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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“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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Art by Nathaniel St. Clair

In an oped in the Washington Post this week, former secretary of the navy Richard Danzig recommended deploying Elon Musk and his team from the Department of Government Efficiency to the Pentagon “not with a view to cutting costs,” but to “increase effectiveness” of our weapons systems.  Danzig believes that “our first national security priority should not be to cut costs.”  I believe that we can do both.

Musk does have an important record in the space and automotive fields to “apply technology to solve old problems in new ways.”  However, he has a major conflict of interest, earning billions of dollars for himself from Pentagon grants and favoring increased defense spending.  The United States spends as much on national defense as the rest of the world.  At this moment, the United States is spending nearly $900 billion at the Pentagon, and an additional $400 billion at such key institutions as Veterans’ Administration; Department of Homeland Security; Department of Energy; and the Intelligence Community. Hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved with reasonable cuts in weapons acquisition and closing a number of military bases and facilities the world over.  The United States has over 700 bases and facilities world wide.  China has one overseas base on the Horn of Africa; Russia has two in Syria that are threatened by the new government in Damascus that replaced 55 years of tyranny under the Assad family.

Every aspect of the Pentagon’s budget, including research and development, procurement, operations and maintenance, and infrastructure needs to be scrutinized for additional savings.  Capping increases in military pay would mean savings of $17 billion, and freezing DoD civilian salaries for three years would save $15 billion.  Two additional drivers have been the cost of operations and procurement, which have been out of control over the past several years.  There are huge logistical costs in transporting  military equipment to our bases, particularly in countries with limited logistical infrastructure.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded over the years that the “costs of developing and buying weapons have historically been, on average, 20-30 percent higher” than Pentagon estimates.  Tens of billions are spent annually on Cold War systems ill-suited to the needs of the 21st century.  The F-35 fighter jet, a costly and contentious program, was too sophisticated for use in either Iraq or Afghanistan.  There is no better example of President Eisenhower’s warning regarding the military industrial complex than the procurement history of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Like the Marines’ V-22 Osprey aircraft, the F-35 has been a troubled program, with cost overruns, military mismanagement, and no political scrutiny.  The next generation of pilotless armed drones as well as hypersonic cruise missiles have more uses—and fewer costs—than several thousand sophisticated fighter aircraft.  The F-35 variants for the Navy and Marines never should have been built.  The drone, however, presents the same problem for the Air Force (no pilots) that Admiral Hyman Rickover’s strategic submarines presented for the Navy (smaller crews, fewer officers).

The very existence of the Marine Corps is questionable.  The Marines have not conducted an amphibious landing since the Korean War, more than 70 years ago, marking the only amphibious landing since World War II.  There is no other nation in the world that has such a Corps in terms of numbers and capabilities.  President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney tried to kill the Marines’ Osprey program 35 years ago.  The Marine response “bordered on insubordination,” according to Richard Whittle, the author of the definitive book on the Osprey.  The General Accountability Office has raised serious questions about its ability to operate in “high-threat operations.”  Meanwhile, the budget for the Marine Corps is nearly $55 billion.

The key to cost savings in the defense arena would involve reducing nuclear forces.  One of the best kept defense secrets of the past 75 years has been the high cost of producing and maintaining nuclear weapons.  We have devoted more than $7 trillion to nuclear weapons, which represents one-fourth to one-third of overall defense spending, and another trillion has been allocated for the next 7 years.  When the United States initially began to develop nuclear weapons, the military-industrial complex stressed (falsely) that the huge investment in nuclear systems would be an overall savings because it would allow a smaller army and navy.  Meanwhile, our army ($180 billion) and navy ($230 billion) have gotten larger and costlier for taxpayers.

While the Trump administration moves to destroy the Agency for International Development and its important economic assistance programs, a variety of military assistance programs continue to grow.  The United States dominates the sale of weapons overseas, which represents one more aspect of the military-industrial-congressional complex.  Israel and Egypt get $4 billion in military assistance, although their serious human rights violations should prevent any U.S. military assistance.  One purpose of military assistance is to contribute to regional stability, which has hardly been the case in the Middle East.  Military assistance has been particularly ineffective in fighting the war against terror.

Sixty-five years after Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, the United States must come to terms with its elevation of the role of the military; its cult of military spending that has become sacrosanct; and a culture of militarism that has placed U.S. bases all over the globe.  Eisenhower’s warning about the dangers of our “cross of iron” militarism has never been more apparent or more threatening to the American way of life.

Finally, what will happen to defense spending if Trump follows through on his acquisitions regarding Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now Gaza.  As for sending Elon Musk and his kids into the Pentagon: What could go wrong?

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Image by Maria Thalassinou.

The Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada, Gaza. Each time Trump hints at taking over a territory, he taps into an American myth synonymous with violence and self-righteous entitlement: Manifest Destiny.

Early in the nineteenth century, John Quincy Adams wrote: “The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation.” [1] In 1832, Massachusetts Congressman Francis Baylies argued for pushing America’s borders out to the Pacific Ocean. “To diffuse the arts of life, the light of science, and the blessings of the Gospel over a wilderness, is no violation of the laws of God,” Baylies proclaimed. “The stream of bounty which perpetually flows from the throne of the Almighty,” he added, “ought not to be obstructed in its course.” [2] As Adams and Baylies saw it, America’s expansion was in accordance with God’s work and God’s will; it was destined.

A decade later, in the July–August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, editor John L. O’Sullivan published an unsigned article about the annexation of Texas. It was in this article that the phrase “manifest destiny” first appeared in public. The article spoke of America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” [3] This time the concern was not spreading civilization, science, or Christianity, but providing the American population with land for unrestrained growth and development. Again, it was justified as a task God given, God driven, and God blessed.

Writing in the New York Morning News in December 1845, O’Sullivan advocated for the acquisition of the Oregon Territory on the same basis: “Away, away with all these cobweb tissues of rights of discovery, exploration, settlement, contiguity, etc.” he wrote. “To state the truth at one in its naked simplicity. . . our claim to Oregon . . . is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us.” [4]

In Providence and the Invention of the United States 1607–1876, historian Nicholas Guyatt notes that over time “national providentialism” in America transformed into a strategy for achieving concrete political goals. [5] Built upon a mythic belief that fused an understanding of nationalism, independence, growth, and divine virtue, American expansion did not allow for questions, restraint, or protest.

Louisiana. California. Nevada. Arizona. New Mexico. Texas. Oregon. Deceitful officials and fraudulent treaties steered acquisition. Exploitation, corruption, violence, and oppression ensued.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, historian Frederick Jackson Turner explained that westward movement, which was fundamental to American civilization and its development, was enabled by free lands, or the wilderness. The acquisition of western lands, however, alongside urbanization and industrialization across the continent, caused this wilderness to disappear bit by bit. America was about to confront a new challenge, Turner predicted, “the closing of the frontier.” [6]

If Manifest Destiny was a divine mandate, how could it be trumped by territorial limitations? As if to find an answer to this disconcerting question, the U.S. embarked on a quest for expansion beyond the continent, beyond the literal wilderness. As historian James Oliver Robertson put it:

Whether it was “taking up the white man’s burden,” providing “oil for the lamps of China,” freeing Cuba from Spain, “making the world safe for democracy,” bringing the Four Freedoms to the world, “saving the Western Democracies,” or “nation-building” in Vietnam, America’s mission, her errand into the wilderness, [had] become—with the disappearance of American wilderness—something to be carried out in the larger wilderness which [was] not-America. [7]

From there, the wilderness became a metaphor for “those places and peoples and nations on earth which America [perceived] to be without democracy, without liberty, without independence, without the possibility of the individual pursuit of happiness,” [8] Robertson explained. With America restless and relentless, the frontier continued to move farther across deserts and oceans. This expansion was not always accomplished through conquest and colonization, but also through industrial, technological, and military means and ideological processes.

Puerto Rico. Guam. The U.S. Virgin Islands. American Samoa. The Northern Mariana Islands. Today these unincorporated territories are inhabited by U.S. citizens who cannot vote in presidential elections, have limited representation in Congress and circumscribed self-governance, and are excluded from important federal programs and tax provisions. They can only benefit from selective constitutional protections. To this list of colonies one can add the U.S. government’s military bases and operations around the world, resource and labor management, economic control, political interventions, and cultural influence.

