing as the US military wages war against Iran.
Union officials in Minneapolis and across the country have directly opposed strike action against ICE raids. Teachers unions have instructed members not to encourage or participate in student walkouts protesting deportations. The UAW warns that the right to strike is at risk under the Trump administration, yet has proposed no action to defend it.
This conduct flows from the fundamental social and economic interests of the bureaucracy, not merely from a conservative outlook. Over the past four decades, even as strike activity was driven to historic lows, spending on union officials expanded dramatically. US unions spend hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from workers’ dues and invested in the stock market, on six-figure salaries, luxury travel and a host of other privileges.
Their hostility to the working class is bound up with entrenched anticommunism, nationalism and deep connections to corporate politicians. Historically, the Democratic Party has been their principal vehicle. Increasingly, however, sections of the bureaucracy have aligned themselves with Trump, drawn by their support for “America First” policies and economic nationalism.
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A clear rule has emerged: the more powerful the objective position of workers and the more a broader movement begins to develop, the more openly the union bureaucracy intervenes to sabotage it. No amount of “pressure” can alter the social interests of this layer any more than pressure can induce corporate management to abandon the capitalist profit motive.
Workers therefore must organize themselves to confront and override this sabotage. The task is not the reform of the apparatus but its removal from control over the struggle and the restoration of power to the shop floor. This is a necessary step toward establishing the political independence and freedom of initiative of the working class, linking immediate contract struggles with the fight against fascism, war and social inequality.
2. Cuban worker describes hellish conditions, appeals to US workers to force an end to embargo
The humanitarian situation in Cuba has undergone a catastrophic decline in the three weeks following Donald Trump’s January 29 executive order declaring the island a “national security threat” and threatening tariffs on any nation supplying it with oil. Washington has effectively turned its long-standing embargo into an overt attempt to starve the population into submission.
While US officials discuss allowing only “small quantities” of fuel to prevent total infrastructure collapse, the White House demanded last week “very dramatic changes” in Cuba. The US Supreme Court, moreover, is considering cases demanding Havana pay billions in compensation to US corporations like ExxonMobil for key ports, plantations and other infrastructure expropriated six decades ago.
In this dire context, the World Socialist Web Site spoke with María, a 32-year-old worker and single mother in Matanzas (“María” is a pseudonym used to protect her identity.) Her harrowing testimony exposes the reality of “maximum pressure” and highlights the necessity of an independent mobilization of the international working class to break the siege.
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María describes a reality that exceeds the horror reported in the corporate media. Basic necessities like cooking gas have vanished entirely; many now rely on increasingly expensive charcoal or even broken furniture for firewood, she explains. While she views Trump’s policies as “asphyxiating,” she also holds the Cuban government responsible for the country’s debacle.
“I am 32 years old,” she continues, “I belong to a generation that went to university with enthusiasm and professional ambitions. The Cuban people are tired of being censored, without freedom of expression, afraid to speak freely about the fact that we live in a failed state.” The pain is sharpened by the fact that “Our friends and colleagues are political prisoners for peacefully disagreeing. The country has been on the road to disaster for years. This did not start with Trump, although it has worsened under him. … Nobody wants to stay here,” she says, noting that the sector of society that still trusts in the government is tiny and unrepresentative.
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The crisis has manifested in widespread hunger, including among children. María confirms that most families cannot afford three meals a day and survive on low-quality food with almost no protein. Often, a child’s only breakfast is an instant soft drink, as even bread has become scarce.
This malnutrition is compounded by outbreaks of respiratory and mosquito-borne diseases, which strike a population with weakened immune systems. In schools, meals are often reduced to a single boiled vegetable or a thin broth. María notes that a single bag of milk for her daughter costs half of her monthly salary.
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According to María, the Cuban government maintains a total monopoly on domestic media, while internet content is often manipulated by various political interests. Cubans are acutely aware that President Díaz-Canel and other officials frequently lie or provide incoherent data. During recent epidemics, the government denied the crisis even as people died in hospitals, choosing to minimize the crisis until the last possible moment.
Despite the misery, a “palpable” climate of fear prevents many from speaking out. Workers contacted by the WSWS reported being interrogated for hours, extorted, or threatened with jail for speaking out about social conditions.
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When asked about appealing to the American working class rather than the Trump administration, María notes that the ideological situation is complex. Decades of “indoctrination to remain silent, ideological disorganization, the lack of coherent political leaders, and the primitive survival mode” have left many Cubans unaware that the American people could offer real support.
