On the morning of January 7, an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother, as she attempted to drive away from him.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said that Ross feared for his life as Good drove her car right at him, but multiple videos showed this to be a lie. He was just pissed because she’d refused to get out of the car. After he shot Good, from two feet away, he was recorded saying, “f—’ing bitch” as her car moved away. He just didn’t like being challenged. And so he killed her.
This is murder, pure and simple.
This came in the midst of what has amounted to a military invasion of Minneapolis, just the latest city invaded by ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection forces. Over 3,000 of these officers have been sent to the city, outnumbering Minneapolis’s own police force by five to one. They have been going door-to-door and patrolling residential streets, accosting anyone passing by and demanding to see IDs and proof of citizenship. They have arrested many—the large majority of whom are citizens. Armed with guns, teargas, flash grenades and rubber bullets, they have attempted to disperse crowds showing up to protest.
Various reasons have been given for this focus on Minneapolis, such as supposed fraud in childcare and health care facilities run by Somali residents in the city. But these accusations of fraud have been shown to be vastly overblown—and the vast majority of members of Minnesota’s Somali community are either immigrants with legal status, or citizens. These are just excuses to scapegoat an immigrant community from what Trump has called a “shithole country,” a racist, inflammatory slur.
And they seem to be excuses to go after Democratic politicians in a city and a state run by Democrats. As has been the case with every city Trump has sent ICE and the National Guard into.
And the administration probably wants to rewrite the narrative of Minneapolis, the site of massive protests in the wake of the George Floyd killing five years ago.
Trump’s whole purpose in sending these invading forces of armed thugs into these cities has been to attempt to intimidate the population, to get us to accept a paramilitary presence on Amerca’s city streets. Trump wants us cowed, broken and afraid. He, and the ruling class he represents, want this to be the new normal. They know that they will be making things worse and worse for the working class in the future, and they want to make sure ahead of time that the population is docile enough to be forced to accept these attacks.
Well, the people of Minneapolis have had other ideas.
From the start of the ICE invasion, they have not allowed themselves to be intimidated or divided. They have stood together, organizing community watch groups patrolling the streets and signaling to each other whenever ICE troops have been spotted. They have come out to confront those troops, braving the tear gas, flash grenades and rubber bullets. They have chased after the ICE troops, throwing rocks and snowballs, yelling “shame!”, and yelling at them to get out of their city. Plans have been announced for a city-wide closing, an “Economic Blackout,” and large-scale protests on January 23.
In other words, they have refused to be intimidated or broken.
In response, Trump has threatened to send army troops to Minneapolis, further escalating the confrontation.
These protests have been echoed across the country, in other cities where ICE has appeared. Protests have occurred practically everywhere ICE has shown its head.
These may not be particularly effective at stopping ICE attacks and arrests, but they are visible. They send a message—people are not alone, if they’re disgusted and angry with what is being done. And for those engaging in these fights and protests, this activity is a starting point. People learn by doing, what works and what doesn’t. People lose their fear of action—they learn that something is possible. People can start to come together, to plan, to build. And what starts with protests against ICE can expand into something greater.
And the working class itself can start to direct a fight, to defend its own interests as a united force, native-born and immigrant. Leaders can come out of these fights—leaders who understand that the only solution is to address the root cause itself: capitalist control and the system putting profit above all else.
When Trump did a public relations tour through a Ford plant in Michigan, things didn’t exactly go according to script. As Trump was walking though the plant, a worker yelled out “pedophile protector,” calling out Trump’s refusal to release all of the Epstein files.
There were dozens of people in the area when this was yelled out, but as someone said, if the shoe fits, Trump had to wear it and so Trump could only respond with a middle finger and a “F--- you.”
When Ford suspended this worker, two GoFundMe’s were immediately set up to support him. Within two days, over 800,000 dollars were raised. The only reason it didn’t go over a million dollars was because the Ford worker asked people to stop giving and asked them to instead give money to other causes.
The White House put out a statement calling this autoworker a “lunatic.” But obviously there must be a lot of “lunatics” out there, because thousands of people, of all political persuasions, from all over the country, supported this worker for speaking out and they agreed with him that Trump is protecting pedophiles.
No, it’s not enough that the Michigan electric utility company, DTE, continues to raise its rates and households scramble to keep up with utility bills. But now, DTE is adding fees onto our energy bills when we pay with a credit card OR a debit card!
Starting March 2, residential customers will be charged a $2.99 fee per card transaction. In its defense, DTE is saying it’s not the bad guy—this money is going to its “third party” payment processor! DTE also says it’s the right thing to do so customers who pay by bank account or with cash aren’t subsidizing the cost for those who choose card payments!
“Earth to DTE”—many people pay with a credit card in the first place because they don’t have the cash or the money in the bank account to do otherwise!
