Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund”: The fusion of the gangster-oligarchy and the state
“Corruption” no longer adequately describes what is happening in Washington. The Trump administration is asserting a principle—a modern day version of “l’état, c’est moi”—in which the president claims the right to dispense public money, immunity and favors like a mob boss handing out envelopes. The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” reveals the essential of the Trump regime: fusion of a gangster-oligarchy and the apparatus of the state.
The fund—approved by the Trump White House and the Trump Justice Department in negotiations conducted between Trump and his former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General—is an act of presidential usurpation of congressional authority without precedent in American history.
Trump agreed to drop his bogus $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for supposed negligence in the leak of his tax returns to the New York Times. In exchange, Blanche—who takes his orders from Trump and hopes to remove the “acting” from his title—agreed to set aside $1.776 billion in US government funds to pay compensation to individuals claiming to have been unfairly investigated or prosecuted by the administration of Democrat Joe Biden.
The establishment of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” through the actions of the executive branch alone is a direct and brazen violation of the US Constitution. Article I, establishing Congress as the primary branch of government, declares: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” thus vesting the spending power in Congress, not the president.
A second feature of the Trump-Blanche deal is a one-page addendum, released by the Justice Department Wednesday, which, in the all-caps style favored by Trump in his incessant social media posts, “RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons and his business entities from claims that “have been or could have been asserted” by federal defendants or “other agencies or departments.” This would include suppressing all ongoing reviews of their tax returns, which have become a byword for deception and fraud.
This addendum comes just short of two years since the US Supreme Court, in its notorious decision in Trump v. United States, held that Trump—and by extension any president—was immune from prosecution for any action he took, no matter how criminal, in the course of exercising his powers as chief of the executive branch.
In effect, Trump has now been immunized both for his public actions and his private actions.
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Trump has been declared above the law, first by his hand-picked justices on the Supreme Court, now by his hand-picked acting Attorney General and a Department of Justice that is a nest of fascist conspirators.
Many of the January 6 attackers pled guilty in return for reduced sentences. All of them have since been pardoned by Trump or had their sentences commuted. None are now in prison, except those who have since been arrested for other crimes, ranging from assault to child molestation. Now they are expected to flood the Department of Justice with requests for six-figure and even seven-figure compensation.
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Media coverage of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” has focused almost entirely on the ever-growing list of Republican political operatives, lawyers and elected officials who sought to disrupt and then overturn the 2020 election and who may now claim payoffs for services rendered.
The media fixation on the prospective “payoffs” for Republican operatives and lawyers deliberately evades the underlying social reality: The naked gangsterism of the Trump regime expresses the social physiognomy of the capitalist oligarchy itself. This is a ruling layer that has accumulated staggering wealth, not through productive labor, but through speculation and parasitism enforced by state power at home and imperialist violence abroad.
It is also inextricably connected to the conspiracy for dictatorship. Trump is using government money to reward and finance his most devoted fascist followers, who have already demonstrated their willingness to use violence in his service. He is providing them with the resources to recruit and build up a fascist militia, the American equivalent of Hitler’s brownshirts, to use against his political opponents.
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The deeper issue is that Trump acts with the confidence of someone who knows that every institution has been compromised. The presidency claims unlimited power; Congress has been reduced to a spectacle of impotence; the Supreme Court has issued doctrines of immunity that place the executive above the law. Trump feels he can do anything because the state itself has been hollowed out by decades of oligarchic domination and is now being openly transformed into an instrument of personal dictatorship.
2. Emperor penguins, Antarctic fur seals now on endangered species Red List
The emperor penguin breeding colonies form in the dead of the Antarctic winter and are studied through high resolution satellite pictures as direct observation is almost impossible. Studies estimate that the penguins’ population declined by approximately 10 percent between 2009 and 2018 alone, or the equivalent of more than 20,000 adult penguins. The current emperor penguin population is estimated at 595,000 adults.
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Emperor Penguins form colonies and breed on fast or landfast ice, that is ice shelves, or grounded icebergs attached to the Antarctic coastline. These ice shelves are breaking up, leading chicks to die as a result of drowning and freezing as they have not developed mature waterproof feathers. The ice shelf breakup leads to chicks being plunged into the water. Their downy feathers become waterlogged leading to their drowning. Those that manage to get back onto the remaining ice platform freeze to death.
