President Donald Trump with reporters, Elon Musk and X Æ A-Xii in the White House Oval Office on February 11, 2025. Photo: The White House (Wikimedia Commons)

Musk and Trump: A morbid spectacle

The spectacle of two billionaires – let’s call them M’ump — wanting more and more money and power is mortifying. No matter how much they have, it’s not enough. Their press conference in the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago — an old man slumped at the Resolute Desk, and a younger one posing, strutting and spouting inanities — could have been filmed in a crack house. Their addiction was showing. How many viewers averted their eyes in embarrassment?

M’ump has a disease, many psychologists argue, called “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (NPD). The narcissist, according to well recognized symptomology, strives to demonstrate his superiority. He insists he is smarter, stronger, funnier, and better at sex than anyone else. He wants to be richer and more powerful too, and sometimes – as in the case of M’ump – he is. But that superiority produces no lasting satisfaction. To get his narcissistic fix, he must diminish, even destroy others, the better to affirm himself. At war with the world, he is a stranger to love, except self-love. But without a regular dose of adoration or fear, even that emotion is cribbed. When a person with NPD is furnished weapons or powerful institutions, he becomes dangerous, even deadly. Driven by motives both apparent and obscure, M’ump has forced hundreds of thousands into hiding or onto unemployment lines. His narcissistic impulses may soon kill thousand and endanger millions.

M’ump seems like an alien from Mars, but in fact, he is familiar, or at least his characteristic mentality is — greed. Everybody knows someone greedy; we’re greedy ourselves sometimes. The difference between us and M’ump is the duration and scale of avarice: M’ump is always and colossally greedy — morbidly greedy. But recognition of his greed – and its political foundation — may offer us a way to challenge it. Precisely because we instinctively revile greed, we can organize to stop it. Our slogan is simple: “Greed kills.”

Cultural and religious aversion to greed

Abhorrence of greed is as universal as the incest taboo. Among foragers (“hunter-gatherers) – whose mode of living prevailed for 90% of human history — sharing was the norm and hoarding punished by ostracism or other sanctions. (There are only a few surviving foraging communities.) But even in intensely hierarchical, pre-capitalist societies, reciprocity or “guest-friendship” – what the ancient Greeks called xenia (ξενία) – was the rule. Strangers must be greeted with gifts of food, drink, lodging, and even entertainment such as story-telling or song. They in turn must be courteous and reciprocate as hosts whenever they can.

Violation of the principle of xenia can lead to violence, even war. The Homeric epic begins with just such a breach: Paris, Menelaus’s guest at Sparta, kidnaps Helen to begin the Trojan war. In the end, Paris is killed, Troy is destroyed, and Helen is returned. There are multiple instances of xenia in the Odyssey and Iliad, including theoxenia, when a host welcomes a stranger who turns out to be a god. There’s a well-known example of theoxenia in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 C.E.). Disguised as peasants, Zeus and Hermes travel to Phrygia where they are repeatedly denied hospice. At the home of Philemon and Baucis however, they are greeted warmly and invited to share a meal. After revealing their divinity, they instruct the elderly couple to leave their home so they can destroy the

city with a flood while not harming them. After the water receded, a temple appears where the couple’s home had been, and Philemon and Baucis are granted their wish to become its caretakers.

The sin of the biblical inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah is usually understood to be lust. But according to early Rabbinic or Talmudic scholars (> 6^th century C.E.), their chief offense against God was greed — failure to extend hospitality to strangers. The Babylonian Talmud lists seven sins that if committed, bring on the plague of leprosy. One of them was “envy,” which encompassed greed and covetousness, prohibited by the tenth commandment of the Decalogue of Moses. Still today, the idea of welcoming strangers into one’s home survives among Jews in the ritual of Passover. It’s considered a mitzvah to welcome anyone who’s hungry to the feast, gentiles as well as Jews. At the conclusion of the seder, a door is opened and a glass of wine poured to accommodate the prophet Elijah, harbinger of the Messiah. The ritual is a re-enactment of theoxenia: a god disguised as a mortal stranger is welcomed into the home and given succor. Any Jew today who begins the Passover seder with the benediction “this is the bread of our affliction, let all who are hungry come and eat,” but reject immigrants, is a hypocrite and a shanda (שָׁנדע).

Xenia is also central to Christian teaching. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples (including Judas), fed a multitude, and offered shelter to the poor, sick, lost and homeless. The Apostle Paul admonished Christ’s followers to “pursue hospitality” (Romans 12:13). The 4^th century Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of hospitality, renounced wealth and vain pursuits (especially hunting) to create a hospice for sick or weary pilgrims. St. Francis of Assisi ministered to the poor and the sick, and even extended xenia to animals and the inanimate world, “brother sun” and “sister moon.” The current fury against immigrants among white evangelicals is thus in profound opposition to longstanding doctrine in all Christian denominations. Anyone who builds walls to keep out immigrants, according to the current Pope Francis, “is not Christian.” He also said: “Greed is a sickness of the heart, not of the wallet.”

Capitalist greed: Adam Smith and Karl Marx

The two greatest theorists of capitalism also believed greed was bad, though for different reasons. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith argued that self-interest among tradesmen and manufacturers was to be applauded because it spurred over-production, abundance, low prices and general prosperity. (This would later be called supply-side or trickle-down economics.) But in Wealth and his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Smith also tempered this viewpoint. Because we live in community with others, we have an obligation to protect the general welfare. Smith writes: “When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self-love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many”. Moreover, greed is eventually checked by public outrage, while fairness is validated by approbation. People prefer to truck with generous traders than greedy ones. A good capitalist is ethical, he claimed.

Historical evidence suggests otherwise. The textile manufacturers of early 19^th C. Britain, the robber barons of early 20^th C. America, and the pharmaceutical manufacturers, oil giants, online retailers, hedge fund traders, and social media executives of today became immensely rich by exploiting employees, abusing customers, and degrading the very climate. There are thousands of other examples of greedy businessmen who are wildly successful. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man because he has fought off unions, layed off masses of workers, and soiled the internet with hatred and lies. He gives little to charity. Trump has become the most powerful person in the world by cheating creditors, lying to customers, abusing women, and attacking the weakest and most vulnerable people – migrants and asylum seekers. He too is uncharitable. Greed is universally regarded as evil, but it pays. Karl Marx explained why.

Marx was capitalism’s greatest admirer, but also its most trenchant critic. He recognized that modern trade and manufacturing created enormous wealth and the material basis for a society of abundance and mutuality – but only if capitalism was eventually superseded. The system’s fundamental feature – the production and exchange of commodities for the sake of profit — was also an agent of moral degradation. Capitalist production

“has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc. . . . In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.”

This exaltation of the “sense of having” – we may call it greed – has destroyed our relationships with others, deranged our sensibilities, and even diminished our physical pleasures. Marx wrote this in 1844, well before his magnum opus, Capital (1867). In the latter work, he recognized more clearly that it wasn’t greed per se that drove the capitalist, but the requirement to increase profits to compete with other capitalists. Under conditions of capitalist competition, Frederick Engels wrote in 1877:

“The bare factual possibility of [the capitalist] extending his sphere of production, becomes transformed, for him, into a compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry…appears now before our eyes as a qualitative and quantitative need to expand which laughs at all resistance.”

Greed or the desire to accumulate, according to Marx and Engels, was not a bug in the system of capitalist production, but its key feature. And what’s true at the individual level, is true at the system level: A functioning, capitalist economy must always be growing. “Accumulate, accumulate!” Marx wrote in Capital: “That is Moses and the prophets!” ​But because production is a social enterprise – think factory floor, department store or warehouse – workers can join and resist their alienation and exploitation. They can fight a system of rationalized greed. Capitalism, the argument goes, spawns its own gravediggers. (But when?)

Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924)

Greed is a film classic and a polemic against avarice. Its creator, Erich von Stroheim, wrote the screenplay (based upon a popular novel by Frank Norris) produced the film, directed it, and even hand color-tinted some of the frames. He was given near complete creative independence by his studio boss, Abe Lehr at the Goldwyn Company, but overplayed his hand. The film went way over budget and ran nearly six hours; the plan was to show it in

theatres on consecutive days with intermissions. When Irving Thalberg replaced Lehr as studio head just prior to the film’s release, he demanded it be drastically cut – it was reduced to just two hours with lots of titles inserted to ensure continuity. That’s the version best known today. In 1999, a nearly four-hour version was constructed using recovered stills.

http://Erich von Stroheim, Dir., Greed, 1924. (Screen shot)

The film was formally innovative. Von Stroheim deployed montage, derived from Sergei Eisenstein, chiaroscuro, as seen in Robert Weine’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and deep focus, found in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). That the director’s cinematic lexicon came in part from horror films was not coincidental. Greed was a kind of horror film: The female protagonist, named Trina Sieppe (played by ZaSu Pitts), changes from blushing bride to grotesque miser, and her husband John McTeague (Gilbert Gowland) from dentist to double murderer. They are each vampiric, and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1899) and its film adaptation by Murnau are each recalled.

Funeral cortege shown in deep focus, behind marriage ceremony in foreground of Greed, 1924. (Screen shot).

But if the film is avant-garde in style and subject, its politics are more rear facing. Though it’s possible to find in the film a critique of the gross, economic inequalities engendered by contemporary capitalism (the “Roaring ‘20s”), the film is more plausibly a throwback to pre-Marxist critiques of wealth, such as by Thomas Carlyle. In the first chapter of Past and Present (1843) titled “Midas,” Carlyle writes:

“Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand — one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause: — it is the Gospel of Despair!”

That last phrase, “Gospel of Despair” would have been a good subtitle for Greed. Trina wins $5000 in a lottery but is miserable, vowing never to spend a penny of it. Her slow-witted husband McTeague tolerates her avarice, until he loses his job as a dentist because of the treachery of his former friend Marcus Schouler (Jean Hersholt) who exposes to authorities McTeague’s lack of professional credentials. After that, McTeague grows impatient, and then desperate for money. When Trina refuses to part with any, he kills her and flees their home in San Francisco for the wilderness, ultimately crossing Death Valley by mule. That’s where he meets Marcus, who wants to capture his former friend to collect a bounty, as well as the $5,000 in gold that McTeague took from his wife. In the climactic scene, the two fight until Marcus is killed. But in the struggle, McTeague’s last canteen of water is destroyed, and he becomes handcuffed to Marcus. The last shot of the film is of a parched desert with slumped figures in the distant background, one dead, the other awaiting death’s deliverance.

The specific, capitalist character of modern greed is nowhere to be seen in the film. In 1924, the richest man in the world was John D. Rockefeller, a billionaire monopolist, whose worth equaled almost 3% of U.S. gross domestic product. If the film were true to modern greed, Trina would have used some of her fortune to bribe a city official so that her husband could have stayed in business as a dentist. She’d then have expanded the practice, bought out rivals and established a monopoly in San Francisco. With accumulated profits, she would have purchased the companies that make dental equipment. Finally, having achieved vertical and horizontal integration and a vast fortune, she would have established the Sieppe/McTeague Foundation to cleanse her reputation by giving money to arts organizations, hospitals and universities.

Understanding M’ump

Two-headed M’ump has no antipathy to greed. He’s a pathological narcissist who endangers democracy with his impulsivity. But to understand this better, M’ump must now be disambiguated.

Donald Trump is a real estate developer born of a Brooklyn developer, Fred Trump. The latter succeeded by stealth, craft, glad-handing, and graft; he lined the pockets of Democratic Party machers and was rewarded with planning approvals, zoning variances, and tax write-offs. The son’s initial triumph, the acquisition and refurbishment of the old Commodore Hotel on East 42^nd Street, was made possible by Fred’s connections, party machine donations, and the help of mob lawyer Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Trump lacked his father’s savvy. In Manhattan in the 1980s, he was a bull in a China shop. His vulgarity, promiscuity and ostentation, his cooperation with mob bosses from the Genovese and Gambino crime families, and general air of hucksterism, turned off politicians and investors. Long time New York mayor Ed Koch said: “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue was notarized,” and called him “greedy, greedy, greedy.” Trump’s deals in the 1990s to develop casinos, airlines, hotels and yachts were all flops, leading to six commercial bankruptcies. But by dint of luck and prevarication, Donald landed a job as host of a new TV series, “The Apprentice.” Over the course of his 14 years on the program, he made over $200 hundred million. Combined with the $413 million he received from his father over the years, he was by the time of his first presidential campaign in 2016, a very rich man.

But if Trump’s actual business moxie is mythical, his self-identification as a successful real estate entrepreneur is real. And like the hedgehog, he understands one big thing: that speculation in land is a potential source of wealth, and that the purchase of low value residences or businesses, and their re-sale as higher value ones is his purpose in life. In recent years, rent has supplanted arbitrage as his main income source, especially the franchising of the Trump name. Rent, Marx observed in Capital, vol. III, is an unusual source of value for three reasons:

“In the first place, by the preponderant influence exerted here by location…. And secondly, by the palpable and complete passiveness of the owner, whose sole activity consists…in exploiting the progress of social development, toward which he contributes nothing and for which he risks nothing, unlike the industrial capitalist; and finally by the…shameless exploitation of poverty, for poverty is more lucrative for house-rent than the mines of Potosi ever were for Spain.”

Trump’s attitude toward governance is that of the developer and rent-seeker. He wants to seize Gaza, move out the beleaguered Palestinians, and lease the cleared land for a new Riviera. He wants Ukraine to promise him a portion of the value of its natural resources (rent) in exchange for not abandoning them to the predations of Russia. He wants the Panama Canal so he can collect rent from it, and Greenland to lease out its mineral rights. He admires the U.S. fossil fuel and mining industries not just because they maim and kill millions (Trump enjoys the spectacle of ruthlessness in others) but because they are the most successful rent-seeking enterprises in the history of the world. Renewable energy does not generate ground rent to nearly the same extent; in fact, distributed solar (rooftops) creates almost none – Trump loathes it. Trump’s greed is thus both old school and up-to-the-moment, but it always involves the “shameless exploitation of poverty.”

Musk’s greed takes a different form. He’s an industrialist and more recently, a social media and tech tycoon. Except for their narcissism and greed, he and Trump have little in common. Musk made his money from automobile manufacturing, like Henry Ford 120 years before, but with this difference: He invented nothing, and was supported for years by subsidies from the federal government ($465 million in 2010), consumer tax rebates on electric cars, and tax credits paid by U.S. car manufacturers who fail to sell the federally mandated number of low-emission vehicles. In addition, Musk benefitted from quantitative easing during and just after the pandemic. When in 2020, the U.S. Federal Reserve bought $700 billion in assets to boost market liquidity, it increased share prices in nearly all sectors. The value of Elon Musk’s shares in Tesla increased in a single year from $25 billion to $150 billion. Since that time, the ongoing asset bubble – plus market optimism from Trump’s support — has multiplied Musk’s worth by three, even as sales of Teslas have slumped badly. In addition, the U.S. space program has now largely been privatized, enabling Musk’s SpaceX to collect billions more in profit, even while blowing up at least half a dozen rockets in the process. (A public agency like NASA wouldn’t be allowed so many failures.) Internal share trading has now made SpaceX the most valuable private start-up company ( a “unicorn”) in the world.

