Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
This week, hundreds of students in Southeast Michigan walked out in protest against the reign of terror being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throughout the state and across the country. The protests took place in the context of a growing wave of high-school walkouts throughout the country against ICE abductions and the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
Students at the Plymouth-Canton Educational Park (PCEP) campus staged a walkout on Wednesday morning against ICE. PCEP is located in Canton Township, a suburb of Metro Detroit. It consists of three separate high schools with a combined student population of more than 7,000. Aerial footage published by Fox 2 Detroit and estimates from the walkout organizers indicated that over 1,000 students participated in the protest.
Students carried a variety of handmade signs. One read, “Prison without due process is a concentration camp.” Another, referencing the musical Hamilton, noted, “Immigrants, we get the job done,” highlighting the role of immigrants in the working class.
The World Socialist Web Site reached out to the student running the Instagram account “PCEP ICE Walkout.” Vinny Howes, the organizer of the protest at PCEP, is a senior at Plymouth High School.
Howes noted that “unlike other school districts in Michigan, Plymouth-Canton Community Schools (PCCS) has yet to release any statement nor show concern about the presence of ICE in our neighborhoods and their impacts on students. As a district full of immigrant families, students were outraged. PCEP students demanded that the PCCS school board break their silence on the matter and show their solidarity with immigrant families; or at the very least, display their concern for students’ safety.”
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Later that same day, students from Community High School in Ann Arbor marched half a mile through the downtown area to the city’s federal building. One of the leaders of the protest, Rosie Meisler, spoke to local news outlets about the motivation behind the walkout.
The abductions carried out by ICE against immigrants across the United States—most recently the detention of four Ypsilanti residents—were, Meisler noted, “unacceptable. We saw it on the news, we’re seeing it in person and it’s time for us to act.”
Students from Community High School chanted, “Power to the people, no one is illegal” and “ICE out now.” They carried signs calling for the abolition of ICE and demanding due process for those facing deportation.
At a rally in front of the Federal Building in Ann Arbor, Meisler declared, “ICE has been committing atrocities against immigrants, documented and undocumented, and citizens alike.”
On Thursday, students at International Technology Academy in Pontiac staged a walkout of their own.
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Along with the walkouts in Michigan, protests have occurred on a regular basis throughout the country. On Thursday, students walked out of high schools in Corpus Christi, Texas; Brentwood, Tennessee; and Baltimore, Maryland.
School districts across the US have responded by warning students that these walkouts are not sanctioned school activities and that those who leave class without permission may face disciplinary consequences. Despite these threats, students have organized and participated in walkouts on January 30 or earlier this year in dozens of cities and schools across the country.
In Arizona, students walked out in large numbers. In the Phoenix metro area, participants included students from Arcadia High School, Camelback High School, Mesa High, Gilbert High, Shadow Ridge High and Tolleson Union High. Thousands walked out in Tucson, including from Rincon University High School, Catalina High School and Pueblo High School. In Flagstaff, students from Flagstaff High School and Coconino High School joined middle schoolers from Mt. Elden and Sinagua Middle Schools in a walkout on January 28.
California saw widespread participation. In Los Angeles, roughly 3,000 middle and high school students walked out under the slogan “ICE out of L.A.” Additional protests were held in the San Fernando Valley in early February. In Orange County, students at Capistrano Valley High, Godinez High, and Valley High participated.
In the Bay Area, hundreds walked out from San Lorenzo High, East Bay Arts High, Arroyo High, Royal Sunset High, Mt. Eden High, Berkeley High, Castro Valley High, East Side San Jose High and Overfelt High. In San Diego County, hundreds of students walked out at Point Loma High School and Grossmont High School in advance of January 30.
In Colorado, about half of the 766 students at Lesher Middle School in Fort Collins walked out. In Denver, both middle and high school students joined the national protests.
Florida students walked out in Brevard County (Viera High, Rockledge High and Satellite High), Tallahassee (Lincoln High School) and Port Orange (Atlantic High School).
In Georgia, students at Riverwood International Charter School and Norcross High School in Atlanta walked out on January 28. In Illinois, more than 200 students walked out at Oak Park and River Forest High School near Chicago.
In Missouri, 200–300 students at Staley High School in Kansas City participated in a walkout on January 20. In Nevada, students at Cheyenne High School, Rancho High School and Desert Rose High School in Las Vegas walked out on January 21.
Texas also saw significant participation, with more than 1,000 students walking out at Tyler High School and Legacy High School in East Texas on January 20.
In Utah, hundreds of students walked out from Bingham High School, Kearns High School and West Jordan High School in the Salt Lake City area.
Wisconsin students in Milwaukee and surrounding areas staged walkouts, including at Rufus King International High School, Reagan High School, West Allis Central, Dominican High School and Shorewood High School. Over 300 students and some family members participated.
Despite intimidation and threats from school administrations, students have demonstrated remarkable courage and determination. These protests were organized independently by student groups, activist networks and community organizations, not by the political establishment.
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In Minneapolis and across the US, teachers are willing to strike to defend their students and themselves from ICE’s fascistic terror. But the unions have rushed to shut down such initiatives, citing “no-strike clauses” and other contractual mechanisms as excuses to keep workers on the job while state repression escalates.
Students must link their fight with the working class. They are a powerful social force and can serve as the spark for a broader movement against ICE, repression and dictatorship. We encourage all students who have participated in walkouts to join the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE).
The IYSSE encourages the formation of rank-and-file committees in every school, workplace, and community. These committees will prepare the ground for united strike action across industries, independent of the union apparatus and the political establishment, in defense of immigrants, democratic rights, and the future of an entire generation.
On Monday, San Francisco teachers will launch the first district-wide strike since 1979. The walkout by 6,400 educators is a direct rebellion against decades of bipartisan austerity in public education.
The educators, para educators and school staff are members of the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) and teach in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). They voted 97.6 percent for strike action last month, following a 99.34 strike authorization in December, expressing the deep anger in the schools over poverty wages, chronic understaffing and relentless cuts.
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For 11 months, educators in San Francisco and almost every other major district in the state have been kept on the job by the California Teachers Association, amid conditions of historic cuts to school funding at both the local and state level by the Democratic Party and the federal level under Trump. But the fact that the union has been compelled to call a strike shows educators’ patience is coming to an end.
The strike coincides with a growing wave of working‑class resistance, including the strike by 31,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and health care professionals in California and Hawaii, and 15,000 New York City nurses. Around 4,000 Kaiser pharmacy and lab workers are set to also walk out on Monday. Tens of thousands of graduate students across the University of California are also voting on strike action.
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The common thread binding these fights—from the hospital wards to the public schools—is the subordinating of essential social services to profit and balanced‑budget dictates imposed throughout the Democratic Party-run state.
In San Francisco, the immediate trigger is the district’s provocative offer of 6 percent wage increases over 3 years, in one of the most expensive cities in the world. This would be combined with limited, short-term family health coverage loaded with “take-backs.” Currently, teachers on family medical plans are paying between $1,200 and $1,500 monthly. Educators are also demanding fully funded family health care, enforceable class‑size limits and more support for special education.
San Francisco’s public schools confront a projected budget shortfall of more than $100 million next year, on top of earlier cuts and layoffs that have already shredded programs.
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The looming strike is rooted in the obscene social inequality that finds particular expression in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area. The region is now home to 82 billionaires—more than anywhere else in the world—and an estimated 342,400 millionaires, with the number of millionaires having surged nearly 100 percent over the last decade. Tech oligarchs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin amass personal fortunes measured in the tens and hundreds of billions, while the district claims that basic wage increases and fully funded health care for educators are “unaffordable.”
This grotesque contrast is the conscious outcome of policy. For years, the Democratic Party at the city, state and federal levels has funneled tax breaks and incentives to the tech and finance elite while starving public education. The San Francisco school board and successive superintendents have responded to state under funding with one “fiscal stabilization plan” after another, each centered on cuts, school closures and layoffs.
In 2021, SFUSD announced a $125 million deficit and threatened more than 400 positions, with the board ultimately approving sweeping cuts demanded by the state. That crisis never truly ended; it merely set a new, lower baseline from which further cuts are now being prepared.
A veteran teacher with more than two decades in the district told the World Socialist Web Site at the time: “We’ve lived through wave after wave of ‘deficit’ crises, furlough days, program cuts, layoffs. Every time they say, ‘there’s no money.’ But you walk outside and see luxury condos, corporate shuttles, billionaire estates. There is money. It’s just not for us or our students.”
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The district and the political establishment have made clear that they intend to use the legal framework and budget constraints to discipline educators. A state‑appointed fact‑finding report has already echoed claims that SFUSD cannot sustain the union’s demands under current funding levels and warning of further deficits if raises go beyond the district’s offer. Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie issued a statement Wednesday stating that “schools must remain open,” and insisting that any settlement must fit within the straitjacket of existing revenue, which is itself the product of tax concessions to the wealthy and chronic under funding from Sacramento and Washington.
In this context, the union’s strategy of appealing to the Democratic Party and relying on closed‑door negotiations is a dead end for educators.
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The conditions exist for a powerful, united movement of educators across California, as shown by the 94 percent strike authorization vote by 35,000-member United Teachers Los Angeles that took place at the end of January.
But the central obstacle is the union bureaucracy, which is terrified of a movement that would challenge the political establishment. The real purpose of the California Teachers Association’s cynically-named “We Can’t Wait” campaign has been to delay and block genuine joint struggle by educators working without a contract throughout the state while preserving the unions’ alliances with the Democratic Party.
