the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jan 5, 2026
After the unrelenting series of attacks on the working class in 2025, what can we expect to see from the capitalists and their government in 2026?
More of the same, and worse.
The ruling class is protecting itself and its profits in increasingly uncertain economic circumstances. And to do that, it attempts to take more and more from the working class, continuing to attack our standard of living and working conditions.
As part of that, we see more and more their preparations on the path to greater and wider war. The recent U.S. attack on Venezuela is just the latest indication. Trump flat-out says that U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil is “America First.” He is tightening the grip of U.S. imperialism over the entire Western hemisphere, anticipating future conflict with Russia, China and other powers, and their “spheres of influence.”
Everything the Trump administration and the ruling class have done in the past year has been part of that preparation, both economic and political: The cutting of jobs. Attacks on workers’ wages and living standards. The cuts in social programs as more spending is shifted to a military build-up and handouts to corporations. And the attacks on any kind of dissent, from the press, the demonstrating public, the academic world, lawyers, and cultural institutions.
It’s not just that Trump has authoritarian ambitions; the ruling class demands this in service of its interests and its profits.
Never mind the fact that all of this contradicts what Trump said he would do. Trump joins a long line of presidents who promised prosperity only to attack the working class, who ran as the Peace Candidate only to take the country to war—to betray their promises as soon as they took office. Democrat and Republican.
Why? Trump, and all politicians, and the state they lead, exist above all to serve the interests of the capitalist class. And when those interests clash with the interests of other countries’ capitalists, as the world economy grows more chaotic and sinks further into crisis and decay, that situation pushes the whole world more and more toward war.
In the face of these attacks, what should workers do? The Democrats are already pointing toward the midterm elections—eleven months away. They would like us to believe that flipping Congress to a Democratic majority will stop Trump’s attacks.
This is both a false hope and a way to delay any pushback from the working class in the coming months. If workers expect the Democrats to do anything different from what they’ve already done, to do anything fundamentally different from Trump and the Republicans, they will—once again—be sorely disappointed. And we will be told again to wait to vote, in two more years.
Every military intervention which the working class accepts takes us one step further toward the wars to come. Every attack on our standard of living serves to force us to live with less. The capitalist class is pushing to increase its profits even more, and make workers pay for its wars.
We need our own organizations. We need our own party, and we will need to organize fights against these attacks. We need leaders who we choose, who will challenge the whole basis of these attacks, the capitalist system of profits itself.
The working class is capable of taking control of this society and running it in the interest of all humanity. In fact, it’s the only way to truly stop the attacks on our standard of living and to stop the march toward war.
Jan 5, 2026
The Justice Department has been releasing the Epstein files in dribs and drabs. What has been released has been heavily redacted, supposedly to protect the victims, the girls and young women. No smoking gun has emerged. The federal government just sat on thousands of documents for years. They are protecting the super wealthy, the prince of England, the vice president of JP Morgan Chase Bank, politicians and other wealthy people high up in the power structure.
The federal government protects the wealthy class all the time in many circumstances. When corporations poison the environment, at best they might get a slap on the wrist, pay a small fine. When Boeing’s planes crashed, what happened to Boeing? Well, they are still making planes, still making profits.
The banks were giving Epstein 50,000 dollars a month! Epstein was flying all these wealthy people around in his “Lolita Express.” We are just supposed to believe that only two people, Epstein and Maxwell, trafficked and abused all these young women and girls when clearly, there are many that did both.
It is not surprising that these super wealthy people were involved in abusing women. These are the same guys that are exploiting the working class and destroying the environment. They are rotten just like their rotten system. It is also not surprising that the federal government protects them. It’s not so different from the Catholic Church covering up and defending hundreds of pedophile priests.
Jan 5, 2026
After the U.S. captured the president of Venezuela on January 3, Trump bragged that no U.S. lives were lost and that victory was already won.
That was not the first time a U.S. president bragged that a war had been won before it had even really begun. In May 2003, after the U.S. toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush gave a similar speech under a huge “Mission Accomplished” banner.
The vast bulk of Iraqis and U.S. troops killed in that war fell after that speech. Eight years after Bush gave it, U.S. troops were still killing and dying in Iraq.
Jan 5, 2026
Over the last decade, hundreds of companies, including Alcoa Corp., AT&T and Lockheed Martin Corp., have sold their pension plans to life insurance companies owned by giant financial companies.
