The Trump administration said that it is pulling back on ICE deployment in Minneapolis. Trump’s lead enforcer Tom Homan said that ICE is leaving because it has “achieved the results we came here for” and added that the “surge” is over, BUT … he added that hundreds of officers “will continue” looking into “fraud allegations” and finished by saying “We’ll come back.”
The massive mobilizations in Minneapolis against ICE, in the face of guns, truncheons and gas, in the face of two recent murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, was courageous and impressive in scope and determination.
And it didn’t stop. Finally, even the powerful had to take notice. And Trump was advised to lower the temperature.
Homan was brought in and the hated, maskless commander Greg Bovino was ejected. It is no small thing. Trump and his reactionary band of co-conspirators and thugs had to bow to the negative public reaction. Trump’s claim of pulling back because they got what they wanted is bullshit, an attempt to cover the truth.
This determined opposition by the people of Minneapolis galvanized the public, was picked up by the media. It pushed the media to expose the lies of the Trump administration about the two murders and attracted people who wanted to do something to organize resistance in big cities and small towns across the country.
But Trump’s actions to pull back pressure on Minneapolis does not mean that things are going back to “normal,” the way they were before. Behind the scenes, the Trump administration continues its plans to impose a more repressive regime.
The federal government has announced that it intends to turn warehouses into ICE detention jails around the country. Kristi Noem brags about spaces to hold 100,000 people at a time. ICE is recruiting more agents and has more than doubled their forces in less than a year. The budget for ICE has grown from 6 billion dollars in 2016 to 85 billion dollars today. ICE’s budget alone is more than the whole military budget of all but 15 countries in the world.
Trump has postured, threatened and bullied his way through many situations. Will these prisons actually be built? Will these huge amounts of money being distributed to his cronies, large and small, result in such containment facilities? We don’t know for sure; it is enough to know they are building the capacity for it.
What is the purpose of this buildup of an internal military force? Can they really accomplish what they call “remigration” or first incarcerating, and then deporting, millions of workers who were not born in the U.S.?
Maybe, but not without tearing apart their own economy. Perhaps this buildup could be used against an even broader slice of the U.S. population if it begins to protest against the horrendous assault on their standard of living, or if and when the ruling class decides to expand war into a broader regional or world event. Maybe it’s to expand the incarceration system currently used primarily against black workers and for crimes against property. The prisons are already bursting.
The Democratic party leaders shut down funding for part of the government, saying that they are pushing back on what ICE is doing. But what they propose is not enough. It won’t get rid of ICE. That’s no surprise because the Democrats are part of a two-party system running a government that has always used repressive force against the population.
Stopping ICE and the repressive regime that is being prepared will not come from any politicians. It must come from the population.
The retreat by the Trump administration only happened because of the resistance started by the people of Minneapolis. People learn by mobilizing. They are learning that it is not enough to mobilize against ICE and the armed thugs sent against them. The problem is not just ICE, it is not just Trump and his corrupt administration, the problem is the whole capitalist system that Trump and ICE represent. That system is what needs to be gotten rid of.
A coffee shop in Chicago called A Cup of Joe posted a sign saying “No ICE Allowed.” The neighborhood has many immigrants, but also many Trump supporters. Some people wearing MAGA hats came to the coffee shop and told them to take down the sign. Others made threats against the coffee shop on social media. They said that on Saturday, February 7, they would hold a MAGA rally outside A Cup of Joe.
The owners and workers called for people in the neighborhood to come defend them. And the neighborhood turned out in big numbers! The line for the coffee shop stretched for a block and a half that day. No one showed up to protest the shop—or, they showed up and left when they saw so many supporters.
Trump recently posted a video to his Truth Social account depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes in a jungle.
The disgustingly racist video stayed up for almost 12 hours and only after Trump received a backlash even from members of his own party, did members of his staff take it down. This racist trope dates back to the days of Jim Crow and slavery, depicting black people as less than human.
When asked if he would apologize for posting it, Trump refused.
Lately, the Trump administration and ICE have mainly directed racist attacks on immigrants, portraying them as rapists, murderers, and widely involved with fraud. It’s the same way Trump and previous politicians have justified incarcerating millions of workers for decades, and disproportionately members of the black population.
As Maya Angelou said, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”
In early February, The Washington Post newspaper laid off more than 350 reporters, or almost half of its staff. A separate Metro news section, as well as the entire sports section and books section were eliminated. Foreign coverage was cut way back, with all but a few foreign bureaus closed, and the reporters were fired.
It was perhaps the biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation. But it wasn’t the first. The Post had been cutting staff since 2021. The Washington Post, one of the most important newspapers in the country, had been turned into a mere shell of itself in a matter of a few short years.
