In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on Monday that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Trump’s administration.
In a letter sent to members of the church, the Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe — the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church — said that two weeks ago, the government “informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees.”
Federal judges across several states are being delivered unsolicited pizza orders — an act of harassment and attempted intimidation, they say, from people who are unhappy with their rulings involving President Donald Trump. The U.S. Marshals Service has been tracking such deliveries since February. Although the agency hasn’t divulged details on how prevalent they are…
U.S. President Trump, when asked by NBC News on May 4th whether he is required to carry out — never violate — the U.S. Constitution, said, “I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.” The Oath of Office that he has twice taken, is “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Trump does not think that as President he is obligated by that oath to never violate the U.S. Constitution. He said this right there, on May 4. Here is the excerpt where he said this, from the interview, starting where the interviewer asked the question, up to where she abandoned the matter:
Kristen Welker: Your secretary of state says everyone who’s here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?
President Donald Trump: I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.
Kristen Welker: Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much.
President Donald Trump: I don’t know. It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials. We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.
Kristen Welker: But is —
President Donald Trump: Some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth. And I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it.
Kristen Welker: But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?
President Donald Trump: I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.
Kristen Welker: Is anyone in your administration right now in contact with El Salvador about returning Abrego Garcia to the United States?
She abandoned the matter, though it is the most important matter that any U.S. citizen ought to consider regarding the President; and, so, continuing any further with her canned list of questions there, was displaying her incompetence. For example, she could have asked him, “What did you twice swear to as you took the Presidential Oath of Office?,” but chose not to. She could have asked him “Why do you need to be told this by your lawyers, though it’s right there in the Oath that you twice swore to?” But she chose not to.
On May 11 (exactly a week later), Politico headlined “Hill leaders question Trump’s attempted Library of Congress takeover.” It IS the library of Congress; it is part of the Legislative Branch, not of the Executive Branch; and, so, it is controlled by the Congress if America still has a Constitutional Government. But, according to Politico’s report, this is merely a political squable between all Democrats, on the one hand, versus almost all Republicans, on the other. “Congressional Democrats have castigated Trump’s moves at the library and have called for Congress to end the president’s power to nominate the top librarian.” However, the real question here is not “the president’s power to nominate the top librarian.” It is instead whether the Congress will uphold the Constitution by slamming down, with at least near unanimity, the President’s ability to hire or fire anyone to act in that capacity WITHOUT A PRIOR congressional vote on any such decision.
Maybe it is not ONLY the President who is spitting upon the U.S. Constitution, but the members of Congress also. The congressional oath of office is:
“I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, …”
In February, President Trump said that tariffs would generate so much income that Americans would no longer need to pay income taxes.
The latest plan, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is to abolish income taxes for people who earn less than $150,000 yearly. That move would affect roughly 75% of workers, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. On its face, this could narrow the wealth gap by boosting disposable income for low- and middle-income households without raising taxes on the wealthy — a politically clever alternative to progressive tax hikes.
Eliminating the burden of income taxes is an exciting proposition, due to savings not just in money but in man-hours — the time spent anguishing over ledgers, forms and receipts. In 2024, according to the Tax Foundation, Americans spent 7.9 billion hours complying with IRS tax filing and reporting requirements. That is equivalent to 3.8 million full-time workers—roughly the population of Los Angeles — doing nothing but tax paperwork for the full year.
The question is, can tariffs and DOGE replace income taxes? If not, how else could the government fund itself? Is a growing debt bubble that is now carrying a $1.2 trillion interest tab, which must continue to expand just to sustain itself, the only alternative?
How Eliminating Middle Class Taxes Would Affect the Budget
Even if enacted in a targeted manner, we estimate such a change would reduce revenue by roughly $10 trillion through 2035 if applied to income taxes only and $15 trillion if applied to employee-side payroll taxes as well. …
If enacted relative to current law, ending taxes on income below $150,000 would boost debt by $12 to $18 trillion with interest, increasing debt-to-GDP to between 145 and 160 percent – compared to 118 percent under current law.… Importantly, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said the proposal would be contingent on achieving budget balance first.
Dividing the $10 trillion lost over 10 years (2025–2035) gives a $1 trillion loss per year on average, though there may be year-to-year variations. Trump’s team proposes to offset this loss with savings from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and new tariff revenues, but the math doesn’t look good.
The Prospects from Tariffs and DOGE
Elon Musk’s DOGE has identified significant areas of federal “waste, fraud and abuse,” but the program was originally projected to save $2 trillion by slashing misused funds. At Trump’s cabinet meeting on April 10, Musk said he expects the agency to find $150 billion in savings in fiscal year 2026, a number significantly lower than even the $1 trillion he said in February he was confident DOGE would find.
Tariffs remain Trump’s primary funding mechanism. He has frequently referenced the 19th century, when there was no income tax, and tariffs were the principal source of revenue for the U.S. government. In his Liberation Day speech on April 2, he said, “From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation, and the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been.” Trump’s particular hero is Pres. William McKinley, whose 1890 tariff of nearly 50% was a high point of the tariff policy.