Under this banner, the CTA and local affiliates like UTLA and UESF have rolled out choreographed “strike ready” stunts—T‑shirt days, after‑school pickets and parent leafleting—aimed at dissipating anger and channeling it into appeals to Governor Newsom and other Democrats, rather than mobilizing the hundreds of thousands of educators statewide who face the same cuts and conditions.
To win this struggle, San Francisco educators cannot limit themselves to pressuring the existing parties or making appeals to the same Democratic politicians who have overseen the destruction of public education. To maximize their initiative and independence, they must organize independent rank‑and‑file committees at every school and worksite. Such committees should:
Demand full, inflation‑beating wage increases that allow all educators and staff to live in the city where they work, without being driven into multiple jobs or out of the region.
Insist on fully funded, no‑premium family health care as a non‑negotiable social right, not a temporary “perk” tied to short‑term funding schemes.
Fight for sharp reductions in class sizes, major increases in special education supports, counselors and nurses, and an end to all layoffs and school closures.
Reject the district’s “structural deficit” framework, demand a full opening of the books and oppose all attempts to pit teachers against other workers or students through cuts.
Link up with educators across California—where unions in numerous districts are preparing their own actions—and nationally, to wage a common fight for massive expansion, not contraction, of public education funding.
3. Ann Arbor, Michigan educators working under expired contract amid massive cuts
Nearly 2,000 teachers, paraprofessionals, and support staff in Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) are working under an expired contract, confronting a district administration that has weaponized a manufactured fiscal crisis to impose a regime of permanent austerity. Negotiations, which formally recommenced on January 26, are unfolding against the backdrop of a global capitalist breakdown, the relentless diversion of social resources toward imperialist war, and the systematic suppression of the working class by the trade union bureaucracy.
The Ann Arbor Education Association (AAEA), led by President Fred Klein, allowed the previous contract to expire on December 31 without a fight, effectively demobilizing the membership. While Superintendent Jazz Parks and the Board of Education claim “good faith” in bargaining, their objective remains the same: ensuring a 15 percent fund balance (approximately $45 million) to satisfy credit rating agencies and state overseers at the expense of educational quality and workers’ livelihoods.
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This impasse is a consequence of the events of 2024, which served as a form of “shock therapy” for the district. The revelation of a $25 million budget deficit in March 2024 was a calculated political maneuver designed to reset the baseline of public education in Ann Arbor.
The crisis was initiated with the sensational claim of a $14 million “accounting error.” District officials cited a clerical mistake regarding pension liabilities and a one-time infusion of state funds to create an atmosphere of emergency to whip up a crisis atmosphere.
However, the subsequent independent review by Plante Moran, released in June 2024, exposed this narrative as fundamentally misleading. The review explained that the “$14 million accounting error” was actually a “recording error” that had no impact on the district’s actual fund balance or the shortfall itself. The true drivers of the deficit were structural: the expiration of federal COVID-19 relief funds (ESSER)—a “fiscal cliff” created by the Biden administration—combined with declining enrollment and rising inflationary pressures.
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Due to cuts, support staff are working in converted custodian closets without ventilation or running water. Instrumental music classes are held in storage rooms reaching 85° F (29° C), and special needs students have been moved into spaces lacking appropriate facilities.
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These cuts would not have been possible without the active collaboration of the AAEA and the Michigan Education Association (MEA). Far from organizing a fightback, the union bureaucracy served as a dampener on rank-and-file militancy.
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The claim of “no money” is a lie. The austerity in AAPS is a direct result of the allocation of social wealth by the Democratic Party, which controls every lever of power in Michigan. The starving of public education is the necessary corollary to the feeding of the war machine and corporate coffers.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer has presided over a massive transfer of public funds to private corporations. While AAPS was cutting $400,000 from world languages, the state was handing out billions:
- General Motors: Secured $2.28 billion in tax savings through 2029.
- Ford Motor Company: Received over $630 million for its Blue Oval Battery Park.
- SOAR Fund: The Strategic Outreach and Reserve (SOAR) fund allocates $500 million annually to attract businesses.
Whitmer has invoked the World War II slogan “Arsenal of Democracy” to describe her vision for Michigan’s future. This involves the direct mobilization of industrial and research capacity for war against Russia and China. Michigan is now home to nearly 5,000 defense contractors generating $30 billion in economic activity.
The University of Michigan (U-M), located blocks from AAPS, exemplifies this subordination of science to war. In Fiscal Year 2025, U-M received $100 million in direct research support from the Department of Defense. Key projects include $7.5 million for heat-tolerant semiconductors for military vehicles and $15 million for AI-driven “game theory” with autonomous agents. While the university develops technology to incinerate human beings abroad, the public schools in its shadow cannot afford to teach children a second language.
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The struggle in Ann Arbor is part of an international wave of resistance. At the end of January, 35,000 Los Angeles teachers voted to authorize a strike against concessionary healthcare deals, and teachers in San Francisco are prepared to strike this Monday. In the UK, educators are striking against “compulsory redundancies” and privatization. In December, more than 35,000 New Zealand primary teachers rejected a sellout pay deal, a clear rebuke to the union bureaucracy and the government’s austerity agenda.
The experience of the last two years has shown that the AAEA and MEA bureaucracy will not lead a fight. To break the deadlock, educators, parents, and students must organize themselves from below, to take initiative out of their hands. Teachers should select a rank-and-file committee, consisting of their most trusted coworkers, to plan strategy and prepare action, in alliance with teachers across the state and the country.
This committee must affiliate with the Michigan Educators Rank-and-File Committee (MERFC) and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), which is fighting for a working class defense of public education all over the world.
Educators must demand an immediate wage increase to effectively compensate for years of accumulated inflation and wage stagnation. This economic reset must be accompanied by the full restoration of all recent cuts, specifically the reinstatement of the 141 positions eliminated in 2024 and the return of all discontinued programs.
To finance these necessities, educators must call for the abolition of the “fund balance” hoard, demanding that these reserves be spent directly on students rather than preserved to satisfy bondholders. Finally, teachers, paraprofessionals and staff must demand an end to the war economy, insisting that the billions currently squandered on corporate subsidies and U-M military research be redirected toward the vital needs of public education.
The struggle for a contract in Ann Arbor is a struggle against the Biden-Trump consensus of austerity and war. It requires the industrial mobilization of the working class in a general political strike to break the power of the corporate oligarchy.
4. The crisis in Australian public education and the need for rank-and-file committees
In Australia the year opens with educators confronting intolerable and socially destructive conditions. These are not the product of isolated policy failures, poor management or temporary budget pressures. They are the outcome of a long-term assault on public education, now led by the Albanese Labor government in collaboration with state governments, and enforced by the education union bureaucrats.
Across the country, schools are buckling under chronic underfunding, staff shortages, impossible workloads and rising levels of violence and distress. Teachers’ wages, like those of all sections of the working class, continue to fall behind inflation, burnout is endemic, and experienced educators are leaving the profession in record numbers. Many graduates never enter teaching or leave within five years. Education support staff are stretched to breaking point, students with complex needs go without assistance, and classrooms increasingly function as sites of crisis management rather than education.
According to the latest OECD data, Australian teachers work an average of 46.5 hours per week, well above the OECD norm, with much of this time consumed by administrative, marking and preparation tasks. Nearly two-thirds report high levels of stress, and more than 80 percent say their work harms their mental health. The problems are most severe in disadvantaged working-class schools, where almost 67 percent of principals report staffing shortages.
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A major study, The Silent Cost: Impact and Management of Secondary Trauma in Educators, drawing on surveys of nearly 2,300 educators, found that teachers, described as the “social workers of society,” experience secondary traumatic stress (STS) at levels higher than psychologists, mental health nurses and paramedics. That reflects the prolonged, emotionally intensive teacher–student relationship and the expanding demands placed on educators in chronically under-resourced schools.
These conditions flow directly from successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, eroding public education. The Albanese government has continued to funnel billions of dollars into elite private schools.
Governments have used the so-called needs-based Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) to massively overfund private schools, while public schools remain underfunded by billions. In 2025, for example, it was revealed that two elite Victorian private schools, Haileybury College and Caulfield Grammar, spent a combined $391.8 million on capital works between 2012 and 2022, more than the entire Tasmanian public school system, consisting of 190 public schools.
The ruling capitalist elite has deliberately constructed a semi-privatized and socially segregated education system, in which families are pressured into private enrollments as public education is systematically run down.
A Swinburne University study this year found that vulnerable families are often going without basic necessities to meet rising school costs. It reported that a child born in 2023 will cost $108,870 to attend a metropolitan public school in Victoria from kindergarten to Year 12.
At the same time, vast sums are allocated to militarism. The AUKUS agreement alone commits Australia to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear-powered submarines and war preparations against China.
For years, this social counter-revolution has been policed by the education unions. In 2025, teachers in Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria entered struggle against poverty wages, intolerable workloads and unsafe schools. In every case, the unions intervened to block, delay or shut down action, deliberately fragmenting teachers along state and sectoral lines despite essentially identical conditions nationwide.
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The unions function not as organizations of struggle but as industrial police for governments and corporate interests. Privileged bureaucrats, many earning around a quarter of a million dollars a year—more than double the average teacher’s wage—enforce government cuts by isolating disputes, suppressing rank-and-file action and politically aligning with the parties implementing austerity.
The assault on public education is part of a broader international offensive rooted in the deepening crisis of capitalism. This has taken its sharpest form under the Trump administration through historic funding cuts, mass layoffs, censorship, book bans and the imposition of a mandated “patriotic curriculum,” rewriting American history. Schools are being transformed into instruments of ideological control. These attacks are inseparable from wider repression, provoking powerful working-class opposition across the US, including mass protests and student-led walkouts against ICE in Minneapolis and beyond.
