1. Massive popular support for San Francisco teachers in first strike since 1979
On Monday, 6,400 educators went on strike against the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), setting up picket lines at 120 sites across the city.
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The city faces a $100 million deficit, with the Democratic Party-led administration and state government insisting there is “no money” for livable wages. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s most recent budget proposes withholding approximately $5.6 billion in school funding guaranteed under Proposition 98, citing “revenue uncertainty.”
In other words, the state is deliberately underfunding education, forcing cuts particularly in districts like San Francisco that are under direct state supervision. To that end, SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su has stated that while negotiations continue, teachers’ demands cannot be met because cuts are necessary to “restore local control.”
Local San Francisco Democrats have likewise sought to undermine the strike. Mayor Daniel Lurie, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Scott Wiener—all Democrats—issued a statement last Sunday urging teachers to take a 72-hour “pause” and refrain from striking, while hypocritically feigning sympathy for educators.
“We’re already chronically underfunded,” Kelly, a paraprofessional in special education, told the WSWS at the Dolores Park rally on Tuesday. “It is very frustrating that we’re in a wealthy city, and I know a lot of our money comes from the state, some from federal and some from the city. But we’re funding billion-dollar Super Bowl parties and ballrooms. Let’s put some money into the kids.
“Let’s figure out why the schools are underfunded. It doesn’t make sense when there’s so much wealth and there’s so much inequality.”
The United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), closely tied to the Democratic Party, has limited its demands to a paltry and inadequate 9 percent raise over two years for teachers and 14 percent for paraprofessionals. The district, for its part, is offering just 6 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
While the union is calling for “fully funded” healthcare, the district has proposed covering only 75 percent. Teachers report paying as much as $2,000 a month in co-pays for family coverage.
2. Epstein files reveal FBI identified billionaire Leslie Wexner as co-conspirator in 2019
During restricted viewings that began February 9, members of Congress confirmed that the Epstein files presented as unredacted remain heavily censored, masking FBI findings that implicated billionaire figures in Epstein’s criminal network.
3. The Department of Justice moves to gut the right of asylum
Immigration courts are being rigged in favor of the White House-driven witch-hunt against those seeking asylum under international law.
4. Berlin state election: Socialism, not war
The Socialist Equality Party (SGP) is standing in the Berlin state elections in September. We oppose the all-party coalition for war and social spending cuts. Together with our sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International, we are building a worldwide movement to stop the madness of war, mass layoffs and wage cuts.
5. Fascist Argentine President Milei’s draconian labor counter-reform sparks mass strikes
The “Labor Modernization” bill—longer hours, gutted severance, and strike criminalization—has sparked mass protests and strikes as workers rebel against IMF-dictated slavery.
6. India’s Labour Code “reform”: A savage attack on worker rights
India's new labor codes dismantle legal protections governing wages, job security and working conditions, and dramatically curtail workers' legal right to strike.
7. Two Amazon Flex workers were arrested in ICE raid in Hazel Park, Michigan
Both men are reportedly asylum seekers and hold Temporary Protected Status. Their seizure occurred in full view of witnesses and the permission of Amazon security.
8. Lucinda Williams’ World’s Gone Wrong: An urgent protest against the fascist danger
Formally, it could be described as a blues-rock album, but it is more importantly a call to fight against the fascist regime emerging in the US. This is a welcome development among popular musicians.
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Several songs early in the album grapple with the rapidly deteriorating social and economic situation. The opening song “The World’s Gone Wrong” is an anxiety-driven rock song centered on a couple, a nurse and a car salesman, who increasingly find it hard to get by. But even amid their daily struggles they are even more worries that most people around them are also doing similar or worse:
They can see what’s going down
Empty houses all over town
So many lost are never found
And bad, bad signs are all around
A lot of people being put on the street
It’s getting’ harder to make ends meetBut the song’s chorus tries to counter the initial bleakness with a call to push forward: “Come on, baby, we gotta be strong … Everybody knows the world’s gone wrong.”
