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The return of Trump. (Screengrab from ABCNews.)

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Screenshot from iPhone.

The impending ban on TikTok pushed many in that oh so American way to do the opposite of what those in charge wanted them to do. Americans are a strange breed– so docile in practice, but only if they think they are being “rebellious” –look to the MAGA movement. Ask any of those diehards and they will tell you they are mavericks, fighting the good fight, all the while not having a clue they are a useful cog in the machine that continues to funnel wealth to the very top. Americans want to be rebels that actually do no useful rebellion. Mainly they like to rebel against behaving in a socially responsible manner.

But sometimes that American irascibility ends up at a refreshing place. The threat of banning a social media platform so many used actually pushed many Gen Z members to download a Chinese social media app deliciously named Red Note. This is a magnificent fuck around and find out moment. Especially when a topic that made the rounds during early exchanges on that site involved cross-cultural discussions about the cost of taking an ambulance to get care in America. Chinese users on Red Note asked if it was true that in America one needs to pay huge amounts for an ambulance—they thought that perhaps this fact was part of their own government’s propaganda campaign about life in the US. The exchanges back and forth were telling, mainly telling in how difficult life in America has become for many, especially the young. Discussions like, how in many cases, two jobs are needed to simply afford rent, that groceries are beyond expensive, that the homeless are often criminalized and fined. Basically for those who remember the 90’s sitcom term…..it was “bad naked”.

It certainly wasn’t our finest hour having these topics aired out. There were instances of even right leaning young influencers voicing their disbelief and exasperation at how very little the average American gets from their government, while so many funds are sent elsewhere. The enrichment machine sends cash all over and those funds often can’t even be properly accounted for. This…… all for nations to continue corporate driven carnage when all many young Americans really want is college.

In the time our nation has funneled astronomic funds in the global war machine, other nations have been investing in infrastructure and improving the lives of their citizens. Obviously every government has its shortcomings, but here in America we are at a starting point of ask not what the government can do for you because it sure as hell isn’t going to do any of it. This includes basics in other nations like health care or modest livability. The brainwashing has been so complete that individuals think they are free, when in fact they are free to be poor, to toil to the point of madness to keep up, to be free to pay taxes to fund an aggressive war machine. So much freedom, it hurts. The question of what is the true purpose to have a nation comes up? If it isn’t as stated “to promote the general welfare” then what exactly is it? Simply a funneling up unethical enterprise?

The narrative has been successful in marking those who want basic decent services and the ability to live a healthier, less stressful life as those wanting some kind of handout. Yet, the same narrative is never given for billionaires who have companies surviving on the largesse of the federal government. We heard so much about the madness of forgiving student loan debt but almost nothing about forgiving all those PPP loans by businesses, often used in very shady manners with frivolous and traceable purchases. Any assistance to those not with means is deemed a handout in the US, yet truly massive gifts to the well off or obscenely rich are simply framed as a necessity to keep the system in motion. Look to Obama’s rectification of the housing crisis of 2008. No moral hazard for the banking system, only to those who were trying to stay in their homes.

The interaction with Chinese citizens has likely been massively eye-opening for the young taking part in all of this. There’s no doubt that the government of China has been outrageous in the past as far as having draconian policies against its citizens, but it would be blind to not realize that they have actively moved away from much of that in the last couple of decades. First-hand accounts from Americans living over there often discuss how they would not want to come back to the US due to things like the lack of affordable healthcare or simple quality of life issues like not needing to work such extreme hours for basic necessities. I’m sure the right-wing reactionaries in the country would tell me if you like it so much, then go. But the thing is I’m here and I just want to make it better in this nation for all of us. The answer isn’t a jingoist subservience that assists the powerful. It’s a clear-eyed assessment that we need to do better. Perhaps we have hit rock bottom and at this point, have to actively try and steer the car away from the sign on the interstate that says Shit-town. Much has been made of China’s one child policies of the past, but we have to be honest and realize that right now in the US we have created economic conditions so poor that many of the young want to have zero children. We don’t have a lot of room to judge their past policies. It’s comical to say we care so much for reproductive freedom (like that’s a thing of any kind in this country now). Again, no room to judge, I’d say. Reproductive freedom goes both ways, not having any choice and mandated forced birth is as bad as denying the ability to have a second child (and this isn’t even their current policy). Just something I’ve had to work out in my mind with previous all-American notions I used to have. I am not a fan of any of these large governments but simply trying to look at them all with clarity, unencumbered by the propaganda we’ve been steeped in.

Back to the topic at hand, though– instead of looking at the dissatisfaction brewing in the US and coming up with something of a New Deal to alleviate distress, our politicians look to…..ban TikTok. If there was truly such concern about American data going into the hands of the Chinese government, I think maybe Temu, Shein or other fast-fashion junk product companies might face a similar ban, but it just goes to show that the concern is only about narrative control.

Many commented that on Red Note, it was obvious just how much Chinese users of that social media site love Luigi. This was a likely powers-that-be issue with TikTok as well. Many TikTok users (and others) felt similar sympathy to him and shared those thoughts. But instead of looking at that situation as a marker of how high the pressure valve reading is in the United States (if it was a cartoon, the thing would be pulsing and bright red, making woo-woo sounds)–again, the answer from the oligarchy has been to look towards censorship as the answer, not actual mitigation of conditions that bring about these feelings. The deer-in-the-headlights astonishment coming even from right-wing idiots like Ben Shapiro has been comical. He was caught off-guard by the rancor from his own followers when he disparaged Luigi. There is some pretty across-the-board disgust at the for-profit systems that control our lives, and it’s coming from every direction. Good luck with censoring all of that, Democrats and Republicans.

It was clear that many of the young who became horrified and disillusioned with US foreign policy got their footage and reports off of TikTok, not CNN or Fox. Those media sources have shown themselves to be little more than an antiquated US version of the USSR’s Pravda. So of course, continue to have access and funding. Obvious disinformation and a very narrow allowed window of discussion is their stock and trade. It’s like– here’s our panel to discuss homelessness. One panelist wants to use their bodies for live organ donation, one wants to sign them up for chain gang labor and our token bleeding heart on the panel wants to simply euthanize them. Don’t say we don’t have a vibrant culture of discourse.

The young in the United States are slowly coming out of their nationwide slumber to realize that the world has passed us by. And it’s by design, when “aid packages” are voted on, you can bet it is a recent $820 billion of aid to the war machine. People have great capacity for necessary sacrifice, but living in the world’s wealthiest nation, dodging potholes to your gig economy jobs, while you suffer from the toothache you can’t treat because there’s no dental coverage……and god forbid, the tooth gets abscessed and you end up in the hospital with sepsis and without health insurance (and yes, the average in 2020 for said ride was around $1300, you know it’s only ballooned with inflation). And perhaps as you sit in the hospital bed, bills accumulating and lost wages due to no sick leave– say you scroll some social media for diversion and see some maimed children with US bombs by the tents…….probably you are not so much in the mood for any more “required austerity” demanded of you by the plutocrats. The money is slated for use in Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, not the education or our young people or the health of our citizenry. How can that go on indefinitely? It can’t. This is late-stage looting by bad-faith actors as people suffer here and especially there.

At some point the expectations of society are just completely not met and that makes for a dangerous time. The anger can roll towards demanding equitability, or it can roll into large-scale jack-booted fascism. Anger is like water in a flash flood; it finds the path of least resistance. We have to make sure the narrative doesn’t allow for that least resistant path to be that of everyday accepted neighborhood fascism. We’ve all allowed the slide, taking in some of the cultural zeitgeist that has allowed things to get so far out of hand in terms of not having empathy or accountability to take care of others. That dripping selfishness of the Reagan era was not taken to be the harbinger of enormous tent cities in 2025, but it should have been. Perhaps if we had reacted more viscerally as a people this all wouldn’t have become so normalized.

So here’s to hoping that the organic cross-cultural exchange on places like Red Note will move us towards demanding a change in course. A change that includes actual responsive governance that includes the well-being of its citizens as a measure of success. If nothing else, this could plant seeds as to what will be accepted in the future from the populace. It may also allow real time experience through direct communication to realize we have so much more in common with each other in the working class than the oligarchs who view us basically as raw materials, not souls. We have more in common with the Chinese Red Note user, more in common with the working-class Ukrainian or Russian, the Palestinian…….we have to realize that and turn away from divisive nonsense that serves only the mentally deranged hoarders. The strife and killing is for the benefit of the top only, same as it ever was.

I guess what I’m saying is that hopefully these discussions on places like Red Note will open the world up for many and Americans can stop massaging mom’s feet and actually attend public school like the normal kids.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There were many lies about immigrants spread during the 2024 presidential campaign. It is necessary to replace the misinformation with facts to think clearly about the economic impact of immigration and deportation on the US economy – especially since Donald Trump says he intends to move forward on mass deportation.

For all of the 21st century, there have been millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. The peak year on record was 2007, when there were 12.2 million unauthorized immigrants living here. In 2022, there were 11 million – 1.2 million fewer or about 10 percent less than in 2007. The provisional estimate for 2023 is 11.7 million, still below the 2007 peak.

In some cases, a sudden, rapid increase in immigrants – authorized and unauthorized – could put social and economic stress on the specific communities receiving the influx. There might be difficulties finding housing and finding space in schools, and social service organizations might find their capacity strained. At the same time, many anecdotal reports detail the economic benefits of increased immigration in particular communities.

At the US-Mexico border, migrant encounters – which refers to apprehensions and expulsions – dramatically increased from 2020 to 2023, but there was a sharp reversal in 2024. The foreign-born population, authorized and unauthorized, in the United States increased 1.6 million from 2022 to 2023. While this was the largest increase in 20 years, it was not large enough to have an impact on the day-to-day lives of most of the over 300 million people in the country.

In a population of nearly 12 million unauthorized immigrants, it would not be surprising to find that there are some number of them who commit serious crimes. The research clearly shows, however, that the rate of criminal offending among immigrants is lower than for the native-born. A study of data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, for example, found that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.” Further, research suggests that immigrant populations actually help to reduce crime ratesin communities.

In sum, the situation in the United States in relation to immigrants today is not much different than it was a decade ago. There is no new crisis.

Unauthorized Immigrants and the US Economy

How would Trump’s planned mass deportation impact the US economy? Recent history gives us some indications. From 2008 to 2014, about 400,000 people were deported from the United States. This mass deportation allowed scholars to study its economic effects. A recent analysis concluded that for each half million immigrants deported, the US-born population would actually lose 44,000 jobs. The work that the immigrants did was necessary to the jobs of US-born workers, so the loss of the immigrants caused the loss of jobs for the native-born. Also, the spending of immigrants (on food, clothing, etc.) paid the wages of US-born workers. Without that spending, jobs for US-born workers were lost. The deportation of millions of unauthorized immigrant workers will mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs for the US-born.

While the overall number of unauthorized immigrants is small in comparison to the entire US population, the fact that they are concentrated in particular sectors of the economy would make their rapid removal disruptive. Unauthorized immigrants are overrepresented as maids, housecleaners, cooks, grounds maintenance workers, janitors, agricultural workers, and construction workers. A large and rapid deportation program would increase the costs of the products and services connected to these industries. In Texas, the construction industry is expressing alarm about how Trump’s plans will devastate their ability to build homes and other infrastructure.

Because unauthorized immigrants are also a significant part of our caregiving economy, the deportation from 2008 to 2014 disrupted this sector. Economists have found that the loss of childcare workers led to a reduction in the number of college-educated mothers with young children in the paid labor force.

Legal Immigrants and the US Economy

Although the Trump campaign has spoken loudly about curtailing unauthorized immigration, there is reason to believe that the new administration will reduce authorized immigration to an equal or even greater degree than unauthorized immigration. As the libertarian Cato Institute has pointed out, the first Trump administration significantly reduced legal immigration but largely failed to reduce unauthorized immigration.

People may have a stereotype of immigrant workers as low-wage workers, but immigrant workers can be found throughout the economy. For example, many immigrants work as nurses, computer programmers, educators, and architects. There is also a higher rate of entrepreneurship among immigrants than among the US-born. Almost half of the 500 largest companies in the United States were founded by immigrants or their children. Losing these workers and entrepreneurs will have a negative effect on the U.S. economy.

The Immigration System is Broken – Politics Prevent Potential Solutions

Millions of people are waiting years to enter the United States legally. This gummed-up system is one of the factors causing people to pursue unauthorized immigration. There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the US immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed, but political gamesmanship continues to stymie reform. A 2007 bipartisan effort was blocked in the Senate. A 2013 bipartisan effort was blocked by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner. In 2024, another bipartisan effort was killed by Donald Trump, who sought to campaign on the issue.

Donald Trump has assured his voters that he intends to carry out the xenophobic anti-immigrant policies he espoused as a candidate. He has not said that he will pursue the comprehensive immigration reform needed to fix the broken system and to strengthen the US economy.

This first appeared on CERP.

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Photograph Source: Tibs foxxo – CC BY-SA 4.0

Despite recent social changes in the Twenty-Six Counties of Ireland and the expectation of ‘change,’ last November’s election demonstrated that the political status quo will remain. The election’s outcome underscores that a meaningful shift in power is still out of reach.

A profound irony of the campaign was the sight of posters with the incumbent Taoiseach, Simon Harris, and his slogan ‘A New Energy’ adorning lampposts throughout the state. Harris’s party, Fine Gael, has been in power, in one form or other, for 14 consecutive years. This election’s result, however, confirmed more of the same.

A new coalition government is on the cusp of coming to office, composed of the two centre-right parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and nine so-called ‘Regional Independents.’ The hysterical property owners of ‘Middle Ireland’ and their media mouthpieces can rest easy for now.

Gombeenism

In classic brazen gombeen style, the ‘Regional Independents’ want to ‘ride two horses with the one arse.’ No sooner had this group reached a deal with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to form a government, and no sooner had the ‘super junior’ ministries been doled out, did they demand the same speaking rights accorded to the opposition.

This bizarre demand stems from the ‘independents’ contradictory class and political positions. Some of the key figures in this group are landlords and business people, with a certified tax dodger also in the mix. Despite their substantial wealth, they play up an image of being downtrodden countrymen, oppressed by ‘them ones above in Dublin.’

There is, without doubt, an economic and infrastructural imbalance between Dublin and some sections of rural Ireland – some of which stems from the country’s colonial past. But rural gombeen types such as the ‘Regional Independents’ astutely foster an ‘us versus them’ mentality, pitting country people against ‘the Dubs.’

This conveniently occludes their own advantageous class position in their communities and disregards entrenched deprivation in parts of the capital. The gombeens can then speak out of both sides of their mouths on a range of issues.

For their supporters, it matters not whether the gombeen might be a landlord contributing to the housing crisis, as long as they bring in some investment to open a new road or community centre. Ultimately, this culture inhibits class solidarity between urban and rural workers.

The development of this rural-based clientelism mirrors similar patterns in Sicily and Southern Italy, identified by Eric Hobsbawm, Luigi Graziano and others. For instance, as Agostino Mantegna has noted, clientelism tends towards corruption, with ‘variations in the territorial distribution of public and infrastructural spending demonstrating that decreasing expenditures … led to an increase in preference voting (i.e. votes of exchange).’

While this gombeen culture is not confined to rural areas—one of the ‘Regional Independents’ was elected in Dublin Bay North on a platform highlighting the structurally underfunded Northside—it retains particular potency in the countryside for the reasons outlined.

We are set, then, for 4-5 more years of neoliberalism. In reality, the election never offered a choice about neoliberalism anyway, since the main party of opposition, Sinn Féin, does not propose to challenge it. What the next period means in practical terms is that instead of Greens attempting to prise cycle lanes from the majority coalition partners, we will have gombeens demanding roads and funding for sports pitches.

Voter Apathy

Why wasn’t this ‘two-and-a-half-party system’ (where Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael are propped up by an alternating choice of a subservient junior partner) effectively challenged this time? After nearly a decade of an ever-intensifying housing crisis, and constant scandals and failures in healthcare, surely ‘the Left’ should have made significant gains?

The pre-election predictions of no unexpected surge towards the professedly centre-left Sinn Féin proved correct. Their support, which peaked at 34% in 2022 opinion polls, appears to have fragmented across smaller centre-left parties, independents, and, worryingly, the far-right.

The real story, however, was voter apathy. Only 60% turned out to vote, the lowest in over a century. The last time such a low turnout was recorded was 1923, when the state was emerging from a vicious British-backed counter-revolution and thousands of Irish republican political activists were imprisoned.

Of the 60% who voted, 40% supported the two centre-right parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. In essence, 24% of eligible voters have re-elected a conservative government. The legitimacy of elected governments in liberal democracies, not just in Ireland but globally, is rapidly eroding.

Finger-wagging from some on ‘the Left’ ensued in the wake of the result, castigating those who didn’t vote for not ‘exercising their democratic right.’ While venting may feel cathartic for these people, this approach ignores deeper structural causes of low turnout. Globally, turnout has declined since WWII.

A 2023 study, Turning off the base: Social democracy’s neoliberal turn, income inequality, and turnout, highlighted how voters of the centre-left have become apathetic due to ‘socio-economic structural changes, such as the decline of their working-class base stemming from de-industrialization and globalization, but also policy changes, such as [centre-left parties’] embrace of market liberalism.’

The main ‘centre-left’ opposition parties, such as Sinn Féin and the Social-Democrats, mirror their global counterparts by accepting a status quo that perpetuates income inequality, the banking- and developer-led housing system, and underfunded public services.

With the continued rise to power of billionaires, the onward march of fascism, and the environmental collapse we see all around us, one would assume the ‘centre-left’ would realise social democracy is a busted flush – yet here we are.

Immigration

The far-right, government mismanagement, and liberal media mainstreaming of fascist talking points saw immigration become an issue during the electoral year.

Centre-left and left-wing parties struggle to address immigration within the capitalist and imperialist framework. Is there a middle-road, based on a material analysis, that is both pragmatic and humane? Can well-planned integration and a redistribution of resources be advocated effectively?

Ireland is certainly not ‘full,’ but the geopolitical instability caused by imperialism and climate change, alongside the likelihood of increasing migration, must be considered. Even with significant redistribution of resources, such as within a potential United Ireland, those resources remain finite against exponential population growth.

This issue, central to civil cohesion and the economic landscape, must be grappled with by ‘the Left’ to prevent citizens from succumbing to far-right narratives.

Democratic Deficit

It has been dystopian watching some on ‘the Left’ exuberantly celebrate their election or re-election, given the broader context of what is clearly a defeat. In such circumstances, one might opt for a more reserved ‘Roy Keane goal celebration’ over a braggadocious ‘Robbie Keane cartwheel, roll and gun celebration.’

Democracy has been hollowed out by billionaires who control economies, influence politics, and dominate media. As Noam Chomsky notes, key decisions in Europe are often made by unelected bodies such as the European Commission, the IMF, and the European Central Bank, leaving citizens feeling disempowered and disillusioned.

In 2008, the Irish electorate voted No to the Lisbon Treaty, rejecting further EU integration. Yet, following media bombardment and political pressure, a second referendum in 2009 yielded a Yes vote. As one voter put it: ‘Sure didn’t we vote No the first time and they didn’t listen to us? What’s the point in doing it again?’

Such moments reinforce the sentiment that ‘voting achieves nothing’, and subsequent elections only bolstered this mentality further. But where is the effective strategy by ‘the Left’ to involve people in struggle?

Failure to Mobilise

Returning to 2024, disengagement from politics resulted in low turnout in places like working-class Jobstown, where less than 1 in 5 voted. Similarly, turnout was low in Adamstown, with its high immigrant population. Two key groups—the most deprived working-class and immigrants—failed to mobilize.

Other factors contributed to this failure: the Irish Left’s inability to cooperate effectively (unlike their French counterparts), entrenched class and housing structures, and media complicity in manufacturing consent.

More broadly, ‘the Left’ remained wedded to electoralism. The ‘strategy’ now revolves around personal profile-building and harvesting votes every electoral cycle, leading to predictable stagnation. Their approach goes something like this:

1) Attempt to get people angry by highlighting government mismanagement, corruption scandals, media bias etc.

2) Harvest votes for electoral gain

3) Make no significant electoral gain

4) Repeat steps 1-3 every 4-5 years.

Even mainstream commentators have noted ‘outrage fatigue’ among voters. ‘Activist fatigue’ within ‘the Left’ will also be a factor when electoral breakthroughs are promised repeatedly but never delivered. It is often the case of one step forward, two steps back.

The ‘politics of perpetual outrage’ will not inspire people. People will only become involved through direct action and real cultural and workplace struggle that achieves tangible outcomes, not through delegating their voices to elected representatives.

The need for a movement

The last major class-based political mobilization in Ireland—as opposed to cross-class social movements like marriage equality and women’s bodily autonomy—was the anti-Water Tax campaign of 2016. Hundreds of thousands marched, forcing the government to abandon water privatization. However, the movement’s energy was never redirected toward housing or broader radical change.

