Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0

What you are about to read is not an analysis of failure. It is an autopsy of deliberate design.

Three days before celebrating children’s rights (November 20, 2025, marked 36 years since the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), the UN Security Council committed an act so obscene it defies comprehension. Resolution 2803 didn’t just fail to stop the slaughter of 20,000 Palestinian children; it blessed it, legitimized it, and guaranteed its continuation forever. By granting Donald Trump control over Gaza’s future through his “Board of Peace,” we witness yet again what we already knew: the destruction of Palestinian children isn’t collateral damage, isn’t fog of war, isn’t humanitarian crisis. It’s policy. It’s strategy. It’s the international system working exactly as intended.

The theoretical frameworks in this article, from Fanon’s “zone of non-being” to Mbembe’s “necropolitics,” from Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being” to Weheliye’s “juridical humanity,” aren’t academic exercises. They’re diagnostic tools that reveal how the machinery works: how a three-year-old Palestinian becomes classified as a “demographic threat” while a three-year-old Ukrainian becomes an “innocent victim.” How the same international law that mobilized instantly to protect 19,000 transferred Ukrainian children remains complacent while over 20,000 Palestinian children are killed. How Arab states perform outrage while enforcing the blockade and collaborating with the perpetrators of this livestreamed genocide. How the UN Security Council transforms from guardian of international peace and security to death administrator.

These theories expose the blueprints of a system where some children are born with rights and others are born as targets. Where the Convention on the Rights of the Child operates as a sorting mechanism: protecting those deemed human while legitimizing the elimination of those expelled from humanity itself. Where international law doesn’t fail to reach Palestinian children but actively constructs their killability, making their deaths appear not just acceptable but necessary, not just legal but moral.

Resolution 2803, passed November 17, 2025, with China and Russia merely abstaining rather than vetoing, represents this system’s most honest moment: the international community formally, legally, openly choosing to make Palestinian children’s death-world permanent. Thirteen nations voted yes. None said no. This article traces how we got here: 77 years of deliberate strategy disguised as unfortunate history, three generations of calculated destruction presented as complex conflict, and now, finally, genocide receiving its official UN seal of approval.

What follows is the operating manual for manufacturing disposable children. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Death-Worlds Made Real Through International Law

While the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child genuinely sought to guarantee every child’s “inherent right to life, survival and development” without discrimination, becoming the most rapidly adopted human rights treaty in history with 196 state parties (United Nations, 1989, Article 6), Resolution 2803 reveals how completely the international community abandons these principles when children have been relegated to what Achille Mbembe (2003, 2019) calls “death-worlds.”

Death-worlds are not metaphorical spaces but concrete realities where sovereign power creates “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). Resolution 2803 doesn’t merely tolerate these conditions; it institutionalizes them. The resolution grants the Zionist entity eternal control through what it calls a “security perimeter presence” that will remain “until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” with the Zionist entity alone determining when that condition is met (UN Security Council, 2025). This transforms temporary occupation into permanent sovereignty, emergency into eternity.

In these zones, the normal rules of human existence are suspended through law itself. When the resolution authorizes the International Stabilization Force to “use all necessary measures” while granting participants immunity from local jurisdiction, it legally sanctifies what was already happening: hospitals becoming legitimate targets, schools becoming burial grounds, refugee camps that are meant to be safe areas burned down with their inhabitants. Death-worlds are spaces where five-year-olds learn to distinguish the sounds of different weapons, where mothers choose which child to feed with the last food, where doctors amputate children’s limbs without anesthesia while they scream.

Resolution 2803 makes this ecology of death official UN policy. By establishing what UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls “a security-first, capital-driven model of foreign control,” (Albanese, 2025) the resolution ensures death saturates every aspect of existence: the water (97% undrinkable), the air (toxic from white phosphorus), the soil (contaminated by destroyed sewage systems). The Board of Peace doesn’t bring peace but administers death, coordinating which Palestinians receive food, which areas get rebuilt, which children might access medical care, all while maintaining the conditions that create the need for such coordination in the first place.

Three Generations in the Zone of Non-Being

The systematic violation of Palestinian children’s rights began with the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled (Pappé, 2006), creating what is now 5.6 million refugees across three generations (UNRWA, 2024). This isn’t merely displacement; it’s what Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007)  identified as the naturalization of war: “[it is] transformed—through the idea of race—and becomes naturalized” (p. 248). What should be exceptional (violence, displacement, rightlessness) becomes the permanent condition for colonized populations.

To understand how Resolution 2803 crystallizes this naturalization, we must grasp Maldonado-Torres’s fundamental insight about how colonial systems transform temporary war conditions into permanent racial realities. During war, normal ethical relations are suspended. Killing becomes permissible, rape becomes a weapon, property can be seized, and entire populations can be displaced. These suspensions of ethics are supposedly temporary, limited to active combat between combatants. Once war ends, normal ethical relations should resume: murder becomes illegal again, civilians regain protections, refugees return home.

Resolution 2803 exemplifies this naturalization perfectly. The resolution conditions Zionist entity withdrawal on “standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization that will be agreed between the IOF, ISF, the guarantors, and the United States.” Palestinians themselves have no say in when their occupation ends. Their children will grow up under the same “emergency” conditions their grandparents faced in 1948, now formalized through international law rather than military decree.

Consider how this naturalization operates through what scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) calls “unchilding,” the systematic stripping away of childhood itself. Palestinian children can be detained without trial, tried in military courts while Jewish children in the same territory face civilian courts, shot for throwing stones under military orders that don’t apply to settlers, and denied freedom of movement, all justified not by active warfare but by their racialized identity as perpetual “security threats.”

This “unchilding” means Palestinian children cease to be children in any meaningful legal or ethical sense. The three-year-old at the checkpoint isn’t processed as a child but as a potential combatant. The twelve-year-old in military court isn’t granted the protections due to minors but treated as an adult enemy. The infant requiring medical care isn’t a baby deserving urgent treatment but what Zionist entity officials openly call a “demographic threat.”

Resolution 2803 codifies this unchilding into international law. By establishing a Palestinian committee that must be “technocratic” and “apolitical,” composed only of “competent Palestinians from the Strip,” the resolution denies Palestinians political agency while treating their children as administrative problems to be managed rather than human beings to be protected. The Board of Peace, chaired by the very president who provided $17.9 billion in weapons used to kill these children, will determine their fate without their participation.

The Current Escalation: Necropower Legitimized by Law

The genocide escalating since October 2023 represents what Mbembe calls necropower in its purest form: “the subjugation of life to the power of death” (Pele, 2020, para 4). Over 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed, one every hour for 23 months (Save the Children, 2025). But necropolitics isn’t merely about killing; it’s about creating conditions where the distinction between life and death becomes irrelevant, and Resolution 2803 makes these conditions permanent.

The resolution exemplifies Mbembe’s concept of how sovereignty operates through the “capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003, p. 27). When Donald Trump, who called Palestinians “terrorists” and gave Netanyahu Jerusalem, chairs the Board of Peace alongside Tony Blair, who destroyed Iraq, we see necropolitical sovereignty in action. Those who orchestrated death in Baghdad now oversee life in Gaza. Those who armed the killers now manage the survivors.

Resolution 2803’s provisions for reconstruction expose necropolitics’ most obscene dimension: the transformation of Palestinian children’s suffering into corporate profit. The Board of Peace—chaired by Donald Trump, who provided the bombs that killed 20,000 children—will “coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” and “establish operational entities” with “transactional authorities” (United Nations, 2025). This isn’t reconstruction; it’s the industrialization of death into capital. Private military contractors like UG Solutions, who deployed 96 former US special forces operatives to Gaza’s checkpoints (Haaretz, 2025) turned aid distribution into killing fields. During their operations from May to October 2025, these contractors killed more than 2,600 Palestinians and wounded over 19,000 who came seeking food (Drop Site News, 2025; Greatreporter, 2025). Contractors later testified they fired live ammunition, stun grenades, and pepper spray “at nearly every distribution site, even without security threats,” with personnel recruited from the Infidels Motorcycle Club whose charter calls for Muslim extermination (Euronews, 2025; New Arab, 2025). These same killers now expand their operations, with UG Solutions recruiting for “12 to 15 new aid distribution sites”—more death traps disguised as humanitarian zones (Drop Site News, 2025; The Intercept, 2025). The obscenity reaches its apex in the estimated $70 billion reconstruction bonanza. Turkish firms like Limak, Tekfen, and Enka; Egyptian military-controlled companies, including Arab Contractors and Orascom; American technology corporations—all circle like vultures over children’s graves (Eurasia Review, 2025; Palestinian Information Center, 2025). Erdogan and Sisi, who enforced the blockade while children starved, now position their construction sectors to profit from rebuilding what they helped destroy (The Globe and Mail, 2025; Carnegie Endowment, 2025). The Board of Peace ensures “multinational corporations rebuild what their governments’ weapons destroyed” (The Arab Weekly, 2025), each bombed school a future contract, each dead child a business opportunity. Critics correctly identify Resolution 2803 as “repackaged colonial control” that rewards genocide’s co-perpetrators with reconstruction profits while absolving the Zionist entity of its crimes (Al-Shabaka, 2025). This is Mbembe’s necropower perfected: not merely the right to kill but the machinery that transforms Palestinian children’s blood into quarterly earnings, their amputated limbs into market opportunities, their mass graves into construction sites. Death doesn’t just generate profit—it becomes profit’s raw material, with Palestinian children processed through the machinery of destruction into the commodity of reconstruction.

Juridical Humanity in Action: The Ukraine Comparison

The differential treatment of Ukrainian versus Palestinian children following legally equivalent ICC arrest warrants illuminates how international criminal law operates through what Alexander Weheliye (2014) calls “racializing assemblages,” law “the law pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of personhood and who is not” (p. 77).

Both conflicts generated ICC arrest warrants: Putin and Lvova-Belova in March 2023 for transferring Ukrainian children (13 months after invasion), and Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024 for war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare (14 months after October 2023). The warrants are legally identical, issued by the same court under the same Rome Statute. Yet the international response reveals how law alone doesn’t determine who receives protection.

For Ukrainian children, the ICC warrants catalyzed unprecedented global mobilization. Thirty-nine states formally referred the situation to the ICC, the largest state referral in Court history. The UN General Assembly passed multiple resolutions demanding children’s return. The EU allocated €2 billion for Ukrainian child refugees, UNICEF launched its largest European response since WWII with $1.4 billion, and 23 countries coordinated through Eurojust to secure the return of 388 children by January 2025.

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan declared: “We cannot allow children to be treated as spoils of war.” The vocabulary was protective: Ukrainian children were “innocent victims,” “traumatized children needing immediate protection.”

For Palestinian children, the same legal finding generated the opposite response. The United States immediately condemned the warrants as “outrageous,” with President Biden declaring “there is no equivalence between the Zionist entity and Hamas.” Congress threatened sanctions against the ICC itself. Germany announced it would not execute the arrests. France questioned Netanyahu’s immunity. The US approved $8 billion in additional weapons sales to the Zionist entity the same month the ICC declared the starvation of Palestinian children a war crime.

Most tellingly, the killing accelerated after the warrants. While Ukrainian children received immediate evacuation and protection, Palestinian children continued to be killed at the rate of one per hour. Resolution 2803, passed just days after these warrants, doesn’t even mention them, doesn’t reference war crimes, doesn’t acknowledge genocide. Instead, it rewards those named as war criminals with permanent control over their victims.

This reveals how international criminal law operates through what Sylvia Wynter (2003) calls the “master code” of race, distinguishing “the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human” (p. 318). The ICC warrants paradoxically prove the point: even when the highest international court recognizes Palestinian children as victims of war crimes, the international order continues treating them as legitimate targets..

Arab States: The Colonial Intermediaries

Where are the Arab states as Palestinian children scream under rubble? Counting money. (Arab Center, 2022, 2024) Egypt’s military regime, which receives $1.3 billion annually from Washington, enforces Gaza’s southern border with more dedication than the Zionist entity enforces the north.(Voice of America, 2024)  Egypt’s military regime, which receives $1.3 billion annually from Washington, enforces Gaza’s southern border – a policy that prioritizes strategic alliances over Palestinian lives.

The joint statement of November 14, 2025, where the United States secured support from Qatar, Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, and Turkey for Resolution 2803, reveals how completely Arab regimes (Chatham House, 2025) have internalized their role in maintaining the structures that ensure Palestinian subjugation. They receive limited sovereignty and security guarantees in exchange for managing their populations’ rage about Palestine while preserving the systems that guarantee Palestinian death.

Saudi Arabia builds NEOM, its $500 billion vanity city, while Palestinian mothers feed their children grass and animal feed 1,000 kilometers away. The UAE hosts luxury conferences about “tolerance” while maintaining security coordination with forces bombing Gaza’s children. Morocco’s king received Netanyahu with honor, shaking the hand that signs bombing orders, trading Palestinian lives for American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Russia and China’s abstention rather than veto reveals how even supposed alternatives to Western hegemony participate in Palestinian erasure. Russian Ambassador Nebenzia described Resolution 2803 as “reminiscent of colonial practices and the British mandate for Palestine,” yet abstained because “the Palestinian Authority and several Arab-Muslim countries had expressed support.” China’s Ambassador Fu Cong noted “Palestine is barely visible in the draft” also abstained, prioritizing regional relationships over Palestinian lives.

They Knew Everything

When historians write about this period, they won’t struggle to understand. The evidence is overwhelming, the intent explicit, the results livestreamed. Zionist entity officials invoked biblical commands to destroy Amalek: “kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for “no half measures” against Gaza’s population. The starvation policy was calculated in calories per person. The killing of children was celebrated on social media by soldiers posting trophy videos.

They all knew. Biden knew when he sent 14,000 2,000-pound bombs while children were already being pulled from rubble. The EU knew when they continued trade agreements worth €30 billion annually while Gaza’s hospitals were systematically destroyed. The UN Security Council knew when they voted for Resolution 2803 while 67 children had been killed just during the ceasefire period.

They knew about the amputations without anesthesia, the C-sections without medication, the children dying of treatable infections because antibiotics were blocked as “dual-use items.” They knew about the 10,000 children with amputated limbs, the 625,000 children out of school for two years. They knew because UN agencies documented it, humanitarian organizations reported it, Palestinian families livestreamed it as they are being murdered.

And they didn’t just allow it; they structured it, funded it, legitimized it. This is the ultimate obscenity: not just the power to kill but the power to make killing rational, legal, even virtuous. Not just creating conditions of death but getting the UN to officially approve them. Not just destroying Palestinian children but having the world agree they brought destruction on themselves.

Breaking the Machinery

Resolution 2803 is the international order removing its mask, revealing what Mbembe calls “those contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003, p. 39). The transformation of child murder from crime to policy, from atrocity to administration, from genocide to governance. The Convention promised every child the right to life. For Palestinian children, it delivered the right to be killed legally, systematically, eternally, with UN approval.

History will record that when Palestinian children needed protection, the international order revealed its true function: a necropolitical system where “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies” operates through law itself (Mbembe, 2003, p. 14). The Convention promised every child the right to life. For Palestinian children, it has delivered only membership in what Fanon (1961) called “the wretched of the earth,” those whom necropower has marked for social and biological death.

The question isn’t why the Convention failed. The question is why we expected documents written by empires to protect those whom empires need dead. Why we thought laws created by the powerful would shield the powerless. Why we believed systems built on racial hierarchy would suddenly recognize Palestinian children as human.

Three generations have now learned that international law exists not to protect them but to legitimize their destruction. Resolution 2803 ensures countless more will learn this truth. Unless we stop appealing to systems designed to kill them and start dismantling the machinery itself: not just the occupation but the entire global order that makes Palestinian children’s death appear rational, profitable, necessary.

The theoretical frameworks of Fanon, Mbembe, Maldonado-Torres, and Weheliye don’t just describe this machinery; they reveal its vulnerable points. If Palestinian children are killed because they’ve been expelled from humanity through racialization, then asserting their humanity becomes resistance. If their deaths are profitable, then making them costly becomes strategy. If their suffering is made invisible through slow violence, then making it spectacular becomes necessity.

Resolution 2803 makes clear that international law will not save Palestinian children. The UN will not save them. Arab states will not save them. Only the complete dismantling of the colonial machinery that produces their death can save them. This means not reforming but abolishing the systems that sort children into those who deserve protection and those marked for elimination. Not appealing to international law but exposing how it operates as an instrument of their destruction. Not requesting recognition from powers that profit from their death but building new forms of solidarity that bypass imperial structures entirely.

They exist where, as Mbembe (2019) writes, “death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven,” where the only escape from the death-world is death itself (p. 38). This is the truth the UN Security Council enshrined three days before Children’s Rights Day: some children are born to be protected, others are born to be eliminated. The Convention sorts them accordingly.

But Palestinian children continue to exist, to resist, to survive despite everything designed to destroy them. In their survival lies the seed of the system’s undoing. Every child who lives despite the machinery of death, who learns despite destroyed schools, who plays despite bombardment, who dreams despite trauma, proves that necropower, while devastating, is not total. In their stubborn insistence on living, on being children despite systematic unchilding, lies both the greatest accusation against the international order and the foundation for its eventual destruction.

Resolution 2803 is not the end but the beginning of the end: the moment the system revealed itself so completely that its legitimacy crumbles. When the UN votes to make child killing permanent, it signs not just Palestinian children’s death warrant but its own moral death certificate. What remains is not reform but revolution, not appeal but abolition, not recognition but resistance until the machinery that produces dead Palestinian children is itself destroyed.

Acknowledgment: The author thanks Ousmane Al-Desiri, an activist and junior researcher committed to environmental justice and to defending the rights of Indigenous peoples and LGBTQ+ communities in North Africa, for his invaluable support and ongoing commitment to Palestinian liberation

References

Albanese, F. (2025, November 19). UN Security Council resolution a violation of Palestinian right of self-determination and UN Charter, UN expert warns [Press release]. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Al-Shabaka. (2025, November 19). Trump’s UNSC Resolution 2803: Repackaged colonial rule [Policy memo].

Arab Center DC. (2022, August 4). International aid to the Palestinians: Between politicization and development.

Arab Center DC. (2024, April 29). Arab states have supported and shunned Hamas in the Gaza war.

B’Tselem. (2021). A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.

Chatham House. (2025, November 21). What is Security Council Resolution 2803, and what does it mean for the Trump Gaza plan?

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (2025, November). The Gaza plan just hit a crucial juncture. Egypt is critical for its success.

Drop Site News. (2025, November 19). U.S. mercenary firm tied to notorious aid scheme is recruiting for new Gaza deployment.

Eurasia Review. (2025, November 21). Rebuilding Gaza – OpEd.

Euronews. (2025, July 3). US contractors claim colleagues fired live rounds at Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza.

Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.

Gaza Ministry of Health. (2024, December). Health sector damage assessment.

Greatreporter. (2025, November 20). U.S. contractor UG Solutions ramps up recruitment as new aid sites planned for Gaza under controversial stabilization plan.

Haaretz. (2025, January 30). Gaza checkpoint to be staffed by U.S. special forces vets hired by private security firm.

International Court of Justice. (2024). Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).

International Criminal Court. (2023, March 17). Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants.

International Criminal Court. (2024, November 21). Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

International Food Policy Research Institute. (2024). Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) for Gaza.

Makdisi, S. (2008). Palestine inside out: An everyday occupation. W.W. Norton.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 240-270.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008). Against war: Views from the underside of modernity. Duke University Press.

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

Morris, B. (2004). The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited. Cambridge University Press.

New Arab. (2025, October). US contractor on how Israel, US forces killed Gaza aid seekers.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

OCHA. (2024). Humanitarian situation in Gaza. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Palestinian Information Center. (2025, October 27). Reconstruction of Gaza: An international race for economic, political influence in the devastated enclave.

Pappé, I. (2006). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications.

Pele, A. (2020, March 2). Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics. Critical Legal Thinking.

Save the Children. (Sep 6, 2025). Gaza: 20,000 Children Killed in 23 Months of War – More than one child killed every hour

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2019). Incarcerated childhood and the politics of unchilding. Cambridge University Press.

The Arab Weekly. (2025). Funding Gaza’s $70 billion reconstruction awaits clarity on next phases of the peace deal.

The Globe and Mail. (2025, October 17). The $70-billion effort to rebuild Gaza can’t start unless the war is truly over.

The Intercept. (2025, October 13). We aren’t finished in Gaza, U.S. military contractors say.

UN Commission of Inquiry. (2025). Report on the destruction of education in Gaza.

UN Security Council. (2025, November 17). Resolution 2803. S/RES/2803.