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Meanwhile, the Antarctic fur seal live in the sub-Antarctic islands such as South Georgia in large colonies that have suffered a precipitous decline in numbers, from 2,187,000 mature seals in 1999 to only 944,000 in 2025. Colonies such as the South Orkneys have declined by 47 percent and Cape Shirreff by 86 percent. IUCN has placed the seal on its Red List of endangered species due to the rapid decline in population numbers.
Seal pup survival has been undermined by the reduction in sea ice and the major food source of nursing mother seals, the Antarctic krill, has moved to deeper colder waters putting it out of reach. The krill has moved to avoid the warming temperatures of shallower water. The destruction of sea ice has affected the Antarctic food chain destroying algae living on the underside of the ice and undermining the seals’ primary food source.
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Antarctica plays an enormous role in stabilising the world’s temperature and climate system as well as providing a refuge for unique wildlife. It does this by reflecting 85 percent of the sun’s radiation back into space. It prevents the Southern Ocean from absorbing excess heat and drives ocean circulation that absorbs 40 percent of human produced carbon dioxide, slowing the rate of global warming through a process known as thermal inertia.
The placing of the emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal on the Endangered list of species is a stark warning of the consequences of global warming on the continent. Senior lecturer in climate science Dr. Kyle Clem and his research team at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, in an important paper “Record warming at the South Pole during the past three decades“ published in Nature Climate Change in June 2020, estimated that Antarctica is warming at three times the rate of the rest of the planet, causing the loss of 100 billion metric tons of ice annually.
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Recent studies have shown that the rate of global warming is accelerating with the last three years being the hottest on record, continuing a decades-long trend of increasing temperatures. The overall rate of increase has risen from 0.2 degrees C. per decade in the 1970s to around 0.35 degrees C. per decade currently, based on NASA data.
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The protection of species such as the emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal is a necessary step but any meaningful resolution of the environmental crisis can only be achieved by halting the production of greenhouse gasses that is not only threatening Antarctic species but the whole of humanity. This can only occur by forging an alliance of workers, youth and principled scientists in the fight for a socialist society where the social interests of humanity, not private profit, are the primary concern.
To workers on the Long Island Rail Road:
The World Socialist Web Site urges you to reject the new four-year tentative agreement in the upcoming vote. The deal’s wage terms do not even keep pace with inflation—and the full details are still being kept from you.
We urge you to form rank-and-file committees, independent of the union apparatus, to finish what you began in your three-day strike. That means uniting with the 40,000 subway and bus workers in Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, whose contract has also expired, to fight for increases that beat inflation and make up for years of frozen wages.
For three days, you shut down the busiest commuter railroad in the country. In the center of world finance, the strike demonstrated the real power of the working class and won enormous support across the city. Attempts to scab on the walkout with shuttle buses largely collapsed: Only a little over 2,000 riders used the substitute service each day, compared with the Long Island Rail Road’s roughly 300,000 daily riders under normal operations.
There was also a powerful impulse to unite with the 40,000 subway and bus workers of TWU Local 100, whose contract expired the same day the strike began. Voting “yes” now would help isolate these workers, who are being kept on the job.
The strike terrified the corporate oligarchy because it threatened to set an example—showing millions in New York and tens of millions across the country, already seething over staggering inequality and an impossible cost of living, what happens when workers begin to act together and use their collective power.
But the union bureaucracy shut the strike down abruptly at the exact point it was beginning to have a broader impact, as the work week started. You had no say in it. Even now, you still don’t know the full terms, beyond a brief email to members.
The MTA, Governor Kathy Hochul, New York City’s “democratic socialist” mayor Zohran Mamdani and the union officials all know what they agreed to. The one group being kept in the dark is the workers who will have to live under it.
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No doubt the union bureaucracy will try to tell you that, while the contract does not meet your needs, it is the best you can expect “under the circumstances.” But those “circumstances” were created by the bureaucracy’s collusion with the political establishment—including blocking strikes earlier by asking Trump to appoint PEB’s under the anti-strike Railway Labor Act—and its refusal to organize a struggle that threatened the city’s business interests.
