Photograph Source: Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – Public Domain

While the mainstream media was copiously tracing the physical and mental decline of President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign of 2024, Donald Trump’s decline was largely ignored or downplayed.  The media seemed obliged to track Biden’s every move and stumble.  Conversely, the media seemed obliged to ignore the worst of Trump’s faltering executive decision-making, but—even worse—believed it was their duty to make Trump’s irrational utterances appear to be rational.

There are already obvious political differences between the first term Trump and the second term Trump, but the cognitive decline of the Donald cannot be explained solely by the fact that there were a few rational advisers in the White House the first time around, and simply no competent advisors or leaders on hand for the second term.  Economic advisers, such as Gary Cohn and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, played a very important moderating role in the first term.  The three and four-star generals in the first term were a particular surprise, doing their best to calm the roiled waters of the White House and the roiled behavior of the president himself.

In the second term, such economic players as Secretary of Commerce Howard Luttnick and Peter Navarro, are making things worse and making decision making more capricious and random.  It’s safe to say that there isn’t one competent player in Trump’s inner circle, and falsely-labeled moderates such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio will find their reputations soiled by their experiences in toadying to the president.  The moderate generals of the first term (Generals Kelley, Milley, and McMasters) have been replaced by an incompetent and unqualified secretary of defense who has conducted a quiet purge of the senior ranks and the Judge Advocate Generals that the media has played down.

An ironic example of the huge differences between Trump I and Trump II is the different handling of deportation cases that dominated Trump’s first term and the early weeks of his second term.  Seven years ago, for example, an Iraqi immigrant who had been living in the United States for nearly 25 years, was mistakenly swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and deported to Iraq in violation of a court order.  The Trump administration soon realized that a serious error had been made, and that led to a month-long odyssey to track down and retrieve a man who never should have been deported in the first place.

The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has followed a far different pattern.  Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi falsely refer to Abrego Garcia as being a member of the violent MS-13 gang, although he has never been charged with being in a gang and a government lawyer even acknowledged his deportation was an error.  The lawyer was fired because of his honesty.

But the total unwillingness to work to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States differs from efforts of the leaders of Trump’s first term, when ICE immediately and affirmatively went to the court to acknowledge that it had violated the Court’s orders.  There was coordination between the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and the Iraqi government.  The government itself conceded that the Iraqi immigrant had been removed to Iraq despite the court order.  Several months later, the Iraqi immigrant was tracked down and returned to the United States.

In the current confrontation, Trump and his closest aides (Miller, Bondi, Homan) are ignoring the decisions of the federal and district courts, even the Supreme Court, to ensure that Abrego Garcia remains in notorious prisons in El Salvador, where he faces indefinite lockup.  They are playing a game with the Supreme Court, focusing on the Court’s use of the word “facilitate” to say that they can’t do that because he’s out of U.S. control.

In any event, the intransigence of the Trump administration ignored the courts demands for “facilitating” the return of Abrego Garcia; providing “regular updates” on the steps that have been taken; and halting the deportation proceedings.  The administration is challenging the constitution’s demands for due process, and the checks and balances that accompany the separation of powers.

Trump has called Senator Chris Van Hollen a “fool” and a “grandstander” for meeting with Abrego Garcia last week in El Salvador.  El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who has received $6 million from the Trump administration to keep the deportees in the notorious Cecot prison, also ridiculed Van Hollen’s meeting with ugly postings on X to match the mendacious postings of Donald Trump.  Bukele has used a two-year state of emergency to reduce crime and violence in El Salvador at the expense of democracy and civil liberties that no longer exist.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the government’s removal of an additional 30 Venezuelan men held in Texas under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The vote was 7-2, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito predictably dissenting.  The decision on Saturday follows an astounding array of Trump’s unconstitutional actions, including the elimination of federal agencies created by statute; the refusal to spend federal funds allocated by federal law; the firing of those working in the executive branch; and the elimination of birthright citizenship.

No two events demonstrate the meanness and mendacity of the Trump presidency more than the 2025 meetings in the Oval Office between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky and between Trump and Bukele.  Trump’s deceitful condemnation of Zelensky in February for starting the war with Russia (“You should have never started it.”), and the grotesque spectacle between Trump and Bukele exuding smug impunity over the illegal deportation of Abrego Garcia to the notorious Cecot mega-prison.  U.S. citizens had never before witnessed such abject cruelty and heartlessness from their commander-in-chief.

The post Trump’s First 100 Days: Meaner, More Mendacious, More Unstable appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Street art in Venezuela, depicting Uncle Sam and accusing the U.S. government of imperialism. Photograph Source: Erik Cleves Kristensen – CC BY 2.0

Nobody is complaining anymore about Latin America and the Caribbean being neglected by the hegemon to the north. The Trump administration is contending with it on multiple fronts: prioritizing “massive deportations,” halting the “flood of drugs,” combatting “threats to US security,” and stopping other countries from “ripping us off” in trade. The over 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine is alive and on steroids. 

But has Washington taken a sharp right turn, qualitatively departing from past practices, or simply intensified an already manifest imperial trajectory? And, from a south-of-the-border perspective, to what extent are the perceived problems “made in the USA”?

Externalization of problems

The view from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is that the Yankees have a problem; they project their issues onto their southern neighbors. An extreme example is Barack Obama’s baseless declaration in 2015 of a “national emergency” – subsequently reaffirmed by each successive president – because of the “unusual and extraordinary threat” posed by Venezuela.

From Washington’s imperial perspective, problems are seen as coming from the south with the US as the victim when, as in the case of Venezuela’s national security, reality is inverted. 

Another case in point: migration is seen as a supply-side conundrum; “they” are “invading us.” In practice, deliberate past US policy (Trump has largely ended these practices) encouraged migration from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and especially Cuba to weaken their governments. 

More to the point, as has been admitted by some of the perpetrators, the main driver for migrants to leave their homes and face great risks in transit are not pull factors, such as a purported love of “our democracy,” but push factors. These range from capitalist exploitation of Central America’s Northern Triangle to the impoverishment caused by US unilateral coercive measures in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. 

As for drugs, trenchantly pointed out by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to her US counterpart, the US itself harbors cartels, is the largest narcotic consumer market, exports the majority of armaments used by drug barons and hosts money laundering banks. 

Rather than “ripping off” Uncle Sam in trade, the LAC region runs lopsided deficits in service industries, a trade benefit conveniently ignored when Trump’s tariffs were calculated. US firms also benefit from LAC as a low-cost source of inputs and assembly for their supply chains. The imperialist narrative conveniently omits crediting its access to strategic resources at favorable terms and the dominance of US firms and dollar-based finance. Various trade agreements, which Trump treats as giveaways, in practice favor US corporations. Unequal exchange is established as a key factor in underdevelopment of the LAC region, despite Trump’s assertion of the opposite.

Finally, gang violence is another US export: literally so in the case of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs which originated in Los Angeles and whose members were deported by US authorities to El Salvador.  

Migration becomes “invasion”

Biden’s ambivalence on migration, tightening aspects of border controls but encouraging more than half a million Latinos to enter the US via “humanitarian parole,” gave Trump an opening. He sold his working class base the notion that migrants were not just taking US jobs but were “criminals.” His populist argument appears to side with US workers, but doesn’t impact the corporate elites who support him.

In fact, deportations have not increased, but are now much higher profile and overtly political. So Venezuelans are arbitrarily characterized as gang members and sent to prison in El Salvador. Deportations to other countries have involved waving the big stick: supposed “allies,” Costa Rica and Panama, have even been obliged to accept asylum seekers from elsewhere, rejected and abandoned by Washington.

The “war on drugs” risks becoming a literal war

Trump’s anti-drug policy has maintained a decades-long focus on supply-side enforcement with a renewed emphasis on deploying military assets to attack cartels and interdict drug shipments. 

What has distinguished his approach is not so much the policy itself, but the blunt and often unilateral manner in which it is being implemented. Support is overtly conditioned on political alignment with Washington’s objectives. 

So troops are deployed on the southern border and Mexico’s cartels are threatened with drone attacks, with no promise to consult Mexican authorities. Alleged members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang are treated as terrorists, and wartime legislation is deployed against them as supposed agents of a narco-terrorist state.

Hemispheric security

The focus of current US policy in the region is countering Chinese influence, particularly Beijing’s investments in infrastructure, telecommunications, and energy. “The expanding role of the Chinese Communist Party in the Western Hemisphere,” Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio complains, “threatens US interests.” 

Yet while the US approaches geopolitics as a “zero-sum game” in which its military dominance is a priority, China professes to follow the principles of “equality and mutual benefit,” offering carrots rather than waving a stick.

China’s economic penetration has been spectacular, making it the region’s second largest trading partner and the first in South America itself. However, Trump has succeeded in forcing Panama to leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative, while Brazil and Mexico, the region’s two largest economies have yet to join, presumably due to US pressure. In Peru, users of a major port developed by China may be threatened by special tariffs. 

The US International Development Finance Corporation’s budget is slated to double. According to Foreign Policy, it should be strengthened still further to combat China’s influence. However, China has an enormous head start, and the US will struggle to catch up, especially as its other development agency, USAID, has had its budget decimated.

Militarily, Trump has increased the visibility and scope of US security operations in the region. Joint exercises, port calls, and programs like the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative continue to be ramped up. While Latin American leaders at April’s CELAC summit called for the region to be a “zone of peace,” Trump threatens war: 

+ Panama has been strong-armed into accepting a greater US military presence, in what has been dubbed a camouflaged invasion. 

+ Ecuador’s President Noboa is accepting US military help as well as the private mercenaries of Blackwater’s Erik Prince, in his own “war” against gang violence. 

+ Marco Rubio has warned Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro that “we have a big navy, and it can get almost anywhere,” threatening to deploy forces in neighboring Guyana.

NATO’s presence in the region has been growing with Colombia already a “partner” and Argentina working to become one. The latter’s collaboration is vital to the West’s military role in the South Atlantic. Its president Milei has become tellingly ambivalent about his country’s claim to the British-occupied Malvinas islands, which are key to strategic dominance. 

War by other means – tariffs and sanctions

Washington’s enormous machinery of unilateral coercive measures (aka “sanctions”), now total 15,373 (of which over 5,000 were imposed in Trump’s first term). The US blockade of Cuba has been tightened, and it is even attempting to throttle Cuba’s extraordinarily effective and popular medical missions abroad. Rubio issued an ominous warning: “The moment of truth is arriving, Cuba is literally collapsing.”

Sanctions against Venezuela have also been strengthened, despite Trump initially hinting at a more collaborative approach. Nicaragua has so far evaded new sanctions, but is threatened both with exclusion from the regional trade agreement (CAFTA) which benefits its exports, and with the loss of its remaining multilateral source of development finance.

The region escaped relatively lightly from Trump’s “Liberation Day” declarations, with a new, minimum 10 percent tariff. Mexico still faces heavy tariff barriers and higher “reciprocal” tariffs on some other LAC countries – Guyana, Venezuela and Nicaragua – have been postponed until July.

Prospects for LAC unity or sowing seeds in the sea

Fragmentation of regional unity has been a long-standing US policy objective. Trump, in particular, openly disdains multilateralism, which is really another term for opposition to US imperialism. 

Left-leaning electoral victories in Mexico (2018), Chile and Honduras (2021), and Colombia and Brazil (2022) have bolstered regional unity. This so-called Pink Tide added to the successes and leadership of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and their respective socialist revolutions. 

But upcoming elections in Chile and Honduras (November), and Colombia and Brazil (both 2026) could significantly reverse those gains. Continuation of leftist rule in Bolivia after this coming August’s election looks dim, given bitter splits in its ranks. In a reportedly fraudulent election in Ecuador, the leftist challenge to the incumbent Noboa appears to have failed. However, current rightist hegemony in Peru’s 2026 election could be challenged. 

Foreign Affairs predicts: “Widespread frustration over organized crime throughout the hemisphere, as well as social changes such as the spread of evangelical Christianity, mean that right-wing leaders may be favored to win upcoming elections.” 

The future for progressive unity is therefore uncertain and has constrained LAC’s response to the Trumpocalypse. The Organization of American States will not question US imperialism. The alternative regional mechanism, CELAC, was set up without Washington’s participation, in part to rectify the OAS’s deficiencies. A broad, anti-imperialist statement drafted by Honduran President Xiomara Castro for its recent summit was heavily watered down by Argentina and Paraguay, who then rejected even the weakened version (Nicaragua also rejected it, for the opposite reasons). CELAC ended up decrying sanctions and calling for LAC to be a zone of peace, but failed to explicitly support Cuba or Venezuela against US aggression.

The multilateral body with a potentially strong but as yet unclear regional influence is the BRICS, of which Brazil is a founding member and now has associates Cuba and Bolivia. Other LAC countries are keen to join. But (in another show of regional disunity, this time on the left) Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s recent applications were blocked by Brazil. 

From Biden to Trump – a bridge or a break?

Independent of the theatre surrounding Trump’s performance style – inflammatory language, threats, and public ultimatums – his underlying policies are mostly aligned with the bipartisan consensus that has long guided US policy for the region. These include support for market-oriented reforms, militarized security assistance, antagonism to leftist governments, and containment of Chinese influence.

When the actual consequences are examined, what might be called the “Biden bridge” underlies, at least in part, Trump’s distinctively confrontational practices. For instance, in March 2020, Trump placed a $15M bounty on the head of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Biden reciprocated, upping the ante to $25M in January 2025. Or, compare the number of deportees in Trump’s term to-date in 2025 to a comparable period in 2024, when Biden booted out even more migrants. 

Under Trump’s first administration, Biden’s interim tenure, and now Trump’s return, deportation machinery remained largely intact, enforcement funding stayed robust, and private detention centers prospered. In effect, Biden normalized the enforcement-heavy model, just without Trump’s nativist overtones. 

In short, Washington’s regional policy has become increasingly shaped by institutional inertia and bipartisan enforcement consensus, rather than sharply divergent ideological commitments. 

That is not to say the policy has been static. In fact, the trajectory has been precipitously to the right. Warning that the “anti-leftist component of Trumpism can’t be overstated.” Latin America analyst Steve Ellner predicts, “when threats and populism lose their momentum, the anti-communist hawks may get their way.”

So, there is a “Biden-bridge” in the sense of the continuation of a trajectory of increasingly aggressive imperialism from one president to the next. But there is also a “bridge too far” aspect, of which dumping migrants in El Salvador’s pay-by-the-head prison is (so far) the most extreme example. 

If there is an upside to Trump’s return to the Oval Office, it is that he unapologetically exposes the core imperialist drive for naked domination, making explicit the coercive foundations of US hegemony in the region. While Trump pays scant regard to international commitments, disregarding trade treaties, his predecessors – Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Bush – all promoted the “rules-based order” to reflect US priorities, conveniently replacing international law. 

Trump’s policies have been a stark amplification of enduring US priorities. They have revealed the structural limits of regional autonomy under Yankee hegemony, especially as Trump’s new territorial ambitions stretch from Greenland to Panama. The strongarm underpinnings of policies, previously cloaked in the hypocritical language of partnership, now take the form of mafia-style threats. 

The post Latin America Three Months Into the Trumpocalypse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ronit Shaked.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to Washington was no ordinary trip. The consensus among Israeli analysts, barring a few remaining loyalists, is that Netanyahu was not invited but, rather, summoned by US President Donald Trump.