There is nothing new about the path Trump seeks from isolationism to imperialism. What is new is that Trump does not hide behind messianic or missionary rhetoric and does not feel any need for moral justification. No more claims to civilizing the savages through Christianity or education and science. No more spreading democracy and promoting free markets. No more liberation. Trump is not one for political correctness. Out with the providential thinking, too. The U.S. is gearing up to expand further not because of America’s God-given exceptionalism but because of Trump’s personal grandiosity and self-indulgence.

“The greatest danger to mankind is not a new weapon, but the human psyche itself,” warned Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. “Without myth, we are directionless, but with the wrong myth, we are dangerous.”

With each executive order, it is as if Trump is speaking O’Sullivan’s nineteenth-century language: Away, away with all these cobwebs of rules of law, democracy, diplomacy, human rights… Condominiums to casinos to golf courses, to the Riviera of the Middle East and even Mars, Trump believes that it is his own Manifest Destiny to expand.

Whether he knowingly exploits a national myth or is personally possessed by it, and is thus lost in a grandiose delusion, does not matter. What matters now is political submission and public acceptance. Taking the myth for granted. Normalizing tyranny and violence. Witnessing without protest. Numbing ourselves. It is with this collective indifference, this ignorance, that we are most dangerous.

Notes

[1] John Quincy Adams quoted in Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1777 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

[2] Francis Baylies quoted in James Oliver Robertson, American Myth American Reality (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), 72.

[3] John L. O’Sullivan quoted in Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 106.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

[6] For more information see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).

[7] Robertson, 123.

[8] Ibid., 124.

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Image by Markus Spiske.

Trumpism is the new, populist, post-postmodern form of a “non-ideological ideology” redefining the relations between the State and Capitalism.

A new iteration of an oligarchy who, after shifting their political allegiance from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party, formed themselves around President Trump and his hubs of power in Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, and the Oval Office, in addition to the Web, as Zuckerberg and Musk as the two-popes of the digital age, where Donald Trump reigns as the “Great Twitter Communicator.”

If there were 12 of them, with a pure heart, and a pure mind bent on self-sacrificing, and Christian compassion, they could be compared to Camelot’s Knights of the Round Table, made famous by the 12^th century Arthur-Lancelot-Graal cycle of the French-Breton Romance. But since they are filthy rich and self-centered, materialist and opportunist, with a tainted heart and mind, they function more like an ideological Pretorian guard supporting and defending the new Presidential Monarch.

This oligarchy/plutocracy constitutes 0.1% of the American population. It owns 14% of the nation’s wealth, $22 trillion in stocks, bonds and real estate, while 50% of Americans own 2.4% of the national wealth ($4 trillion). These ultra rich individuals contributed to the super PACs in favor of Trump’s candidacy. Elon Musk spent more than $200 million of his personal wealth on Donald Trump’s campaign; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, (Amazon) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook and Meta) each gave $1 million to the Inauguration Fund of President Trump.

The Super PACs form an unholy alliance between Big Money and Big Politics. In more ways than one, it can be said that MAGA was funded by GAFA—the European acronym to loop together the American multinationals shaping global consumerism (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple). A majority of the American electorate was persuaded that what is good for the ultra-rich entrepreneurs of these multinationals is good for them.^[1]

This new configuration took the institution of the State by surprise. It comes as close as possible to a political coup, bypassing the law in many instances. This unconstitutional power grab by the tandem Trump-Musk, took most by surprise, barreling along, as it is, like a runaway train with loose cannons on board. It unwittingly and thoughtlessly imposes what it considers to be the cure to a “rotten,” “lunatic,” “Marxist,” “leftist” state of things existing within many departments of the Federal Government. The Federal agencies Donald Trump accused of harboring (without proof) rampant “abuse, waste, fraud” are gutted or suppressed.

Diktats (250 Presidential decrees the first two weeks), the creation of DOGE (Department of Governmental Efficiency), the orders of an unelected, “unofficially official” oligarch (Elon Musk), were used or created ad hoc to clean and wipe-out those agencies deemed by the new political and ideological “system” to draining the Government Treasury, and/or propagating “Anti-American values.” By the same token, Trump holds in suspicion all the intellectuals and academics, lawyers and journalists, artists and Hollywood stars who profess or advertise in public liberal, democratic, or socialist ideas. He believes that, at best, their ideas of control and regulation of capitalism hold the country back, impoverishing the middle- and working-classes; at worst, they are the “inside enemy,” a 5^th column helping the “outside enemy” by subverting the unity of the country, and demoralizing America by propagating anti-American values.

Elon Musk and his bevy of cost-cutters were given carte blanche, firing US federal employees, forcing them to retire, resign, or accept a buyout. Musk and his henchmen (are there any women?) work beyond governmental legality. On the one hand, what they are doing to Washington is an overhaul of the Federal Government by planning to replace many career-civil servants at mid- and top-level with new loyal employees, partisan sycophants, and political buddies, or making the old ones take an oath of obedience. On the other hand, they want to put the Government out of business, by “un-governing,” by making the big machinery of the Federal State obsolete.

The best way to get rid of a dog is to scream that it is rabid. One does not have to prove it.

Since mid-January 2025, the American people have beenexperiencing a mild foretaste of what the Russian people experienced when they were hit by the Easterly, socio-economic Shock-Therapy inflicted by the Chicago School of Economy’s Boys just after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. If one thinks that this vengeful, punitive, cruel, and ultimately idiotic socio-economic “Shock and Awe” treatment of the ex- Soviet Union did not have any bearing on what happened in Russia afterwards, one is clueless. Putin’s imperialist revenge is the by-product of this historic, American-made humiliation and destruction of the economy of what was, for better or worse, a country—something the Chinese government was able to avoid.

So, these politicians for a new socio-economic policy and these megalomaniac plutocrats have to convince the American people that this huge Washingtonian apparatus is worthless, corrupt, and sinful, that the taxpayers’ money spent to run it would be better spent somewhere else. In this battle for the minds of the American electorate, all tricks are justified, even the senseless is forced to make sense. The politics of the sledgehammer is used to squash flies. These “grand liquidators” feel empowered and self-justified by decades of Republican anti-Federalist rhetoric. As Donald Trump constantly repeats, they are only doing what the American voters-taxpayers elected them to do. They are just accomplishing their mandate. The only thing they won’t touch, reform, or diminish is the military, for obvious reasons.

Their principal goal is to free as much Capital as possible from the State Ideological Apparatuses (Althusser), by suppressing and privatizing as much as possible the Government’s functions and services—even if this means destroying what the Government used to positively stand for in the minds of a large majority of the people. They want to maximize the availability of Capital for Big Tech, Big Business ventures and tax breaks for corporations and wealthy entrepreneurs, since the Reaganian trickle-down theory stands paramount in the ideology of these self-declared “benefactors” of humanity. The future development of AI, cybernetics, and space travel will necessitate huge investments, although the Chinese DeepSeek didn’t cost that much. It developed a world-class model of AI app for $5 million. If those oligarchs could, they would totally privatize Health Care and even Social Security.

In order to convince the maximum number of voters, that this “grand deconstruction” of Government and realignment of priorities is for their own good, this new ideology of entanglement of “anarchic populism” (American Libertarianism influence) with Big Money has to conceal its ideological biases. That is to say that the new post-postmodern political discourse had to change.

Giving the word “gaslighting” a new life, Donald Trump and his political cohort started to make of denial and fantasy, the two key ingredients of their representation of reality. Associated to a perverse manipulation of what constitutes “normative reality,” gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a manipulator incites or induces someone to question his/her sanity, memories, or perception of reality. Gaslighted people feel confused, anxious, and unable to trust their own judgment.^[2]

The 2023/24 Presidential Campaign was full of air and gaz. Donald Trump was the Great Manipulator, igniting people’s passions, fueling their volcanic anger, setting their resentment on fire.

It was marked by a shameless and total reversal of the paradigms of the Symbolic system establishing a basic sense of shared reality, keeping the Imaginary in its place, without which a society cannot function in relative harmony: the false became the true, the lie was the prevailing discourse putting to shame all the others (fake news), the metonymic contamination of the larger picture by the manipulative aggrandizement of a minor detail became the real picture, etc. Authenticity, reality, veracity, accuracy, actuality, testimony, genuineness…, became the victimized signifiers of a perverse, and ultimately schizophrenic reversal of our psychic sanity.