And debit card users getting penalized?!? Isn’t that how so many businesses now operate and don’t even deal in cash?!
The Maryland state government has a small team who help patients’ dispute denials of service claims by health insurance companies. Every year they get insurers to pay back around one and a half million dollars for having denied several hundred people’s claims.
The stories are all outrageous. For example, a child was admitted to a hospital emergency department considered “in network” by the parents’ health insurance company, and then was transferred to the same hospital’s psychiatric unit—which was not considered “in network,” and the family had to pay more than $10,000 in bills.
Officials say the government unit receives 12,500 consumer complaints, hotline calls, and emails each year. It turns down most of them, around 10,000 each year. Of the rest, it handles around 500 appeals and grievance cases, with success in more than half.
Every year, health insurance companies in Maryland rake in at least hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, while denying at least several million claims. The work of even a small department of analysts can identify, but not fix, the system’s destructive functioning.
National parks in the U.S. have had “free days” without entry fees for quite a while, for example, on national holidays like Memorial Day or Veterans Day. In December, the president announced an order to remove the free entry for two national holidays. Could you guess which holidays he removed?
It has to do with the color of one’s skin. No surprise there. In December, Trump issued a presidential order to make everyone pay the park fees on two federal holidays, Martin Luther King Day and on Juneteenth, which was a celebration of slaves in Texas after they heard the news of emancipation. Texas slave-owners had kept the news of the Emancipation Proclamation from them for more than a year.
Blatant racism! A “dog whistle” or signal or bone thrown to the racist section of the population that supports him at his worst. An insult directed against all of us who refuse to have history rewritten by a half-wit pig and his perverted posse.
This best-selling investigative book focuses on U.S. military Special Forces, whose base is in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Delta Force, who went recently into Venezuela, is one of these units. The book tells mainly of their role in Iraq and Afghanistan, and back home in and around Fort Bragg.
When troops are listed in a country like Iraq, Special Forces are not listed, as their presence is secret. Kills by Special Forces, contractors, and drones are not included in totals. The author reports from numerous sources that this classified secret status allowed them to operate as hit squads, often without warrant. In Afghanistan the local allies were often poppy growing warlords. During the American occupation, 90% of the world’s heroin was produced in Afghanistan. And in Iraq, stress and a high work load caused the military to prescribe amphetamines, or speed, to soldiers.
The book shows how all these factors caused soldiers to be drug addicted, high risk taking, edgy and brutal and to have grave difficulties in their everyday life. Over 100 soldiers have died at Fort Bragg, 44 in just one year, 2020. Some are said to be suicides with numerous gunshot wounds. No matter what the crime, they are rarely prosecuted for anything. They remain, to this day, a secret tool of the military for the blackest of ops.
This film is a dramatic recreation of a car of Palestinians in Gaza coming under Israeli attack. It was riddled with 335 bullets. A five-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, is hiding under the car and calls an emergency hotline as her family lays dying. The film is unfurled in the narrow confines of the Red Crescent call center, with actors playing the roles of the four emergency workers who were on the other end of the line—but Hind’s voice is her own. The actors respond to the real voice, trying to encourage and console Hind as the emergency workers had done, recreating the agony of their ultimate failure.
This film lays bare the horror and despair as now over 20,000 children have died in Gaza and the deaths continue to this day.
Politicians in Baltimore County voted in mid-December to give capitalists the biggest tax break in county history. It’s a 230-million-dollar property tax break lasting 50 years. The tax break will let companies take home more money by building and running what will be the first officially privately-operated port terminal in the U.S.
This deal is a scam. The port of Baltimore already has six public terminals, which handle more than 45 million tons of cargo on thousands of the biggest and most modern freight ships each year.
The proposed new terminal at TradePoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point will get most of the hundreds of ships it will serve by taking them away from these nearby existing terminals. This will simply transfer work from the city to the county, at great expense to both, and at enormous dredging cost to the federal Army Corps of Engineers. Cargo giant Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) and private equity financier BlackRock will then be able to exploit this transferred and privatized labor.
The region is already on the hook to pay for a new bridge. This tax break demolishes those plans!
Flashing their red National Nurses United scarves, 15,000 New York City nurses struck several hospitals of 3 major healthcare systems on January 12.
Every nurse in the country will be familiar with the nurses’ protest. Overwork, burnout, relentless mandatory overtime, do not make up for nurses who should be hired but are not.
Patients and nurses are endangered when too few nurses have to cover too many patients. In 2023, New York nurses also struck to bring up staffing levels. But hospital promises did not come true. The nurses are out again.
It’s clear that the quality of care in this country is declining, while healthcare industry profits soar. The fights of healthcare workers are truly every worker’s fight.
