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“Nobody should have to livestream the deaths of their loved ones to prove that they deserve to live.” –Mohammad Safa + First, the Israelis said it didn’t happen; the Palestinians were lying. Then, after the bodies were recovered, the Israelis said the people they killed were driving “suspicious vehicles” and shielding Hamas fighters. When the […]
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We are passionate supporters of all but one of the items on the Hands Off agenda for the April 5 rallies. We couldn’t agree more that the corrupt U.S. government should stop destroying, privatizing, firing, and giving away the post office, schools, land, Social Security, healthcare, environmental protections, and all sorts of essential public services. But we are deeply disturbed to see NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) on the list of items that we are rallying to protect.
Many people believe that NATO is a peace-loving, defensive alliance, but the opposite is true. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan, leaving villages bombed, infrastructure destroyed, and countless dead.
Originally formed in opposition to the Soviet Union, NATO not only failed to disband with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it increased from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today. Despite promises not to expand eastward, it ploughed ahead against the advice of senior, experienced U.S. diplomats who warned that this would inflame tensions with Russia. While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine, in violation of the UN Charter, we cannot deny the disastrous role played by NATO in provoking and then prolonging the war in Ukraine. Two years ago, then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted that insisting on NATO membership for Ukraine had brought on the Ukraine war. “[Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders,” he said.
The inclusion of NATO in the Hands Off list contradicts the basic Hands Off agenda. Right now, at the bidding of President Trump, NATO is openly and aggressively pressuring its member nations to move money from healthcare, retirement funds, and clean energy to weapons and militarism. Watch a video of the Secretary General of NATO publicly telling the European Union to move money from healthcare and retirement to war. It should be clear which side of the Hands Off agenda NATO is on.
NATO is a destabilizing, law-breaking force for militarization and war provocation. Its existence makes wars, including nuclear wars, more likely. Its hostility toward the few significant militaries in the world that are not among its members fuels arms races and conflicts. The commitment of NATO members to join each others’ wars and NATO’s pursuit of enemies far from the North Atlantic risk global destruction.
We would be happy to expand the Hands Off demands to international issues, such as Hands Off Palestine or Yemen or Greenland or Panama or Canada. But we do object to including a destructive institution like NATO, an institution that systematically and grossly violates the commitment to settle disputes peacefully contained in the UN Charter. If we are truly committed to human needs and the environment, as well as peace, diplomacy, and the UN Charter, then we should eliminate NATO from the Hands Off agenda.
We should go beyond that. We should recognize that while many government agencies are being unfairly cut and need to be defended, one enormous agency that makes up over half of federal discretionary spending is being drastically increased and needs to be cut. That is the Pentagon. The U.S. government spends more on war and war preparation than on all other discretionary items combined. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. spends more on militarism than 227 of them combined. Russia and China spend a combined 21% of what the U.S. and its allies spend on war. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. The U.S. spends more on war per capita than any other nation, except Israel.
This is not normal or acceptable, or compatible with funding human and environmental needs. NATO has taught people to measure military spending as a percentage of a nation’s economy, as if war were a public service to be maximized. Trump has recently switched from demanding 2% of economies for war to 3%, and then almost immediately to 5%. There’s no logical limit.
Companies that profit from war, like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, will always push for more military spending. So will NATO. While NATO allies consider Russia their most immediate and direct threat, their long-term adversary is China. The constant search for enemies leads to a vicious cycle of arms races. But there is a different path: the pursuit of disarmament negotiations, the rule of law and global cooperation. If we pursued that path, we could move massive amounts of money away from weapons to invest in addressing the non-optional dangers of climate, disease, and poverty.
The rational and moral international piece of the Hands Off agenda should be to eliminate both NATO and the voracious militarism that threaten the future of life on this planet.
The ability of the wealthy to accumulate more wealth has its ups and downs. However, as shown by the Federal Reserve Board’s (the Fed) Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989, the overall trend has been one in which the wealthiest .1% have succeeded at growing their share of the nation’s wealth. According to the Fed figures, by the end of the Biden presidency, the .1%’s share of the nation’s wealth reached 13.8%, increasing by over 60% from 8.6% in the third quarter of 1989 when daddy Bush was in power which is when the Fed figures cited start.
In fact, under each president since 1989, at some point during their term, the share of the nation’s wealth held by the wealthiest .1% reached new heights. Setbacks would follow, but in later years, a new all-time high would be reached. For example, during Junior Bush’s presidency, the Great Recession resulted in a large drop in the .1%’s share of the nation’s wealth. Despite the drop, at the end of Bush’s regime, their share was higher than it was at the end of Clinton’s time in office. During Obama’s and Trump’s presidencies, the share of the .1% became even larger. Biden’s tenure ended with their share reaching its highest point yet.
Many have difficulties protecting the current value of their assets and preventing them from being eroded by inflation. What is “impressive” is that not only have the wealthy .1% been successful at increasing their share of the nation’s wealth, but its total has far outstripped inflation, increasing in nominal dollars more than 121/2 times from 1989 to the end of 2024 from $1.75 trillion to $22.14 trillion while the total nominal wealth of the nation as a whole grew less than 8 times from $20.43 trillion to $160.35 trillion. During this same period, the poorest 50% of the population, almost exclusively members of the working class, saw their nominal wealth increase from $.71 trillion to $4.01 trillion, less than a sixfold increase. Unlike the super wealthy, much of their wealth is tied up in basic necessities such as a place to live.
Below is a table based on the Fed figures showing the high point during one’s presidency and the level of the wealth of the .1% at the end of the fourth quarter of the year right before each new president was sworn in (which may be the same as the high point), and the amount in trillions of dollars.
Many have longed for the days of bipartisanship, lamenting the polarization in our political system. However, what is striking about the Fed’s numbers, whether intentional or not, is the degree of bipartisanship around the .1% capturing a bigger share of the nation’s wealth. People often see Republicans as championing the interests of the wealthy, but the greatest recent increases in the share of the .1%’s wealth occurred during Democratic administrations.
From right before the start of the Clinton administration to its high point, the share of the wealth of the .1% during his time in office increased by 2.6% before declining to a gain of 1.4%. For Obama, it went up 2% after the decline from the Great Recession, and for Biden by .8%. By contrast, in the period covered starting in the third quarter of 1989, under daddy Bush, the increase was .6%. Under the second Bush, it increased 1.6% before tumbling during the Great Recession but still ending higher by .3% than it was at the end of the Clinton administration. The increase in the share of the .1% at the end of Trump’s first regime was .5% despite the pandemic.
Certainly, the increase in the wealth of the .1% during any administration may have much to do with changes in the capitalist economy beyond their control and the policies put in place by their predecessor (that are not reversed) and whose full impact is often realized in the subsequent administration. Bush 2 and Trump oversaw major tax cuts for the wealthy. However, Republican policies have not been alone in helping the .1% better their conditions. Under Clinton, there were tax cuts, much deregulation, and the repeal of sections of the Glass-Steagall Act, and Obama instituted the bailout of the financial industry.
Inequality Among the .1% and the 2025 Losses of U.S. Centibillionaires
Assuming the U.S. population was 340 million at the end of 2024, then the average holding of the wealthiest .1% or 340,000 people came to over $65 million. That is a large amount of money, but $65 million is less than .065% of $100 billion, an amount of wealth, according to the April 4, 2025 Bloomberg Billionaires Index, exceeded by 12 U.S. citizens. In other words, it could be viewed as minute when compared to the wealth of our multicentibillionaires, that as of April 3, according to the Bloomberg Index, included Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, but as of April 4 had one lone member, Elon Musk, as can be seen in the table below.
As a group, these 12 U.S. centibillionaires are experiencing another one of those downturn periods. Using Bloomberg figures, since the beginning of the year, of the wealthiest 12, only Buffet has experienced an increase in the size of his fortune. The remaining 11 have, together for the year as of April 4, lost $359 billion led by Musk, who remains the world’s wealthiest individual despite experiencing a decline in his wealth of $130 billion so far this year, (or $147 billion since January 17, the day Trump was sworn in).[1] Has he been willing to tolerate this huge “sacrifice” because he sees his actions of “disrupting” many peoples’ lives as paving the way for greater gains to make up for his “suffering” from these great losses? Does he deserve to be “admired?” How many people have had the experience, while working in the government, of seeing the value of their wealth drop $130 billion in a short period of time and still remain the world’s wealthiest guy?
Below is a table based on Bloomberg Billionaires Index figures showing what has been happening to the wealth of U.S. centibillionaires.
Don’t shed any tears for the losses these poor folks have suffered. From 2021 to the end of 2024, their nominal wealth increased 82% or by $981.6 billion, far outstripping the rate of gain of the entire .1% during this period that grew 38%, less than half as much. As of April 4, the centibillionares are still up $626 billion from where their nominal wealth stood at the beginning of 2021.
With his fight for tax cuts for the wealthy and other favorable policies for them, despite the recent setbacks, Trump is likely to try to continue the trend of his recent predecessors of providing the .1% with a larger share of the nation’s wealth as he makes America great again while also accelerating the destruction of the environment, enhancing militarism and the threat of a nuclear catastrophe, and fomenting greater alienation and racism along with numerous other social ills.
Notes
1. Since the day Trump was sworn in, as of April 4, despite donating $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, Bezos wealth is down $52 billion, and Zuckerberg’s is down $38 billion. Could Trump be ushering in a revolt by the wealthy against his policies?
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.”
A minimum 10 per cent tariff on exports to the US will hit low-income countries throughout the region. But exports from Nicaragua have been saddled with an even higher tariff of 18 per cent. Delighted opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have blamed it, rather than Trump, for the country receiving this additional penalty. However, simple examination of the figures shows that Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated in the same way as every other country’s.
Before examining the opposition media’s error-strewn reports, this article first explains the background: how the tariff was set, whether it is legitimate and how US-Nicaragua trade is changing. Then it turns to the opposition’s mistakes and explains how they are using Trump’s actions to bolster their attacks on Nicaragua’s government and people.
How the tariffs were set
Trump’s chart of tariffs has two sets of figures for each country: the “tariffs charged to the USA” and the “reciprocal tariffs” to be imposed this month. Bizarrely, the “tariffs charged to the USA” do not relate to actual tariffs charged on US imports. Instead, they are the product of a calculation based on each country’s trade gap with the US. For most countries, the value of these “tariffs charged” has been set at 10 per cent, on the basis that the US has no trade deficit with them, or only a small one. All of these countries (including Nicaragua’s neighbors) are hit with a “reciprocal tariff” of 10 per cent on their exports to the US, from this month onwards, even if they buy more from the US than they sell to it.
However, a higher “tariff charged” is calculated for countries with which the US is judged to have a bigger trade deficit. For each country, the White House looked up the deficit for its trade with the US in goods for 2024, then divided that by the total value of the country’s exports to the US. Trump, to be “kind”, said he would offer a discount, so halved that figure. The calculation was distilled into a formula.
For example, these are the figures for China:
1) Goods trade deficit (exports from the US minus imports): – $291.9 billion
2) Total goods imported to the US from China: $438.9 billion
3) A ÷ B = – 0.67, or 67 per cent
4) Half of this is 34 per cent, the new tariff being applied to China.
Based on this formula, the small African country of Lesotho was saddled with the highest “reciprocal tariff” of 50 per cent, while several major SE Asian countries were also hit with very high tariffs.
How Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated
Nicaragua’s “reciprocal tariff” was calculated in the same way. According to US trade figures, in 2024 US goods exports to Nicaragua were $2.9 billion, while US goods imports from Nicaragua totaled $4.6 billion. The US goods trade deficit with Nicaragua was therefore – $1.7 billion in 2024.
The calculation was therefore: trade deficit (- $1.7 billion) ÷ imports ($4.6 billion) = – 0.37, or 37 per cent, halved to produce a “reciprocal tariff” of 18 per cent.
This means that from April 9, there will be a new tax of 18 per cent on Nicaraguan goods sent to the US, payable as a customs duty on their arrival by the company or agency importing the goods.
How Nicaragua might contest the tariff
It seems unlikely that Trump will bend to pressure on the tariffs. However, at least in theory, there are three ways in which Nicaragua might argue that the tariff is wrongly imposed:
1) Nicaragua’s Central Bank shows a smaller trade gap with the US. According to the Central Bank’s figures for 2024, Nicaragua’s exports to the US totaled $3.7 billion, not $4.6 billion, while its imports from the US totaled $2.7 billion, giving a trade gap of $1 billion, not $1.7 billion. On the basis of Trump’s tariff formula, the result should have been a 14 per cent tariff, not 18 per cent, if Nicaragua’s trade figures are correct. (A possible explanation for the difference may be the way that goods, originating in Nicaragua, are processed in other Central American countries before arrival in the US.)
2) Although most Central American countries import more from the US than they export to it, Costa Rica also has a trade surplus with the US, amounting to $2 billion, bigger than Nicaragua’s, yet it is only being penalized by the standard “reciprocal tariff” (10 per cent).
3) Most importantly, as the Guatemalan government pointed out, under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty new tariffs are illegal (under both US federal and international law). The treaty prohibits new tariffs or customs duties between the seven member countries. Therefore, all six of the other countries that are parties to CAFTA-DR are entitled to challenge the US for breaching it.
Action by CAFTA-DR members is complicated by the fact that Nicaragua is not only worst hit by the tariffs but is also a country that the US would like to exclude from the treaty completely, a point picked up below.
Changing significance of Nicaraguan exports to the US
Nicaragua’s Central Bank divides its trade figures between “merchandise” and products from free trade zones (principally, apparel). This, as we will see, confused the opposition media. This is the breakdown:
+ Exports of merchandise (e.g. gold, coffee, meat, etc.) totaled $4.2 billion in 2024, with the US accounting for 38.7 per cent of these, or $1.62 billion.
+ Exports from free trade zones were lower ($3.5 billion) but the proportion going to the US was much higher (59 per cent, or £2.08 billion).