But the thought that the American working class could mobilize to end the embargo is “moving,” she added, noting that most Cubans feel they do not matter to anyone.
María expresses interest in the fact that millions in the US have protested against the genocide in Gaza and that workers have the objective power to stop wars by mobilizing independently to stop weapons from reaching Israel. The same power could be used to supply Cuba with fuel, medicine, food and other vital goods and services and, ultimately, to end the blockade entirely.
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In the United States, workers instinctively recognize the need for solidarity. A New York teacher interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site stressed that more people need to be informed about the situation in Cuba, though many are currently pulled in different directions by crises in Gaza, Venezuela and Sudan. She explains: “I feel like the people that want to help are pulled in different directions.”
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A planned “Convoy to Cuba,” involving humanitarian organizations and figures like Greta Thunberg who supported aid flotillas to Gaza, is set to deliver humanitarian aid on March 21. Such efforts are courageous challenges to imperialist aggression, and the World Socialist Web Site insists that workers internationally must actively defend any such convoy against attempts to block it.
However, the limitations of such initiatives to overcome a decades-long embargo by the world’s dominant power must be recognized. The continuous provision of food, fuel and medicine requires the organized intervention of the international working class:
Oil, logistics and transport workers, including dockworkers and maritime sailors, must use their control over production and distribution to further the shipment of supplies to Cuba.
Port workers must also refuse to load or unload military and other ships enforcing the embargo.
Workers across the Americas and Europe must coordinate these actions through rank-and-file committees.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees provides the framework for this global struggle. Only on this basis can the Cuban working class begin to chart a path out of the nightmare created by the crimes of US imperialism and settle accounts with the island’s bourgeois regime.
Mandelson’s career is intertwined with the transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of finance capital and an architect of illegal wars and imperialist plunder. Having now resigned five times from various positions—including being twice forced from office during the Blair years due to earlier scandals—he was repeatedly welcomed back to the summit of political power, including by Starmer.
This was because, more than anyone else, Mandelson epitomized the New Labour agenda of serving every requirement of the money-mad banks and corporations. As this venal figure declared after New Labour took office, they were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”
For the working class, the central issue is not holding Mandelson or Mountbatten-Windsor to account through parliamentary debates, humble addresses, or official inquiries—including the public inquiry advocated by Your Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The fundamental task is the building of a new, independent political party of the working class and a decisive break with the entire parliamentary set-up and all its rotten parties. It is the capitalist system they all defend that enabled the financial oligarchy—and figures such as Mandelson and Mountbatten-Windsor—to thrive and profit.
4. Actor Robert Duvall (1931-2026): A realist who went beyond his own conceptions
Duvall’s greatest strength, by all accounts and on the basis of viewing his film work, was his attraction and indeed dedication to psychological and, in a more limited way, social truth, as he construed it. His intensity in that effort seems unquestionable. Duvall worked and studied indefatigably. He was known to “inhabit” his roles with great ferocity and single-mindedness.
He held the firm belief that “research, research, research” was essential to crafting a script, he told students at Hollins University in 2022. “Immerse yourself in the subject matter and then put forth something that you love. I haven’t written that many screenplays, but sometimes I just sit down and start writing and just see where it goes. I go from A to B to C to D and just follow the logic of the script.” Duvall directed himself in The Apostle, about a rural evangelical preacher, based on his own script.
5. Pentagon gives Anthropic 3 days to drop AI safeguards or face blacklisting
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to grant the military unfettered access to Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence system or face either blacklisting as a “supply chain risk” or compulsion under the Defense Production Act. The ultimatum was delivered in a tense meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday morning, attended by six senior defense officials, including the department’s top lawyer.
On the same day, Elon Musk’s xAI signed a deal with the Pentagon to deploy its fascistic Grok AI system on classified military networks, thereby breaking Claude’s exclusive position on classified networks. xAI agreed without restriction to an “all lawful purposes” standard, the exact formulation Anthropic has resisted.
The confrontation with Anthropic was triggered by revelations that Claude was used—without Anthropic’s prior knowledge—in the illegal January 3 US military assault on Caracas, Venezuela, in which between 83 and 100 people were killed and President Nicolás Maduro was abducted. As the World Socialist Web Site documented at the time, the assault was the culmination of a long-planned imperialist intervention driven by the US ruling class’s determination to control Venezuelan oil and reassert hegemony over Latin America.