Musk is also a rentier, or what some call a “neo-feudal” capitalist. His platform X, formerly Twitter, makes most of its money by data licensing (selling or renting user information for AI training) and ads (renting eyeballs to advertisers). X users are thus “serfs”, providing value without being paid. That makes Musk lord of the manner, and he acts it – strutting, preening, boasting, and goading others to ravage and pillage. The spectacle of the world’s richest man gleefully firing probationary workers making $35,000 per year is gross. He wants more and more and will part with nothing. He is like Trina in Greed; Trump may in time tire of his antics and become McTeague.

Greed kills

I have called the spectacle of M’ump mortifying, embarrassing and gross. But in fact, it’s worse; it’s deadly. Last week, The New York Times published a story about M’ump’s dismantling of USAID. Counterpunch readers are likely aware of the organization’s serious limitations: that most of the funding goes to a small number of intermediary organizations that purchase U.S. not local supplies and foodstuffs; that USAID has in the past been complicit in U.S. terror, and that its impact on global health and welfare over the life of the organization (founded during the Kennedy administration) has been negligible. And yet: programs in Sudan and Nigeria to fend off malnutrition, and in Kenya to treat tuberculosis and H.I.V. have been halted. Polio may return to the places it has been eliminated. In Afghanistan, an online women’s university has been shut down since late January. In Indonesia, initiatives to treat malaria and H.I.V. have ended. And so on.

In the U.S., funding to monitor toxic chemicals in the air and water and protect drinking water from sewage and agricultural run-off have been frozen or rescinded. Disaster relief has been stopped. The poorest communities in the country – white and Black, rural and urban, red states and blue states – are the worst impacted, but everyone suffers (and thousands will die) from diminished air quality and additional toxins in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. In nearly every culture and religion, individual greed is considered a sin or perhaps a mental illness. At the scale it is practiced by Trump and Musk, it’s nothing less than murder.

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View from the garden at the Casa de la Misericordia y Todas las Naciones in Nogales, Sonora in February. Photo by Todd Miller.

There’s something spectacular about seeing the face of a newborn. Maybe this is partly because of some personal nostalgia, a reminder of when I first held my own kids in my arms. But there’s more. Perhaps in the case of Valentina, the baby I was about to meet, it was because she was born in a shelter for migrants, far away from her parents’ home in Guerrero. Or perhaps it was because she represented hope; at least that’s what her father, José, told me a week ago during my interview with him at the Casa de la Misericordia y de Todas las Naciones, located in Nogales, Sonora. Since 2020, the Casa has housed asylum seekers, who can stay for months as they go through the long bureaucratic process to get a hearing with the U.S. government. When I finished the interview with José in one of the shelter’s dormitories, where he and his family had been staying for almost a year, he asked me if I wanted to see Valentina, who was born February 4. She was the first newborn at the shelter since Donald Trump’s inauguration.

I had come to the border that day because I was curious about the aftermath of the Trump inauguration from the perspective of the Mexican side of the border. The Casa is located on the far southeastern edge of the city, and it took us nearly 40 minutes to get there through heavy traffic from the international boundary line. I came with Pastor Randy Mayer, of the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in southern Arizona, who brings food to the shelter every week. From the vantage point of the window, the border city of nearly 400,000 people—and 100 maquiladoras—seemed to grind on as usual. When I later interviewed José, he told me that he had worked at one of those maquilas for a month when they first arrived, a U.S. aerospace company called Carlisle that made wiring cables for airplanes. José said he and his family initially “didn’t think we were going to come here,” and it became a serious option only after the death threats got intense. José had been working for the Mexican military in Veracruz when a criminal group (“malandros” was the word he used in Spanish) tried to recruit him. He returned to the small farming community in Guerrero where he was grew up, thinking that the change in location would solve the problem. But the threats from the malandros kept coming. They called his wife, Graciela, and told her that if José didn’t work with them (what they wanted him to do specifically, José didn’t reveal), they were going to come for the family. When José, Graciela, and at the time their three children came to Nogales, they ran into the border and its difficult, cumbersome asylum system. After struggling to make ends meet while working at the maquila and renting an apartment, the family came to live at the Casa.

As we drove across town, we passed the tent encampment recently built on a sports complex by the Mexican government to receive deportees, through a program called México Te Abraza. This shelter was mostly empty, according to Sister Alma Angélica Macías Mejía, the director of the Casa de la Misericordia. The day before, there had been seven deportations, she told me—information she got from Mexican immigration. Daily deportations were way down from the year before, when there were at least 100 a day, with numbers sometimes spiking to 600 or 700, Macías Mejía told me. “Entre el dicho y el hecho hay mucho trecho,” she said, referring to Trump’s bravado as “all talk no action,” before reminding me how many deportations happened under Democratic presidents like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. But when I asked, she agreed that this could change quickly, especially as a $175 billion border and immigration enforcement package made its way through the U.S. Congress.

I also did not see an increased presence of military, which I expected after Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum announced the deployment of 10,000 troops to the border, though I saw Guardia Nacional soldiers in desert camo at the ports of entry. When we arrived to the Casa, Macías Mejía made clear that the biggest impact since the inauguration was neither the deployment of additional troops nor the arrival of thousands of deportees. By far the biggest issue was a bureaucratic one: the cancellation of the CBP One app.

Not that the app was great, but it was the only way asylum seekers had to get an appointment. And it took a long time to get an appointment, usually 10 months, if not more. Longer—José mentioned—than it takes for a baby to enter and leave the womb. José’s family applied every single day (you have to do it separately for each member of your family), and they never received an appointment, even as the death threats loomed. There were many problems with the app; for example, it would give you only one minute to fill in your information, including taking or scanning photos of all the applicants, before the window closed.

When Trump took office on January 20, José and his family had been at the shelter for nine months, as had many of the other 120 or so people staying there. At 10 a.m. that day, Macías Mejía said she was out in front of the parking lot in front of the main office of the Casa when a woman approached her and said that her phone wasn’t working. She couldn’t get in to see her appointment. Then another person arrived with the same problem. Then came the avalanche. Another woman came with tears in her eyes. She was the encargada (head) of the kitchen. She said, “Madre, they canceled my appointment.” Macías Mejía said, “What?” “I received an email that said they canceled my appointment.” The loss of an appointment after months and months of waiting, months and months of dealing with a frustrating app, months and months living in a place you don’t know, with little to no money, with an uncertain future—to lose that appointment was crushing. There were four families, 15 people, with appointments on January 21, 22, 24, and 28. Macías Mejía knew the exact dates. There were others with appointments in February and March.

People started arriving from all the corners of the shelter, which is a complex with many buildings and dormitories. “You could see the burdens they were carrying on their bodies,” Macías Mejía said, describing people trudging up the hill.

“It was as if they were carrying a dead loved one,” she said. “It was as if people’s hopes died right there.”

A spontaneous meeting took place with the 120 people who were staying at the Casa, by the large wood-burning oven outside the comedor, the shelter’s cafeteria. Macías Mejía said she didn’t know what to do. But she knew they needed a place to process what was going on. “We aren’t the problem,” Macías Mejía remembered saying to everyone. She told me it was necessary to see the problem from a distance, but it was difficult because the situation was so intense.

“The tempest is not always here,” Macías Mejía said, trying to cultivate hope. “After the storm comes the calm. And the rainbow. The colors of life.” She told me it was significant that they met by the oven. There was something about the oven. It was where people from all over the planet who stayed at the Casa baked the bread of their heritage. It was also a place designed to warm things up, warm each other up. It was a place to settle down. “And we weren’t going to make any decisions,” she said. “In difficult moments, you don’t move, you wait for things to settle. And only then would decisions be made.”

During my interview with José, I asked him how things were going with their newborn. His face relaxed. “In reality,” he said, “the child took away the anxiety we were feeling. Instead, there was an intense feeling of happiness. Our problems, at least for a little bit, evaporated.”

Then he asked me, “Do you want to see her?” I felt honored.

As we walked down the hall, I thought about how José’s family didn’t lose their appointment, because they never had one to begin with. And now, after the CBP One cancellation, there was no longer any way for them to apply. Trump said he was going to reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols(Remain in Mexico), but that still hadn’t happened. Between 30 and 40 people left. According to Macías Mejía, many were prepared to come back if necessary. One family went to Ciudad Juárez, to be closer to their son who was in Texas. Others went to find work to pay off their debts, often loans to make the trip north. Lawyers told the people whose appointments were canceled to make sure they had proof. If rights groups succeed in appealingTrump’s executive order, things might move fast, even from day to night.

José stopped in front of the closed door of their room and told his wife, Graciela, that we were about to enter. At first it felt a little strange going into their room, their space. But this feeling quickly dissipated when Graciela walked toward me beaming, Valentina swaddled in her arms. There were several bunk beds around the small room, where I imagined the family had been sleeping since April. Graciela removed the blanket, revealing Valentina’s soft, vulnerable face, her eyes squinting in from the streaming sunshine coming through the window, and her remarkable head of wild black hair. I looked up from Valentina to José, who was beaming now as well. After I left, and contemplated the day, and what was happening on the border, what I kept remembering was simply Valentina’s face. Maybe nothing better explained what was really going on.

This first appeared on The Border Chronicles.

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Photo by Nsey Benajah

Rational people should share a sense of amazement that virtually all European political “leaders” and Western professional commentators appear to view with shock and horror the possibility that the United States and Russia, the two major nuclear powers with the capacity to destroy human life, might have correct and cooperative, rather than hostile, relations.

One can understand why those financially and/or professionally invested in the for-profit Hate, Fear and War Industry, with its existential need for enemies and threats, would view a world at peace as unthinkable, but why should anyone else do so?

In my youth, the era of “détente” between the United States and the Soviet Union was widely welcomed as an excellent development.

Why should “détente” today be castigated as the ultimate evil of simple minds — “appeasement”?

Another source of rational amazement should be the apparently unanimous belief among European political “leaders” that, if relations between the United States and Russia were no longer to be hostile, so that the United States would no longer see any need for the military support of European “allies” or vassal states, European military spending would need to be significantly increased.

Why? To counter what military threat?

It should be clear that, with the possible exception of the current NATO/Russia proxy war, the wars in which European countries have become directly or indirectly involved in this century — against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine, none of which posed any conceivable threat to Europe but all of which were perceived as enemies by the United States and/or Israel — involved them because of their relationship as “allies” or vassal states of the United States, a relationship which has dragged them into unnecessary wars rather than protected them from war.

Even the current war in Ukraine was not provoked and perpetuated in defense of any consistent Western principle (https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/24/the-territorial-integrity-of-states-vs-the-self-determination-of-peoples) or any genuine European interest but, rather, in furtherance of the decades-long American quest for “full-spectrum dominance” of mankind and the planet.

If European countries were no longer allied with a Russia-hating United States, why would Russia, which in three years of fighting has been unable even to occupy all the territory of the four Russophone-majority oblasts which it formally annexed in September 2022, have any conceivable incentive to attack a NATO country or even a post-NATO European country?

Rationally, if European countries were to achieve independence from American domination and control, whether by their own initiative or by having independence thrust upon them, and, as a result, have no identifiable enemies, real or imagined, they should be able to significantly decrease their military spending and consecrate their freed-up resources to trying to improve the quality of life for their own people.

Has the world gone mad? Or have I?

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Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

I think that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been misinformed. I don’t disagree with their shutting down USAID, but I think it’s rather small fry.  There are much, much bigger fish to fry if you want to really save U.S. government money that is being wasted in programs that are mischievously justified as aid to the poor people of the world.

Elon, hear me out:  if you walk northwest from your headquarters at the Eisenhower Executive Building along Pennsylvania Avenue, you’ll come after one long block upon two ugly buildings squatting beside each other. One is the World Bank. The other is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). You can actually just walk in and demand to look at their books since they are extensions of the U.S. government. And you would have a very good reason to do so, since these are two of the most questionable and controversial institutions directly or indirectly funded with U.S. taxpayers’ money.

Let me start with the World Bank, which is located at 1818 H St NW.  This institution has so-called development projects throughout the Global South, otherwise known as developing countries. This agency says that its mission is to end poverty in the developing world. To fulfill this goal, its lending has risen from nearly $55 billion in 2015 to $117.5 billion in 2024. Yet, despite this massive increase, the Bank admits that global poverty reduction “has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020-2030 set to be a lost decade.” Some 3.5 billion people, or 44 percent of the globe, remain poor, after decades of massive World Bank lending. And a major part of the reason is that World Bank programs have created poverty instead of alleviating it.

Living in Luxury While “Fighting Poverty”

To manage its operations, the Bank’s full-time staff rose from nearly 12,000 in 2015 to over 13,000 in 2023.  These figures are just the tip of the iceberg. If one includes all employees—permanent, non-permanent, contractual, part-time—throughout the world, the Bank employs close to 41,000 people. The vast majority, 26,000, or 63 percent, work out of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, and only 3,200 are located in Africa, where most people in extreme poverty live.

The Bank’s economists and top administrators are among the highest paid financial functionaries in the world, which explains the reason why the Bank is a major cause of the brain drain from developing countries: a great number of highly trained economists from developing countries prefer to work at the Bank instead of their home countries, with some going straight from Ivy League or British graduate schools to Washington, DC.  Many within the Bank and the International Monetary Fund complain about the “South Asian Mafia” that they claim controls employment opportunities for economists and higher-level staff in the two organizations.

The World Bank has come under fire for the billions it has spent supporting fossil-fuel projects throughout the Third World that have contributed to global warming and to mega-dam projects that have displaced millions. The Bank, along with the Fund, has also gained notoriety for imposing “structural adjustment” programs guided by the radical principles  of the “Washington Consensus” that are designed to promote globalization but have, instead, increased poverty and deepened inequality.  The reason World Bank projects and programs don’t work or create exactly the opposite of their intended goals is because they are based on questionable propositions built on little or no empirical evidence. An assessment made a few years ago by an all-star team of renowned economists led by Princeton’s Angus Deaton, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, was damning:

[The] panel had substantial criticisms of the way that the research was used to proselytize on behalf of Bank policy, often without taking a balanced view, and without expressing appropriate skepticism. Internal research that is favorable to Bank positions was given great prominence, and unfavorable research ignored. In these cases, we believe that there was a serious failure of checks and balances that should have separated advocacy and research. The panel endorses the right of the Bank to strongly defend and advocate its own policies. But when the Bank leadership selectively appeals to relatively new and untested research as hard evidence that thes preferred policies work, it lends unwarranted confidence to the Bank’s prescriptions. Placing fragile selected new research results on a pedestal invites later recrimination that undermines the credibility and usefulness of all Bank research.

The Bank’s refusal to acknowledge real-world refutations of its pro-globalization advocacy and its unbalanced, one-sided research led to justifiable rejection of its advice by the people who were suffering from the policies it was implementing, confessed Paul Collier, head of the Bank’s Research Development Department of the Bank from 1998 to 2003:

The profession has been unprofessional, fearful that any criticism would strengthen populism, so that little work has been done on the downsides of these different processes [of globalization]. Yet the downsides were apparent to ordinary citizens, and the effect of economists appearing to dismiss them has resulted in widespread refusal of people to listen to “experts.” For my profession to re-establish credibility we must provide a more balanced analysis, in which the downsides are acknowledged and properly evaluated with a view to designing policy responses that address them. The profession may be better served by mea culpa than by further indignant defenses of globalization.