The problem is that in the 19th century, the U.S. government had far fewer costs. Among other expenses, there was no Social Security, no Medicare and no trillion dollar interest to be paid to investors.
As originally proposed, Trump’s tariffs included a 10–20% universal tariff and up to 60% on Chinese imports. At that rate, the Tax Foundation estimated that the tariffs could raise $1 trillion over a decade ($100 billion/year) after accounting for reduced imports, while the Tax Policy Center put the figure as high as $2.8 trillion ($280 billion/year).
These projections remain speculative, since the results of the trade deals being negotiated are yet to be reported. On April 30, the president stated that negotiations had already resulted in $8 trillion in promised investment in U.S. production, an impressive number, but investments take several years to manifest as new tax income.
For the near term, DOGE cuts at $150 billion per year and tariffs estimated at $280 billion per year would cover less than half the trillion dollar loss projected from middle-class tax cuts. And that is without touching the $1.9 trillion deficit already projected by the Congressional Budget Office, something Commerce Sec. Lutnick said would have to be eliminated before income tax relief could be considered.
The Elephant in the Room
Even if new trade deals manage to cover the full deficit, the unprecedented federal debt will continue to loom. Currently standing at $36.21 trillion, the debt comes with interest payments projected to hit $1.2 trillion in 2025. That works out to $3.3 billion per day. In effect, all of our middle-class income taxes are being spent just to pay interest to bondholders, foreign and domestic.
Interest costs are expected to rise from 9% of federal revenue in 2021 to 23% by 2034, crowding out federal priorities like infrastructure and healthcare. And that assumes bond buyers keep rolling over the debt at current rates. For FY 2025, an estimated $9.2 trillion — fully a quarter of the debt — will come due and need to be refinanced. What if foreign countries, which hold approximately 30% of the debt, decide to invest elsewhere?
The most efficient to fill the trillion dollar hole left in the budget if middle-class income taxes are eliminated might be to take an axe to the trillion dollar interest tab and the federal debt sustaining it. But how?
Even Quantitative Easing Won’t Work to Eliminate the Interest Burden
Many economists think new rounds of quantitative easing (QE) are necessary, as the only way to keep Treasury interest rates low. QE is a maneuver by which Treasury debt is purchased by the Federal Reserve with newly issued bank reserves. The debt could theoretically be eliminated by having the Fed buy the securities as they come due. Assuming $9.2 trillion in debt maturing annually, the whole debt could be moved onto the books of the Fed in about four years, and since the Fed is required to rebate its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs, this could theoretically eliminate the interest burden. But there are two wrinkles:
(1) The Fed is not allowed to buy federal securities directly from the Treasury. It primarily conducts its open market operations, including QE Treasury purchases, through primary dealers, a select group of large financial institutions designated by the Fed to act as its counterparties in the open market.
(2) Ever since 2008, the Fed has been paying interest on the banks’ reserve balances (IORB), which counts in the costs it deducts from the profits it returns to the Treasury. The rate on IORB set by the Fed is 4.4% as of May 2, 2025, while the average interest rate on the federal debt is approximately 3.3% for the fiscal year-to-date 2025.
Thus if the Fed were to buy $9.2 trillion in federal securities this year, it would receive $9.2 trillion × 3.3% in interest but would have to pay IORB on the same $9.2 trillion at 4.4% to the banks, a net loss to the Fed. In effect, the banks would be receiving the interest rather than the Treasury, unless a couple of laws were changed, and changing them would no doubt meet with heavy resistance from the powerful banking lobby.
Why, you may ask, does the Fed feel it needs to pay interest on bank reserves? Good question. It’s a monetary policy tool designed to curb inflation by setting a floor on the fed funds rate, the rate at which banks lend to each other. Since banks won’t lend at rates lower than they can safely earn from the Fed, it’s a way to keep interest rates high. But the result has been that the banks have simply reduced their lending. Why lend to risky local businesses when they can sit back and collect a safe and ample return from the Fed itself?
It’s a controversial windfall to the banks, to support an interest rate that is itself controversial. But the bottom line is that the Fed is not able to bail out the government from its trillion dollar interest tab. What then is to be done?
A Radical Alternative Whose Time Has Come
Given the president’s predilection for 19th century economics, he could go a bit further back than to President McKinley. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, avoided a crippling national debt by resorting to the funding mechanism of the American colonists: let the government print the money directly, not through a banker-controlled central bank but through the Treasury. The government could buy back its debt with U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks,” as permitted under the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) and declared legal by the Supreme Court. These new currencies could then be used to repurchase maturing Treasury securities debt- and interest-free.
