Food pantries see record demand, as government shutdown becomes longest on record

Jacob Crosse

Jesus Aguilar, center, uses his bicycle to navigate a drive-through food distribution at the San Antonio Food Bank for SNAP recipients and other households affected by the federal shutdown, Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025, in San Antonio, Texas. [AP Photo/Eric Gay]

The United States entered the 37th day of the longest government shutdown in history on Thursday, surpassing the 2018–2019 impasse under the first Trump administration. What began on October 1 has rapidly evolved into a social and economic catastrophe for millions of working people.

More than 1.4 million federal employees have gone without pay since September, including air traffic controllers, TSA screeners and postal workers. On Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that 10 percent of US flight capacity would be cut across 40 airports, triggering hundreds of thousands of cancellations and delays ahead of the holiday season.

At the same time, Trump’s “forced hunger” policy will slash food stamp benefits for 42 million Americans under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that “Nearly 1.2 million SNAP households with roughly 4.9 million people—roughly 1 in 9 SNAP recipients—will receive zero benefits.”

The same report found that “[N]early 5.4 million households with one or two members will receive a minimum benefit of $12 for November.” All SNAP participants, of which 39 percent are children, will receive even less than they should have.

On Thursday, Chief Judge John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court ordered the administration to resume full payments by Friday, writing that “[W]ithout SNAP funding for the month of November, sixteen million children will be immediately at risk of going hungry. This should never happen in America.”

Trump’s Justice Department immediately signaled it would appeal the ruling, guaranteeing weeks, if not months, of further deprivation.

Millions of people across the United States are turning to food pantries to survive. In West Virginia, where 270,000 people rely on SNAP benefits which have yet to arrive, Facing Hunger Foodbank distributed “75 tons of food across the 12 counties during the first weekend in November, more than double what it distributes in a typical weekend,” reported Mountain State Spotlight.

In Pierce County, Washington, home to Tacoma, nearly 118,000 residents rely on SNAP every month. KNKX, the local NPR affiliate, reported that local food banks have seen a 40 percent increase in visits since the start of the shutdown.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the number of families seeking food pantry assistance at Central Storehouse in Fort Worth has jumped from the high 180s per day to 210–225, as SNAP benefits vanish and federal workers go unpaid. In West Texas, over 100,000 people across 19 counties are newly pushed onto food bank rolls, and one distribution site recently served 851 cars in a single morning, a surge unseen since the COVID-19 peak.

The ongoing shutdown comes amid a wave of layoffs not seen since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis. Private placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 153,000 job cuts in October 2025, up 175 percent from the same month last year—the highest October total in more than two decades.

“This is the highest total for October in over 20 years, and the highest for any single month in the fourth quarter since 2008,” said Andy Challenger, the firm’s chief revenue officer. “Like in 2003, a disruptive technology is changing the landscape.”

That “disruptive technology” is artificial intelligence, which corporations are rushing to deploy as they slash payrolls. Nearly 47,900 warehouse and logistics workers lost their jobs in October alone, including thousands at UPS, which has continued mass buyouts after the so-called “historic” 2023 Teamsters contract signed by union President Sean O’Brien.

The technology sector announced 33,281 job cuts in October, bringing the 2025 total to 141,000, a 17 percent increase over last year.

The report also identified Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk—as the leading reason for layoffs this year, citing it in nearly 294,000 planned cuts, including federal contractors. Another 21,000 cuts were attributed to “DOGE Downstream Impact,” caused by the loss of federal funding to private and nonprofit entities.

While DOGE-induced cuts have devastated hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, Musk, the world’s richest man and a notorious neo-Nazi has been showered with new wealth. On Thursday, Tesla shareholders approved a trillion-dollar pay package for the tech mogul that could make him the first-ever trillionaire.

Elon Musk gives a Nazi salute at an indoor presidential Inauguration event in Washington, Monday, January 20, 2025. [AP Photo]

While workers are thrown into unemployment by Musk’s “efficiency” schemes, the oligarchy rewards him with historic levels of personal enrichment.

Workers laid off are finding it increasingly hard to land a new job as hiring has simultaneously collapsed. Employers have announced only 488,000 planned hires so far this year, down 35 percent from this same point in 2024 and the lowest year-to-date total since 2011.