Nevertheless, after three days on strike, the MTA appears to have backed down from the most extreme positions which it had held onto for years. This includes its refusal to accept 4.5 percent without onerous changes to work rules, including on overtime, hiring and contracting.
If this is what resulted from a struggle shut down behind workers’ backs, then what could have been accomplished by a struggle that was not sabotaged by the union bureaucrats?
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The political establishment has claimed for years that there was no money for decent wages. Governor Hochul called workers’ demands “reckless” and insisted that pay increases had to be offset by fare increases. But shortly after the strike ended, the Trump administration announced $8 billion in funding to renovate Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan. Contracts are going to companies controlled by Trump insiders like Peter Cipriano and Steven Roth.
There is plenty of money in the wealthiest city in the world, but it is controlled by Wall Street firms and the city’s 154 billionaires. Fifteen percent of the MTA’s budget goes to servicing its $49 billion in bond debt. That money goes straight to Wall Street firms like BlackRock. Any real struggle requires a fight against this oligarchy itself.
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It is a historical fact that not a single major victory in the history of the working class was ever won without braving anti-strike injunctions, legislation and the full force of the state. NYC transit workers have done this before, including strikes in 1966, 1980 and 2005 in defiance of the Taylor Law. But this requires a broad mobilization and structures making possible the maximum unity and initiative.
Workers cannot retain the initiative and wait for “approval” from the apparatus or from the political establishment. A serious struggle requires the construction of rank-and-file committees, run democratically, answerable only to the membership and capable of making decisions that the bureaucracy cannot reverse behind closed doors.
The WSWS urges that these committees:
Organize a “NO” on the contract. Demand the full text of this agreement—every term, every clause, every side letter—be released publicly, with real time for workers to read it and discuss it collectively.
Prepare a united struggle with NYC transit workers. Workers should organize discussions at every facility to discuss a common program for TWU and LIRR workers and establish “red lines” to fight for. These should include immediate, substantial raises that offset years of below-inflation contracts; full cost-of-living adjustments so your wages never fall behind again; and the complete rejection of every work rule concession.
Make direct appeals to other sections of workers in New York, including other public sector workers whose contracts expire this year and immigrant workers under attack by the Trump administration.
Major wage increases must be paid for not by fare increases, but by the cancellation of the MTA’s $49 billion Wall Street debt. This is only a first step in requisitioning all of the wealth controlled by Wall Street to put at the disposal of public need. This must be combined with the demand for the repeal of the Taylor Law, Railway Labor Act and all other illegitimate restrictions on workers’ inalienable right to strike.
The struggle to defend the rights of the working class cannot be separated from the development of a united movement outside the control of officials who negotiate with the government in secret and independent of politicians who talk about affordability while managing Wall Street’s bottom line.
4. Australian budget further squeezes university funding
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government particularly targeted the universities and their staff and students in last week’s budget.
5. JVP/NPP government in Sri Lanka preparing further attacks on workers amid growing crisis
Sri Lanka’s worsening balance of payments crisis, soaring oil bill and rupee depreciation are driving the JVP/NPP government into a deepening crisis.
6. Socialism AI answers the New York Times: Not yes or no to AI, but who controls it
Socialism AI:Having correctly identified the disease, Goldberg’s prescription is a placebo. Her solution is essentially: look at Japan and the Nordic countries, where governments use regulatory policy and labor consultation mechanisms to ensure AI “complements” rather than replaces workers. Her source is Bharat Ramamurti, a deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council, and her implicit political conclusion is that what America needs is better regulation and stronger labor institutions—a more responsible capitalism, basically.
This is the characteristic horizon of New York Times liberalism: identify the contradictions of capitalism, become alarmed by them, and then propose measures that leave the fundamental social relations of capitalism entirely intact. The problem, she argues, is that America’s “democratic feedback loop” is broken—not that the system is working exactly as designed.