+ Of Nicaragua’s total exports, at $7.7 billion, $3.7 billion went to the US (48 per cent).
+ Exports provide 39 per cent of Nicaragua’s annual income or GDP.
+ Exports to the US therefore account for a significant 18 per cent of GDP.
These figures exclude services, such as tourism and transport, where trade between Nicaragua and the US is roughly in balance (unlike Guatemala and Honduras, with whom the US has a strong trade surplus in services).
Exports to the US have fallen slowly from over 50 per cent of the total two years ago, as the government looks for other markets. Exports to the Republic of China, for example, were four times higher in 2024 than in 2022, but (at $68 million) are still a small proportion. There are other growing export markets, of which the most notable is Canada (now the second biggest buyer of Nicaraguan merchandise).
The Nicaraguan government’s response to the tariffs is likely to involve continued efforts to diversify trade and keeping a watchful eye on the effects on different sectors of the economy. Producers of products like coffee and gold may be less affected as they already have diverse markets. On the other hand the apparel sector, which until this month enjoyed zero tariffs on its $2 billion exports to the US, is geared to the US market and might find greater difficulty in mitigating the tariff’s effects.
Celebration and misinformation in opposition media
Nicaragua’s opposition media, long financed by the US government, admit that they have been hit by Elon Musk’s cuts. How they are now funded is unclear. However, prominent opposition activists enjoy salaried employment in US universities and think tanks, where they call for sanctions that would hit poor Nicaraguans. Naturally, they welcomed Trump’s announcement.
Errors in reporting on the tariffs showed opposition journalists’ unfamiliarity with Nicaragua’s economy. Confidencial, in a piece translated and reproduced in the Havana Times, claimed that the tariff imposed on Nicaragua ignored a trade surplus “of $484 million in favor of the US” which “has been growing in recent years.” This completely ignored exports to the US from the free trade zones. The same error was made a day later by Despacho 505.
According to Confidencial, the reason for the higher tariff on Nicaragua (and on Venezuela, hit with a 15 per cent tariff) was to punish their authoritarian governments. In reality, the higher tariffs on both countries resulted from the application of Trump’s formula, but this deliberate misrepresentation was to be repeated.
In an “analysis” for Confidencial on April 4, Manuel Orozco painted the 18 per cent tariff as specifically aimed at the Nicaraguan “dictatorship” (again, linking it with Venezuela). Orozco is a former Nicaraguan now living in Washington, working for the Inter-American Dialogue, an NGO funded by the US government and its arms industry. It is most unlikely that he was unaware of how the tariff was calculated; misleading his readers strengthened his argument that the higher tariff was a purely political move.
Further articles in Despacho 505 and Articulo 66 also blamed political factors without explaining the arithmetic behind the tariff. In La Prensa, activist Felix Maradiaga wrongly remarked that the US accounts for over 60 per cent of Nicaragua’s exports. According to him, the supposed weakness of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government means the country will struggle to cope (he disregards its remarkable resilience in dealing with the much heavier economic consequences of the 2018 coup attempt and the 2020 pandemic).
Then, also in Confidencial, opposition activist Juan Sebastián Chamorro made the claim that the new tariffs, which of course he welcomes, are entirely compatible with the CAFTA-DR trade treaty. He argued that Washington’s action is justified on grounds of “national security.” This echoes the absurd classification of Nicaragua (during the first Trump administration, continued by Biden) as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
Opposition media are trying to present the new tariff as the first round of the stronger sanctions on Nicaragua that they have been urging Washington to adopt. They do this regardless of their illegality under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty or wider international law. The possibility of going further – excluding Nicaragua from the treaty – was trailed by Trump’s Latin America envoy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, in January, although he was careful to note the difficulties. But if this were to happen it would delight the opposition even further.
Obsessed with promoting regime change in Managua, these anti-Sandinista activists disregard the effects of tariffs and trade sanctions on ordinary Nicaraguans. On “Liberation Day” Trump showed his indifference to the millions of people in low-income countries whose livelihoods depend on producing food and other products for export to the US. The likes of Orozco, Maradiaga and Chamorro behave in just the same way.
Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. Image by Levi Meir Clancy. […]
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Screengrab from a video posted to X of the Israeli bombing of the Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza. Screengrab from a video posted to X of the Israeli bombing of the Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza. Screengrab from a video posted to X of the Israeli bombing of the Jabalia Refugee Camp in […]
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Solid-State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) at Clear Air Force Station. Photo: US Air Force. Solid-State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) at Clear Air Force Station. Photo: US Air Force. Solid-State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) at Clear Air Force Station. Photo: US Air Force. Solid-State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) at Clear Air Force […]
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Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project building, Seattle. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions
+ Trump and Rubio would have deported Tom Paine for writing seditious pamphlets as a “citizen of the world” and not the US. As it was, Paine died a pariah in the country he did so much to liberate, condemned as a heretic and Jacobin. Only six people attended his funeral in New York City, and the great radical essayist William Cobbett felt compelled to sail over to the States, dig up his bones, and take them back to the UK because the US had betrayed Paine’s vision for the country and its own revolution.
+ If you wanted to know what the US was like under Jim Crow and the Red Scare, you’re getting a glimpse of it right now.
+ Kilmar Abrego Garcia came to the US in 2012 to escape being recruited into a Salvadoran gang that had terrorized his family for more than two years. In 2016, he met his future wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, a US citizen living in Maryland. They eventually moved in together and Kilmar helped raise her two children. They later had a child together. Each of the three kids had some form of disability. Kilmar, according to Jennifer, was an attentive and devoted father to all of the children. He held a steady job, he stayed out of trouble, and then he was busted in 2019 while waiting to apply for a job at Home Depot and accused of being a member of the M-13 gang in Long Island, where he’d never been. During his hearing, Abrega adamantly denied any gang ties. The cops said they arrested him because “he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie and that a confidential informant advised that he was an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique.”
Jennifer Vasquez Sura wrote in a deposition that she was so fearful Kilmar would be deported that she arranged for them to get married while he was in jail: “I coordinated with the detention center and a local pastor to officiate our wedding. We were separated by glass and were not allowed physical contact. The officers had to pass our rings to each other. It was heartbreaking not to be able to hug him.”
Relying on the bogus testimony from a confidential informant, the immigration judge issued a removal order but barred his deportation to El Salvador, agreeing that there was a serious threat to Abrego Garcia’s life if he was returned home. The judge ordered his release and required him to regularly check-ins with ICE, which Abrego Garcia faithfully did.
So things stood until March 12, 2025, when ICE agents stopped Abrego Garcia’s car as he was driving his 5-year-old son home from school. He was cuffed, told his immigration status had been revoked and that he would be deported. The agents took him to a detention center in Baltimore. When Kilmar was finally able to talk with Jennifer on the phone, he told her the ICE agents once again accused him of being a member of M-13, saying bizarrely they’d watched the family frequently visit a certain restaurant and that they had photos of Kilmar playing basketball.
On the morning of March 15, Kilmar called Jennifer again to let her know he’d been transferred to Louisiana. “That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different,” Jennifer wrote in her deposition. “He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT.’” Jennifer hasn’t heard from him since.
Then, on Monday of this week, the Trump administration admitted in a court filing that Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order. By accident, they claimed, the result of an “administrative error:” (Which sounds like the excuse for everything that happened in the last two months.) “On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.” Even so, the Trump administration argued the court had no power to order the return of Kilmar from the custody of the nation that he had fled 13 years ago in fear for his life.
The entire case against Kilmar, dating back to 2019, has the smell of a frame-up. When Kilmar’s lawyers attempted to contact the detective who filled out a form in 2019 accusing him of links to MS-13, they discovered that the police department had no record of his arrest. Even more damning, the detective who filled out the fatal form had been suspended.
Despite the outrageous facts of the case, instead of admitting their grotesque error, the Trump administration went on the offensive, sending JD Vance out to smear Kilmar on FoxNews, where he called him “a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here. He had also committed some traffic violations; he had not shown up for some court dates. This is not exactly ‘father of the year’ here.” Trump’s Jesus-worshipping press spokesperson Kathline Leavitt threw even more toxic slime at Kilmar, calling him a “criminal,” a “foreign terrorist,” and a “heinous individual.”
All lies.
Abrega Garcia has no criminal record and his wife and kids miss him and worry about his fate in Naghib Bukele’s lethal dungeon.
+ In 2024, José Gregorio González came to the US from Venezuela to donate a kidney needed to save the life of his brother José Alfred Pacheco, who suffers from late-stage renal failure. But before the operation could take place, González was swept up by an ICE raid in Chicago that a neighbor described as “an ambush.” González’s request for asylum had been denied, but an immigration judge had allowed him to stay in the US for the time being because Venezuela was refusing to accept any deportation flights from the US. González hadn’t any criminal history in the US and wasn’t served with a warrant at the time of his arrest. After public outrage over his detention, Gonzalez was temporarily released until after the operation could take place, at which time he would be deported.
+ The Washington Post explains that this is far from the only case where noncitizen relatives have been deported while caring for relatives with terminal illnesses, though not as terminal as the sickness of the country that is deporting them:
Last month, a child brain cancer patient in Texas and her four siblings — all U.S. citizens — were deported to Mexico along with their undocumented parents who had removal orders as the family was en route to a Houston hospital for her treatment. An undocumented Mexican woman in the Los Angeles area fared better — ICE arrested her in February, but an immigration judge allowed her to post bond as she was the caregiver for an American daughter with bone cancer.
+ According to a report in Pro Publica on deportation flights, “flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.”
+ Here’s a continually updating map tracking the people who have been disappeared by ICE…
+ The Internal Affairs Department for Customs and Border Patrol found that a Chinese woman who Border Patrol had arrested for overstaying her visa hung herself in a cell and was not found for nearly two hours, even though written records noted there had been multiple welfare checks on her. Were the records falsified? Will there be an Internal Affairs Department at CBP next week?
+++
+ CNBC’s Jim Cramer on the eve of Liberation Day, making the right (if obvious) call for once: “I can’t think of a dumber day to buy stocks than today.”
Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So, we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is. It’s also important to understand that the tariff rates that foreign countries are supposedly charging us are just made-up numbers. South Korea, with which we have a trade agreement, is not charging a 50% tariff on U.S. exports. Nor is the EU charging a 39% tariff.”
+ Trump hit the Falkland Islands, a British territory in the Atlantic off the coast of Argentina, with tariffs of 41 percent, 31 percent more than for Britain itself. This is slightly less surreal than the tariffs he slapped on two islands in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica uninhabited by humans. No matter how objectionable they might be to the islands’s avian community of Rockhopper Penguins, Wandering Albatrosses, Storm Petrels, and Subantarctic Skua, the tariffs Trump imposed on Heard and Macdonald Islands may be viewed as a kind of victory for animal rights: “I’m taxed. Therefore, I am.”
+ We go live to the Macdonald Islands for reaction from the local population to the imposition of 20% tariffs by the Trump administration…
+ Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada: “The relationship Canada had with the United States is over.”
+ A piece in the Financial Times calculated the expected inflationary impact of Trump’s tariffs and the measures taken in retaliation…
+ I don’t know if this means China and India will emerge as the big winners, but it sure seems clear who the biggest loser is. Over to you, Beck, uh, Beck, you’re up, c’mon, man…
+ There’s broad support across Europe for retaliatory tariffs against the US, with Denmark, not surprisingly, leading the way.
+ Gold hit a new record high at $3,160 an ounce after Trump’s tariff announcement. Somebody should check his and Elon’s pockets on their way out of Fort Knox.
+ The Nasdaq just experienced its worst-performing quarter since Q2 2022. It was down 11% from January through March.
+ Goldman Sachs said it sees Trump tariffs spiking inflation, stunting growth and raising recession risks.
+ The seven largest single-day Dow Jones point drops in American history
1. Trump, March 16, 2020: -2,997.10
2. Trump, March 12, 2020: -2,352.60
3. Trump, March 9, 2020: -2,013.76
4. Trump, June 11, 2020: -1,861.82
5. Trump, April 3, 2025: -1,679.39
6. Trump, March 11, 2020: -1,464.94
7. Trump, March 18, 2020: -1,338.46
+ The Financial Times should revisit these two financial parasites to see how they feel about their “liberation” after the bloodbath on Wall Street…
+ Laleh Khalili: “They are probably hedging against the market and making money from the volatility.”
+ As usual, Laleh is correct.
+ Todd Vasos, CEO of Dollar General, said that consumers “only have enough money for basic essentials.” Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that only 62% of Americans could come up with $2,000 in case of an emergency, the lowest on record,
+ At least 70 percent of retirees in the US reported having credit card debt, an increase of thirty percent from four years ago.
+ A Redfin analysis found that the top one percent of Americans have enough money in the bank to buy 99% of the homes in the US and that the top 0.1% could afford to acquire every single home across the nation’s 25 largest metro areas, from San Antonio to New York City.
+ According to Gallup, at least 81% of Americans view foreign trade as an opportunity for economic growth, jumping 20 percentage points since last year. Those seeing it as more of a threat to the U.S. economy have fallen by half, down to 14%.
+ OK, I know what you’re thinking: Bill Kristol is almost always wrong about everything, but perhaps not about this thing…?
+ Kristol now occupies a position to the Left of 93% of the elected Democrats on Capitol Hill.
+++
+ In his new book on the 2024 election, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, Chris Whipple gets Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, to paint Biden as physically spent, mentally confused and out of touch throughout the campaign, and at one point seemed to believe himself to be the head of NATO instead of the US.
+ Here’s Whipple’s account of the preparation for Biden’s debate with Trump:
At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, Klain was startled. He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.
That evening Biden met again with Klain and his team, [Biden aides] Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Bruce Reed. ‘We sat around the table,’ said Klain. ‘[Biden] had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted. And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders.’
Klain wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of NATO instead of the US. ‘He just became very enraptured with being the head of Nato,’ he said. That wouldn’t help him on Capitol Hill because, as Klain noted, ‘domestic political leaders don’t really care what [Emmanuel] Macron and [Olaf] Scholz think.’