All evidence supports this assertion. Netanyahu rarely travels to the US without extensive Israeli media fanfare, leveraging his touted relationships with various US administrations as a “hasbara” opportunity to reinforce his image as Israel’s strongman.

This time, there was no room for such campaigns. Netanyahu was informed of Trump’s summons while on an official trip to Hungary. There, he was received by Hungarian President Viktor Orbán with exaggerated diplomatic accolades, signaling defiance against international condemnation of Netanyahu, an accused war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), and portraying him as anything but an isolated leader of an increasingly pariah state.

The capstone of Netanyahu’s short-lived Hungarian victory lap was Orbán’s announcement of Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC, a move with profoundly unsettling implications.

It would have been convenient for Netanyahu to use his Washington visit to deflect from his failed war in Gaza and internal strife in Israel. However, as the Arabic saying goes, “the wind often blows contrary to the ship’s desires.”

The notion that Netanyahu was summoned, not invited, is corroborated by Israeli media reports that he attempted to postpone the visit under various pretexts. He failed, ultimately flying to Washington on the date determined by the White House. Initially, reports circulated that no press conference would be held, denying Netanyahu the platform to tout Washington’s unwavering support for his military actions and to expound on the “special relationship” between the two countries.

A press conference was held, though it was largely dominated by Trump’s contradictory messages and typical rhetoric. Netanyahu spoke briefly, attempting to project the same confident body language observed during his previous Washington visit, where he sat with an erect posture and spread out his legs, as if in command. But this time, his body language betrayed him; his eyes shifted nervously, and he appeared stiff and surprised, particularly when Trump announced that the US and Iran would begin direct talks in Oman soon.

Trump also mentioned the need to end the war in Gaza, but the Iran announcement clearly shocked Netanyahu. He desperately tried to align his discourse with Trump’s, referencing Libya’s disarmament under Muammar Gaddafi. But that was never part of Israel’s official regional plan. Israel had consistently advocated for US military intervention against Iran, despite the certainty that such a war would destabilize the entire region, potentially drawing the US into a conflict far more protracted and devastating than the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Further evidence of the US’ diverging views from Israel’s regional ambitions—centered on perpetual war, territorial expansion, and geopolitical dominance—lies in the fact that key political and intellectual figures within the Trump administration recognize the futility of such conflicts. In leaked exchanges on the encrypted messaging platform Signal, JD Vance protested that escalating the war in Yemen benefits Europe, not the US, a continent with which the US is increasingly decoupling, if not engaging in a trade war.

The Yemen war, like a potential conflict with Iran, is widely perceived as being waged on Israel’s behalf. Figures like Tucker Carlson, a prominent commentator, articulated the growing frustration among right-wing intellectuals in the US, tweeting that “anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but an enemy.”

Trump’s willingness to openly challenge Netanyahu’s policies remains unclear. His conflicting statements, such as calling for an end to the Gaza war while simultaneously advocating for the expulsion of Palestinians, add to the ambiguity. However, recent reports suggest a determined US intention to end the war in Gaza as part of a broader strategy, linking Gaza to Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran. This aligns with Washington’s need to stabilize the region as it prepares for a new phase of competition with China, requiring comprehensive economic, political, and military readiness.

Should Trump prove capable of doing what others could not, will Netanyahu finally submit to American pressure?

In 2015, Netanyahu demonstrated Israel’s unparalleled influence on US foreign and domestic policy when he addressed both chambers of Congress. Despite a few insignificant protests, Republican and Democratic policymakers applauded enthusiastically as Netanyahu criticized then-President Barack Obama, who did not attend and appeared isolated by his own political class.

However, if Netanyahu believes he can replicate that moment, he is mistaken. Those years are long gone. Trump, a populist leader, is not beholden to finding political balances in Congress. Now in his second and final term, he could, in theory, abandon the US’s ingrained reliance on Israel’s approval and its aggressive lobby in Washington.

Moreover, Netanyahu’s political standing is diminished. He is perceived as a failed political leader and military strategist, unable to secure decisive victories or extract political concessions from his adversaries. He is a leader without a clear plan, grappling with a legitimacy crisis unlike any faced by his predecessors.

Ultimately, the outcome hinges on Trump’s willingness to confront Netanyahu. If he does, and sustains the pressure, Netanyahu could find himself in an unenviable position, marking a rare instance in modern history where the US dictates its terms, and Israel listens. Time will tell.

The post Beneath the Surface: Is the Trump-Netanyahu ‘Unthinkable’ About to Erupt? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Man is what he eats,” (“Der Mensch ist was er isst“) is a well-known pun in German on ist (to be) and isst (to eat) from the 19^th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. More than a pun in German, it is an excellent short summary of Feuerbach’s material criticism of Christianity. Today’s front-page radar on President Trump’s on-and-off global tariff impositions is decidedly materialistic. Over 70 leaders from around the world are vying to come to Washington to see how they can get their country’s tariffs lowered. Materialism reigns; the world is playing Trump’s transactional game.

But what about Trump’s disrespect for human rights, the rule of law and separation of powers as well as his gutting foreign assistance? Beyond the kerfuffle about tariffs and trade balances, will any of the state leaders negotiating with Washington speak truth to power and admonish Trump’s autocratic rejection of liberal values? (Negotiating with China’s Xi Jinping is a similar experience. How many leaders mention human rights when negotiating business deals in Beijing?)

As an example: What could Switzerland do when negotiating with Trump? The Swiss are always defending the importance of the rule of law and consider Geneva the world’s center of human rights. But they have said very little when their Sister Republic welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, Netanyahu who is under an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

Furthermore, what about the Swiss defending multilateralism in general and International Geneva in particular with the U.S.? The World Trade Organization (WTO) is based in Geneva. Will the Swiss remind Trump of the U.S.’s legal WTO commitments? In the face of Trump’s proposed tariff violations of WTO rules, the Swiss, Singapore and 34 other countries issued a declaration that reaffirmed “our collective commitment to the principles of the WTO and to maintaining open trade is more crucial than ever” and deplored “the rise of protectionism” without specifically mentioning the United States. When negotiating tariffs, will the Swiss argue for a U.S. commitment to WTO tariff rules and push the U.S. to deblock the deadlock over appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body?

Second, the rules of humanitarian law are being egregiously violated, and not just by Israel. The Swiss Federal Council established a task force to develop a strategy to counter the announced 31% Trump tariff imposition. Why not establish a task force to defend IHL in the face of flagrant violations since Switzerland is the depositary state of the Geneva Conventions, the foundation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL)? Common Article 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions says that States Parties to the Conventions undertake to “respect and ensure respect” for the Conventions. Shouldn’t the Swiss and other countries lobbying for lower tariffs also lobby for ensuring respect for IHL?

More generally, Trump and Company have no respect for the international rule of law which is a bedrock of Swiss foreign policy. “The work of international bodies such as the Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court and the various U.N. investigation and fact-finding mechanisms is of great importance,” Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis stressed at the U.N. Security Council in November 2023. “It is crucial that all states, as well as the Security Council, cooperate fully with these bodies” he stated. “Switzerland will work towards further strengthening rule of law during its tenure in the Security Council,” he added.

Will any of this be brought up when the Swiss discuss tariffs with American representatives? Swiss companies, like the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, have promised to invest more in the U.S. – $23 billion over five years – in order to lower the tariff proposed. Are the only discussions between Switzerland and the U.S. about money and how much more Switzerland will invest in the United States?

During the writing of the Declaration of Independence, legend has it that Thomas Jefferson changed the unalienable rights in the Preamble from “Life, Liberty and Property” to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” because of his familiarity with the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui. If man is more than what he eats and the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right, there must be more to negotiate with the United States than just property and tariffs.

To return to Feuerbach: There was also more than basic materialism in Feuerbach’s message. In arguing for man’s responsibility for himself instead of some otherworldly being, Feuerbach set the stage for radical political action. As he wrote, “It is a question today…not whether we are Christians or heathens, theists or atheists, but whether we are or can become men, healthy in soul and body, free, active and full of vitality.” (Feuerbach’s attacks on religion laid the framework for revolutionary political actions and strongly influenced Karl Marx. See Marx’s 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach”)

Recently, at a rally in Los Angeles on the Fight Oligarchy tour, Senator Bernie Sanders also stated that there were issues with Trump beyond economic materialism; “When we talk about oligarchy, it is not just economics,” he told 36,000 enthusiastic listeners. He went on to describe the corrupt Trump administration and how the system now bends towards greed and violations of the rule of law; “We are fighting a president who undermines our Constitution every day and threatens our freedom of speech and assembly,” Sanders shouted to the cheering crowd.

The kerfuffle over tariffs is necessary; an international trade war will have dire global consequences. But it is not sufficient. Caving in to Trump’s outlandish economic demands will not change the downward spiral of his assault on liberal values. The leaders speaking to Trump to lower his tariffs – especially the Swiss with their traditional role in human rights, humanitarian law and multilateralism – cannot, should not forget values other than economic materialism. Instead of caving in to Trump’s transactional paradigm, they must speak truth to power about non-material values and norms.

The post Tariffs Kerfuffle: Man is More Than What He Eats appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Nick Fewings

Over the last five or so decades, American elections have become increasingly defined by what they don’t accomplish. The classical liberal model of free and fair elections to select representatives who act in the public interest has been replaced with a rogue foreign policy establishment attached to public – private mechanisms (propaganda, censorship, and surveillance) meant to maintain social control. Rampant slaughter abroad and political repression at home now represent America’s relationship with the world.

In recent history, few Americans recognized the Biden administration’s end run around left politics for what it was. Recall, the left critique of woke ideology isn’t that it is directionally wrong. The critique is that it is misguided politics. Many of us who put the argument forward lived through the creation and long, sad, decline of Affirmative Action. The problem is that the frame of LeBron James being oppressed because he is black, while my neighbor who digs cans out of the garbage to live is privileged because he is white, is flawed.

For those who lived through it, the attack on Affirmative Action came by placing largely contrived, but otherwise representative, accounts of poor and working-class whites being denied opportunities in favor of ‘minorities.’ In fact, large corporations become large by crushing smaller competitors. And with nonexistent economic mobility in the US, the children of the rich inherit social control over the children of working people and the poor. Capitalism is a system of economic domination, not of equitable distribution. Just ask Donald Trump.

The two points made as the national Democrats acted to change the subject from economic maldistribution to identity-based bias were 1) the US has been down this road before, and the strategy that didn’t work was state-sponsored bias remediation and 2) the corporations ‘voluntarily’ launching DEI programs would abandon them the minute that the political tide turned. We can argue theory until we are blue in the face, but it was the left critique that produced the correct prediction about how DEI would be ended.

The broader question of liberal impact has it that income and wealth distribution are as concentrated as they have ever been, racial segregation is today accomplished through economic (class) segregation, and the US is ruled by a small group of oligarchs who use the state to make themselves ever richer. The Democrats have governed through enough of this to have these be their policies as well. Bill Clinton was one of the few Americans who really subscribed to Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal economic vision.

The domestic political result is that the two branches of the uniparty are now dedicated to reversing each other’s policies rather than conducting the people’s business. The way that this currently appears is that the Trump administration is reversing the state mechanisms that facilitated the Democrats’ hold on power 1933 – 1973, aka the New Deal. Through a weak read of history, Donald Trump’s supporters imagine that the gilded age that both branches of the uniparty have spent decades trying to recreate presented opportunities that it didn’t.

In his 1980 contest against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan presented what is today called neoliberalism as a radical rebuke of state power. His (Reagan’s) project was to shift power from the state that had sponsored the Vietnam War to capital that had supplied ‘us’ with Hula-Hoops and black-and-white televisions. However, in a now disappeared quote. LBJ offered that ‘he can’t end the (Vietnam) war because his friends were making too much money from it.’ This later represented Joe Biden’s explanation of why war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are good for the US.

Graph: the bipartisan trend in privatizing Medicare finds recent Democrat and Republican administrations privatizing approximately the same proportions, with 8% going to the recent Democrat and 7% going to the past and current Republican. What swings the balance however (thus far) is that it is the ‘best practices’ provision in the ACA that will lead to the total privatization. The provision gives political hacks working for economic hacks the power to declare privatization a ‘best practice,’ making it official Medicare policy. Source: kff.org.

For those who missed it, Donald Trump hasn’t offered that his policies would benefit ‘us all.’ He has argued that his policies will benefit ‘the worthy.’ This is (Bill) Clintonism 101. Both Clinton and Trump argued that ‘opportunity’ is the best that the state can offer. Bill Clinton asserted that ‘a level playing field’ united the autoworkers who his passage of NAFTA rendered unemployed with Donald Trump, who in the mid-1970s inherited a real estate empire worth about $300 million dollars (inflation adjusted). Both men oversaw the return of income and wealth concentration to gilded age levels.

“True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” Michael Parenti.

The problem, for those who choose to see it, is that the entire ‘left’ program that was handed to the Democrats in both 2016 and 2020, from Bernie Sanders’ ascendance to the Black Lives Matter protests, is now a flaming bag of dog excrement waiting to be stomped out. The phrase ‘the Democratic party is the graveyard of social movements’ comes to mind. Sure, Donald Trump’s political program certainly gives the US the appearance of a former empire in free-fall. But then so did the DNC propping up Genocide Joe in a low-budget remake of Weekend at Bernie’s.

With Donald Trump throwing policy bombs and lighting fires domestically, the global class war that has been raging for the last fifty years has been brought home. Mr. Trump’s proponents see him, and themselves, on the winning side of history. This is exactly how American Democrats perceived themselves in the aftermath of the 2020 election of Joe Biden. But outside of life and death, history doesn’t have winners and losers. As Bob Dylan put it “… the loser now, will be later to win.’ History isn’t over until it is over.

This is to point to the folly of ideologically driven reforms rather than coming to some level of public agreement, sometimes known as democratic consent, over national governance. The Democrats enacted DEI and the next Republican president reversed it. Donald Trump tears down the permanent government and the Democrats spend the next four years launching foreign wars. That Democrats don’t know that their party is overwhelmingly responsible for privatizing Medicare begs the question of agency?

It is a sense of repeating cycles that replaces one national ideological predisposition with its opposite. But if history has a voice, it ties to underlying causes. The pattern hasn’t been a symmetrical back-and-forth where national balance is recovered. For five decades now, American politics have represented a relentless march to the hard right. No balance has been recovered via the electoral back-and-forth between the parties.

This point is important to understand. Both Democrats and Republicans claim ideologies. That the national politics has moved hard-right for five decades implies either that Republicans have controlled the politics for all five of these decades— which they haven’t, or that both Democrats and Republicans are right-wing parties. Given that the parties have taken turns governing, Republicans haven’t led the move hard-right. The answer that remains is that the Democrats are a hard-right party. As irony has it, neither party would last five minutes without the other.

This may be painful to read inside the sense of emergency being caused by Mr. Trump’s current idiot-King schtick as it is being applied to actual human lives. But Mr. Trump neither caused the dysfunction that brought him to power (twice), nor does he stand any more chance than the Democrats of fixing it. The result is that both parties have migrated from pretending to solve national problems to erasing the efforts of the other party. Mr. Trump is currently winning that effort to the great detriment of the American people.

There was a blood sport of sorts begun in the 1990s of guessing how long it would take various European Social Democratic parties to govern from the neoliberal right after winning election. They would run on the European equivalent of the political marketing campaigns of American Democrats, and then govern from the neoliberal-right upon election. What became apparent was that there were supra-national forces, call them political economy, that converted the wills of disparate electorates into a unified neoliberal front that transcended national borders.

