Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Corruption scandal hits Greece’s GSEE trade union bureaucracy
At the center of scandal is an investigation concerning €2.1 million government and European Union funding, out of a €73 million total, provided between 2020 and 2025 for professional education and training programs.
2. Say Nothing: Everything essential about the Northern Ireland conflict left unsaid
Say Nothing (2024), about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, came to UK terrestrial streaming platform All4 last year after previous runs on Hulu and Disney+, the drama’s producers. Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 book, the six-hour, nine-part series boasts an impressive cast and high production values.
It runs from the 1960s through the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to the 2014 arrest of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. Its occasional glimpses of something important cannot overcome a general superficiality.
The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) waged a military campaign for some 30 years, involving heroic self-sacrifice from its volunteers. But that campaign ended in the nationalist Sinn Féin joining a power-sharing agreement that left the foundations of British imperialism untouched.
These events underscore the necessity of a critical political appraisal that can explain why the bourgeois nationalist program on which the IRA’s campaign was based led to that outcome.
This can only come from an international revolutionary socialist perspective. Without that, responses to the Troubles are driven into one of two dead ends—glorifying and replicating the perspective that led to this dead end, or rejecting the struggle against imperialism altogether.
Say Nothing adopts the latter conclusion, even though it focuses chiefly on those who viewed the signing of the Good Friday Agreement—establishing a power-sharing executive made up of Unionist and Republican parties—as a betrayal of their struggle and the sacrifices they made. The IRA volunteers at its heart are treated sympathetically, but as damaged victims of their own misguided principles. It is a cautionary morality tale, reflecting Keefe’s conclusion that the struggle against imperialism will destroy both those who undertake it and those around them.
Keefe is a talented investigative journalist, but his human-interest writing reflects his political outlook as a liberal critic only of some of imperialism’s worst excesses. A recent description, that he “hunts for ugly truths,” points to this. He is a solidly establishment figure, serving in 2010–11 as a policy adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Obama presidency.
Keefe became interested in the Troubles and began his research after reading an obituary of Dolours Price in 2013.
Dolours and her sister Marian were among the first women accepted as active IRA volunteers upon its 1969 resumption of armed struggle against the British military occupation. They were members of the Belfast Brigade’s “Unknowns”, a secret cell reporting only to the highest local leadership to avoid information leaks to the British state.
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Keefe naturally offers only cursory nods to the long history of British oppression of Ireland, or to events in the North outside Belfast. Little or no context is given as to why people were prepared to risk their lives in this struggle.
After the 1922 Treaty partitioned Ireland, leaving the six northern counties a British colony, the IRA remained committed to the armed struggle for a united, independent Ireland. This was eventually suspended after the failure of the Border Campaign (1956–62), aimed at forcing withdrawal of British troops, and the IRA became somewhat dormant.
However, the Catholic working class in Northern Ireland was subject to appalling conditions and discrimination in work, housing and politics. Civil rights campaigns were bloodily suppressed amid a rising wave of loyalist attacks.
1969 was a turning point in the reanimation of the IRA’s activity. In that year, the Labour government sent British troops to Northern Ireland. Ostensibly sent to protect Catholic communities from loyalist attacks, they built up a military state apparatus that targeted nationalist protests.
The 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, when British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed civil rights protesters, killing 14, galvanized opposition to British rule. It goes barely noticed in Say Nothing. We hear only that the IRA bombing campaign has escalated from 150 bombs in 1970 to 1,000 in 1972, its most violent year.
British colonialism’s brutalities on the ground are barely explored in general. We see the Burntollet Bridge violence in 1969, when a loyalist mob brutally attacked a peaceful march while the Royal Ulster Constabulary watched, which played a part in radicalizing the Price sisters. But it is treated outside any wider context of imperialist occupation.