Despite the high rate of failure of its lending programs acknowledged in internal World Bank assessments, the World Bank administrative budget that supports the high salaries of its economists and other high-level staff just keeps growing. The World Bank (IBRD/IDA) administrative budget was approved at $3.5 billion for FY25, a sizable rise from the $3.1 billion authorized for FY 2024, with no convincing reason at all.

The IMF and the Art of Worsening Financial Crises

The International Monetary Fund, whose address is 700 19^th St NW, is the World Bank’s sister agency.  It has a full-time staff of 3,100, supported by a budget of $1.5 billion. The IMF’s economists are paid even higher than those at the World Bank, and they evoke more fear, hatred, and contempt than the Bank.

The IMF has an equally controversial history. It has a record of coming in to supposedly assist developing economies in crisis, only to make things worse. Its greatest debacle and scandal was its performance during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, when the so-called “tiger economies “of the East and Southeast Asia were destabilized by the massive inflows and outflows of foreign portfolio investment.

The Fund was heavily criticized on three counts. First, it had encouraged the governments of the region to eliminate capital controls, thus provoking uncontrolled capital flows. Second, it assembled multi-billion dollar “rescue packages” that went to rescue not the people suffering from the crisis but to compensate the foreign financial speculators that had lost millions in dubious speculative ventures, thus encouraging “moral hazard,” or irresponsible investing. Third, its measures to stabilize the damaged economies intensified the crisis, since instead of encouraging government spending to counteract the collapse of private sector, it told the governments to radically cut spending, leading to a “procyclical” negative synergy that ended in deep recession.

In just a few weeks, one million people in Thailand and 22 million in Indonesia fell below the poverty line. The only country that contained the crisis was Malaysia, which refused to follow the Fund’s dictates and imposed capital and currency controls

So disastrous were the IMF’s interventions that George Schultz, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Treasury, called for its abolition for encouraging moral hazard, and prominent economists like Jagdish Bhagwati and Jeffrey Sachs accused it of provoking global macroeconomic instability. Indeed, a rare conservative-liberal alliance in the U.S. Congress came within a hair’s breath of denying the IMF a $14.5 billion replenishment.

Eventually, the Fund was forced to admit that the “thrust of fiscal policy…turned out to be substantially different…because the original assumptions for economic growth, capital flows, and exchange rates…were proved drastically wrong.” But things were never the same again. The IMF was so reviled for its performance that Asian governments developed IMF-phobia, swearing never again to ask the IMF for rescue even in the most dire circumstances. For instance, after paying off what Thailand owed the IMF, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared the country “liberated” from the Fund in 2004.

Instead of learning from its debacle during the Asian Financial Crisis, the IMF stumbled into another fiasco more than a decade later, during the Global Financial Crisis. It allowed itself to be hijacked by Germany, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank to provide billions of public money to rescue German financial institutions and investors that had engaged in an orgy of irresponsible lending to Greece to the tune of 25 billion euros. To get the so-called rescue funds, the Greek government, like the Asian governments previously, was forced to adopt severe austerity measures that drove unemployment up to 28 percent and condemned the Greek economy to permanent stagnation, only to turn the money it was ostensibly receiving over to the German banks.

Not surprisingly, so long as the IMF is there, the big international banks will assume that they will be bailed out for making irresponsible loans.

The U.S. and the Bretton Woods Twins: Fiction and Fact

There is a fiction that the IMF and World Bank are multilateral institutions that are owned by their many member governments. The reality is that the United States controls both institutions, with a 17.4 percent share of total quotas at the Fund and 15.8 per cent share of voting power at the Bank.  These shares give the U.S. government a veto power over any policy change. But the truth is that U.S. power is not limited to its being able to veto policy decisions it does not like. No country would dare oppose a move by the United States to radically cut the administrative budgets (by, say, 75 percent initially) and the number of personnel in the two organizations (to 600 personnel each, as in the case of USAID) if it wanted to do so. All it needs to do to get its way is to threaten to withhold its contributions to the two organizations. I can guarantee that immediately the interest rate at which the Bank borrows in international capital markets would leap upward, paralyzing its lending operations.

The IMF and the World Bank are monuments to misguided economic thinking and policies that have brought much misery to the peoples of the Global South. They are institutions that no longer serve any purpose except to perpetuate and enlarge themselves. If Elon Musk and Donald Trump are really serious about radically downsizing bloated bureaucracies, they could not have better targets than the Bretton Woods twins.

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Paul Farmer with mom and baby. Photograph Source: User:Cjmadson – CC BY 3.0

Only half-jokingly, I often say that the reason that I am involved in medical education is to be able to say to students, “You don’t know who Paul Farmer is? Well, he’s just the greatest international rock star of bringing health care to the poor.”

In his public pronouncements about how he thinks about the October 7, 2023 Al Aqsa Flood operation – Norman Finkelstein says that with Noam Chomsky out of commission, he is forced to reason morally and ethically on his own. Indeed, I feel much the same way about Chomsky myself. I also feel that way about Paul Farmer. In my being-in-the-world as a health practitioner, Farmer has served as a moral compass. Since his passing in February 2022, I feel that I am forced to reason morally and ethically on my own. I do, however, believe that we can keep our friends with us by continuing to engage with them.

When I was a resident at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in the late 1980s, my patients with HIV/AIDS would inevitably die, mostly of opportunistic infections. With the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy, announced in 1996, HIV/AIDS became a treatable condition. The antiretrovirals don’t cure you of the virus, but as long as you take the medications every day, the virus is suppressed. The problem was that most of the people with HIV/AIDS lived in developing countries, and the new therapy (with proprietary medications) cost on the order of $13,000 per year. The administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in Congressional testimony in 2001, specifically opposed antiretroviral treatment for Africans because, he claimed, “They do not use western means for telling time. They use the sun. These drugs have to be administered during a certain sequence of time during the day – and when you say take it at 10:00, people will say, what do you mean by 10:00?”

Farmer, having built a hospital in Central Haiti, managed to beg, borrow, and steal the antivirals from Harvard hospitals. He hired community health workers (accompagnateurs) to deliver the medications on a daily basis (directly-observed therapy). At the 2002 International AIDS Conference, he presented the successful results of the Haiti Partners in Health program. At the time, only Brazil had a national antiretroviral program.

Farmer was also invited to the White House by Anthony Fauci to present the Partners in Health findings. Subsequently, at his January 2003 State of the Union address, George W. Bush announced the Presidential Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to provide antiretroviral therapy for people living with HIV/AIDS in low-income countries. Of note, during this address Bush also essentially announced the invasion of Iraq, which would start in March 2003.

While the new Trump administration has halted a substantial proportion of foreign aid assistance, much of it funneled through the USAID – apparently PEPFAR falls under the humanitarian waiver announced by Secretary of State Rubio in January. Some PEPFAR programs such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) will be restricted, however. Moreover, the funding for the health care workforce that delivers the antiretrovirals has been cut. We must keep in mind that interruptions of even a few days of antiretroviral therapy can have dire consequences. (You don’t die of opportunistic infections right away, but the remaining HIV virus in the body becomes resistant, so the first-line antiretrovirals don’t work any more.)

Undoubtedly Paul would have been saddened by the current situation. After all, he believed in health as a human right, and that all humans must be included “under the rubric ‘human.’” Probably mustering all his charisma, he managed to convince the government bureaucrats of this (not so radical) notion.

In late 2009 I was in Boston for a medical meeting, and I met Paul over dinner. He happened to be staying at a hotel north of Harvard Square. I arrived and told the front desk person that I was there to meet Dr. Farmer. He came downstairs after a while and apologetically said, “Sorry, I was on the phone with Bill.” At the time, Paul was serving in a volunteer role as the United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti, under Bill Clinton.

Over dinner, Paul told me that he had been reading about the FDR administration. He was inspired by the ideal of public, meaning government, service. By this time, Paul had moved his family and his work to Rwanda. Rather than focusing on a charity, as he had initially done in Haiti – Farmer was working with the post-genocide government to improve public services for health.

He told me of how the Obama administration, specifically the Hillary Clinton State Department, had wanted to nominate him to become the administrator of USAID. In preparation for his Senate confirmation hearings, he had brought two bags of his books and papers to the State Department – so that staffers could comb through them for anything that might be construed as disqualifying by unfriendly Senators. For example, in his early books about Haiti, he had recounted how, in response to cases of African swine fever, in 1981-83 the Haitian Kreyol pigs were exterminated. With USAID funds, they were replaced with Iowa porkers, which were unsuited to the Haitian environs and quickly died off – leading to economic disaster for the Haitian peasantry. (See “When the Clintons Did Haiti,” on the Clinton administration’s USAID population control program in Haiti during the 1990s.) The geographically broad and historically deep context, as Farmer was wont to say, was to view Haiti as a Latin American country, in the colonial and neo-colonial orbit of the U.S. The Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier regimes were continually backed by the U.S.

Seemingly changing the subject, Paul asked if I had read the recent Jane Mayer piece in The New Yorker (The Predator War, 19 Oct 2009) about the White House CIA drone program. No, I hadn’t. By the time of that article in late 2009, Obama had launched as many drone strikes on Pakistan as had the George W. Bush administration during its last three years. It came out later that this was a regularly scheduled weekly Tuesday morning appointment for Obama, to choose who would be extrajudicially killed by drone. Paul asked, “Did you know that the administrator of the USAID is on the National Security Council?” No, I hadn’t known that.

“I just couldn’t be a part of that,” said Paul.

Sure, Paul Farmer would have been an unparalleled public servant. After all, one of his mottoes was “to move resources from where they are to where they are not.” Under him, there probably would have been fewer incompetent screw-ups like the pig extermination episode.  But he had no illusions about the role of the U.S. in the world. He asked about one international relations journal, “Would that be the journal for war criminals, or is that the one for budding war criminals?” In the end, he just couldn’t be a part of that.

Yeah, Paul was buddies with Bill. But being invited to be buddies with Hillary and Barack, too? He could tell that his acquiescence was being sought for some nefarious ends. He could tell that he was being set up as a patsy for the deep state.

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John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

There is one common reason for the collapse of democracy: capitalist society has outlived its strength. The national and international antagonisms which break out in it destroy the democratic structure just as world antagonisms are destroying the democratic structure of the League of Nations. Where the progressive class shows itself unable to seize power so as to-reconstruct society on the basis of socialism, capitalism in its agony can only preserve its existence by using the most brutal, anti-cultural methods, the extreme expression of which is Fascism. That historic fact appears in Hitler’s victory

– Leon Trotsky, March 1933, written on the occasion of Hitler’s victory

We are in an intensely good guys/bad guys cultural mindset. I describe it as a cultural imaginary because how we see our enemies is more of how we imagine them than how we’ve experienced them. We don’t hang with those living differently than we do so we have little firsthand knowledge. But we read, listen and see representations of what we do not have firsthand knowledge. But it’s a passionate seeing and hearing in that we are already responding within a space in which everything is already tagged. There’s no neutral position outside anything because we are always already positioned in mind and heart someplace.

Right now, there’s a contesting of narratives going on at an intense level but one that has sidelined the classic Capital vs. Labor struggle, as well as another chapter of the Civil Rights movement that was heating up after George Floyd, as well as the Reaganomics of the Chicago school of economics, as well, and the neo-liberal regime change policies of the G. W. Bush circle. These have all been overwritten and vacated by our pro and con Donald J. Trump cultural imaginary.

Whether you choose to be somewhere else, if you are in the U.S. right now, you are in a place Trump is creating for you. By a flurry of executive orders, he is upending the world you knew.

Those who believe that ask how has a personality ascended to the U.S. presidency twice without offering any credentials beyond destructive and vindictive intentions? He hasn’t written a Mein Kampf, or opposed Marx with National Socialism. There’s no “Quotations from Chairman Mao.” No Little Red Book. MAGA is a campaign slogan, like Obama’s ‘Yes, we can,” neither a political ideology. But he is effectively trying to replace a Constitutional balance of powers with himself. Autocracy, not electoral democracy.

Those who hold that Trump is turning the world right side up after the ruinous Biden presidency as he did after the ruinous Obama presidency, do not cherish a balance of powers or the Constitution that grounds such. It’s all led to a “woke” and DEI desecration of traditional American social and moral values. Trump is the strong man who can act decisively and quickly to destroy degenerate values and bring back the greatness of America. Savior, not megalomaniac.

The results of this Presidential election reveal that more voters frame Trump as their champion than as an emissary from Hell. But his victory goes deeper. It signifies that a way of knowing and a way of being in the world have become rigidly dualistic. In a way this fits the zero sum game of capitalism, as well as the antagonism of moral categories. On the level of political strategy, you can observe that Trump has adhered to a time honored strategy to reach enough voters to win an election. Remember, the clash of opposing narratives is a clash of opposing ways in which the world appears. To change your opponent’s mind is to change the world as they know it and live in it.

Here Trump has won and every stripe of Democrat has lost. Good guys and bad guys.

The clash going on follows what film critics called “the classic realist” formula: John Wayne is the good guy and the bad guy is the guy he beats up. Wayne wants to do something good for the folks, maybe save them; the bad guys aren’t Christians or honest but degenerate. When evil is knocking righteousness, and Wayne, out the door, and it seems as if everything is so corrupt that all hope is gone, the good guy returns, takes over and crushes his enemies. Obama, Trump declared, “has been the most ignorant president in our history. . . the world is a mess.” Note that “the good guy” ready to save the day dog whistles the racism that he judges appealing. Obama has put us on the tracks, a perilous moment. Barak HOSSAIN Obama. Donald J. to the rescue.  Out of the same play book in the 2024 election. Here, the bad guy, “Sleepy Joe,” led us to inflation and illegal alien peril, along with his administration of stupid people. Kamala Harris “cackled while the economy burned.” Another low tag: women cackle.

The most successful proven way of narrating, of passionate acceptance by the greatest number of folks of what is represented follows this formula. Trump is not the first politico to brand who the good and bad guys are but his is an all rules and protocols barred play, one in which he pitches low and dirty but finds welcoming targets. If Trump pitched what we weren’t already in a place to receive, he wouldn’t be president. There was nothing in him that wasn’t reflected in us. Something Americans have to reckon with after Trump is gone.

What we have is Tammany Hall low ball but not in the back room. What’s startling about Trump, among a lot, is how open he is top exposing his Id to us. AI: “Id: a part of the mind that is unconscious and impulsive, and is driven by the need for immediate gratification.” Freud tells us life is a long struggle to keep the Id in check. Trump doesn’t or can’t or won’t. Ditto Musk. But once again, Americans know the Id. We can’t play the ingenue. Trump arrived and succeeded with his mean, low ball because the country was already positioned to welcome him.

When you get away from the naïve realist formula of setting up good and bad and intimate that neither what is good or evil/true or false is not transparently clear but seen “through a glass darkly,” you lose the majority. When you go even further and cast doubts by undermining our narrating ways, then you are denying the autonomy of the individual to shape an airtight story of what is and what is going on for themselves. If you, however, can stick a “fake news narrative” on your opponents while sanctifying your own narrative, then you’ve gotten the “naïve realism” formula to work for you. You’ve unsettled any sure sense of what truth is, which Trump needs to do to dismiss rational grounded indictments against him, but you’ve immediately allayed that trepidation with the presence of yourself, Truth as Trump. Trump has done that.