The financial companies gaining control of these pension funds, including Apollo, Carlyle, Blackstone, Brookfield and KKR, are truly predatory. They buy up companies, load them up with debt, carry out sweeping layoffs, and take the profits off the top. After they bought up hospitals and health care companies, death rates spiked. After they bought up big swaths of the housing market, homelessness skyrocketed. After they took over for-profit colleges aimed at working people trying to further their education and training, these companies provided little education but loaded the students up with debt.
These companies also loan money at very high interest rates to companies with low credit ratings. They bundle those subprime loans together, claim that they are high quality, and resell them at a tidy profit.
Now these predators and scam artists have accumulated over 700 billion dollars in pension fund money, money they are using to boost their profits even further. For them, gaining control of corporate pension funds is a no-lose proposition. They keep all the profits. As for the losses, it is the retirees who pay the price, as much of the money they live off of is cut.
Retirees, fearful that their retirement pensions will soon go up in smoke, have turned to the courts to get their pension funds out of these Wall Street sharks’ control. But one federal court has already thrown out a suit by AT&T retirees. Another court has allowed a retirees’ suit to go forward. But it will still take years, if not decades, for anything to be decided.
No, the courts are not a protection. Odds are that many workers will lose some or all of their benefits, especially when a new economic crisis hits.
This is not the first time that private companies have cheated or scammed their workforce from pension benefits that were supposed to be “guaranteed.” Airline companies, such as American and United, are famous for declaring bankruptcy in order to get out from under all their pension obligations.
In fact, retirement pension benefits were never a gift to workers. Workers had won them through big strikes and other labor struggles in the three decades of economic expansion following World War II.
But retirement pensions never covered more than a minority of the workforce, even at their height. And the companies promised pension benefits only to workers who held onto the same job for decades and decades, thus tying the workers to the company, making the workers feel like they had a stake in how the company performed. In other words, companies promised a decent retirement to pacify their workforce and undercut the very fights that had won the benefit in the first place.
Neither were the traditional retirement pensions a permanent gain. In the 1970s, the period of economic expansion was ended by a grinding economic crisis that has continued to this day. To protect their profits in the teeth of this crisis, companies imposed more and more concessions on the working class. One of the first things to go were full retirement pensions. Companies no longer had the same reason to keep offering full pension benefits, given the waves of mass layoffs and downsizings they have been carrying out ever since.
Today, less than 10% of the private sector workforce still has a traditional pension plan, down from about 32% back in 1975, according to Employment Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) data. And, as we see, even those with pensions are at risk of losing them.
A decent retirement after a lifetime of work should be a basic right for all workers. But the workers cannot count on the capitalists, nor their government, to get it. The workers can only gain it through their own organization, struggles and fights.
Jan 5, 2026
Just a day before it was set to air, 60 Minutes pulled a story about torture at the notorious prison in El Salvador where the U.S. sent hundreds of people last March.
Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief at 60 Minutes maker CBS News, claimed that the piece could not run without an on-the-record comment from someone in the Trump Administration. But the administration refused to comment.
The correspondent on the story pointed out the obvious: demanding an on-the-record comment gave the administration veto power over the show. Pulling this piece was therefore “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
This is just the latest step in a long campaign by Trump and his allies to use money and the courts to control how the media portrays him and his policies. Last year, Trump sued CBS over its editing of an interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes—a lawsuit legal observers almost unanimously thought Trump had no chance to win. Nonetheless, the company decided to settle. In reaction, the news chief and top executive at 60 Minutes resigned, saying corporate leaders were limiting the show’s journalistic freedom.
Soon after, Trump ally David Ellison bought Paramount, the owner of CBS. In order to win approval from regulators, he promised the network would become more friendly to conservatives, and he made good on this promise by appointing Bari Weiss.
So, no one should be surprised that she cancelled this segment on how the Trump administration set up deportees to be tortured, and yes, it was obviously a political decision!
It is nothing new that corporations control the media, and shape what news is presented to the public. The TV networks and social media companies decide what to show people based on what they think they can profit from. Nor is it new that politicians try to shape how the media portrays them and their policies.
But the pressure from the administration and its billionaire allies to control what the population sees is increasing in a way this country hasn’t seen for years—perhaps not since the last time the U.S. was preparing the population for a major war, during the McCarthy period. And pulling this 60 Minutes piece was a means of hiding the brutality they are inflicting on people in a foreign country—exactly what the government will want from the media in case of war.
Jan 5, 2026
In November, a man on a CTA Blue Line train doused a woman with gasoline, then set her on fire. She survived the horrific attack.