There is some acknowledgement that the intelligence operations headed by Brigadier Frank Kitson (Rory Kinnear) repeated the vicious tactics he had used against the Mau Mau in Kenya. But where Keefe is at pains to show how IRA activities affected its own members or civilians, he has next to nothing to say about British military collusion in the killing of Catholic civilians.
The brutality of British rule is reduced to a mirrored intrigue between the IRA and the army, with Kitson’s team beating information out of IRA suspects. When the IRA “disappear” two such assets, we see Kitson say that either the military were being fed vital information or they were driving the IRA to murder their own men—“either way we win.”
There is a similar approach to the state brutality against the Price sisters. Imprisoned in a men’s facility in London, they went on hunger strike for transfer to a women’s prison in Northern Ireland and political status. For 167 days of their 208-day strike they were force-fed in a horrific manner.
The medical team administering the force-feeding quit in protest at the cruelty. This is not pursued further. Nor are the protests supporting the sisters.
Keefe’s description of the unfolding of a hunger strike as “morbid but undeniable entertainment” says a great deal about his own approach.
There were three IRA hunger strikes during this period, but producers decided “we can’t do a series with two hunger strikes.” They therefore omitted the 1981 strike in which 10 republicans died. More importantly, given the focus on Hughes, they also omitted the preceding strike, which Hughes called off in confused circumstances after 53 days.
The political content of the campaigns and the response of British imperialism are not Keefe’s interest. He has written that “As a test of the limits of human endurance, [a hunger strike] can become a spectacle for rubberneckers, a bit like the Tour de France.”
Keefe treats the IRA volunteers as irreparably damaged, with Adams’ political maneuvering contributing. But he follows the line of the British, Irish and above all American ruling classes, which saw power-sharing involving Sinn Féin as the necessary means of creating a stable environment for corporate investment and building a cheap labor platform in the North.
He portrays Adams as evasive and manipulative, while still praising him for his realpolitik: “Whatever callous motivations Adams might have possessed, and whatever deceptive machinations he might have employed, he steered the IRA out of a bloody and intractable conflict and into a brittle but enduring peace.”
A serious artistic appraisal of the Troubles, and serious attempts to understand their effect at a personal level, would have to begin from a historical and political understanding both of British imperialism and the limitations of bourgeois nationalism.
In a contemporary analysis rooted in Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, the World Socialist Web Site explained the class basis for Adams’ and the Sinn Féin leadership’s actions in an editorial statement, “British-Irish agreement enshrines sectarian divisions”:
Once again, a movement that professed anti-imperialist credentials has exchanged army fatigues for business suits and been incorporated into new mechanisms for preserving the rule of big business. This is the logical outcome of the nationalist perspective.
Placing this in the context of the capitulation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the African National Congress, the Sandinistas and others, the editorial continued:
The bitter lessons of this century demonstrate that the Irish capitalist class and the petty-bourgeois nationalists are incapable of overcoming imperialist domination and social and political inequality. The legacy of colonial and class oppression cannot be resolved through jerry-rigged agreements between the imperialist powers and parties that essentially function as their local representatives…
The objective conditions exist for overcoming the age-old divisions between Catholic and Protestant, Irish and British workers, provided they are united on a program that articulates their basic needs for decent jobs, health care, housing and democratic rights. These needs can only be realized on a program for the international unification of the working class against the profit system.
No one expects Keefe to have any sympathy for such a critique. But this does not detract from or excuse Say Nothing’s superficial artistic approach, which is rooted in Keefe’s own political hostility to the struggle against imperialism. This, it must be stressed, is ultimately why his work was chosen as the basis for such a prestige, big-budget drama by the Disney corporation.
3. Florida continues execution surge with lethal injection of Melvin Trotter
On the evening of February 24, the state of Florida continued its aggressive use of the death penalty, executing 65-year-old Melvin Trotter at Florida State Prison near Starke. Trotter, who had spent nearly four decades on death row, was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. following the administration of a three-drug lethal injection cocktail.
