Alright, as it turns out, the golden toilet was just a myth. Donald Trump doesn’t have one. But not to fret. President Trump’s private Boeing 757 jet (not the even more lavish one he may shortly be gifted by Qatar) reportedly has gold-plated seat belts. His Trump Tower apartment features a 24-carat gold front door. Inside, there are gold ceilings, golden plant pots and even a gold elevator!
Fancy a visit to Mar-a-Lago? Its imitation Versailles aesthetic has been described as that of an upscale bordello.
Trump’s favorite restaurant is, of course, the Golden Arches, (also known as McDonald’s). And then there’s his lustrous golden tan with the reverse raccoon eyes. We could suggest that Trump’s three trophy wives were all gold diggers, but that wouldn’t be very golden hearted. Remember the golden showers kompromat rumor? Ick, let’s not go there, either.
The wannabe king boasted during his January 20 inaugural address that “The Golden Age of America begins right now.” Six weeks later, during his March 4 Joint Address to Congress, Trump reassured the audience that his Golden Age truly was coming. “Get ready for an incredible future,” he said. “The Golden Age of America has only just begun. It will be like nothing that has ever been seen before.”
That last part was certainly true.Next came Trump’s embarrassingly titled One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would cause almost 14 million Americans to lose health care, 11 million to be deprived of food stamps, and slashes $700 billion from Medicaid and $500 billion from Medicare. This was necessary, insists the Trump junta, because there’s just so much wasteful spending in Washington — except of course the $45 million US taxpayers will spend on Trump’s June 14 he-man vanity project, that will parade tanks on the streets of the capital and fighter jets overhead.
The Big Beautiful Bill was followed a day later with much fanfare — but surprisingly without any actual golden trumpeters — by the signing of Trump’s five executive orders on nuclear power. “President Trump Signs Executive Orders to Usher in a Nuclear Renaissance, Restore Gold Standard Science,” announced the press release that presaged these disastrous directives.
The orders dramatically weaken nuclear regulatory and safety oversight, put new reactor development on an entirely unrealistic timetable, knit the civil and military nuclear sectors firmly back together again and make a major nuclear accident more likely.
They also endeavor to drastically weaken existing and inadequate radiation protection standards that already don’t account for the heightened vulnerability to harm of pregnant women, infants and children.
However, since we are now entering the age of enlightenment, the press release went on to explain: “Gold Standard Science is just that—science that meets the Gold Standard.” Thank you for clearing that up.
All of these dangerous developments have arrived wrapped — or should I say gilded — in a nausea-inducing level of overblown rhetoric that showcases Trump’s obsession with all things gold, both literal and metaphorical.
And now, as if all this golden fleecing of American taxpayers wasn’t enough, we have the Golden Dome for America!
“Golden Dome for America is a revolutionary concept to further the goals of peace through strength,” asserts its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, our first clue that the Golden Dome has nothing whatever to do with peace. Lockheed Martin is integrally involved in the US nuclear weapons complex, and is a key partner in the development and production of US submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles, specifically the Trident II D5, the most lethal destructive force on earth.
The idea of having an invincible missile defense system that could intercept and destroy all missiles targeting the United States, has been around since the 1950s and was developed in various iterations, garnering headlines under the Ronald Reagan administration with the announcement of his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), quickly nicknamed “Star Wars” by its detractors.
SDI was highly ambitious, complex, expensive and controversial, and arguably led to the failure of what promised to be a bilateral elimination of nuclear weapons agreed by Reagan and then Russian premier, Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 when Reagan refused to place limitations on SDI.
“Unexpectedly, the two leaders agreed that they could eliminate ‘all [U.S. and Soviet] nuclear weapons,’ but Gorbachev added the contingency that SDI be confined to the laboratory,” wrote Aaron Bateman for the Arms Control Association in a 2023 article on SDI. “After Reagan refused to accept any limits on SDI, the two leaders departed Reykjavik without a deal in hand.”
By the end of the 20th century, the SDI program had been renamed National Missile Defense (NMD), eventually shifting to a focus on a Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, whose primary task is to defend against incoming long-range ballistic missiles aimed at the US.
As the Union of Concerned Scientists states in the headline to its history of US missile defense, “Since the system’s deployment in 2002, six out of ten test intercepts have failed.”
The Golden Dome is fundamentally another ambitious reboot of SDI. Trump claims he has already settled on what he calls the “architecture”, which makes you wonder if he sees this as some sort of floating palace, a Mar-a-Lago in the sky? When the plan was unveiled in the White House, Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, stood by the glittery poster looking for all the world like some sort of game show host.
The Golden Dome price tag is a whopping $175 billion (there’s austerity for you!) and apparently it will all be up and running before Trump’s term is out in January 2029, (assuming Trump willingly leaves office and we still have a democratic election process by then.)
It’s a goal longtime national security and nuclear policy expert, Joe Cirincione, called “insane” in an interview with The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “You probably won’t even get the architecture of the system settled by the end of his administration,” Cirincione said.
Even more insane is that, far from enhancing the safety of the US, the Golden Dome is entirely provocative and, as a nervous China has already warned, will only increase the risks of militarizing space and could even relaunch a global arms race (arguably something that is already underway).
In any case, there’s not much use in a Golden Dome unless it’s one hundred percent effective, which it has a one hundred percent probability of not being. Its predecessor certainly didn’t achieve that and was what Cirincione described as “the longest-running scam in the history of the Department of Defense.”
If just one missile gets through, the level of destruction would be devastating, and the US would then likely retaliate after which all bets are off.
Our current missile defense system, whose earliest iteration was deployed in 1962, has cost at least $531 billion so far according to Stephen Schwartz, a longtime analyst on nuclear weapons costs.
On BlueSky, Schwartz called the Golden Dome project “delusional and reckless. There’s no way to design, test, construct, and deploy a comprehensive system to reliably stop any missiles launched from land, sea, or space, and do it in ‘two-and-a-half to three years’ for $175 billion.”
So far, US missile defense interception attempts (fortunately all tests), have had a success rate that spans a range of 41% to 88% depending on whether you accept an independent analysis, which generates the lower number, or “official” tallies, which produce the higher one. Either way, it’s not 100%.
The Golden Dome, it turns out, is no golden ticket to survival.
But no matter, since, its proponents argue, the Golden Dome is merely a deterrent meant to frighten off aggressors. That means we are about to spend $175 billion on something the US would never actually use.
Trump would do well to take a lesson from Shakespeare’s Prince of Morocco who, in The Merchant of Venice, discovers that “All that glisters is not gold.” Indeed, when he chooses the golden box (of course) over the other less sparkly ones, he learns that what tends to lurk inside such “gilded tombs” are merely “worms.”
Or maybe Trump should just stop talking and heed the most important lesson of all? Silence is golden.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
– Milan Kundera
In an age where culture is the primary battlefield, authoritarianism thrives on ignorance, historical amnesia and the brutal aesthetics of cruelty, all normalized as common sense. This is a policy of scholasticide – a full-scale assault on the past – one that aims to erase not only history but the very capacity to critically engage with it. We witness this in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, where education is methodically destroyed, universities obliterated and unimaginable violence becomes the foundation of daily life.
In this chaos, young minds are stripped of the tools to understand their history and collective selves, to challenge power and to envision a future free from oppression. Such policies are not only crimes against individual lives; they are crimes against history itself, erasing the very memory of resistance and the struggles that have shaped the present. In the United States, under the leadership of Donald Trump, historical amnesia has taken on a similarly insidious form, one that deliberately fosters ignorance, particularly surrounding the nation’s deep-seated histories of racial violence, colonialism and the ongoing struggles for justice. Books are banned, critical ideas erased from the curriculum, history is whitewashed, dissenting educators fired or threatened with prosecution, and students protesting for Palestinian freedom are abducted, detained and denied due process.
Critical pedagogy: connecting ideas to action
The fight for justice requires the reclamation of education and public space. This project is no longer optional; it is the condition of survival. As educators, we must cultivate a critical consciousness rooted in attentiveness: to history, to the structures of power, to the unseen and the silenced. This means connecting ideas to action in ways that dismantle forms of ideological and economic domination, and nourish an ethical imagination bold enough to think what the present declares impossible.
Critical pedagogy, both in its symbolic and institutional forms, plays a crucial role in fighting the resurgence of false renderings of history, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, accelerating militarism and ultra-nationalism. Moreover, as fascists across the globe now disseminate toxic, racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is particularly urgent in the face of policies like Trump’s, under which historical amnesia has become weaponized as a deliberate tactic to suppress civic consciousness and dissent. Authoritarians reject the painful lessons of history – racism, genocide, slavery and sexism – because these dark truths echo too powerfully the very worldviews they seek to perpetuate. They refuse to confront the past, for to do so would unravel the foundation of their own power. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have undermined the foundations of civic culture, matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, suppression of dissent and hate. Historical amnesia serves as fertile soil for these toxic ideologies to grow – silencing the voices of resistance and obscuring the struggles that have shaped our movements for justice.
The merging of power, new digital technologies and everyday life has not only altered time and space but expanded the reach of culture as an educational force. A culture of lies, cruelty and hate, coupled with a fear of history and a 24/7 flow of information, now wages a war on attention spans, eroding the conditions necessary to think, contemplate and arrive at sound judgments.
Education beyond the classroom
Education, as a form of cultural work, extends beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence. It plays a crucial role in challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas. We must actively counter attempts to rewrite history through the lens of authoritarian regimes, whether in Gaza, the U.S. or elsewhere. This historical amnesia is not accidental – it is a political tool, wielded purposefully to reshape collective memory and deny the possibility of resistance.
The scholar, Ariella Azolay, powerfully reminds us that educators have a responsibility to practice what she calls pedagogical citizenship – a form of teaching that, when pursued with intent and integrity, helps us remember our shared duties. In the face of relentless assaults on memory, it is education’s task to offer a counter vision: to awaken critical consciousness and expose the violence of authoritarian terror. It is through this work, through the act of resisting historical erasure, that we can equip ourselves with the tools to not only understand but to dismantle the structures of oppression threatening our world.
Any viable notion of critical pedagogy needs to create the educational visions and tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness. It must be capable of recognizing the scorched earth policies of gangster capitalism marked by staggering inequalities, settler colonialism, and the twisted anti-democratic ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot occur without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways that allow them to recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.
Moving beyond slogans
Young people need more than slogans; they need a political vocabulary shaped by the lessons of history, alert to how fascism masquerades as freedom while delivering repression, and how it weaponizes the rhetoric of order to erase the memory of resistance. This is the work that critical pedagogy must undertake. It is not simply about teaching facts but about creating the conditions for a radical reimagination of the future, one that acknowledges the past and allows us to resist the authoritarianism that thrives on ignorance and historical erasure.
If we are to resist the scourge of historical amnesia and reclaim the future, we must all take up the struggle, through education, action and a commitment to justice grounded in the lessons of history.
Aureus (Coin) Portraying Emperor Nero, 66-67 CE. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain.
The view from 4,000 miles
When I first visited Europe in 1974 and for years after, news reports from the U.S. were typically slow to arrive. There were no smart phones or internet, no 24-hour news channels, and local papers were a day or so behind in their coverage of U.S. events. The same time lag existed for the English language International Herald Tribune, published in Paris and filled with stories from U.S. wire services.
Phone calls were still expensive and cumbersome in the 1970s and ‘80s. In France and Italy, they generally required a trip to the post office, the help of an operator, and a vacant phone booth or cubicle. For news and entertainment, I mostly read local newspapers, though with difficulty, given my poor foreign language skills. In those days, when you were away from the U.S., you were really away.
Not anymore. Having this week passed my one-year anniversary as an American expat in Norwich, UK., I can definitively say that living abroad ain’t what it used to be. Not only am I a captive of the U.S. news cycle, so is much of the British media, from the gutter press (Daily Mail, The Sun, etc) to the sober BBC. In addition, the venerated organs of the British left – London Review of Books and New Left Review (NLR) allot copious column inches to American politics and the fundamental question in the age of Trump, “What is to be done?” Given the surfeit of available news, my political outlook here in Norfolk is probably not much different than it would be 4,000 miles away in Florida, from whence I came in late May, 2024.
“Minimalism vs Maximalism”
Last week, the American historian Mathew Karp published a short column in Sidecar, a blog run by NLR, that offers a broad perspective on the Trumpian present. It succinctly laid out the terms of the ongoing debate in the U.S. and U.K. between what may be called “minimalists” and “maximalists.” What follows is an extrapolation of his argument, followed by my disagreement.
Minimalists argue that if you set aside his bombast, corruption, and criminality (the president is a convicted felon), Trump is little different from other presidents. Granted, that’s a lot to put aside, but the 47 American presidents have, with only a few exceptions, been an undistinguished lot to say the least. For every Lincoln or FDR, there have been ten James Buchanans or Calvin Coolidges. The former, by supporting “state’s rights” assured the coming of the civil war; the latter by turning a blind eye to rampant speculation and corruption on Wall Street, made inevitable the stock market crash a year after he left office.
So, while Trump may be high on most historians’ list of worst presidents, he has plenty of company. His bonehead economics – tariffs one week, no tariffs the next, rinse and repeat – are no stupider than Herbert Hoover’s. After the 1929 stock market crash and quick onset of economic Depression, he refused to offer relief to laid-off workers; unemployment soared to 23% by 1932, further depressing demand and hobbling industry, leading to even higher unemployment. Hoover’s support of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 also deepened the recession; tariffed nations reciprocated and even encouraged boycotts of American goods. Sound familiar?
Trump’s restrictions on immigration and his cruel deportation policy are also nothing new. Starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a succession of U.S. presidents have sought to limit immigration and speed deportation of people considered undesirable aliens. The deportees were generally either non-white, non-Protestant, or politically radical, and sometimes all three. President Roosevelt in 1942 issued an executive order mandating the internment of some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. The rationale was military security in wartime, but the real purpose was gratification of racial hatred. In 1954, President Eisenhower approved Operation Wetback, which combined with pre-existing measures, resulted in the forced removal of at least a million people – mostly Mexican farm laborers living in the U.S. southwest. Finally, under Joe Biden, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations were higher on a monthly basis than they have been under Trump, though not as high as Obama at his peak. Lots of presidents, Democrats as well as Republican, have enacted anti-immigrant initiatives. Trump is just louder and prouder.
Then there’s the tax cuts. New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, began a recent column with a list of years: 1981, 2001, 2003 and 2017. Those are when a Republican president and Republican congress passed massive tax cuts that enriched the already affluent, impoverished the already poor and increased the already sizeable federal deficit. Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” will do the same. It’s not yet law but will be soon. (The only real drama is how Sen. Josh Hawley will weasel out of his pledge to protect Medicaid.) Bouie’s point about the tax bill presents the minimalist case in a nutshell. It’s not just Trump; this is what Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) do.
But what about DOGE? Isn’t that maximally obnoxious? In fact, as Karp reminds us, the federal workforce is just 7% smaller because of Elon Musk’s chain saw, the same size it was prior to the Covid build-up between 2019-23. Some presidents, mostly Democratic, hire federal workers, and some presidents, mostly Republican, fire them. The same pattern can be observed in protection of federal land, regulation of industry, protection of worker safety and union rights, and so on. The National Mall should have a see-saw in the middle of it, not an obelisk.
In summary, say the minimalists, Trump is destructive and awful, but apart from the theatrics, there is little new there, and nothing dramatic is needed in response. In fact, the best opposition strategy, as James Carville argued in a post-inauguration New York Times op-ed, is to “roll over and play dead,” allowing Trump and the Republicans to self-destruct. Chuck Schumer and most of the rest of the Democratic leadership welcomed the advice and have followed it assiduously, convinced that if they do nothing at all, they’ll be victorious in the 2026 midterms, and the presidential contest two years later.
Karp, who endorses what he calls “left minimalism,” is similarly confident. “The laws of political gravity appear to remain the same [for 2026]” he writes, “as they were in 2022 and 2018.” The Democrats will take the House, at least. Moreover, he argues, the political sturm und drang of the maximalists – the claim that Trump is authoritarian or fascist, and a unique threat to capitalist democracy — serves only to occlude the actuality of the current crisis: that the Democratic Party and the left more broadly, have failed to address the needs of the American working class. Before it can truly succeed in the struggle against Trump and the Republicans, therefore – not just in the 2025 midterms — the left must look facts in the face and develop a program that will attract disaffected or angry American workers. Memo to Democrats: “Physician, heal thyself!”
Trump, the hedgehog
I don’t buy it. While I agree that President Trump has many wicked, obnoxious or incompetent predecessors, and that the Democrats need to develop a concrete program for the American working class, I nevertheless uphold the maximalist position: Trump represents a unique threat to capitalist democracy. He and his movement are so antithetical to personal, political and expressive freedoms, that a broad popular front must be organized to stop him. And because of his antipathy to environmental protection – indeed his glee at the prospect of ginning up fossil capital — Trump is a threat to the very survival of human and other animal species.
How can if be that Trump, a deeply ignorant man who wouldn’t understand a political theory if it leaped up from a sand trap and bit him on the nine iron, should become the major contemporary avatar of fascism? The answer is that like the hedgehog, Trump knows one big thing: Neutralize or eliminate your enemies. The political science name for that is Gleichschaltung, “coordination” or Nazification – a term with which the U.S. president is surely unfamiliar, but whose game plan he follows.
Gleichschaltung
In the weeks following his appointment as Reich Chancellor in March 1933, Adolf Hitler began a campaign to destroy representative government. He quickly appointed his henchmen, including Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels, to important cabinet posts, while at the same time diminishing the role of the cabinet, thus arrogating more power to himself. Germany’s civil service, education system and mass media were all brought to heel on April 7 by decree of the chancellor. The same political cancellation or worse was meted out to law chambers, charitable organizations, trade unions, and the professions. Arts organization were put under the control of the Reich Culture Chamber, headed by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. The goal was the quick establishment of a dictatorial, one-party state, rearmament, and an end to the civil rights of minorities, especially Jews. Hitler was victorious in the short term; in the longer term he was successful only in destroying his own country, himself, and nearly 20 million people.
In pursuit of a “unitary executive,” the U.S. president and his ideologues have embraced a similar policy of Gleichshaltung. They have destroyed or seized control of federal agencies established by Congress which restrained previous presidents. Acting through Elon Musk, Trump has illegally dismissed thousands of civil servants, and transferred, demoted or forced the retirement of thousands of others. His assault on national law firms – by withdrawal of government contracts and denial of security clearances – has brought some of the biggest to their knees. Large media and technology companies, including ABC, CBS, Meta, Amazon, Facebook and X, have made concessions to Trump.
Threats to de-fund research and bar enrollment of foreign students have prompted the roll-back of free speech and civil rights protections at hundreds if not thousands of colleges and universities. Though I have long been a harsh critic of DEI programs and trainings, the current onslaught is aimed not at the programs themselves, but their goal: the creation of campuses and workplaces where everyone, regardless of ethnicity, class, gender status, or disability, has an equal opportunity to succeed. Trump’s executive order of Jan. 21, 2025, rolling back President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 equal employment directive, is a veritable license to discriminate. The consequence of all this, if allowed to run its course, will be the creation of a sovereign – Trump and his designated successor — empowered by what the German (later Nazi) legal theorist Carl Schmitt called “decisionism” — the capacity to act unconstrained by congress, constitution, common law, or custom. In that “state of exception,” democracy is nullified.
Why Trump is not yet sovereign
Hitler didn’t create his “state of exception” by force of will alone. From March to June 1933, a mass of storm troopers – their total number may have been as high as 2 million – rampaged across Germany, attacking the offices of opposition parties and politicians, intimidating uncompliant elected officials, and destroying or looting independent newspaper offices, union headquarters and university buildings. Hundreds of people were killed; their murderers were applauded. The Nazi state quickly authorized the creation of concentration camps and torture centers, and filled them with up to 200,000 Communists, Social Democrats and others deemed dissident or even just independent. These camps evolved into a vast archipelago that provided the militarized state with slave laborers. World war and death camps – Auschwitz, Treblinka and the rest — were the logical but grotesque conclusion of all this.
Trump has not organized militias or storm-troopers to intimidate, disappear or destroy opponents, and it’s not clear if the Secret Service or ICE could be repurposed as a praetorian guard. (Trump foolishly antagonized both the leadership and rank and file of the FBI and CIA.) But as with everything else concerning the Trump administration, past performance is not indicative of future results. The first Trump administration largely failed at its efforts to intimidate the media (“enemy of the people”), disable Medicaid, and deport millions of immigrants, but it’s well on its way to making good on those pledges. What anti-democratic initiatives will follow?
Team maximalist
I grew up in a political home in a politicized age. If not a “red diaper”, I was at least a pink diaper baby. My mother, Grace, was in her youth a member of the Young Communist League. My dad was a fellow traveler, he told me, until he attended a political demonstration and everybody around him got clubbed on the head by mounted police. As a young child I experienced the fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the shock and horror of the Kennedy assassination. We all watched the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, hated the war, loathed Nixon and rejoiced at his resignation. I spent my life as a professor of art history but have followed every twist and turn in American politics. In my lifetime, no president has been so determined to undermine the structures of democracy. Have there been any like Trump, discounting Confederate President Jefferson Davis? Count me a member of team maximalist.
Path ahead
Trump is not yet sovereign — not yet Trumpus Maximus, a Nero who golfs while the world burns from the consumption of fossil fuels. While the U.S. legislative branches, dominated by Republicans, have accepted Gleichshaltung without a whimper, the judicial system has not. State and federal courts have issued orders and injunctions rolling back many of Trump’s decrees concerning deportations, civil service dismissals, agency closures, and blackmail of law firms and universities. The Supreme Court, though dominated by Schmittians, has ruled against Trump in some cases, while the most important decisions are yet to come. Right now, the high court is the thin reed upon which the future of capitalist democracy leans. We need a back-up plan.
A few universities, law firms and entertainers have publicly resisted Trump. Some Democratic politicians, chiefly Bernie and AOC, have organized large opposition rallies and promise more. While democratic institutions and protections still exist – the right to protest, petition, and publish, and the right to vote — it’s essential they are used. Lacking stormtroopers, Trump and the Republicans rely upon complaisance and fear to enact their will. If political leaders – Democrats, independents, union official and others – offer leadership and an inspiring message, masses of people will join in peaceful but determined opposition to tariffs, immigration policy, tax breaks for billionaires, environmental abuses, racism, attacks on students, and cuts in Medicaid and food stamps. When that happens, the Trump administration will collapse or be dismantled like the Golden House of Nero.
The clean energy transition that the Biden administration touted as the focus of its industrial policy required large amounts of mineral inputs. Batteries for electric vehicles depend on lithium, solar panels contain gallium and molybdenum, and powerful magnets in wind turbines can’t be built without rare earth elements. Biden’s landmark legislation, such as the 2022 Inflation Adjustment Act, effectively resurrected industrial policy in the United States but this time on the basis of a shift away from fossil fuels.
Donald Trump, since taking office in early 2025, has swung U.S. policy back again toward oil, gas, and coal. But the Trump administration is no less interested in securing access to minerals. After all, the same “critical minerals” necessary for the Green transition are coveted by the Pentagon for use in nearly all high-tech weapon systems. The United States depends on foreign sourcing for nearly all of these mineral inputs. And the country that controls the lion’s share of these resources—as well as the processing of them—is China. The Pentagon is particularly uncomfortable with China’s potential to hold major U.S. weapons systems hostage.
Two regions that have figured prominently in Donald Trump’s mineral ambitions are Ukraine and Greenland. These two areas, one a country at war and the other a semi-autonomous possession of Denmark, couldn’t be more different. Greenland is the world’s largest island. Covered mostly with ice, it has a population of fewer than 60,000 people. Ukraine has a smaller land mass but is a major industrialized country and a top agricultural producer, with a current population of about 37 million people.
From Donald Trump’s point of view, the two regions share a key attribute: they are, in the lexicon of Wall Street, assets ripe for a takeover. Ukraine has been weakened by Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion and has come to rely heavily on U.S. military assistance and intelligence. Greenland, without a military of its own, has been angling for independence from Denmark.
During his first 100 days in office, Trump spoke of acquiring Greenland and didn’t rule out a military intervention. With Ukraine, the U.S. president complained that the country was taking U.S. weapons without giving back anything in return. In one of his classic transactional moves, Trump proposed that Ukraine pay its “debt” with the mineral resources beneath its soil.
Trump’s interest in both regions is not purely mineral.
“When President Trump has said several times now that the United States is going to get Greenland one way or another, it’s not always clear what the primary driver is,” explains Klaus Dodds, “At times, for example, we’ve been told it’s on the basis of international security. On other occasions, minerals and energy security have been explicitly cited. Actually, what perhaps was underpinning all of this was a desire to make sure that China never established any kind of economic, political, infrastructural foothold in Greenland.”
As for Ukraine, the agreement over minerals that was finally reached at the end of April didn’t ultimately contain a provision requiring Ukraine to pay down its “debt” with minerals. Rather, it spelled out in vague detail how the sale of the country’s minerals—and other natural resources like fossil fuels—would go toward economic development under the joint supervision of the United States and Ukraine. The Trump administration also hoped the deal would be a preliminary step in reaching a ceasefire in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.
From Ukraine’s point of view, however, the agreement has some problematic elements. “There is nothing in this agreement regarding the contribution of the United States in the form of investment in a fund for the reconstruction of Ukraine,” explains Volodymyr Vlasiuk. “Also, there is nothing in this agreement about Ukraine capturing the maximum value of the minerals extracted in the territory of Ukraine.”
As both president and businessman, Donald Trump is using the power of his company (the United States) to strong-arm weaker partners into lopsided agreements. In Greenland’s case, he is even considering a hostile takeover. As Dodds and Vlasiuk explained at a Global Just Transition webinar in early May, U.S. policy has as much to do with the acquisition of valuable minerals as it does with the U.S. effort to achieve a geopolitical edge, primarily over China.
U.S. Policy toward Greenland
The United States has a longstanding military relationship with Greenland that dates to 1941 when, after Nazi Germany occupied Denmark, Washington sent troops to the island to construct air bases and weather stations. A decade late, a 1951 treaty gave Washington the formal right to build military bases there and move around freely as long as it gave notice to both Greenland and Denmark. The United States currently maintains the Pituffik airbase—previously Thule—that serves as an early-warning system for missile attacks. After a jet bomber carrying four nuclear bombs crashed onto the ice in the northern part of Greenland in 1968, it was revealed that the United States was also using the Thule base as part of its nuclear strategy, with tacit Danish consent.
Geopolitics and minerals were a dual priority from the beginning. “During the Second World War and in the early years of the Cold War, the United States was well aware of the strategic resource potential of Greenland,” Klaus Dodds points out. “And that partly explains why Harry Truman offered to purchase the island in 1946. At that time, the interest was largely in cryolite, which was essential to the manufacture of aluminum.”
A mining operation in Ivituut, the largest source of naturally occurring cryolite, sent 86,000 tons of the mineral to the United States and Canada in 1942. The mine closed in the mid-1980s. Much of the wealth from the sale of cryolite ended up in Denmark, which remains a point of tension between the island and the Danish government.
But that conflict pales in comparison to the disruption that Donald Trump has caused, first with his stated desire during his first term to buy the island, and then with his continued threats to acquire Greenland when he returned to power in 2025. In both cases, he has been rebuffed by both Denmark and Greenland.
Again, minerals seem to be of great interest to Trump, in this case the promise of critical minerals, including rare earth elements. According to a Danish study, the island has 31 of the 34 minerals identified by the EU as critical.
But accessing those minerals will not be easy. “There’s a long history of mining and extraction in Greenland,” Dodds explains. “If President Trump thinks that critical minerals or rare earths are going to be exploited at some point during his second administration, he’s likely to be disappointed. Mining, particularly in remote, challenging areas, is a long-term project. And Greenland is a textbook example of why these things are challenging, why they’re often expensive, and why also politics can complicate things.”
Greenland offers a number of physical challenges. It is very cold, and sites might be accessible only part of the year, depending on location. The mines are likely to be remote, and there isn’t much in the way of infrastructure to access those mines. There is a skills shortage as well on the island.
Then there’s the bureaucracy. “If you look at the experience of licensing, which the government of Greenland is very much in control of, the vast majority of companies and entities that have taken up some kind of license have ended up being disappointed,” Dodds adds. “That’s true of oil and gas. That’s also true of other minerals.”
Greenland currently only has two operational mines. Companies have invested in other mines, and some have spectacularly failed, like the effort of the Australian outfit Energy Transition Minerals that, with Chinese investors, plowed $100 million into a rare earth element mine. Because these minerals are often intermingled with uranium, community opposition to the environmental consequences of this particular enterprise led the government to pull the plug. The company is now suing either to get approval to resume operations or to get compensation to the tune of four times Greenland’s annual GDP.
Many Greenlanders want independence from Denmark, a trend that Trump seems to want to exploit. “If Greenland were to become independent, many Europeans will worry that the United States will try to shape that independence or make sure that it becomes an independent island state under very, very close U.S. supervision,” Dodds points out. Meanwhile, Greenland retains a lot of autonomy short of independence, “and government ministers there have continued to stress that Greenland is open for business and that openness does not necessarily preclude Beijing. So, I predict that American pressure on Greenland and Denmark will continue.”
U.S. Policy toward Ukraine
Donald Trump spent a lot of time on his presidential campaign complaining about all the weapons the Biden administration was supplying Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. As president, Trump became fixated on getting Ukraine to pay off the “debt” it had supposedly accumulated from these deliveries of arms. When apprised of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, he began to push Ukraine to sign a deal that would deliver to the United States at least some of the profits from those extracted minerals.
Ukraine holds as much as 5 percent of the world’s supply of critical raw materials, though what is known about Ukraine’s mineral wealth comes largely from Soviet-era geological exploration. It’s one of the top five countries in terms of its graphite deposits, and it contains one-third of Europe’s lithium. It also has significant amounts of titanium and rare earth elements. According to Forbes Ukraine, the total value of this mineral wealth is nearly $15 trillion.
“We have to be very careful about such a figure,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk pointed out. “This is the whole value of all the deposits of all the minerals in Ukraine. The value of critical minerals is much less than this.”
Vlasiuk divides these critical minerals into three categories: for batteries (lithium, graphite, manganese), for semiconductors (gallium, germanium, metallic silicon), and for strategic construction (titanium, zirconium, hafnium, vanadium). Ukraine has a significant portion of these materials: in the case of both lithium and graphite, for instance, Ukraine has roughly 4-5 percent of the world reserves.
All these minerals add up to a lot of potential money. The first group, Vlasiuk estimates, is worth about $200 billion, the second about $44 billion, and the last about $12 billion. Together, that adds up to about $250 billion—a considerable figure, but considerably less than $15 trillion. Also, some of the deposits are in the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
Three factors make Ukraine’s deposits appealing, not just to the United States but to the European Union and to China. The resources are available in good quantities and of sufficient quality for industrial processing. Because of Ukraine’s infrastructure—transportation, energy—the deposits are relatively easy to access (at least, those not in the occupied territories). “We can get easy access to these deposits, maybe by constructing 5-10 kilometers of road or adding a few kilometers to the electricity grid,” Vlasiuk added. “This is in contrast, for instance, to Siberia or Greenland.”
Finally, Ukraine offers minerals at a competitive cost and the mining projects will be economically efficient.
But processed materials are worth a great deal more than raw materials. If Ukraine produces semi-finished products with these minerals, it could boost the total value to $678 billion, Vlasiuk estimates. Meanwhile, finished products would yield nearly $1.4 trillion. Ukraine is already involved in the production of electrolytes, separators, and graphite rods for electric smelting furnaces, and could supply the nearby European Union. “So, it’s very important to capture the value added through this downstream process,” he concludes.
But much depends on the recent agreement signed with Washington and the resulting United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. The Ukrainian parliament approved the deal unanimously—but only after the objectionable sections of earlier proposals were removed. In this final version, the United States has committed to investing capital in Ukraine to build up the extractive sector—including gas and oil—and all revenues for the first decade will be reinvested in Ukraine. The United States, meanwhile, gets preferential access to what’s produced.
The Role of China
Behind all of this maneuvering lies China. The United States has two primary concerns: the control that China exerts over the critical minerals supply chain and the spread of its geopolitical influence in places like Ukraine and Greenland.
“President Trump has been very clear that he thinks the United States faces an existential threat in the form of China,” Klaus Dodds notes. “Trump absolutely wants to keep China out of Greenland. Remember, Greenland did flirt with Chinese investment. There was talk at one stage about China investing in airports there and maybe even purchasing an abandoned naval station.”
Shift the focus away from minerals and toward seafood and China suddenly becomes a lot more significant. “China has next to no physical presence In Greenland, full stop,” he continues. “But the most important export of Greenland is seafood, and China is the key market. If Greenland wants to become an independent country at some point, and I believe it does, then it’s got to do two things. One is to find a replacement for the block grant, which is an annual transfer of about 500 million euros from Denmark. Second, you don’t want to alienate unnecessarily your biggest consumer of seafood.”
China is also a key partner for Ukraine. “China is the second biggest external trade partner after the European Union,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk reports. “After Russia disappeared from our radar, China became a major consumer of Ukrainian foodstuffs—wheat, corn, sunflower oil.” China has in the past offered loans to Ukraine, such as a $3 billion “loan for corn” deal in 2012 and a $15 billion loan for construction in 2015. During the current war, however, China has focused on partnering with Russia, though it also remains poised to be part of Ukrainian reconstruction once the war ends.
“China’s a powerful country, and this creation of trade barriers by Mr. Trump is not a very good step,” Vlasiuk continues. “From the economic point of view, nobody benefits from this, including the United States. Such barriers make it difficult for countries to benefit from world trade, to achieve an economic impact from globalization.”