President Trump spoke about the attack from the Rose Garden. His administration’s response? They are threatening to hold up funding for the CTA—as if that will address the problem of violence in this society.
The Illinois state legislature just passed a 1.5 billion dollar spending bill. Governor Pritzker protested Trump’s actions, saying that the bill includes money to keep the CTA safe.
We’re not buying it. Violence and the threat of violence are a day-to-day occurrence for workers who use the CTA in Chicago. The Democrats, in charge of the city for decades, have never meaningfully addressed it. And the Republicans only offer more cuts. We will only have safety when working people finally put an end to the violent exploitation that this society rests on.
Jan 5, 2026
A young online influencer named Nick Shirley recently posted a video on X and YouTube purporting to show daycare centers in Minnesota not serving children and therefore receiving government funding fraudulently.
The daycare centers in the video were all run by Somalis, and Shirley attempted to show a Somali influence on the state’s government. Within two weeks, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced it was investigating the daycare centers, and his Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services announced a freeze on all childcare payments to the state of Minnesota.
Donald Trump had made vulgar racist comments directed against Minnesota’s Somali community even before the video, and after the video came out he said, "Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90%, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia."
In the meantime, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families stated that the childcare facilities shown in Shirley’s video were operating properly. They added that one of the centers Shirley visited had been out of business for three years now.
The Trump administration and his supporters are encouraging young content creators to collect and post videos purporting to support their agenda. This is one. And Shirley had previously posted a video supporting Trump’s false claims about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
It’s the latest method the wealthy ruling class has found to use in its attempts to divide workers on racist lines and divert attention away from the real enemy, the wealthy class itself and the capitalist system from which they benefit.
Jan 5, 2026
A Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter marched in the North East Christmas Parade in Cecil County, Maryland outside of Baltimore on December 6—as the Ku Klux Klan had done in the early 1990s.
The Confederacy was the 13 state governments that seceded from the U.S. in 1861, essentially over their right to keep it legal to enslave people.
It’s a holiday parade! Having a parade contingent representing slavery is not acceptable.
Jan 5, 2026
Trump announced during his speech on Saturday, “We have a totally safe city where it was one of the most unsafe cities anywhere in the world, frankly, and now we have no crime in Washington, D.C. We haven’t had a killing.” There was, on average, a murder a week in the city since the guard arrived in August.
What a surprise. Trump lied.
Jan 5, 2026
The following is excerpted from a presentation given in Los Angeles on November 16, before the U.S. seized the president of Venezuela.
The U.S. military has been gathering a massive military force in the Caribbean Sea, complete with bomber planes and drones, missile launchers, 10,000 troops and the USS Gerald R. Ford, world’s largest aircraft carrier. Fourteen percent of the U.S. Navy is now in the Caribbean, according to Fox News (Oct. 21).
So far, this huge force has been used for deadly attacks on small boats off the coast of Venezuela. Since September 2, the U.S. has blown up 21 boats, killing at least 80 people. To justify these killings, Trump administration officials say that these people were drug smugglers, carrying drugs to the U.S. They say it’s all to protect the American people, because drugs coming into the U.S. kill tens of thousands of Americans every year.
This is the same government that cuts health care for the American people. No, this is not about protecting Americans. That’s the standard line the U.S. government uses every time it starts a war around the globe. The U.S., the dominant economic and military power in the world, wages war to reinforce and extend its control over the rest of the world.
The U.S. target this time is Venezuela. The U.S. government has issued an indictment against the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, on charges of “narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.”
The U.S. government says Maduro is a leader of a drug trafficking cartel, the “Cartel of the Suns” (Cartel de Los Soles), which it accuses of “flooding” the U.S. with cocaine. There is no evidence for these claims. It is known that some of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. comes from Colombia, but there is no evidence that Maduro or other members of the Venezuelan government are involved in producing, transporting or selling cocaine.
Nonetheless, the U.S. threat against Venezuela is real, and the Trump administration has been escalating it. The administration recently doubled the U.S. award for Maduro’s head to 50 million dollars, and Trump told journalists that he has authorized the CIA to carry out operations within Venezuela.
To oust the Maduro government, the U.S. could invade Venezuela, or just bomb the country, or try to instigate a coup d’état to overthrow Maduro.
But recent U.S. invasions have met local resistance, turning into bloody wars of occupation and dragging on for many years. And bombing alone has not led to the downfall of a government in the past. To the contrary, bombings often rally the local population behind the government under attack, no matter how unpopular that government may be. As for a U.S.-orchestrated coup d’état, the U.S. has actually tried it three times in Venezuela since 2003. It failed every time.