…
25 minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day. ‘I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,’ he said. ‘I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ He went off to bed.
The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged. Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.
+ Musk spent millions in an attempt to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. He lost badly and Susan Crawford ended up not only defeating her Musk-financed opponent but trouncing Kamala Harris’ 2024 numbers across every political kind of county in the state:
Counties Harris Won by More Than 15 Points
Harris 70%
Crawford 77%
Counties Harris Won by More 5- 15 Points
Harris: 53%
Crawford: 62%
Counties Harris Won Within 5 Points
Harris: 48%
Crawford: 56%
Counties Trump Won by 5-15 Points
Harris 46%
Crawford 52%
Counties Trump Won by More than 15 Points
Harris: 38%
Crawford: 43%
+ In the 34 special Congressional elections during the Trump era, the Democrats’ 22-point over-performance in Florida’s 1st district is their best yet, and their 16-point over-performance in the 6th District of Florida was tied for 6th-best. Still, they lost both elections.
+ Trump on Andrew Cuomo and the NYC mayoral race: “I’ve always gotten along with him.” Of course, he has.
+++
+ The Trump administration is seeking to reduce the amount of congressional oversight of weapons exports, assuming there’s any oversight at all, after the Biden year. The plan is to increase to $23 million from $14 million for arms transfers and rise to $83 million from $50 million for the sale of military equipment, upgrades, training, and other services.
+ One of the schemes Trump is exploring to annex Greenland involves the US somehow paying Greenlanders more than the $600 million a year subsidy that Denmark pays. “This is a lot higher than that,” a Trump official told the Washington Post. “The point is, ‘We’ll pay you more than Denmark does.’”
+ The Washington Post on the lax security of Trump’s National Security team: “Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts. The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.”
+ Here’s some economic news to celebrate: Shares of Nike Sweatshops, Inc. are down 12% post-Liberation Day and down 28% in the last month!
+ Following Trump’s after-hours tariff announcement, the price of gold shot up to $3,200 an ounce, the highest in history. Somebody better pat down the pockets of Trump and Musk on their way out of Fort Knox…
+ According to Barchart, the top one percent of US earners have now amassed more wealth than the entire American middle class combined.
+ Pro Publica: Last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and accused the Consumer Fin Protection Bureau of terrorizing tech firms. It turns out a firm he backed—Greenlight, a debit card company for kids!—was being investigated by the CFPB for not allowing kids to immediately access funds.
+++
+ The Washington Post on the mass firings at HHS: “Some government health employees laid off Tuesday were told to contact Anita Pinder with discrimination complaints. But Pinder, the director at the Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, died last year.”
+ CNN’s Kayla Tausch: “At the HHS building in Rockville, employees describe learning they were laid off when their badge doesn’t work – and then having to do a “walk of shame” by others in line. “Could they have picked another day other than April Fool’s Day?” one tells me.”
Screengrab from X of workers being turned away from the HHS building in Rockville, Maryland.
+ Carol Miller, public health nurse, El Partido Verde activist, and CP contributor: “I worked in that building for two years and with programs based in that building for decades. This is the location of the Public Health Service providing nearly all the government programs for the people; Indian Health Service, Community Health Centers (care for more than 30 million people a year), Maternal and Child Health, National Health Service Corps (places health care providers in communities), Office of Rural Health, HIV/AIDS, and others.”
It’s quite a price the country’s going to pay for the kicks some people get out of “owning the libs.”
WIRED: “A senior scientist at NIH tells WIRED the impact of Tuesday’s layoffs was sheer “chaos,” with the firings of the lead investigators projected to widely impair and impede diverse ongoing research ranging from mechanisms within cells in the brain to human patients with neurologic conditions.”
+++
+ A Gallup survey reports that nearly every American uses products that involve artificial intelligence (AI) features, but two-thirds (64%) don’t realize it.
+ This kind of ignorance makes it that much easier for people like Sam Altman and Elon Mush who want to replace workers and, eventually, humans themselves with AI and robotics.
+ Welcome to the machine…
+ A couple of Sundays ago, Saahil Desai, an editor at The Atlantic, drove a Tesla Cybertruck around Washington, DC and was given the finger at least 17 times.
+ The Tesla board’s response to the Take Tesla Down campaign to a move to Take Musk Down From Tesla…
+ Just 45% of tech workers got a raise last year, according to the job site Dice–that’s a decline of 10 percent from 55 percent of tech workers who got raises in 2023.
+ A movement of Jah people…
+++
+ Trump has succeeded in convincing more Republicans (and quite a few Democrats) than ever before that Canada and the EU are no longer allies of the US but “enemies.” According to a piece in The Economist, nearly 25% of Republicans (and 7% of Democrats) now view Canada as an “enemy” nation, compared to 3% of Republicans and Democrats in 2016. Meanwhile, close to 30% of Republicans (and 5% of Democrats) now see the EU as an “enemy”, up from 17% of Republicans and 3% of Democrats last year.
+ The Economist: “Trump repeatedly claims that the European Union was ‘formed in order to screw the United States.’ Canada, America’s northern neighbor and second-largest trading partner, is “one of the nastiest countries.” Russia was “doing what anyone would do” when it bombed Ukraine’s energy infrastructure during a pause in American intelligence sharing.”
+ No country in Europe currently holds a positive view of the US…
Denmark: 10%
Sweden: 28%
Germany: 30%
France: 32%
+ The genius of French provincial cooking is its ability to make the best food out of whatever’s available, including the worst cuts of beef, offal even…But the French would never raise their cattle in industrial feedlots where the animals stand nearly motionless in their own piss and shit for a year, shot up with hormones…
+ Benedicte de Perthuis, the French judge who ruled French neo-fascist Marine Le Pen ineligible for the 2027 elections after her conviction on embezzlement charges, is now under police protection following a wave of death threats and online doxxing.
+ Finnish President Alexander Stubb, after golfing with Trump: “The half-ceasefire has been broken by Russia, and I think America and my sense is also the president of the United States, is running out of patience with Russia.”
+ The construction of private bunkers in Spain has increased by 200%, as fears of a European war spread.
+ It took Nixon to go to China and Trump to unite three longtime enemies–China, Japan and South Korea–against the US. Bravo, genius!
+ There’s been what’s described as a “bloodbath” of firings at Trump’s National Security Council. But not over the fallout from Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz’s security breaches. Instead, the dismissals seem to be at the behest of the conspiracy-mongering Trump intimate Laura Loomer, who met with Trump in the Oval Office earlier in the week and presented the president with her “research” that several members of Waltz’s staff were “neocons” who had slipped through the vetting process.
+ Jeet Heer: “I’m sorry, but an administration where people get fired because Laura Loomer doesn’t like them is not going to be a stable government.”
+ Hypocrisy, arrogance and ineptitude are virtues in this administration not fireable offenses…”Members of Trump’s National Security Council, including national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.”
+ Mike Waltz may unwittingly become the Daniel Ellsberg of the Trump administration. Politico reported this week that Waltz had set up at least 20 Signal chat groups to “respond to crises across the world”…many of them he and Trump provoked, presumably.
+ Last week, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a memo to his staff describing how the DOJ is, in the spirit of DOGE, considering closing the Antitrust Division’s field offices in San Francisco and Chicago…”In the spirit of DOGE”… i.e., “At the behest of our Tech Overlords.”
+ Here’s a more critical “leak” than the one to Goldberg…
(The pervasive episodes of parapraxis among the leaders of the GOP may end up being what saves the country from complete and utter ruin…)
+ David French, who’s about as far to the right as you could have gotten, pre-MAGA: “In some parts of American Christianity, the theology is so flawed, and the culture is so broken, that evangelicals don’t see Trump contradicting their values at all — he’s exactly like the men and women who lead their church.”
+ On St. Patrick’s Day, Trump invited fellow convict, MMA fighter and failed boxer Conor MacGregor to the White House to promote his “Make Ireland Great Again” campaign for president. It wasn’t received well by the Irish…
+++
Jefferson Morley and Oliver Stone at House hearing on JFK assassination.
+ If I was this stupid, I wouldn’t want to broadcast it during live coverage of Congressional hearings on JFK’s assassination…
Lauren Boebert: Mr. Stone, you wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy. Do these recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?
Oliver Stone looking befuddled by the question, whispers in the ear of [my] former Washington Post editor and JFK assassination expert, Jefferson Morley.
Stone: No, I didn’t.
Boebert: Yes, sir you did…
Stone: “If you look closely at the FILM, it accuses President Johnson…”
Boerbert, excited to the point of giddiness now that she’s finally stumbled on to something profound: “Ok, ok…”
Stone: “Of being part of and complicit in a cover-up of the case. But not in the assassination itself, which I don’t know.”
Boerert, a little unsteady now: “What do you think he was complicit with?”
Stone: The cover-up. How about, for starters, appointing Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA who was fired by Kennedy, to the Commission itself, the Warren Commission. And he goes to almost every meeting, and is pretty much in charge of the Warren Commission from the beginning. Allen Dulles, that’s part of the evidence that pointed to President Johnson, as either incompetent or involved.
Boebert, adjusting her Sarah Palin “sexy librarian” glasses: “Mr. Morley, I think you had something to add to that?
Morely: “I think you’re confusing…
Boebert: “I may have mis—
Morley: “ROGER STONE with Oliver Stone. It’s Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the president. Not my friend Oliver Stone.”
Boebert: “I may have misinterpreted that.”
+ Rutgers, which has an endowment of more than $2 billion and pays the coach of its mediocre football team $6.5 million a year, is shuttering Raritan, one of the best remaining literary magazines, as part of the University’s “Austerity Agenda.” Raritan’s excellent editor, Jackson Lears, explains…
+ Nick Estes: “Yesterday [Monday], the U of Minnesota deleted the American Indian Studies’ statement on Palestine. (Also deleted was a story about Leonard Peltier’s return home and five other dept statements on Palestine.)” Here’s the now-elided original statement, as preserved by the Wayback Machine…
+ And now we take you live to the Oval Office…
+ Frank Zappa: “Some scientists claim that hydrogen because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.”
+ Here’s Neil Young, writing on his Times Contrarian blog about what it’s like to be a Canadian artist living in the states now:
What’s happening in our America right now: Our rights to free speech are being taken away and buried by our government.
Reporters who do not agree with our government have been banned from interviewing our President. Canadian / Americans like me have had their freedom threatened by activities such as taking private info from their devices and using it to block them from entering our country – ie: If you don’t agree with our government, you are barred from entering or sent to jail. There are many stories in the Contrarian that make this information very clear.
Corporate controlled newspapers and TV are mostly bought and paid for now, to a great degree. The information found there is not complete anymore. Thats why you need to read the Contrarian. Articles published here are not controlled by Corporations, they are supported by the public – you.
Just because you love music, don’t allow your children to lose their freedom. Read here and learn what our government is doing to you. That’s right – our government.
Music is my love and my life. I want that for my children and theirs. That’s why I’m here doing this today instead of just selling you records.
There is plenty of music associated news in The Times Contrarian and you can easily find it here. Choose the Music News section or the World News section at the top of the page. Check out your music and the rest too. Don’t let your knowledge be limited by today’s politics and the controlling Trump agenda that challenges your basic American freedoms. You elected this president. He is your President. Elon Musk? Really? Think about it. He is a threat to America, enabled by our president because of the millions he spent supporting our president’s election.
All Their Ammunition, All Their Money Lost, All Their Bold Invasions, All Their Running Dogs…
“Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.” – Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Photograph Source: Office of Vice President of the United States – Public Domain
It’s all happening so fast. If they are not attacking some agency like the Department of Education or a cultural institution such as the Kennedy Center or Smithsonian Museum, they’re launching some personal vendetta against a lawyer or law firm, imposing tariffs right and left, rounding up and deporting people with green cards or rattling on about an eventual third term. It’s hard to keep track of the entirety of the shock and awe of the Trumpian assault. But every once and awhile, amidst the overwhelming noise and horrors, a phrase appears that puts everything in perspective. And JD Vance has done just that.
The Vice-President recently announced the Trumpian temporal view of where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.
This is what Vance said on March 29, 2025, at the Pituffik Space Base in Greenland:
“And, you know, one of the things I heard was, well, what about the many Danes who lost their lives in the war on terror fighting alongside the United States? Well, look, we obviously honor the sacrifice of our Danish friends in the war on terror 20 years ago, just as, for example, the French honor the sacrifice of Americans in Normandy 80 years ago. But recognizing that there are important security partnerships in the past does not mean that we can’t have disagreements with allies in the present about how to preserve our shared security for the future. And that’s what this is about.”
What is this about? It’s much more than just Greenland. It’s about the relationship between the past, present and future. Vance refers to honoring Danish friends in the war on terror 20 years ago just as the French honor American sacrifices 80 years ago. Both of those honorings are about the past. The former Appalachian hillbilly is arguing that today’s discussions about Greenland are not related to the past; they are about disagreements in the present and preserving U.S. security in the future. The Yale Law School graduate sees history as irrelevant to the present and future.
Now history has different directions. One is linear with time moving in a straight line. In this timeline, the past disappears since time moves inexorably forward. What happened before has no relevance to what is happening now and what will happen in the future. Each day brings a new and different perspective.
The other historical time is circular, with time continually returning to some basic truths about human nature and how we live. The seasons come and go, the same human frustrations and joys repeat only in different forms. According to circular time, our lives have not fundamentally changed despite all the technological trappings of modernity. We reread and watch Greek plays and other classics because their stories speak to us here and now.
What does it mean for the president of the United States and those around him to have a linear sense of time? To them, nothing that has come before matters; all they accomplish is unique with no precedents. That’s what makes Vance’s phrase so crucial and frightening.
Who does Trump call for advice? To whom does he listen for previous knowledge? Trump and Musk have fired tens of thousands of government workers who have institutional memories. Did anyone in on the recent Signalgate scandal bother to ask experts how to securitize a conference call? Obviously not. In Trumpian linear time, everything begins with him and his administration. There is no collective, institutional memory. Trump joyfully mocks and insults his predecessors.
