Photograph Source: Saeima – Flickr: Saeimas sēžu zāle – CC BY-SA 2.0

Europe’s political classes were backfooted by Latvia’s Parliament (Saeima) vote to pull out of the Istanbul Convention (IC), the treaty protecting women from violence. They then reset and punted on the IC’s future as several protests in the thousands took to Latvia’s streets. Backstory to the vote for Latvia’s IC exit, however, is less about women’s rights, but insider politics and the decreasing returns on “European Values” for defending the “European Project.” In brief, Latvia’s opposition parties, Latvia First Party, headed by oligarch Ainars Slessers, was previously voted out in 2009, then staged a political return riding our last decade’s global wave of rightwing populism. Then there is the Green & Farmers Party, both rural in character but also led by the flamboyant former oligarch, Aivars Lembergs. Lembergs was briefly jailed in 2021 for corruption, thus relegating him to gray cardinal status in Latvia’s politics thereafter. Lembergs and Slessers are two of the three most powerful oligarchs ever produced by Latvia. This opposition’s third leg comes from the now main party representing Latvia’s Russian speakers, Stability. All three parties are positioning themselves for an allied win eleven months hence in Latvia’s parliament elections. They see an opening in the IC’s language on gender as socially constructed rather than fixed as being alien cultural norms advanced by Brussels and Latvian elites whose lives remain distant from the realities of working people.

Latvia’s liberal parties have defended the Istanbul Convention’s noble goals of protecting women’s safety by wrapping it in the shroud of “European values.” European values have carried the day in endless Latvian political contests the past three decades among Latvians seeing themselves as stalwart allies of Brussels’ European project. Latvia’s rejection of the IC, however, signals a European values fatigue growing within the post-Soviet space.

Latvian, if not Baltic, women have broken many glass ceilings. The EU’s four female prime ministers are in the three Baltic States (Latvia and Lithuania). And, the third Baltic State, Estonia, had a female prime minister (Kaja Kallas) up until last year, when she was kicked upstairs to Brussels to become the EU’s chief foreign affairs representative along with vice-president of the European Commission. Latvian women are some 34% of the members of the parliament, doubling the16% figure of 2016 when they signed the Istanbul Convention. Moreover, Latvia was among the first countries extending the vote to all adult women in 1918. In short, the Baltic States have proven leaders in opening high-level career doors for women.

This is not to say, however, women don’t need protection. Countries marked by significant levels of inequality and poverty serve as incubators for social pathologies, including violence against women, and especially those of the working class. In fact, Latvia has the highest reported rate of “femicide” in all Europe. However, “European values” in the post-Soviet space, to be blunt, often means “not Russian.” Nowhere in the EU does values code to anti-Russian sentiment more than the Baltics. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that lacked the partial autonomy of Cold War Soviet bloc states. Annexed in 1940 by the USSR, Soviet Baltic Republics lacked the limited latitude of freedom from Moscow possessed by communist bloc countries. And of those three Baltic countries, the language of European values resonates most loudly in Latvia, which had the biggest immigration of Russian speakers in the Baltics during the period of Soviet occupation.

Soviet occupation brought a mix of policies. Soviet social supports (childcare, healthcare, education, retirement, etc.) were clearly progressive. Simultaneously, archaic or socially regressive cultural habits persisted behind the “protection” of the Iron Curtain. Economic growth in the early Cold War decade was solid, but stagnation set in by the late 1970s and contraction followed in the 1980s. For those now under 50, memories of “Krievu Laiks,” (“the Russian time” as Latvians reference the Soviet occupation) are linked to stories of older relatives deported to Siberia in the 1940s, Soviet decline in the 1980s, and the trauma of shock therapy transition in the 1990s and up to EU accession in 2004.

Much of Latvia’s younger working-class responded to the 1990s shock therapy and post 2008 financial shock (world’s biggest as percent contraction of GDP) and following “internal devaluation” (austerity) by voting with their feet, as Latvia saw the EU’s biggest emigration by percent of population in the EU space since 1991. Rhetorically, “European values” checked many boxes. For Latvian nationalists, it meant anti-Russian. For young professionals, it meant prospects for social mobility, decent paid work and international travel with NGOs and international companies. For LBTQ+ communities it meant liberation from socially conservative values preserved under Soviet rule, and for which it must be remembered still persisted in the “West” at the point of the Soviet Union’s demise.

For some three decades “European values” successfully carried freight for neoliberals. A combination of nationalists, upwardly mobile professionals and a cultural left delivered sufficient support to keep Latvia’s neoliberals in power. In short, for liberals (cultural, economic and political) European values hold sway and power in Latvia, until they don’t. Latvia’s recent rejection of the Istanbul Convention represents a serious fracture, but not total defeat, of the European values political coalition. But it decidedly represents a weakening of support for a European project generally absent stronger national autonomy and improving conditions for working people.

Latvia’s neoliberals, however, only blame last week’s Istanbul Convention parliament vote loss on, drumroll: Russia. No doubt Kremlin hybrid warriors are pleased with the erosion of support for a united Europe. It would be intellectually lazy, if not strategically misplaced, however, to see erosion of the European values consensus as a production scripted and acted out only by Kremlin marionettes, even if puppeteers are on site tugging (or pushing) on strings.

Three and a half decades of independence have left Latvia’s capital of Riga half prosperous, but plateaued in a “middle income trap.” Outside Riga, much of the rest of the country is some combination of nature preserve and retirement home consequent from three plus decades of emigration and low-birth rates. Moreover, Latvia is a high-cost country where families struggle for lack of adequate kindergartens and other forms of social support. Many Latvians are fatigued by European values rhetoric espoused by neoliberals in suits and fashionable dresses distant from their own daily lived challenged realities. Their ongoing three decades trafficking of a ‘heads I win tails you lose choice’ of ‘it’s either neoliberal Europe or Russia,’ sees diminishing political returns. Moreover, citizens are increasingly weary of a Frankfurt School cultural left politics policymakers pay fealty too without delivering better material living standards for working families. Failing to deliver on the latter, many working people begin turning against the former.

To be fair, a chief defender of the Istanbul Convention (IC) in Latvia’s Progressive Party advanced a pro-labor and family agenda paired to promotion of innovation-centered enterprises, combined with culturally LGBTQ+ values. Among their parliament members advancing this more progressive agenda inclusive of the working class, were Kaspars Briskens and Andris Suvajevs. However, in defending the IC, even the Progressive Party defaulted to “European values” rhetoric as their chief line of defense, thus losing resonance with working people.

Many Latvians rightly expected more from independence. Their demands of respect for local culture can be tethered to tolerance if they are not waterboarded with the tired superiority rhetoric of European values. Improved conditions and voice for labor can coexist with tolerance for all. Absent that ear turned toward labor, with language anchored in a discourse of affordability and respect, European values will further lose appeal and oligarch classes (both local and those connected east) will assume more political wins.

Jeffrey Sommers is Professor of Political Economy & Public and Senior Fellow, Institute of World Affairs of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book on the Baltics (with Charles Woolfson), is The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model.

Cosmin Marian is Chair and Professor of the Department of Political Science at Romania’s Babeș-Bolyai University. He works on comparative politics throughout the EU.

The post “Empire Strikes Back!” Oligarchs and Values Fatigue in Latvia’s Rejection of the Istanbul Convention appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Saeima – Flickr: Saeimas sēžu zāle – CC BY-SA 2.0

Europe’s political classes were backfooted by Latvia’s Parliament (Saeima) vote to pull out of the Istanbul Convention (IC), the treaty protecting women from violence. They then reset and punted on the IC’s future as several protests in the thousands took to Latvia’s streets. Backstory to the vote for Latvia’s IC exit, however, is less about women’s rights, but insider politics and the decreasing returns on “European Values” for defending the “European Project.” In brief, Latvia’s opposition parties, Latvia First Party, headed by oligarch Ainars Slessers, was previously voted out in 2009, then staged a political return riding our last decade’s global wave of rightwing populism. Then there is the Green & Farmers Party, both rural in character but also led by the flamboyant former oligarch, Aivars Lembergs. Lembergs was briefly jailed in 2021 for corruption, thus relegating him to gray cardinal status in Latvia’s politics thereafter. Lembergs and Slessers are two of the three most powerful oligarchs ever produced by Latvia. This opposition’s third leg comes from the now main party representing Latvia’s Russian speakers, Stability. All three parties are positioning themselves for an allied win eleven months hence in Latvia’s parliament elections. They see an opening in the IC’s language on gender as socially constructed rather than fixed as being alien cultural norms advanced by Brussels and Latvian elites whose lives remain distant from the realities of working people.

Latvia’s liberal parties have defended the Istanbul Convention’s noble goals of protecting women’s safety by wrapping it in the shroud of “European values.” European values have carried the day in endless Latvian political contests the past three decades among Latvians seeing themselves as stalwart allies of Brussels’ European project. Latvia’s rejection of the IC, however, signals a European values fatigue growing within the post-Soviet space.

Latvian, if not Baltic, women have broken many glass ceilings. The EU’s four female prime ministers are in the three Baltic States (Latvia and Lithuania). And, the third Baltic State, Estonia, had a female prime minister (Kaja Kallas) up until last year, when she was kicked upstairs to Brussels to become the EU’s chief foreign affairs representative along with vice-president of the European Commission. Latvian women are some 34% of the members of the parliament, doubling the16% figure of 2016 when they signed the Istanbul Convention. Moreover, Latvia was among the first countries extending the vote to all adult women in 1918. In short, the Baltic States have proven leaders in opening high-level career doors for women.

This is not to say, however, women don’t need protection. Countries marked by significant levels of inequality and poverty serve as incubators for social pathologies, including violence against women, and especially those of the working class. In fact, Latvia has the highest reported rate of “femicide” in all Europe. However, “European values” in the post-Soviet space, to be blunt, often means “not Russian.” Nowhere in the EU does values code to anti-Russian sentiment more than the Baltics. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that lacked the partial autonomy of Cold War Soviet bloc states. Annexed in 1940 by the USSR, Soviet Baltic Republics lacked the limited latitude of freedom from Moscow possessed by communist bloc countries. And of those three Baltic countries, the language of European values resonates most loudly in Latvia, which had the biggest immigration of Russian speakers in the Baltics during the period of Soviet occupation.

Soviet occupation brought a mix of policies. Soviet social supports (childcare, healthcare, education, retirement, etc.) were clearly progressive. Simultaneously, archaic or socially regressive cultural habits persisted behind the “protection” of the Iron Curtain. Economic growth in the early Cold War decade was solid, but stagnation set in by the late 1970s and contraction followed in the 1980s. For those now under 50, memories of “Krievu Laiks,” (“the Russian time” as Latvians reference the Soviet occupation) are linked to stories of older relatives deported to Siberia in the 1940s, Soviet decline in the 1980s, and the trauma of shock therapy transition in the 1990s and up to EU accession in 2004.

Much of Latvia’s younger working-class responded to the 1990s shock therapy and post 2008 financial shock (world’s biggest as percent contraction of GDP) and following “internal devaluation” (austerity) by voting with their feet, as Latvia saw the EU’s biggest emigration by percent of population in the EU space since 1991. Rhetorically, “European values” checked many boxes. For Latvian nationalists, it meant anti-Russian. For young professionals, it meant prospects for social mobility, decent paid work and international travel with NGOs and international companies. For LBTQ+ communities it meant liberation from socially conservative values preserved under Soviet rule, and for which it must be remembered still persisted in the “West” at the point of the Soviet Union’s demise.

For some three decades “European values” successfully carried freight for neoliberals. A combination of nationalists, upwardly mobile professionals and a cultural left delivered sufficient support to keep Latvia’s neoliberals in power. In short, for liberals (cultural, economic and political) European values hold sway and power in Latvia, until they don’t. Latvia’s recent rejection of the Istanbul Convention represents a serious fracture, but not total defeat, of the European values political coalition. But it decidedly represents a weakening of support for a European project generally absent stronger national autonomy and improving conditions for working people.

Latvia’s neoliberals, however, only blame last week’s Istanbul Convention parliament vote loss on, drumroll: Russia. No doubt Kremlin hybrid warriors are pleased with the erosion of support for a united Europe. It would be intellectually lazy, if not strategically misplaced, however, to see erosion of the European values consensus as a production scripted and acted out only by Kremlin marionettes, even if puppeteers are on site tugging (or pushing) on strings.

Three and a half decades of independence have left Latvia’s capital of Riga half prosperous, but plateaued in a “middle income trap.” Outside Riga, much of the rest of the country is some combination of nature preserve and retirement home consequent from three plus decades of emigration and low-birth rates. Moreover, Latvia is a high-cost country where families struggle for lack of adequate kindergartens and other forms of social support. Many Latvians are fatigued by European values rhetoric espoused by neoliberals in suits and fashionable dresses distant from their own daily lived challenged realities. Their ongoing three decades trafficking of a ‘heads I win tails you lose choice’ of ‘it’s either neoliberal Europe or Russia,’ sees diminishing political returns. Moreover, citizens are increasingly weary of a Frankfurt School cultural left politics policymakers pay fealty too without delivering better material living standards for working families. Failing to deliver on the latter, many working people begin turning against the former.

To be fair, a chief defender of the Istanbul Convention (IC) in Latvia’s Progressive Party advanced a pro-labor and family agenda paired to promotion of innovation-centered enterprises, combined with culturally LGBTQ+ values. Among their parliament members advancing this more progressive agenda inclusive of the working class, were Kaspars Briskens and Andris Suvajevs. However, in defending the IC, even the Progressive Party defaulted to “European values” rhetoric as their chief line of defense, thus losing resonance with working people.

Many Latvians rightly expected more from independence. Their demands of respect for local culture can be tethered to tolerance if they are not waterboarded with the tired superiority rhetoric of European values. Improved conditions and voice for labor can coexist with tolerance for all. Absent that ear turned toward labor, with language anchored in a discourse of affordability and respect, European values will further lose appeal and oligarch classes (both local and those connected east) will assume more political wins.

Jeffrey Sommers is Professor of Political Economy & Public and Senior Fellow, Institute of World Affairs of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book on the Baltics (with Charles Woolfson), is The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model.

Cosmin Marian is Chair and Professor of the Department of Political Science at Romania’s Babeș-Bolyai University. He works on comparative politics throughout the EU.

The post “Empire Strikes Back!” Oligarchs and Values Fatigue in Latvia’s Rejection of the Istanbul Convention appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Cheney meets with President Ronald Reagan, July 1983 – Public Domain

Modern medical science gave Dick Cheney one of its greatest gifts when he received a donor heart in 2012 at the age of 71.  Thirty-four years earlier, Cheney had suffered his first heart attack; he had a second heart in 1984.  In 1988, at the age of 47, Cheney suffered his fourth heart attack, and then a fifth heart attack in 2010 at the age of 69.  After every attack, according to Dr. Charles C. Hong, Cheney benefitted from a medical breakthrough until he received the donor heart.

There is no indication that Cheney ever softened his headline views on domestic and foreign policy as a result of these near-death experiences.  During his eleven years in Congress, Cheney’s record was strictly reactionary.  He opposed federal funding for abortions, with no exceptions in the case of rape or incest.  He voted against the equal rights amendment for women.  On education issues, he consistently opposed funding of Head Start, and he voted against creating the Department of Education, which Donald Trump has virtually destroyed.

A true westerner, Cheney voted against a ban on armor piercing bullets, often referred to as “cop killer” bullets.  He was one of only four members of the House voting against a ban on plastic guns that could slip through airport security machines undetected.  Not even the National Rifle Association opposed this ban.  In 1988, he voted to scrap a proposed national seven-day waiting period on handgun purchases.

Cheney would have fit in nicely with the Trump team on environmental issues.  He opposed refunding the Clean Water Act, and voted to postpone sanctions placed on air polluters who failed to meet pollution standards.  Cheney consistently voted against legislation to require oil, chemical and others industries from making public records of emissions known to cause cancer, birth defects and other chronic diseases.

Cheney consistently voted to increased defense spending, and supported aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, even after a moratorium on funding was passed.  When then-Senator Patrick Leahy challenged Vice President Cheney’s support for illegal aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, Cheney responded with “go fuck yourself,” which said a great deal about both his personality and his contempt for Congress.  When President George H.W. Bush moved to end the war against Iraq in 1991 without entering Baghdad, Cheney was strongly opposed,

Cheney knew that “personnel is policy” and supported the troglodytes who dominated President George W. Bush’s national security team, particularly Jay Bybee and John Yoo, who drafted the policy guidance that gave cover to the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture and abuse policies, gently referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  He also bolstered the policies and influence of other reactionaries in the administration, such as John Bolton, David Addington, and Paul Wolfowitz.

When asked in 2014 about the CIA’s torture and abuse program, which provided no intelligence on terrorist operations, Cheney offered no contrition.  “I would do it again in a minute,” he said.  And I might add that no CIA executive officer offered any resistance when CIA director George Tenet described the sadistic program, which included such executives as John Brennan, who became Obama’s CIA director.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, known as Cheney’s Cheney, was a consummate operator and advisor in making sure that Cheney’s orders were followed by the bureaucracy.  When George W. Bush refused Cheney’s pleas to provide a pardon to Libby, who had lied to a grand jury about his role in disclosing the identity of a CIA clandestine officer, the Bush-Cheney relationship suffered greatly.

Cheney consistently opposed any measure that supported accountability in the government, such as the War Powers Act, intelligence oversight, the Presidential Records Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and any measure that supported freedom of information.  His emphasis was on enlarging presidential authority, and he often cited those items in the Federalist Papers that supported greater presidential powers.

Cheney’s legacy can best be seen in the national security problems that Barack Obama and Joe Biden inherited in 2009, particularly the unnecessary war against Iraq that was in its sixth year.  There was also the war in Afghanistan, in its 8th year, and difficult security problems with Iran and Pakistan.  Bush and Cheney did their best to get the United States bogged down in distant wars that had no clear strategic purpose, and cost huge amounts of blood and treasure.  When the Israelis wanted the United States to use military force on their behalf, they called on Cheney to get the president to agree.  Fortunately, Bush didn’t comply, and the Bush-Cheney disputes eventually led to the demise of Cheney’s influence in the administration.  The two men were barely speaking to each other by 2008.

Cheney created an imperial vice presidency.  If left to his own devices, the American empire would have been even more supportive of unsavory dictators, more involved in regime change, and more likely engaged in the kind of mindless invasions such as the Bay of Pigs.  At Cheney’s initiative, the United States stripped terror suspects of long-established right sunder domestic and international law.

The Founding Fathers tried to create a president who would act as an “administrator,” but Cheney sought to expand presidential power, which is now referred to as the power of the “unitary executive.”  He had contempt for the Congress, which he described as a “collective, deliberative body” that”slowed down decisions” and “subjected them to compromise.”  He certainly would have been at home in the Trump administration, although—in all fairness—he supported his daughter’s position with respect to Trump’s effort to overthrow the government in 2020.

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Image by Chad Stembridge.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) helicopters will undoubtedly be circling my neighborhood looking for roofers and landscapers this “Veterans Day,” just as they have been for weeks. In the U.S., you’re an easy mark when you have brown skin and your job demands that you labor out in the open.

My town, located just outside of Chicago, has been crawling with ICE agents or soldiers (the terms deserve to be used interchangeably) for weeks now. Recently, two moms, in the cold with their whistles, helped guard a crew working on a roof that was damaged by hail in a recent storm. The ICE agents/soldiers, dressed in full military kit, carrying semi-automatic weapons, and wearing ski masks to hide their identity, are patrolling in unmarked trucks — I think we all know how to spot them at this point.

These people remind me of the soldiers I patrolled with in Afghanistan, only the average ICE agent has less training than the average soldier. It seems like every neighborhood in the U.S. is now subject to an armed and potentially violent confrontation with federal troops. The U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has come full circle.

Similar to the way that I terrorized Afghan villages during my time in the military following 9/11, ICE has been terrorizing my town. When I was in the U.S. Army Rangers, we’d target high school and college-age Afghans. Most of the time, these kids were simply walking down the street, minding their own business, when they became subject to a search, an intimidating interrogation, or abduction. After a while, Afghans would alert their neighbors anytime our caravan of trucks entered a town — sometimes they would use whistles. Villagers would quickly disappear and it then felt like we were rolling through a ghost town. This, in part, is life under occupation.

The Trump Regime’s Skyrocketing Domestic Occupying Forces

ICE training has been cut by five weeks to “surge” the number of troops: Training is now eight weeks long, down from 13 weeks. The Trump administration hopes to increase the number of ICE agents from 6,500 nationwide to 10,000 by the end of 2025. A signing bonus of $50,000 has reportedly drawn 150,000 people to apply for positions with ICE, as the agency uses white nationalist imagery to attract white supremacist recruits.

ICE agents/soldiers are occupying U.S. neighborhoods with some of the deadliest weapons in the world with only eight weeks of training and no comparable past experience required. According to a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official interviewed by NBC News, “[DHS is] trying to push everyone through, and the vetting process is not what it should be.” Yet, even if the vetting were more rigorous and thorough, no amount of training could justify armed soldiers terrorizing our neighbors.

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Arctic Council logo – Fair Use

In May, Denmark, quietly sophisticated, often underestimated, took over the chair of the Arctic Council. Its leadership mattered not just for climate and security, but for how smaller countries navigate great-power rivalries in a literally thawing world.

For the remaining eighteen months, Denmark will continue setting the agenda for a region that’s no longer the silent, frozen corner it once was. I’m no Arctic expert but even last May it was obvious this would be a defining moment.