Similar issues are posed in Australia. In the aftermath of the Bondi massacre, the Albanese government established an “Antisemitism Education Taskforce,” chaired by businessman David Gonski and Zionist corporate lawyer Jillian Segal, tasked with reviewing the Australian curriculum to reject “all forms of antisemitic thought and action.” Under the guise of combating hatred, this body poses a serious threat to democratic rights and academic freedom by equating political opposition, particularly to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, with antisemitism, providing a framework for censorship and repression in schools and universities. Alongside tougher “hate crime” laws, education institutions are to become frontline mechanisms of state control.
Fueling this draconian agenda is the deepening crisis of Australia’s parliamentary system, marked by the implosion of the Liberal-National Coalition and the continuing erosion of support for Labor. With the traditional parties of the post-World War II period losing their capacity to contain mounting social discontent, sections of the capitalist establishment are turning toward authoritarian measures to suppress opposition and shore up their rule.
Combined with already dire conditions, these measures signal a shift toward greater surveillance, conformity and intimidation, particularly of teachers who encourage critical engagement with history, politics and social inequality. Overcrowding, inadequate mental-health support, rising student distress and violence are the domestic expression of a system that prioritizes war, profit and repression over social need.
The same governments that insist there is “no money” for education allocate limitless funds to military expansion and tax concessions for the wealthy. This agenda is reinforced by the growing presence of defence-linked programs in schools, promoted through state and federal partnerships and sponsored by weapons manufacturers such as BAE Systems, SAAB and Lockheed Martin, which use STEM and “pathway” initiatives to integrate education into the needs of the arms industry.
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The central lesson is the necessity for new, genuinely democratic organizations of struggle. Power must return to the rank and file, uniting teachers and education support staff, union members and non-members alike, with parents and students.
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The resources exist to fully fund public education, ensure humane working conditions and provide every student with the support they need. What stands in the way is the capitalist profit system itself.
The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the rank-and-file educators’ network, advances the following demands:
- An immediate 40 percent pay increase to make up for past losses, with salaries indexed against inflation and automatic cost-of-living adjustments.
- Maximum class sizes of 15–20. End administrative burdens so teachers can focus on teaching. A minimum of 8 hours weekly during school hours for planning, assessment and collaboration.
- Abolish NAPLAN and other regressive standardized testing measures that legitimize the narrowing of the curriculum and funding cuts for “underperforming” schools.
- End the authoritarian imposition of mandatory teaching methods. Teachers must have the democratic right to collectively decide on curriculum implementation.
- Hire thousands of teachers and support staff to end punishing workloads. At least one support staff member employed full-time per class. Re-employ experienced educators driven out of the profession.
- Fully funded support services for all students, including those with diverse needs. Employ psychologists in every school.
- Oppose the militarization of education. End all improvisations of educators and students who oppose genocide and war.
- Initiate a high-quality school construction program in working-class communities.
- No public funds for elite private schools. Invest billions in public education for a free, first-class education for all.
The CFPE, initiated by members and supporters of the Socialist Equality Party, has a principled record of fighting for the interests of teachers, school staff and the working class based on a socialist program. We collaborate with educator rank-and-file committees internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
The strike by 31,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers is concluding its second week amid growing determination to escalate the struggle. On Monday, several thousand pharmacy and laboratory workers represented by the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) are joining the walkout, many of whom have been kept on the job without a contract since last fall.
Their entry underscores both the breadth of opposition to Kaiser’s demands and the growing recognition among workers that their fight is part of a broader struggle against inequality and exploitation.
The struggle is unfolding in a highly charged political climate. The arrest by the New York Police Department of 13 striking nurses has intensified anger, as has the growing assault on democratic rights under the Trump administration. Many workers have referenced the murder of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse in Minneapolis by CBP, viewing it as part of an emerging dictatorship. Trump’s persecution of immigrants is widely seen as inseparable from the corporate agenda, and many have stressed in particular particularly Kaiser’s investments in CoreCivic, the for-profit corporation that operates ICE detention centers across the United States.
At the same time, UNAC/UHCP (United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals) has returned to negotiations on Tuesday but only at the local level. This decision represents a conscious effort to dissipate the strike’s strength, allowing Kaiser to settle contract provisions piecemeal while retaining maximum leverage. The union bureaucracy claims this approach is a “tactical” necessity to challenge Kaiser’s public relations campaign while preserving legal standing. In reality, it is a concession to Kaiser’s demand to abandon national talks altogether in favor of innumerable separate local deals.
Kaiser has proposed a 21.5 percent wage increase, which they have inflated 30 percent in public statements by including step increases and longevity adjustments already embedded in existing pay scales.
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Both Kaiser and the union bureaucracy continue to invoke the language of the Labor-Management Partnership, founded in 1997 with the explicit goal of blocking strikes. Workers increasingly view this rhetoric with contempt.
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Rather than demanding mass hiring, UNAC/UHCP has proposed another joint task force to “monitor” staffing compliance and an internal pool of nurses to be redeployed across facilities. These measures amount to formalizing understaffing and spreading exhaustion more evenly, while preserving management’s control over costs.
Susan, an in-patient nurse with five years’ experience, emphasized that patient safety is inseparable from staffing levels.
“For nurses in general, patient safety is our number one priority,” she said. “I think of fair and safe ratios. I think of adequate staffing, because that all goes hand in hand with providing optimal patient care.”
She described conditions in which nurses are “swamped,” taking assignments that are “not safe” and that “may jeopardize and compromise patient safety.”
Susan explicitly linked the struggle at Kaiser to a broader movement of the working class.
“Yeah, I’m all for a general strike,” she said. “Not just nurses here in California but also in New York and practically all workers across all lines of work.”
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Workers repeatedly returned to Kaiser’s financial priorities, particularly its investment in CoreCivic.
“I don’t understand how you can fund ICE but not provide resources and appropriate wages and benefits,” Susan said. “I think this should take priority over ICE—funding your employees and providing adequate resources for your patients.”
She rejected the diversion of healthcare revenue into police repression while frontline workers are told there is no money for staffing.
“I think [healthcare is] a human right,” she said. “Just like water, food and housing. Healthcare is a basic right.”
She described how nurses never consider a patient’s insurance status while providing care. “We’re just trying to make sure you’re okay, keep you alive.”
She rejected employer-based insurance and income-based access to care, concluding, “Everyone should be entitled to fair healthcare. It’s a universal right.”
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The strike at Kaiser is part of a national and international confrontation between the working class and a profit-driven system that subordinates human life to corporate gain. The determination expressed on the picket lines points to the necessity of breaking from the union bureaucracy’s containment strategies and building independent rank-and-file organizations capable of unifying healthcare workers across regions and industries in a common struggle.
6. Canadian unions mute as working-class opposition to Trump and his operation dictatorship surges
Recent weeks have seen the emergence of a movement for a general strike in response to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, the state murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, and, more broadly, Trump’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship.
These developments have profound significance for the class struggle in Canada, where the ruling class has exploited Trump’s barrage of tariffs and threats to annex Canada to dramatically intensify their assault on workers’ social and democratic rights.
The Liberal government has torn page after page from the policy prescriptions of Trump and far-right Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre. Reorganized and repurposed under the former central banker and blue-chip executive Mark Carney, it has initiated a new austerity drive, slashing public services and tens of thousands of federal jobs, massively increased military spending, and all but eliminated the right to strike.
All the while, the trade unions and the union-sponsored New Democratic Party have provided the Carney Liberal government and ruling class essential political cover and support. In the name of “defending Canada” and “Canadian jobs,” they have rallied behind the ruling class’s “Team Canada” response to Trump’s drive to strengthen the global position of US imperialism through aggression, trade war and military conflict.
Workers’ struggles, above all those that directly challenge the Carney government, like those of Air Canada flight attendants and postal workers have been run into the ground. And with the unions’ full support, the NDP has helped secure the minority Liberal government’s survival in parliament, including passage of its budget.
In its “Team Canada” propaganda, the union bureaucracy claims to be the fiercest opponent of Trump.
Yet it has responded to the growth of mass working-class opposition to the would-be dictator president with either total silence or by issuing hollow, utterly meaningless statements of solidarity with the people of Minneapolis.
This is because the union bureaucracy “opposes” Trump from the standpoint of Canadian capital, not the working class.
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In so far as they oppose Trump, the Canadian ruling class does so solely from the standpoint of defending its profits and privileges, beginning with first claim on the wealth derived from the exploitation of Canada’s workers and abundant natural resources. Carney, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and other political representatives of corporate Canada have made clear they would like nothing more than to reinvigorate the eight-decade-old Canada-US economic and military-security partnership. All that they ask is that Washington recognize Canadian imperialism’s prerogatives as a junior partner in the exploitation of the Americas and the world.
The unions are ever so militant in agitating for “elbows up” when it comes to imposing tariffs and other trade war measures, the burden of which falls principally on workers on both sides of the border in the form of job cuts and price increases.
It is quite another matter when it comes to a working-class challenge to Trump.
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The call for a general strike came from workers and young people mobilizing against the state-orchestrated violence by Trump’s fascist thugs in Minneapolis. The union bureaucracies intervened to smother this impulse for a broader mass movement against Trump and turn it into a harmless one-day protest. In the days preceding January 23, the Minnesota AFL-CIO and its major affiliates came out against a general strike, claiming it would violate workers’ collective agreements. They worked systematically to transform the planned worker action into a protest carried out hand-in-hand with employers and tied to the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street and the CIA no less than Trump’s Republicans.
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For decades the union bureaucracy, NDP and the pseudo-left have promoted the lie that the Canadian state is more “progressive” and represents a “kinder, gentler” form of capitalism than that which prevails in the United States, and denigrated the American working class as hopelessly reactionary. The initial signs of a mass movement in the American working class are exploding these myths used by union leaders and the official “left” to keep workers politically tied to the Canadian ruling class.