The growing crisis is mirrored in consumer confidence data showing that optimism among low income workers has plunged to its lowest point in years.

Bloomberg citing the Conference Board, found confidence among households earning under $50,000 has collapsed since mid-2024, even as those making over $200,000 have grown more upbeat thanks to soaring stock prices.

The richest 10 percent of US households now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, fueled by financial gains and asset inflation, while workers slash purchases to survive amid withheld pay and mass layoffs.

Economist Peter Atwater compared the situation to a “top-heavy Jenga tower”—a system so imbalanced that a single wrong move could send it crashing down. The metaphor captures the parasitic character of American capitalism: a speculative, debt-driven economy resting on the backs of an increasingly impoverished majority.

Even Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has been forced to acknowledge a “bifurcated” economy, one that channels wealth to the top while leaving the base to crumble.

While millions go hungry and jobless, the Democratic Party has responded by begging Trump to negotiate on reopening the government, without placing any limits on his dictatorial powers. Following the mass “No Kings” protests last month, Democratic leaders urged Trump and congressional Republicans to restore Affordable Care Act subsidies, arguing that doing so would prevent “price shocks” and maintain insurance company profits.

Trump has so far rejected Democratic entreaties, labeling the Democrats “radicalized lunatics” and calling on Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster in order to ram through his budget unilaterally. On social media Thursday he wrote:

“The Democrats will terminate the Filibuster in THE FIRST HOUR, if and when they assume ‘control’ or power. Republicans have what the Democrats want—We should do it, NOW, and have the greatest three years in History!”

The attacks on jobs, wages and basic social rights flow from the growth of inequality that is intrinsic to capitalism itself. The defense of the right to food, shelter and dignified work requires a frontal assault on the hoarded wealth of the financial oligarchy.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor—a self-described “Democratic Socialist”—reflects the growing left-wing sentiment among workers and youth, but his party’s role in propping up Trump’s government proves the DSA and the Democrats are no vehicle for genuine change.

Target, GM, Ford announce more layoffs, as total US job cuts for 2025 approaches 1 million

Tom Hall

US retailer Target announced 1,800 cuts to corporate jobs on Friday, the latest attack in the ongoing war on jobs in the United States and internationally.

The company justified the move as a necessary response to a longstanding decline in sales and share values relative to Walmart and other major competitors. “Is this our Kmart/Sears moment?” asked one worker on The Layoff message board, referring to the collapse of the two retail companies.

Another corporate employee wrote:

it’s not a factory, but we just got treated like disposable parts. That “professional” label means nothing against “at-will” employment, which is just a nice way of saying “you can be fired at any time for any reason” … We’re not “headcount” to be cut; we’re the people who build the company, and it’s time we had the power to prove it.

The Target layoffs follow a series of major job cuts in the auto industry, driven by disappointing sales of electric vehicles. General Motors announced 200 layoffs in its design engineering division, while EV startup Rivian is laying off 600 people. Workers are also reporting that Ford is going to close its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center and suspend production of the electric F-150 Lightning. A fire last month in a New York state plant supplying aluminum to the company is expected to cost Ford up to $2 billion.

Other recently announced layoffs include:

• 1,200 workers at cable giant Charter;

• 1,400, or 4 percent of the workforce, at chip equipment maker Applied Materials;

• 600 at the risk division of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which cited as the cause of the cuts “significant progress in how we approach risk management and compliance;”

• 100 at Google’s cloud computer division;

• 200 at Texas Instruments, as the company closes a fabrication line in Dallas;

• hundreds of layoffs at major universities across the US. According to Forbes, the causes include “slumps in enrollment, fallout from the various federal cutbacks orchestrated by the Trump administration and rising costs from inflation.”

• 153 positions at Montclair Public Schools, one of countless districts across America facing a funding crisis worsened by the cutoff of public funds, first under Biden and now Trump.