My great-great-grandfather, Jens Bach, sat for decades in the Danish parliament, travelling regularly from Thisted in northern Jutland to Copenhagen. This was two islands and a heroic commute away. In his day, Greenland came up often. Denmark was moving towards a more formal rule over what they called “the big island in the north.” Inevitably, Greenland still comes up. Geography and history have long half-lives in Danish politics.

Copenhagen, for instance, has announced new Arctic defense spending. This includes radar in East Greenland, drones, and upgraded patrol ships. Nothing flashy, Denmark doesn’t really do flashy, but certainly deliberate. Around the Arctic table sit the US, Russia, Canada, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. Nuance goes only so far.

Three forces define Denmark’s Arctic moment: great-power rivalry, Greenlandic self-determination, and rapid climate change.

Greenland gives Denmark its major seabed claims in the Arctic Ocean, a legal and geological smørrebrød layered with what diplomats call “resource and sovereignty implications.” Don’t underestimate this. Further phrases like “continental shelf” hide very real power politics.

At home, the debate over Greenland’s future is sharpening. Greenlandic leaders, diplomats, and scholars have long refined arguments. It’s easy to see how greater autonomy, even independence, would redefine Denmark’s Arctic role, as well as its sense of itself.

Famously, the United States, never shy about its geography, is taking a growing interest in Greenland’s direction. This escalated big time last year when Denmark summoned the US chargé d’affaires over alleged “influence efforts” in Greenland.

The Arctic Council includes six Indigenous organizations as Permanent Participants. Add to that rising attention still to Indigenous rights, plus the post-colonial relationship between Copenhagen, Nuuk, and Tórshavn, and we see Denmark’s history in the region is not a side note.

Then there’s the climate question, the most relentless of all. Melting ice opens new shipping routes and resource hopes, but also new risks. Denmark and Greenland are being pressed to lead on Arctic emissions, black carbon, and methane. The future here isn’t theoretical. Along Greenland’s rugged coast, ice loss and chemical change are already reshaping ecosystems and livelihoods.

Security planners in Copenhagen are having to adjust, too. Those new ships, a polar research vessel, more patrols. Quiet, bureaucratic preparedness. The Danish way, but still a signal. Undersea cables, cyber resilience, counter-intelligence, all no doubt standard topics now in defence meetings. Even telecom companies must receive a scrutiny that would have seemed absurd not so long ago.

Russia looms as the most immediate military concern, especially in the cyber and “a wee bit too close” sea or air encounters. China, as usual, plays the patient investor. The US does, in fact, remain Denmark’s indispensable, if sometimes overbearing, ally.

But if Copenhagen gets it wrong, it could end up sidelined in its own strategic backyard, leaving it wedged between Washington’s impatience, Beijing’s quiet capital, and Greenland’s growing assertiveness.

Nor is it helped by Trump’s habit of treating allies as optional accessories. We saw this last week with the favoritism shown to Hungary in the form of a one-year exemption from sanctions. Greenland didn’t enjoy being discussed like a real estate listing, and neither did Denmark. When science diplomacy and trust fray, Copenhagen’s instinct will be to lean more towards Europe, not less. It’s hardly ice-core astrophysics.

Admittedly, all of this can sound rather forbidding and strategic, but there’s a heartbeat underneath. One Danish relative of mine emigrated to the US, only to return home “to die” after a grim diagnosis in New York. He then lived another forty years. The Arctic, like life, doesn’t move in straight lines.

So too with Denmark’s Arctic role. The path can bend but not break, shaped by resilience, restraint, and the admirably stubborn endurance of small nations in big weather. Not everyone believes in surrendering the playground to the bully. The world turns on the appetites of great powers, but sometimes it survives on the alertness and civility of the small ones to win through.

And maybe in that, Denmark can serve us all.

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After years of steady decline in the number of people executed in the United States, there has been a sharp reversal in 2025.

So far this year, 41 people have been killed in 11 states, with five more executions scheduled before the end of the year.

If all the scheduled executions are carried out, that would make 2025 the year with the most executions since 2010, when 46 inmates were put to death. That year, Texas led the way with 17 executions, while Florida carried out only one.

But this year, the Sunshine State is leading the charge. Florida has executed 15 prisoners in 2025 – the most ever in a single year since 1976, when a brief national moratorium on the death penalty was lifted. Two of the five remaining executions scheduled for 2025 are set to happen in Florida. Texas and Alabama are tied for a distant second, with five executions each.

As someone who has studied the death penalty for decades, what is happening in Florida right now seems to me to be especially important. While in some ways the state is distinctive, in many others it is a microcosm of America’s death penalty system.

The history of the death penalty in Florida

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Florida carried out its first execution in 1827, 18 years before it became a state.

Almost 100 years later, in 1923, Florida replaced hanging with the electric chair as its method of execution. After a brief pause in the use of capital punishment in the 1970s, it was one of the first states to get back in the death penalty business.

In the 1990s, the state had several gruesome botched electrocutions. In three cases, the condemned man caught on fire before dying in the chair. To this day, the electric chair remains legal in Florida, though in 2000 the state Legislature enacted a law whereby prisoners may choose between the electric chair and lethal injection.

Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the state to task for various constitutional defects in its death penalty laws and practices. In its 1982 decision in Enmund v. Florida, the court ruled that Florida could not use the death penalty to punish people who were minor participants in a crime that led to a murder. And in 2014, the Supreme Court found that Florida was unconstitutionally denying the kind of intellectual disability claims by people with low IQ scores that made them ineligible to be given death sentences.

But these rulings have not stopped the state from continuing to go its own way in death penalty cases. In 2020, the Florida Supreme Court ended the practice of having a court review capital sentences. This review was meant to ensure that those sentences met the U.S. Constitution’s requirements that they be meted out only in cases that truly warrant them and that they be proportional. To determine proportionality, the court undertaking such a review would compare the case in front of them with similar cases in the same jurisdiction in which the death penalty had been imposed.

Then in 2023, Florida enacted legislation ending the requirement of jury unanimity in death cases. Now, it takes only eight out of 12 jurors to send someone to death row. Only three other death penalty states do not require jury unanimity. In Missouri and Indiana, a judge may decide if the jury’s decision isn’t unanimous, and in Alabama, a 10-2 decision is sufficient.

Racial inequality on death row

As in the rest of the country, racial discrimination has long been a feature of Florida’s death penalty system.

Thirty-five percent of the 278 people currently on Florida’s death row are Black. But Black people make up only about 17% of Florida’s overall population.

This is actually lower than the approximately 40% of inmates on death row who are Black nationwide, despite the fact that Black people make up just 14% of the U.S. population.

Across the nation, 13 of the 41 inmates executed so far in 2025 have been Black or Latino men.

Florida leads the nation in the number of people – 30 – who have been sentenced to death only to be exonerated later. Of those, 57% were Black.

A record-setting year

Today, Florida has the second-largest death row population in the United States, with 256 inmates awaiting executions. Only California has more, with 580 inmates on death row, but it has had a moratorium on executions since 2006.

As Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis is responsible for issuing death warrants. In 2025, he has signed a record-setting 15 so far. That’s the most death warrants in the state in a single year since 2014, when Gov. Rick Scott signed off on putting eight people to death.

Though he is Catholic, DeSantis does not subscribe to the church’s staunch opposition to the death penalty. The Florida Catholic Conference of Bishops has been outspoken in taking him to task for his position on capital punishment and for presiding over an execution spree. But that has not stopped him.

Indeed, on Nov. 3, 2025, the governor said that capital punishment is “an appropriate punishment for the worst offenders.” He added that it could be a “strong deterrent” if the state carried out executions more quickly.

DeSantis has served as governor since 2019, and prior to 2025, he had signed nine death warrants. He says that he was focused on other priorities early in his term and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The governor, who is term limited, is in his second and last term. DeSantis’ critics allege that the recent uptick in executions is an attempt to garner attention and prove his tough-on-crime bona fides to a national audience.

Florida: Setting the trend, or bucking it?

The total number of executions in the U.S. went from a high of 98 executions in 1999 to a low of 11 in 2021. But that number has increased every year since.

While only one state, Indiana, has resumed executions after a long hiatus, no other state has increased its use of the death penalty as quickly as Florida has. Elsewhere, the common pattern of allowing people to languish on death row for decades, and in some states seemingly permanently, has held.

And although the problems that have long plagued Florida’s death penalty system remain unaddressed, it now stands alone in dramatically escalating its own pace of executions and is leading America to its own 2025 execution revival.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Under Ron DeSantis, Florida Now Leads the Nation in Executions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Edwin Sanchez had the seniority he needed to bid for a higher-paying position in the control room at the oil refinery in Texas City, Texas, where he’d worked for more than 15 years.

But Sanchez, lighthearted and sociable, seemed to prefer the company of his close-knit, 30-person unit responsible for a range of duties inside and outside the sprawling facility.

Sanchez, a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 13-1, showed up for his shifts like clockwork. And then, one day, he didn’t show up at all.

Concerned coworkers ultimately learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement decided to deport Sanchez, whom local police detained after a traffic stop, even though he had an up-to-date work permit.

His deportation to Honduras—a country he hadn’t seen since leaving as a child nearly four decades earlier—occurred in March. The loss angered fellow union members, who fought to hold open Sanchez’s job during his months-long detention, and it underscored the heavy toll that Donald Trump’s dragnet exacts not only on deportees and their families but also on the workplaces and industries they leave behind.

“It just leaves a hole,” observed Brandi Sanders-Lausch, president of Local 13-1, recalling how months of uncertainty about Sanchez’s fate affected about 1,000 union workers at the refinery.

“They were definitely distracted and probably a little uncomfortable,” she said of Sanchez’s coworkers, especially members of his unit who worked most closely with him. “They had questions. They didn’t understand. Everyone still talks about him.”

In all, the nation has so far lost more than a million foreign-born workers like Sanchez amid Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

It’s already causing labor shortages that drive up employer costs and delay work, according to new data from the Federal Reserve. It’s ultimately going to balloon the federal deficit, hinder growth, and lower Americans’ standard of living, according to a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, one of whom explained that “Fewer people means a smaller economy.”

The campaign against immigrants puts large swaths of the economy at risk, not merely by decimating the workforce but by depriving the nation of people with the skills and knowledge essential for operating key industries and keeping them viable for the long term.

For example, Sanchez held a trusted role at the refinery, a veritable small city, where workers refine up to 631,000 gallons of crude oil a day for gasoline, petrochemicals, fuel oil, propane, and other products needed by various kinds of businesses across the country.

Sanchez graduated from a local high school and completed a process technology degree at a community college to prepare for his work as an operator, which involved scaling ladders, monitoring gauges, performing maintenance, and checking for leaks, among other responsibilities, Sanders said.

He continued his education on the job. Both the USW and the company invested in Sanchez on an ongoing basis, providing the safety and other training that empowered his work.

In return, Sanchez invested himself in his work and in his colleagues. He was a dependable, conscientious team player, with an upbeat personality that helped to lighten 12-hour shifts and the overtime that often followed, Sanders said, calling him a favorite among his coworkers.

“They all became really good friends,” she said, noting that Sanchez earned respect for his dedication to picket-line duty during the USW’s 2015 unfair labor practice strike against big oil and his commitment to watching others’ backs in a high-risk work environment.

“You can’t replace a person like that,” Sanders said. “You feel that loss. It’s almost like someone passing away.”

In his mid-30s, unmarried, with no children, Sanchez ended up relying on friends to sell his assets so he’d have some means of supporting himself in Honduras. He also accessed his retirement account, providing additional funds.

But coworkers never saw him again.

Instead of helping to meet America’s energy needs, he’s now figuring out his next steps in an unfamiliar country that has no oil industry, let alone a need for skilled refinery workers.

“He doesn’t speak Spanish,” Sanders said. “He still calls and checks in with everybody from time to time. His friends are here.”

Just like Sanchez, José Galo parlayed hard work and a union contract into a good middle-class life.

But it’s all in pieces now. Galo—who made his way to the U.S. on his own at 14, sometimes sleeping on a couch and skipping meals for lack of money—says he has little choice but to return to Honduras following the deportation of his wife, Karla.

Galo, a U.S. citizen and member of USW Local 1693 in Lexington, Kentucky, accompanied his wife, also a native of Honduras, to a routine check-in with immigration officials in June. Thirty minutes later, a woman returned to the waiting room and told Galo, “She’s no longer here.”

“They took her out the back,” recalled Galo, a manufacturing worker. He made a brief trip to Honduras shortly thereafter, taking the couple’s six-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, so he could live with his mother.

Galo said he’s done his best to contribute to America, joining the ranks of the manufacturing workers who built the country and standing in solidarity with fellow USW members.

He availed himself of the advantages that the USW and other unions have provided all of their members, including members of various immigrant groups, for decades: good wages, affordable benefits, safe working conditions, and a brighter future.

Galo bought a house and a car, willingly paid taxes, and started a lawn care business to explore his entrepreneurial side. He liked nothing more than greeting his son when he walked through the door at the end of a long shift.

Now, his hardships cast a pall over the factory floor, where Galo says his coworkers, a second family, try to cheer him up even though they share his grief. He knows he won’t be seeing them much longer, even though he’s daunted by the prospect of starting over in a country as disadvantaged as when he left decades ago.

“This is my home now,” he said.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

The post Trump’s Immigration Dragnet Harms All U.S. Workers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Edwin Sanchez had the seniority he needed to bid for a higher-paying position in the control room at the oil refinery in Texas City, Texas, where he’d worked for more than 15 years.

But Sanchez, lighthearted and sociable, seemed to prefer the company of his close-knit, 30-person unit responsible for a range of duties inside and outside the sprawling facility.

Sanchez, a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 13-1, showed up for his shifts like clockwork. And then, one day, he didn’t show up at all.

Concerned coworkers ultimately learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement decided to deport Sanchez, whom local police detained after a traffic stop, even though he had an up-to-date work permit.

His deportation to Honduras—a country he hadn’t seen since leaving as a child nearly four decades earlier—occurred in March. The loss angered fellow union members, who fought to hold open Sanchez’s job during his months-long detention, and it underscored the heavy toll that Donald Trump’s dragnet exacts not only on deportees and their families but also on the workplaces and industries they leave behind.

“It just leaves a hole,” observed Brandi Sanders-Lausch, president of Local 13-1, recalling how months of uncertainty about Sanchez’s fate affected about 1,000 union workers at the refinery.

“They were definitely distracted and probably a little uncomfortable,” she said of Sanchez’s coworkers, especially members of his unit who worked most closely with him. “They had questions. They didn’t understand. Everyone still talks about him.”

In all, the nation has so far lost more than a million foreign-born workers like Sanchez amid Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

It’s already causing labor shortages that drive up employer costs and delay work, according to new data from the Federal Reserve. It’s ultimately going to balloon the federal deficit, hinder growth, and lower Americans’ standard of living, according to a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, one of whom explained that “Fewer people means a smaller economy.”

The campaign against immigrants puts large swaths of the economy at risk, not merely by decimating the workforce but by depriving the nation of people with the skills and knowledge essential for operating key industries and keeping them viable for the long term.

For example, Sanchez held a trusted role at the refinery, a veritable small city, where workers refine up to 631,000 gallons of crude oil a day for gasoline, petrochemicals, fuel oil, propane, and other products needed by various kinds of businesses across the country.

Sanchez graduated from a local high school and completed a process technology degree at a community college to prepare for his work as an operator, which involved scaling ladders, monitoring gauges, performing maintenance, and checking for leaks, among other responsibilities, Sanders said.

He continued his education on the job. Both the USW and the company invested in Sanchez on an ongoing basis, providing the safety and other training that empowered his work.

In return, Sanchez invested himself in his work and in his colleagues. He was a dependable, conscientious team player, with an upbeat personality that helped to lighten 12-hour shifts and the overtime that often followed, Sanders said, calling him a favorite among his coworkers.

“They all became really good friends,” she said, noting that Sanchez earned respect for his dedication to picket-line duty during the USW’s 2015 unfair labor practice strike against big oil and his commitment to watching others’ backs in a high-risk work environment.

“You can’t replace a person like that,” Sanders said. “You feel that loss. It’s almost like someone passing away.”

In his mid-30s, unmarried, with no children, Sanchez ended up relying on friends to sell his assets so he’d have some means of supporting himself in Honduras. He also accessed his retirement account, providing additional funds.

But coworkers never saw him again.

Instead of helping to meet America’s energy needs, he’s now figuring out his next steps in an unfamiliar country that has no oil industry, let alone a need for skilled refinery workers.

“He doesn’t speak Spanish,” Sanders said. “He still calls and checks in with everybody from time to time. His friends are here.”

Just like Sanchez, José Galo parlayed hard work and a union contract into a good middle-class life.

But it’s all in pieces now. Galo—who made his way to the U.S. on his own at 14, sometimes sleeping on a couch and skipping meals for lack of money—says he has little choice but to return to Honduras following the deportation of his wife, Karla.

Galo, a U.S. citizen and member of USW Local 1693 in Lexington, Kentucky, accompanied his wife, also a native of Honduras, to a routine check-in with immigration officials in June. Thirty minutes later, a woman returned to the waiting room and told Galo, “She’s no longer here.”

“They took her out the back,” recalled Galo, a manufacturing worker. He made a brief trip to Honduras shortly thereafter, taking the couple’s six-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, so he could live with his mother.

Galo said he’s done his best to contribute to America, joining the ranks of the manufacturing workers who built the country and standing in solidarity with fellow USW members.

He availed himself of the advantages that the USW and other unions have provided all of their members, including members of various immigrant groups, for decades: good wages, affordable benefits, safe working conditions, and a brighter future.

Galo bought a house and a car, willingly paid taxes, and started a lawn care business to explore his entrepreneurial side. He liked nothing more than greeting his son when he walked through the door at the end of a long shift.

Now, his hardships cast a pall over the factory floor, where Galo says his coworkers, a second family, try to cheer him up even though they share his grief. He knows he won’t be seeing them much longer, even though he’s daunted by the prospect of starting over in a country as disadvantaged as when he left decades ago.

“This is my home now,” he said.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

The post Trump’s Immigration Dragnet Harms All U.S. Workers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ryan Stone.

A tragicomedy in diesel, delusion, and democracy.

In the high silence of the Andes, where the air thins to a whisper and the earth itself seems to remember older empires, there lies a nation haunted by the sound of waves it can no longer hear. It once possessed a coastline — a sliver of blue infinity stitched to its western hem like a divine indulgence. Then came the diplomats and the drillers, the wars wrapped in ledgers, and the cartographers tidy knives. Before anyone realized, the sea was gone — not with the violence of a storm but with the bureaucratic calm of a bank transfer.

And yet, even now, the highland people remember the ocean as one remembers a lost love — through rumors, relics, and dreams. In the plazas of La Paz, an old mariner appears from time to time, a spectral veteran who smells faintly of brine and carries a telescope and a broken compass that spins endlessly, loyal to confusion. They call him el Coronel del Desierto — the Colonel of the Desert. He claims to have once sailed ships across the Pacific, though no one can agree whether he is a ghost, a liar, or the last honest man left in the Republic. Children listen wide-eyed to his tales of sea monsters and salt breezes, and their mothers hush them, fearing that belief might reopen old wounds.

It is said that on certain nights, when the moon is full and the mountains gleam like ancient bones, el Coronel walks to the edge of the Altiplano and raises his telescope to the west, searching for the ocean that politics misplaced.

And maybe that’s how it began — the contagion carried on that ghostly shimmer. The dream of the sea drifted north, crossing borders as easily as capital, whispering its promise of stolen freedom and easy blame. By the time it reached the frostbitten prairies — the continent’s cracked reflection — it had changed shape, but not its essence.

Now, far from the Andes, another dreamer lifts his eyes to an imagined horizon. Alberta, that inland dominion of pumpjacks and performative grievances, gazes toward its own imagined shore — not of saltwater but of sovereignty. Its prophets speak of independence as if it were a port city, of separation as a voyage toward freedom, though the map offers no such coast. Perhaps, in some strip club in Fort McMurray, a new Coronel del Desierto is rehearsing the same old fable: that a nation betrayed by geography might yet find salvation in its own reflection — if only it stares long enough into the mirage.

No one remembers when the madness began — only that one morning the prairies started murmuring about the sea. Alberta’s independence fever has haunted Confederation as long as Alberta itself, but this latest outbreak must have begun as a bad joke in a Red Deer bar, then spread through talk radio, Telegram channels, and the reptile cortex of social media. Alberta, landlocked queen of crude, began to dream of independence — the kind of dream that smells of diesel and nostalgia, so large and lonely it could only come from a place that’s never seen a tide.

They say it started with a petition — ordinary names scrawled in digital ink, demanding a referendum to ask whether Alberta should leave the country that made it rich and then made it bored. A bureaucratic hallucination dressed up as democracy. The signatures stacked like wheat bales: tens of thousands, though no one could quite agree what they were signing for — revenge, leverage, bathrooms, or just the exquisite thrill of rebellion before supper.

In Calgary and Edmonton, the think-tank prophets began to speak of sovereignty as though it were a new oilfield — untapped, infinite, waiting just beyond their dreamed of borders. Polls whispered that a third of Albertans were tempted. Not believers, exactly, but flirts — politically bicurious, swiping right on secession and then ghosting on Grindr. The rest watched, muttering that the whole thing was theatre, a hostage note to Ottawa written in Sharpie and narcissism.