UNICEF. (2013). Children in Israeli military detention: Observations and recommendations.

United Nations. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child.

UNRWA. (2024). UNRWA situation report: Gaza emergency.

Voice of America. (2024, September 12). US grants Egypt $1.3 billion in military aid, overriding rights conditions.

Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. Duke University Press.

WHO. (2024). Gaza health emergency situation reports.

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-337.

The post Resolution 2803: How the UN Security Council Legitimized Palestinian Children’s Death-Worlds appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Long before there was Jeffrey Epstein and his repulsive rape ring, there was the terror of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.

The MMIW crisis spans decades, arguably centuries, and involves 1000s of cases in the US and Canada, and yet, even as the Epstein story captures mass media attention and builds pressure for more prosecutions, Indigenous women and girls and women-identified people continue to turn up dead, or simply don’t turn up at all – and only native activists seem to care.

I felt the ice of that terror freeze a new friend once, in a Holiday Inn parking lot off a flat highway in Minnesota. We’d pulled in, just before dark, after a hot, dusty pipeline protest followed by some earnest pleading from two happy, helpful, just-barely teenage girls. Brave before cops and mobs, I saw the skin around the eyes of their mother, my new friend, tighten. An experienced native organizer, her smile squeezed to a clench as she saw white men with trucks milling about. One swim. In my eyesight. No leaving your room – for any reason. We left early. I got it: terror. Happy indigenous girls are an endangered species in America.

In 2022, the National Crime Information Center reported 5,487 cases of missing Native American and Alaska Native women and girls in the United States, where the majority of missing persons cases involved girls aged 0-17 years old. It is estimated that Indigenous women are murdered at a rate at least ten times higher than the national average in some counties, but the data is hard to nail down and record-keeping has always been weak.

Not long ago, a record four Indigenous women managed to get themselves elected to Congress where they did something historic. They passed the Not Invisible Act, authored by then-Rep. Deb Haaland, and signed by President Trump, which created a Commission to study the problem and lay out an action plan.

“The federal government must act now; not tomorrow; not next week; not next month; and not next year. Once and for all, the federal government must end its systematic failure to address this crisis, and react, redress, and resolve this,” declared the Not Invisible Act Commissioners.

In one virtual, and seven in-person hearings in places including Billings, MO, Tulsa, OK, and Anchorage, AK , Commission members heard testimony from tribal leaders, law enforcement officers, service providers, and family members. Motivated by the same righteous rage that moves the relatives of Epstein’s trafficked girls, the family members of murdered and missing Indigenous people made often arduous journeys to testify.

With heroic nerve, Indigenous survivors of human trafficking stood in front of strangers and recalled the worst horrors of their lives. America’s indigenous survivors shared their warnings with the same mix of gratitude and skepticism that we’ve heard from the victims of Epstein. (Someone is finally listening, but will anything, ever, be done? )

Commissioners heard several versions of the same witness sentiment: “I don’t want anyone else to have to live through this nightmare.” 

After 260 witnesses and hours of testimony, the Not Invisible Act Commission produced a report. It described in damning detail the many sources of the problem: longstanding white racism, a limited tribal justice system, jurisdictional cracks – more like chasms — into which most MMIW cases fall. Above all, they expressed the urgent need for adequate funding for investigation, prosecution, prevention and care.

The Not Invisible Act Commission Report was posted on the Justice Department’s website in November of 2023.

By February of this year, that link was dead. The report disappeared soon after Donald Trump resumed office, along with nearly half of all federal funding allocated to federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native nations, and massive cuts to hundreds of safety and justice-related grants. Today, the website of the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women (a primary source of support for MMIW- and MMIP-related resources) features a warning to applicants about falling “out of scope”. Under the administration’s new “anti-DEI” and “anti-woke” regulations, it’s a violation, for example, to “frame domestic violence or sexual assault as systemic social justice issues rather than criminal offenses” or “addressing missing or murdered indigenous persons (MMIP) unrelated to domestic violence or sexual assault.” ) As of November, 21, the site reads “There are no FY 2025 open notices of funding opportunity at this time.”

Where’s the outcry? A bi-partisan Congress has voted to force Trump’s DOJ to release the full Epstein files. Now, how about making the Not Invisible Commission Report visible once again, and implementing its recommendations? Funding for prosecution, prevention and healing in Indigenous communities was never sufficient. It’s in tragically short supply now.

Blaming and shaming the elite and the powerful people around Epstein is necessary and satisfying, but justice for victims of gender-and-race-based violence requires much more than a few high-profile perp-walks. When it comes to the use and abuse of women, we as a nation need a fundamental culture shift, and that demands turning our collective conscience to the colonial cruelty at the heart of so much of our story.

Finally cherishing Indigenous women and girls would be a good way to start.

Laura spoke with the nation’s first Indigenous Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, about her book, Girl Warrior, recently, on ‘Laura Flanders & Friends’. Get the full, uncut audio and transcript, and never miss an episode, through subscribing to her Substack here.

The post Silenced Reports & Epstein Files: Murdered & Missing Indigenous Women Still Don’t Make News appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Pragmatic: Reasonable, practical, logical, workable.  Designed to compliment.

“President Trump’s approach in Latin America appears pragmatic.” (New York Times, November 18, 2025, front page caption.)  “Mr. Trump’s approach appears purely pragmatic.” (NYT front page news story, “Trump sees U.S. as Boss of Americas,” November 16, 2025.)

Since the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States has pursued a monopoly on security concerns regarding Central and South America.  The United States lacked the military power to enforce this policy in the 19th century, but ever since the Spanish-American War in 1898 there has been widespread use of U.S. military power to assure domination of the area.

The policy of political and military dominance enabled the building of the Panama Canal early in the 20th century. Now Donald Trump’s has threatened to regain the canal that President Jimmy Carter had given to Panama in 1977. Hardly pragmatic.

At various times, the United States has used covert action to force regime change in the hemisphere.  President Dwight Eisenhower pursued such a policy in Guatemala in 1954; President Lyndon Johnson took advantage of the weakness of the Dominican Republic in 1965; and President Richard Nixon used the Central Intelligence Agency in 1972 to overturn a free and fair election in Chile.  All of these events were excellent examples of presidential power to use the CIA in covert action.

Only President Franklin Roosevelt (the Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s) and President John Kennedy (the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s) made serious and reasonable efforts to apply more conciliatory policies toward the states of South and Central America.  And President Jimmy Carter was heroic in placing the Panama Canal Zone in the hands of Panama, which was both unpopular and politically costly..

There are many words to describe Trump’s policies toward the Western Hemisphere, but “pragmatic” is not one of them.  When he took office this year, Trump pledged to seize the Panama Canal, renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark. This is bluster, not pragmatism. Nor is his creation of a crisis with Venezuela pragmatic. It is an outright assault on that country’s sovereignty, although it is still not certain that Trump plans to invade and occupy the country.  Nevertheless, as of November 21, the U.S. Navy has destroyed more than 20 small boats and killed more than 80 Venezuelans and Colombians without providing any evidence of their involvement in drug trafficking to the United States.

The most bizarre explanation for U.S. actions in Venezuela has come from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said “We have deployed U.S. assets and interests all over the planet, but when we do it in our own hemisphere…everyone sort of freaks out.”  In a column last week titled “Trumpty Dumpty and the boat strikes,” George Will took Rubio to task for using such a juvenile expression as “freaks out” that a “John Quincy Adams or Dean Acheson” would never have used.  But the more serious problem is that the United States is engaged in lethal and illegal kinetic strikes that have made the international community a more dangerous place.

My major worry is that, having gone public with the authorization to the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, Trump will order the CIA to pursue a policy of assassination against President Nicolas Maduro.  President Gerald Ford signed the first of several executive orders that banned CIA from conducting assassinations.  But executive orders, federal law, and even the Constitution itself mean very little to Donald Trump.

The mainstream media has thus far ignored the “Donroe Doctrine” that appears to carve the international arena into zones of influence.  Trump appears willing to allow Russia to remain influential in Central and Eastern Europe; to allow greater Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region; and to seek greater control in the Western Hemisphere for himself and the United States.  In walking away from problems in Europe and Asia in order to be dominant at home, Trump has created greater anxiety among our European allies and Ukraine, and has signaled that he would not be engaged in any defense of Taiwan.

The current campaign against Venezuela is reminiscent of the phony argument regarding weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Two decades later, U.S. military forces remain in Iraq.  The labeling of Venezuela as a “narco-terrorist” state ignores the fact that the fentanyl that plagues America is manufactured in Mexico, not Venezuela.  And the cocaine is produced in Colombia.  If Venezuela is involved in transport, it is to move cocaine to Trinidad-Tobago, where it is transported to Europe and West African countries, not the United States.

There is nothing “pragmatic” about engaging in a conflict where only one side, the United States, is armed, and the factual basis for the conflict is created  out of whole cloth.  It wasn’t pragmatic to create false facts to justify the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War; the Vietnam War; or the Iraq War.  And it certainly won’t be “pragmatic” to engage in a wider conflict with Venezuela.

The post NYTs Calls Trump Strategy in South America “Pragmatic” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

Donald Trump made it clear in the 2016 presidential debates that he had no understanding of the central issues of the nuclear arms race, particularly the role of the nuclear triad.  When Trump couldn’t answer a question on nuclear verification, he predictably responded that “it would take me an hour and a half to learn everything there is to know about missiles.  I think I know most of it anyway,”

The Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff were so alarmed by Trump’s nuclear ignorance that they held a seminar to brief the president on the nuclear inventory in 2017.  Following the meeting, responding to Trump’s demand for increasing the size of the nuclear inventory tenfold, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to Trump as a “fucking moron.”

In his second term, Trump has deployed a new weapon, which is the censoring of sensitive documents that reveal the danger of an accidental launch of nuclear weapons and the problems associated with nuclear exercises.  In an unprecedented act, the Department of State has removed from its website a 15-page document dealing with a 1983 NATO nuclear exercise that produced a “war scare” in the Kremlin.  The document was withdrawn from the department’s series on the “Foreign Relations of the United States,” which contains over 400 volumes.

When Trump began his second term, he fired the nine nonpartisan members of the Historical Advisory Committee, who presumably would have stood in the way of this unusual censorship.  The censored document dealt with U.S. naval exercises that “simulated surprise naval air attacks on Soviet targets.”  Soviet and Russian officials over the years have assumed that such exercises would be used to conceal an actual U.S. attack against Russia, which is why any evidence of a sophisticated strategic exercise would raise alarm bells in the Kremlin.

I was one of several Soviet analysts at the CIA in 1983 who convinced CIA director William Casey that the Soviet “war scare” was genuine and that President Reagan needed to be informed,  Casey was hesitant at first and his deputy, Robert Gates, was downright dismissive of our analysis.  Fortunately this was one of the few times that Casey ignored Gates and followed the lead of his Soviet analysts.  As a result, President Reagan withdrew from participation in the exercise and the overall exercise was toned down and made less threatening.  This opened the door to the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in the 1980s that produced major success in the field of arms control and disarmament.  (CIA analysts had the advantage of a Soviet agent, Oleg Grinevsky, who provided credibility to the argument that the war scare in the Kremlin was genuine.)

The White House and the Pentagon presumably withdrew the document from the historical record because it explores the danger of possible misuse of nuclear weapons and the added danger of the failure to conduct a strategic dialogue.  Similarly, the Pentagon currently is waging a propaganda war against the important film, “House of Dynamite,” because it exploits the dangers of an accidental launch and the ineffectiveness of national missile defense.  (I co-authored a book, “Phantom Defense,” nearly 30 years ago that documented the failures and waste associated with national missile defense.)

The Trump national security team cannot even claim to have a serious expert on arms control and disarmament at a time when there are compelling reasons for a high-level Russian-American dialogue to reduce nuclear weapons, to restrict military exercises, and to avoid any return to nuclear testing. The Russians have called for such a dialogue; the United States has not yet responded.

The Cuban missile crisis should have taught us lessons in support of bilateral negotiations in times of tension as well as the need to bring China into the strategic dialogue.  Shouldn’t we assume that Russian and Chinese leaders who face U.S. military encirclement and aggressive military exercises could overreact to the actions and policies of their major adversary?

The post Trump Adds Censorship to the Campaign Against Arms Control and Disarmament appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Casa Presidencial – CC0

We inhabit a historical moment that resurrects, with chilling familiarity, the state terrorism once made visible under Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Pinochet, and other dictators who transformed cruelty into a governing philosophy. Central to such regimes lies a single, devastating truth: the law collapses the moment violence becomes its substitute. In this descent, due process evaporates, political opponents are rebranded as “terrorists,” and violence becomes the organizing principle of power. Independent media are smeared or silenced, universities are targeted for their critical capacities, and the spectacle of brown-shirted, goose-stepping thugs hunting down racialized others slips back into public view as a normalized, even celebrated, form of civic life.

Policies soaked in blood are repackaged as entertainment, folded into a culture industry that echoes the aestheticized fascism of Leni Riefenstahl, spectacles designed to numb, seduce, and train the public in the pleasures of violence. The brutality unleashed by the Trump administration against critics, immigrants, cities, political enemies, and so-called terrorists is more than an echo of fascism’s mobilizing passions; it is a signal of what is to come. Its endpoint can be found in the concentration camps and gulags of the 20th century. And the road to the camps always begins the same way: with the brutalization of the innocent in modern-day torture chambers.

This is the central lesson of the illegal abduction and exile of Venezuelans to one of the most notorious prisons in El Salvador—a maximum-security torture chamber run by Nayib Bukele. It is a canary in the coal mine, a rehearsal for the next stage of violence that will be unleashed on Americans. More than 200 Venezuelan migrants were seized and sent to a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. Their tattoos were read as threats, their bodies as evidence. Later, they were deported to Venezuela as part of a large-scale prisoner exchange among the United States, Venezuela, and El Salvador, an arrangement that saw ten Americans held in Venezuela freed in return for the Venezuelan deportees.

As reported in The New York Times, many of the men testified that while imprisoned “they were shackled, beaten, shot with rubber bullets and tear gassed until they passed out. They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours. One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.” What emerges here is not simply a catalogue of human-rights abuses, nor merely the grotesque suspension of due process; it is the language of barbarism made policy, brutality elevated to the level of governance. These acts, carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism, reveal themselves for what they are: the state-sanctioned machinery of a racialized war, a campaign of terror unleashed by the Trump regime against immigrants. Such violence does more than break bodies, it shreds the very fabric of a democratic society–teaching a lesson no nation should ever teach: that some lives can be debased with impunity.

The dreams of annihilation extend from the genocidal slaughter of indigenous populations to its updated colonial and racialized version in American slavery, Hitler’s dreams of racial purity, and Trump and Miller’s embrace of the delusions of white nationalism and white supremacy are back. The Mein Kampf dream-world of masters and servants no longer parade as a fixed repository of history; they have become the present modeled after history.

We live in a world in which stupidity and cowardice no longer hide in the shadows, it now thrives in a culture of massive inequality, precarity, racism, misogyny, and moral collapse. The vans of death are designed not just for immigrants, trans people, and Black and brown people, they are eager to come for anyone who does not surrender to fascist cult led by Trump and his barbaric ilk. The horror inflicted on more than 200 Venezuelans in Bukele’s torture chamber was not an endpoint but a prelude, an experiment in something far more expansive and deadly.

History offers echoes and warnings, and writers who lived through earlier dictatorships remind us of their enduring lessons. Ariel Dorfman, writing about the barbarous Pinochet regime, reminds us that the lessons of history matter as both a form of moral witnessing and a source of collective resistance. He makes clear with a sense of urgency that “that ordinary men and women can find at the most dire and dangerous moments in their lives, the courage and wisdom to resist injustice, so that the crimes of their day—and, alas, of ours—need not be endlessly repeated tomorrow.”  We can only hope that in such dark times his words represent more than a warning but also a call to action.

The post The Warning We Ignore at Our Peril: From El Salvador’s Dungeons to America’s Doorstep  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The object of the children’s game musical chairs is to find a seat when the music stops. The object of the diplomatic game of “empty chair” is to leave a seat unoccupied to show displeasure with whatever diplomatic game is being played. The United States is now playing the empty-chair game with the United Nations, and the recent Security Council adoption of the U.S. peace plan for Gaza does not change that policy.

Historically, France’s famous “empty chair” policy in 1965 marked a serious setback for the development of the European Union. French President Charles de Gaulle, reluctant to give up French sovereignty to a multilateral organization such as the European Economic Community, refused to send representatives to critical meetings. The United States is showing similar petulant behavior toward the United Nations in its absence from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Peer Review session as well as the U.N.’s climate summit in Brazil.

“You are as others see you,” is not only a principle of social psychology, it also has meaning in international relations. Since 2008, the UNHRC has conducted a formal Universal Periodic Review (UPR) to evaluate how countries uphold human rights. Every four and a half years, different countries are brought before the 47 member Council – members are elected by a majority vote of the U.N. General Assembly. This year it was the United States’ turn to have its human rights record reviewed by its peers.

Guess what? It didn’t show up, making it the first member country to opt out of its own review in the 17+ years of the UPR. Other countries have had their reviews postponed, but there has never been a complete withdrawal. The only other country that has missed its UPR session is Israel (in early 2013), but it later participated after a delay.

The UPR was established to facilitate dialogue among all 193 U.N. member states about their human rights policies. Since the first UPR in 2008, the U.N. has reviewed all 193 member states three times with participation rates close to 100 percent. The U.S. Peer Review has been rescheduled for November 2026 in the hope the U.S. will return to the table. However, its withdrawal means that there will be no U.S. national report, no official U.S. appearance at the review, and no responses to issues raised by civil society in the traditional stakeholder submissions.

A State Department official, as reported by The Hill, justified the empty chair saying taking part would overlook the body’s “persistent failure to condemn the most egregious human rights violators,” and that the U.S. would not be “lectured about our human rights record by the likes of HRC members such as Venezuela, China, or Sudan.”

Others disagree. “Showing up and explaining your own record on human rights is the bare minimum for any government that purports to exercise international leadership and uphold democratic norms,” said Uzra Zeya, president and CEO of Human Rights First. She added, “The United States isn’t being singled out — every U.N. member state takes its turn having its human rights record assessed. Running away from that scrutiny doesn’t just show weakness and a lack of confidence, it will give rights-abusing governments cover to do the same themselves.”

Two academics observed, “T]he USA’s withdrawal from the UPR is (1) an unprecedented step that risks contributing to further regression in global human rights protections, and (2) suppresses civil society organisations’ (CSOs) ability to hold the USA to account both domestically and internationally.”

The UPR is not the only venue where the United States is deploying an “empty chair” policy. Top U.S. government officials did not attend the annual United Nations climate summit for the first time in 30 years. No major American political leaders traveled to Belém, Brazil, to participate in COP30. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” a White House spokeswoman explained the absence to the New York Times. Already on his first day in office, Trump had withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement.

Again, others disagree about the U.S. empty chair, this time in Brazil. “The United States has lost credibility…It is completely immature, irresponsible, and very sad for the United States…” a Costan Rican diplomat, Christina Figueres, was quoted in The Guardian.

By empty-chairing COP30, the Trump administration has weakened America’s leadership role in climate diplomacy and given geopolitical competitors like China more room to assert themselves. A June 2025 New York Times article made it clear that “China came to dominate even clean energy industries the United States had once led. In 2008 the United States produced nearly half of the world’s polysilicon, a crucial material for solar panels. Today, China produces more than 90 percent. China’s auto industry is now widely seen as the most innovative in the world, besting the Japanese, the Germans and the Americans.”

Empty-chairing is smugness personified. “I don’t need you, I can do it alone.” France eventually became a member of the European Union and one of its driving forces. “America First,” a popular isolationist slogan from the 1910s through the 1940s that resurfaced in Trump’s 2016 campaign, has reappeared in the administration’s attitude towards multilateral institutions. While Trump’s actions against Venezuela and elsewhere are certainly not isolationist, refusing to participate in the UPR and COP30 and denigrating the United Nations are self-defeating in an interdependent world.

As for the Security Council adopting the U.S. peace plan for Gaza as a potential indication of Trump’s support for multilateralism, Julian Borger in The Guardian described Resolution 2803 (2025) as “a miasma of vagueness” and “one of the oddest in United Nations history.” He added, “The fact that the resolution passed 13-0, with Russia and China abstaining, is testament to its calculated haziness as well as the global exhaustion and desperation over Gaza after two years of Israeli bombardment…” Hardly a ringing endorsement of multilateralism, the resolution does little to signal a fundamental shift in U.S. policy toward the U.N. Its provisions for official Palestinian participation are conditional and extremely limited, reflecting American hegemonic power rather than genuine pluralism.