Since this reversal is systemic and systematic, it generated like in a self-fulfilling prophecy, an accepted repetitive recourse to the political discourse of “commonsensical slogans” which then passed as “truisms”: statism means economic stagnation (decreasing citizens’ standard of living); rule of law means regulations (impeding creativity, innovation, and development);governmental authority means tyranny; immigration means joblessness and insecurity; diminishing federal and state taxation means income gain; freedom means free enterprise, freedom to choose the type of education for one’s children, or choosing one’s doctor; socialism means loss of freedom, higher taxes, statist regulations, government inefficiency and corruption; etc.

The national indicators for physical and mental health, suicide rates, drug addiction, longevity, child mortality, violent death, etc., showing that the American approach to social problems is very problematic, are denounced by Trump’s Republicans as nasty, lying, liberal, or socialist anti-American propaganda.

This radical re-alignment between Political Power, Big Tech, and Big Government is re-defining the political relationship between the State and Capitalism—high-tech capitalism that is. It subordinates the State to its vision, interests and benefits. Already, in 1994, Esther Dyson, George Gebele, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler mapped the future along those same lines with Cyberspace & the American Dream.

What President Trump and his cronies are doing is following the blueprint of Ayn Rand’s libertarian philosophy based on an objectivist “State,” whereby the Federal Government becomes a genuine marketplace institution governed by the invisible hand, à la Adam Smith, and not at all a genuine “Government for all.” It would be an anti-Federalist, anti-state made up of competing agencies for protection, defense, surveillance, and retaliation – in short, a “free-market anarchism” based on a strange alliance between populist leaders and the Big CEOS supposed to take care of the livelihood (consumption, jobs, etc.) of people turned into mere consumer-producers.

Making use of an ideology passing as an anti-ideology, magnified by algorithms (AI), this vindictive and activist anti-statism is streamlining the Government, controlling its administrative apparatus. The goal of this “anti-ideological ideology” is to make sure that what’s left of the regulations and restraints imposed by labor laws and environmental sustainability goals, of the constraints put on digital technology (limits put on AI’s development), and of what’s left of the restrictions put on the speculative dimension of financial capitalism are lifted and made inoperative.

What was left of the surveillance dimension of the State in regard to the excess of capitalism is turned around and directed against the State itself.

In fact, what is deemed reactive or oppositional to this unprecedented “governmental grand liquidation,” or critical of the mere unabashed development of a free techno-capitalism and the way it wants to conduct business, quickly receives the accusatory label of being “Anti-American.” Since, for these pundits and deciders (President W. Busch called himself The Decider) of this new state of things, the ends justify the means: dis-information, fake news, the gross manipulation of facts, outright lies, insults and defamation, the false elevated to the level of the “truth,” all constitute the daily staple fed to a credulous, ignorant, indifferent, disoriented crowd, or worse, a public getting off on the spectacle of abjection.

The “ends” here are the colonization and reduction of the economy and its people by the logic and effects of algorithmic digitalization, which, as in a feed-back loop, will guarantee the accumulation of power and capital within the companies of these digital masters, while assuring the future development of the digitalized economy and its people. Marcuse’ One Dimensional Man will then become a concrete reality.

Tim Cook (Apple), Sam Altman (Open AI), Shou Zi Chen (Tik Tok), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichau (Google), Elon Musk (Telsa, X) are the feudal lords of this neo-feudalism. This alliance between Big Power, Big Money, and Big Tech forms a new techno-fascism, whose roots have been resting dormant in Silicon Valley for years. Since the 1960s, Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy and conception of pure capitalism have been working their way throughout the social body. They heavily influenced the economic and political philosophy of Silicone Valley’s entrepreneurs, techno-geeks and digital gurus. The by-products of this ultra-capitalist ideology also tainted the preconceptions and prejudices of these tech-influencers:

Cult of the performance and of competition, leading logically to the idealization of the winner, the hero, the strong; the one who has the will-power and the intelligence to make things happen, who leads society ahead economically and technologically.

Disdain for the weak, the “feminized” under-achiever, and despising the deviant, the poor, the loser, the dummy; the one unable to adapt or transform himself according the laws of survival of the fittest.

Capitalism is life. It is Nature’s vital force. There’s no Yin and Yang here. This force is masculinist—which prompted Zuckerberg to genuinely and naively declare that America and capitalism need more “masculine energy.” Reminiscent of the 1960s’ ideological strong man, à la Mike Hammer:

“If he’s anathema out of the past, then it’s our fault. We brought a man back who should have died a long time ago. The present can’t stand a man like that anymore. Now they want indecision and compromise and reluctance and fear… and we’ve dropped a hot iron in society’s lap… he’s always been in the special-privilege class… [someone who is] a threat to a different world.”^[3]

Only the strong should lead. Wealth is their just reward. This is the American Dream à la Trusk (characterial alloy of Trump and Musk).

This nexus of techno-capitalists shares the same unapologetic belief in merit and elitism, entrepreneurial savvy and savoir-faire, opening the doors to a return to the 19^th century Western ideology of Anglo-Saxon obedience wrapped up in Ayn Rand’s so-called “objectivism.” The Russian-Jewish-American intellectual emigree’s novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) directly inspired Kevin Roberts, head of the ultra-conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. Its more directly activist branch, aptly named Heritage Action, gave birth to the (in)famous “Project 2025” in case the Republicans won the 2024 elections. “Project 2025” is a literal blueprint for the take-over, reduction, and privatization of the Federal Government, while weaponizing its Executive Branch in order to enforce the transformation of society into a genuine capitalist society.

In her writings, Rand sold the virtues of rational self-interest and individual freedom which, very naturally, would express themselves into a pure, laissez-faire-laissez-passer capitalist economy with a government whose only raison d’être would be the defense and expansion of capitalism with a population able and entitled to make free choices according to their personal interests. Although in Thoreau’s Walden have the freedom to live the way they chose, they exist in a de-institutionalized state, where the government does “govern not at all.”

Nurtured by the same nexus of cognitivism, evolutionary anthropology, behaviorism, sociobiology, and the scientific, physical materialist explanations of Nature and man (genetics, electro-chemistry of the brain, etc.) the American society is witnessing a return of Spenserian socio-Darwinism, of the survival of the fittest-type of ideology, of eugenics (with its racialism–and racism for the most extreme advocates of this populist-capitalist alliance). Perhaps, when students, they read, uncritically, Plato’s Republic promoting a society directed by an aristocracy based on intellectual and ethical merit and governing over a population divided, according to the ability of its members, into carefully designed and permanent classes, where marriages would be arranged genetically.

Elon Musk (a South African) and Paul Thiel (who spent time in South Africa) at one point or the other have expressed their belief in the genetic (?) inadequacy of Black Africans for capitalism. Donald Trump himself has been known to make crude, racist statements, as well as dismissing many African countries as “shithole countries.” Trump has even proposed the idea of taking in White South Africans “suffering from discrimination,” while deporting illegal Latino immigrants supposed to be rapist, criminals, drug-addicts, mentally ill– all animals unworthy of being called humans and of becoming Americans.

This ideological behavior and discourse announces the return of a certain form of the “Master/Slave dialectic” without dialectics.

A new form of feudalism is therefore shaping itself; a techno-feudalism using populism as a prop. It claims to be anti-ideological or non-ideological, when in fact Trumpism is very ideological. President Trump hides the ideological side of his political movement by claiming that its ingredients are common sense, traditional American values, liberty and nativism.

Big Tech, Big Money, Big power.

This techno-capitalist neo-feudalism, like the Medieval form of feudalism, will be based on allegiance streamlining a social pyramid. Oaths, vows, and troths of faithful obedience and loyalty by technocrats, devoted work by a subservient and obedient workforce of engineers and technicians, and a de-unionized or un-unionized labor, etc. will form the new social order. No wonder the Presidential candidate expressed his desire to be surrounded by obedient and faithful German army generals, the way Hitler was. If, per chance, the chosen peer fails to his or her mandate (the conservative journalist Megyn Kelly, Vice-President Mike Pence…) the “wrath of God” descends upon the poor recalcitrant.

Religion is no longer the unifying glue of this new form of feudalism.