Where is the movement connecting a fundamental shift on housing, such as Universal Public Housing, with workplace struggles, the demand for an end to the British occupation of the Six Counties, and everyday linguistic, cultural, and decolonial efforts to empower people? On the latter point, ‘the Left’ disregards identity at their peril as the far-right is clearly seeking to build on exclusivist ideas of identity.

Irish Republicans and ‘the Left’ must empower and politically educate ordinary people rather than exploit them for electoral gain or risk losing them to fascism or mé féiner individualism. The current main players on ‘the Left,’ lacking critical self-reflection, seem incapable of this task despite commanding significant financial and infrastructural resources.

It seems this responsibility will fall to grassroots formations, focused both on activism and the digital space, to build a movement of empowerment and mobilization.

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Wikipedia.

Supporters of U.S. Air Force veteran and former NSA contractor Reality Winner made a last ditch effort last week to lobby outgoing President Joe Biden to pardon Winner for her 2017 violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. The “Reality Is Us!” campaign highlights how the young misfit from a Texas border town “showed America the proof that Russia hacked into our voter data right before the 2016 election, and certain government officials knew about it, but denied it ever happened. For calling that B.S. she was sent to prison for 5 years.”

Reality Winner’s crime against the state? Leaking a classified intelligence report that acknowledged the reality of Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, an investigative news site that published a story about it. The leaked report indicated that hackers from Russian military intelligence had perpetrated a cyberattack on at least one American voting software supplier, sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials shortly before the election, and that the hacking operation may have penetrated deeper into American voting systems than had been previously understood.

Uncle Sam hates whistleblowers of any kind and has been waging a bi-partisan war on intelligence community whistleblowers. The Obama administration famously prosecuted more whistleblowers under the outdated Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined. It’s to be expected that whistleblowers will be prosecuted harshly to discourage others from doing so. But Winner’s case is a relatively unique one of a patriotic American merely attempting to warn her fellow citizens that our government wasn’t telling the whole truth when it came to troubling questions about the integrity of the 2016 election.

It will be interesting to see if former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — nominated by Trump to serve as Director of National Intelligence – will continue pushing for reform of the Espionage Act, as she did with proposed legislation in 2020 that would enable defendant to discuss intent and add a defense of disclosure in the public interest (which Winner was not allowed to do.) Gabbard’s been flipping all over since jumping the shark from Bernie Sanders supporter to MAGA member though, so civil rights supporters probably shouldn’t get their hopes up.

Hollywood producer and activist Scott Budnick (best known as an executive producer of The Hangover) makes an effort to humanize Reality Winner in a recent biopic titled Winner, released in 2024 and soon streaming on Hulu in February. The film focuses more on Winner’s quirky life story leading up to her decision to leak the report, rather than the aftermath. In doing so, it provides a compelling picture of how Winner doesn’t pose a threat to anyone except political elitists who don’t like how she pulled the curtain back on the vulnerability of our electoral system.

“What got me excited about this script is that it was told as a comedy… The twist was you’re telling a movie that could be a straight drama about election interference and threats to our democracy, but you’re telling it as a coming of age comedy which I thought was really smart,” Budnick told Counterpunch. “As someone that’s worked with people in the criminal justice system for a long time, everything to me is about humanizing them… Crime is scary, but as soon as you start looking at them as human beings, people’s opinions start to change. And so I really loved the fact that they told this as a comedy and that’s what I latched on to.”

Winner’s charm as a patriotic animal lover and down to earth fitness freak makes it more difficult for Uncle Sam to paint her as a national security threat. Democrats spent much of Trump’s first term raising a ruckus about alleged Russian interference. Yet when actual evidence came to light in the report that Winner leaked, there were few who defended her courageous action.

“Let’s stop having her have to deal with being a felon and having a criminal record stop her from doing all types of things she wants to do, stop her from starting businesses she wants to start, and not being able to get professional certifications she needs,” Budnick said regarding the pitch to Biden. “I see her as a hero, I see her as somebody that let us know that a hostile foreign power was trying to interfere with our democratic process. I don’t believe in punishing heroes.”

Budnick says he hopes the film will inspire Americans to take a longer look at these electoral integrity issues. Biden could have given Winner her life back with a pardon, but didn’t since her real crime in Uncle Sam’s eyes is surely how she dared to violate the unspoken taboo of shining a light on the vulnerability of our electoral system. This sacred cow has been increasingly problematic since the advent of electronic voting systems that are potentially vulnerable to bad actors with inside connections and access.

There was reasonable suspicion that the 2004 election was stolen in Ohio, twice as galling after the Supreme Court gave Dubbya the 2000 election by stopping the Florida recount. Ohio was still a Purple bellwether state that could go either way back then, before the brain drain problem that turned it Red for Trump. 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry would later admit that he harbored suspicions about what went down, but chose not to raise them out of alleged fear that doing so would only toss the decision back to the Supreme Court again.

Rolling Stone published a troubling story in 2006 detailing the array of dirty tricks that Republicans utilized in Ohio, an article now ironic for being authored by shark jumper Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ”You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble… You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our electoral system,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann told Rolling Stone at the time, alluding to grief he received from his corporate editorial overlords for attempting to pursue issues raised in the story.

Olbermann’s words have resonated ever since and seem the most likely explanation for why Biden didn’t pardon Winner. This only further tarnishes Biden’s tainted legacy as the man who helped enable the Trump regime’s return to power. Biden’s inaction sadly includes having allowed shady Attorney General Merrick Garland to suspiciously slow walk prosecution of Trump and his seditionist cronies for their actions in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. This is another aspect of Biden’s legacy that will live in infamy.

“Under Biden, the United States became the first country to face an attempted coup and not only fail to punish the coup plotters but allow them to hold office and make laws. There is no parallel in world history,” bestselling author and investigative journalist Sarah Kendzior lamented in 2023. Kendzior would go on to again outline Garland’s longtime role as one of the “Servants of the Mafia State” that has corrupted the Justice Department. But such deeper truth doesn’t make it into an increasingly consolidated mainstream media that exists to maintain the corporatocracy status quo.

Like the Greek prophet Cassandra, Kendzior and Winner have seen their concerns go largely unheeded by the Democratic Party. What’s left of American Democracy is now in critical condition and Reality Winner will continue to pay the price for merely trying to warn us, since Joe Biden once again proved he was either too cowardly or too complicit to do the right thing.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Societies survive and grow when they successfully navigate their contradictions. Eventually, however, accumulating contradictions overwhelm existing means of navigating them. Then social problems arise that persist or worsen inside such societies because they are unsuccessfully navigated or go unattended. Sometimes, the dominant conscious reaction to such social problems is denial, a refusal to see them. Denial of internal social problems displaces navigating the contradictions that cause them. The resulting social decline, like the set of internal contradictions it reflects, is denied and ignored. Instead, narratives or rhetorics can arise that position such societies as victims of abuse by foreigners. The United States in 2025 illustrates this process: its rhetorics of refusal aim to end its victimization.

In today’s United States, one such rhetoric refuses to allow continued abuse by foreigners “threatening our national security.” This rhetoric blames bad U.S. political leadership for its failure to put America first and thereby make it great again. Another rhetoric demands that “we” refuse to allow “our democracy” to be destroyed by foreign enemies (and their domestic equivalents): people who are said to hate, not understand, or undervalue “our democracy.” Still another rhetoric of refusal sees foreigners “cheating” the United States in trade and migration processes. Most Americans embrace one or more of such rhetorics. Yet, as we propose to show here, such rhetorics are ever less effective.

One reactionary rhetoric, Trump’s, gestures toward former greatness by literally renewing American imperialism. He threatens to retake the Panama Canal, change Canada into the 51st of the United States, conquer Greenland from Denmark, and possibly invade Mexico. All those foreigners are said to threaten national security or else “cheat” the United States. Trump’s typical bloviating aside, this is remarkable expansionism. Such repeated colonialist gestures feed broader notions of making America greater again.

Colonialism repeatedly helped European capitalism navigate its internal contradictions (temporarily escaping the social problems it caused). Eventually, however, it could no longer do so. After World War II, anti-colonialism limited that escape. The subsequent European neo-colonialisms and the informal colonialism of the American empire had shorter life spans. China and the rest of the BRICS countries are now everywhere closing that escape. Hence the frustrated rage of Trump’s insistence on refusing that ending by deliberately reopening the idea of an escape hatch of colonial expansions. It resembles Netanyahu’s idea (if not yet his violence) in trying to reopen that hatch for Israel by driving Palestinians out of Gaza. United States support for Netanyahu likewise associates the U.S. with colonialist violence in a world overwhelmingly committed to end colonialism and its unwanted legacy.

The United States boasts the world’s strongest military establishment. The dominant rhetoric in the United States casts everything it does as self-defense necessitated by foreign enemies. That justifies the government spending much more on defense than on the few internal social problems that rhetoric even recognizes. Yet the United States lost the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, and these countries’ military establishments were far from the world’s strongest. It turns out that the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technical competition among nuclear powers have changed military balances around the world. The United States’ gross underestimates of Russia’s warfare capacities in 2022 illustrate the change very dramatically. They also illustrate that a rhetoric stressing a refusal to be victimized by foreign militaries undercut or displaced sober analyses of a militarily changed world. Now the world observes not only changed global military configurations but also the costly denials of them by U.S. leaders. Political and economic leaders everywhere else are now rethinking their strategies accordingly. Rhetorics of refusal to be victimized can become self-destructive.

Another reason those leaders are redesigning their growth plans follows from the intertwined declines of the U.S. empire and the U.S. capitalist system. What U.S. leaders deny, many foreign leaders have incentives to see, evaluate, and take advantage of. The BRICS members (9) and partners (9), as of January 2025, account for nearly half the world’s population and 41 percent of the world’s GDP (in purchasing power parity terms). Four other nations have been invited and are likely to join in 2025: Vietnam, Turkey, Algeria, and Nigeria. Indonesia just joined as a full BRICS partner adding its roughly 280 million population. In contrast, the G7—the world’s second-largest economic bloc—accounts for about 10 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of its GDP (also in purchasing power parity terms). Moreover, as data from the International Monetary Fund documents, recent years show a widening gap between the annual GDP growth rates of the G7-leading United States and the BRICS-leading China and India.

Across the history of capitalism from its earlier times in England through the American empire’s peak early in the 21st century, most nations focused chiefly on the G7 in strategizing economic growth, debt, trade, investments, currency exchange rates, and balances of payments. Large- and medium-sized enterprises did likewise. Yet over the last 15–20 years, countries and enterprises have faced an altogether new, different global situation. China, India, and the rest of the BRICS countries offer an alternative possible focus. Everyone can now play the two blocs off against one another. Moreover, in this play, the BRICS now hold better, richer cards than the G7. Rhetorics of refusal spin these changes in the world economy as the evil intentions of foreign others—who likely hate democracy. The United States should righteously refuse and thereby frustrate those intentions, they argue. In contrast, far less attention is paid to how internal U.S. social problems both shape and are shaped by a changing global economy.

The changing world economy and the relative decline of the G7 within it have turned U.S. capitalism away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism. Tariffs, trade wars, and “America first” ideological pronouncements are concurrent forms of such turning inward. Another form is the call to bring parts of the outside of the United States inside: Trump’s unsubtle imperialistic threats directed at Canada, Mexico, Denmark, and Panama. Yet another form is the advisory many major U.S. colleges and universities are sending to enrolled students from other countries (over a million last year). It suggests they consider the likelihood of great visa difficulties in completing their degrees amid increasing U.S. government hostility toward foreigners. A reduced foreign student presence will undercut U.S. influence abroad for years to come (much as it fostered that influence in the past). U.S. higher education institutions, already facing serious financial difficulties, will find them deepening as paying foreign students choose other nations for their degrees. “America first” rhetoric risks the self-destruction of the United States’ global position.

Politically, the U.S. strategy since World War II was to contain perceived foreign threats by a combination of “hard” and “soft” power. They would enable the United States to eliminate communism, socialism, and, after the Soviet implosion of 1989, terrorism, wherever possible, overtly or covertly. Hard power would be deployed by the U.S. military via hundreds of foreign military bases surrounding nations perceived to be threatening and via invasions if, when, and where deemed necessary. Hard power also took the form of implicit threats of nuclear warfare (made credible by the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and by total U.S. arms race expenditures on nuclear and non-nuclear weapons that no other countries, alone or in groups, could match.

“Soft power” would serve globally to project particular definitions of democracy, civil liberties, higher education, scientific achievement, and popular culture. These definitions were presented as best and most exemplified by what actually existed in the United States. In this way, the United States could be exalted as the global peak of civilized human achievement: a kind of partner discourse to other discourses that denied internal social problems. Enemies could then readily be demonized as inferior.

U.S. soft power was and remains a kind of political advertising. The usual commercial advertiser promotes only everything positive (real or plausible) about his client’s product. Typically, everything negative (real or plausible) is associated by that same advertiser only with his client’s competitor’s product. One might call this “advertising communication.” In the 20th century’s Cold War, U.S. soft power entailed an application of advertising communication where the United States and its supporters, public and private, functioned as both client and advertiser. The United States advertised itself as “democracy” and the USSR as its negative opposite or “dictatorship.” Cold War advertising communication continues today in the slightly changed form of “democracy” versus “authoritarianism.” But like advertising, after too many repetitions its influence lessens.

Unfortunately for the United States, economic problems now besetting its capitalist system—both those caused by accumulated internal contradictions and those caused by its declining position within the world economy—directly undercut its soft power projections. Brandishing tariffs and repeatedly threatening to increase them reflect the need for governmental protection for decreasingly competitive U.S.-based firms. U.S. rhetorics that instead blame foreigners for “cheating” sound increasingly hollow. Deporting millions of immigrants signals an economy no longer strong and growing enough to absorb them productively (what once “made America great” and showed that greatness to the world). U.S. rhetorics denouncing “foreign invasions” of immigrants encounter growing skepticism and even ridicule inside as well as outside the United States.

The gross inequality of wealth and income in the United States and the global exposure of billionaires’ power over government (Musk over Trump, CEOs donating millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration celebration) replace perceptions of the United States as exceptional in its vast middle class. The record levels of government, corporate, and household debt alongside abundant signs that such indebtedness is worsening do not help project the United States as an economic model. The year 2024’s experience with a dominant U.S. strategy denying social problems while rhetorically stressing the dangers of evil foreign forces suggests it may be approaching exhaustion. The year 2025 may then provide conditions for a profound challenge to that strategy matching the challenges confronting the global position of U.S. capitalism.

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Photo by Juan Domenech

The Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday is one of the worst things that happened to the man’s legacy.

Let’s me be clear: King was a radical.

Go to a MLK celebration these days and you will hear Black politicians using this holiday as a platform to run for Office. Most white pastors use the day as a time to get in a pulpit and talk to their mostly white congregations about King’s dream about racial harmony, ignoring all the other things he wrote and said about his disappointment with how White people embodied Christianity. Or worse yet, they will ask a Black minister to do it, and a Black minister will tap dance for the white listeners, allowing them to leave the white church, drive home to their white communities and feel like they are a friend to Black people.

But it needs to be said again: King was a radical.

About the America treats the poor, the man said, “there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.” He also asked, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” and “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

That won’t be said at the local MLK celebration.

Toward the end of his life, when thinking about what he accomplished and seeing how white America was treating Black people, he said “I’ve come to believe we are integrating into a burning house,” making it plain that he was not as optimistic about race relations in May of 1967 as he was when he gave his “I have a dream speech in August of 1963.

Given the radicality of his thought, I wonder if King would recognize the man America valorizes on January 20. To understand why King is portrayed as a gentle dreamer instead of an angry prophet, we have to understand what concession were made to get the King hoiliday in the first place.

The first time a bill to have a King holiday was proposed in congress, it was introduced by Representative John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, and Senator Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts in 1979. That bill failed by five votes. A bill was finally passed in 1983, but not before Republicans opposed the bill, openly asking whether King was important enough to receive such an honor.

To get enough votes from the Republican controlled Senate and a signature from President Ronald Regan, advocates for the King National holiday were forced to highlight his unifying rhetoric to the detriment of his actual thoughts on things like universal healthcare and economic justice.

We don’t honor the real Martin Luther King, Jr. anymore. We honor the King that does not offend white people, and that is why this holiday is one of the worst things to happen to his legacy.

There is a danger in reducing any person’s life and work to a sound bite or any single speech or essay. To fully appreciate a thinker as complex as King, we must consider the totality of his work. Not just something he said one day in August.

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The Capitol dressed up for the inauguration. Photo: Mark Medish.

We returned to these places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

– T.S. Eliot “The Journey of the Magi” (1927)

Poets and historians remind us that situational awareness is a key life skill.

The impressive funerary proceedings for Jimmy Carter brought to mind the vivid opening scene of Barbara Tuchman’s magisterial Guns of August describing Europe veering onto the on-ramp to the First World War:

“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration… three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun… After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens…  Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”

The onlookers that May morning in London were likely unaware they were witnessing the ending of an era, the imminent collapse of powerful empires and the unraveling of a century-long period of domestic and international order – the old dispensation — often known as “the concert of Europe.”

As we move from the civil solemnity of Carter’s funeral to the portentous pomp of Trump’s second inauguration, do we now find ourselves at such a historic turning — an inflection point, as policy wonks like to say — a hinge moment after which our reigning assumptions about the world that seem so solid will “melt into air,” to use the phrase of a noted manifesto-writing nineteenth-century German philosopher?

What is history’s clock saying about this moment?  If an epoch is ending, what will be the motto of the era that might lie ahead – a restored Great America, a new Time of Troubles, a Dark Enlightenment, or something entirely different?

I do not know the answer.  But judging from the strangely hollow-looking array of ex-, exiting and incoming presidents in the front pews of Carter’s service, these are fair questions to ask. And they raise the problem of historical perspective — the difficulty of knowing in real time the significance of the time we happen to be living in.

I was a Cuban Missile Crisis baby, born in 1962, the same year Tuchman published her book.  Today is about as far removed in time from that perilous nuclear showdown, at the height of the Cold War, as that date was from the splendid Edwardian funeral.  The human species was essentially the same, but each of those times seem fundamentally worlds apart, socially, materially, mentally and technologically.

This is why I recommend occasionally doing the “flash-back test” as a thought experiment to think in time and to appreciate the flow and flux of things. It’s simple to imagine: just reflect on the conventional wisdom about the state of the world in roughly 25-year intervals, basically a generational timespan.

For example, rewind back 25 years from today, seemingly on the edge of a Third World War, and we were still celebrating the galloping globalization of the 1990s — 9/11 had not yet happened.

Go back a quarter century, to 1975, and we were at another climax of the Cold War, after the fall of Saigon and the run-up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Another 25 years, to 1950, the dawn of the age of nuclear confrontation and the specter of species annihilation.  Next, back to the Roaring 1920’s, a burst of post-bellum optimism and freedom, before the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism. And so on.

For me, the most salient point is the Heraclitan quantity and quality of change in relatively short chunks of time, all in living memory but easy to forget. Historical perspective should teach a degree of epistemological modesty.

In thinking about the meaning of the present, we should be careful not to get carried away with metaphors, whether about domestic affairs or international relations.  We always need and use theories and hypotheses as a basis for policies.  And it is probably natural to indulge in grand narratives about the meaning of an epoch only to learn that things were — and are — far more contingent and fluid than imagined.

We are all too familiar with the regnant metaphors and prestigious mantras of recent times such as “the end of history,” “borderless world,” “the Washington consensus,” the “BRICs” thesis, “the rules-based liberal international order,” “the international community,” the “global war on terror,” and “American exceptionalism.”

These potent memes have been based on certain facts and rational aspirations — but they have also proved less trenchant, less inevitable and less durable than hoped and advertised by their promoters.

The problem is not that the narratives lack evidence, but that they are grossly over-written and over-determined relative to the complexity and contingency of what we should know is out there. They become dogma.

This is because our reductionist fables tend to be eloquently crafted and backed by eminent policy scholars, propagated by political leaders and elite pundits, fortified by groupthink and financed by vested commercial interests. Challenging the veracity of such grand narratives is rarely easy — until the conventional wisdom supporting them has faded and given up its glittering grip on power.

As my colleague Ivan Krastev at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences has recently observed of the U.S. election: “Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more. The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return. Even most liberals do not want it back. Few Americans today are comfortable with the notion of American exceptionalism.”

When I worked in the early 1990s on the U.S. foreign assistance program for the former Soviet bloc countries, our top policymakers insisted on marketing the aid, whether cash or technical assistance, as support for “irreversible change,” which was supposed to be in our national security interest. It was practically a firing offense to disagree.

Apart from the many inherent problems of foreign aid (lack of scale, absorptive capacity, and local ownership of reforms), a central flaw with the irreversibility thesis was that the amazing fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR illustrated precisely the opposite reality: that paradigms could change, that policies are reversible and institutions can be undone.

