Over the past six weeks, the United States has severely escalated its war against the people of Yemen for their resistance against imperialism and their steadfast solidarity with Palestine. U.S. combined naval and air forces have struck Yemen hundreds of times since mid-March. These strikes have mostly targeted civilian infrastructure: dock facilities, fuel silos, grain supplies, residential buildings, and a major sanitation project. 

Since the Trump administration escalated the ongoing U.S. bombing campaign against Yemen in March, hundreds of innocent people have been killed. To be clear, U.S. military aggression against Yemen is not a new development. The Biden administration spent the last year pounding Yemen as punishment for its refusal to abandon Gaza and Palestine.

Biden’s strikes killed dozens and threatened to throw Yemen back into famine. And even so, the recent Trump offensive in the Red Sea represents a marked escalation by the U.S. imperialists. Under Trump, the military attack on Yemen has reached a new fever pitch. 

Recently, the New York Times reported that the U.S. military has begun a significant buildup of military equipment and personnel across the Middle East. As a part of this buildup, the U.S. Navy has moved a second aircraft carrier into the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen and begun negotiations with Saudi-backed militias to begin a ground offensive against the Ansar Allah movement. 

Furthermore, the U.S. moved two Patriot missile batteries and a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to the Middle East. As if this wasn’t enough, a half-dozen B-2 bombers capable of carrying 30,000-pound bombs were dispatched to Diego Garcia, an island base in the Indian Ocean. All of this equipment is being positioned to be used not only against defiant Yemen, but also Iran.  

When Trump took office, he swore to be a peacemaker. He swore to destroy the cycle of “endless war.” The current U.S. military buildup in the Middle East and the severe wave of attacks on Yemen again demonstrate that the Republican and Democratic parties are simply two sides of the same imperialist coin. The imperialist objective to destroy Yemen is not that of Biden or Trump alone, but of all the billionaires who rely on Red Sea shipping lanes and U.S. military presence in the region to rake in profit. 

Yemen represents a serious problem for the U.S. imperialists in that part of the world. Trump and Netanyahu want to be able to carpet bomb the people of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria at will. Yemen and Iran have so far made that impossible. All U.S. and Zionist attacks in the region have been met with a response from the Yemeni people. Whether it is missile strikes on Zionist military bases in Gaza or the blockade on Western shipping in the Red Sea, Yemen has stood up and said no more. No more genocide. No more imperialism. No more war. 

The working class of the United States must stand up and stand in solidarity with the people of Yemen now more than ever. Yemen may seem distant, but our solidarity must be exactly the opposite. The fact is, every bomb that falls on Yemeni ports or schools or factories falls right here at home. Every cent that goes to murdering working-class sisters and brothers in Yemen is a cent that could have been used to house, feed, and clothe all working-class people. 

Our solidarity with Yemen in their fight must never waver. 

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.

On 16 April 2025, the British Supreme Court decreed that the legal classifications of ‘woman’, ‘man’, and ‘sex’ refer only to biological sex and not gender identity in relation to the Equality Act of 2010. The decision was the conclusion of a challenge by the trans-exclusionary organisation For Women Scotland (FWS) to the Scottish parliament for its inclusion of trans women in their ‘gender representation objectives’ in March 2018. After seven years, several appeals, and £300,000 in crowd-funding — including £70,000 donated by JK Rowling — FWS has now achieved its goal. The Supreme Court’s decision will now open the door to trans-exclusionary practices across the board. In the days that followed, spontaneous demonstrations spread across the country as young people expressed their outrage at this reactionary step.

Previously, under the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, trans people in possession of gender recognition certificates (GRCs) were to be treated under their acquired genders ‘for all legal purposes’. This meant that, for example, trans women would correctly be counted under quotas aimed at increasing female representation in public boards or party shortlists. Now, trans people, even those with GRCs, can be legally barred from single-sex spaces including public toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, shelters, prisons, etc, and also excluded from affirmative action programmes.