A privileged caste of functionaries that systematically suppresses working class resistance and diverts it into establishment politics, the bureaucrats who staff the CLC, Unifor and Quebec unions fear the eruption of mass working class opposition to Trump and his operation dictatorship, and this for multiple reasons. Developing in the face of government repression and illegality, it will objectively be driven toward an unlimited general strike, posing the question of what class rules and the need to develop independent working-class political power. Moreover, such a movement will galvanize and radicalize working-class opposition in Canada, as workers confront the combined threat of Trump and the Canadian ruling class. Ottawa is determined to strengthen its position against Washington and secure its share of the spoils in the imperialist drive to repartition the world by escalating class war at home.
There is an indelible tradition of joint struggles uniting Canadian and American workers, from the emergence of the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the formation of the United Auto Workers during the Great Depression and the mass social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the conditions have emerged for class-conscious workers to revive these traditions and place them on a higher level, through the infusion of a socialist and internationalist program.
The popular response to the murders of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis show that a mass movement is beginning to develop against dictatorship in the United States. Canadian workers must consciously orient to this struggle, rejecting the nationalist poison of “Team Canada” and the Quebec nationalism promoted by the Quebec union bureaucracy. They must fight to fuse their struggles with those of their class brothers and sisters across the border.
This requires a break with the union bureaucracy and the building of independent rank-and-file committees, linked across industries and borders through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. Only through such a unified international struggle can workers oppose Trump, Carney, dictatorship, war and austerity, and put an end to crisis-ridden capitalism.
7. Homeless Kalamazoo, Michigan man freezes to death while city spends $515 million on arena
At around 5:30 a.m., December 10, 2025, 29-year-old Christopher Nurrie, Jr. was found unresponsive, without shoes or a shirt, in below freezing temperatures in Martin Luther King, Jr. Park in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan. According to the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety (KDPS), he was transported to a hospital where he was later pronounced dead.
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Just one year ago, 54-year-old Tammy Christie froze to death in her car in downtown Kalamazoo, but no steps were taken to prevent the repetition of such a tragedy.
Nurrie, Jr.’s death is the predictable result of a society that is organized on the basis of the profit motive and private accumulation, rather than meeting human needs. New projects are on the horizon in Kalamazoo, a city of 73,000 in western Michigan, costing more than $700 million.
Similar dynamics are playing out in cities across the nation and around the world. According to Oxfam, the 12 richest billionaires now own more than the poorest half of humanity, or 4 billion people. The $2.5 trillion added to billionaire fortunes last year could eradicate extreme poverty worldwide 26 times over.
Looking south from Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, where Nurrie, Jr. froze to death, there is visible a $44 million hotel development opened in 2021, a $94 million 8th District Courthouse opened in 2023, cranes building a $515 million arena and parking garage, and heavy machinery preparing a site for a planned $100 million county administration building and parking garage.
The most significant development is the arena being built by Catalyst Development Co. This comes after efforts in 2011 and 2018 to build an arena with public funds provided by new sales taxes failed to garner enough public support to even put the measures on the ballot.
The arena, named the Kalamazoo Event Center, will be the new home of the University of Western Michigan basketball and hockey teams and the K-Wings, a minor league hockey team owned by two of the wealthiest individuals in Kalamazoo, married couple Bill Johnston and Ronda Stryker.
Bill Johnston is the chairman and co-founder of Greenleaf Trust, which manages some $20 billion in assets and owns Catalyst Development Co. Ronda Stryker is on the board of directors of the medical device company Stryker Corporation. Forbes estimates her 2025 net worth at $8.6 billion.
The $515 million arena is reportedly being paid for without any public funds, likely in an attempt to blunt criticism. But it would not be possible without government support. Thirteen million dollars in infrastructure improvements is being split with the City of Kalamazoo. The downtown land on which it is being built was assembled by the county and sold to Catalyst Development Co. for $4.27 million in June of 2023.
The city and county governments have been tasked with sanitizing and enhancing the downtown to secure profitability for this major investment, as well as for the numerous speculative land purchases that have followed.
Homelessness has been a significant issue in Kalamazoo for decades, and the presence of homeless and poor individuals occupying public spaces and panhandling dissuades wealthy and upper-middle class individuals from shopping, attending events, staying overnight, or renting downtown.
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On December 2, eight days prior to the death of Nurrie, Jr., the majority Democratic Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners (KCBC) passed a resolution 8 to 1 “declaring housing a public health crisis in Kalamazoo County.” The declaration’s stated purpose is to enable “cross-sector coordination and… expand access to state and federal resources to address root causes.”
Despite declaring a crisis, no urgent action was taken that could have prevented the death of Nurrie, Jr. and no additional action was proposed following his death.
The declaration vaguely “directs the Housing Department and Health & Community Services Department to work collaboratively to integrate County housing strategies to improve both housing and health outcomes,” collect and report metrics, and encourage “continued alignment and partnership among the Kalamazoo County Land Bank, Continuum of Care, nonprofit organizations, local municipalities, and the philanthropic and private sectors to ensure coordinated progress toward the shared goal of healthy, affordable housing for all residents.”
Though the resolution included limited data to justify the declaration, none of it was related to homelessness. This is despite the fact that the board witnessed a presentation at its October 7, 2025 meeting from the Kalamazoo County Continuum of Care on the 2025 Point-in-Time (PIT) Count. This count identified 791 homeless individuals, which was a 19 percent increase from 2024 and the highest number since 2011.
That the real impetus for this action is the arena development was exposed at the November 18, 2025 meeting of the KCBC when the resolution was introduced. It was brought forward by Democratic Commissioner Monteze Morales, who stated “this has been two years in the making,” which lines up with the beginning of the arena development.
It is also worth noting that there was no presentation or public comment provided by the department of Health and Community Services, even though the interim health officer was present in the audience at both the November 18 and December 2 meetings. This indicates that the resolution is based on political calculations, rather than genuine public health concerns.
The declaration of the crisis was likely withheld until the release of the Draft Housing Framework, which was presented at the November 18 meeting of the KCBC. This plan, lauded as transformational by board members, purports to stabilize housing affordability and coordinate housing development through various initiatives.
Notably, none of the initiatives involve raising new taxes, even though Kalamazoo currently does not have any local income tax. Instead, they rely on leveraging existing local, state, and federal government funds and philanthropy to attract and subsidize private investment.
At the December 16 meeting of the KCBC, an anonymous $23.3 million “philanthropic investment” was accepted to support three years of the plan. That this “investment” has been accepted before the Draft Housing Framework has even had a public hearing, let alone been approved, illustrates how the wealthy control the county, not the residents.
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Kalamazoo City Commission meetings held December 15 and January 5 saw, combined, over two hours of public comment, almost entirely focused on the issue of homelessness and anger over the death of Nurrie, Jr.
Attempting to shield themselves from criticism, prior to public comment at the December 15 meeting Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety (KDPS) officers gave a presentation regarding their outreach and engagement with the homeless, portraying themselves as proactive and empathetic.
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At the end of the December 15 meeting of the Kalamazoo City Commission, the mayor of Kalamazoo, David Anderson, a Democrat, delivered a 22-minute lecture on how he has spent decades of his life in professional and personal service on the issue of housing and homelessness. He declared he knew what it actually took to get affordable units built—mainly patience, persistence, and cooperation. But the fact that the housing situation has reached the point that the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners felt compelled to officially declare a crisis demonstrates the bankruptcy of the approaches championed by Anderson.
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The city is working to push the homeless out of downtown. In December of 2025, it fenced off the Arcadia Creek Festival Place for a two-year $3.6 million renovation. This park is three blocks away from the new arena. It is across the street from the largest homeless shelter in the region, the Kalamazoo Gospel Mission.
The park had been one of the primary daytime gathering areas for the homeless until it was closed. Construction will likely not begin until spring or summer.
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For many, it may feel like the most direct path to helping the homeless is to appeal to the conscience of local politicians to use the resources and power of local government to meet human needs. However, the current experience in Kalamazoo makes clear the futility of this perspective.
Government, at all levels, is not a neutral referee. It is a tool in the hands of the ruling class to enforce capitalist social relations. Because of this, the local government cannot take any action that would significantly infringe on private profit.
As of this writing, apartments.com listed over 2,000 rentals available in Kalamazoo County. The 2023 American Communities Survey (ACS) from the Census Bureau estimated there were 8,212 vacant housing units in the county. However, vacant housing units and commercial buildings will stay empty until they secure a contract that satisfies the rate of profit demanded by capital.
For socialists, the right to decent housing is connected to other basic social rights—the right to education, the right to healthcare, the right to a job and decent wages and working conditions. None of these rights can be won without ending the profit system as a whole and replacing it with socialism. This requires a break with both parties of the corporate oligarchy—the Republicans and the Democrats—and the building of a mass movement of the working class to expropriate the oligarchs and replace the system based on private ownership of the means of production and profit with a socialist system based on public ownership and the satisfaction of human need.
8. US energy blockade threatens Cuba with humanitarian “collapse”
The Trump administration’s attempt to pull the plug on the Cuban economy is aimed at carrying through the nearly seven decades of efforts to overthrow the Castroite government installed by the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
Following the January 3 US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which severed a key oil lifeline, Trump issued an executive order absurdly calling Cuba an “extraordinary threat to national security.” Following Trump’s warning of tariffs on oil suppliers, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum halted vital shipments to the island.
The situation was already dire before this year. A stunning 10 percent of the population, or over 1 million people, had fled the island since 2022 in the largest exodus in Cuban history, accelerated by COVID-19’s demolition of the tourist industry.