To say that the Soviet Communist system collapsed of its own weight explains everything and nothing. All societies are in the same boat with respect to vitality, legitimacy and durability. Things are fluid, and nothing is inevitable until it is.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant famously asked, what may I reasonably hope for?  The radical openness of history is at odds with both progressive determinism such as the Enlightenment theories of the historical process, whether Hegelian or Whig, with their faith in rationality and dreams of perfectibility on one hand, or the various old-school conservatisms which posit “plus ca change,” Original Sin or human nature as ineluctable limiting factors to societal progress.

I think we can and do make progress as a species and as social beings, even in a collective international setting, though not as much and not as inevitably as rationalist philosophers such as Harvard’s Stephen Pinker posit.

There is a middle school of pragmatism associated with the likes of John Dewey, Richard Rorty and Roberto Unger who in various ways expounded on  “meliorism” or experimental improvement, which may be America’s best claim to political exceptionalism.  But even this more nuanced and modest conception of the historical process is vulnerable to back-sliding and atavism in practice. Plasticity is not unidirectional.

The Enlightenment Project, vitally linked as it is to our sense of modernity and progressive values, will always inspire but it will also be haunted by the reality of bloody revolutions, two world wars and the Holocaust, as well as the nuclear threat.

It is not for nothing that the British art historian Kenneth Clark started his sprawling 1969 BBC series on “Civilisation” with an episode titled “The Skin of Our Teeth.”  Far from being pretentious about European culture, looking at the sweep of history Clark was acutely aware of contingency, how societies can thrive, but also how great societies can decay and decline, how things can fall apart.

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Jabbar serving as the information technology team chief for the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team during his Army service, pictured in 2013 at Fort Polk. Photograph Source: 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army – Public Domain

Recent headline-making events in two of America’s most famous party-hardy cities sent us back to our well-thumbed copy of Touching the Dragon, a 2018 memoir by James Hatch.

Never heard of Hatch? Well maybe that’s because he spent much of his military career as a Navy SEAL “warfighter” always “close to the enemy” in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but never seeking headlines. A survivor of 150 combat missions, Hatch returned home in bad mental and physical shape; in fact, his crippling wounds of war ended his career. Then, adding insult to injury, he was “forced to reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.”

In his insightful and prophetic book, Hatch warned that his generational cohort of “special operators,” who experienced a similar “volume of fighting,” were now facing: “A serious volume of aftermath. Marriages falling apart. Alcoholism. Guys getting kicked out of their houses. Guys drowning in opioids. The real recoil hasn’t even hit yet.”

During this holiday season, that “recoil” was definitely felt in different—but now sadly familiar ways—by the dozens of civilians left dead or injured in Las Vegas and New Orleans.

The final missions of Army Sergeants Mathew Livelsberger and Shamsud-Din Jabbar left millions of other Americans scratching their heads.  Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction?

In notes left behind, Livelsberger, a decorated Green Beret combat veteran, insisted that his action “was not a terrorist attack” but rather “a wake-up call” necessary because “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence.” His declared goal was “to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Jabbar, a former information technology specialist, left video messages announcing that he had switched sides in the “war between the believers and the disbelievers” and had become a follower of ISIS.

Asymmetrical Warfare

The two soldiers spent a total of four tours of duty in Afghanistan, where only one set of combatants had B-52 bombers, fighter jets, helicopter gun-ships, long-range artillery, and tanks. As a result, both Jabbar and Livelsberger were familiar with key tools of the “asymmetrical warfare” waged by the Taliban (suicide vests, improvised bombs, and speeding vehicles packed with explosives).

Back home, they geared up, in equivalent fashion, and became domestic terrorists. But their actions were definitely not without precedent. In fact, the most reliable predictors of who will perpetrate mass violence in modern-day America is military service.

According to the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START),  “A U.S. military background is the single strongest individual-level predictor of whether a subject …in the PIRUS ( Profiles of Individual Radicalization In the United States) data is classified as a mass casualty offender.” A record of military service, START explains, is, in fact, an even more reliable predicator than mental health problems or a criminal history.

Consider the long list of those who preceded Din Jabbar and Livelsberger down the same path. In 1995, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh parked his Ryder truck, with a home-made bomb, outside the federal building in Oklahoma City. He walked away, leaving 168 people dead and 680 injured, a crime for which he was executed in 2001.

Jabbar, who  contemplated murdering his own estranged family,—seemed to be channeling the murderous energy of another quiet  Texan, Charles Whitman.  A former Eagle Scout and Marine sniper, Whitman killed 15 people and injured 31 during a 1966 shooting spree conducted from the clock tower of the University of Texas at Austin. (On his way to campus, he did fatally stabb his wife and mother.)

More recently, in 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, murdered 12 soldiers and one civilian, and injured 30 others, a crime for which he is now on death row. In March of 2018, Albert Wong, who saw combat in Afghanistan (where Hasan was headed before his killing spree), shot himself and three care-givers at a veterans clinic in Yountville, California.

 That same year, ex-Marine Ian David Long, decorated for his service as a machine gunner in Afghanistan, killed twelve people at a country and western bar in Thousand Oaks, California. And just sixteen months ago, in Lewiston, Maine, Army Reservist Robert Card slaughtered 18 of his neighbors at a local bowling alley, while wounding 13 others. Both Card and Long killed themselves to avoid capture.

If readers are noticing a pattern here, it’s because there is one.  While veterans’ advocates correctly point out that the majority of former service members are certainly not mass murderers, it is also true that a tiny subset of veterans have been responsible for a disproportionate number of mass shootings and other violent attacks.

  Military Socialization

One big factor behind that data point is their military training and indoctrination.  As retired Army Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman explains in his book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, the cultivation of anger and aggression is critical to overcoming normal human resistance to killing other people. This becomes part of the socialization of all military recruits, even those who never see combat.  For those who do, the battlefield deaths of close friends and comrades, can, according to Grossman, further “enable killing.”

As clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay reported in his 1994 study Achilles in Vietnam, “replacement of grief by rage has lasted for years and become an entrenched way of being” for many sufferers of combat-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Researchers at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle, Washington, found that, among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, anger was “independent from, albeit related to, ptsd.”

Veterans who had been diagnosed with ptsd or “subthreshold ptsd” reported increased levels of anger, hostility, and physical aggression, particularly in their intimate relationships.

If service members have a history of behavioral problems, before enlisting, being in the military can make them worse. Albert Wong suffered from PTSD, which is why he was a patient of Pathway Homes (the northern CA treatment center made famous in Thank You For Your Service). But, like Ian David Long, his mental health issues predated his active duty.

Both Wong and Long were troubled children and adolescents. Wong was raised by a series of friends and foster parents and had difficulty in high school. According to one news account, friends and neighbors did not report their concerns about Long’s aggressive behavior when he was a teen-ager because they didn’t want to spoil his dream of enlisting to “kill for his country.”

Better screening of recruits like Wong and Long might have kept them out of the military.  Unfortunately, when both signed up—thanks to simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the U. S. military was suffering from a “serious recruitment crisis.” As a result, screening and drug testing standards were relaxed and even a felony conviction was not necessarily disqualifying.  In 2017, the Army even waived a previous ban on signing up young men and women with a history of “self-mutilation, bipolar disorder, depression, and drug and alcohol abuse.”

Traumatic Brain Injury 

Sevice-related traumatic brain injury (TBI) can be a toxic affliction of former soldiers with past combat exposure, like Livelsberger, and even those, like 40-year old Robert Card, who never served abroad. Dave Philipps’ investigative reporting in The New York Times, has revealed how Card, an experienced Army Reserve grenade instructor, was subject to repeated blast injuries that seriously damaged his brain. The result was increasingly erratic and, ultimately, very deadly behavior.

Philipps’ latest reporting has focused on Livelsberger’s blast exposure in training and when deployed. An Army nurse and former girlfriend, Alicia Arritt, had no trouble recognizing his symptoms—anger, aggression, depression, and inability to concentrate – because she had encountered them before among her  patients still on active duty (as Livelsberger was until his “wake up call” in Las Vegas).

The Department of Defense (DOD) tends to downplay such links, at the time and after-the-fact. In the Card case, it took an independent commission, appointed by the Governor of Maine, to confirm that Card’s superior officers failed to heed warnings about him from fellow soldiers, concerned family members, and mental health clinicians.

During his treatment at a civilian psychiatric hospital, three months before his rampage, Card was found to be experiencing psychosis, having homicidal thoughts, and even had a “hit list.”  Last Fall, on the first anniversary of the Lewiston massacre, survivors and relatives of victims notified the DOD of their intention to sue for damages.  As the group’s lawyer asked, “How many other Robert Cards are out there right now, suffering from mental illness, with ready access to assault weapons?”

Fortunately, as part of the just approved National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Congress has finally required the DOD to set  limits on blast exposure, consider its impact on the brain in designing  new weaponry, and “standardize and improve the detection, treatment, and reporting” of blast injuries.

These harm reduction measures won’t make medical detection any easy because imaging techniques don’t always confirm the impact of blast injuries. That’s why friends, family members and care givers for service members or veterans need to better understand and be alert for symptoms like those displayed by Livelsberger and Card

Access to Skilled Care?

 It’s even more important to expand access to public hospitals and clinics operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Due to restrictive eligibility rules legislated by Congress, the VA-run Veterans Health Administration (VHA) currently covers only half of the nation’s 19 million former service members.

 Unlike the DOD, which just ignores the impact of PTSD, blast injuries, and other service-related injuries until forced to acknowledge them, the VA has an actual track record of treating mental and physical health problems.

Unfortunately, President-elect Trump and former Georgia Congressman Doug Collins, his nominee for VA Secretary, have little appreciation for the VA’s essential role. Rather than supporting its direct care and related research functions, they will be expanding a costly and largely unnecessary network of private sector providers, known as the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP).

Before even more VHA patients accept referrals to the VCCP, they should check out a research study published this month in Health Affairs. The headline sums up its findings: “Veterans May Be Seeing Lower-Quality Clinicians in the VA Community Care Network.” Among the documented shortcomings of outsourced care is the fact that most doctors, in private practice, are not familiar with links between blast injury and depression or PTSD and related anger and aggression.

Dr. Harold Kudler, a Duke Medical School professor, is a skilled care-giver who does recognize those symptoms based on years of experience with VA patients. As he told us: “It’s important to remember that neither PTSD, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, depression or even schizophrenia are likely to make you a mass shooter. That said, these recent events in Las Vegas and Louisiana, like so many others, make it clear the burden that so many of our veterans bear.”

Without a properly functioning healthcare system of their own, too many former soldiers will be left to carry that burden themselves. If they crack under the strain of doing so, the consequences can be devastating– not only for their friends, family, and former comrades, but everyone else on the receiving end of a “mass casualty “event.

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Photograph Source: IDF Spokesperson Unit – CC BY-SA 4.0

Bulldozers, those agile, yellow caterpillar-track hoes, we watch transforming towns, farms, deserts and suburbs worldwide. But how many of us have seen an Israeli bulldozer at work? Many Palestinians for certain, as they rush this way and that to grab furnishings, documents and clothes from their homes before these redoubtable machines demolish their dwellings.

Nowadays we may view a newsreel of these enablers of Israel’s colonial agenda following bombers and tanks across Gaza, clearing the way for new Israeli living places. Notwithstanding the efforts of millions of protestors worldwide, legal prosecutions, celebrity appeals, endless grisly testimonials of the daily slaughter, their work continues unimpeded.

The Occupied Palestinian Territories are a common venue for a super edition of the formidable Israeli bulldozer. There they lumber through streets on a mission that may not appear connected to Gaza’s leveling. Although it is. They are colossal and cumbersome, fitted out with appendages especially designed for their targets. Their unwieldiness does not hamper them. Nor do stones tossed by neighborhood boys. Usually accompanied by fully armed Israeli troops to thwart any resistance, they proceed slowly towards their goal.

I witnessed them at work during an assignment in a West Bank town in 1996 . I stood with an evicted family who’d hastily gathered what they could during the previous hour after being notified their home would be destroyed. Theirs was a well-kept stucco house, I remember: 2 stories, potted trees on upper terraces overlooking the street and beds of flowers behind a low outer wall. I wrote not about the monstrous, unstoppable machine, but about the symbol of the house to the Palestinian family, the domain of the mother, how it’s the singular place of refuge for an occupied people. (Even at that time, many Palestinian babies were still delivered in these homes.) I readily recall the enormity of that machine, how it filled the entire landscape while we gazed – shuttering, silent, insects gathered on a heap of blankets, clothes, and pots.

With its contracted joints held against its sides to enable freer movement, this monster maneuvers through the narrow streets of West Bank Palestinian towns. Some simply target a designated house, its articulated limb rising to attack it from above. Well-practiced in this task, it ensures nothing but rubble remains at the end of an hour.

High above the mesh-covered body of the machine, is a control cabin with its operator, presumably a human being. These machines sprout new features. In a recent photo of one bulldozer, though it’s blurred, having necessarily been taken from some distance away, we can see an array of children’s toys, specifically open-eyed stuffed bears. Hanging on the machine’s protective grate, they must be trophies from homes smashed in earlier exercises. They remind me of the wide-eyed delight of Israeli soldiers inside Gaza homes as they smash and mock their quarry.

Besides house destroyers are bulldozers that regularly uproot orchards. These efficiently hack and dig up fruit-bearing trees, wiping away the livelihood of Palestinian farmers. Also protected by troops or armed Israeli settlers eager to expand their property into these useless fields. Anyone daring to stand in the way of this assault is either maimed, or killed.

The effect of these machines is multiple: first the physical destruction of homes and livelihoods; then the humiliation; then forced dislocation. As author Ta-Nehisi Coates has affirmed in his many recent discussions of apartheid life in the American Jim Crow era, in South Africa before 1991, and in Israel-occupied lands, ‘there is no because’ for such policies. Although we know there will be fatuous, legal justifications proffered by Israeli authorities for this or that killing, or displacement.

I use the term killing here determinedly since, at many levels, these actions are part of the genocide process. They kill the place, making it unlivable. They kill the ability of a people to earn a living. They kill hope and foster resistance which in turn bring more troops and more bulldozers and tanks.

Why write about a machine, you may ask? These cause only the loss of physical structures, while not far away, children are freezing to death, while hospitals are reduced to rubble, while whole families are eliminated. Why? Because this is part of the same process – a process of humiliation and the crushing of human agency, a process of ‘clearing’ that forces more and more people to either depart for other countries or move into smaller and smaller enclaves, a process of forced dependence on charity. It has been underway for decades, as long as Israel’s hunger for land, water, rights, supremacy.

I end with an image from a video: for me, as sinister and hurtful as the stumps on a wounded child’s torso. It is the arm on the front bumper of an Israeli bulldozer, with an enormous hook at its end. It strikes a road and penetrates a foot or more into the pavement, hooking its claw into the neighborhood street, and eviscerates the entire length for the road. The road is impassable to cars, delivery vans, regular movement; it’s a mess, and hardly repairable as municipal administration hardly exists. Why is this done? You tell me.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

A key measure of any U.S. president’s success is the ability or good fortune to leave his successor with a better international situation than the one he inherited.  Donald Trump inherited a relatively stable situation from Barack Obama, but his chaotic and unstable leadership did no favors for Joe Biden.  Trump now inherits a broad pattern of disorder in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, and has named a national security team that seems destined to make all of these issues worse.

Sadly, Joe Biden is leaving the presidency with no awareness of his shortcomings.  He has charged Sudan with genocidal policies, but refuses to acknowledge his complicity with regard to Israeli genocidal policies.  Recently, Biden announced an additional $8 billion in fighter jets, attack helicopters, and artillery to an Israel that relies almost solely on sophisticated U.S. weaponry inappropriate for the terrain and the targets that Israel is facing.  Biden’s national security team ignored Israel’s right-wing attempts to undermine the rule of law, although the importance of the rule of law was Biden’s major campaign volley against Trump.

The Israeli Defense Forces have been politicized and radicalized in their support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies.  The same can be said for the Israeli police on the West Bank, which are conducting their own war crimes in support of Netanyahu.  Israel has made no attempt to examine the serious and profound allegations of the abuse and misconduct on the part of its military and police in Gaza and the West Bank.  The U.S. threat to limit arms shipments to Israel if humanitarian aid wasn’t increased was embarrassingly ignored by Israel.  In fact, Israel tightened the borders and the deliveries, and not even the unconscionable deaths of Palestinian infants has made a difference.

Soon after the war began, Biden arrived in Israel and signaled that the United States would give “carte blanche” to Israel regarding weapons transfers and diplomatic support.  Biden continually referred to his relationship with Prime Minister Golda Meir from the 1970s, and failed to realize that Meir’s Israel no longer exists and that Netanyahu’s Israel has become an imperial power in the Middle East.  Secretary of State Antony Blinken did worse: he arrived in Israel before Biden and stated that “I come as a Jew.”  Thank you, Tony Blinken.

Biden came to the presidency in 2021 with more experience than any previous president in the field of foreign policy and national security.  He said that “I know more about foreign policy than Henry Kissinger.”  In a recent interview, he told reporters that “I know more world leaders than any one of you have ever met in your whole goddamn life.”

But unlike Kissinger, Biden had a weak national security team, conducted foreign policy on his own, and ignored the Cold War situation that he helped to create.  Although the current Cold War promises to be more dangerous, more costly, and more implacable than its predecessor that dominated the 1950s and 1960s, Biden continued to paint Russia and China with the same brush.  Unfortunately, he received support from the mainstream media and the foreign policy community.  Kissinger had very different policies toward Moscow and Beijing, and improved bilateral relations with both of them.

We can’t begin to tackle energy and environment problems without establishing a serious dialogue with China, but as recently as last week Biden, Blinken, and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns were lecturing Beijing regarding China’s relations with Russia and Iran.  Biden appointed Ambassador Burns, a Sovietologist and not a Sinologist, in 2022; since then, both Biden and Burns have been lecturing Beijing about its policies toward Russia, Iran, and North Korea.  But China isn’t about to change its relations with Russia, interrupt its huge purchases of oil from Iran, or alter its relations with North Korea.  China has its own problems with North Korea, a nation on its border that has developed a close relationship with Russia, which worsens Beijing’s national security situation.  Thank you, Nick Burns.

More sadly, a Trump administration offers the promise of worsening these problems.  Although Biden never fulfilled his commitment to create a “rules-based international order” and a “foreign policy for the Middle Classes,” a second Trump administration is likely to worsen the chaos and instability that earmarked the first Trump administration.  Trump’s national security team, if it survives confirmation, will certainly repeat the “carte blanche” of Biden’s four years. The “China hawks” at the White House (national security adviser Mike Waltz); the Department of State (Marco Rubio), and the intelligence tsar and the Central Intelligence Agency (Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, respectively) hardly inspire confidence.  Trump’s self-proclaimed success was in the field of real estate development, but there were failures there as well.

There is no reason to believe that Trump can manage the array of challenges that confront the United States at this time.  And unlike Trump’s first term, there is no one in the second Trump administration that will be able to curb his worst impulses.  The Founding Fathers believed that the Supreme Court and the mainstream media would be able to limit Trump’s powers, but Trump has packed the Court in his favor and the Washington Post is leading the way in limiting the power and influence of the mainstream media.  Thank you, Jeff Bezos.

On the eve of the presidential election in November, the Economist asked “What could possibly go wrong?”  In view of President-elect Trump’s incendiary comments on trade and tariffs, Gaza, Greenland, the Panama Canal, the Gulf of Mexico, and Canada, we’re about to find out.  Trump called “tariffs” his favorite word in the dictionary.  It’s very possible that our worst fears about a Trump presidency will come to pass.  Thank you, American voters.

Finally, the leading columnists of the Washington Post and the New York Times are encouraging policies that will worsen both domestic and international challenges that confront the United States.  Regarding Israel, the Times’ David French praises Biden because he “stood behind” Israel in the Middle East, and Trump for the “hard line against Iran.”  Bret Stephens, the Times’ shill for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, praises Trump for recognizing the “need to spend a whole lot more on defense,” describing our nuclear weapons infrastructure as “decrepit.”  The Post’s David Ignatius credits U.S. military power for backing Israel as “it remade the Middle East,” and falsely credits Biden with seeking to “manage competition” with China, which is exactly what the Biden national security team failed to do.  Thank you, Mainstream Media.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There is something of a loose, informal social contract inherent to a successful human society, and that is the condition of reciprocal empathy. When one experiences misfortune, others in a healthy society care and assist, despite there being no contractual obligation. Others care when catastrophe falls upon their neighbors. It’s basic empathy, not a complicated interaction. Yet we have been immersed in a society that simply wants us to feel empathy in one direction, and that is towards those who have ample resources and power but, for whatever reason, have hit a bump in their golden paved road. The empathy our power structures want us to feel is not the kind that extends downward; the narrative is that we should only feel a concern for the already powerful when they face misfortune.