Nurses and case managers organized in Teamsters Local 322 at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan, have been on strike over 135 days. The 750 workers struck on September 1, Labor Day, 2025, when the hospital would not agree to a new contract. Instead, it began wage and benefit cuts, especially raising nurses’ own health insurance premiums.
Safe staffing levels are a big issue. During COVID, as in every hospital across the country, the nurses and other hospital staff worked to exhaustion under epidemic conditions. Nurses say that the hospital system wanted those hours and those patient loads to become their new normal!
A local tragedy revealed exactly the hospital’s attitude, compared to the nurses’. On September 28, a mass shooter killed 4 and wounded 8 at a nearby church. The striking emergency room nurses rushed from the picket line to the ER to volunteer help. Hospital management blocked them.
In the background is the fact that Henry Ford Health has long resisted unions. It has 13 system hospitals, but at only two are nurses organized. These two were part of the deal when Henry Ford Health absorbed the Genesys system in 2024. HFH is now spending huge amounts of money to pay temp nurses, trying to outlast the strikers, and doubtless trying to prevent the union idea from spreading to the rest of its hospitals.
Donald Trump recently claimed that the 1964 Civil Rights act resulted in “reverse discrimination.” Now, the chairperson of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Andrea Lucas, posted a video on X asking the question, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex?” and suggesting that if so, viewers should contact the EEOC as soon as possible. As an incentive she added, “You may have a claim to recover money under civil rights laws.”
This is just the latest effort by Trump, Vance and their racist cohorts to encourage and reinforce divisions based on race—on theories emerging from Jim Crow and beaten back by the civil rights movement and the black movement which followed. They’ve already gotten rid of many Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in the federal government and the military, and pressured universities and corporations to do the same or risk losing federal grant money.
The inequalities created by the capitalist system victimize white males in addition to black and brown people, women, and many other groups. But claims of “reverse discrimination” by the likes of Trump and Vance and their crew are an attempt to divert anger of workers away from the wealthy capitalist ruling-class bosses and toward members of their own class, the working class.
Holidays are supposed to be happy days, especially for children. But it’s not true for thousands of children living in Orange County, California, a recent survey found. Since children from low-income families heavily rely on their schools for meals, for them holidays mean more days of going hungry.
One out of five youths (from elementary school age to 24) surveyed, who come from families of various stages of homelessness, said they don’t get meals regularly. Not getting enough food not only hampers these children’s development; it also causes severe stress. Of those surveyed in Orange County, one out of three said they have mental problems.
From there, it’s a slippery slope. When hungry and emotionally vulnerable, children more easily fall prey to human traffickers who, in exchange for food, push the children into forced labor and prostitution, and often abuse them physically as well.
It’s not just California, of course. The results of the Orange County survey mirror the dire food situation that tens of millions of working-class families across the U.S. have been facing. Many of these families have members who have jobs—but they still can’t afford the cost of housing, food, and all the other necessities.
Capitalism puts profit first. It continues to destroy working class youth to feed the enormous profits of the wealthiest.
After kidnapping the president of Venezuela, and announcing plans to take Venezuela’s oil, Trump announced that the U.S. government wants Greenland and was going to take it over, by military force or by other means.
What do Trump’s threats toward Greenland really mean? It’s not clear yet. Is this just Trump being Trump with his usual bluster and his maniacal ego saying that he can run the whole world? Is this some negotiating tactic from the self-proclaimed great businessman (who declared bankruptcy six times)? Or does Trump really intend to use military force in Greenland, like he did in Venezuela?
Trump said that the U.S. government needs Greenland for “national security” reasons. But the U.S. government already has a military base in Greenland, and a 1951 treaty gives the U.S. government some broad rights to expand and have a much bigger military presence there.
But what the U.S. ruling class does not have yet is direct control over the abundance of natural resources in Greenland. Greenland is known to have oil, uranium and many rare earth minerals needed for AI, advanced weapons and modern technology. Most of Greenland is covered by glaciers and a thick sheet of ice. But with climate change overheating the earth, this ice is melting and making the natural resources allegedly more accessible.
Certainly, Trump’s rich friends are interested in Greenland’s natural resources. In Trump’s first term, billionaire Ron Lauder told Trump that the U.S. should buy Greenland and Trump has been fixated on Greenland ever since.
Lauder proceeded to buy business interests in Greenland. Lauder then gave over five million dollars to Trump’s election campaign and recently paid a million dollars to attend a special fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
Lauder is not the only billionaire interested in exploiting Greenland’s resources. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Altman and other capitalists have invested in KoBold Metals, which looks for critical minerals around the world and has its eye on Greenland.
There are other capitalists who are interested in Greenland because, as the Arctic ice melts, it opens up the possibility of year-round shipping through the “Northwest Passage” between Asia and Europe.
Greenland is currently within the Kingdom of Denmark and the Danish government and other NATO countries have objected to Trump’s threats to take Greenland. Trump responded by threatening tariffs against any country standing in his way.