The amalgamating force of society is now constituted, on one hand, by a nexus of consumerism, high-tech, digitalized communication, artificial intelligence, Meta verse and hyper-real or hyper-virtual spectacles, and, in the near future, cybernetics (robots and androids). On the other hand, on the affective side, the new social order is cemented by nativism and a fear/hatred or mistrust of the foreign other (immigrants or foreign countries), since the other’s jouissance is threatening to undermine the jouissance of the nativist citizen-producer-consumer.

“Truskist” (Trump/Musk) Republican’s post-postmodern brand of neo-conservatism corresponds to the abandonment of the neo-liberal type of democracy which has fulfilled its function since WWII. It accompanied the transformation of capital from an extractive and agrarian-type of economy into an industrial, and then, in the 1980s into a globally consumerist and financial type of capitalism with a welfare state as a buffer against the negative spin-offs of capitalism’s contradictions.

Whereas capitalism used to plug its machinery into human desires, now capitalism has become desire itself. The French/Continental Theory so many neo-positivists and cognitivists passionately dislike offers crucial analysis of what is going on today with the uncanny alliance capitalism- high-technology-populism.

“Capitalism is an unmediated desire, or abstract machine. A society actualizing that desire can be conceptualized as a particular mix between fascism-paranoia and anarchy-schizophrenia (tending strongly toward the latter)… It is the coming out of capital, a new golden age of greed that dares to say its name. Without a wince, Capitalism no longer has to justify itself. It no longer has to hide behind fascist-paranoid quasicauses and argue that it serves the common good. It can dispense with belief in and good sense, because it is now stronger than molarity, and stronger than the ideologies that help to reproduce it. The men who personify it—the Donad Trumps and Michael Milkens of the world—do not so much represent an ideological cause as embody a desire. An abstract desire, a mania for accumulating numerical quantities. Possessing things is understandable from the moral-molar point of view, as is wanting to accumulate capital for what it can buy in the way of time, things, and activities. But to accumulate more than anyone could ever spend? And then keep on accumulating greater and greater sums, with no other interest or aim in life? That is beyond good and evil. The neoconservative capitalist is defined less by what he possesses than by what possesses him. He is the personification of a mode of irrationality… It is superabstract.”^[4]

The coming-out of post-postmodern capital “surfaces as a fatal attractor whose operational arena is immediately coextensive with the social field.”^[5]

The sky’s the limit of this grand, new re-ordering of things. There used to be a “catch-sentence” symbolizing the expansion of America: “Go West! Young Man!” Elon Musk has changed it into “Let’s Go to Mars!” Perhaps these oligarchs should follow his injunction and build their Xanadu on the Red Planet.

NOTES

1. (French and European legal acronym for the four most powerful American multinational companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). ↑

2. The term comes from George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) where a greedy and sadistic Charles Boyer works on Ingrid Bergman (his wife) to send her over the edge into sanity. ↑

3. Mickey Spillane. The Snake. Signet. New York: 1964. 16, 19. ↑

4. Brian Massumi. Monstrosity in A user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. MIT Press. Cambridge: 1993. 151. ↑

5. Idem. 152. ↑

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Photo by Samuele Errico Piccarini

Sometimes when you drive in a certain direction for long enough, something amazing happens. You arrive in just the place that you were heading. It is quite an ability to be able to deny the consequences of straight lines, movement and time. Those who speak of such unavoidable destinations earn names like Cassandra and are very unpopular at parties. This seems to be just such a time in history.

Now this will be the last time I give any lengthy discussion as to how I consider we had multiple waypoints to diverge from this path; at some point this becomes navel-gazing. Looking above your own abdomen is now a quite necessary thing, but I do think a quick glance in the rear-view mirror is necessary to avoid repetitive mistakes. This one last time I’m gonna air it out.

We are dealing with the fruition of so many toxic decisions– so many steps along the way that could have been averted. An accumulation of terrible concessions and outright ignoring of evil. If we don’t like where we are at, we do need to consider how long this has all taken and how many times mitigation might have been possible.

There is a lot of liberal level hatred going on right now towards those they feel are to their left—they consider the current administration to be the fault of those individuals due to their perceived inelasticity in regard to issues such as……. genocide. But this has been going on much longer than recent atrocities—there’s been a very long history of reality being pointed out by leftists and being ignored by liberals.

Many on the left were pointing out that the Democratic Party was dangerous, due to their mendacity and hollow promises. The voicing of this concern was not to enhance the reactionary right but to save any shreds that could keep fascism at bay. The concern was that we would land exactly where we are, whether in this election cycle or the next. It could have happened after any neo-liberal administration, and the left was warning of this very salient fact. And it’s not like the left were magically prescient, no—this is what always happens when a party like the Democrats offer no significant push-back to the rhetoric of the right or any improvement in quality-of-life issues for the masses. It’s almost worse that they dangle improvement, but do not deliver. A portion of the masses will accept and embrace darker, ill-advised options when this occurs. For the left to have been pointing this out was like being on a street corner with a sign proclaiming 2+2=4 and receiving pushback from neo-liberal Democrats saying, “I don’t think you understand how numbers work, it’s simply more sophisticated than you can grasp.”

The Democrats dropped promises in regard to quality of life/wage issues—they did not pursue codification of important social issues even in times of democratic supermajorities—they did not add justices to the Supreme Court when this looked like a necessary option given the psychotic make-up of the current court. This type of behavior delivered us to this very dark place in history we now find ourselves staring at.

The executive order zeal that Trump has exhibited shows how it was probably available in some form many times during Democratic administrations as well. The Democrats had the option to come down with quality-of-life decrees. If the orders were popular but rescinded by Republicans then that would have fallen on them. Their popularity would have taken a nosedive, but things of this nature were not attempted. Biden would put out multiple strings attached “debt relief” that was shut down and did nothing but infuriate those who were tricked into thinking they might have a chance at clawing out of debt servitude. Can you imagine if truly New Deal type program attempts were made? Anything! Drop credit card interest rates allowable and say it’s because the bible is against usury. Let the Republicans play with that fire. Of course, the man from Delaware wouldn’t do that, but I say this to illustrate that there were ways to fight back if the Democrats were remotely who they said they were. If the result of executive orders really did improve lives–even the Trump followers would probably stay shut up about them. If you successfully implemented an order that would alleviate the pain from our healthcare system, can you imagine the unmitigated love you’d receive? From everyone? Look at what happened with the UHC shooter. You had sympathetic people on every side of the aisle over that due to the inherent cruelty of the system. All along the way there have been issues that could bind rather than divide this country. The Democrats simply opted to ignore that. You can say they followed the rules…. but they followed “rules” because they didn’t want to materially change life for the vast majority of Americans. Some of the rules they made up for themselves such as– we have the right to pick our candidates without voter input. That’s quite a rule. It’s such a tragedy because I believe even slight course corrections at pivotal moments could still have changed this nation.

When those on the left brought up options that could earn support and help fellow citizens it was considered to be accomplice behavior aiding the reactionary right. Instead of listening and processing the validity of the concerns, the energy of many liberals was to blame all the wrong people, that is to say the ones who were telling the truth. As I’ve said, there were crucial moments there to stop or slow this slide. One example, of course, would have been to allow an organic primary. But the selection of even a milquetoast social democrat type like Sanders was marketed as a bridge too far and most Democrats eventually swallowed that nonsense up. They were told a candidate like that would never be able to win despite the man having much higher favorable among the right than their handpicked neo-liberal candidates. It was considered to be a mark of maturity to simply acquiesce to “this is how things are” and “we can’t do better”. Quite the motivational stuff, that. Yes, every year gets harder, there’s more homelessness, more suicides, more misery, but we are the adults in the room and you are to accept this as your lot in life. Of course, we end up with fascists. That’s the damn formula for it that history has proven time and time again.

Then we move to a point where full-on genocide isn’t even considered to be a deal breaker with Democrats. When a party falls to that depth, it’s very difficult to see how it can play out in any other manner. Even now, you see liberals gloat in regard to those who didn’t vote at all or voted third party because they couldn’t morally support the Democrats. They say, “are you happy now? Trump wants to move everyone out of Gaza!” As in ha, ha– stupid leftists see how much worse it is with Trump than Biden? Now on this I say you couldn’t have Trump and his son-in-law making Gaza real estate plans without the Biden administration “softening the target”. So, I find that to be a disgusting non-starter. Are we really arguing about how much genocide we should allow?