An example of this would be the recent magnification of the loss of housing for individuals like actor James Woods (well, I say “actor” but who knew he was playing himself in Casino?). He has been appearing on all the major “news”–(again, the quotes) channels, weeping and wailing over the loss of his mansion. I ask you this—have any of you ever seen an interview on such media from the homeless who have had every single one of their possessions taken, not by wildfire, but by police sweeps—sweeps often conducted to remove the unsightliness of poverty prior to big game events and concerts and such? I’m guessing no. They wouldn’t even want the homeless in their studio. But of these groups –who is more likely to be able to build back their possessions? I am guessing James Woods is not sleeping below an overpass without a sleeping bag or tent at this time.

The lack of empathy is, of course, what brings people to these dire straits in the first place. As I often say, it’s a feature, not a bug, in late-day capitalism that instead of the carrot dangling like it did in the 50’s (a home, a boat maybe, money to send the kids to college), we are firmly in stick territory. If you do not participate successfully in this parasitic economy, you may end up without any safety net at all in your life. Never mind that we have ample resources to deal with any and all of these problems (for example, Elon Musk’s net worth is 416 billion and the estimated current cost of the LA wildfires from an Accuweather calculation is at 135-150 billion). Can you wrap your head around that? One man, a weird man, has enough money to take care of this problem and still have a majority of his wealth left over. How can things not be completely wrecked in such a scenario? Yet said man spends so much time demonizing those who have nothing to their names by saying things like “in most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie, it’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness”. Now, that quote I would use maybe for James Woods now that he is mansion-less, but all those other souls out there that Musk was referring to—not so much. Again, can you imagine having all that wealth and power and you use it……to denigrate people so down on their luck that they don’t even have a roof over their heads or a way to get one? It’s a massive tell that Musk has some sort of internal rot in need of healing. He seems to want love so badly, to the point that it is painful to witness, but avoids all the obvious ways that it could truly come his way (mainly extending out kindness and empathy, not being a part of the overall problem that makes worldwide misery index soar). Of course, it’s not ideal to rely on billionaire largesse, but he truly could have more love than he would know what to do with and could try to fill that internal void if he made any attempt at just being kind. It’s as simple as that.

Look at MacKenzie Scott—she is genuinely cared about by an enormous number of appreciative individuals. It’s not normal to amass that much wealth, but the real evidence of decency is what you do with that wealth if it finds you. Musk chooses to shit-tweet about the homeless; Scott is handing out no-strings-attached grants to make the world better. This is speaking to individual-level behavior, of course. The answer is not to have a society that allows for such disparity, but her behavior is a path of attempted decency, his—not so much.

It’s in this setting that it has become completely acceptable that the concern is for the oppressors of the world, but almost never for the oppressed. The situation in Palestine exemplifies that. You can have people fighting to stay alive and to keep their land and it is labeled terrorism. They get no sympathy, but those colonizing and taking it—well, they get all the sympathy should they have that push-back. Americans with the comfort of time seem to understand Little Big Horn, but in the current era can’t see similarities where they exist, mainly because of the spoon-fed narratives of the media—even in the setting of real-time documentation. Up becomes down, sideways becomes straight, so many words lose their meaning. The disproportionate (by that I mean genocide) response is considered normal, but the act of fighting the powers that be is not. It’s never considered to look back at root causes and to rectify inhumane living conditions—it’s just accepted that the powerless are to die off and the powerful need to continue enriching themselves.

It’s like the homeless having their possessions taken along with their make-shift shelters…..instead of seeking humane answers, we criminalize homelessness. We ensure that housing markets are unaffordable by allowing entities like Blackrock to buy up massive amounts of real estate. We limit the possibilities available to claw out of terrible situations and then bemoan the fact that said individuals become unable to participate in what we consider normal society.

Yet, with all of this going on, we allow James Woods and Mel Gibson to whine on television. Ghouls like Laura Ingraham, whose own brother disavows her lack of empathy, amplify their stories. The empathy is to flow upward, never down, much in contrast to the Jesus fellow they all seem to love to align themselves with.

Unless industrialized late-stage capitalism has factories producing needles with camel-sized passage possible, they are screwed if any of that dogma is true.

But I’m not here to Christian-shame—I think we know (and even they know) that they use the label as a shield. Also, I don’t believe in the supernatural of it–that book of theirs is at odds with itself. But I do think that we aren’t here to continue to punch down and use our empathy for those least in need of it, those who definitely exhibit no reciprocity. I’m not going to be shaming those who would make jokes if it makes them feel better to say, “Well, James Woods, maybe you did need a ceasefire.”–do what heals you; he’s going to be fine.

I do think of something I heard once from (okay, keep with me—I’m not going completely woo on you, but I do like to listen to accounts from those who have had near-death experiences; it fascinates me). But anyway, one of those accounts came from a man who came back and said he was told “it’s not a courtroom, it’s a classroom” in regard to his questions about following religious dogma. His entire worldview was changed and opened up post “death” to levels of love and understanding beyond the standard guidelines of individual religions. So let us look at that statement, and for me, for some reason it resonates like no other. In that one sentence, it offers more than atheistic materialism or the rule-based religions of the world. If this is a classroom, what are we learning—how are we trying to do better? Look at a MacKenzie Scott and an Elon Musk for two different paths to take.

There is one thing that I am sure of and that is the fact that we need to normalize the empathy we are capable of and the actions that can stem from actually caring about others. For far too long we have normalized vapid self-infatuation and we hold individuals like Musk up as an example of success, not a cautionary tale. Those with wealth need to come down and join the rest of us in decent human society. You can’t continue to use your damaged soul as the springboard for the philosophies you choose to embrace. It’s as if some use it as the starting point. Gee, I’m rich, healthy, and good-looking (or at least with the money, I was able to make myself look good)……where can I shop around and find something that allows me to continue feeling awesome about that with absolutely no responsibility to others? I know, maybe Ayn Rand or similar rubbish. This is not the way. This is not learning in the classroom of life– this is being the bully, the asshole with no hint of self-awareness. And I’m fairly certain that is not why we are here.

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Photograph Source: Office of Congressman Mike Johnson – Public Domain

Beyond the massive trust deficit of the dominant political duopoly in America, many thought Trump 1.0 was an aberration. Then, the election of Trump 2.0 was a confirmation that Trump 1.0 was not a fluke and is now a coronation.

Yet many people in America are actually hoping he can really effect positive change and break this duopoly stranglehold without breaking America in the process.

What’s possible with Trump 2.0?

As pie in the sky as it might seem or appear (and chances that admittedly approach zero), the incoming Trump 2.0 Administration does have a golden opportunity to reform the federal government, the administrative state, the ‘deep state’ and truly re-make democracy in America for, of and by the People — without dismantling or demolishing it in the process.

Yet what will more likely happen than not?

While recognizing and realizing a plurality of voting Americans did cast their lot with Trump, I am afraid Trump and company will just gild the lily, consolidate oligarchy, and just screw up America even more for sport, revenge and maximum grift and corruption — for the decided benefit of the rarified very few —whether the rest of America wants it or not.

They will simply replace the heart of the Republic with an unleashed, massively hyper-normalized corruption racket using the levers of government to push the peddle of raw, abusive power all the way down and in the process accelerate the demise of American democracy hurtling hellbent toward autokleptocracy with little or no constraint.

This dismantling of democracy by blowing it up from within will no doubt take place with great applause — leaving the rest of America in the rear view mirror and too many more people ending up in the ditches and in the dust.

At a minimum chaos will ensue, disorder will reign and America may just have an event horizon meeting with history’s reckoning. But am quite sure for many the prospect of just watching it all unfold will provide maximum entertainment and daily drama — until it doesn’t.

Smashing and deconstructing the village of American democracy from within only creates the conditions for collapse instead of a re-birth and reconditioning of the village after clearing out the debris, waste, fraud and abuse — unless the intent is to sell the village out and sell off what’s left — leaving a ghost town of grift and gain with a new sheriff in town packing his power and enforcement ‘peacekeepers’ strutting around like a performative peacock entertaining their flock in a hyper inflated memeTV unreality show.

But going back to re-generating a real democracy is probably just too hard. Trump decidedly did NOT run for democracy, nor did he take a stand for democracy or even fight for real democracy for the everyday working American.

He ran on himself, for himself and by himself and his worldview and democracy is in the way of his brand and stamp of federal autocracy through oligarchical consolidation and control that he wants to impose on America.

He’ll just recast the American Empire in his own image while keeping most of what doesn’t make America all that great!

It is probably a bit too early to prognosticate, but perhaps the return of a New America post-Trump — after the central gov’t is captured and co-opted — hinges on and relies upon the states and the people coming out of the morass and hot mess of America increasingly getting by in name only.

What a country!

Meanwhile one can still at least rage against The Machine — even when it transforms into The Terminator and turns its targeting on democracy as the enemy within.

And the scourge of oligarchy will no doubt increasingly bend government to its will by exercising control in their own interests and especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.

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Mount Hood through a skein of smoke from wildfires near Portland. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Sometime in the 1980’s, as a young college dropout living somewhere in the Boston area, and spending a lot of time hanging around the hub of activity of all sorts that was Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day I got word that Pete Seeger was going to be speaking at a class.  Back then you didn’t need an ID card to enter a building, you could just walk in.  Maybe the public were welcome to that class, I don’t remember, but it was just me and a couple dozen students, in any case.

I think Pete might have played a song or two, but all I remember was the story he told.  Maybe I remember the story in particular because he cried a bit in the course of telling it.

It was a fictional story, about how some scientist had discovered that by mixing together several commonly-found, easily-available compounds of the sort you might use to clean your bathroom floor, you could create a powerful bomb.

There were efforts to suppress the information but eventually word got out, and humanity braced for impact.  In Pete’s tale, what happened next was both sides of the civil war in Peru that was then very violently ongoing used the new bomb recipe, to apocalyptic effect.

The whole country was just destroyed, with a staggering death toll.  Watching the millions of refugees streaming out of their ruined land, in Pete’s tale the rest of the world came together and made a plan to prevent this kind of thing from happening anywhere else.

Realizing that if any disgruntled person could so easily just make a bomb that would destroy the neighborhood, the only way forward was radical equality and empathy, with societies focused on taking care of each other, and making sure no one wanted to blow up the neighborhood.

For days now I’ve been glued to the news even more than usual, watching these hurricane-strength winds blow flames all over the Los Angeles area, with thousands of homes destroyed already, and so many people, including friends of mine, waiting to find out what will become of theirs.

As I hear the horror stories from a burning megalopolis, I’m reminded of Pete’s little parable, in so many ways.

Of course, it’s the combination of the parched Earth, steep hillsides, and fast winds, all in an urban setting, that make the LA area so susceptible to fire, along with poor infrastructure and other factors.  But most of the fires start out with either some kind of accident, like a cigarette butt, or a chain dragging behind a car, or with arson.

At a juncture like this, especially, every individual has the power to blow up the neighborhood, essentially, either by accident or on purpose, with no particular effort at all.

Not only does everyone have the power to burn down the neighborhood with a cigarette, but every individual’s home or business is completely interdependent on everyone else’s homes and businesses, in terms of how their properties are prepared for fire.  It’s no good if just some of the homes in a neighborhood are well-designed for fire.  They all need to be, in order for the fire not to have a foothold to spread from.

At times when there isn’t such a crisis going on, I hear frequent news reports about the difficulties they have up and down the west coast trying to retain sufficient numbers of firefighters.  The firefighters are chronically underpaid — pay that never nearly keeps up with the ever-worsening housing crisis — and the departments are chronically understaffed, as a general rule.

LA completely embodies the concept of the endless American suburb, where people have historically gone to buy their little patch of paradise, or their big patch of paradise, depending on how wealthy they may be.  But now paradise has burned, again.  And whether you’re one of the estimated 70,000 people in Los Angeles County living on the streets (some of whom may be staying warm in the winter with propane heaters in their tents), or a movie star in a mansion with a nice, safe, fireplace, we’re all equal under the Santa Anna winds, just as prone to the errant cigarette butt as everyone else, just as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

As terrible as the ongoing burning of LA continues to be, if we don’t radically change course as a society, the future is absolutely guaranteed to be astronomically worse.

If we continue to follow our current path here in the USA, which can mainly be characterized as what they call the “free market,” then after the fires in LA, just like after the fires in Santa Rosa, Paradise, Talent, Phoenix, Detroit (Oregon), and so many other cities and towns, what comes next is fire insurance becomes either far more expensive or unavailable, while the cost of buying or renting continues to increase far beyond most anyone’s earnings do, forcing people to move further and further away from urban centers, into more fire-prone rural areas.

Here in Portland, Oregon, so far away from Los Angeles, we can be sure that the housing crisis will continue to worsen, as we welcome our friends who will be moving here from LA.  Anyone from Portland can tell you that that’s going to happen, because most of the people that most of us know around here these days are from southern California.  I would also have moved here if I were from southern California, I understand completely, and hasten to add I certainly don’t harbor the least bit of ill will towards people from California, Mexico, China, or anywhere else.

But as soon as someone who does blame people from California or Mexico for the rising cost of housing around here — and someone will — then they will be playing the game of the land-owning banks and hedge funds anyone who rents or bought a house in the past two decades or so is probably deeply beholden to right now.

Yes, what comes next along with the rising cost of housing and more migrants from LA and wherever else will be more of the blame game accelerating.  Some will blame the migrants for the rising costs — deport them!  Others will blame the racists for attacking the migrants.

No one will blame the corporations doubling and tripling our rents.  The algorithms won’t promote that sort of thing, and the FBI doesn’t want to promote it, either, and neither does the corporate media.

That’s what’s coming — more of the same repercussions from the fires, along with more fires.  At least, that’s what’s coming if we continue along the route of housing as an investment market for people to do whatever they want with.

It could all be radically different, but then we’d have to first collectively acknowledge that there’s such a thing as society, and that we need to live in a country that makes policies accordingly.  And then we’d need to build a social movement powerful enough to force the political class to implement those policies, starting with things like real rent control, and a real plan for adapting to climate change, and to implement the other sorts of policies one can commonly find in so many other, more functional countries where there is a widespread belief in the existence of society.

Where it’s not just talk about everyone having an “equal shot,” as our outgoing president loves to say, but having actual equality — the kind of equality that is not just morally right, but that our future absolutely depends on.

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Photograph Source: rajatonvimma /// VJ Group Random Doctors – CC BY 2.0

From early December 2024 to early January 2025, the body temperature of eight babies fell below any acceptable amount and they froze to death. This condition is known as hypothermia. The most recent of these children to die, Yousef, was sleeping beside his mother because, as she told Al Jazeera, of the very cold weather. Temperatures in Gaza have fallen to just above freezing, which in the context of a lack of housing, blankets, and warm bedclothes is deadly. Body heat is the only protection, which is minimal for an infant. Yousef’s mother said, “He slept next to me and in the morning I found him frozen and dead. I don’t know what to say. No one can feel my misery. No one in the world can understand our catastrophic situation.”

Each of these stories is incomprehensible. The al-Batran family in Deir al-Balah are living in a tent made of blue plastic. Their bedding is only acceptable to them because their entire household has been destroyed, and they have not received any relief. Twin brothers Ali and Jumaa were born during this ugly genocidal bombardment in November 2024, but then one after the other succumbed to hypothermia. When the father felt Jumma’s head, it was as “cold as ice.”

By early January 2025, studies by the United Nations and the Palestinian government showed that at least 92 percent of housing units in Gaza had been destroyed. Most Palestinians who remain in northern Gaza have no homes in which to shelter. They are living in makeshift tents, not even having access to the United Nations tents that are sparsely available. Because there are now no hospitals open in northern Gaza, children are being born in these tents, and they are not receiving any medical care. “The health sector is being systematically dismantled,” Dr. Rik Peeperkorn of the World Health Organization told the United Nations Security Council on January 3. In the so-called “safe zone” of al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis, three babies died of hypothermia, mocking the idea that this is indeed a safe zone. Mahmoud al-Faseeh, the father of Sila Mahmoud al-Faseeh (who died in her third week), told Al Jazeera, “We sleep on the sand and we don’t have enough blankets and we feel the cold inside our tent.” The story is the same up and down Gaza’s length: the cold has come at night, ceaseless rain has made everything damp, the tents are inadequate, the blankets are thread worn, and the infants—the most vulnerable—have begun to die.

The map of such suffering is not restricted to Gaza or to the Palestinians. Such stories of a parent walking to find their child beside them in an inadequate tent, with no blankets because of the lack of relief in a war zone, are sadly not unique. The children frozen in the Kabul slum of Chaman-e-Babrak in 2012 had names that are utterly forgotten outside their families. These were victims of a war that trudged on and threw these rural Afghans into cities where they lived in glorified plastic bags. Similarly, there is little memory of the precious infants who froze to death in the unnamed camps north of Idlib, Syria, along the Turkish border. The parents of these children went from tent to tent over a decade, trying desperately to find a stable life. Some of their children froze to death; other families perished as their dangerous heaters in these plastic tents set their entire families on fire.

Wars on Civilians

War zones are no longer places where combatants fight each other. They have become charnel houses for civilians, and entire populations taken hostage and brutalized. In May 2024, before the full toll of the Israeli genocide had been measured, the UN Secretary-General provided a report to the Security Council on civilian deaths. The data is stunning:

The United Nations recorded at least 33,443 civilian deaths in armed conflicts in 2023, a 72 percent increase as compared with 2022. The proportion of women and children killed doubled and tripled, respectively, as compared with 2022. In 2023, 4 out of every 10 civilians killed in conflicts were women, and 3 out of 10 were children. Seven out of 10 recorded deaths occurred in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, making it the deadliest conflict for civilians in 2023.

The number regarding the Occupied Palestine Territory includes the Israeli violence from October to December 2023, but not the violence that intensified across the entirety of 2024. Those numbers will come later this year.

A look backward at the post-9/11 Western wars on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen shows the bleakness of the general attitude toward civilians in these parts of the world. The direct deaths from the bombs and the gunfire have been calculated to be nearly one million, an enormous underestimation but still a very large number. Adding in excess deaths, including from starvation and hypothermia, the toll is calculated to be nearing five million, also an underestimation but at least indicative of the impact on these parts of the world.

On August 29, 2021, two U.S. MQ-9 Reapers hovered over a white Toyota Corolla that had pulled into a parking area of a multi-family home in Kabul’s working-class Khwaja Burgha neighborhood. The U.S. drone operators, who had tracked the car for the past eight hours, watched as a man left the car, as a group of people came to greet him, and as one person took out a black bag from the rear seat of the car. At that point, the U.S. decided to fire a hellfire missile at the man and the people around him. They were all killed. It turned out that the man, Zemari Ahmadi, was not a member of the enemy group ISIS-K, but was an employee of a California-based non-governmental organization called Nutrition and Education International (NEI). The people who came to greet him from inside the house were his children, grandchildren, and their cousins. The black bag, which the U.S. claimed might have had explosives, carried a laptop from NEI, and another bag carried water bottles. The secondary explosion that the operators saw on their video feed was not from a bomb but from a propane tank in the carport.

The list of people killed by the United States on that day should give one pause because of the youth of so many of them: Zemari Ahmadi (age 43), Naser Haidari (age 30), Zamir (age 20), Faisal (age 16), Farzad (age 10), Arwin (age 7), Benyamen (age 6), Malika (age 6), Ayat (age 2), and Sumaya (age 2). This is the last U.S. drone strike before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not one U.S. soldier was charged with the murder, let alone found guilty. Not one Israeli soldier will be charged or found guilty of the deaths of the Palestinian children in Gaza. This is the impunity that defines the assault on civilians, including those little Palestinian babies freezing to death in their blue tents, lying beside desperate parents.

This article was produced by Globetrotter

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Morris Mitchell as Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka. New York City, October, 2024. (YouTube screenshot)

On the last Sunday of this past October, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest broke out in Washington Square Park in New York City. Dozens of participants and thousands of onlookers thronged to the event and when, in the midst of the proceedings, the famed actor himself appeared the throng went into paroxysms of ecstasy. Seemingly equipped with endless stores of good humor, good looks, and God-given talent, Chalamet made his way through the roiling sea of admirers and impersonators and let himself be photographed with the winner, Miles Mitchell, who had come costumed as Chalamet as Willy Wonka, the title role assumed by the actor in the latest movie remake devoted to the campy chocolatier.

Public spaces should welcome events that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, as well as those that careen off that vast spectrum into the surreal and subversive. The mindless enthusiasm of that Afternoon in the Park with Timmy comes into telling relief when we recall that so many historic protests—from suffragette rallies to anti-war, civil rights and labor demonstrations—have taken place in the shadow of Washington Square’s triumphal arch. Alerted to the look-alike pageant conducted without a permit, the NYPD arrived to disperse the mob, even carting off at least one contestant in handcuffs.

Not even the apocalypse excites like celebrity, except maybe when it is brought face-to-face with its simulacrum.

The mad appeal of this competition of appearances derives from its in-person-ness. Thanks to AI and other forms of techno-trickery, images, people and facts are now rampantly faked on screens of all sizes, not to mention goggles, glasses and headsets. Holographic Cary Grants can be made to smooch with holographic Michael Jacksons. A digital waxwork Jimmy Carter can rise from his Capitol coffin to tickle an ersatz Shah, not an impersonator per se, but a by-the-numbers dictator resplendent in 3D. Yet at the time of writing, there is still no substitute for the presence of real people—for a star’s charisma and a worshipper’s scream and shudder.