The tone was half tragedy, half stand-up routine. “We gave the country its fuel, its riches” the old-timers grumbled, “and they gave us lectures about emissions.” You could taste the resentment in the air — thick as bitumen. Yet beneath the noise, a deeper ache thrummed: a feeling that history had stolen something. Not a sea this time, but dignity.

And somewhere in this vast inland ocean of wheat and oil, the ghosts of old Bolivian sailors must be laughing. They, too, once believed salvation lay in a vanished coastline. Alberta’s new captains — draped in oil money and bravado — squint toward an invisible horizon, certain that sovereignty will shimmer there like a mirage, waiting to be struck rich.

But the maps, as ever, refuse to change. The prairies remain landlocked, the pipelines still run have to run west — or south if swallowed up by the voracious Trump regime, and the sea keeps its distance. Only the dream sails on — half tantrum, half bedtime story — a reminder that in certain corners of the world, weaponized nostalgia is the most dangerous natural resource of all.

They say the prairie wind carries the scent of freedom and rebellion — but what it really delivers is the tang of crude and the hum of machinery used as hymnals. In that hum, you’ll hear the politics of a rich province that decided it was owed a sea it never had and a license it never earned. The machinery squeals its gospel: Ottawa is stealing from us.

And yet, the province remains chained — not to Parliament, but to an industry. The oil patch is the puppeteer behind the curtain. The playbill says “separation,” but the director is the fossil-fuel complex. Behind the slogans hums a simple arithmetic: every dollar rise in oil means hundreds of millions for the us; every dip means austerity, resentment, blame for you. It’s an addiction so vast it’s become theology.

The stagehands behind the prairie passion play are hardly shy. Premier Danielle Smith, self-styled Joan of Arc of deregulation, waves her Sovereignty Act like a censer, filling the air with fumes of righteous defiance. Her courtiers — the Free Alberta Strategy architects and their cousins at the Modern Miracle Network — whisper about liberty while cashing royalty cheques. The Pathways Alliance, a nefarious cartel of oil sands titans, preaches carbon capture as salvation and sends lobbyists to Ottawa with the fervor of missionaries, their hymnals stamped Cenovus and Suncor. Even the Fraser Institute, that old libertarian oracle of trickle-down revelation, hums its usual chorus: privatize, decentralize, sanctify the market. And the faithful nod along, convinced that “freedom” is just another extraction to be refined, bottled, and sold.

The faithful howl about Ottawa while kneeling before the 2.0 versions of King Nebuchadnezzar’s Baba Gurgur. They preach freedom while the rig lights flicker like votive candles on the altar of dependency. Norway built a fortune from its oil and banked it for its grandchildren; Alberta built a mythology and handed the profits to the few. And now, as the world turns away from fossil fire, the old priests of petroleum are passing the collection plate again — this time in the name of independence.

The pundits call it sovereignty, but it’s self-hypnosis — a fever fed by oil money, American think tanks, and the ghosts of every boomtown preacher who ever promised salvation by the barrel. Their followers, dazed and loyal, mistake the roar of the pipeline for the sound of surf.

So here they stand, a province sitting atop one of the richest reserves on Earth, insisting it’s the victim of some distant, bilingual tyranny. The wells pump, the politicians posture, and the dream burns bright as a flare stack against the northern Albertan sky. But you cannot build a nation on exhaust fumes, and you cannot sail a sea made of oil. The tide they long for will never return — only the slow, shimmering flood of their own reflection.

They say el Coronel del Desierto finally left the Andes when his stories stopped paying the rent. He hitched a ride north on the fumes of globalization, crossed a few bad borders, and ended up in the badlands of Alberta, where the wind smells of gasoline and broken promises. He arrived with nothing but a telescope and a cough, muttering about the sea. The locals thought he was a prophet or a lunatic — which, these days, in this place, is a distinction without a difference.

Now he wanders the strip-mall cathedrals of the prairie, preaching to men in trucker caps and resentment, to oilfield roughnecks who mistake exhaust for incense. They nod along, eyes shining, as he tells them about the ocean that was stolen — by bureaucrats, by liberals, by some cabal of city devils who never got mud on their boots. They love that part. They know that tale by heart.

At night he drinks rye in motels with flickering neon and tells anyone who’ll listen that he once commanded a navy. The bartender doesn’t believe him but keeps pouring; it’s good business. Outside, the rigs kneel and rise in mechanical prayer, and the prairie hums with the same grievance like a church organ that only plays one note.

This is the gospel of our age: rage without compass, rebellion without memory. It moves across borders like an oil slick — thick, glistening, poisoning every reflection it touches.

And somewhere in that glare, el Coronel del Desierto stands again. He has traded the Andes for the plains, the Pacific for the illusion of another sea. He raises his telescope to the west, searching for the shimmer of salvation beyond the pumpjacks, beyond the pipelines, beyond the lie.

But the only tide that comes is the wind — cold, relentless, and empty of mercy.

He lowers the telescope. The crowd has quieted. Somewhere, a flare stack burns like a false star. The Colonel sighs — a sound old as empire — and for a moment, even the rigs seem to bow their heads.

Because they all know, in their bones, what he knows deep down: the ocean was never stolen.

It was sold.

The post “The Great Landlocked Rebellion” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ryan Stone.

A tragicomedy in diesel, delusion, and democracy.

In the high silence of the Andes, where the air thins to a whisper and the earth itself seems to remember older empires, there lies a nation haunted by the sound of waves it can no longer hear. It once possessed a coastline — a sliver of blue infinity stitched to its western hem like a divine indulgence. Then came the diplomats and the drillers, the wars wrapped in ledgers, and the cartographers tidy knives. Before anyone realized, the sea was gone — not with the violence of a storm but with the bureaucratic calm of a bank transfer.

And yet, even now, the highland people remember the ocean as one remembers a lost love — through rumors, relics, and dreams. In the plazas of La Paz, an old mariner appears from time to time, a spectral veteran who smells faintly of brine and carries a telescope and a broken compass that spins endlessly, loyal to confusion. They call him el Coronel del Desierto — the Colonel of the Desert. He claims to have once sailed ships across the Pacific, though no one can agree whether he is a ghost, a liar, or the last honest man left in the Republic. Children listen wide-eyed to his tales of sea monsters and salt breezes, and their mothers hush them, fearing that belief might reopen old wounds.

It is said that on certain nights, when the moon is full and the mountains gleam like ancient bones, el Coronel walks to the edge of the Altiplano and raises his telescope to the west, searching for the ocean that politics misplaced.

And maybe that’s how it began — the contagion carried on that ghostly shimmer. The dream of the sea drifted north, crossing borders as easily as capital, whispering its promise of stolen freedom and easy blame. By the time it reached the frostbitten prairies — the continent’s cracked reflection — it had changed shape, but not its essence.

Now, far from the Andes, another dreamer lifts his eyes to an imagined horizon. Alberta, that inland dominion of pumpjacks and performative grievances, gazes toward its own imagined shore — not of saltwater but of sovereignty. Its prophets speak of independence as if it were a port city, of separation as a voyage toward freedom, though the map offers no such coast. Perhaps, in some strip club in Fort McMurray, a new Coronel del Desierto is rehearsing the same old fable: that a nation betrayed by geography might yet find salvation in its own reflection — if only it stares long enough into the mirage.

No one remembers when the madness began — only that one morning the prairies started murmuring about the sea. Alberta’s independence fever has haunted Confederation as long as Alberta itself, but this latest outbreak must have begun as a bad joke in a Red Deer bar, then spread through talk radio, Telegram channels, and the reptile cortex of social media. Alberta, landlocked queen of crude, began to dream of independence — the kind of dream that smells of diesel and nostalgia, so large and lonely it could only come from a place that’s never seen a tide.

They say it started with a petition — ordinary names scrawled in digital ink, demanding a referendum to ask whether Alberta should leave the country that made it rich and then made it bored. A bureaucratic hallucination dressed up as democracy. The signatures stacked like wheat bales: tens of thousands, though no one could quite agree what they were signing for — revenge, leverage, bathrooms, or just the exquisite thrill of rebellion before supper.

In Calgary and Edmonton, the think-tank prophets began to speak of sovereignty as though it were a new oilfield — untapped, infinite, waiting just beyond their dreamed of borders. Polls whispered that a third of Albertans were tempted. Not believers, exactly, but flirts — politically bicurious, swiping right on secession and then ghosting on Grindr. The rest watched, muttering that the whole thing was theatre, a hostage note to Ottawa written in Sharpie and narcissism.

The tone was half tragedy, half stand-up routine. “We gave the country its fuel, its riches” the old-timers grumbled, “and they gave us lectures about emissions.” You could taste the resentment in the air — thick as bitumen. Yet beneath the noise, a deeper ache thrummed: a feeling that history had stolen something. Not a sea this time, but dignity.

And somewhere in this vast inland ocean of wheat and oil, the ghosts of old Bolivian sailors must be laughing. They, too, once believed salvation lay in a vanished coastline. Alberta’s new captains — draped in oil money and bravado — squint toward an invisible horizon, certain that sovereignty will shimmer there like a mirage, waiting to be struck rich.

But the maps, as ever, refuse to change. The prairies remain landlocked, the pipelines still run have to run west — or south if swallowed up by the voracious Trump regime, and the sea keeps its distance. Only the dream sails on — half tantrum, half bedtime story — a reminder that in certain corners of the world, weaponized nostalgia is the most dangerous natural resource of all.

They say the prairie wind carries the scent of freedom and rebellion — but what it really delivers is the tang of crude and the hum of machinery used as hymnals. In that hum, you’ll hear the politics of a rich province that decided it was owed a sea it never had and a license it never earned. The machinery squeals its gospel: Ottawa is stealing from us.

And yet, the province remains chained — not to Parliament, but to an industry. The oil patch is the puppeteer behind the curtain. The playbill says “separation,” but the director is the fossil-fuel complex. Behind the slogans hums a simple arithmetic: every dollar rise in oil means hundreds of millions for the us; every dip means austerity, resentment, blame for you. It’s an addiction so vast it’s become theology.

The stagehands behind the prairie passion play are hardly shy. Premier Danielle Smith, self-styled Joan of Arc of deregulation, waves her Sovereignty Act like a censer, filling the air with fumes of righteous defiance. Her courtiers — the Free Alberta Strategy architects and their cousins at the Modern Miracle Network — whisper about liberty while cashing royalty cheques. The Pathways Alliance, a nefarious cartel of oil sands titans, preaches carbon capture as salvation and sends lobbyists to Ottawa with the fervor of missionaries, their hymnals stamped Cenovus and Suncor. Even the Fraser Institute, that old libertarian oracle of trickle-down revelation, hums its usual chorus: privatize, decentralize, sanctify the market. And the faithful nod along, convinced that “freedom” is just another extraction to be refined, bottled, and sold.

The faithful howl about Ottawa while kneeling before the 2.0 versions of King Nebuchadnezzar’s Baba Gurgur. They preach freedom while the rig lights flicker like votive candles on the altar of dependency. Norway built a fortune from its oil and banked it for its grandchildren; Alberta built a mythology and handed the profits to the few. And now, as the world turns away from fossil fire, the old priests of petroleum are passing the collection plate again — this time in the name of independence.

The pundits call it sovereignty, but it’s self-hypnosis — a fever fed by oil money, American think tanks, and the ghosts of every boomtown preacher who ever promised salvation by the barrel. Their followers, dazed and loyal, mistake the roar of the pipeline for the sound of surf.

So here they stand, a province sitting atop one of the richest reserves on Earth, insisting it’s the victim of some distant, bilingual tyranny. The wells pump, the politicians posture, and the dream burns bright as a flare stack against the northern Albertan sky. But you cannot build a nation on exhaust fumes, and you cannot sail a sea made of oil. The tide they long for will never return — only the slow, shimmering flood of their own reflection.

They say el Coronel del Desierto finally left the Andes when his stories stopped paying the rent. He hitched a ride north on the fumes of globalization, crossed a few bad borders, and ended up in the badlands of Alberta, where the wind smells of gasoline and broken promises. He arrived with nothing but a telescope and a cough, muttering about the sea. The locals thought he was a prophet or a lunatic — which, these days, in this place, is a distinction without a difference.

Now he wanders the strip-mall cathedrals of the prairie, preaching to men in trucker caps and resentment, to oilfield roughnecks who mistake exhaust for incense. They nod along, eyes shining, as he tells them about the ocean that was stolen — by bureaucrats, by liberals, by some cabal of city devils who never got mud on their boots. They love that part. They know that tale by heart.

At night he drinks rye in motels with flickering neon and tells anyone who’ll listen that he once commanded a navy. The bartender doesn’t believe him but keeps pouring; it’s good business. Outside, the rigs kneel and rise in mechanical prayer, and the prairie hums with the same grievance like a church organ that only plays one note.

This is the gospel of our age: rage without compass, rebellion without memory. It moves across borders like an oil slick — thick, glistening, poisoning every reflection it touches.

And somewhere in that glare, el Coronel del Desierto stands again. He has traded the Andes for the plains, the Pacific for the illusion of another sea. He raises his telescope to the west, searching for the shimmer of salvation beyond the pumpjacks, beyond the pipelines, beyond the lie.

But the only tide that comes is the wind — cold, relentless, and empty of mercy.

He lowers the telescope. The crowd has quieted. Somewhere, a flare stack burns like a false star. The Colonel sighs — a sound old as empire — and for a moment, even the rigs seem to bow their heads.

Because they all know, in their bones, what he knows deep down: the ocean was never stolen.

It was sold.

The post “The Great Landlocked Rebellion” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Investiture of a knight (miniature from the statutes of the Order of the Knot, founded in 1352 by Louis I of Naples) – Public Domain

Ever since the Internet was born, along with Big Tech, in the 1990s, the world has had a sense that we have entered a new era in global political economy. Many have tried to place a finger on what this transformation is all about. Perhaps the most famous among these critical thinkers is Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote that we are living in an era of “surveillance capitalism,” wherein our harvesting information from cyberspace also provides Google, Microsoft, and other tech titans the opportunity to rake in data about us that they process to create our digital profiles. These profiles are then used by them or their client corporations to manipulate us into purchasing products or are sold to the state, which has an interest in keeping tabs on us.

Another important effort to define what was new came from Mckenzie Wark, who wrote in her influential Hacker’s Manifesto that the central contradiction of the new age was no longer that between capital and labor but between “hackers,”  or the sources of innovation and creativity who wanted to keep information free, and the “vectoral ruling class” that sought to expropriate knowledge and turn it into a commodity.

Acknowledging his debt to both Zuboff and Wark, Yanis Varoufakis says that while they have important insights, they have not followed these to their logical conclusion: that capitalism as a distinct mode of production has been superseded. The synthesis that Varoufakis offers is what he calls “technofeudalism.” He does not say that capitalists no longer matter. They do, and they still engage in extracting surplus value or profit from workers in the process of production. But they themselves are subordinate to a new elite, the “cloud capitalists” or “cloudalists,” who have privatized the commons that was cyberspace and now control access to it. The cloudalists, among the most powerful of which are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the chipmaker Nvidia, control the globe-spanning information highways that are sustained materially by massive data centers located in different parts of the world. Accessing these intermeshed networks in cyberspace known as the “cloud” is now vital for the traditional or “terrestrial” capitalists to get access to you to sell their products, and these corporate gatekeepers make their money by charging these capitalists rent. Without access to the net, capitalists cannot make profits, and, very much like the feudal lords of yore who controlled land, the cloudalists’ monopolistic control of the cloud allows them to directly or indirectly collect, from the “vassal capitalists” and anyone who uses the net, “rent,” or income that is not subject to the market competition on which profit depends.

Cloud Proles and Cloud Serfs

As in capitalism, it is not the cloudalists or the terrestrial capitalists that produce value. The real sources of value are what Varoufakis calls the “cloud proles” and the “cloud serfs.” The cloud proles are the service workers at Amazon and other Big Tech facilities who are nonunionized, paid meager wages, and in constant threat of being displaced by robots and Artificial Intelligence. But these proles’ labor provides only a fraction of the value extracted by the cloudalists. It is the cloud serfs that create most of that value. Following Zuboff, Varoufakis says the cloud serfs are most of us: we provide raw material for the cloud whenever we do a Google search, post a photo on Facebook, or order a book on Amazon, material that is then processed into information that the cloudalists and terrestrial capitalists can use to develop ever more sophisticated marketing strategies to get us to part with our dollars. The distinguishing characteristic of cloud serfs is they are doing unpaid work for the cloudalists even if they don’t realize it. As he remarks, “The fact that we do so voluntarily, happily even, does not detract from the fact that we are unpaid manufacturers—cloud serfs whose daily self-directed toil enriches a tiny band of multibillionaires.”

We are, in other words, the unsuspecting marks of the ultimate scam.

The Rise of Cloud Capital

Varoufakis traces the rise of the cloudalists to the central banks’ creation of money with zero or below zero interest in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 and, later, during the COVID 19 pandemic, to stimulate production and consumer spending. But, with the big fall in demand, most corporations did not invest the loans the private banks channeled to them, instead using them to buy back their own corporate stocks at low prices or invest it in real estate. But cloudalists like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg used the central bank money rerouted to them by the big banks to massively invest in expanding and monopolizing the cloud. The cloudalists

mopped up many of the billions sloshing around within the financial system.  With them, they paid for server farms, fibre optic cables, artificial intelligence laboratories, gargantuan warehouses, software developers, top-notch engineers, laboratories, promising start-ups and all the rest.  In an environment where profit had become optional, the cloudalists seized upon the central bank money to build a new empire.

Resistance in the Era of Technofeudalism

The central contradiction in the technofeudal era has passed from the conflict between labor and capital to that between the cloudalists and their cloud serfs and cloud proles. Varoufakis is my colleague in the international council of Progressive International (PI), and he has helped inspire PI’s partnership with the Switzerland-based UNI Global Union to organize annual one-day strikes by Amazon workers in many countries. According to him, if these actions could be coordinated with Amazon users, so that a critical mass of them are convinced not to visit the Amazon website for even one day, the impact would not be minimal: “Even if were only mildly successful, causing say a 10 percent drop in Amazon’s usual revenues, while Amazon’s warehouse strike disrupted deliveries for 24 hours, such action might prove enough to push Amazon’s share price down in ways that no traditional labor action could achieve.”

But building a strong resistance movement to the cloudalists will have to go beyond such momentary alliances. “To stand any chance of overthrowing technofeudalism and putting the demos back into democracy,” he writes, “we need to gather together not just the traditional proletariat and the crowd proles but also the cloud serfs and, indeed, some of the vassal capitalists.”

Varoufakis might have added to this “grand coalition” the communities whose lives have been disrupted by Big Data. As a recent New York Times article reports,

As data centers rise, the sites — which need vast amounts of power for computing and water to cool the computers — have contributed to or exacerbated disruptions not only in Mexico, but in more than a dozen other countries…In Ireland, data centers consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity. In Chile, precious aquifers are in danger of depletion. In South Africa, where blackouts have long been routine, data centers are further taxing the national grid. Similar concerns have surfaced in Brazil, Britain, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore and Spain.

Communities forced to host data centers, in fact, are now the cutting edge of resistance to Big Tech. In country after country, notes the report, “activists, residents and environmental organizations have banded together to oppose data centers. Some have tried blocking the projects, while others have pushed for more oversight and transparency.”

Clarification Needed

I have a few comments on some of the key elements of Varoufakis’ paradigm, and these are advanced in a critical but friendly spirit:

First, his conceptualization of the proles appears to include only the low-paid service workers. What about the information engineers and other knowledge specialists and their office staffs? He talks about the role of the “technostructure” in late capitalism in the early part of the book, but it seems he includes the different layers of this stratum in management during the technofeudal era rather than in labor, though as Mckenzie Wark stressed, technical innovators or “hackers” contribute to the value that is expropriated by the Big Tech elite.

Second, there is some ambiguity in the book when it comes to who exactly has the ultimate power in the technofeudal power structure. In most of the book, the billionaire leaders of the Big Tech firms like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook, are portrayed as the power elite. But he also writes about the “financial uber-lords [who] rival the cloudalists—three U.S. companies with powers exceeding those of private equity and all terrestrial capitalists put together: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. These three firms, the Big Three as they are known in financial circles, effectively own American capitalism.” This is due to the controlling shares they own in the most strategic corporations. So, do we have a split power elite with blocs that have different sources of power? Are we really in a post-capitalist era or merely in another (higher? hyper?) stage of capitalism?

This relates to my third point, which is that Varoufakis must do more explaining of how the dynamics of technofeudalism are really distinct from those of monopoly capitalism.

Economists, both progressive and orthodox, have long contended that in a situation of monopoly or oligopoly, as in the car industry or pharmaceuticals, the key players derive profit but they also extract rent, which is profit in excess of what would be available if there were significant market competition. As in the car and drug industries, there is in the Big Tech sector both oligopoly and fierce competition, much of it “non-price competition,” the dynamics of which results in both profit and rent. Are not the dynamics of cloudalist competition really the same? How does monopoly capitalist rent differ from technofeudal rent? How do the earnings of Google, for instance, differ from those of non-Big Tech oligopolists like JP Morgan, Johnson and Johnson, and Toyota, except perhaps in terms of volume?