The wave of layoffs expresses a massive war on the working class, with a redistribution of wealth upward to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. Earlier this week, Amazon announced the layoff of 15 percent of its global human resources division, while the New York Times reported on plans by the company to use automation to avoid hiring 600,000 people over the next eight years. Earlier this month, 4,000 “reductions in force” (RIF) were implemented across US government agencies, as Trump uses the ongoing government shutdown as a pretext to go after social programs and consolidate personal control over the executive branch.

This week, hundreds of furloughed federal workers lined up at food pantries as the shutdown entered its fourth week. Federal News Network spoke with workers who had been fired in Department of Energy cuts earlier in the year, rehired and now fired again. “I am reliving the nightmare of the first RIF,” one worker said, who had received the first layoff notice while in the hospital from a stress-induced seizure.

Food stamp funding is set to run out by the end of the month, but even apart from the shutdown, $180 billion has been cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Major new requirements to restrict access to benefits are scheduled to take effect next month.

The scale of the layoffs is unprecedented in recent years. According to the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the United States is on track for the most job cuts announced by employers since 2020. A major factor is the jobs bloodbath within the federal government.

So far in 2025, there have been 946,426 job cuts as of September, “up 55 percent from the 609,242 job cuts announced through the first three quarters of last year and up 24 percent from the 2024 full year total of 761,358.” The report notes that “the 2025 year-to-date total is the fifth highest in the 36 years Challenger has reported.”

Unemployment has risen continuously since early 2023, from 3.4 percent to 4.3 percent. September figures have not been released, ironically, because Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employees have been furloughed. But even the official numbers underestimate the real toll. Earlier this year, the BLS issued a massive downward revision to its 2024 employment data, erasing nearly 1 million jobs previously reported.

Meanwhile, an orgy of speculation continues on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen more than 9,000 points since its sharp decline in April following Trump’s announcement of universal tariff increases.

The country is teetering on the brink of a recession, triggered by rampant speculation and corporate profiteering, the costs of which are already being imposed entirely upon the working class. Last month, financial services firm UBS estimated the chance of a US recession by the end of the year as high as 93 percent. According to an analysis by a Moody’s economist, 22 out of 50 states plus the District of Columbia are already in recession. The most recently added state to this list is Michigan, the historic center of the US auto industry. ABC News spoke with economists predicting that the government shutdown could be the factor that tips the entire US economy into recession.

The ruling class intends to use this downturn to carry out a sweeping restructuring of the economy. Mass layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, the elimination of less profitable sectors of production, and the automation of millions of jobs are all part of an effort to intensify exploitation and protect corporate profits.

The political expression of the financial oligarchy’s domination of the economy is Trump’s bid for dictatorship, which enjoys the support of tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman. Plans are being discussed within the administration to deploy the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to major cities in coordination with corporate executives, including the head of Union Pacific. Trump claimed on his Truth Social account that planned deployments to San Francisco were called off because “friends of mine who live in the area called last night.”

On Friday, Trump issued a flurry of posts promoting his tariff policies, announcing an abrupt cutoff of negotiations with Canada. He claimed that Ford and GM personally thanked him because they were “up big” on truck sales due to tariffs. “THE UNITED STATES IS WEALTHY, POWERFUL, AND NATIONALLY SECURE AGAIN, ALL BECAUSE OF TARIFFS!” he wrote.

But tariffs function as a regressive tax, paid by importers and ultimately borne by consumers through higher prices. Their impact is only beginning to be felt, with inflation reaching 3 percent in September, up 0.7 points since April.

Millions threatened with hunger as South Africa’s ANC seeks to terminate Social Relief of Distress grant

Alejandro López

The African National Congress (ANC), allied with the Democratic Alliance (DA) and a cluster of right-wing parties in South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU) is planning to terminate the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) in March 2026. The decision to withdraw a lifeline on which millions depend is a declaration of war on the working class.

The grant currently keeps 8.4 million people from starvation. An estimated 45 percent of the country’s population depends on social grants or the SRD grant as a primary source of income. This includes approximately 13.2 million child support grant beneficiaries and 4.3 million recipients of the old age grant.

The SRD was first introduced in May 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a concession extracted from a terrified ruling class facing the threat of social upheaval. Prior to the pandemic, unemployment exceeded 12 million and inequality had reached record levels. Working-class communities were living in squalor, without secure access to electricity or running water, plagued by rampant crime, corruption, poverty, particularly among the predominantly young population.