But………here is where we do get the difference in the parties. And that is in the wholesale dismantling of our government infrastructure currently going on. Again, the liberals would blame the left for this situation when in fact this would not be our reality should the Democratic party have allowed for a natural primary in 2016, 2020 (or hell, even a primary at all in 2024). Those on the left were speaking to history, the inevitable allowance for fascism should relief valves and mitigation not be put in place. You don’t have these situations arise in materially comfortable, at ease societies. And no amount of “this naked emperor has clothes on that were free-trade sourced and hand-sewn by minority lesbians” will change the fact that he is indeed, fucking naked.

But alas, we find ourselves “together’ in that we aren’t fine with the future, the neoliberals and the leftists……..what the world is shaping itself to be is of course simply awful in new and adventurous ways. I would say that the path forward can’t be one of ceding to corporate power, to allowing greasy superficial politicians to convince you to accept situations as egregious as genocide. Our future may look quite different—we may end up with localities having much more power than in the past. We are in uncharted territory, but one thing is for certain and that is we cannot allow pretend opposition to corral our better natures or convince us that in the interest of rationality, we need to forego what we know is decent and correct. Because do not forget, these “rational players”, be it Obama, Clinton, Biden..…. Harris—well, look what their fake opposition has done for us. But they are pretty materially comfortable, aren’t they? Someone said we are in the copper stripping era of the national government. It really won’t affect Biden’s deal with his Hollywood agent.

Moving forward, the greasy political class those types spring from need to be consigned to the dustbin of history. They will bring us nothing but continued misery and a large portion of the masses will look to an authoritarian daddy to fix things. We have actual work to get done. Again, this isn’t new—we didn’t invent this situation. The only way to combat hate, selfishness and inhumanity is the exact opposite of all those things, not pretending, posing and sending out 1,000,000 give me money emails from AOC. This will be my last missive in regard to the Democrats because they are “like a candle in the wind—unreliable” –(thank you fictional Dean Lerner for whatever you were talking about when you delivered that unhinged and delicious line). Time to move on and not repeat such idiocy in the future.

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Photograph Source: 内閣官房内閣広報室 – CC BY 4.0

All presidents bring their own characteristics and governing styles to the White House.  Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency in the most awful of circumstances, was infatuated with himself, taking a LBJ bust to the Vatican to present to the Pope.  Ronald Reagan arrived at the White House so grossly ill informed that a Washington Post reporter remarked that the “task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”  Reagan’s principal biographer, Lou Cannon, wrote that Reagan “may have been the one president in history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.”   George H.W. Bush was particularly nasty during the 1987-1988 campaign, so he had to prove he was really a good guy.  Bush was only the third president in two centuries to be inaugurated  with both houses of Congress in the control of the opposition, so he had to reach out to Democrats.

In our 250 years of history, we have never had to endure as president as ignorant and uncouth as Donald Trump.  His rancid and irredeemable character was unveiled in his second week in the White House when an Army helicopter collided with a commercial airliner over the Potomac River.  The day after the tragedy, Trump blamed the Federal Aviation Authority for hiring disabled people as air traffic controllers, saying they suffered from “intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

Trump didn’t mention that on his first full day in the White House, he had fired all members of the aviation security advisory committee that had been created in 1989 after the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland.   Instead of leading and performing the traditional presidential duty of consoler-in-chef, Trump chose to be combative and point the finger of blame.

Trump’s favorite target is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs throughout the government, particularly in the Pentagon.  In his second day in office, Trump issued an executive order to eliminate DEI programs throughout the federal government.  Trump has falsely accused the Agency for International Development (AID) of funding a DEI musical in Ireland; a “transgender comic book” in Peru; and financing sex changes and “LGTB activism” in Guatemala. As DEI programs are designed to widen the act of hiring to pull in more diverse applicants, Trump’s actions are an expression of his white supremacist agenda.

In taking steps to dismantle AID, Trump froze all foreign aid for 90 days, which endangered the lives of participants in AID trials for new medicines and procedures.  The dismantling of AID, which distributes tens of billions of dollars’ worth of foreign aid annually, assures the spread of disease as well as delays in the development of vaccines and new treatments.  TB alone kills over one million people per year and makes an additional ten million people ill.

As a candidate, Trump pledged to get “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”  On his first full day as president, he signed an executive order barring transgender athletes, thus “restoring biological truth to the federal government.  In doing so, Trump’s bigotry regarding transgender athletes in women’s sports  stopped 10 transgender athletes from competing against more than 530,000 women in the NCAA, which amounts to .000056 of those participating in college athletics.  (Overall, transgender women represent just 0.6 percent of the American population.)

Donald Trump is particularly unusual, applying a style of meanness and mendacity that has worsened in his second term in the White House.  On his second day in office, Trump fired the Coast Guard commandant, Linda Fagan, who was given 60 days to move out of her house at Joint Base Anacostia.  But Trump ordered her to leave her quarters in three hours, leaving the commandant little time to remove all of her personal effects.  What could be more petty and personal?

Trump’s meanness and mendacity over a period of several weeks have violated a congressional law that structured AID as a stand-alone agency; a congressional law that stated 30 days’ notice and “substantive rationale” were needed to remove inspectors general; First Amendment rights that blocked the freezing of domestic grants and other government spending; the Impoundment Control Act that prevents a freeze on most foreign aid; and the ban on birthright citizenship that violates the 14th Amendment.

Trump’s revenge and vengeance campaign has led to the nomination of a number of unqualified and unsavory individuals to important Cabinet posts and senior positions.  One of the worst of them is Anthony Tata, a retired brigadier general, to become undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.  Tata has a history of Islamophobia and other inflammatory comments, once calling former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.”  Meanwhile, Trump’s revenge campaign against the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA, NSA and the Pentagon continues apace, while uncleared moles in the name of Elon Musk rummage through private and classified personnel files.

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How many graduates of Buena Vista Elementary and Lowell High School in San Francisco have become labor book authors?

Probably not many–other than Eric Blanc, whose mother taught in that city’s public school system (and served as union president) and whose father was long active in its central labor council.

Blanc became a teacher himself and drew on that experience when writing his first book, Red State Revolt: The Teachers Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. It chronicled the 2017-18 uprising in public education in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and other states.

Now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, Blanc has just published a more wide-ranging study, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. It grapples with a perennial question facing the labor left—namely, what kind of break with business as usual, within established unions, would help more private sector workers win union recognition, first contracts, and strikes?

A member of DSA, Blanc argues that the current imbalance of power between labor and management in the U.S. can only be changed, for the better, with large-scale, coordinated organizing efforts rooted in the rank-and-file. His most detailed case study focuses on the four-year union recognition drive at Starbucks, one of the biggest restaurant companies in the world, with 380,000 employees and market value of $108 billion.

 In the U.S., that workforce is relatively high-turnover, widely dispersed and fragmented into small, retail store size groups.  The author’s interviews with founders of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)  take us behind the scenes of an amazingly durable campaign that began when “ten young radicals started salting Buffalo Starbucks stores in early 2021.” (One was Jaz Brisack, now a “practitioner in residence” at the UC Berkeley Labor Center).

“Worker to Worker DNA”

During its early months, SBWU filed almost two representation petitions per day at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This implanted what Blanc calls “worker-to-worker DNA into the entire subsequent trajectory of the campaign.”  Because of its do-it-yourself spirit, the campaign’s initial Labor Board election win rate was a remarkably high 80 percent. According to Blanc, SBWU could not have gained such traction if the organizing had been done in more conventional fashion, with heavy reliance on full-time union staff.

Backed by Workers United/SEIU, SBWU has since helped about 11,000 baristas win bargaining rights at 525 Starbucks stores in 45 states.  SBWU had to develop union majorities, unit by unit and maintain them before, during, and after hotly contested NLRB voting. For two years, SBWU endured what Blanc calls a “scorched earth union busting campaign of unparalleled intensity and breadth,” with an estimated price tag of $250 million.

That effort was orchestrated by Littler Mendelson, a corporate law firm notorious (and often victorious) in the field of “union avoidance. To achieve that management goal at Starbucks, countless workers were harassed, several hundred were fired or suspended for their union activity, and baristas who voted for collective bargaining were illegally denied wage and benefit improvements granted in non-union stores, as an incentive to keep them that way.