Graph: it’s easy enough for those unfamiliar with the data to associate the large decline in life expectancy with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The problem with doing so is that the graph looks largely the same in relative terms, when compared with peer nations. What this suggests is that the Covid-19 pandemic brought-to-light the existing deficiencies of the US healthcare system that were supposed to have been fixed by passage of the ACA. After shoveling billions more dollars in public largesse into health insurer executive bonus pools, the ACA has produced the worst healthcare system in the developed world. Why? Source: worldbank.org.

This paradox, where voters vote but donors control the policies that emerge, represents political disempowerment for all but the rich. With more nuance than yours truly imagined likely, Donald Trump’s targeting of Federal employees has targeted the PMC (professional-managerial class), meaning Democrats, quite effectively. This was Mr. Trump’s variation on Bill Clinton’s use of NAFTA to realign the Democrats with the interests of capital. The class that will remain in the burned-out shell of the US will be the oligarchs.

Key to this effort has been to conflate what politicians say about their policies with what the policies actually accomplish. Remarkably, even as a key provision in the ACA (Affordable Care Act) represents the clearest path for the Trump administration to privatize all of Medicare, Democrats are quadrupling down on their commitment to the program. The ACA provision, called ‘best practices,’ allows one politician in a position of authority to define privatized Medicare (Medicare Advantage) a ‘best practice,’ making it Federal policy to end non-private Medicare.

Graph: after relentlessly criticizing the deportation of immigrants by the Trump administration, Democrats slept through the Biden administration’s massive increase in deportations. The irony is that the Trump campaign spent its prior four years downplaying what the Democrats were doing. It was selling the fantasy of a ‘massive increase in illegal immigration.’ This is why I keep asking my Republican friends why they don’t vote for Democrats? Joe Biden did exactly what they just elected Donald Trump to do. Source: nytimes.com.

As readers certainly know by now, 54% of Medicare (graph below) has already been privatized, mainly by Democrats. The incongruity of Democrats nodding in the affirmative to claims by Democratic politicians that they will ‘save’ Medicare (and Social Security) is perfectly contradicted by the facts. Not only have Democrats privatized more of Medicare than have Republicans, but the ‘best practices’ provision of Obamacare seems designed to privatize all of Medicare. That Democrats don’t know this makes them dangerously misinformed.

In a similar vein, righteous anger over the Trump administration’s violent and likely illegal deportation of Venezuelan citizens who were legally in the US to a gulag in El Salvador is based on ignorance of the actual history of deportations by Presidents. As the graph above illustrates, following the public anguish over Donald Trump’s deportation of immigrants during his first term, the Biden administration doubled the number of deportations. Democrats who oppose the mass deportation of immigrants need to learn at least a few facts about the party that they claim to support.

To possible distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deportations, the left has fought capital over open borders for several centuries. Industrialists long fought for open borders so as to flood the US with desperate workers in order to lower wages. The politics that took labor out of consideration is telling. Those who don’t care about labor tend to be aligned with capital. This would be the PMC left, American liberals, and the oligarchs. Having worked white-collar and blue-collar jobs, no working person would voluntarily open the door for their replacement.

While I didn’t participate in the national ‘Hands Offs’ protests, I spoke with friends who attended local events. The local politicians who attended are neoliberal, neoconservative, Zionist, apparatchiks. In a city plagued by FBI efforts to entrap its citizens in fake ‘terrorist’ plots, and that is a dumping ground for state projects that can’t be built elsewhere due to public opposition from powerful forces, the local politicians are aligned with national Democrats against the citizens.

The richest 1% of Americans (the oligarchs) owns over half of the stock market. And the richest 10% owns ninety percent of the stock market. Finance is what empowered the oligarchs. Ending its value could restore something resembling a democratic social order. Note that Democrats have spent the last five decades doing everything in their power to raise the value of the stock market. Bill Clinton was / is a stock market god, having overseen the largest market bubble until the next two market bubbles.

The point is that the stock market is a major source of the oligarch’s power. Letting the stock market fall to valuation levels of earlier stock market history would cut the economic power of the oligarchs down to size. Broadly economically adverse outcomes would accompany the move. But without dampening the economic power of the oligarchs, restoring economic and / or political democracy is impossible. Concentrated wealth will continue to purchase political power until it is made to stop doing so.

The current political lining-up, with Democrats protesting Mr. Trump and his policies under the idea that the next Genocide Joe will be incrementally better than the Republican alternative, misses that the US is an empire in free-fall. The post-War period when the US had the only intact industrial base is long past. The Democrats were urged to put together an industrial policy, and chose not to. This left the Trump – right to inflict its version of an industrial policy. The best guess here is that it will not end well.

Changing economic relations from the bipartisan neoliberal model to something else can proceed from the right or the left. Both the Democrats and the Republicans chose to hand the task to the Trump-right. Please re-read the quote from Michael Parenti above. In extraordinary circumstances, count on the Democrats to side with the right. What the US needs is economic redistribution to accomplish political redistribution. But the American Social Democrats (Democrats) like the current arrangement just fine.

The post Social Democracy isn’t Going to Save the West appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Eric Brehm

“The whole world has decided that the U.S. government has no idea what it’s doing.”

– Mark Blyth, “Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers,” (New York Times, April 14, 2025.)

Professor Mark Blyth’s remarks were aimed at the Trump administration’s creation of turmoil in the world’s financial markets due to its completely inept handling of the bond markets and the start of a trade war with China.  But Blyth’s charge could have been leveled at every aspect of Trump’s governance over the past three months, beginning with the appointment of the most inexperienced and least capable cabinet secretaries and agency heads in the history of the United States.  Donald Trump’s inauguration address for his first term in 2017 talked of “American Carnage.”  Well, eight years later, here we are—American Carnage.

In less than 90 days, the United States under Trump has become a very different country.  It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is facing a meltdown that will be difficult to reverse.  The executive branch has taken on powers that are usually associated with wartime requirements.  The legislative branch has been largely neutralized because of the near total abdication of the Republican Party.  And the judicial system is facing an unprecedented challenge from a president and vice president who have no respect for our courts and our judges.  Trump has fired at least 15 inspectors general who were tasked by the Congress to root out abuses in federal agencies.  This is an open invitation for corruption and abuse.

The United States is facing existential, constitutional, and identity crises that mark the country’s decline; the impact can already be seen in terms of our domestic and international instability.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS:  Donald Trump’s failure to obey the Supreme Court’s unsigned order last week to take steps to garner the return of a Salvadoran migrant—Kilmar Abrego Garcia—marked the beginning of a constitutional crisis that was anticipated by many who feared Trump’s return to the White House.  Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported to the most notorious prison in El Salvador, and there is still no evidence of wrongdoing on his part.  He has never been arrested or accused of a crime.  El Salvador President Nayib Bukele told Trump on April 14 that he would not return Abrego Garcia, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, sitting next to Trump, said that it was up to El Salvador to decide.  In a perfect example of the abject cruelty and heartlessness of the Trump administration, Bondi added that “if they want to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.”

Last week, Trump said he had no respect for the decisions of federal courts, but would obey the decisions of the Supreme Court.  Two days later, the Trump administration threw down the gauntlet, stating that it was not required to engage El Salvador’s government in order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.  Abrego Garcia’s deportation amounted to a case of “official kidnapping,” as he was removed from the United States without due process.  Trump’s tone of defiance was backed by his Department of Justice that is moving to expand the powers of the executive branch in ways that are illegal and even unconstitutional.

THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS:  The constitutional crisis places the United States in an existential crisis that finds leading members of the administration, particularly the Attorney General and the Deputy Chief of Staff to the president questioning fundamental concepts of the rule of law and freedom itself.  There has not been a challenge of this magnitude at any time in U.S. history with the exception of the Civil War period in the 1860s.  For the past 150 years, U.S. politicians and historians have prided the United States on its exceptionalism, which set the United States apart and justified the export of U.S. traditions and values.  “Exceptionalism” no longer works as a trope in political speeches and historical narratives.

Over the past 80 years, the United States took particular pride in playing an indispensable role in ridding the world of Fascist and Communist threats, but the Trump administration has created strategic confusion concerning U.S. goals and objectives.  The state of the Atlantic alliance is now in question; the trade and tariff war with China is worsening; and the pressure on Ukraine has raised doubts about U.S. support among allies in Europe and Asia.

THE IDENTITY CRISIS:  The identity crisis is marked by the profound meanness of Trump himself, who is personally responsible for the cruelty that marks his administration’s illegal and unconstitutional handling of refugees.  The poem on the Statue of Liberty expresses the statue’s role as a symbol of welcome and hope.  Now refugees in the United States, who have encountered violence in their own countries, find greater violence in the United States.  Trump has committed himself to deporting one million immigrants in his first year, and only a lack of funding and staffing will probably prevent that goal.  Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is directing the deportation effort, pressing 30 countries to take migrants who are not their citizens.  The case of Abrego Garcia is typical of the overwhelming meanness of the Trump team.

The revocation of the visas of foreign students by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which appears to be his only activity these days, is another marker of the new U.S. identity.  In less than 60 days, more than 1,000 international students have had their visas revoked as part of a phony effort to fight anti-semitism on college campuses.  Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was the first case in this crackdown, and it has caused many international students to self-deport, which is exactly what Trump, Rubio, and Miller favor.  As a result, foreign students will not consider U.S. universities for their higher education, especially since Canada and Australia offer far more safety and support.

American citizens themselves are also experiencing the meanness of the Trump team.  Trump has revoked security protection for President Joe Biden’s son and daughter, and even talked of Hunter Biden as deserving of the death penalty, which explains why Biden pardoned his son before leaving office in the first place.  Trump’s language has created serous serious concerns for former national security adviser John Bolton, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and General Mark Milley, which probably explains Trump’s delight in removing their security protection. More than a dozen prosecutors who worked for special council Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of Trump have been fired.

Every important institution in the United States is being targeted by the troglodytes in the Trump administration, even libraries and museums that we rely on as the “most trusted sources of information in this country,” according to the CEO of the American Alliance of Museums.  We used to say that the Soviet Union was the only country in the world that had an “unpredictable past,” but that charge could be applied to the United States as well.  Last month, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which promises a revision of our historical narrative.

Trump himself has targeted the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of African American History and Culture for retooling and revision.  Vice President J.D. Vance, who now sits on the Smithsonian’s board, is in charge of removing the institution’s “improper ideology.”  Elite universities; successful regulatory agencies; health departments; and prestigious law firms  are being targeted and weakened in the process.  Donald Trump even engineered a a direct takeover of the Kennedy Center, which was an example of his pathological narcissism.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.”  It is possible that the Soviet collapse endowed the United States with too much power for its own good, leading to the misuse of power in the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the twenty years of war in Afghanistan, and a continued military presence in Iraq that followed a similar twenty-year war.  The greatest geopolitical disaster thus far in the 21st century may be the political and economic meltdown of the United States, which is having far-reaching results for the entire international community.

In addition to the domestic turmoil initiated by the Trump administration, the United States has been losing power and influence in the international arena, including the decline of U.S. influence in the Atlantic Alliance that had secured the safety of U.S. relations with Western Europe; the mindless and “monumental split” between the United States and China that makes no geopolitical sense whatsoever; the retreat from arms control and disarmament; the purge and politicization of the professional military; and last week’s threat to the global financial system that had secured the primacy of the U.S. dollar and U.S. bonds in international markets.  Britain lost the primacy of the pound in the wake of the Suez War in 1956.  History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme; perhaps we are witnessing the lost primacy of the dollar due to the idiocy of the Trump national security team.

The post The Meltdown of the United States appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Denis Oliveira

I first watched Breaking Bad a few years ago, after the show had completed its original run. During these past two months, I’ve rewatched the entire series, which–in light of the Trumpian reign of terror–seems oddly cathartic.   

The locus of Breaking Bad is Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its protagonist is Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a downtrodden, underappreciated high school chemistry teacher.  White, we learn, is a onetime scientific hotshot and had been a core founder of a startup business–an endeavor that made a fortune after his own ignoble exit, robbing him of money and prestige. He lives in a sort of purgatory.

White is suddenly faced with the catastrophic medical diagnosis of advanced, most likely fatal, cancer. A high school teacher has insurance coverage, of course, but in White’s case it is not adequate enough for the first-rate care that will potentially extend or save his life. The show presents this without editorializing or even explanation: It is simply understood that the system will not fully provide.

White taps into his reservoir of chemical expertise and—joining forces with his scabrous (and very funny) ex-student, Jesse Pinkman (played brilliantly by Aaron Paul)—begins to manufacture meth, ostensibly to cover his medical expenses and leave his family a nest egg when he’s gone. Breaking Bad chronicles White’s gradual, pathological transformation from teacher to ruthless criminal mastermind.

A survey of Breaking Bad’s many plot complexities and vast, vivid canvas of characters could fill a book. There is perhaps the most stunning montage I’ve ever seen, delineating the beginning of Walt and Jesse’s new business endeavor. Incongruously juxtaposed with a sprightly lounge-jazz tune and bright, cheery lyrics, Jesse makes his sales rounds amid desolate parking lots, a mostly empty laundromat, and the subsistence-level motels that can be found all over the United States. His meth-consuming clientele ranges from the rough-looking, the haggard, the sinister—and in one telling instance, the prosperous.  It is life in these United States.

Breaking Bad loosely follows in the Godfather lineage, in which enshrined American archetypes are utilized for nefarious purposes. Vito Corleone arrives at Ellis Island with nothing, and thanks to his discipline, hard work, and foresight, rises to the top. It is the classic American success story. Likewise, Walter White, faced with catastrophe, takes a can-do attitude and uses his scientific skills to save himself and his family.

The Godfather canon also explicitly links organized crime to capitalist success: the idea that the Mafia is a business is an ongoing trope. This is made even more explicit in Breaking Bad. (And interestingly, both Michael Corleone and Water White start out as criminal neophytes, and both eventually out-brutalize hardened criminals.)

White has followed the classic entrepreneurial playbook by launching his own startup. This particular startup is illegal, but it mimics legitimate business models and harnesses those cherished concepts of “disruption” and “innovation.” His meth has a distinctive blue tint that makes for effective branding. The quality and purity of the product keep the customers coming back. White even brands himself with an attention-grabbing alias: Heisenberg, in a perverted homage to the German scientist-philosopher Werner Heisenberg.

White takes immense pride in his product, its purity, and in that blue tint. But like so many entrepreneurs, Walt and Jesse certainly have the technical know-how, yet are lacking in expertise when it comes to effective product distribution. It could be grist for a TED Talk.

In order to move their product, they enter into a business alliance with Gus Fring, the straitlaced, courteous owner of the Los Pollos Hermanos fast-food chicken chain: paragon of respectability, civic booster, friend of the police—and, in reality, a brutal drug kingpin.

Breaking Bad is set in a United States full of sinister nooks and crannies. The high school teacher produces meth. The friendly fast-food outlet is, in reality, a crime epicenter. Even the local vacuum cleaner store is the place of nefarious secrets. The proprietor of one such store—played by the late Robert Forster, in his final role—is known as the “disappearer.” For a large sum of money, he can provide you with an entirely new identity and place to live. The viewer is not privy to any backstory; we have no idea who this disappearer really is. All we have is shadowy conjecture.

In the Breaking Bad constellation, there are deceptions large and small, violence at every turn, white supremacists. The New Mexico desert is simply a utilitarian device to dispose of contraband or bodies.