There may still be the possibility of the U.S. making a deal with Maduro and allowing him to stay in power, in exchange for concessions. In fact, the New York Times reported in October that, to reach a deal, Maduro had offered to transfer Venezuela’s oil and gas fields to U.S. oil companies, and that he also accepted to cut trade relations with U.S.’s rivals—China, Russia, Iran and Cuba.
When asked about this by a journalist, Trump used the opportunity to show off U.S. dominance. He said: “He’s offered everything. You’re right. You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.”
… We’ll see what happens, but whatever the U.S. ends up doing, it will be to show who’s boss. And working people will pay the price—above all in Venezuela. But working people here in the U.S. also pay the price of U.S. wars abroad, in money and lives.
The U.S. wants to oust the Maduro government because Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, tried to loosen the U.S.’s tight grip on Venezuela’s economy. Chávez had earned the U.S.’s hostility by running for president, and winning, against a government that was allied with the U.S. Then, after taking office, Chavez tried to establish a small measure of independence from the U.S. by developing relations with historical U.S. rivals like Cuba, China and Russia. He also used a small part of Venezuela’s oil revenues to start some social programs that would benefit workers and the poor, his electoral base.
These were practical policies for Chávez to reinforce his position as the leader of Venezuela—not ideological policies. But the U.S. could not allow them. For one, Russia and China are two big military powers which are capable of competing with the U.S. over the world’s resources and markets. So, for these two countries to have direct access to Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, is a threat to the century-old dominance of U.S. oil companies. And any country trying to have some independence can encourage others to do so.
But the U.S. failed to overthrow Chávez, mainly because Chávez’s social programs had gained him popularity among the working class and poor. When the U.S. orchestrated a coup d’état against Chávez in 2003, for example, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets in protest, and the coup attempt fizzled out.
Chávez died of cancer in 2013, at the age of 58. But the U.S. attack on Venezuela continued during the presidency of his successor, Maduro. In 2015, the Obama administration imposed sanctions designed to squeeze the Venezuelan economy, which significantly worsened the impoverishment of the population.
The price of oil had dropped a year earlier and that had already had a devastating impact on Venezuela, given that much of Venezuela’s economy depends on those exports. As a result of the 2015 sanctions, many U.S. companies stopped doing business in Venezuela. This further harmed Venezuela’s economy, since the U.S. was Venezuela’s most important trading partner, accounting for more than half of the country’s exports and imports.
In 2019, the first Trump administration expanded the economic sanctions on Venezuela. The U.S. banned U.S. and foreign companies and individuals from doing business with Venezuela’s state-run oil company. In addition, the U.S. and other governments allied with the U.S. froze Venezuelan government assets and blocked its financial operations.
This 10-year-long, brutal U.S. economic siege of Venezuela has caused a human catastrophe. Between 2015, when the sanctions began, and 2024, about eight million people, more than one out of four Venezuelans, have left the country to flee poverty and hunger. The majority of these migrants went to other Latin American and Caribbean countries, but more than half a million of these migrants have ended up in the U.S., more than doubling the number of Venezuelan immigrants in this country.
That actually is a very large number, considering that these migrants have no money and have to put their lives in danger to pass, on foot, through the jungle between Colombia and Panama called the Darién Gap. This is a remote and dangerous area of rainforest, swamp and mountains, where the Pan-American Highway is broken. It is a no-go zone for travelers because of its difficult terrain and high likelihood of being attacked by criminal gangs—which is also true for these migrant families’ journey through the rest of Central America and the vast territory of Mexico.
And these are the people that Trump and his cronies are calling criminals and threatening with deportation—back to starvation in their country caused by the U.S.’s imperialist policies, that is!
It’s not just a question of the last 25 years. U.S. imperialism pushed the working population of Venezuela into poverty for a whole century, despite the fact that Venezuela sits on the world’s largest oil reserves and has been a major oil exporter since the 1920s.
Even though it was Royal Dutch Shell, a British-Dutch company, that first extracted oil in Venezuela, big U.S.-based monopolies like Standard Oil quickly moved in and took over most the country’s oil industry. By the end of the 1920s, Venezuela had already become the second-largest oil producer in the world, after the U.S., and the biggest oil exporter. During World War II, Venezuelan oil proved to be crucial for keeping the U.S. war machine running, and U.S. oil companies continued to produce a lot of oil in Venezuela after the war also, pocketing the lion’s share of Venezuela’s oil wealth. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was estimated that Venezuelan oil accounted for 40% of Standard Oil’s worldwide profits.