Collective action—especially work stoppages—were “key to sustaining momentum and forging solidarity” and keeping the pressure on management, Blanc reports. “In addition to periodic nationwide mobilizations, many Starbucks strikes were begun locally as responses to grievances at their stores.” According to the author, SBWU also “did a great job fighting for and highlighting partial concessions from management secured along the road to a first contract.”

First Contract Fight

That goal suddenly became more achievable in February, 2024, when “Starbucks raised a white flag” and agreed to “begin bargaining in good faith and stop illegally denying equal benefits to unionized workers.” The ensuing talks on a “foundational framework for union contracts” have not so far led to a settlement. If the company’s new CEO, Brian Niccol (who makes $57,000 per hour) changes course–in light of Trump’s hobbling of the NLRB—labor relations at Starbucks could become brutal again, very quickly.

By December, the union disclosed, Starbucks had “yet to bring a comprehensive economic package to the bargaining table,” hundreds of still pending unfair labor practice charges had not been settled, and “$100 million in legal liabilities remain outstanding.”

So SBWU conducted a strike authorization vote in which 98% of the reported participants declared their willingness to walk out, if necessary, “to win fair raises, benefits, and staffing, protest unfair labor practices, and resolve outstanding litigation.”

During Christmas week, according to the union, 5,000 baristas participated in a job action, disrupting operations in 300 stores in 43 states. On January 31, the parties agreed to third-party mediationof their unresolved bargaining dispute.

While this high-profile national fight for a first contract continues, Blanc urges other unions to follow SBWU’s example: Develop and train more rank and file leaders in non-union workplaces, who “can self-organize and train others.” Use digital communication tools like Zoom “to quickly and widely scale up drives across huge spatial divides…so workers can directly coordinate and support each other without relying as much on paid staff and union resources.”

The author also recommends more “salting at strategic targets” since it was the conscious deployment of a “crew of radical salts” whose workplace activity led to the formation of SBWU. And he stresses the importance of seizing opportunities to “spread unionization as widely as possible,” like SBWU did when it was deluged with appeals for organizing help from baristas around the country, after its initial upstate N.Y. breakthroughs.  In short, Blanc argues, “the labor movement needs to finally start acting like a movement again.”

Union Reform Aids Organizing

Blanc’s book also highlights recent union reform victories–within the United Auto Workers (UAW) and NewsGuild/CWA—which led to organizing program improvements. One common denominator of these successful internal election campaigns was “small pockets of newly organized, radicalized young workers [who] played an outsized role.” Their efforts have led to greater rank-and-file engagement in contract campaigns, more frequent strike action, and expanded membership recruitment in both the auto industry and the media.

Given the UAW’s much bigger size, the positive impact of the election of Shawn Fain and other members of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) to leadership positions, two years ago, is more widely known.  Blanc lauds UAW’s new leadership for internal and external organizing initiatives which “raise expectations, tap into anger at corporate overlords, and show that workers can win big through mass militancy.”

It was no easy task rallying dues-payers understandably “cynical and checked out,” after years of Solidarity House corruption and dysfunction. Yet, during its 2023 contract talks with the Big Three, the UAW’s use of membership education and mobilization, unprecedented bargaining table transparency, and a selective strike strategy produced major gains, after years of divisive and demoralizing concessions. Just a few months later, newly energized and inspired UAW supporters at a non-union Volkswagen plant in Tennessee achieved a major southern organizing breakthrough, with more to come.

 A NewsGuild Shake-Up

The catalyst for a similar organizational shake-up in the 30,000-member NewsGuild was Jon Schleuss winning the union presidency five years ago. As Blanc recounts, his main qualification for national union office was helping to organize the Los Angeles Times, a non-union paper for 135 years. Unlike Fain in the UAW, the 31-year old Schleuss had never been elected or appointed to any union position before, other than a local bargaining committee.

On this own dime, Schleuss went to the NewsGuild’s national convention in 2019 anyway. With backing from three locals, he got himself nominated as a candidate for president in a race everyone assumed was a shoe-in for an incumbent thirty years older and far more experienced than Schleuss.  All Guild officers, headquarters staff, and field reps, along with many local union officials, opposed his candidacy.

Nevertheless, the young journalist proved to be an effective organizer of restive media workers nationwide. During a rare union presidential campaign debate, Schleuss called for “tapping the creativity of our members” in better organized campaigns against newspaper take-overs by hedge-fund owners and others “intent on destroying journalism.” If elected, he pledged to seek more resources from the Guild’s parent organization, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and expand rank-and-file participation in the Guild’s own “Member Organizing Program.”

This MOP draws on four decades of CWA-backed member-based organizing in the public and private sector–using the model favored by Blanc for all unions (ie training and deploying active members, on a “lost-time” or volunteer basis, to recruit non-union workers in the same industry or occupation as their own.)

Strike Activity

During the last five years, the Guild has become what Blanc calls “a powerhouse of new organizing.” Its reform leadership has invested heavily in on-line and in person training of activists who want to get involved in external and internal organizing, contract bargaining, job actions, and strikes. As part of the broader organizing surge that made this possible, nearly 11,000 media workers won bargaining rights in more than 200 new units between 2018 and 2023, according to Blanc. In the last four years, the union has helped workers secure100 first contracts.

By last fall, when Guild members walked out at a legal publication called Law360, it was the union’s 24^th strike of the year. Other targets included Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, The NY Times, Chicago Tribune, and other media outlets, large and small.  In 2023, 36 newsrooms were struck for varying lengths of time. While many of these were quickie strikes, not open ended ones, 100 workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been out for two years, in the longest running strike in the nation.

In We Are The Union, Schleuss recalls when he and other Guild supporters signed up enough co-workers to get an NLRB election at the LA Times seven years ago. Even then, they knew their job was not over. After winning that vote, “we would still have to do everything we could to fix the union—to make it more focused on organizing and more focused on building rank-and-file power.” To keep their spirits up during their difficult contest with management, Times organizing committee members reassured each other that “we have more power than we know.”

In Schleuss’s view, that collective realization is a source of empowerment whether you’re “struggling against an employer who is fighting you every step of the way or you’re a rank-and-filer pushing against deadweight union leadership.” The strength of We Are The Union is Eric Blanc’s inspiring examples of workers overcoming both adversaries.

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“Bosses of the Senate,” by Joseph Keppler, The Puck, January 23, 1889.

We we are living in an extremely dangerous time. Future generations will look back at this moment – what we do right now – and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism. They will remember whether we stood with President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg who in 1863, looking out at a battlefield where thousands died in the struggle against slavery and stated that; “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Do we stand with Lincoln’s vision of America or do we allow this country to move to a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires?

But it’s not just oligarchy that we should be concerned about, and the reality that the three richest people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our society – 170 million people. It’s not just that the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, and that we have more income and wealth inequality today than we’ve ever had.

It is also that we are looking at a rapid movement, under President Trump, toward authoritarianism. More and more power resting in fewer and fewer hands.

Right now, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is attempting to dismantle major agencies of the federal government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged. These agencies were created by the U.S. Congress and it is Congress’ responsibility to maintain them, reform them or end them. It is not Mr. Musk’s responsibility. What Mr. Musk is doing is patently illegal and unconstitutional – and must be stopped.

Two weeks ago, President Trump attempted to suspend all federal grants and loans – an outrageous and clearly unconstitutional act. As I hope every 6th grader in America knows, under the Constitution and our form of government the president can recommend legislation, he can support legislation, he can veto legislation, but he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding passed by Congress. It is Congress, the House and the Senate, who control the purse strings.

But it’s not just Congress that’s under attack. It’s our judiciary.

This weekend, the Vice President, a graduate of Yale Law School, who clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, said that: “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Really? I thought that one of the major functions of the federal courts is to interpret our Constitution and, when appropriate, serve as a check on unconstitutional executive power.

Mr. Musk, meanwhile, has proposed that “the worst 1% of appointed judges be fired every year,” and demanded the impeachment of judges that have blocked him from accessing sensitive Treasury Department files. No doubt, under Mr. Musk’s rule, it will be him and his billionaire friends who determine who the “worst” judges are. And no, Mr. Musk, you don’t impeach judges who rule against you. You may or may not know this, but under the U.S. Constitution, we have a separation of powers, brilliantly crafted by the founding fathers of this country in the 1770s.