Musical chairs is a game for children. Empty-chairing is a childish reaction in the adult world of diplomacy. While countries can certainly disagree with one another, refusing to show up is an immature way of expressing that disagreement. Empty-chairing and cherry-picking when to engage multilaterally undermine international cooperation. When the music stops, everyone should have a chair.

The post The U.S.’s Empty Chair U.N. Policy  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Jamal Khashoggi, image Wikipedia.

Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Seven years later, Donald Trump received Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—the man U.S. intelligence concluded ordered Khashoggi’s killing—with open arms in the Oval Office. When ABC News journalist Mary Bruce asks him directly about that finding, Trump shrugs: “Things happen.”

Things happen. Journalists get slain and dismembered. Academics get imprisoned. Activists get tortured. Dissidents disappear. Independent media bows down. Judges kneel.

Political violence, the erosion of free speech, the end of democracy… Things happen.

In the words of the late psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton, this points to “malignant normality.” The process by which destructive ideologies, violent policies, and dehumanizing practices become embedded in everyday life—routinized, accepted, even perceived as normal. And in that normalization, evil not only persists but spreads.

According to PEN America’s reporting, Khashoggi sensed what was coming. Fearing for his safety, he left Saudi Arabia in September 2017 and went into self-exile in the United States, where he began writing for the Washington Post. From Washington, he continued to criticize Mohammed bin Salman’s escalating repression including mass arrests of businessmen, clerics, intellectuals, royal family members, and women’s rights activists. He warned about the rapid deterioration of free expression in Saudi Arabia and across the Arab world. “I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot,” he wrote and spoke up.

In a May 21, 2018 column, he reflected on the government’s efforts to control the social and political narrative: “The message is clear to all: Activism of any sort has to be within the government, and no independent voice or counter-opinion will be allowed. Everyone must stick to the party line.”

He refused that line. And for that, he was killed.

Khashoggi’s murder unfolded during sweeping purges that targeted nearly every sector of Saudi civil society. Many detainees were subjected to staged and rigged trials; some described severe torture. His final column, which was sent to the Washington Post by his assistant the day after he disappeared, was a plea for free expression in the Arab world and a reflection on the Arab Spring’s unfulfilled promise. It criticized state-run rhetoric that demands unconditional obedience from citizens.

Obey, otherwise, things happen.

But we must be very clear: the phrase “things happen” does not belong solely to the Middle East or to distant authoritarian regimes. Things happen here, too. Right now. On American soil.

Senators get handcuffed by federal agents. National guards invade cities. Immigrants, including citizens, are abducted and detained. Voting rights, suppressed. Political dissent, silenced. Universities, targeted. Scholars, ousted. Books, banned. Activists, jailed. Courts tilt. Justice walks a razor’s edge. Terror takes root.

Back in 2018 Khashoggi wrote: “When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?”

Fear, intimidation, arrests, public shaming. It is all happening right here, right now. Are we surprised?

Children living in poverty, things happen.

Healthcare out of reach, things happen.

Corporate corruption, things happen.

Press under siege, things happen.

Police brutality, things happen.

Hate crimes, things happen.

Mass shootings, things happen.

Climate collapse, things happen.

But here is what also happens: Information breaks through. Grassroots movements strengthen. Voices rise. Revolutions take shape. Kings lose their crowns. Empires fall.

When the moral compass resets toward justice, these things happen.

Courage is infectious, and so is radical hope.

The post “Things Happen”: Murder According to Trump appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

USS Gerald Ford. Photo: US Navy.

There’s an old protest sign I can’t stop thinking about. It read, “It will be a great day in America when our schools have all the money that they need and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to pay for a bomber.” Well, how about for an aircraft carrier?

Where I am, in a rural part of New York state, the radio is packed with appeals from nearby food pantries where, after 43 days of government shutdown, volunteers are terrified that they’ll run out of supplies before Thanksgiving.

With Congress reopening, some safety net spending will be restored, but around here, SNAP budgets don’t come close to meeting real people’s actual food costs. Long before the shutdown, one in five children was going hungry, with 24% of children living in poverty according to the local data-crunchers, and that’s been consistent for years now.

While my neighbors on SNAP are supposed to be happy to receive modest monthly benefits (up to about $298 for a single person), drive two hours south, or about 100 miles to Wall Street, and people with money to spare are celebrating record-high stock market gains and their brokers anticipate end-of-year bonuses that are on track to surge as much as 25% over last year’s.

The end-of-year bump the rest of us will see is in our health insurance premiums. They’re about to double, triple, or quadruple, for some 20 million Americans. In addition, fifteen million Americans can expect to be thrown off Medicaid, and all to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the richest 1% of us, courtesy of a Congress packed with millionaires whose health insurance is almost entirely paid for by taxpayers (thanks to a national healthcare plan they won’t let the rest of us in on).

Meanwhile, a dangerous-looking military deployment in the Caribbean continues, gobbling up Congressionally-appropriated dollars that will never be honestly calculated. As of late November 2025, (according to Wikipedia), the U.S. has deployed at least 15 major warships to the Caribbean, including:

+ The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and its escort destroyers.

+ Guided-missile destroyers (USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham, USS Stockdale, USS Winston Churchill, USS Mahan).

+ Guided-missile cruiser (USS Gettysburg, USS Lake Erie).

+ Amphibious assault ships (USS Iwo Jima, USS San Antonio, USS Fort Lauderdale).

+ Littoral combat ships (USS Wichita, USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul).

+ A nuclear-powered attack submarine (USS Newport News).

+ Special operations vessels (MV Ocean Trader).

Take just one: the USS Gerald Ford which has just pulled into the Caribbean. It cost $13 billion to build (another $4 billion more to develop). When the government was “shut down” it was not. It was eating up an estimated $8 million per day to operate, and that’s not including the cost of jet fuel for its 90-plus aircraft. When the USS Ford stopped for gas soon after it launched, it took a couple of days and close to a million gallons. At a mid price of $4/gallon, that’s $4 million to fill its tanks.

The annual cost of continuing Affordable Care Act (ACA) healthcare subsidies is about $30 billion per year, or roughly $82 million per day.​ This means that the daily cost of operating a single aircraft carrier is roughly equivalent to about 10% of the daily cost of maintaining ACA healthcare subsidies for the entire country. Put another way, the amount spent on one carrier in a single day could fund ACA subsidies for hundreds of thousands of Americans for that same day. Add the cost of this entire dangerous Gulf escapade, and the immoral sum could cover SNAP beneficiaries past Christmas.

Donald Trump and his war secretary say their deployment is all about fighting narco-terrorism and getting tough on crime. But who is getting tough on our misplaced priorities — and the crime of poverty in this country? It’s time we elected some people who had actually lived through the experience.

The post One Aircraft Carrier or Health Care Coverage for Tens of Thousands? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

“Down with communism,” they chanted while also waving the One Piece pirate flag, meant to be a symbol of resistance to elitist excess, corruption, and inequality. The right-wing march was also meant to be a Generation Z protest, but most of the people I could see among the 1,000 or so marching through the center of Puebla, were of older generations; clearly the most loyal membership of Mexico’s right-wing parties, the PRI and PAN.

Similar such marches were held in various cities around Mexico on Saturday. They were a bizarre attempt to copy-paste the recent uprisings and protests in Nepal, the Philippines, and Indonesia, but they were built from the top down. Money was spent conjuring the protest from AI campaigns, bots, and influencers, rather than involving real social movements.

The main chants in the march were “Out Morena” (Mexico’s governing party) and “No more narco state.” Meant to be organic, spontaneous anger at the government, crime, and corruption, the marches’ vagueness and misuse of symbols left serious and experienced activists in the country amused, and a little annoyed.

As 51% of content is now AI-generated, it’s worth decoding how this protest has been fabricated, and the impact of its co-option of the symbols and phrases of more genuine causes. AI literacy and awareness of how videos and facts are manipulated for political and economic interests, is becoming more important.

This Instagram account was among the first to publicly call for the November 15 protest. Describing itself as Generation Z, “anti-party,” “the disinterested generation” and “enough of the same old shit” – there are dozens of signs signs the account was not created by movement activists. The account does not follow, tag or interact with other longstanding movements, collectives, or grassroots organizations like unions or community or alternative media. The only groups it follows are bot-like replicas of itself, that have each posted perhaps four times in total. The account’s first posts were created exactly a month before the November 15 protest, and got hundreds of engagements (likes and comments) straight off the bat: a sign the account holder either has funds to pay for significant boosting, or that the posts were supported by bots.

Almost all the account’s content, including videos, is AI-generated. Likewise, the sister account on Facebook. There are few real humans to be seen. But in Mexico, while people often cover their faces in public videos denouncing crimes and injustice due to fear of persecution, it is always important to show at least the eyes, or the full group of farmers on the land being attacked or the Indigenous people meeting, women standing together and so on, to demonstrate that these communities are organizing and speaking out. The Generation Z Mexico accounts don’t have such visuals because they don’t actually meet, discuss, decide based on voting or consensus, hold speak-outs to build larger protests, and other staples of real movements.

“Generation Z Mexico” doesn’t have real visuals of activists – and especially not young ones – – because it is not led by actual activists or actual young people. In Mexico, there are strong women’s movements, movements for the forcibly disappeared, for water rights and more, but there is no movement here to revoke the president, so there are no photos of that to be used. Instead, this group has resorted to AI-generated photos of protests like this one. After Saturday’s march, they will have photos they can use, though even those are being digitally edited to make their crowds look bigger.

And because this made-up movement doesn’t consist of real, committed activists, the people behind it instead throw money at influencers. One of the few real people seen on the Instagram account includes this influencer, who has 177,000 followers, and dedicates all her posts to fashion and to photos of herself posing. She openly advertises that she is available for paid promotions.

Another person featured on the account and who promoted the November 15 protest is this influencer, who also has never posted any political content until a week or two ago, when he suddenly went on a rant about “the left” or “communists” trying to delegitimise his “movement.” Like all the content generated for the November 15 protest, he is vague about what it is he wants, talking about “a movement that seeks to represent us” and “dialogue” and “tolerance” (post since removed). Influencer Carlos Bellow, who describes himself as a “man of god and business” and posts photos of himself in expensive suits, has also taken up the flag of the “protest.”

Another indication that this protest isn’t genuine, is the support it has garnered by right wing and commercial media. Media like TV Azteca for example, that usually demonizes real movements and resistance, was among the first to promote the November 15 protest. The head of TV Azteca, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a billionaire recently investigated for money laundering and tax avoidance, has posted about the November 15 protest various times and with slogans totally in line with the phrasing used by the Generation Z Mexico accounts, not to mention directly sharing their posts.

Finally, the content of the protest and those promoting it, is muddy at best. Screaming without substance. There were references to phrases brought up in other Gen Z protests in other countries, like “corruption” and “authoritarianism” but without specifics. There were no deep-dives into state power structures and collusion between organized crime, big business, and the various levels of government. There was no analysis of causes, no proposals, no named corrupt figures beyond the president. Calling out the lack of safety as “bad” is so obvious that it is meaningless. Everyone here knows how harmful the proliferation of organized crime is – the key is in denouncing its origins (including the US’s “War on Drugs” and rampant neoliberalism) and what should actually be done about it. Empty, obvious phrases like “corruption is bad” and “crime is bad” are typical of battles for individual power, not of genuine movements. Only politicians or CEOs make cheap references to “safety” and “transparency” in order to get votes or financing, without wanting to dent a thing about the way the rigged system works in their favor.

To make it worse, one of the influencers mentioned above created this post for the Generation Z account, where she argues that Che and Trump are the same kind of thing. It’s a typical right-wing argument, not dissimilar to the wackiness of the right wing in Venezuela adopting Guy Fawkes masks. Beyond the blatant disregard for ideological nuance, let alone the macro difference between an anti-imperialist revolutionary like Che and a racist blockhead, this conflating of “extremes” serves centrists and right-wingers as a way to dilute left wing heroes of their impact, while seeking to appropriate symbols or methods like diversity, dialogue, revolt, direct action, into their own sphere of influence. Portraying people who want basic decent things like healthcare for all, or unpolluted rivers as “extreme” sidelines them to a bubble of irrationality, while the boring, polluting conservatives get to claim reasonableness for themselves.

Mexico does need protests, but not like this

Nevertheless, there are many steep horrors in Mexico worthy of mass, protracted protest, and this manipulated initiative likely drew some genuinely frustrated youth. But, Mexico is not Nepal or Indonesia. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is extremely popular here, and abroad. She uses spin masterfully, vindicating important rights and oppressed identities, while in practice she and her party continue to put big business first. Morena is full to the brim with politicians who have migrated over from the traditional right wing parties. Here in Puebla, our human rights are violated constantly as our water is cut off for months so that Morena can roll out the red carpet to water-consuming transnationals like Google’s AI projects, Volkswagen, Audi, Walmart, and more. Morena promised to de-privatize our water before AMLO’s first term, and instead, our rates have gone up.

There are a zillion more reasons to protest – and indeed people are – including the extreme femicide rates and the murder and criminalization of land defenders. Organized crime is booming, taking over industries like avocados, permissions (to park, to set up a stall, to sell gum on the train) and tourism. There are 134,000 disappeared people in Mexico.

We are intensely angry. But the pain, exhaustion, disillusion, trauma from being ignored and minimized, the concern for Mexican and Central America migrants, the rage at protection networks for rapists and the misogyny in healthcare goes back decades. The pain is, unfortunately, integrated into the rhythm of our lives, and so a sudden revolt led by faceless AI graphics and wealthy whitexican influencers, was always unlikely to provoke an overnight rebellion.

What’s worse with Saturday’s right-wing march is that Sheinbaum and AMLO before her, have dismissed many important and real movements, claiming they were orchestrated by the right. AMLO has suggested that Mexico’s women’s marches – some of the biggest globally – were organized by the opposition. Sheinbaum has dismissed the important demands of feminist marches by accusing them of violence and criminalising them, and she said “there is always dialogue …so one doesn’t understand why they protest” in response to the CNTE (education workers) protests a few days ago and repressed by the government. AMLO rejected journalist protests against the high rate of murders of journalists in the country (one of the highest globally), and called journalists “conservative”. In that sense, an actual right wing protest only adds fuel to the fire of those trying to de-legitimize real movements.

The Latin American right

This is not the first time resources have been used to digitally promote disturbances aimed at overthrowing a Latin American government. The account calling for the November 15 protest on X only has 209 posts (they seem to be regularly deleting more posts than they share, that figure has since dropped to 182 posts, at the time of writing). When the account was first created in 2024, its first posts were sharing tweets in support of right-wing leaders and candidates in Venezuela.

In Latin America, the international right wing has repeatedly used AI and bot strategies to generate very vague anti-government discontent in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Ecuador (under Correa). I witnessed right-wing protests in Venezuela and Ecuador, saw the protesters parroted the online slogans (#SOS, or wearing gas masks to convey repression), and talking to them, noted how inarticulate they were. The participants in those protests, like Saturday’s in Mexico, were not people ever seen supporting other causes, like the sexual diversity marches, anti-racism, worker rights, or standing up to mines.

The #SOS hashtag was used in Cuba, Venezuela, and Ecuador as an attempt to convey that things were so desperate for people in the particular country, that US intervention was necessary. That is not happening here in Mexico – the government here is barely centrist and never stands up to the US in practice, bar voting against the Cuban sanctions. Although, it does seem that a few on the right are dreaming about it. There was one guy at a protest recently against the killing of a mayor, walking around with a sign in English welcoming the US army to the region, and an unofficial US security news account with 500,000 followers shared the One Piece flag and wrote “It’s time for President Trump to order massive air strikes against all Narco Terrorist targets across Mexico” and “The People of Mexico are asking America to destroy the Cartels and end decades of violence, crime and corruption! Make Mexico Great Again!”

In the Cuba “SOS” movement, it was non-local accounts that kicked off the July 2021 protests (the first account to tweet about a Covid-19 crisis in the country was in Spain and that account would tweet over a thousand times in two days;10 and 11 of July), with the support of mass amounts of bot accounts, then paid influencers, who, like the ones here, had previously never posted about political or social issues. Over 1,500 accounts that used #SOSCuba were created during those two days.

These digital campaigns can cause long-lasting damage. Especially in the absence of AI and media literacy, they can cultivate distrust of the symbols and demands of genuine movements and causes. It can become a game of popularity based on who can pay for the most boosts–and movements of the oppressed tend to lose that game.

As AI and bot manipulation is used increasingly by the right and elites, reliable, on-the-ground, quality reporting becomes even more vital. It takes experienced, local reporters and activists to be able to distinguish between real movements, and fabricated ones, to read between the lines of government spin, identify local actors and their alliances and interests, decipher the agendas behind the PR, and know when Zapata is being evoked for the right reasons and when his memory is being used by groups with no understanding of his legacy – parading Indigenous resistance for their own interests.

All photos by Tamara Pearson.

The post How the Rightwing has Used AI and Influencers to Make Up an Anti-Government Movement in Mexico appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Encampment Protest at the University of California, San Diego, May 1, 2024.  Photo by author.

Is it antisemitic to protest the State of Israel for its military occupation of Palestinian territory and its policies toward Palestinians that deny them basic political rights, including the right of self-determination?  Is it discriminatory toward Jews to critique the ideology of Zionism that justifies an exclusionary Jewish ethno-state in Palestine?  For those defending freedom of expression and the right to assembly, the answer to these questions is a resounding “no,” but sadly university leaders across the country have admitted to an exception to these principles when it comes to Israel and Palestinians that has compromised the university as a space of free and open discussion of issues of public concern.

For the past 25 years, Israel’s promoters have sought to deflect criticism of Israel and Zionism as anti-Jewish animus.  By the early 2000s, as Palestinians launched a Second Intifada against their Israeli military occupiers, a global critique of Israeli brutality in repressing Palestinians emerged as part of a discourse of resistance directed against Israel and Zionism.  This discourse defined the State of Israel as a colonialist venture upheld by a racist ideology.  The World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001 was a turning point in this critique and proved to be a forerunner to the charges of Apartheid levelled against Israel by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Confronted with this critique, promoters of Israel and Zionism argued that the specter of a “new antisemitism” was haunting the globe, but to support this claim, the meaning of antisemitism had to be expanded beyond its historically accepted definition as animus directed at Jews.

One individual centrally involved in promoting this idea was Kenneth Marcus, an official in the Department of Education in the early 2000s.  Marcus was alarmed by anti-Israel protests on college campuses and successfully lobbied lawmakers to add protections to Jewish students under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.^[1]  What was needed to make this campaign about new antisemitism effective, however, was an institutional change in the meaning of antisemitism such that protests against Israel and Zionism, nominally protected forms of speech and assembly, became racist violations against the civil rights of Jews.  To the rescue came the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Focused primarily on Holocaust education, the IHRA took up the cause of redefining antisemitism in 2005 and by 2016 adopted a “working definition” of the age-old concept.  Although its definition emphasized antisemitism as hatred and prejudice toward Jews, the IHRA ignited controversy by clarifying the meaning of its definition with eleven examples of antisemitism.  Seven of these examples do not focus on Jews at all but on questions related to Israel and Zionism and in this sense seek to delegitimize and even criminalize speech protected under the First Amendment.^[2]

For example, the IHRA lists as antisemitism, “claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”  In this way, the definition enables Israel’s defenders to dismiss as antisemitic the comprehensive studies of Israel as an Apartheid state by the aforementioned Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with Israel’s own human rights organization, B’tselem.

Two other examples from the list of eleven are also noteworthy.  One calls out speech “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to the Nazis.” The second castigates the use of symbols and images that associate Israel or Israelis with “blood libel” referring to the ancient myth that Jews killed non-Jews, mostly children and used their blood in Jewish rituals.   Defenders of Israel have weaponized these two examples in the IHRA definition to portray Encampment protestors across the country as antisemitic bigots.

Across the country, Encampment protestors registered two very visible demands:  an end to Israel’s genocide, and termination of the killing by Israel of now 20,000 children in Gaza.  Israel’s backers, however, were quick to insist that calling for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza likened Israel to the Nazis by suggesting that both were perpetrators of humanity’s most heinous crime.  Similarly, by seeking an end to the killing of children in Gaza and using imagery of Palestinian children murdered by Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, Encampment protestors were supposedly smearing Israel with an antisemitic blood libel harkening back to the Middle Ages.