He adds that “it’s quite obvious that the United States and the European Union have lost time while China has made a very impressive step forward to reach these deposits and to take the control of global supply chains. China continues to look around the world for more deposits. It is very active in the Africa and the Middle East. And, of course, there is closer cooperation between China and Russia. There are a lot of Chinese workers in Russia. China is profiting a lot from buying Russian natural resources at a cheap price. Putin wants China to invest in the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, but so far China has refused. But I am sure that China will use this war to reach deposits in Russia, which will make China even more powerful in controlling the value chain of these critical minerals.”
More Geopolitics
China is not the only geopolitical consideration. For Donald Trump, the acquisition of territory is an obsession. Trump considers Greenland to be integral to the U.S. sphere of influence.
“It’s worth recalling that this is a president who likes maps, globes, charts,” Klaus Dodds points out. “As everybody knows, the Mercator projection makes Greenland look even bigger than it is. It’s three times the size of Texas, but it’s probably not quite as big as Donald Trump thinks it is. Trump wants to be immortalized in U.S. history as the president who made America bigger: the Trump Purchase, if you will.”
The Cold War pitted two superpowers in a race for resources around the world, particularly in the Global South. Today, this tension is being replayed by the United States and China. “To a certain extent, there’s a certain sort of deja vu to all of this,” Dodds continues. “The names change, but the impulse remains the same: to create ‘supply chain resilience,’ which is the term we use nowadays. With the Kennedy administration, for instance, when it came to places like Ghana, bauxite loomed large, for aluminum smelting, which was also linked to dam construction because of the enormous amount of power and cooling required. Today, it’s the Democratic Republic of Congo where there is a scramble for influence that involves China, the European Union, the United States, and also regional actors such as Rwanda.”
On the Ukrainian side, geopolitics boils down to defeating Russia and moving closer to the European Union. The mineral agreement “gives Trump the instrument to continue to support Ukraine with military equipment,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk points out. “Without this cooperation, the risk would increase of a cessation of U.S. military aid.”
But the agreement could contain some potential pitfalls for Ukraine. The United States could still try to condition future military assistance on the delivery of an equal amount of mineral wealth as a quid pro quo. Or Washington could focus on the extraction of primary materials and discourage Ukraine from processing the ore or producing finished products, thus depriving the country of considerable value. “In terms of the operation of this fund, Ukraine and the Ukrainian people should benefit as the owners of these deposits and derive the maximum value added in Ukraine,” Vlasiuk maintains.
Also, he continues, “it’s very important that this agreement should not create any barriers for Ukrainian access to European Union. Our European Union colleagues would also like to make a win-win project in the exploration and processing of these deposits. But with this agreement, the Americans would like to take a dominant position in order to choose the most attractable deposits for future processing. So, we have a very difficult job ahead of us. We need to be careful. We would like the West and East to cooperate and for there not to be a split between democratic and not-so-democratic countries, especially in such an explosive form as on our territory. But it’s not our choice.”
Environmental and Labor Considerations
Although most pictures of Greenland feature sparkling ice, polar bears, and imposing mountain range, the Arctic is not pristine.
“When you look at ice cores taken from the Greenlandic ice sheet, what you discover is a record of traces of lead and other pollutants going back to the Roman era,” Klaus Dodds reports. “Greenland has borne the brunt in one form or another of past centuries of extraction and use of various minerals, which are trapped in Greenlandic ice. Because of melting, these pollutants are making their way through the island and into the neighboring sea.”
Then there’s the more recent history of mining. “There were lead and zinc mines in Greenland going back 50 or 60 years,” he continues. “And they are still causing pollution-like consequences, particularly in certain parts of southern Greenland. There is a legacy of toxic mining. People haven’t forgotten this, and they’re living with those consequences because in some cases those mines were not that far away from communities. So, there was a very public shift, a visceral reaction against uranium extraction in the aftermath of a longer history of unhappiness over the toxic consequences of mining.”
On the labor question, Greenland has a small population. Any significant mining operation will require foreign laborers. “This is not unique to Greenland, but it does create anxieties about importing the labor force,” Dodds notes. “Where are these people going to be staying? How are they going to be supported?”
The European Union’s environmental standards apply to Greenland (through Denmark). But they also exert influence on Ukraine, which hopes to accede to the EU as quickly as possible.
“The development of mining and processing of critical minerals is not friendly to the environment,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk points out. “Especially, for example, the processing of lithium ore in the form of spodumene concentrate. In our business plan, we mention that pollution is the costlier part of the project. But now, after seven years, we have discovered that there are much more effective technologies that ensure that this processing is less dangerous for the environment. We want to cooperate with more technologically developed countries so that they will invest as much as possible in the technology that reduces this pollution in Ukraine.”
Vlasiuk adds that Ukrainians are often well aware of environmental consequences and have mounted protests accordingly. “So, it’s very important to have political support and local support and to explain the benefits and that the pollution will not be dangerous for either health or social stability.” Ukraine, he notes, also has a skilled labor force and specialists who can do the work.
Corporate Interest
With the exception of mining corporations owned by the state—in China, Vietnam, Tanzania, Chile—private corporations are responsible for the bulk of mineral extraction around the world: BHP Group (Australia), Rio Tinto (Australia-UK), Glencore (UK), Vale (Brazil), Freeport-McMoRan (U.S.).
“Greenland in the recent past has had no shortage of companies interested in both minerals and oil and gas,” Klaus Dodds says. “Exploration licensing over the last 20-odd years has been genuinely a multinational affair: North American companies, Australian, European.” Some of those companies have included Green Rock, Amaroq, and Critical Minerals Corporation. Most recently, the government inked a deal with a Danish-French consortium to mine anorthosite, a substitute for bauxite.
“In 2021,” Dodds continues, “when the elected government of Greenland moved away from uranium mining, it left some companies rather exposed and, in at least one case, profoundly irritated by the loss of millions of dollars spent on drilling and investment.”
Corporations are also not the most reliable sources on the value of their enterprises. “This is not an island that has been lacking when it comes to mapping, surveying, and resource valuation,” he adds. “In many parts of the world, and Greenland is absolutely typical, there is a tendency on the part of commercial enterprises to engage in boosterism. When you read various estimates about what the rare earth value might be of Greenland, you might alight upon figures of $30 billion, $70 billion. I would treat this with a degree of healthy skepticism. It wouldn’t be the first time that companies have tried to talk up the value of their licenses and their investment.”
Outside corporations are also lining up to have the opportunity to access Ukraine’s mineral wealth—particularly because of the accessibility of these deposits. “Maybe I’ll not give you the concrete names of the companies,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk says, “but I can say that companies from the United States, Germany, and Japan are interested a lot in investing in Ukraine deposits. In 2013-4, both Shell and Chevron entered Ukraine to explore and extract shale gas.” The Chinese, meanwhile, have been interested in Ukrainian coal.
What hasn’t happened yet, according to Vlasiuk, is Russian exploitation of mineral resources in the occupied territories. However, in January, Russian forces occupied Shevchenko in the Donbas, home to one of Ukraine’s largest lithium deposits.
In terms of the new U.S.-Ukraine mineral agreement, it will be the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) that will serve as the U.S. partner along with Ukraine’s State Organization Agency on Support of Public-Private Partnership. “As I understand, this financial corporation as a state entity can also invest and will have very close contact to other U.S. investors,” Vlasiuk concludes.
On May 22, the House passed President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill Act” by a vote of 215 to 214. By now you have probably heard that the Medicaid cuts are expected to cause 8.6 million people to lose their health insurance, with the total program funding cuts estimated to be at least $700 billion over 10 years. That’s an average annual reduction of $70 billion in Medicaid spending – 12 times the $5.8 billion (in 2025 dollars) average annual cut enacted in 2005, previously the largest reduction in Medicaid spending.
Maybe you feel bad for people on Medicaid, or are angered that millions of people could lose their health insurance so that the President and Republicans in Congress can offset tax cuts for the wealthy. But if you are not on Medicaid, you have probably thought to yourself that you are glad your healthcare will not be affected. Hold that thought. The truth is that blowing a $700 billion hole in health spending on Medicaid services will degrade health system infrastructure and reduce the quality of care for all of us.
Here’s how.
Medicaid funds flow into virtually all the community hospitals in the US. These are the hospitals that we rely on for a wide range of health services — to stabilize us when we are having a stroke or heart attack; to treat a child having a severe asthma attack; to set a broken bone after a bicycle accident. Cuts this steep will have a noticeable effect on hospital revenues, and hospitals will face tough choices when they think about which services to eliminate — and even whether they can afford to stay open. Hold times on telephone calls will go up, wait times in hospital emergency rooms will increase, and distances traveled for some hospital services like delivery of a new baby will multiply.
Industry CEOs: Medicaid Cuts Will Cause Wider Harms
The alarm about the House bill has been sounded by four of the largest Catholic health systems – Ascension, Trinity Health, Providence and SSMHealth. As detailed by Alan Condon in Becker’s Hospital Review, the health systems’ CEOs point to the negative effects of the proposed cuts on an already strained health system, and how they will jeopardize access to health care for millions more patients than those who lose Medicaid coverage. Erik Wexler, president and CEO of Providence, pointed out that Medicaid cuts affect a broader population than just the subset on Medicaid. When programs and services become unsustainable, he argued, they will be forced to close, and access to care will be diminished for everyone.
Mike Slubowski, president and CEO of Trinity Health – a hospital system where Medicaid is the health insurance for 20 percent of patients across its 93 hospitals — worries that Medicaid cuts would exacerbate Trinity Health’s losses, as current Medicaid reimbursements fall short of the actual costs of treating Medicaid patients. The gap would widen, making it difficult to staff some programs, especially nursing homes and long-term care facilities where Medicaid is the predominant source of coverage.
Slubowski also pushed back on Republicans’ claims of widespread Medicaid fraud, waste, and abuse. He argued that it’s not possible to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid without hurting people more broadly.
Ascension president Eduardo Conrado pointed out that his health system provided care in 2024 to 6.1 million people. Of those, only 1.1 million – 750,000 covered by Medicaid and 350,000 uninsured or self-paid – would be directly affected by the proposed Medicaid cuts. But any reduction in hospital spending as a result of Medicaid cuts would reduce services for Ascension’s broader patient population as well. “Cuts of this scale,” he said, “would deepen financial pressure on hospitals, shift even more burden to the private sector, and limit access for everyone — not just those covered through Medicaid. Cutting critical services make it harder to hire and keep caregivers, risk hospital closures and limit states’ ability to fund Medicaid using proven tools like provider tax.”
Joe Hodges, the regional lead executive and president of SSMHealth’s Oklahoma/Mid-Missouri market – which includes large rural areas – noted that 70 percent of Oklahoma hospitals operate at a loss, as do 87 percent of those in Kansas. “It is a crisis in rural healthcare,” Hodges said. “Any challenges that are associated with taking away access or funding to rural hospitals will make them even more vulnerable.”
Labor Leaders Decry Effects of Medicaid Cuts
It’s not only healthcare CEOs raising the alarm about the Republican bill. Union leaders are speaking out about the harms the Big Beautiful Bill will cause. Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, points out that cuts to health care including Medicaid in the bill “will slash nearly 500,000 care jobs in 2026 alone, forcing hospitals, clinics and nursing homes – especially in rural and lower-income communities – to close.”
Nancy Hagan, president of National Nurses United union, rejects cuts to Medicaid and other social support programs and noted that nurses will not give up the fight for patients and for public health: “Nurses believe in a society where we take care of one another, not abandon people who are born or become disabled, or happen to work a job that is not financially valued.”
April Verrett, president of the Service Workers International Union, noted that Republicans in the House passed legislation that will rip healthcare from families to make the mega rich even richer. Instead, she argued, “we should make costs go down for families, not set them up for skyrocketing bills. We should raise wages and make life more secure for working families, not pull the rug out from under them.”
The House bill will cut core services and reduce their availability not only to the subpopulation of Medicaid patients but also to the broader patient population. They will affect not only people, but the health system’s infrastructure – the hospitals, clinics, doctors, and the clinical and other staff needed to care for patients.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” now goes to the Senate, which has promised to revisit these draconian spending cuts. Preserving Medicaid’s funding is essential to maintaining the capabilities of the US health system.
The Washington Post’s senior national security columnist, David Ignatius, is the mainstream media’s leading apologist for the Central intelligence Agency, American foreign policy, and Israel. Last week, Ignatius described the politicization of U.S. intelligence by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. In the same column, however, he praised former acting CIA director John McLaughlin, who was responsible for the most costly intelligence failure in CIA’s history—the phony intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. McLaughlin’s role in this debacle is public knowledge, but Igatius chooses to ignore or forget.
Tulsi Gabbard, who is completely unqualified to serve as DNI, ordered the rewrite of an intelligence assessment to protect the lies of Donald Trump regarding Venezuela’s connection to a terrorist gang, Tren de Aragua. Trump’s lies were used to justify the deportation of hundreds of migrants—including Kilmar Abrego Garcia—to a notorious jail in El Salvador. The government has admitted that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported. Gabbard not only stopped the intelligence assessment that exposed Trump’s lies, but she summarily fired two leading intelligence officials who simply did their job, preparing an honest assessment.
Ignatius exposed the wrongful actions of the DNI and her top officials, but closed his column by citing remarks by McLaughlin, a leading supporter of the CIA’s torture and abuse program as well as the officer in charge of the so-called “slam dunk” briefing. It was CIA director George Tenet who promised President George W. Bush that he could provide an assessment that would allow Bush to make a convincing case for war against Iraq to the American people. Tenet said it would be a “slam dunk” to prepare such a document. McLaughlin, who was described by Tenet as the “smartest man he ever met,” was in charge of that effort and personally delivered the “slam dunk” briefing to the president
Nevertheless, Ignatius had the audacity to cite McLaughlin’s advice to young intelligence analysts to “just keep doing your job professionally.” The abiding rule, according to McLaughlin, was to “Be humble. Open your eyes. You don’t know everything. Be explicit about what you know and what you don’t know.”
That is exactly what Tenet and McLaughlin didn’t do in 2002-2003 when they politicized intelligence in order for Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and national security adviser Rice to browbeat their critics. With phony intelligence from the CIA, they began a war that took several thousand American lives, 37,000 American casualties, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian fatalities at a cost of more than $2 trillion. Twenty-two years later, U.S. troops remain in Iraq.
And it is exactly what CIA director Bill Casey and deputy director for intelligence Bob Gates didn’t do when they made the phony case for an unnecessary military build up against an exaggerated Soviet threat. Casey and Gates made their politicized case in the mid-1980s; the Soviet Union were already politically and economically bankrupt at that time and collapsed not long after that.
And there is the example of former CIA director Mike Pompeo, who did his best to compromise any intelligence that failed to exaggerate the threat from Iran in order to challenge the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as the Iran nuclear agreement. One of his first acts as CIA director was to invoke the state secrets privilege to prevent CIA officers, such as Gina Haspel who was Pompeo’s successor, from testifying in the trial of Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Jessen and Mitchell developed the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that constituted the sadistic torture and abuse program. They earned $80 million from the CIA for work that produced no useful intelligence whatsoever.
Ignatius over the years has been one of the worst examples of journalists who regularly report the self-serving comments of Defense Department and CIA officials tasked with shaping public perceptions of official policy. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA leaked classified materials to reporters to create the false impression that its detention and interrogation program was an effective tool. In 2002, the New York Times agreed to withhold information about a secret prison in Thailand, where torture and abuse were applied, at the urging of CIA leaders and Vice President Cheney. And McLaughlin was permitted to contribute to a book of essays from CIA leaders who castigated the authoritative Senate report on CIA torture and abuse, and argued that they considered the “moral and ethical implications of a program that involved a degree of coercion.” The book received no scrutiny from CIA publications review, which regularly censors criticism of CIA from CIA authors.
Finally, Ignatius is a regular apologist for the Pentagon’s use of force and CIA’s covert action. For the past two years, he has regularly predicted victory for Ukraine because of the introduction of one Western weapons system or another. The most recent so-called “game changer” in the war, according to Ignatius, was the ATACM-300 long range missile system. He said the arrival of the ATACM “might eventually open the way for a just negotiated peace.”
As recently as May 25, the Washington Post’s lead article on its front page was titled “Experts: Time Ripe to Press Moscow.” A series of editorials in the Post have argued that “if Ukraine can deny Russia from reaching the borders of Donetsk between now and Christmas, and Kyiv’s international partners are diligent in degrading Russia’s economy, Moscow will face hard choices about the costs it is prepared to incur for continuing the war.” Well, if “ifs and buts were candy and nuts,” then every day would be Christmas.
For Ignatius, there is always light at the end of the tunnel in dealing with U.S. and Israeli militarism. In fact, in 2023 he wrote that the “thing about tunnels is that if you keep moving through them, darkness eventually gives way to light.” The ATACM was an example of Ignatius’ “light.” Before that, it was the Abrams and Leopold tanks from the United States and Germany. Russia President Vladimir Putin thus far has been willing to pay the strategic and economic costs of the war, which now finds Russia committing more than a third of its national budget to funding the war against Ukraine.
The most recent example of Ignatius’s “light at the end of the tunnel” was the column that credited the United States and Israel with “making significant progress toward stabilizing three dangerous wars: Israel’s tit-for-tat conflict with Iran, the devastating assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the brutal war against Hamas in Gaza. For the past year, he has reported one hopeful scenario after another, ignoring the hostilities that continue and the thousands of Palestinians who face starvation.
It is a sad fact that over the course of the past 70 years, various administrations have received great support from the mainstream media in pursuing costly and unnecessary wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, which produced millions of civilians deaths and gained the United States very little. Reporters such as Drew Middleton, Joe Alsop, and David Ignatius have contributed heavily to this task.
Fortunately, individuals and institutions have stepped in to fill the void that the mainstream media has created. It was a whistleblower from the American Psychological Association who exposed the role of professional psychologists in creating a torture and abuse program. And it was the CIA’s Inspector General’s report on detention and renditions that forced the Bush administration to rein in the program. With the Trump administration, however, there are no inspectors general to probe for such transgressions, and it would take a very brave sole to be a whistleblower in our current environment.
We’ve all heard the line: ‘How many times have you heard someone say, if I had his money I’d do things my way?’ But that was the lie—reiterated later in Rich Man by Vampire Weekend—wasn’t it? As the original song A Satisfied Man goes—Joe ‘Red’ Hayes and Jack Rhodes wrote it but Tim Hardin sang it best—‘It’s so hard to find one rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.’
Macabrely, it only came to mind when a friend messaged me last week about the latest trend in crypto crime: violent, real-world attacks. Kidnappings. Pistol-whippings. In two instances, fingers literally severed. Jameson Lopp, a cyber-libertarian with a freedom-fighter beard and a GitHub account, has now catalogued 22 such ‘$5 wrench attacks’ this year. Why bother with sophisticated hacks when simple brute force works? As fortunes move offline—cold wallets, hidden vaults, paper keys—the violence simply adapts. Taking your assets off-grid doesn’t take you off the map. It just makes the extraction more medieval.
It wasn’t always so. (Or perhaps it was.) I recall a dim, low-ceilinged hall near London Bridge, some eleven years ago. A pokerfaced crypto meet-up. Barely a woman in sight. Geeks crippled with shyness. Hoodies and hush. City lads dashing in like accountants late to an orgy. Everyone giddy with the same idea: money without middlemen. Digital sovereignty. Revolution. Crypto in a crypt, really. I asked myself: was there a film in this?
If action is character, as they say about film, there wasn’t any. It’s never enough just to film people making money, though the dream was exciting enough: death to the banks, birth of the blockchain. The reality? PowerPoint decks, nervous coughs, and that lit-up look of early-adopter greed. They whispered of freedom but watched the charts. Hopeful. Hungry. Hooked on the number going up. Same old, same old.
I’d been invited by American couple Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert. They were running a successful TV show in London, two in fact, at the time. Max Keiser—an electric, loud, economic evangelist—had just profiled the doctor-bolstered documentary I was making about corporate interference in the NHS. Fast-forward over a decade: he and Stacy Herbert now successfully advise El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele on cryptocurrency.
It was of course Bukele who recently turned up at the White House refusing to extradite a man whisked into one of his mega-prisons without due process—the victim’s tattoos already digitally edited in the US to suggest gang affiliation. Last week, presumably separate from that, Max Keiser was issuing dire warnings about the bond market ‘ushering in Depression 2.0’ and predicting Bitcoin would hit $2.2 million. Not a misprint. Two-point-two. Million. Per coin. It is presently just over $100,000, his initial once poo-poohed prediction.
At the same time, the New York Post was turning on MAGA-lorian Trump, accusing his family of Biden-style influence-peddling, only this time via crypto. The focus: a Chinese e-commerce shell called GD Culture Group. Eight employees, no revenue, all vibes. They announced plans to purchase $300 million of his $TRUMP memecoin. This was while Trump still dithers over whether to ban TikTok—a platform GD Culture relies on. In fact, 40 per cent of the president’s entire net worth today is said to be from 2 crypto coins, the other being World Liberty Financial, which received a recent $2 billion investment from the UAE. He was also last Thursday giving a gala dinner, including a 23-minute speech, for the top 220 holders of his $Trump memecoin, some flying in from overseas, before disappearing in a helicopter without staying for the meal. Even the Genius Act, which legitimates stablecoins, advanced in the Senate last week.
And what of China? ‘The least understood but most important to understand nation,’ as Cindy Yu wrote in The Times last week. Though we do know China wants to own the future through AI dominance, it has since 2021 kept a tight ban on cryptocurrency trading and mining. There has been talk of a reverse—Hong Kong is crypto-savvy—but most experts remain unconvinced. They point to how slow and regulated it would be.
And while all this plays out, crypto investor John Woeltz, known as the crypto king of Kentucky, is done for kidnapping and torturing Italian tourist Michael Carturan by allegedly dangling him from the fifth floor of a Manhattan townhouse, trying to get his Bitcoin password. A man in New Zealand is arrested for helping run a global crypto ring that made off with $265 million. Here in London, only last year, Jian Wen, a former takeaway worker, was convicted of laundering £2 billion ($2.69 billion) in Bitcoin. That’s billion, with a B. She’d already begun converting it into jewellery and property until the Metropolitan Police stepped in, dryly announcing the UK’s largest-ever crypto seizure.
Still looming over all this of course is the one and only figure a subpoena or writ could never touch: Satoshi Nakamoto, though most observers are bored with this story. The name. The myth. The ghost in the machine. A man? A woman? A group? ‘Satoshi’ famously posted the white paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in 2008—four months later, ‘he’ launched the first ever crypto message board. The P2P Foundation profile listed Japan as home, used very British spellings, and claimed the age of 47 in 2022.
A sharp-eyed friend—aka Offshore Man—messaged me back when I asked him about Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘It wasn’t a Japanese genius nerd who created Bitcoin,’ he said. ‘That’s just a beautiful cover story. Just like it wasn’t two kids in a garage who gave us Google.’ He added: ‘Crypto was designed as a hot-money sink. A trap. Something to absorb wealth fleeing fiat debasement and steer it away from hard assets. It’ll collapse. And the suckers will be left with nothing.’
It should also be noted that Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert—nobody’s fools, either—have more than emphasised Bitcoin’s role in not only challenging but potentially replacing—with its more peaceful nature—what has been called ‘the inherent violence of fiat money’. Ironically enough, given these recent attacks.
I gather Russian crypto mining continues to flourish, with its two largest firms Intelion and BitRiver making $200 million in revenue in 2024. Russia’s illegal crypto sector meanwhile is ruefully described as ‘largely unaccounted for’. Talking of which, the UK is tightening the screws on the sector. From 2026, any operating crypto firm must collect and report extensive user data. Cold wallets won’t save you. Anonymity is done. The borderless dream gets a border, after all.
Last week, I left a meeting in Mayfair’s Shepherd Market—now cheekily dubbed ‘Silicon Alley’—and descended into Green Park Tube. A busker was belting out the song John Wesley Harding. The real name of the outlaw in the song was John Wesley Hardin (no G)—as in Tim Hardin, coincidentally enough. Dylan said he simply misspelled the name and no one bothered to fact-check it. I suspect he added the G to make it scan. A lyrical mutation. An artistic fib. And perhaps, just perhaps, a metaphor. Anyway, as I began searching ads for crypto tax tools for this piece, I kept hearing the song in my head even past Westminster:
All across the telegraph his name it did resound
But no charge held against him could they prove
And there was no man around who could track or chain him down
He was never known to make a foolish move
Lovely idea. But these days, even your best move might still cost you a finger.
Donald Trump thinks that young girls should get by with fewer dolls, but there is apparently no limit to the number of regulatory gifts he is offering Corporate America. Long-standing rules are being brushed aside, while laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act are not being enforced. Entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been put in limbo. Investigations launched by the Biden Administration are being abandoned. Trump even pardoned a cryptocurrency company and its founders fined for anti-money-laundering deficiencies.
Big Business is not, however, escaping all oversight. That’s because there are two areas beyond Trump’s control that are still acting as checks on corporate abuses: state government regulation and private litigation.
The U.S. Justice Department may be focusing more on legitimizing Trump’s acceptance of a $400 million airplane from Qatar, but state prosecutors continue to go after misconduct in the business world. This is true even in red states. The Texas Attorney General’s office recently announced that it is collecting more than $1 billion from Google to settle allegations that the company unlawfully amassed private data on users regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometrics.
Hawaii’s AG negotiated a $700 million settlement with Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi, resolving long-running litigation over the safety and efficacy of the blood thinner Plavix.
New Jersey’s AG and its Department of Environmental Protection announced a settlement of up to $450 million with 3M to resolve litigation over the company’s role in contamination of drinking water supplies with toxic PFAS substances, also known as forever chemicals.
Meanwhile in the courts, drug distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health, and Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen) together agreed to pay $300 million to a group of employee benefit plans to settle class action litigation alleging they contributed to the opioid epidemic in their marketing of the dangerous drugs.
A state jury in Louisiana recently determined that oil giant Chevron should pay $745 million in damages for harm caused to the coastline over many years of drilling activity. In the latest of a series of antitrust settlements in the meat industry, Tyson Foods and two other companies agreed to pay $64 million to settle allegations they conspired to fix prices on pork products provided to food service providers.
Defying the Trump Administration’s campaign to prohibit any efforts to address systemic racism and sexism, private anti-discrimination lawsuits move forward. Google just agreed to pay $50 million to settle allegations that it paid thousands of black workers less than their white counterparts and limited their opportunities for advancement.
A federal judge in California just granted preliminary approval to a class action settlement in which Walt Disney Company agreed to pay $43 million to resolve allegations that the compensation given to women in middle management was substantially lower than what was received by men in substantially similar jobs.
These are but a few of the steady stream of cases being brought by AGs and class action lawyers. It is far from desirable for the federal government to retreat from its primary role in business oversight. But until that policy shift can be reversed, the states and the courts are making sure that corporate misconduct does not go unchallenged.
Sunday, May 25, marks five years since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Despite the flurry of statements, very little has changed. Indeed Trump’s Department of Justice is reversing modest reforms made.
Aside from a few retrospective posts in the news and from policymakers, particularly from Minnesota, Sunday was a day much like any other.
This is notable considering recent mobilization. On April 5, 2025, millions of people demonstrated across the country and indeed the world, loosely affiliated with Indivisible, organized by two former Democratic Congressional staffers. A smaller number again took to the streets on May 1 – known almost everywhere outside the U.S. as Labor Day, commemorating the 1886 Haymarket rebellion in Chicago that won us the right to the weekend. Visibly missing from the media coverage and grassroots organization of these last two worldwide protests were leaders doing specifically antiracist work, particularly combating antiblackness.
This dystopia was far from foretold. We, Unions, let this happen.
We should have seen this coming, even before Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention. When unions embrace a top-down or “least common denominator” approach instead of a bottom-up, inclusive antiracist approach, issues confronting BIPOC workers, and specifically Black workers, are swept aside, leaving white workers vulnerable to the manipulation and disinformation that corroborates their deeply ingrained antiblack beliefs, particularly to what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture” of identity politics.
“Either we go up together, or we go down together”
The fight for economic justice–which is why labor unions exist–is inextricably linked to the fight for racial justice.
It is no coincidence that Dr. King, one of the most iconic civil rights leaders, was assassinated while preparing to march with sanitation workers in Memphis who were on strike; in his last speech, “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” Dr. King implored collaboration and solidarity: “either we go up together, or we go down together.” Nor is it coincidental that the unrealized ‘racial awakening’ of 2020 was accompanied by a renewed energy for workplace unionization. Unions were designed to combat economic injustice–to redistribute wealth and power to those most marginalized in the workplace: workers.
The United States’ material wealth and cultural, social and political power is rooted in the economic exploitation of poor people and/or people of color. The theft of land from Indigenous people; the theft of Black, Asian, and immigrant labor for centuries; and the intentional denial of economic opportunities to these communities of color–but particularly Black folks–codified in laws and practices, form the bedrock of our nation’s wealth–and the resulting wealth gap. Hence unions exist to serve as vehicles of structural and institutional disruption. This is unequivocally antiracist work, for there can never be economic justice without racial justice, and vice versa. The power of the labor movement is derived from its ability to unite and build solidarity among workers–and this demands that unions engage directly with the issues that impact these workers and the communities they serve. As Charlene Carruthers, Chicago millennial activist and cofounder of Black Youth Project-100, argues, it is “all of us or none of us.”
“The Achilles Heel of the Labor Movement”
Unfortunately, though, unions, and the U.S. labor movement as a whole have not historically harnessed their collective power to oppose and defy racism–and they certainly have not consistently attempted to combat anti-Black racism: the deep-seated disdain for Black people that permeates every part of our society–even communities of color that also experience racism. On the contrary, unions have more often than not upheld white supremacy and been accomplices of bosses, capital, and imperialist agendas. Historians have acknowledged that the creation of “whiteness,” laws and practices that distinguished white indentured servants from their Black enslaved peers, were a direct response of the wealthy white elite who feared continued multiracial uprisings like that of Bacon’s Rebellion in the colony of Virginia. These elites deepened hereditary slavery for those of African descent while granting white farmers more rights and powers to distinguish them as different and of “higher status” than their Black enslaved counterparts.
The disdain for Black people and their well-being is not always spoken out loud; it doesn’t need to be. It is evident in the toleration of violence against Black bodies–from unparalleled police violence, to the violent systems of “discipline” in our schools that criminalize and punish Black children; to the ways in which Black mothers and children die at exponentially higher rates during childbirth. It is evident in the normalizing and even justifying of Black pain and suffering; in colorism that permeates Latin American and Asian cultures; in the ways Black people’s needs and concerns are discounted and even ignored in favor of more “universal issues”–despite the clear and well-documented history of violence, exploitation, and exclusion exacted upon Black people.
In modern day union history, this antiblackess has manifested in acts like more than 7,000 union members choosing to leave the American Federation of Teachers rather than integrate their local unions after the Brown v. Board of Education decision; to revered United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president Al Shanker leading a 36-day teachers’ strike in 1968 to quell the movement of Black and Brown parents to control their schools; to UFT’s refusal to pass a Black Lives Matter at School resolution in 2018 because it was too “divisive.” White supremacy has been, in education activist Pauline Lipman’s words, “the Achilles heel of the labor movement.”
Democrats, so-called progressives, and yes, so-called unionists, continually perpetuate antiblackness. After the majority of white voters and a significant minority of Latine and Asian voters lifted Donald Trump into his second presidency, the direction from many white labor leaders was to bring union members together; to listen to “both sides” in order to establish “common interests” so that we could “move forward together.” There was no call to address the antiblackness in our ranks. There was no acknowledgement that folks were willing to sacrifice the well-being of their Black, Latine, immigrant and transgender union “siblings” for the promise of spending a few less cents on eggs or gas–cynical promises summarily abandoned as Trump started a global trade war.
It is not that issues such as Social Security or Medicare aren’t of concern to Black folks. Indeed, Black folks are the most targeted. It just stings when labor clearly and intentionally omits how antiblackness played as significant a role in the election outcome as the economy. White and non-Black workers were willing to embrace racist rhetoric, policy agendas, etc. because they believed they would be sheltered and that Black folks would experience the most harm–which would be acceptable.
A mantra of unions is that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” But if that were truly the case, millions would line the streets daily over the violence and cruelty that Black folks face. Our society, and yes, our unions, have determined that Black folks, while reliable, are disposable.
Progressives rely on the fact that Black people will fight and resist injustice because they have to in order to survive. And every marginalized group benefits from that struggle. But when it is time to truly ally together to protect and/or follow Black folks, and by extension, all of humanity, virtue-signaling non-Black liberals often retreat into “least common denominator” or “unifying” politics.
Imagine being the most loyal base for Democrats and labor unions, but time and again have your priorities sidelined and outright dismissed for some faux form of “solidarity.” It is not only infuriating, it is exhausting. Little wonder why Black folks have been noticeably absent from post-election protests.
Black folks want to know that our lives, our well-being, our needs, our concerns, matter–not just when folks need our labor, our organizing and our resistance.
Until Black lives matter ALL the time, true solidarity is not possible. Because when we/they demonstrate that we/they don’t see or appreciate Black people’s full humanity, this chips away at Black folks’ empathy and compassion for non-Black people. In essence, we all become dehumanized.
Antiblackness makes us all vulnerable and unsafe. Just as we are now.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and should not be read as speaking for their affiliations.
The media, universities, the Democratic Party and liberals, by embracing the fiction of “rampant antisemitism,” laid the groundwork for their own demise. Columbia and Princeton, where I have taught, and Harvard, which I attended, are not incubators of hatred towards Jews. The New York Times, where I worked for fifteen years and which Trump calls “an enemy of the people,” is slavishly subservient to the Zionist narrative. What these institutions have in common is not antisemitism, but liberalism. And liberalism, with its creed of pluralism and inclusiveness, is slated by our authoritarian regime for obliteration.