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the fourth richest billionaire in the world, whose personal wealth is estimated at 261 billion dollars, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. When Bezos bought the paper in 2013, he was hailed as a savior. In those first years, he shelled out the money to increase staff by almost 85%. The Post distinguished itself with coverage of Trump’s first term under the banner “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and subscriptions, readership and profits surged.
But Bezos was always in it for the money. For Bezos, The Washington Post was a valuable vehicle to increase his influence in the nation’s capital at a time when his businesses, including Amazon and the space company Blue Origin, sought fat government contracts and subsidies, while currying favorable treatment from government regulators.
When the political winds shifted in Trump’s favor in 2024, Bezos wrenched the Post’s editorial policy in a pro-MAGA direction. This caught the Post’s writers by surprise. Many left in protest. Others were forced out. Subscriptions and readership plunged, as did advertising revenue, which led to more staff cutbacks in a kind of death spiral.
These cuts were not at all unusual. Newspapers all throughout the country are being bought up by private-equity firms and investment groups that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. Nearly 3,500 newspapers have been shuttered and more than 270,000 newspaper jobs have been cut since 2005.
For Bezos, gutting The Washington Post corresponds with his ongoing campaign to curry favor with Trump. Bezos donated one million dollars toward Trump’s inauguration, and sat on the dais with other tech titans when Trump was sworn in. Amazon came through with a big donation to help finance the gutting of the White House East Wing and the construction of Trump’s gaudy new ballroom. And Bezos just paid 75 million dollars to a company controlled by Melania Trump for a documentary that recently premiered in theaters and will soon be shown on Prime.
Bezos didn’t utter a peep of protest when Trump began his unprecedented attacks on the press, including against Bezos’ own newspaper, where the FBI recently searched the home of a journalist and seized her phone, computer and all her files.
Bezos is just one of several pro-Trump oligarchs who now control key sections of the U.S. media. In addition to Musk’s X, which has become a platform for rampant bad information, the Ellison family now owns CBS. Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world, is ardently pro-Trump, and CBS News has donned the kid gloves in its Trump coverage. Into that mix throw TikTok, which is now under the control of Ellison and other Trump allies. Meanwhile, Ellison’s company is fighting to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN.
So, news coverage, as limited and warped as it had been, is being degraded, if not outright destroyed by the owners, in order to further their own profit, influence and power.
None of this is new or unique. As the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wrote in the early part of the last century, “All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake ‘public opinion’ for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”
Those words ring truer today than ever!
Last month, federal officers arrested five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, when they arrived home from school in Minnesota. And then, these so-called “officers” shipped them to be imprisoned at a private prison run by a company, CoreCivic, at its South Texas Dilley facility. President Obama’s government opened this “immigration jail” for families of workers, including their children, in 2014.
The Dilley facility operators routinely deny medical treatment to children they imprison, and don’t provide access to drinkable water, child-friendly foods, or hygiene supplies. They subject kids to sleep deprivation, according to a court filing submitted by children’s rights groups last year. There is currently a measles outbreak at this jail.
In short, this so-called facility is nothing but a torture and horror chamber for the jailed, their little children, and even babies.
CoreCivic currently owns and operates 45 such prisons in the U.S. to profit. This company touts its success. “I have worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company,” CoreCivic’s then-CEO Hininger said on an earnings call last year.
The two largest for-profit prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic, through their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), generated more than 2 billion dollars in revenue.
ICE currently imprisons more than 70,000 people, and the majority of them are incarcerated in private prisons. Within the last year, the majority of the 38 people who have died under ICE custody died in for-profit facilities.
Capitalism extracts profit by imprisoning workers and their children under horrible conditions.
Miramar Martinez was shot five times last October by Charles Exum, a Border Patrol agent, in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood. Martinez survived her wounds and for the last month has been speaking out about her case. Exum and fellow agents were part of Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” which terrorized immigrants for months. At the time, agents claimed that Martinez boxed their car in, then rammed them with her own car.
Martinez was charged with assault and impeding, but those charges were quickly dropped. Martinez’s lawyer then worked to get the government’s evidence in the case released—he and Martinez argued in court and before Congress that the evidence had new relevance, in the wake of the ICE shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Martinez also wants to clear her name, as the Trump administration has continued to call her a “domestic terrorist,” even after dropping the charges against her.
The evidence—video footage from inside the agents’ vehicle—shows that what they claimed was a pack of lies. The video shows Exum announcing he is going to hit her car, saying “we’re going to make contact,” then swerving to hit it. The agents claimed in statements to be “boxed in” by three other cars in front of them, and submitted a drawing to support their statement. The video does not show any cars ahead of the agents. After Exum swerves into Martinez, agents in the car cry out, “we’ve been struck, we’ve been struck!”