While Venezuela remained underdeveloped, the small part of the oil wealth that stayed in Venezuela went to the luxury of a small wealthy elite. New hotels, office buildings, apartments and highways gave parts of Caracas, the capital, a modern look, but next to this showcase, much of the city consisted of slums where workers and the poor lived.
The oil companies imposed this situation on Venezuela’s population through repression. For about 40 years after oil was discovered in Venezuela, the country was run by a series of military dictators, who were little more than puppets of the oil companies. The military governments outlawed all political parties.
The inequality and repression led to a social explosion. In January 1958, a rebellion inside the military sparked demonstrations, strikes and clashes with police, which persisted for more than a year. This massive revolt coincided with the Cuban Revolution, which ousted another U.S.-sponsored dictator in the region. So, the U.S. moved to stabilize oil-rich Venezuela by allowing elections and installing a civilian government in February 1959.
But behind this new political façade, the oil companies stayed in control. The plunder of Venezuela within the imperialist order continued. Whenever the oil price dropped on the world oil market, the Venezuelan economy fell into recession. The slums of Caracas and of Maracaibo, the center of Venezuela’s oil industry, kept expanding.
In 1976, the Venezuelan government joined a world-wide trend and nationalized much of its oil. But that did not ease the dominance of the oil companies over Venezuela. In fact, U.S. oil companies, along with U.S. banks, profited handsomely from nationalization in the Venezuelan oil industry.
The Venezuelan government paid the oil companies large sums for facilities that were old and run-down, and now the government also had to pay for the cost of any new investments and exploration. So, the government had to borrow money from U.S. banks. The Venezuelan government was also forced to hire the very same U.S. (and British) oil companies to do the work, since they had the resources and technology.
Venezuela ran up big debts with big interest payments, which the government had no money to pay for—especially after a worldwide recession in the early 1980s caused the oil markets to crash. The banks and the IMF forced the Venezuelan government to impose heavy austerity measures on the population, raising hunger and deprivation to new levels.
In February 1989, protests against the government’s austerity measures led to food riots in Caracas. For five days, people looted supermarkets. The army was brought out to shoot down people who were trying to feed themselves and their children. Officially, hundreds of people were killed, but the real number was in the thousands.
No, the governments of Chávez or Maduro did not create the poverty and hunger in Venezuela, as U.S. officials and media commentators claim. In fact, when Chávez came to power in 1998, it was, to a great extent, because persistent poverty and hunger had totally discredited the existing government—behind which was U.S. imperialism, the real reason for the poverty and hunger.
Jan 5, 2026
This article is translated from the January 2 issue, #2996 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
The U.S. military claims to have bombed a jihadist group in northwestern Nigeria on December 25. Donald Trump justified the bombing by portraying himself as a modern-day crusader protecting Christians all over the world.
Trump posted “Merry Christmas” on social media to everyone, including any dead alleged terrorists. He had already announced he would target perpetrators of atrocities against “Christians” everywhere. “Tonight, they paid,” he rejoiced the day after the operation.
But the Nigerian government’s version is slightly different. Nigeria’s foreign minister stated this was a joint operation between the Nigerian and American militaries, “having nothing to do with any particular religion.” In fact, behind his medieval rhetoric, Trump is primarily defending the interests of American imperialism.
Northern Nigerian farmers live in abject poverty, and they have long been plagued by armed groups. This area is even more neglected than most parts of Nigeria, whose oil resources allow it to rival South Africa for the title of sub-Saharan Africa’s leading economic power. The North was once a stronghold of the Boko Haram jihadists. But instead of religious motivations, today’s armed bands mostly seek to profit from kidnapping. For example, on December 28, bandits kidnapped travelers in Plateau State and demanded almost a thousand dollars in ransom.
Trump uses the supposed fight against terrorist groups as a pretext to pressure the Nigerian government. In early November, he accused Nigeria of tolerating the killing of Christians and threatened to intervene militarily. A U.S. surveillance aircraft constantly patrols the country and U.S. ships in the Gulf of Guinea are ready to open fire.
This military deployment has no effect on the lawlessness which increasingly plagues the country, but it reflects the increased influence of the U.S. in Africa. For example, the U.S. is negotiating to gain control of mineral resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This attack also provides another opportunity for Trump to let the world’s leaders and people know that he can bomb whomever he wants, whenever he wants, with impunity—and that he does not hesitate to do so.