The conflation of outrage over the genocide with antisemitism is a sleazy tactic to silence protest and placate Zionist donors, the billionaire class and advertisers. These liberal institutions, weaponizing antisemitism, aggressively silenced and expelled critics, banned student groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, allowed police to make hundreds of arrests of peaceful protests on campuses, purged professors and groveled before Congress. Use the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ and you are fired or excoriated.
Zionist Jews, in this fictional narrative, are the oppressed. Jews who protestthe genocide are slandered as Hamas stooges and punished. Good Jews. Bad Jews. One group deserves protection. The other deserves to be thrown to the wolves. This odious bifurcation exposes the charade.
In April 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, along with two board members and a law professor, testified before the House of Representative education committee. They accepted the premise that antisemitism was a significant problem at Columbia and other higher education institutions.
When Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University David Greenwald and others told the committee that they believed “from the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada” were antisemitic statements, Shafik agreed. She threw students and faculty under the bus, including long-time professor Joseph Massad.
The day after the hearings, Shafik suspended all the students at the Columbia protests and called in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), who arrested at least 108 students.
“I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” Shafik wrote in her letter to the police.
NYPD Chief John Chell, however, told the press, “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
“What disciplinary action has been taken against that professor?” Representative Elise Stefanik asked in the hearing about Columbia law Professor Katherine Franke.
Shafik volunteered that Franke, who is Jewish and whose position at the law school where she had taught for 25 years was terminated, and other professors, were being investigated. In an apparent reference to visiting Columbia Professor Mohamed Abdou, she claimed he was “terminated” and promised he “will never teach at Columbia again.” Professor Abdou is suingColumbia for defamation, discrimination, harassment and financial and professional loss.
The Center for Constitutional Rights wrote of the betrayal of Franke:
In an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy, Columbia University has entered into an “agreement” with Katherine Franke to leave her teaching position after an esteemed 25-year career. The move — “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” according to Franke’s statement — stems from her advocacy for students who speak out in support of Palestinian rights.
Her ostensible offense was a comment expressing concern about Columbia’s failure to address harassment of Palestinians and their allies by Israeli students who come to campus straight from military service — after Israeli students sprayed Palestinian rights protestors with a toxic chemical. For this, she was investigated for harassment and found to be in violation of Columbia’s policies. The actual cause of her forced departure is the crackdown on dissent at Columbia resulting from historic protests opposing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Franke’s fate was sealed when former Columbia president Minouche Shafik threw her under the bus during her cowardly appearance before Congress.
Despite her capitulation to the Zionist lobby, Shark resigned a little more than a year after assuming her position as head of the university.
The crackdown at Columbia continues, with an estimated 80 people arrestedand over 65 students suspended following a protest in the library in the first week of May. Former television journalist and Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman condemned the protest, stating,“Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies…Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.”
Of course, appeasement does not work. This witch hunt, whether under the Biden or Trump administration, was never grounded in good faith. It was about decapitating Israel’s critics and marginalizing the liberal class and the left. It is sustained by lies and slander, which these institutions continue to embrace.
Watching these liberal institutions, who are hostile to the left, be smeared by Trump for harboring “Marxist lunatics,” “radical leftists,” and “communists,” exposes another failing of the liberal class. It was the left that could have saved these institutions or at least given them the fortitude, not to mention analysis, to take a principled stand. The left at least calls apartheid apartheidand genocide genocide.
Media outlets regularly publish articles and OpEds uncritically accepting claims made by Zionist students and faculty. They fail to clarify the distinction between being Jewish and being Zionist. They demonize student protesters. They never bothered reporting with any depth or honesty from the student encampments where Jews, Muslims and Christians made common cause. They routinely mischaracterize anti-Zionist, anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian liberation slogans and policy demands as hate speech, antisemitic, or contributing to Jewish students feeling unsafe.
The New York Times, in a decision worthy of George Orwell, instructed its reporters to eschew words such “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” “slaughter,” “massacre,” “carnage,” “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” when writing about Palestine, according to an internal memo obtained by The Intercept. It discourages the very use of the word “Palestine” in routine text and headlines.
In December 2023, Democratic Governor of New York Kathy Hochul sent a letter to university and college presidents who failed to condemn and address “antisemitism,” and calls for the “genocide of any group,” would be subjected to “aggressive enforcement action,” by New York State. The following year, in late August, Hochul repeated these warnings during a virtual meeting with 200 university and college leaders.
Hochul made clear in October 2024 that she considered pro-Palestine slogans to be explicit calls for genocide of Jews.
“There are laws on the books – human rights laws, state and federal laws – that I will enforce if you allow for the discrimination of our students on campus, even calling for the genocide of the Jewish people which is what is meant by ‘From the river to the sea,’ by the way,” she said at a memorial event at the Temple Israel Center in White Plains. “Those are not innocent sounding words. They’re filled with hate.”
The Governor successfully pressured City University of New York (CUNY) to remove a job posting for a Palestinian studies professorship at Hunter College which referenced “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in his new book “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” leads efforts by the Democratic Party — which has a dismal 27 percent approval rating in a recent NBC News poll — to denounce those protesting the genocide as carrying out a “blood libel” against Jews.
“Whatever one’s view of how the war in Gaza was conducted, it is not and has never been the policy of the Israeli government to exterminate the Palestinian people,” he writes, ignoring hundreds of calls by Israeli officials to wipe Palestinians from the face of the earth during 19 months of saturation bombing and enforced starvation.
The grisly truth, openly acknowledged by Israeli officials, is far different.
“We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us,” gloats Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed…it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world,” Israeli Knesset member Zvi Sukkot, told Israel’s Channel 12 on May 16.
The perpetuation of the fiction of widespread antisemitism, which of course exists but which is not fostered or condoned by these institutions, coupled with the refusal to say out loud what is being live streamed to the world, has shattered what little moral authority these institutions and liberals had left. It gives credibility to Trump’s effort to cripple and destroy all institutions that sustain a liberal democracy.
Trump surrounds himself with neo-Nazi sympathizers such as Elon Musk, and Christian fascists who condemn Jews for crucifying Christ. But antisemitism by the right gets a free pass since these “good” antisemites cheer on Israel’s settler colonial project of extermination, one these neo-Nazis and Christian fascists would like to replicate on Brown and Black in the name of the great replacement theory. Trump trumpets the fiction of “white genocide” in South Africa. He signed an executive order in February that fast-tracked immigration to the U.S. for Afrikaners — white South Africans.
Harvard, which is attempting to save itself from the wrecking ball of the Trump administration, was as complicit in this witch hunt as everyone else, flagellating itself for not being more repressive towards campus critics of the genocide.
The university’s former president Claudine Gay condemned the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which demands the right of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, as bearing “specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel.”
Harvard substantially tightened its regulations regarding student protests, in January 2024, and increased the police presence on its campus. It barred 13 students from graduating, citing alleged policy violations linked to their participation in a protest encampment, despite an earlier agreement to avoid punitive measures. It placed more than 20 students on “involuntary leave” and in some cases evicted students from their housing.
The capitulations and crackdowns on pro-Palestine activism, academic freedom, freedom of speech, suspensions, expulsions and firings, since Oct. 7, 2023, have not spared U.S. colleges and universities from further attacks.
Since Trump took office, at least $11 billion in federal research grants and contracts have been cut or frozen nationwide according to NPR. This includes Harvard ($3 billion), Columbia ($400 million), University of Pennsylvania ($175 million) and Brandeis ($6-7.5 million annually).
On May 22, the Trump administration intensified its attacks on Harvard byterminating its ability to enroll international students that make up around 27 percent of the student body.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Kristi Noem, DHS Secretary wrote on X, when posting screenshots of the letter she sent to Harvard revoking foreign student enrollment. “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
Harvard, like Columbia, the media, the Democratic Party and the liberal class, misread power. By refusing to acknowledge or name the genocide in Gaza, and persecuting those who do, they provided the bullets to their own executioners.
They are paying the price for their stupidity and cowardice.
Victory Day Parade on Red Square on 9 May 2025. Photograph Source: Kremlin.ru – CC BY 4.0
Nobody doubts the difficulty of counting the dead in war. Hence the omnipresent tomb for The Unknown Soldier which commemorates that sad reality. But sometimes deficiencies in counting are about something else. Look at Gaza’s grim counter which seems to have got stuck at 52,000 when everybody knows the number is much higher. Given that by June 2024 over 39000 Palestinian deaths had been recorded, it is hard not to believe that the West has imposed its own moratorium on reporting fatalities; perhaps in some vain attempt to assuage sensitivities back home.
One death toll that is well-known, however, at least to an older generation, is 27 million. That being the number of souls the Soviet Union lost in the Second World War. And it is generally acknowledged, by historians if not by European politicians, that the fight against Fascism could not have been won without that Soviet sacrifice – their costly victory at Stalingrad being the turning point that secured victory for the Allies. And to give the size of that death toll some historical perspective: the loss of 27 million people in 1945 would have equated to wiping out of the entire populations of Poland (24m), Lithuania (2.7m) and Estonia (1.08m).
It is therefore beyond disappointing that Europe’s current political representatives felt unable to show a modicum of respect for the horrendous suffering that preserved Western Civilisation. Indeed, Robert Fico, the Slovakian Prime Minister, who only last year was seriously injured by a far-right assassin, and Aleksandar Vučić, the Serbian President, were the sole European leaders in attendance at the 80th anniversary of V.E. Day in Moscow. But whether in attendance or not, attempting to elide that immeasurable Soviet contribution brings nothing but shame on those engaged in such historical revisionism. It also serves to remind us that Fascism was not a movement confined to Nazi Germany.
Kaja Kallas, Vice President of the EU Commission, and well-known Estonian Russophobe, scolded the two leaders for breaking ranks, insisting that they should have marked the day in Kiev. Not wishing to take anything away from the suffering of the Ukrainian people both in WW2 and today, in the West’s proxy war against Russia, but Kalas knows that it was the Soviet army that liberated Slovenia and Slovakia from both the retreating German Nazis and the Fascist Ukrainian Nationalists – the Waffen SS Galicia Division – who were then supporting them. None of us are responsible for the actions of our ancestors, but it is surely appropriate that commemoration day is spent on the soil of the liberators rather than in the country whose Fascist forces forestalled them.
Particularly on days set aside for honouring those killed in war, it is important not to besmirch their memory with political machinations emanating from the present, but unfortunately that is what is now happening. And it is happening because of European initiatives like the 2008 Prague Declaration which is a project aimed at reframing the narrative of WW2 along the lines of a ‘Double Genocide’ in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are viewed as equally complicit in war crimes. Whilst such a revisionist proposal might seem far-fetched given that it is common knowledge that the Soviet army liberated Europe from Nazi Germany – according to historian Geoffrey Roberts 80% of all combat in WW2 took place on the Eastern front – the Double Genocide construct is being deployed in order to whitewash the fact that the war against Fascism was not fought by the whole of Europe. Not only were a number of European states allied with Germany, the so-called Axis powers, but in others, particularly in the East, there was active support for Nazi efforts to exterminate European Jewry. And it is the fact of Nazi collaboration that those states, now liberated from Soviet occupation and part of the EU, are having to come to terms with.
According to the Simon Weisenthal Centre, [SWC] “the rate of Holocaust murder in the Baltics was the highest in Europe.” Many such murders were of individuals or families who were shot by their neighbours, often close to their home. Those neighbours were not criminals or thugs, but ordinary people drawn from all walks of life. Rather than acknowledging that painful reality, the governments of such states, particularly Lithuania, have chosen to downplay their complicity in the genocide by attributing the murders to the actions of a national independence movement seeking emancipation from Soviet occupiers and their communist supporters. The difficulty with that line of argument is that it implies that the murdered Jews supported the Soviet occupation of 1940, which is not true. But even if it were true, why would 220,000 Jews need to be slaughtered for their political views? Because most of these people did not die in battles, or street fights, or any sort of partisan confrontation. They were not even armed, and many were children. And what about the Jews who escaped being murdered and did join the partisans to fight the Nazis, would they be classified as war criminals, guilty of Soviet crimes? Unbelievably, under the Double Genocide dogma formalised into Lithuanian law the answer is yes.
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A further problem with this notion of Double Genocide is that in order to make Soviet killings symmetrical with the Nazi genocide, the definition of genocide has to be expanded from that contained in the Genocide Convention. The definition there was specifically drafted after the war to describe Nazi actions directed against ‘a people’, i.e., a genus; and in that case the people were Jews. In order for actions or inactions to be capable of constituting a genocide they have to be directed at ‘a people’ or part of ‘a people’, and not simply at people. And what constitutes ‘a people’ is defined in the convention as something ethnic or racial or religious or national, e.g., like the Palestinians. By expanding the notion of ‘a people’ to include Social or Political groups which is what the Lithuanian Criminal Code has done in order to incorporate Soviet killings, the definition of genocide has become so diluted as to be meaningless.[1]
The ‘Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism’ which, according to Wikipedia, is the initiative of the Czech government, was signed on June 3rd 2008 by “prominent European politicians, former political prisoners and historians.” It also received letters of support from a cluster of right-wing elder statesmen – Margaret Thatcher and Zbigniew Brzezinski, being two of them. So the project is a large one, involving politicians, academics, historians, lawyers, Europeans government institutions and NGOs. Its overt purpose is “to call for Europe-wide condemnation of, and education about, the crimes of communism.” Without any hint of irony, the Declaration states that its intention to create a “Platform for European memory and Conscience”, draws heavily on the conception of totalitarianism.
What is taking place here is more than the countenancing of an alternative interpretation of the past. Because what is emphasised in the Declaration is the need to forge a unitary view: ‘to consolidate .. a united European memory of the past.” Apparently, ”Europe will not be united unless it is able to reunite its history,” which is an idea that is both novel and dangerous. How many countries, parties, people have an identical view of the past? The Declaration goes on to put forward a wide range of tactics through which the desired consolidation can be effected, including:- “a Europe-wide overhaul of school text books in order to educate children about the dangers of Communism; the establishment of a new remembrance day – Black Ribbon Day – which would unite Nazi victims with Soviet ones; the promulgation of new local laws in order to punish and provide compensation for crimes retrospectively identified as ‘Communist war crimes’; the setting up of commissions of investigation within nation states in order to identify Communist war crimes comparable with Nazi ones – the so-called Red-Brown commissions and the co-opting of historians and academics to sit on them. The late historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, resigned from such a commission in disgust at the Lithuanian government’s treatment of Jewish survivors of the holocaust, who were being ‘excoriated’ as Communists and threatened with prosecution for war crimes because they had joined the partisans. Unsurprisingly, none of the octogenarians were actually prosecuted, but no public apologies were issued either.
Unsurprisingly, the Declaration has received a lot of criticism concerning its revisionism and holocaust distortion. The SWC described it as “a new and insidious combination of antisemitism and holocaust distortion”, “a well-coordinated effort to rewrite history and to persuade Western Europe to join in jettisoning the historic concept of the holocaust.” The SWC further suggested that “The goal of this sophisticated, new incarnation of extreme forms of local ultranationalism, antisemitism and racism, is to whitewash the massive Baltic nations’ participation in the murder of their Jewish populations.” It has certainly resulted in a number of historians, who have raised the thorny issue of local collaboration, being prosecuted for defamation, particularly in Poland. In the post Prague Declaration world, governments want their populations exonerated, not accused
The Declaration also serves to protect Nazi war criminals from prosecution, as historian and former Nazi Hunter Efraim Zuroff explains, “The lack of political will to bring Nazis war criminals to justice and/or to punish them continues to be the major obstacle to achieving justice, particularly in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The campaign led by the Baltic countries to distort the history of the Holocaust and obtain official recognition that the crimes of Communism are equal to those of the Nazis is another major obstacle to the prosecution of those responsible for the crimes of the Shoa.”
Coming to terms with your nation’s or, more precisely, your parents’ collaboration in a genocide must be unimaginably painful. When Anthony Eden, Britain’s war-time Foreign Secretary was asked by film-maker, Marcel Ophuls, what he thought of the Vichy government’s collaboration with their Nazi occupiers, he demurred, politely pointing out that ‘Britain had not been occupied.’ It was a gracious moment. But Ophuls’ 4 hour documentary about that collaboration: ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ – was devastating for French society. In 1981, more than ten years after the film had been made and shown in selected cinemas, the French government finally permitted it to be broadcast on TV and the cocoon of imagined resistance was ripped away. Voices in the establishment regarded the work as a traitorous and damaging portrait of the French people, and had tried to block its screening. But ultimately the film had a transformative effect on French culture, especially on French film and literature.
Admittedly, French Liberal society’s comfort with Nazism was not as aggressively collaborationist as that of the independence-seeking countries of Eastern Europe – ordinary French citizens tended to ignore the genocide rather than aid it. Still, the very fact of Nazi collaboration by those nascent states raises an important moral question regarding a nation’s choice of allies in its fight for nationhood, as pointed out by Lithuanian philosopher, Leonidas Donskis, in his attempt to come to terms with his country’s collusion. Donskis does not seek to moralise and he resists dividing Lithuanian society up into Jews and Lithuanians, as is so often done. Instead, he blames his country’s crimes and moral failings on a lack of leadership; on the failure of the political elites of the time to delegitimize the rule of the occupier which was their task. In Donskis view, in failing to do that they became collaborators. When under Nazi occupation in 1941, the provisional government spouted the same racist rhetoric as their occupiers, as captured by an article in a contemporary news magazine, ‘The New Lithuania’, published in July 1941: “The New Lithuania, joined to Adolf Hitler’s New Europe, must be cleansed of Jews… Exterminating Jewry, and together with it Communism, is the first task of the New Lithuania.”
If, following the Prague Declaration, Nazism and Communism are to be conflated and some sort of criminal symmetry established, it is difficult to see what hateful ideological rhetoric Communism has produced that equates with the rabid racism above. ‘Workers of the world unite,” doesn’t seem to hold quite the same menace as ‘Exterminate world Jewry’. That is not to say that the Soviet regime did not commit war crimes; they did. The massacre of 20,000 Poles at Katyn being, perhaps, the best known. What Stalin ordered to be done was horrific, but it was not genocide. It also was not inherently Communistic. Likewise, Liberal and Conservative states have carried out comparable massacres, often in the name of ‘the Civilising process’, which had nothing to do with Liberalism or Conservativism, or being civilised. The same cannot be said about Nazism.
If, as the Declaration states, “children are to be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess Nazi crimes,” that would seem to suggest that supporting Communist principles of egalitarianism and antiracism is as criminal as supporting the racist, ethno-supremacist ideas inherent in Nazism which does not make any sense. And actually the wording of article 2 of the Declaration exposes this obvious distinction between the two ideologies which tends to get ignored by those advocating for symmetry. For what that article actually conflates are ‘Nazi crimes’ and ‘Crimes committed in the name of Communism,’ which are obviously entirely different entities. Crimes can be committed through actions carried out in the name of anything: God, Religion, Civilisation – that does not mean that the entity the name is taken from is itself criminal. Whereas, the essential character of Nazism is criminal because it is an inherently racist, ethno-supremacist violent ideology. If you take the criminal elements of Nazism away, nothing is left.
Unsurprisingly, the Double Genocide movement has divided historians. Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz –set up a website www.defendinghistory.com to resist this revisionist history and was subsequently dismissed from his teaching post at Vilnius University. On the other hand, a recent history book that has, intentionally or not, been used to further that thesis is Timothy Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands – Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,’ which juxtaposes Nazi systems against Soviet ones. Omer Bartov – Professor of Genocide Studies at Brown admires Snyder’s analysis but finds the work biased towards Poland, lacking in new evidence, and failing to make sufficient reference to the widespread Nazi collaboration that took place. He also accuses it of “draining the war of moral content” and points out that it is reminiscent of the revisionist claims made by German historians in the 1980s – the historikerstreit – from which came the appraisal that apart from the gas chambers, Nazis were just fighting Communism. But what seems fatal to Snyder’s regime comparison is Bartov’s observation that a Nazi victory over the USSR would not have prevented the holocaust, as indeed it would not. And, further, following such a victory it is highly unlikely, given Hitler’s desire for lebensraum in the East, that there would have remained any East European states left to be liberated in 1991.
Postmodern thinking has dispelled the illusion of ideology-free narratives. The old idea that objective truth is obtainable in any of the humanities, or even sciences, untrammelled by social and political agendas has gone. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the study of history. Nevertheless, facts still remain – slender and isolated maybe, and awaiting the historian to gather them up and convey them to a wider public, but still, facts speak through the historian’s chosen narrative which is available for analysis and critique – to be read, perhaps, more like a witness statement than a true story. E.H. Carr, a British historian of the 60s who wrote the classic, ‘What is History?’ is probably not much of an exemplar on writing history today, but his observation that once facts are found, you need a bag to put them in, captures the reality of any narrative. The point is to study the bag in order to discern whose interests are being furthered by that particular presentation of the facts.
All historical accounts, and even accepted definitions are essentially a mix of fact and ideology. And being aware of that – both as writer and reader – may bring us closer to the truth. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the definition of Fascism itself. Presenting it as a fixed ideological structure locked in the past and twinned with an expired counter ideology gives the impression that it is a spent force, when it is not. Such an interpretation prevents us from recognising its chameleon-like fluidity, and its particular relevance today. As Mussolini proudly declared, “The Fasci di Combattimento – [the fighting bands] do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.”[2] And as for there being a totalitarian equivalence with Communism, Mussolini would have denied it, asserting in 1932 “A party which governs a nation in a totalitarian manner is a unique event in history. Neither references nor comparisons can be made.”[3] Whether or not the Prague Declaration or the war in Ukraine or the fall of the Soviet Union, or perhaps even the stuttering of Capitalism itself has brought this odious mentality that promotes the basest impulses of human nature back into view, a re-invigorated awareness of Fascism’s destructive capacity is necessary. For Fascism has the distinction of being capable of destroying more than regimes or even countries; it destroys a person’s humanity.
In ‘Anatomy of Fascism’, historian Robert O. Paxton, who wrote extensively on the Vichy regime, introduces Fascism as “the major political innovation of the 20th Century.” It is more of a force than a repository of ideas and is capable of working with Liberalism and Conservatism, but its main focus is the destruction of the Left, particularly International Socialism – its primary enemy. Paxton dismisses the notion that Fascism is an ideology on the basis that unlike other ‘isms’: Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism, Fascism has no intellectual base. Fascism is not a viewpoint that debates. And the reason it lacks the intellectual content necessary for debate is because, unlike those other isms, it does not feel constrained by legality. As Engels presciently observed, “We (socialists) under this legality get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal. There is nothing for them (Conservatives) to do but break through this legality themselves.”[4] Though the mass approval that break through met with is probably something Engels could not have imagined. Thirty years later, however, the Communist International had woken up to that reality and described Fascism as “the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”[5]
Whilst Fascism itself has no pretence of an intellectual bent that does not mean it holds no appeal for the intelligentsia, quite the opposite as history has shown. But intellectuals don’t just jump on the Fascist bandwagon, they are there at its inception. As Paxton explains “In the early days the intellectuals helped create a space for Fascist movements by weakening the elite’s attachment to enlightenment values – until then those values had been widely accepted and given institutional form in liberal society.” What the intellectuals, whether through the church or the cultural and political elites, provide is a kind of ‘cultural preparation’. In effect they open the door to Fascism. Fascism cannot do this for itself since it has only feet.
The proponents of political ideologies – of those other ‘isms’- have tracts and manifestoes ready to argue their cause and win support by showing their ‘truth’. Fascism’s relationship with truth is entirely different, “truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”[6] What Fascism has are slogans and sigils and style bcause Fascism dominates in the aesthetic realm; that space we all look to when everything else in society seems full and used up. Paxton describes Fascism as “the most self-consciously visual of all political forms.” Presumably it would have to be since it works by contagion, hiding its vulgarity beneath a stylised veneer. Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who killed himself in Spain in 1940 rather than be murdered by the Nazis, was probably the first to write about Fascism’s aesthetic essence, “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”[7] Benjamin regarded Fascism as a ‘violation of the masses’ since it denied them their rights and kept the property structure intact, but gave them the freedom to express themselves, primarily through violence, and particularly through war. Essentially, it used them – it fed their senses, and emotions and then left them empty. Because in the spectacle of violence brought forth by Fascism, what is occluded, albeit momentarily, are the relations of power within society. In many ways it acts like a safety valve for the capitalist system, almost like a catharsis through which the masses could vent their frustrations and purify themselves – dominate and destroy other lives before returning to the servility of their own. As Paxton reports, although “early fascist movements paraded an anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeoisie animus, that rarely came to anything”, other than the destruction of the working class through the imprisonment of trade unionists and Socialists; it certainly did not alter the socio-economic hierarchy.
“The ultimate Fascist response to the Right-Left political map was to claim that they had made it obsolete” which in many ways they had: they were offering purgation in place of equality. Thus, they could claim to be “transcending that divide in the interests of the nation.” But then, as Donskis asked earlier, what sort of nationhood does Fascism offer? Because, as Paxton explains, ‘Fascism changes the fundamental nature of citizenship’. It is no longer about debate and party and representation – those aspects of the world of legality are left behind. Rather, it enforces participation in ceremony and ritual and violence, and ultimately enforces the most debasing forms of conformity – the contagion of the pogrom or the massacre or the race riot.
How individuals and communities come back from such depravity has been the challenge of modern nationhood. A challenge to which International Socialism believed it had the solution. Whether Israel can come back from the abyss of its own ultra nationalist ideology is perhaps the question more uppermost in people’s minds right now. Even if the Zionist state survives, which seems unlikely, what would it look like? ‘Soulless’ would probably be the single word most people would use. Thereby confirming Socrates’ warning to the jurors who unjustly condemned him that they had suffered the greater loss. Which makes you wonder what it is that lures us to risk so much. What cause is worth such tragic undoing? Tolstoy thought it was patriotism and he could be right, because what is patriotism but the velvet glove for virulent nationalism? Tolstoy interpreted Patriotism as meaning, “advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular state system into which we happen to have been born.’ And, if we accept his definition then perhaps we should hope that he is right and that in the future calling someone a patriot will be recognised as ‘the deepest insult you can offer him.’
Notes.
[1] It is worth noting that according to the Weiner Holocaust Library ‘the largest mass murder of a particular group in human history’ is that of Soviet prisoners of war, denied the protection of the Geneva Convention by the Wehrmacht. In total between 3.3m to 5.7m were murdered.
It’s always been something of a shock to return to the United States after a stay in Europe or northeast Asia. Things just run better in those parts of the world. The public transportation is fast and efficient. The medical services provide universal care. Infrastructure isn’t in a state of decline. Green spaces are well maintained. Industrial agriculture doesn’t dominate the countryside.
Sure, there are exceptions. Japanese bureaucracy, British trains, Italian unemployment, South Korean work hours: these are nothing to boast about. But in general, the United States ranks pretty low in quality of life compared to its European and Asian competitors. In the U.S. News and World Report’s Quality of Life index, the United States is a middling 22 out of 89 countries, below Belgium, Japan, and Ireland. It’s tied for seventeenth place in the latest UN Human Development Report, below Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canada. That’s pretty lousy marks for the largest economy in the world.
Returning from South Korea this week, I was once again reminded of the continual slippage of the United States. Passport control at Logan Airport was short-staffed. I had to navigate the virtually incomprehensible maze of South Station in Boston to find the bus terminal. Then there was the four-hour bus trip to cover the 92 miles to get back home. By comparison, the 167-mile trip from Seoul to the southern city of Gwangju—where I participated in a conference last week—took me a mere two hours by express train.
On top of the general entropy the United States has been experiencing since the 1970s, there’s the Trump factor. Whatever additional time I had to wait on the passport line at Logan bears no comparison whatsoever to the horrifying experiences of Canadian and Western European tourists detained at the border, residents with green cards or travel permits taken into custody and readied for deportation, and the Venezuelans, Afghans, and Haitians whose Temporary Protected Status has been summarily revoked.
The quality of life for anyone but permanent residents in the United States has thus dropped to near zero.
Lest you feel excluded from the general slide downward under Trump, his attacks on government services is having a negative effect on everyone living in this country. The recently rechristened (by me) Department of Government Chaos, Revenge, and Patronage is making sure that the United States falls even further in the global rankings of quality of life. This Department—and all the accompanying executive decrees—are accelerating the free fall of the United States to the status of what Trump famously labeled a “shithole country,” a place that people all over the world are increasingly trying to avoid.
Jeez, do I have to spell it out?
The Politics of DoGCRaP
It’s common for Americans to criticize their government. A joke that Ronald Reagan made famous was: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Americans typically disparage federal help even as they receive their Medicaid benefits. They don’t understand that federal dollars support infrastructure like roads and bridges. They don’t see that federal money supports education, public media, and research that improves their overall health and wellbeing.
As Joni Mitchell put it in her song “Big Yellow Taxi”—“Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”
Now that Donald Trump and his minions are eviscerating the federal government, Americans are suddenly starting to realize that the 10 most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the Trump administration and I’m here to help.” (Psych!)
The three key elements of Trump’s effort to deconstruct government are chaos, revenge, and patronage. The budget cuts are designed to send federal programming into a death spiral that generates unprecedented chaos. Trump is targeting in particular all the elements of society that did him wrong: the liberal media, law firms that brought suit against him and his businesses, institutions like the Kennedy Center and the National Institutes of Health that indirectly challenge his lack of competence and credentials. Finally, because the federal government controls a considerable amount of money, Trump is doing all he can to loot public resources for the benefit of himself and his friends.
None of this is going through the proper channels. Congress has been transformed in the Trump era into a vestigial branch of government, an American appendix. Government lawyers are trying to argue that the administration doesn’t have to abide by any court decisions, even those of the Supreme Court. Internal resistance might ordinarily throw sand into the gears of Trumpism. But Trump is busy throwing the sand-throwers out of the civil service.
The Four Rs of National Self-Destruction
Let’s examine the mechanisms by which the Trump administration is chipping away at the foundations of American democracy.
Republicans have always been interested in “regulatory reform,” otherwise known as deregulation, otherwise known as canoodling with corporations. Given the sheer difficulty of pushing through any type of governmental change, past Republican administrations (and some Democratic ones) have largely engaged in a form of nip-and-tuck, slicing away here and sewing things back together there. Trump is not interested in cosmetic surgery. He prefers the guillotine approach.
As The New York Times reports:
Across the more than 400 federal agencies that regulate almost every aspect of American life, from flying in airplanes to processing poultry, Mr. Trump’s appointees are working with the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative headed by Elon Musk and also called DOGE, to launch a sweeping new phase in their quest to dismantle much of the federal government: deregulation on a mass scale.
If he can’t eliminate an agency altogether—as he has tried to do with the Voice of America’s parent agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Department of Education—Trump is embracing the strategy of “death by a thousand cuts.” As agencies reel from cuts in staff, in funding, and in the regulations themselves, the business world is liberated to do whatever it wants.
In many cases, regulations are dying simply because the administration is forcing agencies to stop enforcing the laws, which is like local police no longer monitoring speeding or issuing tickets. “At the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump officials have scaled back enforcement of rules intended to curb air and water pollution from power plants, oil refineries, hazardous waste sites and other industrial facilities,” The New York Timesreports. “At the Transportation Department, enforcement of pipeline safety rules has plunged to unprecedented lows since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.”
At the pettiest level, the administration is just making it impossible for government employees to do their jobs, for instance by cutting off the supply of printer toner or placing a $1 limit on government credit cards. Government labs can’t do their work because the administration refuses to approve new purchases.
Which brings us to the second R: a reduction in research.
Going after Scientists
The United States has long been a leader in research and development, measured by amount of money invested and number of patent applications (at least until around 2019, when it was surpassed by China). Donald Trump is determined to undermine U.S. leadership in research by changing the rules governing grantmaking. So, for instance, the administration established a cap on indirect costs that the National Institutes of Health covers in its grants. That might seem like a trivial change, but it will strip many research institutes of their capacity to do work. As one institute director told NPR, “Cutting the rate to 15% will destroy science in the United States. This change will break our universities, our medical centers and the entire engine for scientific discovery.”
In early May, the administration froze all grants issued by the National Science Foundation. New rules will be applied to determine whether new proposals align with “administration priorities” (i.e., proving that the world is flat, the 2020 election was stolen, and fluoride in the water system causes Marxism). The administration is also using the charge of “anti-Semitism” to threaten research funding at major institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton.
The administration’s overall budget proposal reveals an even greater determination to destroy the federal programs that fund scientific research. As Naturepoints out,
the proposal would cut all non-defence spending by 23%, but it targets the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for a 56% funding reduction, and would slash the budget of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) by roughly 40%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be hit by a 55% cut as the administration seeks to eliminate what it calls “radical” and “woke” climate programmes. On the day the budget was released, the EPA announced plans to dismantle its primary research division.
It’s no surprise that scientists are looking to relocate abroad. Welcome to brain drain, Trump-style.
Retribution and Remuneration
Donald Trump doesn’t hide his intentions. During the 2024 campaign, he promised his followers that “I am your retribution.” It could have been a line from a villain in a superhero movie (though, of course, his followers heard it as a line from the superhero instead).
In late April, NPR reported on its investigation into the Trump administration’s implementation of retribution. He has gone after disloyal members of his first administration, political opponents, law enforcement officials who investigated Trump, lawyers who tried to convict him, and universities that have stood up to him (Harvard). He has instructed a range of agencies to carry out what can only be termed a “witch hunt,” the term that Trump falsely used to describe the campaigns to bring him to justice.
