CovertAction Bulletin

May Day and the Power of the General Strike

In over 3,500 cities and towns across the United States, workers took to the streets on May 1st for a day of no work, no school, and no shopping on the fourth day this year of mass organized action. Following the January 23rd and 30th shutdowns that started in Minneapolis and spread coast to coast and the No Kings Day in March, May Day was the latest in what’s becoming a building process of collective power and consciousness. Around the world, May Day or International Workers’ Day, is a celebration of the power of workers and our movements. Many countries mark it as an official labor holiday.

ICE raids continue to terrorize immigrant communities around the country. The fragile ceasefire with Iran is marked by regular threats to resume and intensify with a ground invasion. Trump on Friday signed another executive order trying to starve the Cuban people of resources by further restricting trade. Gas prices and costs of consumer goods continue to soar. And the Supreme Court has taken another step in rolling back hard-won civil rights in its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, attacking core provisions of the Voting Rights Act. 

It’s becoming more clear to so many that only the power of the people will stop the attacks of the Trump regime and the system it represents.

Age Verification: Backdoor to Surveillance & Censorship

Imagine being forced to prove how old you are - and having it verified by a third party -  before unlocking your phone or signing up for a social media site. That’s the goal of legislation introduced or passed in some U.S. states, the UK and Australia. Age verification requirements for social media and “adult content” are being proposed across the US, Europe and beyond with the justification of protecting children. But verifying your age basically means scanning your ID, and therefore tying your online presence with your real-world identity. Not only will this exclude millions of people who don’t have government IDs, it attacks people who need to speak out anonymously against injustice, including whistleblowers. 

Even beyond age verification for social media, California’s Assembly Bill 1043 goes into effect on January 1st, 2027 and requires operating systems - Windows, macOS and Linux among others, to perform age segmentation at the base level of the phone or computer system.

The surveillance state loves the idea of age verification, which does very little to protect children as it claims to do - but does a lot to silence dissent, prevent the spread of information and silence free speech.

Secret Court Reauthorizes Secretive Spy Program

Congress is set to vote soon on reauthorization of the Section 702 warrantless surveillance program, part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. 702’s authorization expires on April 20th. On its surface, the program allows intelligence agencies to spy on non-citizens outside the United States - without their knowledge, or the consent of their governments. But people inside the US can be and are caught up in this surveillance if they’re in contact with targets of the program for any reason - including,as noted by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, “business or personal reasons” not associated with any criminal activity.

The intelligence community is on a propaganda tour ahead of the renewal votes, saying the program helped them prevent an attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Austria and to kill El Mencho, a Mexican cartel leader. But regardless of the vote, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has already approved the program through March of 2027 - regardless of what Congress votes on regarding the renewal of Section 702.

PLUS: Democrats are ignoring their own recent history of criminalizing student protest to claim there are no left-wing protests under Trump as the midterms come up - and more.

Trump’s Threats Further Destabilize World Order

NOTE: This episode was recorded hours before the announcement of the 2-week ceasefire on April 7th.

Just a day after Donald Trump made a national prime-time address on April 1st claiming the US is “winning and winning big” in the war on Iran, an American F-15E Strike Eagle fighter plane was shot down over a mountainous region of eastern Iran, kicking off a frantic search-and-rescue and a covert misinformation operation by the CIA within Iran. The U.S. military has over 200 F-15E planes, at a cost in 2026 dollars of $65 million each and the next-generation F-15EX set at about $100 million each. The war on Iran has cost about $43 billion so far.

But at an Easter luncheon earlier on April 1st, Trump also said he told Russel Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care.” and went on to say, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things,” saying that the federal government’s priority should be wars and weapons while people still go hungry, without housing and without healthcare. And he’s effectively threatened genocide against the Iranian people and the entire region.

The Trump administration and Project 2025 have been shaking the core of civilization like an earthquake shakes a building. The question of what comes after this structure breaks is at the core of how we move forward.

Eyewitness Cuba: Solidarity, Not Blockades

Cuba is set to receive oil for the first time in 2026, following the March 31st arrival at Matanzas Bay of the Russian tanker Anatoly Kolodkin with over 730,000 barrels, or 100,000 tons, of crude oil. The tanker and its owner, the state-owned company Sovcomflot, have had sanctions on it since 2024. Late last year, the Trump administration announced severe tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba and, after the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores, prevented Venezuelan ships from reaching the island. All of this on top of decades of sanctions put the island into a severe fuel shortage, an attempt to strangle and starve the population. The delivery of the Russian tanker is a much-needed event and pokes a hole in the U.S. blockade of Cuba, but much more remains to be done.

Also in March, the Nuesta America convoy to Cuba brought people from around the hemisphere and the world to Cuba in solidarity, bringing with them aid including solar generators and solar panels to help Cuba advance its renewable energy infrastructure in the face of the blockade. Our guest today was part of the Youth Brigade of dozens of organizers who went to Cuba, where he met, exchanged and stood together with Cuban youth, building bonds of solidarity. We’ll now welcome Phill Campbell, an organizer and member of Artists Against Apartheid to the show.