In Hitler’s rise to power, he had to tarnish his chief antagonists, the Communists, who were tarnishing him. It was a fight Hitler won by convincing enough Germans that the Communists would make them puppets of the Soviet Union. One political ideology clashed with another. The clash now between Liberals and MAGAS, or the Radical Left vs. the Voice of the People, or, the will of President Trump vs. all who oppose him is a clash of passions, not ideologies. “The Enemy Within” is within the “Deep State.” The Enemy within that Deep State is a radical, progressive, liberal, “woke,” DEI propagandistic Democratic Party.

That’s a mouthful. But it’s the successfully imprinted villain/bad guy/enemy in which Democrats are keeping President Trump from making America great again. Greater again. And the Democrats here are no Trotskys able to interpret the rise of Trump. That failure, after 16 years of Democratic presidencies, is clearly the case for the reasons Trotsky gave in 1933: “Where the progressive class shows itself unable to seize power so as to reconstruct society on the basis of socialism, capitalism in its agony can only preserve its existence by using the most brutal, anti-cultural methods, the extreme expression of which is Fascism.”

Passionate attacks on “woke,” DEI, critical race theory, LGBTQIA2S+ and so on feed at the trough the imaginary passion creates. They burn out or as expressed in Ecclesiastes and so are fated as a “striving after wind.” The offense against Democrats fades with Trump’s demise but the lack of offense on the Democrat’s part holds them in the place they are now, namely, a place where they cannot escape the role of the “Enemy Within” that Trump has tarred them with.

Rather than move toward a socialism, the Social Democrat Bernie kind for a start, in order to nip the anti-democratic splurge Trump has triggered for megalomaniacal “reasons,” some Democrats, hopefully not a majority, are strategizing on how to salvage “woke” and DEI and so on. This is a party that has leaned into an oligarchy creating capitalism, substituted agendas which do not affect root causes of oligarchic wealth divide, and, what most affects the 2026 Congressional elections, is imprinted as “the bad guy” within the imaginaries of those who will soon discover that no relief is to be found in Market Rule of Trump Rule. A truly sad situation.

National socialism, the political ideology of Nazism, pops up now and then, as in  the U.S. now, but both fascism and Nazism include a strong central government as well as a strong central leader. What we have going on with Trump/Musk is a hollowing out of the Federal government so that, in Trump’s case, he can do whatever he wants without facing power to stop him. He wants to replace a strong central government with himself. How what’s left of government can serve its constituency and keep him from facing Stalin’s end is not a consequence total self-absorption can consider.

Musk simply and criminally wants to cut off the heads of anything in government that can interfere with his multi-billionaire making ways. He too may face an angry mob. Trump relies upon his own megalomaniacal illusions to inspire his MAGA cult. He sees himself as invincible. Perhaps immortal. Musk’s Plutus image, Greek god of wealth, armors him from the hard struggles of ordinary life. His power wielding presence in a democracy under attack is also truly sad.

When a man, whose mission is solely to rule like an autocrat and to enjoy making opponents suffer and others kiss his ring, dies, that mission dies with him. If along the way he immiserates the lives of about half of those who voted for him, and they realize the villain is not the “woke” crowd, will the liberal, left wing Democrats become their new heroes? Are the Democrats to engineer the escape from Trump? Or will some new rough beast slouch toward Bethlehem to be born? “I would conjecture that it will take a long time and a firm stance away from and not leaning into Market Rule before Democrats wash out what Trump has brushed them with.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

America’s richest have never been richer. Our over 800 billionaires ended 2024 worth a combined $6.72 trillion. Today, almost two months later, Americans make up 14 of the 15 richest people in the world. Just these 14 alone hold a combined net wealth of over $2.5 trillion.

One predictable consequence of numbers like these: Our world’s “super yacht” sector is doing spectacularly well, as the annual Miami International Boat Show last week convincingly confirmed. The star of this year’s show turned out to be a super yacht nearly the length of a football field.

Drivers on America’s highways and byways, meanwhile, are now needing to make room for the newly released latest luxury super car from Rolls-Royce. The new Black Badge Spectre can “sprint from zero to 60 mph in just 4.1 seconds.” The base price: a mere $490,000.

Amid all this excess, the fortunes — and power — of America’s most fortunate just keep mounting ever higher. At the expense of the rest of us. The world’s wealthiest billionaire, Elon Musk, has found an particularly lucrative new hobby: axing the jobs of federal employees working at agencies that protect the health and economic security of average Americans.

Researchers and analysts worldwide are, for their part, continuing to carefully track the ongoing — and historic — concentration of America’s wealth. But Hollywood, these days, may actually be tracking this concentration even closer.

The wealth, privileges, and formidable clout of our richest, Hollywood understands, are outraging average Americans. We’ve become a nation hungry for entertainment that expresses that outrage, and Hollywood has been all too happy to offer up that entertaining.

“The popularity of ‘eat the rich’ media — like Saltburn, White Lotus, Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Infinity Pool, The Fall of the House of Usher, and the Knives Outmovies — has reached a fever pitch,” as the culture critic Kelsey Eisen puts it.

This “vilification of the rich,” adds Eisen, regularly includes “rich characters undergoing some terrible event — ranging from marital troubles to shipwrecks to even death — as some sort of comeuppance for being wealthy.”

“We do love watching the 1% get their comeuppance, don’t we?” agrees Adrian Lobb, another widely published and perceptive writer on contemporary culture.

Lobb last year interviewed Jason Isaacs, one of the stars of The White Lotus, an Emmy Award-winning comedy drama created for HBO. Isaacs told Lobb that he also “absolutely” loves the joy of the “comeuppance” moments swirling all around us.

“We watch these people who look like they’ve got everything,” Isaacs explains, “and console ourselves with the fact that they’re miserable as hell.”

The White Lotus features “sun, sea, sex” and super-rich secrets, notes the culture analyst Lobb, “with a side order of slaying.” Each season of the series showcases a set of gastronomically obsessed wealthy out to enjoy life at an exotic luxury resort, with no guest, quips writer and filmmaker Alyssa De Leo, “safe from being skewered — figuratively and literally.”

Another skewering of the “successful” takes place, De Leo observes, in the widely acclaimed film Triangle of Sadness, the story of an ultra-wealthy cruise ship that sinks and leaves the survivors “stranded on a desert island” with “the upper-class guests lacking any resources or knowledge of how to survive.”

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Photo Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

It’s going to take a very brave judge to stop Elon Musk and the Trump-created DOGE at this point. And I doubt that judge is going to appear anytime soon. Which means that, ultimately, this saga won’t be resolved until it works its way through levels of court proceedings, appeals, and perhaps even lands before the Supreme Court.

Let’s back up for a moment. Legal experts have been sounding the alarm for months, arguing that DOGE’s actions—many of which seem to operate in a legal gray area—may actually be outright illegal. Critics have pointed to potential violations of the Privacy Act, the Internal Revenue Code, and the Federal Information Security Modernization Act. Some go further, arguing that DOGE’s aggressive overreach—such as forcing the removal of federal employees, claiming the power to dissolve agencies, and even seizing funds authorized by Congress—flies in the face of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. In short, there’s a growing consensus that what we’re witnessing is nothing less than a constitutional crisis in the making.

Yet, despite these concerns, there seems to be little appetite from the totality of lawmakers—at least those who wield real power—to pump the brakes. When House Democrats tried to subpoena Musk over DOGE’s activities on February 5, 2025, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform shut them down. That lack of congressional oversight has forced outside organizations to step in. Just two days later, the ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act requests with more than 40 federal agencies, hoping to uncover whether DOGE has gained unauthorized access to sensitive personal and financial data.

The most high-profile legal battle thus far is Gribbon v. Musk, a class-action lawsuit filed on February 12, 2025. The plaintiffs, which include taxpayers, federal employees, and benefit recipients, argue that DOGE’s access to their personal and financial data violates their rights and entitles them to compensation. The lawsuit specifically challenges whether DOGE, a quasi-governmental entity established under executive authority, has the legal right to bypass existing privacy laws and access government databases without oversight. Attorneys for the plaintiffs have artfully pointed out that DOGE’s structure lacks transparency and its leadership—headed by Musk and key allies like Scott Bessent—operates outside traditional government accountability measures.

Another significant challenge to DOGE’s authority comes from the USAID controversy. When DOGE ordered the agency’s closure and placed 2,200 employees on administrative leave, the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees fought back. On February 6, these labor unions filed a lawsuit arguing that the executive branch lacks unilateral authority to dismantle a congressionally funded agency. Judge Carl J. Nichols issued a temporary restraining order on February 7, preventing the shutdown from proceeding, and later extended the freeze through February 21. The case raises broader questions about whether DOGE’s consolidation of power represents a direct challenge to the separation of powers doctrine enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Adding to the legal chaos, DOGE has set its powerful jaws on the Internal Revenue Service’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, a database containing highly sensitive taxpayer information. Sources indicate that the IRS, under pressure from the White House, is preparing to grant a DOGE employee access to this system under the justification of investigating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Critics argue that allowing DOGE this level of access without clear legal safeguards represents an unprecedented violation of taxpayer privacy rights. The IRS has remained largely silent on the matter, but leaked internal emails suggest growing unease within the agency about the legal implications of complying with DOGE’s demands.

Meanwhile, in a separate lawsuit filed on February 17, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan held a hearing regarding a request to block Musk from influencing federal agencies through DOGE. The lawsuit, brought by a coalition of civil liberties groups, alleges that Musk is using DOGE to execute policies without congressional approval, effectively consolidating executive power in ways that circumvent legal norms. Judge Chutkan, while expressing skepticism about granting an immediate restraining order, acknowledged the broader concerns about DOGE’s secrecy and the speed at which it has exerted influence over multiple government agencies.

The legal landscape surrounding DOGE is further complicated by the ideological divide in the judiciary—and this is where things get super-complicated.

Some conservative judges appear hesitant to challenge DOGE’s actions, seeing them as an extension of executive authority that aligns with their broader vision of deregulation and government restructuring. Others, particularly those appointed in prior administrations, have expressed deep concern over what they view as blatant overreach. The upcoming rulings in these cases could set major precedents for executive power and data privacy in the digital age.

At this point, the only thing that’s clear is that Elon Musk and DOGE are pushing the limits of executive power in ways we haven’t seen before. The legal battles are mounting, but so far, no judge has stepped up to put a stop to it. And unless one does soon, more courts—and possibly even the Supreme Court—will be left to clean up the mess. 

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Photograph Source: IAEA Imagebank – https://www.flickr.com/photos/iaea_imagebank/5765324940/ – CC BY-SA 2.0

The dispersal of radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima-Daiichi reactor disaster site to the Pacific Ocean is “in line with international safety standards” according to a task force set up by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear power advocacy program, in a December 24, 2024 report.

Ever since the Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, first proposed pumping wastewater left from cooling Fukushima’s three hot piles of melted reactor fuel into the Pacific, the IAEA has supported, encouraged, and endorsed the plan, in spite of its own formal published guidelines which advise against it.

In June 2023, Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, published a scathing critique of the IAEA’s approval, finding the oceanic pollution violates essential provisions of the agency’s own General Safety Guide.

The IAEA’s first 2023 report on the dumping scheme said the plan was “consistent” with its standards, and it claimed even before the first major release of the radioactive water that it would have a “negligible radiological impact to people and the environment.” Now the IAEA’s onsite laboratory in Japan has analyzed the first ten discharges that have been conducted between August 2023 and October 2024, Nuclear Engineering International reported.

The bulk of the radioactivity in the wastewater being pumped into the ocean is from tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen, and carbon-14, neither of which can be filtered from water they contaminate. However, analyses of 1.3 million tons of waste coolant now stored in tanks shows a complex mix of other highly radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90, cesium-134 and -137, cobalt-60, americium, technetium, and even tellurium-127. In 2018, Tepco apologized for the failure of its giant filter system to separate all the materials it promised to, and has said it would repeatedly re-filter the contaminated water to try and remove 62 different reactor-borne isotopes before dumping it into the world’s largest ocean.

IAEA approval is license to copy bad actors

Japan’s oceanic radioactive pollution was supposed to have been banned with the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter. This monumental international law against disposing of hazardous and radioactive wastes at sea prohibits dumping “from vessels, aircraft, platforms or other man-made structures.”

Yet the use of major undersea pipelines at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan, at La Hague in France, and at Sellafield in the UK have been granted exemptions — as if the massive pumping systems were not “man-made.” On a yearly basis, the La Hague plutonium processing system discharges some 1.4 million barrels worth of liquid radioactive waste into the North Sea, Greenpeace reports.And the UK’s Sellafield site pumps 24 million barrels of radioactive liquids into Irish Sea every year.

When the IAEA says that Japan’s ocean dumping is “in line with international safety standards,” this is the globalized radioactive polluting that is being referenced and endorsed.

Radioactive soil to be spread nationwide as construction fill

In spite of obvious risks to workers who handle it and the threat of surface water contamination caused by rain runoff and winds, the Japanese government has approved plans to allow 14-million metric tons of radioactive soil — and 300,000 metric tons of radioactive ash from incinerators — to be used in public works projects like road and railway construction, and even agriculture “nationwide,” according to the international news reports.

The government calls the plan “recycling,” and it’s been consistently opposed by critics who point to federal regulations that forbid any use of radioactive materials that are contaminated with more than 100 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram (Bq/kg). Waste that’s “hotter” must be disposed of as radioactive waste.

Yet the government intends to allow the use of soil (scraped from thousands of square kilometers that were hit with fallout from the three meltdowns) containing up to 8,000 Bq/kg of cesium, 80 times the federal limit. Radioactive cesium was spewed in large quantities from the triple meltdowns of March 2011 and it persists in the environment for up to 300 years. (Mountain forests in the fallout zones west of Fukushima cannot have topsoil removed and so remain contaminated with cesium which is spread downhill by heavy rains.)

Watchdogs with the Citizens Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo point out that government rules would be violated if the 8000 Bq/Kg limit is allowed. Yumiko Fuseya wrote in CNIC’s newsletter, “Despite the Nuclear Reactor Regulation Act stating that only waste of 100 Bq/kg (becquerels/kilogram) or less can be recycled, [the plan says] ‘removed soil’ of up to 8,000 Bq/kg can be recycled, and this is a double standard.”

Fuseya complained that Japan’s Ministry of Environment, “claims that ‘disposal’ includes ‘recycling,’ even though Article 41 of the Act on Special Measures Concerning the Handling of Materials Contaminated by Radiation does not include ‘recycling.’

The daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported December 5 that about 75% of some 14 million tons of bagged soil has a radioactive cesium count of 8,000 becquerels or less per kilogram.

CNIC also reports that the government has conducted hair-raising agricultural experiments in Fukushima Prefecture, such as growing and harvesting cucumbers and radishes “in fields where the [contaminated] soil has been covered with normal soil.”

Just as the International Atomic Energy Agency has approved of dispersing contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, the agency last September gave final approval to Japan’s plan for using the radioactive soil and fly ash (now piled in 14 million 1-tonne bags) for public works projects, saying that the scheme is “consistent with IAEA safety standards.”

Ongoing earthquakes & aftershocks

As if accidents with wastewater pumping, Pacific Ocean poisoning with radioactive wastewater, and spreading millions of tons of cesium-tainted soil around the public commons weren’t hazardous enough, routine earthquakes and their aftershocks off northeast Japan relentlessly rock the Fukushima disaster site and threaten to crack open giant tanks now holding 1.3 million tons of highly radioactive wastewater. Relentlessly frequent quakes also endanger the means of water cooling the 880 tons of molten reactor fuel (or ‘corium’) still thermally hot and radioactively unreachable somewhere beneath the three smashed reactors.