The only people left out of the discussion about Greenland’s future are the people of Greenland themselves. Many of them have indicated they want independence from Denmark. And almost all of them have said that they don’t want to be ruled by Trump and the United States.
Over the holidays there was a surge of television ads from the Trump administration, trying to recruit people to work for ICE. These ads were part of a major advertising campaign that ICE called their “wartime recruitment” strategy, which also included ads on Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat.
ICE placed ads on particular podcasts and social media platforms that were aimed at recruiting people they think will be willing to carry out violent and aggressive actions against immigrants and dissenters. The ICE ads targeted former cops and military members and young men who they believe to be eager to use weapons.
Some of the ICE ads were barely-disguised racist dog whistles and other ads used coded white supremacist themes. The ads almost exclusively showed white men as ICE agents, often confronting people with black and brown skins.
The ads appeal to those who feel that immigrants are a problem. The ads demonize immigrants, claiming that “America has been invaded” and talk about “repelling foreign invaders.”
Some ads appeal to patriotism. Other ads use extreme nationalism, saying people have a “sacred duty” to “defend the homeland” and echo words used in Nazi Germany.
The ICE ads show exactly what kind of agents they want to have. The Trump administration wants people ready to use violence against immigrants, ready to use violence against anyone who could be an immigrant, ready to use violence against anyone who protests against ICE terrorism.
The ICE agent in Minneapolis who shot Renee Macklin Good three times at point-blank range and murdered her was not some kind of rogue or deviant ICE member. He is exactly the type of agent that ICE wants. This is how ICE trains their agents to act. That’s why the Trump administration is backing him up and justifying this murder.
The day after Renee Macklin Good’s murder in Minneapolis, two young Target workers, working drive-up, saw border patrol chief Greg Bovino and a dozen or more of his ICE goons rolling up on their store. The two workers both pulled out their phones, commenting that Bovino’s troops were blocking traffic and making clear they detested the ICE occupation. One of the officers then took down one of the young men in the entryway to the Target store and then bundled him into a dark SUV. The video of the incident was posted to Department of Homeland Security’s X account, alongside a caption: “This individual was arrested for assaulting federal law enforcement officers.”
The video shows clearly: the two use no violence against the officers, they neither “resist” nor “impede” them in their duties. It’s obvious that the officers’ “duty” in this case was to beat up and brutalize people in Minneapolis—part of a campaign of domestic state terrorism, in this case because these two workers aired an opinion.
One worker was driven several miles away and released in a Walmart parking lot, the other held briefly in a detention center. Both are citizens. As of this writing, the government has not tried to charge either with a crime.
Target workers in Minnesota and the region have called on the company to speak out against the government campaign. Target HR has only told workers “not to provoke” federal agents, and that they have access to any public areas of its stores. Management worries more about “its brand” than its workers. Target workers have been raising a stink, both about ICE and their management!
The Trump administration announced that it is ending the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somali immigrants as of March 17, 2026. TPS is granted to immigrants whose deportation would put them in danger because of the conditions in their country. There are only about 3,800 Somali people in the U.S. on TPS or applying for it, less than two percent of Somalis living in the U.S. Trump’s attack on them is significant because it is part of the Trump administration’s wider attack on Somalis—and immigrants in general.
It is an openly vile, racist attack. In early December, Trump called Somali immigrants in the U.S. “garbage” and threatened to send them “back where they came from.” Trump and his administration are also trying to portray Somalis as criminals—as it has been identified that a few dozen Somalis were involved in a federal childcare fraud case in Minnesota.
The majority of the 260,000 Somali people living in the U.S. came to the U.S. in the 1990s, when they were fleeing violence in their country—and that violence was largely driven by the intervention of foreign powers, above all the U.S. Somalia emerged as an independent country in the Horn of Africa, in 1960, in areas formerly colonized by Britain and Italy. This was the time period of the military rivalry between the U.S. and USSR known as the Cold War, when smaller countries armed by the two big powers fought regional wars. One of these proxy wars was that between Somalia and its neighbor, Ethiopia, in 1977. The defeat of Somalia in that war set the stage for the country’s descent into chaos and the eventual collapse of the Somali state in the early 1990s. The fight for control among various militias spelled disaster for the population, leading to mass displacement, famine, and a big wave of migration abroad, including into the U.S.
The Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, but U.S. intervention in the region continued. The Horn of Africa, near the oil-rich regions of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, as well as the trade routes of the Red Sea, was too important for U.S. imperialism to abandon. The U.S. was involved in the Somali civil war in the 1990s, including a direct military invasion (depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down), which greatly contributed to the violence and instability.