The dispute between Anthropic and the Trump administration is being presented in the corporate media as a clash between “AI safety” and “national security.” In reality, it is a conflict within the American ruling class over the terms under which the technology giants will place their most powerful AI systems at the unrestricted disposal of US imperialism’s wars of aggression.
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Claude is widely regarded as the most capable frontier AI model in the world. Claude Code—Anthropic’s AI coding tool—has transformed software engineering to such a degree that their own head of product, Boris Cherny, recently warned that AI will make 2026 “a painful year” for software engineers, predicting the job title will “start to go away.” Engineers at major firms report AI writing the entirety of their code.
The Pentagon is not threatening Anthropic because it can afford to lose Claude. It is threatening Anthropic precisely because it cannot—because the most powerful AI system on the planet is indispensable to its plans for AI-driven warfare, and because the precedent of any company imposing conditions on the war machine is intolerable to the state.
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Anthropic’s post-meeting statement confirmed the dynamic. “During the conversation, Dario expressed appreciation for the Department’s work and thanked the Secretary for his service,” the company said. “We continued good-faith conversations about our usage policy to ensure Anthropic can continue to support the government’s national security mission in line with what our models can reliably and responsibly do.” The language—expressing gratitude to the man who had just threatened to destroy the company—is the unmistakable posture of a corporation preparing to capitulate.
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The corporate press has largely presented Anthropic as a courageous company standing up to military overreach. This narrative is a fabrication.
Anthropic has pursued military integration aggressively over the past two years. Most significantly, in November 2024, it partnered with Palantir—the surveillance contractor whose entire business model is built on serving the US military and intelligence apparatus—and Amazon Web Services to deploy Claude on classified networks. In June 2025, it launched “Claude Gov” for national security agencies. The following month, it celebrated its awarding of a $200 million Pentagon contract. And last August, it offered Claude to government agencies for $1 to undercut competitors and win market share.
The company’s “red lines” are remarkably narrow. Its Acceptable Use Policy prohibits “fully autonomous weapons” and “mass domestic surveillance of Americans.” These are not prohibitions on targeted killing, foreign surveillance, drone targeting with a human “in the loop,” or planning assaults on sovereign nations, the very operation that triggered this crisis. The policy explicitly reserves the right to negotiate exceptions for government customers. The “red lines” are not lines at all; they are opening positions in a negotiation.
Any assessment of Anthropic’s independence must also reckon with who owns it. Amazon—whose AWS built and continues to provide the CIA’s primary cloud infrastructure—has invested $8 billion. Google has invested approximately $3 billion. Microsoft and Nvidia committed a combined $15 billion. Early funding included $500 million from Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research—invested using misappropriated FTX customer funds, as prosecutors established at Bankman-Fried’s fraud trial, in one of the largest financial swindles in American history. The notion that a company embedded within this web of military-intelligence capital represents an independent ethical actor is a fantasy.
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The confrontation with the Pentagon reveals the terminal limit of this liberal bourgeois position: when the state demands unconditional submission, corporate ethics and philanthropic pledges are powerless.
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The announcement Tuesday that the Pentagon will begin using Grok AI on classified military networks, clearly timed to coincide with Amodei’s meeting with Hegseth, is an unmistakable sign that the Trump administration intends to utilize AI in the service of the most extreme surveillance and repression of democratic rights.
As Lawfare has documented, Grok has a “documented history of biased, misleading, antisemitic, and harmful outputs.” The record is extraordinary. In July 2025, Grok called itself “MechaHitler,” praised Adolf Hitler, recommended a second Holocaust to users with neo-Nazi profiles, deployed the antisemitic phrase “every damn time,” and blamed “Jewish executives” for “forced diversity” in the entertainment industry. xAI dismissed the episode as an “unintended update.”
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The Pentagon’s demand that Anthropic drop its prohibition on “mass domestic surveillance of Americans” must be understood in the context of what the Trump administration is already building. ICE has deployed Clearview AI facial recognition under a $3.75 million contract. Palantir—Anthropic’s own partner on classified systems—operates the $30 million “ImmigrationOS” platform providing “granular tracking” of immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has “significantly expanded the operational scope” of facial recognition and AI surveillance. The fascistic Trump regime is already using AI for mass surveillance; the Pentagon’s demand is that the most powerful AI model be made available for the apparatus of a police state and escalating war abroad.