On January 23, after a 5.2 magnitude quake hit the Fukushima Prefecture’s Aizu area, the government warned of possible aftershocks and urged people to “stay vigilant” against landslides and avalanches. Last April 4, a 6.1 magnitude quake rattled Fukushima’s coastline just 47 miles off the site of the three meltdowns — far closer than the super quake of March 2011, the biggest in Japan’s recorded history, which was 80 miles offshore.

Clean-up workers increasingly fear contamination

Following a string of clean-up related radiation accidents at the devastated station, Tepco workers have grown more concerned about their safety. The daily Asahi Shimbun reports that a Tepco survey its workers found that over 40 percent of the workforce was worried about jobsite “radiation issues.” Of this group, 52% said “physical contamination” was their main concern, seven percentage points higher than its 2023 survey. Tepco said that the repetition of exposure accidents on site have likely increased workers’ worries.

In October 2024, two workers were hospitalized after being splashed with highly radioactive liquid wastes bursting from a hose that disconnected inside a wastewater treatment building. And in February 2024, about 5.5 cubic meters, or 5.5 metric tonnes, of highly radioactive liquid waste gushed from the a “cesium absorption apparatus” in an incinerator building before a worker noted it and closed a valve.

The Citizens Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo keeps close track of the routine accidents taking place at Fukushima and across Japan’s nuclear industry here.

New documentary: “Unfogging Fukushima”

The China Global Television Network (CGTN) has produced an English language documentary on the three simultaneous reactor meltdowns and their massive radioactive releases which premiered December 31, 2024.

The network announced the debut noting, “Despite extensive efforts over the past 13 years, problems such as discharging nuclear-contaminated water into the sea still exist. CGTN visited the worst-hit area, measured nuclear radiation, and investigated the truth behind the enduring consequences of the accident.” The film is available here.

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Image Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0

A $trillion is a steep climb. How does a kid driven to school in a Rolls Royce and inheriting merely $millions become a $trillionaire? In 2011 Musk’s net worth was south of $1 billion. It bumped along at that level until Covid five years back and then rocketed up into the dozens of billion en route to hundreds of billions. And with the Trump 2024 campaign and now presidency seeing its 2nd stage launch past the half $trillion mark.

The post 2008 financial shock, by necessity, required governments create massive piles of cash to sustain the economy, especially if they were not going to bail out holders of home mortgages. Turning cash over to finance kept the economy humming, but without much boost to middle-class incomes, it mostly launched asset prices ever higher, thus Musk, et al., seeing their fortunes rise. Covid provided the next big fuel (money) injection powering asset prices ever higher and once again Musk was a principal beneficiary.

Now that this two-stage burn has finished, a massive infusion of energy (money) is required for the 3^rd stage burn propelling Musk truly to the stars as the world’s first $trillionaire. Like space the vastness of this amount of cash is hard to grasp. But imagine having a $million to  spend annually. At this rate it would take fully a million years to get rid of it.

Having established the size of such a fortune, the question rises, how can one person get it? This $trillion sum is so vast that one can’t merely add this much value to the economy to get it. But there are “ores” of cash representing fortunes that can be moved from the public’s balance sheet to Musk and other owners of paper wealth. In short, the Mother of All Privatizations (MOAP).

1) Asset prices (Much of Musk’s wealth is comprised of asset): Assets, from equities, to crypto, to property and more, have risen well over inflation and economic growth the past 4 decades. In short, this is what the French economist Thomas Piketty simply characterized as the problem of r>g (rate of returns on investments being above the underlying rate of economic growth). This alchemy in recent decades has been achieved by “mining” labor (domestic and foreign) by paying them (both in wages and social supports) less than the underlying rate of economic growth. Ergo, the growth disproportionately is upward distributed largely through asset price increases.

As with any mining operation, new “ores” need to be found as ones are spent, and in the US Social Security and Medicare are the motherlode.

2) Tax cuts: Tax cuts increase asset prices. Cutting Social Security (whose present and future deficits from previous raids on past SS surpluses to pay for tax cuts to make government deficits from the general budget smaller than they otherwise would be) reduces general government liabilities (obligations), therefore enabling bigger tax cuts on income, capital gains, etc. Cutting Medicare benefits has the same impact on the general budget, thus leading to lower taxes for the wealthy AND freed capital otherwise going to social expenditures now available for investment or increasing asset prices. Cutting Social Security and/or privatizing it in part or whole, creates further cash that will push up asset prices. But this is a one off. Once done there are no further big “ores” to mine.

The above freed capital will go chiefly to asset prices vs investment, as constrained consumption by broad majorities of the population leads enterprises to place money into assets as limited growth of consumer markets discourages investments in new production.

3) Government spending on Musk products. Trump already declared his intention to increase spending on the US government “Space Force” (militarization of space) in addition to other space expeditions and bases (e.g., orbital stations, stations on Moon and Mars). Obviously, Musk is positioned to take windfall gains from supplying these efforts. Yet, the above must be squared with the Trump Administration’s overall goal to reduce government spending. These spending cuts will come from many sources, but by far the largest pools of cash are in Social Security and Medicare.

You might ask, “instead of these big cuts, why doesn’t the government just borrow more as the US has done since the 1980s? Trump’s view (and likely right) is that the US has reached its limit to borrow (have foreigners buy Treasury Bills, etc.). Therefore, to keep interest rates down (both for business and government) the US must reduce borrowing. They don’t so much predict the end of the US reserve currency system so much as it having reached its limits, with likely some contraction. But maintaining it requires lower government deficits and Social Security and Medicare are the biggest items on the government’s balance sheet.

4) Lastly, while less impacting Musk personally, throwing hundreds of thousands if not millions of public sector workers out work will lead to massive downward pressure on private sector wages. This will drive down payrolls for US businesses while also delivering lower taxes, seeing them win twice at the expense of labor.

In short, Musk is about to go “where no man has gone before” to become the world’s first trillionaire. Getting their requires a MOAP in part or in whole of your Social Security and Medicare, thus ending the last and largest legacy of the New Deal. Will you let him?

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In a deeply disturbing and unprecedented move, the U.S. has begun transferring immigrant detainees to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They’re being held without access to their lawyers and families.

President Trump has ordered up to 30,000 “high-priority” migrants to be imprisoned there as part of his larger mass deportation and detention campaign.

Trump claims these migrants are the “worst criminal aliens threatening the American people.” But recent investigations of those detainees have already challenged this narrative. And a large percentage of immigrants arrested in the U.S. have no criminal record.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time our government has invoked “national security” to deny marginalized communities their basic human rights. President George W. Bush created the infamous military prison at Guantánamo during the “War on Terror” to hold what his administration called the “worst of the worst.”

The prison has since become synonymous with indefinite detention — 15 people still remain there today, over 20 years later. Notorious for its brutality and lawlessness, Guantánamo should be shut down, not expanded.

Of the 780 Muslim men and boys imprisoned there since January 2002, the vast majority have been held without charge or trial. Most were abducted and sold to the U.S. for bounty and “had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11,” reported the UN’s independent expert in 2023, who reiterated the global call to close Guantánamo.

The Bush administration designed the prison to circumvent the Constitution and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, refusing to treat the prisoners as either POWs or civilians. This legal fiction resulted in a range of human rights violations, including torture.

But the Constitution — and international law — still applies wherever the U.S. government operates. All prisoners, including immigrants, are still entitled to humane treatment, legal counsel, and due process.

“Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantánamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU case challenging Trump’s executive order.

However, the U.S. does have a sordid history of detaining migrants captured elsewhere at the base. As legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn points out, the U.S. has detained Haitians at Guantánamo on and off since the 1970s.

In the 1990s, thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing persecution following a military coup were captured at sea. The U.S. held them in horrific conditions at Guantánamo so they couldn’t reach U.S. shores to seek asylum — which is a fundamental human right long enshrined under U.S. law.

Shrouded in secrecy, the U.S. continues to capture and detain asylum seekers fleeing Haiti, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries at Guantánamo. Last fall, the International Refugee Assistance Project reported that refugee families are kept in a dilapidated building with mold and sewage problems, suffer from a lack of medical care, and are “detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world.”

Trump’s order would take these abuses to a horrifying new level.

Currently, the base’s existing immigration detention facility can hold up 120 people. Expanding it to 30,000 will require enormous resources. The “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo already costs an estimated $540 million annually, making it one of the most expensive prisons in the world.

Then there are the moral costs.

The mass deportation and detention of asylum seekers is not only unlawful but cruel — and not a real immigration solution. Instead, our government should prioritize meaningful immigration reform that recognizes the dignity of all people.

We should also shut down the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo once and for all — and pursue accountability for its decades of abuses. Otherwise, it will only continue to expand. “I can attest to the facility’s capacity for cruelty,” warned Mansoor Adayfi, who was subjected to torture and endured nearly 15 years at the prison.

Guantánamo’s legacy of injustice must end.

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Mural, Bolinas, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Paul McCartney heard rumors of the wild goings-on in the Haight and visited on April 4, 1967. At the Fillmore Auditorium, he listened to a rehearsal by the Jefferson Airplane. At Marty Balin’s and Jack Casady’s apartment and along with his girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher, he played an acetate (a type of phonograph) of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” album, which would be released later that year. Thousands of others flocked to the Haight, once a largely Black neighborhood, for the music, the drugs, and the revolution that was promoted by the Diggers, who named themselves after 17^th century English dissidents. Gerard Winstanley and his Digger comrades aimed to turn the world upside down would probably have felt at home in the Haight in 1967 when the great American counterculture was “busy being born” to borrow the words from Bob Dylan’s ballad  “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m only bleeding).”

How counter was the counterculture?  And if you were alive then and there how counter was your own personal culture? Not sure? You might be able to decide on your own when the Counterculture Museum opens this spring on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the neighborhood where hippies and their friends reigned supreme for about two years in the late 1960s.

Then disaster struck. Bad drugs. Bad health. Bad cops. Paradise rarely lasts long, not for Diggers or hippies. But the melodies from that time and place have played on and on. Dozens of books have been written about that era including Charles Perry’s brilliant The Haight Ashbury that comes with an introduction by Grateful Dead member Bob Weir who says, “We weren’t all stoned all the time. But we were all artists, musicians, and freaks all the time.”

The Haight staged a comeback in the 1990s, largely because of the efforts of gay men. Today it is a vital San Francisco neighborhood with Amoeba, a gigantic record store, Gus’s, an excellent grocery, two cannabis dispensaries, a post office, a few decent cafes and restaurants, and dozens of shops and boutiques selling tie-dyed T-shirts, hoodies and sneakers. It also attracts a great many tourists who want to imbibe the magic of the hippie era, buy rolling papers, roaches, posters and R. Crumb Comic books.

Estelle and Jerry Cimino, a husband and wife team and the founders of the Counterculture Museum—they are also the founders of the Beat Museum in North Beach —plan to give as much if not more space to the anti-war and civil rights movements as they do to the “youth culture” of the Sixties that created communes, staged rock festivals, made marijuana a commodity, and went on overland journeys to India to seek gurus in ashrams.

 That decision to blend the movement and the counterculture might surprise and even shock veterans and historians of the Sixties. After all, they were two separate entities from about 1967 to 1972. In those  heady days, Yippies tangled with members of SDS, Abbie Hoffman battled Tom Hayden of the Red Family and Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, who once called Abbie “a thorn in her side.” Abbie called her “Bernie” much to her distress.  At the time, the rivalries and clashes seemed as significant as the divisions in 1917 and 1918 between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks or those between American anarchists and American members of the US Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s.

In the fall of 1970— five months or so after the National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State and police shot and killed two and injured twelve students at Jackson State—I joined a small delegation that traveled from New York to Algeria to meet with Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, both living there in exile with the pipe dream of creating a new organization that would appeal to Black Panthers, Yippies, members of SDS, as well as psychedelic warriors who belonged to the League for Spiritual Discovery.

The other members of the delegation were Marty Kenner, Brian Flannigan, Anita Hoffman, Jennifer Dohrn and Stew Albert.  In the background in Algiers were Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge’s wife, and several young Panthers who had fled the US rather than go on trial and go to jail. In the elegant Panther embassy, in-between visits from the North Korean Ambassador, the young Panthers listened to Motown, smoked dope and danced. I danced and smoked with them. I also dropped acid with Leary and watched a visiting Russian volleyball team trounced an Algerian team.

Anita Hoffman represented Abbie who was not allowed to leave the US; that was an order from Judge Julius Hoffman who presided over the Chicago Conspiracy trial. Marty Kenner represented Panther support groups, Stew Albert spoke for his pal, Jerry Rubin, Jennifer Dohrn conveyed the sentiments of her sister, Bernardine and Brian Flannigan, who had been arrested during the “Days of Rage” in October 1969, expressed the anger of the quintessential street fighting man.

I had a singular objective. Bernardine asked me to meet with Eldridge and tell him in confidence that Leary was untrustworthy, that he had blabbed to reporters and acid heads, gave away secrets about the Weather Underground, and named the names of people who helped him escape from Lompoc Prison and also aided and abetted his flight from the US.                                                                                 Eldridge taped my conversation with him and held an AK-47 (a gift of the North Korean Ambassador to Algeria) in his lap the whole time we talked. He overreacted to the information I delivered and put Leary and his wife Rosemary under house arrest. The members of the delegation were confined to Eldridge’s pad, which was different from the Panther Embassy and also different from the house in the hills where Eldridge lived with Kathleen.

Don Cox, the Panther Field Marshall gave us a tour of Algiers and described the history of the Algerian liberation movement. On one occasion we enjoyed a sumptuous seafood dinner, while a couple of CIA agents kept their eyes trained on us.

One afternoon, in the pad, I wrote a press release in which I quoted Eldridge, who called for armed struggle, and Leary who wanted cosmic voyagers to travel to outer space. Not surprisingly they couldn’t agree on anything. Also, not surprisingly they both returned to the US, surrendered to the authorities and made deals that kept them from long prison terms.                                                                                  That fall, I flew from Algiers to Paris, reencountered with Abbie and met pseudo French Yippies —pseudo because they were living at home with their parents. I also roamed the Left Bank with Jean-Jacques Lebel, a French Beat, a translator, and a surrealist. We looked for trouble that never arrived. The young French Yuppies seemed to have the best of two worlds. They defied older generations, rioted in the streets and came home to eat their mothers’ gourmet cooking.                                                                                         My favorite person from that time was Bernadette Devlin, the Irish revolutionary who was fond of saying of the British, “kick them when they’re down.” Nasty but oh so satisfying.

At home in New York I wrote an account of Leary and Cleaver in Algeria. Paul Krassner published it in The Realist under the title, “Eldridge & Tim, Kathleen & Rosemary” and with an illustration that depicted the two couples in bed together in a spoof of the movie, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice that capitalized on and reflected some of the sexual politics of that era.

I don’t expect the Counterculture Museum to offer exhibits that will highlight the fiasco in Algeria or the odd position of the French Yuppies who were both in and out of the global counterculture. The Ciminos emphasize unity not disunity, hope not despair, creativity not self-destruction and positive gains not loses. That’s surely the best tact to take especially since they want to attract visitors and inspire them.