Exum claimed he shot through Martinez’s front windshield, because she was trying to run him down. Photos of Martinez’s vehicle show the shots were fired through her passenger side window and the rear of her car—because she was trying to get away.
Exum later texted friends, bragging about the shooting. Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino sent a congratulatory email to Exum. Cops have been known to lie, particularly when it comes to shootings—in the case of these ICE shootings, agents’ lies have come fast and furious.
San Francisco school workers have ended their strike, which began on Monday, February 9 and shut down all of the district’s 120 schools for a week. The tentative agreement reached by union and school district negotiators still has to be ratified by the workers.
The agreement provides pay raises and, starting in 2027, full-family health insurance premiums. But the future is still uncertain for San Francisco school workers. The raises, 8.5% over two years for the lower-paid, non-teaching staff, and 5% over two years for teachers, will still leave California’s highly expensive Bay Area unaffordable for them. And the prospect of layoffs and school closures, which the district has been threatening, is still hanging over their heads.
District officials blame the ongoing crisis on cuts in government funding. Whatever extra federal funds school districts got during the COVID pandemic have expired, they say, and they also point to the drop in enrollment since the pandemic, which has caused state funding to decrease as well.
School districts across the U.S. have been seeing a decline in enrollment. At least in part, this is a consequence of policies school boards adopted during the pandemic. They not only shut down the schools, but also stopped hiring and training teachers and other school workers. So, when in-person education started again, schools were even more overcrowded, and even more in disrepair, than before—which caused many parents to look into alternatives, such as home schooling.
The crisis in education is not universal. Schools in well-to-do areas have in fact been thriving with small class sizes and state-of-the art facilities—thanks to higher tax income and donations from parents. But in working-class neighborhoods, classrooms with more than 40 students and decrepit buildings are the order of the day.
School workers have been trying to fight back, and not just in San Francisco. Teachers in Richmond, California, near San Francisco, went on strike in December. In Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, teachers have voted to authorize strikes.
In San Francisco, many parents expressed support for the strikers and joined the picket lines, despite the difficulty of arranging day care for their children during school closures. This shows that these struggles have the potential to spread to other workplaces and sectors of the economy. If that happens, working people can begin to push back on the authorities’ decades-long, severe underfunding of working-class schools.
Pregnant women in working class communities in the U.S. are at risk of dying in pregnancy and childbirth. The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate of all developed countries. And levels of maternal death are three times higher for black women. Eighty percent of maternal deaths in recent years were preventable. And the real numbers are even higher because the data does not correctly capture statistics for after-birth deaths of moms. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 50% and more of maternal deaths occur seven days to one year after delivery.
What does this say about the wealthiest, most technologically advanced country in the world?
The delivery of a healthy baby depends on many factors. First and foremost, it depends on the health of the mother. In the U.S., the lack of health care generally and the lack of maternal care, specifically, contribute to difficult deliveries. The continuing economic crisis with its high prices and lack of good food result in obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes, to name a few risk factors. Many pregnant women never see doctors until they are in crisis. Work and/or caregiving for others comes first, so they don’t have time.
In the most recent period, as capitalism cannibalizes infrastructure for profit, hospitals and clinics have been increasingly unavailable to pregnant women. Many women have no medical monitoring during pregnancy. Health care of any kind is unavailable and unaffordable.
But the history of birthing in the U.S. has not always been so, and in its history lie important lessons to be learned to take us to a safer place.
In the U.S., like every other place in the world, women play a major role in assisting childbirth. Communities built systems of support by selecting out women who were trusted to guide safe and healthy deliveries. Doctors were eventually included in this important profession, but they were not primary. These women, called midwives or doulas, provided services up until around 1910 when they were displaced by hospital systems.
As the hospitals took over birthing, laws were passed which placed childbirth under a doctor’s care. Midwives were banned from the delivery rooms.
While this transition to hospital care greatly reduced mortality, the birthing environment moved from being one of support both physical and emotional in the home with loved ones, to the sterile environment of a hospital. Twilight sleep was introduced, which removed a woman from any active role in birthing. And finally, increasingly, natural birthing was replaced by planned events called C-sections, where the baby is taken out of the mother through abdominal incision.
Many of these changes instituted were based on racism and misogyny, a disdain of women. Hospitalization treated pregnancy as illness, and subjected women to the increased negative attitudes of the population at large. One prominent obstetrician called pregnancy and childbirth dangerous and evil. He promoted the use of forceps, sedatives, ether, and argued that midwives be ejected from the process. Laws passed in 1921 finally barred midwives from practicing almost completely. For example 150 midwives were eliminated in Alabama alone, overnight.