People line up to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in Lawley, south of Johannesburg, South Africa, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021. (AP Photo/ Shiraaz Mohamed)

When the ANC government imposed one of the world’s harshest lockdowns, enforced with troops and rubber bullets, millions were deprived of all means of survival. Within weeks, nearly half of all households had run out of money for food, while soldiers patrolled the townships.

The WSWS consistently defended lockdowns as necessary public health measures to eliminate the virus. However, such measures had to be combined with mass testing, contact tracing, isolation facilities, and full income protection for workers.

Faced with the spectre of social upheaval, the ANC moved to grant workers a pittance of R350 ($20) a month in May 2020. The grant was conceived as a temporary measure, confirmed when the government abruptly discontinued the grant in April 2021, only to hastily reintroduce it in August after the eruption of mass riots in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng following the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma.

The ANC recognised that the unrest, that left at least 354 people dead with more than 5,000 arrested, went beyond the imprisonment of its former corrupt leader and president. The deeper causes lay in mass unemployment, staggering inequality, and deepening poverty, conditions intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Now, nearly five years later, the same state that spends billions of dollars to service its debts claims that it cannot afford to maintain this meagre lifeline for millions due to “fiscal responsibility”. South Africa’s national debt has ballooned to over R5.2 trillion (US$290 billion) and is projected to exceed R6 trillion ($330 billion) by 2026. In the 2025/26 budget, just R35.2 billion ($1.95 billion) is allocated to sustain the SRD grant, less than one-twelfth of the amount devoted to debt service which stands at an astronomical R426.3 billion ($23.7 billion). For every rand spent to keep a human being alive, twelve are paid to the financial oligarchy and international creditors in interest.

Behind this policy stands the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Last year the IMF declared that South Africa “needed to pursue ambitious fiscal consolidation to restore the sustainability of its public finances” and demanded “durable expenditure-based consolidation of at least 3 percent of GDP over the next three years.” The IMF’s country report, along with a World Bank review published the same year, made clear that any continuation or expansion of the SRD grant should be “financed through expenditure reprioritization,” that is, by slashing other social programmes.

The ANC obeyed. It has frozen the SRD’s nominal value, refused to link it to inflation, and maintained an income threshold that deliberately excludes millions. As the Food Poverty Line rises to R796 (US $44), the means test remains fixed at R624 (US $35), ensuring that the poorest of the poor are declared “too rich” to qualify. It is now moving to terminate the SRD completely.

The consequences will be catastrophic. For millions of unemployed adults, the SRD grant is the sole source of income. Its real value has already fallen by nearly 20 percent since 2020 as the cost of food, electricity, and transport has surged. Termination will deepen misery on an immense scale. In rural provinces such as the Eastern Cape, Limpopo, and KwaZulu-Natal, where unemployment and underdevelopment are most severe, SRD circulates as the only cash income in entire communities.

A shanty town in South Africa [Photo by pxhere.com / CC BY 4.0]

The ANC talk of “replacing” the SRD with a grant “linked to employment” is a fraud. There are no jobs to seek in a country where the official unemployment rate exceeds 33 percent and youth unemployment has reached 62 percent.

The assault on the SRD grant exposes the reactionary character of the ANC-led GNU. Celebrated by the capitalist media as a triumph of “national unity” and “democratic maturity,” it has developed as the WSWS warned: the ANC’s “deal with the Democratic Alliance means intensifying a programme of class war at home in the interest of South African and international capital, under conditions where South Africa, the world’s most unequal society, is a social and political powder keg”.

Once hailed as the liberation movement that overthrew apartheid, the ANC has spent the past three decades functioning as the principal party of capitalist rule in South Africa. Upon taking power, it adopted the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme in 1996, a policy framework that embraced free-market principles, fiscal restraint, and privatisations. GEAR marked a decisive break from the ANC’s earlier promises of redistribution and laid the foundation for the deepening austerity of today.