During the U.S. government’s professed “war on terror” in the 2000s, the U.S. sent massive amounts of money to militia leaders based in Mogadishu, the capital of now-defunct Somalia, under the pretext of fighting Islamist militants. This, however, did not save the brutal militias from being ousted by a popular uprising in 2006. The U.S. countered, by backing up the invasion of Mogadishu by neighboring Ethiopia the following year. All this led to another wave of mass migration out of Somalia.
The U.S. military and CIA continue their intervention in the region to this day, mainly in the form of drone attacks—with their constant toll of civilian deaths. So, Trump’s ridiculous claim that Somali immigrants have “destroyed our country” is so hypocritical—considering how the U.S.’s decades-long imperialist policy toward Somalia is responsible for the destruction of Somalia and uprooting of its people!
Trump’s open, racist attack on Somali people, along with other non-white immigrants, is aimed at dividing the U.S. working class. For American workers, falling into this trap can only mean a further weakening of the whole U.S. working class and a green light for U.S. imperialism in its march to more, bigger wars around the globe—for which American workers have always paid dearly.
The Permian Basin is a huge oil producing region encompassing parts of Texas and New Mexico. Roughly half of U.S. crude oil is produced there, mainly through fracking. Underground pressures around the oil wells in the Permian Basin are at critically high levels, causing them to burst and spew their toxic liquid.
Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, to name a few, all operate there to take their filthy share from this bonanza. To extract oil, these companies resort to hydraulic fracturing, a water-intensive process. Fracking involves injecting water laden with chemicals and sand into a horizontal well to crack open the oil-bearing rock and keep it open. The oil is recovered at the surface along with toxic water, which must be disposed of in special wells.
These oil giants generate as many as six barrels of toxic, salty water for every barrel of oil. Last year, about 6.6 million barrels per day were extracted from this oil field. That is, about 40 million barrels of salty, toxic water were brought to the surface every day. Then these companies put this water back underground.
The Permian Basin has been in operation for more than 100 years. Considering that the oil companies have resorted to hydraulic fracturing over the last 60 years, enormous amounts of toxic water have been injected underground. Because no more space is left underground, the increasing pressure from constant injection causes 100-foot-high geysers. Capping one geyser results in another nearby geyser, forcing workers to play whack-a-mole with these holes.
Texas ranchers now worry that this toxic water contaminates groundwater sources and imperils their cattle-grazing fields. “If it breaks loose in a zone where we’re drawing, say, stock water from, it could put you out of business overnight,” said Brad Gholson, a Texas rancher in Pecos.
Alarmingly, underground earth movements from such oil extraction operations cause hundreds of earthquakes, some with magnitudes over five, felt as far away as Dallas, El Paso, and San Antonio, damaging buildings.
Now, these oil companies are asking the Texas government to issue permits to dump the toxic water into the rivers. Imagine that.
After the U.S. military invaded Venezuela in early January and kidnapped the president and his wife, Trump promised future prosperity for the people of the country, with U.S. oil companies leading the way. “Very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, will go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” said Trump.
Oil production in Venezuela had plunged from 2.5 million barrels per day in 2015 to less than one million barrels per day in 2025, as the U.S. government strangled Venezuela’s economy by imposing a trade embargo. They did this to punish a government that dared to take some of the profits of the big oil companies in order to relieve some of the country’s worst poverty.
Now, despite the fact that the U.S. has ended the embargo, and the U.S. government is now in charge of the country, top U.S. oil executives have so far balked at the prospect of a return to producing crude oil in Venezuela. As Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, blurted out during a meeting with Trump: Venezuela is “uninvestable” under current conditions.
“Uninvestable”? Chevron Corp., the biggest U.S. oil company after ExxonMobil Corp., has been pumping oil in Venezuela for the last 25 years, fighting tooth and nail to remain in the country. Chevron wouldn’t be doing that unless it made big profits out of that production.
In reality, the U.S. oil executives are simply aiming to get the U.S. government to guarantee their profits by offering subsidies, such as loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank, which the U.S. already provides them in other “unstable” regions, such as Mozambique.
It isn’t just the major oil companies that seek to profit from oil production in Venezuela. U.S. oil refineries, such as Valero and Marathon Petroleum, can’t wait to get their hands on Venezuelan oil, despite the fact that today more crude oil is produced in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world.
Venezuela’s crude oil is very heavy and dirty—which also means that it is much cheaper than oil from other countries. So, almost 70% of all U.S. oil refineries were outfitted decades ago with Venezuela’s oil in mind. Those plants are concentrated on the Gulf Coast, where nine of the country’s ten largest refineries are located.
“Our refineries on the Gulf Coast are the best in the world in terms of refining this heavy crude and there’s been a shortage of heavy crude around the world so I think there will be tremendous demand and interest from private industry if given the space to do it,” Secretary of State Rubio said on ABC’s “This Week,” a day after the U.S. invasion.