Jan 5, 2026
On December 29, Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his palace at Mar-a-Lago. Trump heaped praise both on Netanyahu and the successes of the Israeli state, with no mention of any possible points of contention, like the spread of Israeli settlers into Palestinian lands in the West Bank.
The picture of luxury for these two men could not contrast more with the ongoing horror in Gaza. Israel keeps expanding the area of the territory forbidden to the Palestinians, enforcing these restrictions with regular shootings despite the supposed “cease fire.” Food and medicine are still almost impossible to come by and Gaza has been beset by floods, making it even harder to survive in ruins—eighteen Palestinians died in mid-December from the extreme weather.
But the U.S. and Israeli states have too many interests in common for the plight of these millions of people to mar their holiday friendship fest.
For 25 years, the U.S. military has been fighting in the Middle East to reinforce U.S. corporations’ domination of the region and its resources. These wars have destroyed almost all the states that in the past took any kind of stance against U.S. imperialism. But for at least 15 of those years, the U.S. has been trying to extricate its forces, to focus on other parts of the world.
Now, the Trump administration calculates that the U.S. might be able to do so, in large measure because it can count on its loyal policeman, Israel. Over the past two years, Israeli military campaigns have weakened the two countries’ main remaining common enemy, Iran. And the Israeli military has been able to massacre the Palestinian population without it causing serious problems for U.S. relations with its Arab client states.
The U.S. National Security Strategy released in November even crowed that: “…the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was. It is rather emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment—a trend that should be welcomed and encouraged.”
A more cynical statement could hardly be imagined against the enormous human catastrophes the U.S. and Israel have unleashed on the Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan, Yemeni, Libyan, Lebanese, and Iranian people over the last two decades. But in the end, the Trump administration looking for business opportunities in the “peace of the graveyard” is just a more open expression of what U.S imperialism has long meant for the people of this region.
Jan 5, 2026
This article is excerpted from the January 2 issue, #2996 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
The Chinese government launched large-scale military exercises off the coast of Taiwan on December 29 and 30….
The exercises were China’s response to a massive arms deal Lai Ching-te recently made with the U.S. The Chinese military mobilized a fleet of ships, aircraft, and drones, conducted live-fire exercises on maritime targets, simulated a blockade of the island, and disrupted nearly a thousand commercial flights to Taiwan’s capital Taipei….
… On November 25, Japan had deployed aircraft to Yonaguni, a Japanese island hardly 75 miles east of Taiwan. Japan is also heavily arming the island by installing surface-to-air missile batteries. On December 10, the U.S. and Japan conducted joint bomber and fighter jet exercises, in response to Russian-Chinese maritime exercises….
Taiwan is a forward operating base and thorn in China’s side, meant to help contain this competitor that is gaining too much ground in the Asia-Pacific region and the global economy. The U.S. asked Taiwan to increase its military spending to more than three percent of GDP by 2026 and five percent by 2030. At the end of November, Taiwan’s president announced that the island’s military spending would increase by 40 billion dollars over several years. Following this, in mid-December, he notoriously placed the largest arms order since 2001—more than 11 billion dollars worth of missile systems, howitzers, anti-tank missiles, drones, and so on.
To justify these arms orders, Taiwan’s president predicts a Chinese invasion in 2027. However, faced with the U.S., Japan, and their Western allies like France, China is not in a position to invade Taiwan. While the Beijing regime has been demanding reunification with Taiwan since 1949, most of all it opposes any official recognition of Taiwan’s independence. The Chinese government protests almost automatically against every step taken in that direction.
By escalating tensions and accusing China, Lai Ching-te actually intends to undermine the political position of those who advocate closer ties with Beijing, who are somewhat well received on the island. By heavily arming the island, he wants to demonstrate to the Taiwanese that his position—the definitive and official separation of Taiwan from China—is the only possible one. By doing this, he keeps the entire region a powder keg.
Jan 5, 2026
In recent days, parts of the Iranian population have taken to the streets in protests over the increasingly difficult economic situation in the country. The Iranian currency, the rial, has lost 60% of its value, which has further fueled inflation.
Over the past year, inflation is running over 40%. It’s even worse for food prices, which have increased by 60 to 70%. It is estimated that today 27 to 50% of the Iranian population lives below the poverty line. This poverty has led to protests and strikes in the past.
These latest protests began among small shopkeepers. They were then joined by university students. So far, the workers have not been part of the protests as an organized force.