My last point has to do with the changing relationship between the state and the cloudalists.  In the book, the state mainly appears as an enabler of the rise of the cloudalists via the central banks’ provision of free money in the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the pandemic. Recent developments, however, have seen the state disciplining Big Tech and curbing its freedom of maneuver. Under both the first Trump administration and Biden’s presidency, Washington imposed fairly restrictive measures that cut into the profits of the cloudalists, like the sharing of advanced information technology with Chinese corporations. For instance, export controls on advanced AI chips imposed by Biden in 2022 have drastically reduced Nvidia’s share of the Chinese AI chip market from 95 percent to 50 percent, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars. Under the second Trump administration, Washington has moved even more drastically, using the imposition of tariffs to force cloudalists like Apple to move key parts of their global supply chains to the United States, though this would involve major costs and disruptions. But acknowledging the state’s commanding role, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated recently, “The president wants more [production] in the US…Apple also wants more in the US.”

On Accurately Naming the Beast

Varoufakis does note the more prominent role of the state represented by these latest developments. However, he does not fully draw out their implications for what he has portrayed as the immense power of the cloudalists and what lies ahead for them. From the enabler of the cloudalists portrayed in Technofeudalism, the relationship between the state and Big Tech in the United States is becoming more like that between the Chinese Communist Party regime and China’s data titans like Alibaba and Baidu, as the geopolitical rivalry heats up and national security concerns, not profitability, take center stage. China’s political economy has been called state capitalism or political capitalism (with only the Communist Party of China clinging on to Deng Xiaoping’s definition of it as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). Varoufakis contends that the choice of a name is critical to understanding the essence of a political economy. I agree.  But to underline what is likely to be become an even bigger directive role for the state in the political economy of the United States and the increasing subordination of profitability to national security, I think we need a better word than “technofeudalism.” (This would have the added benefit of avoiding the subliminal association of the title to Friedrich Hayek’s classic anti-socialist neoliberal tract, The Road to Serfdom.)

Technofeudalism is a provocative piece of analysis, well-argued and well-written. And it is very accessible to those with little background in political economy or economics. There may be areas where I may not completely agree or points that I feel should be more carefully elaborated, but these should not detract from my judgment that this book by one of today’s leading progressive thinkers is a major contribution to understanding the times we live in.

The post Have We Entered a New Feudal Era? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Investiture of a knight (miniature from the statutes of the Order of the Knot, founded in 1352 by Louis I of Naples) – Public Domain

Ever since the Internet was born, along with Big Tech, in the 1990s, the world has had a sense that we have entered a new era in global political economy. Many have tried to place a finger on what this transformation is all about. Perhaps the most famous among these critical thinkers is Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote that we are living in an era of “surveillance capitalism,” wherein our harvesting information from cyberspace also provides Google, Microsoft, and other tech titans the opportunity to rake in data about us that they process to create our digital profiles. These profiles are then used by them or their client corporations to manipulate us into purchasing products or are sold to the state, which has an interest in keeping tabs on us.

Another important effort to define what was new came from Mckenzie Wark, who wrote in her influential Hacker’s Manifesto that the central contradiction of the new age was no longer that between capital and labor but between “hackers,”  or the sources of innovation and creativity who wanted to keep information free, and the “vectoral ruling class” that sought to expropriate knowledge and turn it into a commodity.

Acknowledging his debt to both Zuboff and Wark, Yanis Varoufakis says that while they have important insights, they have not followed these to their logical conclusion: that capitalism as a distinct mode of production has been superseded. The synthesis that Varoufakis offers is what he calls “technofeudalism.” He does not say that capitalists no longer matter. They do, and they still engage in extracting surplus value or profit from workers in the process of production. But they themselves are subordinate to a new elite, the “cloud capitalists” or “cloudalists,” who have privatized the commons that was cyberspace and now control access to it. The cloudalists, among the most powerful of which are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the chipmaker Nvidia, control the globe-spanning information highways that are sustained materially by massive data centers located in different parts of the world. Accessing these intermeshed networks in cyberspace known as the “cloud” is now vital for the traditional or “terrestrial” capitalists to get access to you to sell their products, and these corporate gatekeepers make their money by charging these capitalists rent. Without access to the net, capitalists cannot make profits, and, very much like the feudal lords of yore who controlled land, the cloudalists’ monopolistic control of the cloud allows them to directly or indirectly collect, from the “vassal capitalists” and anyone who uses the net, “rent,” or income that is not subject to the market competition on which profit depends.

Cloud Proles and Cloud Serfs

As in capitalism, it is not the cloudalists or the terrestrial capitalists that produce value. The real sources of value are what Varoufakis calls the “cloud proles” and the “cloud serfs.” The cloud proles are the service workers at Amazon and other Big Tech facilities who are nonunionized, paid meager wages, and in constant threat of being displaced by robots and Artificial Intelligence. But these proles’ labor provides only a fraction of the value extracted by the cloudalists. It is the cloud serfs that create most of that value. Following Zuboff, Varoufakis says the cloud serfs are most of us: we provide raw material for the cloud whenever we do a Google search, post a photo on Facebook, or order a book on Amazon, material that is then processed into information that the cloudalists and terrestrial capitalists can use to develop ever more sophisticated marketing strategies to get us to part with our dollars. The distinguishing characteristic of cloud serfs is they are doing unpaid work for the cloudalists even if they don’t realize it. As he remarks, “The fact that we do so voluntarily, happily even, does not detract from the fact that we are unpaid manufacturers—cloud serfs whose daily self-directed toil enriches a tiny band of multibillionaires.”

We are, in other words, the unsuspecting marks of the ultimate scam.

The Rise of Cloud Capital

Varoufakis traces the rise of the cloudalists to the central banks’ creation of money with zero or below zero interest in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 and, later, during the COVID 19 pandemic, to stimulate production and consumer spending. But, with the big fall in demand, most corporations did not invest the loans the private banks channeled to them, instead using them to buy back their own corporate stocks at low prices or invest it in real estate. But cloudalists like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg used the central bank money rerouted to them by the big banks to massively invest in expanding and monopolizing the cloud. The cloudalists

mopped up many of the billions sloshing around within the financial system.  With them, they paid for server farms, fibre optic cables, artificial intelligence laboratories, gargantuan warehouses, software developers, top-notch engineers, laboratories, promising start-ups and all the rest.  In an environment where profit had become optional, the cloudalists seized upon the central bank money to build a new empire.

Resistance in the Era of Technofeudalism

The central contradiction in the technofeudal era has passed from the conflict between labor and capital to that between the cloudalists and their cloud serfs and cloud proles. Varoufakis is my colleague in the international council of Progressive International (PI), and he has helped inspire PI’s partnership with the Switzerland-based UNI Global Union to organize annual one-day strikes by Amazon workers in many countries. According to him, if these actions could be coordinated with Amazon users, so that a critical mass of them are convinced not to visit the Amazon website for even one day, the impact would not be minimal: “Even if were only mildly successful, causing say a 10 percent drop in Amazon’s usual revenues, while Amazon’s warehouse strike disrupted deliveries for 24 hours, such action might prove enough to push Amazon’s share price down in ways that no traditional labor action could achieve.”

But building a strong resistance movement to the cloudalists will have to go beyond such momentary alliances. “To stand any chance of overthrowing technofeudalism and putting the demos back into democracy,” he writes, “we need to gather together not just the traditional proletariat and the crowd proles but also the cloud serfs and, indeed, some of the vassal capitalists.”

Varoufakis might have added to this “grand coalition” the communities whose lives have been disrupted by Big Data. As a recent New York Times article reports,

As data centers rise, the sites — which need vast amounts of power for computing and water to cool the computers — have contributed to or exacerbated disruptions not only in Mexico, but in more than a dozen other countries…In Ireland, data centers consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity. In Chile, precious aquifers are in danger of depletion. In South Africa, where blackouts have long been routine, data centers are further taxing the national grid. Similar concerns have surfaced in Brazil, Britain, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore and Spain.

Communities forced to host data centers, in fact, are now the cutting edge of resistance to Big Tech. In country after country, notes the report, “activists, residents and environmental organizations have banded together to oppose data centers. Some have tried blocking the projects, while others have pushed for more oversight and transparency.”

Clarification Needed

I have a few comments on some of the key elements of Varoufakis’ paradigm, and these are advanced in a critical but friendly spirit:

First, his conceptualization of the proles appears to include only the low-paid service workers. What about the information engineers and other knowledge specialists and their office staffs? He talks about the role of the “technostructure” in late capitalism in the early part of the book, but it seems he includes the different layers of this stratum in management during the technofeudal era rather than in labor, though as Mckenzie Wark stressed, technical innovators or “hackers” contribute to the value that is expropriated by the Big Tech elite.

Second, there is some ambiguity in the book when it comes to who exactly has the ultimate power in the technofeudal power structure. In most of the book, the billionaire leaders of the Big Tech firms like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook, are portrayed as the power elite. But he also writes about the “financial uber-lords [who] rival the cloudalists—three U.S. companies with powers exceeding those of private equity and all terrestrial capitalists put together: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. These three firms, the Big Three as they are known in financial circles, effectively own American capitalism.” This is due to the controlling shares they own in the most strategic corporations. So, do we have a split power elite with blocs that have different sources of power? Are we really in a post-capitalist era or merely in another (higher? hyper?) stage of capitalism?

This relates to my third point, which is that Varoufakis must do more explaining of how the dynamics of technofeudalism are really distinct from those of monopoly capitalism.

Economists, both progressive and orthodox, have long contended that in a situation of monopoly or oligopoly, as in the car industry or pharmaceuticals, the key players derive profit but they also extract rent, which is profit in excess of what would be available if there were significant market competition. As in the car and drug industries, there is in the Big Tech sector both oligopoly and fierce competition, much of it “non-price competition,” the dynamics of which results in both profit and rent. Are not the dynamics of cloudalist competition really the same? How does monopoly capitalist rent differ from technofeudal rent? How do the earnings of Google, for instance, differ from those of non-Big Tech oligopolists like JP Morgan, Johnson and Johnson, and Toyota, except perhaps in terms of volume?

My last point has to do with the changing relationship between the state and the cloudalists.  In the book, the state mainly appears as an enabler of the rise of the cloudalists via the central banks’ provision of free money in the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the pandemic. Recent developments, however, have seen the state disciplining Big Tech and curbing its freedom of maneuver. Under both the first Trump administration and Biden’s presidency, Washington imposed fairly restrictive measures that cut into the profits of the cloudalists, like the sharing of advanced information technology with Chinese corporations. For instance, export controls on advanced AI chips imposed by Biden in 2022 have drastically reduced Nvidia’s share of the Chinese AI chip market from 95 percent to 50 percent, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars. Under the second Trump administration, Washington has moved even more drastically, using the imposition of tariffs to force cloudalists like Apple to move key parts of their global supply chains to the United States, though this would involve major costs and disruptions. But acknowledging the state’s commanding role, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated recently, “The president wants more [production] in the US…Apple also wants more in the US.”

On Accurately Naming the Beast

Varoufakis does note the more prominent role of the state represented by these latest developments. However, he does not fully draw out their implications for what he has portrayed as the immense power of the cloudalists and what lies ahead for them. From the enabler of the cloudalists portrayed in Technofeudalism, the relationship between the state and Big Tech in the United States is becoming more like that between the Chinese Communist Party regime and China’s data titans like Alibaba and Baidu, as the geopolitical rivalry heats up and national security concerns, not profitability, take center stage. China’s political economy has been called state capitalism or political capitalism (with only the Communist Party of China clinging on to Deng Xiaoping’s definition of it as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). Varoufakis contends that the choice of a name is critical to understanding the essence of a political economy. I agree.  But to underline what is likely to be become an even bigger directive role for the state in the political economy of the United States and the increasing subordination of profitability to national security, I think we need a better word than “technofeudalism.” (This would have the added benefit of avoiding the subliminal association of the title to Friedrich Hayek’s classic anti-socialist neoliberal tract, The Road to Serfdom.)

Technofeudalism is a provocative piece of analysis, well-argued and well-written. And it is very accessible to those with little background in political economy or economics. There may be areas where I may not completely agree or points that I feel should be more carefully elaborated, but these should not detract from my judgment that this book by one of today’s leading progressive thinkers is a major contribution to understanding the times we live in.

The post Have We Entered a New Feudal Era? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by María Alejandra Mora, Wikipedia.

For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.

As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Nightstalkers” — the same unit that, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.

Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005 an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”

Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away — but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

This was how the Bush–Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The UN reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly a million Iraqis died overall.

Iraq has never fully recovered—and the U.S. never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected U.S.-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey—not the United States.

The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal”—or simply the destruction of a country or society.

A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, U.S.-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking—while making life worse for ordinary people.

These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.

Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main U.S. ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.

In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban—the very force it had invaded the country to remove.

In Haiti, the CIA and U.S. Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.

In 2006, the U.S. militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government—an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. U.S. AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.

In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the U.S. supported an election to replace him. The U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration—until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.

Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the U.S. and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries and a 45% reduction in oil exports.

Also in 2011, the U.S. and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the U.S.-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, Al Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. still militarily occupy other parts of the country.

The U.S.-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.

In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a U.S.-backed transitional government, the U.S. joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis—yet did not defeat the Houthis.

That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the U.S. has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.

But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. U.S. presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.

In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots—attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean—have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by U.S. senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.

Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it—and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.

Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of  Iran. He has maintained the global empire of U.S. military bases and deployments, and supercharged the U.S. war machine with a trillion dollar war chest—draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.

Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.

Brazilian President Lula made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.” At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over U.S. investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.

Cuba-bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as Secretary of State it renders him incapable of responsibly managing U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.

Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.

If there is one lesson from the long history of U.S. interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial U.S. violence once and for all.

The post “Regime Change” in Venezuela is a Euphemism for U.S.-Inflicted Carnage appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image Source: TUBS – CC BY-SA 3.0

Multilateralism is in tatters. Instead of rules-based, consensus agreements, global economic relations have largely devolved into one-on-one arm-twisting and name-calling — alternating with fawning sycophancy and lavish personal gifts to curry favor with President Trump, from private jets to gold-covered golf balls, crowns, and desserts.

In a world already divided by extreme inequalities, the collapse of multilateralism makes it even more likely that the most powerful players — the largest economies and the wealthiest corporations and individuals — will score the best deals. Small countries and ordinary people, from Iowa soybean farmers and Mexican factory workers to digital service consumers in Cambodia, are even more likely to get the shaft.

The G20 is a space that was intended to catalyze multilateral action. In fact, it touts itself as the “the premier forum for international economic cooperation,” and it is the one place where leaders of the world’s largest economies sit down together at least once a year for face-to-face dialogue.

South Africa will host this year’s G20 summit from November 22 to 23, and the United States will host the next one in December 2026. Do we have any reason to think this forum holds potential for not only restoring multilateralism but also advancing a more equitable global economy?

This is a question I’ve grappled with over the past several months as part of a team of analysts from the UK, Brazil, South Africa, and other countries. In our new joint report, The G20 at a Crossroads, we document a few examples of decisive actions this body has taken during its nearly two decades of existence.

In the midst of the financial crisis that erupted in 2008, for instance, labor unions and others successfully lobbied G20 leaders to adopt coordinated stimulus measures that helped avoid a depression-level global collapse.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the G20 approved of at least some debt relief for low-income countries and authorized $650 billion in financial aid in the form of “special drawing rights,” the largest-ever allocation of this IMF-created international reserve asset.

These actions were far from perfect. Governments prematurely aborted the stimulus programs they adopted after the 2008 crash in favor of austerity budgets that deepened and prolonged economic crises.

Pandemic support programs were woefully insufficient for the poorest countries and failed to prevent many of them from sinking even further into debt. Between 2019 and 2023, Sub-Saharan Africa’s total external debts increased from $747 billion to $864 billion while the number of global billionaires grew from 2,153 to 2,640. Overall, 3.4 billion of the world’s people live in countries that spent more money in the years 2021-2023 servicing their foreign debts than on public education or health.

What can we learn from these examples? G20 leaders obviously have the power to mobilize vast resources, but the few times they’ve used this power, the focus has largely been on containing market crises to protect the interests of the wealthiest creditors and investors rather than improving the lives of the most vulnerable.

And so while we need to push for renewed multilateralism, we cannot be satisfied with a return to old models. We need new approaches that go beyond crisis management to build a more resilient, sustainable, and just global economy for the long term.

To achieve this, the G20 must tackle what we describe in our report as the “lived crises of our time” — the daily realities of extreme droughts, food insecurity, unaffordable housing, precarious work, debt traps, and forced displacement.

Decades of neglecting these threats to global stability has undercut the welfare of people in both the Global North and South. High levels of poverty and unemployment in the developing world, for example, weaken the bargaining power of U.S. workers who are competing in a global labor pool.

Climate change, obviously, knows no boundaries. And skyrocketing inequality is fueling political polarization, authoritarianism, and xenophobia around the world, as elites deflect blame onto migrants and other convenient scapegoats instead of confronting structural failures.

Last year, the Brazilian presidency took important steps towards broadening the G20 agenda. Through diplomacy, sustained civil society engagement, and collaboration with innovative academics, they elevated critical proposals for clean energy financing, taxing extreme wealth, and valuing care work. And while they did not secure G20-wide cooperation on these fronts, their efforts gave a boost to campaigns in numerous countries for increasing taxes on billionaires and ensuring decent pay for caregivers and affordable care for those who need it.

“Wherever we live, we all want the same things — a secure place to live, a healthy environment, the ability to care for our loved ones, and the chance to plan for our future,” notes our lead report author, Fernanda Balata, of the New Economics Foundation.

With political will and a commitment to cooperation, G20 leaders have the power to deliver these basic elements of a dignified life to billions of people.

The post Can the G20 Do More Than Serve Markets and Investors? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph Source: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety – CC BY-SA 3.0

I learned basic arithmetic skills in third grade. I wasn’t exceptional; everyone in my public school third-grade class learned them. Of course, we all can now use computers to have calculations done for us in a fraction of a second. But still, somehow we have major national debates that show zero understanding of even the most basic arithmetic.

The latest example is the $2,000 tariff dividend check that Trump is promising us. The arithmetic here is about as simple as it gets. We have roughly 340 million people in the country. Let’s say 10 percent don’t get the check because they meet Trump’s category of “high-income.”

That leaves over 300 million people getting Trump’s $2,000 checks. That comes to more than $600 billion. Trump’s tariffs are raising around $270 billion. That means we will be paying out $330 billion more in Trump tariff dividend checks than he is raising in tariff revenue. That would add $270 billion to the deficit — this coming from the same guy who is making an obsession of paying down our national debt.

And just to be clear, we were already looking at a budget deficit for 2026 of $1.8 trillion. If we add $330 billion, the deficit for the fiscal year will be $2.1 trillion. To put this in simple language that even a reporter for a major national news outlet can understand, Trump is proposing to add $2.1 trillion to the debt in 2026; he is not paying it down.

I acknowledge not being a deficit hawk and am not terrified by a deficit of this size, which is roughly 7 percent of GDP. But I suspect most of the politicians in Washington are, and certainly anyone who thinks we need to be paying down the debt should be screaming bloody murder.

But watching the reaction in major media outlets, there seems almost no appreciation of the fact that Trump was floating what would ordinarily be considered a very large increase in the deficit. In fact, if Trump were to give this tariff dividend check every year over the next decade, it would add close to $4 trillion to the debt (counting interest payments), almost as much as the big tax cut Congress approved earlier this year.

It’s also worth comparing Trump’s tariff dividends to other items in the news. The government shutdown was in large part over the $35 billion in annual payments for enhanced subsidies for people buying insurance in Obamacare exchanges. Trump and Republicans in Congress claimed that we didn’t have the money to pay for these subsidies. Trump’s tariff dividend checks would cost more than 17 times as much as the enhanced insurance subsidies.

To make another comparison, Trump saved us around $6 billion a year by shutting down PEPFAR, the program that has saved tens of millions of lives by treating people in Africa for AIDS. This means that Trump’s tariff dividend checks will cost us 100 times as much as the AIDS program that he said we couldn’t afford.

And just to throw in one more comparison, the annual appropriation for public broadcasting was $550 million. Trump’s tariff dividend checks would cost more than 1,000 times as much as the government’s payments for public broadcasting.

People can differ in their views on how important it is to save lives in Africa or provide people here with healthcare. They may also differ in their assessments of how important deficits are. But it really would be good if media outlets could make knowledge of third grade arithmetic a job requirement for reporters who deal with budget issues. It should be their job to provide meaningful information to the public on the topic. Letting someone talk about $2,000 dividend checks, and also about paying down the debt, is a sick joke.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. 

The post Tariff Dividend Checks for Dummies (i.e., the People in Policy Debates) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph Source: Beyond My Ken – CC BY-SA 4.0

When veterans and their families gather at commemorative events on Nov. 11, many who use the benefits and services of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will be wondering whether they can still rely on that federal agency.

Among those worried about the agency’s future — and their own — are the 100,000 former service members who comprise one-third of the workforce in the largest public health care system in the country.

These veterans work at nearly 1,400 VA-run hospitals and clinics nationwide. Every day, they help the nine million men and women who have service-related medical conditions or qualify for VA coverage because of financial need or recent deployment in combat zones.

The fact that so many VA caregivers have first-hand experience with the military–and resulting wounds of war–creates a culture of solidarity and empathy between patients and providers that is unique in U.S. health care.

But the Trump administration doesn’t seem to appreciate the importance of veterans getting specialized, high-quality services from a skilled, committed and union-represented workforce.

Since January, political appointees in Washington have canceled the contracts of VA researchers developing new treatments that can save veterans’ lives (and benefit millions of non-VA patients). VA Secretary Doug Collins has reduced the agency’s in-house clinical care budget and pledged to cut 30,000 positions this year. More patients are now being referred to private sector treatment — which is often costlier, of lower quality and not as accessible, particularly in rural states. And, in a move still being challenged in court, Collins has deprived 300,000 workers of their collective bargaining rights.