Nurse-midwifery, a system instituted under Mary Breckenridge, while attempting to retain midwives, reflected racist values. It demanded education of midwives and then refused to allow black women to be educated. These combined attacks broke the tradition of midwifery, resulting in the numbers of Hispanic and black midwives dropping to 5%.
It is important to have emergency rooms and operating rooms available or close by birthing centers. Society should use the best of medicine and technology available to support childbirth. But birthing as it was transferred to hospitals fell under the effects of capitalism and its profit orientation. It was not primarily organized around supplying the best care for pregnant mothers. It was organized like capitalism’s other assembly lines: to cut corners and staffing to increase profits.
Giving birth is not a process that is designed to be digitalized and sped up. In fact, the hospital corporations found ways to change the birthing process to accord with their profit system.
The new process severed women from control of their own bodies and undercut assisted natural child delivery. It added killing stress at all levels. The system was less empathetic and less responsive to women’s pain and their wishes. Especially in the early 1900s, racist and chauvinist actions and remarks, supplemented by anti-female attitudes, resulted in harmful, dehumanized physical processes. These social attitudes are well documented in the experiences of black women being badly treated in hospitals.
Finally, it resulted in the practice of making C-Section, Caesarean Section, a major surgery, routine for well and high-risk mothers alike. This introduced risk and complications for mothers. Decisions to do so were often made during labor when patience, watchful waiting, positioning and movement comfort measures, rest and calm could have resulted in safer, more natural childbirth. The rate of Caesarean Section surgeries has reached around 33% of all live births. The system seems to be saying, “Heaven forbid a pregnancy delivery would be relaxed and natural. Where is the money in that?”
And so, women who bring the new generations into this world are put in harm’s way by capitalism, as are their babies.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Women’s Movement and the Black Movement put maternal rights in the spotlight. They advanced slogans like “Our Bodies, Our Selves,” and protests against discrimination against women. Birth centers and midwifery programs followed in some more progressive hospital systems. And newly enacted Medicaid funding gave a financial support for birthing venues that provided for more natural delivery.
These more human approaches to birthing resulted in traditional midwifery being combined with hospital services in some large hospitals like those in New York City. Women were able to deliver babies in more comfortable home-like areas within the hospitals. Special areas called birthing centers were established. This approach allowed women not to be rushed and badgered and to experience a more comfortable delivery assisted by midwives and family and friends. If emergency services were needed, they were available immediately.
The combination of hospital care and midwifery is practiced today in France and other European nations, with up to 75% of births assisted by midwives.
Why not here in the U.S.?
Pregnant women are running out of places to give birth. Less than 42% of rural hospitals nationwide offer labor and delivery services. Over 120 rural hospitals have halted maternity delivery since 2020. But it isn’t limited to rural hospitals.
The number of closures, including urban hospitals, is estimated at 500 since the year 2000. From 2010 to 2022, 399 maternity care units across the U.S. closed. In Los Angeles County, 26,500 babies were born in emergency rooms between 2016 and 2023!
Beyond the closing of maternal birthing units comes the closing of hospitals altogether. And while some authorities cite the high cost of maintaining round-the-clock staffing and increasing expenses, this shearing off of maternal care units and centers is a deliberate choice being made by the medical industry and Wall Street profiteers to cut any and every service, vital or not, that is lower on the profit charts and to replace it with more profitable services.
While early application of hospital services greatly reduced maternal mortality, in the early 2000s, it was on the rise again.
Today, working-class people are seeing the struts of their world pulled out from under them. Inflation is causing us to lose buying power, high prices forcing us out of our homes and apartments. Jobs are disappearing, putting a lie to the politicians’ promises. Health care? Most cannot afford it. When it comes to maternal care, working women mostly don’t have it and don’t have the means to take care of themselves during pregnancy. Almost 40% of births require Medicaid funding (and no, not just for the jobless). Medicaid pays 8,732 dollars less than private insurance per delivery.
What can we do to protect ourselves and our babies? Of course, we have to fight for better services and to protect ourselves and each other best we can under the current system. But individual mothers have little defense against the attacks of the system.
It is unbelievable that authorities are telling women in rural settings to catch a ride to a facility in a faraway town or city because the local hospital just closed its doors to pregnancy. Emergency rooms are overflowing. How long can this go on?
The capitalists have billions for what the elite upper class wants. Trillions for war. One war machine could fund millions of hospital visits and new births. Money has to be reallocated to supporting life, not war. But …
Capitalism is not going to release its deadly grip on our bodies and our babies. Profit is their bottom line.