Cuba was even selling a fraction of its scarce fuel to pay for vital imports, including drugs and machinery. Finally, last December, a partial dollarization of the economy failed as a last-ditch attempt to attract investments, modernize industry and increase foreign currency reserves.
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On Thursday, [Cuban President Miguel] Díaz-Canel delivered his first televised address since the abduction of [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro to declare that he is open to talks with Washington. “Cuba is willing to engage in dialogue with the United States,” he said, insofar as it seeks to “build a neighborly, civilized relationship that can be a win-win for our peoples.”
Nonetheless, Havana is “preparing for a state of war in any moment,” he added.
The most recent appeal for talks with Washington significantly takes place after the Russian ambassador Viktor Coronelli vowed to continue supplying oil to the island without providing details. Any attempt to overcome the US military blockade of tankers threatens to ignite a military conflict. On January 8, however, after the US seizure of a Russian-flagged tanker leaving Venezuela, Moscow issued only a brief statement denouncing it.
With Beijing’s response similarly limited to expressing concerns and “urging” the US to stop the embargo, the threat to impose famine and genocide on Cuba as the world’s capitalist governments watch recalls nothing so much as what has been taking place in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
Trump is openly stating that he will “run” Venezuela and that he sees the 19th century military theft of half of Mexico’s territory as the compass for US policy for the region today. In this context, Diaz-Canel’s proposal for talks signals the latest capitulation by nationalist forces across the region to Trump’s imperial diktats.
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The largest countries in the region are governed by ostensible “leftists” representing the so-called “Pink Tide.” They have long professed a desire for regional integration to protect Latin American sovereignty. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva has remained quiet over threats to Cuba; Mexico’s Sheinbaum has capitulated to tariff threats; Colombia’s Gustavo Petro kissed Trump’s ring in the White House Tuesday and promised collaboration in the carve up of Venezuela.
There is no clearer indictment against all the pseudo-left and petty-bourgeois nationalist tendencies in the region and internationally, especially those that have promoted the Cuban Revolution and later the Bolivarian Revolution as a new road to socialism and anti-imperialism.
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The barbaric displays of aggression by Trump can only be seen as a sign of desperation in the face of the deepening crisis of US imperialism and world capitalism. Nonetheless, the apologists for the likes of Sheinbaum, Lula and Petro, not to mention the Cuban leadership itself, insist that their capitulation amounts to “realism,” arguing that there is nothing else these leaders can do.
However, for workers in Venezuela, Cuba and internationally, it is not a question of what else can the Chavista and Castroite leaders do under these conditions, but how their policies over decades have helped to create these conditions and what workers must do in response based on their independent class interests.
A serious answer to these questions requires an examination of the struggle waged by the International Committee of the Fourth International in its principled response to the Cuban Revolution.
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Pabloism, a revisionist tendency that broke with the Fourth International in the early 1950s, developed pernicious arguments claiming Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement created a workers’ state in Cuba and was establishing socialism. They insisted that the Cuban Revolution had proven that guerrillas based on the peasantry could achieve this without the independent mobilization of the working class, let alone the building of a Trotskyist leadership.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States used the Cuban Revolution as the primary justification for its 1963 unprincipled reunification with the Pabloite International Secretariat. Under the leadership of Joseph Hansen, the SWP claimed that Fidel Castro had established a “workers’ state” by following the “dialectical logic” of the revolution, despite its lack of proletarian organs of power like soviets. Hansen insisted that this proved all fundamental differences with the Pabloites were water under the bridge.
Against such arguments the International Committee of the Fourth International, led notably at the time by the British Socialist Labour League (SLL), maintained that the Cuban Revolution was a petty-bourgeois nationalist movement. While the ICFI waged an active campaign to defend Cuba against imperialist aggression, it refused to characterize the regime as a “workers' state” because the revolution lacked the conscious participation and leadership of the working class. Facing the political degeneration of the SWP, the stance of the SLL was central to preserving Trotskyism as the sole political current fighting for the mobilization of the international proletariat in abolishing capitalism.
Cuba represented a confirmation in the negative of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, the SLL argued, as the Castroite leadership remained unable to achieve genuine liberation from imperialism. The SLL criticized, moreover, the Pabloite’s claim that “natural” or “unconscious” Marxist leaderships could emerge from petty bourgeois movements like Castro’s July 26th Movement, asserting that a proletarian party must be consciously constructed to build socialism.
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The struggle over Cuba was a turning point for the ICFI, as the SLL took up an offensive against revisionism to clarify the movement's historical tasks. The “myth of guerrillaism” promoted by the Pabloites led to catastrophic defeats and the physical annihilation of revolutionary cadres across Latin America, as youth were diverted into isolated armed actions that separated them from the industrial proletariat. The resulting defeats suffered by the Latin American working class and the imposition of US-backed military dictatorships throughout much of the region only served to intensify the isolation imposed by US imperialism against Cuba.
The catastrophic trajectory of the Cuban regime today provides another tragic vindication of the ICFI's political perspective. The regime's turn toward foreign direct investment for decades, the marketing of cheap labor to multinationals, and the persistence of social inequality demonstrate the bourgeois limits of the revolution and its inability to solve the historic problems of Cuban society.
Ultimately, the ICFI’s defense of the political independence of the working class and its fight to unite workers across national boundaries remain the essential preconditions for waging a genuine struggle to defeat imperialist aggression and carry out the socialist revolution.
9. Trump posts racist video depicting the Obamas as apes
Late Thursday, President Donald Trump posted a 62‑second AI‑generated video clip on his Truth Social account that ends with a depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
The video is centered on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen through the manipulation of voting machines in key states. The largely AI-generated video brought together pseudo‑documentary imagery and graphics suggesting “intentional manipulation” of vote counts, packaged in the familiar style of far‑right conspiracy propaganda.
In a one-second clip at the end of the video, the Obamas are seen as apes with smiling faces. The presentation is of a piece with Trump’s constant racist agitation combined with his appeals to his white Christian nationalist political base.
The video also includes images of Trump taken from a far‑right meme video that portrays the fascist president as “King of the Jungle,” with Democrats turned into assorted animals and accompanied by a snip-it of the song, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Trump is shown as a lion, accompanied by the reactionary Pepe the Frog meme, which was widely embraced by fascistic and neo‑Nazi layers during the 2016 campaign.
In this way, the video fuses the cult of the leader, the stolen election lie and the racist language already familiar to Trump’s fascist milieu of supporters. The images are brief and clearly designed to flash by as a signal to those steeped in the racist trope that has a long history in American white supremacist ideology.
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The post was eventually removed from Trump’s Truth Social feed amid mounting criticism from the US political establishment. Both Democrats and Republicans were compelled to distance themselves from it. Republican Senator Tim Scott, the sole black Republican in the Senate and an active supporter of Trump, wrote on X, “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”
After [White House Press Secretary Karoline ] Leavitt defended the meme, the White House shifted to damage control, claiming that the reposting of the video was “erroneous” and had been carried out by a “staff member,” not by Trump himself.
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The corporate media, instead of calling out the blatant racism of the Trump administration for being a central component of his fascist platform, described the video as “controversial” and “racially charged” but isolated the incident from the broader program of the White House.
The racist meme is in fact part of Trump’s open embrace of Christian nationalism, highlighted in his speech a day earlier at the National Prayer Breakfast. In a rambling 70-plus‑minute address, Trump boasted that he has “done more for religion than any other president” and insisted that he has brought Christianity “back to center” in American politics.
He declared that he does not “know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat,” effectively labeling tens of millions of people as godless enemies of the nation. Trump also called for an event on the National Mall to “rededicate America as one nation under God,” a direct attack on the separation of church and state.
This drive is a central plank of the fascist “great replacement” narrative, which fuses white racial dominance and Christian identity into a single “national” community supposedly under siege by immigrants, religious minorities and secularism. This racist and white supremacist conspiracy theory alleging that white, European-descended populations are being deliberately “replaced” through mass immigration of non-whites, higher birth rates among minorities, and falling white fertility rates, orchestrated by elites (often identified as Jewish or liberal) to eradicate white Christian civilization.
The depiction of the first black president and first lady as jungle apes is also art of Trump’s campaign to rehabilitate symbols and ideology of the Confederacy and the Southern slavocracy. From the defense of Confederate monuments and flags to the praise of General Robert E. Lee as a “great general,” Trump has repeatedly signaled his alignment with those who mourn the defeat of the Confederacy and seek to legitimize its legacy.
The AI video extends this historical falsification into the digital age, using new technical means to revive the oldest and most reactionary racist stereotypes.
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Racism has always played a central role in the efforts of the American ruling elite to divide the working class and deflect attention from the real source of social and economic crisis: the capitalist system. By circulating images that degrade black people and African Americans, Trump is reinforcing the Big Lie that social problems are caused by “undeserving” minorities and immigrants rather than the parasitic financial oligarchy and crisis of capitalism.
The spectacle of the US president posting such filth on social media speaks to the degradation of the ruling oligarchy, which is seeking to normalize racism as part of its attacks on the working class. It is this same degenerate billionaire elite, including Donald Trump, that is protecting the co-conspirators of the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog beginning on Sunday marks a turning point in Australian politics. In a manner without precedent, governments, led by Labor, are openly embracing mass murder and genocide as legitimate instruments of policy, and they are repressing opposition with police-state measures that are incompatible with democracy.