Critics will cry “hyperinflation,” arguing that the newly-issued currency would flood the economy, spiking demand and prices. But if new money is directed to productive investments — for example infrastructure, energy, and healthcare — supply and demand will rise together, stabilizing prices. The Chinese demonstrated this in the 25 years from 1996 to 2025, when their domestic money supply was inflated from 4,840 CNY (Chinese yuan) to 320,526 CNY, or by 5500%; yet the price level remained stable and low. For a fuller explanation with data, see my earlier article here.
To ensure that the Greenbacks finance growth, a national infrastructure bank could channel funds into projects such as affordable housing, high-speed rail, broadband, the power grid and large water and transportation projects. China is again the modern model. It has three giant “policy banks” assigned to implement the policies of the government, including China Development Bank, the world’s largest infrastructure and development bank. A U.S. version could prioritize projects with high economic returns, vetted by transparent, DOGE-like algorithms to prevent waste and cronyism.
We desperately need infrastructure funding, and the current federal budget has no room to adequately address those needs. A viable proposal for a national infrastructure bank, H.R. 4052, currently has 47 cosponsors. The bank would use off-budget financing on the model of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the federal financial agency that rebuilt the country’s infrastructure during the banking crisis of the 1930s. For more information, see the NIB Coalition website.
For state and city governments, public banks on the model of the Bank of North Dakota could address local infrastructure needs. See my earlier article here and the Public Banking Institute website.
Prosperity Without Debt
It has been argued that “just printing the money” would jeopardize the federal government’s credit rating. Perhaps, but we wouldn’t need credit if we could create our own, debt-free. To repeat an editorial directed against Lincoln’s debt-free Greenbacks attributed to the 1865 London Times, which may be apocryphal but nevertheless demonstrates the possibilities:
If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.
Lincoln’s Greenback policy was indeed destroyed, along with the president who dared to implement it. But the U.S. government is powerful enough today to pull that “mischievous financial policy” off. A Greenback-funded debt buyback could offer a way to pay down debt without interest costs, while spurring growth through targeted investments monitored through a national infrastructure bank and local public banks to absorb demand productively. In several years, the whole $1.2 trillion interest tab could be slashed from the budget, making our trillion dollar middle-class income tax payments that barely cover that expense unnecessary.
The full budget could even be funded with Treasury-issued Greenbacks, eliminating the need for taxes at all. DOGE has demonstrated the possibilities for monitoring the government’s expenditures transparently and accountably with artificial intelligence. And as AI progressively replaces jobs, the government will need some form of universal basic income to supplement or replace worker salaries, perhaps “Social Security for All.”
Granted, that raises new issues around the privacy and programmability of a government-issued digital currency. But as Cornell Prof. Robert Hockett argues in his book, The Citizens’ Ledger, these can be overcome with cryptographic protections. For people leery of digital government-issued dollars, the Treasury could exercise its constitutional power to issue coins and paper dollar bills. Those are all complicated issues for another article, but the possibilities are provocative. We can escape the debt trap engineered by a private banking system that creates money as debt at interest – and escape the middle-class income taxes paying for that interest – by returning the sovereign power to issue money to the Treasury.
The US government has dropped its demand for Hamas to disarm as a precondition for a ceasefire in Gaza, Egyptian sources revealed to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
“US negotiators conveyed to Egyptian intermediaries that the issue of Hamas’s disarmament could be addressed at a later stage, rather than being an immediate requirement for a ceasefire agreement,” the Qatari-owned news outlet reports.
The unnamed source added that US President Donald Trump’s “inner circle” is convinced of the “futility” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to free the captives via military pressure, believing that no military option will help save the Israeli captives in Gaza.
Standing at the Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. on Monday, Trump administration officials welcomed 59 white South Africans to their new home in the United States. “We respect what you had to deal with these last few years,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told a small crowd. “We’re excited to welcome you here to our country where we think you will bloom.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday asking drugmakers to voluntarily lower pharmaceutical costs for U.S. consumers — but the order lacks a clear mechanism for enacting such reductions. Trump’s order recognized that costs for prescription medicines are higher in the United States than they are in other countries. “Drug manufacturers, rather than seeking to equalize…
Hamas released an Israeli American soldier from captivity in Gaza on Monday, seeking to reopen ceasefire negotiations as a gesture of goodwill to President Donald Trump as he visits the Middle East this week. The 21-year-old Israeli military soldier, Edan Alexander, was first released to officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who handed him over to the Israeli…
If White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is to be believed, Team Trump is poised to drive another stake through the heart of the Constitution. On May 9, Miller told reporters that the administration is considering whether to suspend the right to habeas corpus – known as “The Great Writ” – in immigration cases. Suspending habeas corpus, which allows individuals to challenge the legality…
Ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia on May 13, the Committee to Protect Journalists and 15 other human rights organizations condemned the kingdom’s deteriorating press freedom, including journalists’ arrests, travel bans, surveillance, and disinformation aimed at silencing the media.