Ed Martin, the interim U.S. district attorney for Washington, DC, participated in the January 6 insurrection and later defended the perpetrators in court. Those perpetrators are all free, thanks to one of Trump’s executive orders, and Martin is going after the people who jailed them. More than a dozen of the prosecutors on those cases have been fired, in a letter signed by Martin.
Two days after this NPR report appeared, Trump issued an executive order freezing all federal funding for NPR.
The flip side of this drive for retribution is the campaign to reward followers. Autocrats always rule in this manner: one hand giveth, the other taketh away.
The primary beneficiary of Trump’s largesse is, of course, himself. He has made money off his meme coin and crypto more generally thanks in part to investments from Gulf states. His businesses—hotels, golf courses—have benefitted from U.S. government expenditures as well as those of foreign governments. He even netted $40 million from Amazon for a documentary about Melania Trump.
It’s not just the Trump family. Elon Musk is poised to make billions in government contracts for satellites, rocket launches, and, most lucratively, the “Golden Dome” boondoggle. Musk also tagged along on Trump’s trip to the Middle East and signed billions of dollars in contracts.
Trump allies on Wall Street were not happy when the market took a dive after his “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced. The market has recovered some of that wealth, but the real remuneration will come with Trump’s threatened privatizations. The postal service, Social Security, Amtrak: these all could be transferred to private hands over the next four years. Then there’s the asset-stripping that is taking place as the government sells off federal properties.
Remember what happened in Russia during the privatization mania of the 1990s? The new Yeltsin government sold off state enterprises for a song. Billions of dollars were transferred out of the country to foreign banks, and a new class of oligarchs emerged from the rubble.
Guess where Russia is today on the Quality of Life index? Off the charts—and not in a good way.
How Will It End?
Perhaps the average Trump supporter hates universities, scientists, and NPR. Perhaps they don’t ride Amtrak. Perhaps they don’t go abroad to discover just how un-great America really is by comparison.
But Trump’s destruction of government will eventually hit home for them as well. They’ll face sticker shock at WalMart, thanks to the tariffs. They’ll encounter problems getting their Social Security checks or their Medicare benefits. They’ll die because life-saving vaccines are no longer available.
Will they understand, by the time of the mid-terms, that everything Trump says is a 180-degree swerve from reality? The witch hunt he decries has become the witch hunt he directs. The efficiency gains and budget cuts he promises have become a huge increase in the national debt?
Violence, soaked in blood and stripped of shame, has become the defining language of governance in the age of Trump and the global resurgence of authoritarianism. Across the globe, democracy is in retreat, and with it, the very notion of moral and social responsibility. In its place, we find a brutal political grammar scripted by modern-day barbarians, disciples of greed, corruption, racial purity, ultra-nationalism, and permanent war. Compassion is mocked as weakness. The social state is vilified and hollowed out, derided in the language of a deranged anti-communism. And policies that produce mass suffering, engineered by the powerful and shielded by the myths of meritocracy and social Darwinism, are deemed not only acceptable, but inevitable.
Among the MAGA elite, democracy is no longer a cherished ideal but a target of scorn and contempt. Echoing Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, democracy is now replaced with illiberal democracy, with its call to eliminate racial mixing and unleash a torrent of repression against free speech, universities, the press, and organized dissent. In this case, fascist politics and strategies have become the new governing norm. Embracing the playbook of ruthless dictators such as Putin and Orbán, Trump expands presidential power, wages war on the rule of law and dismantles democratic institutions, especially those that nurture critical thought, all the while feigning uncertainty about whether the Constitution even applies to him.
Trump’s financial backers and ideological allies, like Peter Thiel, openly endorse authoritarianism, with Thiel bluntly declaring that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible. Trump’s sycophantic enablers Elon Musk and Steve Bannon pay hollow tribute to democracy by offering their followers Nazi salutes. As Judith Butler astutely observes, too many in positions of power, politicians, powerful lawyers, academic administrators, and the financial elite, surrender to fear, greed, or corruption, allowing cowardice to silence their conscience. In doing so, they “proclaim the inevitable end of democracy at the hands of authoritarianism, effectively giving up the struggle in advance.” Without any sense of irony, Theil, Musk, Bannon and others proclaim themselves to be champions of freedom, but the only freedom endorsed by this group is for white Christian nationalist and rich billionaires-a notion of freedom rooted in racialized authoritarian impulses. These are authoritarians drunk on power in the service of violence and domination. What they despise is any embrace or articulation of power as both a moral force and force for radical change.
We are not adrift in a moment of historical ambiguity, nor suspended in a mere transition between epochs, as some would have us believe. The notion of uncertainty has been shattered by an era fueled by the passionate mobilization of fascism. This intoxicating force has seduced millions with its lies and emotionally charged racism, redirecting their economic anxieties into a maelstrom of hate and the false swindle of fulfillment. Fascism from below does not merge with fascism from above, it thrives in the abyss of misplaced rage. The once-clouded vision of what America has become is now as clear as day. The ghosts of the past have returned, cloaked in bloodlust, armed with a language of dehumanization. They are driven by the vision of a new unified Reich, one populated by totalitarian subjects unburdened by truth, morality, critical thought, or democratic agency. The long descent from liberal democracy into the abyss of neoliberalism, more brutally, gangster capitalism, with its worship of markets, cruelty, and survival of the fittest, has reached its terminal point. An unholy alliance with fascism now stands at the helm, enshrining racial cleansing, lawless power, and the erasure of dissent as governing principles.
Hard vs. Soft Eugenics in the Age of Updated Fascism
To understand the devastating impact of the current political and social climate on marginalized communities, it is essential to distinguish between two forms of eugenics that have shaped the modern era: hard eugenics and soft eugenics. Hard eugenics, with its violent, lawless application, is historically linked to overt violence, policies of sterilization, genocide, and forced elimination of those deemed “undesirable.” The brutal methods that defined this version of eugenics still echo in history, reminding us of the violence that can be enacted in the name of racial purity and nationalistic ideals.
In contrast, soft eugenics operates through more covert, systemic means. It does not require physical violence or open lawlessness but instead utilizes policies embedded in the legal and economic structures of society. Soft eugenics is the weaponization of policy and law to create conditions of exclusion and suffering, targeting vulnerable populations with austerity measures, limited access to education and healthcare, and the stripping away of rights. In many ways, it is the quieter, more insidious form of state violence, one that does not physically eliminate the “undesirable” but ensures their long-term marginalization and, in some cases, their slow destruction.
This distinction is crucial as we turn to the policies of the Trump administration, where both hard and soft forms of eugenics converge to shape a new machinery of governance, one that normalizes disposability and entrenches racial hierarchies. These are not abstract doctrines; they are enacted through the daily erosion of healthcare, the criminalization of dissent, and the abandonment of the most vulnerable. Nowhere is this logic more visible than in the war on children, where youth of color are sacrificed to the brutal arithmetic of austerity, privatization, and neoliberal neglect.
Yet this eugenicist project does not end with children. It deepens and expands through immigration policy, where the same cruel calculus is used to preserve a white supremacist vision of the nation. Here, belonging is not only regulated by law, it is reengineered by ideology. Immigrants of color are cast as contaminants, while white refugees are welcomed as preservers of a racial ideal. In this context, eugenics reappears not as pseudoscience, but as policy, a political weapon wielded to reshape the nation’s genetic future under the guise of national security and demographic control.
While cruelty has deep roots in the history of the United States, it has now become inextricably linked to an ever-accelerating culture of dehumanization and violence. This culture both fuels the rise of fascist politics and menaces individuals through the weaponization of fear, alongside policies of extreme deprivation and immiseration. These forces strip individuals and entire communities of their power, rendering them not only powerless but also depoliticized.
What sets this moment apart from the past is the language that sustains it, a language that reproduces racial, social, and financial hierarchies steeped in the toxic discourse of social Darwinism. It aligns with the neoliberal creed of “survival of the fittest,” where personal responsibility is heralded as the sole determinant of success, if not, indeed, of existence itself.
Moreover, the cruelty embedded in this rhetoric, as exemplified in the GOP’s budget bill, does more than line the pockets of the wealthy with enormous tax breaks. It exacts a savage toll on the poor, with benefit cuts so severe that they will cost lives. Paul Krugman rightly refers to this assault on social benefits as an “attack of the sadistic zombies,” but his description only scratches the surface. What we are witnessing, especially with the draconian cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, is a form of sadism endemic to gangster capitalism. How can one be indifferent to eliminating health insurance for millions of poor people or defunding nursing homes? This is a sadism that draws its power from the same well as the death and misery imposed by the SS in the concentration camps, and the indifference of those who tossed dissenting students from planes during the Pinochet regime. This is cruelty without limits. This is the cruelty of monsters, turbocharged by a neoliberal resurgence of the “survival of the fittest” ethos, a cruelty that echoes the worst of human history. It is what I once called the zombie politics in the age of casino capitalism, where human lives are nothing more than disposable commodities in the ruthless, unforgiving colonial game of empire.
This era of unchecked cruelty marks the resurgence of Eugenics. Eugenics in its most violent versions has an extensive history in the United States and is linked to the forced sterilization of Black women, and forms of immoral medical practices and experiments applied to slaves, and later in the century to Black men. One particularly horrendous example of medical apartheid took place in what is known as the Tuskegee Study, in which 600 Black men with syphilis were left untreated to order to see how the disease progressed.
Soft Eugenics has resurfaced in the United States, becoming a central motif for both the Trump administration and far-right ideologues, fueled by the resurgence of white nationalism. This ideology, rooted in the belief of racial superiority, demands that white power and control be safeguarded at any cost by the ruling elite and relies on policies of deprivation to shorten or weed out those who do not measure up to what constitutes a white nationalist ethos and mode of superiority.
The deeply entrenched notion of white supremacy is historically intertwined with the insidious logic of soft eugenics, a concept that underpins policies often rooted in dehumanization and social Darwinism. This dangerous ideology is embodied in the rhetoric of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, has promoted the idea that resistance to diseases such as measles is part of a natural survival process. In this worldview, the vulnerable are left to fend for themselves, with no support or protection. This view is a central organizing idea behind many of Trump’s policies. Kennedy’s stance reflects a brutal neoliberal survival-of-the-fittest mentality, suggesting that instead of shielding the most vulnerable with vaccines, they should simply be allowed to “adapt” or “fight” the disease, thus stripping away any sense of compassion or responsibility for those most in need of protection. This rhetoric is not just a policy stance, it is a chilling reflection of a larger, dehumanizing vision that discards the weak in favor of a false and cruel meritocracy.
This same ideology also reflects Kennedy’s view of autistic children whom he stigmatizes as a drain on the social state when he states that “These are children who will never pay taxes, they will never hold a job, they will never play baseball or write a poem, they will never go on a date. Many of them will never go to the bathroom unaided.” Jakob Simmank, quoting, Volker Roelcke, Professor of Medical History at the University of Giessen, rightly states, “This is social Darwinism.” Roelcke further explains that statements like “You will never pay taxes” reflect what he describes as “a dog-whistle rhetoric that is typically social Darwinist.” This reflects the soft eugenics view that those unable to survive without medical intervention should be abandoned to their fate. Kennedy is not alone in this belief, as other figures in the Trump administration similarly blame the weak for their suffering, insisting that health is a personal responsibility, one that should not be managed by the government.
Immigration as Eugenics: Engineering the Nation’s Genetic Future
A version of eugenics thinking also fuels the Trump administration’s a hard line on immigration, tied to the preservation of a white supremacist vision of America’s genetic makeup. Beres is worth quoting at length on this issue. He writes.
The increasing frenzy around immigration seems fueled by the desire to shape the population’s genetic makeup. Elon Musk’s cuts to foreign aid are already leading to increased child mortality and HIV and malaria cases in Africa (the Trump administration’s other main policy engagement with Africa has been offering white South Africans refugee status). At the heart of all these policies is soft eugenics thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive.
As gangster capitalism hovers on the brink of a legitimation crisis, it turns to the dark power of soft eugenics, weaponizing it to scapegoat racialized communities in order “to justify its imperialist projects,” dismantle the welfare state, and provide a veneer of legitimacy for its most virulent policies. This is not merely political theater; it is a deliberate strategy rooted in a toxic language of cruelty and state-sanctioned violence. White nationalist and supremacist figures, like Stephen Miller, have pushed this rhetoric to the forefront, exemplified by his claim at a Trump rally that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” In this dangerous narrative, immigrants are vilified as vermin and criminals, due process is stripped from international students protesting genocide, and critics are demonized as communists or leftist thugs. In this climate, the horrors of the past are not forgotten, they are resurrected, now cloaked in dehumanizing language and unimaginable violence that powers a modern-day death machine, propelling the darkest chapters of history into the present.
How else can we explain Trump’s incendiary claim that migrants are criminals who have invaded the country and are poisoning the blood of Americans? This rhetoric is not just inflammatory; it embodies a white supremacist worldview that is deeply entrenched in the United States and fueled by the delusions of empire. It is a worldview increasingly wedded to the rising tide of fascism, which draws heavily from the toxic premises of eugenics to legitimize a new order of racial and class hierarchies. These hierarchies are accompanied, as always, by a potent mix of historical erasure, dehumanization, and censorship, tools used to cement the power of those at the top while silencing dissent from those below.
This ideology is not confined to the fringes but is woven into the fabric of domestic policy, particularly in its treatment of Black people. Updated by the dangerous rhetoric of white replacement theory and a crude neoliberal view of survival of the fittest, it targets the very foundations of racial justice. The war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a stark example of this, an ideological assault aimed at erasing Black history and dismantling policies designed to prevent racial discrimination against people of color. The evidence is undeniable: the banning of books about the history of racism, the targeting of the Smithsonian for its “race-centered ideology,” and the defunding of what are labeled “anti-American” ideologies, all of these are part of a broader campaign to suppress the voices and histories of marginalized communities, particularly people of color, from public and federal spaces.
The Language of Eugenicist and the Politics of Erasure
The death of history, memory, and the politics of remembering is part of a long established fascist policy of weakening the power of historical consciousness as a source of insight and truth. David Corn is right in stating that authoritarians cannot tolerate dissent, free thought, and modes of inquiry that make power accountable. In this context, it is not surprising that Trump wants to erase “dark veins of American history, racism, sexism, genocide, and other nasty business, that have been crucial components of the national story.” He adds that Trump has appointed himself as “the ultimate arbiter of history, with the right to police thought.” In his white washed version of history, there is “no dirty laundry, no references to the mass murder of Indigenous people, the suppression of workers, Jim Crow, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, the mistreatment of Chinese laborers, ugly interventions in Latin America and elsewhere, and so on. Only the glories of the United States shall be acknowledged, that is, worshipped.”
On a global level, this eugenicist language takes a more punishing and violent form. It is often used to justify the politics of social abandonment, terminal exclusion, and genocidal violence. One tactic it uses is to label specific groups as subhuman. For example, in analyzing how prominent Israelis use language to dehumanize Palestinians and promote a policy of ethnic cleansing, Yumna Fatima writes:
Announcing a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza two days after Hamas’ attack on Israel, the latter’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, was straightforward about his view of Palestinians. ‘There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and will act accordingly.’ Even this is a throwback to earlier comparisons. In a speech to the Knesset in 1983, then IDF chief of staff Raphael Eitan declared: ‘When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.’ When stereotypes of hate, rooted in fear, are taught to society, dehumanization is no surprise. It is no surprise when right-wing Israelis at the annual Jerusalem flag march shout: ‘A good Arab is a dead Arab.’
The rhetoric of dehumanization, as explored in Fatima’s analysis, is not an isolated occurrence but part of a broader, disturbing global pattern, where the logic of soft eugenics is weaponized to justify violence and marginalization. This language of dehumanization, employed by Israeli officials to strip Palestinians of their humanity, mirrors the tactics used by the Trump administration, particularly in its characterization of immigrants of color as rapists and criminals. This kind of rhetoric not only incites genocidal violence but also legitimizes policies that dismantle protection for vulnerable populations, both domestically and internationally.
The violence of such language is enacted in executive orders stripping Temporary Protected Status from thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, and Afghans. At the same time, international students, largely people of color, are being abducted and jailed for their political views, a stark example of the administration’s deliberate attack of marginalized communities. Deportations, the suspension of due process, and the unchecked use of police terrorism are disproportionately aimed at people of color, revealing a deeply entrenched racial bias in the enforcement of state power. As the Trump administration strips away the rights of immigrants, it engages in a chilling process of disposability, sending those deemed expendable to gulag-like prisons under the control of dictators, embodying a malignant lawlessness that underscores the growing brutality of state power.
How else to explain the cruel deportations and the suspension of rights for thousands of immigrants of color in the United States, while simultaneously offering refugee status to white South Afrikaner farmers? Trump’s defense of this policy rest on the claim that “some Afrikaners that they are victims of ‘mass killings’ and suffer from violence and discrimination by vengeful Black South Africans.” This is a complete lie, and there is no evidence to support this ludicrous claim of “white genocide,” one that is endorsed by Elon Musk, among others. On the contrary, this claim is a delusional fiction of white victimization that lies at the heart of the authoritarian mindset. This blatantly duplicitous policy is not just a policy decision, it is an overt expression of white supremacy, where the lives of Black and brown people are treated as disposable, while white lives are protected and prioritized. The racism embedded in these policies speaks volumes: it is not merely a political stance but an unapologetic embrace of racial hierarchy, one that starkly contrasts the disposability of people of color with the privileged sanctuary of white refugees.
The War on Children and the Politics of Eugenics
In the United States, the descent into fascism is no longer hidden in the margins. The neo-fascist project now occupies the center of political life. Fantasies of unchecked power, the normalization of lawlessness, the criminalization of protest, and the violent expulsion of those deemed disposable have become policy. The punishing state expands while the institutions meant to uphold justice, equality, and truth are under siege. At the core of this radical transition lies a culture of social abandonment and immense cruelty that renders the unthinkable not only imaginable but routine. At the core of this cruelty is a resurgent eugenicist ideology that peddles the notion that mixed races represent the scourge of democracy and most be eliminated. Nowhere is this death of morality and militarized thinking more visible, or more horrifying, than in the escalating war on children, both at home and abroad, and the silence that shadows their suffering.
We are witnessing a war on youth, on poor, Black, and brown youth in the United States, and on the children of Gaza, waged through the brutal calculus of a resurrected social Darwinism. In this merciless worldview, poverty is a moral failing, vulnerability is a crime, and survival is a privilege reserved for the strong and the favored. This is the eugenicist logic that once fueled the death camps of Nazi Germany, now resurfacing in the quiet violence of policy and the loud indifference of empire. In the United States, it takes the form of the Trump administration’s ruthless cuts to social programs, the gutting of education and healthcare, and the militarization of everyday life under a punishing state.
Abroad, the war on youth manifests in the language that describes the children of Gaza as collateral damage, their lives deemed disposable in the machinery of permanent war. Under the iron rule of neoliberal cruelty, these young lives are sacrificed to a political economy that trades in suffering and views compassion as weakness. Yet perhaps most chilling is the silence that greets this war on children, a silence that does more than betray the innocence of its victims; it signals a dangerous complicity, revealing how the machinery of fascism is not simply returning but is already operating in plain sight, both at home and abroad.
This war on children is not waged solely through bombs and bullets, nor only in the glare of political spectacle; it is executed through the slow violence of policy, the calculated cruelty of abandoned futures, and the erasure of suffering behind bureaucratic language and economic rationalizations. It operates through what can only be called the politics of disposability, where entire generations are written off as collateral damage in the ruthless pursuit of profit, power, and ideological purity. In this machinery of abandonment, policies become weapons, and silence becomes the accomplice that allows such violence to proceed unchecked. To grasp the full scope of this war, we must examine the specific policies and cultural forces that render the suffering of children invisible, normalizing their pain as the inevitable price of a social order sinking ever deeper into the shadows of authoritarianism. The pain and suffering of children in both Gaza and the United States inform each other by connecting a culture of disposability and extermination that no longer view children as a resource or their care as a measure of democracy itself. This is a shared crisis that makes clear what the horror of fascism looks like when state violence is waged against children. In the age of neoliberal fascism, with Trump as its corrupt enabler, violence is no longer banal, it is sustained by the interrelated systemic erosion of truth, moral judgment, and civic courage. Cruelty is no longer disguised as progress, it is now celebrated as Walter Benjamin once noted, as a document of barbarism.
The Policies of Disposability and the Global Assault on Childhood As a Shared Crisis
The war on children is hidden in plain sight, embedded in the fabric of both domestic and foreign policy, where suffering is legislated and innocence is bartered away for political gain. In the United States, it begins with the systematic dismantling of the social safety net. Under the Trump administration and its MAGA’s teenage tech-soldiers, billions have been slashed from federal programs essential to poor and marginalized families, Medicaid, housing assistance, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), leaving countless children vulnerable to hunger, homelessness, and chronic illness. Eloise Goldsmith claims cuts to Medicaid alone “will kill people.” Proposed cuts to Head Start, which serves nearly 800,000 low-income children, have already led to program closures and service reductions, though the administration claims to have backed away from the cuts. If enacted, these policies could strip healthcare coverage from over 500,000 children and deny food assistance to more than 2 million others. These are not bureaucratic oversights or unfortunate side effects, they are deliberate policy choices that treat poor children as expendable in the ruthless arithmetic of neoliberal austerity. How else to explain the Trump administration halting research “to help babies with heart defects,” especially since as Tyler Kingkade notes “one in 100 babies in the U.S. are born with heart defects, and about a quarter of them need surgery or other procedures in their first year to survive….[moreover] worldwide, it’s estimated that 240,000 babies die within their first 28 days due to congenital birth defects.”
These are not policy failures; they are deliberate acts of violence,” calculated decisions rooted in the cold arithmetic of a neoliberal death drive, where the lives of poor, Black, and brown children are weighed against tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and found expendable. Trump’s healthcare policies further reveal the depths of this disposability. Cuts to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and mental health services have left millions of children without access to basic care, even as rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among youth, especially marginalized youth, continue to rise. The punishing state does not merely neglect these children; it polices, disciplines, and abandons them, making their suffering a permanent condition of life under the rule of capital.
Education, once imagined as a vehicle for emancipation, has also been weaponized in this war. Public schools are increasingly defunded, turned into sites of surveillance and punishment rather than learning and hope. The school-to-prison pipeline tightens its grip, with Black and brown children disproportionately criminalized through zero-tolerance policies and police presence in schools. As I mentioned earlier, right-wing assaults on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusioninitiatives, the banning of books, and the erasure of critical histories from curricula rob young people of the intellectual tools needed to understand and resist their own oppression.
It is worth re-emphasizing that abroad, the war on children reaches one of its most brutal expressions in Gaza, where the language of “collateral damage” has become a grotesque alibi for the mass slaughter of the innocent. This logic of abandonment reaches its most violent form in Gaza, where the destruction is not only material but existential, young bodies mutilated, children purposely shot – targeted by IDF soldiers, tortured, and subject endless bombings and forced starvation
Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy abandoned even the pretense of humanitarian concern, cutting all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which had provided vital health, education, and food services to Palestinian children. Meanwhile, U.S. backed Israeli military operations have unleashed a campaign of scholasticide, the systematic destruction of schools and universities, that has reduced the future of Gaza’s children to rubble. More than 200 schools have been deliberately targeted, displacing over 625,000 students and annihilating any semblance of educational continuity. As of early 2024, over 13,000 children have been killed, making up nearly 44 percent of all fatalities in the conflict, while the United Nations has warned that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours without urgent medical and nutritional aid.Bill Gates
Here, the brutal logic of eugenics and empire converge. Children are not merely casualties of war, they are obstacles to be erased, victims of ethnic cleansing, their capacity to remember, imagine, or resist intentionally destroyed. Defined as burdens, drains on resources, or symbols of disposable populations unworthy of the white nationalist ideal of citizenship, they are deemed unworthy of compassion, justice, or freedom. This is not just warfare. It is the politics of displacement and ethnic cleansing, a deliberate construction of racial and class hierarchies. This is a blueprint for extermination and the systematic eradication of poor children of color, carried out with chilling precision and justified through a culture of manufactured ignorance, historical erasure, censorship, and silence.
The excessive brutality and violence of Trump’s war on children has drawn criticism even from the billionaire financial elite. Bill Gates, writing in the FinancialTimes, accused Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, of “killing the world’s poorest children” by shutting down the US Agency for International Development. Gates claimed that “the abrupt cuts left life-saving food and medicine to expire in warehouses.” He noted that such cuts could trigger the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV, and polio. Gates specifically condemned Musk’s decision to cancel grants for a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, that prevents the transmission of HIV from mothers to their babies, spurred by the unfounded belief that US funds were supporting Hamas in Gaza. “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children who have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” Gates said. This is cruelty without remorse, signaling not just the death of moral conscience and social responsibility, but the birth of a politics that resurrects the horrors of a genocidal past.
Massive violence against children now crosses borders and its blood filled death machines operate through the weaponization of policies designed to produce starvation, health emergencies, and mass immiseration. The war on children is not confined to distant battlefields; it reverberates within our own borders, produced through policies that erode the foundations of child welfare. The parallels between the plight of children in Gaza and those in the United States are stark and unsettling. Whether at home or abroad, the logic is the same: to crush the possibility of agency and dignity by stripping young people of the resources, rights, and dreams that nourish hope and dissent. And the silence that surrounds these atrocities is perhaps the most damning indictment of all. It signals not only moral collapse but complicity. It reveals what the turn toward fascism looks like, not just in policy, but in the deadening of conscience.
These domestic policy decisions, much like the external conflicts, disproportionately impact children from marginalized communities, effectively rendering them invisible and expendable. The erosion of safety nets and educational opportunities mirrors the physical destruction witnessed in war-torn regions, underscoring a systemic disregard for the well-being of the most vulnerable.
The convergence of these crises reveals a disturbing global trend: the commodification and disposability of children in the face of political agendas and economic austerity. It is imperative to recognize and challenge these policies, both foreign and domestic, that perpetuate cycles of suffering and deny children their fundamental rights to safety, health, and education.
The Culture of Silence and Neoliberal Cruelty: Making the Unthinkable Normal
If policy provides the machinery for this war on children, culture supplies its moral anesthetic. In a society gripped by the ruthless logic of neoliberalism, compassion is cast as weakness, and market values invade every corner of public life. Children are no longer seen as bearers of hope or the promise of a more just future; they are recast as financial burdens, security risks, or, in the cold calculus of empire, collateral damage. This cultural landscape thrives on historical amnesia, erasing the lessons of past atrocities even as it repeats them in real time.
The neoliberal order commodifies empathy, reducing care and concern to hollow performances in the marketplace of virtue. Philanthropy replaces justice, and isolated acts of charity stand in for systemic change, allowing structural violence to continue unchallenged. The suffering of children becomes a spectacle consumed in passing, briefly mourned and quickly forgotten in a media environment obsessed with scandal, celebrity, and the endless distractions of manufactured crises.
This is not merely a culture of forgetting but a culture of moral paralysis, where people are trained to look away, to normalize the unbearable, and to accept cruelty as the price of personal comfort and national security. As the children of Gaza are slaughtered and poor children in America wither and die under the weight of poverty, hunger, and despair, the silence surrounding their suffering becomes a form of complicity. It is a dangerous silence, one that not only betrays the most vulnerable but also clears the path for the resurgence of fascism, dressed not always in jackboots and uniforms but in business suits, political slogans, and the technocratic language of efficiency and order.
In such a world, the question is no longer whether fascism is on the horizon but whether it has already arrived, wearing the face of indifference and operating behind the closed doors of legislative chambers, corporate boardrooms, and media empires. Breaking this silence is not simply an ethical imperative, it is an act of political resistance against a future where the machinery of abandonment becomes permanent and irreversible.
Conclusion: Breaking the Silence, Defending the Future
The war on children, whether waged through bombs in Gaza or budget cuts in America’s poorest neighborhoods, is the most damning indictment of our political and moral failures. It exposes a social order that has turned its back on the most vulnerable, trading away the futures of young people for the hollow promises of profit, power, and nationalist pride. But this war does more than produce suffering, it signals the rise of a political project that views democracy as an obstacle, historical memory as a threat, and the lives of marginalized children as expendable. The United States is no longer poised on the edge of fascism–we have crossed the threshold into a dark chapter that betrays not only the anguished cries of the dead who once endured its terrors, but also the fading promise that our children would be spared such unspeakable cruelty.
To remain silent in the face of this is to become complicit in the machinery of fascism as it grinds its way through both history and the present. Breaking that silence requires more than bearing witness; it demands that we name these atrocities for what they are, refuse the false comforts of neutrality, and fight relentlessly for a future in which every child, regardless of race, nation, or class, is granted not just the right to live–but the right to flourish.
Jeffrey St. Clair has rightly argued that silence kills and becomes all the more unthinkable in the face of the mass slaughter of women and children in Gaza. “The problem with writing about Gaza,” he writes, “is that words can’t explain what’s happening in Gaza. Neither can images, even the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Because what needs to be explained is the inexplicable. What needs to be explicated is the silence in the face of horror.” Such silence hollows out language itself, draining words of their power when they fail to name atrocity, when children are starved to death by Israel, when food becomes a weapon, and drones shatter bodies while spreading an endless climate of terror. This silence is not neutral; it is dehumanizing. It is complicity, complicity not only with the death of children in Gaza, but with those in the United States and across the globe who perish for lack of food, medicine, and the most essential care.
In the age of fascism, war crimes are normalized, state terror becomes a mode of governance, and the walking dead cheer the return of old slogans soaked in blood and driven by a lust for annihilation. St. Clair’s plea to break the silence that smothers conscience is more than a moral demand, it is a warning that suggests that what is happening in Gaza as Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned back in December 2023 is a “rehearsal of the future.” And that future is closer than we think given that fascism has already found fertile ground in the United States.
America is no longer approaching fascism, we are living inside its architecture, each brick laid in silence, complicity, and fear. We have turned away from the cries of the dead who once bore witness to its horrors, and from the fragile promise that our children would never see its return. That promise cannot be located in obscene levels of inequality, in the hatred of the Other, in the narcotic haze of consumerism, or in the cheap, seductive violence of scapegoating. As James Baldwin warned, nothing can be changed until it is faced. And as Hannah Arendt taught, the danger lies not only in monstrous acts but in the slow, quiet erosion of thought, memory, and moral imagination. To remember is to resist. It requires staying awake in a world that urges sleep, refusing to look away, to be “wakeful” as Edward Said might say while daring to imagine the pain inflicted on children. It means allowing empathy to deepen into outrage, and letting that outrage ignite action. To name this moment is not a choice but a moral obligation. And to fight for the living, for their dignity, their future, their right to simply exist, is the only promise worth making, and the only one worth keeping.
Now is the time to break the silence, to speak with moral clarity, and to organize with the fierce urgency that justice demands. We must reclaim the institutions that once carried the promise of a radical democracy, reimagined beyond the grip of capitalism and grounded in solidarity, care, and the public good. We must shield and fight for those deemed disposable, revive the power of civic literacy, and summon the courage to confront the machinery of cruelty and state-sanctioned terror. This is not merely a political task; it is a moral imperative. Fascism cancels the future, but history is watching and future does not have to imitate the present. And the fate of countless children, at home and across the globe, hangs in the balance of what we choose to do now.
Television news reports recently showed two different worlds at almost the same time. A $600 billion commitment to invest in the United States, $142 billion sales of arms, and a $400 million luxury jet. Such were part of the bounty in Donald Trump’s monarchical tour in the Middle East. But while DJT hobnobbed and made self-proclaimed deals totalling trillions in the oil rich capitals of Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi, almost concurrent reports showed starving Palestinians as Israel continues to block desperately needed aid from entering Gaza.
The difference between Trump’s high-end luxury tour and the situation in Gaza is startling. The distance from Riyadh to Gaza is 882 miles; Doha to Gaza 1120 miles; Abu Dhabi to Gaza 1400 miles (All distances are in flight miles.). But no physical measurement can accurately portray the distances between the three capitals and what is transpiring in Gaza. While the 47th U.S. president luxuriated among the world’s wealthiest leaders seeing how he could monetarise his presidency for himself and his family, the ostentatious display of economic “deals” was obscene considering what was taking place roughly one thousand miles away in another obscenity.
How to reconcile the ostentatious displays of wealth and power with those who are starving so close by. (I will get to another situation of starvation later.)
Deals and transactional politics are part of Trump’s modus vivendi. Newly elected presidents traditionally begin their terms visiting allies and neighbors. Trump couldn’t resist being fawned over and raking in money by traveling to the Middle East. He became the first U.S. president to make the Middle East his first foreign destination, doing it twice, having visited Saudi Arabia on May 20-21, 2017. “The last four days have been truly amazing,” Trump said after his recent visit. “Nobody’s treated like that,” he boasted to reporters on Air Force One returning to Washington.
The differences between Trump’s extravagant whirlwind tour and the situation in Gaza needs historical perspective. First, Trump did not visit Israel during his recent tour to argue for or insist on Israel’s opening access to aid. Second, not so long ago the idea of the Right to Development was very much on the international agenda. As the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently noted:
“Over thirty years ago, the Declaration on the Right to Development broke new ground in the universal struggle for greater human dignity, freedom, equality and justice… It demanded equal opportunities, and the equitable distribution of economic resources – including for people who are traditionally disempowered and excluded from development.” (Italics added)
The Declaration on the Right to Development was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in a 1986 resolution. (The United States was the only state to vote against the resolution.) The “Right to Development” and the 1974 New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for greater economic equality through the equitable distribution of economic resources.
What makes the Trump tour so impressive is how the Middle East leaders’ wealth attracted the president. Human rights and international solidarity were not on his agenda. The tour’s art of the deal was all about money; no right to development, no NIEO, no equitable distribution of economic resources, no help for the people of Gaza. Melvin Goodman perceptively called the Middle East “Trump’s favorite shopping mall.”