Herzog is touring the country as an official guest of the federal Labor government. Amid mass outrage over his impending arrival, every senior Labor leader has voiced their complete solidarity with this war criminal. And they have organised a massive police mobilization to prevent public displays of hostility, including with the announcement today of a lockdown of much of central Sydney.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has demanded that the population “recognise the solemn nature” of the visit and has boasted of his own longstanding acquaintance with Herzog. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has proclaimed that the Israeli leader is “here to provide support,” as though he were an embodiment of kindness and humanity. Defence Minister Richard Marles has described Herzog as “our welcome and honored guest.”
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The pretext for the visit is both false and obscene. Labor has claimed that Herzog will provide solace to the Jewish community in the wake of the December 14, antisemitic terror attack in Bondi. Herzog, implicated in state terrorism on a grand scale, has no business shedding crocodile tears for innocent victims of mass murder, whatever their religion or ethnicity.
As numbers of anti-Zionist Jews have raised, the identification of world Jewry with the militarist Israeli state is a slander. Masses of Jewish people around the world, including in Australia, have joined demonstrations opposing the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. The false conflation of all Jewish people with the genocidal Israeli state can only incite and promote antisemitism, not combat it.
Ignoring all of that, Labor leaders have presented their red-carpet welcome for a war criminal and the head of an apartheid ethno-state as an exercise in “social cohesion” and “unity.” The application of those terms to such a visit underscores their Orwellian character.
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In effect, the Labor governments are partnering with the Israeli fascist leader to implement dictatorial measures. The New South Wales Labor government has invoked extraordinary legislation, passed after the Bondi attack, whereby it can ban any public protest for up to three months after the designation of a terrorist incident. It has declared the ban applies to a planned march from Sydney Town Hall to the NSW state parliament on Monday evening, opposing Herzog.
On Saturday, NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns went further, declaring Herzog’s visit a “major event” and imposing lockdown-style measures on most of the Sydney central business district and its eastern suburbs.
The measures allow the government to “limit the number of persons who may enter a major event area or any part of a major event area” and to ban whomever they want from the designated zone, under threat of arrest or fines of over $5,000. As many as 3,500 additional police are to flood the center of Sydney to enforce what can only be described as a form of martial law. Behind the talk of “social cohesion,” this is a massive provocation, setting the stage for violent confrontations.
The clear purpose of Herzog’s visit is to shut down all opposition to Israeli war crimes. For more than two years, Australian governments, led by Labor, have slandered, vilified and deployed police against protesters. But the failure to suppress the hostility entirely has been a cause of consternation, in the Australian ruling elite, from the Israeli state and its local proxies in the Zionist lobby and from the Trump administration in the United States. Now, Labor is seeking to demonstrate its ability to deal with the opposition, cynically exploiting the Bondi attack as the pretext.
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With the welcome to Herzog, Labor is sending a message to Trump, that it too has no “red lines,” when it comes to wars for profits, resources and markets.
There is mass anger and opposition. But the critical issue is for political lessons to be drawn.
Throughout the genocide, the mass protest movement has been dominated politically by the Greens and pseudo-left groups such as Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance. Together, they have claimed that with sufficient “pressure” and moral appeals, Labor would “see sense” and end its support for the mass murder of Palestinians. The opposite has been the case. The greater the opposition, the more the repression.
In practice, the line of the Greens and the pseudo-left has served to subordinate opposition to the very government that is complicit in the genocide. The protest politics have served to dull political consciousness, covering over the connections between Labor’s backing for the war crimes in Palestine and its broader imperialist program, including participation in US-led preparations for war against China.
The pseudo-left too has sought to foster illusions in the Labor-aligned trade unions. But the unions blocked any industrial action whatsoever against the genocide itself, and they are partners with the Labor governments that are now instituting dictatorial measures.
As the Socialist Equality Party has insisted, a new political perspective is needed. It must be based, not on appeals to the Labor governments, but on the most determined political fight against them.
11. A socialist perspective: Trump’s plan to purge the federal government and the threat of dictatorship
On Thursday, the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced a new rule that will strip tens of thousands of federal workers of job protections and due process rights and reclassify them as “at-will” employees, subject to termination by the president for any reason. This reclassification is a component part of the Trump administration’s erection of a presidential dictatorship.
The rule subverts the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which established the U.S. Civil Service Commission and required that federal jobs be filled based on merit and competitive examinations rather than political loyalty. Before the act, the federal government operated under a spoils system, in which incoming administrations routinely fired large sections of the workforce and replaced them with loyalists.
Major newspapers have reported that the rule could affect up to 50,000 federal workers but nothing in the rule itself limits the figure.
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Simply put, the rule allows the executive to fire federal workers without appeal if they are deemed insufficiently compliant with presidential directives—while redefining such compliance as a measure of the “democratic process.” This turns the meaning of democracy on its head. The Constitution vests lawmaking authority in Congress and assigns the executive the role of enforcing those laws. By contrast, the new rule treats resistance to presidential orders as resistance to democracy itself, placing loyalty to the president above loyalty to the Constitution.
The rule permits the mass firing of civil servants for interpreting statutes differently than the White House, delaying implementation pending legal review, or refusing to carry out directives they believe are illegal. Its vague and elastic criteria mirror the language of Trump’s October 2020 executive order creating Schedule F, which defined covered positions as those of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” That order was issued just months before the January 6 coup attempt, when Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol to prevent certification of the election.
Five and a half years later, the program is being revived and expanded. Trump’s power to summarily fire civil servants—at the EPA, Department of Labor, NLRB and elsewhere—can now be used against those who previously voiced opposition to his agenda or who fail to demonstrate sufficient loyalty. These measures amount to a political purge aimed at transforming the entire state into a mechanism of personal rule directed from the White House.
The significance of these actions arises from their broader context. The Trump administration is openly conspiring to rig or cancel the upcoming 2026 midterm elections. Trump has threatened to “nationalize” the elections, and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon has threatened to deploy ICE agents outside polling places. In recent days, he has denounced Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta as “corrupt” and declared in an NBC interview that he would only accept election results if they are “honest.”
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As Trump moves to consolidate dictatorial power, the Democratic Party is doing everything it can to suppress opposition and keep the government functioning. Amid national outrage over the ICE/CBP killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, congressional Democrats supplied the critical votes this week to keep the government open and ensure uninterrupted funding for ICE and CBP. Their proposed “guardrails” for funding ICE, such as body cameras and use-of-force guidelines, are cosmetic measures that do nothing to halt repression or prevent dictatorship.
The media wing of the Democratic Party has attempted to tamp down mass opposition by promoting the illusion that Trump is retreating in the face of protests. The real purpose of this narrative is to prevent the development of a mass movement from below that would threaten the political establishment as a whole.
As hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been fired or seen their jobs eliminated, the trade union apparatus has done absolutely nothing. Not a single strike action has been called to defend the livelihoods or basic rights of workers. While the Trump administration carries out the most sweeping purge of public employees in modern American history, the unions are proposing no resistance whatsoever—only empty gestures and legal appeals.
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The union bureaucracies are not defenders of workers—They are the last line of defense for the dictatorship now being assembled.
The World Socialist Web Site calls for coordinated resistance by the working class to oppose Trump’s attacks on federal workers and the broader conspiracy to impose presidential dictatorship. This is a class war waged by the oligarchy against the democratic and social rights of the working class.
We urge federal workers to begin organizing now: Build rank-and-file committees in every workplace, independent of the trade union apparatus. These committees must prepare to resist the coming wave of mass firings, oppose the destruction of job protections and fight to defend the rights of all workers.
This struggle must be connected to the growing movement of the working class as a whole—from striking nurses in New York City and healthcare workers in California, to students walking out across the country in protest against ICE murders and abductions, to the millions of workers confronting mass layoffs, job cuts and wage suppression across every industry.
The fight against the jobs massacre is inseparable from the fight against dictatorship and the capitalist system that breeds it. Every section of the working class must be united in a common counteroffensive against the social and political counter-revolution of the oligarchy. The defense of democratic rights requires the development of a powerful, independent political movement of the working class, fighting to overthrow capitalism and reorganize society on the basis of equality, democracy and socialism.
To justify its own rearmament and its push toward a new German great power policy, politicians and leading media outlets regularly claim that Berlin—unlike the United States under Trump, Russia or China—stands for freedom, democracy and human rights. If any further proof were needed that this portrayal is nothing but propaganda, it was provided by Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s trip to the Gulf monarchies of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—above all, his two-and-a-half-hour personal meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
To describe bin Salman as “reactionary” would be a gross understatement. He is not a defender of human rights but a dismemberer of human beings. The Saudi crown prince was directly involved in the bestial murder of journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi. On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to collect documents for his upcoming wedding. He never left the building.
The details of his martyrdom have been known for years. Shortly after his disappearance, the Turkish government declared that it possessed audio and video recordings proving that Khashoggi was interrogated, tortured and then murdered inside the consulate. The recordings reportedly capture how he was dismembered while still alive and his body later dissolved in acid.
All of this is as well known to the German government as it is to the other imperialist powers, which—after a brief phase of feigned distance—have long since returned en masse to Riyadh. In February 2021, even the US government published an intelligence report stating that Mohammed bin Salman had personally “approved” the murder. The perpetrators came from his closest inner circle.
The murder of Khashoggi is merely the most prominent case within a system of state terror. Every year, there are numerous other “Khashoggis” who fall victim to the violence of the Saudi regime. “In 2024, more executions were carried out in Saudi Arabia than ever before,” Amnesty International declared. People were “sentenced to death for a wide range of offenses and under circumstances that violate international law and international standards.”
This trend continued in 2025. In the first half of the year alone, more than 180 people were executed, mostly for drug-related offenses, Amnesty’s Middle East expert Katja Müller-Fahlbusch told Der Tagesspiegel. Regime critics who are not murdered disappear into torture prisons. Activists campaigning for democratic rights are sentenced after grossly unfair trials to decades in prison or placed under strict house arrest.