The exclusions will require case-by-case legal justification from the organisations which choose to enforce them, and must be based on ‘proportionate’ and ‘legitimate aims’. The Supreme Court judges sought to reassure trans people that they would still be protected from forms of discrimination based on the characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’ — meaning that it remains unlawful to discriminate against trans people in areas such as employment, education, and the provision of services. But this is of no consolation to the tens of thousands of trans people across Britain who are seeing the revocation of their health care  and legal rights, and who are subject to around 5,000 reported hate crimes a year from people emboldened by rulings such as these.

An early consequence of the ruling is the revision by the British Transport Police (BTP) of their procedures on strip searches. These will be henceforth conducted ‘in accordance with the biological birth sex of the detainee’. This would allow for male officers to conduct intimate searches on women whom they suspect are transgender. This will also force trans people working for BTP to conduct strip searches against detainees of the opposite gender. If a change as violent as this can be proved as just within the eyes of the law then it is clear that the law offers no serious protections for trans people at all.

On 25 April, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) issued its own guidance in response to the ruling. This will apply to all schools, workplaces, sports bodies, public services, and associations of 25 people or more. Under this guidance, trans people ‘should not be permitted’ to use facilities in line with their gender identities. Not only this, but there are now also circumstances wherein trans people will be barred from using facilities that correspond with their biological sex! This is in the event of  the provision of a third, segregated space for use by transgender people. One wonders if we will next be forced to access services through our own ‘transgendered entrances’!

Despite claims from the Supreme Court’s supporters, including Keir Starmer and Women and Equalities minister Bridget Phillipson, that the ruling provides ‘real clarity’ for women and services, the decision clearly raises more questions than it answers. How will exclusions be enforced? How will a person’s sex be ascertained? How will intersex people be affected? Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden has said that there ‘isn’t going to be toilet police’ but is that because they are instead going to rely on toilet vigilantes? The Supreme Court has bent the knee to the bio-essentialist, conspiratorial ideology of the trans-exclusionary radical feminists, while the Labour party is now able to distance itself from its supposed ‘wokeness’ on the issue, an important electoral consideration for the party as it seeks to compete with Reform UK for  the votes of the most reactionary sections of the electorate.

The Labour Party is not alone in capitulating to the most backward sections of the electorate. A  joint communiqué by the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and the Young Communist League (YCL) issued two days after the ruling stated:

‘We welcome the Supreme Court’s clarification that “sex” means biological sex in the Equality Act 2010 . . . This materialist outcome corroborates our view that “sex” must mean biological sex for the purposes of the Act and any other interpretations would negate its single sex statutory protections. We reject any notion that the Supreme Court ruling was influenced by, or issued as a result of, a transphobic political climate and note Lord Hodge’s remark when delivering the judgment – that it should not be seen as victory of one side over another.’

Thus did supposed ‘communists’ welcome a decision by the guardians of bourgeois moral order, an essential component of the reactionary state apparatus: a hymn of praise for its supposed enlightenment. More than welcome the ruling, in fact, the CPB/YCL actually called for it. In March 2023 the CPB released a statement on the Scottish Parliament’s 2022 Gender Recognition Reform Bill which read:

‘Gender as an ideological construct should not be confused or conflated with the material reality of biological sex. Gender is the vehicle through which misogyny is enacted and normalised. Gender identity ideology is well-suited to the needs of the capitalist class, focusing as it does on individual as opposed to collective rights, enabling and supporting the super-exploitation of women. For these reasons, the Communist Party rejects gender self-ID as the basis for sex- based entitlements in law to women’s single-sex rights, spaces and facilities. The Party will continue to oppose any proposed legislation – whether at Scottish, Welsh or British level – that seeks to enact such a provision. We call for ‘sex’ as a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act to be defined as biological sex.’

The implication is that trans people are ideological tools of the ruling class, they are misogynists, they are vehicles for the super-exploitation of women — something that real communists have always regarded not as an ideological question, but one rooted in the material conditions of capitalist production. Any idea of sex as an immutable, static binary completely falls apart when you bother to acknowledge the existence of intersex people. Any argument for a single determining factor in whether a person is male or female breaks under the slightest scrutiny. Moreover, we as Marxists examine the world through the scientific model of dialectical materialism, not through the mechanical materialism that the CPB subscribes to. In practice, the CPB/YCL are adapting to the sentiments of the most backward sections of the working class. The ruling has nothing to do with defending or advancing the rights of women: these will come under increasing attack by the Labour government as the crisis deepens.