Notwithstanding Washington Square’s status as a vital site of protest, it was strangely appropriate that this recent eruption of fandom took place there. The park is in Greenwich Village, the main location for the early 1960s rise to fame of the young Bob Dylan that is depicted in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which had concluded shooting in June. The movie premiered on Christmas Day, two months after the Chalamet look-alike jamboree.

Revisited after the release of Mangold’s Dylan biopic, the Washington Square hijinks reveal that Mitchell-as-Chalamet looks more like Dylan than Chalumet-as-Dylan does. The Russian doll dance-and-shell-game also sheds light on the sometimes curious ways of biopics, especially musical ones.

Mitchell was blessed with the more Dylan-like nose. Chalamet’s aquiline exemplar was thought by the filmmakers to require prosthetic enhancement. This fake nose was not nearly as massive and distracting as the cinematic schnozzes previously fitted onto Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro or Nicole Kidman as Virginia Wolf in The Hours. Even with his bespoke Bob-beak, Chalumet would never be mistaken for the real McCoy from Minnesota.

There are also ways of doing a nose job on the singing voice and the guitar-playing appendages. In Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace, the flashy pianist-entertainer’s hands were grafted by CGI onto Michael Douglass’s arms. These Las Vegas keyboard antics were utterly convincing on screen.

Chalamet, by contrast, does the singing and strumming himself, and has been garnering richly deserved plaudits for his performance of the Dylan tunes heard in A Complete Unknown. Mangold’s project had been planned before the pandemic, and the musically untrained Chalamet diligently set to work learning the guitar and etching his voice into Dylanesque texture. Delayed by Covid, Chalamet continued to work up his musical chops and learn his Dylan songs before the project went into production last year.

Having to watch fake riffs on a mute keyboard or violin can be as off-putting as an actor lipsynching songs to the real artist’s recordings since the speaking voice can be heard in the singing one, and vice-versa. The disparity between the spoken and sung word can become irritating to the point of distraction. But even with the voice, digital technology can be deployed to correct pitch or, in the present case, could have Dylan-ified the core Chalamet sonority, roughening the timbral grain, tweaking the nasal quality already aided and abetted by prosthesis.

Yet even the admirable program of musical skill-building undertaken by Chalamet, however impressive, can only fall short of its model. Adding to the confusion, there are scads of Dylan tribute bands out there with frontmen who are better musicians and mimics than Chalamet, even if they lack his star power.

Another way of querying the ontological difference between meticulously covering a song and acting a part is to wonder whether Chalamet-look-alike Mitchell can act that role as well as Chalamet can play and sing like Dylan. Lacking the celebrity brand, at least for now, maybe Mitchell has music in him too. He’s certainly got the Dylan look down, even if he was trying to be Chalamet in another guise.

It is a lot easier to strum your way through Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” delivered a few times by Chalamet in the film, than it is to toss off a Chopin Polonaise à la Liberace. In the hierarchy of technical challenges in music, learning a few chords is relatively easy as a musical task. That very accessibility allowed so many people to join in the folk music renaissance of the 1950s, the movement that helped birth Dylan’s art.

The Chalamet nose only approximates Dylan’s and the same is true for his guitar-playing. What so many movie directors seem to forget is that the hands are as expressive as the face, that mirror of emotion so fetishized by the Hollywood close-up. I don’t mean to be cruel about Chalamet’s musical efforts: he can indeed play and sing and it is fun to hear and watch him do so, even if his contorted left hand lacks the supple surety of Dylan’s and his right is sometimes hesitant and irregular in its strummings and occasional pickings.

Just arrived on the East Coast from Minnesota, Dylan makes his way early on in the film to Woody Guthrie’s hospital room in New Jersey to find Pete Seeger (done with quavering nobility by Ed Norton in the film’s best performance) there as well. Woody is rendered mute by a debilitating disease, but Seeger asks Dylan to play something and the complete unknown duly serves up “Song to Woody.” It’s a poignant, if fabricated, scene and an affecting performance by Chalamet, not least because one can hear and see the effort. The scene becomes not so much a magisterial demonstration of the power of method acting, but of meta-acting, a gifted actor demonstrating that he has put in the time and has the talent to pay tribute to Dylan analogously to the gifts that Dylan himself, at a much higher level of musicianship, has brought with him on this pilgrimage to meet his stricken idol.

A Complete Unknown is filled with music, and one is sincerely thankful for the screen time given it by Mangold, and for the practice time taken by Chalamet to get to where he has gotten. But the film’s welcome concentration on performance and its reenactment (if in occasionally jumbled chronology) means that character development and the human relationships that should give the drama life and originality are reduced to set-piece moments of caddish unfaithfulness, narcissistic posturing, the Oedipal collision between father-figure Seeger and his renegade progeny, Dylan, who (hardly a spoiler) electrocutes the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 at the film’s overcooked climax. These amplifications and distortions of history accord with the imperatives of the Hollywood biopic, and the music is asked to carry the larger themes of genius and generational conflict but also to speak—to sing—for itself.

The film’s real problem, however, is not just that the fingers are as telling as the face, but that the moving, sounding images of the real Dylan are so ubiquitous in documentaries and recordings, much of this material instantly accessible on the internet. In the look-alike and sound-alike contest staged by A Complete Unknown, Dylan, forever young in black-and-white footage, beats Chalamet, hands and nose down, voice thrown to the wind.

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Photograph Source: Thomas J. O’Halloran – Public Domain

Jimmy Carter’s body has been interned after a century of energetic engagement on the earth’s surface. But his legacy remains debated as observed in legions of overviews on his legacy published this past week. Some see him as an idealist lacking humanity’s foibles nonetheless necessary to properly govern people less earnest than himself. Many on the left see him inaugurating the neoliberal era with his deregulatory economic agenda, while conservatives view him as the harbinger of massive inflation and economic malaise. Meanwhile, on foreign policy front, liberals saw him as re-introducing values into foreign policy, while those on the right thought him soft and failing to use the US’s iron fist to advance American interests. Instead, we might view his actions through a Black Swan set of economic events only radical solutions could have addressed while succumbing to pressure from Cold War Democrat hawks that shifted foreign policy in ways creating geopolitical instability up to the present.

Running the world in the Cold War was not for the pure of heart. From the “scientific management” of war meted out in Vietnam by former Ford Motor’s President Robert McNamara as Secretary of State, to the assassinations and overthrow of democracies by the CIA as exposed by Senator Frank Church’s Commission, to the deviousness of power exposed by the Watergate hearings on the Nixon Administration shown daily on television in 1973, it was an ugly ride. Many Americans wished for renewal following this period. And it seemed to arrive, as it only could in the US, by calling up Frank Capra’s central casting for a Norman Rockwell figure coming to full immerse Baptize America anew and to wish away its sins. In short, Jimmy Carter, the Plains, Georgia engineer, farmer, intellectual and preacher, but no snob, arrived on the “set” in 1976.

Labor wanted a reboot of the New Deal from Carter, but instead got a raw deal. The 1970s were the opposite side of the long economic cycle that began a half-century earlier in the 1920s that culminated in the New Deal. The interwar period, out of which the New Deal was born, was marked by under-consumption by workers. In the 1970s, the opposite, as post-WW II gains for labor shifted in the post-WW II era to more of the economy’s output going from wealth to income (wages). This period saw workers getting roughly 10 percent more of the economy’s output as labor does now. In short, there was much room in the 1930s to address the economic crisis through boosting wages and increasing industrial investment. By the 1970s, this was no longer the case. This time saw manufacturing over-capacity and the Black Swan stagflation event of the energy crisis. Under these 1970’s conditions, an expanded New Deal like industrial policy could not be accomplished with Keynesianism (government spending that also retained capitalist profits).  

The Brits were the first to offer the alternative of doubling down on infrastructural investment/modernization before Carter was even elected. The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, James Callaghan, argued for this in 1976. The AFL-CIO suggested it for the US in 1979 but were rebuked by Carter. It might have worked, but it would have required crossing the line from Keynesianism to socialism, or quite close to it (which I support), given the erosion of profit levels that would have ensued. As smart as Carter was, he was not equipped by training nor inclination nor class background to go that route.

James Callaghan, as referenced above, however, was going to try this more radical fix to the then crisis that would have arguably crossed from Keynesianism into socialism. Callaghan was going to launch a massive modernization of industry program to escape the crisis through increasing productivity. Problem was how to pay for it? The new burdens of a 300% increase in oil from 1973 were budget-busting. The answer was to get the International Monetary Fund (IMF) money. William Simon, President Gerald Ford’s Treasury Secretary, paid PM Simon a visit to say, paraphrasing, “No way, Jose. Your investment solution will exacerbate the already existing crisis of manufacturing overcapacity thus worsening the already existing crisis of corporate profitability. Return to your ‘comparative advantage’ of banking (especially offshore), or you get no IMF money to pay for oil this winter.” Callahan folded. What choice did he have?

In 1979, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO proposed an industrial policy similar in direction to Callaghan’s. This was the Reindustrialization Financing Corporation that would combine private and public money with union pension funds to modernize US industry. Labor’s proposal was nixed, however, by Carter’s economic advisors that already settled into their deregulatory path and were keen on keeping government budgets going too far into the red. Francois Mitterrand in France was the last to this pivot to investment direction but was crushed by a capital strike (when big business withholds money and starves the economy).

During this 1970s crisis the Trilateral Commission (TC) exercised their influence on policy directions as they formed a new consensus among capital. The TC represented figures making up the faction of elites that previously backed FDR; capital-intensive industries whose profits came from investments more than from labor-intensive older industries (e.g., National Association of Manufacturer types) where low wages and low taxes delivered profits. By 1975, the TC decided, contra failed Democratic Party candidate Al Smith’s 1928 maxim that the “cure for the ills democracy was more democracy” had reached its limits as an instrument for maximizing stability. Elite opinion in the TC now argued (activism and electoral) by the 1970s we had overdosed on democracy and it now generated instability that had to be rolled back. Samuel Huntington’s TC work group concluded this in their 1975 report entitled The Crisis of Democracy claiming democracy needed “downsizing.”

But there was not yet consensus in the TC on how to deal with the economic crisis as it unfolded in the early 1970s . Carter in the first half of his presidency tried a Keynesian “locomotive” strategy where US spending would pull it and West Europe out of the slump. This failed. By 1978 this pushed elite opinion toward the direction of restoring macro-economic stability, or austerity rather than investment to restore the economy. The massive 1978 oil shock added further fuel to implement this austerity solution. As we know, labor was expected to pay most of the cost and under Reagan following Carter, workers paid all the freight of the economic rebalancing under their supply-side austerity policies.

Carter was, in essence, a friendlier/nicer version of Margaret Thatcher, with the economic outlook of them both shaped by the small business environment out of which they emerged (the grocer’s daughter and peanut farmer). Carter differed from the Iron Lady in also being a “Naderist” (Ralph), thinking that anti-corruption and halting price gouging and rent-seeking of various types were needed for restoring economic vitality. Of course, Naderist reforms were helpful (and normatively good), but insufficient for achieving this policy goal of fixing the 1970’s crisis. Carter’s paternalistic outlook as a protestant preacher linking sacrifice (austerity) and piety were also unhelpful. Labor was shafted and handed the first bar tab for system reform, for which fully developed neoliberalism would dump even more bills for workers to pay.

Where Carter exercised real agency, rather than being pushed by the underlying logic of late-stage Keynesianism matched by the Black Swan event of the oils shock, was on foreign policy. The critical event was his pressure to appease Cold War hawk Democrats by appointing Zbigniew Brzezinski (ZB) as National Security Advisor. ZB was frequently sidelined in the first half of Carter’s Administration with Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State mostly shaping a more liberal and less interventionist foreign policy. Carter, however, finally bowed to right-wing pressure and permitted ZB in 1979 to implement his Afghani scheme in support of the Mujahideen. This was transformative. Designed to get the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan to give the Soviets “their own Vietnam” (as ZB put it), it set the table for radical Islamic terrorism to flourish up to the present, while also working to break up the Soviet and then Russian “empires.” This policy echoes into the present in our renewed Cold War. Permitting Brzezinski to take the reins of foreign policy in 1979 was nothing short of the difference that history might have taken if Henry Wallace had been allowed to remain FDR’s VP, rather than his replacement by Truman and the influence that hawk Secretary of State James Byrnes exercised over US foreign policy shaping the Cold War.

In short, Carter had little agency to fix the 1970’s economic crisis. He could have chosen the massive investment drive that would have in effect made the US a near socialist economy (a choice your author would support). That, however, was risky and would not comport with Carter’s outlook or grasp of economics. By contrast, Carter had greater latitude to constrain Zbigniew Brzezinski’s foreign policy adventures but bowed to political pressures late in his presidency to shift right and with it delivering a legacy of geopolitical instability that remains with us today.

Marxist historian and first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, argued that anti-slavery really wasn’t much of “thing” among Europe’s ruling and middle classes before 1800. While imperfect as an analogy, before the 19^thcentury one might as a slave prefer living under the rule by the most enlightened slave owner rather than the worst sadists among those presiding over that institution. Given the prevailing class relations of the 1970s, Carter’s small business farming background and being a pastor, his actions on policy were both predictable and one can argue his intentions noble and as observed, better than what followed him even if he opened the path for neoliberalism.

Future policy progressive change by policymakers will require an intellectual anchoring in political economy. While Carter’s undeniable (to my mind) extraordinary humanity is admirable, and qualities we should seek for officeholders, absent a command of political economy and grasp of class relations, we should not expect better outcomes than obtained by Carter’s rule in his four years as President during the crisis of the 1970s.

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The logo for the Department of Government Efficiency as of November 14, 2024 – Public Domain

Apparently unbeknownst to my Republican friends, the effort to cut ‘government waste’ has a long, bipartisan, history in the US. While Republicans point to Ronald Reagan as the original budget chide, the Federal budget deficit doubled under Reagan (graph below). It was Democrat Bill Clinton who last ‘balanced the budget,’ a feat that was rapidly followed by a deep and lasting recession. And Joe Biden dedicated his career to cutting Social Security, Medicare and Veteran’s benefits.

Graph: despite his rhetoric, Ronald Reagan was unable to make meaningful headway in ‘resolving’ the Federal budget deficit. The deficit was larger when Mr. Reagan left office than when he entered. It was Bill Clinton who achieved a brief surplus, just before the US economy entered a deep and lasting recession. That Clinton isn’t a hero of the Reaganites is significantly explained by Republicans having no knowledge of this history. Source: cato.org.

Over the years, US Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, Biden, and now Trump, have all paid fealty to the canard of ‘living within our means.’ Note the partisan bias in this list of names: there is none. Bill Clinton even hallucinated an entire ‘market’ theory of fiscal austerity, the ‘bond vigilantes,’ suggesting that God, via markets, is deeply concerned about American fiscal probity.

The term ‘efficiency’ reeks of moral fiber, of rectitude, of a capacity to do basic budgetary arithmetic. It appeals to Max Weber’s Protestant ethos of capitalism, to modesty, thrift, and decency toward the world. However, as with the inexorable logic of arithmetic, what is counted is a matter of what gets counted, and not ‘the math’ per se. When bodies start to pile up from this policy or that, the social violence soon enough becomes difficult to contain.

Through siloed discourse, few political conservatives know that Barack Obama structured his signature program, the ACA (Affordable Care Act, Obamacare), using the same capitalist principles that Elon Musk is currently espousing. Mr. Obama’s goal was to make the American healthcare system better by making it ‘more capitalist.’ With health insurers currently in the news for denying legitimate claims at rates suggestive of looting, the ACA is indeed capitalist. One’s view on whether this is a good thing likely depends on whether one is an insurer, or the insured.

What ‘efficiency’ has meant in the case of the ACA is that executive compensation has been raised through health insurers denying legitimate claims— nearly without restraint. The rollout of the ACA has been accompanied by a catastrophic rise in ‘excess deaths,’ of Americans dying from preventable causes that wouldn’t have if the ACA ‘worked.’ That Democrats consider the program a success suggests that making executives rich by killing large numbers of Americans was their intent.

Graph: compared against a benchmark of life expectancy data for peer nations, the graph illustrates relative life expectancy in the US to be below that of peer-nations in 1980, the year that Ronald Reagan was elected. The decline continued after 1980. Americans currently live five fewer years than the citizens of peer nations. Throughout history, governments have been toppled for less egregious outcomes. But none of the architects of the current system are being held to account for this catastrophe. Source: healthsystemtracker.org.

In practice, capitalist efficiency is treated as an optimization problem dependent upon a chosen goal. If efficiency means getting more from less, the question becomes: more of what? While the concept of efficiency implies a physical optimization, e.g. producing four toaster ovens using the same quantum of inputs previously used to produce three toaster ovens, in practice, the capitalist goal is to maximize corporate profits, a monetary measure. And here is where it becomes political.

Suddenly the problems of physical optimization, of optimizing around physical constraints, is broadened to include capitalist social organization in its method. If a five-percent rate of profit can be earned from producing toaster ovens, but a ten-percent return is expected from buying a stock index fund, the optimal solution based on the goal of maximizing profits is to stop making toaster ovens and invest the proceeds in the stock index fund.

However, if every manufacturer of toaster ovens does this, toaster ovens will soon be hard to come by and stock prices overvalued. Further, selling off the assets of a toaster oven manufacturer to raise the money needed to buy the stock index fund is expensive, cumbersome, and time consuming. And if enough manufacturers follow this strategy, the market for toaster oven manufacturing equipment will be flooded and prices will plummet.

The question then is: how does the common-sense view of efficiency as frugality, as producing as much as one can within the limits of what one has, shift to the realm of social relations where frictions and the set of available opportunities are both changeable and moveable? The ‘innovation’ of money renders liquid, or transactable, the social aspects of economic production in a way that physical quanta will never be.

The pushback against DOGE here isn’t reflexive. Many Americans likely share the view that much of what the Federal government does shouldn’t be done. For instance, why are the FBI and CIA interfering in US elections? Why is the US funding and arming Israel? Ukraine? Why is the Federal government militarizing the police by producing military ‘surplus’ to supply them with? And why is oligarchy the only choice on the ballot?

Graph: the US has the highest ‘defense’ expenditures in the world by several multiples. If capitalism is efficient, why isn’t the US spending less on defense than non-capitalist countries? The answer: that through supporting 800 US military bases abroad, we buy a lot more of it, begs the question, why? For three centuries Fortress America, being sandwiched between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, has meant that the US should spend far less on its defense than other nations. But the opposite has been the case. Source: statista.com.

In terms of national accounts, one person’s ‘waste’ (e.g. Pentagon budget) is another person’s paycheck. What this means is that 1) budget battles produce winners and losers and 2) the gains go to the winners, and not to ‘the nation.’ And Elon Musk is a poster child for dependence on Federal handouts. Not only do ‘his’ companies receive direct transfers from the Federal government (link below), but much of Musk’s wealth comes from two Federal bailouts of Wall Street.

Historically, austerity policies have found industrialists arguing that Federal subsidies to nominally private enterprises (such as Tesla and SpaceX) are ‘efficient,’ while social spending is ‘waste.’ This view is based in / on the web of related theories that constitute capitalist economics. As with earlier efforts, fans of austerity leap from local examples to global conclusions without apparently understanding that the economic logic doesn’t tie to the political conclusions drawn.

Soon after entering office, Ronald Reagan cut taxes and social spending while increasing military spending. Assessments of the policy are complicated by Paul Volcker’s, Jimmy Carter’s Chair of the Federal Reserve, effort to strangle the economy with sky-high interest rates. What Reagan did manage to prove was John Maynard Keynes’ theory that increasing Federal spending in an economic downturn (military Keynesianism) would boost the economy (top graph in this piece).

Graph: within the terms of his own economic program, Ronald Reagan’s policies of cutting taxes while increasing Federal defense spending significantly ‘worsened’ the Federal budget deficit. This is partly due to the fact that the theory that cutting taxes increases government revenues (‘Laffer curve’) was never scaled because it is an ideological argument, not empirical. The similar terms being laid out by Trump in the present— a wider war in the Middle East while Federal domestic expenditures are cut, will yield similar results. The point: deferring to Reagan’s actual policy results is a loser for supporters of DOGE. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Note: this is not how Reagan and his supporters explained their results. The theory that cutting both taxes and social spending raises economic output was born. However, this conclusion is roughly analogous to writing a review of the play at which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated without mentioning the assassination. The facts come in pieces here. Cutting taxes and social spending work in opposite directions economically, not the same.

The theory that cutting taxes boosts economic output has empirical support, but not for the reasons that proponents claim. Cutting taxes boosts consumption, depending on the ‘propensity to consume,’ by leaving more money in the hands of consumers, and not by shifting economic production from government to ‘private’ enterprise. By analogy, Medicare is more ‘efficient’ than private health insurance in terms of both managing costs and producing good health outcomes. Medicare is a program of the Federal government. The point: the question of ‘efficiency’ isn’t answered by ‘government versus capital’ framing.