The capitalists will not give up their power or profit voluntarily. This system is so corrupt, so decrepit, so anti-life! We will have to knock their system out of the way, and build a new one that serves the interests of workers and the population.
Because, for as long as profit comes before human life, we are caught in a downhill slide all the way to the bottom.
Janell Green Smith died January 1, 2026, of complications from her first pregnancy, the day after she had worked 12 hours as a certified nurse-midwife, delivering seven babies. She was 31 years old and beloved in her black community in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She was a mainstay at her job at Prisma Health Greenville Midwifery Care.
The president of The American College of Nurse Midwives, Jessica Brumley, pointed out on the PBS Newshour that black women die three times more frequently in pregnancy than white women in the U.S. As Brumley put it, black women are “more likely to [be forced to] seek care in systems of care that are not high quality.… The chronic stress, the generations of chronic stress, the different exposures to racism in this country, all of that adds and creates what is known as weathering, right? And so it makes it more difficult to manage these conditions in individuals who have had these exposures.”
We live with a healthcare system that is designed to create such outcomes, as Brumley said. “And when we think about historically where our system has come from, it came from centering childbirth into the hospital, away from the community, away from the people who cared for us, right, our community-based midwives, Black granny midwives, and that nurturing environment into an environment that wasn’t welcoming and still isn’t often very welcoming for Black women in our country.”
Brumley emphasized that when one part of the population receives poorer health care, it drags down the health care for the entire population. In the U.S. a person with more income has better health insurance, access to better hospitals, and better health outcomes. She concluded, “If we can design a system where Black women have the best outcomes, everyone else will have better outcome too, because even though Black women have some of the worst outcomes in the U.S., the U.S. has some of the worst maternal health outcomes in the world.”
Janell Smith dedicated her life to best serving those who, like her, were shut out of an advanced care system.
Weeks-long stretches of intensely heavy rain in southern Africa so far this year have caused enormous damage. Some parts of Mozambique saw 10 inches of rain fall in a day. Entire villages of sun-dried brick homes in Mozambique, South Africa, Malawi, Eswatini, and Madagascar were submerged, with people stuck in trees and on the tops of buildings.
Far more than a million people were affected, more than 400,000 cattle, goats, and poultry drowned, and thousands of miles of roadway and bridges were washed away. Cholera spread as people who can’t afford five cents for a five gallon jug of clean water drank, cooked, and washed with river water contaminated with human and animal waste. Crocodiles drifting in the bloated rivers have killed a number of people.
Experts say the world’s increasingly hotter and wetter climate caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels amplifies the effects of this year’s La Niña weather pattern. This event happens once or twice each decade, when trans-ocean trade winds become stronger for a number of months for complex and incompletely known reasons, heating up the southern hemisphere. This can lead to more extreme rainstorms there. But warmer and wetter air ratchets up the impact. This year’s rainy season floods are the worst in decades.
The great powers have extracted fortunes in mineral and agricultural wealth from southern Africa. Why do people there not have five cents to buy clean water? It’s the legacy of the same capitalist system which is scalding the planet.
This article is translated from the February 13 issue, #3002 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
A big conference on mining in Africa began in Cape Town, South Africa on February 9. Around 10,000 attendees representing mining corporations and African governments are competing to strip the continent’s population of the wealth that could have lifted Africans out of poverty.
The International Energy Agency expects global demand for minerals to quadruple by 2040, with prices rising accordingly. The proliferation of digital technology and giant data centers and the promised phasing out of fossil fuels will fuel this growth. This technological revolution alone would suffice to stoke rivalry for access to mineral resources. But there is also the global economic war raging between the U.S., China, and Europe. Every government and mining company is more determined than ever to lock in its supplies.
In this context, the African continent is the focus of intense attention. Even now, a big part of global mineral production is extracted in Africa. South Africa and Gabon dominate the manganese market. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) produces 75% of the world’s cobalt. Madagascar and Mozambique dominate the graphite market. But most of all, Africa’s untapped reserves are impressive. Taken as a whole, they amount to a third of the world’s reserves. Many mines could one day open in areas where political insecurity now delays industrial exploitation. Currently some veins of ore are exploited only by self-employed miners. The almost total lack of freight transportation makes it prohibitively expensive to ship ore to processing plants and ports. Motorcycle couriers playing cat and mouse with highway robbers make up somewhat for the lack of trains. But what is not profitable today could become profitable tomorrow if demand and prices rise.
China owns a large share of Africa’s mines, but the U.S., locked in a power struggle with China, leads the charge for minerals. Under U.S. auspices, a peace agreement was signed in Washington in December between the DRC and Rwanda. This let Trump boast that the U.S. is getting a large share of Congo’s mining rights. The U.S. and Europe are also financing a rail and highway corridor between the mining city of Lubumbashi in the DRC, Zambia’s “copper belt,” and Angola’s port Lobito.