That is why one of Trump’s first acts after invading Venezuela was to sign a contract to deliver 30 to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil stored on ships and on land and send it to U.S. oil refineries.
Despite the end of U.S. sanctions, the renewed U.S. domination of the Venezuelan oil industry won’t spell relief from the overwhelming impoverishment of the Venezuelan population. On the contrary, it marks a return to the years when foreign governments and companies ran Venezuela as a virtual colony. Very little might ever be invested to reconstruct the country, simply going to the United States capitalists, instead.
This article is translated from the January 16 issue, #2998 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Last November, a huge corruption scandal broke out in Ukraine, implicating the highest levels of government. More revelations keep on coming.
In November, two cabinet ministers implicated in plundering 100 million dollars from the energy sector were dismissed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s business associate who allegedly orchestrated the plundering fled abroad. For his involvement, Andrii Yermak was ousted as head of the Office of the President. He had also led Ukraine’s delegation in negotiations which deadlocked so badly they hardly merited the name of peace talks.
Looting from on high is all the more scandalous when millions of people go without electricity and heat in the dead of winter, due to Russian airstrikes on energy infrastructure—facilities which the country’s leaders had already hamstrung by money grabs.
Another sensitive case broke in the first days of this year. Corruption in the Ministry of Defense allowed millions of dollars to be pocketed from the sale of spare parts to the air force. One high-ranking official even embezzled over 20 million dollars. All this was facilitated by members of Zelenskyy’s political party, whose name “Serve the People” sounds like a bad joke.
Ukraine’s attorney general reported that a private company sold the military 70 million dollars of unusable mines. This is nothing new. Ukraine’s defense department estimates that state losses due to defective war supplies total more than 11 billion dollars!
It seems outrageous, but bureaucrats and private businesspeople inherited their expertise in plundering public resources and the state budget from the days of the Stalinist regime, in Ukraine as in Russia. Every day confirms this.
A former military commander in Lviv was caught red-handed embezzling defense funds. An armored brigade soldier disclosed the rates mid-level and junior officers charge to re-assign troops to cushy office jobs and posts far behind the front lines or even in presidential guard: between six and ten thousand dollars. These rates apply to ground troops, such as conscripts who couldn’t escape military recruitment center (CTR) agents who ruthlessly round up, mobilize, and extort men whether young or old, able-bodied or not.
These practices are so widely known that Zelenskyy’s new chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, quickly announced he would fight corruption by CTRs. Sure.
High-ranking officers benefit from this system. But while profiting from draining new recruits away from the front, they still have to grab enough bodies to hold the line. So CTRs accuse disabled and sick people and heads of large families of being “draft dodgers” and draft them. Local media can no longer ignore this, especially when the family of a conscript reports that he died before reaching his unit or was beaten to death in a CTR center. This happened on New Year’s Eve in Belgorod-Dniestrovski.
Some people’s hatred focuses on CTRs for treating “insubordinate” conscripts like enemies, traitors, and murderers. The Kyiv CTR just revealed that civilians killed four of its agents and attacked 272 others to prevent them from abducting more prey.
Meanwhile Zelenskyy presented two bills in Ukraine’s legislature to extend mobilization and the state of emergency for another 90 days. It’s the 18th extension since the war started. Legislators also want to abolish deferment of military service for men over 25 years old who start university or vocational training.
This war endlessly demands more cannon fodder. From the top to the bottom of the state apparatus, it offers opportunities to get rich at the expense of working-class people who are sent into slaughter. All in the name of defending the homeland.
This article is translated from the January 16 issue, #2998 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Reza Pahlavi is the son of the Iranian king (shah) who was deposed in 1979. Since the uprising started, he has been trying to sally forth from his gilded exile in the U.S. and present himself as an alternative to the ayatollahs’ regime. Media outlets show some protesters holding portraits of him and chanting, “Pahlavi, come back.”
Some of these images are doctored and spread by pro-American and pro-Israeli networks. While the shah undoubtedly has supporters, most of them are outside the country, in the diaspora. Maybe now some people see no other alternative to dictatorship and are pivoting to the solution he proposes. But until recently, he had very little support. For good reason.
The monarchy of the Pahlavi family was a regime serving imperialism. Reza Pahlavi’s father came to power during World War II, when the U.S. and Great Britain were dividing up oil resources. In 1953, liberal Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh tried to nationalize Iran’s oil. The CIA orchestrated a coup against him, with the shah’s support, and effectively neutralized nationalists who opposed U.S. interests. For several decades, the shah’s regime with its American-equipped army served as the U.S.’s primary policeman in the Middle East—even more than Israel.
The dynasty presented itself as modernist. But political opponents were hunted down, tortured by SAVAK, the political police notorious worldwide for its brutality, and “disappeared” without a trace. Activists from the numerous workers’, socialist, and communist organizations in Iran were among its principal victims. SAVAK terrorized the population to such an extent that it was unthinkable even to joke about the regime without fear of being turned in.