Nothing from the past has any relevance in Trump’s world except that he is the greatest of all time. At a rally in Michigan just before the November 5, 2024, election, Trump boasted that Border Patrol agents declared him “the greatest president in history” and “better than both Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.” He didn’t have to say it himself; he quoted others saying what he believes.
A very different example of humility is that when John F. Kennedy was elected president, one of the first things he did was to call wise men such as the former Governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson II and Dean Acheson, the former Secretary of State under President Truman to ask their advice. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy spoke with former President Dwight Eisenhower to review the situation. Experience mattered.
In response to Vance’s comments, the Danish Foreign Minister said, “But let me be completely honest: we do not appreciate the tone in which it is being delivered. This is not how you speak to your close allies. And I still consider Denmark and the United States to be close allies.” Allies are part of circular time. Trust and confidence require experience. Trump/Vance’s linear time has no place for friendships, alliances or common experiences; it’s only about current interests. Contrary to the Danish Foreign Minister, Trump and Vance do not treat Denmark as an historic ally in their current desire for Greenland.
History and culture are intertwined. Can one imagine what kind of cultural events DJT and Melania will present at the White House and Kennedy Center, the Village People performing “Y.M.C.A.” or Queen singing “We are the champions”? Remember Pablo Casals playing in the East Room of the White House for the Kennedys or Aretha Franklin singing at Barrack Obama’s inauguration?
For the attacks on the Kennedy Center, Smithsonian Museum and universities are not just anti-intellectualism; they are brazen attacks on history and culture. There is no reason to read only dead white males, but there is certainly no reason to ignore history and culture. More bluntly, there is no reason not to read. The dismantling of the Department of Education is more than just a bureaucratic erasure of a federal department.
Trump, Vance, Musk and Company are the epitome of linearity. Their efficient, creative destruction is ahistorical. It all starts and ends with them. The Trumpian vision is that history is the last 25 seconds on some screen with him on the home page.
But what goes out comes back. There are forces that even the most modern technology cannot deny. We are witnessing a great tragedy unfolding with no Greek chorus to tell us what will happen as the play develops. The circle will come back. It always has; it always will.
Photograph Source: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine – CC BY-SA 2.0
In a practice that might seem quaint if it weren’t so murderous, the American uniparty is currently assigning party colors to its ‘boutique’ wars in Ukraine and West Asia. While these wars were arguably started by, and are being prosecuted by, the United States, the powers that be in the US have apparently determined that branding them by team color (Red v Blue) would effectively preclude the development of a national anti-war response.
In this light, the (New York) Times recently shat out the second installment of its ex-post recitation of CIA talking points crafted with a method that I call ‘cat-litter journalism.’ The focus of the new Times’ piece is the American war in Ukraine. Should this read as a misstatement to you, that maybe it is a war between Ukraine and Russia, tell it to the New York Times. The gist of the Times piece is that the Americans would have won the war if it hadn’t been for the Ukrainians.
The phrase ‘cat-litter journalism’ refers to the near-random assemblage of earlier reporting by the Times that has been reassembled to convey the illusion that its ‘reporting’ ties to any determinable facts. Deference to authority is another way to describe the piece. Without footnotes and / or links, the assertions made in the piece are a compilation of the least plausible state propaganda of recent years crafted for the post-election political dynamic.
‘In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.’ nytimes.com’ 3/29/25.
For readers upset by the prospect of their favorite war losing its luster, fear not. The political logic of Donald Trump’s rapid policy dump upon entering office is the ethereal nature of Presidential power. For good and not-good reasons, Mr. Trump is about to hit a wall of institutional pushback. Further, his ‘peace through strength’ schtick (borrowed from Richard Nixon) is a serious misreading of the current political environment.
The reason why New York Times reporters are acting like rats fleeing a sinking ship with respect to the CIA’s war in Ukraine is that the Ukraine ship is sinking. Don’t take my word for it. The new US Intelligence Assessment for 2025 states 1) that Ukraine (the CIA) has substantially lost the conflict, and 2) nothing that the West has at its disposal will turn the situation around. Having a chair to sit in when the music stops is the political needle being threaded.
Russia in the past year has seized the upper hand in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is on a path to accrue greater leverage to press Kyiv and its Western backers to negotiate an end to the war that grants Moscow concessions it seeks. dni.gov.
The political logic of parsing the war in Ukraine from the genocide in West Asia goes like this, 1) by US calculations, there is no way for the West to prevail in Ukraine, and 2) attending to the denouement in Ukraine when a promise of genocide has been sold to a foreign adversary (Israel) requires operational consolidation. Once the US moves outside of Gaza (it already has), Greater Israel begins to resemble Poland on August 31, 1939.
For those who may have forgotten, here is the leader of the Blue Team telling us that ‘Putin has already lost the war’ in mid-2023. Two years later, the New York Times is belatedly informing us that it was the Ukrainians who lost the war; that the US is blameless, if not heroic, for its ‘support’ of Ukraine; and that maybe the US should have gotten one-million citizens of a more deserving nation killed for the privilege.
That British ‘intelligence,’ MI6, was active in both the Russiagate fraud and in maintaining friendly relations with Ukrainian fascists from 1944 to the present so that they were available for service in Ukraine 2013 – present, argues for ending the Five-Eyes Alliance and criminally charging the Brits for interfering in American elections. The problem is that the Western ruling class has demonstrated itself to be immune from public sanction.
That the leader of the Blue Team was the largest recipient of legal bribes from supporters of Israel in Congress unites him in a deep moral commitment to genocide with Donald J. However, in the American terms of discourse in 2025, Donald Trump ‘got the better deal.’ Miriam Adelson contributed $150 million to Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign, with $100 million of it reportedly dedicated to improving the lives of Western arms dealers. Joe Biden only got four million dollars for his genocide.
This ‘genocide for hire’ posture of America 2.0, where US foreign policy does the bidding of foreign adversaries in exchange for specific payments to specific politicians, might seem irredeemably corrupt. In fact, it is irredeemably corrupt. However, there is a political term— ‘imperialism,’ that rehabilitates corrupt acts under the nuevo-scriptural precept of ‘kick their ass and steal their gas’ that is emerging from the gold toilet crowd.
Were it not for the earlier ‘coming-clean’ piece from the Times that began in the aftermath of the US – British coup in Ukraine in 2014, the US timeline found in the recent Times article would be inexplicable. How could the timelines match US state propaganda so perfectly given that between the two articles, pretty much everything that the Americans and Brits said about the conflict was later restated in materially different terms?
Further, as the vile, offensive, and yes, fascistic, efforts by the Trump administration to quell domestic rebellion against corrupt acts by politicians taking money from adversarial foreign governments to commit genocide, the ship of state is struggling. Threatening Americans with deportation, imprisonment, and being disappeared for expressing their constitutionally protected right to object to these policies is profoundly anti-American under the existing terms of discourse.
Ominously for we, the people, Donald Trump was able to extract far more money than Joe Biden was for a roughly equivalent genocide (thus far). Yes, under US law, American politicians can take money from adversarial foreign governments which personally benefits them, and not the United States, in exchange for the promise that the US will commit genocide against foreign nationals for the benefit of other foreign nationals. Question: where is MAGA on this?
If any of this suggests a path out of the current mess through electoral politics, the evidence doesn’t support that conclusion. Here is one of the several pieces that I wrote in and around early 2019 where I correctly argued that were Joe Biden to be elected, he would fail to govern and that Donald Trump, or someone worse, would follow Biden. That is what happened. I was right, and the DNC just reelected Donald Trump.
For those who don’t see it yet, Donald Trump is in the process of imploding politically. His economic policies, which share quite a bit with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Ronald Reagan, are ideological— based on a group of like-minded people sitting around making shit up with no one to challenge them. He doesn’t understand basic economics well enough to avoid the catastrophe-in-the-making that his policies will produce.
Firing tens of thousands of Federal workers without a coherent plan to reemploy them both raises the unemployment rate and lowers wages. As I’ve previously written, adding former Federal employees to the unemployment line increases the number of workers vying for a limited number of jobs, thereby leading the most desperate to accept lower wages. Rising unemployment and falling wages is a recipe for electoral defeat.
With respect to liberal fears of a Fourth Reich, ex-CIA Larry Johnson and others familiar with military production argue that the lead time from cold start to having weapons in hand is a decade. When existing facilities can be used, this lead time can be reduced to three years. In its wisdom, the US began firing its skilled manufacturing workforce in the 1970s. Skilled work in 2025 is ‘influencing’ teenagers to buy Viagra for their pet gerbils on YouTube.
When Mr. Trump references ‘peace through strength,’ he asserts that while his aim (‘peace’) is virtuous, his method will be the threatened or actual use of violence to achieve it. The social logic is that the party being threatened has a choice to surrender or be killed. This framing has been used by repressive power for millennia to claim that political repression maintained through violence is ‘peace.’ In so doing, the term is emptied of content. The definition of peace is reduced to ‘not death.’
The political benefit of this approach for empires is that it frames repressive political power as a defense of peace, and its opponents as the instigators of violence. In history, the US is only two generations from the ‘Indian Wars,’ where innocent settlers ‘were overwhelmed and slaughtered by ignorant savages,’ for those who buy Hollywood’s version of the history. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore illustrate the genocidal versions of this view-from-power of ‘peace.’
How the phrase (peace through strength) was heard on the campaign trail by Mr. Trump’s constituents was likely through the anti-historical fantasy that the US has won the wars that it has engaged in since WWII. As actual history has it, it was the Russians who won WWII. Richard Nixon used the term, combined with his claim that he had a ‘secret plan’ to end the US war in Vietnam. He didn’t. Nixon ended up expanding the war to Laos and Cambodia before the ignominious ‘fall of Saigon’ in 1975.
With respect to the US proxy war in Ukraine, the precise social logic of Mr. Trump implying that the Biden administration was ‘weak’ in threatening imminent nuclear annihilation in the latter days of the administration begs the question of what the word means? Is ending the world a sign of strength? To whom? Who would be alive to judge the matter, and what would be the consequence of any such judgment?
One might have imagined that Times readers previously burned by its fraudulent reporting regarding Iraq’s WMDs and Russiagate would have felt ‘twice bitten, thrice shy’ with respect to its Ukraine reporting. Implied in the steadfastness of its readership is that getting true information about the world isn’t— is not, why its readers read the Times. Or perhaps, Times readers like their news several years after the fact, when it can be found in the ‘corrections’ section.
The residual purpose of the New York Times is to demonstrate that Pravda in the waning days of the Soviet Union is the model to which the American press aspires. But this is only a ‘press’ story to the extent that the volunteer state media in the US doesn’t require threats to carry water for power. They want to do so. It gives them purpose, and the occasional invitation to the right dinner party.
I wrote early on in the US war in Ukraine that the Ukrainians ‘would rue the day that they ever heard of the United States.’ With the New York Times now blaming the Ukrainians for the American loss against Russia, they join the Palestinians in being tossed onto the garbage heap of empire. So are the Russians. The difference is that the Russians can take care of themselves. That is why American imperialists hate Russia so much. They don’t control it.
Photograph Source: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos – Public Domain
I attended Rashid Khalidi’s course, History of the Modern Middle East, 20 years ago and still think about it. Amid Columbia’s sea of polished and top-of-their-game scholars, Khalidi stood out as brilliant, and every lecture was exceptionally lucid and compelling. But beyond his talent as a lecturer, what was striking was how measured and sober, and even at times seemingly cautious, Khalidi was. He and other members of Columbia’s MEALAC department simply bore no resemblance to the right’s caricature of them. Insofar as their teaching was classifiable as “controversial,” it was not due to any ideology or temperament, let alone the defamatory bad faith accusation of anti-Semitism, but only because they were accurately chronicling an historical reality shaped by mass and ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the powers that be.
This then makes all the more striking Khalidi’s recent denunciation of Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump Administration’s attack on its students, employees, and academic freedom and free speech in general. Columbia, Khalidi writes, is Vichy on the Hudson, a fatally compromised collaborator that is a university in name only. While it is obviously the Trump Administration that is at the forefront of this breakneck authoritarian regression, it’s useful to remember that the historic attacks on the department and critics of Israel in general have always been a bipartisan affair. And it is the mutual culpability of this bipartisanship, giving lie to the shrill but facile Resistance to Trump 1.0, that prevents liberal institutions from effectively challenging the Trump Administration today.
The nature of the Democrats’ pulled punches is currently on vivid display over the imbroglio of the Trump Administration’s mishandling of classified communications preceding its attack on Yemen. Democrats and their media outlets surely cannot challenge Trump regarding the heart of the matter: the bombing of a foreign country and the killing of innocents. After all, it was the Democrats, under Barack Obama, who facilitated the war on Yemen both directly and via its Saudi attack dog. Similarly, Democrats cannot convincingly complain that the attack did not go through the “proper channels” or obtain congressional approval, as it was Obama who made a laughingstock of the War Powers Resolution by defending his refusal to request congressional approval for his war on Libya, claiming that it wasn’t in fact a “war,” a far more contemptuous, and deadly, semantic sleight of hand than even Bill Clinton’s notorious pronouncement that “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” And of course Biden, his characteristically bankrupt promises notwithstanding, helped continue the onslaught in Yemen. Accordingly, the Democrats can do little else but seize the opportunity to put Trump on the defensive via the charge that he is an unreliable wielder of empire, i.e., the old “Reporting for duty,” more patriotic than thou, John Kerry script, as preposterously sanctimonious as it is ineffective.
Liberals’ proclamations of horror and outrage are not entirely insincere – how can they be considering the sheer bizarreness and surreal hubris of the Trump Administration’s shitstorm of slothful stupidity? Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable note of thou-protest-too-much in their railings, evoking a husband who screams at his wife because she left the rice out, displacing his real anger over the fact that she is sleeping with her co-worker, which he cannot express since he is busy sleeping with her friend.