(MMT— Modern Monetary Theory, has a very different explanation of the relationship between taxes and economic output that readers with an interest would do well to acquaint themselves with).

This distinction is important because the result of DOGE, to the extent there is any, will be to privatize government functions for the benefit of oligarchs and Wall Street. For instance, NASA, the space agency of the US, has essentially outsourced the US space program to Elon Musk (and Jeff Bezos) under the theory that they can run it more efficiently than NASA can. But basic arithmetic argues against this theory.

Private enterprise must earn a rate of profit that the Federal government doesn’t in order to legitimate the social distribution of income and wealth. If the rate of profit is, say, 6%, this is 6% more that ‘private’ providers must earn to break even with Federal results. The US DoD (Department of Defense) actually offers ‘cost-plus contracts’ to guarantee private military contractors a rate of profit.

So, which is more efficient, for the Federal government to produce military equipment itself, to pay contractors to do so with a guaranteed rate of profit, or to put the question to ‘markets?’ There is no generic answer to the question. Each instance requires defining the intended outcome and estimating costs and methods. With the experience of Medicare in hand, there is no generic guarantee that the private solution is the most ‘efficient.’

The private health insurance ‘solution’ inflicted on the US has produced the worst outcomes amongst peer nations (see graph of life expectancy above) by a margin so wide that it should disprove the fantasy of capitalist efficiency from this moment forward. That Americans don’t know how bad these outcomes are suggests that the powers that be do know how bad they are. There is no benefit for Democrats from making these results known. And the only ‘private’ solution for Republicans (more capitalism) will produce even worse results than the Democrats have achieved.

Chart: airlines are considered here because they were amongst the first industries to have their public purpose shifted from transporting people to earning profits. When Jimmy Carter began deregulating transportation infrastructure in the late 1970s, the measure of industry efficiency was the number of people transported safely from one place to another. In this way, shifting the metric of concern from people to profits was political. With the current ratio of CEO-to-worker pay of 268:1, firms could instantly increase their ‘efficiency’ by firing their C-suites and replacing them with lower cost alternatives. Source: multiple.

Reagan’s economic thesis, tied to capitalist theory, had it that Federal spending is wasteful because of incentives. Question: why would private enterprise be more efficient than government? Both are structured hierarchically, meaning that they feature executives giving direction to the workers ‘below’ them. The capitalist theory is that ‘incentives’ motivate better outcomes. So, why not give incentives to government workers? Wouldn’t doing so ‘equalize’ them with private industry?

Giving Federal workers performance bonuses has actually been tried. Some Federal workers receive performance bonuses equal to up to 10% of base pay. But the real bonuses are paid when regulators and legislators leave government to take jobs with the corporations that they formerly regulated. These ‘revolving door’ jobs are limited to senior managers, suggesting a fungible, class-based, economy separate from the experience of, and outside of the purview of, rank-and-file workers.

Ironically, of sorts, coincident with this ‘revolution’ in economic understanding that people require incentives to give their employment their all has been a five-decade-long effort to reduce the economic incentives paid to labor (graph below). The result: it now takes two working adults to earn what one working adult earned (in inflation-adjusted dollars) a generation ago, leaving no one to raise children or maintain the household.

Graph: how can Western economists proclaim the importance of financial incentives to capitalist production when they don’t apply to 90% of American workers? The average variable, or incentive, pay in the US in 2024 was 9.6%. But this conflates the experience of executives earning 400% of their base pay in bonuses with workers receiving 3%. Source: inequality.org.

Another question to ask: what type of behavior does incentive pay motivate? Brian Thompson, the recently deceased CEO of United Healthcare, was paid large bonuses to kill ‘his’ customers by denying their legitimate insurance claims. The point: in the case of United Healthcare, capitalist ‘incentives’ legitimated the killing of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of the firm’s ‘customers.’ So, why isn’t health insurer efficiency measured in life hours saved (graph below) rather than corporate profits?

Do incentives work in terms of big picture efficiency? In 2014, the year that the ACA was implemented, Americans lived 3.5 fewer years than did the citizens of peer nations. In 2022— eight years later, we live five fewer years than do the citizens of peer nations. Health insurance industry profits rose, executive compensation increased, and Americans have died at rates only seem in history in full-blown societal collapses (chart below). So no, the ACA goal of raising executive compensation has produced worse health outcomes, not better.

Chart: despite the ACA having been implemented six years before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the US had the worst mortality rate amongst peer nations by several multiples. With the arrival of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, fifty-percent again more Americans died under Biden over a similar time period than died under Trump. This point is made because Biden recently shoveled hundreds of millions more in Federal largesse into the health insurers, apparently as compensation for killing more Americans than all US wars combined have. Source: healthsystemtracker.org.

The point here is likely different than imagined. The point is that economic ‘efficiency’ depends on what the chosen objective is. If raising health insurance industry profits and executive compensation was / is the objective, then the ACA is an inspiring success. Government works! If the objective was to improve health outcomes for the people, this has not occurred. (Send me your evidence. I’m glad to debate this). But neither objective was handed down from God. Either is a social choice.

Early evidence for this conclusion can be found in the Republican debate over h-1b visas. Tesla employs about a thousand h-1b visa holders. Elon Musk is the Grand Poobah of Tesla. Musk maintains that the program allows Tesla to import skilled workers. However, as with the ACA and the health insurance industry, there is a history of large, industrial employers and contracting firms using the h-1b program to steal wages from workers. The point: when left to employers, robbing employees and customers enters quickly as an option.

My Republican friends argue that the ACA is ‘communist’ or ‘communistic’ without considering that if this is true of healthcare spending, it is also true of military spending. What they mean is that the ACA provides undeserving people with something for nothing. With the evidence from United Healthcare in hand, health insurance on which 30% – 40% of claims go unpaid is a lottery ticket, not insurance. The beneficiaries of the ACA are, again, health insurers and their executives. The proof: ‘excess’ deaths are through the roof, along with health insurer profits and executive compensation.

Graph: while the group represented in the graph is relatively narrow, white males between the ages of 45 – 64, the results are broadly representative of American political economy. Following the onset of the Great Recession in late 2008 or thereabouts, Federal bailouts revived the economic fortunes of the urban bourgeois. This, as the not-connected who live outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley were left to their own devices. As mortality rates for the newly bailed-out urbanites were plummeting, they rose for every other segment of the population. The link provides details for the broader population. Source: nih.org

From Reagan forward the Pentagon budget has been a rallying point for demands for government ‘efficiency,’ if not quite in the way currently imagined. The point of confusion appears to be the units of concern, ‘individuals,’ versus ‘the nation.’ This can be rectified easily enough by putting military spending in terms of individual benefit. The per capita (person) Pentagon budget for 2024 is a tad over $2,200. This means that for a family of four, Mom, Dad and two kids, the annual Federal outlay for the Pentagon is $8,800.

Conceiving the Pentagon in the same way that the ACA is, as Federal outlays paid per individual for their own personal benefit, finds that $2,200 per person per year is paid. Recall, the ACA benefit, to the extent there is any, isn’t ‘paid’ to individuals. It is paid to health insurers, much as the Pentagon budget is distributed to MIC suppliers and contractors, not to citizens. Question: why would someone who is undeserving of healthcare be deserving of national defense?

Further, the US hasn’t ‘won’ a war since WWII. And in that case, it was the Russians (Soviets) who won WWII. If efficiency at the Pentagon is graded by how many wars the US has won since WWII, the grade is F. What then is the correct measure of ‘efficiency’ when it comes to national defense? The number of wars won? The destructive power created per dollar spent. The political state of the West? The answer depends on one’s interests. So. What are Trump’s / Musk’s interests with respect to the Pentagon? SpaceX? The US?

The mutual disdain that the political parties in the US are able to generate and maintain is a product of the differentiated material realities that are supported by differentiated discourses (graph above). When the US entered economic crisis around 2008, bailouts of the malefactors were quickly organized, leading those whose livelihoods were tied to Wall Street to quick recovery. The heavily subsidized US tech industry also quickly recovered. But this hasn’t been the case for the other 80% – 90% of Americans (graph above).

The analogy of the Federal budget to either a corporate or family budget is flawed for very basic reasons. The Federal government has the legal authority to create money. Corporations and households don’t. For example, should a family want to buy a car, it can pay for the car from savings or borrow the money to buy it. What it cannot legally do is ‘print’ the money needed to buy the car. The same is true, with some differences, for state and local governments and corporations.

My Republican friends argue that ‘money printing’ is in all cases counterproductive. But the actual risk of inflation is contextual—it depends on resource constraints, not simply on economic demand. Barack Obama ‘printed’ somewhere around $19 trillion USD to bail out Wall Street in 2009. But most of this was never drawn down, meaning that it never entered the economy. Deflation was the problem that Obama / Ben Bernanke were trying to solve, not inflation. The point: even in the face of large-scale ‘money printing,’ inflation was restrained from 2009 – 2020.

Had Mr. Obama’s ‘stimulus’ and bailouts been inflationary is the sense of causing a rise in the price of a broad basket of goods and services, my Republican friends might have a point. But in fact, what was proved (chart below) is that large amounts of money can be added to a depressed economy without inflation taking hold. This was a fundamental insight of economist John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression. And it provided the theoretical justification for the Depression-era spending that eventually pulled the US out of the Great Depression.

Graph: despite the trillions in Federal largesse that Barack Obama delivered to Wall Street, inflation as measured by CPI was only 1.46% per year over Mr. Obama’s two terms. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Donald Trump clearly understood this when he promoted his $2.3 trillion pandemic relief program in 2020. Trump’s (and Biden’s) economic stimulus is widely blamed for the inflation that followed. However, corporate profits rose in lockstep with the rise in prices, meaning that producers were charging customers for price increases that they were not experiencing. Add this to health insurers killing their customers to earn larger bonuses and the social practice of capitalism is brought into the light.

For those who missed it, US Presidents have been promoting government ‘efficiency’ for five decades now. The result of those earlier efforts is the current state of the US. While ‘entrepreneurial’ spirits are applied to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Mr. Trump was born rich and Elon Musk owes almost all of his fortune to fortunate timing. Musk took Tesla public in 2010, just as Mr. Obama was doing everything in his power to raise stock prices. And Mr. Trump’s ‘pandemic relief’ is more accurately described as the ‘save the stock market Act of 2020.’

Graph: as a group, American billionaires have been the largest beneficiaries of Federal largesse in recent decades. Thanks in large measure to Federal contracts and Donald Trump’s Pandemic Relief bill, Elon Musk’s personal fortune grew twelve fold between 2017 and 2023. Should Musk’s percentage change in wealth impress, that Musk had less wealth in 2017 than the others (denominator effect) helps explain the difference. Source: americansfortaxfairness.org.

Recall that within capitalist explanations of income and wealth, skill and hard work are fundamental. In contrast, the wealth of American billionaires doubled after Donald Trump put his pandemic relief bill forward in 2020. How did the already rich in 2020 get already rich? They were already rich from when Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street in 2008. From 2008 – today, the best guarantee of getting richer has been to already be rich. This represents a rigged game, not returns to skill and hard work.

Partisan political frames detract from understanding American political economy. The current Republican conceit that Elon Musk is a radical here to shake up a moribund system misses that every President over the last five decades has made a similar pitch. And while economic predictions are notoriously difficult to get right, this is a guarantee: should DOGE get up and running, the rich will be made richer and the rest of us poorer. This isn’t because Trump and Musk are evil or singularly self-interested. It will because this is how the American economy has been set up to operate.

The people running the US continue to make the worst decisions in the history of bad decisions—for the rest of us. For themselves, the free money keeps on flowing. S&L Crisis? The rich got bailed out. GFC (global financial crisis)? The rich got bailed out. Stock market down because of the pandemic? The rich got bailed out. In each case ‘we’ were told that it was ‘the system’ that was being bailed out. But somehow the money always landed in the pockets of the looters, not the looted. The US is out of time to get this right. In the parlance of the age: sad.

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Photograph Source: David Wilson – CC BY 2.0

The Telegraph recently reported that ahead of President-Elect Donald Trump’s inauguration later this month, thousands of Haitian immigrants have already left or are planning to leave Springfield, Ohio. The Haitian community has been living in fear for months, and their flight could reverse some of the economic and social gains that the rust belt town has won by virtue of its immigrant community’s hard work and cultural contributions. What is happening in Springfield could be a harbinger in similar places once Trump occupies the Oval Office.

Springfield became a focus of attention last fall when candidate Trump, during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, made the false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating Springfield residents’ cats and dogs. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, later said that the stories were based on “first-hand accounts of my constituents.” He provided no evidence, and officials in Springfield have repeatedly stated that no pets went missing or ended up on rotisseries.

Unable to maintain his or his boss’s ridiculous claims any longer, Vance later changed tack and said that inventing stories about immigrants was perfectly fine as long as they brought attention to how American towns suffer at the hands of pernicious migrants.

Their xenophobic remarks had predictable results. Members of Springfield’s Haitian community were immediately subjected to threats of violence and acts of vandalism. At a city council meeting, a local resident and vocal white supremacist, Drake Berentz, said, “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you are doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” Police removed him from the meeting. There is no program to import migrants.

Also, in the wake of Trump and Vance’s accusations, more than thirty bomb threats were made to city agencies, forcing repeated school closures and event cancellations. Haitian parents and guardians reported that even on all-clear days, they were hesitant to send their children to school, and some people complained to police about numerous acts of vandalism and property damage.

Members of the Haitian diaspora in Springfield are in the United States legally, and many are beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) provisions, which Trump has vowed to abolish. TPS means that foreign nationals may remain and work in the United States if civil conflict or natural disasters in their home countries are so dire that their lives could be at risk if they return. Haiti is currently in a state of social chaos, and violence there has dramatically spiked. Trump insists that they should be sent back.

The case of Springfield also demonstrates the falsity of the Republican Party’s claims about the causal connection between migrants and crime. Vance maintained that Haitians drove the murder rate up in Springfield by 80 percent based on the difference between the number of homicide cases in 2021 and 2023, when there were five and nine murders, respectively. However, the City of Springfield’s website states that Haitians are more likely to be the targets of crime, not the perpetrators of it. That fact generalizes in other parts of the country. However, Vance asserted that four more murders demonstrated a general trend. It does not.

According to Republican Clark County Prosecutor Daniel Driscoll, during his entire 20-year career in law enforcement, there has not been a single case of a Haitian who committed a murder in Springfield. Furthermore, the argument that Trump’s harsh immigration policies reduced crime and increased safety across the country do not bear scrutiny. FBI statistics show that more homicides occurred in Springfield under Trump than during the Obama or Biden administrations. In other words, immigration policy from the top has nothing to do with slight, statistically insignificant fluctuations in crime on the ground. One might as well blame it on the weather. Study after study has shown that higher-than-average concentrations of immigrants do not contribute to increased crime and might even lower it.

Haitians began moving to Springfield in 2017 because of plentiful employment opportunities and its low cost of living. Local labor shortages meant that their work was sorely needed, and their tax dollars have helped fill city coffers for a range of necessary services. Employers were pleased as Haitian men and women filled job vacancies. What is more, according to data cited in the Springfield News-Sun, $1 billion was generated in tax revenue in 2023, up from $864 million in 2022. These numbers represent a dramatic increase in funds available for city services. So, the addition of an estimated 15,000 people in less than a decade — who just happen to be from Haiti — became part of the fabric of the city and improved its economic fortunes. They worked hard, rented apartments, purchased homes, and started their own businesses, all of which enriched the life of a place that needed their skills.

Cities with sizable immigrant populations in red states could experience a similar outmigration to places that seem safer. In addition to Ohio, states like Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas are currently home to thousands of migrants who are paying close attention to threats emanating from the din of Trump’s rallies or wafting from his kitsch principality at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump and his circle would like to reverse the positive developments that immigration brings. Since the Grand Old Party offers extraordinarily little to ordinary people, the theater of keeping them safe from non-existent threats must continue for the sake of political expediency. They are perfectly willing to vilify people who never hurt anyone and evoke fear in millions of others. The results may well be a greater erosion of community bonds in places like Springfield and renewed economic downturns in other rust belt regions across the country that have significant immigrant populations.

Yet, there might be a method to this madness. Engineering greater fear, increasing social atomization, and creating more economic precarity translates to easier manipulation of voters.

More importantly, however, mass deportation to countries in the throes of violence could claim innocent lives.

It is up to us to resist that.

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Photo by Bernd Dittrich

In November, Álvaro Noboa, the father of Ecuador’s president Daniel Noboa, had a heart attack. He was hastily taken to a clinic in Guayaquil, his hometown, and then after he was stabilized, flown to a hospital in New York. Álvaro Noboa unsuccessfully ran for president five times (1998, 2002, 2006, 2009, and 2013), but it was his son who prevailed in 2023 at the age of 35. What defines the Noboa family is not political office, but the wealth of the Noboa Corporation. Grupo Noboa was formed out of Bananera Noboa S.A. set up in 1947 by Luis Noboa Naranjo, the grandfather of the current president. Bananera Noboa expanded, thanks to Álvaro, into the Exportadora Bananera Noboa, which is the heart of the Group’s billion-dollar empire in Ecuador (population 18 million, a third of whom live below an abysmally low poverty line). The name of the expanded firm has two words in it that describe the hold of the Noboa family on the Ecuadorian economy and on its political life: the export (exportadora) of bananas (bananera).

Banana Trade

Countries other than Ecuador produce a very large share of the world’s banana product. India produces more than a quarter of bananas, while China produces a tenth. But these are not banana-exporting countries because they have enormous domestic markets for bananas. More than 90 percent of the world’s exported bananas come from Central and South America as well as the Philippines. Ecuador, which only produces a little over 5 percent of the world’s banana produce, exports 95 percent of its production, making up 36 percent of the world’s exported bananas (Costa Rica is next at 15 percent). Grupo Noboa is Ecuador’s largest banana firm, and therefore one of the most important companies in the export of bananas globally. The largest importers of bananas are the European Union (5.1 million tons), the United States (4.1 million tons), and China (1.8 million tons). Europe and the United States have established suppliers in Central and South America (Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic), and neither experience major supply shortages.

China has faced problems from its major suppliers Cambodia and the Philippines (from which it procured 50 percent of its imported bananas). For instance, Cambodia has been wracked by El Niño, resulting in less precipitation, greater depletion of soil moisture, and an increase in pesticide resistance pests. Such a climate change phenomenon has damaged banana production in both Cambodia and the Philippines. This is the reason why Chinese importers have invested in expanding banana plantations in India and Vietnam, two emerging suppliers for the Chinese market. But there is no substitute for Ecuadorian bananas.

Chinese Market

Between 2022 and 2023, Ecuador’s exports of bananas to China increased by 33 percent. However, the problem with Ecuadorian bananas is that the journey from South America to China has increasedthe average import unit value to $690 per ton. This means that for the Chinese market bananas from Ecuador are 41 times more expensive than bananas from Vietnam. Over the past five years, the banana merchants of both China and Ecuador, and their governments, have tried to reduce the cost of the bananas for export to China.

First, the two countries signed a free trade agreement in May 2023 that ensured that 90 percent of the goods traded between the countries would be tariff-free and that any tariffs on bananas would be eliminated over the next decade. China is already Ecuador’s largest trading partner. It is expected that the Chinese firms will invest in processing and in the industrial production capacity within Ecuador so as to make products from the bananas before the fruit sets sail.

Second, the Chinese have been eager to cut the shipping time between South America and China, which means to ensure upgrades at ports at both ends. The Chinese government has upgraded both the Dalian Port in Liaoning Province and the Tianjin Port in Tianjin. Both of these ports are capable of running container ocean liners from dock to dock over twenty-five days, which is a week faster than other routes. The new Peruvian port in Chancay, built with Chinese investment, will enable goods from Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to travel very fast to and from China, while the upgraded Ecuadorian ports of Puerto Guayaquil and Puerto Bolívar already ensure rapid transit of goods from Ecuador. Meanwhile, the Colombian government and the Chinese government are considering the expansion of the port of Buenaventura and the building of a “dry canal” to link the Pacific (Buenaventura) and Atlantic (Cartagena) ports by a rail link; this would be a direct challenge to the Panama Canal, which is perhaps why Donald Trump made his speech about bringing that canal under direct U.S. control.

Third, the banana merchants on both sides of the Pacific have been working to upgrade their ports so that they are both storage facilities for cold chain products (such as fruits and vegetables) and light manufacturing so that value can be added to them through processing. With warehouses for refrigerated containers, there is less waste and greater haste in getting the goods ready for the long journey.

With European supermarkets enforcing a cut in banana prices, Central and South American exporters are keen to send their bananas to China. But this is not just about bananas.