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Musically the most effective of Williams’ “troubled world” songs on the album is a cover of reggae legend Bob Marley’s 1979 song “So Much Trouble in the World.” Performed with veteran Civil Rights singer Mavis Staples, now 86, it is played convincingly as a combination Jamaican dub-country song. Both singers perform the chorus passionately, the power of their voices in the chorus conveys something urgently felt. In a livestreamed album debut of the song Williams repeats one of the key lines several times to close the song: “We the street people talkin’ / We the people strugglin’ / With so much trouble / We the street people talkin.’”
This motivation to rally the “people in the streets” finds reflection in the most interesting and propulsive songs on the album, such as “Sing Unburied Song,” “We’ve Come Too Far to Turn Around” (with talented artist Norah Jones on piano and back-up vocals) and “Freedom Speaks.” These are all sung as a kind of call to arms–the latter two songs end the album–and feel distinctly pertinent to the current climate and situation.
9. Germany: At Bosch, Stalinist MLPD attacks opposition to IG Metall union apparatus
The Stalinists of the MLPD are playing the role of henchmen for the trade union mafia: they intimidate workers who want to defend themselves and employ the vilest lies to defend the bureaucracy.
10. Los Angeles moves to dismantle federal oversight of homelessness as crisis deepens
The Democratic administration of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, through its legal representatives, has initiated an appeal seeking the removal of U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who is overseeing enforcement of a court settlement governing the city’s response to homelessness. The appeal challenges Judge Carter’s continued role in supervising implementation of the agreement and disputes the scope of judicial authority in monitoring municipal compliance. The case has become a focal point of conflict between city officials and the federal judiciary amid mounting evidence that Los Angeles is failing to meet its own legally binding commitments.
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If the city’s appeal succeeds, the practical consequences would be significant. While the settlement agreement might formally remain in place, the removal of active judicial supervision would sharply weaken enforcement. Deadlines could be delayed, with benchmarks reinterpreted and failures obscured with little risk of consequence. In effect, the city would regain broad discretion over how homelessness is “managed,” allowing officials to claim progress publicly while scaling back obligations behind the scenes.
In court filings, the city’s lawyers argue that Judge Carter has exceeded his authority by dictating policy and intruding into municipal governance. This portrayal is misleading. Judge Carter is not imposing a right-wing law-and-order agenda, nor is he acting as an adversary of the Democratic Party. He is enforcing a settlement that the city itself agreed to, one that imposes measurable requirements for housing placements and restricts the clearance of encampments without providing alternatives.
More fundamentally, the city’s arguments adopt a conception of executive power indistinguishable from that advanced by Donald Trump, under which judicial enforcement of legal obligations is recast as unlawful interference. This doctrine, repeatedly invoked by the Trump administration to defy court rulings, is now being echoed by Democratic officials in Los Angeles. In challenging Judge Carter’s oversight, the city asserts that elected authorities may enter into settlements under legal compulsion while remaining effectively immune from meaningful judicial enforcement once those commitments become inconvenient.
Such a stance represents a serious erosion of the constitutional principle of separation of powers. Judicial oversight exists precisely to ensure that legal obligations are not reduced to empty promises. The city’s effort to remove the judge reflects an attempt to escape judicial enforcement that would force officials to fund, implement and meet the commitments they have long invoked rhetorically while leaving tens of thousands unhoused.
The political motivation behind this effort is clear. Housing tens of thousands of people at scale would require a decisive break with existing priorities. It would mean massive public investment in non-market housing, long-term operating subsidies and a direct confrontation with real estate developers, landlords and financial interests that profit from scarcity and rising rents. The capitalists in Los Angeles have no intention of pursuing such a course.
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The city’s legal maneuver must also be understood in the context of its longstanding approach to homelessness. For decades, Los Angeles (and California more broadly) has relied on a model based on privatization, fragmented nonprofit provision and law-and-order enforcement. Rather than building publicly-owned, permanently affordable housing, officials have outsourced homelessness policy to a sprawling network of contractors, consultants and service providers.
The result has been waste, scandal and failure. Facilities have been constructed at exorbitant cost, sometimes paying nearly double for the number of beds actually delivered. Oversight bodies have proliferated, but accountability has remained elusive. Billions of dollars have been spent without reversing the growth of homelessness.