So, we are seeing an organized attack on Congress and the courts.

But Trump and his friends aren’t just trying to undermine two of the three pillars of our constitutional government – Congress and the courts. They are also going after the media in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of this country.

Every member of Congress will tell you that people in the media, and media organizations, are not perfect. They, like everyone else, make mistakes every day. But I hope that every member of Congress understands that you cannot have a functioning democracy without an independent press – non-intimidated journalists who can write it and say it the way they see it. And in that regard, I want to remind my colleagues what this president has done in recent months.

President Trump has sued ABC and received a $15 million settlement. He has sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and received a $25 million settlement. He has sued CBS, and its parent company Paramount, is apparently in negotiations over a settlement. He has sued the Des Moines Register, and his FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and NPR.

In other words, we have a President of the United States who is using his power to go after media in this country who are saying and doing things he doesn’t like. How are we going to have an independent media if journalists are looking over their shoulders, fearful that their reporting will trigger a lawsuit from the most powerful man in the world?

Now is the time to ask a very simple question. What do Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and their fellow billionaires really want? What is their endgame?

And in my view, the answer is not complicated. It is not novel. It is not new. It is what ruling classes throughout history have always wanted and have always believed is theirs by right: more power, more control and more wealth. And they are determined to not allow democracy and the rule of law to get in their way.

For Mr. Musk and his fellow oligarchs, the needs, the concerns, the ideas, the dreams of ordinary people are simply an impediment to what they, the oligarchs, are entitled to. That is what they really believe.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this in our country’s history.

In pre-revolutionary America, before the 1770s, the ruling class of that time governed through a doctrine called the “divine right of kings,” the belief that the King of England was an agent of God, God appointed him, and he was not to be questioned by mere mortals.

In modern times we no longer have the “divine right of kings.” What we NOW have is an ideology being pushed by the oligarchs which says that as very, very wealthy people – often self-made, often the masters of revolutionary new technology and as “high-IQ individuals,” it is THEIR absolute right to rule. In other words, the oligarchs of today are our modern-day kings.

And it is not just power that they want. Despite the incredible wealth they have they want more, and more and more. Their greed has no end. Today, Mr. Musk is worth $402 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg is worth $252 billion and Mr. Bezos is worth $249 billion. With combined wealth of $903 billion, these 3 people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society — 170 million people.

Not surprisingly, since Trump was elected, their wealth has soared. Elon Musk has become $138 billion richer, Zuckerberg has become $49 billion richer and Bezos has become $28 billion richer – since Election Day.

Meanwhile, while the very rich become much richer, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million are uninsured or under-insured, 25% of seniors are trying to survive on $15,000 or less, 800,000 are homeless and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. And real, inflation adjusted wages for the average American worker have been stagnant for 50 years.

Do you think the oligarchs give a damn about these people? Trust me, they don’t. Musk’s decision to dismember U.S. AID means that tens of thousands of the poorest people around the world will go hungry or die of preventable diseases.

But it’s not just abroad. Here in the United States they’ll soon be going after the healthcare, nutrition, housing, and educational programs that protect the most vulnerable people in our country – all so that Congress can provide huge tax breaks for them and their fellow billionaires. As modern-day kings, who believe they have the absolute right to rule, they will sacrifice, without hesitation, the well-being of working people to protect their privilege.

Further, they will use the enormous media operations they own to deflect attention away from the impact of their policies while they “entertain us to death.” Mr. Musk owns twitter. Mr. Zuckerberg owns Meta – which includes Facebook and Instagram – and Mr. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Further, they and their fellow oligarchs, will continue to spend huge amounts of money to buy politicians in both major political parties.

Bottom line: The oligarchs, with their enormous resources, are waging a war on the working class of this country, and it is a war they are intent on winning.

Now, I am not going to kid you — the problems this country faces right now are serious and they are not easy to solve. The economy is rigged, our campaign finance system is corrupt and we are struggling to control climate change — among many other important issues.

But this is what I do know:

The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans — Black, White, Latino, urban and rural, gay and straight, young and old — come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.

Their oligarch’s nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation or country of origin and will, together, have the courage to take them on.

Will this struggle be easy? Absolutely not.

And one of the reasons that it will not be easy is that the ruling class of this country will constantly remind you that THEY have all the power. They control the government, they own the media.

But our job right now, in these difficult times, is to not forget the great struggles and sacrifices that millions of people have waged over the several centuries to create a more democratic, just and humane society. Think about what people THEN were saying.

+ Overthrowing the King of England to create a new nation and self-rule. Impossible.

+ Establishing universal suffrage. Impossible.

+ Ending slavery and segregation. Impossible.

+ Granting workers the right to form unions and ending child labor. Impossible.

+ Giving women control over their own bodies. Impossible.

+ Passing legislation to establish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a minimum wage, clean air and water standards. Impossible.

In other word, as Nelson Mandela told us, everything is impossible until it is done.

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Image by Mike Von.

Rise up people and fast. Tyrant Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and protections is being targeted.

To feed Trump’s insatiable vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans who are assisting them.

In his demented lawless arrogance, convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching). He is defiantly violating the U.S. Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers exclusively given to Congress.  The Constitution demands that we live under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.

While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers, seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private security detail.

Consider, people, that the world’s richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing critical services that have long and bi-partisan support. Assistance to children, emergency workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat – whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Trump/Musk are gutting.

Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025). Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.

Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.

Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times) shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising, deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare and food are erupting.

Kristof concludes that all this (and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!

When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.

Musk, whose next target is the federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.

What is very clear in the first 20 days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs.  They hate Medicaid (provided to over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions of children.  Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow up entire cities.

Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly children, in the past fifty years.

The Washington Post headline on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil servants to obey or be driven out.

The Republicans in Congress, to their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising monarchy in the White House.

The Democrats in the minority are just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big time. Demand unofficialhearings now! Federal judges are starting to uphold the violated laws.

The media, itself threatened by Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar (see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025 piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”) will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower with their tyrannical abuses.

The career military does not relish the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult.  Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming Trump tsunami.

Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.

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Photograph Source: DanielGoldhorn – CC BY 4.0

The classic coup d’état has guns. Uniformed men run wild seizing government agencies and claiming control over what government does and who government serves.

But in our new cyber age, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder reflected this past week, a coup can unfold without any armed overthrow. We can have “a couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives.”

These young men, operating upon “vague references to orders from on high,” can gain access to basic computer systems and “proceed to grant their Supreme Leader” effective power over just about everything that government does.

The historian Snyder is, of course, describing America’s current reality. He’s calling this reality a coup — and so are defenders of America’s democratic faith.

We aren’t living through “a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices,” charges former U.S. attorney and current Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance. We’ve living through “a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup.”

“The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes,” adds in the University of Minnesota Law School’s Will Stancil. “Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.”

The Musk legions now hacking their way through the nation’s capital, the New York Times reports, have already “inserted themselves” into the databases of 17 federal agencies. These legions include fervent Musk admirers like Akash Bobba, a software engineer less than three years out of high school who once interned with a tech firm chaired by fellow Musk billionaire Peter Thiel.

One by one, the federal agencies that keep the nation running have fallen, with the full blessings of Donald Trump, under Musk’s effective control. Trump, meanwhile, is making headlines about taking over Gaza and Panama, in the process, notes Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, “distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

The Trumpsters, agrees Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, are moving us “into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.”

Elected officials and progressive activists are pushing back in the courts to stop the Musk putsch and scoring some initial victories. One federal judge, for instance, has just blocked Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s computer payments system. That access, the judge ruled, threatens “irreparable harm” to the personal and financial data of millions of Americans.

But lower-level court rulings may not pass muster with higher-level Trump-appointed judges. Stopping the Musk coup will require a broader popular mobilization, and that push back is indeed building, with protests drawing thousands in locales ranging from downtown Washington to a host of state capitols nationwide.

Our best hope to counter the Musk coup’s billionaire corporate backers — “and their boundless options” to shape “our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments”? That may well be intensified trade union action, suggests a new analysis long-time labor activist Michael Podhorzer, and that action is also building.