Cold Banana War

The United States government has taken it as a personal affront that Chinese businesses and the Chinese state have been involved in economic activities in Latin America. In 2020, the United States blocked a Chinese firm from developing La Unión port on the Pacific Ocean in El Salvador. But this year, it was impossible to prevent Peru from participating in the $3.6 billion upgrade to the port of Chancay, also on the Pacific. In comparison, in May 2023, the United States pledged $150 million as a credit to upgrade the Turkish-run Yilport Terminal Operations at the Puerto Bolívar port in Ecuador. The arrival of expensive Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in South America is now a fact.

The U.S. government has only now begun to invest in its own ports (to the tune of $580 million promised in November 2024, a pittance compared to what is needed). In November 2023, the United States launched the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, whose intention is to contest China’s BRI in Latin America. However, the Partnership only has $5 million as an accelerator, which is an embarrassingly small amount of money. Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru—all three involved in the BRI projects—are members of the Partnership, but the gains they get from it are minimal.

The story seems to end where it always ends. Unable to compete on commercial grounds, the United States brings its cavalry to bear. President Noboa gave the U. S. permission to use the environmentally fragile Galapagos Islands as a military base to conduct surveillance in the area.

The Noboa family knows a thing or two about using force instead of conducting an honest negotiation. When workers from their plantations organized a union to fight for an end to child labor (documentedby Human Rights Watch) and to ensure that the Ecuadorian Constitution was honored, the Noboa corporation refused to engage with them. Twelve thousand workers at Los Álamos plantation struck on May 6, 2002. Ten days later, armed men went into the workers’ houses, detained the organizers, and tortured them (one was killed). They threatened the workers that if they did not stop the strike, they would put about 60 of them in a container and dump it into a nearby river. They shot at the workers, wounding many of them. Mauro Romero, whose leg had to be amputated, received nothing from his employers; it was the union that paid his bills. This was under the watch of President Noboa’s father and his minister of agriculture (Eduardo Izaguirre). But despite where the story appears to end, these men understand the current realities: they will trade with China, but give up part of their territory to the United States for a military base.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I haven’t written much about Gaza since the war started, for two main reasons. One, because everything is already so clear. Britain, America, Israel and their allies have decided to try to eliminate a resistant population in a strategically crucial region, and the rest of the world is either participating, acquiescing or wringing its hands. Everyone can see what is happening; what can I add of any value that is not already entirely obvious? And secondly, because attempts to impose sense on such a senseless situation feel crass. The situation is so intensely disturbing, even the simple act of putting it into words seems already to trivialise it. As the Chicago-based Palestinian journalist Ali Abinimah of Electronic Intifada put it early on in this latest phase of the war, “People come to us for analysis. I don’t know how to analyse this. I don’t know what to say to people.” Because the annihilation of Gaza is also a war against meaning.

Our ability to make and tell stories is what makes us human. That’s also how we deal with suffering and pain and loss. But stories have an arc; there is a return from the abyss. Terrible, tragic things happen, even things which we might never heal from, but people change and adapt and weave the terrible into the story of their life. People die, but their influence lives on, their memory is celebrated and valued by those who knew and loved them. People suffer but they learn something and grow from their experiences, somehow, however awful they are. ‘Your gift will come from your wound,’ as the storytellers say.

But the sheer relentless nature of the holocaust in Gaza means there is no story arc. There is no return from the abyss. The abyss just grows and keeps growing. People are killed but before they can be grieved or celebrated or woven into a story, everyone who knew them is slowly (or quickly) killed as well, whilst anyone left is focused on survival. There is no time to make sense of anything, and no sense to be had anyway. There is no ‘personal growth’ to be made from this horror.

Ahmed Alnaouq, founder of the Palestinian group, We Are Not Numbers, lost his father, five remaining siblings and all fourteen of their children to an Israeli airstrike on his father’s home two weeks into the war. A year later, he was commissioned by the New Arab to write an article about it. He later told the Electronic Intifada about the process of writing this article: “Ten years ago, Israel killed my brother, my older brother, and that was the first time I lost a family member. But writing a story about my brother back then, it was much easier than writing this story about my family.  And I think it’s because when you lose only one brother, when you only lose one family member, you know that your sadness, your agony, your pain is focused, is concentrated, you know what you are lamenting for, you know what you are crying for. You know what is very deeply painful to you – it is a brother. Ten years ago, when Israel killed my brother, I couldn’t forget about my brother: I imagined, I remembered all the stories that we had together, all the memories, all the pictures: and for me that was a relief, because I knew who I was sad for. But when you lose twenty-one members of your family ..  you could not know who you cry for. I didn’t know to think about my father or my brother or my other brother or my sisters or my nieces and nephews, the fourteen kids who I raised some of them. I was very distracted for the past year. And because I was very distracted I couldn’t think of one specific person, I couldn’t dare to think of one of them for the past year, I would always avoid talking about them, I would avoid going to whatsapp messages that I shared with one of them. It was very difficult and I purposely tried to avoid remembering them because if I remember them I will be one hundred times more depressed than I am.”

And this is part of the intention. Resistance movements are built on stories: of repression and suffering and heroism. Refaat Alareer understood this very well (see his beautiful Ted Talk, ‘Stories Make Us’, here). He was perhaps the single most important figure in terms of bringing Gazan voices to the English-speaking world, and had educated and inspired a whole generation of English-language journalists and authors in the strip. In one of several books of Gazan writing he edited, he wrote that “Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.” Israel wants to eradicate not only the Palestinians’ resistance and nation but also their ability to make sense of their situation. Hence the relentless killing of Gaza’s storytellers. Over 200 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel in the past fifteen months, many in openly targeted attacks. Just last week, a clearly marked press van was hit by an Israeli missile, burning alive all five of its occupants. Refaat Alareer himself was hunted down and killed along with several members of his family in a targeted strike on his sister’s apartment on December 6th 2023 (perhaps not coincidentally, just three days after the British RAF began flying surveillance flights over Gaza for the IDF). It was the third attempt on his life: his own apartment and University had both been hit earlier in the war.. Famously, his last poem, written to his daughter Shaima, began ‘If I must die, you must live, to tell my story.’ But she too was killed, along with her husband and their baby son, in an airstrike on their home a few months later.

Think about the alcoholism rife in aboriginal communities in Australia and North America. This reflects not simply degraded material conditions and opportunities, but the transformation of a worldview rich with deep meaning into one rendered senseless through colonial erasure.

And they want to do that to the rest of us as well; they don’t want anyone to be able to imbue the story and concept of ‘Palestine’ with any meaning. And it is not easy to see a way to resist this – attempts to render meaning to the struggle, in the midst of a senseless holocaust, come across too often as crass denials of reality, using Palestinian suffering as a raw material to fuel our own pontifications.  Even as I write this now, it feels like that.

The tragedy is, Israelis are committed to this path because of their own need for a sense of meaning. The Nazi Holocaust had this same effect on many Jews, destroying their ability to make meaning of their individual and collective lives. But Israel was presented as their happy ending, one that made sense of the Holocaust and finally gave it meaning. It provided a final act that transformed that senseless event into a story. It was always a fiction of course; Amos Oz talks in his memoir about his mother’s suicide as a result of her inability to find meaning in her life after the horror of the Holocaust; for her, the mere concept of the state of Israel could not – despite (or perhaps because of) actually living there – help her overcome this.

To admit the failure of the project now would put Israelis right back face-to-face with the senselessness of the Holocaust. The final act was a myth. There never was any happy ending.

There is a way out of course, and it’s one Jews are increasingly taking – to embrace the fact that the struggle for justice is universal, and meaning comes from committing to that struggle, whatever the costs, with no exceptions. This means a decisive rejection of Zionism. But that is where meaning is to be found, even in the Holocausts and the Nakbas – for Palestinians, for Jews and for all of us.

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Photograph Source: EneasMx – CC BY-SA 4.0

In June 2024, Mexicans elected a female president, Claudia Sheinbaum to replace Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Arguably, Mexico is Washington’s most significant foreign policy partner, playing a central role in two issues that Donald Trump manipulated to win the 2024 presidential election: migration and drugs.

Laura Carlsen, one of Mexico’s most distinguished progressive journalists and political analysts, takes stock of President Sheinbaum’s performance so far and how she plans to deal with Trump. Carlsen is based in Mexico City, where she directs the international relations think tank, Mira: Feminisms and Democracies. She also coordinates knowledge and global solidarity with Just Associates, JASS. Holding graduate degrees from Stanford, she is a dual Mexican-US citizen.

How is the Mexican government taking Trump’s threat of mass deportations?

The Mexican government estimates there are 4.8 million Mexicans in the United States without papers and 11.5 currently with some form of legal residence, so the demographic implications could be enormous. President Claudia Sheinbaum and her cabinet have taken a dual approach to Trump’s threat to immediately begin a campaign of mass deportation after taking office. On the one hand, the government—along with many analysts in the United States—has questioned how far Trump will actually go, pointing out that the U.S. economy would suffer, experiencing labor scarcity, loss of tax revenues, inflation, and deceleration if Trump carries out the threat. Mexico is preparing facts-based studies to discuss the real impact on the U.S. economy and society with Trump’s team and find other solutions.

That doesn’t mean that the Mexican government isn’t taking it seriously though. Several days ago, Sheinbaum warned Mexicans in the United States that they are facing “a new reality” as of January 20. On this side of the border, Mexico is actively preparing for the possibility of mass deportation. Although we don’t yet have all the details, the government is working on plans to receive returning Mexicans, including reducing paperwork and obstacles to reincorporation in schools and employment, and some sort of support. The Secretary of Foreign Relations Juan Ramon de la Fuente announced measures for Mexicans residing in the United States, including a “panic button” to alert the nearest consulate and relatives if apprehended for deportation, and know-your-rights campaigns. Consulates have already registered a spike in queries and widespread fear in immigrant communities. With Tom Homan as border czar—founder of the family separation policies that stripped children from their parents with many still not reunited after years of searching—concerns run deep. The government has also been talking to Central American countries to develop plans for safe return to other countries of origin. The threat to apply a 25 percent tariff on all Mexican exports to the US (80 percent of Mexico’s trade) has increased pressure to accept and accommodate deportees even from other countries.

In 2016 after Trump’s first election, we organized a “caravan against fear” along the border on the U.S. side to register reactions in immigrant communities. Families were literally afraid to leave their homes and mixed-status families faced the disintegration of the home. Daily routines fell apart and the stress was palpable. This time around threatens to be worse and no matter how fast deportation proceeds or how deep it goes, millions of lives—especially children’s—will be irreparably traumatized.

Do you think the results of this policy will depart significantly from that of Obama and Biden?

It is a fact that Biden continued Trump’s hardline immigration policies and by the end of his administration had surpassed the first Trump administration in deportations. A new report states there were 271,000 deportations in fiscal year 2024, more than Trump’s peak year of 2019 and only less than Obama in 2014. That the highest levels of deportation have occurred under Democrats reveals the paradox of Trump’s accusing Biden of “open borders.” This line, repeated over and over and often embellished with outright lies due to ignorance or indifference to the truth, seems to have swayed millions of voters to vote for Trump.

Biden did not significantly change Trump immigration policy, although he quickly reversed some Trump measures including child separation, safe third-country agreements and the Muslim ban and increased legal immigration and refugee resettlement. Since his administration continued detention policies, his actions had little or nothing to do with high migratory flows to the US during his administration. Corporate extractivism, the profound inequality and poverty caused by neoliberal policies in the Global South, violence, and displacement caused by climate change are among the primary causes of increased immigration to the US. They are structural causes inherent in the global system and as such will not reverse, although there may be temporary fluctuations.

Although there have been more apprehensions at the border, many are repeat attempts, and the numbers are neither unprecedented nor in any way threatening. The “backlash” against immigration evident in the 2024 campaign was almost completely a result of the fomentation of racist and nativist fears. It is interesting to note that districts with the highest Trump vote often correlated with very low immigration, meaning that these voters have little direct contact or impact from immigration in their daily lives and yet were convinced that immigrants pose a threat to the American “way of life.”

Since at least Bill Clinton, the Democrats made a strategic decision to abandon the defense of human mobility and human rights in migration and embrace the Republicans’ national security framework that presents immigration as a threat. Although both parties now employ similar anti-immigrant arguments and policies and in the last election tried to outdo each other in terms of restriction and repression, there is reason to believe that Trump will institute more hardline policies that will further endanger and disrupt the lives of immigrants. Homan has announced a return to family separation, and anti-immigrant mastermind Stephen Miller is expected to find more ways to cut off rights to asylum, family reunification, and legal residence.

How would you describe AMLO’s approach to the drug cartels? Was it successful or merely a confession that Mexico had lost the war on the cartels? Some say that unless it is able to control the cartels, the Mexican government’s other initiatives at reducing poverty and promoting development will have little positive impact. In other words, the cartels pose a real existential crisis to the future of the Mexican state.

Mexico has always been forced to follow U.S. policy in the war on drugs. Since Richard Nixon announced the war on drugs in the United States in 1971, the policy has been imposed on Mexico through trade sanctions, military strong-arming, and even temporary border closure. The Bush administration’s Merida Initiative, funded by Congress during the Obama administration, tied Mexico to the DEA strategy of drug seizures and arrests or killing of drug lords, known as the kingpin strategy. The Mexican president at the time, Felipe Calderon, agreed to an unprecedented level of U.S. involvement as part of his own war on drugs.

By 2018 it had become clear that the strategy was a disaster for Mexico. Homicide rates shot up, disappearances became a tragic reality for thousands of families, and cartels that had previously restricted activities to drug trafficking to the U.S. market, had been fragmented, causing more violent turf wars between cartels and a diversification into other criminal activities including extortion, human trafficking, and territorial control. AMLO campaigned with the promise to end the war on drugs and address root causes.

Some of the social programs for youth did address some of the root causes, but the kingpin strategy and U.S. control of Mexican security policy continued. The “hugs not bullets” strategy, continuously mocked by conservatives and the macho press, could have been a solid conceptual approach, but due in large part to U.S. pressure it was never really applied. The vicious cycles set in motion by the drug war’s militarized response to cartel crime continued and even deepened. Although the last years showed some reduction in the homicide rate, the AMLO administration registered the highest homicide rate on record, with more than 115,000 disappearances and high rates of injury and gender violence compounding the problem.

The binational effort to defeat cartels militarily in Mexico instead of addressing the economic roots of black-market smuggling and sale of prohibited substances—mostly found within the borders of the United States–led to massive bloodshed in Mexico. It also stimulated more economic gain for the U.S. arms industry and opened the country up to much more expansive U.S. presence in Mexican security. It reinforced social and patriarchal control by emphasizing macho militarist models of domination and militarizing regions where indigenous peoples, rural populations, and urban poor carry out defense of land and resources.

The cartels have historically been a violent and economically powerful corrupting force in the country, but they focused primarily on the lucrative business of trafficking drugs to the U.S. black market.  Now they are entrenched in battles for territorial control between rival cartels and with state armed forces. This means that the violence has permeated civic life much more than before.

It can’t be conceived of as a criminal versus state battle because the lines are so blurred. State actors at all levels, including the armed forces, often act with and for the cartels. The war on drugs shifts allegiances and balances of power between cartels, but never advances in terms of common-sense objectives such as abating the flow of illegal drugs, reducing the power of cartels, or increasing rule of law, and it causes more, not less, violence. The last kingpin capture orchestrated by the U.S. government, of El Chapito, Joaquin Guzman López, and Ismael Zambada, is just the latest in a series of hits against specific cartels that trigger inter-cartel battles and end up favoring the first cartel’s rivals.

Can you describe the other key challenges that face the Scheinbaum government and how it plans to tackle them?  Aside from the cartels and the undocumented migrants issue, I would imagine the list would include the transgenic corn issue, agrarian reform, climate change, corruption, and gender inequality.

That’s a big question. Her political platform of “100 steps toward Transformation” in reference to the continuation of what AMLO dubbed the Fourth Transformation of Mexico—after Independence, the Reform Period, and the Revolution—includes: A “moral economy” with fiscal control and pension reform; development with well-being and regional perspective and broad infrastructure plans; streamlined policy-making and enforcement; social rights and welfare and reducing inequality, health rights; reducing violence against women and assuring equality; Indigenous and Afromexicans; energy sovereignty, rural development; environment, water and natural resources; science and culture and democracy. Among these, some challenges are more acute than others. Mexico has to make the space to determine its own development and security policy, but continues to be under the U.S. thumb. The policies of immigration repression that Trump demands of Mexico is at heart a tool to keep the Global South under control as capitalism intensifies at an even more predatory and brutal stage. Mexico is under pressure to serve up key natural resources including oil, water, and labor. U.S. policies such as the drug war and Trump’s climate change denial run counter to the stated aims of the new government. Finding ways to stand up to pressure without provoking economic reprisals from a volatile and unpredictable U.S. president with an America First—or rather America Only—view on U.S. domination will be a constant challenge.

Specifically, several controversies are on the horizon. President Sheinbaum has reaffirmed that Mexico has the right to limit the import and prohibit the cultivation of U.S. genetically modified corn to protect native landraces, indigenous rights, health and food sovereignty. Mexico just lost in a NAFTA court on the question of import restrictions. A powerful civil society movement has been working for decades to defend Mexico’s right to make its own decisions on GM corn. Now they will be forced to abide by the decision while continuing to try to protect native corn and customs. There will be more legal and political run-ins on this and related issues, with powerful transnationals such as Bayer/Monsanto seeing Mexico’s bid for food sovereignty as a dangerous global precedent.

Sheinbaum also faces a major challenge in ending discrimination and reducing violence against women, and repairing the relationship with feminist and women’s rights organizations in the country. While declaring support for women’s equality, Sheinbaum inherits the conflicted relationship established by AMLO, who accused women’s groups that protested against violence as being pawns of the conservative opposition and tended to see women’s equality solely in terms of parity in formal representation. The femicide rate continued to be very high throughout his term and yet the government minimized the crisis of gender violence.

Now several feminist leaders form part of the government and Sheinbaum’s platform includes the goal of reducing femicide and preventing gender violence, although without many details on how. In the economic sphere, most of the emphasis is on continuing with existing social programs, which have reduced female poverty somewhat but have not addressed structural discrimination and inequality or patriarchal relations.

In this area, as in most areas, a huge obstacle is that the “Fourth Transformation” under AMLO largely froze out the movements responsible for demanding and making social gains and for electing MORENA. Without the active participation of women’s groups—and indigenous, campesino, urban, environmental, etc. organizations—top-down measures cannot be effective and lasting.

What foreign policy initiatives should we expect from the new administration? Will it provide progressive leadership for the rest of Latin America as well as the Global South? How will it wade into the transnational conflict that now pits Lula and the left and Milei and the right?

AMLO took a leading role in reinvigorating regional South-South ties explicitly with the aim of reducing U.S. hegemony in the region and taking advantage of newly elected left to center-left governments. Later, in his term however, this work declined as the focus shifted back to the United States. Sheinbaum has specifically promised to ”recuperate CELAC” (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) and strengthen regional ties, work with CELAC on an initiative to provide needed medicines, and work together on a new model for immigration that kind of keeps getting launched and never quite takes off. The relationship with the United States is also listed as a priority. Controlling illegal gun smuggling from the United States to Mexico is a critical issue for Mexico and will continue to be. The new government emphasizes multilateralism and in print anyway wants to strengthen Mexico’s role. This could be positive, but actual efforts have been sporadic and it’s not clear how much emphasis and resources will be devoted to it. Nor is it clear to what degree the new Mexican government, keen on preserving U.S. investment as key to the neoliberal model still very much in place, will buck U.S. hegemony.

How would you compare President Scheinbaum to the other dominant female leader in Latin America, Cristina Fernandez Kirchner of Argentina, in terms of their ability to navigate a culture of male political leadership?

Sheinbaum’s response to Trump’s vow to enact 25 percent tariffs on Mexican exports “on Day One” if Mexico did not do enough to stop immigration and control cartels was firm. She underlined all that Mexico was already doing but also said the nation would develop its own policies and the United States should do the same. This is a departure from the chummy and often subordinate relationship with Trump that AMLO’s foreign secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, and Lopez Obrador projected.

Trump is a public misogynist and has little respect for women, even those who are world leaders (as shown in his treatment of Angela Merkel). Sheinbaum seems to be taking a practical approach in the relationship with Trump that takes into account the need to sustain the bilateral relationship but draws the line at sovereignty. Her best bet is to maintain as much distance as possible.

Globally, so far she looks solid as a leader. She has strong experience as former mayor of Mexico City, and while she is unlikely to be a feminist leader on the world stage, she seems to know how to hold her own. Some other leaders, notably Dilma Rousseff, have underestimated the power of patriarchy, old-boys networks, and misogynist memes with tragic results. The male vote, organized in online clubs and chats with explicitly anti-women’s rights positions that draw on insecurities and a particularly virulent form of modern-day misogyny, elected Donald Trump and Javier Milei. Now they feel vindicated and emboldened globally by these wins.

The irony is that the United States—self-proclaimed as beacon for democracy and progress—proved itself unready to accept a woman in the highest position of power while Mexico—constantly derided as macho– elected its first woman president in a landslide. Now Sheinbaum will have to prove her leadership on the world stage in an increasingly hostile environment for women leaders.