The groups called on Saudi authorities to release all detained journalists, lift arbitrary travel bans, and end legal and digital attacks. They also urged U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration and the U.S. Congress to protect U.S.-based journalists from Saudi transnational repression and spyware.
Saudi Arabia is one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, with at least 10 behind bars on December 1, 2024, making it the 10th worst jailer of journalists globally in CPJ’s latest annual prison census.
The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) voting rights unit is switching its focus from protecting voters’ ability to cast ballots to investigating so-called voter fraud and fair election practices — buzzwords frequently used by President Donald Trump to push election denial. “The mission of the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division is to ensure free, fair…
Neighbourhood resistance to an abduction by US immigration agency ICE last week prompted local police to back agents up by pinning a child to the ground.
Police back up ICE with violence amid neighbourhood outrage
A mother in Worcester, Massachusetts, was seeking asylum. She reportedly didn’t have a deportation order against her. But amid an increasingly aggressive and possibly unconstitutional assault on immigrants under the Donald Trump administration, things like due process don’t seem to matter.
Immigration officials (mostly bulky men) abducted the mother, but “crowds of neighbors” (many of them women) quickly came out to try and intervene, “surrounding the ICE vehicles and trying to stop them from leaving”. ICE panicked and called in police officers, who backed the agents up. Viral footage of the mother’s 16-year-old daughter show police holding her face down to the ground. Her understandably strong reaction to the abduction saw officers arrest her, along with another woman. The daughter’s 21-year-old sister, whose daughter’s father had been taken by ICE the day before, said she had been left “very traumatized”. Massachusetts Department of Children and Families are currently holding both her 16-year-old sister and 13-year-old sister.
Hundreds of people attended a peaceful protest in Worcester on 11 May, with one protester insisting that “the Safe Communities Act provides due process for these immigrants”. Another protester said:
We don’t want to live in a community where our neighbours are pulled off the street.
Resistance is fertile
In March, masked agents elsewhere in Massachusetts abducted PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, focusing on her opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Critics have called her kidnapping a “chilling violation of civil liberties“. But after protests, legal action, and a six-week stay in a Louisiana abduction facility, this weekend saw a judge order her release on bail. The legal battle is not over, but the pressure seems to be paying off.
Another anti-genocide abductee, Mohsen Mahdawi, had received a similar release order previously. His battle continues, but has now launched “a legal defence fund to help immigrants like himself who are facing deportation hearings”.
Intensifying the Joe Biden administration‘s repression of anti-genocide students, Donald Trump’s government has gone after prominent activist voices like Ozturk, Mahdawi, and Mahmoud Khalil. The latter is now about two months into his ordeal, having to miss the birth of his son in the process. A judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation, while pushing Trump’s regime to justify using an obscure law to persecute the campaigner over potential “foreign policy consequences”.
The rise of Trump-style politics very much relies on lack of popular engagement in the political process. But as recent weeks have shown, challenges both on the street and in the courts can be incredibly powerful. And the more the Trump administration oversteps, the more resistance it will face.
Ancient oak trees rise above gigantic boulders scattered across a high desert mesa in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. This is Oak Flat (Chi’ chil Bildagoteel), a sacred site for Native Americans, including the Western and San Carlos Apache. And like many other lands across the West, it’s under grave threat from multinational mining interests, all in the name of climate mitigation…
May Day 2025 in the United States came amid the most aggressive assault on U.S. workers in a century. The federal agencies that provide some minimal protection against corporate power — the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and many more — are being systematically destroyed. On May 1, hundreds of thousands protested at roughly 1,300 actions across the United States. Under the broad theme “Workers Over Billionaires,” they condemned union-busting, austerity, climate destruction, anti-immigrant terror, the U.S.-Israeli genocide, and other facets of the assault.
A federal judge in California on Friday temporarily blocked what at coalition of labor unions, local governments, and nonprofits argued was “the unconstitutional dismantling of the federal government by the president of the United States on a scale unprecedented in this country’s history and in clear excess of his authority.” Since returning to office in January, U.S.
San Diego-based attorney Ian Seruelo received three separate reports in March alone about local county Sheriff Kelly Martinez violating California’s immigration policy. The California Values Act, also known as Senate Bill 54 (SB 54), ensures that local law enforcement will not cooperate with immigration authorities to deport individuals. For Seruelo, the violations were an example of how the Trump…
Israel is in a weak position and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremism knows no bounds. The only other way around an eventual regional war is the ousting of the Israeli prime minister.
US President Donald Trump has closed his line of communication with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to various reports citing officials.
This comes amid alleged growing pressure on Israel regarding Gaza and the abrupt halt to American operations against Ansarallah in Yemen. So, is this all an act or is the US finally pressuring Israel?
On May 1, news broke that President Donald Trump had suddenly ousted his national security advisor Mike Waltz. According to a Washington Post article on the issue, the ouster was in part a response to Waltz’s undermining of the President, for having engaged in intense coordination with Israeli PM Netanyahu regarding the issue of attacking Iran prior to the Israeli Premier’s visit to the Oval Office.