The Democrats, as well as Columbia and more broadly all liberal institutions, are in on it and, it goes without saying, will not be coming to save us. We are alone to face a determined authoritarian movement that, notwithstanding its own weaknesses, will go as far it can in destroying human security, freedom, and dignity.
This is hardly a call to keep our heads down. On the contrary, to do so would be political and psychological suicide, a point eloquently expressed in Bruno Bettelheim’s 1960 essay in Harper’s Magazine, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank.” The essay was controversial, as Frank had become a symbol of wartime virtue, and the perceived criticism of her family’s choices seemed cruel if not sacrilegious. But, in taking aim at the “universal admiration of their way of coping, or rather of not coping,” Bettelheim identified a great irony: those, like the Frank family, who thought they were doing the safe thing by going into hiding to wait out the nightmare were in fact likelier to be caught. Of particular consequence to Bettelheim were the psychological consequences of survivors’ wartime choices. Describing the experiences of others paralyzed by the harrowing circumstances of the war, Bettelheim writes:
As their desperation mounted, they clung more determinedly to their old living arrangements and to each other, became less able to consider giving up the possessions they had accumulated through hard work over a lifetime. The more severely their freedom to act was reduced, and what little they were still permitted to do restricted by insensible and degrading regulations imposed by the Nazis, the more did they become unable to contemplate independent action. Their life energies drained out of them, sapped by their ever-greater anxiety. The less they found strength in themselves, the more they held on to the little that was left of what had given them security in the past – their old surroundings, their customary way of life, their possessions – all these seemed to give their lives some permanency, offer some symbols of security. Only what had once been symbols of security now endangered life, since they were excuses for avoiding change. On each successive visit the young man found his relatives more incapacitated, less willing or able to take his advice, more frozen into activity, and with it further along the way to the crematoria where, in fact, they all died.
That is, the lesson the world drew from Frank’s story, “glorifying the ability to retreat into an extremely private, gentle, sensitive world,” was both self-serving and mistaken, an embrace of denialism and a refusal to confront a system that, at the seeming drop of a hat, can become devastatingly oppressive. On the contrary, those who chose to fight on principle and stuck their necks out, or who endured the sacrifices of escape, choices which appeared far riskier at the time, were in fact likelier not only to maintain their psychological integrity but to survive.
Photograph Source: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – CC BY 2.0
For the past 20 years, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius has been the mainstream media’s leading apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency, and his latest editorial essay (“Intelligence analysts are still doing their job”) indicates he is loathe to yield his title. In reviewing the CIA’s “Annual Threat Assessment,” Ignatius falsely credits the CIA’s analysts with “giving priority to Trump’s concerns but not, so far as I could tell, fudging the facts.” In my 25 years as a CIA intelligence analyst, I often worked on these annual assessment and can assure readers that Ignatius is terribly wrong when he states that in these assessments “priorities can shift, for better or worse, depending on who’s in power.”
Ignatius is arguing that the annual assessments are politicized to some degree as a matter of course, but directors such as Richard Helms, William Colby, Adm. Stansfield Turner, and William Burns refused to engage in politicization. Directors such as William Casey, Robert Gates, and James Schlesinger tried to politicize assessments, but they were often challenged successfully. This year’s assessment is blatantly political and suggests that, like other agencies and departments of government in the Trump era, the CIA is not willing to tell truth to power.
The worst example of politicization in this year’s annual assessment is the fact that climate change was ignored as a critical threat to U.S. national security. For the past several years, one of the strong areas of agreement throughout the intelligence and military communities was the consideration that climate change was the number one threat to U.S. security. The Trump administration is damaging the work of Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, and the CIA is obviously paying no attention.
The softening of the language toward Russia suggests that CIA’s directorate of intelligence—now reporting to Director John Ratcliffe—decided to accommodate a new softer line on Russia. Ignatius argues that the “underlying analysis of Russia…is consistent with last year’s assessment.” Not true! From my past experience challenging the politicized views of William Casey and Robert Gates in the 1980s, I would guess (and hope) that there are intelligence analysts pushing back against Ratcliffe.
Last year’s assessment argued that Moscow “seeks to project and defend its interests globally and to undermine the United States and the west.” But this year’s assessment accommodates the Trump administration by arguing that the “west poses a threat to Russia,” and that the Kremlin’s objective “to restore Russian strength and security in its near abroad against perceived U.S. and western encroachment…has increased the risks of unintended escalation between Russia and NATO.” Last year’s assessment described Russia as a “resilient and capable adversary across a wide range of domains.” This year’s assessment refers to Russia as a “potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests.”
The threat assessment says nothing about disarmament, although Russia, China, Iran, and even North Korea have hinted that they are prepared to open talks with the United States regarding arms control. At the same time, the assessment makes matters worse by exaggerating the possibilities for “adversarial cooperation” among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. The CIA anticipates greater threats from each of them individually, posing new challenges to U.S. strength and power globally. It says nothing about dialogue and diplomacy with the group, which coincides with the Trump administration closing down the United States Institute for Peace, which has provided policy guidance in recent years over the possibility of such talks.
In addition to CIA’s tilting in the direction of Trump’s distorted views, we have Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reorienting U.S. military policy in a similar direction. And to make matters worse, the secret internal guidance from the Pentagon is in some places word-for-word duplications of text written at the Heritage Foundation last year. According to the Washington Post, the guidance outlines Trump’s vision for winning a potential war with China and for defending against such threats in the “near abroad” as Greenland and the Panama Canal. I participated in numerous war games at the CIA and the National War College over the years, and the United States was on the losing end of all of the encounters designed to defend Taiwan.
There are various examples in the threat assessment of truckling to Donald Trump. A major example is the assessment that the Israel-HAMAS conflict derailed the unprecedented
diplomacy and cooperation generated by the Abraham Accords. The assessment describes a “trajectory of growing stability in the Middle East.” This exaggerates the impact of the Abraham Accords, which Trump constantly praises, as well as the “trajectory of growing stability in the Middle East.” There was no such trajectory, particularly as a result of Israel’s right-wing government.
There are similar distortions throughout the assessment. Iran has taken a military beating since the Hamas attack of October 7th, but the CIA claims that Iran’s conventional and unconventional capabilities pose a threat to U.S. forces. There is the claim that the fall of President Bashar al-Asad’s regime at the hands of opposition forces led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has created conditions for extended instability in Syria. Actually, the emergence of HTS offers the first opportunity since 2011 for creating some political stability in Syria, and lifting U.S. sanctions against Syria could contribute to a diplomatic exchange between Washington and Damascus. It is the job of CIA to point to opportunities for U.S. diplomacy, and not just engage in worst-casing of the geopolitical environment.
The intelligence distortions from the annual threat assessment were presented at the same hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee that heard blatant lies from Director of National Intelligence Gabbard and CIA Director Ratcliffe. It is David Ignatius’s job to expose these distortions and lies, but he is too busy obfuscating them.
In addition to ignoring climate change, there is another existential threat that neither the CIA nor the Pentagon is in a position to describe, which is the threat of having Donald Trump and his troglodytes in the White House for three and a half more years.
Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan […]
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Recently in New York State, prison guards, largely to counter media exposés of their brutalities—like the beating death of Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility last December—staged a wildcat strike. The strike left thousands of prisoners locked for weeks inside cold cells, cut off from food, showers, medicine, visits. The strike is over now; the […]
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The well-prepared, abundantly funded Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025’s implementation overwhelms all that has come before. The ill-prepared, leaderless Democrats and opposition are stymied to stop it. No March on Washington like the 1963 March for civil and political rights or the 1967 March against the Vietnam War will slow down the Trump steamroll. Neither the high price of eggs nor Wall Street jitters have had any effect.
What to do? Could courts be the deciding factor to halt the United States slide towards fascism?
Rules are essential to any organized society. Ever since Hammurabi’s Code written laws have existed. Although the idea of rules may be a fiction unless they are physically implemented, their very existence since at least 1750 BC shows how societies have historically sought to govern themselves. When Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social network last month; “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he directly challenged the relevance of laws. The man who twice swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution placed his saving the country above the law. Trump’s attacks on the judiciary and its role in government checks and balances are more than a constitutional crisis; there is now a societal crisis between liberalism and fascism.
Having consensual rules and implementing them are fundamental to stable societies. The Dominican Republic, for example, has had 32 constitutions since its independence in 1844. The United States, on the other hand, has had one constitution since 1789; it is the oldest written national constitution in force in the world and has been amended only 27 times. The U.S. Constitution is the constitutional gold standard; it has had international influence. The 1848 Swiss Constitution, for example, is in many ways a cut and paste of the U.S. one, something my Swiss friends don’t like to admit.
The implementation of the written law or commonly agreed upon laws such as in the unwritten constitution of the United Kingdom separates liberal societies from fascist states. Fascism revolves around an authoritarian leader who believes he is the incarnation of the nation; someone who acts individually as if he had no obligations to obey society’s laws.
In a very short period of time, President Trump has shown that he has no intention to respect the rule of law and uphold the oath of office he took on January 20, 2025. An example: A federal judge ruled that the government should not deport Venezuelan men to El Salvador without due process. The deportation went ahead anyway. “If anyone is being detained or removed from based on the administration’s assertion that they can do so without judicial review or due process, the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation,” a Columbia University law professor was quoted in The New York Times.
Trump then called for the impeachment of the judge who made the ruling. “If a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Supreme Court Chief Judge John Roberts, in an unusual public statement indirectly rebuking Trump’s threat, said that “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” the Republican appointed Justice declared. “The normal review process exists for that purpose.”
Where will the confrontation between Trump and the judiciary lead? The federal judge, James Boasberg, moved to hold the government in contempt for not following his order. “The government again evaded its obligations,” he wrote. Not following judge’s decisions is a Trump Administration pattern. In refusing to provide Judge Boasberg with details of the mass deportation, the Department of Justice argued that “This is a case about the President’s plenary authority, derived from Article II and the mandate of the electorate,” and that “’[J]udicial deference and restraint’ are required to avoid undue interference with the Executive Branch.”
Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also threatened the courts. “We do have authority over the federal courts,” he said at a press conference. We can eliminate an entire district court,” he boasted.
“The problem with this administration is not just acute episodes like what is happening with Judge Boasberg and the Venezuelan deportations,” another law professor was quoted in The Times’ article. “It’s a chronic disrespect for constitutional norms and for the other branches of government.”
Trump and Musk are moving to consolidate presidential power at the expense of the Constitution’s separation of powers. In addition to the deportation ruling, CNN reported; “[A] judge in Rhode Island hearing a dispute over a government-wide freeze…added a cautionary footnote: ‘This is what it all comes down to: we may choose to survive as a country by respecting our Constitution, the laws and norms of political and civil behavior…Or, we may ignore these things at our own peril.’ A judge in Seattle declared in a separate case; ‘It has become ever-more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals.’”
As far as the case involving the United States Institute of Peace (USIP); DOGE and Washington D.C. police forcibly entered its building, evicting the USIP president George Moose and others. “I’m very offended by how DOGE has operated at the Institute and treated American citizens trying to do a job that they were statutorily tasked to do at the Institute,” District Judge Beryl Howell said. “I mean, this conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigation, using armed law enforcement from three different agencies … to carry out the executive order… with all that targeting probably terrorizing employees and staff at the institute when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals [of the executive order] …Why?” Howell asked. “Why those ways here — just because DOGE is in a rush?”
Whatever protests are organized against the MAGA president, whatever MAGA failures occur because of the price of eggs, inflation/recession or the downslide on Wall Street, the legal battles taking place warrant close attention. According to Bloomberg News, “[I]n the first four weeks of the new administration, at least 74 lawsuits were filed, and of those, 58 were brought in federal district courts in Washington, Boston, Seattle and suburban Maryland.”
Cases will soon reach the Supreme Court. Judges Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts seem prepared to break with the conservative majority to join the three liberal judges. If that happens, there will be more than a just a constitutional crisis. The confrontation between Trump and the courts will be a tipping point between liberalism and fascism.
As Harvard Law Professor and constitutional expert Laurence Tribe eloquently stated in The Guardian; “The president, abetted by the supine acquiescence of the Republican Congress and licensed by a US supreme court partly of his own making, is not just temporarily deconstructing the institutions that comprise our democracy. He and his circle are making a bid to reshape the US altogether by systematically erasing and distorting the historical underpinnings of our 235-year-old experiment in self-government under law.”
The news outlets seem to be focused particularly on the incompetence indicated by the leaked Signal chat involving Trump’s top advisors having an emoji-filled discussion about how and when they were going to bomb Yemen. The story is that having such a top-secret chat on a messaging app and accidentally inviting the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine to join all indicates scary levels of incompetence among the leadership of the world’s preeminent military power. And this is obviously true.
But there are other stories that this incident speaks to, that aren’t being as widely analyzed in the news. Which is the fact that these top advisors seem to have fully immersed themselves in a form of self-deception, and it is not an act. They are, apparently, not playing the part of being deluded nationalists, they are actually fully delusional. They didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, they seem to have been raised on it, and now they’re swimming in it.
Hearing about how they discuss the geopolitics they’re apparently responding to, they seem to actually believe that NATO is a defensive organization, that the US is somehow protecting Europe, that the US has been taken advantage of by Europe, and that the US has regularly been engaged in a form of self-sacrifice through the practice of being the world’s policeman, which seems to involve the thankless task of protecting shipping lanes for the benefit of Europeans.
It’s just one example of the type of conversation that presumably must take place often, that the public isn’t privy to. But just being privy to this one conversation seems to very much bolster the observation many of us made a long time ago, that this new crop of far right leaders in the US seems different from many of those from previous generations, in that they appear not to be using propaganda as a tool to get the public to support their duplicitous policies, but they believe the propaganda themselves.