We want to be clear: you cannot be a socialist, let alone a communist, and remain a member of the CPB/YCL. Nor can you be whilst attaching yourself to the thoroughly reactionary Labour party. The policies of socialist Cuba towards trans people, in particular its 2022 Family Code, are the negation of these parties’ reactionary standpoints. Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! has and will always be an organisation that stands against all forms of discrimination. We will always completely encourage and welcome the involvement of trans people within the broader struggle towards socialism. The demonstrations across the country in the days that followed the judgment were a refreshing response to the ruling: dominated by young people, protests were democratic in spirit and conduct, with open mics being the norm rather than the exclusionary methods adopted by the official labour movement whose pre-selected platform speakers are intended to ensure passivity in any audience. In Brighton, Liverpool, London, Newcastle and elsewhere comrades of FRFI addressed the crowds to call for solidarity with trans people in the face of this attack by the British state. FRFI will continue to support these protests as they develop.

Another world is possible! Trans liberation now!

Source: Fight racism! Fight imperialism!

The Trump administration’s designation of drug cartels as “terrorists” has opened the door to direct military intervention in Latin America. However, behind this security narrative lies an uncomfortable reality: most of the weapons that fuel organized crime violence come from the United States.

The US government, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, issued an Executive Order designating Mexican and regional drug cartels as “terrorists”. With this, the White House and the Pentagon build the framework of justification for self-enabling drone and missile warfare attacks on the sovereign territories of Latin America.

In parallel to this decision, and according to a recent investigation by analysts Paula Giménez and Matías Caciabue published in Nodal News, the illegal arms trade supplies the cartels, strengthening their firepower, which has become a scourge for the region. This reality has become a serious affront to Latin American states and a danger to their citizens.

But where do drug trafficking weapons come from, what are the interests of the political and economic actors involved, and how does this dynamic impact regional security and forced migration?

Gimenez and Caciabue say the weapons come mainly from Arizona, Texas and Florida, where weak legislation and controls allow arms to flow easily to organized crime. In these states, the arms business and the world’s largest drug market converge in a symbiotic relationship: while weapons cross the southern border to strengthen criminal groups, drugs make the reverse journey to feed U.S. demand.

“The money from the lucrative narco-economy continues to feed the illegal circuit of buying and selling weapons. Violence that, obviously, ends up promoting the immigration that has awakened so much xenophobia in U.S. voters, that is encouraged by Trumpism,” the experts affirmed.

U.S.-made weapons fuel violence in several regions. “In the case of Latin America, it is known that a significant number of guns recovered at crime scenes were either manufactured in the United States, or first imported into the United States and then illegally trafficked,” they stated. For example, 98% of illegal guns in Haiti and the Bahamas come from the United States. In Mexico this figure reached 70% in the last decade. In the 7 Central American countries, 50% of illegal weapons come from the US.

Similarly, according to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 73% of the weapons recovered between 2018 and 2023 in the Caribbean region originated in the United States, and in some countries these weapons are responsible for up to 90% of homicides.

The geopolitical response to this crisis is contradictory. Washington criminalizes gangs south of its border, but weapons flow freely from the north, a policy that only benefits the war and private security industries. Without a dramatic change gun violence will continue to increase, organized crime will grow stronger, and Latin American societies will continue to be trapped in a spiral of death.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

Caused by a parasite which is spread by infected mosquitoes, malaria has killed billions during thousands of years of human history. Just in the last century, an estimated 150 to 300 million people died from the disease.

While smallpox, cholera, polio and the plague have been beaten back, malaria and tuberculosis continue to kill hundreds of thousands of people annually. In 2023, an estimated 597,000 people died from malaria. Ninety-five percent were Africans.

This disease also endangered Vietnam’s liberation struggle against the U.S. capitalist empire. In addition to the napalm and Agent Orange dropped by U.S. planes, Vietnamese people were also dying from malaria.

Mosquitoes were infecting Vietnamese soldiers marching down what the corporate media called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Older remedies like chloroquine were not as effective as they once were. 

The Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh asked the People’s Republic of China for help. Ho’s comrade, Mao Zedong, responded by setting up Project 523 to find a new and better cure.