Authority figures are inept: White is growing his burgeoning drug empire under the very nose of his brother-in-law, a highly placed drug enforcement agent. If they’re not inept, they’re part of the rot and grand deception. There is the twisted, cheerfully amoral lawyer and fixer Saul Goodman (titular character of the Better Call Saul spinoff) and the ruthless henchman Mike Ehrmantraut, who is a defrocked Philadelphia policeman.

Breaking Bad is a study in fear: If one enters Walter White’s orbit, the threats come from a wide array of sources. Nobody will help you. And it is strongly implied that nobody will help you, really, even if you stay out of Walter White’s orbit.

The United States as a whole is saturated with shadow and incongruity. Are there other countries this continuously frightened?  We are being invaded by fearsome migrants, so ferocious as to eat household pets. There is ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter—posing threats nobody can define–Venezuelan gangs, a trans and gay “agenda”—which also has no definition–and a president who was secretly a Kenyan. We are being visited by UFOs that potentially bear the threat of annihilation—and the government knows this and is keeping the salient details hidden. In the outside world, we are beset with a growing list of lethal threats: Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba, Islamic fundamentalism. And in the Trump universe, even the dead have malevolent power: they vote, they collect Social Security benefits.

Breaking Bad is fiction and comes to a delineated conclusion—which may be why watching it has been cathartic. It is a startlingly accurate look at the twisted, frightened American psyche.

Our unfolding political and social catastrophe is, of course, very real. There is no conclusion, delineated or otherwise. In fact, this is just the beginning.

The post Breaking Bad and America’s Dark Shadows appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo credits: Public domain and Steve Jurvetson (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is sending its first satellites into space. The company’s founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos, seems keen to challenge all things Musk—including Elon’s SpaceX Starlink system.

The satellites in Amazon’s $10 billion-plus Kuiper Atlas project are being launched with the Lockheed Martin-designed Atlas V rocket, at Cape Canaveral’s Space Force Station.

OK, a few thoughts on the matter that corporate media probably won’t contemplate.

Astronomical Funding

Fifteen years ago, Barack Obama’s White House trumpeted an increase in NASA funding. Obama said it would “help improve the daily lives of people here on Earth” and help companies produce “new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere”—first to an asteroid, later to Mars. I’m just a little unclear about how, overall, sending hundreds of billions of dollars into space has been improving my daily life so far. If you ask me, money for reliable bus service would help a lot more. Universal medical care. Free higher education.

The benefits to the planet’s most massive corporations are obvious. I hear Amazon’s lining up deals in Britain, Indonesia, Australia, and potentially Taiwan.

This lucrative new space race feeds off the human need for information, especially where internet access is sparse.

Profit Streams

Yes, Starlink connects people in far-flung places with internet services. And it calls these people markets. It’s not hard to imagine unbanked populations being converted into profit streams, once they’re online.

Moreover, when wealthy companies secure US government backing, they can become political instruments, manipulating the populations they claim to serve. Polish taxpayers have forked over an annual $50 million to provide Starlink’s services to Ukraine. But Poland’s foreign minister tweeted out concerns about the trustworthiness of US-based Starlink. Be quiet, small man, Musk snapped back. (Musk then bragged about having challenged Putin to one-on-one physical combat.)

People with unfathomable wealth take more billions in handouts from the US military in the name of national security. General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations for the US Space Force, recently named SpaceX as a recipient of nearly $6 billion more. Saltzman called the contract “a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win.”

Got it. Warfighters gonna warfight. Blam! Zonk! Kapow! Splat!

Cosmic Sprawl

So here comes Jeff Bezos, a prominent player in Donald Trump’s troupe of lickspittles since January. With the Trump regime now describing Amazon Prime as a model for deportation, who knows? Maybe “alien enemies” (those people who have autism awareness tattoos or otherwise ruffle the regime’s feathers) could be shipped into orbit.

In any case, Amazon’s space project will pile 3,200+ satellites onto the tens of thousands that Elon’s launching into the low Earth orbit (within a 1,200-mile band around Earth). Space scientists have long pressed for reviews of the satellites’ impact on the delicate balance of elements and molecules in the air when these things ultimately burn up in our atmosphere.

And the Federal Communications Commission enables it all.

Welcome to outer space in the Anthropocene.

The post Bezos Versus Musk: Which Billionaire Will Trash Space the Most? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Oren Rozen – CC BY-SA 4.0

In conversations about Israel and Palestine, I am often asked about my views on the internal resistance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

My questioners point to hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been taking to the streets to protest against the government and its efforts to introduce a judicial overhaul over the past two years and inquire why I remain apathetic to these efforts to end Netanyahu’s rule.

My answer is simple – the real problem facing Israel is not its current government. The government might fall, but until we radically transform the nature of the regime, not much will change, and particularly not in relation to the basic human rights of Palestinians. A recent Israeli Supreme Court decision underscores my point.

On March 18, 2024, five Israeli human rights organizations filed an urgent petition with Israel’s Supreme Court, asking the court to instruct the Israeli government and military to fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law and address the civilian population’s humanitarian needs amid the catastrophic conditions in Gaza.

The petition was submitted at a time when aid was entering Gaza, but the amount crossing the border was far from sufficient to meet the minimal needs of the population, of whom 75 percent had already been displaced. The rights groups wanted the government to lift all restrictions on the passage of aid, equipment and personnel into Gaza, particularly in the north where there were already documented cases of children dying from malnutrition and dehydration.

The court did not issue a ruling for more than a year, effectively allowing the government to continue restricting aid unchecked. Three weeks after the rights groups filed the petition, the court convened only to provide the government additional time to update its preliminary response to the petition. This set the tone for how the petition would proceed over the next 12 months.

Each time the petitioners provided data on the worsening conditions of the civilian population and emphasized the urgent need for judicial intervention, the court simply asked the government for further updates. In its April 17 update, for example, the government insisted that it had significantly increased the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, claiming that between October 7, 2023, and April 12, 2024, it had allowed 22,763 trucks to cross the checkpoints. This amounts to 121 trucks per day, which according to every humanitarian agency working in Gaza, does not come close to meeting the population’s needs.

In October 2024, at least half a year after the petition was submitted, the rights organizations asked the court to issue an injunction after the government deliberately blocked humanitarian aid for two weeks. In response, the government claimed that it had been monitoring the situation in northern Gaza closely and that there was “no shortage of food”. Two months later, however, the government confessed that it had underestimated the number of Palestinian residents trapped in northern Gaza – thus acknowledging that the aid entering the Strip was insufficient.

On March 18, 2025, after Israel breached the ceasefire agreement and resumed its bombardment of Gaza and the minister of energy and infrastructure halted the supply of electricity to the Strip, the petitioners submitted yet another urgent request for an interim order against the government’s decision to prevent the passage of humanitarian aid. Again, the court failed to issue a ruling.

Finally, on March 27, more than a year after the rights organizations had filed the petition, the court issued a verdict. Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit and Justices Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz unanimously ruled that it lacked merit. Justice David Mintz interlaced his response with Jewish religious texts, characterizing Israel’s attacks as a war of divine duty, while concluding that, “[The Israeli military] and the respondents went above and beyond to enable the provision of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, even while taking the risk that the aid transferred would reach the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization and be used by it to fight against Israel.”

Thus, at a time when humanitarian agencies have pointed again and again to acute levels of malnutrition and starvation, Israel’s Supreme Court – both in the way it handled the judicial process and in its ruling – has ignored Israel’s legal obligation to refrain from depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival, including by wilfully impeding relief supplies. In effect, the court legitimized the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

This is the court that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are trying to save. It’s March 27 ruling – and almost all other rulings involving Palestinians – reveal that the Supreme Court of Israel is a colonial court – one that protects the rights of the settler population while legitimizing the dispossession, displacement, and horrific violence perpetrated against the Indigenous Palestinians. And while the Supreme Court might not reflect the values of the existing government – particularly on issues relating to political corruption – it undoubtedly reflects and has always reflected the values of the colonial regime.

Hence, the liberal Zionists who fill Tel Aviv’s streets every weekend are not demonstrating against a judicial overhaul that endangers democracy, but against an overhaul that endangers Jewish democracy. Few of these protesters have any real qualms about the court’s horrific ruling on humanitarian aid, or, for that matter, on how the court has consistently upheld Israeli apartheid and colonial pillars. The regime, in other words, can continue to eliminate Palestinians unhindered as long as the rights of Israel’s Jewish citizenry are secured.

This article first appeared in Al Jazeera.

The post Why I Don’t Cheer for Israel’s ‘Pro-Democracy’ Movement appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Tasnim News Agency – CC BY 4.0

The Israeli killing of medical workers in Gaza is further proof of a lack of any restraint on the part of Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF). They have been accused of executing 15 handcuffed medics before burying them in a mass grave underneath their crushed ambulances in southern Gaza. As Middle East Eye reported on the medics: “They were found over the weekend in a mass grave with around 20 multiple gunshots in each one of them.” According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza; “At least one of them had their legs bound, another was decapitated and a third topless,” he added.

Here are some of the reactions to the execution:

The top United Nations interim official for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jonathan Whittall, told journalists: “What is happening here defies decency, it defies humanity, it defies the law. It really is a war without limits. It’s an endless loop of blood, pain, and death.”

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) was “outraged.” IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain stated: “Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of International Humanitarian Law could not be clearer – civilians must be protected; humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected.”

“Preliminary analysis suggests they were executed, not from a distant range,” a forensic consultant who examined the exhumed bodies told The Guardian, “since the locations of the bullet wounds were specific and intentional,” he said. “One observation is that the bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”

What was Israel’s explanation? “When Hamas terrorists operate in active combat zones — while using humanitarian vehicles as cover, launching rockets from hospitals and stealing aid — Israel will do whatever it takes to protect its soldiers and citizens,” justified Jonathan Harounoff, a spokesman for Israel’s mission to the U.N.

The New York Times contradicted Israel’s version of what happened: “The video obtained by the Timesshows that the approaching ambulances and fire truck were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.” The video was discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics.

After watching the video, Farnaz Fassihi and Christoph Koettl described what they saw and heard in the Times. It is worth repeating the gruesome details:

“Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side. Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out. A barrage of gunshots is seen and heard in the video hitting the convoy. The camera shakes, the video goes dark. But the audio continues for five minutes, and the rat-a-tat of gunfire does not stop. A man says in Arabic that there are Israelis present.

The paramedic filming is heard on the video reciting, over and over, the ‘shahada,’ or a Muslim declaration of faith, which people recite when facing death. ’There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger,’ the paramedic is heard saying. He asks God for forgiveness and says he knows he is going to die.

‘Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,’ he said.’”

After reports on the video went public, Israeli officials modified their initial justifications. “The Israeli military on Saturday [April 5] acknowledged that the initial accounts from troops involved in the killing last month of 15 people in southern Gaza — who the United Nations said were paramedics and rescue workers — had been partially ‘mistaken,’” journalist Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem. Israel now says the episode was “under thorough examination.” (The Times has interviewed several witnesses to the shootings Eyewitnesses Recount Deadly Israeli Attack on Medics in Gaza – The New York Times)

The outright assassination of medical workers is a new and different form of Israeli violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in its continuing refusal to respect international norms. Over 50,000 people, including women, the elderly and children, have died in Gaza. An entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Millions have been displaced. IHL in all its complexities is only effective if it is respected by all parties to a conflict. Israel signed the Geneva Conventions on Dec. 8, 1949, and ratified them on July 6, 1951.

What happens if a party to a conflict like Israel continues to violate IHL in the most egregious manner? So far, very little. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visits Hungary and the United States as if they were normal diplomatic trips, ignoring the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued search warrants for his arrest. (The U.S. and has no obligation to arrest Netanyahu since is not party to the Rome Treaty.)

For years, my dear friend Eugene Schulman often wore a keffiyeh to honor the Palestinian people. He would regularly unfurl a Palestinian flag on his Geneva balcony in support of a Palestinian state. A non-practicing Jew, Gene was constantly outraged at how Palestinians were treated by Israel. Gene died five years ago next month – Matthew Stevenson movingly described him in CounterPunch (Our Friend Eugene Schulman – CounterPunch.org.). Gene would be beyond outrage today at what is happening to Palestinians.

Hunters have seasons to shoot. Their prey have respites. The IDF and Israeli military have shown it is an open season in Gaza. Nothing is out of bounds. There is no respite for anyone, including humanitarian workers and medics. Even the erudite Gene Schulman would not find words to describe what is taking place. He would be, as we all should be, beyond outrage.

The post Beyond Outrage: Israel’s Execution of Medical Workers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

We live in an age when disappearance is no longer a metaphor. It is both a threat and a governing principle. Under the Trump regime, language is no longer a prelude to violence—it is its echo, its announcement, its choreography. The rhetoric of erasure has been sharpened into policy, and policy has become the staging ground for an unfolding theater of cruelty. Immigrants, dissidents, students, institutions, and even sovereign nations are now targets of an authoritarian imagination that seeks not merely to silence but to unmake. What once lived in the realm of the unspeakable now materializes in the architecture of state violence, abduction, deportation, and political terror.

Dissent, once the lifeblood of democracy, is now branded as terrorism. The protester is no longer a citizen with a voice but a suspect under surveillance, a body to be silenced, imprisoned, or vanished—sometimes in distant nations where autocrats echo Trump’s contempt for law and human rights. Under the creeping shadow of authoritarianism, a student with a green card becomes a threat, a journalist is branded a traitor, entire immigrant populations of color are  viewed as a threat to national security and rendered disposable. Atrocities—such as the relentless bombardment and starvation of Palestinian women and children—vanish from mainstream coverage, their suffering lost in the machinery of genocide and indifference. In a culture fragmented into a thousand soundbites, social responsibility holds no market value; it evaporates in the toxic air of manufactured ignorance, hate, and despair. The moral compass of American society spins wildly, as cruelty becomes normalized, and conscience is silenced in the name of security, profit, and power.

When Stephen Miller stood before a cheering crowd at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024, and declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he was not merely indulging in a grotesque strain of ultra-nationalism—he was resurrecting the death-scented language of racial purity. His words, echoing the rhetoric of Hitler, did more than exclude immigrants; they targeted the very idea of shared humanity. The message was clear: not only Black and Latino immigrants, but anyone who defends their dignity and rights, belongs outside the nation’s moral and political borders. The crowd roared in approval as Miller gave voice to Trump’s own warning—that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—signaling the full return of a fascist logic in which citizenship is no longer a democratic right but a racialized weapon. In this worldview, those who do not conform—by birth, by belief, or by the color of their skin—are marked for removal, erasure, or expulsion.

We are now living through a globalized necropolitics in which the meaning of “citizen,” once tethered to democratic representation and civic belonging, has been hollowed out. What remains is a brutal calculus of disposability, a politics of unbeing. Entire populations are thrust into a liminal space, a state of enforced invisibility. As Achille Mbembe warns, “vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead”—ghosts in plain sight, denied recognition until they disrupt, at which point they are declared pathological or dangerous, and swiftly cast out. In a corporate-controlled media landscape saturated with spectacle, education has been hollowed out and repurposed as a pedagogy of unreason—a toxic bullhorn for glorifying war, normalizing cruelty, and disseminating the lies, racial fantasies, and authoritarian dreams that sustain fascist ideology.