We in the US live in a society governed by money, which is obvious to any reasonable observer of how things work in the US. But at the same time, we can all hear politicians from both parties regularly rejecting such basic observations out of hand, claiming they govern on behalf of the public, rather than the corporate elite, even though they accept massive amounts of corporate donations and then proceed to do things like cut taxes on the rich and eliminate regulations and oversight bodies that get in the way of corporate profits.
We’ve never had much democracy in the alleged fatherland of modern democracy. It’s always been rule by the rich. We’ve never had much free speech in the home of the First Amendment. It’s always looked good on paper, but not been effectively enforced in practice, when the speech involved is critical of the establishment.
The propaganda has always been patently false. But increasingly, it seems, it is internalized and believed as factual by the heirs to the creators of the propaganda machine. This Signal chat is evidence of a degree of self-deception, of a sort of blowback of the propaganda machine, that seems somehow even more alarming than if these advisors were lying and knew they were lying. If they believe their own propaganda, what else will they believe next?
The propaganda that these advisors are all steeped in is largely rooted in the propaganda of the so-called Cold War. Much of it is also rooted in pre-Cold War propaganda, but the bulk of it comes out of what we now know of as the Cold War era, so it seems like a useful exercise to review the basic precepts of the American propaganda version of Cold War reality, and contrast it with the actual motivations for US policies, for which the Cold War was mostly a wild story invented to justify policies that were otherwise extremely difficult to justify.
According to the propaganda version of reality, the US has long been beneficently looking after the welfare and security of its allies in places like Europe, spending lots of money to fulfill the role of being the world’s policeman, for the benefit of the world. The reality has been much more about serving US imperial and corporate interests, and compelling Europe to participate in this project. The new rulers say they’re done being helpful, and now just want to serve US national interests, by which they mean the interests of the US corporate elite. What they truly seem to be confused about is how the institutions they’re actively dismantling used to serve those interests in a somewhat less direct way, too.
Let’s go over some of the major developments over the past century or so that might help inform our understanding of what might be going on here in the minds of Trump’s advisors, in terms of the reality vs. the propaganda version of it.
Starting with World War 1. The propaganda version is the US got involved in order to save European countries from other European countries, since eventually the Wilson administration decided they liked one side of the war better than the other.
In reality, the US got involved with the war — quite late — in order to be in a better position to be one of the Great Powers dividing up the spoils of war afterwards.
The labor movement in the US (and many other countries) was very big and very militant at the time of World War 1. Repression against union members seeking to speak freely on the sidewalks, let alone organize a strike, was intense, because the labor movement was a threat to the profits of the owners of industry, which the government represented.
The propaganda version of reality promoted heavily at the time was the problems in society weren’t about workers being unemployed, hungry, working in dangerous conditions, not paid a living wage, etc., but about too much immigration, immigrants being mostly communists and anarchists, or what at the time they identified as “German agents,” or by later in 1917, “Bolsheviks,” or supporters of the Russian Revolution who wanted to create chaos and smash our great democracy, too.
With World War 2, Americans were willing to sacrifice themselves in tremendous numbers because they were told they were in a war against fascism, defending free peoples from this evil, out of concern for the welfare of humanity — and European humanity in particular.
In reality, US victory in World War 2 set the stage for a vast expansion of the network of US colonies and neocolonies around the world, which were generally organized for the purposes of wealth and resource extraction that would benefit the rich and immiserate most others.
With the post-war formation of NATO and beginning of what they called the Cold War, the American propagandists created an atmosphere of fear of their former ally in the fight against Germany, the Soviet Union, pushing the same old 1917-era line about Soviet intentions to attack western Europe, the US, and the rest of the world. NATO, it was claimed, would be a defensive organization, mainly about defending Europe from the Soviet Union.
In reality, NATO was created to encircle and “contain” (to use their popular euphemism) the Soviet Union. Rather than being a defensive organization, it has proven itself to be a way to exert control through very offensive initiatives, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Libya. It has also demonstrated itself to be very oriented towards expansion, inviting many former Soviet states to join.
With the rise around the world of Soviet and Cuban soft power in the form of medical missions all over the world, food aid, advisors helping countries develop in various ways, etc., the US formed agencies to engage in the same sorts of efforts, to counter Soviet and Cuban influence, such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Aside from providing things like food and medicine to some people who benefit from that, at least on the face of it, what has really driven policy for groups like USAID and NED has been the effort to undermine the governments they don’t like, and promote largely false narratives about how things are in the west. These groups provide so much funding for things like independent journalism in eastern European countries, for example, that they effectively give the impression that in the US, there’s lots of state funding for independent journalism, which of course there is not.
These groups were not set up in order to feed the hungry and clothe the naked out of the goodness of the hearts of the American political elite that set them up. They were set up in order to exercise American soft power, for the purposes of promoting US interests, by spreading disinformation, in various forms, about how things really were.
Copious evidence suggests that US support for Israel has never been about concern within the US leadership about the plight of Jewish people. The desire for some Jewish people to pursue the Zionist project of stealing the land from the Palestinian people for Jews to occupy was convenient for US imperialists, it was thought, and thus, like other settler-colonial projects, it was supported as a venture that would at least potentially be very profitable in many ways, at least for the ruling few.
Similarly, US support for Ukraine has never been about supporting the Ukrainian people, but about undermining Russia. It would be a grave error to assume that there’s any motivation to help Jews or to help Ukrainians involved with US support for Israel or Ukraine. This is the propaganda. The reality is about serving US interests, whether that’s about keeping the Suez Canal open for American ships, or keeping Russia out of the mainstream of global commerce in order to make massive profits on the scarce supply of commodities induced by the sanctions.
Throughout the Cold War period, every war the US got involved with was a war against communism, to contain the expansionist communist menace, and to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights. Post-Soviet Union, every war the US has gotten involved with has been a war against the irrational, predatory ideology of “terrorism,” and in support of democracy, freedom, and human rights.
In reality, the millions of civilians killed in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere have all been killed by an invader that treated the entire populations of these countries as their enemy — not at all the sort of war-fighting methods that had a chance of winning the hearts and minds of the populations being bombed — because the point was not to help these countries develop, but to suppress opposition to US hegemony, and make the world safer for unquestioned US corporate domination. In none of these cases was the US motivated by actually believing they were fighting “communism” or “terrorism” — the leadership knew this was propaganda meant for mass consumption, to justify unjustifiable cruelty and mass murder, in the minds of the domestic population. There was nothing beneficent about these imperial adventures. They were all intended to bolster US control over a global order that was set up to benefit the US and other, lesser members of the imperialist club.
In the minds of Trump’s advisors, however, it seems clear that they believe all of these wars really may have been about protecting the world from communism and terrorism, and now they resent all of this work the US has allegedly done to protect the world from these evils, and now Europe needs to step up and involve themselves more fully in this epic struggle. It’s all just a fantasy based on a fantasy, but for them, it happened — it seems like they saw it on the History Channel, so it must be true.
It is the nature of propaganda to be convincing. Countries around the world that consolidated their national identities and institutions by the middle of the 19th century and developed distinct national narratives and national media have mostly been very successful in instilling in their populations a sense of national identity and purpose that even might be worth fighting and dying for. For most of this period, though, there has generally been the sense — partially real, partially not, probably — that the leadership is aware that the propaganda is fake, and is meant for public consumption, in order to pacify and control the public.
That reality is bad enough. But now we seem to be in a new one, one where reality itself has been entirely thrown out the window, in favor of a fantasy based on Cold War propaganda that has been fully absorbed as truth by a stunningly unqualified collection of incompetent advisors, who are actively making policy based on their completely confused understanding of where we are and how we got here.
The first phone call between Putin and Trump was described as ‘frank’. Putin did it his way, as Frank Sinatra might have said. Say what we like, the Russian leader rejected the proposal for an immediate ceasefire. At the same time, London GPs were sending out text messages asking if people had served in HM Forces, which of course some misconstrued as the preliminaries of a call-up. The UK was meanwhile continuing to support Ukraine despite Putin saying a ceasefire would never work if foreign military aid and intelligence was still being shared. Nor did it help that the mass shutdown of Heathrow Airport after a fire at a nearby electricity substation aroused additional suspicion, conforming as it did to the hybrid form of war so favoured by Russia in Europe. Despite Counter Terrorism Command on the case, a mistake by an electrical engineer wax suggested.
‘One Trident sub could ‘incinerate 40 Russian cities’: Why Putin should fear Britain’s nuclear arsenal,’ read another London headline. This was just as US, UK and Turkish defence companies were informed they would be excluded from the new figure of €150 billion ($163 billion) in EU defence funding, unless of course they signed defence and security pacts with Brussels. More remarkable perhaps was Trump welcoming the idea of the US—as a former British colony—re-joining the Commonwealth. ‘I Love King Charles,’ he posted on Truth Social: ‘Sounds good to me!’ An affinity unmatched, it should be said, by the number of British subjects reportedly refused entry into the US despite valid visas.
‘So it was these two great leaders coming together for the betterment of mankind,’ rhapsodised US envoy Steve Witkoff about the Trump-Putin confab, ‘and it was honestly a privilege and an honour for me to sit there and listen to that conversation.’ Despite the Times of London reminding readers that Putin had flattered and deceived 5 US presidents, Trump spoke of improved relations, with the two agreeing that negotiations on the 30-day truce should begin ‘immediately’—which our very own wily Sam Kiley of the Independent called ‘an entirely Putin-constructed process.’ Witkoff then confirmed it was Putin who had ordered the Russian military to halt attacks on energy plants in Ukraine, though the actual timing of the Russian hit of the Ukrainian energy infrastructure of Slovyansk in the Donetsk would be disputed by Witkoff. This was before the Special Envoy’s snub of Keir Starmer’s peace efforts in a Tucker Carlson (anti-Zelenskyy, pro-Putin) interview. ‘So bold are Putin’s ceasefire demands,’ came the next London headline, ‘it’s hard to believe he is entirely serious.’
It was considered no surprise therefore that the Russian leader delayed the call with Trump by more than 50 minutes. Had it been Zelenskyy, we have to assume smoke would have billowed from US ears. Then news reached London of the NHL (National Hockey League) saying it would be ‘inappropriate’ to comment on Russia and the US hosting hockey matches together. At least the more punctual Trump and Zelenskyy chat was termed ‘a very good telephone call,’ much of it ‘in order to align both Russia and Ukraine in terms of their requests and needs.’ Trump even offered to help return the missing 35,000 children from occupied areas of Ukraine, though it remained unclear how he would navigate his own recent funding cut to Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab which was responsible for the database on the mass abductions.
‘Obviously this is the world descending into worse and worse standards of targeting civilians,’ said the late UK politician Clare Short about Iraq and Gaza. So much for the presently broken ceasefire in Gaza. A tragedy of such epic proportions, it deserves far more than my feeble mention. (‘Life is the farce we all must play,’ wrote Arthur Rimbaud.) There have been so many instances of Israeli–Palestinian ceasefires that even the most persevering of Egyptian, UN or Qatari mediators must want to walk. Recent temporary truces in 2008, 2014, 2021, 2023 were all shattered. Just like the one last week shortly after UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated that Israel was breaking international humanitarian law—before being shut down by his own party. Gazan ceasefires are so fragile that Palestinians must know in their hearts they will be followed by renewed tensions or violence.
I’ve mentioned in the past WWI Christmas ceasefires returning to slaughter. While the Korean War Armistice of 1953 between North Korea, China, and the UN Command (mainly South Korea and the US) compares favourably to what we might see one day in Ukraine, the Korean War is still just a ceasefire. As for the 1973 Paris Peace Accords which began as a ceasefire, these did end US military involvement but fighting resumed soon afterwards between North and South Vietnam. There was the 1991 Gulf War in which Coalition forces declared a ceasefire after driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. It ended combat operations but tensions remained and eventually led to the 2003 Iraq War. At least in Northern Ireland there was the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between the British and Irish governments, and most Northern Irish political parties, resulting in a political ceasefire that ended decades of sectarian violence. Since 2016 we’ve seen several localised and temporary Syrian Civil War ceasefires brokered by the UN, Russia, and Turkey. The Nagorno-Karabakh ones of 1994, 2020, and 2023 have just been followed by the Swiss Federal Assembly’s National Council and Council of States adopting a resolution titled ‘Peace Forum for Nagorno-Karabakh: The Possibility of Armenian Return.’ In short, ceasefires are everywhere and don’t always last.
Meanwhile, Ukraine launched a massive drone attack near a Russian strategic bomber base. A vast and portentous apocalyptic cloud was filmed rising immediately afterwards into the sky above Engels, home to Russian Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear capable heavy strategic bombers. This type of thing would have been at least one good reason why those follow-up discussions in Riyadh—for what were the first parallel negotiations since 2022—included Sergei Beseda, former head of the FSB spy agency’s fifth directorate.
As Russia launched another drone attack on Kyiv this time killing seven people including a five-year-old child, some flights at Heathrow Airport resumed but still with one or two Brits convinced it was sabotage, ignoring the fact cock-ups usually trump conspiracies. It was of course the same week that the death of former KGB colonel turned UK secret agent Oleg Gordievsky was announced, a Russian who influenced far more Cold War policies than Putin before and after he was betrayed by KGB spy Aldrich Ames of the CIA. One of Gordievsky’s MI6 Moscow handlers carried a green Harrods bag and ate a Mars bar in order to confirm Gordievsky’s imminent getaway to him to a UK safe house. Let’s just hope there are no more such shenanigans and nothing but a constructive openness before a nice, long and lasting Easter ceasefire.
Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.
During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to US national security and yelled ‘Stop Funding Israel,’ since neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark Warner had mentioned Israel in their opening statement nor had Gabbard mentioned the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in her statement either.
As Capitol police were taking Barry out of the hearing room, in the horrific style of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, Cotton maliciously said that Barry was a “CODEPINK lunatic that was funded by the Communist party of China.” Cotton then said if anyone had something to say to do so.
Refusing to buckle or be intimidated by Cotton’s lies about the funding of CODEPINK, I stood up and yelled, “I’m a retired Army Colonel and former diplomat. I work with CODEPINK and it is not funded by Communist China.” I too was hauled out of the hearing room by Capitol police and arrested.