It was named for its starting date of May 23, 1967. Its leader was the woman medical researcher Tu Youyou.

Project 523 included more than 500 researchers, including Yu Yagang and Zhong Yurong. (Science, Sept. 29, 2011) Tu and her colleagues searched through thousands of old recipes from Chinese traditional medicine.

A plant called sweet wormwood, mentioned in a 1,600-year-old Chinese medical text, became the focus of attention. Tu Youyou helped develop an extraction method that led to the discovery of the anti-malaria drug Artemisinin in 1972.

Socialist solidarity vs. capitalist greed

Artemisinin and a later medication also developed in China, called dihydroartemisinin, have saved millions of lives around the world. Tu Youyou was finally awarded a Nobel Prize in 2015.

The struggle against malaria continues. It’s outrageous that over half a million Africans die from it every year.

Project 523 followed other massive public health efforts in socialist China, including the struggle against schistosomiasis, which was carried by snails. An army of volunteers waded into waterways to destroy the snails, as recounted in “Away with all pests,” by Dr. Joshua S. Horn.

The number of schistosomiasis cases in China fell from 11.6 million in the 1950s to 38,000 in 2017.

Compare that with capitalist Big Pharma’s record against COVID-19 in Africa. While by the fall of 2021, 6.4 billion vaccine doses had been administered worldwide, only 2.5% of them had been given in Africa. 

Back in 2001, the U.S. Agency for International Development head, Andrew Natsios, declared it was useless to provide treatment for HIV/AIDS in Africa. He claimed that the medications — which had to be taken at certain intervals — were worthless because Africans allegedly “don’t know what Western time is.”

This year is the 50th anniversary of Vietnam’s victory against the U.S. empire. On April 30, 1975, a Vietnamese tank smashed through the gates of Wall Street’s former embassy in what was to become Ho Chi Minh City. Poor and working people rejoiced everywhere. 

Helping Vietnam was the solidarity given by the other socialist countries, including the then-existing Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Part of that solidarity was the work of Tu Youyou and her fellow scientists in finding new cures for malaria.

The Pentagon killed millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, yet the U.S. war machine was defeated. Despite the genocide in Gaza, Palestine will also win.

For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the U.S. government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/15/25), former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who previously headed the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asserted that “Wuhan lab’s risky gain-of-function research was a giant mistake that cost millions of lives.” He offered as evidence that “Western intelligence agencies” who “initially bowed to political pressure and rejected the theory that Covid emerged from the Wuhan lab…now favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

The op-ed called not for a massive overhaul of scientific research into stopping the next pandemic, but for a domestic and international hunt for those responsible for such treachery, because the “Chinese Communist Party was permitted to bleach the crime scene.” Gallagher said:

Mr. Trump should establish a multination tribunal, akin to the International Criminal Court but with actual teeth, to investigate the origins of the virus, examining evidence of negligence or intentional misconduct, and determining the culpability of key people and institutions.

‘Finally comes clean’

Gallagher isn’t alone when it comes to media outlets reheating the lab leak furor. New York Times contributing writer Zeynep Tufekci (3/16/25) stressed that “there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market.” Her main evidence that the virus might have originated in a lab leak was the assessment of various intelligence agencies (mostly U.S., one German).

Tufekci (New York Times, 11/27/24) had previously praised President Donald Trump’s appointment of Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, despite “making catastrophically wrong predictions” about the deadliness of Covid, because he “has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak.”

Tufekci’s recent column was gleefully received by right-wing media. The New York Post (3/17/25) ​​said the Times “finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was ‘badly misled’ about the origins of Covid-19—triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.” It said that Tufekci—who is a sociology professor at Princeton University, and not a medical researcher, as the Post implies—“argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.”

The British conservative magazine Spectator (3/18/25) reported on Tufekci’s piece with the headline “The New York Times Finally Comes Clean About Covid.” The subhead: “It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.” Another right-wing British outlet, UnHerd (3/17/25), also used Tufekci’s column as fodder for a “we told you so” piece.

It’s not true that Tufekci is the first at the Times to advance the lab leak hypothesis. The Times‘ David Leonhardt promoted the concept in his widely read Morning Newsletter (5/27/21) only about a year after the U.S. went into shutdown mode. “Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible,” Leonhardt wrote. “And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.”