Some analysts, considering that Waltz has been pushing for a war on Iran, argued that his ouster was a signal that the Trump administration’s pro-diplomacy voices were pushing back against the hawks.
This shift also came at a time when Iran-US talks had stalled, largely thanks to a pressure campaign from the Israel Lobby, leading US think tanks and Israeli officials like Ron Dermer.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump publicly announced the end to a campaign designed to destroy/degrade Yemen’s Ansarallah-led government in Sana’a on May 6.
Israeli leadership shocked
According to Israeli media, citing government sources, the leadership in Tel Aviv was shocked by the move to end operations against Yemen, essentially leaving the Israelis to deal with Ansarallah alone.
After this, more information began to leak, originating from the Israeli Hebrew-language media, claiming that the Trump administration was demanding Israel reach an agreement for aid to be delivered to Gaza, in addition to signing a ceasefire agreement.
The other major claim is that President Trump has grown so frustrated with Netanyahu that he has cut communication with him directly.
Although neither side has officially clarified details on the reported rift between the two sides, a few days ago the Israeli prime minister released a social media video claiming that he would act alone to defend Israel.
On Friday morning, another update came in that American Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth would be cancelling his planned visit to Tel Aviv.
Can Trump and Netanyahu remake the Middle East? Video: Palestine Chronicle
Is the US finally standing up to Israel? In order to assess this issue correctly, we have to place all of the above-mentioned developments into their proper context.
The issue must also be prefaced on the fact that every member of the Trump government is pro-Israeli to the hilt and has received significant backing from the Israel Lobby.
Mike Waltz was indeed fired and according to leaked AIPAC audio revealed by The Grayzone, he was somewhat groomed for a role in government by the pro-Israel Lobby for a long time.
Another revelation regarding Waltz, aside from him allegedly coordinating with Netanyahu behind Trump’s back and adding journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a private Signal group chat, was that he was storing his chats on an Israeli-owned app.
Yet, Waltz was not booted out of the government like John Bolton was during Trump’s first term in office, he has instead been designated as UN ambassador to the United Nations.
The UN ambassador position was supposed to be handed to Elise Stefanik, a radically vocal supporter of Israel who helped lead the charge in cracking down on pro-Palestine free speech on university campuses. Stefanik’s nomination was withdrawn in order to maintain the Republican majority in the Congress.
If Trump was truly seeking to push back against the Israel Lobby’s push to collapse negotiations with Iran, then why did Trump signal around a week ago that new sanctions packages were on the way?
He announced on Friday that a third independent Chinese refiner would be hit with secondary sanctions for receiving Iranian oil.
Israeli demands in Trump’s rhetoric
The sanctions, on top of the fact that his negotiating team have continuously attempted to add conditions the the talks, viewed in Tehran as non-starters, indicates that precisely what pro-Israel think tanks like WINEP and FDD have been demanding is working its way into not only the negotiating team, but coming out in Trump’s own rhetoric.
There is certainly an argument to make here, that there is a significant split within the pro-Israel Lobby in the US, which is now working its way into the Trump administration, yet it is important to note that the Trump campaign itself was bankrolled by Zionist billionaires and tech moguls.
Miriam Adelson, Israel’s richest billionaire, was his largest donor. Adelson also happens to own Israel Hayom, the most widely distributed newspaper in Israel that has historically been pro-Netanyahu, it is now also reporting on the Trump-Netanyahu split and feeding into the speculations.
As for the US operations against Yemen, the US has used the attack on Ansarallah as the perfect excuse to move a large number of military assets to the region.
This has included air defence systems to the Gulf States and most importantly to Israel.
After claiming back in March to have already “decimated” Ansarallah, the Trump administration spent way in excess of US$1 billion dollars (more accurately over US$2 billion) and understood that the only way forward was a ground operation.
Meanwhile, the US has also moved military assets to the Mediterranean and is directly involved in intensive reconnaissance over Lebanese airspace, attempting to collect information on Hezbollah.
An Iran attack imminent? While it is almost impossible to know whether the media theatrics regarding the reported Trump-Netanyahu split are entirely true, or if it is simply a good-cop bad-cop strategy, it appears that some kind of assault on Iran could be imminent.
Whether Benjamin Netanyahu is going to order an attack on Iran out of desperation or as part of a carefully choreographed plan, the US will certainly involve itself in any such assault on one level or another.
The Israeli prime minister has painted himself into a corner. In order to save his political coalition, he collapsed the Gaza ceasefire during March and managed to bring back his Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to his coalition.
This enabled him to successfully take on his own Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, in an ongoing purge of his opposition.
However, due to a lack of manpower and inability to launch any major ground operation against Gaza, without severely undermining Israeli security on other fronts, Netanyahu decided to adopt a strategy of starving the people of Gaza instead.