This assault on critical consciousness doesn’t just distort reality—it dismembers the very frameworks of belonging, paving the way for what Zygmunt Bauman calls “social homelessness”—a condition in which people are not simply unhoused but stripped of the very social and political structures that confer existence. This is the logic of neoliberal fascism, where the free market is sacrosanct, but the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the racialized are disposable. In this wasteland of abandonment, exclusion is terminal. Protection is denied, rights are withdrawn, and existence itself is rendered conditional.

But what is most chilling is that it is not just bodies that disappear. What vanishes in this discourse is memory, truth, solidarity, and the possibility of justice. Trump’s authoritarian grammar of erasure now extends even to entire nations. His fantastical threats to annex Greenland, Canada, or Panama are not the ravings of a deluded mind—they are ideological gestures toward empire, conquest, and the disappearance of sovereignty itself. What begins as ideological erasure—of history, borders, and human worth—inevitably manifests in real-world violence, where bodies are seized, visas are revoked, and lives discarded with bureaucratic precision.

The abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk by plainclothes agents of the state mark a terrifying threshold in the unfolding drama of American authoritarianism. These acts were not isolated law enforcement errors but political kidnappings, signaling that fascism in the United States is no longer a creeping threat—it is a reality. These young scholars, legal U.S. residents, were seized, denied due process, and imprisoned in remote detention centers for nothing more than their dissent against the Israeli-American genocide in Gaza. And many more were to follow. This is the new state terror: bureaucratically sanitized, legally justified, and ideologically ruthless.

To call these abductions “acts of state terror” is to recognize the intent behind them—not just the physical violence or legal abuses, but the psychological and political message they send. As in fascist regimes of the past, the disappearances are not meant solely to silence the individuals targeted. They are warnings to the rest of us: dissent will be punished, protest will be surveilled, and critique will be criminalized. The invocation of “support for terrorism” without evidence, and the convenient deployment of national security rhetoric, is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi regime’s use of “protective custody” and “public order” to justify mass arrests and detentions.

What allows this to happen—especially in elite spaces like Columbia University—is not simply external pressure from the state, but the internal corrosion of governance within higher education itself. Universities, once regarded as citadels of critical thought, have increasingly capitulated to political expediency, financial pressures, and market logics. They have surrendered to the seductions and rewards of neoliberalism and now function as craven adjuncts of a state captured by billionaires and ideological extremists. Institutions like Columbia and Harvard, by prioritizing corporate donations, federal contracts, and their own reputational security over academic freedom and human rights, have chosen cowardice over conscience. In refusing to defend Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia did not simply fail a student—it failed the very democratic ideals it claims to uphold.

The lessons of history make clear where this road leads. In 1933, as part of a national effort to align German institutions with Nazi ideology—a process known as Gleichschaltung—the regime targeted universities as key sites for ideological control. At Goethe University Frankfurt, Jewish professors were summarily dismissed, and Jewish students expelled. Many faculty members, rather than resisting, colluded—choosing the security of their positions and the continuation of their research over solidarity with colleagues and the defense of institutional autonomy. The same pattern unfolded at Heidelberg University, Munich, and others, where universities traded academic freedom for ideological conformity.

This history is not a relic; it is a warning. Today, when institutions like the University of Pennsylvania suspend students for political speech, or when MIT distances itself from scholars who criticize U.S. foreign policy, we are witnessing a similar erosion of moral courage and intellectual independence. Then as now, universities become accomplices in repression not only through what they do—but through what they refuse to defend. As Michael Roth bravely argues, it is time to challenge this institutional cowardice. Universities are not compelled to roll over in the face of political pressure; they have both the moral responsibility and the democratic obligation to support student activism and uphold the principles of free speech and modes of critical education that make such activism possible. Yet, As Samuel Karlin  in Left Curve notes, it is crucial  to   that academics join with both their unions and worker’s unions “take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.”

The broader institutional landscape mirrors this complicity. As Jason Stanley, the prominent philosopher of fascism, has made clear in his decision to leave Yale for a university in Ontario, there is now a systemic failure across U.S. academic and civic institutions to stand up to the fascist turn. His departure is not only a personal choice; it is a public indictment of a nation drifting—or rather, plunging—into authoritarianism.

In the face of Trump’s three-pronged assault—on the Palestinian movement, on immigrants, and on the autonomy of universities—the mainstream media offers only minimal resistance, and even that fails to connect these intersecting attacks as core elements of a fascist politics. Meanwhile, universities capitulate. Law firms once proud to defend civil rights now retreat. Together, these failures mark the collapse of civic imagination and moral courage. History teaches us that tyrants always move first against legal experts, educators, and other so-called “enemies of the state.” Strip away the defenders of law, and the victims of repression stand alone. When universities yield to fascist pressure, they don’t just betray their mission—they embolden further attacks on free thought. The assault on First Amendment rights is no anomaly; it’s a well-worn tactic of authoritarian rule. As G.S. Hans writes in Balls and Strikes:

By targeting lawyers and law firms for their advocacy, the White House mimics authoritarian regimes abroad, where despots intimidate or even kill lawyers who resist. In the Philippines, over sixty lawyers were murdered under Duterte. In China, human rights attorneys were jailed for defending dissidents. Without meaningful legal representation, activists either fall silent—or face brutal reprisal.

Khalil’s case, as I wrote recently, is about the fate of democracy itself. When legal residents with green cards are abducted and deported for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, we are no longer operating within a democratic framework. We are witnessing a perversion of law, where legality is weaponized to uphold injustice, and due process becomes an optional formality.

Donald Trump’s declaration that he wants to be “dictator for a day,” his chilling assertion that “he who saves the country does not violate the law,” and his claim that he intends to run for a third term—despite constitutional limits—are not rhetorical slips. They are the ideological scaffolding of fascism. We are now living in what I have called “authoritarianism with fascist overtones,” where the state no longer hides its contempt for democracy, but broadcasts it as a badge of strength. The machinery of repression today is draped in the language of legality, national security, and patriotism. But its core purpose remains: to suppress opposition, erase memory, and consolidate power.

Trump and his movement have already dehumanized vast swaths of the population—migrants, Muslims, people of color, and now students and educators. They are cast not as citizens but as threats. As Judith Butler has noted, such dehumanization is not incidental; it is foundational to fascist politics, which requires scapegoats to function.

Trump’s politics of perpetual turmoil—his ceaseless crises, dog whistles, and vendettas—serve a strategic purpose. They exhaust democratic response, disorient the public, and allow authoritarian measures to be passed under the cover of chaos. These are choreographed spectacles of trauma, animated by the energies of the dead, designed not only to terrorize but to numb—to make violence feel ordinary, to render dissent unimaginable. The true danger lies not only in what the state enacts, but in what the public comes to accept as normal, even necessary. What is at stake is more than a culture of silence or the routine cruelty of a politics of disappearance—it is the slow, methodical construction of a fascist subject. This is a subjectivity shaped by fear, seduced by obedience, and ultimately stripped of the capacity to recognize—or reject—the very forces that dominate it. It is not merely that people surrender to authoritarianism, but that they are fashioned by it, habituated to its violence, until resistance feels futile and complicity feels natural.

Yet, even amid this darkness, resistance is growing. The nationwide protests on April 5 signaled a new wave of opposition: tens of thousands in New York and Washington, thousands more in small towns, all rising to say that the line has been crossed. The creativity and moral clarity of these demonstrations offer a glimpse of what is possible. The question is not whether resistance will emerge—it has. The question is whether it will be sustained, deepened, and radicalized.

From here, we must push toward a broad-based front of democratic refusal. Universities must become sanctuaries for truth, not outposts of surveillance. Artists, journalists, educators, and students must converge to defend critical spaces, reclaim memory, and affirm a radical imagination. Law firms must unite against the fascist threats of the Trump administration. Moreover, they must all acknowledge that what they have in common is the need to resist together against the plague of fascism in its updated forms. As Robin D.G. Kelley insists, this moment demands more than protest—it requires organized, collective nonviolent direct action. Kelley calls for a resurgent solidarity among workers, unions, students, young people, educators, and higher education institutions. This is not merely a call for resistance, but for disruption—for coordinated actions that prevent this authoritarian regime from functioning. From strikes and walkouts to divestment campaigns and sanctuary networks, the goal is not to plead with power but to undermine its capacity to rule without legitimacy.

As Kelley reminds us in “Notes on Fighting Fascism,” “If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’” This means thinking with an energizing and informed class consciousness, organizing across identities, and reviving a politics rooted in justice, collective power, and radical imagination. Building on Robin Kelley’s call for resistance, Samuel Karlin insists that any meaningful struggle must break free from illusions about capitalist institutions. Resistance, he argues, cannot be rooted in the very structures that sustain exploitation and domination. As Karlin writes:

As the Trump administration increases its authoritarian measures against Palestine activists, immigrants, universities, and more, it is essential that all those fighting these attacks rely on ourselves, not the institutions of capitalists. We need to start organizing spaces that can bring our movements together to debate and decide on how to fight these attacks. It will require broad democratic campaigns that mobilize masses across the country. And it is essential that unions, especially academic workers’ unions, take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.

History is not merely warning us. It is demanding that we act. The fascist capture of America is not inevitable, but its consolidation becomes more likely with every act of silence, complicity, and moral retreat. Democracy cannot survive if people look away, lapse into complicity, or speak out yet refuse to collectively organize against and tear down a gangster capitalism that now proudly displays its fascist mobilizing passions.  Democracy as a radical idea and practice will survive if—and only if—people rise with courage, defiance, and militant hope. It is time to pay attention, learn from history, connect the dots in order to recognize the totality of this authoritarian system, and make resistance a necessity rather than an afterthought. This is not merely about one administration or a single demagogue. It is about the fate of public memory, the survival of political agency, and the right to speak and act without fear. The United States is not approaching a crisis—it is already engulfed in a four-alarm fire. And the only antidote to this rising tide of authoritarianism is a resistance that is collective, courageous, and unrelenting.

We are not standing at the edge of fascism—we are living through its rehearsal, its staging ground, its opening act. The question is no longer whether we see it, but whether we have the will to stop it before the final curtain falls. Resistance offers no guarantees. But without it—if it falters, if it remains timid or fragmented—what dies is not only democracy as we know it, but the very possibility of imagining it anew.

The post Democracy Disappeared appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Dear Xenophobic America,

On November 14, 2024, I “confessed” that my late Mexican immigrant mother, Carmen Mejía Huerta, “stole” White American jobs. My mother’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” consisted of working as a domestic worker (doméstica)for over four decades, “stealing jobs” from White American women. These are the same gendered jobs that millions of White women discarded and outsourced during the second half of the 20^th Century (to the present) to pursue leisure and employment opportunities.

Like my mother, my late Mexican immigrant father, Salomón Chávez Huerta, participated in “criminal behavior” in the American workplace, “taking away jobs” from White American men. His first “American job heist” occurred during the 1960s, as a guest worker for the Bracero Program (or Mexican Farm Labor Program). As I documented in a past essay, “The day my Mexican father met César Chávez,” the “…Bracero Program represented a guest worker program between the United States and Mexico. From 1942 to 1964, the Mexican government exported an estimated 4.6 million Mexicans to meet this country’s labor shortage not only in the agricultural fields during two major wars (WWII and Korean War), but also in the railroad sector.”

While invited as a “guest” during a critical economic time in American history, my father and millions of his paisanosexperienced exploitation and humiliation in the workplace. Instead of being honored as essential farm workers (campesinos), they were treated more like animals—not that animals, as non-humans, should be abused or neglected. At the Mexican and U.S. processing centers for this bi-national program, government officials forced the Mexican men from the countryside to strip naked in large groups without privacy. The immoral officials sprayed the prospective braceros with the pesticide DDT.  DDT causes cancer, among other illnesses.

After suffering from this traumatizing and humiliating experience, my father rarely spoke about it. Once working on the agricultural fields, the exposure to toxic chemicals continued for my father and his paisanos, as the immoral farmers sprayed their agricultural fields with pesticides linked to cancer and other illnesses. These are the same pesticides that the United Farm Workers (UFW) fought against for many years.

From 1975 to 1985, my father “stole” another American job, when he worked as a janitor in a manufacturing factory. The factory produced chrome wheels for automobiles.  For a decade, my father was exposed to high levels of hexavalent chromium, as part of the chrome-plating process. Like DDT and other pesticides, hexavalent chromium causes cancer and other illnesses.  One day, a young White foreman ordered my father to work closer to the furnaces.  Instead of exposing himself to more heat and toxic chemicals, he quit. Like in the 1960s, when he worked as a farm worker, my father experienced toxic exposure and workplace abuse at the factory while never exceeding the federal minimum wage!

Racial capitalism broke my father’s work spirit.

Defeated, he sporadically worked as a day laborer (jornalero) into his early sixties.

On March 9, 1996, my father died—on his 66^th birthday—of cancer.

Racial capitalism killed my father.

As I critically reflect on my father’s tragic death, I don’t even need to apply my rigorous social science training from UC Berkeley to link my father’s exposure to carcinogens—at high levels for many years—to his early death.

If the xenophobic lords and complicit enablers want me to “return” the earned meager wages by my late immigrant parents, while toiling in discarded American jobs, they must perform a miracle.

Return my Mexican parents from the dead—if only for one day—so I can tell them, individually, what I failed miserably as their proud son to express:

“I love you.”

The post My Immigrant Father “Stole” American Jobs: Another “Confession” from a Child of Mexican Immigrants appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Megan Lee

Veterans who get their health care from “The VA,” actually the cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs, need to be aware that the Trump administration is quietly working to privatize the healthcare facet (Veterans Health Administration, or VHA) of the VA.

In May of 2014, it was alleged that 40 veterans had died while waiting for appointments at the VHA hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. This claim was soon disproven, but investigation revealed that management at that hospital had created a policy of awarding bonuses to hospital employees who misrepresented appointment times. The resulting scandal led to the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014, and a three-year trial program known as Veterans

Choice. Based upon the very real circumstances wherein many veterans lived a sizable distance from the nearest VHA facility, and some of those facilities lacked the equipment or professional staff to deal with the veteran’s unique medical or mental status, the Choice program allowed a private vendor company to assign those vets to obtain care at a private or for-profit provider, with payment to that provider to come out of the VA’s budget. At least one of the vendor companies initiated a policy of paying the civilian providers exactly half of what they had billed, and putting the other half into their own corporate coffers.

By 2017, the Choice program had resulted in $2 billion in cost overruns, including $90 million in overbilling by its two main contractors. Before long, a large percentage of private providers refused to see VA/Choice referrals. The contractor companies ignored the problems and referred more and more veterans, regardless of location, to the private sector.

The Choice program was replaced by 2018’s Mission Act, which handed the ball to another vendor corporation, Community Care, which promptly outsourced even more veterans to for-profit walk-in clinics without a referral. Even worse, those private providers are not required to adhere to the VHA’s standards of care, and there is no provision for oversight by the VA to ensure quality of care. Again, payments for these questionable services come out of the VA’s budget. By 2019, the VHA had approximately 67,000 openings for doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, and psychologists, but there were no provisions to increase wages for those positions. Payouts from the VA budget to private providers chosen by Community Care have skyrocketed. Veteran suicides continued to increase at a rate far exceeding that of the general public.