Gaza is not the only current obscenity. Riyadh to Sudan is 1200 miles; Doha to Sudan is 1400 miles; Abu Dhabi to Sudan is 1200 miles. Sudan is now considered the world’s most disastrous humanitarian crisis. A March 2025 statement from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported:
“Sudan is facing the most severe hunger crisis in the world: nearly 25 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, with close to nine million in emergency and catastrophic levels of hunger. One in every two Sudanese is struggling to put food on the table, and people are already succumbing to hunger.”
(For those interested in domestic United States income disparities, a Robin Hood Foundation’s Poverty Tracker in New York City 2025 report showed that that of the 2.02 million New Yorkers now living in poverty, 1.6 million are adults and 420,000 are children. In comparison, in the 2024 edition of the World’s Wealthiest Cities Report by Henley & Partners and New World Wealth, New York City remained the world’s wealthiest city with 349,500 millionaires, 744 centi-millionaires (with investable wealth over $100m), and 60 billionaires. That’s all in the same city with no 1000 mile separation.)
A superficial reading of the above might suggest that I am asking the Middle East monarchs to use their vast wealth to help the most vulnerable, such as in Gaza (if possible) or Sudan. With the United States and other Western countries cutting back on foreign aid, one could hope that the oil rich countries would use some of their new-found wealth to replace the reduced contributions of traditional Western donors.
The Western donors have been by far the major humanitarian donors. The U.S. provided roughly 40% of all U.N. humanitarian aid in 2024. “Together, the U.S., Germany, the European Union and the United Kingdom account for nearly 65% of global humanitarian assistance,” Dorian Burkhalter wrote in Swissinfo. “The Trump administration’s decision to slash 83% of programmes run by USAID – the U.S. government’s main aid agency – has further accelerated a broader decline in funding from traditional donors,” Dorian Burkhalter added.
A report by the Geneva Policy Outlook on Paying for Multilateralism 2013-2023, noted that; “The top 15 donors account for over 86% of all contributions received by the 21 institutions studied [in Geneva]. This donor group is composed of Western governments, the EU, the UN, and the Gates Foundation.”
And the wealthy Middle East countries as donors? Will they replace the traditional Western ones? “Gulf nations – particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE – have in recent years become regular top-ten contributors to UN humanitarian agencies,” Burkhalter observed. “But their funding is mostly allocated to countries of the Arab League.”
As for the future, it may be that China, through its Belt and Silk Road Initiative, may become a major donor. For the moment, the newly wealthy states of the Middle East have shown little desire to replace traditional Western donors on a global scale.
What cannot be denied is that Trump’s wealth meetings highlighted the obscene differences between the global haves and have nots. Whatever or whoever works to diminish those differences needs to move quickly. The starving in Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere need immediate help. Hundreds of billions of dollars in non-humanitarian business deals in the face of millions starving is obscene. And one doesn’t need formal U.N. programs, resolutions or declarations to see that and to try to fix it. The distances between the global super-rich and the impoverished are more than mere measurable miles; and they are obscene.
Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen, “The Apocalypse”, 1498, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.
Marking my calendar
I no longer have the luxury of certainty that I’ll be dead before the end-times. The actuaries give me 14 more years, maybe one extra for being a vegan. That means I anticipate expiring in 2040, preferably in summer. Winter in Norfolk is depressing enough without a funeral.
But President Trump and British Prime Minister Starmer are doing everything they can to bring about the end of human civilization before my appointment in Samarra. The former, Behemoth-like, by waging war on nature and hastening economic Armageddon. The latter, determinedly but less consequentially, by backtracking on environmental protection, slow-walking improvements to the NHS, and dismissing proposals that would improve tax fairness and reduce inequality. Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s barely updated version of Oswald Mosley’s 1932 British Union of Fascists, is poised to pick up the pieces of another failed British government and join forces with its big, strong American cousin, the Republican Party.
In a nod to Farage, Starmer’s has pledged to cut recruitment of health care and other low-skill workers (mostly non-white) from abroad. If he has his way, there will be no kindly South Asian and African nurses and carers for me. (The PM must think British-born workers will queue-up for demanding jobs paying £12 per hour). In 15 years, my poor wife Harriet will be stuck doling out my meds, tying my shoelaces, and combing my wisps of hair as we vainly await the Rapture – unless it all blows up first!
The four-horsemen are galloping toward us at speed: 1) pestilence. 2) war by autonomous AI; 3) economic collapse; 4) global warming. Don’t be depressed! Contemplating the end encourages us to enjoy the now. Carpe diem!.
Pestilence
Alfred Rethel, Dance of Death: Death the Strangler, 1850. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain.
Under Trump, the U.S. suffered more Covid deaths than any other nation including China where the outbreak began. Before the pandemic, the U.S. president disastrously cut CDC staff in China, as well as cabinet level contacts with the country, making it nearly impossible to follow the early course of the disease. He also rejected mask use, after initially supporting it, and promoted quack cures like chloroquine, Ivermectin, and bleach. The re-elected president’s recent withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization, and gutting of staff at the CDC, NIH and FDA mean that the nation – and the world – are ill-prepared for the next pandemic.
The Trump administration’s deregulation of animal agriculture — reduction of safety inspection and approval of industry efforts to speed up production lines — means there will be many more chances for viruses to jump from wild to domesticated animal populations. Republican abandonment of efforts to halt biodiversity decline, deforestation, and habitat loss – the consequence of climate change — mean that diseases formerly restricted to tropical zones will spread north as well as cross the wildland-urban interface. Risks from zoonoses such as dengue, malaria, ebola, SARS, and bird flu (H5N1) will continue to grow. In such a scenario, industrial production and consumer spending will freeze, and the global economy collapse. I have amassed a nice collection of N99 masks but have no illusions they will save a senior citizen when the next pandemic hits.
War by AI
As if we don’t have enough idiotic reasons for war – territorial disputes, control of markets, desire for resources, religious and ethnic differences, treaties and defense pacts, preemption and retribution, profit for the arms and aerospace industries, and humanitarian intervention – we now have another: the entertainment of our robots.
The imminent arrival of supersmart AI, also known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has significant implications for war planning by the major global powers. One nation’s machines may soon possess the ability and desire to incapacitate its rival’s nuclear weapons or defenses. In that circumstance, both countries would have an incentive to strike first during a time of military tension – the one because it thinks it can win without suffering significant losses; the other because it thinks it needs to attack first before it is disabled. Mutually assured destruction (MAD), the fragile foundation of nuclear security for more than 60 years, may soon be rendered otiose.
And then there is an additional doomsday scenario that sounds like the stuff of science fiction – and is. Right now, a small set of AI companies including Open AI, Microsoft, Meta and about a dozen others, are pursuing AGI without significant (or any) controls by democratically elected governments. It’s just the smart machines and their dumb bosses in charge. (The U.S. and U.K. have no regulations on AI; the E.U. recently launched some.) The tech overlords may tell us their goal is a world of abundance in which robots work while humans play, but their real goals are the acquisition and enhancement of power and wealth. As Mel Brooks once said, “It’s good to be the king!”
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot, 1952 (first U.K. edition). Photographer unknown.
Once AGI is achieved, tech stocks will skyrocket and the oligarchs will celebrate, heedless of the fact that their new and improved robots remain prone to errors or “hallucinations,” potentially dangerous ones: think water systems, air traffic control, communication, and electric utilities. Inspired by Isaac Asimov’s famous First Law of Robotics, “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” the AI bros may add new safeguards, including Asimov’s Second Law: “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”. But will they ever get around to the Third Law: “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” Suppose a low-level programmer, told to enter the third law, gets distracted and forgets its second clause? In that case, a robot attacked by aggressive viruses and malware would be wise to eliminate every potential hacker; it would destroy all human life on earth. Oops!
Economic collapse
Tolstoy’s famous opening line of Anna Karenina can be adapted to describe capitalism: “All growing capitalist economies are alike; each failing one is failing in its own way.” Recessions and depressions have been triggered by bank and mortgage lender collapses, asset bubbles, liquidity crises, pandemics, supply chain snafus, aging populations, high interest rates, low interest rates, supply shocks (like disruption of the oil supply) and even just loss of consumer or investor confidence.
High tariffs, such as those implemented or proposed by Trump, could easily tip a fragile economy into recession. The tariffs on Chinese goods are potentially the most damaging, both because they are so high, and because they will impact consumer as well as capital goods essential for U.S. manufacturing. The effective tariff rate on Chinese products is now about 30% but may rise much higher when Trump’s 90-day tariff suspension expires this summer.
Recessions are common. In fact, stagnation is more the rule than the exception in American economic history, and has rarely caused major political upheaval, much less threatened apocalypse. But the American people are angry, and a sharp downturn could spur mass demonstrations. If protests were also directed at Trump’s immigration, Gaza, tax, civil rights and environment policies, he could respond with violence or martial law.
Hans Lützelburger (1495 –1526), (after Hans Holbein the Younger), Death and the Rich Man, ca. 1526, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.
That would broaden the resistance and worsen the recession. Strikes, boycotts and more repression would ensue. Chaos.
Global warming
The scientific consensus is that global warming is happening faster than previously thought. In 2024, the planet crossed the threshold 1.5-degree temperature rise that the IPCC didn’t expect to be breached until 2030 at the earliest. Last year was also the hottest year on record, and this year’s temperatures are following a similar trajectory. In fact, the last ten years have been the warmest ten ever recorded. Ocean temperatures over the last decade have risen even more quickly than land, leading to stronger and more rapidly intensifying hurricanes. Hotter ocean temperatures lead to more ocean evaporation and more rainfall.
Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge Drawing, 1517, The Royal Collection, his Majesty King Charles III. Public domain.
Sea-level rise has also accelerated, meaning that more shorelines are disappearing and more islands are threatened with inundation. There is every reason to believe the trend will continue, and even speed up unless we stop burning fossil fuels. We are also rapidly approaching multiple tipping points that once passed, will further accelerate sea-level rise and make it unstoppable. One of these tipping points is the loss of Antarctic ice-sheets. The intrusion of warm ocean water between the ice and supporting bedrock is causing the former to become destabilized and slide toward the sea. When that happens, the sea-level will rise far more than previously expected – meters not just feet. Every major coastal city in the world will be impacted,
Other dire climate change effects are also becoming apparent. Heat and drought have made whole cities nearly unlivable. Phoenix, AZ in 2024, experienced 113 consecutive days of temperatures over 100 degrees. By 2050 or sooner, it will suffer about 50 days a year of temperatures above 110. Recent research indicates that over 104, the human body can’t overcome excessive heat and continue to function. A rise in heat-caused deaths is certain in the Southwest and South, indeed across the U.S.
Los Angeles, El Paso, Phoenix and other cities may run out of water within a generation. Miami too, though not so much from heat and drought as from the intrusion of rising sea water into the aquifer that provides the city its fresh water. Fires this year destroyed whole neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. Though not as severe in their human impacts, fires last year also plagued east coast cities, the Pacific Northwest, and even Minnesota, “the Land of Lakes”.
The U.S. is per capita the world’s worst offender when it comes to the burning of fossil fuels, the production and consumption of meat (a major source of greenhouse gases) , and the use of gasoline powered cars, trucks and buses. Here in Norwich, UK, the buses are mostly electric. In the U.S. few are, and the Trump administration is cutting grants that would have accelerated the transition from gas or diesel to electric. The consequences will soon be dire, and not just on human health. Climate change will inevitably lead to system change.
Günther Thallinger, chief executive officer, of Allianz Investment Management, and member of the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, recently said that runaway climate change will destroy the global capitalist economy: “Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable…. Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.”
When that happens, mortgages and other financial services are no longer viable and whole asset classes – industry, agriculture and transportation as well as housing — will disappear form ledger books. Regions too will lose their asset valuations. What will be the value of Miami or Los Angeles without their booming housing markets?
When insurance is impossible, assets cannot be priced, and what cannot be priced cannot be bought. The consequence will be a general crisis of capitalism, far greater than any that came before. Those of us on the socialist left yearn for a rapid end to the extractive, exploitive, nature-destroying, soul hardening, creativity-denying, capitalist system. Will I live to see it’s unravelling? All I can say is that at the rate Trump, Starmer, their patrons and courtiers are going, the whirlwind may come sooner rather than later. Whether that storm is followed by fair weather or foul is anybody’s guess.
“The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.”
― Richard Burton
+ Why lie, when you know the lie will be exposed as soon as you tell it? Because the lie is the point. The more blatant the lie, the more likely it will be repeated every time it is refuted. Repeat it enough times and the libel, no matter how vile, will stick with the audience you want to appease.
+ This explains the spectacle that unfolded in the White House this week, when Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a barrage of fake news stories and a manufactured video meant to advance the outrageous lie that black South African’s, with the connivance of the Republic of South Africa’s government, is engaged in a “white genocide” of Afrikaner farmers.
+ White genocide? There were 27,621 murders in South Africa in 2023, more than 80 percent of them young, black males, who were poor or unemployed. During that same year, there were a total of 49 people (both white and black) killed on farms. For context, Israeli forces have killed more than 50 Palestinians every DAY in Gaza for the last 19 months. The population of South Africa is 63.1 million. Population of Gaza (pre-October 2023): 2.1 million.
+ In his effort to humiliate South Africa’s president and portray himself as the champion of allegedly oppressed whites around the world, Trump went so far as to show photos of the burial site of black women who were raped and burned alive in the Congo and claimed it depicted the “burial site” of white farmers in South Africa.
+ Ramaphosa is not South Africa’s most dexterous politician, but he did keep his cool as he realized the Trump White House had set him up. He was affable, solicitous, deferential and professional, as he was treated with abuse by Trump. The message won’t be lost on other African leaders, who are already finding a more receptive audience with the government of China.
RAMAPHOSA: I am sorry I don’t have a plane to give you
TRUMP: I wish you did. I’d take it. If your country offered the US Air Force a plane, I would take it.
RAMAPHOSA: Okay.
REPORTER: What will it take for you to be convinced there is no white genocide in South Africa?
RAMAPHOSA: I can take that. It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.
TRUMP *scowling*: We have thousands of stories talking about it…
RAMAPHOSA: I would say if there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen (including his white Secretary of Agriculture) would not be here..
TRUMP: We have thousands of stories talking about it. We have documentaries. We have news stories.
+ Imagine Trump ambushing Netanyahu with real videos of the mass killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces, the way he did South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa today with manufactured videos of Afrikaners, in one of the most despicable treatments of a foreign leader at the White House since, well, the tag-teaming of Zelensky.
+ South Africa’s richest man, the billionaire Johann Peter Rupert, told Donald Trump to his face in the Oval Office that there is no white genocide taking place in South Africa. Rupert told Trump, as he slumped in his gilded chair, that the issue is about crime, poverty, and unemployment, not “white genocide.” Rupert said even though he’s one of South Africa’s most hated men, he sleeps on his own farm with his doors unlocked.
+ When the meeting inevitably blew up in Trump’s face, he tried to pin the entire White Genocide scam on Musk, who was standing at the back of the room: “Elon is from South Africa. I don’t want to get Elon involved. That’s all I have to do—get him into another thing. This is what Elon wanted.”
+ The firebrand Julius Malema, member of the South African parliament and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, had the most incisive response to Trump’s grotesque “white genocide” spectacle at the White House yesterday:
We’re not going to kill white people. Stop being sensitive. No one is going to kill you. You think we’re going to kill you just because you killed our people? The killing mentality is in your head. We don’t have a killing mentality. We have a mentality of justice and peace. The only thing we’re not prepared to do is to prioritize peace over justice. There must be justice first, before there is peace…We don’t owe white people an apology. Black people, stop apologizing to whites. They are the ones owing us an apology. You have done too much damage to black people. who are unemployed because of you, who are dying of diseases because of you, who are illiterate because of you, who are addicted to drugs because of you. You owe us a lot. You must show remorse and stop behaving like crybabies. South African democracy is going to be built by a robust debate, particularly when it comes to race relations. We must stop deceiving each other. The poor meant black. The rich meant white. For as long as that has not been resolved, there will be a permanent problem between the poor and the rich.
+ So why did Trump lay a trap for Ramaphosa? Yes, he was appeasing thewhite South African exiles (Mush and Thiel) who dumped millions into his campaign, but in the White House’s own words, the scorging of South Africa was also motivated by its brave stance against Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza:
In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.
+++
+ The shooter who killed two employees of the Israeli embassy in DC this week claimed to be acting in the name of Palestinians, but the blowback from this senseless act of slaughter will do inestimable harm to the anti-genocide movement, at a moment when the political tide seemed to be turning decisively against Israel. Inevitably, the murders will be used as justifications for even more repressive crackdowns against Palestinians and their allies, even though they bear no culpability for the crimes.
+ But it must be noted that the Israeli government has never paid any kind of price for its military killing American citizens, including sailors (USS Liberty), students (Rachel Corrie and Aysenur Eygi), journalists (Shireen Abu-Akleh), octogenarians (Omar Asad) or children (Omar Rabea). Indeed the shooting of the Israeli embassy workers by a lone, unaffiliated gunman, who allegedly shouted “Free Palestine!” garnered far more attention than Israeli forces firing at diplomats from two dozen countries on the very same day, including representatives from China, Brazil, India, Russia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, France, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Jordan, the UK, and Egypt–an act of political intimidation the Israeli government later wrote off as a mere “inconvenience.”
+ According to the latest Data for Progress poll, 76% of US voters now support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
+ Yair Golan, head of the Israeli Democrats and former Deputy Chief of Staff of the IDF:“Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don’t return to acting like a sane country. And a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.”
+ Predictably, Netanyahu responded by accusing Golan of “echoing anti-semitic blood libels.”
+ Speaking of blood libels…Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We are at war with the Gaza entity. The Gazan terror entity, which we ourselves established in Gaza at Oslo and in the disengagement, the disengagement that Prime Minister Netanyahu voted in favor of. That is the enemy now. Every such child to whom you are now giving milk in another 15 years will rape your daughters and slaughter your children. We need to conquer Gaza and settle it. And not a single Gaza child should remain there.”
+ Netanyahu said this week that he will “end the war only if…Trump’s plan to relocate the territory’s population outside Gaza is implemented.”
+ Arkansas has passed the “Recognizing Judea and Samaria Act,” prohibiting state agencies from using the term “West Bank” in official government documents and communications. Instead, the law mandates the use of the biblical terms “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the territory in eastern Palestine that Israel illegally occupies in violation of international law.
+ Michelle Goldberg: “In the twisted logic of Project Esther — which is also the logic of Donald Trump’s war on academia — ultra-Zionist gentiles get to lecture Jews about antisemitism even as they lay waste to the liberal culture that has allowed American Jews to thrive.”
+ The BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire to Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon: “You’ve KILLED tens of thousands of civilians. You’ve killed paramedics, you’ve killed journalists. You’ve even killed your own hostages, but not, apparently, all of the Hamas.” There’s a definite shift in the air.
+ Israeli “Security” Minister Itamar Ben Gvir: “Resuming humanitarian aid to Gaza is a grave mistake. We can’t give our enemies oxygen.”
+ There should be an entry in the DSM for the kind of diseased mind that can rationalize this: The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, told the BBC this morning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in 48 hours if aid did not reach them in time.
+ Former French Prime Minister Dominique Villepin to CNN on how the EU needs to respond to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza: “There are three things that need to be done. First, immediately suspend the EU-Israel [trade] agreement. The majority of Israel’s trade is with Europe, suspend it. Second, immediately impose an arms embargo from all European countries. Third, bring the entire Israeli government and senior military officials before the International Criminal Court.”
+ Pope Leo from the Southside during his first general audience in St. Peter’s Square: “I renew my heartfelt appeal to allow the entrance of dignified humanitarian aid to Gaza and to put an end to the hostilities whose heartbreaking price is being paid by children, the elderly, and sick people.”
+ Brian Eno is demanding that Microsoft end its partnership with Israel and has pledged to donate the original fee for his Windows ’95 chime to the Palestinian victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
+ Eno’s message doesn’t seem to be getting through. A few days after anti-genocide activists disrupted its Build developer conference, Microsoft banned the words “Palestine” and “Gaza” from internal emails.
+ Liam O’Hanna, a member of the Irish hip-hop band Knee, has been charged with a “terror offense” for displaying a flag supporting Hezbollah.”
+++
+ Six members of Congress have died in office in the last year. All were Democrats–Payne (65), Jackson Lee (74), Pascrell (87), Grialva (77), Turner (70). Three Democrats in the House have died since Trump took office. The latest, Gerry Connolly, was named ranking member of the Oversight committee to thwart the ascent of AOC, even after disclosing he had terminal cancer. The House passed Trump’s reconciliation bill, 215-214. It would have failed if the six dead Democrats had been alive to vote no.
+ David Hogg on the death of Rep. Gerry Connolly: “One more point on the real danger posed by the system of seniority politics…It’s really sad that this happened, but the feelings of any particular member don’t take precedence over the millions of Americans who are going to be impacted by these bills.”
+ Rep. Jim McGovern on the latest version of Trump’s tax break for the rich/spending for Pentagon and police/slash medicare, medicaid, social welfare bill:
If I am understanding the numbers correctly, the latest version of their text scam, the top 0.1% stand to gain $255,000 on average in 2027 alone. That is $700 a day every day. The people who make over $1 million a year will also get their pockets lined. On average, these millionaires will have an additional $81,500 per year, but pennies for everybody else. For those earning less than $50,000 a year, the average benefit is $265, less than one dollar per day…This is not a governing philosophy. It is a scam. I wasn’t sent here to vote for trash like this. For the life of me, I cannot understand why you are doing this. Why the hell did you choose a career in public service just to do this? Just to rip away the health care and food assistance and security of working and middle class Americans.
+ Impacts of Trump’s tax bill on the federal debt…
Spectrum auction: -$88 billion
Cuts to anti-poverty & food aid: -$295 billion
Student loan changes: -$295 billion
Claw back climate spending: -$678 billion
Cuts to Medicaid: $792 billion
+ Impacts on poor children
– 19% of children rely on SNAP
– 42% of children rely on Medicaid
– 38% of children rely on free or reduced-price school meals
+ David J. Bier: “The House reconciliation bill would fund an immigration police state unlike anything America has ever seen. Papers-please agents would be everywhere. The GOP provides more funds for going after peaceful immigrants than it does for all federal law enforcement combined.”
+ Rep. Angie Craig from Minnesota: “I have no idea why we think it’s a good idea to repeal a tax on silencers when we are going to feed fewer children in our country as a result of this. It’s a moral damn failure is what it is.”
+++
+ The people running our government couldn’t pass a 6th-grade civics test…
SEN HASSAN: What is habeas corpus?
Secretary NOEM: Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country…
+ Of the 240 Venezuelans the US government renditioned to Salvador’s notorious prison two months ago, the Cato Institute identified 50 who entered the US legally and never violated any immigration law. Even so, they are now imprisoned in a foreign concentration camp at the request of theUS government and at the US taxpayers’ expense:“These legal immigrants are being treated worse than murderers are in the US. They had no right to legal representation, no trials before imprisonment, were disappeared, and are now imprisoned indefinitely in conditions that SCOTUS has said would violate the 8th Amendment. This is clearly a crime, and DHS Sec. Noem and others should be impeached for it.”
+ Marco Rubio being questioned in the House on the arrest, detention and attempted deportation of Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk: Someone comes up here to stir up problems on our campus, we’re going to revoke their visa.
Rep. Jayapal: She didn’t do any of that. She wrote an op-ed. You revoked her visa.
Rubio: Yes, proudly.
+ This week, ICE rejected a request by Mahmoud Khalil to have a “contact visit” with his newborn so he can hold his baby for the first time. There’s no reason for this petty denial, except cruelty and retaliation for exposing the political nature of his arrest and detention. Khalil has committed no crime. He’s done something worse. He’s condemned the genocide against Palestinians, a moral stance for which he will never be forgiven by those who are complicit.
+ According to two immigration lawyers, ICE deported at least a dozen Burmese and Vietnamese migrants to South Sudan–a country in the midst of a famine and civil war–in violation of a court order.
+ The latest ICE ruse is for people who showed up for their asylum court hearings only to be told that ICE prosecutors had dismissed their cases — and then be arrested moments later by ICE officers and taken to detention centers for unknown reasons.
+ Ximena Arias-Cristobal, a 19-year-old from Dalton, Georgia, who was “mistakenly” arrested for making a turn without signaling and turned over to ICE by Georgia cops, has now been released from custody and will go through her immigration court proceeding outside of detention. Ximena was granted a minimum $1,500 bond by the immigration judge and the government waived appeal.Ximena has lived in the US since the age of four,
+ Tim Walz: “ICE agents are modern-day Gestapo.” It would have been nice if Walz had made this same analogy under Obama or Biden…
+ LaMonica McIver responding to being charged with “assaulting federal agents” outside the Newark ICE detention center: “I think this is political intimidation from the Trump administration. I mean, me being charged is absurd… especially when I’m there just to do my job.”
+ Trump on the DOJ’s charges against Rep. McIver: “Oh, give me a break. Did you see her? She was out of control…The days of woke are over…She was shoving federal agents. She was out of control. The days of that crap are over in this country. We are going to have law and order.”
+ People and places that have been charged, investigated or legally threatened by Trump and his administration in the last week…
Letitia James
Andrew Cuomo
Rep. LaMonica McIver
Kamala Harris
Bruce Springsteen
Beyonce
Bono
Oprah Winfrey
James Comey
Unnamed “treasonous” Biden aides
City of Chicago
Kennedy Center
Media Matters
NBC News
+ James Comey’s a shit and he should probably just shut the hell up about everything and anything, but for Tulsi Gabbard to call for him to be arrested is more outrageous than almost anything Comey’s done. To be “86’d” is to be tossed out of a bar…not a window.
+ On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an order halting Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, which is great news for Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Tsinghua University, Karolinska Institute, Edinburgh University, University of Barcelona, Imperial College, Nanyang Technological University, Utretch University, University of Bologna and the National University of Singapore…
+ Kristi Noem: “Today, I sent them a letter that said they will no longer be allowed to participate in this student exchange visitor program, and that’s up to 27% of their enrolled students.”
+ Noem has a BA from South Dakota State, the 266th-ranked university in the country. Revenge of the land grant college grads!
+ Trump on Harvard University: “The students they have, the professors they have, the attitude they have is not American…So we’ll pull back the grant.”
+ Marshall Burke: What happens to science under autocracy? The rise of the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany provides an (admittedly extreme) example.Prior to 1933, scientists at German institutions won a third of Nobels. Ten years later, that number was 5%, and has never recovered.”
+++
+ The Buddha on the transience of our current political moment: “This too shall pass … like a kidney stone.” Right, George?
+ Frank Bisignano, a former Wall Street executive Trump tapped as the new head of the Social Security Administration, was recorded telling a meeting with Social Security managers that he knew nothing about the job and had to use Google to find out what it entailed: “So, I get a phone call and it’s about Social Security. And I’m really, I’m really not, I swear I’m not looking for a job. And I’m like, ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ So, I’m Googling Social Security. You know, one of my great skills, I’m one of the great Googlers on the East Coast.”I’m like, ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ So, I’m Googling Social Security. You know, one of my great skills, I’m one of the great Googlers on the East Coast … I’m like, ‘What the heck’s the commissioner of Social Security?’Put that as the headline for the Post: ‘Great Googler in Chief. Chief in Googler’ or whatever.”
+ Donald Trump, oncologist:
I think it’s very sad, actually. I’m surprised that it wasn’t—you know—the public wasn’t notified a long time ago, because to get to stage 9, that’s a long time. I just had my physical. You saw that. You saw the results of that particular test. I think that test is standard to pretty much anybody getting a physical—a good physical. We had the doctors at the White House and over at Walter Reed, which is a fantastic hospital, do it. I did a very complete physical, including a cognitive test. I’m proud to announce I aced it. I got them all right. You proud of me? Your husband would be proud of me for getting them all right. It’s a little risk. If I didn’t get them all right, these people would be after me. It would be not a good situation.
But I think, frankly, anybody running for president should take a cognitive test. They say it’s unconstitutional, but I would say in that particular case, having a cognitive test wouldn’t be so bad.
But when you take tests—medical, as a male—that test is very standard. I don’t know if it’s given to everybody, but it’s given just about. And it takes a long time to get to that situation… to get to a stage 9. I think that if you take a look, it’s the same doctor that said that Joe was cognitively fine, there was nothing wrong with him. If it’s the same doctor, he said there was nothing wrong there. That’s been proven to be a sad situation.
And the autopen is becoming a very big deal. You know, the autopen is becoming a big deal because it seems that maybe it was the president—whoever operated the autopen. But when they say that was not good, they also—you have to look and you have to say that the test was not so good either. In other words, there are things going on that the public wasn’t informed [about], and I think somebody is going to have to speak to his doctor—if it’s the same or even if it’s two separate doctors.
Why wasn’t the cognitive ability—why wasn’t that discussed? And I think the doctor said he’s just fine, and it’s turned out that’s not so. It’s very dangerous… this is dangerous for our country. Look at the mess we are in.
You talk about all these questions on Ukraine and Russia. That would’ve never happened, as an example, if I were president. It would’ve never happened. The other thing—you have to say: Why did it take so long? I mean, this takes a long time. It can take years to get to this level of danger. It’s a very, very sad situation. I feel very badly about it. And I think people should try and find out what happened.
Because I’ll tell you, I don’t know if it had anything to do with the hospital. Walter Reed is really good. They’re some of the best doctors I’ve ever seen. I don’t even know if they were involved. But a doctor was involved in each case. Maybe it was the same doctor. And somebody is not telling the facts. That’s a big problem.
+ According to a report on CNBC, UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers.
+ Apparently, many lawyers who are too embarrassed to admit they work for Big Pharma companies tell people their practice represents “the life sciences.”
+ Trump: “The drug companies are very worried that they’re going to fight, and that’s ok. If they fight, we’ll just say, that’s ok, we’re not going to let you sell anymore cars into the US…or wine, liquor, alcohol, or something that’s much more important to them than the drugs.” What’s the cognitive decay detector reading on this one, Siri?
+ JD Vance on Trumpcare in 2017: ” What is it that’s going to drive Trump’s voters away from him? Well, losing their health care may actually be the answer to that question.”
+ BERNIE SANDERS: Is healthcare a human right?
RFK Jr: It’s not a right of a kind that we otherwise enshrine in the Constitution … the objective is to get Americans the level of healthcare they want
SANDERS: They don’t want the choice to be uninsured or die
+ Karoline Leavitt on Trump’s private meeting with people who bought his Trumpcoin: “The American public believes it’s absurd to insinuate that this President is profiting off of the presidency. Not only has he lost wealth, but he almost lost his life. He sacrificed a lot to be here and to suggest otherwise is absurd.”
+ Share of Americans who think Trump is using the office of the presidency for personal gain…
Yes: 52%
No: 35%
Not sure: 13%
-yougov
+ Sen. Chris Murphy: “40% of Trump’s entire net worth is due to these two crypto coins that he just launched months ago. All of this money is going straight into his pocket. He is trading U.S. policy to get paid.”
+ The Trump White House has purged the official transcripts of Trump’s remarks from the government website. In its place, they’ve put up a few selected videos of Trump’s public appearances. The only transcript remaining is Trump’s inaugural address. I remember when the Republicans erupted in theatrical fury over the Biden White House adding an apostrophe to Biden’s verbal blunder, “the only garbage is his supporters,” to make it “supporter’s,” over the objections of the official stenographer.
+ A survey by Allianz, the insurance giant, of 4,000 companies worldwide on the impact of Trump’s trade war…
Will have to raise prices: 54%
Can absorb the cost of tariffs: 22%
+ Moody’s: “We anticipate the US’s federal debt burden will rise to about 134% of GDP by 2035, compared to 98% in 2024.”
+ Countries with a Moody’s credit rating higher than the US…
– Germany
– Canada
– Australia
– Denmark
– Luxembourg
– Netherlands
– Switzerland
– Norway
– Sweden
– Singapore
+ According to the Atlanta Branch of the Federal Reserve, in order to qualify to afford the median-priced home, a household would have to make $121,171 annually to keep monthly payments at 30% of income. This income level is 52.7% higher than the actual median income in the US.
+ Serious credit card delinquencies have risen to the highest level since 2011, at 12.31%. Meanwhile, more than 6.5% of borrowers are at least 60 days late on their car payments, the highest level ever recorded, according to the credit ratings company, Fitch.
+ At least 30% of metro Atlanta’s single-family rental homes are now owned by private equity.
+ How a beer executive explained to the FT falling alcohol sales: “Alcohol used to occupy a much bigger share of people’s entertainment and joy. In the past 10 years, the number of entertaining things has grown, including gaming, so I believe alcohol’s share of fun, enjoyment, and happiness has decreased.”
+ IBM: Only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered expected return on investment over the past three years.
+ Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, admitted that as much as 30% of Microsoft’s code is now written by AI.
+ Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of the buy-now-pay-later platform Klarna, claims that AI helped shrink the company’s workforce by 40%. But the company still saw its losses double in the first quarter of 2025, after $136 million in customer debts went unpaid.
+ The consulting firm Gartner predicts that one in four job applicants will be fake by 2028. Probably 25 percent of the jobs will also be bogus.
+ Northwestern Mutual: Only 9% of Americans have 10 times their annual income saved for retirement. 10 times yearly income saved? How about 10 times their annual income in debt?
+ What Americans most worry about when retiring…
High inflation: 53%
Social Security inadequate to live on: 43%
High taxes: 43%
Social Security no longer exists: 39%
Health crisis: 38%
Economic volatility: 38%
Not enough savings: 38%
Potential recession: 36%
Income is too low: 36%
Too much debt: 35%
Source:Allianz.