As it continued imposing attacks on the working class and overseeing record levels of inequality, the ANC’s electoral support collapsed. From winning 62.7 percent of the vote in the historic 1994 election, it fell to 57.5 percent in 2019 and plunged to just 40.2 percent in 2024, its first loss of a parliamentary majority since the end of apartheid.

The ANC-DA alliance is a coming together of factions of the ruling class to enforce austerity and police state attacks on the working class. The DA descends from apartheid-era formations, including the National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The Government of National Unity were soon joined by other right-wing forces, including the Zulu ethno-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the anti-immigrant Patriotic Alliance (PA), and the white-Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus (FF+). This coalition marks the fusion of the black bourgeois layer cultivated through the ANC’s Black Economic Empowerment policies with the white capitalist elite in a united offensive against the working class.

The ANC’s splinters that act as the nominal opposition, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party, are refusing to mount any serious opposition to the SRD termination. They have not called for any protests, let alone strikes. Drawn from the strata that orbit the ANC, their calls for expropriation of capital owned by white South Africans seeks only a larger share of the spoils, not the abolition of capitalism. Both parties are exploiting legitimate anger against capitalist inequality to divert it into nationalist and chauvinist channels, including xenophobic campaigns.

As for the trade unions, they have issued statements opposing the SRD’s termination but have refused to call for strikes to stop it. This, despite COSATU, historically aligned with the ANC, still claiming around 1.5 million members; SAFTU around 650,000; and FEDUSA and NACTU around 600,000 and 400,000 respectively. While they have all denounced the government’s attack, with COSATU calling the failure to inflation-adjust the SRD an “absolute abomination,” SAFTU warning of “catastrophic consequences,” and FEDUSA declaring “hands off the poor”, none have initiated nationwide strike action. Their responses are parliamentary submissions, token marches, and appeals to the ANC.

Amazon, UPS, Paramount Global slash tens of thousands of jobs as economic and social crisis in US deepens

Jerry White

On Tuesday, Amazon, UPS and Paramount Global announced plans to eliminate at least 50,000 jobs, part of a continuing wave of mass layoffs that has already wiped out nearly a million positions this year. The corporations justify the cuts as “efficiency gains” and “AI transformation,” even as they post record profits and soaring stock prices.

The Seattle Times reported that Amazon will cut 14,000 corporate positions this year with more cuts coming in 2026. Despite “strong business results,” Senior Vice President Beth Galetti said in a blogpost, the company must be “organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership.” In short, even huge profits are being used to rationalize a global purge of jobs.

According to Business Insider, the cuts span Amazon’s retail, human-resources, logistics, advertising, Audible, Devices and Fire TV divisions, with remaining workers told to “lean in on AI.” Internal documents obtained by the New York Times and analyzed by the World Socialist Web Site show that Amazon plans to automate as much as 75 percent of its operations, eliminating between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs over the next several years. By 2033, the company expects to double sales while avoiding hundreds of thousands of new hires.

Amazon’s global downsizing is also hitting its European workforce. In Germany—one of its largest markets—the company has notified works councils of impending cuts affecting warehouse and corporate staff, and employees have reported being locked out of company systems before termination notices were issued.

Job destruction is reaching Amazon’s delivery network as well. The Seattle Times reported that 110 drivers in Kitsap County, west of Seattle, lost their jobs when Amazon ended its contract with the local Delivery Service Partner Jarde. The company claimed it “regularly evaluates our network,” but the subcontracting system allows Amazon to shed drivers while hiding the real scale of layoffs.

UPS, meanwhile, has already eliminated 48,000 jobs this year—34,000 in operations and 14,000 in management. In an earnings call with investors Tuesday, CEO Carol Tomé boasted that the company was “positioned to run the most efficient peak in our history” and said the reductions were part of a strategy to “align capacity with demand” and “find new opportunities to bring costs down.” UPS posted higher-than-expected quarterly profits even as parcel volumes fell. The layoffs come just one year after the Teamsters bureaucracy hailed its contract as “historic,” claiming it would protect jobs. In fact, management is carrying out one of the largest downsizings in company history.

Paramount Global is also in the midst of a sweeping jobs bloodletting, targeting roughly 1,000 employees across corporate offices, streaming operations and its film and television divisions. The cuts follow earlier rounds at CBS, MTV Entertainment and Paramount+ production units in Los Angeles and New York.