He now threatens a major ground offensive, yet it is hard to see what impact it would have beyond an accelerated mass murder of civilians.
The Israeli prime minister’s mistake was choosing the blocking of all aid into Gaza as the rightwing hill to die on, which has been deeply internalised by his extreme Religious Zionism coalition partners, who now threaten his government’s stability if any aid enters the besieged territory.
Netanyahu in a difficult position
This has put Netanyahu in a very difficult position, as the European Union, UK and US are all fearing the backlash that mass famine will bring and are now pushing Tel Aviv to allow in some aid.
Amidst this, Netanyahu made another commitment to the Druze community that he would intervene on their behalf in Syria.
While Syria’s leadership are signaling their intent to normalise ties and according to a recent report by Yedioth Ahronoth, participated in “direct” negotiations with Israel regarding “security issues”, there is no current threat from Damascus.
However, if tensions escalate in Syria with the Druze minority in the south, failure to fulfill pledges could cause major issues with Israeli Druze, who perform crucial roles in the Israeli military.
Internally, Israel is deeply divided, economically under great pressure and the overall instability could quickly translate to a larger range of issues.
Then we have the Lebanon front, where Hezbollah sits poised to pounce on an opportunity to land a blow in order to expel Israel from their country and avenge the killing of its Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Trigger a ‘doomsday option’?
Meanwhile in Gaza, if Israel is going to try and starve everyone to death, this could easily trigger what can only be called the “doomsday option” from Hamas and other groups there. Nobody is about to sit around and watch their people starve to death.
As for Yemen’s Ansarallah, it is clear that there was no way without a massive ground offensive that the movement was going to stop firing missiles and drones at Israel.
What we have here is a situation in which Israel finds itself incapable of defeating any of its enemies, as all of them have now been radicalised due to the mass murder inflicted upon their populations.
In other words, Israel is not capable of victory on any front and needs a way out.
The leader of the opposition to Israel in the region is perceived to be Iran, as it is the most powerful, which is why a conflict with it is so desired. Yet, Tehran is incredibly powerful and the US is incapable of defeating it with conventional weapons, therefore, a full-scale war is the equivalent to committing regional suicide.
Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specialising in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle and it is republished with permission.
Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed that the US government has what he called a “grand encirclement” strategy aimed at isolating and weakening China.
Trump hit China with tariffs of 145%, imposing what is essentially a trade embargo.
The Trump administration wanted to pressure Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and India to follow the US and “approach China as a group”, Bessent said, according to Bloomberg.
This strategy is clearly failing.
The finance ministers and central bank governors of China, Japan, South Korea, and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met in Italy on May 4 and published a joint statement pledging “to further strengthen regional financial cooperation”.
Democratic anti-Trump warriors are popular with the party base — and they know it. On Wednesday, May 7, Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel put out a strongly worded press release decrying the latest “appalling Supreme Court decision” in favor of President Donald Trump’s ban on trans people in the military. The previous day, Nessel’s office had announced it would join another in a…
Operation Rolling Thunder was a sustained U.S. bombing campaign over Vietnam. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a 1975–76 madcap concert tour headed by Bob Dylan, featuring extraordinary musicians and collaborators. Now, there’s a new “Rolling Thunder”; a maximalist anti-abortion campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration, the FDA, Congress and the courts to ban the use of mifepristone. To bolster their claims against mifepristone, abolitionists have latched on to a new non-peer-reviewed highly questionable study by a conservative think tank.
During the Presidential campaign, Trump juked and jived on his position on abortion access as seven states passed measures to enshrine abortion rights and several others, including red Kansas blocked efforts to restrict existing access. Now the Administration must balance the real-politique of the upcoming mid-term elections with the zeal of the anti-abortion coalition.
The question remains as to whether abortion abolitionists can prevail over the will of the majority of women and men who support access to abortion.
Restricting and ultimately banning access to medication abortion has been a longtime goal of the conservative movement. According to the Guttmacher Institute, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the playbook for the Trump administration, advocated “reinstating medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone that require in-person dispensing and limit who can prescribe and receive the medication.
“By effectively ending telehealth provision of the method, these restrictions would limit access to the method for anyone who faces barriers to reaching a brick-and-mortar clinic, including individuals receiving telehealth care (under the protection of shield laws) in states where abortion is banned.”
Project 2025 “also recommends revoking mifepristone’s US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, which would remove the drug from the market entirely.”
Politico’s Alice Miranda Ollstein recently reported that, “While the Trump administration paid little attention to the medication in its first months in office, and even filed a court brief to preserve access, the activists are counting on a report from the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center to light a fire under those in power.”
Ollstein further notes that “Mifepristone, one of two drugs used in roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S., is a longtime target of conservative activists who consider it the primary driver of the increase in abortions since Roe’s fall in 2022 and the method millions of women are using to circumvent state bans”
This largest-known study of the abortion pill is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023.
10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.
The real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of “less than 0.5 percent” in clinical trials reported on the drug label.