In 2022, VA doctors, nurses, therapists and thousands of support staff members used their collective voice to block VA facility closings sought by the Biden administration. VA nurses have campaigned for better nurse-patient staffing ratios to improve patient safety and for the use of lift equipmentthat protects both patients and their bedside helpers.

Union members at the VA have also blown the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse involving unnecessary outsourcing of VA services, which costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars each year. Recently, 170 current and retired VA clinicians recently signed an open letter warning that, if this privatization trend continues, it will “undermine direct care delivery, overwhelm (the) VA’s budget and negatively affect the lives of all veterans.”

The letter reminded Congress, the White House and VA Secretary Doug Collins that the VA has a long history of “continuous improvement and innovation,” which has made it a “respected model for integrated, patient-centered medicine” as well as “the system that the vast majority of veterans trust and prefer for their care.”

VA patients and their families have been showing up at local and national protests against privatization. They are joined by veterans’ groups that range from progressive to conservative and differ on many issues but all agree on one thing: saving the VA.

Women veterans — now the fastest-growing part of the U.S. veteran population — are very active in this fight, according to Kyleanne Hunter, the former Cobra attack helicopter pilot who now heads Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

“Women veterans need a strong and highly functioning VA because we have unique needs, not only when compared to those of male veterans but also to women who are civilian patients,” Hunter told us in an interview. “Anyone who takes care of women vets needs to understand the jobs women had in the military and the injuries and exposures we may have sustained and how that impacts our health.”

A healthy nation depends on a healthy VA; this Veterans Day, let’s recommit to keeping it that way.

The post This Veterans Day, the VA Faces Multiple Threats appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Depiction of Rip Van Winkle by John Quidor (1829)

There is an old children’s tale about Rip Van Winkle. He fell asleep for 20 years and wakes up after the America Revolution and finds the world has changed in big ways. Donald Trump seems to be doing his own Rip Van Winkle routine. This weekend, Trump suggested that as an alternative to Obamacare — which he said feeds the “money sucking” insurance industry — we just give money directly to people and let them buy their own healthcare.

This is a Rip Van Winkle story because Trump seems to think he has come up with a new idea. He apparently has missed the debate around healthcare reform that led up to Obamacare. He also apparently missed the debate on developing an alternative during his first term.

While we don’t know exactly what Trump has in mind (the plan will be ready in two weeks:), I hear) there are fundamental problems with this sort of just-give-people-cash idea. These problems push serious people, who have been awake, towards something like Obamacare or universal Medicare.

The basic problem of providing healthcare coverage is that some people have health conditions that are very expensive to treat, but most people are relatively healthy. If we just left things to the market, insurers would only cover healthy people. These people are very profitable for the industry, since they are basically just sending their insurer a check every month.

Trump Checks: Who Gets Them, and How Much?

The problem is with the tens of millions of people who have health issues like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or other conditions. These people are big money losers for the industry. They will avoid insuring them if they can, or alternatively charge them tens of thousands a year for coverage. They may also contest making payments by claiming people had failed to disclose their health conditions when they applied for insurance. I briefly went through the problems of the pre-ACA insurance market a few weeks back.

If Trump just gives people cash, it will do nothing to get around these problems. First, it is not clear which people he wants to give cash, and which cash. If he just means the enhanced subsides, he has around $35 billion a year to play with. Currently, around 22 million people get the enhanced subsidies, so that would imply checks of around $1.600 a year.

But there are another 28 million people currently without insurance, and another 2 million getting insurance in the exchanges without subsidies. Surely these people should be eligible for the Trump checks also. That would come to 52 million people sharing $35 billion, giving them each a check of less than $700.

Making the story even more complicated, people gain and lose coverage all the time, as they or a family member gets hired or leave a job with insurance. They may also gain or lose coverage for a government program like Medicaid. This means Trump has to figure out whether he will be sending out his checks once a year, giving many people a huge bonus and screwing those who lose their job after the cutoff date. Alternatively, this would have to be some sort of recurring payment, monthly or quarterly.

Perhaps Trump intends to take all the money going to Obamacare, not just the enhanced subsidies — which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities puts at $125 billion — and roll it into his Trump checks. That would make them around $1,900 a year.

The next question is what Trump expects people to do with their money. A young healthy person may be able to cover their healthcare costs with $1,900 a year, but even these people would likely want insurance against the risk they may incur a serious illness or be in some sort of accident. Good luck finding insurance for $170 a month.

And the problem is far worse for older people and people with major health issues. In an unregulated insurance market, these people would be paying thousands of dollars a month for their insurance. Their Trump check will not go very far towards covering a premium of several thousand dollars a month.

Perhaps Trump plans to keep the Obamacare restrictions that require insurers to cover everyone, regardless of health condition, and prohibits discriminating based on health condition. That would limit the payments for people with health problems, but it would still mean premiums that dwarf the size of the Trump checks, especially for those in the oldest pre-Medicare age bracket 55-64.

That would also put us basically where we are now except the checks would be smaller and untargeted, since all people without insurance — not just those enrolling in the exchanges — would be getting checks. Also, the current payments are adjusted by income. We don’t know whether Trump plans his checks to be income-based.

And in this story, the money would still be going to money sucking insurance companies, except presumably with less regulation so that the money sucking insurance companies could suck up more money. Under Obamacare, insurers have to pay out at least 80 percent of what they collect in premiums to providers, otherwise their customers get a rebate. Since Trump wants to get the government out of the picture, the insurers could presumably pocket even more money.

Medicare Advantage and “Money Sucking”

If Trump really wants to go after the money sucking insurance companies, getting them out of Medicare would be a great start. They mostly add costs to the program. He can improve the traditional program, adding dental, eyecare, and hearing coverage, and also imposing an out-of-pocket cap, and stop paying money sucking insurers in the Medicare Advantage program. Due to their higher administrative costs and profits, Medicare Advantage costs the government at least $100 billion a year compared to the traditional Medicare program.

If we’re really serious about cracking down on the money sucking insurance companies, why not go all the way and just provide universal Medicare. This would not only save the money directly paid to insurers, it would also eliminate much of the cost that hospitals, doctors’ offices and other providers have to incur dealing with complex forms from multiple insurers. This could save as much as $1 trillion($8,000 per household) a year compared to what we pay now for administrative costs and insurance industry profits.

A universal Medicare system would also mean that everyone has access to healthcare regardless of where they work, what government program they qualify for, or if they remembered to pay their insurance premium last month. Not many would have expected Donald Trump to be the person to get us to Medicare for All, but if he really wants to crack down on money sucking insurance companies, that would be the way to go. Welcome aboard, comrade!

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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Photo by NASA

The U.S.-UK technology deal announced in September 2025 promises to accelerate Britain’s AI sector, but critics warn it will happen at the expense of national tech sovereignty. It reflects the steady trend of U.S. government and private interests extending a technologically driven form of hegemony, employing communications, data, and AI systems to deepen dependence on American networks and weaponize against rivals.

China has built a parallel structure of influence through its own technology exports, manufacturing base, and integrated supply chains, challenging the American model without the costly global military footprint. And unlike earlier empires, Washington’s and Beijing’s systems increasingly overlap: Spain, long considered a reliable partner for American tech firms and data security, has faced U.S. pressure after contracting with Chinese company Huawei in July to store judicial wiretap data.

Yet both tech-driven networks face a growing diffusion of capability. Advances in manufacturing, resource mapping, and digital development are making it easier for smaller states to build industries that have until now been dominated by major powers—“Small countries like Taiwan and the Netherlands have curated specialized offerings in niche parts of the global AI supply chain,” stated an article in the digital law and policy journal Just Security. A more balanced and competitive order could emerge, though the U.S. and China still retain major leverage.

The U.S. has maintained a strong foreign presence for more than a century. When Elihu Root became Secretary of War in 1899, he had already spent decades cultivating the nation’s elites as a lawyer and once in office, he modernized the army for sustained overseas operations. Subsequent American expansion in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines was framed as paternal administration—to spread the “civilizing mission” to those less fortunate in need of a long period of paternal tuition—rather than colonial conquest. Yet military power remained central to advancing government and private American interests.

After World War II, the collapse of European empires left the U.S. and the Soviet Union with competing spheres of influence. Unlike Moscow’s more militarized approach, “Washington’s forms of control were more in accordance with the will of the local populations,” creating what scholars called an “empire by invitation,” according to Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad. Military and subversive power were often used to promote U.S. interests, but many states partnered voluntarily to receive financial and technical assistance.

With the Soviet collapse in 1991, the U.S. entered a new phase of expansion. Technologies like GPS, which reached full global coverage in 1993, expanded American power as a “silent utility” providing an increasingly essential service. The rapid spread of the internet under U.S. oversight further extended American standards and control across global communications, while the rise of tech giants like Microsoft, Intel, and Google embedded U.S. software and hardware at the center of globalized technology systems.

Even as global military demobilization followed the Cold War, Washington demonstrated its continued combat and technological dominance through limited conflicts in the Persian Gulf and precision strikes in the Balkans. Dominating global arms exports, it deepened leverage by integrating more countries into U.S. weapons systems and defense supply chains.

Yet within years, the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the limits of invasions and occupation, which no longer guaranteed control over resources or populations. As of March 2025, America had 1.3 million personnel stationed abroad, reflecting an outdated emphasis on physical presence. With nearly 90 percent of corporate assets in advanced economies now intangible, such as software, patents, and intellectual property, the same logic applies to power projection. Digital networks and remote capabilities have replaced much of what permanent garrisons once represented.

Trump’s October 2025 suggestion to reclaim Afghanistan’s Bagram airbase to counter China, if genuine, reflects the durability of that older strategic thinking. Analysts noted that most of the surveillance and strike capabilities he referenced are already met through long-endurance drones, sensor arrays, and satellites. The vulnerability of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea to drones and missile strikes during the war with Ukraine further shows the new limits of fixed bases in contested regions.

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. had already adjusted military strategy toward targeted strikes, digital surveillance, cyber operations, and space-based surveillance, collectively known as “triple canopy.” These measures expanded under the Trump and Biden administrations, with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) unveiling major advances in biometric drones that are capable of more effectively identifying and targeting individuals.

Space has regained its centrality to reducing the sprawling American military burden. In September 2025, the Space Development Agency launched the first phase of its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a mesh of low-orbit satellites for global surveillance and communication.

Other programs like the Golden Dome, building on Reagan’s “Star Wars” and Obama’s triple canopy concepts, seek to fuse space, land, and cyber networks into an automated U.S. defense grid integrated with the private sector. AI and autonomous ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems have steadily outsourced more decision-making to code.

Much of this technological architecture extends beyond the military. Dual-use systems like Starlink and integrated AI tools have become indispensable to governments and populations alike. Many countries host their public data on American cloud servers, while their citizens communicate through WhatsApp and pay for services through Google Pay—daily dependencies maintained without a single U.S. soldier in sight.

China’s Challenge

China is also building counterspace weapons and satellite systems to resist U.S. orbital dominance, and its military capabilities are similarly matched by strategic and commercial components. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, and its digital extension, the Digital Silk Road, have grown to rival U.S. initiatives. For the first time, Washington faces a competitor able to offer countries comparable material benefits on a scale that not even the Soviet Union’s foreign infrastructure projects ever achieved.

Despite Western alarm over the security risks associated with Chinese technology, many developing and emerging countries continue to adoptChinese digital infrastructure. High-quality equipment, low costs, and state-backed financing have made Chinese systems indispensable even for governments aware of the surveillance and dependency potential, which is also true of U.S. technology.

China’s digital infrastructure is deliberately designed for interoperability with subsequent Chinese technologies, ensuring that upgrades and maintenance depend on continued Chinese support.

As economist Dev Nathan noted, one of the major ways 21st-century imperialism operates is through global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks. China’s specialization in production means its GVCs extract value without directly exporting capital. By flooding markets with essential technologies to undercut competitors in smartphones, power grids, payment apps, and communication technologies, it is creating layered dependencies across industries.

The manufacturing and logistics dimension of China’s overseas influence is evident across Europe, once the center of global industrial and imperial power. Belgium’s port of Zeebrugge is now 85.5 percent owned by China’s Cosco, which also holds stakes in nearby Antwerp, Rotterdam, and other European ports. Automated Chinese cranes unload Chinese cargo guided by Chinese logistics software and tracking platforms, giving Beijing a presence at every level of the supply chain.

U.S. influence remains entrenched, however, and Washington has pressured European allies to block Huawei infrastructure projects and restrict Chinese access to advanced technology sectors. American-based platforms, from social media to cloud infrastructure to software systems, continue to dominate Europe’s digital ecosystems, and under U.S. pressure, Denmark recently seized a China-owned chipmaker operating in the country, Nexperia, citing “serious governance shortcomings.”

While China has met strong resistance to expanding its technological footprint in Europe, it has emerged as the development partner of choice for much of the Global South. Companies such as Huawei and ZTE now dominate the global 5G market, supplying infrastructure and equipment to dozens of countries. “China is now a major force in the digital development of Global South countries, with important implications for their digital economies, societies, policies, etc.,” stated an article in the journal Information Society.

Chinese exports of electronics and electric vehicles have also surged, with more than half now going to non-OECD countries. In the first eight months of 2025, exports to Latin America and the Caribbean rose 11 percent compared to 2024, while shipments increased by 72 percent in the Middle East, 75 percent to ASEAN countries, and 287 percent to Africa compared to last year. In renewable energy, China leads in solar panel and wind turbine production, driving down global costs and accelerating green transitions.

These are emerging technologies where China is gaining an early lead, creating dependencies that could last for years.

While China maintains no formal military presence abroad, security measures nonetheless help support its aspirations. Its Global Development Initiative for infrastructure-led growth is complemented by the Global Security Initiativefor cooperative stability. Chinese policing programs also provide training and joint security patrols in partner countries, while private military companieshelp secure BRI infrastructure alongside local and national forces.

Diffusion of Tech Power

Breaking the U.S.-China tech infrastructure duopoly is a formidable challenge, and Russia’s war in Ukraine illustrates how dependent Moscow remains on the old paradigm of territorial control, spurred partly by its limited ability to compete through modern, networked influence.

Even so, Russia has experimented with tech services-based model of empire, achieving some success in providing tech surveillance in Belarus and Central Asia, and with its GLONASS global navigation service. In 2024, Russia also signed agreements with Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger to supply satellites and telecommunications systems, while Russian aerospace firm Bureau 1440 is attempting to develop a global broadband network.

Despite these efforts, Russia lags behind, and its window to expand influence may be closing as a wider flattening of technological capabilities takes hold. Factories, technologies, and resources have become easier to localize, eroding the advantages once held by major powers.

“Lights out” automated factories, for example, reduce the appeal of foreign labor, while factory construction has become more streamlined. During the Biden administration’s reshoring and friendshoring manufacturing initiatives, for example, China quickly established industrial plants in Mexico. While this demonstrated China’s manufacturing dominance, it also highlighted how easily industrial capacity could be replicated abroad. India and Southeast Asian countries have similarly scaled up their manufacturing in recent years, diffusing China’s previous concentration of power.

The same decentralizing trend is visible in financial technology. Brazil’s Pix system, unveiled in 2020, shows that middle-power countries can now develop independent digital payment networks without relying on Chinese or American financial infrastructure.

Resource control is likewise losing its traditional strategic weight. Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, for example, was once seen as a critical prize for conquest, but now matters less as renewable energy and advanced minerals mapping technologies have expanded supply. After years of focuson South American lithium reserves, Germany recently announced one of the world’s largest deposits, and it is unlikely to be the last breakthrough discovery.

As scarcity potentially declines and technology and manufacturing become more widely distributed, the competition for resources and the monopolies that once defined empire may finally begin to ease. Yet the collapse of technological empires means military force could once again become the main instrument of power, as Russia has demonstrated.

Another issue lies in American and Chinese entities simply consolidating their technological dominance, stifling or hijacking innovation, and blocking new systems from emerging. Even as capabilities begin to flatten globally, both powers remain invested in preserving their rivalry rather than allowing a more open order to emerge.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post Technology Empires and the Race to Cement Dominance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by NASA

The U.S.-UK technology deal announced in September 2025 promises to accelerate Britain’s AI sector, but critics warn it will happen at the expense of national tech sovereignty. It reflects the steady trend of U.S. government and private interests extending a technologically driven form of hegemony, employing communications, data, and AI systems to deepen dependence on American networks and weaponize against rivals.

China has built a parallel structure of influence through its own technology exports, manufacturing base, and integrated supply chains, challenging the American model without the costly global military footprint. And unlike earlier empires, Washington’s and Beijing’s systems increasingly overlap: Spain, long considered a reliable partner for American tech firms and data security, has faced U.S. pressure after contracting with Chinese company Huawei in July to store judicial wiretap data.

Yet both tech-driven networks face a growing diffusion of capability. Advances in manufacturing, resource mapping, and digital development are making it easier for smaller states to build industries that have until now been dominated by major powers—“Small countries like Taiwan and the Netherlands have curated specialized offerings in niche parts of the global AI supply chain,” stated an article in the digital law and policy journal Just Security. A more balanced and competitive order could emerge, though the U.S. and China still retain major leverage.

The U.S. has maintained a strong foreign presence for more than a century. When Elihu Root became Secretary of War in 1899, he had already spent decades cultivating the nation’s elites as a lawyer and once in office, he modernized the army for sustained overseas operations. Subsequent American expansion in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines was framed as paternal administration—to spread the “civilizing mission” to those less fortunate in need of a long period of paternal tuition—rather than colonial conquest. Yet military power remained central to advancing government and private American interests.

After World War II, the collapse of European empires left the U.S. and the Soviet Union with competing spheres of influence. Unlike Moscow’s more militarized approach, “Washington’s forms of control were more in accordance with the will of the local populations,” creating what scholars called an “empire by invitation,” according to Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad. Military and subversive power were often used to promote U.S. interests, but many states partnered voluntarily to receive financial and technical assistance.

With the Soviet collapse in 1991, the U.S. entered a new phase of expansion. Technologies like GPS, which reached full global coverage in 1993, expanded American power as a “silent utility” providing an increasingly essential service. The rapid spread of the internet under U.S. oversight further extended American standards and control across global communications, while the rise of tech giants like Microsoft, Intel, and Google embedded U.S. software and hardware at the center of globalized technology systems.

Even as global military demobilization followed the Cold War, Washington demonstrated its continued combat and technological dominance through limited conflicts in the Persian Gulf and precision strikes in the Balkans. Dominating global arms exports, it deepened leverage by integrating more countries into U.S. weapons systems and defense supply chains.

Yet within years, the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the limits of invasions and occupation, which no longer guaranteed control over resources or populations. As of March 2025, America had 1.3 million personnel stationed abroad, reflecting an outdated emphasis on physical presence. With nearly 90 percent of corporate assets in advanced economies now intangible, such as software, patents, and intellectual property, the same logic applies to power projection. Digital networks and remote capabilities have replaced much of what permanent garrisons once represented.

Trump’s October 2025 suggestion to reclaim Afghanistan’s Bagram airbase to counter China, if genuine, reflects the durability of that older strategic thinking. Analysts noted that most of the surveillance and strike capabilities he referenced are already met through long-endurance drones, sensor arrays, and satellites. The vulnerability of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea to drones and missile strikes during the war with Ukraine further shows the new limits of fixed bases in contested regions.

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. had already adjusted military strategy toward targeted strikes, digital surveillance, cyber operations, and space-based surveillance, collectively known as “triple canopy.” These measures expanded under the Trump and Biden administrations, with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) unveiling major advances in biometric drones that are capable of more effectively identifying and targeting individuals.

Space has regained its centrality to reducing the sprawling American military burden. In September 2025, the Space Development Agency launched the first phase of its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a mesh of low-orbit satellites for global surveillance and communication.

Other programs like the Golden Dome, building on Reagan’s “Star Wars” and Obama’s triple canopy concepts, seek to fuse space, land, and cyber networks into an automated U.S. defense grid integrated with the private sector. AI and autonomous ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems have steadily outsourced more decision-making to code.

Much of this technological architecture extends beyond the military. Dual-use systems like Starlink and integrated AI tools have become indispensable to governments and populations alike. Many countries host their public data on American cloud servers, while their citizens communicate through WhatsApp and pay for services through Google Pay—daily dependencies maintained without a single U.S. soldier in sight.

China’s Challenge

China is also building counterspace weapons and satellite systems to resist U.S. orbital dominance, and its military capabilities are similarly matched by strategic and commercial components. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, and its digital extension, the Digital Silk Road, have grown to rival U.S. initiatives. For the first time, Washington faces a competitor able to offer countries comparable material benefits on a scale that not even the Soviet Union’s foreign infrastructure projects ever achieved.

Despite Western alarm over the security risks associated with Chinese technology, many developing and emerging countries continue to adoptChinese digital infrastructure. High-quality equipment, low costs, and state-backed financing have made Chinese systems indispensable even for governments aware of the surveillance and dependency potential, which is also true of U.S. technology.

China’s digital infrastructure is deliberately designed for interoperability with subsequent Chinese technologies, ensuring that upgrades and maintenance depend on continued Chinese support.

As economist Dev Nathan noted, one of the major ways 21st-century imperialism operates is through global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks. China’s specialization in production means its GVCs extract value without directly exporting capital. By flooding markets with essential technologies to undercut competitors in smartphones, power grids, payment apps, and communication technologies, it is creating layered dependencies across industries.