None other than Benjamin Netanyahu exploited these claims about Encampment protestors in an incendiary speech on April 24, 2024.^[3]  “Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading U.S. universities,” he proclaimed, and without evidence, insisted that these mobs “attacked Jewish students and Jewish faculty.”  More significantly, Netanyahu cast as “shameful” several university presidents who, according to the Israeli leader, failed to crack down on protestors whom he compared to Nazis at German universities in the 1930s.  Tragically, in the aftermath of this blatant threat to campus leaders in the U.S. to punish Encampment protestors or else, campus presidents cowered before the Israeli Prime Minister and initiated violent and brutal crackdowns on Encampments across the country – including my own campus at the University of California, San Diego.

The right to free expression and freedom of assembly are two of the most hallowed rights in the legal and moral lexicon of the U.S and have become core values at U.S. universities.  It would therefore be logical for University leaders to strengthen these rights in order to promote a vibrant campus environment based on open discussion and debate about issues of public concern such as Israel, genocide, and antisemitism.  Instead, University leaders from Columbia to UCLA have allowed groups defending Israel and its ideology to weaponize the meaning of antisemitism and notions of discrimination under the Civil Rights Act to attack these rights to speak and assemble. The outcome of such attacks on rights of speech and protest across universities is a climate on campuses of surveillance, censorship, and the chilling of free expression.  Interestingly, one of the drafters of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Kenneth Stern, has denounced use of the definition to censor speech on college campuses, calling it “a travesty.”^[4]

Unfortunately, the crackdown on Encampments and the surveillance and censorship that followed is only part of a broader and more draconian campaign to restrict students and faculty from criticizing and protesting injustice when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

Last month, the Trump administration demanded that campuses at the University of California agree to a broad overhaul in a sinister document entitled the “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education.”  The Compact reflects how federal authorities are weaponizing both the IHRA definition of antisemitism and turning upside down the idea of discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Right Act.  Campus leaders themselves, however, in tacitly accepting the IHRA definition of antisemitism to suppress Encampment protests, have played a disturbing role in enabling the Federal Government to intervene in the academic affairs of the UC.  In a letter sent to UC President James Milliken, the UC Academic Council representing the Faculty Academic Senate from all ten UC campuses implored the Office of the President and the UC Board of Regents to reject demands in the Compact “that compromise institutional autonomy and academic freedom,” while similarly, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote: “The Compact violates core principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech.” ^[5]  Regents at UC will supposedly decide whether to accept this “Compact” at a meeting scheduled for November 18-20.

Sadly, these attacks our rights of free expression and assembly are not limited to University campuses.  Israel’s defenders have waged a successful campaign to pass a bill in California, AB 715, signed into law by Gavin Newsom, that ostensibly aims to “combat antisemitism in schools” but is inspired by the same kinds of antisemitism allegations afflicting university campuses.  In seeking to curb the way educators in California schools will be able to teach on the issue of Israel and Palestine, AB 715 generated overwhelming opposition from teachers’ unions, civil rights groups, and education advocates across California.  Such opposition, along with outrage by free speech advocates throughout the State and across the country has inspired the Arab-American Anti-discrimination Committee (ADC) to file a federal civil rights lawsuit against the bill as unconstitutional in the way it overturns basic rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Although the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by the Governor, it is possible that the legal action initiated by the ADC may very well have something unexpected on its side.

On October 25th, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston, struck down a lawsuit brought by a pro-Israel group against MIT alleging that that the university, by failing to ban pro-Palestine protests on the campus, discriminated against Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.  The Appellate Panel hearing the case, made two key findings:  1) the pro-Palestine groups were exercising a First Amendment right; and 2) gathering on campus and setting up an encampment to protest were not antisemitic acts, but were instead protected speech.  Juan Cole, history professor at the University of Michigan, described the decision as “one of the more important rulings in the history of the First Amendment.”^[6]

How university leaders and lawmakers interpret this decision remains an open question but students, faculty, and human rights activists everywhere whose voices have been silenced over the past two years might now take some solace from this case.  The imperative of free and open expression when it comes to issues of genocide on college campuses and beyond is more critical than ever.

Notes.

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/24/us/politics/kenneth-marcus-college-antisemitism-complaints.html

^[2] https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism

^[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/video/netanyahu-denounces-u-s-college-campus-protests-as-antisemitic-209638981991

^[4] https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-use-his-antisemitism-definition-to-censor-he-calls-it-a-travesty

^[5] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/council-chair-to-president-council-statement-ucla-demand-letter.pdf                        https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/2025-10/Letter-AAUP-to-OGC-Compacts.pdf

^[6] https://www.juancole.com/2025/10/227621.html

The post Antisemitism, Campus Censorship and Freedom of Expression appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

More than 50 Mesa Verde tenants rallied to condemn unsafe and unsanitary housing conditions, questioning why tax dollars are instead going to fund war and attack marginalized communities. Photo: Craig Birchfield.

 On 8 November, 2025, dozens of tenants gathered in front of La Mesa Verde housing complex in Jackson Heights, Queens. In La Mesa Verde alone, 859 violations have been filed against the owner, A&E Real Estate – one of New York City’s largest landlords. Across Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, there are 131 active lawsuits against the company. At La Mesa Verde, nearly 100 households have joined a lawsuit against A&E.

Tenants, many of whom have lived there for decades, spoke of a wide range of housing and safety violations. Some have suffered from broken hips and arms as a result of deteriorating and structurally unsafe stairs and floorboards while others have landed in the emergency room after ceilings collapsed on top of them. Parents complain of their children developing chronic health issues due to mold and lead paint exposure. Because of persistent elevator issues, elderly and disabled tenants are either trapped in their apartments or forced to risk injury by hauling laundry and groceries up six flights of deteriorating stairs.

The elevators, neither of which have worked since March, have been in and out of disrepair for years. Tenant leader José Luiz Rico, who has lived at La Mesa Verde for over 20 years, spoke about his neighbor who died as a result of the strain this has caused: “Years ago, a neighbour died of heart problems because the elevator was again not working. He had heart issues and he died in the doorway of the laundry room from a heart attack after hauling his laundry from the 6th floor. I am sure this is because of the strain the lack of elevators put on his heart.”

This story is not unique: La Mesa Verde’s owner, A&E Real Estate Holdings, has 64,000 housing violations across roughly 180 buildings and 17,000 apartments in New York City. Tenant leader Celina della Croce spoke of similar struggles across the country, and of her great aunt who died as a result of a broken hip incurred by similar conditions in her public housing building in Nevada almost exactly a year ago. ‘If she had been rich, or if she had a tenant union like this one, maybe she would still be alive’, della Croce said.

John Francis, the supervising attorney of Communities Resist, which is representing Mesa Verde and other A&E tenants, explained how landlords like A&E are “systematically… destroying these historic New York City neighborhoods [and] driving out families who have been there for decades or generations,” all while raking in exorbitant profits. He identified common strategies employed by landlords like A&E, such as allowing buildings to deteriorate into a state of disrepair that paves the way for demolition and the sale of the building to developers at huge profit margins. Rather than maintaining affordable housing, these developers often build luxury housing in their place. Other strategies include charging above the legally permitted threshold in rent-stabilized buildings like Mesa Verde, banking on the assumption that tenants don’t know their legal rights. They even take advantage of the affordable housing discourse in New York, which focuses on creating new units while allowing existing ones to deteriorate:

There are more available units than there are people sleeping on the street right now. But those people are not able to gain access to those apartments because the landlord is either warehousing them or illegally deregulating them and charging them exorbitant rents that people are not going to be able to afford.  …

What they are doing is… pushing [these tenants] outside of the city… and then refitting these apartments in such a way that the millionaire class can move in and rent it out. And/or, again in the long term, eventually selling off these lots for large amounts of money to developers who will then again make more units for the millionaire class to come in and take and rent.

In fact, in a country with an annual military budget of $1.537 trillion, nearly 1 million people are homeless, and many more are housing insecure and living in squalid conditions. In New York City, where there are 28 vacant homes to every 1 unhoused person, the $560.2 million spent on funding weapons for Israel to perpetrate a genocide against Palestinians could have paid for one month’s free rent for 351,236 households, one month’s free groceries for 1.18 million families, or 6,116 salaries for elementary school teachers. On a national level, the $17.9 billion the US spent on military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023 could have paid for a month’s rent for 11.2 million households.

While the US spends 12.6 more per capita on the military than any other country in the world, it could instead eradicate homelessness ($20 billion) and hunger ($26 billion), guarantee tuition-free education ($70 billion), transition to a Medicare for All System ($300 billion), and still have 72.93% of the currently military budget left to spend on the wellbeing of people in this country and reparations to places like Palestine.

Leaders of the Mesa Verde tenants’ union understand the connections between their daily hardship and the broader reality not only in the city and country, but across the world. ‘Our government spends over $1 trillion of our tax dollars on war, bombing Palestinians,” della Croce said, “yet it can’t provide decent housing.” That is why, she continued, the group is organizing, not only “to expose A&E management for the horrendous conditions in this building and to tell them that we won’t put up with this any more,” but also to build a stronger union by making broader connections between the struggles facing working people in New York and across the world.

“This struggle we have is the same struggle of all our neighbors in Queens and in NY,” explained tenant leader Elena Martínez, who has lived in La Mesa Verde for 35 years. “We fight for dignified housing today, and tomorrow for better education and healthcare. We fight for a better future where the needs of all workers are prioritized. Because we create the wealth of this city. We build the buildings, we teach in the schools, we cook in the restaurants; everything moves because of us immigrants.”

In the face of a heightened assault against the working class that relies on an agenda of hate, scapegoating, and division – whether through escalation of ICE raids (assaulting immigrants and US citizens and residents of color alike), rolling back SNAP benefits, or scapegoating immigrants, communities of color, LGBTQ people, and the poor for problems caused by the rich – mobilizations of the working class rooted in unity and a tying together of the struggles facing the working class class are the only path forward.

The post Queens Tenants Fight for Dignified Housing and against the War Economy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Saeima – Flickr: Saeimas sēžu zāle – CC BY-SA 2.0

Europe’s political classes were backfooted by Latvia’s Parliament (Saeima) vote to pull out of the Istanbul Convention (IC), the treaty protecting women from violence. They then reset and punted on the IC’s future as several protests in the thousands took to Latvia’s streets. Backstory to the vote for Latvia’s IC exit, however, is less about women’s rights, but insider politics and the decreasing returns on “European Values” for defending the “European Project.” In brief, Latvia’s opposition parties, Latvia First Party, headed by oligarch Ainars Slessers, was previously voted out in 2009, then staged a political return riding our last decade’s global wave of rightwing populism. Then there is the Green & Farmers Party, both rural in character but also led by the flamboyant former oligarch, Aivars Lembergs. Lembergs was briefly jailed in 2021 for corruption, thus relegating him to gray cardinal status in Latvia’s politics thereafter. Lembergs and Slessers are two of the three most powerful oligarchs ever produced by Latvia. This opposition’s third leg comes from the now main party representing Latvia’s Russian speakers, Stability. All three parties are positioning themselves for an allied win eleven months hence in Latvia’s parliament elections. They see an opening in the IC’s language on gender as socially constructed rather than fixed as being alien cultural norms advanced by Brussels and Latvian elites whose lives remain distant from the realities of working people.

Latvia’s liberal parties have defended the Istanbul Convention’s noble goals of protecting women’s safety by wrapping it in the shroud of “European values.” European values have carried the day in endless Latvian political contests the past three decades among Latvians seeing themselves as stalwart allies of Brussels’ European project. Latvia’s rejection of the IC, however, signals a European values fatigue growing within the post-Soviet space.

Latvian, if not Baltic, women have broken many glass ceilings. The EU’s four female prime ministers are in the three Baltic States (Latvia and Lithuania). And, the third Baltic State, Estonia, had a female prime minister (Kaja Kallas) up until last year, when she was kicked upstairs to Brussels to become the EU’s chief foreign affairs representative along with vice-president of the European Commission. Latvian women are some 34% of the members of the parliament, doubling the16% figure of 2016 when they signed the Istanbul Convention. Moreover, Latvia was among the first countries extending the vote to all adult women in 1918. In short, the Baltic States have proven leaders in opening high-level career doors for women.

This is not to say, however, women don’t need protection. Countries marked by significant levels of inequality and poverty serve as incubators for social pathologies, including violence against women, and especially those of the working class. In fact, Latvia has the highest reported rate of “femicide” in all Europe. However, “European values” in the post-Soviet space, to be blunt, often means “not Russian.” Nowhere in the EU does values code to anti-Russian sentiment more than the Baltics. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that lacked the partial autonomy of Cold War Soviet bloc states. Annexed in 1940 by the USSR, Soviet Baltic Republics lacked the limited latitude of freedom from Moscow possessed by communist bloc countries. And of those three Baltic countries, the language of European values resonates most loudly in Latvia, which had the biggest immigration of Russian speakers in the Baltics during the period of Soviet occupation.

Soviet occupation brought a mix of policies. Soviet social supports (childcare, healthcare, education, retirement, etc.) were clearly progressive. Simultaneously, archaic or socially regressive cultural habits persisted behind the “protection” of the Iron Curtain. Economic growth in the early Cold War decade was solid, but stagnation set in by the late 1970s and contraction followed in the 1980s. For those now under 50, memories of “Krievu Laiks,” (“the Russian time” as Latvians reference the Soviet occupation) are linked to stories of older relatives deported to Siberia in the 1940s, Soviet decline in the 1980s, and the trauma of shock therapy transition in the 1990s and up to EU accession in 2004.

Much of Latvia’s younger working-class responded to the 1990s shock therapy and post 2008 financial shock (world’s biggest as percent contraction of GDP) and following “internal devaluation” (austerity) by voting with their feet, as Latvia saw the EU’s biggest emigration by percent of population in the EU space since 1991. Rhetorically, “European values” checked many boxes. For Latvian nationalists, it meant anti-Russian. For young professionals, it meant prospects for social mobility, decent paid work and international travel with NGOs and international companies. For LBTQ+ communities it meant liberation from socially conservative values preserved under Soviet rule, and for which it must be remembered still persisted in the “West” at the point of the Soviet Union’s demise.

For some three decades “European values” successfully carried freight for neoliberals. A combination of nationalists, upwardly mobile professionals and a cultural left delivered sufficient support to keep Latvia’s neoliberals in power. In short, for liberals (cultural, economic and political) European values hold sway and power in Latvia, until they don’t. Latvia’s recent rejection of the Istanbul Convention represents a serious fracture, but not total defeat, of the European values political coalition. But it decidedly represents a weakening of support for a European project generally absent stronger national autonomy and improving conditions for working people.

Latvia’s neoliberals, however, only blame last week’s Istanbul Convention parliament vote loss on, drumroll: Russia. No doubt Kremlin hybrid warriors are pleased with the erosion of support for a united Europe. It would be intellectually lazy, if not strategically misplaced, however, to see erosion of the European values consensus as a production scripted and acted out only by Kremlin marionettes, even if puppeteers are on site tugging (or pushing) on strings.

Three and a half decades of independence have left Latvia’s capital of Riga half prosperous, but plateaued in a “middle income trap.” Outside Riga, much of the rest of the country is some combination of nature preserve and retirement home consequent from three plus decades of emigration and low-birth rates. Moreover, Latvia is a high-cost country where families struggle for lack of adequate kindergartens and other forms of social support. Many Latvians are fatigued by European values rhetoric espoused by neoliberals in suits and fashionable dresses distant from their own daily lived challenged realities. Their ongoing three decades trafficking of a ‘heads I win tails you lose choice’ of ‘it’s either neoliberal Europe or Russia,’ sees diminishing political returns. Moreover, citizens are increasingly weary of a Frankfurt School cultural left politics policymakers pay fealty too without delivering better material living standards for working families. Failing to deliver on the latter, many working people begin turning against the former.

To be fair, a chief defender of the Istanbul Convention (IC) in Latvia’s Progressive Party advanced a pro-labor and family agenda paired to promotion of innovation-centered enterprises, combined with culturally LGBTQ+ values. Among their parliament members advancing this more progressive agenda inclusive of the working class, were Kaspars Briskens and Andris Suvajevs. However, in defending the IC, even the Progressive Party defaulted to “European values” rhetoric as their chief line of defense, thus losing resonance with working people.

Many Latvians rightly expected more from independence. Their demands of respect for local culture can be tethered to tolerance if they are not waterboarded with the tired superiority rhetoric of European values. Improved conditions and voice for labor can coexist with tolerance for all. Absent that ear turned toward labor, with language anchored in a discourse of affordability and respect, European values will further lose appeal and oligarch classes (both local and those connected east) will assume more political wins.

Jeffrey Sommers is Professor of Political Economy & Public and Senior Fellow, Institute of World Affairs of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book on the Baltics (with Charles Woolfson), is The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model.

Cosmin Marian is Chair and Professor of the Department of Political Science at Romania’s Babeș-Bolyai University. He works on comparative politics throughout the EU.

The post “Empire Strikes Back!” Oligarchs and Values Fatigue in Latvia’s Rejection of the Istanbul Convention appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Saeima – Flickr: Saeimas sēžu zāle – CC BY-SA 2.0

Europe’s political classes were backfooted by Latvia’s Parliament (Saeima) vote to pull out of the Istanbul Convention (IC), the treaty protecting women from violence. They then reset and punted on the IC’s future as several protests in the thousands took to Latvia’s streets. Backstory to the vote for Latvia’s IC exit, however, is less about women’s rights, but insider politics and the decreasing returns on “European Values” for defending the “European Project.” In brief, Latvia’s opposition parties, Latvia First Party, headed by oligarch Ainars Slessers, was previously voted out in 2009, then staged a political return riding our last decade’s global wave of rightwing populism. Then there is the Green & Farmers Party, both rural in character but also led by the flamboyant former oligarch, Aivars Lembergs. Lembergs was briefly jailed in 2021 for corruption, thus relegating him to gray cardinal status in Latvia’s politics thereafter. Lembergs and Slessers are two of the three most powerful oligarchs ever produced by Latvia. This opposition’s third leg comes from the now main party representing Latvia’s Russian speakers, Stability. All three parties are positioning themselves for an allied win eleven months hence in Latvia’s parliament elections. They see an opening in the IC’s language on gender as socially constructed rather than fixed as being alien cultural norms advanced by Brussels and Latvian elites whose lives remain distant from the realities of working people.

Latvia’s liberal parties have defended the Istanbul Convention’s noble goals of protecting women’s safety by wrapping it in the shroud of “European values.” European values have carried the day in endless Latvian political contests the past three decades among Latvians seeing themselves as stalwart allies of Brussels’ European project. Latvia’s rejection of the IC, however, signals a European values fatigue growing within the post-Soviet space.

Latvian, if not Baltic, women have broken many glass ceilings. The EU’s four female prime ministers are in the three Baltic States (Latvia and Lithuania). And, the third Baltic State, Estonia, had a female prime minister (Kaja Kallas) up until last year, when she was kicked upstairs to Brussels to become the EU’s chief foreign affairs representative along with vice-president of the European Commission. Latvian women are some 34% of the members of the parliament, doubling the16% figure of 2016 when they signed the Istanbul Convention. Moreover, Latvia was among the first countries extending the vote to all adult women in 1918. In short, the Baltic States have proven leaders in opening high-level career doors for women.

This is not to say, however, women don’t need protection. Countries marked by significant levels of inequality and poverty serve as incubators for social pathologies, including violence against women, and especially those of the working class. In fact, Latvia has the highest reported rate of “femicide” in all Europe. However, “European values” in the post-Soviet space, to be blunt, often means “not Russian.” Nowhere in the EU does values code to anti-Russian sentiment more than the Baltics. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that lacked the partial autonomy of Cold War Soviet bloc states. Annexed in 1940 by the USSR, Soviet Baltic Republics lacked the limited latitude of freedom from Moscow possessed by communist bloc countries. And of those three Baltic countries, the language of European values resonates most loudly in Latvia, which had the biggest immigration of Russian speakers in the Baltics during the period of Soviet occupation.

Soviet occupation brought a mix of policies. Soviet social supports (childcare, healthcare, education, retirement, etc.) were clearly progressive. Simultaneously, archaic or socially regressive cultural habits persisted behind the “protection” of the Iron Curtain. Economic growth in the early Cold War decade was solid, but stagnation set in by the late 1970s and contraction followed in the 1980s. For those now under 50, memories of “Krievu Laiks,” (“the Russian time” as Latvians reference the Soviet occupation) are linked to stories of older relatives deported to Siberia in the 1940s, Soviet decline in the 1980s, and the trauma of shock therapy transition in the 1990s and up to EU accession in 2004.