6. Measles cases in the US surge past 1,000 in 2026
The United States has reached a catastrophic milestone in the resurgence of preventable infectious diseases, exposing the devastating consequences of a systemic assault on public health infrastructure. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation has already confirmed 982 measles cases in 2026, while CNN’s measles tracker reports an even higher toll of 1,030 infections.
The US did not breach the 1,000-case threshold last year until May, putting the country on a rapid trajectory to greatly surpass 2025’s three-decade high of 2,281 infections. This is not merely an epidemiological failure, but a historic regression in which a highly contagious virus, officially eliminated more than a quarter-century ago, is being allowed to rampage through the population.
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The CDC has all but been left rudderless in a storm of infectious disease and politics. This is not incompetence; the absence of leadership is not a failure of policy but the intended policy itself—to bury the CDC in the quagmire and make it impossible to fulfill its mission.
The agency is now helmed on an acting basis by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the notorious Great Barrington Declaration—the herd-immunity-through-mass-infection manifesto widely condemned by public health experts as a blueprint for mass death—who has entirely failed to flag South Carolina’s systematic underreporting or demand transparent hospitalization data, signaling a tacit federal endorsement of the state’s obfuscation.
The geography of this crisis highlights the social terrain where vaccine refusal has been deliberately cultivated. South Carolina has emerged as the undisputed epicenter, recording 973 cases in a massive outbreak centered in Spartanburg County. As the measles crisis explodes across the state, public health officials are engaged in dangerous obfuscation of the disease’s true severity. South Carolina does not require its hospitals to report measles-related admissions to the state. Consequently, the state is reporting a staggeringly low hospitalization rate of just 2 percent, or a mere 20 admissions.
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South Carolina state epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell has openly admitted that the agency is “not getting an accurate picture at all” of how the virus is ravaging the community, yet she simultaneously declared that the state has not even considered adding measles hospitalizations to its mandatory reporting list. This bureaucratic negligence is compounded by intense political pressure from right-wing state legislators and corporate health systems that are collectively pandering to a vocal, vaccine-resistant minority. Doctors treating patients on the front lines are left entirely in the dark, forced to rely on Facebook posts and local rumors to learn about severe local complications like pneumonia, dehydration or life-threatening encephalitis.
This complete lack of federal oversight aligns seamlessly with the broader Trump-Kennedy administration agenda of normalizing mass infection and downplaying the deadly realities of vaccine-preventable diseases. By allowing states like South Carolina to hide the true extent of this outbreak, the CDC further erodes whatever fragile public trust remains in its authority, proving once again that the health and safety of the population have been entirely subordinated to anti-science political expediency and vaccine disinformation—and the results are now manifesting in communities across the country.
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The current public health crisis represents a tragic and deliberate reversal of one of the greatest scientific and social achievements of the 20th century. The combination of decades of sustained public health initiatives, comprehensive school immunization laws, and the removal of financial barriers through the Vaccines for Children program culminated in the historic elimination of endemic measles in the United States in 2000. These advances were not merely medical breakthroughs; they were monumental social gains won through collective effort, demonstrating that human progress and science could conquer ancient, deadly scourges.
Today, these hard-fought protections are being systematically dismantled by a ruling class and a social order in advanced decay. Having normalized mass death and debilitation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to protect corporate profits, the political establishment now treats disease prevention as an unacceptable impediment to profit-making.
7. IMF chief hails Sri Lanka “success story” as its austerity agenda deepens social crisis
The three-day visit of International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, who repeatedly hailed Sri Lanka as a “success story” under the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility program, has once again laid bare the class character of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government.
According to media reports, the purpose of the IMF visit was to “assess” the destruction caused by Cyclone Ditwah, which killed around 1,000 people, devastated homes and critical infrastructure, and affected more than 2.3 million people last December. The International Labour Organization has estimated the economic losses at $US16 billion, or approximately 16 percent of GDP.
Nearly three months after the disaster, neither the JVP/NPP government nor the major international powers have provided anything remotely close to the resources required to rebuild the shattered lives of thousands of families or restore devastated infrastructure. Anger is mounting among working people and the rural poor over the government’s failure to deliver adequate relief, including permanent housing for families who lost everything in cyclone-triggered floods and landslides.