The manufacturing and logistics dimension of China’s overseas influence is evident across Europe, once the center of global industrial and imperial power. Belgium’s port of Zeebrugge is now 85.5 percent owned by China’s Cosco, which also holds stakes in nearby Antwerp, Rotterdam, and other European ports. Automated Chinese cranes unload Chinese cargo guided by Chinese logistics software and tracking platforms, giving Beijing a presence at every level of the supply chain.

U.S. influence remains entrenched, however, and Washington has pressured European allies to block Huawei infrastructure projects and restrict Chinese access to advanced technology sectors. American-based platforms, from social media to cloud infrastructure to software systems, continue to dominate Europe’s digital ecosystems, and under U.S. pressure, Denmark recently seized a China-owned chipmaker operating in the country, Nexperia, citing “serious governance shortcomings.”

While China has met strong resistance to expanding its technological footprint in Europe, it has emerged as the development partner of choice for much of the Global South. Companies such as Huawei and ZTE now dominate the global 5G market, supplying infrastructure and equipment to dozens of countries. “China is now a major force in the digital development of Global South countries, with important implications for their digital economies, societies, policies, etc.,” stated an article in the journal Information Society.

Chinese exports of electronics and electric vehicles have also surged, with more than half now going to non-OECD countries. In the first eight months of 2025, exports to Latin America and the Caribbean rose 11 percent compared to 2024, while shipments increased by 72 percent in the Middle East, 75 percent to ASEAN countries, and 287 percent to Africa compared to last year. In renewable energy, China leads in solar panel and wind turbine production, driving down global costs and accelerating green transitions.

These are emerging technologies where China is gaining an early lead, creating dependencies that could last for years.

While China maintains no formal military presence abroad, security measures nonetheless help support its aspirations. Its Global Development Initiative for infrastructure-led growth is complemented by the Global Security Initiativefor cooperative stability. Chinese policing programs also provide training and joint security patrols in partner countries, while private military companieshelp secure BRI infrastructure alongside local and national forces.

Diffusion of Tech Power

Breaking the U.S.-China tech infrastructure duopoly is a formidable challenge, and Russia’s war in Ukraine illustrates how dependent Moscow remains on the old paradigm of territorial control, spurred partly by its limited ability to compete through modern, networked influence.

Even so, Russia has experimented with tech services-based model of empire, achieving some success in providing tech surveillance in Belarus and Central Asia, and with its GLONASS global navigation service. In 2024, Russia also signed agreements with Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger to supply satellites and telecommunications systems, while Russian aerospace firm Bureau 1440 is attempting to develop a global broadband network.

Despite these efforts, Russia lags behind, and its window to expand influence may be closing as a wider flattening of technological capabilities takes hold. Factories, technologies, and resources have become easier to localize, eroding the advantages once held by major powers.

“Lights out” automated factories, for example, reduce the appeal of foreign labor, while factory construction has become more streamlined. During the Biden administration’s reshoring and friendshoring manufacturing initiatives, for example, China quickly established industrial plants in Mexico. While this demonstrated China’s manufacturing dominance, it also highlighted how easily industrial capacity could be replicated abroad. India and Southeast Asian countries have similarly scaled up their manufacturing in recent years, diffusing China’s previous concentration of power.

The same decentralizing trend is visible in financial technology. Brazil’s Pix system, unveiled in 2020, shows that middle-power countries can now develop independent digital payment networks without relying on Chinese or American financial infrastructure.

Resource control is likewise losing its traditional strategic weight. Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, for example, was once seen as a critical prize for conquest, but now matters less as renewable energy and advanced minerals mapping technologies have expanded supply. After years of focuson South American lithium reserves, Germany recently announced one of the world’s largest deposits, and it is unlikely to be the last breakthrough discovery.

As scarcity potentially declines and technology and manufacturing become more widely distributed, the competition for resources and the monopolies that once defined empire may finally begin to ease. Yet the collapse of technological empires means military force could once again become the main instrument of power, as Russia has demonstrated.

Another issue lies in American and Chinese entities simply consolidating their technological dominance, stifling or hijacking innovation, and blocking new systems from emerging. Even as capabilities begin to flatten globally, both powers remain invested in preserving their rivalry rather than allowing a more open order to emerge.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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It is difficult to interpret the Trump administration’s wholesale attacks on governmental programs as anything other than accelerationist efforts to destroy basic features of the American political and economic systems. From DOGE’s Artificial Intelligence-rampage through federal bureaus, the destruction of agencies like the Department of Education, or Trump’s expanding ICE as his well-funded private domestic army and occupying Democrat-governed cities; the destruction of old standards of normalcy are clear. While documents like Project 2025 reveal elements of Trump’s game plan, there are serious open questions concerning the administration’s long game and exactly how far the oligarchs influencing Trump want to take this antidemocratic movement.

While the destruction’s end-goal is less than clear, ever since Reagan it has been a safe default assumption that whatever foolish things were done by Republican or Democrat presidents supported neoliberal capitalism’s drive to privatize governmental services, transforming public services into private corporatized commodities. It remains possible that this will be the most significant outcome of Trump’s pillaging of governmental agencies, as businesses owned by crony capitalists fill the gaps lefts by the annihilated governmental services Trump attacks. But there are other, even more worrisome, possibilities.

If we take seriously the writings and statements of several of the powerful crackpot tech oligarchs whose ideas permeate Project 2025 and who played instrumental roles in placing JD Vance one-congestive-heart-failure-heartbeat from the presidency, there are reasons to wonder if more extreme desires fuel this destruction of government and attacks on portions of our economy.

A wealth of books and articles, by authors on the left and right, recently argue that as old forms of capitalism crumble, we are rushing towards some new type of feudalistic-adjacent economy. Some call this neo-feudalism, others, techno-feudalism. Books like Joel Kotkin’s 2020 The Coming of Neo-Feudalism or Curtis Yarvin’s (written under the pseudonym, Mencius Moldbug) Patchwork: A Political System for the 21^st Century, present visions of new anti-democratic political formations where local sovereign polities run by wealthy lords replace the crumbling American system. Peter Thiel’s anti-democracy statements align with these visions. Even Yanis Varoufakis sees some sort of techno-feudalism on the horizon. Yarvin and Thiel’s visions are sometimes called, the NeoReaction (NRx) or Dark Enlightenment movement and they have features familiar to fans of dystopian fiction storylines, where local fiefdoms ruled by all powerful lords emerge after a Great Collapse. The familiar fictional tropes range from The Duke in Escape from New York, to various Road Warrior warlords, outposts in The Parable of the Sower, The Walking Dead, or The Road, with lots of variations—though few fictional visions seem to have benevolent lords. Patchwork: A Political System for the 21^st Century’s thesis longs for a world where after, “the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These joint-stock corporate mini-countries would function a lot like less-restrained versions of the human rights abusing “company-towns” of American logging or mining history, but without even the pretense of a human rights or a legal system.

The influence of Peter Thiel and other tech-bros in Trump’s second term brings renewed attention to the anti-democracy views of Silicon Valley billionaires and their followers. The recent tragicomedy film Mountainhead, playfully shows these dreams playing out in ways that should make us wonder if some elites are cheering for a great collapse—or in the language of Yarvin (who “jokes” about using the poor as biofuel), a “hard reset” or “rebooting,” to rid the world of progressive notions of equality and provide opportunities for those with surviving wealth to buy up chunks of the world at fire sale prices.

Tech bros’ politics have always been weird. A few decades ago it was easy enough to roll our eyes at the simplistic libertarian screeds some predictably spewed as early online culture developed, especially as their libertarianism used to be committed to induvial freedoms for things like sexual identities, drugs, abortion, demilitarization, and some elements of social issues generally embraced on the American Left (while abandoning the poor to the brutal ravages of market forces). But this desire for capitalism as we know it to collapse and give way to a system of networked feudal enclaves run by billionaire lords is something different. The roots of these dark enlightenment dreams of a resurrected aristocracy have an interesting not-quite-forgotten (because it wasn’t ever really known) prehistory within a larger genealogy of American anti-democracy that is worth considering.

I am referring to Rudolph Carlyle Evans’ strange book, The Resurrection of Aristocracy, published in 1988 by one of my favorite presses, Loompanics Unlimited—now defunct publishers of a wide range of wonderfully wild books, on topics like lockpicking, con artistry primers, living on abandoned islands, or treatises on hiding things in public places. In this lost work Evans envisions replacing our collapsing American capitalist republic with independent feudal regions managed by aristocrats. In doing so he lucidly expressed a crazed vision that now resonates with our present age’s dark enlightenment call for medieval solutions to our postmodern world’s problems.

Sometimes the clearest expressions of a group under increasing public scrutiny and wariness can be found in past writings from a less guarded time, when self-censorship was at a minimum, and the logic of a movement could be nakedly expressed without the trimmings and justifications needed when others are closely watching. Evans’ kooky treatise, The Resurrection of Aristocracy is an unheralded uninhibited, unhinged, classic work hawking the dreams of those who would demolish the American republic and replace it with independent aristocratic fiefdoms. If this sort of world is part of the shared vision of the robber barons of a new gilded age, no matter how insane a vision it is, we ignore it at our parrel.

Limited information about Rudolph Carlyle Evans survives on the web. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1952, moved to England as a child, later graduated with a degree in sociology and anthropology from Hull College in 1976, later moving to the United States. While Evan’s work seems to largely be forgotten, the WayBack Machine records at least one brief, 2015, acknowledgement by an astute reader that his work prefigures much of the insanity of Mencius/Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment pitch.

The Resurrection of Aristocracy has an unusual introduction by Robert Hertz (not, the famed French sociologist, who had been dead for seven decades), who frames the book in blunt insulting terms rare for any volume’s introduction, while complimenting its exploration of its utopian (for an elite few) vision for a world to come. Hertz explains that,

In Evans view, the main function of the common people is to beat the lily pads at night to keep the frogs quiet. That, and go to war when their well-rested masters demand it. Evans wants to see a two-tiered social morality: for the leaders—pride and booty and a chance to humiliate their enemies; for their enemies; for the mass of followers—at best, security, and a chance to take orders from those they fear and respect.

What Evans wants is a new feudalism. If the world once moved from castles and serfs into bourgeois cities and capitalism, he sees no reason why it cannot be reversed. Evans has read enough Karl Marx to appreciate his systemic approach to society, but he rejects Marx’s determinism and is frankly horrified by his egalitarian philosophy.

Hertz differentiates Evans views from those of his contemporary conservatives like William F. Buckley, because Evans rejects free enterprise, noting that Evans is “anti-Christian,” his political orientation is “somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun—and affectionately, too, because Evans has the clarity and courage to organize and articulate what I and other ‘reactionaries’ have been hinting at for years.”

Evans calls for a rejection of governance by efforts to achieve equality under the law to return to governance by “Great Men.” He insists that society is trapped in the “doldrums” and human efforts to solve social problems has been a complete failure, and the cure is a “new model of reality,” a model in which “not only must our modern ideals and values be overthrown, but our blind devotion to scientific rationalism must also be carefully reassessed and amended.”

For Evans, the source of all social problems is rooted in modern society’s efforts to give “equal opportunity to all even though all are not equally suited to succeed at being model citizens of modern industrial society. For those who fail to live up to expectation, alcohol and narcotics are two readily available alternatives, depending on age and circumstances.” Evans’ solution is to hasten “a transition to a new age, one more forthright and less complex than our own, an age based on the essentials of human nature which are known to us from history, rather than an idealized version of a good society, something which has been with us for the last hundred years and has almost succeeded in stifling our natural feelings and emotions.”

Evans’ blindness to less essentialized interpretations of the modern world and the self-assuredness with which he knows he has found solutions to society’s problems feels like reading a treatise on the problems of the modern world written by Confederacy of Dunces’ Ignatius J. Reilly. Yet, his neo-feudal vision expresses aloud the details of a desired anti-egalitarian world to come that increasing elites, and followers, increasingly express alignment with. Prefiguring Trump’s attacks on intellectuals and universities by over three decades, Evans preaches that,

Our much-praised access to education has probably done as much as anything else to make us susceptible to what I can only describe as the enfeeblement of the modern mind. We have been led to believe that the universal availability of education would solve many of the problems of western society and, despite setbacks, people still believe this. They believe it because modern industrial society continues to exist and so to believe anything else would be to turn one’s back on the only lifestyle and value system of which the individual, his family and friends are part. And yet, there is a certain amount of unease that runs through the worship of education; it has been most clearly apparent in the past decade during which the application of expert knowledge and careful reasoning (the hallmarks of our educated society) has utterly failed to come to grips with the most pressing problems of western society.

Evans declares universal education propagates an unhealthily unhappy citizenry, and he explicitly prescribes ignorance as the cure for this “enfeeblement of the modern mind.” Anything promoting equality or critiquing bias must be attacked using claims of bias.

To perfect society, Evans insists the existing political economic system must be replaced with a new feudal aristocratic age. These new aristocrats will do away with the “motto of justice for all, elevating the weak at the expense of the strong,” because mistaken views of human equality are “destroying life, not enriching it.” He promises that in the coming age of aristocratic rule with have clear cut gender rules as those

physical and psychological differences which distinguish men from women will once more come into prominence, the penchant of this age for the rights of women and others will be seen as a misunderstanding of the human condition. These days we speak about happiness as if it were the birthright of every man who lives, when in fact it is the birthright of no man be he rich or poor, brilliant or illiterate. The birthright of man is not happiness, but struggle and conflict with nature and with other men. This truism has receded well into the background but will one day return with a vengeance. The superabundance and lax social structure that characterizes western industrial society is, after all, just a brief interlude; it could never be a permanent way of life.

Not only has the modern world abandoned what Evans imagines are essentialized biological differences between male and female, but promises of equality left those he views as lesser-thans with unrealistic expectations. His Great Men have slunk away into the shadows, while society suffers from them not contributing to their full potential. Three and a half decades early, he’s says Trump’s quite part out loud:

The weak, the underprivileged and the indigent who expect happiness to be handed to them on a plate are living in a world of make-believe which is destined to be shattered. Not surprisingly, the strong-willed, independent-minded spirits no longer venture out in public. The one-sided stress of contemporary society on its fatuous attention to the needs of those least able to help themselves has worked hand in hand with our scientific materialism to denude our age of all those qualities which make for greatness. Instead, the popular ideals of contemporary western society embrace the most despicable and ignoble traits of mankind.

Even when the most qualified and gifted individuals became political leaders, their ability to affect change under our system is severely limited, Evans insists, because they become “subject to the limitations of his age” as he [yes, he] would “find himself re-echoing popular sentiment, or struggling vainly to keep an already hopeless situation from going totally out of control.” This leads to the “degradation of the finest intellects.” This is the inevitable outcome of our political system, because as Evans see it, democracy is “the system by which the unscrupulous are elected to office by the most incompetent.”

Even in the era when Ronald Reagan was attacking the common good and beginning the trajectory leading to the destruction we now live under with Donald Trump, writing thirty-seven years ago Evans declared he lived “in the tail end of an age which has become devoid of feeling. In our inane desire to stamp out all prejudices, all views, which do not conform to the fatuous ideals of late twentieth century liberalism, we are well on the way to draining life of all conflict, all sharp emotion; in fact, we are in the process of destroying the very essence of western civilization.”

Evans sloppily commandeers highly selected bits and pieces of social science literature for his analysis. Though he discusses biological and cultural evolution, he dismisses notions of “progress” as an ethnocentric distortion. He rejects August Comte’s notions of societal evolution ending in the age of positivism, but he admires Herbert Spencer’s approach to cultural evolution, which is unsurprising given Spencer’s nasty social Darwinism, his biological essentialist notions that certain people are inherently better than others, and that the poor must not be supported by society.

He uses Max Weber to critique the overbearing power of bureaucracy. In a passage that might have been written by Elon Musk to justify hacking apart large sections of the federal government, he declares “a bloated bureaucracy is one of the most consistent indications that a society has reached the limits of its development.” His Weberian analysis predicts shifts aways from legal-rational authority as his new aristocratic age “will be dominated by Traditional and Charismatic authority,” noting that such a shift to charismatic authority “indicates a serious loss of confidence in the established institutions.” Because of the “enormous human energy” these Charismatic leaders unleash, they are able to accomplish many of their goals, but as Weber established, these charismatic leaders don’t tend to last very long. Either this leader’s changes are institutionalized, or there is a reversion to former ways. Evans is convinced that once his predicted charismatic leader arrives, there will be no going back, and aristocracy will return humankind to its destiny—a destiny of haves and have nots, following the logic of eugenics.

He namedrops Horkheimer and Adorno supporting observations of shallowness of our modern age, as if they or others from the Frankfurt School might align with his vision of elites ruling without restraints. Not surprisingly, Evans’ failure to address more anthropological bodies of knowledge highlights his crude biological essentialism and social Darwinist models throughout, which seems odd given his background in anthropology. At one point he briefly discusses the Nuer of the Sudan and other societies without firmly recognized permanent hierarchal leaders; but this is only used to illustrate something lacking in what he designates as a lesser-developed society.

Explicitly rejecting Marxist critiques of class exploitation, Evans finds his intellectual inspiration in the works of Cecil Rhodes, whose colonialist conquests represent an ideal Great Man of History. The fervor of Evans’ admiration of Rhodes is striking and raises questions about just how much Evans would enjoy being a slave or a peasant in this brave new world he awaits.

Whereas Plato’s Republic dreamed of a world where the aristocrats ruling the masses had the best interests (or at least their conceptions of best interests) of society as a whole at heart, Evan argues elites should be allowed to do as they please, and the rest of society must follow, and this will be a better world because whatever these elites do will be good by virtue of them doing it. Evans fails to explain how this coming aristocracy would differ from an oligarchy—which at least Plato understood to be among the most corrupt and undesirable forms of governance.

Evans’ endorsement of E. F. Schumacher’s small is beautiful thesis is a surprising twist, and this vision significantly diverges from contemporary would-be techno-aristocrats, who generally have high tech infrastructure, controlled by elites, as a bedrock feature of their fantasies. Evans supports Schumacher anti-growth thesis that many of the planet’s problems come from capitalism’s need for eternal market growth. Evans incorporates portions of Schumacher’s critique, while insisting that the solution to capitalism’s problems is to replace it with feudalism, observing that, “the age in which we live compels us to pollute our environment, develop previously unspoiled open spaces, destroy our mental peace and break up our families.”

Churches in Evans’ coming Aristocratic Age will be dedicated to reinforcing and keeping people in their proper social roles and quelling uprisings. Evans assures readers that revolts will be rare, and that the “ruling class” won’t “have much need to suppress subversive ideas, for there will be very few of these,” as humanity’s consciousness easily adapts to this new, more naturally hierarchical social order. He assures readers that,

With the arrival of man’s complete [adaptation] to his environment, there will be no longer any need to strive for new interpretations of reality which would challenge the status quo. Intellectually, the mind of western man will at last be at rest; abstract theorizing and scientific investigations will no longer be of interest to him. As for those who believe a society lacking deep interest in science and technology would be an inferior civilization, they do well to remember the dictum that an unsubdued thirst for knowledge can lead to barbarism just as can extreme hatred of knowledge. This is especially so in an age such as ours when unlike the ancients who were content with theoretical speculation, we have an unstoppable urge to apply our knowledge, regardless of possible consequences.

Finally, humanity can stop asking all these bothersome questions as the end of history and class conflict arrives. Between the elites’ exclusive legitimate use of violence on the masses and the church’s total support for the new order, the new aristocracy will maintain order, as “the hegemony of the bourgeois world view will be broken by the new conception of reality.”

Evans eagerly awaits a period of social and economic upheaval. During this coming collapse “those who are successful in establishing supremacy within their area of operation” will “automatically distinguish themselves” as fit to become the new leaders. But those who “decry the fact that western society is destined once again to see the return of aristocracy” will fall by the wayside as new leaders seize power. While the majority of society has up until now been “brainwashed into believing that the utilitarian-humanist ideal of contemporary western society is the zenith” of western civilization, they will be shown the folly of their ways.

In Evans’ fantasized coming aristocratic new age a spirit of mutual aid will spread, as “neighbors will work all day in the fields side by side, help repair one another’s homes after damage by bad weather or other causes. Each individual will contribute to the community according to his strength, talent and experience…” A world where everyone knows their proper place, low on the pecking order with no assumptions of things like equal rights or inalienable human rights, brings social cohesion and eliminates strife.

…and so on.

You get the picture. While Evans’ embracement of a low tech small-is-beautiful ethos rather than high tech fiefdoms, his envisioned “utopia” foresaw many of the features that Yarvin and others advocating for techno- or neo-feudal futures incorporate.

Countering Aristocratic Fantasies

Maybe it was ridiculous for me to spend hours reading, digesting, note taking, then summarizing this odd long-lost crackpot book. But I found this worthwhile for several reasons, the most pertinent is that in our current moment of forgetting, there is value in critically considering these nonsensical ideas, portions of which apparently are attractive to contemporaries who have amassed great wealth and power. We should not ignore such insanity at a moment when various parts of our society that once housed intellectual critiques are under attack or struggling (universities, the fifth estate, public airwaves, presses, libraries, independent bookstores, etc.) while most Americans appear to have stopped reading anything longer than 75 words, outsourcing reading and writing to Artificial Intelligence systems designed by those positioned to become our new aristocracy.