The regime modernized the country in the name of a “white revolution,” developing industry for the benefit of Western capitalists, harshly exploiting workers, and deepening inequality. In 1971, the shah celebrated the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian (Iranian) empire at the site of its ancient capital Persepolis. To welcome heads of state from around the world, he ordered fountains built, flowers flown in from the Netherlands, and 25,000 bottles of wine and more than 300 pounds of caviar carried to the middle of the desert. Poor people were evacuated tens of miles away, so the sight of their abject poverty would not disturb guests at the celebration.
The shah’s pro-American dictatorship ultimately turned the entire population against it, from workers and merchants to small farmers and the urban poor—as well as all political organizations, from leftist parties to supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In 1979, a massive uprising overthrew the monarchy. But the uprising was channeled by Khomeini’s men, with the complicity of imperialist leaders who helped him return from exile. Leaders of left-wing parties presented Khomeini to the masses as the man they should trust.
The man who presents himself today as an alternative is the heir to this deeply unequal monarchy which was a devoted agent of imperialism and ferocious toward its opponents. Reza Pahlavi grew up in exile in the U.S. and Switzerland. He never disavowed this heritage. He finds support among the far right worldwide. Trump cautiously keeps his distance. But Pahlavi is backed by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, butcher of Palestinians, who makes state resources available to promote him.
A return of the Pahlavi dynasty to power could only become another dictatorship, just as brutal against the exploited, and in the service of imperialism. People in Iran who stand against the ayatollahs and the shah know this well.
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of January 11, 2026.
Overnight January 2nd to the 3rd, hundreds of U.S. troops carried out a spectacular military operation to kidnap one man, the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. Heavily armed, they were backed up by 150 U.S. air force and naval planes, plus the biggest naval armada ever seen in the Caribbean.
Five days later, one woman was killed in Minneapolis, which had been invaded by 2,000 troops from ICE. Driving her car, Renee Nicole Good found herself caught in the middle of an ICE motorcade. Blocked in, she tried to back up and steer her way out. Her escape was cut short by a masked man who shot her at close range, putting three bullets in her head. The next day, ICE raided a high school, rousting students out of their classes, terrorizing kids.
Two different countries, two different situations, but no matter how different, the two are intimately linked by the U.S. military force involved in each of them.
The U.S. did not go to war in Venezuela over drugs—despite Trump’s excuses. The U.S. invaded Venezuela to put its hands on Venezuela’s oil. Trump even said it later the same day: “We will take Venezuela’s oil.” Twelve hours after the raid, he already had a contract signed for the delivery of 30 to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, which the U.S. government will sell.
This massive show of military might and of unbridled ambition was a demonstration not only to Venezuela’s people, but to the whole world. Trump’s U.S. intends to control all of Latin America, with its mineral wealth, rich agricultural land and productive facilities. Trump even mentioned Greenland—Greenland, clear up in the Arctic circle—“Greenland should be part of the United States.”
So, no, Trump did not send troops into Venezuela to root out drugs—no more than he sent ICE into American cities to get rid of “the worst of the worst,” as he calls the immigrants whom ICE deports. Of the people picked up, only 25% had any criminal record, and most of those were charged only with driving infractions.
No, the people hunted by ICE are not criminals, they are people working, just like the rest of us. The attack on immigrants today, and on anyone who helps them, is aimed at getting us used to the idea that gangs of heavily armed men will patrol our streets. Not to stop the criminals, but to intimidate the rest of us.
Trump uses inflammatory language to describe the immigrants. He sends thugs organized as ICE to control city streets. And he peddles videos of the spectacular confrontations that result, to show what his government is capable of doing.
This shows how far down the road to war we are, how close we are to another Armageddon—as brutal as the previous two world wars, just much more destructive and murderous.
Capitalism ultimately drives us to war. For over half a century, its economy has functioned with the threat of financial collapse hanging over everything. Those who control the wealth of this country cannot make enough profit from producing needed goods and services. They speculate instead. With each new bout of speculation, they pull their own economy closer to collapse.
It’s an old scenario, played out how many times already. And war is written into it, as its final chapter, the end product of capital’s competition for control of the world’s wealth.
Capitalism’s wars inevitably pit the working people of one country against workers of another. When capitalism moves to war, it tries to pit workers inside every country against each other, arbitrarily dividing us by ethnicity, race, age, sex, even by skills.
Our only protection against the vicious drive of capitalism is to fight to bring our own forces together, to oppose the crude jingoism with which capitalism would divide us. Some people are already doing that today. Others have to join in.