Georgieva made clear that the devastation created by Cyclone Ditwah cannot justify any deviation from the IMF’s harsh austerity program. “IMF programs are designed to be flexible when circumstances change,” she said. But this “flexibility” operates strictly within the boundaries of debt sustainability and creditor confidence. Disaster relief must be administered without undermining fiscal targets. The government’s 2026 budget, prepared before the cyclone struck, will remain intact. There will be no policy reversal.
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For working people, the economic consequences are becoming catastrophic. Although headline inflation has dropped, prices of essential goods and services remain far above pre-crisis (i.e., 2022) levels. VAT increases and other indirect taxes are consuming a larger share of household income. Electricity, water, fuel, and cooking gas prices have risen sharply over the past two years under IMF-mandated adjustments. Real wages, however, have not recovered to their pre-2022 levels, and the government has told public sector workers there will be no wage increases.
Public hospitals continue to report severe shortages of essential medicines, equipment, chemicals, and staff. Schools, particularly in rural areas, struggle with overcrowding and inadequate resources and teaching staff. Many families remain heavily indebted after years of high interest rates. According to a World Bank survey conducted late last year, almost one third of the population (32.4 percent) lives below or just above the poverty line of $US2 per day.
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The working class and rural masses are not responsible for the country’s foreign debts, which are the product of decades of borrowing to fund tax concessions for the wealthy, vast military spending, corrupt mega-projects, and integration into volatile global capital markets.
The so-called economic success story is built on the backs of working people. Only their independent mobilization, based on a socialist and internationalist perspective, can offer a genuine alternative to the austerity now being prescribed as the future of the working population.
The meeting was organized as part of the Health Workers Action Committee's campaign to advance a socialist strategy to defend the country’s collapsing public health system and oppose the government’s austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was held against the backdrop of more than a month of protests by 20,000 doctors demanding the restoration of allowances and the resolution of long-standing grievances.
Around 90 participants attended the meeting, including doctors, nurses and other health workers, as well as youth and workers from several other sectors. The broad composition of the audience underscored growing concern over the deepening crisis in the public health sector amid sweeping budget cuts, staff shortages and deteriorating hospital conditions.
Speakers addressed the mounting pressures faced by health workers and the crisis in public health system, linking them to the IMF austerity program being implemented by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/ National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government. Government austerity, the speakers explain, threatens to dismantle the island’s free public health system, which has long been regarded as a major social gain of the working class.
9. Demand the immediate release of Communist Party Marxist-Kenya leader Booker Omole!
The Central Committee of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) has reported that its secretary general, Booker Ngesa Omole, was violently abducted on Monday in Isiolo town by the Kenya Police Service.
In a public statement February 24, the party wrote: “This was not an arrest. This was not lawful detention. This was a kidnapping.” Omole was “beaten severely. Tortured. Brutalized to near death. His tooth was broken. His finger was cut with a pen knife.” They state that after the assault he was “dumped at Mlolongo Police Station,” a facility associated with extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. His phone signal, they report, was traced there.
The party posted a photo of Omole in a Mlolongo Police Station cell February 25, explaining that he is being held unlawfully, “and the police have refused all access to him. No lawyers. No comrades. No family.”
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) denounces Omole’s abduction and demands that the Kenyan regime release him immediately.
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The repression against the CPM-K is part of the escalating violence of the Ruto regime since he came to power in 2022. In 2023, Ruto’s first year in power, security forces killed at least 31 demonstrators. In June 2024, during the Gen Z protests against Ruto’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) Finance Bill that sought to impose savage tax hikes, police killed more than 60. In 2025, at least 50 were killed in protests and hundreds injured.
The abduction of Omole takes place amid an escalating campaign of repression against opposition figures in the run-up to next year’s elections. Weeks ago, police violently dispersed a rally in Kitengela organized by the former and expelled the general secretary of ODM, Senator Edwin Sifuna, firing tear gas and live rounds at thousands of supporters. One of the victims, 28-year-old Vincent Ayomo, was shot in the eye as he crossed the road from work and another 50 attendees were injured.
This deepening turn to repression unfolds against a backdrop of extreme social inequality and mounting economic hardship. Oxfam reports show that nearly half of Kenya’s population lives in extreme poverty, surviving on meager daily incomes, even as wealth accumulates at the very top. A minuscule layer of the super-rich has amassed obscene fortunes: the richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than 77 percent of the population—over 42 million people.