Molecular biologist Alina Chan was more definitive in a New York Times op-ed (6/3/24) published last year, headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points.” Chan wrote that “a growing volume of evidence…suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.” The essay “recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse,” FAIR’s Phillip Hosang (7/3/24) wrote in response.

Government talking points

In another FAIR piece (4/7/23) about corporate media pushing lab leak speculation, Joshua Cho and I noted that news and opinion pieces often cited intelligence agencies to bolster the credibility of their lab leak claims. “Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy,” we wrote, noting that “there is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts.”

Less than two years later, as Trump prepared for his second inauguration, the federal government reintroduced the specter of “lab leak” when the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report that offered “no new direct evidence of a lab leak,” but instead, according to Science (12/3/24), offered

a circumstantial case, including that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) used NIAID money to conduct “gain-of-function” studies that modified distantly related coronaviruses.

The magazine also reported that “Democrats on the panel released their own report challenging many of their colleagues’ conclusions about Covid-19 origins.” The minority report noted “that the viruses studied at WIV with EcoHealth funding were too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to cause the pandemic.”

The following month, the CIA “offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals” (BBC, 1/25/25). As AP (1/26/25) noted, however, the “spy agency has ‘low confidence’ in its own conclusion.” Reuters (3/12/25) subsequently  reported, citing “a joint report” by two German outlets, Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, that

Germany’s foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%–90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

‘Unfounded assertions are dangerous’

Once again, the claims about the pandemics origin being a Chinese lab leak seem to come from Western spooks and anti-Communist zealots, not actual scientists. Yet Gallagher and Tufekci present these governmental declarations, sometimes from the same agencies that brought us the Iraqi WMD hoax, as compelling evidence, seemingly more authoritative than the researchers in relevant fields who point to a zoonotic jump as Covid’s most likely source.

The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” Nevertheless, the journal reported, “the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.” The immunobiologists and other scientists who wrote the essay spelled out the danger of “lab leak” myth:

Despite the absence of evidence for the escape of the virus from a lab, the lab leak hypothesis receives persistent attention in the media, often without acknowledgment of the more solid evidence supporting zoonotic emergence. This discourse has inappropriately led a large portion of the general public to believe that a pandemic virus arose from a Chinese lab. These unfounded assertions are dangerous…[as] they place unfounded blame and responsibility on individual scientists, which drives threats and attacks on virologists. It also stokes the flames of an anti-science, conspiracy-driven agenda, which targets science and scientists even beyond those investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The inevitable outcome is an undermining of the broader missions of science and public health and the misdirecting of resources and effort. The consequence is to leave the world more vulnerable to future pandemics, as well as current infectious disease threats.

It is hard to believe that the world’s scientists have conspired to create research suggesting zoonotic jump (Globe and Mail, 7/28/22; Science, 10/10/22; PNAS, 11/10/22; Scientific American, 3/17/23; Nature, 12/6/24) for the sole purpose of covering up a lab leak. The Times and Journal’s unquestioning acceptance of the lab leak hypothesis endorses it as the expense of scientific research that says otherwise, and assumes that China’s government is guilty until proven innocent.

More importantly, the goal of reviving the lab leak idea seems completely divorced from preparing for the next pandemic or protecting public health. If anything, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for scientists to guard against future viral dangers, given its many cuts to scientific and medical research (All Things Considered, 2/10/25; STAT, 4/1/25; Scientific American, 4/11/25).

Recent articles giving credence to the lab leak hypothesis serve the Trump administration’s mission of reducing medical research and protections for public health, and have the side benefit for MAGA of stirring up nationalist rage against China. It’s harder to understand what people genuinely interested in protecting humanity from the next pandemic get from listening to intelligence agencies rather than scientists.

Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Transit fares have gone up 58 times since 1948

April 21 — The Fare Ain’t Fair campaign held a news conference this morning across from City Hall in lower Manhattan, demanding a rollback in subway and bus fares. Initiated by the December 12th Movement, the campaign advocates a big expansion of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s “fair fares” program.