Will referrals of veterans healthcare to the private sector actually result in shorter appointment times, or any improvement in the levels of care provided? According to one government study, 77 percent of all U.S. counties face severe shortages of practicing psychiatrists, psychologists,  or social workers. Fifty-five percent, all rural counties, have no mental health professionals at all. (Southwest Virginia is an example). Even when private-sector psychiatrists are available, many are unwilling to accept either private insurances or federal reimbursement. Under such “market conditions,” not only do private-sector patients wait too long for appointments, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, 40% of Americans with schizophrenia and 51% suffering from bipolar disorder go untreated in any given year.

By contrast, data available on Capitol Hill in 2018 showed that the waiting time to see a VHA mental health professional averaged four days! And, the VHA personnel are trained to deal with the unique mental issues encountered by combat veterans such as PTSD. Proponents of VA privatization have doggedly refused to require any specialized training for the professionals to whom veterans will be outsourced. While campaigning for a second term as President, Donald Trump denied any familiarity with Project 2025, a guidebook created by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation with wide-ranging recommendations for the second Trump regime. Currently, adhering to the Project 2025 script, Trump / DOGE are working to gut the VA which is terribly understaffed, by cutting staff another 80,000.

Even more troubling, the Veterans ACCESS Act, currently being reviewed by committees in both the House and Senate, will, if passed, increase outsourcing of VA medical and mental health patients to the private medical industry. Hidden in the depths of the ACCESS ACT like a ticking time bomb is a provision intended to dismantle the VHA system quicker than you can say “privatization,” enabling all veterans seeking help for addiction or mental health challenges to walk into virtually any private medical or mental health provider and request outpatient care without any VA authorization, referral, approval, or oversight of the care provided.

The ultimate goal of the ACCESS Act, as stated in the Project 2025 playbook, is to eliminate all VA hospitals in approximately three years, and increase the number of Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) to re-make VA health care into a chain of facilities resembling “urgent care” clinics. Within a very few years, the VA would be transformed into an insurance company, only able to pay the private industry from its $369 billion annual budget.

This project is already under way. Elon Musk’s DOGE has already fired 2,400 VA employees, a Reduction in Force (RIF) order was issued February 26th, and the goal is to reduce the VA’s employee count by 80,000 in the short term.

It should be noted that passage of the PACT Act, allowing VA coverage of ailments related to toxic substances such as Agent Orange in Vietnam veterans, and smoke from toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, has resulted in the addition of 400,000 more VA patients, and is expected to add another 400,000 in the near future. DOGE has also cut the VA’s research into muscular dystrophy, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and assorted cancers.

President Trump’s new Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins has predicted that cuts to the VA’s workforce will “eliminate waste, reduce management and bureaucracy…and increase workforce efficiency.” Secretary Collins pledged to do this “without making cuts to healthcare or benefits” and warned critics that “we will be making major changes. So get used to it.”

Surveys indicate that 92% of veterans currently getting their health care from the VA prefer to get their care from it. Studies consistently show that VA health care is equal to or better than private-sector care without even considering that the VA is the only entity suited to treat medical and psychological issues specific to military service.

Again, the Veterans ACCESS Act is awaiting action in committees in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, and veterans are urgently needed to contact their Reps and Senators and urge them to deny this unscrupulous bill. A call to the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 will guide you to the specific phone number for your Representative or Senator. If you hope to have VA medical care in the (near) future, you need to call today.

The post Veterans VA Healthcare is Threatened appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Paul Teysen.

Donald Trump’s paleo-conservative, isolationist attack on global capitalist trade is already having formidable impacts. If tariff levels and targeted announced on ‘Liberation Day,’ April 2, are sustained, a full-blown economic catastrophe could result, perhaps reminiscent of 1930s-scale Make America Great Depression Again.

Transactional Trump

The worst danger: national elites in victim countries will be divided-and-conquered. Even South African President Cyril Ramaphosa – who 15 months ago had bravely challenged Washington’s ‘rule of law’ fakery by authorizing Pretoria’s challenge to Israel’s genocide at the International Court of Justice – apparently feels compelled to dream up utterly irrational deals for Trump, ideally sealed over a game of golf. Ramaphosa’s spokesperson told the NY Times last month that Ramaphosa may soon offer to U.S. Big Oil firms generous offshore leases for methane gas exploration and extraction, in spite of enormous climate damage, Shell Oil’s courtroom setbacks, and widespread shoreline protests.

He’s not alone; more than 50 world leaders have ‘reached out’ to Washington in an obsequious manner, leading Trump to brag, “They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis.”

Even before the April 2 announcements, Trump imposed 25% universal tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum (effective March 12) and on cars (and auto parts) (March 26), radically lowering demand for what are traditionally the three main South African exports to the U.S. under the tariff-free Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

According to Business Leadership South Africa’s Busisiwe Mavuso:

“Trump has made it clear that he wants concessions from each country if he is going to reduce or drop the tariffs. He emphasized that the tariffs put the U.S. in a position of power in the series of bilateral negotiations that are to come. Given the transactional nature of US politics, we have to think hard on what is commercially available and viable for all parties. The U.S. has exempted many of our key metal exports, including platinum, gold, manganese, copper, zinc and nickel, because these are considered critical to the U.S. economy.”

Twisted economic logic

Setting aside the exemptions on raw materials, which makes the whole operation appear as a neo-colonial resource grab that simultaneously stifles poor countries’ manufacturing sectors, what would justify these highest tariffs on U.S. imports in 130 years? Trump’s chief economic advisor (and investment banker) Stephen Miran, who holds a Harvard doctorate in economics, explained the underlying theory in a November 2024 report, celebrating the potential for a:

“generational change in the international trade and financial systems. The root of the economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade… Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects, consistent with the experience in 2018-2019. While currency offset can inhibit adjustments to trade flows, it suggests that tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline…”

This is wishful thinking, most experts believe. Currency adjustments are hard to predict but the dollar’s decline on April 2-3 (about 1%) is already being offset by its ‘safe haven’ status, providing a quick valuation bounce-back. The reason: international financial volatility always encourages global footloose capital’s short-term flight to dollar-denominated assets, no matter how irrational that may be in the medium term.

U.S. consumer inflation will soar, it’s fair to predict. Already, those whose pensions have been invested in the world’s (admittedly way-overvalued) stock markets have suffered major losses, e.g. in South Africa and the U.S., more 10% on April 3-4 alone. As nervous money floods out of vulnerable countries, the interest rates investors demand to fund 10-year bonds are soaring, in South Africa’s case by 2.2%, from 8.9% at the end of January to a painful 11.1% in early April (at a time of long-term average inflation of 5%).

And as a distributional matter, left economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research points out,

“Import taxes are highly regressive, meaning that tariffs will cost ordinary working people a much higher share of their income than for high income people. This is because working people tend to spend most or all of their income, while high income people save a large portion of their income. Also, working people are more likely to spend their money on the goods subject to tariffs, whereas higher income people spend more money on services.”

Splintered oppositional narratives

Beyond Miran’s fantasies, five other narratives are generating anti-Trump ideologies that – without a coherent stitching together – risk splintering critics:

1. mainstream neoliberalism

The corporate and state elites who in most countries typically back neo-liberal trade deregulation are now in shock, as their own personal share portfolios crash. The Economist summed up, “Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc.”

In alliance with market-friendly ‘bastard Keynesians‘ like Paul Krugman, the neoliberals are expressing utter disgust at Trump because precepts of free trade are being violated in the most primitive manner. The powers and legitimacy of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO) to police tariffs and trade are being trampled by Trump – leaving the body’s defense to some of the world’s most aggrieved neoliberal forces, in Beijing.

Because Trump is launching “economic nuclear war on every country,” even Bill Ackman – a strong supporter of the president and a billionaire fund manager – conceded, “we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.” Quite right.

(This growing establishment hatred of Washington is extremely useful if progressives want to forge even brief alliances, e.g. to ‘Vote Trump off the G20 Island,’ a true Survivor approach which would be indisputably popular in the bloc’s capital cities, except for Buenos Aires and maybe Rome, and set the stage for the 2026 G20 not to be held in the U.S., but maybe jointly by Mexico and Canada instead, as should the 2026 soccer World Cup and 2028 Olympics.)

2. radical Keynesianism combined with dependency theory

Both these approaches are highly critical of international trade, but not for the reasons Trump is. The last century’s leading British economist, John Maynard Keynes, at one point – in his 1933 Yale Review article – firmly advocated tariffs and other forms of protectionism, so as to support domestic industries and thus achieve much more balanced internal development: “let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national” (using tightened exchange controls).

As for global economic regulation, Keynes’ last (unsuccessful) major project was to propose penalties for economies that ran trade surpluses: the ‘Bancor’ International Currency Union proposal at Bretton Woods in 1944. His objective was to use trade and currency controls to achieve self-correcting international economic stability, in the wake of a Great Depression and war caused in part by extreme commercial and financial volatility.

From the Global South, a different critique of international trade and an even stronger advocacy of tariffs together aim to promote poor countries’ ‘delinking’ from dangerous international circuits of capital, and to protect infant manufacturing industries. Africa’s main contributor to this dependencia school was Egyptian political economist Samir Amin. He understood the differential labor values and ‘unequal ecological exchange’ (resource looting) that are embodied in South-to-North trade as benefiting transnational corporations, and causing Africa’s underdevelopment.

Amin also criticized trade between impoverished countries and South Africa which – even after apartheid was defeated in 1994 – he viewed (until his death in 2018) as a malevolent capitalist power on the continent: “nothing has changed. South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced, still dominated as it is by the Anglo-American mining monopolies.”

Indeed AngloGold Ashanti and many similar Johannesburg firms have benefited from the South African National Defence Force’s ersatz quarter-century-long military presence in the eastern Congo. (Last November, these troops were recognized by the UN not for heroism, but as the peace-keeping force’s worst offenders for sexual exploitation, abuse and paternity lawsuits.) Pretoria’s troops were recently forced out of the DRC by invading Rwandan forces (and also lost battles in Northern Mozambique and the Central African Republic since 2013), but the critique of sub-imperial interests remains intact.

3. climate consciousness

Opponents of ecocide – surely, all of us who aren’t climate denialists – regret the massive greenhouse gas emissions caused by excessive, often pointless international trade: 7%+ of all CO2 emanates from shipping and air transport, according to the International Transport Forum.

And while the International Maritime Organization has hosted a decade of talks about its members’ dirty bunker-fuel emissions – which for the sake of ‘polluter pays’ policy, should be costed at $1056/tonne (even the World Economic Forum admits) – these have been futile. The modest $150/tonne tax on shipping emissions demanded by increasingly-desperate Pacific and Caribbean small island states is this week being rejected by rich Western countries and also by an alliance centered on four BRICS members: Brazil, China, Indonesia and South Africa.

Moreover, genuine ‘Just Transition’ plans are widely recognized as necessary to wean workers and affected communities off CO2-intensive export production, e.g. the West’s (highly flawed yet necessary) Just Energy Transition Partnerships and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms, but these and other climate obligations Trump has simply walked away from. The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance had already called on the world to impose trade sanctions on the U.S. as a result, a call that now has much more purchase.

Indeed, to that end, many would support a ‘degrowth‘ approach seeking to stabilize and indeed diminish much of the high-carbon industrial output exported by many economies into the U.S. Those include steel, aluminum and automobiles – now 25% tariff victims – due to the vast waste involved in rich-country consumption. And South Africa is one of the worst, with the ‘Energy Intensive Users Group‘ of 27 multinational corporate exporters guzzling more than 40% of the country’s scarce electricity but hiring only 4% of workers in the formal sector.

4. African nationalism

African patriots logically perceive Trump’s hatred of the continent (full of ‘S-hole countries‘) as, in part, behind attacks on its trade-surplus countries. Tiny Lesotho was hit by Trump with the highest new tariff on April 2 mainly because of its $240 million trade surplus with the U.S.: mostly Levi’s and Wrangler jeans and diamond exports, whereas imports from the U.S. are indirect, as they first are cleared by customs in South Africa. Trump also imposed 40%+ tariffs on Madagascar and Mauritius, because of their trade surpluses.

The context for the continent’s (and world’s) rising anti-Americanism is Trump and Pretoria-born Elon Musk’s halt to financial support for African healthcare (especially AIDS-related – which could lead to 6.3 million unnecessary deaths by 2029 – and maternal), climate (mitigating emissions, strengthening resilience and covering ‘loss & damage’ relief), renewable energy and vitally-needed emergency humanitarian food supplies. Some critics here suggest these cuts reflect Trump’s white supremacy, called out by Pretoria’s fired ambassador to Washington, amplified by the fiscal chainsaw wielded by Musk, against whom protest is rapidly rising.

All this means Trump is discarding Washington’s soft power, which notwithstanding the vast destruction in the meantime, could ultimately be very useful for anti-imperialists (in contrast to last November’s internecine squabbling over a controversial National Endowment for Democracy conference held in Johannesburg).

4. Marxist political economy

Readers of Das Kapital understand that capitalist crises and the ‘devaluation’ of ‘overaccumulated capital’ (e.g. deindustrialization once businesses addicted to exports to the U.S. shut down) reflect the mode of production’s intrinsic contradictions. In reaction, capitalism often degenerates into inter-imperial and imperial/sub-imperial rivalries, generalized trade wars (often based on tit-for-tat tariffs) and stock market turbulence. The conclusion drawn is that eco-socialist planning of the global economy in the public and environmental interest, is the only route out. (Disclosure: that’s my main bias but I’ll travel a long way with advocates of positions 2-4 as well.)

For those outside mainstream, neoliberal logic, can the latter four framings be fused together for not only a coherent analysis but also a clear political response? The danger of not having a strategy linking Keynesians, environmentalists, nationalists and anti-capitalists is four-fold:

1/ under a beggar-thy-neighbour ‘reciprocal tariff’ trade war, we all face a new version of a 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act and then a 1930s-style Great Depression (which by the way, was an extremely constructive period for South African capitalism, which grew 8% per year as a result of import-substitution industrialization);

2/ recognizing the durable power of U.S. economic imperialism, individual governments will go cap-in-hand to Trump to beg for a bit of relief, offering absurd concessions in the process such as Ramaphosa’s invitation to drill baby drill;

3/ surplus countries will redirect already-produced (or in-production) manufactured goods and commodities away from the now shuttered U.S. market, flooding all other potential buyers, thus further deindustrializing South Africa – whose main anti-dumping measures applied by the International Trade Administration Commission are against various ultra-cheap imports from China; and

4/ Naturally the mainstream logic of ‘searching for new markets’ – now that the U.S. is closing its trade doors – won’t get at the root cause of the problem. That cause is sometimes termed ‘uneven and combined development,’ in which over the past 40 years, the global trading system became exceptionally volatile and generative of ever worsening inequalities (especially unequal ecological exchange), i.e., depleting, polluting and emitting against the interests of poor economies and natural environments.

A long pattern of economic abuse

This extreme abuse of commercial power being exercised with a vengeance by Trump, no matter how self-destructive financial markets have judged his Liberation Day, is only the latest reflection of Western economic chaos. The world has suffered extreme uneven development after the recovery from early-1980s global recession, as ‘Washington Consensus’ liberalization kicked in everywhere due to debt crises and IMF/World Bank squeezing, and especially via global commerce following the capture by nearly all governments’ policies by the World Trade Organization after 1994.

The limits of trade globalization became clear in 2008 – the peak year of world trade/GDP until until 2022 – as did the limits of financialised economies in recent months, in the form of overvalued ‘Buffett Indicators‘ of stock market capitalization, unprecedented debt loads, currency volatility and recognition of the $’s malevolence after two Fed-led ‘Quantitative Easings’ and interest rate manipulations, etc.