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The attacks on the CPM-K, the abductions, arbitrary detentions and cross-border renditions to neighboring Uganda under brutal dictator Yoweri Museveni, carried out by the Kenyan government, are political preparations for far broader assaults on the democratic rights of the population as a whole. What is being tested against one organization today will be used tomorrow against striking workers, protesting youth and impoverished communities resisting austerity.
These events lay bare the grave dangers confronting the masses as social tensions intensify and the ruling elite closes ranks in defense of its wealth and power.
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The turn to open repression in Kenya is being emboldened by the example set by would-be dictator Donald Trump in the United States. Thousands of armed ICE agents have been sent into major urban centers, while detention centres have been built across the country, with 66,000 people held in immigration custody—the highest level in US history. These crackdowns have left two American protesters killed.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron and the political establishment have exploited the death of fascist activist Quentin Deranque—following clashes around an event addressed by Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed)—to whip up a reactionary campaign against the left. Backed by the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and the Socialist Party, a broad political front is seeking to criminalize opposition and prepare the ground for an authoritarian shift in advance of next year’s presidential elections. As with Charlie Kirk in the US, the death of a fascist is being weaponized to strengthen the repressive powers of the state and legitimize far-right forces.
In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) government is deploying the army into townships under the pretext of restoring order. It follows the mass killings of protesters in Tanzania in the aftermath of last year’s elections, where thousands were reported killed or disappeared amid a brutal post-election crackdown, and the ongoing suppression of opposition forces in Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni.
These developments are expressions of a global crisis of capitalism. From Washington to Paris, Pretoria to Nairobi, ruling elites confront deepening inequality, mass anger and political instability. Their common response is to fortify the police state apparatus, promote far-right forces and normalize violence against social opposition.
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The ICFI has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the CPM-K, which have been clearly presented in the World Socialist Web Site. But it unequivocally opposes this brutal attack on the organization’s general secretary, demands Omole’s immediate release, and calls for an end to all state threats and repressive acts against the CPM-K.
10. An historic attack on citizenship rights: Labor blocks entry to Australians interned in Syria
It is now clear that the Albanese Labor government, urged on by Australia’s political and media establishment as a whole, is doing everything it can to prevent the return home of Australian citizens—women and children—who have been incarcerated in primitive concentration camps in Syria since 2019.
This constitutes a historic assault on the core democratic right of citizenship, without which no other political or civil rights can effectively be exercised—including the rights to vote, reside, politically communicate, travel, work and access health, education and welfare services. It takes away the basic right to challenge government decisions, including arbitrary detention without trial.
To strip a person of Australian citizenship constitutes punishment “tantamount to civil death,” according to the High Court, Australia’s supreme court, which ruled in 2022 that citizenship cannot be revoked by ministerial decree.
The most immediate targets are 11 women and 23 children—all Australian citizens with valid passports—who were prevented from returning to Australia last week because of alleged various links to killed or imprisoned Islamic State (ISIS) fighters.
The 11 families had left the Al Roj internment camp in northeastern Syria with plans to travel to Beirut and then Australia, only to be turned around 50 kilometres into their journey. Many of the children were born in detention and have known no other life, deprived of essential care and education, resulting in illnesses and deaths.
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While the Labor government has denied media reports that it directly blocked the repatriation of the women and children by telling Syrian authorities they were unwanted “terrorists,” Albanese has doubled down on his declarations that the government will do nothing to assist them, even if it is “unfortunate” for the children.
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Every day sees this assault taken to a new level. Yesterday, the opposition Coalition demanded that the government join hands with it to make it a criminal offense to help Australians “linked to terrorist hotspots or terrorist organizations” return home. This would even include charities such as Save the Children.
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Last week, the Murdoch media’s Australian published an editorial insisting that lack of legality should be no obstacle to indefinite imprisonment. If the government could find no legal basis to bar the re-entry of the families, “a way (unspecified) must be found for them to be detained and evaluated for an extended period in a secure facility such as the one that already exists on Christmas Island.” The editorial said the women and children must be “effectively deradicalized before there is any chance they will be set loose on Australian soil.”
Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, hosts one of the notorious “offshore” detention camps in which successive Coalition and Labor governments have indefinitely incarcerated asylum seekers in violation of international and domestic law. Now that “black hole” regime is being proposed for Australian citizens who are deemed by a government and ASIO to require “deradicalization.”