The counterculture that sprang up in the Haight Ashbury is worth remembering and celebrating, especially because the Ciminos will connect it to the movements of the past and political causes of today.

Estelle describes the museum as though it’s a beloved child. “The Counterculture Museum will celebrate the vibrant legacy of Haight-Ashbury by preserving art, activism, and creative expression that once defined the neighborhood. Far from being a relic of the past, counterculture continues to shape music, fashion, social movements and the spirit of independent thinking,” she says.

Estelle adds, “By bringing history to life through exhibitions, events, movies and storytelling, the museum hopes to strengthen the community, enrich the cultural fabric of Haight-Ashbury, and support local merchants by drawing visitors eager to experience the authentic, enduring impact of the counterculture movements.”

It’s worth remembering because as far as I can see there are few if any genuine countercultures today in the US. Journalists and reporters who write about them seem to assume that they’re dead and buried.

In a recent article published in The New Yorker about the documentary filmmakers, Albert and David Maysles, and editor and director, Charlotte Zwerin, journalist Michael Schulman notes that the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in December 1969  marked “a death knell for the counterculture.” Indeed, it seemed to be the flip side of Woodstock. Ever since then cultural critics have held funerals and burials for the counterculture though in the 1970s the counterculture spread from  New York’s Lower East side and San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury to the countryside where it put down rural roots.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s in the aftermath of the bloodbaths at Kent and Jackson state I wrote two contradictory pieces about the counterculture: one of them titled “Children of Imperialism” which largely denounced youth culture and the other “New Morning which was issued as a communiqué by the Weather Underground and that herald the arrival of youth culture. Some Black Panthers described it as a betrayal of Third World Liberation struggles.

At that time I thought that the Weather Underground needed a base and a constituency; hippies seemed the only potential allies around, especially since the organization had given up on the white working class. But I could also see that hippies and freaks had adopted some of the racist notions of their parents. They idealized American Indians and Third World peasants and saw themselves as active consumers buying and selling drugs, music, and even rebellion which was framed as a commodity.

Perhaps the Counterculture Museum will convert millennials and members of Generation Z to the cause of rebellion and resistance today but it will be an uphill battle. “We seem to be going backward,” Estelle says, thinking of Trump and company. But she and Jerry Cimino are not giving up their culture war

“It’s important to educate young people about the past so they understand that positive change can happen today just like it did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she says. Jerry adds that the counterculture of the 1960s happened because “the boomers reached critical mass and because their coming coincided with the arrival of global electronic mass media.” Today technology seems more reactionary than ever before, especially when it’s in the hands of autocrats like Elon Musk and his minions.

If the Ciminos wanted help with their museum they could do no better than turn to Stannous Flouride who has lived in the Haight for 43 years and who gives popular walking tours in the neighborhood wearing a black leather jacket and an ancient button that screams “Yippie!”    “City Hall hated the hippies,” Flouride says. “Mayor Joe Alioto wanted to destroy them, so he canceled services to the neighborhood, like garbage removal, which prompted the Diggers to organize a ‘clean-in.’ The Diggers fed thousands of kids and provided the spiritual and political backbone for the hippies.”

If Flouride were creating a counterculture museum he says he’d feature the Diggers, The Panthers, jazz, rock, the January 1967 “Human Be-in” and the “Summer of Love.” He adds “there is really no counterculture here as there was in the Sixties.” He adds, “The only remaining counterculture is hip hop which appeals to both young whites and young Blacks.”

If I wanted to revive a slogan from the Sixties and put it back in circulation it might be, “The spirit of the people is greater than the Man’s technology.” It was greater in Vietnam and it can be greater around the world again. Get off your phones and your laptops. Go into the streets and make as much noise as you can.

If the Counterculture Museum succeeds it will send visitors into the streets of the Haight and beyond. It will turn into its opposite, not a museum with artifacts but a cradle of resistance and rebellion with ideas and tools for insurrections. After all, museums are usually repositories of the past, and as such they are innately conservative and rarely innovative. It’s time to bring about a cultural revolution in the world of the counterculture.

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Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

Are you keeping lists? Years from now, when the dust settles on this Trumpian insanity, historians will look back upon this Archimedean tipping point and show specific moments where certain individuals could have changed the course of history. Counterfactual social psychologists will analyse this historic moment by asking: What if enough Republican senators had voted not to confirm most of Trump’s nominees? What if enough civil servants decided to resign to shut down the entire government in solidarity with those let go or given unacceptable marching orders? Before historians and counterfactual experts start their work, now is an appropriate moment to begin keeping lists of profiles in cowardice as well as noting the rare profiles in courage.

The term profiles in courage comes from Senator John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson’s 1956 Profiles in Courage, eight narratives of senators’ bravery in going against the tide while risking their careers. The book begins: “This is a book about that most admirable of human virtues – courage.” Most relevant today, the book recognizes different kinds of pressures exerted on members of the “world’s most exclusive club.” Trump’s MAGA threats to the GOP senators is nothing new.

Each of the eight senators highlighted made decisions that went against his party’s position; each senator made a decision that put his political future in jeopardy. As the authors note about each of the senator’s bravery;

“To be courageous, these stories make clear, requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all. Politics merely furnishes one arena which imposes special tests of courage.”

One example of the courage described is George W. Norris a Midwestern Republican from Nebraska. At the turn of the 20^th century, Morris chose “between conscience and constituents,” “between principles and popularity.” In the House, Norris was able to change the precedent that the Speaker could appoint members of the Rules Committee instead of the House itself, overruling the power of the House “Czar” Joe Cannon. Norris once declared; “I would rather go down to my political grave with a clear conscience than ride in a chariot of victory as a Congressional stool pigeon, the slave, the servant, or the vassal of any man, whether he be the owner and manager of a legislative menagerie or the ruler of a great nation…”

In the Senate, Norris filibustered the U.S.’s entry into WWI. He was condemned as “treasonable and reprehensible” as well as compared to Benedict Arnold. He offered to participate in a special election to see if the people of Nebraska would still support him. As he told a crowd; “Even though you say I am wrong, even though you feel sure I should have stood by the President, has the time come when we can’t even express our opinions in the Senate…without being branded by the moneyed interests as traitors?” In the Senate, he became “the nation’s most outspoken advocate of public power…” He even switched party, believing that progressives had no choice but to support Al Smith. As Kennedy/Sorenson wrote; “A democracy that has no George Norris to point to – no monument of individual conscience in a sea of popular rule – is not worthy to bear the name.”

But what about profiles in cowardice? Frank Bruni excoriates Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine in The New York Times. As opposed to the young senator and his ghost writer’s presentation of political courage, listen to Bruni on Collins’ positive votes on all of Trump’s nominees except Pete Hegseth: “Collins is a coward. Worse yet, she’s a bellwether. Make that a church bell, the kind that tolls when there’s a death. In this case, it marks the passing of any independence, any dignity, any scruples among Republicans in the Senate, who are letting President Trump have whomever he wants and seem poised to let him do whatever he pleases because it’s the easy path, the one that protects them from his rancor and retribution.”

It is certainly ironic that Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, former leader of the Senate GOP, was the only Republican senator standing up to Trump. He opposed the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth. “The Senate’s power of advice and consent is not an option; it is an obligation, and one we cannot pretend to misunderstand,” McConnell said in a statement opposing Gabbard. “When a nominee’s record proves them unworthy of the highest public trust, and when their command of relevant policy falls short of the requirements of their office, the Senate should withhold its consent.” A worthwhile statement; but for all his actions while Majority Leader, the Senator from Kentucky does not merit being on a profiles in courage list.

Are there possible profiles in courage today outside the Senate? There are very few examples. An outstanding signal of resistance came from the district attorney’s office in New York. The Justice Department’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove III, instructed prosecutors to dismiss corruption charges against New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams, accused last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, refused to carry out the order, sending her own letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi explaining her reasons. Sassoon resignation was followed by at least six other prosecutors in New York and Washington

The surprise move by Sassoon, a Federalist Society member and former clerk to conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, is just the kind of resistance we need today. “It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” Sassoon wrote. “I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially,” she added in her letter to Bove, as described by Eric Lach in a detailed analysis in The New Yorker.

There have been other publicized acts of resistance. Several members of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Board resigned when Trump announced he would install himself as Chair after ousting 18 Board members. Several prominent artists have cancelled performances. “Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I’ve decided to cancel my appearance at this venue,” wrote the actress and writer Issa Rae on Instagram in announcing the cancellation of her show next month,

Keeping lists of cowardice and courage may not be enough to change what is happening today. But rereading Kennedy and Sorenson is a helpful reminder of how individuals in the Senate made courageous choices. One can only hope that decision makers will read the book. In the least, Susan Collins should be required to wear a Hester Prynne scarlet letter C for cowardice.

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Round Dance at the Salmon Festival of the Columbia River Tribes, Lyle, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Envisioning a society not based on competition, on artificial scarcity, or even one based on a foundational level of respect for every member of society is a concept considered to be fruitless unless you are writing Sci-fi for Lucille Ball (yeah, she was involved in Star Trek). That is to say, it’s a non-starter in serious quarters.

The evidence that human lives proceeded in a very different manner in the thousands and thousands of years prior to wide-scale civilization and agriculture is largely ignored. Many books have been written in regard to the concept, and they do a fine job of articulating it (The Fall by Steve Taylor and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn are stand-outs). The basic concept is that once “the food got locked up” through wide-scale agriculture, then there were those more than happy to hold the keys. These keys produced power differentials and an often artificial scarcity. In association with this, concepts such as lineage and ownership became more prominent and thus, the subjugation and “ownership” of women became a feature.

Prior to this global lockdown of the food, small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers existed in a quite sustainable manner. The tripe about short and brutish lives does not seem to be true in most cases. Basing leisure time as a measure of well-being, those hunter-gatherers spent far more of their time in the pursuit of social interactions and other leisure activities than the workers of today. This has been studied even in modern times with tribes of the Amazon. Hell, even medieval peasants had more days off and less hours spent working for others than the office worker of today. It doesn’t seem to be a normal breakdown of the day to spend 8-12 hours working to maintain shelter and food—increased time for the arts, for love and socialization seems to be more the human baseline need. The inherent inefficiency of having to work for others like our oligarch class increases the workday by magnitudes from what it really should be. Elon’s jets don’t fly themselves. No, they require the input of millions of us working extra minutes of the day for each member of this parasite class.

This situation is probably why so many are unhappy and unconnected, falling into the notion that there is something wrong with them rather than realizing they have been plunged into a world at odds with the internal genetic memory of generation upon generation who led lives with more freedom. Why is it we can memorize the words to thousands of songs effortlessly and sing to them on the radio at will- yet if we are forced to recite the rules on creating an Excel spreadsheet, we falter? I’d say it’s because we are hard-wired to sing and tell stories at night around the fires, not to attempt self-domestication in cubicles.

From what I’ve said it might sound like I hope for a return to hunter-gatherer lives. No, I do like the connectivity of the modern world and the leaps in science. My point is that we have a need for socialization, a baseline way of living that has not been factored in because we have all been brainwashed and forced to participate in this sick sociological experiment. It’s been one of subjugation and limiting human potential. It’s ironic because the system is not conducive to human happiness, not even for the billionaires. One simply has to witness the front row group at Trump’s inauguration. Has there ever been such an exhibit of raw insecurity in those with so much power? Sadly, it looks like nothing will fill their dark soul voids. This way of life isn’t even making them satisfied. They are subject to the same wants and needs that we are, but they have deluded themselves into thinking that the way of happiness is power and distancing themselves from humanity, rather than embracing connectivity and empathy—the only clear ways to find peace and purpose.

But back to considering our heritage, if you will, what we all truly need. Humans are a curious species, and we need to create. We take care of others if we aren’t brainwashed into thinking that our brothers and sisters are our enemies. Loneliness literally kills people every day and we are creating a world with more and more of it. As anthropologists have described— evidence of care for the elderly, for those who had broken bones that required others to care for them to maintain health again—it’s all there in the historical record. Don’t believe the new techno-eugenicists who would have us leave others in the dust if they are not what they consider productive. Don’t believe them when they try to say this is just the natural order of things. This is their own toxicity. They know nothing but affluence paired with internal emptiness and they only seem to feel something……..anything—if they are causing others pain.

We have deep needs for connection, purpose and egalitarianism. The first contact with native peoples in the Americas clearly indicated many offered assistance to the early settlers in a reflexive manner. Again, they showed ways of life, not necessarily built on coercion, suppression and extreme hierarchy. Yes, I know exceptions were obviously there, but I’m speaking to the overall more stable and less destructive ways of life exhibited by those not participating in settler-colonialism. The best notions the founding fathers came up with were lifted from the Iroquois. It was discussed in colonial times how it was a problem that settlers who experienced native life would often want to stay, refusing to return to s0-called civilized society. I’m not trying to do some weird fetish of native life, but to give credit where credit is due. Overall, it was a more sustainable lifestyle and many Europeans found it to be desirable. It’s a failure of our imaginations and in many cases, willful disregard to consider that our current way of life is not remotely close to a default human condition.

Yes, we have serious problems as a species, to the extent I’d almost entertain the wildest of notions, that we are a hybrid of sorts, such potential for good and for evil, often at odds with ourselves, but I’d say this internal discord comes much from the way of life we’ve all been trapped within. It’s been one of overwhelming fear, lack of free will, and all tied up in the crazy-making notion that this is normal and no other way of life is possible.

In the current situation, particularly in the US, the minimal freedom we did have seems to be dwindling. By that, I am especially speaking to the freedom from notion. Freedom from economic uncertainty, freedom from others proclaiming soft ownership of your body, freedom from a life dictated by your parent’s social class at your birth. The very minimal movement and freedom that was in place is being clamped down upon by those who are the primary vectors of this civilizational sickness. A healthy individual with billions of dollars could no more spearhead efforts to further enslave the society they live in than cut off their own hand. But we aren’t talking about healthy individuals. We see billionaires who will never be satiated, who can never have enough and sadly, these are the ones we have in charge of us right now. They make cruel decisions with not so much little regard to the consequences, but more like no regard for how this plays out for anyone but themselves.

This situation would not have been possible without a populace who believes that this is something of a norm. We watch television shows about hoarders and shake our heads but accept the most extreme hoarders of all. Yes, everyone complains, but they overall only envision something slightly better–as in larger cages and better protection from the capricious whims of the economy. Unfortunately, there is no large-scale belief system that this is inherently insane and perhaps one of the most cruel ways to handle a population.

It’s difficult to envision what might play out. These are rapidly changing times. I try to do “though experiments” on how one would go about improving this situation and my mind’s eye is blank (also I literally have aphantasia so it’s in truth always dark in there). But I try to think in concepts and in logical steps for improvement and transcendence. One aspect that I keep coming down to is that we have to purge the notion that anyone is worth more than another. This is the ground floor, the required foundation—if this very basic concept can be accepted as truth, I think we’d be shocked at what we can accomplish.