Witnesses observed Trotter breathing heavily and twitching for approximately a minute after the drugs began to flow, his movements slowing before a medic confirmed his death. He declined to make a final statement.
Trotter’s execution stems from the June 16, 1986, murder of 70-year-old Virgie Langford, a long-time grocery store owner in Palmetto who was on the verge of retirement. During a robbery in which Trotter stole approximately $100 and food stamps to fuel his cocaine addiction, he stabbed Langford seven times with her own butcher knife. Langford survived long enough to identify her attacker, noting he wore a “Melvin” name badge from Tropicana, before she died of cardiac arrest during surgery.
Trotter’s legal team long argued for mercy based on his intellectual disabilities and the fact that he was high on crack at the time of the crime and came to the store unarmed, demonstrating he lacked the capacity for premeditation.
His attorneys argued that his significant intellectual disabilities should have barred his execution under the Eighth Amendment, citing early school records, low IQ tests placing him on the border of clinical intellectual disability per Florida law, special education placement, and family testimony about his lifelong struggles with reading, financial management and independent decision-making. They highlighted evaluations from mental health experts during his competency proceedings, who described Trotter as a “slow learner” with impaired common sense, poor planning ability, distorted sense of reality, and reduced inhibition—exacerbated by chronic cocaine use tied to his traumatic childhood.
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Trotter’s execution took place against a backdrop of deep judicial and humanitarian concern. The US Supreme Court cleared the way for his execution by denying his application for a stay, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she was “deeply troubled” by the state’s record on lethal injections.
She said death row inmates have not been able to prove their suspicions that the state is using expired drugs and engaging in other questionable practices because the Florida Supreme Court hasn’t allowed the inmates access to documents that could back up their claims.
“By continuing to shroud its executions in secrecy, Florida undermines both the integrity of its own execution process and, potentially, this Court’s ability to ensure the State’s compliance with its constitutional obligations,” she wrote.
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This secrecy is part of a broader history of executions in Florida gone horribly wrong. The state’s executions by the “Old Sparky” electric chair came under scrutiny in March 1997 when foot-long flames erupted from the head of Pedro Medina as he was being put to death. Another condemned inmate, Allen Davis, suffered visible agony during his electrocution in July 1999, when blood gushed from his mouth and chest and it took several minutes for him to die.
In December 2006, the lethal injection of Angel Diaz was also horrifically botched when the prisoner squinted, grimaced and tried to mouth words after the first injection, a sedative, was administered. An autopsy revealed that the chemical had been injected into soft tissue, rather than a vein, rendering the drug’s sedating mechanism ineffective before the second and third deadly chemicals were injected.
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Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has seen an unprecedented surge in executions. In 2025, Florida led the nation by putting 19 inmates to death—the highest single-year total for the state since the death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1976. DeSantis maintains complete control over signing death warrants and setting execution dates, a process that allows the governor to champion his reactionary, pro-death penalty agenda and gain favor with the Trump administration.
Florida recently enacted laws that further erode the rights of the condemned. In 2023, the state lowered the jury threshold for death sentences from a unanimous vote to an 8-4 recommendation. This move contradicts the Supreme Court’s 2016 Hurst v. Florida ruling, which had temporarily required jury unanimity after the Court struck down Florida’s prior sentencing statute. Florida also expanded death-eligible crimes to include non-homicidal offenses, a direct challenge to the 2008 high court ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana.
The relentless pace of executions in Florida is particularly alarming given the state’s record of error. Florida leads the nation in death row exonerations, with 30 individuals cleared of wrongful convictions since 1973.
3. Hanau shooting memorial highlights political shift to the right in Germany’s political establishment
On the sixth anniversary of the racist terror attack, the families of the victims warn of the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the "fascistic escalation" in the US. At the same time, the establishment parties are distancing themselves from such commemorations.