The FDA should immediately reinstate its earlier, stronger patient safety protocols to ensure physician responsibility for women who take mifepristone under their care, as well as mandate full reporting of its side effects.
The FDA should further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women and, based on objective safety criteria, reconsider its approval altogether.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA chief Marty Makary — have already expressed openness to re-examining the pills’ safety and efficacy. The Guardian reported that “Last month, Makary told the Semafor World Economy Summit that he had ‘no plans to take action’ on mifepristone. However, he added: ‘There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone. So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.’”
While Ollstein pointed out that “Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective,”
Anti-abortion activists are treating the Ethics and Public Policy Center report as if receiving manna from heaven. “One of the things that we have the ability to do now with this data is to pressure the FDA and lawmakers to reconsider, if not suspend, their approval of this medication until they can do more research into it,” Maria Baer, a podcast host for the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, said on a private Zoom call last week where anti-abortion leaders discussed the strategy. The groups on the call included Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Students for Life and Live Action.
Abortion-rights supporters are calling the report “junk science,” maintaining, according to Ollstein, “that the paper was released directly by the conservative think tank and not published in a medical journal where it would have been vetted by outside experts in the peer review process.” Ollstein argues that, “Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective.”
“Activists on the Zoom call pushed back on those criticisms, arguing that academia is ‘broken’ and they couldn’t trust the peer reviewers not to leak or ‘sabotage’ their effort.”
As the Guardian recently reported, “So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.”
Abortion abolitionists will not be satisfied until all abortions are illegal, abortion pills banned, doctors punished for performing abortions, women stigmatized and criminalized for having abortions, and anyone daring to help a woman get an abortion is punished severely.
In a move that is surprising on the surface, on May 5, Trump Justice Department lawyers asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit aimed at restricting access to the abortion pill mifepristone on technical jurisdictional grounds.
Quoted in the NY Times, Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion law expert at the University of California, Davis, said that “the Trump administration’s action to dismiss the case is surprising, but I think the best way to read it is that they’re just buying time to figure out what to do about mifepristone.” …She said the filing “avoids saying anything on the substance at all,” and might reflect cautiousness before the mid-term elections.
Rolling Thunder is a blending of legal effort with political muscle, aiming not just to defund Planned Parenthood and close clinics, but to eliminate the most accessible form of abortion care altogether. If successful, it could further fragment reproductive rights across the U.S., deepening the divide between states that protect abortion access and those that seek to eliminate it entirely.
In February, President Trump said that tariffs would generate so much income that Americans would no longer need to pay income taxes.
The latest plan, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is to abolish income taxes for people who earn less than $150,000 yearly. That move would affect roughly 75% of workers, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. On its face, this could narrow the wealth gap by boosting disposable income for low- and middle-income households without raising taxes on the wealthy — a politically clever alternative to progressive tax hikes.
This week on CounterSpin: They say ignorance is bliss, but I know that, for myself and others, our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives. Bartlett Naylor breaks it down for us; he works at Public Citizen, as a financial policy advocate at their project Congress Watch.
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (photo: Judith Slein)
Also on the show: Billionaires don’t need tax cuts; they already have a system designed to appease them. But it’s not enough! Part of the budget bill to give more to those who have everything is an effort to sell off public land for exploitation for fossil fuel companies, who are determined to die taking the last penny from our fingers. Pulling up the covers and waiting for better times isn’t the way; if we stay focused, we can save critical elements of, in this case, unspoiled wild places in this country. Ashley Nunes is public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. We hear from her this week about that.
President Donald Trump sparked widespread outrage Thursday by abruptly firing Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden with a two-sentence email sent by the White House’s deputy director of presidential personnel. According to her bio, Hayden was the first woman and first African American to lead the national library, which is the largest in the world and home to more than 178 million items…
Labour MP Clive Lewis has criticised the anti-democratic nature of the US-UK tariff deal.
Clive Lewis: there must be accountability over US-UK tariff deal
In a PoliticsHome article, Lewis insisted that, while there’s always a worrying “absence of parliamentary accountability” around trade deals:
the current trade talks with the US stand out. There has been no public consultation, no published mandate, and reports suggest secrecy has intensified, with some documents now classified “top secret”. MPs have been told there will be no guaranteed vote.
Eight years ago, we were told we were taking back control. If we are serious about that promise, trade deals – among the most consequential decisions a government can make – must be subject to full parliamentary accountability.
The deal has been negotiated in secrecy and looks set to be pushed through without a vote in Parliament. It should be subject to democratic scrutiny and a full vote.
It asserted that:
This one-sided agreement is just a precursor to a bigger, worse deal – it fires the starting gun on more rounds of negotiations. Trump will come back for more, and expect Starmer to say “thank you”.