African government representatives attending the conference will try to secure a few crumbs for themselves by driving up prices. Of course higher sales will not benefit ordinary people, but will inflate the wealth of politicians. In the DRC, being president or even governor of a mining province like Katanga means the chance to build a financial empire in the midst of one of the world’s poorest populations.
Commentators like to talk about the “resource curse.” In fact, they mean the curse of imperialism.
This article is translated from the February 13 issue, #3002 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
To justify continuing the war in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounces Hamas’ use of the bodies of deceased Israelis as bargaining chips. But Israel’s government also engages in this sordid practice and on a much larger scale.
Netanyahu’s own government admits that the war in Gaza has claimed more than 70,000 lives. But no one knows how many Palestinians have disappeared under the rubble, or how many bodies the Israeli army holds. Nearly 360 mostly unrecognizable Palestinian corpses were handed over as part of the trades arranged with Hamas in exchange for the release of hostages. Another 54 bodies were transferred to Gaza on February 4, along with 60 crates holding the remains of an undetermined number of Palestinians.
This practice of refusing to return the remains of Palestinians to their families was inherited from the British colonial authorities and has persisted since the creation of the State of Israel. In 1948, Zionist militias carried out massacres in Arab villages to terrorize the inhabitants and force them to flee. Bodies were buried in mass graves which are still being discovered today during construction of beachfront parking lots and tourist resorts. After 1948, Israeli authorities created “enemy dead cemeteries” in closed military zones for burials of Palestinians killed by the army. Their graves are marked only by numbers.
In 2017, the government institutionalized these practices by officially decreeing that the bodies of Palestinians killed “during terrorist operations” or who died in prison would be preserved for use as bargaining chips. Bodies were kept in freezers at Israel’s National Forensic Medicine Center. Some were returned to their families under strict conditions, with no option to examine them before burial. According to a Palestinian NGO, Israel still holds 672 bodies of Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
This policy reflects the violence employed by Israeli leaders for the past 80 years to deprive Palestinians of their land, property, and rights. Since its inception, Israel has waged a perpetual war against the Palestinians with the more or less overt complicity of major powers, first of all the U.S. Even today, after nearly three years of mass slaughter in Gaza, most Western governments remain silent in condemning Israeli state terrorism and the way it holds Palestinians hostage, dead or alive.
This article is translated from the February 13 issue, #3002 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s troops signed a ceasefire agreement with the predominantly Kurdish Democratic Forces (SDF) on January 30. But tensions remain high in northeastern Syria (Rojava) where the siege of Kurdish cities Kobane and Hassakeh continues.
The SDF was created in October 2015 to formalize the alliance between Kurdish militias in Syria linked to Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and some local Arab tribes. The SDF made up the bulk of the ground troops supported by the U.S. and the Western coalition to fight the Islamic State (ISIS), which had covered a vast territory straddling Syria and Iraq. SDF fighters suffered the heaviest losses in the fight to recapture this territory. ISIS had barely been defeated in 2019 and its once capital Raqqa retaken when the U.S. abruptly abandoned the SDF. This let the Turkish army seize a large swath of territory along the Turkish border, at the cost of thousands of lives, after relentlessly pursuing Kurdish and particularly PKK fighters.
The SDF was only able to maintain power in Rojava thanks to an agreement with Syrian then-President and dictator Bashar al-Assad and Arab tribes living on the banks of the Euphrates River, with U.S. approval. This allowed SDF leaders to control border crossings and gas and oil fields in the region—meaning revenue, trafficking, and corruption.
The SDF’s governance of Rojava let the Kurds live in relative security despite being deprived of national rights and repressed in neighboring countries where they form significant minorities. Unlike other military apparatuses and warlords that have established themselves over the years amidst the chaos left by numerous American military interventions in the Middle East, the SDF presents itself as secular and progressive. Notably, the SDF has female combat troops. But in exchange for this very precarious position, the SDF had to perform the most thankless tasks on behalf of imperialism.
Until recently, the SDF administered huge camps for former jihadist prisoners and their families. Tens of thousands of people are still being held in about 10 camps—former fighters, but also women and children of Syrian, Iraqi, French, German, and British nationality. Roj and al-Hol camps alone hold more than 28,000 civilians, including 8,500 foreigners, in appalling conditions. Children are born and raised in these camps. Most European countries refuse to repatriate their citizens, even minors, who joined ISIS whether willingly or by force. These families still languish in Rojava.