+ One in 10 people in Britain have no cash savings, according to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, while an additional 21% of the population has less than £1,000 in savings.
+ In an attempt to squirm out of an antitrust suit, Ticketmaster just put Trump’s intimate Richard Grenell on its board of directors.
+++
+ The Reconciliation Bill contains $25 billion as start-up funding for Golden Dome, the latest iteration of the missile defense money pit first marketed as Star Wars under Reagan. Trump says the scam will eventually cost US taxpayers $175 billion, while the Congressional Budget Office estimates that deploying and operating the Golden Dome space-based missile defense system will cost $542 billion over the next 20 years, much of it going into the accounts of Elon Musk.
+ Ron Paul: “There’s a much cheaper Iron Dome. Stop irritating other countries.”
+ Acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s top officer, said U.S. forces carried out “the largest air strike in the history of the world” during recent operations against the Houthis near Somalia. And the Houthis didn’t fold. Trump did.
+ Trump told the leaders of EU nations that Putin agreed to start direct negotiations on a ceasefire immediately, causing a few seconds of puzzled silence. Zelensky then pointed out that Putin had previously agreed to negotiate and that talks took place last week.
+ German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Trump’s bungled attempt to negotiate with Putin: “I don’t think he deliberately betrayed Europe. I believe he simply misjudged the negotiation situation with Vladimir Putin — and his own influence as the us president.”
+ Trump famously vowed to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of re-taking office. Now he is privately telling his inner circle he doesn’t think Putin wants to end the war, which has been evident for some time, with Russia continuing to steadily acquire more and more Ukrainian territory. With no deal in the works, Trump apparently just wants to walk away from the whole conflict. But that’s unlikely, given the ongoing sanctions he’s imposed on Russia, the supply chain of weapons he’s continued to greenlight for Ukraine and the minerals he wants to extract from the war-battered country.
+ China (Derangement) Syndrome:Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse testifies that U.S. intelligence has increased intel collection on China by at least 30% and increased analytic production by “double digits.”
+ Mohammed bin Salmanto Fox News: “If China falls, everyone on the planet falls, even America.” MBS’s assessment is surely correct, but it seems increasingly likely that the US will fall and not take everyone with it.
+ $55 billion: the amount Apple started investing in China per year by 2015. “People think there’s great vocational training in China; the vocational school in China is Apple,” Patrick McGee, author of Apple in China.
+ Best evidence yet that today’s youth aren’t being taught by “Cultural Marxists:” The younger the American, the more likely they are to believe the Vietnam War was “the right thing to do”…
+ The US has the largest gender gap in the world when it comes to the perception of freedom…
Are you satisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life…
USA Women 66
Men 77
Gap 11
Lithuania
Women 73
Men 83
Gap 10
Pakistan
Women 48
Men 57
Gap 9
Guinea
Women 73
Men 82
Gap 9
Italy
Women 72
Men 80
Gap 8
Russia
Women 72
Men 80
Gap 8
Canada
Women 78
Men 86
Gap 8
N. Macedonia
Women 65
Men 72
Gap 7
Bolivia Women 75
Men 81
Gap 6
+ Biden may have lost most of his cognitive function. Chuck Schumer entered the Senate this way: “Putin is watching. Hamas is watching … If Congress fails to defend democracy … because of border policies inspired by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, the judgment of history will be harsh indeed.”
+ Brazilian President Lula da Silva: “The democracy we learned to live with after WWII, the functioning of multilateralism as an important role in relations between states, the respect for diversity, and the sovereignty of each country are now fading. What comes next, we don’t know. We thought we were creating a more civilized, more solidarity-based, more humane society. The result is worse. It’s as if there is a lamp, and when you open the lid, the evil people come out.”
+++
+ On Monday, the city of Shabankareh in Iran hit 52.1°C, the earliest any town has ever topped 125°F…We’re making large swaths of the planet unlivable for humans and other forms of life, in our own lifetimes. What a thing to witness.
+ Over his first 100 days in office, Trump has approved more than 145 measures to roll back or eliminate pollution rules and promote fossil fuels, more than the entire number of rollbacks during his first term.
+ In the first quarter of 2025, China added60GW of solar power, more than half of it as rooftop installations. This is more than the total installed solar capacity in Spain and France combined–all in only three months. In 2010, the US and Europe were the largest solar and wind power manufacturers. By 2024, China had installed six times more wind and solar power than all of Europe and eight times more than the US.
+ By gutting the incentives for renewable energy, the Trump tax bill passed by the House will likely:
+Cost more than 830,000 jobs
+ hike energy bills
+ increase carbon emissions by an additional 230 million tons by 2035, roughly the annual emissions of Spain
+ A new report on sea level rise published in Nature: Communications warns that millions globally will be forced from their homes by advancing waters and extreme tides even if warming remains below 1.5 °C. “We’re starting to see some of the worst-case scenarios play out almost in front of us. At current warming of 1.2 °C, sea level rise is accelerating at rates that, if they continue, would become almost unmanageable before the end of this century.” But the world ison track for 2.5C-2.9C of global heating, which results in the collapse of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets–a scenario that would lead to a catastrophic 12 metres of sea level rise.
+ Rep. Yassamin Ansari: “I sit on the Natural Resources Committee, where we witnessed the most anti-environment legislation go through. It includes massive giveaways to the oil and gas industry. I also discovered that the chairman, for the first time in his career, had purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of oil and gas stocks. So we’re seeing incredible amounts of corruption.”
+ Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo: “Should we really have wind and solar subsidies in this bill? What if it’s not windy? What if it’s not sunny?”
+ At least 6.7 million hectares of primary forest were lost last year, more than half of it to fire.
+ This is not a serious country. Map of US counties with subways…
+++
+ Elon Musk and his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, have taken massive blows to their reputations. In 2021, Tesla ranked 8th among the nation’s 100 most visible companies in the Harris brand reputation poll. Now it has fallen to 95th.
+ The damage is eating into Musk’s bottom line. Last month, cars made by Chinese EV maker BYD outsold Teslas for the first time in Europe…
BYD 7,231
Tesla: 7,165
+ In Qatar this week, a sheepish Musk announced he was pulling the plug on any new political spending, in an attempt to avert any more damage to his ventures:
“In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future.”
“Why is that?”
“I think I’ve done enough.”
“Is it because of blowback?”
“Well, if I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. But I don’t currently see a reason.”
+ Greg Casar, who’s been leading the Dems’ anti-Musk campaigning, says this is a sign that naming and going after oligarchs works.
“It shows that accountability can work. I think it’s a template for creating an anti-billionaire, pro-worker Democratic Party. The Republican Party in Washington thinks that infinite money is an infinite benefit, and I think we can actually turn that money against them.”
+ Elon didn’t need too much help in that regard. He just shifted his ego into self-drive mode,hit the accelerator and drove right into a wall…
+ Pelle Dragsted and William Banks pinpoint what’s missing from the “Abundance” theory of Democratic revival, redistribution of excessive wealth: “While numerous factors contribute to the high marks Nordic countries receive on measures of public trust, good governance and happiness, every scholar agrees the redistributive policies of universalist social welfare programs play the decisive role.”
+ Cory Booker was the lone Democrat in the Senate to vote in favor of Charles Kushner’s nomination to become Trump’s ambassador to France. Booker should denounce himself on the floor of the Senate for the next 26 hours by reading the federal indictment against Kushner, over and over again…
+ How can the Democrats be this bad at the politics thing…?
Net Approval
Republicans: +4%
Democrats: -16%
+ Biden agreed to a $4 million salary demanded by top adviser Mike Donilon to work on the campaign in early 2024. The next top-paid aide, his campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, made $300,000. So much for gender equity…
+ According to the new report by Catalyst on the demographics of the 2024 elections, women and People of Color made up the majority (57%) of the Trump coalition….
+ Turnout for Democrats versus the previous presidential election…
Battleground States
2020 +7
2024 -7
Non-Battleground States
2020 +2
2024 -14
+++
+ Texas state Rep. Nate Schatzline: “What got me involved [in politics] was, I was out on a prayer run. I was praying for my students, for our church and about that time I heard the sound of a baby crying. I took up my headphones. I looked around. I was in the desert. We lived in California at the time. Now we’re back, in God’s country in Texas. I looked around and couldn’t find anything. So I kept jogging. About a mile later, I heard the same baby crying. And all of a sudden, the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart and said, “That’s the sound of the unborn that are going to die if you don’t run for office and protect the unborn.”
+ Self-proclaimed Biblical Prophet Johnny Enlow declares that “in the eyes of the Lord, [Trump] is not just President of the United States, he’s King of the World.”
+ Medhi Hassan: “If somebody got onto the metro, sat next to you and started ranting about Bruce Springsteen’s skin, or about being Lord of the world…you would get up and move to a different seat. In this country, we gave that person nuclear codes.”
+ Joe Rigney, the associate pastor of the new right-wing Christ Kirk, in DC, says they are planting the Church in the capital to “calibrate Christians” to the new Trump era: “We’re gonna come for feminism. We’re going to go after sodomy. Those are the sins in that town. Those are sins that are acceptable among both parties in that town. And we want to plant that flag and say the Bible has something to say about this.”
+ Rep. Erin Houchin (R-IN) on why she supports Trump’s proposal to impose a 100% tariff on films not made in the U.S.: “Hollywood is dying at their own hands because they’ve gotten so far off of the mark from where the American people You look at movies that are culturally more conservative, they tend to do better. They [Hollywood] are changing the narrative in a lot of ways that are not healthy for the next generation in a lot of ways. We don’t want other countries bringing their propaganda here.”
+ Wes Anderson at Cannes on Trump’s movie tariffs: “The tariff is interesting because the 100% tariff, I’ve never heard of a 100% tariff before. I’m not an expert in that area of economics, but I feel that means he’s saying he’s going to take all the money, and then what do we get? So it’s complicated to me. Can you hold up the movie in customs? It doesn’t ship that way.”
+ After less than two years, Bill Maher’s “Uncancellable” podcast studio has been cancelled. (In 2000, Maher cancelled me from his show, Politically Incorrect. If he hadn’t, I would have cancelled myself.)
+ From the NYRB: “Soon after publication, sales of The Great Gatsby dried up. Four months before Fitzgerald died of alcoholism and heart disease in December 1940, the last royalty statement he saw reported seven copies sold in the previous year.”
“In a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”
– Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Scene from Lorenzo Ferrero’s opera La Conquista, a production of the Prague National Theatre from 2005. Photo: Nic Muni. CC BY-SA 3.0
Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend. A Chicago artist famous for large canvases depicting crimson torture rooms in Central America, Golub had been asked what it meant to him to be a “Jewish political artist.” The painter’s quick reply was that he wasn’t a “Jewish political artist,” he was just a “political artist.” In the end, though, Golub came to believe that he had let himself off too easily, that his answer was too pat. Yes, he was a political artist. His paintings had focused not just on Latin America but on war-torn Vietnam and racism in the United States and South Africa. But he had consciously avoided Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Golub admitted that what it meant for him to be a successful artist was never to take the “horrors inflicted on Palestinians” as his subject matter. Only then would he be left free to paint his political opinions on anything else.
Over the last year and a half, I’ve thought of Leon Golub, who died in 2004, many times as the escalation of Israel’s assault on Gaza and settler violence on the West Bank paralleled my own rush to finish a book (just published as America, América: A New History of the New World).Among other things, it traces Latin America’s largely unrecognized role in the abolition of the doctrine of conquest and the creation, after World War II, of the liberal international order, including the founding of the International Court of Justice (today considering South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza).
I’ve been writing critically on how the U.S. acted in Latin America for more than three decades. Unlike many scholars and students of the Middle East, I was able to do so and not be punished because, like Golub, I mostly focused on the “horrors inflicted” on people other than Palestinians. As President Richard Nixon put it all too accurately in 1971, nobody of import in the United States gives “one damn about Latin America.”
A general indifference to the region, as well as the fact that even the most diehard defenders of U.S. global power have been willing to concede that this country often acted in unhelpful ways in its own hemisphere (where Washington undertook at least 41 regime changes between 1898 and 1994!), have made it remarkably safe to speak out about Latin America. Yet, in 2025, the “horrors inflicted” are everywhere and it’s no longer possible to silo one’s sympathies.
Conquest, Then and Now
Consider the Spanish conquest of the Americas alongside Israel’s assault on Gaza. In many ways, the two events, separated by half a millennium, are incomparable. The first was continental in scale, a fight for a New World that was then home to, by some estimates, 100,000,000 people. The second unfolds on a patch of land the size of Las Vegas with a population of just over two million. The conquest would claim tens of millions of lives, while so far, Israel is estimated to have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands more.
Yet there are uncanny parallels between the two conflicts, including the fact that each began in the wake of a communications revolution: the printing press then, social media now.
Spain was the first empire in modern history to actively publicize its colonial atrocities, as printers in Madrid, Seville, and other cities stamped out sheet after sheet of conquest gore: accounts of mass hangings, of babies drowned or roasted over fire pits to be fed to dogs, and of torched towns. One Spanish governor described a postapocalyptic landscape filled with the walking near-dead, victims of mutilations meted out to Native Americans, this way: a “multitude of lame and maimed Indians, without hands, or with only one hand, blind, their noses cut off, earless.” Today, the internet circulates countless photographs and videos with no less horrific images of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers on Palestinians, of armless boys and “decomposing babies.” Some photographs of children starved by the IDF, according to a New York Times editor, were simply too “graphic” to publish.
In sixteenth-century Spain, common soldiers wrote, or paid others to write, their stories of mayhem, hoping to make a heroic name for themselves. Today, we see updated digital versions of a similar kind of conquering pride, as members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), on platforms like TikTok, upload videos of Gazans “stripped, bound, and blindfolded” and others showing bulldozers and tanks razing homes. Soldiers mock the destruction of schools and hospitals or, as they rummage through abandoned homes, are seen playing with or wearing the bras and underwear of their former residents.
Both Spanish officials then and Israeli spokesmen now have openly declared their intention to “conquer” their enemies by forcing their removal from their homes and concentrating them in more controllable areas. Not all Spanish, like not all Israelis, believed their enemies to be subhuman. But some did and do. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda thought Native Americans were “brute animals,” as “monkeys are to men.” Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls Palestinians “human animals.” Many Spanish priests and royal officials admitted that Native Americans were human, but considered them child-like innocents who had to be violently severed from their pagan priests — just as Israel believes Palestinians have to be violently severed from Hamas. “We are separating Hamas from the population, cleansing the strip,” said Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the IDF’s extreme tactics.
Hernán Cortés had his men level Aztec temples, which he called mosques. Those temples served as healing places, and their destruction parallels the ruin visited on Gaza’s hospitals and other centers of refuge. Not even the dead were safe — neither in the Americas, nor today in Gaza. As did the conquistadores, the IDF has desecrated several burial grounds.
Spanish violence in the Americas provoked a powerful ethical backlash. The Dominican jurist Francisco Vitoria, for instance, questioned the legality of the Conquest, while Father Bartolomé de las Casas insisted on the absolute equality of all human beings, and other theologians of the time condemned the many varieties of enslavement imposed on Native Americans. Such declarations and condemnations were consequential in the long run. Yet they did little to stop the suffering. Arguments over the legality of the Conquest went on for decades, just as arguments over the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands have.
“The Conquest,” as a singular uppercase event, might have been challenged, but all the individual battles that made up the Conquest, the morning massacres and midnight raids on indigenous villages, simply went on. Spanish settlers took it for granted that, no matter what priests said from pulpits or jurists argued in seminar rooms, they had a right to “defend” themselves: that, were Indians to attack them, they could retaliate.
Here’s just one of many examples: in July 1503, Spanish settlers slaughtered over 700 residents in the village of Xaragua on Hispaniola (the island that today comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic), killings that Spain’s Queen Isabella deemed “just” because some members of the village had started to violently resist Spanish rule. Israel uses the same kind of legalisms to insist that its war on Hamas is indeed similarly just, since Hamas started it. Just as the conflict on Hispaniola is sequestered from the larger context of the Conquest, the conflict that started on October 7, 2023, is isolated from the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
From Cortés to Hitler
The doctrine or “right” of conquest goes back to Roman times and, apart from the criticism aimed at Spain in the 1500s, remained mostly uncontested until the late eighteenth century, when — with the breaking free of the Americas from Europe — the doctrine found new champions and new critics.
The leaders of the new United States reinforced the doctrine, invoking the right of conquest to justify their drive westward toward the Pacific Ocean and their taking of Native American and Mexican lands.
Generations of law professors in the U.S. taught their students that the doctrine was legitimate. “The title of European nations, and which passed to the United States, to this vast territorial empire, was founded on discovery and conquest,” as James Kent put it at Columbia Law School in the 1790s. The Supreme Court, too, said that the United States was founded on conquest, and that its doctrine remained applicable. As late as 1928, a widely-assigned English-language law book insisted that, “as long as a Law of Nations has been in existence, the States, as well as the vast majority of writers, have recognized subjugation as a mode of acquiring territory,” deeming it legal for “the victor to annex the conquered enemy territory.”
In contrast, Spanish America’s independence leaders fiercely repudiated the principle of conquest. They had to, since they had to learn to live with each other, for they presided over seven new Spanish-American republics on a crowded continent. If they had adhered to a U.S. version of international law, what would have stopped Argentina from conquering Chile the way the United States conquered the Creeks and the Mexicans? Or Chile from marching on Argentina to gain access to the Atlantic? The result would have been endless war. And so, the region’s jurists and other intellectuals (drawing from earlier Catholic criticisms of Spain’s subjugation of the New World) disavowed conquest. In its place, they cobbled together a new framework of international relations that outlawed aggressive war and recognized the absolute sovereignty of all nations, regardless of their size.
For decades, Latin American diplomats tried to force Washington to accept such a vision of cooperative international law — and for decades Washington refused, not wanting to be a Gulliver tied down by a gaggle of Latin Lilliputians. Over time, however, U.S. statesmen began to grudgingly accept Latin America’s legal interpretations, with the far-sighted among them realizing that a reformed system of international law would allow for a more effective projection of Washington’s power. In 1890, at the first Pan-American Conference, the United States signed a provisional treaty abrogating the doctrine of conquest. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to give up the right to intervene in Latin American affairs and to recognize the absolute sovereignty of all nations.
At the end of WWII, with Adolf Hitler dead and fascism defeated, Latin America’s nations gladly joined in the creation of a postwar “rules-based” liberal order, the founding principles of which they had all already adopted, especially the rejection of the doctrine of conquest.
Cortés to Hitler, the age of conquest, it seemed, was finally over.
The End of the End of the Age of Conquest
Not really, of course. Cold warriors found many ways to circumvent the “rules,” and didn’t need to cite Roman law doctrine to justify atrocities in Vietnam, Guatemala, or Indonesia, among other places. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, war began spreading again like wildfire in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the U.S.-led first and second Gulf Wars.
Still, the liberal order globally held on to the idea that the world should be organized around cooperation, not competition, that nations had more interests in common than in contention.
Now, though, that idea seems to have been tossed aside and, in its place, comes a new vision of conquest. We see its burlesque version in the boastful pronouncements of Donald Trump, who has casually claimed the right to use coercion to take the island of Greenland, annex Canada as “the 51st state,” grab the Panama Canal, and clear out Gaza, supposedly turning the strip into a Riviera-like resort. Far more ferocious expressions of that vision of conquest are seen in both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s in Gaza.
Of those two wars of conquest, the second touches a deep nerve, in part because Israel’s existence is so tightly bound up with the fortunes of the liberal international order. The United Nations in 1949 conjured Israel (legally at least) into existence. Latin American nations at the time voted unanimously to recognize Israel’s nationhood, with Guatemala serving as Washington’s whip, ensuring that the region would act as a bloc. And the Holocaust has served as the West’s moral reference point, a nightmarish reminder of what awaits a world that forsakes liberal tolerance or doesn’t abide by liberal rules. At the same time, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, the United Nations has also become the most persistent critic of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel ignores U.N. criticism while invoking the U.N. charter’s article 51, which grants nations the right to self-defense, to justify its assault on Gazans.
As we enter what may be the final phase of the Gazan genocide, that long entwinement between a rules-based order and Israel has become a kind of death dance. Many turn away, unable to bear the news. Others can’t turn away, horrified that those in power in this country offer nothing other than more weapons to Israel, which continues to kill indiscriminately, while withholding all food and medicines from those trapped in Gaza. As of April, about two million Palestinians had no secure source of food at all. Babies continue to decompose. “When children die of starvation, they don’t even cry. Their little hearts just slow down until they stop,” said Colorado pediatrician Mohamed Kuziez, who works with Doctors Against Genocide.
In early May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet unanimously approved a plan dubbed Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which, if enacted, would drive all Gazans into a small containment zone in the southern part of that strip, with Israel controlling all food and medical aid to them. The IDF would then, as one official described the plan, complete “the conquest of the Gaza Strip.” Gaza, said Finance Minister Smotrich, will then be “completely destroyed.” He added grimly, “We conquer and stay.”
Back in the 1500s, the revulsion felt by some theologians and philosophers at the extreme brutality of the Spanish conquest began the “slow creation of humanity” — the fragile idea, nurtured over the centuries and always imperfectly applied, that all humans are indeed equal and form a single community beyond tribalism and nationalism. Today, a similar brutality is undoing that work. Humanity appears to be dissolving at an ever-quickening pace.
From Cortés to Netanyahu, Putin, and Trump, the end of the end of conquest begins.
Israel’s decision to allow only minimal food into Gaza is a small reprieve—not a solution. It does nothing to reverse the widespread malnutrition ravaging Gaza’s children or the irreversible health collapse among its elderly. This is not charity. It is an attempt to normalize starvation as a weapon of war. Indeed, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has openly admitted that the limited aid is necessary to maintain an “international umbrella” protection from Israel’s allies to continue its genocide.
Hours after announcing the aid relief, Israel launched new military operations, expanding its occupation and mass displacement of civilians yet again. This came on the heels of a three-day massacre that left over 500 civilians dead. The limited aid is not a policy shift—it is calculated savagery intrinsic in the Zionist ideology: inflict maximum pain, then offer the bare minimum to deflect outrage. This is not aid. It is barbarity with a countdown — starvation management, not relief.
It is yet another Israeli manipulative political maneuver — one we’ve seen time and again: apply unbearable pressure, then selectively ease it for “practical and diplomatic reasons,” all while maintaining control over the basic conditions of survival. Allowing crumbs of aid is not an end to war crimes. This is merely a shift from killing people on empty stomachs to killing them on half full ones.
Let us be clear: it was Benjamin Netanyahu who broke the most recent ceasefire—just as he has repeatedly violated international norms throughout this war of annihilation. There is no reason to believe he will not reimpose the blockade once political pressure and scrutiny subside. This pattern of intermittent blockade has persisted for nearly 20 months. In the absence of a decisive international response, Netanyahu is likely to repeat this tactic—using food and medicine not as humanitarian necessities, but as tools of coercion and collective punishment.
By reducing a systematic policy of deprivation to a discussion about supply chains or distribution, Israel tries to rebrand a war crime as a bureaucratic glitch. This is not new. In 2012, documents revealed that Israeli authorities had calculated the minimum caloric intake necessary to keep Gazans alive without sparking international outrage — a policy that turned an entire population into subjects of a wicked experiment. A grotesque reminder of the Nazi experimentations on Jewish concentration camps during WWII.
Now, in coordination with the U.S., Israel proposes aid distribution centers in southern Gaza—areas under its military control. The pretext? Preventing chaos. The reality? Israel itself has orchestrated past aid breakdowns. Its presence doesn’t ensure order; it deepens the desperation bred by enforced starvation.
The U.S.-Israel negotiation over so-called “safe” distribution zones is merely a continuation of the ongoing cruelty. These zones are not intended to alleviate suffering but to exert control and inflict humiliation on a starving population. By forcing displaced Palestinians to cluster near Israeli-controlled aid points—closer to the Egyptian border—a sinister plan to depopulate urban centers in both northern and southern Gaza, paving the way for their eventual “voluntary” expulsion. These so-called “food safe zones” risk becoming human traps, designed to detain or even kill desperate residents in search of aid—much like Israel’s use of hospitals to arrest or murder the sick seeking medical care.
As of May 20, Israel allowed five aid trucks into Gaza—only 0.8 percent of what’s needed to feed 2.3 million people. However, none of the aid was distributed because of last minute logistical obstacles created by the Israeli army. This brings to mind the Biden–Blinken floating pier: a theatrical distraction from the Israeli blockade. As Trump emulates Biden, Netanyahu takes it even further—weaponizing spectacle to anesthetize the starving, deflate Trump and international pressure, all while doing nothing to end the siege.
In my last op-ed, I cautioned that the release of the Israeli soldier could be misinterpreted by Israel not as a gesture of goodwill but as an entitlement. Sadly, that warning has proven correct, as Israel has intensified the air and shelling of schools and civilian centers, murdering more than 600 civilians in the last five days. Typical of Netanyahu, he hardened his stance, treating the release of the Israeli soldier as weakness to be punished —murdering one Palestinian every 12 minutes.
The Israeli blockade is not a logistical issue; it is a form of narrative warfare. It blurs intent, dilutes responsibility, and numbs global outrage. If the problem is logistics, then the solution is better trucks and tighter coordination. But if the problem is policy — a conscious decision to starve a civilian population — then it is a glaring war crime. Israel’s siege is a political choice—not a matter of “coordination,” “security vetting,” or “distribution inefficiencies.” Such framing is not just misleading; it is an intentional deception.
Therefore, allowing a trickle of food into Gaza must not absolve Israel of responsibility for the nearly three-month-long starvation blockade. There can be no negotiations over how to manage starvation—it is a deliberate method of warfare. The only acceptable response is accountability and prosecution. Bureaucratic smokescreens serve one purpose: to shield a war crime in progress.
The conventional wisdom regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine is universally accepted by retired generals and ambassadors; bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate; too many political scientists, and of course the ever obedient mainstream media. The conventional wisdom roughly dictates that Putin invaded Ukraine to overthrow the government and occupy the entire country, marking the first step to reach further into East Europe to return states such as Poland to the Russian orbit; and to recreate the Soviet empire.
This wisdom dictates that the only response to Putin’s putative empire-building is to isolate Moscow; increase sanctions; pursue the war as Ukraine’s benefactor; and provide more lethal military equipment to Kyiv. There is a belief that Ukraine can win the war as a result, as well as the argument that Ukraine must be victorious in order to preserve the “international legal order” and to give the “rule of law a chance in Russia.” This latter statement belongs to Yale Professor Timothy Snyder, who argues that Ukraine’s victory would “lift the threat of major war in Europe…and Asia.”
Retired generals such as Wesley Clark and retired ambassadors such as Bill Taylor argue that the Trump administration “needs to push Putin hard to end the war in Ukraine—now.” The fact that sanctions have had no impact on Putin’s decision making, and that Russia has huge advantages in terms of strategic depth, greater numbers of personnel, more advanced offensive weaponry, and a willingness to use terrorist tactics against civilians and civilian infrastructure does not deter those who advocate applying greater force against the Russian military. These advocates favor a “decisive demonstration of political will” and greater “leverage of Western sanctions” to obtain a ceasefire and to “accelerate diplomacy.”
But what if these assumptions regarding the reasons for Putin’s war are wrong? If they are wrong, then the arguments for ways to get Putin to the bargaining table must be reexamined as must the concessions that the United States and the European members of NATO might have to entertain. For example, what if NATO expansion was a major factor in Putin’s decision to invade? What if Putin needs to have some security guarantees regarding the steady expansion of NATO that finds Russia’s western border virtually entirely encircled by NATO’s military forces? In that case, the United States would have to provide security guarantees not only to Ukraine, but also to Russia. Even if a ceasefire and an end to the war can be negotiated, there will be no peace in Europe as long as the current disposition of Western military force remains in place. Putin will not accept such a Western disposition of force on a permanent basis; no likely Russian leader would do so either.
It’s important to keep in mind that the expansion of NATO that began in the late 1990s was a betrayal that took advantage of Russia’s political and economic bankruptcy in the wake of the sudden and shocking collapse of the Soviet Union. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assured their Soviet counterparts (Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze) that the United States would not “leap frog” over a reunified Germany if the Soviets were to remove their 380,000 troops from East Germany. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush destroyed this promise, and Bush Jr. was even willing to lobby the European members of NATO for Ukrainian and Georgian membership in an expanded NATO.
Serious critics of expansion, including former U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union (George Kennan and Jack Matlock) lobbied strongly against the expansion, but the Cold Warriors in U.S. administrations over the years have exaggerated the threat from the Soviet Union and Russia to this very day. This was true in the early years of the Cold War, when the Dulles brothers (John Foster and Allen), Frank Wisner, Paul Nitze, and others argued for greater defense spending to “contain” a Soviet threat. And it’s true in recent times, when the arguments for greater defense spending, which is now projected to exceed $1 trillion in the Trump era, cited the dual threat of Russia and China to lobby for unnecessary strategic modernization and greater power projection.
U.S. strategists and policymakers have always paraded behind the flag of greater support for the democratization of key East European countries, when the real purpose of U.S. diplomacy and deployment in Europe has been to maintain pressure on the Soviet Union and on Russia. As part of any reexamination of the threat perception regarding Russia, we must come to grips with easing the military pressure on Russia’s vulnerable western borders. Our regional missile defenses in Poland and Romania are unneeded, and the original justification for them as a defense against Iran’s missile program was risible. Our base framework in East Europe that includes regular force deployments in Poland and Bulgaria must be reassessed. The rotation of German forces in the Baltics is threatening to Russia, a country that lost 24 million citizens in WWII. The idea of Ukraine’s formal membership in NATO must be abandoned. After all, Ukraine in some ways is already an informal member of NATO, which includes secret aspects of military, technological and intelligence cooperation that is largely unknown to the general public….and even the Congress for that matter.
Finally, Putin would possibly be receptive to any serious discussion of the limits of Western military forces in East Europe because he has “already lost” the war in a strategic sense. In addition to the failure of his conventional attacks at the start of the war, the war itself has driven Ukraine to align itself with the West, has forced greater unity within NATO, and has led to increased defense spending throughout Europe. European unity has been enhanced with only the likes of Hungary, Slovenia, and Serbia showing varying degrees of support for Putin’s war. Most of NATO’s membership has agreed to greater defense spending, and even Germany—often willing to give Russia the benefit of the doubt—argues that Russia has become a greater threat. Even if Ukraine had to give up some territory in order to get an end to the war, a smaller Ukraine would remain a battle tested Ukraine with greater technological support from the West and would pose a greater threat to Russia as a result of having Europe’s largest standing army.
Even an infatuated Putin must now understand that Ukraine will never be part of Russia. However, as long as the high-level policy discussion in Washington cannot get beyond “Managing the Challenge of a Rogue Russia,” we will never get into a genuine return to diplomacy and dialogue with the Kremlin. The United States and Russia are now engaged in a huge increase in defense spending that neither one can afford. The prospects of a greater, longer, and more dangerous Cold War hang in the balance if we get this wrong.
At the risk of stating the obvious. it is not difficult to gauge the U.S. response if Russia and its arms and allies were to surround the United States.
Privatization of publicly funded Medicare and Medicaid, managed care, and “value-based payment”1 have failed to reduce cost or improve population health despite over 30 years of trying, and a new paradigm for health policy is needed. This article summarizes key health policy concepts and the implications of different payment systems and offers recommendations for design of an optimally cost-effective system enabling universal high-quality care at lowest cost.
Key Concepts
1. Should Health Care be Financed as a Public Good or with Market Competition?
Public funding is appropriate for essential public services necessary for everyone—funded by taxes and paid for with budgets based on cost of operations, with no opportunity for profit or loss. Examples include police and fire departments, public schools, the military, roads and bridges, and government services. Health care should be added to this list. Other industrialized countries with far more cost-effective universal systems treat health care as a public good, not a commodity.
Marketplace financing uses competition, market forces, private enterprise, and opportunity for profit and risk of loss. This works well for consumer goods, industry and manufacturing, hotels and restaurants, fuel and food production, and housing (except for those in poverty). These are appropriately subject to market forces, but health care is not.
2. Ethics: Professional vs Commercial Ethics
Professional ethics, traditional in medicine and other professions, put patient or client interests and welfare first, ahead of personal financial interests.
Commercial ethics prioritize financial interests of owner(s) or shareholders. Patients or clients (and taxpayers) are viewed as consumers from whom money can be extracted.
Reliance on professional ethics in health care is not perfect, but it works much better than commercial ethics and there are effective ways to deal with outliers who engage in unethical practices. It would be far less costly to manage outlier practitioners than to try to control mega-corporations that have amassed deep pockets at taxpayer expense.
Profiteering and the corporatization of health care, with substitution of commercial for professional ethics, is the main root cause of excessive cost and dysfunction in U.S. health care.
3. Insurance Risk:
The entity that covers the unpredictable variability in healthcare cost bears insurance risk. Direct payment of providers with fee-for-service means claims received will be variable and somewhat unpredictable, and risk is retained by the payer.
Government programs may contract payment to private fiscal intermediaries with capitation (payment per-member, per-month), as in Medicare Advantage, Medicaid Managed Care, and Medicare Accountable Care Organizations, shifting insurance risk onto the intermediary. A fiscal intermediary contracting to assume risk will always try to over-charge—usually to assure around 90% chance of profit, 10% risk of loss.