The Iranian regime has responded to these protests with a double-sided answer. On the one hand, Iranian president Pezeshkian has acknowledged the economic problems facing the population and called for meetings with the protest leaders to listen to their concerns. On the other hand, the regime sent in military and police forces to attack the protests. These security forces killed a number of protesters.
The U.S. government, under both Republicans and Democrats, have continued to impose punishing trade sanctions on the Iranian economy, especially oil and natural gas. Iran has the 4th largest reserves of crude oil and the 2nd largest reserves of natural gas in the world. But Iran is restricted in selling these resources on the world market because of sanctions imposed by the U.S. government and some of its allies.
The capitalist class in Iran and its government, with the normal functioning of capitalism, exploits the Iranian working class. The U.S.-led economic sanctions on Iran multiply this exploitation and further reduce the standard of living of the Iranian population. When Iranian people protest the high prices and their poverty, they may be aiming their protests against their own regime. But the U.S. government and world imperialism are also responsible.
Trump and U.S. imperialism are not going to solve the problems faced by the Iranian people. There is a large working class in Iran, a class that has come to the forefront before with strikes and protests. The Iranian working class is a force that can address the problems faced by the Iranian population and the region beyond.
Jan 5, 2026
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of December 14, 2025. It was written in anticipation of the attack that the U.S. carried out on January 3.
There is an enormous U.S. battle group stationed in the Caribbean near Venezuela’s coast. It’s Trump’s usual playbook: threaten the extreme, to see what he can shake out of you.
Starting in August, the U.S. military began to move warships and planes into the area, along with amphibious assault ships and submarines. The buildup brought U.S. troop numbers in the Caribbean up to nearly 13,000 by early December, including sailors, marines, special forces. To drive home the point, Trump ordered this billion-dollar military force to destroy a couple dozen small fishing boats. High tech missiles and drones incinerated them, plus the people in them.
When asked what legal authorization backed up these attacks, Trump answered, “Authorization? No, no authorization, we just kill them!” He went on to say, “We’re going to start doing these strikes on land, too. You know land is much easier.”
It was a blatant threat issued against the thirty million people living in Venezuela, most of them near the coast patrolled by the U.S. military.
Concretely, it was also a threat aimed at Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. To make sure Maduro heard, Trump contacted him by phone, telling him he had only a short time left. Step down from the presidency and leave Venezuela—or else! To back it up, Trump publicly threatened to send in the CIA to “eliminate” Maduro.
It’s a shakedown, pure and simple—with the U.S. military providing the threat hanging over the head of Maduro, and everyone else in Venezuela.
So, what is it that the president of the United States wants to extort from Venezuela?
It’s true that Venezuela has enormous oil reserves, the largest known reserves in the world. It also has important minerals: bauxite, coltan, gold, and rare earth minerals, key to the development of advanced technology. It wouldn’t be the first time that the U.S. government used its military to steal another country’s natural resources for the benefit of U.S. corporations.
But the issue is bigger than just Venezuela and its oil. Like so many other countries, Venezuela nationalized some industries in 2001 as a way to keep a larger part of their benefits inside the country itself. That upset what had been a solid flow of profit feeding a few big corporations and banks in the imperialist countries.
Trump’s crass greediness and bragging put his extortion right out in the open. But the extortion started long before Trump.
The U.S. has been tightening the noose around Venezuela’s neck ever since 2001. Every U.S. president since George Bush has been upping the ante. Sanctions were imposed to prevent Venezuela from buying weapons and medicines; to prevent its government from having its debt underwritten by international banks; to freeze Venezuela’s assets placed in U.S. banks; to prevent Venezuela from selling its oil in international markets, etc.
The Venezuelan people have been collateral damage in the struggle to control the country’s resource wealth. Today, 70% of the population live in dire poverty, without enough to eat, without medicine or medical services, beset by malaria, battered by the collapse of water and electrical systems. Four million have already tried to escape. For many millions more, there is no escape, only grinding poverty. It is a humanitarian crisis, imposed by the U.S. as part of a policy to threaten any regime that would not toe imperialism’s line.
What is happening in Venezuela gives an exact picture of the world capitalism has created.
The standard of living in this country may not be so dire, but it is under attack for the very same reason: capitalism cannot stop pushing to grab more wealth, even as its push tears up the societies over which it presides.
This is our reality—until the working class, resting on its size and its position in the center of the economy, takes control of the situation to throw capitalism and its politicians out with the garbage.