4. Amid deepening crisis of class rule, Peru saddled with eighth president in 10 years
On the night of February 18, the Peruvian Congress, meeting in extraordinary session, voted to install a new president to replace José Jerí, the eighth Peruvian head of state in barely a decade. Jerí, a right-wing politician, has been ousted after just four months in office, the latest president to fall victim to charges of corruption and personal scandal. Only time will tell whether he joins four of his predecessors who are behind bars.
Neither Jerí nor his immediate predecessor, Dina Boluarte, won popular elections, but rather were imposed in what amount to parliamentary coups by the Congress. José María Balcázar is the latest to be installed by the Congress as interim president. His main task will be to oversee the presidential elections set for April 12 and serve as a caretaker president until a new one is inaugurated in July, if he lasts that long.
Balcázar, 83, has past ties to Peru Libre, the party of ousted and imprisoned president Pedro Castillo, a former teachers union official who was removed from office in December 2022 after attempting to block a trumped-up, US-backed congressional impeachment.
This has led to a vicious media propaganda campaign aimed at casting Balcázar, a conservative ex-judge, as a “communist.” Ominously, the Naval Union, representing retired Navy officers, issued a public statement warning that the government had been captured by “Marxist-Leninists.”
It has been suggested that the aim of the right-wing parties that control Congress was to install Balcázar as a political foil, allowing their candidates to disassociate themselves from a supposedly “left” government under conditions in which the approval ratings for both the executive and legislative branches of government have rarely risen beyond the low single digits.
For his part, Balcázar has done everything possible to dispel any illusions that there will be anything “left” about his presidency. His first official meetings were with the US ambassador, the head of Peru’s central bank and business leaders of the National Society of Industry.
Most consequentially, he chose the right-wing economist and former presidential candidate Hernando de Soto as his prime minister.
De Soto, a long-standing asset of US imperialism and the International Monetary Fund, is the founder of the right-wing think tank Instituto Libertad y Democracia (ILD), whose operations were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the US agency created to carry out overtly the kind of political influence interventions previously performed covertly by the CIA. In the 1990s he was a chief adviser to President Alberto Fujimori and is considered the author of the “Fujishock,” a drastic economic austerity package that plunged large sections of the Peruvian population into poverty overnight by scrapping subsidies, currency and price controls along with most social spending. The package was imposed by dictatorial measures, with troops in the street.
At the last minute on Tuesday, however, Balcázar announced without explanation that his prime minister will be Jerí’s ex-minister of the economy, Denisse Miralles, a long-time technocrat in Peru’s financial institutions, and not De Soto.
For his part, De Soto claimed that his replacement came in response to disagreements over cabinet appointments and that Balcázar had failed to pass a “trial by fire” when he demanded that the interim president make changes. He also made statements that Balcázar had been “kidnapped” by business and political interests and issued warnings of the “Venezuelaization” of Peru. The new cabinet includes seven members who are holdovers from that of Jerí. Balcázar supporters have charged that De Soto attempted to change cabinet appointments after they had been agreed upon.
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In a country where 70-85 percent of Congress is facing criminal charges and past presidents have been jailed over multi-million-dollar kickback schemes, many involving the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, the known offenses for which Jerí was ousted seem relatively minor. He is accused of violating protocol governing the scheduling of meetings outside the presidential palace. These meetings took place in a “chifa”—the name used in Peru for Chinese restaurants, giving rise to the scandal known as “Chifagate.” The meetings were with Zhihua Yang, a businessman and fixer with connections to Beijing. Trying to hide his identity with a hoodie that covered part of his face, Jerí did not realize he was being filmed and that videos of the illicit meeting would go viral on social media.
Congress also accused Jerí of holding nighttime meetings with young women at the presidential palace. At least five of them were hired by the legislature with monthly salaries between 6,000 and 11,000 soles (approximately US$1,800 to US$3,300).
That the issue precipitating Jerís fall centered on purportedly illicit Chinese influence is hardly a coincidence. Peru has become a focal point in the drive by US imperialism to roll back China’s economic influence and reassert Washington’s hegemony in Latin America under the so-called “Donroe Doctrine.”
Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Peru reportedly stands at US$30 billion, far outstripping the US, which accounts for just US$6.7 billion. China, meanwhile accounts for 36 percent of Peruvian foreign trade, and the US just over 14 percent. Meanwhile, in Peru as in the rest of South America, China has far overtaken the US as the biggest trading partner.
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The corrupt and impotent Peruvian bourgeoisie, incapable of adopting any independent position, is torn between its economic interests tied to China and its dependence upon US imperialism in matters of “national security,” i.e., counterrevolutionary repression.
Washington’s pressure is aimed at seeing Peru join the Latin American countries that have elected far‑right presidents committed to putting the full weight of the crisis onto the shoulders of the working class and lining up with US imperialism in its preparations for war with China: Milei in Argentina, Katz in Chile, Paz in Bolivia, Noboa in Ecuador, Bukele in El Salvador and Asfura in Honduras.
The latest poll by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP) reflects the alienation of the broad masses of the Peruvian population from all of the existing capitalist parties in an election year with 36 presidential candidates. It puts Rafael López Aliaga, the far-right businessman and former Lima mayor in first place with 14.6 percent, while second place is given to Keiko Fujimori, the right-wing daughter of the former dictator, who rose from 8.1 to 10.3 percent in the last month. In third place with 5.3 percent is Alfonso López Chau, an economist and academician who describes himself as “center-left” and has, predictably, been denounced as a communist by his far-right opponents.
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Underlying the unrelenting political crisis of the Peruvian capitalist ruling class and its virulent anti-communism is an overwhelming fear of a movement from below by the working class and oppressed masses in a country plagued by massive social inequality, with nearly 30 percent of the population living in poverty and the majority laboring without basic benefits or protections in the so-called informal sector. The supposedly strong Peruvian economy, characterized by a boom in metal prices and record bank profits, has done nothing to ameliorate the conditions facing the vast majority of Peruvians.
Recent months have seen a series of strikes by transport workers over the carnage inflicted by politically connected extortionist mafias, with 20 drivers killed per week so far in 2026. Youth marching under the banner of Gen Z have clashed with riot police, and healthcare and construction workers have staged strikes and protests.
The fundamental challenge confronting this emerging movement of social struggle is the absence of a revolutionary leadership in the working class.
For decades, Stalinists of the Peruvian Communist Party undermined proletarian struggles through their dominance of the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP) and subordination of workers’ struggles to bourgeois parties and governments. For their part, Pabloite revisionism and its main representative in South America, Nahuel Moreno—who died in 1987—bear responsibility for thousands of deaths and historic defeats by promoting petty-bourgeois guerrillaism, Castroism and alliances with bourgeois nationalists as substitutes for the building of revolutionary parties in the Latin American working class. This paved the way to the US-backed military dictatorships that dominated the region over the course of two decades beginning in the 1960s.
In Peru, at the beginning of the 1980s two currents emerged: Izquierda Unida (IU) and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, SL). The former chose the electoral road, winning the mayoralty of Lima (1984–1986) with its leader Alfonso Barrantes providing a “left” face for bourgeois rule. The latter, a Maoist tendency, launched a guerrilla war that was met with murderous state repression, costing some 70,000 lives, most of them from Indigenous communities, over the course of two decades.
The bitter lessons of this history must be assimilated by a new generation as part of the struggle to forge a new revolutionary leadership in the working class based upon the perspective of international socialism and Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) in Peru and throughout Latin America to unite the struggles of workers in these countries with those of workers in the US and internationally.
5. Former Fiji PM Bainimarama arrested on charges of inciting mutiny
The renewed legal offensive against Bainimarama is an expression of intensifying factional struggles amid Fiji’s growing social crisis.
The month-long strike of 31,000 healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente was abruptly brought to an end by the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP) as a series of legal confrontations arose, which expose the rottenness of America’s profit-driven healthcare system.