Supported by Turkey and the U.S., the recapture of Rojava by recently defrocked jihadist al-Sharaa’s troops raises the question of the prisoners’ future. The U.S. plans to transfer to Iraq 7,000 of those it considers the most dangerous, without regard for the fate of other prisoners or the consequences in an Iraq devastated by decades of American wars.
As for Syria’s Kurdish population, they are once again victims of the boundless cynicism of imperialist leaders who trample on the rights of peoples while manipulating them when it suits their purposes. But the Kurds also suffer the consequences of the policies of their own leaders, who are willing to offer their services to anyone who helps them control territory.
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of February 8, 2026.
Over 70,000 manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have been cut since last spring.
When Trump came to office, he claimed he was going to increase manufacturing jobs by bringing them back from other countries. In April, he imposed big tariff increases on foreign products. Since then, the U.S. government has collected on average about 30 billion dollars per month.
But those protectionist measures didn’t stop the terrible job losses in this country.
That’s because the job losses are not caused by foreign competition. “Free trade,” “China,” and “Mexico” have been blamed for the huge loss in manufacturing jobs for many, many decades. But it was always a cover story that U.S. companies used to impose ever harsher sacrifices on the workforce, especially by increasing the pace of work so that fewer workers do ever more work. Over the last year, for example, the very same companies cutting jobs were actually INCREASING production in this country by over three percent.
The job cuts in manufacturing are a part of a new wave of layoffs hitting U.S. workers right in the face. At the end of January, Amazon announced that it would lay off an additional 16,000 corporate employees after laying off 14,000 workers in the fall. UPS said it plans to slash 30,000 jobs this year, on top of 48,000 job cuts last year.
Other major companies, such as Tyson Foods, HP, Intel, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, and Microsoft, also announced mass layoffs.
Some companies blame the introduction of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robots for eliminating jobs. Other companies claim they are eliminating jobs because they supposedly hired too many people after the pandemic. In other words, employers try to pretend that it isn’t their fault, they have no choice but to destroy the livelihoods of countless thousands of people at one stroke.
No choice? Year after year, U.S. companies have been making record profits, not just in dollar terms, but as a share of the economy. They enrich their biggest shareholders, making millionaires into billionaires. And they routinely reward top executives with tens of millions of dollars a year in compensation, if not more.
And no one blinks an eye. Because the capitalist economy is about corporations accumulating ever higher profits, making the rich even richer. It’s their economy, their society, and they make the rules.
But it is the working population which actually does the work. We produce everything and make everything run. While the capitalist billionaires have so much money, they don’t know what to do with it all. They buy ever bigger and more costly yachts, private jets and mansions. They speculate and gamble with it, pushing up speculative markets, from stocks and bonds to real estate, crypto and gold.
But it is the working class which makes the economy run. The entire society could easily function a lot better if it wasn’t run for ever higher profits and ever greater enrichment of a tiny minority.
So, the working class will have to find a way to grab the control of the economy from the capitalist billionaires by expropriating their wealth and overthrowing this government that completely serves the interests of the capitalist billionaires.
Together, working people can decide what to produce, how to produce it and in what quantity. Workers could easily eliminate the scourge of unemployment by distributing the work among all. Workers can put an end to the destructive competition between workers in different countries by cooperating with workers in other countries so that progress made by workers in one country benefits workers in the other countries.
This is not an impossible dream. The material and technological means are already there, within our reach.
This documentary follows an investigation into the violent death of an immigrant, Hernández Rojas, at the border in the custody of the Border Patrol in 2010. Of course, the agents said he violently resisted and they had to defend themselves. But after years of agitation by the family and the community and the efforts of a reporter, a witness found the courage to come forward with a video of the entire event. Rojas didn’t resist; he was handcuffed, lying on the ground, and was brutally beaten to death.
The publicity around this caused international scrutiny, and gave other families courage to come forward with their stories. And the investigation uncovered an illegal secret unit within the Border Patrol that investigated any “critical incidents,” and forbade any local police to do their own investigating, all to mitigate “liability.” This system continues today.
The U.S. government has allocated approximately 10 billion dollars per year to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since 2020. In 2025, the Trump government, under the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” increased this budget to 29 billion dollars.
Much of this huge sum of ICE money goes to U.S. government contractors.
For comparison, ICE’s current budget exceeds Turkey’s military budget of 27.3 billion dollars. With its 900,000 troops, including reserves, and sophisticated killing machines, Turkey has the largest military in NATO after the U.S. Turkey’s army currently wages a very brutal war against Kurds and Syrians.
Leading American corporations, including Amazon, Palantir, Deloitte, and private prison giants GEO Group and CoreCivic, raked in over 22 billion dollars from contracts with ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) last year.