Much of Latvia’s younger working-class responded to the 1990s shock therapy and post 2008 financial shock (world’s biggest as percent contraction of GDP) and following “internal devaluation” (austerity) by voting with their feet, as Latvia saw the EU’s biggest emigration by percent of population in the EU space since 1991. Rhetorically, “European values” checked many boxes. For Latvian nationalists, it meant anti-Russian. For young professionals, it meant prospects for social mobility, decent paid work and international travel with NGOs and international companies. For LBTQ+ communities it meant liberation from socially conservative values preserved under Soviet rule, and for which it must be remembered still persisted in the “West” at the point of the Soviet Union’s demise.

For some three decades “European values” successfully carried freight for neoliberals. A combination of nationalists, upwardly mobile professionals and a cultural left delivered sufficient support to keep Latvia’s neoliberals in power. In short, for liberals (cultural, economic and political) European values hold sway and power in Latvia, until they don’t. Latvia’s recent rejection of the Istanbul Convention represents a serious fracture, but not total defeat, of the European values political coalition. But it decidedly represents a weakening of support for a European project generally absent stronger national autonomy and improving conditions for working people.

Latvia’s neoliberals, however, only blame last week’s Istanbul Convention parliament vote loss on, drumroll: Russia. No doubt Kremlin hybrid warriors are pleased with the erosion of support for a united Europe. It would be intellectually lazy, if not strategically misplaced, however, to see erosion of the European values consensus as a production scripted and acted out only by Kremlin marionettes, even if puppeteers are on site tugging (or pushing) on strings.

Three and a half decades of independence have left Latvia’s capital of Riga half prosperous, but plateaued in a “middle income trap.” Outside Riga, much of the rest of the country is some combination of nature preserve and retirement home consequent from three plus decades of emigration and low-birth rates. Moreover, Latvia is a high-cost country where families struggle for lack of adequate kindergartens and other forms of social support. Many Latvians are fatigued by European values rhetoric espoused by neoliberals in suits and fashionable dresses distant from their own daily lived challenged realities. Their ongoing three decades trafficking of a ‘heads I win tails you lose choice’ of ‘it’s either neoliberal Europe or Russia,’ sees diminishing political returns. Moreover, citizens are increasingly weary of a Frankfurt School cultural left politics policymakers pay fealty too without delivering better material living standards for working families. Failing to deliver on the latter, many working people begin turning against the former.

To be fair, a chief defender of the Istanbul Convention (IC) in Latvia’s Progressive Party advanced a pro-labor and family agenda paired to promotion of innovation-centered enterprises, combined with culturally LGBTQ+ values. Among their parliament members advancing this more progressive agenda inclusive of the working class, were Kaspars Briskens and Andris Suvajevs. However, in defending the IC, even the Progressive Party defaulted to “European values” rhetoric as their chief line of defense, thus losing resonance with working people.

Many Latvians rightly expected more from independence. Their demands of respect for local culture can be tethered to tolerance if they are not waterboarded with the tired superiority rhetoric of European values. Improved conditions and voice for labor can coexist with tolerance for all. Absent that ear turned toward labor, with language anchored in a discourse of affordability and respect, European values will further lose appeal and oligarch classes (both local and those connected east) will assume more political wins.

Jeffrey Sommers is Professor of Political Economy & Public and Senior Fellow, Institute of World Affairs of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book on the Baltics (with Charles Woolfson), is The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model.

Cosmin Marian is Chair and Professor of the Department of Political Science at Romania’s Babeș-Bolyai University. He works on comparative politics throughout the EU.

The post “Empire Strikes Back!” Oligarchs and Values Fatigue in Latvia’s Rejection of the Istanbul Convention appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Cheney meets with President Ronald Reagan, July 1983 – Public Domain

Modern medical science gave Dick Cheney one of its greatest gifts when he received a donor heart in 2012 at the age of 71.  Thirty-four years earlier, Cheney had suffered his first heart attack; he had a second heart in 1984.  In 1988, at the age of 47, Cheney suffered his fourth heart attack, and then a fifth heart attack in 2010 at the age of 69.  After every attack, according to Dr. Charles C. Hong, Cheney benefitted from a medical breakthrough until he received the donor heart.

There is no indication that Cheney ever softened his headline views on domestic and foreign policy as a result of these near-death experiences.  During his eleven years in Congress, Cheney’s record was strictly reactionary.  He opposed federal funding for abortions, with no exceptions in the case of rape or incest.  He voted against the equal rights amendment for women.  On education issues, he consistently opposed funding of Head Start, and he voted against creating the Department of Education, which Donald Trump has virtually destroyed.

A true westerner, Cheney voted against a ban on armor piercing bullets, often referred to as “cop killer” bullets.  He was one of only four members of the House voting against a ban on plastic guns that could slip through airport security machines undetected.  Not even the National Rifle Association opposed this ban.  In 1988, he voted to scrap a proposed national seven-day waiting period on handgun purchases.

Cheney would have fit in nicely with the Trump team on environmental issues.  He opposed refunding the Clean Water Act, and voted to postpone sanctions placed on air polluters who failed to meet pollution standards.  Cheney consistently voted against legislation to require oil, chemical and others industries from making public records of emissions known to cause cancer, birth defects and other chronic diseases.

Cheney consistently voted to increased defense spending, and supported aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, even after a moratorium on funding was passed.  When then-Senator Patrick Leahy challenged Vice President Cheney’s support for illegal aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, Cheney responded with “go fuck yourself,” which said a great deal about both his personality and his contempt for Congress.  When President George H.W. Bush moved to end the war against Iraq in 1991 without entering Baghdad, Cheney was strongly opposed,

Cheney knew that “personnel is policy” and supported the troglodytes who dominated President George W. Bush’s national security team, particularly Jay Bybee and John Yoo, who drafted the policy guidance that gave cover to the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture and abuse policies, gently referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  He also bolstered the policies and influence of other reactionaries in the administration, such as John Bolton, David Addington, and Paul Wolfowitz.

When asked in 2014 about the CIA’s torture and abuse program, which provided no intelligence on terrorist operations, Cheney offered no contrition.  “I would do it again in a minute,” he said.  And I might add that no CIA executive officer offered any resistance when CIA director George Tenet described the sadistic program, which included such executives as John Brennan, who became Obama’s CIA director.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, known as Cheney’s Cheney, was a consummate operator and advisor in making sure that Cheney’s orders were followed by the bureaucracy.  When George W. Bush refused Cheney’s pleas to provide a pardon to Libby, who had lied to a grand jury about his role in disclosing the identity of a CIA clandestine officer, the Bush-Cheney relationship suffered greatly.

Cheney consistently opposed any measure that supported accountability in the government, such as the War Powers Act, intelligence oversight, the Presidential Records Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and any measure that supported freedom of information.  His emphasis was on enlarging presidential authority, and he often cited those items in the Federalist Papers that supported greater presidential powers.

Cheney’s legacy can best be seen in the national security problems that Barack Obama and Joe Biden inherited in 2009, particularly the unnecessary war against Iraq that was in its sixth year.  There was also the war in Afghanistan, in its 8th year, and difficult security problems with Iran and Pakistan.  Bush and Cheney did their best to get the United States bogged down in distant wars that had no clear strategic purpose, and cost huge amounts of blood and treasure.  When the Israelis wanted the United States to use military force on their behalf, they called on Cheney to get the president to agree.  Fortunately, Bush didn’t comply, and the Bush-Cheney disputes eventually led to the demise of Cheney’s influence in the administration.  The two men were barely speaking to each other by 2008.

Cheney created an imperial vice presidency.  If left to his own devices, the American empire would have been even more supportive of unsavory dictators, more involved in regime change, and more likely engaged in the kind of mindless invasions such as the Bay of Pigs.  At Cheney’s initiative, the United States stripped terror suspects of long-established right sunder domestic and international law.

The Founding Fathers tried to create a president who would act as an “administrator,” but Cheney sought to expand presidential power, which is now referred to as the power of the “unitary executive.”  He had contempt for the Congress, which he described as a “collective, deliberative body” that”slowed down decisions” and “subjected them to compromise.”  He certainly would have been at home in the Trump administration, although—in all fairness—he supported his daughter’s position with respect to Trump’s effort to overthrow the government in 2020.

The post Dick Cheney: Two Hearts, But Remained Heartless appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Chad Stembridge.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) helicopters will undoubtedly be circling my neighborhood looking for roofers and landscapers this “Veterans Day,” just as they have been for weeks. In the U.S., you’re an easy mark when you have brown skin and your job demands that you labor out in the open.

My town, located just outside of Chicago, has been crawling with ICE agents or soldiers (the terms deserve to be used interchangeably) for weeks now. Recently, two moms, in the cold with their whistles, helped guard a crew working on a roof that was damaged by hail in a recent storm. The ICE agents/soldiers, dressed in full military kit, carrying semi-automatic weapons, and wearing ski masks to hide their identity, are patrolling in unmarked trucks — I think we all know how to spot them at this point.

These people remind me of the soldiers I patrolled with in Afghanistan, only the average ICE agent has less training than the average soldier. It seems like every neighborhood in the U.S. is now subject to an armed and potentially violent confrontation with federal troops. The U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has come full circle.

Similar to the way that I terrorized Afghan villages during my time in the military following 9/11, ICE has been terrorizing my town. When I was in the U.S. Army Rangers, we’d target high school and college-age Afghans. Most of the time, these kids were simply walking down the street, minding their own business, when they became subject to a search, an intimidating interrogation, or abduction. After a while, Afghans would alert their neighbors anytime our caravan of trucks entered a town — sometimes they would use whistles. Villagers would quickly disappear and it then felt like we were rolling through a ghost town. This, in part, is life under occupation.

The Trump Regime’s Skyrocketing Domestic Occupying Forces

ICE training has been cut by five weeks to “surge” the number of troops: Training is now eight weeks long, down from 13 weeks. The Trump administration hopes to increase the number of ICE agents from 6,500 nationwide to 10,000 by the end of 2025. A signing bonus of $50,000 has reportedly drawn 150,000 people to apply for positions with ICE, as the agency uses white nationalist imagery to attract white supremacist recruits.

ICE agents/soldiers are occupying U.S. neighborhoods with some of the deadliest weapons in the world with only eight weeks of training and no comparable past experience required. According to a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official interviewed by NBC News, “[DHS is] trying to push everyone through, and the vetting process is not what it should be.” Yet, even if the vetting were more rigorous and thorough, no amount of training could justify armed soldiers terrorizing our neighbors.

The post ICE Is Functioning Like an Occupying Army. I Know Because I Served in One. appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Arctic Council logo – Fair Use

In May, Denmark, quietly sophisticated, often underestimated, took over the chair of the Arctic Council. Its leadership mattered not just for climate and security, but for how smaller countries navigate great-power rivalries in a literally thawing world.

For the remaining eighteen months, Denmark will continue setting the agenda for a region that’s no longer the silent, frozen corner it once was. I’m no Arctic expert but even last May it was obvious this would be a defining moment.

My great-great-grandfather, Jens Bach, sat for decades in the Danish parliament, travelling regularly from Thisted in northern Jutland to Copenhagen. This was two islands and a heroic commute away. In his day, Greenland came up often. Denmark was moving towards a more formal rule over what they called “the big island in the north.” Inevitably, Greenland still comes up. Geography and history have long half-lives in Danish politics.

Copenhagen, for instance, has announced new Arctic defense spending. This includes radar in East Greenland, drones, and upgraded patrol ships. Nothing flashy, Denmark doesn’t really do flashy, but certainly deliberate. Around the Arctic table sit the US, Russia, Canada, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. Nuance goes only so far.

Three forces define Denmark’s Arctic moment: great-power rivalry, Greenlandic self-determination, and rapid climate change.

Greenland gives Denmark its major seabed claims in the Arctic Ocean, a legal and geological smørrebrød layered with what diplomats call “resource and sovereignty implications.” Don’t underestimate this. Further phrases like “continental shelf” hide very real power politics.

At home, the debate over Greenland’s future is sharpening. Greenlandic leaders, diplomats, and scholars have long refined arguments. It’s easy to see how greater autonomy, even independence, would redefine Denmark’s Arctic role, as well as its sense of itself.

Famously, the United States, never shy about its geography, is taking a growing interest in Greenland’s direction. This escalated big time last year when Denmark summoned the US chargé d’affaires over alleged “influence efforts” in Greenland.

The Arctic Council includes six Indigenous organizations as Permanent Participants. Add to that rising attention still to Indigenous rights, plus the post-colonial relationship between Copenhagen, Nuuk, and Tórshavn, and we see Denmark’s history in the region is not a side note.

Then there’s the climate question, the most relentless of all. Melting ice opens new shipping routes and resource hopes, but also new risks. Denmark and Greenland are being pressed to lead on Arctic emissions, black carbon, and methane. The future here isn’t theoretical. Along Greenland’s rugged coast, ice loss and chemical change are already reshaping ecosystems and livelihoods.

Security planners in Copenhagen are having to adjust, too. Those new ships, a polar research vessel, more patrols. Quiet, bureaucratic preparedness. The Danish way, but still a signal. Undersea cables, cyber resilience, counter-intelligence, all no doubt standard topics now in defence meetings. Even telecom companies must receive a scrutiny that would have seemed absurd not so long ago.

Russia looms as the most immediate military concern, especially in the cyber and “a wee bit too close” sea or air encounters. China, as usual, plays the patient investor. The US does, in fact, remain Denmark’s indispensable, if sometimes overbearing, ally.

But if Copenhagen gets it wrong, it could end up sidelined in its own strategic backyard, leaving it wedged between Washington’s impatience, Beijing’s quiet capital, and Greenland’s growing assertiveness.

Nor is it helped by Trump’s habit of treating allies as optional accessories. We saw this last week with the favoritism shown to Hungary in the form of a one-year exemption from sanctions. Greenland didn’t enjoy being discussed like a real estate listing, and neither did Denmark. When science diplomacy and trust fray, Copenhagen’s instinct will be to lean more towards Europe, not less. It’s hardly ice-core astrophysics.

Admittedly, all of this can sound rather forbidding and strategic, but there’s a heartbeat underneath. One Danish relative of mine emigrated to the US, only to return home “to die” after a grim diagnosis in New York. He then lived another forty years. The Arctic, like life, doesn’t move in straight lines.

So too with Denmark’s Arctic role. The path can bend but not break, shaped by resilience, restraint, and the admirably stubborn endurance of small nations in big weather. Not everyone believes in surrendering the playground to the bully. The world turns on the appetites of great powers, but sometimes it survives on the alertness and civility of the small ones to win through.

And maybe in that, Denmark can serve us all.

The post A Small Kingdom at the Top of the World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

After years of steady decline in the number of people executed in the United States, there has been a sharp reversal in 2025.

So far this year, 41 people have been killed in 11 states, with five more executions scheduled before the end of the year.

If all the scheduled executions are carried out, that would make 2025 the year with the most executions since 2010, when 46 inmates were put to death. That year, Texas led the way with 17 executions, while Florida carried out only one.

But this year, the Sunshine State is leading the charge. Florida has executed 15 prisoners in 2025 – the most ever in a single year since 1976, when a brief national moratorium on the death penalty was lifted. Two of the five remaining executions scheduled for 2025 are set to happen in Florida. Texas and Alabama are tied for a distant second, with five executions each.

As someone who has studied the death penalty for decades, what is happening in Florida right now seems to me to be especially important. While in some ways the state is distinctive, in many others it is a microcosm of America’s death penalty system.

The history of the death penalty in Florida

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Florida carried out its first execution in 1827, 18 years before it became a state.

Almost 100 years later, in 1923, Florida replaced hanging with the electric chair as its method of execution. After a brief pause in the use of capital punishment in the 1970s, it was one of the first states to get back in the death penalty business.

In the 1990s, the state had several gruesome botched electrocutions. In three cases, the condemned man caught on fire before dying in the chair. To this day, the electric chair remains legal in Florida, though in 2000 the state Legislature enacted a law whereby prisoners may choose between the electric chair and lethal injection.

Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the state to task for various constitutional defects in its death penalty laws and practices. In its 1982 decision in Enmund v. Florida, the court ruled that Florida could not use the death penalty to punish people who were minor participants in a crime that led to a murder. And in 2014, the Supreme Court found that Florida was unconstitutionally denying the kind of intellectual disability claims by people with low IQ scores that made them ineligible to be given death sentences.

But these rulings have not stopped the state from continuing to go its own way in death penalty cases. In 2020, the Florida Supreme Court ended the practice of having a court review capital sentences. This review was meant to ensure that those sentences met the U.S. Constitution’s requirements that they be meted out only in cases that truly warrant them and that they be proportional. To determine proportionality, the court undertaking such a review would compare the case in front of them with similar cases in the same jurisdiction in which the death penalty had been imposed.

Then in 2023, Florida enacted legislation ending the requirement of jury unanimity in death cases. Now, it takes only eight out of 12 jurors to send someone to death row. Only three other death penalty states do not require jury unanimity. In Missouri and Indiana, a judge may decide if the jury’s decision isn’t unanimous, and in Alabama, a 10-2 decision is sufficient.

Racial inequality on death row

As in the rest of the country, racial discrimination has long been a feature of Florida’s death penalty system.

Thirty-five percent of the 278 people currently on Florida’s death row are Black. But Black people make up only about 17% of Florida’s overall population.

This is actually lower than the approximately 40% of inmates on death row who are Black nationwide, despite the fact that Black people make up just 14% of the U.S. population.

Across the nation, 13 of the 41 inmates executed so far in 2025 have been Black or Latino men.

Florida leads the nation in the number of people – 30 – who have been sentenced to death only to be exonerated later. Of those, 57% were Black.

A record-setting year

Today, Florida has the second-largest death row population in the United States, with 256 inmates awaiting executions. Only California has more, with 580 inmates on death row, but it has had a moratorium on executions since 2006.

As Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis is responsible for issuing death warrants. In 2025, he has signed a record-setting 15 so far. That’s the most death warrants in the state in a single year since 2014, when Gov. Rick Scott signed off on putting eight people to death.

Though he is Catholic, DeSantis does not subscribe to the church’s staunch opposition to the death penalty. The Florida Catholic Conference of Bishops has been outspoken in taking him to task for his position on capital punishment and for presiding over an execution spree. But that has not stopped him.

Indeed, on Nov. 3, 2025, the governor said that capital punishment is “an appropriate punishment for the worst offenders.” He added that it could be a “strong deterrent” if the state carried out executions more quickly.

DeSantis has served as governor since 2019, and prior to 2025, he had signed nine death warrants. He says that he was focused on other priorities early in his term and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The governor, who is term limited, is in his second and last term. DeSantis’ critics allege that the recent uptick in executions is an attempt to garner attention and prove his tough-on-crime bona fides to a national audience.

Florida: Setting the trend, or bucking it?

The total number of executions in the U.S. went from a high of 98 executions in 1999 to a low of 11 in 2021. But that number has increased every year since.

While only one state, Indiana, has resumed executions after a long hiatus, no other state has increased its use of the death penalty as quickly as Florida has. Elsewhere, the common pattern of allowing people to languish on death row for decades, and in some states seemingly permanently, has held.

And although the problems that have long plagued Florida’s death penalty system remain unaddressed, it now stands alone in dramatically escalating its own pace of executions and is leading America to its own 2025 execution revival.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Under Ron DeSantis, Florida Now Leads the Nation in Executions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Edwin Sanchez had the seniority he needed to bid for a higher-paying position in the control room at the oil refinery in Texas City, Texas, where he’d worked for more than 15 years.

But Sanchez, lighthearted and sociable, seemed to prefer the company of his close-knit, 30-person unit responsible for a range of duties inside and outside the sprawling facility.

Sanchez, a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 13-1, showed up for his shifts like clockwork. And then, one day, he didn’t show up at all.

Concerned coworkers ultimately learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement decided to deport Sanchez, whom local police detained after a traffic stop, even though he had an up-to-date work permit.

His deportation to Honduras—a country he hadn’t seen since leaving as a child nearly four decades earlier—occurred in March. The loss angered fellow union members, who fought to hold open Sanchez’s job during his months-long detention, and it underscored the heavy toll that Donald Trump’s dragnet exacts not only on deportees and their families but also on the workplaces and industries they leave behind.

“It just leaves a hole,” observed Brandi Sanders-Lausch, president of Local 13-1, recalling how months of uncertainty about Sanchez’s fate affected about 1,000 union workers at the refinery.