While my reasons for writing this are to alert thinking people to the existence of this text and arguments, I wonder if unearthing this forgotten text could be used to empower this text to awaken the demons within it, much like Ash in The Evil Dead reciting, “khandar estrada khandos. . .” unleashed a torrent of deadites. May it not be so. Instead, I think we need to seriously critique this sort of bat-shit crazy philosophy, because our current stage of capitalism is facing enough contradictions that some elements of this deranged philosophy may well be where our elites want to drag us once they’ve demolished the broken world we now inhabit.

If it weren’t for the influence of Yarvin and others promoting notions of a techno-aristocracy to Vance and others in powerful positions, it would be easy to laugh off the lunacy of Evan’s book, but it reveals deep currents of anti-democratic thought in American society. Because Evans, Yarvin, Musk, Trump, and others cannot accept that stratification is created by society, not an expression of some sort of essential quality, they attack scholars studying the social creation of inequality as liars spreading propaganda. Fields like anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, labor studies, and gender studies are now under attack because of their research findings directly challenge elite supremacist views that hierarchy as an expression of natural abilities. These elites will never accept, as anthropologist, Jon Marks once observed, “perhaps the most important discovery of early anthropology was that social inequality was inherited, but not in the same way that natural features were. You pass on your complexion to your children and you pass on your social status to your children, but you do so by very different modes.” This is the sort of understanding that the current attacks on liberal arts programs hope to annihilate.

It does not matter how many peer-reviewed studies anthropologists and other scholars publish establishing that social forces, rather than trivial genetic differences, account for meaningful differences, racists cling to their beliefs of “natural” superiority. We regularly hear this in Trump’s rambling, as he insults women and people of color as having low IQs, or his claims of coming from a strong genetic background. While The Resurrection of Aristocracy has little chance of birthing the world it envisions, its bigoted assumptions align perfectly with the embrace of privileged anti-egalitarianist resonating with Trump World and the technocrats backing Vice President Vance and those charting the future course of the Republican Party. My concern with these present aristocratic dreams is less about these oligarchs achieving independent neo-feudal states anytime soon, my concern is that people harboring such anti-egalitarian fantasies are rapidly gaining unchecked power. I worry that powerful people holding such views can dismantle existing institutions, at least striving to achieve liberty, equality, and community. It should concern all of us who dream of a world where Americans have universal health care, food security, and meaningful work, that our oligarchs dream of a world where they have unchecked power and we are chattel.

Artificial Intelligence appears poised to bring waves of massive unemployment, and we can expect the victims of this techno revolution to be blamed for their fate, while those who own this new means of production declared worthy superiors. Such shifting economic conditions will be fertile ground for the sort of dangerous aristocratic false consciousness that Evans and more contemporary techno-feudalists pitch. As university departments housing the academics who spent careers studying the social basis of inequality are under attack, we need to be vigilant in our confrontations with this sort of elitist nonsense. Though such humane human views may become more difficult to access in a world where distorted tools like Musk’s Grokipedia becomes our social memory and arbiters of “truth.”

As an ideology justifying the elite’s “natural” supremacy, aristocracy fits the logic of capitalism. It maintains a socially-suspended-illusion which functions like a self-fulfilling prophecy as it obscures the roles of nurture, unequal opportunity, and chance in creating “winners.” Much like fascism, the problem with aristocracy worship is that its “logic” aligns with the social facts of capitalism. It embraces the values of a highly competitive political economy with decreasing opportunities for winners, and endless growth opportunities for the dispossessed–those growing numbers of dispossessed whom Evans and his ilk promise purpose and peace of mind as they become the human grease for the wheels of aspiring techno- or not-so-techno- feudal lords.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald Trump is wagging the dog. To “wag the dog” means to make something secondary control something more important, as if the dog’s tail were controlling the dog. Politically, it means the deliberate creation of a distraction. The phrase originally described initiating a war to divert attention from a presidential scandal and was popularized in the 1997 movie Wag the Dog in which a spin doctor (Robert De Niro) fabricates a war to cover up a presidential sex scandal.

Donald Trump and his handlers have concocted a new version of this strategy. Trump’s Wag the Dog 2.0 controls the news cycle by continually shifting the presidential focus. There is no need for Trump to start a fake war to distract the public: a trip to Asia, a meeting with Xi Jinping, threats of nuclear tests, changes in tariffs, East Wing renovations, redoing the Lincoln bathroom, floating rumors about a third term, even a Halloween party – all serve to grab the headlines.

Trump is energetically wagging the dog, leaving major issues off the radar.

Among those issues lacking sustained media attention is the President’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein file remains the elephant in Trump’s Oval Office. While King Charles stripped his brother Andrew of all royal titles, journalists continue to fail to fully connect the dots between Trump and Epstein. As Carla Bleiker asked on the German broadcaster DW; “Epstein scandal: Consequences for Andrew ― what about Trump?” Trump has a $10 billion libel suit against The Wall Street Journal over an article claiming he sent a very unpresidential birthday note to his then-friend Epstein on his 50^th birthday.

Contrast Trump’s evasive attitude to the Epstein issue with his boasting about being a global peacemaker, claiming to have solved at least eight major conflicts. His Nobel Prize campaign shows little success in the Middle East. The “Gaza Peace Plan”? A unified transition authority? Since the October 10, 2025, ceasefire and Trump’s “Peace Plan,” over 200 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli strikes, according to media sources and the Gaza Health Ministry. On October 29 alone, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 100 people.

Aid deliveries and medical supplies remain well below what is needed. The World Food Programme reports that roughly 750 tons of aid are being delivered daily compared to the 2,000 tons required. Many crossing remain closed or difficult to access. Medical supplies have not yet reached large parts of the population. Infrastructure remains weak and damaged; hospitals that are still standing are functioning well below capacity.

Regarding the first phase of the 20-point governance Peace Plan, Hamas has not disarmed. Medium – and long-term authority over Gaza remains unclear. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Gaza being governed either by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, insisting that Israel retain security control. As for the “Board of Peace” which Trump proudly announced he would chair, where is it?

For all the noise about peace in the Middle East, a “New Middle East” has not materialized. Trump and the news cycles have drifted away from the region and the story.

Similarly, Trump’s bragging about ending the Russia/Ukraine war in 24 hours, as he promised during his campaign, has also not materialized, and the fighting is no longer front-page news. Instead of creating a fake war, (“Wag the Dog” 1.0), Trump has stepped back from serious involvement in the ongoing Russia/Ukraine conflict. His on-again, off-again relationship with Vladimir Putin reflects his inconsistent style and a lack of sustained interest. After receiving Putin with royal pomp in Alaska – including rolling out a red carpet and a ride in the presidential car – the lack of progress towards a ceasefire led to the cancellation of the much-touted Budapest summit.

Instead of creating a fake war to hide a scandal, Trump has withdrawn from a real war.

Even domestically, Trump avoids focusing on complicated issues. While hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain unpaid during the shutdown as well as the potential loss of food stamps for 42 million Americans, DJT decided to take a foreign tour instead of solving a serious domestic crisis. During the 1995 shutdown, President Clinton canceled his trip to Japan and Asia, including attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.  During the 2013 shutdown, President Obama also canceled attending an APEC summit as well as visits to Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Regarding Trump’s inactivity during the shutdown, the New York Times reported; “The White House declined to answer questions about whether Mr. Trump would get more involved in the negotiations in the days ahead.”

“Wag the dog” traditionally implies assertive action, initiating a war to distract from something else, such as a sex scandal involving Trump’s alleged relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Donald Trump’s Wag the Dog 2.0 is perpetual motion, distraction through hyperactivity. Trump flits from place to place, from issue to issue, without ever fully addressing the most demanding and complex problems.

Like a child endlessly surfing online games, the President of the United States shows little capacity for serious focus or the maturity to deal with complicated diplomatic issues. The original “wag the dog” strategy was deliberate, a calculated means to conceal a scandal. Trump’s Wag the Dog 2.0 is perhaps less a strategy than a reflection of his particular personality. Nevertheless, the political, social, and economic consequences are there; the results of a lack of presidential responsibility.

The November 5 elections reflected voter dissatisfaction with the sitting President. Donald Trump’s Wag the Dog 2.0. is unpopular, and highly irresponsible.

Woof, woof. This dog smells.

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Photograph Source: Redteamo – CC BY 3.0

Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which will be celebrating the group’s fiftieth anniversary at its convention being held in Chicago this November 7 to 9, has for decades been known as the voice of reform in the Teamsters Union. But this year there will be those inside and outside the convention hall challenging TDU’s direction and arguing that it has abandoned its ideal. At the center of the controversy is TDU’s support for Teamster president Sean O’Brien who is allied with President Donald Trump.

Some Teamsters no longer see TDU as fighting for reform but rather as part of the establishment. They are appalled that O’Brien has aligned with President Donald Trump who has fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers, torn up their contracts, and effectively destroyed their unions, while at the same time he has reversed decades of Black workers’ achievements, and attacked immigrants. TDU’s alliance with O’Brien and thus with Trump has tarnished its reputation as a movement for union reform and social justice, while isolating the Teamsters from the majority of the labor movement.

For a number of TDU members and other Teamsters, TDU’s alliance with O’Brien and his support for Trump have become the central issue. Leonard Stoehr, a longtime Teamster now living in the Atlanta area, is an over-the-road driver for ABF company. Stoehr says, “I think a plurality of Teamsters voted for Trump, but without full information. They thought he was going to have a laser-like focus on the economy to help working people, but, once he took office, he went right back to representing the oligarchy, which is where he comes from. We will absolutely raise the Trump issue at the TDU convention, because support for Trump is a death-wish for organized labor.”

Dave Robbins, now retired, was a Teamster for fifty years and served as a steward or local officer in several local unions; he first joined TDU in 1977. He spent his life fighting for the union’s members. He will be going to the TDU convention with his wife Sol Rodriguez, also a TDU member. Dave doesn’t mince words. “Sean O’Brien is a terrible general president for so many reasons, but primarily for remaining silent about Trump’s racism, anti-immigrant attitudes. He’s a traitor, a class-traitor, and he should not be endorsed by TDU. Sean O’Brien is a pro-fascist, Trump-supporter.”

David Levin, TDU’s national organizer, the top staff person, disagrees. As he wrote to me, “Endorsing Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters United Slate does not mean endorsing Donald Trump or attacks on workers. TDU has been, and will continue to be vocal in our opposition to attacks on the working class, including OSHA, the NLRB, immigrant workers, and union-busting of federal worker unions.”  He argues that since O’Brien real gains have been made. “Under new leadership, the IBT is standing up to employers and mobilizing members.”

Or as Peter Landon, a longtime TDU activist and former TDU staff person puts it, “I don’t support O’Brien. I do recognize the opportunities he has created for the membership to play far more of a role in the union.”

Some in TDU appear to have bought the argument that though Trump is an authoritarian, a union-buster, a racist and a sexist, who dispatches ICE, the National Guard, and active-duty troops to our cities, nevertheless they will continue to back O’Brien as long as it gives TDU more latitude for organizing in the Teamsters. This is the devil’s bargain that TDU has made. They are willing to endorse O’Brien, accepting his alliance with Trump as long as he tolerates the TDU’s organizing in and through the union.

At this convention, TDU will be holding a vote on whether or not to endorse O’Brien for union president for five more years. If TDU does endorse him, it will renew the devil’s bargain in both senses of that phrase, making a morally compromised decision that accepts a short-term gain for a larger, long-term loss. Such an endorsement would be made with eyes wide open and the knowledge that Sean O’Brien is comfortable with the Teamsters carrying the mantle of MAGA’s favorite union.

TDU in its Heyday

Teamsters for a Democratic Union began fifty years ago as a small group of rank-and-file activists committed to union democracy and militancy. I was one of them. After its founding, TDU opened a national office and hired a small staff paid modest wages made possible by the members’ dues and by grants from progressive foundations. (Today according to public documents TDU has revenues of over $300,000 and its educational and legal arm, Teamster Rank And File Education And Legal Defense Foundation raised $1.43 million in 2023. These are modest amounts compared to the Teamsters union’s treasury and to the wealthy corporations against which TDU for years fought for the members rights.)

TDU fought for things like elected rather than appointed union stewards and ran reformers for local union office as well as for top offices of the international union. When the U.S. Justice Department brought a RICO suit against the union and threatened to take it over, TDU argued that instead, as the feds removed the mafia. it should allow the membership to have free elections with the right to vote on the union’s top officers. The Justice Department and the courts agreed with TDU and rank-and-file Teamsters won a real victory for democracy.

For nearly all of its history, TDU was in the opposition and often persecuted by the Teamster leadership and company bosses. TDU members elected to the top offices of local unions found themselves blocked at every turn by the Teamsters’ national leadership. Only for five years, during the presidency of Ron Carey, whom TDU had helped to elect, was TDU not only tolerated but accepted by the union leadership. Carey and TDU, while they did not always see eye-to-eye, collaborated on local elections and contracts. It was TDU’s heyday. That was the TDU that I described in my book Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union published back in 1990.

TDU Makes a Deal with the Devil

Under Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., who served as Teamster general president from 1998 to 2018, that is for twenty-five long years, TDU was a persecuted opposition. Veteran TDU leaders like Ken Paff, and his successor David Levin yearned to come in out of the cold, to be able once again to operate with the support of the union leadership as they had when Ron Carey was president. The 2022 Teamster presidential election provided that opportunity.

Sean O’Brien, the head of Boston Local 25, was running for President of the Teamsters Union and remaking himself as a Teamster reformer. The head of Boston Local 25, he had a reputation as a thug. For example, he intervened in 2013 in the local election in Teamster 251 in Rhode Island, threatening the TDU activists there who were running a slate against his preferred candidate. “They need to be punished,” said O’Brien. The Teamsters Independent Review Board charged O’Brien and found him guilty of violating the Teamster Constitution and federal law when he threatened TDU members and he was suspended for two weeks.

Yet in 2022, in their campaign for the union’s top offices, O’Brien and his running mate Fred Zuckerman, known as the OZ slate, put themselves forward as reformers. Seeing an opportunity, Paff and Levin, negotiated with O’Brien to form an alliance, and eventually won over the TDU leadership and the TDU convention. O’Brien, with TDU’s support, won the election and became Teamster president.

The first item on O’Brien’s agenda was the UPS contract set to expire in August of 2023. He gave the impression he was prepared to lead a national strike to win the union’s demands. Back in 1997, President Ron Carey working with TDU had led UPS workers in a tremendous strike and won a real victory. The slogan for that strike had been “Part-Time America Won’t Work,” and the union forced the company to agree to create 10,000 new full-time jobs. It was one of the most important strikes by any union in that era and many Teamsters now wanted to repeat it. To prepare, TDU worked with O’Brien on planning the strategy and tactics needed to educate and organize the members.

But the strike never happened. O’Brien negotiated a contract with the company, which TDU proclaimed a historic victory, and there were some significant gains, but it was, in fact, weak in several areas. Most importantly it failed to end part-time status for workers who now made up 60% of the workforce. As Sam Gindin, former research director for the Canadian Auto Workers wrote, “The union made big gains — but in opting not to strike over demands beyond wages, the Teamsters may have passed up a transformative opportunity for the labor movement.”

Having won the Teamster presidency and having settled the UPS contract in August 2023 without a strike, O’Brien went off to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring, and then in July of 2024 O’Brien spoke at the Republican Party National Convention. While the Teamster leadership had declined to endorse either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, O’Brien’s speech was clearly a tacit endorsement of Donald Trump. To quell any doubts about where the union stood, the Teamsters made large financial contributions to Trump and other Republican candidates. So, TDU, now allied with O’Brien, has come full circle, from fighting the powers-that-be to joining them.

Teamster Reform in a New Era

The TDU convention this year will be different from others because there will be vocal opposition to the leadership both within and without the convention. In an attempt to diminish the opposition, TDU steering committee members and staff have called some dissident members and suggested, “Maybe it would be better if you don’t come this year.” Still there will be dissident members on the floor.

Some opposition will come from organized groups who oppose TDU’s current course. One such activist group within the union is Teamsters Mobilize (TM).

One member of TM is Jennifer Hancock of Local 322 , a part-time UPS employee in the warehouse, a sorter at the Coach Road hub and package car center in Richmond. “I’ve been doing it for 34 years,” she explains. “I’m also the political coordinator for Teamster local 322. We support candidates who support labor,” and most of those she says are Democrats

A few years ago, Hancock got involved in a TDU discussion group among UPS part-timers, mostly young people, a group that subsequently evolved into Teamsters Mobilize. “The general word about part-timers is that we’re lazy, we’re stoned, etc. But a few years ago, a bunch of us on a TDU part-timer chat decided to put together a group hoping to influence the next contract. At that time, we were still trying to work with TDU, so we went to the TDU convention. We wanted a part-timer caucus. There were Black caucuses, Latino caucuses, and women’s caucus. So why not a part-timer caucus? We finally got a watered-down resolution passed, but then it just disappeared. We’re told we couldn’t organize a caucus and would just have to rely on grievances. So, our hands were tied behind our backs.”

Teamster Mobilize went from being a part-time employee caucus to a more general reform group within the union. Their website says, “Teamsters Mobilize is a grassroots organization of Teamster activists organizing to build up real worker power in our union against our employers and their cronies, to expose corrupt Teamsters leadership, and to build brick-by-brick a genuine fighting labor movement.” A statement that sounds like TDU back in the 1970s and 80s when it was fighting Teamster presidents Frank Fitzsimmons, Roy Williams, and Jackie Presser.

This year it seems Hancock won’t be going to the convention. “I’m still a member of TDU, but I’m not allowed to come to the convention.” David Levine wrote her saying she couldn’t attend because she and Teamsters Mobilize members intended to “crash’ the convention. Levine wrote, “TDU is not going to allow non-registrants to crash our Convention or the Convention hotel and we are not going to allow TM to have a mixed group of registrants and crashers.”

But Hancock doesn’t believe that’s the real reason she is being excluded. “I believe there is going to be a floor vote on Sean O’Brien and they know that we would be against that. So, they’re putting their finger on the scale to get the result they want. I would not have voted for Sean O’Brien in any case.  I don’t support Sean O’Brien because he is not supporting labor. Everything Sean O’Brien has done has been about supporting Sean O’Brien. His support for the Trump administration is also a big issue.”

She gives the example of Donald Trump’s firing of Gwynne A. Wilcox, removing her from the NLRB. When that happened, my principal officers and others went up to Washington, D.C. to protest—but the O’Brien and the International officers did nothing.”

Overall, says Hancock, “I am very disappointed in TDU. When I first joined TDU, this was before Sean O’Brien’s election, everyone told me what a great organization it was. We took TDU’s word and campaigned for Sean O’Brien. Then TDU snuggled up to the O’Brien administration and now there’s no light between them.”

John Palmer of the Hooker Slate

John Palmer, hails from San Antonio, Texas a member of Local 657 was a freight driver for ABF for years but is now international vice-president-at-large, elected on the O’Brien-Zuckerman slate. “I was played,” he says.  I knew what O’Brien was, I had sat next to him for five years, but Fred Zuckerman convinced me that O’Brien had found religion and would be a reformer.”

Palmer soon learned that was not so. “It started when I objected to the UPS contract. I was the only one on the executive board who raised an objection. And I did it in public. I went to the press about it.” At a meeting to discuss the tentative contract, “I was attacked by all of the other executive board members. When they were done, I told them, ‘I appreciate the dogpile. Now I’m going to put together a slate,’ ” meaning an opposition slate to run against them. And he did. Today Palmer is running on the Hooker Fearless Slate for the same position he now holds.

When O’Brien organized a meeting with presidential candidate Donald Trump, Palmer explained, “I refused to meet with Trump. I know who Trump is. I wouldn’t sit in the same room with him for two reasons. First, he was a draft dodger. I’m a veteran and my dad and his brothers all served. Second, he’s a scab.”

Like some of the others with whom I talked, Palmer is also disappointed in TDU. “How can TDU be a democratic membership organization, when so many decisions are made by the national organizer,” for 45 years Ken Paff and now David Levin.

Palmer says, “I won’t be going to the TDU Convention, but I and many of our slate members will be at the hotel in Chicago. “I’m not coming to raise a ruckus. I’m 67 years old. I’m past that. But I’ll be talking with the members.”

Richard Hooker, Candidate for General President

Richard Hooker is the secretary-treasurer, the top officer of Philadelphia Teamster Local 623. Before becoming a full-time union officer, he was a UPS worker. “I’ve done every job you can think of at UPS.” The son of a preacher, he began working at UPS while attending Drexel University, and is now married and the father of four children.

“I’m not going to the convention, but I will be in the same hotel, collecting signatures from those who are there. The signatures are to become an accredited slate, though if we have to, we could still get on the ballot at the convention. But the TDU convention is a good opportunity to listen to and to talk with our members.”

While not a TDU member, Hooker says, he used to support TDU. But no more. “I’m shocked by TDU’s support for O’Brien. Even though I never was a member I always respected their fight, their being there. From the very beginning I never supported Sean O’Brien because of his intimidation, retribution, and retaliation. He has a history of doing that. He’s also known for failing to win strong contracts. He has a history of concessions, 13 of the last 18 years we have had concessions and he has a lot to do with that.”

Like others, Hooker criticizes O’Brien for “his fascination with Trump.  He’s decided to go along with Trump and everything that he’s done. But not just Trump, also the ruling class, the employer class, the billionaire class, because that’s who Trump represents. He doesn’t represent the workers.”