The campaign estimates four million New Yorkers would benefit if the program were expanded to include those living below 400% of the miserably low federal poverty limit. It would certainly help one-out-of-three New York City residents who are paying at least half their income on rent. 

Speakers pointed out that the current $2.90 fare is 58 times what it was in 1948, when it was a nickel. Nobody’s wages have risen like that. The fare is scheduled to go up to $3 in August.

People can’t afford the fare, and many are jumping the subway turnstiles out of necessity. Police have flooded the subways hunting for poor people to jail.

Last year, cops shot Darrell Mickles for allegedly skipping the fare and shot two other people as well at the Sutter Avenue station. Over 88% of those arrested for non-payment are Black or Latinx.

The real crime is the Metropolitan Transit Authority paying $2.8 billion every year in tax-free interest to the banks and other bondholders. That’s four times what the MTA claims it’s losing to folks’ self-help at the fare box or turnstile.

As the Fare Ain’t Fair campaign stated, “it’s time the MTA starts TAXING Wall Street rather than BORROWING from them and putting us in more debt. It’s time THEY PAY THE FARE!” 

After the news conference, people testified at a City Council hearing. To get in touch with the Fare Ain’t Fair Campaign, contact fareaintfair@protonmail.com.

On March 30, 2025, delegates from China, Japan, and South Korea held their first economic dialogue in five years. This appears to be a reaction to Trump’s tariff war against the world. Only time will tell what these talks mean for the U.S.-dominated political and economic order, but they may indicate increasing independence from the U.S. However, China, Japan, and South Korea each have different relationships to U.S. imperialism, the nature of which is obscured in the capitalist media. 

Japan and South Korea dominated by U.S. in different ways 

South Korea, though typically referred to as an “ally” of the U.S., is a semi-colony or a satellite state. The U.S. dominates it politically, economically, and militarily, even if Washington doesn’t control the government directly. South Korea is occupied by the U.S. military, with some 30,000 troops, the third largest U.S. military occupation after Germany and Japan.

This is no conspiracy. It’s how U.S. imperialism operates. This kind of arrangement gives the U.S. all the same control and profits without the overhead costs of an outright colony like “Israel.” This has been the case with South Korea since the end of World War II in 1945.

Japan is different because it is an imperialist power itself. Japan brutally occupied Korea between 1910 and 1945. Today, Japan is generally aligned with and subordinate to the U.S. After World War II, the U.S. deliberately rehabilitated and modernized Japanese industry — to strengthen the Japanese ruling class against both their own working class and the socialist wave sweeping Asia, particularly China, as well as the socialist countries led by the USSR.

After World War II, both Germany and Japan were subordinated militarily by the U.S., with each occupied by the largest U.S. military deployments in the world (that is, there are more U.S. military personnel and equipment, headquarters, etc., in Germany and Japan than in anywhere else in the world outside the U.S.). They are U.S.-occupied imperialist satellites.

The U.S.-imposed constitution on Japan, particularly Article 9, initially limited Japan’s military capacity, and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty ensured that Japan served U.S. strategic interests in Asia against the Soviet Union and China.

Japan’s post-war economic resurgence (“economic miracle”), aided initially by U.S. policy, eventually led to economic contradictions and inter-imperialist rivalry with the U.S. and Europe. Trade disputes and competition in industries like automobiles and electronics emerged. In recent years, Japan’s government has essentially overridden Article 9 with a serious buildup of military forces. On Dec. 26, 2024, the Associated Press reported:  

“The Japanese Cabinet on Friday approved a record 8.7 trillion yen ($55 billion) defense budget for 2025 as Japan accelerates building up its strike-back capability with long-range cruise missiles and starts deploying Tomahawks to fortify itself against growing threats from China, North Korea and Russia.” 

This comes amid a rise of economic and political nationalism accompanied by anti-immigrant movements and growing racism in Japan, as in other imperialist countries like the U.S., Germany, Britain, and France. 

China’s socialist revolution made a difference

China, however, had a socialist revolution in 1949. It put the majority of people — the workers and peasants — in charge. China had endured its own “century of humiliation” as a semi-colony of Great Britain, which began in 1839. Before the 1949 socialist victory, Japan had occupied parts of China, namely with the colonial puppet state of Manchuria. A U.S. Library of Congress source says that 20 million Chinese people were killed in the Second Sino-Japanese War between 1937 and 1945, making it one of the deadliest conflicts of WWII. 