Conditions in the other Gulf monarchies are scarcely better. The United Arab Emirates brutally suppresses all opposition and actively contributes to one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of our time through arms deliveries to Sudan’s RSF militia. Saudi Arabia, for its part, supports the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), further fueling the civil war. Added to this is Riyadh’s devastating role in Yemen.
If, alongside the genocide in Gaza and the war in Sudan, there has been another conflict in recent years with genocidal characteristics, it was the Saudi-led war against Yemen. Hundreds of thousands of people died from bombardments, starvation and the collapse of medical care. As early as 2021, the United Nations Development Programme estimated the death toll to be at least 377,000.
None of this prevented Merz from praising relations with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE in the highest terms. In Riyadh, he declared that the “economic, cultural, and social modernization of Saudi Arabia” made the country an “attractive market for German industry.” The Saudi sovereign wealth fund was also invested “to a considerable extent” in Germany—a potential that one wanted to “use for growth in Germany.”
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When Merz speaks of “peace and stability,” he means the imperialist reordering of the Middle East through subjugation and war. Germany has politically, diplomatically and militarily supported the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. The Gaza Strip has been almost completely destroyed, and more than 70,000 people—mostly women and children—have been killed.
From the outset, the World Socialist Web Site has explained that the Gaza genocide is part of a comprehensive imperialist war strategy. The aim is the complete subjugation of the resource-rich and geostrategically central Middle East as preparation for a direct military confrontation with Russia and China. Because the European powers share these objectives and want to secure their share of the spoils, they support US war threats and regime-change plans against Iran. Shortly before his departure, Merz openly threatened, “The days of the Iranian regime are numbered.”
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Workers and young people must understand Merz’s trip as a serious warning. The ruling class will—just as it did in the 1930s when it brought Hitler to power—stop at nothing to enforce its global great-power interests and suppress the growing resistance against them.
On Wednesday, in a vindictive and retaliatory move, the Trump administration filed a motion to prematurely end the asylum claims of the family of Liam Conejo Ramos. The five-year-old boy and his father, who legally entered the United States in 2022 from Ecuador, were kidnapped from their home in Minneapolis last month by the immigration Gestapo and were only returned last week.
In an interview with MPR News, attorney Paschal Nwokocha said the government “was bent on removing this family from the United States.” In a hearing held on Friday, which did not address the asylum claim itself, Nwokocha explained, “We were able to get additional time to do what we need to do in court.”
The attorney did not specify how much time the family was granted to argue its case. For months, the Trump administration has sought to expedite the deportation of asylum seekers and other immigrants by asking judges to “pretermit,” or dismiss, asylum claims without a hearing. The government has argued that immigrants should instead seek asylum in so-called “safe third countries” rather than the United States. In practice, this policy has resulted in thousands of immigrants being deported to countries they have never lived in and to which they have no personal or familial ties.
In the case of Liam’s family, the government may not deport them to Ecuador but instead to a “third country,” where they would be forced to reapply for asylum.
Adrian Conejo Arias, Liam’s father, told MPR News that he does not know what will happen to them. “The government is moving many pieces. It’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear every day,” he said.
The Trump administration’s attacks on Liam mirror the retaliation it carried out against Kilmar Abrego Garcia last year. The abduction and deportation of the Maryland father, along with more than 250 other immigrants, the vast majority of whom had committed no crimes, to the CECOT prison camp in El Salvador drew widespread attention and sparked mass opposition, expressed in the multi-million-strong “No Kings” demonstrations.
That same wave of outrage followed the release of photographs showing immigration police kidnapping five-year-old Liam and then using him as bait in an attempt to abduct his mother while she was inside their home. These images provoked mass anger in the United States and internationally. Shortly after their seizure by federal agents, Liam and his father were transported more than 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) from their home to a so-called “family detention” center in Dilley, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.
Liam’s arrival at the south Texas concentration camp cast a spotlight on the hellish conditions in which hundreds of children and their relatives are forced to languish. Detainees have reported bugs in their food, discolored and undrinkable water, and degrading treatment by guards and staff.
On January 24, the day after the first mass protest in Minneapolis and the same day that VA nurse Alex Pretti was murdered by Customs and Border Protection agents, who have yet to be charged with a crime, detainees inside the Dilley facility held a large protest, chanting “Let us out!” and “Liberty for the kids!”
Immigration attorney Eric Lee was at the facility and able to document the January 24 protest in real-time. Lee’s footage of the protest and growing awareness of the horrid conditions at the facility provoked another protest at the camp on January 28, this time from community members and residents.
Facing a growing mass movement animated by the call for a general strike to abolish the immigration police and drive the fascists from Washington, the Trump administration released Liam and his father last week, allowing them to return to Minneapolis.
The Trump administration’s renewed attempt to expedite the deportation of Liam and his family further exposes the fraudulent claims that there has been a “draw down” of the federal occupation in Minnesota or any scaling back of the broader “mass deportation operation.” On Wednesday, Trump’s so-called “border czar” Tom Homan announced the withdrawal of 700 Customs and Border Protection agents from Minnesota, which he claimed was made possible by “unprecedented cooperation” from local law enforcement under the direction of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, both Democrats.
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The federal occupation of Minnesota continues. Some 2,300 federal agents remain in the state, kidnapping and assaulting residents, immigrant and citizen alike, with impunity. Video evidence shows agents smashing car windows, issuing threats, and abducting US citizens who were legally observing and documenting ICE activity.
That much of the mainstream media has fallen silent on the occupation of Minneapolis is no accident. The corporate media and the Democratic Party are working systematically to suppress coverage, demobilize opposition, and create the illusion that the danger has passed. In reality, the ICE reign of terror continues uninterrupted, and the Trump administration remains actively engaged in efforts to establish a dictatorship.
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Broad layers of the working class are entering into struggle, driven by outrage at state brutality and the intolerable conditions of life under capitalism. This movement has not emerged through appeals from the Democratic Party or the union bureaucracies, but in opposition to them. It is precisely for this reason that both are working to contain it, diverting anger into safe channels such as court appeals, electoral maneuvers, and symbolic protests.
The role of the unions has been especially reactionary. Functioning as an additional layer of management, they have blocked any independent action by workers. Following the murder of Alex Pretti and growing calls for a general strike, the United Auto Workers falsely labeled a mass protest a “general strike” without calling out a single member. Other unions, including CWA Local 7520 and the AFGE, responded by invoking legal technicalities or issuing appeals for “peace and calm,” even in the face of the murder of a rank-and-file member.
Conclusions must be drawn. The working class confronts a highly organized ruling class that is militarizing the state and shredding basic democratic rights. What is required is not faith in the Democrats, appeals to the courts, or reliance on the union apparatus, but the independent organization of the working class itself. Rank-and-file committees must be built in workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools to coordinate resistance to raids, defend immigrants and citizens alike, and prepare collective action on a national and international scale. The logical culmination of this struggle is a general strike, mobilizing the immense social power of the working class against the machinery of repression and the capitalist system that sustains it.
14. United States: Workers furious after USW announce sellout deal for 30,000 refinery workers
Workers reacted with anger Friday afternoon after the United Steelworkers (USW) announced a sellout national agreement covering roughly 30,000 refinery workers across the United States. The contract, which falls far short of workers’ demands, was unveiled suddenly nearly a week after the previous agreement had expired, without any meaningful explanation or advance notice to the membership.
According to information workers are receiving from the union, the contract contains only a 15 percent wage increase spread over four years, in increments of 4 percent, 3.5 percent, 3.5 percent and 4 percent. Beyond this, the only notable provisions are the maintenance of health care coverage at current levels and the continuation of letter agreements from the prior deal.
The USW did not include the actual contract terms in the brief announcements posted to its website or distributed through its text update service, further fueling anger and suspicion among refinery workers.
The deal falls far short even of the program the USW itself passed at its National Oil Bargaining Program (NOBP) bargaining convention last August. That policy called for a 25 percent wage increase over four years, structured in 10-5-5-5 increments, between two and eight weeks of vacation depending on seniority, company contributions to 401(k) plans toward retiree medical costs for workers without company-sponsored plans, caps on health insurance premium rates at 2025 levels, and shift differentials of between 5 and 10 percent for evening and overnight work.
The NOBP policy also called for guarantees that artificial intelligence would not be used to eliminate jobs. Oil and gas corporations, like the rest of the corporate world, are aggressively deploying AI as part of a drive to slash labor costs, beginning with maintenance, inspection and safety-related positions.
The absence of any binding language protecting jobs from new technologies opens the door to a bloodbath of layoffs, similar to what followed the ratification of the auto and UPS contracts in 2023, which were pushed through on false pretenses. AI-driven layoffs would likely contribute to safety conditions only worsening. Last October, an explosion at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery rocked the Los Angeles area, with the fire being seen, and the blast being felt, for miles.
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Workers have taken to social media to denounce the deal and the role of the union apparatus. One wrote, “Did not at all represent us in what we wanted. Spineless gutless cowards that sold us down the river. This is absolutely shameful.”
Another commented, “The union is laying in the same bed with these companies. They accepted the deal Monday. They took five days to drink and eat high dollar meals acting like they were fighting for more. That’s why there was no communication, they were not fighting, they already settled.”
A longer statement captured the depth of anger and exhaustion felt by many refinery workers:
I have been around long enough to know when we are being fed a line. We are [busting] our asses day in and day out with long shifts, mandatory overtime, missed holidays, broken sleep, wear and tear that doesn’t show up in any of their spreadsheets … so forgive me if I’m not in the mood for smiles and slogans. We don’t want happy laughing videos of our representation going to the table like they are meeting an old friend. We don’t need cheerleaders. We don’t need ‘everything is going great’ energy while we are getting low-balled at the table. We want some fire! We want to see a serious leadership that is just as pissed off as we are! Because out in these refineries it’s very focused and the patience is gone.