Hooker is also critical of O’Brien’s actions within the Teamsters. “If you look at what O’Brien did when he first got elected. He eliminated a lot of people from the staff and 70 percent of them black and brown people.” As a result, Hooker explains, “The union, that is the union’s members, had to pay 2.9 million dollars as a result of a discrimination lawsuit. And then he fired three other officials for their support of the rival Steve Vairma slate. The union members had to pay 2 years back wages to each of those people. His policies don’t work for the Teamsters or for the broader working class.”

Hooker is disappointed with TDU today. “They have a go along to get along attitude. No matter what O’Brien does, they refuse to speak out against him. TDU was built to educate and empower and to call out wrong-doing.” But today, he says, TDU doesn’t speak out.  “When you are silent, you have taken the side of the oppressor. That is what TDU has done because they refuse to speak out against the oppressor of the Teamsters. They have become what they fought against.”

Sean O’Brien, candidate for reelection, will be speaking at the TDU Convention, though he is not a member, and Richard Hooker, also not a member, will not be given such an opportunity. Levin wrote to Hooker, “TDU is not going to spend the members’ time or funds to host a campaign speech by you.” While TDU certainly has a right to determine who speaks and its conventions, it seems a shame not to allow the two candidates for Teamster president—the only two so far—to debate or at least speak. What an educational opportunity for the members! But Levin, clearly committed to O’Brien, has no interest in helping his opposition.

What Next for TDU?

 With its fifty-year history, its substantial and expanding foundation fundraising capacity, its permanent staff, the continuity of its leadership, and its conviction that it’s the genuine voice of Teamster members, I think of TDU as something like a miniature version of the labor bureaucracy. Not financially privileged like most union officials, not corrupt like some officials have been, not tied to a political party, at least not until recently, but still a power center in the union which despite its theory and its genuine attempts to root itself among them remains separate from the union members.

Given all of this, TDU seems unlikely to change course, though there is the possibility that this convention could realign the organization, that it could return to its more militant roots. Denying O’Brien its endorsement would reestablish TDU as an independent organization speaking up for the Rank & File and holding leadership accountable, regardless of the risk. Not unlike the original founders of TDU some fifty years ago.

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Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of current and future missile threats to the U.S. in 2025 – Public Domain

Over the past several months, the editorial board of the Washington Post  has moved steadily to the right, endorsing greater defense budgets, the use of military force, and even making a case for the U.S. military to return to its largest air base in Afghanistan.  In a recent editorial, “How to live in our nuclear ‘House of Dynamite’,” the Post has reversed a long-standing position in order to endorse the building of the Golden Dome national missile defense. The system could take more than a decade to build and require more than $1 trillion in funding.

The United States has already spent nearly $400 billion dollars for defensive systems over the past 50 years without any reason to believe a Star Wars system can be successful.  The tests themselves have been conducted under careful conditions to ensure success and to avoid realistic scenarios that would not be assured of success.

The current defense budget already has carved out a modest down payment of $25 billion for a system that is not workable.  The only certainty is that billions of dollars will be pumped into the pockets of defense industry.  More gold for the oligarchs.

Several decades of testing on theatre and national missile defense systems show that it is not easy to hit one missile with another, and there is no system thus far that can distinguish between an actual ballistic missile and a decoy.  One of the reasons why the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to an Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972 was their recognition that any national defense system would be ineffective, and would provoke another round of escalation in offensive strategic delivery systems.  The ABM Treaty was considered a landmark achievement in arms control and disarmament, expected to permit greater reductions in offensive systems.  The abrogation of the treaty opened the door to justifying new offensive systems.

In a world without national missile defense systems, the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia reduced their nuclear stockpiles by more than 80 percent, and nuclear testing (except for North Korea) had ceased.  However, Donald Trump has now threatened to resume testing for the first time since 1992.  The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty bans nuclear testing, but the United States, Russia, and China—signers of the CTBT—have never ratified the document.  The Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1969 has also been successful in limiting the number of nuclear weapons states, but resumed testing and a national missile defense in the United States would lead to more threatening scenarios.

One of the best reasons for negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine would be the possibility of the United States returning to the negotiating table with Russia regarding arms control and disarmament.  The last extant arms control treaty between Russia and the United States—the New SALT Treaty—will expire in February 2026, and Russian President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have indicated that Moscow is prepared to extend the life of the treaty and discuss other arms control issues.  Such a step would help to reduce the level of tension and suspicion that exists between the two largest nuclear powers, and could even induce China—the third largest—to enter an arms control dialogue.  Meanwhile, China is on target to have an inventory of 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2020.

The Washington Post editorial glibly asserts that mutual assured destruction and the threat of overwhelming retaliation have prevented a nuclear attack.  Nevertheless, it concludes that, as “missile defenses can fail, so too can deterrence.” It therefore concludes that a Golden Dome is needed.   We certainly don’t need a system that doesn’t work, and that would likely lead to a greater buildup of offensive weapons and a costly arms race.

The United States and the global community would be better served by talks to reduce offensive weaponry, prevent any notion of national missile defense, prevent the weaponization of space, and take on the challenge of AI that could potentially lead to the accidental use of nuclear weapons.  Meanwhile, the United States is prepared to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a system that has never been successfully tested in a way that combines interceptors, radars, and controlling computer networks.  Any national defense system will only hinder the cooperation needed to reduce the dangers of accidental launches and compromise the cooperation needed for early warning systems.

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Collage by James Bovard.

Some folks who know my work presume that I am implacably opposed to all federal agencies. Not true.  I have always appreciated federal agencies that exposed the waste, fraud, abuse, and brazen lies committed by politicians and bureaucrats.

The Trump administration has warred against such truth-tellers since its first week in office. On January 24, President Trump fired 17 inspector generals working for a wide array of federal agencies. Trump’s action jolted Washington because most of those officials could supposedly only be removed for cause — specific misconduct or other abuses. Trump also scorned the federal law requiring giving Congress 30-days notice before terminating such officials.  Some of those inspectors had done excellent work.

A White House official justified the firings: “These rogue, partisan bureaucrats who have weaponized the justice system against their political enemies are no longer fit or deserve to serve in their appointed positions.” The official said the firings will “make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”

But does the Trump version of “rule of law” go beyond hiding all government crimes?

Among the initial firings was John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Sopko was one of the most heroic truth tellers in modern Washington. He withstood fierce pressure from multiple presidents to debunk official propaganda on the Afghanistan war:

In 2014, Sopko revealed: “I was stunned when senior State Department officials on my first trip to Kabul suggested how we should write our reports. They even suggested changes to our report titles and proposed that we give them our press releases in advance so they could pre-approve them.”

In 2019, Sopko declared that “the American people have constantly been lied to” about the Afghan war.

In 2020, Sopko testified to Congress: “There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue . . . mendacity and hubris. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.”

A few weeks after Trump fired him, Sopko declared: “The problem was, we have built into the American system to lie to the American people.”

Trump later fired other inspector generals and acting inspector generals, bringing the toll to roughly two dozen. The New York Times, in a piece headlined, “Watchdogs Are Watching Their Backs,” noted: “The message to thousands of workers in inspectors general offices was clear: Be careful what you choose to investigate or you might be out of a job.”

Late last month, the Trump administration deleted funding for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.  That torpedoed dozens of websites with bevies of reports of federal abuses, including “a repository of decades of recommendations on how the government can save money,” the New York Times reported.  It also knocked offline the “hotline and whistle-blower links for the public to provide allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse.” Armen Tooloee, an Office of Management and Budget spokesman, justified the demolition by claiming that inspector generals “have become corrupt, partisan, and in some cases, have lied to the public. The American people will no longer be funding this corruption.”

And since inspector generals have been fired, there is no risk of other corruption in Washington.

Trump is repeating the same anti-oversight jihad that the George W. Bush administration launched earlier this century. President Bush repeatedly revealed in signing statements that anti-corruption efforts violated his prerogative. After Congress created an inspector general in late 2003 to look into the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Bush decreed: “The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investigations by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security.”

In 2008, Bush declared in a signing statement that his administration would not cooperate with a “Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan” Congress created “to investigate allegations of waste, mismanagement, and excessive force by contractors.” Regardless of how many controversies had arisen over U.S. contractors wantonly shooting innocent Iraqis, or how many scandals had erupted over billions of U.S. tax dollars vanishing in Iraq, the president ruled that no one had a right to discover what happened under his command. Preserving the prerogatives of the president was far more important than protecting American taxpayers or Iraqi civilians.  Taxpayers had no right to know how Bush spent their paychecks.

The only lesson that the Trump team took from those Bush cover-ups is to get bigger brooms to sweep away evidence and to make more threats against potential whistleblowers.

Trump is governing as if he is entitled to sovereign immunity from reality. Trump is also warring with the Government Accountability Office. Russell Vought, the chief of the Office of Management and Budget, said last month that GAO is “something that shouldn’t exist.” GAO is Congress’s audit and investigative arm. Torpedoing GAO would be consistent with the Trump dogma that no one has a right to know how the administration is using its power or spending tax dollars.

Until 2004, GAO was known as the Government Accounting Office – almost the personification of innocuousness.  When I was getting rolling as an investigative journalist in Washington in the 1980s, GAO quickly became one of my favorite sources. A long, widely-hated article I did in 1983 on the failure of federal food assistance relied on GAO reports on the failure of school lunches and food stamps to improve nutrition or bolster good health. When I pummeled federal farm programs in the 1980s, GAO reports were often linchpins for my attacks.  When GAO issued reports exposing agricultural program failures, congressional staff would summon them to Capitol Hill and berate them for hours without mercy.  But the auditors usually stuck to their guns.

GAO is no Temple of Delphi entitled to automatic deference.  The agency has sometimes taken a dive on controversial issues or bungled its analyses beyond repair.  But American citizens have few alternatives for semi-credible information inside the government.  Crippling GAO won’t make any boondoggles vanish.

Trump’s vendetta against auditors and inspectors will do nothing to make Washington less devious and deceitful.  “Truth will out” is still the biggest fairy tale in Washington. And there is no reason to expect Trump or any of his appointees to sacrifice themselves in the name of full disclosure.

Even if federal inspectors and auditors often kowtow or strike out,  their existence provides a riverboat gamble that citizens could someday learn of official outrages.  Many federal agencies suffer the same ‘incentive to require people to lie’ that SIGAR John Sopko mentioned on for Afghan policy.  And we can’t count on divine intervention to compel  Washington policymakers to  deal honestly with the American people.

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Last week may well go down as the week of humiliation for us in the Asia Pacific. At the beginning of the week, Trump landed in Kuala Lumpur to attend the ASEAN Leaders’ Summit, where he got a special ceremony to mark his allegedly successful brokering of the peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia, the heavy lifting of which was actually done by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, who gracefully yielded center stage to the egomaniac. Trump did not even bother to wait for the summit to end but flew on to Japan, with Prime Minister Hun Manet’s sweet promise ringing his ears that Cambodia will nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Japan, Trump got a royal welcome from Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a disciple of the late Shinzo Abe, the reactionary ideologue who was also Trump’s golf buddy. Takaichi, Japan’s first female top leader, thought that a fitting gift for Trump was the club the assassinated Abe used to put the ball into the hole. Trump also notched another promise of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from her.

Takaichi was, however, upstaged by Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, who presented Trump with a replica of a golden crown from the Silla dynasty that was discovered in a royal tomb in Gyeongju. I don’t know if this was fake news, but I find entirely consistent with Trump’s personality the report that upon being presented with the crown, he said to Lee, “Thanks, but I prefer the original.”

And what did these leaders get for their brazen displays of vassalage to King Donald? None of the ASEAN governments got any reduction from the punitive tariffs of 19 percent imposed on their exports to the United States imposed by Trump. Nor did Korea and Japan get any relief from the 15 percent levied on their exports. Indeed, in addition to meekly accepting the tariffs, they also had to make commitments to make hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the United States.

What Trump is up to is the question that has kept the world at the edge of its seat since he began his second term ten months ago. Trump is the epitome of unpredictability, but if you impose the zigzag pattern of his moves on what statisticians call a scatterplot, you will see that there is a trend line that fits the hypothesis of the imposition of a new paradigm in the U.S. relationship to the world. There is a coherence to most of Trump’s ostensibly madcap moves.

Trump’s “Grand Strategy:” A Smoke and Mirrors Act

What are the main elements of Trump’s “grand strategy”?

Trump definitely represents a sharp break from the eight decades-long U.S. imperial strategy of liberal containment, where Washington met perceived challenges to U.S. hegemony wherever they appeared with a combination of military intervention, political alliances, and a multilateral regime that favored its interests. Trump represents that sector of the right that sees the United States as overextended economically, politically, and militarily, and believes that this is one of the key causes of its decline. This isolationism is the dominant one in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base.

He encourages a perspective of victimhood that sees both enemies and allies as abusing American generosity and regards previous U.S. administrations as being suckers for tolerating this abuse, the consequences of which fell on the American people. Trump sees China as the worst offender when it comes to taking advantage of the United States, but it is not the only one. Punitive tariffs on practically all countries in the world are his way of rectifying what he sees as a fundamental injustice.

He doesn’t care about multilateralism and the institutions that the US erected to legitimize its hegemony, notably the World Trade Organization, World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He wants to deal with each country on a bilateral basis, though this is only bilateral in name since the reality is unilateral imposition of Trump’s wishes on the weaker partner in military and economic negotiations. From Trump’s point of view, there are no definitive agreements, only tentative ones that are subject to change in their terms if the other party displeases Trump, a lesson Canada learned the hard way when the government of the province of Ontario aired an ad featuring Ronald Reagan saying tariffs hurt every American. Trump did not like this and said he was adding a 10 percent increase to the 35 percent tariffs he had already imposed on Ottawa!

As for addressing planetary problems like climate change, forget it. The United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and will boycott the climate summit in Belem, Brazil, this month, just as it pulled out of the fourth Financing for Development conference in Sevilla, Spain, in late June and early July this year.

Trump knows that globalization and neoliberalism promoted the deindustrialization and financialization of the US economy, and he is determined to make “America Great Again” via an ultra-protectionist strategy that radically limits imports to encourage U.S. reindustrialization and demands that US and foreign corporations dismantle their global supply chains, even at great cost, and relocate the most vital links in these chains in the United States. The corporations that led the migration from the United States in the 1990s and the 2000s in search of cheap labor in China and elsewhere have acknowledged that Trump is the boss, with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, meekly stating, “The president has said he wants more in the United States…so we want more in the United States.”

Whether Trump can reverse the process of American economic decline and reindustrialize the United States via ultra-protectionism remains to be seen, but the chances of stopping China from becoming number one are not, in my opinion, great. Indeed, in terms of the measure of purchasing power parity, China is now the biggest economy in the world, and it has developed a self-sustaining research and development capability that, in many areas, like Artificial Intelligence, now rivals that of the United States.

Trump’s simplistic approach to reindustrialization might well be called magic capitalism, where simply by issuing threats to raise tariffs against countries and demanding investment from corporate hostages, without any planning or industrial policy, voila, you have a gleaming newly industrially reinvigorated American economy!

Trump’s ultra-protectionist trade and investment policy is consistent with his immigration policy, which is to round up and throw out undocumented migrant workers and radically reduce the numbers of migrants coming in legally except from white countries like Norway, whose people have no intention of migrating to the United States.

Trump’s rhetoric is aggressive, but let’s not be taken in by appearance. He is actually moving from a posture of confronting threats to U.S. hegemony everywhere to a “spheres of influence” approach, where the United States sees the Western hemisphere, including Latin America, as its sphere of influence, while Russia is informally acknowledged as being dominant in Eastern Europe, Western Europe is left to fend for itself, and the Asia-Pacific is seen as China’s sphere of influence.

Behind Trump’s demand that Europe, Japan, and Korea must spend 5 percent of their GDP on their militaries is the reality that maintaining over 700 U.S. bases globally is a serious drain on American resources. The ruling elites in Japan and South Korea are, in fact, worried that Trump will significantly reduce the U.S. military presence in their countries and worry that Trump might come to a deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whom Trump regards as a personal friend, behind their backs. Their worries parallel those of the European elites, who suspect that Trump wants very badly to have a deal on Ukraine with Putin behind their backs. This suspicion was aired by no less than the president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, when he said a few weeks ago that Trump “objectively functions as an asset” of Russia.

There is a domestic reality behind Trump’s spheres of influence approach, and this is that the MAGA base is largely isolationist, as noted earlier. Vice President Vance, ideologues Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have been vocal about ending or radically reducing Washington’s global commitments to ensure there will be no more “forever wars.” They are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but because they feel overseas engagements are a distraction from America First. At the same time, the recent strikes against Venezuelan boats on the pretext they are smuggling drugs to the United States are really signs of an aggressive reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine that Latin America is an integral part of the U.S. imperial sphere of influence. More displays of this kind are likely in the future.

Another important feature of Trump’s military policy is that aside from its refocusing of the U.S. military interventionist capabilities on the Western hemisphere is his use of the military as an instrument of domestic coercion, along with the police. Using the pretext of dealing with crime, he has deployed or plans to deploy troops in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, Memphis, and Portland, all of which are cities controlled by the Democratic Party. Indeed, in an unprecedented assembly of U.S. military commanders from all over the world in September, Trump said deployments to U.S. cities were meant to deal with “a war from within,” in other words, to contain what he regards as the threat of civil war, and train them for combat abroad.

This refocusing of the U.S. military to the domestic front and the Western hemisphere does not mean, of course, that Trump will not engage in global shows of force, like the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities a couple of months ago. It is likely, however, that these will not be sustained interventions but occasional unilateral strikes to keep what Trump perceives as Washington’s enemies off balance. And, of course, whether under the Democrats or under Trump, the U.S. commitment to arming Israel’s genocidal machine is likely to continue indefinitely.

To sum up, Trump’s grand strategy might best be described as a smoke-and-mirrors act. It is the fighting retreat of an imperial power in decline. It is a defensive imperialism that has replaced the old expansive imperialism of the old liberal containment paradigm. But it is no less dangerous, because it has so many elements of unpredictability, indeed of irrationality, the main one of course being Donald Trump. This volatility was on display this last week, when even as he paraded himself as a man of peace in pursuit of the Nobel Prize during his trip through Asia, Trump also announced he was giving the order for the United States to resume nuclear testing.

How to Respond to Trump?

How should the Asia Pacific and the Global South respond to Trump’s recasting of America’s role in the world?

This is, of course, a subject that demands a separate essay. But let me just say, with respect to trade, that while the punitive tariffs may mean hardship for our peoples in the short term, since owing to World Bank and IMF policies, our economies have become so dependent on exports to the United States, they may also be a blessing in disguise in the medium and long term since we will be forced to pay attention to cultivating our domestic markets as the main engine of demand and this can only be possible through the adoption of redistributive strategies to foster greater equality.

Also, with the collapse of the old neoliberal multilateral order that favored U.S. economic interests as Trump adopts unilateralism, the rest of the world may find this an opportune time to build alternative regional and global arrangements built on cooperation, equality, and the provision of development space for countries in the Global South. The BRICS may offer an alternative, but they need not be the only one.

We live in an era of multiple crises, but this can also be one of multiple opportunities. Let me just end with my favorite quote from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, one that is so apt for our times: “The old world is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

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Image Source: Tiburonboliviano – CC0

A deadly force is brewing — and it’s not caused by the climate.

A deadly force, intensifying as it goes, claiming lives and destabilizing nations. Hurricane Melissa’s assault on the Caribbean was devastating. So is Donald Trump’s extrajudicial bombing campaign.

When Melissa hit Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, we saw heart-rending pictures of homes underwater, families wading through muck, and hospitals with their roofs blown off. The compassion we felt was real, the urgency high, and for a news cycle or two, the media made the world pay attention.

But not too far from Melissa’s flood zone, another kind of disaster has been unfolding in comparative media quiet. This one is caused not by climate, but by our autocratic president, who gave us two month’s warning.

On September 23, in a thuggish address to the United Nations Donald Trump explicitly threatened to blow “Venezuelan terrorist drug smugglers” “out of existence” in blatant disregard of international law or due process. Sure enough, as of the end of October, U.S. forces had conducted fifteen air strikes on multiple vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.

The White House thumps on about stopping narcotics flow, but we’ve seen no interceptions, no arrests, no narcotics cargo — only executions.

Melissa took, by an early count, thirty-two lives. Trump’s warships and drones have officially killed at least sixty-one people. The survivors and victims include nationals from Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Trinidad, mostly fishermen and boat crews whose families — and governments — dispute all allegations of narco-trafficking. The Trump team doesn’t care. Nor does it care to consult Congress — as the War Powers Act requires — or offer proof.

Now, a massive military force is massed just to the south and east of Melissa’s path of destruction. The U.S.deployment reportedly includes tens of thousands of troops, eight major warships, three amphibious assault ships, a guided-missile cruiser, several fighter jets and a nuclear submarine. The U.S. military has also reopened formerly inactive facilities in Puerto Rico to support these operations.

It’s the largest military build-up in the Caribbean since the invasion of Panama in 1989, and yet it’s generating less media attention than a gale-force storm.

It’s not too late. Politicians, pundits and the press still have time to get the American people activated enough to stop this country’s next catastrophic war.

The resignation of the military commander overseeing the operation — Admiral Alvin Halsey — head of U.S. Southern Command, should sound an alarm. Meanwhile, “Demolition Don” is making no bones about his plans. After it was revealed that he’d secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert action in Venezuela, he bragged, “We are certainly looking at land now.”

What are we waiting for? The blatant build up to this country’s next imperialist war is at least as terrifying as a hurricane — or it should be.

Catch my conversation with U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Marine Captain Janessa Goldbeck on the president’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, at LauraFlanders.org.

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