After so much death and destruction, the people of China would not fall into the same trap again. China’s revolution secured its sovereignty. Western powers, led by the U.S., have never forgiven China for its revolution. The U.S. has spent much of its military budget for decades trying to economically and militarily encircle China. But even with intensified aggression, starting under Obama and intensifying into Trump’s second term, China is not backing down, and is not bending to kiss Trump’s ring. 

Significance of current trade talks

As a response to U.S. tariffs, China, Japan, and South Korea agreed to expand their economic cooperation by continuing to stabilize supply chains and maintain continuous dialogue on export controls. 

Japan and South Korea are interested in importing raw materials for semiconductors, and China is interested in finished chip products in return.

To avoid drawing attention from the imperialists in Washington, both Japan and South Korea have downplayed the discussions. 

But the joint statement speaks for itself: 

“We noted with satisfaction the advancements made in trilateral cooperation between our three countries and held fruitful discussions on the future trajectory of our cooperation. We especially recognized the need for ongoing trilateral economic and trade cooperation to effectively address emerging challenges and achieve tangible outcomes in key areas.”

Though this is not a new trade agreement, an agreement to continue talks independently of the U.S. could be significant. It could signal that Washington’s ability to control the situation may be waning. Trade relations in themselves (even in defiance of U.S. efforts to isolate China) will likely not be enough to counteract Japan’s remilitarization and increasingly racist posture. 

But in this current period, it may be a political accomplishment in itself for two nations aligned with U.S. imperialism to be in the same room as one that has proven to be its counterweight, discussing economic cooperation. Ultimately, though, it is people’s struggles, particularly in Japan and South Korea, that can fundamentally change the dynamics.

People’s Victory in South Korea

Days later, on April 4, 2025, President of South Korea Yoon Suk Yeol was ousted by the country’s Constitutional Court. 

This was a result of a four-month-long struggle that followed President Yoon’s attempted declaration of martial law. Working-class forces, including the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), took to the streets demanding his removal. 

Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, an organization of Koreans in the diaspora for reunification and national liberation, put it succinctly:

“The movement in the streets that brought down Yoon has always demanded far more than his removal. Yoon is simply one representative of South Korea’s ruling capitalist class, and this class itself is dependent on U.S. imperialism to remain in power.” 

A special election for the presidency takes place in June. What this may mean for continued economic cooperation with China and Japan remains to be seen. But the South Korean people have shown that they have the power to topple U.S.-backed stooges. This is likely not comforting to the imperialist leaders in Washington and their Wall Street constituents. 

People traveled from across the Deep South on Tuesday to take part in a protest at an ICE prison in Jena, Louisiana. On any given day, as many as 2,000 people are caged at the LaSalle Detention Facility, one of nine for-profit immigrant prisons across the state. The majority of the people in detention have never been charged with a crime; most are forced to spend months in detention, and some, even years.

Protesters from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Shreveport, and beyond spoke out against the persecution of immigrants and demanded the release of student activist Mahmoud Khalil, who is being targeted by the Trump administration for speaking out against the U.S. / Israeli genocide in Palestine.

The Trump administration is trying to use ICE as a Gestapo-like force to crush any organizing against U.S. wars-for-profit, for workers’ rights, etc. They have been targeting our immigrant brothers and sisters, but their intention is to intimidate and repress any and all efforts to resist the U.S. billionaires’ agenda of war and austerity. Any efforts to defend and expand the labor and civil rights and social programs we’ve fought so hard to win must also be aimed at the abolition of ICE and the legalization of immigrants whose labor the billionaires exploit for super-profits. None of us is free if one of us is chained.

Marches, rallies, and actions to inspire courage among the people are all part of the fight against fascism. We will build our strength that much more by bringing the movement into our workplaces and working-class communities. The struggle for Palestinian freedom is part of the struggle for food on our table, is the struggle to liberate humanity from the clutches of the war and prison profiteers in control of the U.S. government.