4. Excessive Cost of U.S. Health Care:
The managed care paradigm blames excessive cost on fee-for-service with its presumed incentive to provide unnecessary care and over-utilization. The solution offered is “value-based payment” (see below) or up-front funding for care of a defined population with capitation2. But the U.S. has never had higher utilization compared to other countries that use fee-for-service and whose universal health care costs half as much per person, so fee-for-service cannot be the cause of excessive U.S. healthcare cost3. The difference between the U.S. and other countries is in administrative cost and pharmaceutical prices, not over-utilization4. And market financing of U.S. health care means about a third of total cost goes to administration.5,6
Health Care Payment Systems
1. Fee-for-service (FFS)
Simple FFS is inexpensive to administer, although FFS as implemented in the U.S. is often unnecessarily complex and costly. For doctors, FFS rewards productivity—working harder means more pay. FFS is compatible with “patient first” professional ethics and it is compatible with independent private practice. FFS does not shift insurance risk onto providers of care, so it does not need risk adjustment or linking payment to diagnostic coding, and up-coding is not an issue.
However, FFS can reward unnecessary treatment. FFS is more likely to be abused when billing is separated from direct contact with the patient, allowing substitution of commercial ethics for professional ethics. Abuse of FFS is lowest with doctors in independent practice who bill out of their office, more problematic with doctors employed by a large group practice or hospital, and worst with for-profit ownership of doctors’ practices by an insurance company or private equity7. Current trends are in the wrong direction.
For government programs, paying doctors and hospitals directly with FFS means government retains insurance risk and must cover the variability in claims received. However, the larger the risk pool the more manageable this unpredictability becomes, and reserve funds and re-insurance can manage budgetary uncertainty without shifting risk to third-party intermediaries.
2. Salaries for doctors
Salaries are inexpensive to administer, do not create incentives to over- or under-treat, and are compatible with “patient first” professional ethics. However, payment with salaries requires an employer, which can be a problem if the employer is profit-seeking and paid with either fee-for-service divorced from contact with the patient or capitation with its incentive for profiteering. Salaried doctors who can control their schedule/workload may be tempted to become less productive, but this can be mitigated with salary plus a small productivity incentive.
3. “Value-based payment” and capitation
“Value-based payment” systems hold doctors and hospitals accountable for quality and cost of care, even when cost and quality outcomes depend largely on patient characteristics that are beyond the control of care providers. “Capitation” is an advanced form of “value-based payment,” defined as up-front payment per-capita, based on the average per-person cost for a defined population of “members.” Value-based payment and capitation shift insurance risk onto care providers.
Capitation is a simple concept, that seemingly should be inexpensive to administer and provide cost control because care delivery must live within a capitated budget. But capitation is not the same as a simple budget, and in a competitive setting introduces inherent perverse incentives, requires added administrative burdens and costs, and does not assure budgetary control.
+ Up-front payment per member requires members, and performance on quality metrics and cost depends heavily on which members are captured.
+ Gaming the risk pool: Competition for members rewards capturing the healthy and avoiding the sick.
+ Capitation requires risk adjustment, which is administratively expensive, can’t be done anywhere near accurately enough to deter risk pool gaming8, AND…
+ Risk adjustment incentivizes up-coding diagnoses to game the risk-adjustment formula. Up-coding is heavily abused by capitated, risk-adjusted Medicare Advantage8 and Medicaid Managed Care plans, exploiting government funding.
+ Capitation rewards skimping on care since less care means more of payment can be kept, but capitation deters necessary as well as unnecessary care9.
These incentives align to raise administrative cost and worsen disparities in care, and they conflict with professional ethics, contributing to physician moral injury.
Government programs (Medicare and Medicaid) may think capitation of fiscal intermediaries is a convenience because per-member payment is fixed for a contract year. However, payer risk due to changes in enrollment remains, and predictable funding is not assured over subsequent contract periods. Capitated fiscal intermediaries can keep unspent funds, inviting profiteering by plans guided by commercial instead of professional ethics. And government contracts with capitated plans means loss of control of the budget year-to-year, because in practice plans can extract whatever raises they want by gaming financial data reported to government.10
For doctors, payment with capitation is independent of office visits, how often a patient is seen, or even whether a “member” is seen at all. Capitated doctors were protected from loss of income when patients stopped coming to the office during the COVID-19 pandemic. In theory, capitation does not require linking every service to a procedure code, but in practice payers using capitation often require fee-for-service claims for budgeting and benchmarking purposes, precluding administrative savings. And the perverse incentives and administrative costs of capitation listed above all apply.
4. Paying hospitals and other institutional providers
Fee-for-service
Hospital fee-for-service billing is extremely complex and heavily gamed, with chargemaster fee-setting, cost-shifting across different insurance lines of business, unreimbursed care, different in-network and out-of-network fees, and data reporting for value-based payment schemes. Large savings could be realized by paying hospitals with global budgets (see below) instead of fee-for-service.
Capitation
Attributing “members” to a hospital is problematic unless the hospital is part of a closed system with members who signed up for that system (e.g. Kaiser). The perverse incentives inherent to capitation listed above apply to hospitals in capitated systems.
Global budgeting
Simple global budgeting of hospitals (as in Canada) pays hospitals with global operating budgets based on cost of operations, including salaries for employed doctors and other professionals, plus separate budgets for capital improvements based on community need. Simple global budgeting of hospitals does not involve capitation (no “members”) or risk shifting and can’t be easily gamed like fee-for-service or “value-based payment.” Hospital administrative costs per capita in Canada (in US dollars) are less than a quarter of those in U.S. hospitals.11
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has been promoting the AHEAD model (“Advancing All-Payer Health Equity Approaches and Development”)12, which includes a version of global hospital budgets applied on top of fee-for-service with rates standardized across all payers, with claims revenue reconciled to the budget at the end of the year, plus partial capitation with attributed “members” and “value-based” add-ons. These include pay-for-performance and incentives to address inequities and social determinants that are largely not under the control of the hospital. This version of hospital budgeting has none of the administrative savings of simple global budgeting, and in fact piles on more administrative burdens and cost.
Recommendations for universal care at lowest cost
1. Health care should be publicly financed by government, and the government payer should retain insurance risk, with no sub-contracting to risk-bearing fiscal intermediaries. Risk is most cost-effectively managed with broadest possible risk pooling plus financial reserves and/or re-insurance.
2. The major focus of reform should be on reducing administrative cost and therefore prices, not “managing” utilization of care.
3. Physicians could be either in independent practice or employed, and hospitals could be either privately or publicly owned, but ownership of doctors’ practices and hospitals by for-profit corporations or private equity and the corporate practice of medicine should be banned by law.
4. “Value-based payment” introduces perverse incentives and high administrative costs that preclude real value and should have no place in health care.
5. Large administrative savings could be achieved with simplified, standardized payment of care providers. Simplified fee-for-service would be appropriate for doctors in independent practice, with all procedures reduced to professional time required and hourly rates based on required training. Fee-for-service based on time and training would be much fairer and less costly to administer than attempting to assign a relative value to each of thousands of procedure codes.13 Payment should be based on the value of the time and expertise of the professional performing a procedure instead of attributing value to the procedure itself.
6. Hospitals, other institutional providers, and community-based health services should be paid with global budgets, with employed doctors paid with salaries.
7. Pharmaceutical prices should be regulated and negotiated by government.
8. Necessary administrative functions and quality assurance may be publicly administered or contracted out to an Administrative Services Only contractor on a non-risk basis.
Healthcare Cost Implications
Savings would come from markedly reducing billing and collections costs for doctors and hospitals, reduced administrative cost for the government single-payer, negotiated pricing for pharmaceuticals and durable medical equipment, and eliminating the high administrative cost of competing private plans. Further savings would result from a much-improved practice environment for primary care that eliminated disincentives for practice in under-served rural and urban areas, expanding access to primary care in the most cost-effective settings and reducing preventable ER visits and hospitalizations.
If all these recommendations were implemented, U.S. per-capita healthcare costs would likely fall into the range of Canada and other countries with universal systems that cost at least 30-40% less than what the U.S. now spends on health care.
9. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, “Some Medicare Advantage Organization Denials of Prior Authorization Requests Raise Concerns About Beneficiary Access to Medically Necessary Care,” April 2022, https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-09-18-00260.pdf.
The journey from Islamabad to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, is a memorable one. Mine was made over 17 years ago when most folk were fixated on Al Qaeda, though Kashmiri militant group Ansar ur-Tawhid wal Jihad in Kashmir would later support Al Qaeda. As it happened, I was just as interested in the concept of Kashmir belonging to the Kashmiris—not to India, not to Pakistan. Something former Pakistan cricket captain Shahid Afridi also later argued for. Wishing a pear to fall from the ceiling is an old Kashmiri proverb. It means vain hope. Was it really in vain to believe in an independent Kashmir?
I remember winding through the hills of Murree. At Lower Topa, the road becomes Bhurban Road, also called Khakan Abbasi Road, leading to Kohala. From there, you trace the Jhelum River to Muzaffarabad. ‘Kashmir has always been more than a mere place,’ wrote the wonderful journalist, travel writer and historian Jan Morris. ‘It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.’ I recall snowy glaciers. Surprisingly dense forests. A child walking with a raised chair over its head to shelter from the rain. (I filmed this.) Verdant meadows. A loya jirga. (I filmed that too.) Valleys. Gorgeous gorges. Fluent rivers. It was all so beautiful. Lyrical. Not Led Zeppelin lyrical—their song Kashmir was weak by comparison.
I had also wanted to visit Abbottabad south of Kashmir in the Orash Valley but my Pakistani companion had said nothing ever happens there. Of course, Abbottabad was about to become famous not just for its 1850s founder James Abbott of the Bengal Army, who once blew all his money elsewhere on a three-day party with local Hazaras, but as the oddly public hideout of Osama bin Laden—until 14 years ago, almost to the day.
But let’s be clear: it was the British not Al Qaeda who carved out the lines of conflict and violence that still bleed into Kashmir today. Many Kashmiri Brits still tell us this. They also say that unless properly acknowledged, even now, there can be no path to redress.
While India and Pakistan have been ‘trying’ not to nuke each other these past few weeks, I’ve been scouring news on this. Even after the ceasefire and return of villagers to their homes, journalist Yashraj Sharma had noted continued violations by Indian forces along the famous Line of Control (LoC). Pakistani drones were also reportedly abuzz above Srinagar.
Alexander Evans was on the case. Many moons ago, we met in Pakistan. Though a Brit, he was advising the US on Pakistan after being recruited by Richard Holbrooke. Now a popular LSE professor here in London, I remember him sitting on a white plastic chair in the late Islamabad sun—we shared AfPak interests—putting the world to rights. Last week, Evans wrote: ‘Nuclear weapons may provide a degree of power-matching, but emerging technologies and India’s massive military advantage risk degrading Pakistan’s command and control. This has Pakistani generals worrying, including about a potential Indian strike to eliminate Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.’
David Loyn, it must be said, also knows his Pakistan. For a people who authored many of the region’s problems, we Brits don’t half retain an interest in them—perhaps this is a case of late-stage remorse. (Will we be seeing likewise with Americans one day regarding their 133 military conflicts to date?) I first encountered Loyn’s work through his book Frontline: The True Story of the British Mavericks Who Changed the Face of War Reporting, more recently coming across his name while trying to help free a friend of mine and central figure in his book held by the Taliban. (He is home now.) Last week, Loyn wrote of the recent spat: ‘The group who carried out the attack on 22 April called themselves the ‘Resistance Front,’ but were just another avatar of the Pakistan-financed LeT and JeM factions. Earlier this year, India wanted them included in the UN’s six-monthly global assessment of terrorist threats. Pakistan opposed it.’
Today, of course, it is Chinese influence we ‘see’ on the march. Journalist and author Con Coughlin was reminding us of this when he stated that between 2017 and 2021, nearly half of China’s total arms exports went to Pakistan—as much a testament to Pakistan’s role in China’s long-term Belt and Road ambitions as anything. ‘They’re halfway through a 150-year plan,’ a well-informed friend half-joked to me only the other day.
Meanwhile, Trump in three of seven Gulf Arab states—the richest ones—was shaking Arab hand after Arab hand while his hosts did likewise with the entourage of American businessmen. Regards the continued India-Pakistan ceasefire 1700 miles away, India’s PM Modi remained oddly quiet about Trump’s self-trumpeted role. Amidst all this, also, were so many hosts in exquisite traditional Bedouin garb that I found myself indulgently drifting off to my own brief shemagh-wearing days in the desert.
The shemagh. Red and white. Knitted edge. Sandstorm-proof. No one quite wore theirs like my Bedouin companion Ibrahim al-Hirsh—though an English colleague, with whom I would later survive a nasty car crash, did a pretty good job.
On the subject of dress, while we’re at it, few things rival the Kashmiri pheran—two gowns layered atop each other. Despite the rise in popularity of the shalwar kameez—a racing green version of which was gifted to me by the late Afghan commander Abdul Haq and worn throughout my time filming the mujahideen in Afghanistan—the pheran is unmatched. In winter, wool. In summer, cotton. It fends off the cold like nobody’s business.
But none of this can distract from the fact that the greatest British crime of all in Kashmir was the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar. After the First Anglo-Sikh War, the East India Company sold Kashmir to Maharaja Gulab Singh for 7.5 million rupees—land, people, and all. To many Kashmiris, it was a literal sale of their lives. By ignoring Kashmir’s ethnic, cultural, and religious makeup, it made conflict inevitable.
‘There are things you break that can’t be put back together again,’ wrote the great survivalist Salman Rushdie, whose masked attacker Hadi Matar has just been sentenced to 25 years. ‘And Kashmir may be one of them.’ The 1947 partition of Pakistan left Kashmir’s fate dangling. The Instrument of Accession with India, allowing Indian military intervention, was conditional on a plebiscite. It never happened. Decades of dispute have followed.
Even during the Cold War, British interests continued to stoke conflict. Alliances with Pakistan seemed more about control than resolution. I saw this geopolitical obsessiveness first-hand in the early ’80s during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Though the Brits had officially exited the Indian subcontinent as far back as 1947—when they left behind fractured sovereignty, contested borders, and deep mistrust—once again, this legacy bled into the present. Not to mention the very real wars: 1949, 1965, 1999. Deadly eruptions of violence followed in 2016 and 2019.
Today, while India’s Northern Army Command visit the Poonch and Naushera districts of Jammu and Kashmir to check up on things, and while activists still gather for Free Kashmir rallies outside India House in London, arguably only Kashmiri writers show workable unity. This they do with verse, one of the greatest weapons of all, embracing the still troubled terrain with echoes of memory and resilience. After the 2005 earthquake near Muzaffarabad, for example, Kashmiri poetry rose from the rubble in a manner as resilient as the people themselves. As Mohammad Ayub Betab penned: ‘Far away on an upland near the stars, my mother’s house is a sky made of sapphire.’
Kashmir. A place of beauty. A place of scars. A place—formerly—of Brits. And maybe, in time, the odd pear falling from the ceiling.
Always turned on by his most extreme ideas, Trump wants to reopen Alcatraz as a federal prison. He apparently got this twisted idea after watching Don Siegel’s 1979 film with Clint Eastwood, Escape from Alcatraz, one of the best prison movies ever made, a film with a deep sensitivity to those who live under confinement. Trump says he picked Alcatraz because it’s a prison no one’s ever escaped from, which is a pretty clear indication that he didn’t watch the Siegel/Eastwood flick, which documents the 1971 escape by three prisoners, Frank Morris and the brothers Clarence and John Anglin. (I doubt Trump has the attention span to watch any film that doesn’t include him.)In fact, there were 11 known escape attempts, five of which appear to have been successful.
But of course, preventing prison escapes is not the point of Trump’s theatrics. The point is to sound tough-to-the-point-of-sadistic while getting under the skin of California Government Gavin Newsom and San Francisco elites, for whom Alcatraz has become a weird emblem of the Bay Area, attracting more than 1.5 million tourists and generating more than $60 million in revenue from ferry tickets and tours of the Island.
The issue certainly isn’t a pressing concern about federal prisons, which isn’t escapes.There’s only been one escape from a Super Max prison (none at Florence, however) and nine from medium security federal prisons in the last 20 years, and all of the escapees were recaptured within a few days. Most prison escapes aren’t escapes from prison, but people who just walk away from parole, home confinement, skip bail or miss court dates. The real issue with America’s over-stuffed federal (and state) prisons is keeping prisoners alive, where the conditions are so unforgiving that in 2019 alone, there were 695 suicides in state, local, and federal prisons and jails.
Trump, ever in search of sadistic pleasures, wants his own CECOT-like prison to intern what he calls America’s “most vicious and violent criminals.” After prowling Alcatraz’s dark corridors, where men spent years in solitary confinement, in cramped cells that would turn anyone into a claustrophobic, not allowed to speak to each other or communicate with the outside world, you can see why this haunted rock with its chill history of retribution and psychological torture appeals to Trump’s debased instincts.
The reconstruction of Alcatraz, which is a ruined prison on top of a ruined Army fort on stolen ground, wouldn’t survive a DOGE audit. ADX Florence costs $60 million to build and more to operate: $33,000 a year per prisoner versus $18,500 a year at a medium security prison.Yet Alcatraz would prove even more outlandishly expensive. From the time the prison doors opened in 1934, Alcatraz was America’s most expensive prison, costing three times as much per inmate to run. And it was falling apart almost as soon as it began operations, with the spray from the salt water eroding the prison’s walls and foundations. RFK, Jr, ordered its closure and replacement by a new maximum security prison in Marion, Illinois, in 1963.
The most thrilling Alcatraz story isn’t about people trying to escape the island but about the 89 Native Americans who invaded the island, reclaimed it, and occupied it for 19 months, from November 20, 1969, through June 11, 1971. On the day the tribal activists landed, the lone guard on Alcatraz sent out a radio alert: “Mayday! Mayday! “The Indians have landed!”
In researching the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz (Gannet) Island, I spent three days exploring the Island and photographing the remains of the old fort and rusting prison, much of which has been reclaimed by the island’s vegetation, birds, and marine life.. It’s still not too late to do the right thing and give it back.
The shared experience of genocide should unite, not divide, Jews and Palestinians, say two activists
“Do you hate all Jews?” It’s something the 25-year old UK-based Palestinian journalist Yara Eid gets asked not infrequently. She finds the query both understandable and exasperating.
But Eid also knows it’s the wrong question. Palestinians and Jews have far more in common than what separates them, Eid noted, as she sat side-by-side with Jewish Holocaust survivor, Stephen Kapos, during a discussion about genocide held recently at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Eid lost at least 60 family members along with her best friend in just the first two months of Israel’s current brutal attack on Gaza. And as Israel now escalates its violence, intent on achieving what has long been the obvious goal — the seizure of all land in Gaza leading effectively to the erasure of the entire Palestinian population — Eid, like the Jews of the Nazi Holocaust, could be looking at a family tree pruned of all its branches.
“Every time I listen to Stephen and the stories he tells, I can totally resonate with them,” Eid said. “We grew up in two different worlds, very different, but if you look closer, we’re actually very similar. What we share is the repression as well as the resistance.”
Kapos, born in Hungary and now 87, lost 15 family members of his own during the Holocaust, but was hidden on false papers in a school for boys, all of them Jews. Today he is the “poster boy” of the pro-Palestine protests in London where he is frequently seen at the front of the march with a sign hanging around his neck that reads: “This Holocaust survivor says stop the genocide in Gaza.”
For Kapos, denouncing the Gaza genocide is a moral imperative. As he has repeated at almost every interview, “the way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they’re doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.”
With more than six decades separating them, Kapos and Eid find themselves bound together as witnesses to two separate genocides, an experience that obliges them to redefine the word. A genocide is not just about those killed, they say, it’s also about the trauma of those who survive.
Kapos says he was too young when he went into hiding to fully understand the trauma of what was happening to Jews. But he saw it in others. Kapos recalled a boy at his home who had been taken in a group with his mother to the banks of the Danube “and shot straight into the river by the fascists,” Kapos said.
“He was holding his mother’s hand and the mother sank right beside him.” The boy was only wounded and eventually scrambled ashore downstream where he was rescued by strangers. “He was very very nervous and obviously traumatized by this experience,” Kapos recalled.
Another boy, riding with his parents in a crowded tram in Budapest, had moved forward to watch the driver at work when fascists came on board demanding papers. His parents, identified as Jews, were arrested.
“In that instant the parents had to make a decision whether to make contact with their son or part without saying goodbye,” Kapos said. They chose the latter, the ultimate act of selfless courage. The parents went to Auschwitz. Their son was rescued and brought to the home, where, said Kapos, he manifested “the extremities of the Holocaust experience.”
Eid recounted how she suffered a breakdown as a result of Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014. She was living in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza at the time. “I was 14. I saw people getting cut into pieces in front of me,” she recalled. “I should have never seen that. I’m still in therapy for that.”
Eid is currently banned for travel to Israel and therefore to Palestine, but recognizes if she could go back “they might kill me, too.” The best friend who was killed in the early weeks of Israel’s attack, was a fellow journalist, one of the groups, like doctors and aid workers, which has been deliberately targeted by Israeli forces.
The shared traumas are what bind Jews and Palestinians together, or should. And in the many protests that have erupted since Israel began its brutal attack on Gaza in October 2023, we have seen it. In the US, some of the most outspoken opposition to the Gaza genocide has come from Jewish Voice for Peace, whose members have swarmed Wall Street and Trump Tower in New York and who willingly face arrest.
Similarly, in the UK, an alliance calling itself the Jewish Bloc is omnipresent at the pro-Palestine marches around the country. To them, to cite the Holocaust as an excuse to conduct another genocide against others, is unconscionable and intolerable.
Last year, ten Holocaust survivors signed a letter condemning the invocation of that brutal event as if it somehow justifies the present day version being carried out by Israel in Gaza. “In our opinion, to use the memory of the Holocaust like this to justify either genocide in Gaza or repression on college campuses is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust,” they wrote.
But in late April a judge in Germany convicted a pro-Palestine activist for holding a sign that asked “Have we learned nothing from the Holocaust?”, ruling that she had incited hatred and that her sign “trivialized” the Holocaust. Other pro-Palestine protesters in Germany have been brutalized by police using a level of violence reminiscent of the Gestapo and SS.
Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian student at New York’s Columbia university who was arrested and then released as he awaits deportation hearings, held regular meetings with Israeli students there where the group tried to navigate a path to peace amongst themselves and their nations. One of the Israeli students who attended, Josh Drill, recalled how they would have “intense discussions, sharing our personal traumas, healing together, envisioning a peaceful future and what our place in that is.”
But that’s who we are arresting, the peacemakers like Mahdawi and Kapos, who was also called in for questioning by police after the January 18 pro-Palestine march in London. When empathy is erased, autocracy prevails.
Kapos felt that intensely when he visited an exhibition, Letters from Gaza, at a London art gallery. As he read the hopes and fears expressed by the Palestinians writers, many of them children, he was struck, he said, by “how similar their concerns were, just as it was for us during the Holocaust.”
After the end of World War II, the U.S. employer class—the capitalists—faced overlapping threats, both domestic and foreign. On the domestic side, a coalition of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), two socialist parties, and a communist party had grown large and powerful during the 1930s Great Depression. Together, they pushed hard and successfully for domestic policies collectively known as the New Deal.
These policies included the establishment of the Social Security system, the unemployment compensation system, the nation’s first minimum wage, and a federal jobs program that employed millions. Along with several other programs, the New Deal represented a leftward shift of state priorities. For the employer class, worse than those spending shifts were the corresponding changes in federal revenue sources.
Sharply raised taxes on (and borrowing from) corporations and the rich funded the New Deal’s massive program for the employees. This reallocated the nation’s income and wealth from the top to the middle and bottom. As against the dominant trickle-down economic policies that were in place before and soon after it, the New Deal represented an experiment in trickle-up economic policies. Once World War II was over, the employer class wanted nothing more than to undo the New Deal, and to bring back trickle-down polices.
A second domestic problem threatened the U.S. economy after 1945: the risk of backsliding into depression. Five years of huge wartime deficit finance finally lifted the U.S. economy out of the 1930s depression. When 1945 put demobilization of troops and redeployment of resources to peacetime production on the agenda, it also provoked fears of a reversion to depression. Leading U.S. politicians and academics, more or less influenced by Keynes’s work, looked urgently to government interventions to prevent that.
The U.S. employer class also perceived foreign threats. Chief among these was the USSR, the wartime ally of the United States. In service to the U.S. employer class, President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) transformed perceptions about the USSR from a close wartime ally into a fearsome enemy bent on “overthrowing the U.S. by force and violence.” Despite having suffered enormous wartime destruction, the USSR was quickly rebranded by U.S. mainstream politicians, media, business, and academic leaders as an extreme danger. Communists and their “fellow travelers” were notoriously purged by what has ever since been called McCarthyism.
Western European leaders also feared and turned against the USSR as Europe’s eastern countries became the USSR’s postwar socialist allies. These countries also became closer to the USSR as it supported and assisted successful revolutions against an already weakened European colonialism. At the same time, Europe’s employer classes acutely feared their domestic communist parties that were by then strongly entrenched in their anti-Nazi resistance movements and organized labor movements. The 1930s depression strengthened them all (as it had in the United States).
In Europe, labor movements, communist and socialist parties, and many of their supporters mobilized, trained, equipped, funded, and coordinated several anti-fascist resistances. By 1945, that resistance work led to the immense popularity of these parties and movements. Western European employers in each country feared the economic demands their domestic socialists, communists, and labor unions would make. Those demands would be backed by their workers’ domestic political power and gain more support due to the USSR’s geopolitical proximity.
These conditions in the United States and Western Europe resulted in a shared commitment by their capitalist classes, leading to an alliance, which would embrace U.S. dominance—defined as “free-world leadership”—in military matters and in mobilizing resources internationally against the USSR (NATO, IMF, and World Bank). The employer class in each of these countries focused their resources, along with those of their governments, to purge communists, socialists, labor militants, and their supporters as thoroughly as conditions allowed. The actions ranged from imprisonment and deportation to loss of jobs, income, and social influence.
The alliance’s central theme was to declare and wage a Cold War against both the USSR and its “agents” inside the United States and European countries. The purges inside the United States included the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as Soviet spies. Those actions also entailed loudly favoring (and secret CIA funding) many of Europe’s “pro-Western” politicians and parties, media outlets, and student groups. The U.S.-European alliance added Canada and Japan to their bloc. The U.S. dollar and its global position lubricated everything this alliance was and did.
The central ideological and political problem for the U.S. employer class after 1945 was how to accomplish the undoing of the New Deal and the United States’ wartime alliance with the USSR. The solution it found was a well-coordinated, well-funded campaign featuring cohesive arguments articulated by institutions that could saturate global public opinion. Nothing less than a total turnaround in public opinion and policy would rescue U.S. capitalism from what its employer class saw as an existential crisis.
There lie certain similarities with what Trump faced when he took office in 2025. In both cases, the employer class felt deeply threatened, especially due to the escalation of the political and economic dangers. Today, that class worries about crippling social divisions and tensions. The deepening inequalities of the distributions of income, wealth, and political influence have caused the promised American dream to be out of reach for the majority, which has angered them.
The employer class also fears the deepening indebtedness of its government, its corporate sector, and the majority of households amid the worrisome decline of the nation’s geopolitical position. China’s growth over recent decades positions it as the first serious global economic competitor of the United States in a century (the USSR was too small an economy to ever achieve this status). Among the many consequences of China’s growth, the fading global position of the U.S. dollar ranks high. As in the case of Truman taking power in 1945, Trump’s second term is also defined by heavy cumulated pressures prioritizing breaking from dangerous and declining situations.
The U.S. employer class’s solution in 1945 was to destroy the domestic left and transform the USSR from ally to enemy. Trump’s solution for the employer class is similarly to try to destroy the left but to transform Russia from an enemy to an ally. Despite important differences in time and global conditions—the United States left in 1945 was far more radical than it became later and is now—the similarities here are suggestive. In 1945, employers commenced undoing the New Deal. They eventually succeeded, but only partly. They managed an upward redistributive state, but they had to accept the shift to a regulatory state. Today, Trump seeks to complete burying the New Deal legacy by going further and undoing the regulatory state.
The class politics of Trump carry forward the actions of his predecessors across the last century. The details, not the goals, vary with the circumstances. The transition from the USSR to Russia facilitated Trump’s changed policy stance toward the country. The decline of the United States’ organized labor movement over the last 70 years facilitated Trump’s electoral appeal to the employee class. On the other hand, China’s continuing rise as an economic competitor reinforces the employer class’s worries about its status and security. More deeply, what disturbs the U.S. employer class now is the intertwined decline of the U.S. empire and the U.S. capitalism’s global position.
After 1945, the employer class reasserted its social dominance. It refocused the federal government on the twin tasks of purging supporters of the New Deal from the government, unions, and other social institutions and demonizing and containing the USSR as the evil global enemy. Anti-communism became the main ideological weapon to achieve this. The purge demanded that all those who supported the deal not only denounce communism but also show sympathy to such dogmas as “state interference in the economy” is inefficient, wasteful, and inferior to what private “free” enterprises could and would achieve.
Communists, socialists, unionists, liberals, Democrats, and others associated with the New Deal got purged as believers in bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. At best, they were seen as agents of Moscow’s crusades against democracy and individual liberty. Putting domestic communists first among its targets let the employer class link the domestic purge quickly and seamlessly with the Cold War struggles against the USSR. These actions against communists at home while waging the Cold War abroad aimed to defeat two evils at the same time.
Over the last 80 years, the employer class, directly and through its power over governments, undertook a massive program of ideological change. It made the struggle between more versus less government intervention in the “private enterprise economy” and “the free market” an important issue in economics and public policy. Professional economists debated between Keynesianism and neoclassicism. Moderate politicians rallied around slogans that defined the struggle as being between “meeting people’s needs” versus suffering a “authoritarian bureaucracy.” Extremist politicians called the state evil (often using communist, socialist, liberal, Democrat, and even terrorist as synonyms).
The global “free market” established after 1945 enabled the United States, which became dominant after the wartime destruction of all potential economic rivals (Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and Italy), to sustain that position through NATO on the one hand and demonizing the USSR on the other. Fighting communism abroad justified sustaining that dominance. Fighting communism at home justified destroying the New Deal coalition and thereby undoing the policy.
Cold War leaders in the United States, representing both major political parties, carried out these policies consistently. The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 report updates and expands them into a plan that Trump’s regime is largely following. That plan targets what little remains of the New Deal: removing “regulatory” state apparatuses. Trump’s regime also accepts implicitly what it denies explicitly: that the U.S. empire and U.S. capitalism are in decline.
Tariffs are the magic bullet to reverse all that and fast. Above all, they are implemented with the hope that they will return manufacturing to the United States. (This was promised by each of the presidents this century, but none of them delivered on it.) The tariffs might, at best, slow the decline, but their political, economic, and ideological costs and the retaliations by many nations will make the magic bullet fail. Much the same happened to many empires earlier that failed to stop their decline with their magic bullets. Tariffs will likely function much like the proposal of “taking back” the Panama Canal or Greenland and loudly squeezing symbolic gains from Canada and Mexico. These plans are aggressive disguises and over-advertised offsets for the painful reality of the declining empire and economy.
It is worth remembering that in all empires, when their rise inevitably turns into decline, those who accumulated the greatest wealth and power use these resources to retain their position. They thereby offload the costs of decline onto the middle and lower classes. The latter suffer more and face the consequences first. Trump’s first budget proposals starkly exhibit this offloading. For most empires, such offloading proves socially divisive and ends very badly.
Recent national election results in Canada and Australia suggest that those classes are beginning to grasp the Trump regime’s larger goals and have voted against politicians seen to be insufficiently opposed to them. Some polls in the United States point in similar directions. Europe’s leaders are worried too. Most of them have been long and deeply complicit with the United States’ goals and methods. Voters may punish them for failure to resist the repeated anti-European policies and attitudes flowing from the Trump regime. European leaders risk voters finding them guilty by association. So many break away from Trump by exaggerating support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine and demonizing Russia.
I have long been a fan of universal Medicare. While some time back I thought we could get there fairly quickly, I became a fan of incrementalist approaches as I watched even much smaller changes like the ACA get bogged down in petty politics and industry lobbying. As bizarre as it seems, Trump’s second term makes me more optimistic about a quicker transition.
There are three reasons for my newfound optimism. The first is the public response to the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United HealthCare. I am not going to in any way endorse violent actions against insurance executives, or anyone else in the industry, but the widespread sympathy for Luigi Mangione, shows considerable hostility towards insurance companies. The era where most people liked their insurance company seems to be behind us.
The second has been the ability of Trump to walk all over long-established norms and rules of conduct. It’s true that Trump has a cult following that will literally buy anything he says or does, and a money-man enforcer in the form of Elon Musk.
But a Democratic president elected on a clear agenda for universal Medicare could look to apply similar pressure on congressional holdouts, if they have established their case in the campaign. If people understand the issues and have given a president a clear mandate for universal Medicare, they have some ability to push recalcitrant senators and Congresspeople.
They can also pull a Trump and threaten to withhold important funding for their state or district. Yeah, this is bullshit politics, but when billionaires can buy elections, there is no point in playing nice. And it doesn’t look like the courts will do much to block this, unless they become even more political in applying different standards for Republicans than Democrats.
The third reason is that Trump’s looney tariff-fest shows that people are not as allergic to taxes as has generally been believed. Trump has imposed one of the most massive tax increases in the last half century with his tariffs, likely on the order of $300 billion a year, or $2,200 per household. And it could go much higher. The tariffs have hurt him in the polls and will likely hurt more when they really start to bite, but the reaction is nothing like we might have expected with such a huge tax increase.
Trump’s tax increases are literally for nothing. Yeah, he tells his followers that we will get back good-paying manufacturing jobs, but it’s not likely anyone but his extreme cultists buy that. Does anyone really think workers will get paid $35 an hour, with benefits, sowing together dolls or turning tiny screws in an iPhone?