The next round of negotiations could reportedly include proposals to cut the digital services tax, a UK tax on billionaire-owned big tech corporations such as Amazon and Meta.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s not to trust Keir Starmer
Starmer has showntime and again that we can’t trust him. And with him now “caving in to Trump’s bullying”, we should be very concerned. As Clive Lewis pointed out:
If a deal is genuinely in the public interest, the government should have the confidence to make its case. Open debate can improve a deal, as Parliament and the public bring forward concerns and insights.
This kind of debate is essential, he said, because the absence of democratic scrutiny is precisely what has driven mass discontent with mainstream political parties in recent months and years. He added:
people feel increasingly shut out of decisions that shape their lives. From calls for public ownership of essential services like water to demands for wealth taxation, citizens feel unheard. The populist right has capitalised on this alienation, tapping into the sentiment that ordinary people lack real influence.
That’s why the secrecy must end. Because as he explained:
These negotiations affect every aspect of our daily lives – from the kind of food on our shelves to the cost of medicines and the rules governing foreign investment.
Donald Trump’s administration has brought severe uncertainty to the world by seeking to impose tariffs not just on enemies, but on allies too. And Keir Starmer’s UK government has bowed down to this bullying by handing the US president his “first big trade deal”. Britain will now be worse off than before this tariff war, but Starmer still heaped praise onto Trump in a vomit-worthy live chat on 8 May.
Even mainstream media outlets had to recognise that the exchange was “awkward“. But the most cringeworthy part was when Starmer stooped to the level of the resident arse-kissers of Trump’s administration. The prime minister recognised that Trump expects people to massage his ego, and was happy to oblige, saying:
I want to thank you for your leadership on that, Donald
The BBC has pointed out that “this isn’t a trade deal”. It’s “only the bare bones of a narrow agreement”, which has simply “reversed or cut some of [Trump’s] tariffs on specific goods”.
The bootlicking of Trump didn’t stop there
Starmer was clearly nervous about praising Trump in the right way. And his years of questionablevoice coaching didn’t help to stop his constant, uncomfortable umming and ahing. But he tried anyway, saying it was “incredibly important” and “truly historic” that the weak tariff agreement (sorry, “great deal”) came on VE Day, as if beating fascists and bending over to one were the same thing.
It was obvious Starmer wanted to use as many fawning phrases as possible, as he started off by saying:
This is a really fantastic, er, historic day in which we can announce, erm, this deal between our two great countries. And I think it’s a real tribute, erm, to, erm, the history that we have of working so closely, erm, together. Can I pay tribute, Donald, to your negotiating team as well? … they’ve done, erm, an incredible job—a very professional job.
He went on to say:
I’m so pleased that we’ve got this deal, erm. We’ve finalised it, erm, and, erm, we’ve built an incredible platform, erm, for the future. So thank you so much, erm, Donald.
And just in case we weren’t convinced, he finished by saying:
I’m really pleased, and, and it feels, er, completely historic… So Donald, thank you so much, erm. It’s really good to have got this, erm, deal over the line. A tribute to both teams, tribute to our countries, and tribute to your leadership.
At home, meanwhile, Labour’s right-wing leadership has (predictably) been showingnosigns of willingness to change direction amid plummeting popularity and far-right successes. Rather than dealing with the party’s progressive exodus by adopting popular anti-austerity positions, Starmer’s team has continued to pander to the limited number of people on the right who would consider voting Labour. Rather than changing course, the prime minister has promised to go “further and faster down the wrong path“. This is despite a senior Reform figure saying:
The more they sing our tune, the more we win.
In short, Starmer’s Labour seems to care more about its corporate donors and keeping good relationships with fascists like Trump than on people’s wellbeing. And it’s utterly sickening to watch.
During his announcement of a trade deal with the United Kingdom on Thursday, President Donald Trump dismissed the idea that American consumers will face higher prices on goods still subject to his tariffs. Several companies have repeatedly indicated (even before Trump was elected in 2024) that any tariffs implemented by Trump would likely prompt them to raise prices. During a press briefing…
In a Washington Post op-ed written from the LaSalle Detention Center, the Palestinian American activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil described “the breakneck speed” with which an immigration judge decided that the Trump administration would be allowed to deport him. He also questioned the basis of the case against him: “Why should protesting Israel’s indiscriminate killing of…
At a hearing Wednesday on the status of nearly 140 Venezuelan immigrants whom the Trump administration hastily expelled to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, a federal judge told lawyers representing the detainees that there were “a lot of facts in their favor” regarding whether the White House has the authority to return the men to the United States. During the hearing…
A new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that major cuts to Medicaid proposed by Republicans would remove millions of enrollees from the program. Republicans have repeatedly claimed that the cuts they’ve proposed would only target supposedly wasteful spending and abuse of Medicaid, which is funded jointly by states and the federal government.
A federal judge has placed a hold on the U.S. government’s plans to deport a number of immigrants to Libya, following allegations from immigrants, their families and their lawyers that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials told them they would soon be sent to that country. The injunction placed by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy states that the Trump administration’s actions…