On February 20, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals filed suit against nine major insurers, led by American International Group and Chubb Limited, seeking up to $95 million in directors and officers liability coverage. The payment would partially offset Kaiser’s recent $556 million settlement of whistleblower allegations accusing the organization of manipulating Medicare Advantage reimbursements through systematic diagnostic “upcoding.”
Kaiser employees will now confront the consequences of the betrayal of the UNAC/UHCP bureaucracy—deteriorating wages, medical coverage and working conditions. By contrast, the healthcare giant is maneuvering for reimbursement after a record fraud payout.
In January 2026, Kaiser affiliates agreed to pay $556 million to resolve False Claims Act allegations brought by the US Department of Justice. The resolution, the largest recovery ever tied to Medicare Advantage risk-adjustment practices, involved multiple entities, including Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. and several Permanente Medical Groups.
The case originated in whistleblower lawsuits filed by former employees Ronda Osinek and James Taylor. Osinek, a medical coder, alleged that Kaiser pressured physicians to retroactively add diagnosis codes in order to increase reimbursement rates. Taylor, a physician medical director, reportedly attempted to correct coding irregularities internally before filing his own complaint. Under the False Claims Act’s whistleblower provisions, the former Kaiser employees—the relators in the case, ie., the ones who brought the case on behalf of the US government—received a combined $95 million.
Prosecutors contended that between 2009 and 2018 Kaiser conducted retrospective record reviews that generated roughly 500,000 unsupported diagnoses. These additions allegedly produced about $1 billion in excess Medicare payments, despite internal compliance warnings.
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The UNAC/UHCP apparatus shut down the powerful month-long strike without a new contract or tentative agreement, let alone a vote by its members. This underscores the compounded threats healthcare workers face from corporate wealth, profit-driven healthcare and management’s “labor partners.” While executives debate insurance coverage for a half-billion-dollar settlement, frontline workers continue to confront workloads that threaten both patient safety and their own livelihoods.
While the union bureaucracy tries to limit the outlook of workers to trade union negotiations, the Kaiser litigation demonstrates that healthcare crises are inseparable from the financial architecture governing the capitalist system. Billing practices, insurance markets and corporate reserves shape not only profits but staffing levels, patient outcomes and workplace conditions.
Regardless of the verdict, the litigation has exposed the fraudulent “nonprofit” status of Kaiser Permanente and Medicare Advantage. No outcome under the current framework addresses the underlying reality: healthcare under capitalism operates through complex financial circuits that prioritize revenue extraction over public health. Fraud settlements, insurance disputes and regulatory negotiations represent symptoms of a system structured around profit rather than care.
The “Virginia Labor Coalition” meeting at GMU seeks to tie workers to Democrats and unions while suppressing broader struggles over wages and democratic rights in the face of the Trump administration’s assault on democracy.
8. Australia: Victorian Labor government hands police expanded stop-and-search powers
Such police-state powers mark a further shift to the right by Labor governments, seeking to crush dissent.
9. Thirty-thousand LA school support workers overwhelmingly vote to strike
An overwhelming 94 percent of 30,000 classified school workers in Los Angeles have voted to authorize a strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest school district in the United States. The vote, conducted by SEIU Local 99, signals a sharp escalation of class struggle in a district serving more than 400,000 students across over 1,000 schools.
This follows the 94 percent vote three weeks ago by members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) to authorize a strike by 35,000 teachers. Taken together, 65,000 teachers and support staff are now preparing to strike.
The classified workers are the backbone of the public school system. They include instructional and special education aides, custodians and maintenance workers, bus drivers, food service employees, campus safety officers and logistics staff. Schools cannot function without them. Yet they are paid poverty wages and treated as expendable.
This struggle is not isolated. Across California and the United States, class tensions are intensifying. In addition to LA teachers, 40,000 graduate student workers in the University of California system have voted to strike with their contract expiring on March 31.