The federal government contracted Fisher Sand & Gravel to build portions of a wall along the southern U.S. border. This company has earned the most from Customs and Border Patrol contracts, receiving more than 6 billion dollars since July. This is a wall against workers.
Another large beneficiary of ICE contracts has been CSI Aviation, a broker of charter flights for the federal government, which has secured more than 1.2 billion dollars in revenues since Trump returned to office last January.
So, ICE is now ready for a very cruel war against workers in the U.S. All these U.S. companies will pocket more money from the taxes we pay.
Do not forget who is profiting from cruelty and human suffering to the tune of billions!
The Epstein files have opened a window on this country’s ruling class.
Trump, the Clintons, Elon Musk, Google founder Sergey Brin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Steve Bannon, a sultan of Dubai, British royal family members, even professors like Lawrence Krauss and Noam Chomsky—all cultivated personal ties with Jeffrey Epstein. Leading executives at the biggest banks show up: J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America. So do universities like Harvard.
The files released so far show how these people make money off of each other, exchanging tips and making deals—and also ripping each other off left and right. They go to the same parties. They compete by showing off who can host the most lavish event at their estate or private island. And they protect each other: according to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump told her that he didn’t want to release all the Epstein files because “My friends will get hurt.”
Not all of them participated in Epstein’s abuse of teenage girls. But most continued their associations with him after he was convicted of sex trafficking minors in 2008. After all, who among them would be surprised to see women treated as sex objects—including teenagers? Epstein got his big fortune working for Les Wexner, the man who built Victoria’s Secret by selling sex. His private jet was called The Lolita Express, after the famous novel about an underage girl. He made little effort to hide his attitude toward women—and used pimping as one tool among many to hold together his network of wealthy friends.
The billionaires who rule the world are used to buying everything—the labor of workers, whole corporations, judges, government officials. Why not women, even if they are minors?
Of course, these disgusting attitudes trickle down into the rest of society.
But the working class majority has a different interest. In every factory, hospital, warehouse, restaurant, school, and other workplace, workers cooperate to make society run. We can cooperate on an even bigger scale to overthrow this parasitic ruling class that treats all of us as tools to satisfy their wants!
Ammunition made in a U.S. Army-owned factory is being sold commercially and is used by cartels in Mexico to terrorize and kill civilians and make war with Mexican police.
This ammunition includes cigar-sized.50-caliber armor-piercing rounds capable of destroying tanks and helicopters, designed for the U.S. military. They are made at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant outside Kansas City, Missouri. It’s the largest small-arms manufacturing plant in the world, capable of producing almost two billion rounds a year, employing 2,000 workers. The plant is owned by the Army but since 1941 has been operated by private contractors including Remington, Winchester, ATK, and Northrop Grumman.
The plant’s injury rate remains almost four times higher than the industry average, with fatal explosions in 1981, 1990, 1991, 2011, and 2017. Layoffs and wage cuts led workers to organize a union over a decade ago. It’s also a Superfund site with 73 burn pits, lagoons, and other areas contaminated with heavy metals and other toxic chemicals.
When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the U.S. military promised a “peace dividend.” In part this would come from cutting military costs by letting military-owned factories sell munitions commercially to civilians. The contractor pays the military five percent of commercial sales revenue. It’s a “win-win situation,” we are told.
Ammunition is big money. The plant now sells half its daily production of four million rounds to civilians through 16 online retailers, earning the Army between 30 and 50 million dollars a year. Bullet prices more than doubled from 2000 to 2020.
Mexican officials say that more than three quarters of the bullets used in crimes in Mexico come from the U.S. This is not a question of anyone’s right to protect their family. The world’s biggest military is helping private companies profit from arming violent criminals.
On the night of February 10, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that El Paso airspace would be closed for 10 days. This would have canceled all flights in and out of this city of 700,000 people.
The day before, the Border Patrol had used a new laser weapon that it had been given by the military. Luckily no planes were nearby, but there had been insufficient tests to see how this laser would affect commercial planes flying nearby—and it was pretty reasonable to think that firing a laser next to an airplane might put passengers in danger!
For months, the FAA had been asking the military to make sure the weapon was safe before firing it. They were ignored. After it was used, the FAA asked the border patrol and military not to fire it again until more tests could be carried out. The military insisted they had the right to use it whenever they wanted. So the FAA chief, responsible for the safety of airline passengers, felt he had to act.
In the end, the FAA agreed to reopen El Paso airspace the next morning, and the new lasers were taken out of commission—for the time being.
What was the Border Patrol in such a rush to shoot down? They claimed at first it was a drone operated by a Mexican cartel bringing drugs into the U.S. But it turned out to be … a party balloon.
You can’t make this stuff up!