After I was taken out of the hearing room, Cotton libelously continued his McCarty lie, “The fact that Communist China funds CODEPINK which interrupts a hearing about Israel illustrates Director Gabbard’s point that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are working together in greater concert than they ever had before.”
Senator Cotton does not appreciate the responsibility he has in his one-month-old elevation to the chair of the Senate’s intelligence committee.
Senator Cotton does not seem to care that his untruthful statements in a US Congressional hearing aired around the world can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those he lies about, their friends and family. In today’s polarized political environment we know that the words of senior leaders can rile supporters into frenzies as we saw on January 6, 2021 with President Trump’s loyal supporters injuring many Capitol police and destroying parts of the nation’s capitol building in their attempt to stop the Presidential election proceedings.
CODEPINK members have been challenging in the US Congress the war policies of five presidential administrations, beginning in 2001 with the Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, long before Senator Cotton was elected as a US Senator in 2014. We have been in the US Senate offices and halls twice as long as he has. We have nonviolently protested the war policies of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again.
After getting out of the Capitol Hill police station, a CODEPINK delegation went to Senator Cotton’s office in the Russell Senate Office building and made a complaint to this office staff.
We are also submitting a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee for the untrue and libelous statements Senator Cotton made in the hearing.
The abduction and deportation of international students who joined protests of U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the scathing treatment of visitors who have wanted to enter our country and now the McCarthy intimidating tactics used by Senator Cotton in a Senate intelligence committee hearing of telling lies about individuals and organizations that challenge U.S. government politics, particularly its complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza must be called out and pushed back against.
And we must push back against US Senators who actually receive funding from front groups for other countries. Senator Cotton has received $1,197,989 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to advocate for the genocidal policies of the State of Israel.
On January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump, by executive order, indicated his intention to remove the US from World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations agency responsible for global public health. This decision will have wide-ranging and negative consequences for people’s health worldwide.
Since it joined the organization in 1948, the United States has been its greatest funder, making it WHO’s most influential member. However, despite its global importance, the agency has a budget of roughly one-quarter of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which shows its limitations in addressing critical health challenges at a global level.
WHO is funded by contributions from its nearly 200 member states, with each contribution determined by the United Nations based on a country’s wealth. For the period 2024-2025, for example, that number has been set at $264 million for the US and $181 million for China. WHO also receives voluntary contributions from member states, philanthropic foundations and private donors. While for the same period the US is projected to provide $442 million (making it the largest contributor,) China is set to provide just $2.5 million.
Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, WHO has six regional offices and 150 country offices worldwide. Through them, the agency promotes the control of epidemic and endemic diseases, sets international health standards, collects information on global health issues, serves as a forum for health-related scientific and policy discussions, and assesses worldwide health challenges.
As part of its mandate, WHO heads a vast network of public health agencies and laboratories where scientists track new disease outbreaks and collect data to develop vaccines and therapies to address them. There are 21 WHO collaborating centers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and three at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Those centers are focused on US health priorities, such as polio eradication, cancer prevention and global health security.
WHO has been at the frontline response to national disasters such as the earthquakes in Afghanistan, Nepal, Syria and Turkey, and devastating floods in Libya, Pakistan and South Sudan. It has done so by deploying emergency medical teams, sending medical aid and helping countries cope with the mid- and long-term effects of these events.
US cuts in funding will affect childhood immunizations, polio eradication, and response to emergencies and to influenza and other pandemic threats. Through its Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, the WHO processes data from countries around the world to track and assess circulating viruses. Cutting its ties to WHO could hinder US access to critical tools for developing biological ways to control influenza.
In 2019, WHO established a Special Initiative for Mental Health which has helped bring badly needed community mental health services to 50 million more people. At least 320,000 girls, boys, women and men were receiving mental, neurological, and substance abuse services for the first time in their lives. A new WHO Commission on Social Connection has been created, aimed at combating loneliness and social isolation as pressing health threats. The Commission intends to elevate social connection as a public health priority in countries of all income levels.
Experts predict that the US withdrawal from WHO will allow China to gain control of the organization. “There is one country that’s desperate for the United States to leave the WHO, and that’s China,” cautioned Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat at a past hearing of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Because the US entered WHO membership through a joint 1948 resolution passed by both houses of Congress –that President Harry Truman explicitly referenced as his legal basis for joining WHO—observers believe that the US withdrawal from the organization violates US law because it doesn’t have the express approval of Congress.
As an independent international public health consultant, I have conducted health-related missions in over 50 countries worldwide for several agencies, including WHO. I have seen the lives-saving work that local branches of WHO does to improve the health of the most vulnerable in developing countries, work that will be severely curtailed from lack of funds.
During the 2020 conflict of the US with WHO, when the US’s withdrawal from the organization was later rescinded by President Biden) a group of leading international health experts wrote in the Lancet, “Health and security in the USA and globally require robust collaboration with WHO –a cornerstone of US funding and policy since 1948. The USA cannot cut ties with WHO without incurring major disruption and damage, making Americans far less safe.” This statement remains as true now as when it was written.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has aggressively moved to shrink the federal government. His administration has frozen federal grants, issued executive orders aligned with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and, most prominently, created what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
At first glance, total government spending appears stable over time. In 2024, federal, state and local expenditures made up 35% of the U.S. economy, the same as in 1982. However, my analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data offers a new perspective, recasting privatization as a macroeconomic phenomenon. I find that U.S. economic activity has become increasingly more privatized over the past 50 years. This shift happened in three key ways.
First, government involvement in economic production has declined. Historically, public institutions have played a major role in sectors such as electric power, water delivery, waste management, space equipment, naval shipbuilding, construction, and infrastructure investments. In 1970, government spending on production accounted for 23% of the economy. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 17%, leaving the private sector to fill the gaps. This means a growing share of overall government spending has been used to fund the private sector economy.
Second, government’s overall ability to produce goods and services – what economists call “productive capacity” – has fallen relative to the private sector, both in terms of labor and capital. Since 1970, public employment has lagged behind private sector job growth, and government-owned capital assets have trailed those of the private sector. Although public sector capital investments briefly rebounded in the 2000s, employment did not, signaling a shift toward outsourcing rather than direct hiring. This has significant implications for wages, working conditions and unionization.
Third, and relatedly, government increasingly contracts work to private companies, opting to buy goods and services instead of making them. In 1977, private contractors accounted for one-third of government production costs. By 2023, that had risen to over half. Government contracting – now 7% of the total economy – reached US$1.98 trillion in 2023. Key beneficiaries in 2023 included professional services at $317 billion, petroleum and coal industries at $194 billion and construction at $130 billion. Other examples include private charter schools, private prisons, hospitals and defense contractors.
The meaning of privatization
Privatization can be understood as two interconnected processes: the retreat of government from economic production, and the rise of contracting. The government remains a major economic actor in the U.S., although now as more of a procurer of goods and services than a provider or employer.
The government’s shift away from production largely stems from mainstreamed austerity politics – a “starve the beast” approach to government – and backlash against the New Deal’s expansion of federal economic involvement. In 1971, the controversial “Powell Memo,” written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, mobilized business leaders around the goal of expanding private sector power over public policy. This fueled the rise of conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the eventual architect of the Project 2025 privatization agenda.
Trump’s latest moves can be viewed as a massive acceleration of a decades-long trend, rather than a break from the past. The 50-year shift away from robust public sector employment has already privatized a lot of U.S. employment. Trump and Musk’s plan to cut the federal workforce follows the same blueprint.
This could have major consequences.
First, drastic job cuts likely mean more privatization and fewer government workers. Trump’s federal workforce cuts echo President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 mass firing of more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, a source of prolonged financial struggles and family instability for many fired workers. Trump’s firings and layoffs are already reachingfar beyond Reagan’s.
In addition, since federal spending directly contributes to gross domestic product, cuts of this magnitude risk slowing the economy. The Trump administration has even floated the idea of changing GDP calculations, potentially masking any reality of economic decline.
Rapid privatization is also likely to trigger significant economic disruptions, especially in industries that depend on federal support. For example, USAID cuts have already sent shock waves through the private sector agricultural economy.
Finally, the privatization trend risks eroding democratic accountability and worsening racial and gender inequalities. That’s because, as my prior research finds, public sector unions uniquely shape American society by equalizing wages while increasing transparency and civic participation. Given that the public sector is highly unionized and disproportionately provides employment opportunities for women and Black workers, privatization risks undoing these gains.
As Trump’s administration aggressively restructures federal agencies, these changes will likely proceed without public input, further entrenching private sector dominance. This stands to undermine government functioning and democratic accountability. While often framed as inevitable, the American public should know that privatization remains a policy choice – one that can be reversed.
Allow me to stipulate that I do not wish to die. In fact, had anyone consulted me about the construction of the universe, I would have made my views on the subject quite clear: mortality is a terrible idea. I’m opposed to it in general. (In wiser moments, I know that this is silly and that all life feeds on life. There is no life without the death of other beings, indeed, no planets without the death of stars.)
Nonetheless, I’m also opposed to mortality on a personal level. I get too much pleasure out of being alive to want to give it up. And I’m curious enough that I don’t want to die before I learn how it all comes out (or, for that matter, ends). I don’t want to leave the theater when the movie’s only partway over — or even after the credits have rolled. In fact, my antipathy to death is so extreme that I think it’s fair to say I’m a coward. That’s probably why, in hopes of combatting that cowardice, I’ve occasionally done silly things like running around in a war zone, trying to stop a U.S. intervention. As Aristotle once wrote, we become brave by doing brave things.
Remember That You Are Dust
I wrote this on Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the season of Lent. The Ash Wednesday service includes a ceremonial act meant to remind each of us of our mortality. A priest “imposes,” or places, a smudge of ash on each congregant’s forehead, saying, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That action and those words reflect the brevity and contingency of human life, while echoing Christianity’s Jewish roots in the understanding that human life must have both a beginning and an end. Psalm 103 puts the sentiment this way:
“As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.”
You don’t need to believe in a compassionate divinity to feel the loneliness of that windswept field, that place that remembers us no more.
I’ve been ruminating on my fear of dying lately, as I contemplate the courage of the people of Ukraine, many of whom would, as the saying goes, rather die on their feet than live on their knees. It’s an expression I first heard in Nicaragua during the Contra war of the 1980s — mejor morir de pie que vivir en rodillas –although it’s an open question who said it first. In the twentieth century, it was proclaimed by both Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, and the Republican heroine of the Spanish civil war, Dolores Ibárruri, also known as “La Pasionaria.” I wish I could discern in my own breast that passionate preference for a dignified death over a life of suppression or slavery, yet I find that I can’t make myself feel that way. When I think about death — dignified or otherwise — my mind strays again to that empty windswept field and I am afraid.
It’s odd — and a little disgusting — that I seem to share Donald Trump’s horror about the numbers of people dying in Russia’s war against Ukraine. I also want that war to stop. I don’t want one more person to lose his or her chance of finding out how the story ends. Yet I also understand why people choose to fight (and possibly die) — in Ukraine, in Gaza, and on the Jordan River’s West Bank.
The Death of Millions
Here’s an observation often attributed to Russian autocrat Joseph Stalin that was, in fact, probably lifted from a German essay about French humor: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” Whoever said (or wrote) it first, the point is that, while we can imagine a single death with its personal details of life and extinction, the human brain has trouble truly grasping large numbers of anything, including deaths.
In particular, we’re not good at understanding the numerous deaths of people who live far from us. At the end of February, the Associated Press reported that six infants had died of exposure in Gaza over the previous two weeks. One father said of his two-month-old daughter, whose body turned cold at midnight on a windswept Mediterranean plain, “Yesterday, I was playing with her. I was happy with her. She was a beautiful child, like the moon.”
We can imagine one child, beautiful like the moon. But can we imagine more than 48,000 babies, children, teenagers, adults, and old people, each with his or her own story, each killed by a military force armed and encouraged first by the Biden administration and now by that of Donald Trump? Indeed, while President Biden finally denied Israel any further shipments of 2,000-pound bombs (though not all too many other weapons), President Trump’s administration has renewed the transfer of those staggeringly destructive weapons, quite literally with a vengeance. Announcing an “emergency” grant of an extra four billion dollars in military aid to Israel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently explained the shift:
“Since taking office, the Trump Administration has approved nearly $12 billion in major FMS [“Foreign Military Sales”] sales to Israel. This important decision coincides with President Trump’s repeal of a Biden-era memorandum which had imposed baseless and politicized conditions [emphasis added] on military assistance to Israel at a time when our close ally was fighting a war of survival on multiple fronts against Iran and terror proxies.”
As Reuters observes, “One 2,000-pound bomb can rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wide blast radius.” That’s not exactly a weapon designed to root out individual urban commandos. It’s a weapon designed to “cleanse” an entire city block of its inhabitants. And we know that Donald Trump has indeed imagined plans to cleanse the rest of Gaza before (of course) converting it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Perhaps Israel can use its new bombs to level the rest of the Strip’s remaining buildings to make way for Mar-a-Gaza.
Yes, we can imagine the death of an infant, but can we imagine the permanent displacement of more than two million of her fellow Palestinians?
People Are Dying — and They’re Just Getting Started
If you can wrap your head around the destruction of Gaza, you’re ready for an even bigger challenge, one about which the new regime in Washington has said exactly nothing: Sudan, where civil war and famine threaten the lives of five million people. Back in 2019, a popular nonviolent uprising dislodged that nation’s long-time dictator President Omar al-Bashir. Sadly, after a brief period of joint civilian-military rule, the Sudanese army seized the government, only to be confronted by a powerful militia called the Rapid Response Forces. The historical origins of the conflict are complex, but the effects on the Sudanese people are simple: murder, rape, and mass starvation. And the new Trump regime has done nothing to help. In fact, as the BBC reported:
“The freezing of U.S. humanitarian assistance has forced the closure of almost 80% of the emergency food kitchens set up to help people left destitute by Sudan’s civil war… Aid volunteers said the impact of President Donald Trump’s executive order halting contributions from the U.S. government’s development organization (USAID) for 90 days meant more than 1,100 communal kitchens had shut. It is estimated that nearly two million people struggling to survive have been affected.”