The other rationale is offsetting the cost of Trump’s big tax cuts to corporations and the rich. This is a priority for Trump’s billionaire backers, but not a huge winner at the kitchen table for most of the country. If Trump can get away with his massive tariff-tax increase, surely raising taxes to provide everyone with good quality healthcare would be politically doable.
There are a million ways to slice and dice both a universal Medicare plan and also the transition, which will pose real problems. However, it is important any plan be comprehensive. That doesn’t mean it has to cover the plastic surgery needed to give people the Mar a Lago look, but it does need to cover areas like dental, vision, and hearing, which are excluded from traditional Medicare.
Dental care is by far the biggest of these three. It has historically been separate from more general healthcare. That may have made sense sixty years ago, when dental care was relatively simple and cheap (dentists filled cavities and pulled teeth). It doesn’t make sense today. We’ll spend close to $200 billion this year, $1,600 per household, on dental care. That’s a lot for people to absorb out of pocket, especially since it is very unevenly distributed, some will have bills coming to many thousands of dollars, while others will pay little or nothing.
Much of the story in having the government pick up the tab for healthcare is getting the money that is currently paid by companies and workers for private health insurance. That will be close to $1.5 trillion this year. Most of it from employers.
This is where the tax would come in. If it takes the form of an employer-side payroll tax it would largely replace the money that employers are now paying to insurance companies. While there are some issues of implementation that are tricky, it is unlikely many workers would be upset if their employer was paying money to the government for insurance rather than a private insurer, especially since the coverage would likely be better than what they are getting now.
It is also important that we take a chainsaw to costs in the industry. As has often been pointed out, our government already pays enough for national health insurance. Federal, state, and local governments will pay more than $8,500 a person this year for healthcare through Medicare, Medicaid and other public programs. This does not even count the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance. By comparison, Germany and the Netherlands both spend around $6,000 per person in total for their healthcare.
Part of the story of reducing costs is easy. We pay $350 billion a year for the administrative costs of private health insurance, more than 25 percent of what they pay out to providers. By contrast, the administrative costs of Medicare are just over 1.0 percent of what it pays out to providers.
There are a number of reasons for these differences, but an obvious one is that the insurers pay their top executives tens of millions a year. By contrast, the top administrators in Medicare get a bit over $200,000 a year. If someone is looking for waste, the excessive pay of insurance company executives is a good place to start.
In addition, the insurers are in business to make a profit for their shareholders, and at least some of them have been doing a good job of that lately. The stock of HCA, the country’s largest insurer, has increased more than fourfold over the last five years.
On top of the money directly paid to the insurers, there are also enormous indirect costs. Hospitals, doctors’ offices, and other providers have to spend an enormous amount of money hiring staff to deal with the differing rules and forms of various insurers. A recent study found that in 2017 almost a third of our healthcare expenditures went to cover the direct and indirect costs of insurance, almost five times what Canada was spending on a per person basis for its universal Medicare system. Eliminating this waste will get us most of the way toward covering the cost of universal Medicare in the United States.
But there is also enormous waste in what we pay providers. We pay twice as much for most of our healthcare inputs as people in other wealthy countries. The first place to look is prescription drugs. We will spend more than $700 billion this year, $2,200 per person, for drugs and other pharmaceutical products. Other countries spend less than half this amount. If we let drugs be sold in a free market, without patent monopolies, we would likely be spending close to $100 billion a year.
There is a similar story with medical equipment, where we pay far more for everything from MRIs and other scanning equipment to kidney dialysis machines. We also pay our doctors roughly twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries. (This is much more a story with specialists than family practitioners.) Getting doctors’ pay down to something close to what they receive in Germany and Canada could save around $100 billion a year.
In short, there are ways to squeeze out the savings that would make universal Medicare affordable in the United States. There are obviously tons of things that need to be worked through in the details of a universal Medicare plan, which will matter a lot, but the main thing is to put the idea on the table. The details can be worked out after the fact.
Will a plan for universal Medicare sell politically? That isn’t my area, but I can say that what the Democrats have been selling has not done especially well. They just lost an election to a former reality-TV show host and failed president who had previously tried to overthrow the government. And as Trump has made an unprecedented assault on democracy, the response of its two leaders in Congress was to embark on tours hawking their new ghost-written books.
Perhaps a plan for universal Medicare will scare away billionaires who might otherwise support Democrats. That seems a risk worth taking. The prospect of the party taking and holding power, while offering most people no real change in the system does not seem very promising.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
The brief freeze and rapid partial reinstatement of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding in early 2025 helped expose it as a US regime-change tool. Created to rebrand CIA covert operations as “democracy promotion,” the NED channels government funds to opposition groups in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, meddling in their internal affairs.
Regime change on the US agenda
In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the US Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work carried out by NED, of which he is now vice-chair. Carl Gershman, then president of the NED and giving evidence, was asked about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected with an increased majority two years prior. He responded: “Time for him to go.”
Seven years later, Trump took office and it looked as if the NED’s future was endangered. On February 12, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk froze disbursement of its congressionally approved funds. Its activities stopped and its website went blank. On February 24, Richard Grenell, special envoy to Venezuela, declared that “Donald Trump is someone who does not want to make regime changes.”
Washington’s global regime-change operations were immediately impacted and over 2,000 paid US collaborating organizations temporarily defunded. A Biden-appointed judge warned of “potentially catastrophic harm” to (not in her words) US efforts to overturn foreign governments. The howl from the corporate press was deafening. The Associated Presscried: “‘Beacon of freedom’ dims as US initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither.”
However, the pause lasted barely a month. On March 10, funding was largely reinstated. The NED, which “deeply appreciated” the State Department’s volte face, then made public its current program which, in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, includes over 260 projects costing more than $40 million.
US “soft power”
Created in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan following scandals involving the CIA’s covert funding of foreign interventions, the NED was to shift such operations into a more publicly palatable form under the guise of “democracy promotion.” As Allen Weinstein, NED’s first acting president, infamously admitted in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In short, NED functions as a “soft power arm” of US foreign policy.
The NED disingenuously operates as a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit foundation. However, it is nearly 100% funded by annual appropriations from the US Congress and governed mainly by Washington officials or ex-officials. In reality, it is an instrument of the US state—and, arguably, of the so-called deep state. But its quasi-private status shields it from many of the disclosure requirements that typically apply to taxpayer-funded agencies.
Hence we encounter verbal gymnastics such as those in its “Duty of Care and Public Disclosure Policies.” That document loftily proclaims: “NED holds itself to high standards of transparency and accountability.” Under a discussion of its “legacy” (with no mention of its CIA pedigree), the NGO boasts: “Transparency has always been central to NED’s identity.”
But it continues, “…transparency for oversight differs significantly from transparency for public consumption.” In other words, it is transparent to the State Department but not to the public. The latter are only offered what it euphemistically calls a “curated public listing of grants” – highly redacted and lacking in specific details.
NED enjoys a number of advantages by operating in the nether region between an accountable US government agency and a private foundation. It offers plausible deniability: the US government can use it to support groups doing its bidding abroad without direct attribution, giving Washington a defense from accusations of interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is also more palatable for foreign institutions to partner with what is ostensibly an NGO, rather than with the US government itself.
The NED can also respond quickly if regime-change initiatives are needed in countries on Washington’s enemy list, circumventing the usual governmental budgeting procedures. And, as illustrated during that congressional presentation in 2018 on Nicaragua, NED’s activities are framed as supporting democracy, human rights, and civil society. It cynically invokes universal liberal values while promoting narrow Yankee geopolitical interests. Thus its programs are sold as altruistic rather than imperial, and earn positive media headlines like the one from the AP cited above.
But a look at NED’s work in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba suggests very much the opposite.
Venezuela
Venezuela had passed an NGO Oversight Law in 2024. Like the US’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, but somewhat less restrictive, the law requires certification of NGOs. As even the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) – an inside-the-beltway promoter of US imperialism with a liberal gloss – admits: “Many Venezuelan organizations receiving US support have not been public about being funding recipients.”
The pace of Washington’s efforts in Venezuela temporarily slowed with the funding pause, as US-funded proxies had to focus on their own survival. Venezuelan government officials, cheering the pause, viewed the NED’s interference in their internal affairs as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. In contrast, the US-funded leader of the far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, begged for international support to make up for the shortfall from Washington.
WOLA bemoaned that the funding freeze allowed the “Maduro government to further delegitimize NGOs” paid by the US. Hundreds of US-funded organizations, they lamented, “now face the grim choice of going underground, relocating abroad, or shutting down operations altogether.”
With the partial reinstatement of funding, now bankrolling at least 39 projects costing $3.4 million, former US senator and present NED board member Mel Martinez praised the NED for its “tremendous presence in Venezuela… supporting the anti-Maduro movement.”
Nicaragua
Leading up to the 2018 coup attempt, the NED had funded 54 projects worth over $4 million. Much of this went to support supposedly “independent” media, in practice little more than propaganda outlets for Nicaragua’s opposition groups. Afterward, the NED-funded online magazine Global Americansrevealed that the NED had “laid “the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.
One of the main beneficiaries, Confidencial, is owned by the Chamorro family, two of whose members later announced intentions to stand in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections. The family received well over $5 million in US government funding, either from the NED or directly from USAID (now absorbed into the State Department). In 2022, Cristiana Chamorro, who handled much of this funding, was found guilty of money laundering. Her eight-year sentence was commuted to house arrest; after a few months she was given asylum in the US.
Of the 22 Nicaragua-related projects which NED has resumed funding, one third sponsor “independent” media. While the recipients’ names are undisclosed, it is almost certain that this funding is either for outlets like Confidencial (now based in Costa Rica), or else is going direct to leading opponents of the Sandinista government to pay for advertisements currently appearing in Twitter and other social media.
Cuba
In Latin America, Cuba is targeted with the highest level of NED spending – $6.6 million covering 46 projects. One stated objective is to create “a more well-informed, critically minded citizenry,” which appears laughable to anyone who has been to Cuba and talked to ordinary people there – generally much better informed about world affairs than a typical US citizen.
Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez criticized the NED’s destabilizing activities, such as financing 54 anti-Cuba organizations since 2017. He advised the US administration to review “how many in that country [the US] have enriched themselves organizing destabilization and terrorism against Cuba with support from that organization.”
Washington not only restored NED funding for attacks on Cuba but, on May 15, added Cuba to the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with its anti-terrorist efforts.”
The NED: Covert influence in the name of democracy
Anyone with a basic familiarity with the Washington’s workings is likely to be aware of the NED’s covert role. Yet the corporate media – behaving as State Department stenographers and showing no apparent embarrassment – have degenerated to the point where they regularly portray the secretly funded NED outlets as “independent” media serving the targeted countries.
Case in point: Washington Post columnist Max Boot finds it “sickening” that Trump is “trying [to] end US government support for democracy abroad.” He is concerned because astroturf “democracy promotion groups” cannot exist without the flow of US government dollars. He fears the “immense tragedy” of Trump’s executive order to cut off funding (now partially reinstated) for the US Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of the Voice of America, Radio Marti, and other propaganda outlets.
Behind the moralistic appeals to democracy promotion and free press is a defense of the US imperial project to impose itself on countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Those sanctioned countries, targeted for regime change, need free access to food, fuel, medicines and funding for development. They don’t need to hear US propaganda beamed to them or generated locally by phonily “independent” media.
Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0
CAIRO, Egypt — It is 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are 2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food, medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s.
A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare — starvation. One in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a new offensive that is killing upwards of 100 people a day, has declared that nothing will impede this final assault, named Operation Gideon’s Chariots.
There will be “no way,” Israel will stop the war, he announced, even if the remaining Israeli hostages are returned. Israel is “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza. The Palestinians “have nowhere to return.”
“[The] only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,” he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. “But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.”
The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations. It marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the most basic and fundamental rights matter. It ushers in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity, including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and exploitation. We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of democracy, justice and human rights.
The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant footnotes in our collective history.
In fact, genocide is the currency of Western domination.
Between 1490 and 1890, European colonization, including acts of genocide, was responsible for killing as many as 100 million indigenous people, according to the historian David E. Stannard. Since 1950 there have been nearly two dozen genocides, including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda.
The genocide in Gaza is part of a pattern. It is the harbinger of genocides to come, especially as the climate breaks down and hundreds of millions are forced to flee to escape droughts, wildfires, flooding, declining crop yields, failed states and mass death. It is a blood-soaked message from us to the rest of the world: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.
Gaza puts to rest the lie of human progress, the myth that we are evolving morally. Only the tools change. Where once we clubbed victims to death, or chopped them to pieces with broadswords, today we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps, spray families with bullets from militarized drones or pulverize them with tank shells, heavy artillery and missiles.
The 19th century socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is perpetrated by oppressors to disempower the oppressed.
“All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature… But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.” Blanqui warned.
Scientific and technological advancement, rather than an example of progress, could “become a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.”
“For humanity” Blanqui wrote, “is never stationary. It either advances or goes back. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.” Further, he wrote, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.”
Human history is defined by long periods of cultural barrenness and brutal repression. The fall of the Roman Empire led to immiseration and repression throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth through the 13th century. There was a loss of technical knowledge, including how to build and maintain aqueducts. Cultural and intellectual impoverishment led to collective amnesia. The ideas of ancient scholars and artists were blotted out. There was no rebirth until the 14th century and the Renaissance, a development made possible largely by the cultural flourishing of Islam, which, through translating Aristotle into Arabic and other intellectual accomplishments, kept the wisdom of the past from disappearing.
Blanqui knew history’s tragic reverses. He took part in a series of French revolts, including an attempted armed insurrection in May 1839, the 1848 uprising and the Paris Commune — a socialist uprising that controlled France’s capital from March 18 until May 28 in 1871. Workers in cities such as Marseilles and Lyon attempted, but failed, to organize similar communes before the Paris Commune was militarily crushed.
To trust in the fairy tale of human progress to save us is to become passive before despotic power. Only resistance, defined by mass mobilization, by disrupting the exercise of power, especially against genocide, can save us.
Campaigns of mass killing unleash the feral qualities that lie latent in all humans. The ordered society, with its laws, etiquette, police, prisons and regulations, all forms of coercion, keeps these latent qualities in check. Remove these impediments and humans become, as we see with the Israelis in Gaza, murderous, predatory animals, reveling in the intoxication of destruction, including of women and children. I wish this was conjecture. It is not. It is what I witnessed in every war I covered. Almost no one is immune.
The Belgian monarch King Leopold in the late 19th century occupied the Congo in the name of Western civilization and anti-slavery, but plundered the country, resulting in the death — by disease, starvation and murder — of some 10 million Congolese.
Joseph Conrad captured this dichotomy between who we are and who we say we are in his novel “Heart of Darkness” and his short story “An Outpost of Progress.”
In “An Outpost of Progress,” he tells the story of two European traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to the Congo. These traders claim to be in Africa to implant European civilization.
The boredom, the stifling routine, and most importantly the lack of all outside constraints, turns the two men into beasts. They trade slaves for ivory. They fight over dwindling food and supplies. Kayerts finally murders his unarmed companion Carlier.
“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier, “whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations — to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.”
The genocide in Gaza has imploded the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It mocks every virtue we claim to uphold, including the right of freedom of expression. It is a testament to our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. We cannot, having provided billions of dollars in weapons and persecuted those who decry the genocide, make moral claims anymore that will be taken seriously. Our language, from now on, will be the language of violence, the language of genocide, the monstrous howling of the new dark age, one where absolute power, unchecked greed and unmitigated savagery stalks the earth.
Nicușor Dan and George Simion during their only televised debate, on 8 May 2025.
Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan bested sovereigntist George Simion in Sunday’s Romanian presidential election. Both were anti-systemic candidates of sorts. They were Romania’s established political parties that crumbled over the course of a half-year long electoral contest. Dan, a math Olympiad, once youth anti-corruption activist, and mayor of Bucharest, embodied the idealized self-image of Romania’s youth and thriving urban middle class professionals. Meanwhile, Simion, who at university studied “crimes of communism” and history, leaned toward symbols of national greatness. He called for reuniting independent Moldova (Bessarabia) with Romania, while embracing national and traditional values finding resonance among Romania’s culturally conservative population. He took a majority of both rural voters and of the nearly 1.7 million strong diaspora vote. These latter populations have struggled for decades with no political party championing their interests.
But the real winner of Romania’s May 18, 2025 presidential election was mass psychological pressure. The long election season started in November 2024 with Tik Tok’s algorithmic matches tossed onto Romania’ flammable electoral tinder. Democracy went rogue, escaping the reservation of the country’s long established political coalitions. Panicked, the Romanian government canceled the second round of presidential voting scheduled for December 4th before the upstart “sovereigntist” candidate Călin Georgescu could ignite a full-scale prairie fire laying waste to Romania’s political terrain. With the United States Embassy at its back, Romania’s government announced its canceling of the next round of elections scheduled for December 4th and banned its front-runner candidate. No disinterested observer, Romania hosts a rapidly expanding set of US military bases rapidly becoming a chief NATO forward force on the Black Sea. Thus, it was no surprise that this rip cord was pulled, aborting Romania’s elections and then blamed on (drumroll): Russia. Romania reprised the US’s MSNBC news network narrative that surely Americans in 2016 could not have “elected” the unctuous Donald Trump. America’s elites defaulted to the psychologically comforting narrative that “Russia did it.” In fact, Kremlin social media buys in the US 2016 election amounted to a paltry $100,000 that merely ran retreads of GOP social media memes and ads delivering nothing new to the campaign. No doubt Kremlin “Boris Badenov” operatives in a sort of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Democratic figures such US Senator Adam “Shifty” (rightly dubbed by Trump) Schiff delighted in this narrative that Moscow steered the election result over any introspection that it represented socio-economic turbulence within Romania.
In the case of the US 2016 election, the reality was that Trump out hustled Democrats. Cambridge Analytica (CA) delivered superior data to the Trump campaign, meanwhile Democrats and Hillary Clinton were smugly satisfied that they were “superior” to the horrible TV reality star. Trump brought his one part tent revival, one part Hulk Hogan wrestling match and one part public lynching as Sunday entertainment program, to forgotten parts of Wisconsin eight times during that election that Hillary Clinton deemed unimportant enough to visit Wisconsin even once. And of course, let’s not forget Bernie Sanders, to whom Democrats gave the “et tu Brutus” treatment in both 2016 and 2020 (with Elizabeth Warren being called up from central casting in both elections to play the role of Brutus). This delivered tailwinds helping propel Trump toward both his electoral wins. In short, Trump’s victory was homegrown.
Meanwhile, Romania’s government in November asserted with the blessings of Washington and Brussels, that AI and social media deployed by nefarious interests sought to burn down Romania’s still youthful democracy. While true, this correlation does not necessarily make for causation on why Romania’s Georgescu won the first round of voting. With Biden gone on January 21, 2025 and Trump restored to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the United States government flipped its position on Romania. On February 14th’s Munich Security Pact, U.S. Vice-President, J.D. Vance punctuated the point about Romania’s dubious actions taken on the score of democracy in shutting down its election and banning its most popular candidate for office. His argument, credibly, was that if small social media buys can derail elections, then democracy’s roots in Romania must be shallow. Meanwhile, Romanians were divided on its cancelled elections. For sovereigntists this was about their political voice, agency and government arbitrarily revoking their choice. For other Romanian voters the question was not electoral fairness, but the potential pending loss of US security guarantees and Romania adhering to its political liberal path. Bordering a war zone with what they term the “beast from the east,” many Romanians look to the United States for security. European leaders in the main also backed Romania’s government decision to cancel their second round of voting.
The anti-system nature of Romania’s elections continued this April and May. Candidates of Romania’s established political parties were rejected by voters. The interim social-democrat prime-minister resigned only to be replaced by another interim coming from the liberal center-right ranks. None of the candidates that qualified for the annulled second round in December 2024 were present on the May 18, 2025 final ballot. One candidate was prevented by the Constitutional Court from running, another got less than 3% in the first round of elections on May 4th. Yet, the April-May electoral campaign was spared from the Tik Tok campaigns of the previous November election. The banned sovereigntist Călin Georgescu was now replaced with a candidate one generation his junior. The 38-year-old George Simion who emerged from Romania’s nationalist soccer toughs, the Ultras. A self-declared admirer of all things Donald Trump, Simion sought to “Make Romania Great Again.”
The results of this shuffling of Romania’s electoral terrain in recent months was both surprising yet predictable. The political fights were predictable enough, but the final candidates emerged victorious, surprising. Both finalists came from outside the established national political landscape. Both claimed to be against Romania’s established political parties – one on the populist right, and one a mayor fusing liberal values and local politics. The electoral questions in play mirrored the same East vs West debate present at Romania’s post-communist founding over three decades back. Like a long jazz bee bop solo departing from melody the past many years, Romania this past year “returned to melody” with the questions of will Romania’s future be linked to the East? West? Or somehow exist outside both?
With the elections settled, Romania can be seen as suffering many losses this election. Large segments of society lost trust in the national project of embedding itself within a larger European Union values-based system; traditional political parties’ lost viability and possibly face extinction; trust in institutions to run elections shattered; voters residing within the country distrusting voters working abroad and vice-versa; trust in elections lost to AI algorithms; and the idea elections work in the public interest. But the current wave of anti-systemic currents against liberal democracy has common sources, chiefly economic insecurities and inequalities that are expressions of neoliberalism.
Romanians are merely the most recent nation having knocked the next brick off liberal democracy’s crumbling “Vital Center.” Romania in 1989 was thrust into the then forecasted liberal “end of history” that buried Central and Eastern Europe’s “really existing communism.” But for the “really existing democracies” of the time they themselves were already undergoing (borrowing Karl Polanyi’s term, who incidentally completed his dissertation in Cluj-Napoca, Romania) a “Great Transformation.” After the cataclysms of war, economic collapse and revolutions of the 20th century’s first half, social democracies were created in post-war West (including Japan). By the 1980s the stable social democratic post WWII orders, however, were being transformed into radical economic liberal orders anchored in the theories of Austrian and “Freshwater” (Chicago, et al.) economics. History leapt backwards, with a return to radical economic liberalism affixing itself as parasite, convincing its host (liberal democracy) that economic liberalism fed democracy rather than feeding off it. While imperfect, capitalism’s roughest corners were blunted and workers enjoying wages commensurate with productivity gains during the post-war embedded liberal compromise As Finland’s post war president Urho Kekkonen characterized this period “The Soviet Union created a workers paradise [long pause], just not in the USSR, but in Finland.” In short, authoritarianism on behalf of workers to the East, forced capital in the West to behave and create balanced economies enhancing political liberalism and social stability. The high-water mark of this embedded liberalism occurred under US President John F. Kennedy. His chief advisor, Harvard historian Arthur Schlessinger Jr. referenced the American political consensus as the “Vital Center.” While an idealized portrait of the period, this nonetheless was the model the communist Central and Eastern Europe bloc aspired to emulate upon achieving independence starting in 1989. For Romania, Europe’s most Christian country by percent of believers, independence fully arrived on Christmas Day in 1989, with the summary trial and execution of Romania’s Ceausescu ruling married couple. This ensured no counter-revolutionary rescue. The process was not unlike the Bolsheviks elimination of Czarist era Russia’s ruling family, although in this case not extending to, quoting Mick Jagger in 1968, “kill[ing] his ministers, while “Anastasia screamed in vain.” In short, government ministers and Ceausescu’s children were spared.
Rule under Ceausescu evolved from solid economic development in the 1960s, to imposition of a brutal austerity in the 1980s applauded by the International Monetary Fund (with debt-service payments made on time). This rendered many Romanians poor and embittered.
After 1990’s failed efforts to engage a program of national development for lack of investment capital, along with global manufacturing increasingly turning toward China’s then “reserve army of labor” low-wage labor, Romania embraced neoliberal policies. Ultra-low tax levels kept social services at minimal levels. German manufacturers seeking to outsource auto parts were attracted by Romania’s comparatively low wages. Meanwhile, agriculture lacked investment, while Austrians and others “mined” Romania’s forests for raw timber.
European structural funds modernized some infrastructure and Romania’s impressive human capital (in part resulting from communist-era investments in education) saw IT and other high-value added activities emerge in cities such as Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest that created prosperous middle classes, if not new power elite entrepreneurs. But for many Romanians not winning the genetic lottery of well above-average intelligence and access to opportunities in select urban areas, neoliberalism only offered low-wages, stress and Albert O. Hirschman’s classic formulation of “exit.” The 2008 financial shock rightly fueled democracy’s doubters when shackled by neoliberalism. Since Syriza’s 2015 failure in Greece to reverse neoliberal austerity, Europe’s electorates now seek relief from other quarters absent left policy choices. This opened the door to right-wing populists who promised alternatives in an era where no one else has. Thus, we have reached the moment when, quoting Vladimir Lenin, “when the lower classes [working class] do not want to live the old way and the upper classes cannot carry on in the old way.” Presently, only the populist right gives voice to sovereigntist alternatives, regardless of how viable in practice.
Romania’s election reveals a population under enormous pressure with an institutional system failing to respond to popular demands. The burden of democracy’s unrealized promises, partial loss of autonomy to EU officials in Brussels, neoliberal inequality and economic insecurity, adversity that pushed millions to emigrate, and concerns over war on Romania’s border have all placed “The Weight” on Romanians still seeking someone to “take the load right off me.”
But without water, survival time drops to 3-7 days. Clearly, if we don’t drink water, we quickly die from dehydration. Given that the human body is 76% water, one might think as a society we would put the absolute highest priority on maintaining this most vitally necessary substance for our survival.
Unfortunately, that is not the case on either the federal or state level as politicians pander to the never-ending demands to lower water quality standards to appease industries, municipalities, water utilities, and to muster support by claiming deregulation is “cutting red tape.”
The average American would be shocked to know what’s in their water — as well as what passes through both fresh and wastewater treatment plants. Nor are the effects of the growing multitude of pollutants a mystery. Scientists and doctors know certain substances are extremely deleterious to human health. Yet, bowing to the pressures of commerce or cost, the current direction is to allow more, not less of these substances in our water.
The most recent egregious example is the move by Lee Zeldin, now the head of Trump’s mis-named Environmental Protection Agency, to roll back the limits on PFAS, that were first adopted by Biden’s administration just last year.
PFAS are a group of widely-used substances which are known as “forever chemicals” because they are basically impossible to remove once they are in the human body or environment. They are classified by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer as “carcinogenic to humans.”
In March, only a month after being confirmed by the Senate, Zeldin claimed he was making “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history” by redirecting the EPA to favor deregulation and energy production. He claims his rollback of PFAS standards in drinking water is introducing “common-sense flexibility” by kicking the compliance date out to 2031 and rescinding standards on three PFAS substances. But continuing to poison the population surely doesn’t make much common sense.
While the deregulatory wrecking ball crashes into the federal water quality standards, Montana’s legislature and governor have similarly decided to turn our water quality regulations to a sort of mush by repealing “numerical standards” that measure the amount of pollutants actually in the water to “narrative standards.”
As reported, narrative standards are described by the Department of Environmental Quality as “more general statements of unacceptable conditions in and on the water.” To put it mildly, this change does not portend cleaner water for Montanans and is now the subject of a lawsuit by the Upper Missouri Waterkeeper group challenging the agency’s use of narrative standards in its refusal to list the Big Hole River as impaired due to nutrient pollution.
Despite being at the very headwaters of the nation’s mightiest rivers, studies in Montana’s major river valleys found an alarming number of chemical pollutants in our groundwater, domestic, and commercial wells. The Helena Valley study, for instance, found “pharmaceutically active” compounds including antibiotics, hormones, and drugs as well as the herbicide atrazine in the groundwater/well samples…all of which affect both humans and aquatic life.
Simply put, we’re heading in the wrong direction and fouling our own nest by moving to capitulate to commerce rather than regulating pollutants to protect the health of our citizens and environment. We know the damage is being done. And no amount of short-term profits can or ever will replace the most vitally necessary substance for life — good, clean water.
A stark monument in Hamburg’s courthouse square, near the infamous Dammtor prison. Photo by the author.
I’m married to a German citizen who’s a life-long resident here in Hamburg, and I spent most of the winter and spring in this city of two-million — a far cry from my rural Wisconsin homestead outside a town of 2,000. Not far from our flat is Hamburg’s federal, state and municipal courthouse square, which has a billboard-sized concrete cuboid monument with a blunt, stark, and grim reminder. It reads simply: 1933. The monument is also the site of Dammtor prison where during the terror the Nazi regime conducted 468 executions using the guillotine.
It’s frightening to follow news of repression in the United States, and people here ask why I intend to fly back this month. The short answer is my connection to the rest of my family and friends, my work colleagues, personal identity, the national park system, and the intentional community farmstead that a group of us built with our own hands over the last 36 years.
The prevalence and unpredictable expansion of political persecution is what my friends here and at home are afraid of. They know even high-ranking Republican Party stalwarts like Alaska’s U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski have said publicly, “We are all afraid. I’m oftentimes very anxious about using my voice because retaliation is real.”
This trepidation in high places prompted Sally Quinn to write in the New York Times on May 10, “Washington is …., “Washington is physically, emotionally, psychologically and spirituality permeated with an invisible poison. The emotion all around … is fear. Nobody feels safe.” Perhaps nobody should. Trump said Nov. 17, 2023 in New Hampshire, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” I wonder if Sally Quinn and I qualify for the “vermin thug” list.
It’s hard to say, since Trump himself could hardly be more thuggish. On his first day in office he demonstrated that his magical thinking can’t find thugs among his radical right storm troopers. He released from prison 1,500 January 6 rioters led by far-right militias, many of whom had been convicted of violently assaulting police officers, injuring 140.
Speaking of thugs with the rightwing website National Pulse, Trump said that immigration was “poisoning the blood of our country” — his Hitlerian dog whistle heard around the world which he would repeat. At an Ohio rally March 16, 2024, he said about immigrants, “I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.” Using his best words, Trump added, “I’ve seen the humanity, and these humanity, these are bad, these are animals, okay?”
Dehumanization and vengeful cruelty
Robert Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, told National Public Radio in 2023 that “dehumanization of political opponents are the bricks that pave the road to political violence.” In view of Charlottesville, January 6, and the pardons of unrepentant paramilitary rioters, that road’s been paved, resurfaced, and upgraded to a speedway.
Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts Univ. graduate student from Turkey was grabbed March 25 in Somerville, Mass. by masked secret agents, shipped off to a Louisiana jail, and held there 7 weeks for signing an opinion piece in the college paper. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, was abducted without a warrant from his Columbia University housing in New York City by ICE agents March 8 and shipped to jail in Louisiana, although he’s not charged with a crime. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland sheet metal worker with no criminal record, was mistakenly shipped to El Salvador’s notorious “Center for Terrorism Confinement” or Cecot maximum security mega-prison, in violation of a federal immigration judge’s 2019 order prohibiting the U.S. from returning him to El Salvador, where gangs could “pose a threat to his life.” Garcia is still there.
The Kafkaesque nightmare nature of Trump’s martial law dreams is that neither the U.S. State Department nor the government of El Salvador have even identified the 260 prisoners sent to the giant maximum-security prison, and neither state has provided evidence of the men’s alleged crimes or gang membership. A federal judge’s order forbade the White House from invoking an antique wartime law to justify the deportations, but the flights had already left. The imprisoned men have effectively vanished indefinitely inside a Salvadoran dictator’s police state nihilism, without recourse.
And immigrants aren’t Trump’s only targets. Lydia Polgreen reported May 8 in the New York Times that the president “muses about ejecting U.S. citizens too,” and enacting “the fantasy of expelling every person he deems undesirable.” In January, Trump talked about sending U.S. citizens who are “repeat offenders” to El Salvador’s gulag-for-hire. Repeatedly belaboring his repetitive repetition again and again, Trump said January 27 in Miami, “If they’ve been arrested many, many times, they’re repeat offenders by many numbers.”
He added, “We’re going to get approval, hopefully, to get them the hell out of our country, along with others,” NBC News reported. The next day Trump said in the Oval Office he wanted U.S. citizens convicted of crimes sent to foreign prisons “to get these animals out” of the United States. “If we could get them out of our country, we have other countries that would take them.” In February, El Salvador offered to jail violent U.S. citizen convicts in the “most severe cases,” in addition to the 260 men flown there earlier from the U.S. without due process.
On May 9, White House adviser Stephen Miller said for the cameras, “The Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So, it’s an option we’re actively looking at.” Miller mis-quotes the U.S. Constitution to suit his Apartheid agenda. Article VI says, “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby.”
Habeas corpus is the right to challenge your detention in court and threats of its suspension moved Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut to warn, “The slope to despotism can be slippery and quick.” And this is where Trump’s deliberately irrational, secret and rogue police actions, designed to keep opponents off balance, can look and feel like terror. In my work against nuclear weapons and the war system over 4 decades, I’ve been convicted of dozens of nonviolent misdemeanor charges for sit-ins, blockades, and non-payment of fines, and have been sent to 20 county jails and four federal prison camps — including one here in Germany. Within our bands of “repeat offenders,” we call ourselves “nuclear resisters,” but the peace movement’s resistance has never garnered much more than a “pffff” from the police, the masters of war, or the courts that protect them. That’s why I’ll likely be left alone at passport control when I return.
But in view of warrantless, secret police snatching and detention of nonviolent immigrants and students without due process and even in violation of court orders, Sally Quinn’s withering warning gives pause. “The hallmark of this administration is cruelty and sadism, vengefulness carried out with glee.” As if to prove the point, Trump’s richest friend, the Afrikaner Elon Musk, has declared: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Ja voll, Herr Musk! Que the stiff-arm salute.