The post How Will Mexico’s New President Deal With Trump, Migration and Drug Cartels? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Ketamine solution poured onto glass and left to dry. Photograph Source: Coaster420 – Public Domain

Clinics offering ketamine infusions and injections for “treatment-resistant depression” are today claiming 24-48 hours remission, and ketamine is also being marketed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder.

“Between 500 and 750 ketamine clinics have cropped up across the United States,” NPR reported early in 2024 (“The Ketamine Economy: New Mental Health Clinics are a ‘Wild West’ with Few Rules”). This may be an underestimation, as Psychiatric News reported later in 2024, “More than 1,500 intravenous (IV) infusion clinics have proliferated nationwide.” Ketamine industry revenues of $3.1 billion were reported in 2022, and projected to be $6.9 billion by 2030.

All this has occurred despite the fact that the Food and Drug Administration has warned: “Ketamine is not FDA approved for the treatment of any psychiatric disorder.”

“Special K” is one of many slang names for ketamine, which is termed by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a “dissociative anesthetic hallucinogen” that “distorts the perception of sight and sound and makes the user feel disconnected and not in control”—an experience that on the street is referred to as the “K-hole.”

The mainstream media reports little about ketamine’s scientific reality but a great deal about celebrity ketamine users’ testimonials and deaths. So the U.S. public has heard about Elon Musk’s praise of ketamine for his depression; and about Matthew Perry’s tragedy, which began with clinic treatment, then illegal ketamine acquisition, multiple-injections-a-day addiction, and finally death with an autopsy determining that he had died from “the acute effects of ketamine.”

All this begs some questions: (1) Why would psychiatry turn to ketamine, a “club drug” that is used by drug risk takers hoping for a euphoric out-of-body experience, used by predators to facilitate sexual assault, and is not approved by the FDA for any psychiatric disorder? (2) What do scientific studies—not enthusiasts’ anecdotal reports—actually tell us about ketamine as a psychiatric treatment? (3) What is a sane approach to so-called “treatment-resistant depression”?

Why Psychiatry is Turning to Ketamine: A History of Failed Chemical Treatments

“In my last severe depression, I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.”

— Sigmund Freud, 1884

Before Big Pharma greed began fueling magic-bullet treatments for depression, it was ego that fueled Sigmund Freud, who at age 28 was desperately searching for a way to gain prominence (see the Cocaine Papers). To Freud’s credit, he ultimately acknowledged the correctness of fellow physician Adolf Albrecht Erlenmeyer’s warning that cocaine was dangerously addictive, the “third scourge of mankind” (along with morphine and alcohol); and Freud would abandon his interest in cocaine in favor of the psychological theories which would gain him the fame he so desired.

Freud’s cocaine fiasco is just one of many chemical failures by psychiatry that ultimately resulted in more long-term suffering for patients, followed by psychiatry’s repeated returns to the hunt for another chemical magic bullet.

An early Big Pharma magic-bullet chemical cure for depression was the amphetamine Benzedrine, first marketed in the 1930s by the drug company Smith, Kline, and French; followed by other amphetamines—commonly called “speed”—all of which have been found to be highly addictive. Then there have been the various so-called “antidepressants,” beginning with the tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) such as Tofranil and Elavil that psychiatry began using in the 1950s. Later, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac which hit the market in the late 1980s, then Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, and other multi-billion dollar grossing SSRIs. Next have been the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) such Effexor, Cymbalta, and Pristiq. And now, it is ketamine.

The major reason why psychiatry returned to the hunt for a magic-bullet for depression is their commonly used antidepressants have had such lousy depression outcomes that some psychiatrists are now saying these drugs should never have even been called “antidepressants.”

One of those psychiatrists is ketamine enthusiast Craig Heacock, who concludes: “The meds that we call antidepressants, SSRIs, mostly don’t work for depression . . . . I’m still shocked and crushed at how many physicians think that SSRIs are antidepressants” (2023 interview with psychologist and podcaster Roger McFillin).

In “Relabeling the Medications We Call Antidepressants” (Scientifica, 2012), psychologist David Antonuccio and psychiatrist David Healy cite multiple study references to support the following conclusions about so-called antidepressants:

“. . . a true antidepressant should be clearly superior to placebo, should offer a risk/benefit balance that exceeds that of alternative treatments, should not increase suicidality, should not increase anxiety and agitation, should not interfere with sexual functioning, and should not increase depression chronicity. Unfortunately, these medications appear to fall short on all of these dimensions. Many of the ‘side effects’ of these medications have larger effect sizes than the antidepressant effect size. . . . In other words, it may make just as much sense to call these medications antiaphrodisiacs as antidepressants because the negative effects on libido and sexual functioning are so common.”

Determining the scientific effectiveness of a treatment means conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to discover whether the treatment is more effective than a placebo, as well as examining whether, in the long term, it is more effective than no treatment at all. A sane approach also means discovering whether drug benefits exceed drug adverse effects. Unfortunately, psychiatry has a history of eschewing sanity when it comes to its new magic-bullet treatments.

We have known for over twenty years just how scientifically ineffective so-called “antidepressants” are. A 2002 studycomparing depression remission outcomes of a placebo to the herb St. John’s wort and to the SSRI Zoloft reported that the placebo worked best; a positive “full response” occurred in 32% of the placebo-treated patients, 25% of the Zoloft-treated patients, and 24% of the St. John’s wort-treated patients. Also in 2002, a leading researcher of the placebo effect, Irving Kirsch, who had gained access to published and unpublished drug company trials on various antidepressants, reported that “all antidepressants, including the well-known SSRIs . . . had no clinically significant benefit over a placebo,” describing antidepressants as “clinically negligible” with respect to depression remission.

The psychiatry establishment actually acknowledges that the majority of depressed patients do not remit with a single antidepressant, but it has insisted that if patients are treated with enough different antidepressants, the majority will achieve remission. They justify this with the 2006 reported results of the “Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D), a year-long study consisting of four three-month stages; in each stage, patients who did not remit with one antidepressant were prescribed a different one or augmented with another drug. STAR*D investigators claimed a 67% cumulative remission rate.

However, in 2023, psychologist Ed Pigott and his co-researchers conducted a reanalysis of STAR*D, and concludedthat if STAR*D investigators (who had financial ties to drug companies manufacturing the antidepressants used in the study) had adhered to their original protocol, “In contrast to the STAR*D-reported 67% cumulative remission rate after up to four antidepressant treatment trials, the rate was 35%.” Furthermore, Pigott and his co-researchers had previously shown in 2010, that of the 4041 patients who entered the STAR*D study, only 108 remitted, stayed well, and remained in the study to its one-year end; and so STAR*D could only document a get-well/stay-well rate at the end of a year of only 3%.

Even if one accepts STAR*D researchers’ highly inflated results, the STAR*D outcome is still inferior to the natural course of depression without any medication. Published in 2006 was the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study, “The Naturalistic Course of Major Depression in the Absence of Somatic Therapy,” which examined depressed patients who had recovered from an initial episode of depression, then relapsed but did not take any medication following their relapse. One year later, the recovery rate of these non-medicated depressed patients was 85%.

There is another major reason why so-called anti-depressants are falling out of favor for many patients and even some psychiatrists: increasing recognition of just how widespread and serious are the long-term adverse effects.

Two of the most crippling long-term adverse effects are sexual dysfunction and withdrawal difficulties that include serious physical and emotional suffering. The percentage of sexual dysfunction for SSRI antidepressants runs from 25%–73%, according to a 2010 examination of several studies; and post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), in which sexual dysfunction exists even after discontinuation of the SSRI, is widespread enough for PSSD online support groupsto have emerged. With respect to withdrawal adverse effects when trying to reduce or come off of antidepressants, 56% of individuals experience adverse effects, and approximately 25% of individuals experience severe adverse effects.

In 2020, the CDC reported, “During 2015–2018, 13.2% of adults aged 18 and over used antidepressant medications,” and the CDC had previously reported, “More than 60% of Americans taking antidepressant medication have taken it for 2 years or longer.” Thus, if one takes into account antidepressant market size, their scientific ineffectiveness, and their troubling adverse effects for so many people, especially with long-term use, it is no wonder why many psychiatrists are turning elsewhere.

Scientific Research on Ketamine Psychiatric Treatment

While it is easy to see why psychiatry would be on the hunt for another treatment, how can psychiatrists use ketamine on depression when the FDA made clear in 2023 that ketamine is not an FDA approved treatment for any psychiatric disorder, and repeated in 2024 that ketamine is FDA approved for general anesthesia but not for any psychiatric disorder?

The answer to this question is that doctors are allowed to prescribe a drug “off-label” for a condition that the FDA has not approved if the FDA has approved it for another condition. So ketamine intravenous (IV) infusions and intramuscular (IV) injections for depression are not illegal despite not being FDA approved for that use. Unlike ketamine, psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca, and psilocybin are DEA classified as Schedule 1 drugs, meaning no acceptable medical use and a high potential for abuse, so these psychedelics cannot be legally prescribed off-label. Thus, a major reason for the ketamine industry’s growth is its “off-label loophole.”

Ketamine enthusiast psychiatrist Craig Heacock’s web site claims: “Ketamine is perhaps the most hopeful new psychiatric treatment to appear in the last decade, often bringing people out of severe depression or suicidality within 24-48 hours.” Quite a magic bullet.

In the short-term, dramatically destabilizing treatments for depression will often result in some positive anecdotal reports. This is true for ketamine, as it was true for Freud and cocaine. It was also true for bloodletting, which is why bloodletting continued to be used by physicians for over 3,000 years, until scientific analysis was applied to it

No doubt Heacock and other ketamine enthusiasts have seen these dramatic outcomes, but their observations are not scientific evidence of effectiveness. Scientific studies, in contrast, tell us a more sobering story about ketamine for depression and other psychiatric conditions. While the mainstream media is not covering the scientific research on ketamine, Peter Simons, managing editor of the webzine Mad in America, has been reporting on the important studies.

In 2023, Simons published “Ketamine Fails to Beat Active Placebo for Depression,” reporting on a Stanford University study, lead-authored by anesthesiologist Theresa Lii (published in the journal Nature Mental Health in October 2023). This study, in contrast to previous ketamine depression studies, was designed to create a true control. In virtually all previous trials on ketamine for depression, controls were ineffective because subjects could easily guess whether they had received a saline solution or the ketamine because ketamine has such strong side effects. Lii and her co-researchers created a true randomized controlled trial (RCT) by using a subject pool of patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) with moderate to severe levels of treatment resistance, all of whom were scheduled to undergo surgery; this allowed researchers to give all participants standard surgical anesthetic with half randomly assigned to receive ketamine, and this created the type of blinding or masking necessary for a true RCT.

The results of the Stanford study? Both the placebo group and ketamine group showed large improvement post-infusion at one, two, and three days; the likely explanation, according to the researchers, was that heightened expectations created this improvement, as such expectations can be created by the belief that one is taking a powerful antidote. However, in comparing the effectiveness between the placebo group and the ketamine group, the researchers concluded: “A single dose of intravenous ketamine compared to placebo has no short-term effect on the severity of depression symptoms in adults with major depressive disorder . . . . Our results suggest that ketamine may actually be ineffective for the short-term treatment of MDD.” The patients were followed for two weeks and assessed at 7 days and 14 days, and the placebo group actually did better than the ketamine group, especially at the beginning of this time period.

In sharp contrast to the many online ketamine anecdotal enthusiasts, to get a sense of what a bona fide research scientist—with no financial conflicts of interest—sounds like, I suggest listening to Theresa Lii’s talk about her study “Randomized Trial of Ketamine Masked by Surgical Anesthesia in Depressed Patients.”

Ketamine is similarly ineffective compared to a placebo when used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2024, Simons reported “Ketamine Fails to Beat Placebo for PTSD in New Analysis” about an analysis of six existing trials of ketamine treatment for PTSD lead authored by psychologist Nicholas C. Borgogna (published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology). As with depression, both the ketamine and the placebo groups improved rapidly, however, the researchers concluded: “While ketamine was associated with a reduction in symptoms, the effect was generally not stronger than control conditions . . . . Placebo is the likely mechanism behind reported therapeutic effects.”

In three of the six studies analyzed by Borgogna and his co-researchers, the placebo used was an active placebo (or active control), designed to mimic some of the side effects of ketamine. In the other three studies, the placebo was a saline infusion, which routinely has no side effects, thus making it easy for subjects to guess that they are receiving a placebo (and so they are not truly blinded). The results? At 24 hours, the ketamine group did slightly better than the group receiving the saline placebo, but the ketamine failed to beat an active placebo that mimicked ketamine’s side effects. Moreover, at one and two weeks post-infusion, ketamine failed to beat either the saline or the active placebos.

While ketamine infusions and injections are not FDA approved for any psychiatric condition, in a highly controversial process in 2019, reported by Kaiser Health News (“FDA Overlooked Red Flags in Drugmaker’s Testing of New Depression Medicine”), the FDA did approve esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Esketamine (or s-ketamine) is an enantiomer of ketamine (with similar molecular structure), and the journal Medicine reports esketamine is approximately twice as potent as ketamine. The brand name for esketamine is Spravato, taken as a nasal spray and sold by Janssen (part of Johnson and Johnson).

Why was the FDA approval of esketamine so controversial among many researchers? Researchers Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff, both psychiatrists, noted (in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2021) that among the six published studies (which were 4-week trials), five of the six studies did not report a statistically significant difference between a placebo and esketamine, and in the single study in which the esketatmine did slightly outperform the placebo, the difference was smaller than the threshold that even Janssen researchers had established to be clinically significant.

Previous to the FDA’s controversial approval of esketamine, many scientists had criticized the FDA’s standard requirement of needing only two short-term statistically significant trials for antidepressant drug approval. One criticism is that the short length of trials does not accurately reflect the longer periods antidepressants have been used in practice (recall the CDC has reported, “More than 60% of Americans taking antidepressant medication have taken it for 2 years or longer”)—and the 4-week esketamine trials were even shorter than the 6–8 week trials the FDA routinely requires. A second criticism is about the two positive studies requirement that allows drug companies to discount negative trials and conduct as many studies as necessary to get those two positive studies—and in the esketamine approval process, “even that low bar was dropped,” Horowitz and Moncrieff point out, as only one of the short-term trials conducted by Janssen showed a statistically significant difference between esketamine and placebo.

As noted, a sane approach to medications means discovering whether a drug is more effective than a placebo, and independent researchers argue that ketamine and esketamine fall short of this standard when compared to true controls in which the placebo group is truly blinded. Moreover, a sane approach also includes assessing whether or not drug benefits exceed drug adverse effects, and in the case of ketamine and esketamine, the adverse effects are significant.

In 2021 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Horowitz and Moncrieff, reviewed some of the troubling adverse effects of ketamine recreational use:

“Deaths from ketamine include accidental poisonings, drownings, traffic accidents and suicide. As a dissociative anaesthetic, ketamine can reduce awareness of the environment, increasing risk of accidental harm. . . . putting people at increased risk of driving accidents. In Hong Kong, where it achieved particular popularity, ketamine had been used by 9% of individuals involved in fatal traffic accidents between 1996 and 2000. Ketamine also induces ulcerative cystitis, found in 30% of regular UK ketamine users and known as ‘ketamine bladder’. The condition can lead to difficulty passing urine, hydronephrosis and kidney failure. . . . Ketamine is also addictive. It quickly induces tolerance and stopping regular use causes a withdrawal syndrome characterised by anxiety, dysphoria and depression, shaking, sweating and palpitations, and craving the drug.”

With respect to esketamine, Horowitz and Moncrieff reported: “A large range of other side-effects occurred: half of participants experienced dissociation and one-third dizziness; increased blood pressure, vertigo, hypoaesthesia, nausea and sedation were each present in between 10 and 30% of participants.” They also reported that even with only weekly or fortnightly esketamine dosing that “17% of patients (136/802) in the long-term safety study demonstrated symptoms reminiscent of ‘ketamine bladder’, a known and potentially serious complication of ketamine use.” Kaiser Health Newsreported that in the esketamine/Spravato trials used for its approval that “three patients who received the drug died by suicide during clinical trials, compared with none in the control group, raising red flags Janssen and the FDA dismissed.”

A Sane Approach to So-Called “Treatment-Resistant Depression”

“Treatment-resistant depression,” according to establishment psychiatry, “happens when at least two different antidepressants don’t improve your symptoms.” However, if research has shown SSRIs and other antidepressants to have “no clinically significant benefit over a placebo,” to be “clinically negligible” with respect to depression remission, and less effective in a year’s time than no treatment at all, does it makes sense to diagnose patients with “treatment-resistant depression” because they did not improve after two antidepressants?

The reality is that some patients ultimately labeled as “treatment resistant,” earlier on, could have been helped by a highly-skilled psychotherapist. Such a therapist not only helps patients understand why they are depressed, but also has the talent for energizing patients to take constructive actions that include: extricating from toxic relationships; healing from traumatic wounds; incorporating regular physical exercise; finding meaning and purpose; and acquiring confidence to connect with others and the skills to maintain healthy relationships.

However, it is true that some patients become so immobilized and demoralized—sometimes because of repeated lousy treatments that consist of uninspiring talk therapy and/or numbing drugs—that they lose hope and feel they need some kind of altered state to get them out of their deep rut. For them, a chemical agent that can dramatically alters one’s consciousness is going to be attractive. This is true for ketamine, for LSD and other Schedule 1 psychedelics, and for cocaine as Freud discovered.

However, chemical agents are not the only way to achieve dramatic alterations in consciousness. Such states have been achieved without drugs—through fasting, a week alone in the wilderness, an authentic sweat lodge ceremony, and various other extraordinary experiences outside of one’s comfort zone.

In all of such experiences of dramatic alteration in consciousness, drug-induced or otherwise, some people report breakthrough benefits. Sometimes these benefits occur because of the phenomenon referred to as a “noetic experience” in which the dramatic alteration of consciousness allows for thoughts not previously taken seriously to now “feel more real than reality”—and to become powerful and liberating (for example, taking seriously previously discarded insights about the distinction between self-acceptance and self-absorption). However, unless this experience results in constructive actions that become habits, depression will return.

So, what do ketamine enthusiasts say upon hearing that well-controlled research shows ketamine works no better than a placebo, and that patient expectations rather than the ketamine is what produces improvements which are often short-lived? Some will say, “It makes no difference whether it was the ketamine or a placebo effect if the patient showed such immediate improvement.” There are problems with this way of thinking.

First, among the experiences that result in altered states, ketamine is one of the most physically dangerous. This relative unsafety is certainly true compared to non-chemical experiences that produce altered states. It is even true compared to psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca, and psilocybin, which may sometimes result in psychological problems such as a “bad trip” but, unlike ketamine, are not addictive nor shown to cause organ damage.

Second, to legitimize the ketamine treatment, enthusiasts talk about ketamine “triggering the brain to create healthy circuits” and “helping the brain regrow synapses.” However, in 2024, internist and epidemiologist G. Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins, told Psychiatric News, “There’s lots of evidence that ketamine is toxic to neurons”; and Dutch researcher reported (Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 2022), “Long-term recreational ketamine use was associated with lower gray matter volume and less white matter integrity, lower functional thalamocortical and corticocortical connectivity,” adding that this may explain some of ketamine’s long-term adverse effects such as memory impairment.

Ketamine “brain-benefit” theories obviously benefit the ketamine industry. Moreover, like the now discarded serotonin-imbalance theory of depression, such biological theories divert people from the depressing nature of their society and culture, depoliticize them and subvert change to the status quo—and thus are welcomed by the ruling class.

While it is possible that some individuals may take ketamine and use its consciousness-altering experience as a springboard to make beneficial life changes, many others, seeking a repeat pleasurable ketamine state, will simply become regular clinic customers. Most of them will not, as was the case with Matthew Perry, proceed from legal clinics to purchasing ketamine illegally and die from it. However, if they believe that ketamine can “create healthy circuits” and “regrow synapses,” they may see their relapses as indicating a need for more ketamine, rather than recognizing that a long-term antidote to depression requires difficult life changes.

Alexander also told Psychiatric News in 2024 that much of the research on ketamine is plagued by nontrivial limitations, including studies that were too short, had too few participants, were conducted by researchers with conflicts of interest, had no active comparator, had researcher and participant bias due to lack of blinding, and he concluded, “What’s not unclear, what’s not ambiguous [about ketamine], are the potential risks.”

If that’s not concerning enough, Psychiatric News also reported in 2024 that “nearly half (47%) of individuals who are receiving ketamine therapy [are] doing so outside of a clinical setting and in their own homes, ingesting a compounded formulation such as a lozenge or lollipop after being prescribed the medication via a virtual clinic.” And if that’s not troubling enough, ketamine is now being promoted by some clinics as a “treatment option” for children and teensdiagnosed with psychiatric disorders.

“Are we repeating mistakes of the past?” is the rhetorical question posed by Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff, psychiatrists concerned about their profession. If, as the saying goes, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” then much of psychiatry is insane.

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