Hundreds of thousands of Maryland residents saw their gas and electric (BGE) bills go up by 25% from 2024 through 2025. BGE claims they have to repair and replace gas lines, some of which are 100 years old. Yes, they surely do need to do that with the money we have been paying them every year. Instead, for the past 30 years their real concern is funneling profits to their managers and shareholders.
While thousands in Maryland and millions around the country pay these bosses big salaries and dividends, people risk freezing in winter or boiling to death in summer. That is also thanks to Congress, which passes de-regulation to support ever higher profits for utility companies.
The federal government monitor overseeing the United Auto Workers (UAW) union has intervened in the union’s affairs and brought about a shakeup at the top of the union. The chief of staff for UAW president Shawn Fain has resigned, and Fain’s Communications Director was suspended and demoted. A few months earlier, the Compliance Director had also resigned.
An investigation and report by the monitor said that these staff members, along with Fain, had fabricated charges against UAW Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock and had orchestrated her removal from several assignments. The monitor also said that Fain and his top staff had not cooperated with his investigation and had deliberately deleted dozens of requested text messages.
In 2023, Fain won the direct election for UAW president in a very close run-off vote. It appeared that Fain took assignments away from Mock and Vice President Rich Boyer in order to consolidate his control over the union. Both Mock and Boyer had more votes and more of a base in the auto sector of the UAW than Fain. After the election, Fain brought in his top staff from outside the auto sector and mostly from outside the UAW.
Fain had campaigned for union president by promising transparency and a change from the heavy-handed bureaucracy of past union leadership. But the monitor’s report paints an ugly picture of dirty tricks coming from Fain and his top staff. It is similar to and in some cases worse than what was done by some past UAW leaders.
Some may celebrate the monitor’s action in this situation to undo some dirty dealings by Fain and his staff. In the past, others celebrated the monitor’s actions to bring about direct elections in the UAW, which helped Fain get elected. But the presence of the monitor and his authority over the activities of the UAW is a real danger to the workers and their union.
The federal government imposed the monitor onto the UAW in a consent decree in 2021, supposedly in response to corruption by some top UAW leaders. But the “corruption” cited by the government was minuscule in comparison to the corruption that goes on every day in the corporate world. The government’s investigation into the UAW was never about corruption. It was about the government being able to impose a consent decree on the UAW and hold the threat of punishment over union leaders and union members, if they propose a real fight against the corporations. In the monitor’s report, he did not take action against Fain, but he left open that possibility in the future. It was a clear threat to hang over Fain, who could be negotiating a new auto contract, which could possibly lead to a strike in 2028.
By imposing a similar consent decree on the Teamsters union, the federal government held a threat over the Teamsters union for 25 years. When Teamster president Ron Carey led a militant strike against UPS in 1997, the federal government used its hold over the Teamsters to remove Carey from office. The federal government’s consent decree with the UAW is supposed to expire in 2027. However, there is language in the consent decree that the government might use to extend the decree longer.
If there is corruption or wrongdoing by union leaders, UAW members can address it and make changes they want, not a monitor imposed by the government. If they don’t, they will simply get the union the government wants, representing the interests of the corporations, not the workers.
Recently, an “Unsung Hero” of the Civil Rights movement, Claudette Colvin, died at age 86.
On March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks, Colvin, then 15 years old, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama. She stayed put until she was dragged off the bus by police and arrested.
Colvin, and untold numbers of ordinary people like her, opened the door to the role that Rosa Parks played. Unsung, because after Colvin’s courageous stand, she lived her life as a caregiver and nurses’ aide, struggling as a single mother—like countless other black working-class women in this society.
The actions of people like the Claudette Colvins of the 1940s and 50s and 60s played pivotal roles in paving the way to push back some of the racist practices that were the norm in society at that time. In the court case that followed, challenging the city’s Jim Crow policies, Browder v. Gayle, Colvin was a principal witness. The lawyer in that case credited Colvin with helping to ignite the battle against segregation in the Deep South.
And in her words, during that court case that led to the landmark 1956 U.S. supreme court decision banning segregation in public transit as unconstitutional, Colvin, who was in high school at the time, said she felt that she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other, and “history had me glued to the seat.”
World problems? Possible war? Two ongoing wars not yet settled? No, Secretary of State Rubio had a more important issue to address: typefaces on correspondence. Typefaces are the style of the letters. For example, this typeface you are reading is Times New Roman, used in a number of major newspapers and in many books. Two years ago, the Biden administration changed the typeface that had been used for the previous 20 years to Calibri, which looks like this: abcd efgh ijkl. Rubio claims the typeface is “woke,” according to whatever the administration thinks that means, and so it is changing it from now on, back to Times New Roman. “Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” Mr. Rubio said.
As a leading typologist put it, “When typefaces become part of the political discourse, one should wonder if there are things we are distracted from that need more attention than picking a typeface.”
We could not have said it better.