Deception, Oppression & Cover-Ups: Mueller Was No Hero

Former FBI Director Robert Muller died on March 20th. He entered into that position on September 4th, 2001. Within eight weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had arrested over 1,200 people - mostly Muslim men in the United States. None of them were shown to have any connection to Al Qaeda, but that didn’t deter the FBI and its partners in local law enforcement agencies like the NYPD from heightening their surveillance of Muslim communities, even sending informants into mosques.

All of this was done under the presidencies of George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, who convinced the Senate to allow Mueller to serve an extra two years on top of the 10-year term for FBI directors. It was also under the shadow of the War on Terror, powered by the PATRIOT Act to destroy lives and curtail rights abroad and at home.

But Mueller underwent an image transformation about a decade ago. Rather than rightly being decried as an enemy of the people and of civil liberties, he led the charge on the so-called Russiagate hoax, kicking off years of delusional frenzy among liberals that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to get Donald Trump elected.

Pentagon, AI Giants Aim for Increased Lethality

Swarm Forge. Ender’s Foundry. Project Grant. Open Arsenal. These are the names of just some of the “Pace-Setting Projects” that Pete Hegseth identified in a January memorandum on the “Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the Department of War.” Their names are as hard to take seriously as “Operation Epic Fury,” but like the war, the Pentagon’s AI initiatives are already having a significant impact on the world. AI systems were reportedly used to select targets for more than 1,000 attacks in the first days of the war on Iran. It’s investing heavily in targeting systems, data collection and analysis, and even autonomous weapons that can take instructions and then independently engage in missions, destroying and killing without immediate human feedback.

Private companies won’t be left out of it, either - the Pentagon plans to “leverage the hundreds of billions in private sector capital investment being made in America’s AI sector through our growing array of creative partnerships with America’s world-leading companies.” From Palantir and Anduril to xAI, OpenAI and Google billions of dollars continue to be spent every year on using AI to “increase lethality” - to make the U.S. military even more of a threat around the world.

Even Soldiers Don't Want War

The 82nd Airborne Division has canceled a training exercise to keep the Division ready to deploy with just 18 hours of notification for what it calls “forcible entry parachute assaults.” Parts of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, are being moved from South Korea to the Middle East. As we are recording on Tuesday, March 10th, Pete Hegseth said it would be “yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran - the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes” with the Pentagon claiming more than 5,000 targets have been hit inside the country - including what we now know was a double-tap strike on a girl’s school in Minab last week.

While the Pentagon is playing up its use of technology and in particular AI in war, the fighting by and large still requires people flying the plains, maintaining the equipment, and filling those often-referenced “boots on the ground.” According to the Center on Conscience and War, their phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from service members and families looking for options to refuse to fight Trump’s war.

We’re joined by Mike Prysner, the Executive Director of the Center on Conscience and War, which you can find online at https://centeronconscience.org.

The US Cannot Win a War Against Iran

The US/Israeli war on Iran could easily spark a greater regional conflict if it continues. Donald Trump at first said Tehran would be taken in 3-4 days, then a day later claimed the war would last no more than 4-5 weeks and threatened that the US has enough weapons to fight “forever.” Already, the bombing has killed 787 people, including 180 at a girls’ school in Minab on Saturday as Operation Epic Fury began. 

Iran is responding in self-defense with attacks on important regional bases and centers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and Israel after the bombings killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. An Israeli strike on Tuesday then bombed the Council of Experts in the holy city of Qom as they began deliberations on appointing a new leader. The White House has outlined its goals for the war, including the complete elimination of the Iranian government - a regime change operation.

On the killing of Khamenei, Trump told ABC News “I got him before he got me,” suggesting a paranoia around supposed Iranian threats to him.

The US/Israeli attacks and the Trump administration’s frantic and sometimes contradictory messaging might seem out of the ordinary, but deeper analysis shows that this war is not uniquely Trump’s. It’s an unprovoked, imperialist war of aggression like so many others that the US has launched on the people of the Middle East and beyond in its quest for complete domination of the world. It’s the latest in a long series of US interventions in Iran, starting with the 1953 US/British coup that overthrew the secular, nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and continuing through this past summer and today.

This war is also not a war that the US can win. Will imperial hubris land the region in another deadly, expensive “forever war?”

Lessons From Iraq to Stop a War Against Iran

Is the U.S. government preparing to go to war with Iran? Leading up to talks set to happen towards the end of the week in Geneva, the Trump administration has also threatened Iran with war, saying the country has “10 to 15 days” as of February 20th to agree to a deal - putting Trump’s one-sided deadline somewhere in the first week of March.

In apparent preparation for military strikes, massive amounts of military equipment have been sent to the region, including dispatching the USS Gerald R Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, to the Arabian Sea near the Persian Gulf. At least 120 aircraft, including F-35 stealth strike fighters and F/A 18-E Super Hornets, have been sent to the region with the Ford, in addition to E-3 Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) used for command & control operations as well as surveillance. The Ford will be joining the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is already off the coast of Oman.

As we come up on the 23rd anniversary of the 2003 US war on Iraq as well as the 15th anniversary of the US-led NATO invasion of Libya, we’ll look back at what led up to them, the lessons learned from the anti-war movement of the period, and how we can stop the next war:

• Stand for self-determination and against imperialist aggression
• The primary responsibility of those in the US is to oppose their government’s actions
• Don’t fall into the trap of tailing the Democrats, the graveyard of social movements.