“They were definitely distracted and probably a little uncomfortable,” she said of Sanchez’s coworkers, especially members of his unit who worked most closely with him. “They had questions. They didn’t understand. Everyone still talks about him.”

In all, the nation has so far lost more than a million foreign-born workers like Sanchez amid Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

It’s already causing labor shortages that drive up employer costs and delay work, according to new data from the Federal Reserve. It’s ultimately going to balloon the federal deficit, hinder growth, and lower Americans’ standard of living, according to a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, one of whom explained that “Fewer people means a smaller economy.”

The campaign against immigrants puts large swaths of the economy at risk, not merely by decimating the workforce but by depriving the nation of people with the skills and knowledge essential for operating key industries and keeping them viable for the long term.

For example, Sanchez held a trusted role at the refinery, a veritable small city, where workers refine up to 631,000 gallons of crude oil a day for gasoline, petrochemicals, fuel oil, propane, and other products needed by various kinds of businesses across the country.

Sanchez graduated from a local high school and completed a process technology degree at a community college to prepare for his work as an operator, which involved scaling ladders, monitoring gauges, performing maintenance, and checking for leaks, among other responsibilities, Sanders said.

He continued his education on the job. Both the USW and the company invested in Sanchez on an ongoing basis, providing the safety and other training that empowered his work.

In return, Sanchez invested himself in his work and in his colleagues. He was a dependable, conscientious team player, with an upbeat personality that helped to lighten 12-hour shifts and the overtime that often followed, Sanders said, calling him a favorite among his coworkers.

“They all became really good friends,” she said, noting that Sanchez earned respect for his dedication to picket-line duty during the USW’s 2015 unfair labor practice strike against big oil and his commitment to watching others’ backs in a high-risk work environment.

“You can’t replace a person like that,” Sanders said. “You feel that loss. It’s almost like someone passing away.”

In his mid-30s, unmarried, with no children, Sanchez ended up relying on friends to sell his assets so he’d have some means of supporting himself in Honduras. He also accessed his retirement account, providing additional funds.

But coworkers never saw him again.

Instead of helping to meet America’s energy needs, he’s now figuring out his next steps in an unfamiliar country that has no oil industry, let alone a need for skilled refinery workers.

“He doesn’t speak Spanish,” Sanders said. “He still calls and checks in with everybody from time to time. His friends are here.”

Just like Sanchez, José Galo parlayed hard work and a union contract into a good middle-class life.

But it’s all in pieces now. Galo—who made his way to the U.S. on his own at 14, sometimes sleeping on a couch and skipping meals for lack of money—says he has little choice but to return to Honduras following the deportation of his wife, Karla.

Galo, a U.S. citizen and member of USW Local 1693 in Lexington, Kentucky, accompanied his wife, also a native of Honduras, to a routine check-in with immigration officials in June. Thirty minutes later, a woman returned to the waiting room and told Galo, “She’s no longer here.”

“They took her out the back,” recalled Galo, a manufacturing worker. He made a brief trip to Honduras shortly thereafter, taking the couple’s six-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, so he could live with his mother.

Galo said he’s done his best to contribute to America, joining the ranks of the manufacturing workers who built the country and standing in solidarity with fellow USW members.

He availed himself of the advantages that the USW and other unions have provided all of their members, including members of various immigrant groups, for decades: good wages, affordable benefits, safe working conditions, and a brighter future.

Galo bought a house and a car, willingly paid taxes, and started a lawn care business to explore his entrepreneurial side. He liked nothing more than greeting his son when he walked through the door at the end of a long shift.

Now, his hardships cast a pall over the factory floor, where Galo says his coworkers, a second family, try to cheer him up even though they share his grief. He knows he won’t be seeing them much longer, even though he’s daunted by the prospect of starting over in a country as disadvantaged as when he left decades ago.

“This is my home now,” he said.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

The post Trump’s Immigration Dragnet Harms All U.S. Workers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Edwin Sanchez had the seniority he needed to bid for a higher-paying position in the control room at the oil refinery in Texas City, Texas, where he’d worked for more than 15 years.

But Sanchez, lighthearted and sociable, seemed to prefer the company of his close-knit, 30-person unit responsible for a range of duties inside and outside the sprawling facility.

Sanchez, a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 13-1, showed up for his shifts like clockwork. And then, one day, he didn’t show up at all.

Concerned coworkers ultimately learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement decided to deport Sanchez, whom local police detained after a traffic stop, even though he had an up-to-date work permit.

His deportation to Honduras—a country he hadn’t seen since leaving as a child nearly four decades earlier—occurred in March. The loss angered fellow union members, who fought to hold open Sanchez’s job during his months-long detention, and it underscored the heavy toll that Donald Trump’s dragnet exacts not only on deportees and their families but also on the workplaces and industries they leave behind.

“It just leaves a hole,” observed Brandi Sanders-Lausch, president of Local 13-1, recalling how months of uncertainty about Sanchez’s fate affected about 1,000 union workers at the refinery.

“They were definitely distracted and probably a little uncomfortable,” she said of Sanchez’s coworkers, especially members of his unit who worked most closely with him. “They had questions. They didn’t understand. Everyone still talks about him.”

In all, the nation has so far lost more than a million foreign-born workers like Sanchez amid Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

It’s already causing labor shortages that drive up employer costs and delay work, according to new data from the Federal Reserve. It’s ultimately going to balloon the federal deficit, hinder growth, and lower Americans’ standard of living, according to a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, one of whom explained that “Fewer people means a smaller economy.”

The campaign against immigrants puts large swaths of the economy at risk, not merely by decimating the workforce but by depriving the nation of people with the skills and knowledge essential for operating key industries and keeping them viable for the long term.

For example, Sanchez held a trusted role at the refinery, a veritable small city, where workers refine up to 631,000 gallons of crude oil a day for gasoline, petrochemicals, fuel oil, propane, and other products needed by various kinds of businesses across the country.

Sanchez graduated from a local high school and completed a process technology degree at a community college to prepare for his work as an operator, which involved scaling ladders, monitoring gauges, performing maintenance, and checking for leaks, among other responsibilities, Sanders said.

He continued his education on the job. Both the USW and the company invested in Sanchez on an ongoing basis, providing the safety and other training that empowered his work.

In return, Sanchez invested himself in his work and in his colleagues. He was a dependable, conscientious team player, with an upbeat personality that helped to lighten 12-hour shifts and the overtime that often followed, Sanders said, calling him a favorite among his coworkers.

“They all became really good friends,” she said, noting that Sanchez earned respect for his dedication to picket-line duty during the USW’s 2015 unfair labor practice strike against big oil and his commitment to watching others’ backs in a high-risk work environment.

“You can’t replace a person like that,” Sanders said. “You feel that loss. It’s almost like someone passing away.”

In his mid-30s, unmarried, with no children, Sanchez ended up relying on friends to sell his assets so he’d have some means of supporting himself in Honduras. He also accessed his retirement account, providing additional funds.

But coworkers never saw him again.

Instead of helping to meet America’s energy needs, he’s now figuring out his next steps in an unfamiliar country that has no oil industry, let alone a need for skilled refinery workers.

“He doesn’t speak Spanish,” Sanders said. “He still calls and checks in with everybody from time to time. His friends are here.”

Just like Sanchez, José Galo parlayed hard work and a union contract into a good middle-class life.

But it’s all in pieces now. Galo—who made his way to the U.S. on his own at 14, sometimes sleeping on a couch and skipping meals for lack of money—says he has little choice but to return to Honduras following the deportation of his wife, Karla.

Galo, a U.S. citizen and member of USW Local 1693 in Lexington, Kentucky, accompanied his wife, also a native of Honduras, to a routine check-in with immigration officials in June. Thirty minutes later, a woman returned to the waiting room and told Galo, “She’s no longer here.”

“They took her out the back,” recalled Galo, a manufacturing worker. He made a brief trip to Honduras shortly thereafter, taking the couple’s six-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, so he could live with his mother.

Galo said he’s done his best to contribute to America, joining the ranks of the manufacturing workers who built the country and standing in solidarity with fellow USW members.

He availed himself of the advantages that the USW and other unions have provided all of their members, including members of various immigrant groups, for decades: good wages, affordable benefits, safe working conditions, and a brighter future.

Galo bought a house and a car, willingly paid taxes, and started a lawn care business to explore his entrepreneurial side. He liked nothing more than greeting his son when he walked through the door at the end of a long shift.

Now, his hardships cast a pall over the factory floor, where Galo says his coworkers, a second family, try to cheer him up even though they share his grief. He knows he won’t be seeing them much longer, even though he’s daunted by the prospect of starting over in a country as disadvantaged as when he left decades ago.

“This is my home now,” he said.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

The post Trump’s Immigration Dragnet Harms All U.S. Workers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ryan Stone.

A tragicomedy in diesel, delusion, and democracy.

In the high silence of the Andes, where the air thins to a whisper and the earth itself seems to remember older empires, there lies a nation haunted by the sound of waves it can no longer hear. It once possessed a coastline — a sliver of blue infinity stitched to its western hem like a divine indulgence. Then came the diplomats and the drillers, the wars wrapped in ledgers, and the cartographers tidy knives. Before anyone realized, the sea was gone — not with the violence of a storm but with the bureaucratic calm of a bank transfer.

And yet, even now, the highland people remember the ocean as one remembers a lost love — through rumors, relics, and dreams. In the plazas of La Paz, an old mariner appears from time to time, a spectral veteran who smells faintly of brine and carries a telescope and a broken compass that spins endlessly, loyal to confusion. They call him el Coronel del Desierto — the Colonel of the Desert. He claims to have once sailed ships across the Pacific, though no one can agree whether he is a ghost, a liar, or the last honest man left in the Republic. Children listen wide-eyed to his tales of sea monsters and salt breezes, and their mothers hush them, fearing that belief might reopen old wounds.

It is said that on certain nights, when the moon is full and the mountains gleam like ancient bones, el Coronel walks to the edge of the Altiplano and raises his telescope to the west, searching for the ocean that politics misplaced.

And maybe that’s how it began — the contagion carried on that ghostly shimmer. The dream of the sea drifted north, crossing borders as easily as capital, whispering its promise of stolen freedom and easy blame. By the time it reached the frostbitten prairies — the continent’s cracked reflection — it had changed shape, but not its essence.

Now, far from the Andes, another dreamer lifts his eyes to an imagined horizon. Alberta, that inland dominion of pumpjacks and performative grievances, gazes toward its own imagined shore — not of saltwater but of sovereignty. Its prophets speak of independence as if it were a port city, of separation as a voyage toward freedom, though the map offers no such coast. Perhaps, in some strip club in Fort McMurray, a new Coronel del Desierto is rehearsing the same old fable: that a nation betrayed by geography might yet find salvation in its own reflection — if only it stares long enough into the mirage.

No one remembers when the madness began — only that one morning the prairies started murmuring about the sea. Alberta’s independence fever has haunted Confederation as long as Alberta itself, but this latest outbreak must have begun as a bad joke in a Red Deer bar, then spread through talk radio, Telegram channels, and the reptile cortex of social media. Alberta, landlocked queen of crude, began to dream of independence — the kind of dream that smells of diesel and nostalgia, so large and lonely it could only come from a place that’s never seen a tide.

They say it started with a petition — ordinary names scrawled in digital ink, demanding a referendum to ask whether Alberta should leave the country that made it rich and then made it bored. A bureaucratic hallucination dressed up as democracy. The signatures stacked like wheat bales: tens of thousands, though no one could quite agree what they were signing for — revenge, leverage, bathrooms, or just the exquisite thrill of rebellion before supper.

In Calgary and Edmonton, the think-tank prophets began to speak of sovereignty as though it were a new oilfield — untapped, infinite, waiting just beyond their dreamed of borders. Polls whispered that a third of Albertans were tempted. Not believers, exactly, but flirts — politically bicurious, swiping right on secession and then ghosting on Grindr. The rest watched, muttering that the whole thing was theatre, a hostage note to Ottawa written in Sharpie and narcissism.

The tone was half tragedy, half stand-up routine. “We gave the country its fuel, its riches” the old-timers grumbled, “and they gave us lectures about emissions.” You could taste the resentment in the air — thick as bitumen. Yet beneath the noise, a deeper ache thrummed: a feeling that history had stolen something. Not a sea this time, but dignity.

And somewhere in this vast inland ocean of wheat and oil, the ghosts of old Bolivian sailors must be laughing. They, too, once believed salvation lay in a vanished coastline. Alberta’s new captains — draped in oil money and bravado — squint toward an invisible horizon, certain that sovereignty will shimmer there like a mirage, waiting to be struck rich.

But the maps, as ever, refuse to change. The prairies remain landlocked, the pipelines still run have to run west — or south if swallowed up by the voracious Trump regime, and the sea keeps its distance. Only the dream sails on — half tantrum, half bedtime story — a reminder that in certain corners of the world, weaponized nostalgia is the most dangerous natural resource of all.

They say the prairie wind carries the scent of freedom and rebellion — but what it really delivers is the tang of crude and the hum of machinery used as hymnals. In that hum, you’ll hear the politics of a rich province that decided it was owed a sea it never had and a license it never earned. The machinery squeals its gospel: Ottawa is stealing from us.

And yet, the province remains chained — not to Parliament, but to an industry. The oil patch is the puppeteer behind the curtain. The playbill says “separation,” but the director is the fossil-fuel complex. Behind the slogans hums a simple arithmetic: every dollar rise in oil means hundreds of millions for the us; every dip means austerity, resentment, blame for you. It’s an addiction so vast it’s become theology.

The stagehands behind the prairie passion play are hardly shy. Premier Danielle Smith, self-styled Joan of Arc of deregulation, waves her Sovereignty Act like a censer, filling the air with fumes of righteous defiance. Her courtiers — the Free Alberta Strategy architects and their cousins at the Modern Miracle Network — whisper about liberty while cashing royalty cheques. The Pathways Alliance, a nefarious cartel of oil sands titans, preaches carbon capture as salvation and sends lobbyists to Ottawa with the fervor of missionaries, their hymnals stamped Cenovus and Suncor. Even the Fraser Institute, that old libertarian oracle of trickle-down revelation, hums its usual chorus: privatize, decentralize, sanctify the market. And the faithful nod along, convinced that “freedom” is just another extraction to be refined, bottled, and sold.

The faithful howl about Ottawa while kneeling before the 2.0 versions of King Nebuchadnezzar’s Baba Gurgur. They preach freedom while the rig lights flicker like votive candles on the altar of dependency. Norway built a fortune from its oil and banked it for its grandchildren; Alberta built a mythology and handed the profits to the few. And now, as the world turns away from fossil fire, the old priests of petroleum are passing the collection plate again — this time in the name of independence.

The pundits call it sovereignty, but it’s self-hypnosis — a fever fed by oil money, American think tanks, and the ghosts of every boomtown preacher who ever promised salvation by the barrel. Their followers, dazed and loyal, mistake the roar of the pipeline for the sound of surf.

So here they stand, a province sitting atop one of the richest reserves on Earth, insisting it’s the victim of some distant, bilingual tyranny. The wells pump, the politicians posture, and the dream burns bright as a flare stack against the northern Albertan sky. But you cannot build a nation on exhaust fumes, and you cannot sail a sea made of oil. The tide they long for will never return — only the slow, shimmering flood of their own reflection.

They say el Coronel del Desierto finally left the Andes when his stories stopped paying the rent. He hitched a ride north on the fumes of globalization, crossed a few bad borders, and ended up in the badlands of Alberta, where the wind smells of gasoline and broken promises. He arrived with nothing but a telescope and a cough, muttering about the sea. The locals thought he was a prophet or a lunatic — which, these days, in this place, is a distinction without a difference.

Now he wanders the strip-mall cathedrals of the prairie, preaching to men in trucker caps and resentment, to oilfield roughnecks who mistake exhaust for incense. They nod along, eyes shining, as he tells them about the ocean that was stolen — by bureaucrats, by liberals, by some cabal of city devils who never got mud on their boots. They love that part. They know that tale by heart.

At night he drinks rye in motels with flickering neon and tells anyone who’ll listen that he once commanded a navy. The bartender doesn’t believe him but keeps pouring; it’s good business. Outside, the rigs kneel and rise in mechanical prayer, and the prairie hums with the same grievance like a church organ that only plays one note.

This is the gospel of our age: rage without compass, rebellion without memory. It moves across borders like an oil slick — thick, glistening, poisoning every reflection it touches.

And somewhere in that glare, el Coronel del Desierto stands again. He has traded the Andes for the plains, the Pacific for the illusion of another sea. He raises his telescope to the west, searching for the shimmer of salvation beyond the pumpjacks, beyond the pipelines, beyond the lie.

But the only tide that comes is the wind — cold, relentless, and empty of mercy.

He lowers the telescope. The crowd has quieted. Somewhere, a flare stack burns like a false star. The Colonel sighs — a sound old as empire — and for a moment, even the rigs seem to bow their heads.

Because they all know, in their bones, what he knows deep down: the ocean was never stolen.

It was sold.

The post “The Great Landlocked Rebellion” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ryan Stone.

A tragicomedy in diesel, delusion, and democracy.

In the high silence of the Andes, where the air thins to a whisper and the earth itself seems to remember older empires, there lies a nation haunted by the sound of waves it can no longer hear. It once possessed a coastline — a sliver of blue infinity stitched to its western hem like a divine indulgence. Then came the diplomats and the drillers, the wars wrapped in ledgers, and the cartographers tidy knives. Before anyone realized, the sea was gone — not with the violence of a storm but with the bureaucratic calm of a bank transfer.

And yet, even now, the highland people remember the ocean as one remembers a lost love — through rumors, relics, and dreams. In the plazas of La Paz, an old mariner appears from time to time, a spectral veteran who smells faintly of brine and carries a telescope and a broken compass that spins endlessly, loyal to confusion. They call him el Coronel del Desierto — the Colonel of the Desert. He claims to have once sailed ships across the Pacific, though no one can agree whether he is a ghost, a liar, or the last honest man left in the Republic. Children listen wide-eyed to his tales of sea monsters and salt breezes, and their mothers hush them, fearing that belief might reopen old wounds.

It is said that on certain nights, when the moon is full and the mountains gleam like ancient bones, el Coronel walks to the edge of the Altiplano and raises his telescope to the west, searching for the ocean that politics misplaced.

And maybe that’s how it began — the contagion carried on that ghostly shimmer. The dream of the sea drifted north, crossing borders as easily as capital, whispering its promise of stolen freedom and easy blame. By the time it reached the frostbitten prairies — the continent’s cracked reflection — it had changed shape, but not its essence.

Now, far from the Andes, another dreamer lifts his eyes to an imagined horizon. Alberta, that inland dominion of pumpjacks and performative grievances, gazes toward its own imagined shore — not of saltwater but of sovereignty. Its prophets speak of independence as if it were a port city, of separation as a voyage toward freedom, though the map offers no such coast. Perhaps, in some strip club in Fort McMurray, a new Coronel del Desierto is rehearsing the same old fable: that a nation betrayed by geography might yet find salvation in its own reflection — if only it stares long enough into the mirage.

No one remembers when the madness began — only that one morning the prairies started murmuring about the sea. Alberta’s independence fever has haunted Confederation as long as Alberta itself, but this latest outbreak must have begun as a bad joke in a Red Deer bar, then spread through talk radio, Telegram channels, and the reptile cortex of social media. Alberta, landlocked queen of crude, began to dream of independence — the kind of dream that smells of diesel and nostalgia, so large and lonely it could only come from a place that’s never seen a tide.

They say it started with a petition — ordinary names scrawled in digital ink, demanding a referendum to ask whether Alberta should leave the country that made it rich and then made it bored. A bureaucratic hallucination dressed up as democracy. The signatures stacked like wheat bales: tens of thousands, though no one could quite agree what they were signing for — revenge, leverage, bathrooms, or just the exquisite thrill of rebellion before supper.

In Calgary and Edmonton, the think-tank prophets began to speak of sovereignty as though it were a new oilfield — untapped, infinite, waiting just beyond their dreamed of borders. Polls whispered that a third of Albertans were tempted. Not believers, exactly, but flirts — politically bicurious, swiping right on secession and then ghosting on Grindr. The rest watched, muttering that the whole thing was theatre, a hostage note to Ottawa written in Sharpie and narcissism.

The tone was half tragedy, half stand-up routine. “We gave the country its fuel, its riches” the old-timers grumbled, “and they gave us lectures about emissions.” You could taste the resentment in the air — thick as bitumen. Yet beneath the noise, a deeper ache thrummed: a feeling that history had stolen something. Not a sea this time, but dignity.