There are enormous needs for change, but each one of us can look at our own prejudices, our own self-imposed domestication and attempt to take down bricks one by one. I’m speaking to our mental makeup, sadly it’s obviously not possible for most to extract physically from the economic necessities of participating in the system. But even so, we have the seeds in our minds if we choose to grow them. I apologize if this is too far into the woo for most readers who are used to reading about nuts-and-bolts problems and issues. I’ve just had a need to look for solutions to avoid despondence and sadly answers aren’t exactly forthcoming in this current environment. But still—there is absolutely not one power or entity that can stop us from envisioning a better world and from passing these views to others. We may not even see the fruit of such thoughts and worldview alterations– likely we will not, but if we want a purpose, something to clearly indicate why we are here and what we need to do, I’d say embracing that mindset and allowing it to flourish is the most important thing we can do for any descendants. It’s a horrible and exciting time to be alive—we might end up the group that begins the needed lifting of the veil and the unclouding of our own minds.

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A portrait of Leonard Peltier at the entrance of Oceti Sakowin Camp, 2016.

Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier finally returns home today. In the last moments of his presidency, Joe Biden commuted his two consecutive life sentences to home confinement. Many in Indian Country see this executive clemency as a significant victory in a decades-long campaign for his release. However, clemency is not the same as a pardon or exoneration, nor does it reclaim the five decades of life taken from elder Peltier or the time lost with his family. It also does not overturn what many consider a wrongful conviction or provide justice for decades of FBI misconduct. Yet, the 80-year-old member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa will spend the rest of his days surrounded by loved ones at home.

The entire history of Peltier’s campaign — with its twists and turns, betrayals and victories — has yet to be written. My involvement in the movement is minor compared to those who survived the shootout at Oglala in 1975 or lost their lives during the “reign of terror” that engulfed the Pine Ridge reservation after the 71-day siege at Wounded Knee in 1973. Others who devoted their entire lives fighting for his freedom didn’t live long enough to witness Peltier’s return home. His return home would not have happened without their sacrifices.

I became involved in the campaign to free Leonard Peltier in 2013. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I attended graduate school. There were annual demonstrations advocating for his freedom at the federal courthouse. As Barack Obama’s administration ended, the drive for presidential clemency intensified. Additionally, the Water Protector Movement at Standing Rock, opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, provided a rare chance to discuss Peltier’s case with a national audience and its impact on American Indian rights in the United States. I don’t remember a time before 2016 when there was an international platform and an open audience for what are often marginalized and easily dismissed “Indigenous stories” in corporate media.

The clemency campaign was invigorating. It linked the experiences of Water Protectors at Standing Rock to the previous generation of Red Power activists, many of whom, by then elders, also made pilgrimages to the Oceti Sakowin camp at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers. There were also similarities in how the police responded to Water Protectors as they did to the Red Power Movement. Notably, the swift and violent crackdown against Water Protectors created a new generation of Indigenous political prisoners, awakening many across the world to the reality that the Indian wars and American Indian people were not mere relics of a lamentable past. Those struggles were, and remain, very much central to our present realities. Leonard Peltier’s case and ongoing persecution exemplify that truth.

After I left the Standing Rock camps for the last time in late November, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to petition Congress for Leonard Peltier’s release. Appealing to the humanity of those who have dehumanized us and our movements is not an easy ask for me. But I felt compelled by a sense of duty. The Obama administration had made many promises to Indian Country. I thought we had a chance.

On the morning of December 9, I woke up to the heartbreaking news that Peltier’s son, Wahacanka Paul Shields, had died in the hotel room next to mine. He passed away fighting for the freedom of a father he only got to know while in prison. His death, however, didn’t elicit any sympathy from those with the power to free his father. The reactions to our lobbying efforts were cold. Fear gripped our so-called elected congressional allies as Donald Trump’s presidency loomed large. How cruel, I thought. Native faces made for great photo ops, but we get sidelined amidst the settler political infighting as an inconvenience. The lesson I learned was that crying on the colonizer’s shoulder can get you killed. You will die waiting for them to recognize your humanity. The lobbying efforts in front of congressional staffers who’d rather be elsewhere were humiliating. We were not a priority.

Unlike the high points of the movement to free Peltier, when hundreds, and sometimes thousands, demonstrated on his behalf, in December 2016, there were only a few of us: several of Peltier’s children—Chauncey and Kathy; longtime advocates like Peter Clark, Eda Gordon, and Suzie Baer; his AIM spiritual advisor, Lenny Foster; and two survivors of the Oglala shootout, Norman Patrick Brown and Jean Roach, who were teenagers at the time but are now elders in their own right. It wasn’t a low point, despite not achieving what we aimed for. For me, the conversations were enlightening. Everyone else had decades more experience than I did. Beyond the shared knowledge, it was very clear that Leonard Peltier was as much a political prisoner as he was a spiritual one. The Indian Wars, both old and new, were as much about achieving the political conquest of Indigenous peoples as they were about spiritual warfare—attempting to extinguish the fires of resistance even if they had been reduced to embers.

I now realize that movements aren’t only defined by their high points or the eye-catching spectacles of public demonstrations. Mobilizations are important, but they aren’t what sustains a movement over many years. Movements are shaped by periods of backlash and reaction, especially when victory feels distant or unattainable. For American Indian people, this reality confronts us nearly every day in a settler society that seeks to erase us and forget our existence. Erasing what came before and continues to exist, despite acts of genocide and elimination, makes it easier to claim land and resources that rightfully belong to others.

Leonard Peltier’s campaign appeared impossible, a fool’s errand to outsiders. Plenty of detractors said he would never get out. Sympathetic people were sometimes surprised that he was still alive or that he was still in prison. They had forgotten about him—maybe about us, too, and the movements fighting for our continued existence. Or perhaps they just tuned in at the wrong times. It’s easy to forget. It’s harder to remember. It’s even harder to reverse the course of a history that seems to naturalize our erasure. Peltier’s struggle behind walls cut off from the world was spiritual, keeping the faith in the people and movement of history. Ours on the outside had to match that level of commitment.

What are we willing to do for liberation? That is a profoundly political and spiritual question. It has humbled me to see in others their commitment, watching comrades endure devastating sanctions or genocidal wars but still maintain a revolutionary duty to stay, fight, and build power. Leonard Peltier survived five decades in a prison cell. His fight was spiritual.

***

On January 20, I kept hitting refresh on the White House press briefing website. The Trump inauguration ceremonies had already begun, and time was running out for Biden to grant clemency to Peltier. There were no updates.

Frustrated, I stepped into the twenty-below weather. It was so cold that the moisture in the air crystallized into ice, producing the effect of a light snowfall despite the clear sky. The sunlight refracted through the ice particles, creating a glittering rainbow effect. I made my way to the Mississippi River to an eagle’s nest. I said a prayer with a tobacco offering, hoping the Wanbli would take that message.

Within minutes of returning from the river, my phone blew up. “He’s coming home.”

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Americans these days don’t much like billionaires. Our ultra-rich, Americans overwhelmingly believe, aren’t paying enough in taxes. Polling earlier this month found that nearly three-quarters of the nation’s likeliest voters — 74 percent — feel billionaires are paying “too little’ at tax time.

Just how concerned about billion-dollar fortunes have Americans become? Nearly half of us overall, Harris polling found last summer, would like to see a limit on “wealth accumulation.” Among Gen Z’ers, that support for limits on billionaire fortunes runs all the way up to 65 percent.

“Billionaires,” some 58 percent of Americans agreed in that same Harris poll, “are becoming more like dictators.”

The share of Americans equating billionaires with dictators — given Elon Musk’s current dominant role in the new Trump White House — is most likely running even higher today.

The best way to counter our ongoing billionaire coup? We might want to look east for some answers. In the run-up to Germany’s February 23 parliamentary elections, that nation’s Left Party, Die Linke, has proposed a detailed five-step set of initiatives designed to cut the super rich down to democratic size.

“We believe,” the Die Linke co-chair Jan van Aken notes simply in his intro to his party’s new plan, “that there should not be any billionaires.”

But van Aken and Die Linke understand quite well that no government can suddenly snap its fingers and make billionaires disappear. The party has instead melded ideas from all around the world into a coherent and common-sense package.

The Die Linke plan’s step one: restoring a “wealth tax.” Germany has been without one since the nation’s top court nixed the wealth tax in effect back in 1995. The proposed new version would revolve around an annual levy starting at 1 percent on wealth over 1 million euros — the equivalent of about $1.03 million — and rising up to 12 percent on wealth concentrations above a billion euros.

On top of that would come a special one-time wealth tax, also on a graduated scale, that would only impact Germans sitting on fortunes worth more than 2 million euros. This levy’s top rate would hit 30 percent for awesomely affluent Germans in the proposal’s highest wealth bracket.

Germany’s super rich would also see, under the Die Linke plan, a higher inheritance tax on the wealth they leave behind. On the annual income side, top corporate executives and other high-earners would face a 75-percent tax rate on their take-homes over a million euros.

The fifth and final plank of the Die Linke plan: replacing the current 25-percent flat tax on capital gains — the income from the sale of financial and other assets — with a graduated sliding scale of rates.

The overall goal of the Die Linke tax plan: a halving of the wealth of Germany’s wealthiest over the next decade. Three other German parties on the left side of German politics are also backing tax hikes on the wealthy, but at levels not nearly as significant as Die Linke.

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Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

America’s Vice-President, JD Vance’s comments this week on democracy ring nicely to the ear of some, but are off key on the musical score of facts. February 14^th’s Munich Security Pact saw Vance inveigh against European states for not adhering to democracy. And recent actions in Europe on democracy do raise eyebrows. Vance, for example, referenced Romania canceling its December 8, 2024 final round of presidential elections. Upstart “populist” candidate Calin Georgescu won the plurality of votes on November 24, 2024’s first round. Romania’s government, with support from the United States Embassy, expressed concerns that a TikTok campaign by Russia was a headwind pushing Georgescu to victory. And polling positioned him to win the final round.

The above events were during the concluding period of the Biden Administration. Romania has 3 big NATO (US) bases with the largest US base in the EU under construction. Romania has also supplied Ukraine with weapons and other forms of support. Moreover, Romania’s port at Constanza has stepped up to become one of the biggest points of entry for military supplies into Ukraine and for the export of its grain.

Georgescu, while having a long public career in environmental policy, holds policy views at variance with Romania’s, if the EU’s and the pre-Trump political mainstream. Georgescu speaks in the parlance of “anti-globalists.” He celebrates Romania’s interwar dictators and their rule as a period of national glory while praising Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Furthermore, he supports ending the war in Ukraine, but on terms favoring the Kremlin rather than NATO. In short, the prospect of Georgecu’s electoral win panicked both Romania and the US administration in late 2024.

However, under Trump’s Administration, Georgescu’s views are embraced, not to mention that of the AfD in Germany, Orban in Hungary, Law and Justice (of which the last has gotten too much of a pass given Poland’s support for Ukraine in the current war). Vance singled out Romania for its election interference in his Munich remarks. He argued, not without merit, that a $200,000 social media buy that has never been conclusively linked to Russia, but regardless even if it did, is thin sauce for calling off an election, thus hinting at the weakness of our democracies. To be clear, however, normatively, these are Romania’s election decisions to make.

On all these points, Vance is correct. But the evidence points to his intellectual dishonesty with his protestations and advocacy for democracy. The day after Vance’s Munich speech, his “boss” (a word one can be confident Trump endorses), saw the latter post to social media Napoleon’s purported axiom that, “He who Saves his country does not violate any Law.” This trolling of the public with Trump placing himself above the law demonstrates disregard for constitutionalist government let alone democracy. Of course Trump’s disregard for democracy was fully evident in his 2020 election loss when he rang up Georgia’s Georgia Secretary of State, Republican, Brad Raffensperger stating, “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” Moreover, the ransacking of the US Capitol on January 6, 2020 by Trump supporters in the weeks following Trump’s above election night phone call and subsequent referencing of the ransackers arrested as “hostages,” goes further yet in revealing the cynical deployment of “defense of democracy” by Vance.

Looking further yet on democracy, Hungary’s Viktor Orban gave the opening speech at the Republican’s 2022 CPAC meeting in Texas (headlined by Trump). Orban asserted, “We cannot fight successfully by liberal means… The only thing we Hungarians can show you is how to fight back by our own rules.” These remarks combined with Hungary’s gerrymandering of legislative districts and control over judiciaries (tactics also deployed in the United States most notably in Wisconsin and North Carolina) fully point to disregard for democracy.

In short, there is reason to see defense of democracy by both liberals and conservatives alike as chiefly instrumental. Each embraces democracy insofar as it advances their agendas, but no further. This does not mean liberals and the populist right are equals, and in fact, I argue the greater disregard for democracy comes from the populist right, but it does point to how both will disregard democracy in pursuit of their objectives if seen as necessary.

But on the score of liberals professing (if not believing) in democracy, while instrumentally rejecting it when it confronts their other core values and/or interests, the question remains, why is the public increasingly either rejecting democracy and/or embracing the populist right?

Polanyians (Karl), such as Germany’s Wolfgang Streeck (and to some extent the present author with perches in Transylvania where Polanyi wrote his doctoral dissertation, and Wisconsin) answers lie in tensions between markets and society. In the 19th century nationalism created spaces for local middle classes to emerge and access to professions and social mobility previously monopolized by foreign imperial entities. Nationalism represented a liberatory character for society where state and nation displaced rule by empire and their foreign proxy elites. Of course, in the inter-war years, nationalism also revealed what could be its evil character when the state detached from democracy and national groups themselves became oppressors of their own national minorities.

Fast forward to the last half century and we see the “long stagnation” and the market again subsuming society to the economic imperatives of elites. Social democracies put guard rails in place providing protections for society in place from the 1930s-1970s. But by the 1990s those began to erode and after the 2008 financial shock, to break down. Meanwhile, in the post-Soviet bloc vestiges of social protections on health and education remained from the communist period, but working classes otherwise were subjected to nothing short of beatings by market forces that impoverished them at home leaving many to depart their national communities in favor of work abroad with minimal protections.

For many in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) communism placed their national aspirations on pause. The post-Soviet period thus represents to these states the chance to pick up the project of pre-WW II national communities. This has the possibility of taking on forms either resembling more benign characteristics of 19th century nationalism or if subjected to impediments to realizing that project, its more dangerous interwar form.

Neoliberalism (an extreme state imposed form of the market) has eroded support for democracy. Political liberals have spoken and acted at points under neoliberalism to protect vulnerable populations (all to the good) while failing, however, to maintain conditions for working and middle class majorities to thrive. To local populations, NGOs, Brussels bureaucrats and academics advancing the projects for “vulnerable populations” can, however well intentioned, take on the appearance of missionary efforts that fail to meet the broader needs of society. Populist responses emerge from this soil and with it the figures many warned of in Central and East Europe (CEE) following the 2008 financial crisis, but now linking up with analogs to them in the West. Moreover, while long-standing hatred of Russians exists among many in the CEE from their experience with Soviet aggression, others want peace and wish to see accommodations made with Russia that stop war.

In the short term, figures like JD Vance must be shown for what they are: persons with demonstrably no loyalty to democracy and only opportunistically referencing it for whatever tactical political rhetorical gain can be had. Medium and long-term, however, democracy’s adherents must pivot to policies defending society at the local level and at larger geo-strategic dimensions develop strategies for walking back war and finding more Westphalian solutions to international order. In short, some variation of Polanyi’s formula of privileging society, which also means, especially in CEE, protecting nations, represents the only chance at democry’s survival.