Labor’s national voice, the AFL-CIO, has just launched a new campaign, the Department of People Who Work for a Living, to challenge Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”

“Government can work for billionaires,” points out AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, “or it can work for working people — but not both.”

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Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

Despite the fallout, there was little that was actually new or shocking about Trump and Netanyahu’s press conference last week. What shocked informed people on all sides of the Palestine issue was Trump’s forthright (if crude, ill-comprehended and oblivious) statement of the truth: that the United States is committed to the Judaization of Palestine and a process of “normalization” between a “greater” Israel and its Arab neighbors that involves a combination of apartheid and physical displacement. All the diplo-speak of Biden and his predecessors that so effectively obfuscated the Americans’ and Israelis’ true policies – gone. Trump is simply incapable of employing the clever phrasing needed to frame racist policies as rational statecraft.

Stepping back from Trump’s crude and stupid remarks, then, we can easily discern the thrust of Israeli/American policy, clear to most of us for years, but is now reaching its culmination in the “normalization” process. This is how it goes:

+ Saudi Arabia, the Jewel in the Crown for completing the Abraham Accords, has conditioned normalization with Israel on a vague, never-to-be-implemented commitment to a “pathway” to a Palestinian state at some indeterminate future date. No details or conditions necessary; for example, would the Palestinian state be territorially contiguous, genuinely sovereign and economically viable? Why spend the political capital to get into problematic details over an eventuality that “everyone knows” (to quote Leonard Cohen) will never materialize? The other Arab states that have already normalized with Israel – Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco – haven’t even made that symbolic demand.

+ Arab government collusion with Netanyahu and Trump (& Biden, this is not just a Republican plan) empowers Israel to define less what the Palestinian Bantustan-“state” would look like (who cares?) and more the expanded Israel they would be normalizing. The parameters are clear: they were set out in detailed maps back in 2020 (see below). “Israel” is defined as the state of Israel in its 1967 borders PLUS its settlements. Israel thus expands to 85% of historic Palestine while the Palestinian “state” is reduced to three enclaves in the West Bank and an uninhabitable Gaza. For “security” reasons Israel also controls the borders (Palestine will not have a border with an Arab country), the airspace and even internal movement between the enclaves. No territorial contiguity, no sovereignty, no economic viability, and no capacity to bring the refugees home. A Palestinian Bantustan within an all-encompassing Israeli apartheid regime.

The fact that the normalization process is nearing its completion explains Israel’s push to ethnically cleanse Area C , the 62% of the West Bank where its settlements are located, and which is planned to be annexed. The most violent Israeli settler youth have been unleashed on Palestinian communities; indeed, they have been recruited into a special IDF unit called Desert Frontier where they join other army units in driving Palestinian farmers and shepherds from their villages and lands. More than 50 rural communities have been abandoned since October 7th; more than 40 new settlement “outposts” established to replace them. All to establish the “facts on the ground” that will then be normalized.

Whether a couple million Gazans are relocated semi-voluntarily or by force, or whether they just rot there under some puppet Palestinian or Arab authority makes no difference. Israel has no strategic interest in Gaza and, a few settlers aside, no interest in integrating it into a Greater Israel. It is marginal and expendable. Israel’s main interest is removing 2.3 million Palestinians from its direct rule, then placing the remaining three million of its West Bank Bantustan under some Palestinian Authority-type subcontractor. Thus a Greater Israel with a Jewish majority of 70-80% covering all of historic Palestine.

+ The only actual condition imposed on Israel by the US and Saudi Arabia for the normalization process to go ahead is industrial quiet, quietizing the Palestinian issue so that it simply drops out of sight. Thus Israel’s intense campaign of pacification, beginning with eliminating Hamas in Gaza, the last bastion of effective resistance, but now spilling over into the West Bank where Israel is “Gaza-fying” the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nablus refugee camps as well as other pockets of resistance. (With, sickeningly, the active support of its collaborationist Palestinian Authority, desperate to “prove” to Israel that it is capable of taking control of Gaza.)

+ Then, with all this in place, normalization. A “Greater” Israel is recognized by Saudi Arabia, much of the Arab and Muslim world and the United States, the Palestinians regulated to “a problem” that demands little more than periodic lip-service. To be sure, this will be sold as the “two-state solution” the international community has long supported, but let’s call it by its real name: two-state apartheid.

Settler colonialism ends not with victory but by being normalized. For normalization means closure. Once an expanded Israel and its apartheid regime is recognized by the international community – if not formally by much of Europe, the BRICS Bloc and the Global South, then certainly de facto, which for Israel is good enough – there is little political space for the Palestinians to continue pushing their cause. Completion of the Abraham Accords represents the greatest threat to the Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. Opposing it as long as normalization does not mean restoring to the Palestinians their national rights should be our priority.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Meshuggener”

—Yiddish word for “crazy person.”

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

– H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920.

Donald Trump has occupied the White House for only three weeks, and the term “crazy town,” which former chief of staff John Kelley applied to Trump’s Washington in the first term, is gaining greater credibility and meaning.  According to Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” Kelly said that Trump was an “idiot.  It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything.  He’s gone off the rails  We’re in Crazytown.  I don’t know why any of us are here.  This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

Kelly can say “I told you so,” because “Crazytown” is back.  There’s Canada as the 51st state; the Gulf of America, which is waiting for the official geographer to change our maps; the possible seizure of the Panama Canal; and of course the purchase of Greenland for U.S. national security.  But the plan to seize and rebuild the Gaza Strip, removing two million Palestinians in order to create the “Riviera of the Middle East,” could not be more bizarre and zany.

On the other hand, what would you expect from three real estate developers: Trump, his special envoy Stephen Witkoff, and his prodigal son-in-law Jared Kushner, who told an audience at Harvard University—his alma mater—about the wonderful development opportunities on the 25 miles of sunset-facing Gaza waterfront.  Add to the list of real estate developers, David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, who called the idea “brilliant and out of the box creative and frankly the only solution I’ve heard in 50 years that has the chance of actually changing the dynamics in that troubled part of the world.”

Well, “the world” didn’t exactly react in the way that Friedman opined.  The three key Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan) that were supposed to support this operation and absorb many or most of the displaced Palestinians immediately rejected the idea.  All three leaders of these states knew that the mere announcement of the idea would contribute to the destabilization of the region, particularly Jordan that already has a Palestinian majority that creates significant political tension.  The Palestinians themselves, who have faced illegal and immoral displacement from the Israelis for the past 75 years and barely survived Israel’s current genocidal campaign, didn’t share Trump’s view regarding the “kindness” of his plan.

Only the right-wing troglodytes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security cabinet and within America’s pro-Israel community endorsed the idea.  Netanyahu, who was given little advance notice of Trump’s plan, was smirking as Trump was speaking, which suggested that even he knew that he was in “Crazytown,”  Between smirks, Netanyahu kept looking over to Ron Dermer, his national security adviser, with a look of disbelief.  After achieving a free hand for his military campaign from the Biden administration, Netanyahu presumably realizes that he currently has a U.S. administration that also will provide “carte blanche” for his policies, although it will require careful handling from time to time.

It took the Trump administration less than 24 hours to try to clean up the international mess that it had created.  White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is clearly over her head in this position, explained that Egypt and Jordan would only have to take in the Gazan population on a “temporary” basis.  Temporary?  Middle East envoy Witkoff told Trump that it would take decades and dollars to simply remove the rubble that Israel has created in Gaza.  As for the dollars, Trump’s plan for Gaza came on the heels of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which presumably would have been central to any task of a territory that Israel has made uninhabitable.

Leavitt also had to explain that Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. military would be involved in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza did not mean he was “committed to putting boots on the ground.”  Leavitt had all sorts of trouble dealing with the press corps simply because she was explaining a “plan” that had never been discussed at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, or in the intelligence community.  National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who is clearly over his head, referred to the “plan” as “very bold” with “fresh new ideas.”  He didn’t think that it “should be criticized in any way.”

And if this craziness wasn’t sufficiently bizarre and zany, on the very day that the White House was in partial retreat from its plan, it received an email from the Central Intelligence Agency that listed all employees hired over the past two years.  This in itself was not unusual, but the fact it was sent as an unclassified email was a counter-intelligence nightmare.   I can hear the laughter from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping who foresee better days ahead for their own national security situations vis-a-vis a much diminished United States.

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