More than 35,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers just waged a month-long strike before it was abruptly shut down by the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals without even reaching a tentative agreement. Skilled trades workers in the California State University system and San Francisco teachers conducted four-day strikes earlier this month, and nurses at USC Keck Medical Center are also engaged in contract battles.
The SEIU vote reflects a workforce pushed to the brink by relentless cost-of-living increases in one of the most expensive metropolitan regions in the country. The average salary for classified school workers is $35,501, classified as “extremely low income” in Los Angeles. Many workers are employed only part-time, working the 10-month school year and earning closer to $30,000 or less. A significant number fall below the federal poverty line.
Nearly 90 percent of these workers are Latino or African American, and a substantial proportion are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Many are themselves parents of LAUSD students. They confront not only economic hardship but also the broader climate of repression directed at immigrant communities, including the escalation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids under the Trump administration.
10. With US imperialist war machine in position, Trump menaces Iran in State of the Union speech
The absence of any expression of popular opposition to the war reflects both the backing among the European imperialist powers and broad support among the privileged middle class “left” for a “regime change” operation led by Washington.
11. Report on impact of AI triggers market turmoil
The extreme nervousness on Wall Street about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on a range of companies, particularly those supplying software and software services, was highlighted on Monday when a report by a small research firm played a significant role in a market selloff.
The report by Citrini Research was widely circulated and cited as a contributing factor in the fall, which saw the Dow drop by more than 800 points or 1.7 percent, the S&P 500 by 1 percent and the NASDAQ by 1.1 percent.
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The main concern in the past months has been whether the massive spending on AI data centers by the hyperscalers, such as Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, would generate a sufficient rate of return. Those fears remain.
But new ones have emerged in recent weeks centering on the impact of AI tools which contain the possibility of upending existing information and software systems by massively reducing time and labor costs.
Pointing to these effects, the Citrini report began: “What if our AI bullishness continues to be right … and what if that’s actually bearish?”
In other words, what will be the impact on the economy if the potential productivity gains of AI are realized.
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One of the big questions arising from the AI-induced rout of software-based firms, and the possibility that some may go under, is the impact on the private equity funds that have played a major role in financing their activities.
The amounts run into the trillions of dollars. This month, according to a recent FT report, the value of two of the world’s largest software companies, Salesforce and ServiceNow, have fallen by a fifth.
This has led to concerns over the exposure of private capital groups, including Blackstone, Ares, KKR and Blue Owl, which have exposure to software investments.
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Investors fear that if the use of AI expands as rapidly as the latest daily developments indicate, then private equity firms will have billions of dollars tied up in software companies that will either be severely disrupted or on their way to extinction.
A report on Bloomberg dealing with the travails of the private equity firm Blue Owl, the shares of which have now plunged 60 percent in the past 13 months, evoked the lead up to the financial crisis of 2008.
12. The Socialist Equality Party replies to Trump’s fascist address to Congress
In the United States, where the capitalist two-party system has been in place for 150 years, all those genuinely opposed to the policies and interests of the ruling class are denied the right to address the people. However, if the Socialist Equality Party had been given the opportunity to deliver a televised rebuttal, not only to Trump’s State of the Union Address but also to the Democrats’ reply, this is what we would have said.
[This headline perspective is published in full in the previous post at this blog, but readers are encouraged as always to visit the original article at the World Socialist Web Site.]
The March 21 state election will resolve nothing for workers and young people.
14. Epstein files naming Trump as attacker were withheld by DOJ
Multiple media reports quote Epstein victims whose statements to the FBI were recorded, but not released by the Department of Justice last month.
Kiswani’s suit alleges that the violent far-right group has been targeting her for over a year, including by supplying her name to the Trump administration for deportation.
16. Oppose the pro-imperialist Kurdish nationalist coalition in Iran
The “coalition of political forces of Iranian Kurdistan” represents yet another episode in the protracted and disastrous alignment of Kurdish bourgeois nationalist organizations with American imperialism.
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.