Jan 5, 2026
This documentary of journalist Seymour Hersh tells the story not just of his six decades of daring exposés of egregious cover-ups but also revisits the events that led to his reporting. It is more of a historical documentary of atrocities than a memoir. He was instrumental in forcing the media to cover the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam war, where American troops executed in cold blood over 500 civilians, and in showing this was not an isolated incident. He reported on Watergate; on the gruesome torture by the U.S. military during the Iraq war in the Abu Ghraib prison, backed up by horrendous photos; on the CIA’s illegal surveillance of the U.S. student movement in the 1960s; on the U.S. involvement in the installment of the dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile; and continues even today at age 88 with events in Gaza. The film examines his work with a critical eye; he of course made mistakes. But he never relented from trying to shine a light on some of our darkest history.
Jan 5, 2026
The U.S. bombing of Caracas and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores, his wife, in the early morning hours of January 3 was certainly shocking. But it wasn’t a surprise.
Since early September, the U.S. military has escalated its attacks against Venezuela step by step. It began by destroying small boats off Venezuela’s coast, murdering 105 people. Then in late November, Trump announced that the U.S. was closing Venezuelan airspace. The U.S. military followed this up by hijacking two oil tankers, stealing Venezuelan oil. Finally, on December 16, Trump announced a naval blockade of the entire country.
While carrying out these attacks, the U.S. military assembled the biggest war machine in the Caribbean Sea since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. These include the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, the largest and most modern in the world, along with guided-missile destroyers, F-35B fighters, MZ-9 Reaper drones, an amphibious assault group of 15,000 American troops, a nuclear-powered submarine, a special warfare support vessel and on and on.
The U.S. military then used some of its war planes to threaten and intimidate the people of Venezuela and the entire region. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—which flies missions for the Navy SEALS, Green Berets and Delta Force—periodically buzzed giant helicopters next to the coast of Venezuela. Gigantic B-52 strategic bombers flew threatening missions throughout the region.
Trump accuses Maduro and the government of Venezuela of “narcoterrorism, human trafficking, murders and kidnappings,” for which Trump plans to present Maduro and his wife in a ridiculous and idiotic show trial in New York City.
In fact, the only reason that Trump has targeted Venezuela is that it refuses to bow down to every demand of the big bad U.S. imperialist power. Under Hugo Chavez, who came to power in 1998, and then under Maduro, who succeeded Chavez in 2013, the Venezuelan regime has used the country’s vast oil wealth, 300 billion barrels in the ground, the largest reserves of oil in the world, to gain a tiny bit of independence from the U.S.
Of course, Chavez and Maduro continued to try to do business with the U.S. oil companies and banks and allow the oil companies to continue to profit. But the Venezuelan leaders tried to prevent the oil companies from completely robbing and plundering Venezuela, as in the past. When the U.S. tried to turn up the heat on Venezuela, the regime even had the temerity to look to such U.S. rivals as Russia, Cuba, Iran and China for support.
For the U.S. capitalists and the government that consider the entire Western Hemisphere to be its very own “backyard”, this show of defiance was completely unacceptable. Under Republicans and Democrats, the U.S. has openly tried to overthrow the regime. When that failed, the U.S. began strangling the economy through trade embargoes and economic warfare, making the population pay through ever worse living conditions, provoking a mass exodus outside the country.
At his news conference on January 3, Trump rejected all of his electoral promises not to get involved in another foreign war. Instead, Trump bragged that the U.S. government, with him at its head, was going to take over Venezuela and install a puppet government for the purpose of stealing its oil.
And—Trump emphasized—he didn’t want to, but he was ready to bring in U.S. troops. In reality, by decapitating the Venezuelan government, U.S. troops had already invaded Venezuela. And, as previous U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan show, this usually results in long and bloody wars, carried out by U.S. troops of occupation.
Republican isolationists like Marjorie Taylor Green, as well as Democratic “socialists,” like Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have already denounced Trump’s disastrous military adventure, like earlier U.S. wars from Iraq to Vietnam.
But these wars are not just the fault of a single leader, like Trump, as disgusting as he is, or a Bush, Obama or Biden. No, they come out of the drive by the biggest imperial powers to impose their domination over the world’s peoples and resources—wars, destruction and death that also produce ever greater profits, for the capitalists, billionaires and bankers the world over.
Working people in this country have every reason to oppose these wars, since we are the ones who pay for them, with our tax money and our blood. But we also have to get rid of the forces that are bringing about these wars, the capitalist economic system run in the interest of the very billionaires and capitalists, who exploit and impoverish us here at home.