The damage done to South Africa’s industrial economy was amongst the most severe, as we lost most labor-intensive industries – clothing, textiles, footwear, appliances, electronics, etc – which had driven the manufacturing/GDP ratio up to 24%, before the steady decline to less than 13% by the 2010s. So the challenge is reversing that imbalance – i.e. fighting against uneven and combined development – with progressive policies, not merely relying upon the program of dissatisfied export-oriented capitalists.

Here in South Africa, the de facto retraction of AGOA zero-tariff access for locally-made luxury cars, aluminum, steel, petrochems, vineyard products and plantation nuts and citrus reminds that the main losers are capital-intensive extractive industries, carbon-intensive smelters and super-exploitative plantations, all with mainly white ownership. From Washington, the imperialist Hudson Institute last month even recommended not cutting the tariff-free AGOA trade program, since “The communities that benefit most from the AGOA largely support South Africa’s pro-American political parties.”

In contrast to Trump’s paleo-con isolationism and to neoliberal trade promotion, the four historically-progressive ideologies of Keynesianism, environmental justice, African nationalism and eco-socialism represent countervailing views. Programmatically, to move in their direction can only be assessed once the dust settles a bit and the distinction between those national leaders who are either fighting or who are obsequious, becomes clear.

So far, South Africa’s leaders, under threat of losing their Government of National Unity related to a budget dispute caused by excessive neoliberalism, are decidedly in the latter category.

In contrast, the potential for China to guide the international fightback is not merely witnessed in its WTO complaint against Trump, quickly filed on April 4. The same day, Beijing’s central bank experimented with a much more rapid, blockchain-secured digital alternative to the dollar-denominated cross-border bank settlement and clearance system, with 10 regional and another six West Asian economies now reportedly able to avoid the Brussels-based SWIFT network, even if merely for cost and speed savings.

There have been far too many false alarms and hyped hopes about de-dollarization. If it began in earnest thanks to Trump’s misstep, we’d much more likely see the venal, volatile Bitcoin take over, as Blackrock CEO Larry Fink warns, than the renminbi.

All this suggests a far more durable approach is needed, to get out from under Trump’s thumb and then the dollar’s domination, and then escape the tyranny of capital. A series of non-reformist reforms were offered to Democracy Now! by Indian radical economist Jayati Ghosh, worth mulling over for countries like South Africa, and all others, as a last word:

“There’s a silver lining in this for developing countries, which is that for too long, for maybe three decades, we’ve been told that the only way we can develop is through export-led growth. And that’s really — it’s been unfortunate, because we have never seen giving our own workers a fair deal as a good option. We’ve always seen wages as a cost, not as a source of our own domestic demand and market. It’s now time to actually change, to shift gears, to think about different trading arrangements, more regional arrangements, looking at other developing countries as markets, looking at our own population as markets, and thinking about the things we can do to create sustainable production, that’s not ecologically damaging, that actually provides living wages and decent working conditions within our own countries.”

(The University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change will convene a webinar on Trump tariffs in the G20-from-below series on Tuesday, April 15, 3pm SA time, 9am Washington time, here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84736248638 )

The post Trump’s Tariffs Seen from Contradictory Angles appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

Massachuset’s Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira and Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegsmeth have little in common.  Teixeira is serving a 15-year sentence for leaking Pentagon documents on an unclassified web site called 4chan and on Twitter and Telegram.  He then posted printouts of the documents at his parent’s home as well as on an instant messaging platform “Discord.”  The leaked documents were primarily related to the Russo-Ukrainian War, containing operational briefs from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.  The operational details would have been extremely valuable to Russian forces for they identified Ukrainian difficulties in countering Russian flanking maneuvers.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth is a former Army National Guard officer who has academic degrees from Princeton University and Harvard University.  (Teixeira is a high school graduate.)  Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate as the 29th secretary of defense in U.S. history, requiring a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance.  It was only the second time in our history that a Cabinet nominee’s confirmation was decided by a vice president’s vote.  He is the second-youngest person to serve as secretary of defense, after Donald Rumsfeld, who was the youngest in serving President Gerald Ford and the oldest in serving President George W. Bush.  Like Teixeira, however, Hegseth released operational details from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff that identified details of an imminent U.S. military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen.  Unlike Teixeira’s information, Hegseth’s operational intelligence could have endangered the lives of naval airmen and compromised the top secret mission.

There is a major difference between the two men regarding outcomes.  Unlike Teixeira, Hegseth has faced no punishment for his failure to comply with Department of Defense policies and procedures and to place the lives of U.S. servicemen at risk.  The Pentagon’s independent watchdog has agreed to a request from the Senate Armed Services Committee to launch a probe into Hegseth’s actions.  The review will determine whether Hegseth was in compliance with classification and records retention requirements.  Hegseth has lied, arguing falsely that no classified military plans has been discussed.

There are several aspects of this illegal activity that finds the two men have something in common.  First of all, Teixeira and Hegseth were engaging in performative actions that compromised national security interests of the United States.  Second, the two men were essentially boasting about their knowledge of extremely sensitive intelligence to what can be fairly described as their peers.  Teixeira’s peers were very young men in their teens and early twenties who seemed to have had no interest in the sensitive information that Teixeira provided, but were awed by Teixeira’s knowledge and access to unusual information available to very few people in the U.S. government.

Hegseth’s peers were high-level members of the Trump national security team who had no need for Hegseth’s information at that time because the decision to attack the Houthis had already been made, which is exactly what deputy chief of staff Steven Miller told the chat group in order to cut off any debate regarding the decision.  In other words, both men—the teenaged airman and the secretary of defense—were boasting about their knowledge of sensitive information for their own self-aggrandizing reasons.

As a result, the young, low-level braggart is in jail for the next 14 years, but the big-time braggart will go completely free; he’s “too big to jail.”  The same could be said for National Security Adviser Mike Waltz who set up the illegal chat room where Hegseth’s military plans were revealed.  Waltz is a particularly pathetic case because he was responsible for placing a liberal journalist in the controversial chat room.  More recently, Waltz’s lack of stature in the Trump administration was manifested when he couldn’t prevent the firing of six senior staffers from his NSC because of the rantings of a crazed conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer.  Loomer is well known for calling 9/11 an “inside job.”

Hegseth’s escapade fits a larger pattern that finds high-level officials escaping punishment, while lower level officials end up in jail.  Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton received no punishment for her wanton disregard of U.S. laws and national security in using her personal cell phone for storing sensitive materials.  CIA director David Petreaus, a retired four-star general, provided sensitive intelligence to his biographer, who was also his mistress, but received a modest fine that was covered by a few of his speaking fees.  Former national security adviser Sandy Berger stuffed his pants with classified documents from the National Archives, but received a modest fine.

And former CIA director John Deutch placed the most sensitive CIA operational materials on his home computer, which was used to access pornographic sites.  Deutch was assessed a fine of $5,000, but received a pardon from President Bill Clinton before prosecutors could file the papers in federal court.  Former attorney general Alberto Gonzales kept sensitive documents about the NSA’s surveillance program at his home, but received no punishment.

Conversely, the “Jack Teixeira’s” of the world get hammered.  John Kiriakou, a CIA operative, received a thirty-month jail sentence in 2014 for giving two journalists the name of a CIA operative, although the name never appeared in the media.  Kiriakou was punished because he was the first CIA officer to reveal the torture and abuse program.  Meanwhile, the authors of the torture memoranda at the Department of Justice—John Yoo and Jay Bybee—received no punishment or even censure.  Moreover, Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California’s law school in Berkeley, and Bybee is a senior judge of the Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit.

A CIA colleague from the 1970s, Frank Snepp, wrote an important book on the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam that used no classified information, but had to forfeit considerable royalties because the book wasn’t submitted for the agency’s security review.  Meanwhile, former CIA directors Leon Panetta and George Tenet received special treatment from the CIA for their memoirs. (My CIA memoir contained no classified information and took nearly a year to be cleared, requiring the intervention of the ACLU to get the manuscript released.  The ACLU took the case all the way to the Supreme Court before it was predictably dismissed on national security grounds.)

The CIA’s review system is in fact a censorship system that can’t be squared with the Constitution.  At the same time, in the case of Secretary of Defense Hegseth, we find the government doing nothing to protecting bona fide national security secrets.

The post The Insecurities of Airman Teixeira and Secretary of Defense Hegseth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Ministerio Bienes Nacionales – CC BY 2.0

Some 40 people form a circle on the dusty, late-summer grass. Following days of uncertainty and fear, cut off from most forms of communication, families from Mapuche communities in Argentina’s Chubut province gather to talk about what happened to them on Feb. 11.

At 7 AM that Tuesday, hundreds of Argentina’s armed provincial and federal police forces raided their homes, smashing windows and destroying belongings. The special forces, wielding assault rifles, held men, women and children at gunpoint for more than ten hours.

During their day of terrorizing Mapuche families, police took cell phones and computers, leaving the communities—spread over miles at the eastern base of the Andes—cut off from each other. They confiscated books and farm tools, forced indigenous men, women and children to give DNA samples, semi-stripped young women and photographed tattoos and other body markings, manhandled elders, and separated young children from their parents while forcing toddlers to witness the violence against their mothers. In the twelve simultaneous strikes, police also broke into a Mapuche community radio in El Maiten, Radio Petu Mogelein, and destroyed vital communications equipment.

These communities, often just a handful of indigenous families that survived the bloody campaigns of genocide and displacement throughout Argentina’s colonial history, are the now the target of a new offensive under the “anarchocapitalist” policies of Javier Milei. The repression aims at stripping them of the little they have left of their ancestral territory and placing it in the hands of some of the world’s largest corporations and wealthiest billionaires.

Trawun, testimony

Outside one of the homes that was raided, Mapuche community members described the violence. A few international journalists and representatives of regional human rights organizations observed the trawun—a community gathering to share information, repair the community and plan strategy. We strained to hear the words of their testimonies as the wind whipped through a stand of poplar trees.

An 84-year-old elder pushed up his sleeve to show bruises from being thrown to the ground and cuffed by police. Young women described being forced to lie face down on the floor for hours and as police intimidated them with their guns. Children witnessed scenes of brutality that will mark them for life.

For hours the security forces refused to present a judicial order or inform indigenous families of the reason behind the violent invasion of their homes. Authorities finally presented a judicial order, signed by judge Jorge Criado, who was formally accused of racial discrimination against the Mapuche in a 2020 case, to investigate a vandalism attack Jan. 18 in Estancia Amancay 80 kilometers away.

Police arrested Victoria Núñez Fernández, a 37-year-old member of the Lof Pillan Mawiza who has lived with and worked with the Mapuche community for years. Witnesses and evidence from GPS records prove that Núñez Fernández was miles from the scene at the time the equipment was set on fire, but the judge ordered 60 days of house arrest as government authorities continue to declare her guilt.

Forest fires as a smokescreen

Since they began in December, Argentine government propaganda has blamed the Mapuches for forest fires that have burned more than 50,000 hectares of mostly national forest land in Patagonia. It’s a triple ploy– to distract from the role of climate change and government negligence in the fires, to divert attention from real estate interests waiting to take over land for megaprojects, and to criminalize the indigenous people who are the last the remaining bulwark against the mass exploitation and destruction of one of the world’s largest freshwater and forest reserves.

“It’s so outrageous that we should be blamed when actually the Mapuche community has always done everything to protect life here. We´re part of the territory that we defend, and we’re going to protect the life of the river, the life of the mountain, the life of the forest”, Evis Millán of the Lof (community) Pillan Mawiza told me in an interview at her ranch by the river.

“We would never set fire to it. This set-up that the government of Chubut is carrying out with the national government has a clear objective–to name an internal enemy to cover up the criminalization and eviction of the Mapuche communities.”

Without a trial or investigation, the day after the police operation, Governor Ignacio Torres of Chubut province presented a PowerPoint accusing the Mapuche of the fires and the vandalism. Flanked by hooded agents bearing machine guns in what was supposed to be a press conference, he projected the faces of four indigenous women, calling them “the persons responsible for the attack [on Amancay]” and swore “they will rot in jail”. Among them was Victoria Núñez Fernández, still in custody, and Moira Millán. Moira Millán is an internationally known indigenous land defender, novelist and women’s rights leader.

Torres’ performance followed a playbook handed down from the far-right government of Javier Milei and his Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich. Bullrich, whose ministry is also responsible for preventing and controlling forest fires, has long promoted usurping land from indigenous peoples for sale on the international market. Following the raids, she released a video with images of the police raid on Millan’s home, stating, “These people will be declared under Article 41 TER-ROR-ISTS”.

Milei’s government established the legal framework for this extreme measure just days after the raids, when it listed  “RESISTENCIA ANCESTRAL MAPUCHE (RAM)” (Mapuche Ancestral resistance) as a terrorist organization in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities linked to Acts of Terrorism and its Financing. The RAM is an invention to smear the Mapuche people; the communities have stated repeatedly they have no knowledge of or contact with it. There’s only one person identified with the RAM, Facundo Jones Huala. Despite taking credit for the vandalism at Amancay, Jones Huala has not been arrested and makes no effort to hide from authorities. Meanwhile, the government continues hold Núñez Fernandez on trumped-up charges and to make the untenable claim that a handful of Mapuche women torched the forests they live in as an act of revenge for efforts to displace them.

Mapuches in Patagonia point to powerful economic interests with ties to Milei’s government as the real culprits behind the fires.

A fire sale of Patagonia

The forest fires that destroyed thousands of acres in the summer months are finally being quelled by autumn rains. Experts have warned that the high temperatures and low rainfall caused by climate change is behind rising fire destruction in the region. But local governments and the government of Javier Milei—a climate change denier—prefer to blame the Mapuche, while taking advantage of the destruction to privatize a land coveted for its minerals and pure water, and for its natural beauty and remoteness.

Milei began preparations to sell off Patagonia to foreigners as soon as he took office. Using presidential decrees, he repealed the law that limited foreign land ownership on Dec. 21 as part of a package of decreesto deregulate the economy and promote sale of resources to foreign investors.

In what seem to be moves to increase the vulnerability of protected natural reserves, he eliminated the Fund for the Protection of Forests and transferred responsibility to the security ministry, leaving a huge void in know-how, infrastructure and funding to confront forest fires, despite the fact that each year fire destroys more forest land. He also cut spending of the National Service for Fire Management by 81%.

Milei also announced the repeal of the law that bans the immediate sale of land affected by fire for agribusiness and real estate development. This kind of law exists in most countries as a necessary safeguard against business incentives to torch public lands. Although the repeal has not gone into effect yet, it recently passed committee in the Senate and continues to be a key element in the government’s plan for a massive fire sale of Patagonian lands.

Mining companies, real estate interests, hydroelectric plants and other megaproject developers have long waited to get their hands on more land in Argentina’s Patagonia. Milei is banking on the sell-off of indigenous territories and resources to help pay for the huge debt he hopes to receive in order to prop up the Argentina peso and avoid the total collapse that looms under his radical free-market policies.

Neocolonialism, rebooted

The Milei government has mapped the road forward for Patagonia, and it runs right over the bodies and the territories of the Mapuche people. To mask its own complicity with business interests hoping to move onto affected lands, the Milei government launched a media and legal strategy to deflect attention from the link between the fires and land-use changes that stand to benefit billionaire foreigners, and to neutralize the Mapuche-Tehuelche people who stand in their way through criminalization, eviction and extermination.