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Photograph Source: Raul Jusinto – CC BY-SA 2.0

Donald Trump spoke to reporters for over three hours on Air Force One on his way to see the Super Bowl in New Orleans on 9 February 2025. It was not clear to the reporters who broadcast his comments whether Trump was speaking as the President of the United States, a member of the United Nations, or as a real estate magnate. Gaza, he said, is a “demolition site” that needed to be “leveled out” and “fixed up”. Since Gaza is on the Mediterranean Sea, Trump said, it could be developed into a new French Riviera. According to him, it is not the crime scene of a genocide but “a big real estate site”. The United States, he said with his presidential smile on, “will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too”.

Palestinians from Gaza listening to this commentary could have imagined that the United States would be funding the reconstruction of Gaza, which has been estimated by the United Nations to be – at a minimum – $53 billion (the cost after the 2014 pulverization of Gaza by Israel was $2.4 billion). In 2023, total US Overseas Development Aid was $66 billion, and, with the cuts proclaimed by President Trump, it is unlikely that the US can muster anything near the bill for the reconstruction of Gaza. There was nothing humanitarian in Trump’s comments about the making of the Gaza Riviera (or since this appears to be a gift to Israel, it is more likely that Trump imagines it to be the Azzah Riviera, using the Zionist name for Gaza, meaning “strong city”). The Israeli establishment has, from the start of this genocidal campaign, said that it wants to annex Gaza, which seems to be aligned with the Trump vision to make Gaza American or to develop Gaza as a beachside resort for U.S. tourists and Israeli settlers. Knowing Trump, he will likely want to reserve a section of the beachfront for himself and to build a Trump International Hotel and Tower that has a casino attached to it for good measure.

Zionist Gentrification

None of this is a surprise and nor are these ideas original to Trump. The entire Zionist project imagines an Eretz Israel that stretches from the borders with Egypt to that of Iran. The real estate deed for this is a line in the Bible, “To your descendants, I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river the Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18). It is not clear which river in Egypt this line refers to, whether the Nile or Wadi el-Arish (in the Sinai Peninsula). But if the Euphrates is taken as its border, then the land that Zionists claim includes the entire West Bank and Jerusalem, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the western half of Iraq. There are maps of this kind that can be seen in the offices of far-right Israeli politicians (on 19 March, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke in Paris from a podium that displayed an Israeli map that included Jordan). This is utterly normal in the world of the illegal settlements in the West Bank (part of the UN-mandated Occupied Palestine Territory), which the settlers call Judea and Samaria. Their geography has been different since at least when their spiritual guide Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in The Iron Wall(1923) that Zionists must build Eretz Israel behind an “iron wall, which is to say a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure”.

Trump is not much of a reader. He probably has never heard of Jabotinsky or of Theodor Herzl. He probably cannot define Zionism. But he knows a real estate opportunity when he sees one, and that is how he has understood his solution to the problems facing Israel. In his first term, Trump made the “deal of the century”, the Abraham Accords, which brought a series of states to normalize relations with Israel: Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (September 2020), Sudan (October 2020), and Morocco (December 2020). With Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) having already made peace deals with Israel, the map had begun to shift away from the Palestinians and toward the Israelis. The new governments in Lebanon and Syria are not far from making their own separate agreements, and Saudi Arabia has already said that it would normalize with Tel Aviv. Trump is a “bazaari” (marketplace) politician, one who tosses outlandish agreements in the air (for Morocco, the acceptance of its illegal occupation of Western Sahara) in utter disregard for international law. He is now doing the same with Gaza.

“I think that it’s a big mistake to allow people – the Palestinians, or the people living in Gaza – to go back yet another time”, he said on Air Force One. “We don’t want Hamas going back”, Trump said. “The United States is going to own it”. It did not take long for all the UN Special Rapporteurs to sign a strong letter condemning Trump’s comments. They made the correct argument that his idea, if implemented, is a war crime. Trump does not understand international law. He thinks like a gentrifier. This is what he has been doing across the United States: evicting ordinary people and building hideous buildings as a monument to the fabulous wealth of the few. Trump, like the illegal settlers, conducts Zionist gentrification.

Silence

Marwan Bardawil is an engineer with the Palestinian Water Authority. At a little-noticed press conference in Ramallah, Palestine, Bardawil said that 85% of the water and sewage facilities in the Gaza Strip were destroyed by the Israeli genocide. It will cost $1 billion to repair and replace the water and sewage facilities in Gaza. Polio, which was eradicated in Gaza a quarter of a century ago, has returned because of the collapse of the water system.

The Palestinians are being silenced as the debate around Gaza unfolds. If they want a Trump International Hotel and Tower, that is up to them, not up to Trump or Netanyahu. But they are not clamouring for a golden tower. What they want are their homes. And their universities. And their hospitals. And the photographs of their family members who are now all dead.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photograph Source: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate Airman Jordon R. Beesley – Public Domain

“Take your money with you,” said Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, when told about Trump’s plans to cut aid to Latin America, “it’s poison.”

USAID (US Agency for International Development) spends around $2 billion annually in Latin America, which is only 5% of its global budget. The temporarily closed-down agency’s future looks bleak, while reactions to its money being cut have been wide-ranging. Only a few were as strong as Petro’s and many condemned the move. For example, WOLA (the Washington Office on Latin America), a leading “liberal” think tank which routinely runs cover for Washington’s regime-change efforts, called it Trump’s “America Last” policy.

While USAID does some good – such as removing landmines in Vietnam (themselves a product of US wrongdoing) – as an agency of the world’s hegemon, its fundamental role is aligned with projecting US world dominance.

Not unexpectedly, the corporate media have largely come to the rescue of USAID. They try to give the impression that they are mainly concerned that some countries would be badly effected by its loss. In fact, the follow-the-flag media understand that USAID is part of the imperial toolkit.

Both the Los Angles Times and Bloomberg suggested that USAID’s shutdown would “open the door” to China. The Associated Press described the withdrawal of aid as a “huge setback” for the region; the BBC echoed these sentiments. The NYT and other mainstream media point to the irony that many of its programs help stem outward migration from Latin America, an issue which is otherwise at the top of Trump’s agenda.

Weaponization of humanitarian aid

The corporate media, not surprisingly, give a one-sided picture. It’s true, of course, that an aspect of USAID’s work is humanitarian. But, as Jeffrey Sachs explained, “true, and urgent, humanitarian aid” was only one element in a larger “soft power” strategy. From its inception, USAID’s mission was more than humanitarian.

A year after President John Kennedy created USAID in 1961, he told its directors that “as we do not want to send American troops to a great many areas where freedom may be under attack, we send you.”

The organization is “an instrument of [US] foreign policy …a completely politicized institution,” According to Sachs. It has mainly benefitted US allies as with the program to limit hurricane damage in Central America, cited by the NYTwhich omits Nicaragua, hit by two devasting storms in 2020. Needless to say, Nicaragua is not a US ally.

Although USAID provides about 42% of all humanitarian aid globally, the Quixote Center reports that most of the funds are spent on delivering US-produced food supplies or on paying US contractors, rather than helping local markets and encouraging local providers. The Quixote Center argues that “a review of USAID is needed,” though not the type of review which Trump or Elon Musk probably have in mind.

Indeed, the dumping of subsidized US food products undermines the recipient country’s own agriculturalists. While hunger may be assuaged in the short-term, the long-term effect is to create dependency, which is the implicit purpose of such aid in the first place. In short, the US globally does not promote independence but seeks to enmesh countries in perpetual relations of dependence.

Regime change

The third and most controversial element, identified by Sachs, is that USAID has become a “deep state institution,” which explicitly promotes regime change. He notes that it encourages so-called “color revolutions” or coups, aimed at replacing governments that fail to serve US interests.

The State Department is sometimes quite open about this. When a would-be ambassador to Nicaragua was questionedby the US Senate in July 2022, he made clear that he would work with USAID-supported groups both within and outside the country who are opposed to Nicaragua’s government. It is hardly surprising that Nicaragua refused to accept his appointment. The progressive government has since closed down groups receiving regime-change funding.

The history of US regime-change efforts in Latin America is a long one, much of it attributable to covert operations by the CIA. But since 1990, USAID and associated bodies like the National Endowment for Democracy have come to play a huge role. For example, they have spent at least $300 million since 1990 in trying to undermine the Cuban Revolution.

Regime-change efforts in Cuba involved a vast organization known as Creative Associates International (CREA), later shown by Alan MacLeod to be directing similar USAID programs across Latin America. Currently, CREA is working in Honduras whose progressive government is under considerable pressure from the US government. Yet CREA is only one of 25 contractors which, in 2024, earned sums ranging from $32 million to a whopping $1.56 billion.

Culture wars

USAID’s regime-change work often foster ostensibly non-political cultural, artistic, gender-based or educational NGOs whose real agenda is to inculcate anti-government or pro-US attitudes. Examples proliferate.

In Cuba, USAID infiltrated the hip-hop scene, attempted to create a local version of Twitter, and recruited youngsters from Costa Rica, Peru and Venezuela to go to Cuba to run a particularly inept project that risked putting them in jail.

In Venezuela, USAID began work after the unsuccessful US-backed coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez in 2002. By 2007, it was supporting 360 groups, some of them overtly training potential “democratic leaders.” The Venezuelan rock band Rawayana, recent winners of a Grammy, are funded by USAID to convey pro-opposition messages in their public appearances.

In Nicaragua, after the Sandinista government returned to power in 2007, USAID set up training programs, reaching up to 5,000 young people. Many of those who were trained then joined in a coup attempt in 2018.

Astroturf human rights and media organizations

Another tactic is to undermine political leaders seen as US enemies. In 2004, USAID funded 379 Bolivian organizations with the aim of “reinforcing regional governments” and weakening the progressive national government.

It did similar work in Venezuela, including in 2007 holding a conference with 50 local mayors to discuss “decentralisation” and creating “popular networks” to oppose President Chávez and, later, President Nicolás Maduro. USAID even expended $116 million supporting the self-declared “interim presidency” of Juan Guaidó.

In a similar vein, Nicaragua was the subject of a USAID program intended to attack the credibility of its 2021 election. Likewise, after the election of Xiomara Castro in Honduras, USAID set up a democratic governance program to “hold the government to account.”

Creating or sustaining compliant “human rights” organizations is also a key part of USAID’s work. Of the $400 million it spends in Colombia each year, half goes to such bodies. In Venezuela, where USAID spends $200 million annually, part goes to opposition-focused “human rights” groups such as Provea. USAID funded all three of the opposition-focused “human rights” groups in Nicaragua, before they were closed down, and now probably supports them in exile, in Costa Rica.

Finally, USAID creates or sustains opposition media which, as Sachs put it, “spring up on demand” when a government is targeted to be overthrown. Reporters without Frontiers (RSF, by its French initials) reported: “Trump’s foreign aid freeze throws journalism around the world into chaos.” It revealed that USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets. In the run-up to the 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua, USAID was supporting all the key opposition media outlets.

RSF, while purporting to support “independent journalism,” itself is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the European Union – hardly neutral parties.

Few regrets

This is why there may be few regrets about the demise of USAID in Latin America among governments beleaguered by the US. Indeed, opposition groups in Venezuela and Nicaragua admit they are in “crisis” following the cuts to their funding.

Even Trump’s ally President Nayib Bukele is skeptical about USAID: “While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.”

The evidence that USAID has weaponized so-called humanitarian aid is incontestable. Yet, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it is the Latin American countries that Washington has targeted for regime change – Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela – who are “enemies of humanity.” In response, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil retortedthat the “only enemies of humanity are those who, with their war machinery and abuse, have spent decades sowing chaos and misery in half the world.”

Regrettably, USAID has been a contributor to this abuse, rather than opposing it. While temporarily shuttered at USAID, the empire’s regime-change mission will with near certainty continue, though in other and perhaps less overt forms.

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Photograph Source: dsgetch – CC BY 2.0

“Trump’s actions against the federal bureaucracy are significant and worth watching as they unfold in the courts and political arena.  They are not a constitutional emergency, and casting them as such will diminish the force of such warnings if they are needed.”

– Jason Willick, The Washington Post, “The constitutional emergency that isn’t,” February 8, 2025.

It is difficult to keep up with Donald Trump’s challenges to U.S. democracy, and it is similarly difficult to keep up with the Washington Post’s denial of the challenges.  On the heels of an editorial that suggested it would be useful to allow Elon Musk and his minions into the Pentagon to begin a process of military reform, a Post editorial denies that the United States is facing a constitutional challenge.  Bret Stephens, a senior columnist with the New York Times, is in the same camp as Willick in terms of denying the constitutional crisis and preferring to give Trump benefit of the doubt.

Willick argues that Trump has not engaged in any intrusion on Congress’s power of the purse to rival President Joe Biden’s efforts to forgive hundreds of billions of student loans without authorization.  It is frustrating that Willick did not say that Biden’s actions were overturned by the Supreme Court and that Biden immediately obeyed.  As for Trump’s blanket clemency for those who violently attacked the Capitol and seriously injured Capitol police on January 6th, well that was “perfectly legal,” according to Willick.

It is noteworthy that when Biden left the White House and Trump returned, the busts and portraits of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, Jr, were removed, and the portrait of Andrew Jackson, a White supremacist, was returned.  Jackson, who is one of Trump’s favorite presidents along with William McKinley, is reputed to have said, in response to a Supreme Court decision that favored Indian tribes over the state of Georgia, that “The chief justice has made his ruling.  Now let him enforce it.”  Vice President J.D. Vance has suggested that it might be fine to refuse to do so, saying that that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”  So much for the Constitution and the separation of powers.

Not even Trump’s illegal removal of 17 or 18 inspectors general meets Willick’s test of a legitimate challenge to the Constitution.  In fact, Willick says that Trump’s White House is in “its strongest constitutional position, when it comes to the removal of inspectors general at the most important agencies and departments.”  Willick ignores the fact that the law requires a 30-day notice be provided to Congress before removal of a statutory inspector general, and that a valid cause be provided for such a firing.  Instead, he cites the 2020 case of v. Scalia v. CFPB that confirms the president’s virtually unlimited discretion to remove most executive-branch officers.

It is difficult to keep up with all of the laws and statutes that Trump has shredded in less than a month.  In a 72-hour period, Trump has managed to stop most foreign aid; eliminate federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs; and place a freeze on “all federal financial assistance,” such as grants and loans to state agencies.  It is ironic that the people who will suffer the most from these fiats are presumably the same people who played a role in putting Trump into power.  Trump doesn’t have to worry about accountability because he has removed  inspectors general, and the courts thus far have not stopped his ability to rescind spending previously authorized by Congress.

Trump and his acolytes argue that he is the leader of the executive branch of government and, as a result, the U.S. work force belong to him and owe their loyalty to him personally.  Current applicants to the civil service have to declare their loyalty to him; current employees who challenge his applicants are simply dismissed as members of the “deep state.”  In this way, Trump is challenging the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which reformed the civil service following the political abuse and illegalities of the Reconstruction Period.  The Pendleton Act made it illegal to fire or demote government officials for political reasons.

Not since President Woodrow Wilson had to rely on Colonel Edward House to manage the government has an American president had to rely on someone as arrogant and authoritarian as Elon Musk to conduct a campaign of “shock and awe” against the agencies and departments of the entire federal work force.  Wilson had suffered a stroke so he wasn’t up to the task.  Trump’s case is different; he has no understanding of the workings of the government, other than wanting to reduce it and to those he believes undermined him in his first term—the so-called “deep state.”  Trump is testing the American people and their institutions and, thus far, we are losing.

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