Workers Voice Socialist Movement is based in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Este pasado miércoles de Semana Santa, Puerto Rico vivió – por segunda vez en apenas tres meses – un apagón general. El primero fue en vísperas del Año Nuevo.

Desde que se privatizó el servicio de energía eléctrica, hemos vivido con una inestabilidad de ese servicio. Los apagones, que duran horas y las fluctuaciones de voltaje, han causado no solo desasosiego en la población, sino que muchas personas han perdido desde electrodomésticos, aparatos electrónicos, alimentos, hasta su vivienda que se ha quemado ya sea por un cortocircuito, o por la explosión de un generador eléctrico. Y ni se hable del costo a la salud. Algunas personas enfermas, sobre todo en lugares montañosos, que viven a merced de bombonas de oxígeno o instrumentos médicos eléctricos, ya han perdido sus vidas o se le ha agravado su condición. Pequeños comerciantes que no tienen para costear un generador, o un sistema de placas solares, han perdido sus negocios, el ingreso de su familia. Y recordemos también, que en lugares altos, el servicio del agua depende de bombas que a su vez operan con energía eléctrica. Así que cuando no hay luz, ¡tampoco hay agua!

El gobierno local de Jenniffer González, obediente a la Junta de Control Fiscal impuesta por Estados Unidos sigue premiando a estas compañías que vienen, no a proveer un servicio, sino a robarle al pueblo. Ya han subido el costo de la luz siete veces desde que comenzaron hace cuatro años. ¡Ahora esa Junta ha pedido que se suba la tarifa otra vez! Y a diferencia de otros países que pueden pasar por dificultades en este servicio, no hay ningún remedio ni alertas del gobierno. ¡Todo lo contrario! La gobernadora, solo miente y hace promesas falsas al pueblo.

Pero parece que ya está colmándose la paciencia del pueblo y tanto en las redes sociales como en los noticieros, se manifiestan tanto en contra del funcionamiento de estas compañías privadas, como del de la gobernadora.Y aquí hace 6 años, comenzó un movimiento similar para que hizo que el gobernador Roselló renunciara. 

Veremos si ahora, se convertirá en ¡Jenniffer Renuncia! ¡Cero privatizaciones! Y ¡Fuera la Junta!

Desde Puerto Rico, para Radio Clarín de Colombia, les habló, Berta Joubert-Ceci

Donald Trump wants the world to believe that fascist thugs kidnapping people in broad daylight is simply a necessary step to protect the poor, suffering Jewish community from an onslaught of antisemitism. 

According to the president, the key to winning the battle against antisemitism is to seize and deport pro-Palestine activists, students, professors, and labor organizers. Whether it was Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Alfredo Juarez, Rasha Alawieh, Yunseo Chung, or one of the other people facing abduction and deportation by Trump’s regime, the fact pattern was roughly the same. 

Kidnapping workers and activists

Enter a worker, student, or activist going about their lives. Some are on their way to dinner with friends. Some are on their way to work. Some are arriving home along with their pregnant spouses. Now, enter a squad of jack-booted Gestapo throwback agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Before too long, the person is far from their loved ones in a hellhole of a federal detention center. 

Donald Trump wants the Jewish community, and really the entire working class, to believe that they should accept the kidnapping and concentration of their neighbors because it is necessary to defeat antisemitism. How ironic, a fascist demagogue would attempt to use the trauma of the Holocaust to justify the usage of the exact same tactics from the holocaust against oppressed communities and progressive organizers.

All this comes from the same man who insisted that there were “good people on both sides” when hundreds of violent neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Virginia. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville saw white polo-wearing Nazis marching around chanting “the Jews will not replace us.” The rally also led to the murder of DSA activist Heather Heyer. Good people on both sides, he says. 

Donald Trump did not deport a single neo-Nazi who marched on Charlottesville. Donald Trump did not deport the cohorts of Robert Bowers, the fascist organizer who murdered 11 Jewish people in cold blood at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Donald Trump did not deport any of the vicious anti-Semites who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In fact, Trump pardoned all of them. 

A new red scare

No Jewish person should be fooled by these deportations as anything but a new attack on the working class and anti-imperialist organizing during a new red scare. 

Bring them home! End the deportations! Tear down the prisons! 

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.