The formula is not new. Crusades against the Mapuche began with the conquest of their ancestral lands centuries ago and has not let up since then. The current crisis has the same colonial roots as previous genocidal campaigns: racism and the takeover of land and resources by force.

In January, Bullrich ordered the eviction of the Lof Pailako in the Los Alerces National Park. To avoid bloodshed, community members abandoned their homes hours before the arrival of police forces. Families were left homeless, animals without sustenance and children without access to housing, health or education. Bullrich stated triumphantly: “This is the first eviction of a series that will mark the end of a period in which a lack of respect for private property reigned in Argentina.”

The Minister of Security acts with the full backing of the federal and provincial governments. Milei, an admirer of Donald Trump and member of the international far right, launched the offensive against the Mapuche with his trademark free-market and white supremacist zealotry. While giving investors free rein, he ended indigenous land registry programs and rescinded Law 26.160, the Emergency Indigenous Territory Law of 2006 that at least nominally suspended evictions of indigenous communities in indigenous territory. Despite having signed on to international indigenous rights treaties, successive governments of both the right and the left failed to institutionalize recognition of land and rights, paving the way for Milei to revert gains and protections for the communities.

Human rights organizations have denounced the repeal of indigenous rights to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Office of the Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The billionaire bonanza

As the Mapuche are violently evicted from the few hectares of land they live on, international billionaires already own, often illegally, millions of hectares in the Argentine Patagonia and are looking to take over more. The ultra-rich set their sights on this land with its sweeping views of the Andes and miles of clear lakes and open woods decades ago. The region holds much of the earth’s remaining fresh water, clean air and pristine forests. Corporations have moved in to exploit natural resources, and individual billionaires see the region as their private playground and a refuge for when the rest of the planet becomes inhabitable.

A case point is Lago Escondido, property of the British multimillionaire Joe Lewis. Lewis owns 12-14 thousand hectares including the entire lake. Although he has entertained Argentine presidents and foreign dignitaries on his property, it’s sealed it off to public access by physical barriers and armed guards. Other foreign interests with extensive holdings in the Argentine Patagonia include the Israeli firm Mekorot, the Italian firm Benetton, the actor Sylvester Stallone, and investment companies from United Arab Emirates, among others.

Like Trump, Milei’s government of the rich and for the rich has acted fast to remove environmental and social restrictions. Milei instituted a new Incentive Regime for Large Investments (RIGI by its Spanish initials) last year that provides tax breaks, customs incentives and foreign exchange benefits for projects of more than 200 million dollars that are initiated within two years. The law will promote the kind of large-scale extractivist projects that citizen groups and Mapuche communities have opposed for uprooting communities and destroying the land.

An analysis of the likely impact of RIGI in Chubut finds that Patagonian province could see a rapid boom in mining and oil and gas exploitation. Chubut has a ban on open-pit mining–the result of grassroots organizing. Experts fear a legal challenge that could result in overturning the popular will expressed in the ban.

RIGI and the other programs to sell Patagonia to foreign investors set the scene for local conflicts over land and resource use. Billionaire land owners stand to profit enormously from Milei’s measures and already have drawn up plans to expand holdings and operations.

The attacks, expulsions and criminalization of the Mapuche communities can be seen as a preemptive measure to weaken forces that defend native lands and environmental protection.

Reinforcing the Police State

The federal government has prepared to put down resistance by legalizing violent repression of local and national opposition. On March 10, Congress passed the so-called  “Anti-Mafias Law” that mandates that all members of a group can be given the same sentence as a single member, a law the international associations of jurists and human rights organizations have called the “legalization of a virtual state of siege” especially designed to apply to those most hurt by Milei’s measure–the poor, political opposition, unionists and indigenous peoples.

Milei’s government also adopted an “anti-picket protocol” that criminalizes protest. These measures have led to more than a thousand protesters injured due to excessive use of force, according to a report by Amnesty International. Most recently, police fired a gas canister directly at a photographer during March 12 protests. The photographer Pablo Grillo, whose skull was broken, is still in intensive therapy.

The recreation of a brutal police state in Argentina conjures images of the military dictatorship, a period of state terrorism that lasted from 1976 to 1983. Millan warns that the Milei government is a dictatorship and that the country is seeing a return to the “state terrorism” that led to thousands of assassinations and disappearances during the military dictatorship.

When Caring for Land and Culture Means Risking your Life

It’s not surprising that the regime has made indigenous women the center of its defamation campaign. Women are the core of Mapuche defense of their territory and the protection of the land and life against extractivist projects and privatization. They’ve worked for decades to consolidate and reestablish communities in ancestral lands, teach new generations the Mapuche language and customs, and build peaceful resistance. The latest government-corporate offensive has put their lives and liberty at grave risk.

“This group in power—patriarchal, racist —feels threatened by the capacity and the defense of life that we women carry out,” Moira explained in a recent interview. “The State and the corporations know that women can build alliances among sectors to defend rights so they need to weaken this strong organizational process in this historic moment, including at the global level.” In this context she added, the openly misogynist attacks of the Milei government are strategic, they’re being incorporated into public policy, and they are a focus of repressive policies.

Despite all the forces against them, today’s Mapuche communities continue to live on and care for their land. They protect the rivers and lakes, and manage the forests to keep trees healthy, prevent fire damage and control invasive species. Some have lived on these lands continuously for generations, others have returned from forced migration to urban slums to rebuild their lives, their land and their identity.

Almost every day during the weeks of our visit, the women left the house early to hold traditional ceremonies. Language, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge and practices are nourished through daily life, family and community ties. Even after the genocidal campaigns and the speeches devoted to denying their existence (the government frequently speaks of “pseudo-Mapuches”) or spreading hate, these communities still survive and it’s because of them that the region still offers world-famous fresh water, abundant fish and unspoiled views.

The power of example can be more threatening to illegitimate power than might.

Two radically different views of the land and humans’ relationship to it are in play here. As plans advance to create an extractivist enclave out of nature’s masterpiece, Moira Millán summed it up: “We have firmly opposed extractivist large-scale mining, dams, hydroelectric projects that would murder the river to provide electricity to transnationals and lately the aqueduct that oil companies are pushing for. The Mapuche people recover land to reaffirm the commitment to life. For us, life is the most important. And not just human life, the life of everything in our surroundings.”

The post Milei’s Fire Sale of Patagonia and the Mapuche People’s Fight for Life appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

We live in perilous times. The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a  period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing.

First, the notion of government as a democratizing public good and institution of social responsibility—that once held power to account, protected the vulnerable, and nurtured the ideals of justice and collective responsibility—is being methodically destroyed. The common good, once seen as the essence of democratic life, has become the enemy of the neoliberal fascist state. It is not merely being neglected—it is being assaulted, stripped bare, and left to rot in the shadows of privatization, greed, and brutality—the main features of gangster capitalism. Public institutions are hollowed out, courts are under siege, regulatory bodies are politicized and disempowered, and the mechanisms of governance now serve only the most ruthless forms of concentrated financial and political power.

Second, we are witnessing a form of ideological cleansing—a scorched-earth assault on critical consciousness. Education, both public and higher, is under siege, stripped of its democratic mission to cultivate informed judgment, critical thinking, and the capacity to make corrupt power visible. What once served as a space for reflection, dissent, and civic engagement is being transformed into a battlefield of ideological control, where questioning authority is replaced by obedience, and pedagogy is reduced to training, conformity, and propaganda. Education is explicitly no longer on the side of empowerment for the many. It has become an ideological tool of massive repression, indoctrination, surveillance, and an adjunct of the billionaire elite and the walking dead with blood in their mouths.

Books that illuminate injustice, affirm histories of resistance, and introduce critical ideas are being banned. Entire fields of knowledge—gender studies, critical race theory, decolonial thought—are outlawed. Professors are fired, blacklisted, or harassed for daring to speak the truth, especially those who denounce the genocidal violence being waged by Israel, which has now taken the lives of over 50,000 Palestinians, many of them children. Journalists are doxxed, detained, or demonized.

Cultural institutions are defunded or coerced into silence. The arts are no longer sacred; they are now suspect. Social media platforms and news outlets are intimidated, policed, and purged. Elite law firms are targeted,  intimidated, silenced or forced into complicity by the Trump administration. Scott Cummings rightly argues President Donald Trump’s recent speech to the Department of Justice was meant as a declaration of war against lawyers. Some prestigious law firms and attorneys—once alleged guardians of justice—now grovel before authoritarianism in acts of staggering complicity. The public sphere is shrinking under the weight of repression.

Third—and perhaps most alarming—is the escalating campaign of racial cleansing—a war against the most vulnerable, on bodies, on the flesh, and on visceral forms of agency. This is not hyperbole. Immigrants are caged in squalid detention centers, separated from their families, deported without due process to detention centers in Louisiana or to Guantanamo, or simply disappeared. Muslims are vilified, surveilled, and targeted with impunity. Black and brown communities are over-policed and under-protected, sacrificed to the machinery of carceral violence. State terrorism is normalized.  The state is actively criminalizing existence itself for all those who do not fit the white Christian nationalist fantasy of purity, obedience, and subjugation.

This is a war not only against people, but against memory, imagination, and the very capacity to think, make connections, and to dream a different future. The unimaginable has become policy. The unthinkable now passes for normal.

Consider just a glimpse of the horror now unfolding:

Venezuelan migrants are being disappeared into a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon  in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. A legendary British punk band, the UK Subs, denied entry for voicing dissent against Trump’s authoritarian policies. A French scientist barred at the border for criticizing Trump, who with sneering smile, tears up the Constitution with performative contempt. Trump violates court orders with impunity. Student visas are revoked in the dead of night. Their dorm rooms raided, their wrists bound in handcuffs, they are forced into unmarked cars by agents of a system that is both cruel and clandestine. Young people—Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Ranjani Srinivasan, Yunseo Chung—are disappeared, imprisoned in Louisiana, and await deportation under a regime of malignant legalities.  cloaked in legalese. These are not arrests—they are abductions. Not justice—but the slow machinery of fear made flesh. Dissent is now branded as terrorism, and those who challenge Trump’s authoritarian grip vanish into the void—arrested, erased, rendered disposable.

Trump’s totalitarian machine is waging a relentless war on colleges and universities. As Chris Hedges observes, the administration has threatened to strip federal funding from more than 60 elite higher education institutions under the guise of protecting Jewish students—while already pulling $500 million from Columbia University, an action that has nothing to do with combating antisemitism. The charge is a smokescreen, a cynical pretext to silence protest and crush dissent—especially in support of Palestinian freedom. As Rashid Khalidi observes, “It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to.”

Elite universities once proud of their intellectual autonomy are being transformed into fortified zones of surveillance and submission.  Columbia among the most glaring, where the campus now resembles a police precinct more than a place of progressive ideas and democratic values. Only now, as the darkness thickens, are a handful of journalists and liberal commentators awakening to the authoritarian siege on higher education—a siege some of us have been naming for decades.

Americans are not witnessing a slow drift toward authoritarianism. They are living through the violent, coordinated seizure of democratic life by fascist forces emboldened by indifference,  cruelty, and the architecture of unaccountable power.

Under such circumstances, it is crucial for people to pay attention to the political crisis that is unfolding. This means being attentive,  learning from history, analyzing the mobilizing passions of fascism as a system—one directly related to the forces of gangster capitalism and the force of white supremacy and white Christian nationalism. Language matters, and those willing to fight against the fascist tide must rethink the meaning of education, resistance, bearing witness, and solidarity. And action is imperative: build alliances, flood the streets, defend critical education, amplify resistance, and refuse to be silent.

In the face of this rising tide, resistance must no longer be fragmented, polite, or confined to isolated corners of dissent. As Sherilyn Ifill notes, “it is not  enough to fight. You have to meet the moment.” Cultural critics, educators, artists, journalists, social workers, and others must wield their craft like weapons—telling prohibited stories, defying censorship, reigniting the radical imagination. Educators must refuse complicity, defending classrooms as sanctuaries of truth and critical inquiry, even when the risks are great. Students must organize, disrupt, and reclaim their campuses—not as consumers of credentialing, but as insurgents of liberation.

Academics, including faculty and administrators, must form a common front to stop the insidious assault on higher education.  Journalists must break the silence, not by chasing access or neutrality, but by naming injustice with moral clarity. Organizers, activists, and everyday people must converge—across race, class, gender, and nation—into a broad front of democratic refusal. This is a moment not just for outrage, but for audacity—for reclaiming hope as a political act, and courage as a shared ethic. Fascism feeds on fear and isolation. As Robin D. G. Kelley brilliantly argues, it must be met with solidarity, imagination, and relentless struggle, based on a revived class politics. In a culture of immediacy, cruelty, and staggering inequality, power must be named for its actions, and the language of critique and hope must give way to mass collective action.  History is not watching—it is demanding. The only question is whether anti-fascist forces will rise to meet it.

This darkness is not without precedent, nor is it without models of resistance.  During the rise of fascism in Europe, teachers and intellectuals in Nazi-occupied France joined the underground, distributing banned literature and teaching forbidden truths in secret classrooms. In apartheid South Africa, students in Soweto sparked a nationwide uprising, defying bullets with the cry that liberation begins with education. In the American South, Black freedom fighters risked their lives to build freedom schools, challenge police terror, and reimagine democracy in the face of white supremacy. The Zapatistas in Chiapas created autonomous zones rooted in dignity, justice, and Indigenous knowledge. Palestinian writers, youth, freedom fighters, and teachers continue to create under siege powerful examples of resistance, insisting through every poem, every painting, every lesson, that their people will not be erased, their memories will survive, and settler-colonialism will not only be relentlessly resisted but will be defeated. There is no other choice.

Today, movements like Black Lives Matter, Abolitionist Futures, Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives and Indigenous Rights Movements are keeping alive the traditions of collective struggle. Courageous campus coalitions, in spite of the shameful crackdowns by the government and in some cases universities themselves, are resisting militarized policing and corporate capture of higher education. Migrant justice organizations are building sanctuary networks to protect those the state seeks to expel. These are not just moments of protest—they are blueprints for democratic rebirth. The task now is to connect these diverse movements in a mass movement with the power to wage strikes, engage in direct action, teach-ins, and use any viable non-violent form of resistance to overcome the fascist nightmare spreading across the globe.

The stakes could not be higher. This is a time to reimagine justice, to reclaim the promise of a radical democracy yet to be realized. Fascism feeds on despair, cynicism, and silence—but history teaches otherwise. Again and again, it is when ordinary people refuse to be silent, when they teach, create, march, strike, and speak with fierce clarity, that the foundations of tyranny begin to crack. Fascism has returned from the shadows of history to once more dismantle justice, equality, and freedom. But its resurgence must not be mistaken for fate. It is not the final script of a defeated democratic future—it is a warning. And with that warning comes a call to breathe life into a vision of democracy rooted in solidarity and imagination, to turn resistance into a hammer that shatters the machinery of cruelty, the policies of disposability, and the totalitarian and oligarchic opportunists who feed on fear. As we stand before the terrifying rise of authoritarianism, it becomes undeniable: the fire we face is not some distant, abstract peril, but a fierce and immediate struggle — the fire this time is the fascist capture of America. This is the moment to make education central to politics, to shape history with intention, to summon a collective courage rooted in the demands of freedom, equality, and justice—to act together with a militant hope that does not yield. Fascism will not prevail—unless we let it. In times like these, resistance is not a choice; it is the condition of survival.

The post The Fire This Time appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.