Last month, Los Angeles County officials announced that they had effectively dismantled the joint city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), transferring much of its authority and funding to a newly created Department of Homeless Services and Housing under direct county control. The restructuring has been presented as a reform aimed at efficiency and coordination. In reality, it marks a further step in the corporatization of homelessness policy, concentrating power within a centralized bureaucracy insulated from democratic accountability and oriented toward contract management and enforcement rather than guaranteeing housing as a social right.
At the same time, the city and county continue to rely on encampment sweeps and criminalization. Anti-camping ordinances, police enforcement and forced displacement are justified as necessary to maintain public order, but they do nothing to address the underlying causes of homelessness. They merely push people from one location to another, deepening instability and trauma.
Responsibility for this record lies squarely with the Democratic Party, which has dominated Los Angeles and California politics for decades. Democratic mayors and city councils have presided over the explosive growth of homelessness alongside the enrichment of a narrow elite. Los Angeles is home to enormous concentrations of wealth, including over 40 billionaires, yet officials insist that there are insufficient resources to guarantee housing as a basic right.
The struggle over judicial oversight in Los Angeles ultimately obscures a more fundamental reality: immense wealth is being diverted away from social needs and toward repression at home and war abroad by both big business parties. Trillions of dollars are allocated to the military, police forces and corporate subsidies, while housing is treated as a commodity rather than a social right.
The city’s attempt to dismantle federal oversight of homelessness represents a retreat from even minimal accountability and an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis cannot be resolved without challenging capitalist priorities the political establishment is committed to defending. Homelessness will not be solved through court supervision, privatization, bureaucratic reshuffling or appeals to compassion from officials who serve wealth and property. It requires a socialist program based on public ownership of housing, democratic control of resources and the redirection of social wealth away from repression and war.
11. New Zealand’s capital city faces environmental disaster from massive sewage leak
Following the preventable breakdown of the capital’s wastewater treatment plant, tens of millions of liters of raw, untreated sewage have poured into the nearby ocean.
12. Migros warehouse workers’ struggle continues despite Turkish police pressure and dismissals
In addition to low wages and harsh working conditions, warehouse workers face constant violations of their legal rights including weekly working hours, overtime pay, weekly holidays, public holidays, annual leave, occupational health and safety.
13. UK loses measles elimination status amid sustained assault on public health
Increasing vaccine coverage is the key to eliminating measles, but this goal is being actively undermined by the Starmer government’s continued assault on public spending and the National Health Service.
14. Widespread anger over NYSNA’s sellout bid to end New York nurses’ strike
The union is attempting to push through sellout contracts for striking nurses at Mount Sinai and Montefiore systems, while isolating the 4,500 nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian.
15. Rampage against Sydney pro-Palestinian protest orchestrated by NSW government, police command
It is clear that police were told “the gloves were off” and they had a green light to violently attack protesters opposing the visit to Australia of Israeli war criminal Isaac Herzog.
16. Software firms take major hit from AI
At the beginning of 2025, the high-tech market was rocked by the announcement from a Chinese start-up company, DeepSeek, that it had developed a chatbot as good as that launched by OpenAI (Chat GPT) at a fraction of the cost and without the latest high-end chips.
At the start of this year the market has again been thrown into turmoil with the launch by the AI firm Anthropic of a new tool, known as Claude, which when combined with a series of plugins has the capacity to carry out a series of complex tasks, in particular the writing of software.
The well-known American software engineer, Aditya Agarwal, who played a role in establishing Facebook and was chief technology officer at Dropbox, summed up the impact in comments reported by the Financial Times (FT).
“It was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. Something I was very good at is now free and abundant,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether this is an exaggerated assessment, but his remarks indicate the direction of development.
The new AI tool codenamed Claude Cowork has impacted on a wide range of software and IT business models. These include enterprise software firms, such as Salesforce and Adobe, legal and data firms, including Thomson Reuters and Relx, legal outsourcing firms and Software as a Service (SaaS) firms where applications are hosted by a vendor and accessed by users over the Internet.
The stocks of the firms affected have taken a major hit. For example, last Tuesday as Anthropic was rolling out its new tool, the shares of Relx, which provides legal information and risk analysis, declined 14.4 percent. In the words of the FT, it reversed “the fortunes of one of the best-performing stocks in recent years and a company regarded as one of the UK’s brightest hopes for AI success.”