And somewhere in this vast inland ocean of wheat and oil, the ghosts of old Bolivian sailors must be laughing. They, too, once believed salvation lay in a vanished coastline. Alberta’s new captains — draped in oil money and bravado — squint toward an invisible horizon, certain that sovereignty will shimmer there like a mirage, waiting to be struck rich.

But the maps, as ever, refuse to change. The prairies remain landlocked, the pipelines still run have to run west — or south if swallowed up by the voracious Trump regime, and the sea keeps its distance. Only the dream sails on — half tantrum, half bedtime story — a reminder that in certain corners of the world, weaponized nostalgia is the most dangerous natural resource of all.

They say the prairie wind carries the scent of freedom and rebellion — but what it really delivers is the tang of crude and the hum of machinery used as hymnals. In that hum, you’ll hear the politics of a rich province that decided it was owed a sea it never had and a license it never earned. The machinery squeals its gospel: Ottawa is stealing from us.

And yet, the province remains chained — not to Parliament, but to an industry. The oil patch is the puppeteer behind the curtain. The playbill says “separation,” but the director is the fossil-fuel complex. Behind the slogans hums a simple arithmetic: every dollar rise in oil means hundreds of millions for the us; every dip means austerity, resentment, blame for you. It’s an addiction so vast it’s become theology.

The stagehands behind the prairie passion play are hardly shy. Premier Danielle Smith, self-styled Joan of Arc of deregulation, waves her Sovereignty Act like a censer, filling the air with fumes of righteous defiance. Her courtiers — the Free Alberta Strategy architects and their cousins at the Modern Miracle Network — whisper about liberty while cashing royalty cheques. The Pathways Alliance, a nefarious cartel of oil sands titans, preaches carbon capture as salvation and sends lobbyists to Ottawa with the fervor of missionaries, their hymnals stamped Cenovus and Suncor. Even the Fraser Institute, that old libertarian oracle of trickle-down revelation, hums its usual chorus: privatize, decentralize, sanctify the market. And the faithful nod along, convinced that “freedom” is just another extraction to be refined, bottled, and sold.

The faithful howl about Ottawa while kneeling before the 2.0 versions of King Nebuchadnezzar’s Baba Gurgur. They preach freedom while the rig lights flicker like votive candles on the altar of dependency. Norway built a fortune from its oil and banked it for its grandchildren; Alberta built a mythology and handed the profits to the few. And now, as the world turns away from fossil fire, the old priests of petroleum are passing the collection plate again — this time in the name of independence.

The pundits call it sovereignty, but it’s self-hypnosis — a fever fed by oil money, American think tanks, and the ghosts of every boomtown preacher who ever promised salvation by the barrel. Their followers, dazed and loyal, mistake the roar of the pipeline for the sound of surf.

So here they stand, a province sitting atop one of the richest reserves on Earth, insisting it’s the victim of some distant, bilingual tyranny. The wells pump, the politicians posture, and the dream burns bright as a flare stack against the northern Albertan sky. But you cannot build a nation on exhaust fumes, and you cannot sail a sea made of oil. The tide they long for will never return — only the slow, shimmering flood of their own reflection.

They say el Coronel del Desierto finally left the Andes when his stories stopped paying the rent. He hitched a ride north on the fumes of globalization, crossed a few bad borders, and ended up in the badlands of Alberta, where the wind smells of gasoline and broken promises. He arrived with nothing but a telescope and a cough, muttering about the sea. The locals thought he was a prophet or a lunatic — which, these days, in this place, is a distinction without a difference.

Now he wanders the strip-mall cathedrals of the prairie, preaching to men in trucker caps and resentment, to oilfield roughnecks who mistake exhaust for incense. They nod along, eyes shining, as he tells them about the ocean that was stolen — by bureaucrats, by liberals, by some cabal of city devils who never got mud on their boots. They love that part. They know that tale by heart.

At night he drinks rye in motels with flickering neon and tells anyone who’ll listen that he once commanded a navy. The bartender doesn’t believe him but keeps pouring; it’s good business. Outside, the rigs kneel and rise in mechanical prayer, and the prairie hums with the same grievance like a church organ that only plays one note.

This is the gospel of our age: rage without compass, rebellion without memory. It moves across borders like an oil slick — thick, glistening, poisoning every reflection it touches.

And somewhere in that glare, el Coronel del Desierto stands again. He has traded the Andes for the plains, the Pacific for the illusion of another sea. He raises his telescope to the west, searching for the shimmer of salvation beyond the pumpjacks, beyond the pipelines, beyond the lie.

But the only tide that comes is the wind — cold, relentless, and empty of mercy.

He lowers the telescope. The crowd has quieted. Somewhere, a flare stack burns like a false star. The Colonel sighs — a sound old as empire — and for a moment, even the rigs seem to bow their heads.

Because they all know, in their bones, what he knows deep down: the ocean was never stolen.

It was sold.

The post “The Great Landlocked Rebellion” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Investiture of a knight (miniature from the statutes of the Order of the Knot, founded in 1352 by Louis I of Naples) – Public Domain

Ever since the Internet was born, along with Big Tech, in the 1990s, the world has had a sense that we have entered a new era in global political economy. Many have tried to place a finger on what this transformation is all about. Perhaps the most famous among these critical thinkers is Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote that we are living in an era of “surveillance capitalism,” wherein our harvesting information from cyberspace also provides Google, Microsoft, and other tech titans the opportunity to rake in data about us that they process to create our digital profiles. These profiles are then used by them or their client corporations to manipulate us into purchasing products or are sold to the state, which has an interest in keeping tabs on us.

Another important effort to define what was new came from Mckenzie Wark, who wrote in her influential Hacker’s Manifesto that the central contradiction of the new age was no longer that between capital and labor but between “hackers,”  or the sources of innovation and creativity who wanted to keep information free, and the “vectoral ruling class” that sought to expropriate knowledge and turn it into a commodity.

Acknowledging his debt to both Zuboff and Wark, Yanis Varoufakis says that while they have important insights, they have not followed these to their logical conclusion: that capitalism as a distinct mode of production has been superseded. The synthesis that Varoufakis offers is what he calls “technofeudalism.” He does not say that capitalists no longer matter. They do, and they still engage in extracting surplus value or profit from workers in the process of production. But they themselves are subordinate to a new elite, the “cloud capitalists” or “cloudalists,” who have privatized the commons that was cyberspace and now control access to it. The cloudalists, among the most powerful of which are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the chipmaker Nvidia, control the globe-spanning information highways that are sustained materially by massive data centers located in different parts of the world. Accessing these intermeshed networks in cyberspace known as the “cloud” is now vital for the traditional or “terrestrial” capitalists to get access to you to sell their products, and these corporate gatekeepers make their money by charging these capitalists rent. Without access to the net, capitalists cannot make profits, and, very much like the feudal lords of yore who controlled land, the cloudalists’ monopolistic control of the cloud allows them to directly or indirectly collect, from the “vassal capitalists” and anyone who uses the net, “rent,” or income that is not subject to the market competition on which profit depends.

Cloud Proles and Cloud Serfs

As in capitalism, it is not the cloudalists or the terrestrial capitalists that produce value. The real sources of value are what Varoufakis calls the “cloud proles” and the “cloud serfs.” The cloud proles are the service workers at Amazon and other Big Tech facilities who are nonunionized, paid meager wages, and in constant threat of being displaced by robots and Artificial Intelligence. But these proles’ labor provides only a fraction of the value extracted by the cloudalists. It is the cloud serfs that create most of that value. Following Zuboff, Varoufakis says the cloud serfs are most of us: we provide raw material for the cloud whenever we do a Google search, post a photo on Facebook, or order a book on Amazon, material that is then processed into information that the cloudalists and terrestrial capitalists can use to develop ever more sophisticated marketing strategies to get us to part with our dollars. The distinguishing characteristic of cloud serfs is they are doing unpaid work for the cloudalists even if they don’t realize it. As he remarks, “The fact that we do so voluntarily, happily even, does not detract from the fact that we are unpaid manufacturers—cloud serfs whose daily self-directed toil enriches a tiny band of multibillionaires.”

We are, in other words, the unsuspecting marks of the ultimate scam.

The Rise of Cloud Capital

Varoufakis traces the rise of the cloudalists to the central banks’ creation of money with zero or below zero interest in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 and, later, during the COVID 19 pandemic, to stimulate production and consumer spending. But, with the big fall in demand, most corporations did not invest the loans the private banks channeled to them, instead using them to buy back their own corporate stocks at low prices or invest it in real estate. But cloudalists like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg used the central bank money rerouted to them by the big banks to massively invest in expanding and monopolizing the cloud. The cloudalists

mopped up many of the billions sloshing around within the financial system.  With them, they paid for server farms, fibre optic cables, artificial intelligence laboratories, gargantuan warehouses, software developers, top-notch engineers, laboratories, promising start-ups and all the rest.  In an environment where profit had become optional, the cloudalists seized upon the central bank money to build a new empire.

Resistance in the Era of Technofeudalism

The central contradiction in the technofeudal era has passed from the conflict between labor and capital to that between the cloudalists and their cloud serfs and cloud proles. Varoufakis is my colleague in the international council of Progressive International (PI), and he has helped inspire PI’s partnership with the Switzerland-based UNI Global Union to organize annual one-day strikes by Amazon workers in many countries. According to him, if these actions could be coordinated with Amazon users, so that a critical mass of them are convinced not to visit the Amazon website for even one day, the impact would not be minimal: “Even if were only mildly successful, causing say a 10 percent drop in Amazon’s usual revenues, while Amazon’s warehouse strike disrupted deliveries for 24 hours, such action might prove enough to push Amazon’s share price down in ways that no traditional labor action could achieve.”

But building a strong resistance movement to the cloudalists will have to go beyond such momentary alliances. “To stand any chance of overthrowing technofeudalism and putting the demos back into democracy,” he writes, “we need to gather together not just the traditional proletariat and the crowd proles but also the cloud serfs and, indeed, some of the vassal capitalists.”

Varoufakis might have added to this “grand coalition” the communities whose lives have been disrupted by Big Data. As a recent New York Times article reports,

As data centers rise, the sites — which need vast amounts of power for computing and water to cool the computers — have contributed to or exacerbated disruptions not only in Mexico, but in more than a dozen other countries…In Ireland, data centers consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity. In Chile, precious aquifers are in danger of depletion. In South Africa, where blackouts have long been routine, data centers are further taxing the national grid. Similar concerns have surfaced in Brazil, Britain, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore and Spain.

Communities forced to host data centers, in fact, are now the cutting edge of resistance to Big Tech. In country after country, notes the report, “activists, residents and environmental organizations have banded together to oppose data centers. Some have tried blocking the projects, while others have pushed for more oversight and transparency.”

Clarification Needed

I have a few comments on some of the key elements of Varoufakis’ paradigm, and these are advanced in a critical but friendly spirit:

First, his conceptualization of the proles appears to include only the low-paid service workers. What about the information engineers and other knowledge specialists and their office staffs? He talks about the role of the “technostructure” in late capitalism in the early part of the book, but it seems he includes the different layers of this stratum in management during the technofeudal era rather than in labor, though as Mckenzie Wark stressed, technical innovators or “hackers” contribute to the value that is expropriated by the Big Tech elite.

Second, there is some ambiguity in the book when it comes to who exactly has the ultimate power in the technofeudal power structure. In most of the book, the billionaire leaders of the Big Tech firms like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook, are portrayed as the power elite. But he also writes about the “financial uber-lords [who] rival the cloudalists—three U.S. companies with powers exceeding those of private equity and all terrestrial capitalists put together: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. These three firms, the Big Three as they are known in financial circles, effectively own American capitalism.” This is due to the controlling shares they own in the most strategic corporations. So, do we have a split power elite with blocs that have different sources of power? Are we really in a post-capitalist era or merely in another (higher? hyper?) stage of capitalism?

This relates to my third point, which is that Varoufakis must do more explaining of how the dynamics of technofeudalism are really distinct from those of monopoly capitalism.

Economists, both progressive and orthodox, have long contended that in a situation of monopoly or oligopoly, as in the car industry or pharmaceuticals, the key players derive profit but they also extract rent, which is profit in excess of what would be available if there were significant market competition. As in the car and drug industries, there is in the Big Tech sector both oligopoly and fierce competition, much of it “non-price competition,” the dynamics of which results in both profit and rent. Are not the dynamics of cloudalist competition really the same? How does monopoly capitalist rent differ from technofeudal rent? How do the earnings of Google, for instance, differ from those of non-Big Tech oligopolists like JP Morgan, Johnson and Johnson, and Toyota, except perhaps in terms of volume?

My last point has to do with the changing relationship between the state and the cloudalists.  In the book, the state mainly appears as an enabler of the rise of the cloudalists via the central banks’ provision of free money in the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the pandemic. Recent developments, however, have seen the state disciplining Big Tech and curbing its freedom of maneuver. Under both the first Trump administration and Biden’s presidency, Washington imposed fairly restrictive measures that cut into the profits of the cloudalists, like the sharing of advanced information technology with Chinese corporations. For instance, export controls on advanced AI chips imposed by Biden in 2022 have drastically reduced Nvidia’s share of the Chinese AI chip market from 95 percent to 50 percent, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars. Under the second Trump administration, Washington has moved even more drastically, using the imposition of tariffs to force cloudalists like Apple to move key parts of their global supply chains to the United States, though this would involve major costs and disruptions. But acknowledging the state’s commanding role, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated recently, “The president wants more [production] in the US…Apple also wants more in the US.”

On Accurately Naming the Beast

Varoufakis does note the more prominent role of the state represented by these latest developments. However, he does not fully draw out their implications for what he has portrayed as the immense power of the cloudalists and what lies ahead for them. From the enabler of the cloudalists portrayed in Technofeudalism, the relationship between the state and Big Tech in the United States is becoming more like that between the Chinese Communist Party regime and China’s data titans like Alibaba and Baidu, as the geopolitical rivalry heats up and national security concerns, not profitability, take center stage. China’s political economy has been called state capitalism or political capitalism (with only the Communist Party of China clinging on to Deng Xiaoping’s definition of it as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). Varoufakis contends that the choice of a name is critical to understanding the essence of a political economy. I agree.  But to underline what is likely to be become an even bigger directive role for the state in the political economy of the United States and the increasing subordination of profitability to national security, I think we need a better word than “technofeudalism.” (This would have the added benefit of avoiding the subliminal association of the title to Friedrich Hayek’s classic anti-socialist neoliberal tract, The Road to Serfdom.)

Technofeudalism is a provocative piece of analysis, well-argued and well-written. And it is very accessible to those with little background in political economy or economics. There may be areas where I may not completely agree or points that I feel should be more carefully elaborated, but these should not detract from my judgment that this book by one of today’s leading progressive thinkers is a major contribution to understanding the times we live in.

The post Have We Entered a New Feudal Era? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Investiture of a knight (miniature from the statutes of the Order of the Knot, founded in 1352 by Louis I of Naples) – Public Domain

Ever since the Internet was born, along with Big Tech, in the 1990s, the world has had a sense that we have entered a new era in global political economy. Many have tried to place a finger on what this transformation is all about. Perhaps the most famous among these critical thinkers is Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote that we are living in an era of “surveillance capitalism,” wherein our harvesting information from cyberspace also provides Google, Microsoft, and other tech titans the opportunity to rake in data about us that they process to create our digital profiles. These profiles are then used by them or their client corporations to manipulate us into purchasing products or are sold to the state, which has an interest in keeping tabs on us.

Another important effort to define what was new came from Mckenzie Wark, who wrote in her influential Hacker’s Manifesto that the central contradiction of the new age was no longer that between capital and labor but between “hackers,”  or the sources of innovation and creativity who wanted to keep information free, and the “vectoral ruling class” that sought to expropriate knowledge and turn it into a commodity.

Acknowledging his debt to both Zuboff and Wark, Yanis Varoufakis says that while they have important insights, they have not followed these to their logical conclusion: that capitalism as a distinct mode of production has been superseded. The synthesis that Varoufakis offers is what he calls “technofeudalism.” He does not say that capitalists no longer matter. They do, and they still engage in extracting surplus value or profit from workers in the process of production. But they themselves are subordinate to a new elite, the “cloud capitalists” or “cloudalists,” who have privatized the commons that was cyberspace and now control access to it. The cloudalists, among the most powerful of which are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the chipmaker Nvidia, control the globe-spanning information highways that are sustained materially by massive data centers located in different parts of the world. Accessing these intermeshed networks in cyberspace known as the “cloud” is now vital for the traditional or “terrestrial” capitalists to get access to you to sell their products, and these corporate gatekeepers make their money by charging these capitalists rent. Without access to the net, capitalists cannot make profits, and, very much like the feudal lords of yore who controlled land, the cloudalists’ monopolistic control of the cloud allows them to directly or indirectly collect, from the “vassal capitalists” and anyone who uses the net, “rent,” or income that is not subject to the market competition on which profit depends.

Cloud Proles and Cloud Serfs

As in capitalism, it is not the cloudalists or the terrestrial capitalists that produce value. The real sources of value are what Varoufakis calls the “cloud proles” and the “cloud serfs.” The cloud proles are the service workers at Amazon and other Big Tech facilities who are nonunionized, paid meager wages, and in constant threat of being displaced by robots and Artificial Intelligence. But these proles’ labor provides only a fraction of the value extracted by the cloudalists. It is the cloud serfs that create most of that value. Following Zuboff, Varoufakis says the cloud serfs are most of us: we provide raw material for the cloud whenever we do a Google search, post a photo on Facebook, or order a book on Amazon, material that is then processed into information that the cloudalists and terrestrial capitalists can use to develop ever more sophisticated marketing strategies to get us to part with our dollars. The distinguishing characteristic of cloud serfs is they are doing unpaid work for the cloudalists even if they don’t realize it. As he remarks, “The fact that we do so voluntarily, happily even, does not detract from the fact that we are unpaid manufacturers—cloud serfs whose daily self-directed toil enriches a tiny band of multibillionaires.”

We are, in other words, the unsuspecting marks of the ultimate scam.

The Rise of Cloud Capital

Varoufakis traces the rise of the cloudalists to the central banks’ creation of money with zero or below zero interest in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 and, later, during the COVID 19 pandemic, to stimulate production and consumer spending. But, with the big fall in demand, most corporations did not invest the loans the private banks channeled to them, instead using them to buy back their own corporate stocks at low prices or invest it in real estate. But cloudalists like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg used the central bank money rerouted to them by the big banks to massively invest in expanding and monopolizing the cloud. The cloudalists

mopped up many of the billions sloshing around within the financial system.  With them, they paid for server farms, fibre optic cables, artificial intelligence laboratories, gargantuan warehouses, software developers, top-notch engineers, laboratories, promising start-ups and all the rest.  In an environment where profit had become optional, the cloudalists seized upon the central bank money to build a new empire.

Resistance in the Era of Technofeudalism

The central contradiction in the technofeudal era has passed from the conflict between labor and capital to that between the cloudalists and their cloud serfs and cloud proles. Varoufakis is my colleague in the international council of Progressive International (PI), and he has helped inspire PI’s partnership with the Switzerland-based UNI Global Union to organize annual one-day strikes by Amazon workers in many countries. According to him, if these actions could be coordinated with Amazon users, so that a critical mass of them are convinced not to visit the Amazon website for even one day, the impact would not be minimal: “Even if were only mildly successful, causing say a 10 percent drop in Amazon’s usual revenues, while Amazon’s warehouse strike disrupted deliveries for 24 hours, such action might prove enough to push Amazon’s share price down in ways that no traditional labor action could achieve.”

But building a strong resistance movement to the cloudalists will have to go beyond such momentary alliances. “To stand any chance of overthrowing technofeudalism and putting the demos back into democracy,” he writes, “we need to gather together not just the traditional proletariat and the crowd proles but also the cloud serfs and, indeed, some of the vassal capitalists.”

Varoufakis might have added to this “grand coalition” the communities whose lives have been disrupted by Big Data. As a recent New York Times article reports,

As data centers rise, the sites — which need vast amounts of power for computing and water to cool the computers — have contributed to or exacerbated disruptions not only in Mexico, but in more than a dozen other countries…In Ireland, data centers consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity. In Chile, precious aquifers are in danger of depletion. In South Africa, where blackouts have long been routine, data centers are further taxing the national grid. Similar concerns have surfaced in Brazil, Britain, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore and Spain.

Communities forced to host data centers, in fact, are now the cutting edge of resistance to Big Tech. In country after country, notes the report, “activists, residents and environmental organizations have banded together to oppose data centers. Some have tried blocking the projects, while others have pushed for more oversight and transparency.”