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Particularly treacherous is the way the deal would isolate workers at BP’s Whiting refinery in northwest Indiana. There, the company is demanding massive concessions and attempting to pull the facility out of the national bargaining framework altogether. BP is also demanding that workers waive their legal rights related to the implementation of AI, laying the groundwork for sweeping job cuts. Talks with USW Local 7-1 have collapsed, with the union telling workers to prepare for a strike that workers had already authorized by 98 percent.
The USW bureaucracy is attempting to repeat the isolation of refinery strikes at Richmond, California and Beaumont, Texas during the last round of negotiations in 2022, when workers were left to fight alone while the union rushed to settle nationally.
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Workers must reject this contract by the widest possible margin. But a “no” vote alone is not sufficient. It must mark the beginning of a rank-and-file rebellion that overrides the bureaucratic sabotage and enforces the democratic will of the membership.
Mass meetings must be organized immediately, in person or online, to elect rank-and-file refinery workers to a national rank-and-file committee. This body must coordinate a unified struggle against the sellout and prepare collective action across all refineries.
The bargaining committee should be thrown out. It has not been involved in genuine bargaining but in a conspiracy against workers conducted behind their backs. It must be replaced by a committee composed exclusively of active refinery workers, with all negotiations live-streamed and all strategy and actions during talks subject to discussion, approval and override by the membership.
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The USW bureaucracy is rushing to sell out workers precisely because refinery workers are in a position of enormous strength. They account for roughly two-thirds of US refining capacity. Domestic oil and gas production is at record levels, while refinery utilization rates are as high as 95 percent. In the event of a national strike, the corporations would have no easy alternatives.
Federal filings show that the USW controls more than $1.7 billion in assets, financed entirely from workers’ dues, which totaled more than $300 million in the last reported 12-month period. At $1,000 a week, there is enough in the USW’s treasury to provide strike pay to refinery workers for more than a year. This is workers’ money and must be used to provision a real struggle.
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There is no doubt that the tentative agreement was also worked out in collaboration with the White House, as was the last deal. Then USW President Tom Conway met with Biden during talks and openly boasted that the deal, which provided only an 11 percent raise over three years, did “does not add to inflationary pressures,” meaning that workers were deliberately made poorer as wages lagged behind the rising cost of living. A central concern of the Biden administration was keeping the “home front” under control as it prepared for a major new war against Russia in Ukraine, which broke out the day after the contract was finalized.
Today’s contract is being pushed through amid expanding imperialist wars for control of oil and strategic resources, including US aggression against Venezuela and preparations for conflict with Iran, with China, a major importer of oil from these countries as the ultimate target. At the same time, it is aimed at suppressing domestic opposition under conditions of growing resistance to Trump’s emerging police-state dictatorship.
A refinery strike would win immense support from the broader working class, which is moving into struggle against the corporate oligarchy. Tens of thousands of nurses on both coasts are striking against for-profit health care. Teachers in San Francisco are preparing to strike, while tens of thousands of graduate students in the University of California system are voting on strike action.
Hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers in New York City have contracts expiring this year. Logistics workers are fighting mass layoffs at companies like UPS, imposed with the assistance of the Teamsters bureaucracy. The contracts for 25,000 steelworkers also expire later this year, and they would support and welcome a fight by fellow USW members.
Growing calls for a general strike in response to ICE shootings in Minneapolis reflect a broader mood in the population, which is increasingly looking to the working class for leadership. There is a growing understanding that only the collective power of the working class, the source of all wealth, can resolve the deep social, political and economic crisis gripping the United States. A national refinery strike would be a powerful catalyst for such a movement.
15. Trump announces plan to close Kennedy Center for 2 years coinciding with July 4th celebrations
President Donald Trump’s abrupt announcement February 1 that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will shut its doors for “approximately” two years beginning July 4 has triggered shock and anger throughout Washington’s artistic community.
The declaration, made characteristically via social media before any formal plan was presented to staff or the public, proclaimed a project of “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” to turn what he called a “tired, broken, and dilapidated Center” into a “World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment.” In other words, more of the lies and rubbish the public has come to expect.
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To anyone with eyes to see, the timing and manner of the move, coming after a wave of cancellations and boycotts in response to Trump’s seizure of the center’s board and its rebranding as the “Trump Kennedy Center,” make obvious this is a politically motivated, face‑saving maneuver rather than a genuine renovation plan. If the situation for artists and the attacks on democratic rights were not so deadly serious, Trump’s “renovation” plan would be met primarily with derisive laughter.
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Musicians and staff members, already operating under the cloud of Trump’s right‑wing cultural purge, now confront the additional threat of layoffs, contract shredding and the potential dispersal of one of the country’s major orchestras.
Kennedy Center officials insist the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO), which has made the Kennedy Center its principal performing venue, is “not pulling out.” But they have provided no clear explanation as to where the orchestra, founded in 1930, will perform or how it will survive two years without its home stage and subscription base.
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The legality of Trump’s shutdown plan is itself in question. The Kennedy Center is a federal entity created and defined by statute; its basic purpose and even its name are laid down in federal law. It is well known that—at least on paper—Congress, not the White House, has ultimate authority over its mission and operations.
Yet Trump has already moved to neutralize potential opposition on the board. The Post reported previously that in May 2025 the Kennedy Center quietly rewrote its bylaws so that “only trustees appointed by the president could vote,” explicitly barring ex officio members appointed by Congress (including the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate) from voting or even counting toward a quorum. These actions effectively transformed the center’s leadership into a rubber stamp for the administration.
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The planned closure of the Kennedy Center will coincide with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Under Trump’s plans, the Kennedy Center—a major center of symphonic music, opera, ballet and theater—will go dark at the same time that the administration has announced a series of absurd and culturally debased spectacles to mark the historic date.
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Trump’s attacks on cultural life unfold under conditions in which millions across the country are out of work, including tens of thousands of federal and contract workers in the D.C. region who have already been laid off through budget cuts and agency restructurings and now queue at church basements and local charities for food assistance.
The dismantling of a leading cultural institution at the very moment when social inequality, authoritarianism and militarism are reaching unprecedented heights is not an accident. It expresses the deep cultural and moral degeneration of the American bourgeoisie, for whom serious art, historical reflection and critical thought are intolerable obstacles to a regime of oligarchic plunder and repression. It is inseparable from his drive toward dictatorship at home and war abroad.
16. University of Illinois student Republican club calls for assassination of political opponents
On January 30, the Illini Republicans, the registered student organization of the Republican Party at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), posted a statement on social media calling for the assassination of political opponents. In particular the post celebrated the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents during protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota and threatened that other opponents of President Donald Trump’s government ought to likewise be murdered.
The Instagram post included a graphic depicting the assassination of Pretti with the text “Only Traitors Help Invaders.” Along with the image, the Illini Republicans wrote a statement steeped in white supremacist language saying that immigrants are “incompatible with Western civilization.”
They continued stating that, “Traitors such as Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good had voided their liberties” and that, “It is… the mandate of our brave public servants, domestic and abroad, to fell the enemies of the United States of America.”
The statement is an open call for violence, including the targeted political assassination of those who defend the democratic right of immigrants. That it was posted the same day that hundreds of UIUC and local high school students walked out of class to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) clearly indicates the statement was intended to intimidate and threaten demonstrators.
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After Friday’s post ignited anger from UIUC students, the university administration posted an official statement indicating that no disciplinary action will be taken against the fascist student organization. The University stated that while a Title VI report had been filed to review the incident, the Illini Republicans “are responsible for managing their own affairs, and their social media accounts represent their own views, not those of the university… but the university cannot discipline them for the viewpoint or content of protected speech.”
The University of Illinois administration’s claim that it cannot discipline the Illini Republicans is a fraud. It is a cowardly defense of fascistic incitement that stands in total contradiction to the university’s actual record.
Over the past two years, the university has carried out a systematic campaign to suppress student protests against the Gaza genocide. It has proven that it is perfectly willing to punish “viewpoints” when those views challenge the interests of US imperialism.
In 2024, the administration oversaw the official termination of the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). It has also utilized aggressive disciplinary measures to hand down long-term suspensions and de facto expulsions against anti-genocide activists.
In one instance, when students organized a peaceful encampment on the Quad, the university worked with local prosecutors to level felony “mob action” charges against eight protesters, threatening them with years in prison.
The university further codified this repression through its “Expressive Activity” policy. These rules established arbitrary noise limits and bans on unapproved structures specifically designed to criminalize the methods used by pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
The University’s selective defense of “free speech” for the far right, while criminalizing the left, is an expression of the political complicity of the Democratic Party in Trump’s immigration raids and his plans to establish a fascist dictatorship. The UIUC administration is an appendage of the state Democratic Party and the administration of Governor J.B. Pritzker.
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This alignment demonstrates that the Democratic Party will not fight against fascism. On the contrary, the Democrats are defending the right of Republicans to threaten violence while leading the charge to strip left-wing students of their basic democratic rights.
The open call for assassination by the Illini Republicans is a desperate response to the growing radicalization of the youth. These fascistic groups do not represent a mass movement, but are the foot soldiers for a ruling class that has completely abandoned democratic forms of rule. There is mass and growing opposition among workers and young people to the ICE murder and Trump’s developing dictatorship. However, this power remains latent as long as it is tied to the dead end of the Democratic Party.
17. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
Sri Lanka:
Malaysia:
Lumileds factory workers protest sackings and deportations
18. 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.