Workers posting on TheLayoff.com described chaotic communication and mounting anxiety. One wrote, “The goal is to get many of us to the point where we can’t take the stress anymore and walk out on our own. That saves them money on severance.” Another said remote staff outside major cities are being cut first to reduce salary costs. The layoffs come amid renewed merger speculation involving Warner Bros. Discovery, as executives slash payroll to make the studio more attractive to investors.

Forbes summarized the carnage: “It’s only Tuesday, and this week has already seen more than 50,000 corporate employees at some of the nation’s largest companies let go.”

The auto industry is also shedding jobs at a rapid pace. General Motors has laid off several hundred engineers and designers at its Warren Technical Center in Michigan just days after reporting sharply higher profits and a major stock-price jump. GM is also idling and “rebalancing” electric-vehicle production, with temporary and permanent layoffs at its Detroit “Factory Zero” and likely closure of its CAMI Assembly plant in Ontario.

Ford has announced up to 1,000 job cuts at its EV facility in Cologne, Germany, and further reductions across Europe after eliminating nearly 4,000 positions last year. Stellantis is cutting US engineering and software staff while demanding up to 40 percent labor-cost reductions to “stay competitive.” Across all three companies, management invokes automation and “realignment for EV demand” as pretexts for mass job destruction even as they hand billions to investors in dividends and stock buybacks.

Multinational corporations are carrying out similar cuts across industries. Lufthansa, Germany’s largest airline, is eliminating 4,000 positions by 2030, citing “digitalization and the increased use of artificial intelligence.” Salesforce cut 4,000 jobs worldwide in September; Microsoft and Meta are slashing thousands across Europe and Asia while expanding AI data centers. Around the world, employers are wielding the same justification—“efficiency” and “AI transformation”—to destroy jobs and boost profits.

Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi admitted that 23 state economies in the US were contracting, just 16 were seeing economic growth, albeit with slower momentum, and 12 were “treading water.” Earlier, Zandi said, “The way people perceive their own economy, their own finances, are very consistent with the recession.”

The mass firings coincide with the Trump administration’s purge of nearly 300,000 federal employees under its “reduction-in-force” program and the slashing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamps for up to 44 million people. A senior citizen living in public housing in Portland told the WSWS that pantries “can’t keep up with this administration’s theater of cruelty.” Food banks report empty shelves, while inflation—driven higher by Trump’s tariffs—erodes what remains of workers’ incomes.

Another worker who wrote into the WSWS said: “I work at a senior center, many of whom are lower income individuals. At the end of the month, they have a week long bingo bucks shopping thing, where they trade in the prize coupons they win daily for trinkets, toiletries, and so on... this last week a lot of it has been for food.”

The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported October 2 that employers have announced 946,000 job cuts so far in 2025, the highest since the first pandemic year. Retail layoffs are up 203 percent over 2024, and holiday hiring plans are the weakest since 2009. More than 17,000 cuts were directly attributed to artificial intelligence and 20,000 more to “technological updates.”

What is unfolding is a coordinated class war, not a series of isolated restructurings. It spans logistics (Amazon, UPS), auto manufacturing, media (Paramount), tech (Microsoft, Salesforce, Meta), retail (Target), aviation (Lufthansa) and the public sector. Both corporate parties back it. Trump’s Project 2025 blueprint calls for mass federal layoffs, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, Social Security and other essential programs and the funneling of even more money into the hands of the corporate financial oligarchy and the build up for World War III.

As for the Democrats, they support “fiscal responsibility” and fear nothing more than the revolutionary potential of a mass movement of the working class against the fascist president and the economic and political domination of the oligarchy.

The trade union bureaucracies serve as accomplices. The Teamsters, who boasted of their “historic” UPS contract, are silent on the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs. The United Auto Workers under Shawn Fain promotes Trump’s nationalist trade program to divide US workers from their brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico and around the world, while global auto companies carry out new rounds of mass layoffs. Far from defending the working class, the unions act as labor-management partners, suppressing resistance and isolating struggles.