Clarification Needed

I have a few comments on some of the key elements of Varoufakis’ paradigm, and these are advanced in a critical but friendly spirit:

First, his conceptualization of the proles appears to include only the low-paid service workers. What about the information engineers and other knowledge specialists and their office staffs? He talks about the role of the “technostructure” in late capitalism in the early part of the book, but it seems he includes the different layers of this stratum in management during the technofeudal era rather than in labor, though as Mckenzie Wark stressed, technical innovators or “hackers” contribute to the value that is expropriated by the Big Tech elite.

Second, there is some ambiguity in the book when it comes to who exactly has the ultimate power in the technofeudal power structure. In most of the book, the billionaire leaders of the Big Tech firms like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook, are portrayed as the power elite. But he also writes about the “financial uber-lords [who] rival the cloudalists—three U.S. companies with powers exceeding those of private equity and all terrestrial capitalists put together: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. These three firms, the Big Three as they are known in financial circles, effectively own American capitalism.” This is due to the controlling shares they own in the most strategic corporations. So, do we have a split power elite with blocs that have different sources of power? Are we really in a post-capitalist era or merely in another (higher? hyper?) stage of capitalism?

This relates to my third point, which is that Varoufakis must do more explaining of how the dynamics of technofeudalism are really distinct from those of monopoly capitalism.

Economists, both progressive and orthodox, have long contended that in a situation of monopoly or oligopoly, as in the car industry or pharmaceuticals, the key players derive profit but they also extract rent, which is profit in excess of what would be available if there were significant market competition. As in the car and drug industries, there is in the Big Tech sector both oligopoly and fierce competition, much of it “non-price competition,” the dynamics of which results in both profit and rent. Are not the dynamics of cloudalist competition really the same? How does monopoly capitalist rent differ from technofeudal rent? How do the earnings of Google, for instance, differ from those of non-Big Tech oligopolists like JP Morgan, Johnson and Johnson, and Toyota, except perhaps in terms of volume?

My last point has to do with the changing relationship between the state and the cloudalists.  In the book, the state mainly appears as an enabler of the rise of the cloudalists via the central banks’ provision of free money in the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the pandemic. Recent developments, however, have seen the state disciplining Big Tech and curbing its freedom of maneuver. Under both the first Trump administration and Biden’s presidency, Washington imposed fairly restrictive measures that cut into the profits of the cloudalists, like the sharing of advanced information technology with Chinese corporations. For instance, export controls on advanced AI chips imposed by Biden in 2022 have drastically reduced Nvidia’s share of the Chinese AI chip market from 95 percent to 50 percent, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars. Under the second Trump administration, Washington has moved even more drastically, using the imposition of tariffs to force cloudalists like Apple to move key parts of their global supply chains to the United States, though this would involve major costs and disruptions. But acknowledging the state’s commanding role, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated recently, “The president wants more [production] in the US…Apple also wants more in the US.”

On Accurately Naming the Beast

Varoufakis does note the more prominent role of the state represented by these latest developments. However, he does not fully draw out their implications for what he has portrayed as the immense power of the cloudalists and what lies ahead for them. From the enabler of the cloudalists portrayed in Technofeudalism, the relationship between the state and Big Tech in the United States is becoming more like that between the Chinese Communist Party regime and China’s data titans like Alibaba and Baidu, as the geopolitical rivalry heats up and national security concerns, not profitability, take center stage. China’s political economy has been called state capitalism or political capitalism (with only the Communist Party of China clinging on to Deng Xiaoping’s definition of it as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). Varoufakis contends that the choice of a name is critical to understanding the essence of a political economy. I agree.  But to underline what is likely to be become an even bigger directive role for the state in the political economy of the United States and the increasing subordination of profitability to national security, I think we need a better word than “technofeudalism.” (This would have the added benefit of avoiding the subliminal association of the title to Friedrich Hayek’s classic anti-socialist neoliberal tract, The Road to Serfdom.)

Technofeudalism is a provocative piece of analysis, well-argued and well-written. And it is very accessible to those with little background in political economy or economics. There may be areas where I may not completely agree or points that I feel should be more carefully elaborated, but these should not detract from my judgment that this book by one of today’s leading progressive thinkers is a major contribution to understanding the times we live in.

The post Have We Entered a New Feudal Era? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by María Alejandra Mora, Wikipedia.

For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.

As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Nightstalkers” — the same unit that, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.

Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005 an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”

Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away — but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

This was how the Bush–Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The UN reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly a million Iraqis died overall.

Iraq has never fully recovered—and the U.S. never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected U.S.-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey—not the United States.

The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal”—or simply the destruction of a country or society.

A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, U.S.-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking—while making life worse for ordinary people.

These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.

Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main U.S. ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.

In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban—the very force it had invaded the country to remove.

In Haiti, the CIA and U.S. Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.

In 2006, the U.S. militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government—an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. U.S. AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.

In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the U.S. supported an election to replace him. The U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration—until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.

Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the U.S. and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries and a 45% reduction in oil exports.

Also in 2011, the U.S. and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the U.S.-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, Al Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. still militarily occupy other parts of the country.

The U.S.-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.

In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a U.S.-backed transitional government, the U.S. joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis—yet did not defeat the Houthis.

That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the U.S. has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.

But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. U.S. presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.

In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots—attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean—have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by U.S. senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.

Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it—and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.

Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of  Iran. He has maintained the global empire of U.S. military bases and deployments, and supercharged the U.S. war machine with a trillion dollar war chest—draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.

Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.

Brazilian President Lula made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.” At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over U.S. investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.

Cuba-bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as Secretary of State it renders him incapable of responsibly managing U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.

Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.

If there is one lesson from the long history of U.S. interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial U.S. violence once and for all.

The post “Regime Change” in Venezuela is a Euphemism for U.S.-Inflicted Carnage appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image Source: TUBS – CC BY-SA 3.0

Multilateralism is in tatters. Instead of rules-based, consensus agreements, global economic relations have largely devolved into one-on-one arm-twisting and name-calling — alternating with fawning sycophancy and lavish personal gifts to curry favor with President Trump, from private jets to gold-covered golf balls, crowns, and desserts.

In a world already divided by extreme inequalities, the collapse of multilateralism makes it even more likely that the most powerful players — the largest economies and the wealthiest corporations and individuals — will score the best deals. Small countries and ordinary people, from Iowa soybean farmers and Mexican factory workers to digital service consumers in Cambodia, are even more likely to get the shaft.

The G20 is a space that was intended to catalyze multilateral action. In fact, it touts itself as the “the premier forum for international economic cooperation,” and it is the one place where leaders of the world’s largest economies sit down together at least once a year for face-to-face dialogue.

South Africa will host this year’s G20 summit from November 22 to 23, and the United States will host the next one in December 2026. Do we have any reason to think this forum holds potential for not only restoring multilateralism but also advancing a more equitable global economy?

This is a question I’ve grappled with over the past several months as part of a team of analysts from the UK, Brazil, South Africa, and other countries. In our new joint report, The G20 at a Crossroads, we document a few examples of decisive actions this body has taken during its nearly two decades of existence.

In the midst of the financial crisis that erupted in 2008, for instance, labor unions and others successfully lobbied G20 leaders to adopt coordinated stimulus measures that helped avoid a depression-level global collapse.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the G20 approved of at least some debt relief for low-income countries and authorized $650 billion in financial aid in the form of “special drawing rights,” the largest-ever allocation of this IMF-created international reserve asset.

These actions were far from perfect. Governments prematurely aborted the stimulus programs they adopted after the 2008 crash in favor of austerity budgets that deepened and prolonged economic crises.

Pandemic support programs were woefully insufficient for the poorest countries and failed to prevent many of them from sinking even further into debt. Between 2019 and 2023, Sub-Saharan Africa’s total external debts increased from $747 billion to $864 billion while the number of global billionaires grew from 2,153 to 2,640. Overall, 3.4 billion of the world’s people live in countries that spent more money in the years 2021-2023 servicing their foreign debts than on public education or health.

What can we learn from these examples? G20 leaders obviously have the power to mobilize vast resources, but the few times they’ve used this power, the focus has largely been on containing market crises to protect the interests of the wealthiest creditors and investors rather than improving the lives of the most vulnerable.

And so while we need to push for renewed multilateralism, we cannot be satisfied with a return to old models. We need new approaches that go beyond crisis management to build a more resilient, sustainable, and just global economy for the long term.

To achieve this, the G20 must tackle what we describe in our report as the “lived crises of our time” — the daily realities of extreme droughts, food insecurity, unaffordable housing, precarious work, debt traps, and forced displacement.

Decades of neglecting these threats to global stability has undercut the welfare of people in both the Global North and South. High levels of poverty and unemployment in the developing world, for example, weaken the bargaining power of U.S. workers who are competing in a global labor pool.

Climate change, obviously, knows no boundaries. And skyrocketing inequality is fueling political polarization, authoritarianism, and xenophobia around the world, as elites deflect blame onto migrants and other convenient scapegoats instead of confronting structural failures.

Last year, the Brazilian presidency took important steps towards broadening the G20 agenda. Through diplomacy, sustained civil society engagement, and collaboration with innovative academics, they elevated critical proposals for clean energy financing, taxing extreme wealth, and valuing care work. And while they did not secure G20-wide cooperation on these fronts, their efforts gave a boost to campaigns in numerous countries for increasing taxes on billionaires and ensuring decent pay for caregivers and affordable care for those who need it.

“Wherever we live, we all want the same things — a secure place to live, a healthy environment, the ability to care for our loved ones, and the chance to plan for our future,” notes our lead report author, Fernanda Balata, of the New Economics Foundation.

With political will and a commitment to cooperation, G20 leaders have the power to deliver these basic elements of a dignified life to billions of people.

The post Can the G20 Do More Than Serve Markets and Investors? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety – CC BY-SA 3.0

I learned basic arithmetic skills in third grade. I wasn’t exceptional; everyone in my public school third-grade class learned them. Of course, we all can now use computers to have calculations done for us in a fraction of a second. But still, somehow we have major national debates that show zero understanding of even the most basic arithmetic.

The latest example is the $2,000 tariff dividend check that Trump is promising us. The arithmetic here is about as simple as it gets. We have roughly 340 million people in the country. Let’s say 10 percent don’t get the check because they meet Trump’s category of “high-income.”

That leaves over 300 million people getting Trump’s $2,000 checks. That comes to more than $600 billion. Trump’s tariffs are raising around $270 billion. That means we will be paying out $330 billion more in Trump tariff dividend checks than he is raising in tariff revenue. That would add $270 billion to the deficit — this coming from the same guy who is making an obsession of paying down our national debt.

And just to be clear, we were already looking at a budget deficit for 2026 of $1.8 trillion. If we add $330 billion, the deficit for the fiscal year will be $2.1 trillion. To put this in simple language that even a reporter for a major national news outlet can understand, Trump is proposing to add $2.1 trillion to the debt in 2026; he is not paying it down.

I acknowledge not being a deficit hawk and am not terrified by a deficit of this size, which is roughly 7 percent of GDP. But I suspect most of the politicians in Washington are, and certainly anyone who thinks we need to be paying down the debt should be screaming bloody murder.

But watching the reaction in major media outlets, there seems almost no appreciation of the fact that Trump was floating what would ordinarily be considered a very large increase in the deficit. In fact, if Trump were to give this tariff dividend check every year over the next decade, it would add close to $4 trillion to the debt (counting interest payments), almost as much as the big tax cut Congress approved earlier this year.

It’s also worth comparing Trump’s tariff dividends to other items in the news. The government shutdown was in large part over the $35 billion in annual payments for enhanced subsidies for people buying insurance in Obamacare exchanges. Trump and Republicans in Congress claimed that we didn’t have the money to pay for these subsidies. Trump’s tariff dividend checks would cost more than 17 times as much as the enhanced insurance subsidies.

To make another comparison, Trump saved us around $6 billion a year by shutting down PEPFAR, the program that has saved tens of millions of lives by treating people in Africa for AIDS. This means that Trump’s tariff dividend checks will cost us 100 times as much as the AIDS program that he said we couldn’t afford.

And just to throw in one more comparison, the annual appropriation for public broadcasting was $550 million. Trump’s tariff dividend checks would cost more than 1,000 times as much as the government’s payments for public broadcasting.

People can differ in their views on how important it is to save lives in Africa or provide people here with healthcare. They may also differ in their assessments of how important deficits are. But it really would be good if media outlets could make knowledge of third grade arithmetic a job requirement for reporters who deal with budget issues. It should be their job to provide meaningful information to the public on the topic. Letting someone talk about $2,000 dividend checks, and also about paying down the debt, is a sick joke.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. 

The post Tariff Dividend Checks for Dummies (i.e., the People in Policy Debates) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Beyond My Ken – CC BY-SA 4.0

When veterans and their families gather at commemorative events on Nov. 11, many who use the benefits and services of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will be wondering whether they can still rely on that federal agency.

Among those worried about the agency’s future — and their own — are the 100,000 former service members who comprise one-third of the workforce in the largest public health care system in the country.

These veterans work at nearly 1,400 VA-run hospitals and clinics nationwide. Every day, they help the nine million men and women who have service-related medical conditions or qualify for VA coverage because of financial need or recent deployment in combat zones.

The fact that so many VA caregivers have first-hand experience with the military–and resulting wounds of war–creates a culture of solidarity and empathy between patients and providers that is unique in U.S. health care.

But the Trump administration doesn’t seem to appreciate the importance of veterans getting specialized, high-quality services from a skilled, committed and union-represented workforce.

Since January, political appointees in Washington have canceled the contracts of VA researchers developing new treatments that can save veterans’ lives (and benefit millions of non-VA patients). VA Secretary Doug Collins has reduced the agency’s in-house clinical care budget and pledged to cut 30,000 positions this year. More patients are now being referred to private sector treatment — which is often costlier, of lower quality and not as accessible, particularly in rural states. And, in a move still being challenged in court, Collins has deprived 300,000 workers of their collective bargaining rights.

In 2022, VA doctors, nurses, therapists and thousands of support staff members used their collective voice to block VA facility closings sought by the Biden administration. VA nurses have campaigned for better nurse-patient staffing ratios to improve patient safety and for the use of lift equipmentthat protects both patients and their bedside helpers.

Union members at the VA have also blown the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse involving unnecessary outsourcing of VA services, which costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars each year. Recently, 170 current and retired VA clinicians recently signed an open letter warning that, if this privatization trend continues, it will “undermine direct care delivery, overwhelm (the) VA’s budget and negatively affect the lives of all veterans.”

The letter reminded Congress, the White House and VA Secretary Doug Collins that the VA has a long history of “continuous improvement and innovation,” which has made it a “respected model for integrated, patient-centered medicine” as well as “the system that the vast majority of veterans trust and prefer for their care.”

VA patients and their families have been showing up at local and national protests against privatization. They are joined by veterans’ groups that range from progressive to conservative and differ on many issues but all agree on one thing: saving the VA.

Women veterans — now the fastest-growing part of the U.S. veteran population — are very active in this fight, according to Kyleanne Hunter, the former Cobra attack helicopter pilot who now heads Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

“Women veterans need a strong and highly functioning VA because we have unique needs, not only when compared to those of male veterans but also to women who are civilian patients,” Hunter told us in an interview. “Anyone who takes care of women vets needs to understand the jobs women had in the military and the injuries and exposures we may have sustained and how that impacts our health.”

A healthy nation depends on a healthy VA; this Veterans Day, let’s recommit to keeping it that way.

The post This Veterans Day, the VA Faces Multiple Threats appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Depiction of Rip Van Winkle by John Quidor (1829)

There is an old children’s tale about Rip Van Winkle. He fell asleep for 20 years and wakes up after the America Revolution and finds the world has changed in big ways. Donald Trump seems to be doing his own Rip Van Winkle routine. This weekend, Trump suggested that as an alternative to Obamacare — which he said feeds the “money sucking” insurance industry — we just give money directly to people and let them buy their own healthcare.

This is a Rip Van Winkle story because Trump seems to think he has come up with a new idea. He apparently has missed the debate around healthcare reform that led up to Obamacare. He also apparently missed the debate on developing an alternative during his first term.

While we don’t know exactly what Trump has in mind (the plan will be ready in two weeks:), I hear) there are fundamental problems with this sort of just-give-people-cash idea. These problems push serious people, who have been awake, towards something like Obamacare or universal Medicare.

The basic problem of providing healthcare coverage is that some people have health conditions that are very expensive to treat, but most people are relatively healthy. If we just left things to the market, insurers would only cover healthy people. These people are very profitable for the industry, since they are basically just sending their insurer a check every month.

Trump Checks: Who Gets Them, and How Much?

The problem is with the tens of millions of people who have health issues like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or other conditions. These people are big money losers for the industry. They will avoid insuring them if they can, or alternatively charge them tens of thousands a year for coverage. They may also contest making payments by claiming people had failed to disclose their health conditions when they applied for insurance. I briefly went through the problems of the pre-ACA insurance market a few weeks back.

If Trump just gives people cash, it will do nothing to get around these problems. First, it is not clear which people he wants to give cash, and which cash. If he just means the enhanced subsides, he has around $35 billion a year to play with. Currently, around 22 million people get the enhanced subsidies, so that would imply checks of around $1.600 a year.

But there are another 28 million people currently without insurance, and another 2 million getting insurance in the exchanges without subsidies. Surely these people should be eligible for the Trump checks also. That would come to 52 million people sharing $35 billion, giving them each a check of less than $700.

Making the story even more complicated, people gain and lose coverage all the time, as they or a family member gets hired or leave a job with insurance. They may also gain or lose coverage for a government program like Medicaid. This means Trump has to figure out whether he will be sending out his checks once a year, giving many people a huge bonus and screwing those who lose their job after the cutoff date. Alternatively, this would have to be some sort of recurring payment, monthly or quarterly.

Perhaps Trump intends to take all the money going to Obamacare, not just the enhanced subsidies — which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities puts at $125 billion — and roll it into his Trump checks. That would make them around $1,900 a year.

The next question is what Trump expects people to do with their money. A young healthy person may be able to cover their healthcare costs with $1,900 a year, but even these people would likely want insurance against the risk they may incur a serious illness or be in some sort of accident. Good luck finding insurance for $170 a month.

And the problem is far worse for older people and people with major health issues. In an unregulated insurance market, these people would be paying thousands of dollars a month for their insurance. Their Trump check will not go very far towards covering a premium of several thousand dollars a month.

Perhaps Trump plans to keep the Obamacare restrictions that require insurers to cover everyone, regardless of health condition, and prohibits discriminating based on health condition. That would limit the payments for people with health problems, but it would still mean premiums that dwarf the size of the Trump checks, especially for those in the oldest pre-Medicare age bracket 55-64.

That would also put us basically where we are now except the checks would be smaller and untargeted, since all people without insurance — not just those enrolling in the exchanges — would be getting checks. Also, the current payments are adjusted by income. We don’t know whether Trump plans his checks to be income-based.

And in this story, the money would still be going to money sucking insurance companies, except presumably with less regulation so that the money sucking insurance companies could suck up more money. Under Obamacare, insurers have to pay out at least 80 percent of what they collect in premiums to providers, otherwise their customers get a rebate. Since Trump wants to get the government out of the picture, the insurers could presumably pocket even more money.

Medicare Advantage and “Money Sucking”

If Trump really wants to go after the money sucking insurance companies, getting them out of Medicare would be a great start. They mostly add costs to the program. He can improve the traditional program, adding dental, eyecare, and hearing coverage, and also imposing an out-of-pocket cap, and stop paying money sucking insurers in the Medicare Advantage program. Due to their higher administrative costs and profits, Medicare Advantage costs the government at least $100 billion a year compared to the traditional Medicare program.

If we’re really serious about cracking down on the money sucking insurance companies, why not go all the way and just provide universal Medicare. This would not only save the money directly paid to insurers, it would also eliminate much of the cost that hospitals, doctors’ offices and other providers have to incur dealing with complex forms from multiple insurers. This could save as much as $1 trillion($8,000 per household) a year compared to what we pay now for administrative costs and insurance industry profits.

A universal Medicare system would also mean that everyone has access to healthcare regardless of where they work, what government program they qualify for, or if they remembered to pay their insurance premium last month. Not many would have expected Donald Trump to be the person to get us to Medicare for All, but if he really wants to crack down on money sucking insurance companies, that would be the way to go. Welcome aboard, comrade!

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Trump Van Winkle: White House Goes After “Money Sucking” Insurance Companies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.