In a rationally planned and consciously organized economy, the developments in AI would provide the means for major advances. Like all major technical developments, those in AI are subject to constant improvement. But under capitalism, grounded on market relations and driven by profit, this very development contains the seeds of a crisis.
This is because the vast amounts of capital which have been invested previously suddenly undergo what is known as moral depreciation—a term initially elaborated by Karl Marx. It occurs not because the asset depreciates due to wear and tear but is suddenly devalued as another product enters the market rendering the existing asset obsolescent and outdated. As the events of last week show, this can happen literally overnight.
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While they have yet to do so, the sharp falls have the potential to set off a financial crisis because of the increasing role being played by debt.
The fall in the price of Bitcoin, which has wiped out all its gains since the coming to power of Trump, is another indicator of possible financial turmoil. Concerns about what its dramatic fall might signify emerged last week when US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked in a congressional hearing whether the government could force banks to buy it in order to halt the decline.
17. Australian workers and youth speak out against Herzog visit and anti-protest laws
“I’m here because Australia’s complicit in genocide and it needs to stop—we need to break the system.”
18. 3,000 pharmacy, lab workers join strike of 31,000 Kaiser healthcare workers
On Monday, more than 3,000 pharmacy and laboratory workers from the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770 joined a strike by 31,000 nurses and other healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii.
The Kaiser strike is unfolding alongside a widening movement of educators and academic workers across California and the country. Six thousand San Francisco teachers have walked out; Los Angeles teachers have voted to authorize strike action; and tens of thousands of graduate student workers at the University of California are currently voting on their strike authorization. These struggles share common roots in austerity, understaffing and the subordination of social needs to corporate profit, raising the objective necessity for a unified response across industries.
At the same time, the trade union bureaucracy is continuing to do what it can to disrupt this growing movement. The same day the Kaiser strike expanded, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) has announced a sellout tentative agreement covering three of the four New York City hospitals whose nurses have been on strike for four weeks. The agreement includes 12 percent raises over 3 years instead of the 30 percent demanded by nurses and only 30 additional hires out of the needed 700 at Mount Sinai Hospital.
The betrayal provoked “rage” among strikers, one nurse told the World Socialist Web Site. On Tuesday, the New York Healthcare Workers Rank-and-File Committee held an online meeting to discuss how nurses could fight back. Attendees passed a resolution calling on nurses to reject the contracts and organize to expand the strike, demand strike pay and replace the bargaining committee with one elected from the rank and file.
It also urged New York nurses “to unite with the 31,000 healthcare workers and 3,000 pharmacy and lab workers on strike at Kaiser Permanente facilities in California and Hawaii. These struggles must become the spearhead of a nationwide movement to defend workers’ rights and end the subordination of healthcare to corporate profit.”
At Kaiser, a major issue is management’s attempts to eliminate national bargaining in favor of dozens of local contracts. Daniel, a psychiatric hospital worker with 20 years at Kaiser, warned bluntly about the implications. “They want to get rid of the National Alliance because it’s going to be easier to pick and choose with each local,” he said. Once management “gets their foot in the door,” locals will be pitted against each other: “‘How come this local’s getting this? Why is this one not getting that?’ even though they’re on basically the same pay scale.”
Daniel described how Kaiser’s reliance on temporary and traveling staff, driven by cost cutting and understaffing, is creating dangerous conditions. “The money they’re paying for travel nurses is almost five times what staff nurses make,” he noted, including lodging and food. This churn of contingent labor undermines continuity of care and institutional knowledge.
19. Australia: “Prohibited hate group” laws recall 1951 referendum to ban “communism”
The Albanese Labor government’s legislation echoes that of 1950 and 1951, when the Menzies government sought to criminalize “communists.”
20. How New York City nurses can fight the sellout of their 4-week strike
On Tuesday, a day after the New York State Nurses Association announced sellout tentative agreements with Montefiore and Mount Sinai, the union leadership is violating its own bylaws to shut down the strike at the remaining hospital system, NewYork Presbyterian.
21. Public Meeting in London, England: Trotskyism and the fight for revolutionary leadership
At stake was the survival of Trotskyism, of revolutionary Marxism, as an organized political tendency. The ICFI’s victory over the WRP, and expulsion of those who refused to accept its socialist internationalist principles, was an event of global, historic significance.
22. 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.