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The appeal to the Biden administration and Democratic Party-aligned figures like Ramamurti as models is particularly revealing. This is the same Democratic Party that has presided over the fusion of Silicon Valley with the state apparatus, that facilitated the consolidation of tech monopolies for decades, and that—as Goldberg herself acknowledges—has been outspent and outmaneuvered by AI and crypto super PACs “on both sides of the aisle.” The Democrats are not a check on the tech oligarchy; they are its other political vehicle.
In 2022, the unions saved the government from a direct political confrontation with the working class and are determined to do so again under conditions of a much deeper social and economic crisis, and greater popular hostility to the ruling class’ agenda of austerity and war.
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The takeover of public school boards are not technical fixes; the Ford government is demonstrating its eagerness to override local democracy to force through fiscal austerity. By appointing supervisors to run eight of the seventy-two school boards in Ontario, the government has made explicit its plan to accelerate cuts, close schools, end regular maintenance of decrepit school buildings, cut staff and supports for students like special education. These measures are falsely presented as “necessary efficiencies,” but are in reality part of a broader program to funnel public funds to corporate priorities and military spending.
According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, per-student funding in Ontario has declined in real dollars by about $1,500 since the 2018-19 school year, a percentage decline of 11.4 percent. Funding for special needs education has been hit especially hard. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) has estimated a current shortfall of $398 million for special education spending. Overall, it suggests that if 2018-19 budget levels had been maintained, an additional $3.1 billion would be available across the education budget.
The five education unions—the OSSTF, Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association, the Associations des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens and the CUPE-affiliated Ontario School Board Council of Unions—have issued verbal criticisms of the Ford government. They have combined this with stunts to allow education workers—who are furious after years of real wage cuts, underfunding, crumbling school buildings and a growth of violence in schools bound up with the social crisis—to let off steam, not mobilize for struggle.
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The unions are deeply complicit in the disastrous state of public education in Ontario. They have collaborated in the enforcement of one round of concession-filled contracts after another, while systematically demobilizing worker opposition to the combined onslaught on education waged over recent decades by all political parties in the Ontario legislature. This policy of close cooperation with government and the smothering of the class struggle is in line with the trade unions’ actions at the federal level, where they have worked hand in hand with successive Liberal governments since 2015. Under Prime Ministers Trudeau and Carney, successive Liberal governments have reduced real-terms funding to the provinces in order to divert society’s resources towards the military, waging war against Russia in Ukraine and backing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, and enriching Canada’s fabulously wealthy billionaire oligarchs.
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The corporatist bureaucracies that call themselves unions have material interests that are tied to the preservation of their close partnership with government through the reactionary collective-bargaining framework, which is the main source of the bureaucracy’s privileges. The events of 2022–23 demonstrate this clearly.
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The betrayal of 2022–23 shows unions cannot be reformed from within: their institutional life depends on compromise and collaboration with the capitalist state at all levels, which necessitates unflinching support for austerity and war. The unions saved the government in 2022 from a direct political confrontation with the working class and are determined to do so again under conditions of a much deeper social and economic crisis, and greater popular hostility to the ruling class’ agenda of austerity and war.
8. Stop militarization and cuts at Germany’s universities! No to genocide and world war!
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are standing in the student parliament elections at Humboldt University in Berlin. We are publishing their election statement here.
9. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Ghana:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Europe
Belgium:
Thousands of teachers at French-speaking Belgian schools in 10-day strike against austerity cuts
Greece:
Public sector employees hold 24-hour nationwide strike and protest rally over austerity pay and working conditions
Ireland:
Ambulance workers in Ireland strike for more pay and improved working conditions
Norway:
Cleaners strike for salary and sick pay increases
Spain:
Thousands of doctors continue monthly strikes and demonstrations for statutory improvements in pay and conditionsTeachers in several regions stop work over low pay and poor working conditions
Teachers in several regions stop work over low pay and poor working conditions
Türkiye:
Workers at Procter and Gamble strike for cost-of-living pay increase
United Kingdom:
Learning assistants in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland walk out over grading row
Further stoppages by child social work management staff in Bath over pay cuts and restructuring
Walkout by Newshour and The World Tonight journalists at BBC over rotaBus control staff in London hold further walkout over rota changes
Bus control staff in London hold further walkout over rota changes
Middle East
Syria:
10. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