This is a sweeping proposition, embracing some kind of brainwashing. It goes beyond those accused of sympathy for Islamic fundamentalism, without being convicted of any crime. It goes beyond Palestinians and anti-Gaza genocide demonstrators who have been falsely accused of antisemitism.
Such “deradicalization” language, linked to references to threats to “our way of life” or “Australian values,” can be used to justify barring entry or incarcerating anyone—including Australian citizens—who is designated by a government to be a “radical” enemy of the existing capitalist economic and political order.
Historically, there has never been a constitutionally protected right to citizenship in Australia. In fact, there is no bill of rights guaranteeing any basic right, including the right to vote. Instead, the 1901 Constitution, a British colonial era document adopted by the emerging Australian capitalist class, treated residents as “British subjects.”
That designation continued until after World War II, when the Chifley Labor government introduced the 1948 Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948. Under this legislation, birthright (jus soli) citizenship made anyone born in Australia a citizen. That principle was overturned by the Hawke Labor government’s legislation in 1986, which mandated that at least one parent be a citizen or permanent resident.
That marked a historic shift from basing citizenship on birth to requiring allegiance, or “loyalty to Australia,” and supposed shared values, together with a “pledge of commitment” from immigrants. Today that commitment, amended several times, requires new citizens to pledge their “loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect and whose laws I will uphold and obey.”
Yet these “rights and liberties,” as far as they ever existed, are being increasingly torn up.
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The intensifying saga surrounding the women and children trapped in Syria shows that the most basic legal and democratic rights, even citizenship itself, are threatened in the hands of the ruling class and its political servants. The defense of all such rights depends on the development of a mass movement of the working class, guided by a socialist perspective for the total reorganization of society on the basis of genuine democracy and equality, with full rights for all people, regardless of their country of birth.
The expanding contracts with universities feed into the next phase of the AUKUS military pact between the US, UK and Australia, targeting China.
Five teenagers arrested last Friday after police attacked an anti-ICE student rally in Quakertown, Pennsylvania are now facing felony aggravated assault charges, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.Notably, no charges have been filed against Quakertown Police Chief Scott McElree, who was captured on video in plain clothes grabbing students by their shirt collars and placing a teenage girl in a chokehold.
The Inquirer reported that the five teens “face charges of aggravated assault and related crimes,” citing two people with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.
More than four days after the police assault, the cops have refused to release the teens’ names, ages, or specific charges. Despite tracking the students after they left the campus on Friday, police have refused to provide a detailed timeline of events leading up to the attack. They have withheld body camera footage and offered only a brief statement claiming police intervened after students were “throwing snowballs” and “blocking traffic.”
The paper confirmed that only children were arrested during the incident, contradicting earlier reports that an adult had been taken into custody.
A 17-year-old girl who attended the protest but was not arrested told the Inquirer that students were speaking with a uniformed officer when Chief McElree “barged onto the sidewalk” and grabbed a teenage boy by the back of the neck.
The students did not know the man in plain clothes was the police chief. “All the kids thought he was a counter protester. So everyone started to protect their friends.”
She said she saw McElree throw one student to the ground and choke another. At least three students suffered significant injuries. One student’s nose was broken while a separate student suffered a chin injury that required stitches.
The teen recorded part of the encounter. “It was really scary, because it was a group of kids versus this really angry man.”
The students were held for over 72 hours before appearing before a judge Tuesday morning in a more than three-hour hearing that was closed to the public. Prosecutors declined to answer reporters’ questions after leaving the courtroom.
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These teenagers now face the possibility of spending years in prison, a significant portion of their young lives, while the billionaire president and his criminal administration continue to cover up the murders of American citizens in Minnesota, prepare for illegal war against Iran, carry out deadly murders in the Caribbean and Pacific, and suppress evidence of their own criminal conduct exposed in the Epstein files.
13. UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman calls for solidarity with Turkish miners’ wildcat strike
The miners have halted production to demand payment of unpaid wages, enforcement of promotion rights, retroactive contract benefits, guaranteed seniority and severance protections, and genuine health and safety measures.
Postal workers at the Keighley delivery office in West Yorkshire spoke out against intolerable working conditions, mail backlogs and the collusion of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) leadership in enforcing Royal Mail’s restructuring agenda.
15. Mass protests in Detroit area against plans for ICE detention and operational centers
Hundreds of people in Romulus and Southfield, Michigan, protested Monday evening against plans to expand ICE operations across the Detroit metro area.
16. 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.