Nor are Sudan and Gaza the only places where people are already dying because of Donald Trump. The New York Times has produced a lengthy list of programs frozen for now (and perhaps forever) by the shut-down of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Those include “H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries, and global efforts to wipe out polio.” Even programs that count the dead have been discontinued, so we will never know the full effect of those cuts.
On March 5th, a divided Supreme Court ruled five-to-four that USAID funds must indeed be reinstated for now. However, two things remain unclear: First, will the case be returned to the Supreme Court for further adjudication? And second, will the Trump administration abide by its decision in the meantime and release the funds that have been impounded? This seems increasingly unlikely, given Secretary of State Rubio’s March 10th announcement that 83% of those USAID contracts will be permanently cancelled.
His comments have rendered the legal situation even murkier. In any case, if, as seems all too likely, the administration continues to stonewall the courts, then we have indeed already arrived at the constitutional crisis that’s been anticipated for weeks now.
It’s not only overseas that people will die thanks to the actions of Donald Trump. While we can’t blame him for the recent measles outbreaks in Texas and eight other states, he is the guy who made Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the secretary of health and human services. And Kennedy is the guy who first downplayed the seriousness of measles; then, rather than vigorously promoting the measles vaccine, called it a matter of “personal choice”; and finally suggested that measles can be easily treated with Vitamin A. (In case you had any doubts, this is not true!) To date only two people — an unvaccinated child and an unvaccinated adult — have died, but sadly, it’s early days yet.
Meanwhile, there’s a new pandemic sniffing around for potential human victims: the H5N1 strain of bird flu. It’s already led to the culling of millions of chickens (and a concomitant rise in the price of eggs). It’s also infected dairy cattle, cats, and even a few human beings, including one resident of Louisiana who died of the disease in January 2025. To date there are no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission, but the strains circulating in other mammals suggest an ability to mutate to permit that kind of contagion.
You might think that Trump learned his lesson about underestimating a virus with the Covid pandemic back in 2020. That, however, seems not to be the case. Instead, he’s endangering his own citizens and the rest of the world by pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, where global cooperation to confront a potential pandemic would ordinarily take place. And Kennedy is seriously considering pulling an almost $600 million contract with the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against bird flu. That’s what I call — to use a phrase of the president’s — Making America Healthy Again.
Kennedy has also postponed indefinitely the February meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory panel on flu vaccines. This is the group that convenes regularly to make decisions about which strain of seasonal flu should be addressed by the current year’s vaccines. Deaths from flu and attendant pneumonias vary across time. During the 2022-2023 season more than 47,000 Americans died of flu or flu-related pneumonia. Estimates of last year’s deaths exceed 28,000. Without effective vaccines those numbers would have been — and perhaps in the future will be — much higher.
There are many other ways Trump’s actions have killed and will continue to kill, including through the suicides of transgender youth denied affirming healthcare; or the deaths of pregnant people denied abortion care; or those of people who come here seeking asylum from political violence at home, only to be shipped back into the arms of those who want to kill them; or even of fired and despairing federal workers who might take their own lives. The list of those at risk under Trump grows ever longer and, of course, includes the planet itself.
As Elon Musk recently told podcaster Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” And the strategy of Musk and Trump is, in effect, to pile the corpses high enough that the numbers overwhelm our capacity for empathy.
People will die and, as was true of the cruelty of Trump’s first term, their deaths are, in a sense, the point. They will die because he has undoubtedly realized that, no matter how long he remains president, one day he himself will die. His administration is, as he has told us, driven by a thirst for retribution. He is seeking revenge for his own mortality against everything that lives.
Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light
There is another murder I haven’t even mentioned yet, a metaphorical killing of a particularly devastating sort, one that will doubtless lead to many actual deaths before we’re done. I’m thinking, of course, of the death of our democracy. Many others, including Timothy Snyder, M. Gessen, and Anne Applebaum, have written about that process, already well underway, so there’s no reason to rehearse the details here.
Contemplating this already violent moment in our history, this genuine break with the rule of law and all that’s decent, brings me back to the meditation on death with which I began this piece. I’ve long loved poet Dylan Thomas’s villanelle on old age, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” As I climb higher into my seventies, it speaks to me ever more directly. The first three lines are particularly appropriate to these Trumpian times:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
I’ve always been a partisan of the “rage, rage” faction. I’m not going gentle. Give me all the “heroic measures.” No do not resuscitate or DNR for me. And yet, paradoxically, our rage at the dying of democracy’s light will indeed drag some of us, I believe, burning and raving into that good night.
I know that certain of us may well be called upon, perhaps sooner than we imagine, to die for liberty here in this country. It’s happened before. I doubt I would (or should) kill for freedom, but I hope I would, if put to the test, be willing to die for it.
I might have missed Grover Cleveland’s 188th birthday on March 18 if Paul Jacob hadn’t pointed it out in his own column on the man who (as Jacob mentions) many libertarians consider “the last great president of these United States.” I don’t consider the presidency a venue for greatness, but as presidents go “Big Steve” was arguably one of the least bad.
Cleveland, of course, has been noticed lately for some of his similarities with Trump. He was the first, and until Trump the only, president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Like Trump, he was a New York Democrat. And, like, Trump he won his first presidential election despite a sex scandal — although unlike Trump he openly admitted his past conduct (he’d fathered a child out of wedlock, something more scandalous then than now).
The differences between the two, however, are more interesting.
On foreign policy, Cleveland was an anti-imperialist who opposed the US annexation of Hawaii. He never seems to have considered adding, say, Greenland or Canada to the constellation of American states. Trump’s an imperialist in practice who occasionally talks a not very convincing non-interventionist game while somehow managing to escalate every conflict he inherits and who couldn’t be bothered to complete his negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan before leaving office the first time.
On tax policy, Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and seems determined to wreck the US economy with his capricious demand-then-back-down approach to foreign trade. Cleveland worked to lower tariffs, and laid out the irrefutable case against them to American workers who thought such taxes “protected” their jobs:
“Those who buy imports pay the duty charged thereon into the public Treasury, but the great majority of our citizens, who buy domestic articles of the same class, pay a sum at least approximately equal to this duty to the home manufacturer. … with slight reflection they will not overlook the fact that they are consumers with the rest …”
Perhaps the biggest differences, both of which informed Cleveland’s opposition to high tariffs and Trump’s support for them:
First, in Cleveland’s time, the federal government enjoyed an increasing budget surplus rather than continuing deficits, while Trump inherited a government $20 trillion in debt and left office the first time with that debt at more than $28 trillion.
Second, Cleveland opposed the “spoils” system under which the party in power rewarded its supporters with government jobs and contracts. He wanted a “civil service” based on competence rather than partisan loyalty, and considered the tariff-fueled budget surplus a problem because it made so much money available to pay for those “spoils.”
Trump, on the other hand, clearly sees government employment as “spoils” candy to be handed out on the basis of personal loyalty. And since his biggest supporters are among the American wealth elite, he gets a “two-fer” by taxing your purchases of foreign goods to their advantage (revenue) while rewarding less well-heeled loyalists with those government jobs (spending).
We could use a man like Grover Cleveland again. Too bad we got another Herbert Hoover.
I’ve stopped counting the articles on the Democratic Party’s disarray over how and when they should confront Tyrant Trump’s criminal destruction of our country, its people’s livelihoods, security for their families, and their freedom to speak and advocate for their concerns.
Seized with internal doubts, fear, and cowardliness, most Democrats in Congress and the Party’s corporate-indentured bureaucracy can’t stop contracting out their jobs to corporate-conflicted consultants who have been and are in reality overpaid Trojan Horses.
What’s the superlative of “pathetic”? The Washington Post’s Dylan Wells gave us a definition. The Democrats in Congress are all agog about learning how to use TikTok against the more elaborate GOP’s TikTok. They invited an influencer who posted a “choose your fighter”-themed video featuring Democratic congresswomen bouncing in a fighting stance while their accomplishments and fun facts were displayed on the screen. I kid you not! At one influencers session, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was seen taking detailed notes.
Sporting its lowest-ever favorability ratings, the Party of the Donkey neither listens to seasoned civic group leaders, who know how to talk to all Americans (see winningamerica.net), nor to progressive labor unions like the American Postal Workers Union and the Association of Flight Attendants. The dominant corporate Democrats (just look at their big campaign donors) don’t even listen to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker who for many months has been aggressively taking the Grand Old Plutocrats, led by their dangerous Madman, Trumpty Dumpty, to the woodshed.
Instead, we have mealy-mouth Chuck Schumer vainly trying to recharge his dead batteries amidst the slew of avoidable election defeats in the U.S. Senate despite huge campaign cash.
Of course, the Democratic leaders don’t listen to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who is the most popular politician in America and is attracting huge crowds (5000 people at an event in Tempe, Arizona) in Republican Congressional districts and going after the cruel, vicious, self-enriching, anti-worker Wall Street over Main Street GOP corporatists.
Long-time political observer, Bill Curry, says “POLICY PRECEDES MESSAGE.” Otherwise, the messages are empty, forgettable excuses for the Party’s media consultants to get their 15% commission on repetitively empty TV ads. The Democrats should instead be investing in a serious ground game.
Last fall in Pennsylvania, people told us that the door-knocking by Democrats was far more frequent than in 2022. What were they knocking about? Just saying, vote Democratic? The Party lost the state to the wannabe dictator Donald and a U.S. Senate seat to boot.
By contrast, Pritzker raised alarms about Trump’s regime alluding to the rise of Nazism in Germany where Hitler was also an elected dictator.
Look, there are no secrets about the winning agendas, authentically presented and repeated with human interest stories and events. Here are six of them for starters that Kamala Harris Et al. avoided or reduced to disbelieved throw-away lines while adopting her vapid slogan about creating “an opportunity economy.”
1. Raise the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25 to $15 an hour. That would mean 25 million workers would live better. Slogan – “Go Vote for a Raise, you’ve been long denied it.” Or “America Needs a Raise.”
2. Raise the Social Security benefits FROZEN for over 45 years and pay for that by raising the Social Security tax on higher income individuals. In 2022, two hundred House Democrats voted for such a bill by Congressman John Larson (D-CT). Sixty-five million retirees would live better.
3. Restore the child tax credit, providing about $300 a month to sixty-one million children from both liberal and conservative families. Before the Congressional Republicans blocked its extension in January 2022, this measure alone had cut child poverty by 40 percent.
Just these three long overdue very popular safety nets would help almost 150 million Americans. Lots of votes there, including giving the 7.1 million Biden 2020 voters a reason not to stay home in 2024, along with over 80 million additional eligible voters who sat out the election.
Bear in mind, that just a switch of 240,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin would have defeated Trump and his brutishness in 2024.
4. Raise taxes on the very undertaxed super-wealthy and profitable corporations – half of the latter pay no federal income taxes. Polls show 85% of the American people support the overdue restoration from the Trump and GW Bush tax escapes for the rich and powerful.
5. Crackdown on the corporate crooks who cheat, lie, and steal the hard-earned consumer dollars and savings of all Americans, regardless of their political labels. Huge super-majorities of Americans are disgusted by the double standards of justice that stains our democracy every day in every way.
6. Empower the American workers to join trade unions (the U.S. has the biggest hurdle in union organizing in the Western world), and make it easier to be able to band together to demand and get universal, affordable health insurance, protect their children, make sure their taxes come back home to upgrade crumbling public services, and to organize civic groups to manage their elected representatives who have mostly forgotten where they came from and who is sovereign under the “We the People” Constitution.
There are more compacts with the American people to landslide the GOP. For now, the urgent mission has to be to stop the fascist dictatorship that is using police state tactics, ripping apart life-saving and life-sustaining services. Note Trump/Musk do not touch the massive “waste, fraud and inefficiency” of corporate welfare – subsidies, handouts, bailouts, giveaways, and tax escapes – corporate crime e.g., defrauding Medicare ($60 billion a year) and other federal payout programs (Medicaid, corporate contracts) and the unaudited, bloated military budget that Trump/Musk want to expand further.
Never in American history has there been such an impeachable domestic, law-violating, constitution-busting president committing criminally insane demolitions of the federal civil service staffing the ramparts of protecting the health, safety, and economic well-being of all Americans in red and blue states.
With Trump’s polls falling along with the stock market and inflation/prices starting to rise, the sycophant Congressional Republicans, violating their constitutional oaths of office, are starting to get the jitters. The packed angry crowds at their Town Meetings are just modest harbingers of what is to come soon.
Trump wants to “Impeach” and “Fire” anyone who is in a position to resist Der Fuhrer. Well, people, tell him with ever larger marches and polls that HE must be fired, which is just what our Founders provided for in the Impeachment authority exclusive to the U.S. Congress.
It’s up to you, the citizenry, as Richard Nixon discovered after the Watergate scandal. Expect the politicians only to follow you, not to lead.
The consensus in the economic research community and the business press is that the US economy is in serious trouble thanks to President Donald Trump’s wildly shifting tariff policies, plundering of the federal government and other factors. Unemployment has been slowly rising for the last year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 3/7/25). Tariffs are hurting American […]
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David Kelly’s lifeless body lay on Harrowdown Hill, Oxfordshire, England. The dead doctor was a microbiologist working for the British Ministry of Defence. Kelly was said by the Tony Blair government to have taken his own life four months after Britain and America invaded Iraq in March 2003. The illegal occupation of the oil-rich Middle […]
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+ The ceasefire that never was is now a bloodbath that never stops. + Israel never abided by the ceasefire in Gaza it agreed to. It never stopped killing Palestinians in Gaza. It didn’t withdraw its troops from Gaza. It continued to restrict the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza and limit where Palestinians could […]
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